If a man were unexpectedly transported from life's most clamorous scenes to the silent shores of the Arctic Ocean, he would feel what I feel beside the tomb of Napoleon, for we find ourselves suddenly standing by the edge of that tomb.
Leaving Paris on the 25th of June, Napoleon awaited at the Malmaison the moment of his departure from France. I return to him: coming back to past days, anticipating future times, I shall not leave him again until after his death.
The Malmaison, where the Emperor rested, was empty. Joséphine was dead[356]; Bonaparte found himself alone in that retreat. There he had commenced his fortune; there he had been happy; there he had become intoxicated with the incense of the world; there, from the heart of his tomb, issued orders that shook the world. In those gardens where formerly the feet of the crowd raked up the sanded walks, the grass and brambles grew green; I had ascertained this when walking there. Already, for want of tending, the exotic trees were pining away; on the canals the black Australian swans no longer floated; the cage no longer held the tropical birds prisoners: they had flown away to await their host in their own country.
Bonaparte might, however, have found a subject of consolation by turning his eyes upon his early days: fallen kings are afflicted above all because, looking upwards from their fall, they see only a splendid inheritance and the pomps of their cradle: but what did Napoleon discern prior to his prosperity? The manger of his birth in a Corsican village. Higher-minded, when flinging off the purple mantle, he would have proudly resumed the goat-herd's sayon; but men do not place themselves back at their origin when it was humble; it seems that an unjust Heaven deprives them of their patrimony when, in fate's lottery, they do naught but lose what they have won; and nevertheless Napoleon's greatness arises from the fact that he had started from himself: none of his blood had gone before him and prepared his power.
At the sight of those abandoned gardens, of those untenanted apartments, of those galleries faded by the routs, of those rooms in which song and music had ceased, Napoleon was able to go over his career: he was able to ask himself whether, with a little more moderation, he might not have preserved his delights. Foreigners, enemies, were not banishing him now; he was not departing as a quasi victor, leaving the nations in admiration of his passage, after the prodigious campaign of 1814: he was retiring beaten. Frenchmen, friends, were demanding his immediate abdication, urging his departure, refusing even to have him as a general, sending him messenger after messenger, to oblige him to quit the soil over which he had shed as much glory as scourges.
Added to this harsh lesson, came other warnings: the Prussians were prowling around the neighbourhood of the Malmaison; Blücher, full of wine, staggering, ordered them to seize, to "hang" the conqueror who had "put his foot on the neck of Kings." The rapidity of the fortunes, the vulgarity of the manners, the promptness of the elevation and degradation of the personages of to-day will, I fear, take away a part of the nobility of history: Rome and Greece did not speak of "hanging" Alexander and Cæsar.
The scenes which had taken place in 1814 were renewed in 1815, but with something more offensive, because the ingrates were stimulated by fear; it was necessary to get rid of Napoleon quickly: the Allies were arriving; Alexander was not there, at first, to temper the triumph and curb the insolence of fortune; Paris was no more adorned with its lustral inviolability; a first invasion had profaned the sanctuary; it was no longer God's anger that fell upon us, it was the contempt of Heaven: the human thunder-bolt was spent.
All the cowardly characters had acquired a new degree of malignity through the Hundred Days; affecting to raise themselves, through love of the country, above personal attachments, they exclaimed that it was really too criminal of Bonaparte to have violated the treaties of 1814. But were not the true culprits those who had countenanced his designs? Suppose that, in 1815, instead of getting new armies for him, after forsaking him once only to forsake him again, they had said to him, when he came to sleep at the Tuileries:
"You have been deceived by your genius, opinion is no longer with you; take pity on France. Retire after this last visit to the country; go and live in the land of Washington. Who knows that the Bourbons will not make mistakes? Who knows that, one day, France will not turn her eyes towards you, when, in the school of liberty, you shall have learnt to respect the laws? You will then return, not as a ravisher swooping on his prey, but as a great citizen, the pacificator of his country!"