There are harmonies of immensity.
From the Bellerophon Bonaparte crossed on to the Northumberland. Two frigates laden with the future garrison of St. Helena escorted him. Some of the officers of that garrison had fought at Waterloo. They permitted that explorer of the globe to keep with him M. and Madame Bertrand, Messieurs de Montholon[370], Gourgaud and de Las Cases[371], voluntary and generous passengers on the submerged plank. By one clause in the captain's instructions, "Bonaparte must be disarmed:" Napoleon alone, a prisoner on board ship, in the midst of the Ocean, "disarmed[372]!" What a magnificent terror of his power! But what a lesson from Heaven to men who abuse the sword! The stupid Admiralty treated the great convict of the human race as a Botany-Bay felon: did the Black Prince "disarm" King John?
The squadron weighed anchor. Since the bark which carried Cæsar, no ship had been laden with so great a destiny. Bonaparte was approaching that sea of miracles upon which the Arab of Mount Sinai had seen him pass. The last French land that Napoleon discerned was Cape la Hogue[373]: another trophy of the English.
The Emperor had been mistaken in the interest of his memory, when he wished to remain in Europe; he would soon have been only a vulgar or faded prisoner: his old rôle was ended. But, beyond that rôle, a new position revivified him with a new renown. No man of universal fame has had an end similar to Napoleon's. He was not, as after his first fall, proclaimed autocrat of a few quarries of iron and marble, the first to furnish him with a sword, the second with a statue; an eagle, he was given a rock on the point of which he remained in the sun-light till his death, in full view of the whole world.
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At the moment when Bonaparte is quitting Europe, in which he is giving up his life to go in search of the destinies of his death, it is well to examine this man of two existences, to depict the false and the true Napoleon: they blend and form a whole from the mixture of their reality and their falsehood.
Napoleon as statesman.
From the conjunction of these remarks it results that Bonaparte was a poet in action, an immense genius in war, an indefatigable, able and intelligent spirit in administration, a laborious and rational legislator. That is why he has so great a hold on the imagination of peoples and so much authority over the judgment of practical men. But, as a politician, he will always appear deficient in the eyes of statesmen. This observation, which has escaped the majority of his panegyrists, will, I am convinced, become the definite opinion that will survive concerning him; it will explain the contrast between his prodigious actions and their pitiful results. At St. Helena, he himself severely condemned his political conduct on two points: the Spanish War and the Russian War; he might have extended his confession to other delinquencies. His enthusiasts will perhaps not maintain that, when blaming himself, he was mistaken in himself.
Let us recapitulate:
Bonaparte acted contrary to all prudence, not to speak again of the hatefulness of the action, in killing the Duc d'Enghien: he attached a weight to his life. Notwithstanding the puerile apologists, this death, as we have seen, was the secret leaven of the discords that subsequently burst out between Alexander and Napoleon, as also between Prussia and France.