Bonaparte is not great through his words, his speeches, his writings, through the love of liberty which he never possessed and which he never pretended to establish; he is great in that he created a regular and powerful government, a code of laws adopted in different countries, courts of law, schools, a strong, active, intelligent administration, which still lasts us; he is great in that he revived, enlightened and governed Italy superlatively well; he is great in that, in France, he restored order from the midst of chaos, in that he built up the altars, in that he reduced furious demagogues, vainglorious scholars, anarchical men of letters, Voltairean atheists, open-air orators, cut-throats of the prisons and streets, starvelings of the tribune, the clubs and the scaffolds, in that he reduced them to serve under him; he is great in that he curbed an anarchical mob; he is great in that he put an end to the familiarities of a common fortune, in that he forced soldiers, his equals, and captains, his chiefs or his rivals, to bend before his will; he is great above all in that he was born of himself alone, in that he was able, with no other authority than that of his genius, able, he, to make himself obeyed by thirty-six million subjects, at a time when no illusion surrounds the thrones; he is great in that he overthrew all the kings his opponents, in that he defeated all the armies, whatever the difference in their discipline and valour, in that he taught his name to savage as well as to civilized peoples, in that he surpassed all the conquerors who preceded him, in that he filled ten years with prodigies so great that we have difficulty to-day in understanding them.
The famous offender in triumphal matter is no more; the few men who still understand noble sentiments can do justice to glory without fearing it, but without repenting of having proclaimed what that glory had that was baleful, without recognising the destroyer of independences as the father of emancipations: Napoleon does not need that one should ascribe merits to him; he was richly enough endowed at his birth.
Now, therefore, that, severed from his time, his history is ended and his idyll commencing, let us go to see him die: let us leave Europe; let us follow him beneath the sky of his apotheosis! The hissing of the seas where his ships have struck sail will point out to us the spot of his disappearance:
"At the extremity of our hemisphere," says Tacitus, "is heard the sound made by the dipping sun: sonum insuper immergentis audiri."
*
João de Nova[387], a Portuguese navigator, had lost his bearings in the waters separating Africa and America. In 1502, on the 18th of August, the feast of St. Helen[388], mother of the first Christian Emperor[389], he came upon an island at the 16th degree of latitude and 11th of longitude; he landed and gave it the name of the day upon which it was discovered.
After frequenting the island for some years, the Portuguese relinquished it; the Dutch established themselves there, and subsequently abandoned it for the Cape of Good Hope; the British East Indian Company seized it; the Dutch retook it in 1672; the British occupied it anew and settled there.
St. Helena.
When João de Nova landed at St. Helena, the interior of the uninhabited country was mere forest land. Fernando Lopez, a Portuguese renegado, transported to that oasis, stocked it with cows, goats, hens, guinea-fowls and birds from the four corners of the earth. On to the island were taken successively, as on to the deck of the Ark, animals of the whole creation.
Five hundred whites, fifteen hundred negroes, mingled with mulattoes, Javanese and Chinese, compose the population of the island. Jamestown is its town and its harbour. Before the English were masters of the Cape of Good Hope, the Company's fleets, returning from India, put in at Jamestown. The sailors spread their slop-goods at the foot of the cabbage-trees: the mute and solitary forest changed once a year into a noisy and populous market.