"No," said Napoleon, "I would not have her witness the degrading state to which I am reduced and the insults to which I am subjected."
That beloved sister, germana Jovis, did not cross the seas: she died in the regions where Napoleon had left his reputation.
Schemes of abduction were formed: a Colonel Latapie, at the head of a band of American adventurers, designed a descent on St. Helena. Johnson[410], a resolute smuggler, meditated an attempt to carry off Bonaparte by means of a submarine vessel. Young lords entered into these plans; people plotted to break the chains of the oppressor: they would have left the liberator of the human race to die in irons without a thought Bonaparte hoped for his delivery from the political movements of Europe. If he had lived till 1830, perhaps he would have returned to us; but what would he have done among us? He would have seemed infirm and out of date in the midst of the new ideas. Formerly his tyranny appeared liberty to our slavery; now his greatness would appear despotism to our littleness. At the present period, everything is decrepit in a day; who lives too long dies alive. As we advance in life, we leave three or four images of ourselves, different one from the other: we see them next in the haze of the past, like portraits of our different ages.
Bonaparte, in his feebleness, no longer occupied himself except like a child: he amused himself by digging a little basin in his garden; he put a few fish into it: the mastick employed in cementing the basin contained copperas, and the fish died. Bonaparte said:
"Everything I love, everything that belongs to me is immediately smitten."
About the end of February 1821, Napoleon was obliged to take to his bed and did not rise again.
"How low am I fallen!" he murmured. "I stirred the world, and I cannot raise my eyelid."
He did not believe in medicine and objected to a consultation of Antomarchi[411] with the Jamestown doctors. Nevertheless, he admitted Dr. Arnott beside his death-bed. He dictated his will from the 13th to the 27th of April; on the 28th, he ordered his heart to be sent to Marie-Louise; he forbade any English surgeon to lay a hand upon him after his decease. Persuaded that he was succumbing to the malady by which his father had been attacked, he requested that the report of the autopsy should be transmitted to the Duc de Reichstadt: the paternal direction has become useless; Napoleon II. has joined Napoleon I.
Napoleon's death-bed.
At this last hour, the religious sentiment with which Bonaparte was always imbued awoke. Thibaudeau, in his Mémoires sur le Consulat, tells us, with reference to the restoration of public worship, that the First Consul said to him: