Death of Napoleon.
On the 3rd of May, Napoleon was administered the sacrament of Extreme Unction and received the Blessed Viaticum. The silence of the bed-chamber was interrupted only by the death-sob, mingled with the regular sound of the pendulum of a clock: the shadow, before stopping on the dial, did a few more rounds; the luminary that outlined it had a difficulty in dying out. On the 4th, the tempest of Cromwell's death-pangs arose: almost all the trees at Longwood were uprooted. At last, on the 5th, at eleven minutes to six in the evening, amid the wind, the rain and the crash of the waves, Bonaparte gave up to God the mightiest breath of life that ever quickened human clay. The last words caught upon the conqueror's lips were, "Tête... armée," or "Tête d'armée." His thoughts were still wandering in the midst of combats. When he closed his eyes for ever, his sword, dead with him, was laid by his side, a crucifix rested on his breast: the symbol of peace, applied to the heart of Napoleon, calmed the throbbing of that heart even as a ray from Heaven makes the wave to fall.
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Bonaparte first desired to be interred in the Cathedral of Ajaccio; then, by a codicil dated 16 April 1821, he bequeathed his bones to France: Heaven had served him better; his real mausoleum is the rock on which he expired: turn back to my story of the death of the Duc d'Enghien. Napoleon, foreseeing the opposition of the British Government to his last wishes, eventually made choice of a burying-place in St. Helena.
In a narrow valley known as Slane's or Geranium Valley, now Tomb Valley, rises a fountain; Napoleon's Chinese servants, faithful as Camoëns' Javanese, used to fill their pitchers there: weeping willows overhang the spring; green grass, studded with tchampas, grows all around:
"The tchampas, despite its brilliancy and its perfume, is not a flower that one seeks after, because it flourishes on the tombs," say the Sanskrit poems.
In the declivities of the bare rocks, bitter lemon-trees thrive ill, with cocoanut-trees, larches and cone-trees of which men collect the gum which sticks to the beards of the goats.
Napoleon, booted, spurred, dressed in the uniform of a colonel of the Guard, decorated with the Legion of Honour, was laid in state on his little iron bedstead; upon that visage which was never astonished the soul, as it fled, had left a sublime stupor. The planishers and joiners soldered and nailed Bonaparte into a four-fold coffin of mahogany, of lead, of mahogany again, and of tin: they seemed to fear that he would never be imprisoned enough. The cloak which the erstwhile victor had worn at the vast funeral of Marengo served as a pall to the coffin.
Napoleon delighted in the willows of the spring; he asked for peace of the Slane Valley even as banished Dante asked for peace of the Convent of Corvo. In gratitude for the transient repose which he tasted there during the last days of his life, he appointed that valley as the shelter of his eternal rest. Speaking of the source, he said: