"If God were willing that I should recover, I would raise a monument in the spot where it springs."
That monument was his tomb. In Plutarch's time, in a place consecrated to the nymphs on the banks of the Strymon, one still saw a stone bench on which Alexander had sat
The obsequies were held on the 28th of May. The weather was fine: four horses, led by grooms on foot, drew the hearse; four-and-twenty English grenadiers, carrying no arms, surrounded it; Napoleon's horse followed. The garrison of the island lined the precipices of the road. Three squadrons of dragoons went before the procession; the 20th Regiment of Infantry, the marines, the St. Helena Volunteers, the Royal Artillery, with fifteen pieces of cannon, brought up the rear. Bands of musicians, stationed at distances on the rocks, exchanged mournful tunes. On reaching a pass, the hearse stopped; the twenty-four unarmed grenadiers lifted up the corpse and had the honour of carrying it on their shoulders to the burying-place. Three volleys of artillery saluted the remains of Napoleon at the moment when he sank into the earth: all the noise which he had made on that earth did not penetrate six feet beneath it.
A stone which was to have been employed in the building of a new house for the exile was lowered upon his coffin, as it were the trap-door of his last cell.
They recited the verses from Psalm 87:
"I am poor, and in labours from my youth: and being exalted have been humbled and troubled.
"Thy wrath hath come upon me.... [413]"
The flag-ship fired minute-guns. This warlike harmony, lost in the immensity of the Ocean, made response to the Requiescat in pace. The Emperor, buried by his victors of Waterloo, had heard the last cannon-shot of that battle; he did not hear the last detonation with which England disturbed and honoured his sleep at St. Helena. All withdrew, holding in their hands a branch of willow, as though returning from the Feast of Palms.
Lord Byron thought that the dictator of kings had abdicated his renown with his blade, that he was going to die forgotten. The poet ought to have known that Napoleon's destiny was a muse, like all high destinies. That muse was able to change an abortive issue into a catastrophe which revived its hero. The solitude of Napoleon's exile and tomb has spread over a brilliant memory a spell of a different kind. Alexander did not die under the eyes of Greece; he disappeared in the proud perspectives of Babylon. Bonaparte has not died under the eyes of France; he has vanished in the gorgeous horizons of the torrid zone. He sleeps like a hermit or like a pariah in a valley, at the end of a deserted pathway. The magnitude of the silence which presses upon him equals the vastness of the noise that once surrounded him. The nations are absent, their crowd has withdrawn; the tropic bird "harnessed," says Buffon, "to the chariot of the sun," precipitates itself from the orb of light; where does it rest to-day? It rests upon ashes whose weight tilted the globe.
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