Robbed of his catafalque of rocks, Napoleon has come to be buried in the dirt of Paris. Instead of ships which used to salute the new Hercules, consumed upon Mount Œta, the washerwomen of Vaugirard will roam around him with pensioners unknown to the Grande Armée. By way of prelude to this feebleness, little men were able to imagine nothing better than an open-air wax-work show. After a few days' rain, nothing remained of these decorations but squalid odds and ends. Whatever we may do, the real sepulchre of the triumpher will always be seen in the midst of the seas: the body is with us, the life immortal at St. Helena.
Napoleon has closed the era of the past: he made war too great for it to return in a manner to interest mankind. He slammed the doors of the Temple of Janus violently after him; and behind those doors he heaped up piles of dead bodies, to prevent them from ever opening again.
*
A visit to the Golfe Juan.
In Europe I have been to visit the parts where Bonaparte landed after breaking his ban at Elba. I alighted at the inn at Cannes[421] at the very moment when the guns were firing in commemoration of the 29th of July[422]: one of the results of the Emperor's incursion, doubtless unforeseen by him. Night had fallen when I arrived at the Golfe Juan; I got down at a lonely house alongside the high-road. Jacquemin, potter and inn-keeper, the owner of the house, led me to the sea. We went by sunk roads between olive-trees under which Bonaparte had bivouacked: Jacquemin himself had received him and guided me. To the left of the cross-path stood a sort of covered shed: Napoleon, invading France alone, had deposited the luggage with which he had landed in that shed.
On reaching the beach, I saw a calm sea wrinkled by not the slightest breath; the surge, thin as gauze, unrolled itself over the sand noiselessly and foamlessly. An astonishing sky, all resplendent with constellations, crowned my head. The crescent of the moon soon sank and hid itself behind a mountain. In the gulf lay only one bark at anchor, and two boats: to the left appeared the Antibes light-house, to the right the Lérins Isles; before me, the main sea opened out to the South in the direction of Rome, to which Bonaparte had first sent me.
The Lérins Isles, now called the Sainte-Marguerite Isles, of old received a few Christians fleeing before the Barbarians. St. Honoratus[423], coming from Hungary, landed on one of those rocks: he climbed a palm-tree, made the sign of the Cross, and all the serpents died, that is to say, paganism disappeared and the new civilization was born in the West.
Fourteen hundred years later, Bonaparte came to end that civilization in the parts in which the saint had commenced it. The last solitary of those hermitages was the Man in the Iron Mask, if the Iron Mask is a reality. From the silence of the Golfe Juan, from the peace of the islands of the anchorites of old, issued the noise of Waterloo, which crossed the Atlantic to die out at St Helena.
In praise of indifference.
One can imagine what I felt, between the memories of two societies, between a world extinct and a world ready to become extinct, at night, on that deserted sea-board. I left the beach in a sort of religious consternation, leaving the billows to pass and pass again, without obliterating them, over the traces of Napoleon's last step but one.