At the end of each great epoch of time, one hears some voice, doleful with regrets of the past, sound the curfew: thus moaned they who saw vanish Charlemagne, St. Louis, Francis I., Henry IV. and Louis XIV. What could I not say, in my turn, eye-witness that I am of two or three lapsed worlds? When one has met, as I have, Washington and Bonaparte, what remains there to look at behind the plough of the American Cincinnatus and the tomb at St Helena? Why have I survived the age and the men to whom I belonged by the date of my birth? Why did I not fall with my contemporaries, the last of an exhausted race? Why have I remained alone to seek their bones in the dust and darkness of a full catacomb? I am disheartened at lasting. Ah, if only I possessed the indifference of one of those old long-shore Arabs whom I met in Africa! Seated cross-legged on a little rope mat, their head wrapped in their burnoose, they while away their last hours in following with their eyes, in the azure of the sky, the beautiful flamingo flying along the ruins of Carthage; lulled by the murmuring of the waves, they half forget their existence and, in a low voice, sing a song of the sea: they are going to die.
[356] The Empress Joséphine died at the Malmaison on the 29th of May 1814.—B.
[357] 29 June 1815.—B.
[358] Nicolas Léonard Comte Beker (1770-1840), a general of division, count of the Empire, and grand officer of the Legion of Honour. He fell out of favour with Napoleon, and was sent in disgrace to Belle-Isle-en-Mer, where he remained in command till 1814. He was a member of the Chamber of Representatives during the Hundred Days. Louis XVIII. raised him to the peerage in 1819.—B.
[359] Louis XVI. purchased Rambouillet from the Penthièvre Family in 1778.—T.
[360] 3 July 1815.—B.
[361] Captain, later Admiral Sir Frederick Lewis Maitland (1779-1839).—T.
[362] Themistocles (circa 535 B.C.—470 B.C.) took refuge, when exiled from Athens, first with Admetes King of the Molossians, and secondly with Artaxerxes I. King of Persia, who showed him a magnificent hospitality, but wished to make him bear arms against Greece. Themistocles took poison to avoid being forced to obey.—T.
[363] General Sir Robert Thomas Wilson (1777-1849) accompanied the Russian army in the campaign of 1812 and took a prominent part in the fighting. He was appointed Governor of Gibraltar in 1842. Wilson was one of the three Englishmen instrumental in the escape of the Comte de Lavallette from Paris in 1816.—T.