From the collection of W. C. Crane
Engraved by S. W. Reynolds
Napoleon At St. Helena
Painted by Horace Vernet.
Napoleon, the prisoner, had a double object—release and self-justification. The former he hoped to gain by working on the feelings of the English Liberals; the latter by writing an autobiography which, in order to win back the lost confidence of France, should emphasize the democratic, progressive, and beneficent side of his career, and consign to oblivion his tyrannies and inordinate personal ambitions. The dreary chronicle of the quarrel between a disarmed giant and a potent pygmy is uninteresting in detail, but very illuminating in its large outlines. The routine of a court was instituted and for a time was rigidly observed at Longwood. The powerless monarch so successfully simulated the wisdom and judgment of a chastened soul that the accounts which reached the distant world awakened a great pity among the disinterested. As on shipboard and at The Briars, he gave his mornings to literature, clad in a studied, picturesque dishabille. The afternoon he devoted to amusement and exercise; but a distaste for more physical exertion than was actually essential to health grew steadily, until he became sluggish and corpulent. At table he was always abstemious; his sleep was irregular and disturbed. The evenings he spent with favorite authors, Voltaire, Corneille, and Ossian; frequently, also, in reading the Bible. The opinions he expressed were in the main those of his pseudoscientific days; among other questions discussed was that of polygamy, which he upheld as an excellent institution theoretically. Much time was spent by the household in abusing Longwood, and so effectually that a wooden house was constructed in England, and erected near by; but the prisoner made difficulties about every particular, and never occupied it. There were continuous schemings for direct intercourse with friends in France, and partial success ended in the dismissal of Las Cases. Gourgaud, too, departed, ostensibly because of a quarrel with Montholon, really, as he represented, to agitate with Alexander, Francis, and Maria Louisa for Napoleon's release. The exile confessed, in an unguarded moment, that no man alive could have satisfied him in the relation of governor of St. Helena, but yet he was adroit and indefatigable in his efforts to discredit Lowe. The "Letters from the Cape of Good Hope," published in England anonymously, but now incorporated in the official edition of Napoleon's works as the thirty-first volume, abuse the climate of St. Helena, depict the injustice of the imprisonment, and heap scorn on the governor. The book was widely read, and furnished the Whigs in Parliament with many shafts of criticism. This success emboldened the author, and further compositions by his hand were mysteriously published in Europe.
For three years Napoleon's self-appointed task as a historian was unremittingly pursued, and the results, while he had the assistance of Las Cases and Gourgaud, were voluminous; thereafter the output was a slender rill. Most of the volumes which record his observations and opinions bear the names of the respective memorialists, Montholon, Las Cases, Gourgaud, O'Meara, and Antommarchi, the two latter his attendant physicians. The period he took pains to elucidate most fully in these writings was that between Toulon and Marengo. Over his own name appeared monographs on Elba, the Hundred Days, and Waterloo. His professional ability is shown by short studies on the "Art and History of War," on "Army Organization," and on "Fortification"; likewise by his full analyses of the wars waged by Cæsar, Turenne, and Frederick the Great. These are not unworthy of the author's reputation; his versatility is displayed in a few commonplace notes—some on Voltaire's "Mahomet," some on suicide, and others on the second book of the Æneid. A widely circulated treatise, the "Manuscript from St. Helena," was long attributed to him, but was a clever forgery. As will be explained, its effect on history was important.
For nearly four years Napoleon's health was fair. O'Meara, the physician appointed to attend him, was assiduous and skilful, but when he became his patient's devoted slave he was dismissed by Lowe. Thereupon certain disquieting symptoms, which had been noted from time to time, became more pronounced, and the prisoner began to brood and mope in seclusion. In the autumn of 1819, Dr. Antommarchi, a Corsican physician chosen by Fesch, was installed at Longwood. For a time, as he claimed, he had some success in ameliorating the ex-Emperor's condition, and to what the writer records as their confidential talks we owe our knowledge of Napoleon's infancy. But from month to month the patient's strength diminished, and the ravages of his mysterious disease at length became very apparent. The obstinacy of Lowe in carrying out the letter of his instructions, by intruding on the sufferer to secure material for a daily report, seriously aggravated Napoleon's miseries. Two priests accompanied Antommarchi: one only remained for some time, and after his arrival mass was celebrated almost every morning in the chapel adjoining the sick-room. "Not every man is an atheist who would like to be," was a remark Napoleon dropped to Montholon. Yet, though preparing for death, he was making ready simultaneously to speed his Parthian arrow.
His testament displays his qualities in their entirety. The language sounds simple and sincere; there is a hidden meaning in almost every line. His religion had been outwardly that of a deist; he now professed a piety which he always felt but rarely practised. During his life France had been caressed and used as a skilful artificer caresses and uses his tools; the last words of his will suggest a passionate devotion. To his son he recommended the "love of right, which alone can incite to the performance of great deeds"; for his faithless wife he expressed the tenderest sentiments, and probably felt them. It was his hope that the English people would avenge itself on the English oligarchy, and that France would forgive the traitors who betrayed her—Marmont, Augereau, Talleyrand, and Lafayette—as he forgave them. Louis he pardoned in the same spirit for the "libel published in 1820; it is full of falsehoods and falsified documents." The blame for Enghien's murder he took to himself. The second portion of the document is a series of munificent-sounding bequests to a list of legatees which includes every one who had done the testator any important service since his earliest childhood. France under the Bourbons confiscated the imperial domain of about a hundred and eighty millions, which Napoleon had estimated at over two hundred and twenty. When the nation passed again under the Bonapartes it appropriated eight millions toward the unpaid legacies. In the end his executors collected three and a half millions of francs wherewith to pay bequests amounting on their face to over nine and a half. In a codicil he remembers a certain Cautillon, who had undergone trial for an alleged attempt to assassinate Wellington. "Cautillon had as much right to assassinate that oligarch as he [Wellington] to send me to the rock of St. Helena to perish there." Such was the nature and substance of an appeal to a generous, forgiving nation, and to posterity, by one who wrote in the same document that he wished to die in the bosom of the Christian church, whose central doctrine is love, and whose ethic is forgiveness of enemies.
"I closed the abyss of anarchy and brought order out of chaos. I cleansed the Revolution, ennobled the people, and made the kings strong. I have awakened all ambitions, rewarded all merit, and enlarged the borders of glory." These were the words of Napoleon in 1816; he Lived in this hallucination to the end. In the autumn of 1820 he realized his condition, and throughout the winter he was feeble and depressed. In February, 1821, he began to fail rapidly, and the symptoms of his disease, cancer in the stomach, multiplied; but, in spite of feebleness, he faced death with courage. On May third two English physicians, recently arrived, came in for consultation; they could only recommend palliatives, and under the influence of that treatment the imperial patient kept an uncertain hold on his faculties. Two days later a violent storm of wind and rain set in. A spreading willow, under which Napoleon had spent many hours, was overturned; the trees planted by his hands were uprooted; and a whirlwind devastated the garden in which he had worked for exercise. The death of the sufferer was coincident, and scarcely less violent. The last words uttered were caught by listening ears as the sun rose; they were "Tête ... armée." Mme. Bertrand and her children were present; at the sight of their friend's suffering the boy fainted and the little girls broke into loud lamentation. At eleven in the morning the supreme agonies began; a little before six in the evening the heart put forth its last convulsive effort, and ceased to beat. The mournful band of watchers within bowed their heads. Without the door another watch was set—that of the orderly. During the first outburst of grief among those at the bedside two officers entered silently, felt the cold limbs, marked the absence of life, and left without a word. England's prisoner had escaped.
It requires a complex environment to develop a man of any sort; for the exhibition of his personality and identity he must live in family, church, and state, and beyond all these surroundings even the meanest of mankind is subject to some cosmopolitan influence. How much more true is this of a historical and political personage, who is and can be himself only under the conditions which permit the play of his powers. Removed from these, his soul and spirit sicken, his character becomes morbid, his capacities are crippled, his identity is distorted. Nothing could be more fatuous and simple than the effort to read the true character of Napoleon Bonaparte from his talk and behavior when an exile; a prisoner of time and space, as world communications then were; an exhausted body; a crippled, outraged spirit, reduced for attack and defense to the weapons of the pen and the tongue wielded on and over an immensity of apartness. Yet exactly this has been the self-imposed task of many investigators and writers. The literature of his prison-house has grown to vast dimensions, and readers feel cheated when the bald outline of all that may even be considered history is offered for their consideration. The narrative of the St. Helena epoch in his life just given is probably accurate, and there are portions of it that rest on historical evidence both objective and internal, as trustworthy as most of what passes for history.