But when this is said the statement must be carefully guarded, for the reason that substantially all our evidence is virtually such as would be given about himself by a convict behind the bars, his sympathizing accomplices, his jailer, and his prosecutors. The simile is not strained. The surgeon of the Northumberland, ignorant of French, gathered from those of Napoleon's attendants who spoke English such scraps regarding the prisoner as he could, published them, and lost his government employment. The book was widely read and proved a very lucrative enterprise. Outside its pages there was profound silence and complete ignorance in Europe regarding the now mysterious convict, buried to the world. Craving for information was universal and insatiate; if only Napoleon himself would speak! It appeared as if the longing were satisfied in a published "Manuscript arrived from St. Helena by unknown means." The volume was difficult to procure, although edition followed edition in swift succession; many a precious copy was used in reading circles and there are still in existence a considerable number of the very numerous reproductions made at the time with pen and ink. One of these was actually sold not long ago to an unsuspecting editor in the United States and published in his magazine as a rarity. It fell flat because so many knew the truth: that it was apocryphal, the merry jest of a Genevese gentleman, Lullin de Châteauvieux, who lived to see his sport a dangerous element in the falsification of history. It was not only Napoleonic in style, but too Napoleonic; and, considered as an imperialist pamphlet, an anti-royalist pronunciamento, brought into being the embryo of a legend such as men crave and which the loyal efforts of many historians have utterly failed to destroy. Its contents, of course, are utterly worthless except as a comedy, a mask of literature which influenced public opinion.
The first known opportunity of the Napoleon court for communication with the outside world was afforded by the British government. The guarding and maintenance of Napoleon proved a source of great expenditure. The garrison and military staff, the hovering vessels of the navy, the entertainment of the continental commissioners, and especially the allowance for the establishment of Longwood, miserable as it was—the total cost appeared to the London authorities exorbitant. Prices of supplies at St. Helena were enormous because of its remoteness. So the subordinates of the ministry, with the assent of their superiors, determined upon reductions, and they began with the household of the Emperor, issuing orders that four of its members should be dismissed. These were, first, the Polish adventurer Piontkowski, part gentleman, part domestic, and wholly emissary and spy, who had been sent out by the English government in a vessel which followed the Northumberland, for reasons best known to themselves. He appears to have accepted a charge from Napoleon; that, namely, of laying before the Czar a formal protest against the treaties which made Napoleon the joint prisoner of the allies, entrusted to the charge of Great Britain. The next to leave were Archambaud and Rousseau, one a huntsman, one a chief butler; they were to visit Joseph Bonaparte in the United States and give him the fullest information. The fourth was the chamberlain Santini, a Corsican, and, though a soldier, utterly illiterate. To him was confided a protest for use either in London or in Italy, as the event should determine. A copy was made in Chinese ink on white satin ribbon for concealment about his person, but the chief reliance was, that "verbally and literally" he was drilled in its repetition until he could neither forget nor mistake in its recital. The faithful servants reached Joseph's home in America, the Pole on arrival in England styled himself Count and Colonel, became the hero of a social season in London, and vanished from history as mysteriously as he entered it. But Santini with Italian adroitness gained not only the presence of Lord Holland but his attentive ear; his recital was translated into English and published, the matter was brought before Parliament by interpellation of the great Whig statesman and caused great excitement throughout the world.
Napoleon's "Appeal to the English Nation," as printed from Santini's copy, recited the stupidity of his jailer, the unhealthiness of the climate, the expense and difficulty of living. His statements were not merely confirmed, the conditions of life on St. Helena were monstrously exaggerated by Montchenu, the French commissioner, in a private letter which was published soon after the arrival of Santini in London. This, too, was circulated all abroad. Public opinion was further agitated. The allied dynasties were made to feel ashamed by their subjects, and in Great Britain there was a fierce surge of reprobation, the resonance of which has not yet died away. The exile was chained to a horrid rock, in a climate Europeans could not endure, his miserable existence in hovels overrun with vermin must be eked out by loans from friends and the sale of his silver tableware, he was put to needless shame by the stupid regulations of a stupid government, stupidly enforced by a stupid governor, he was sick of body and heart, very sick and might die. Whose was the responsibility for this disgrace to civilization? Somewhat in this way men talked and questioned; soon his faults were forgotten in the pitiful recital of his woes; the legend was further advanced, once more the glory of Napoleon's epoch became a powerful force in Europe.
On the fourteenth of March, 1818, there arrived in England a member of the St. Helena court, whose name and fame bid fair to rival if not to obliterate those of all his companions in exile, though most undeservedly. This was General Gourgaud, styled Master of Ordinance. He was thirty-five years old and had been a soldier for sixteen, winning promotion for intelligence and intrepidity, securing Napoleon's affection by personal charm and by services which once at least, and probably twice, directly saved the Emperor's life, until at last he was a baron, a general at Waterloo, and a companion in St. Helena. This all seems passing strange because he was a high officer of Louis XVIII before Napoleon's return from Elba; made obeisance to established authority as soon as he returned from captivity, and during the successive governments of France to his death in 1852 found favor with each in turn. Whatever he was before and after, his life in St. Helena was that of a sentimental, jealous, sensitive child, scarcely a male at that. Every word and every act of every one gave him such pangs of wounded vanity that at last his presence was intolerable and by the influence of the Montholons it was arranged that he should leave. No sooner was the dust of Longwood shaken from his feet than within sight of its doors he accepted the kindly attentions of his former jailers with eagerness, and no sooner were those feet ashore in England than he began to woo the ministry, to make advances to the Bourbons, and to fawn on the Holy Alliance itself. It was not until he experienced certain chills and got his groping finger on the pulse of public opinion that he found himself utterly mistaken and in danger of mortal error. He then wrote, and gave to the public prints, a curious letter, addressed to Marie Louise, asserting that Napoleon was dying in the torments of a frightful agony. This amounted to a recantation. In consequence he was banished from England under the Alien Bill. At once he hurried away to Prince Eugène (Napoleon's treasurer) and from him reclaimed and received, for four years certainly, his arrears of imperial pay and pension. In 1822 he was permitted to return to France.
The notoriety of his name is due to two sets of circumstances. Sir Walter Scott told the truth about his conduct, just when the noble general was beginning to swim in the refulgence of the Napoleonic legend. There ensued a wordy warfare. The weapons on one side were official papers; on the other denials, insinuations, and finally the assertion of some vague commission or another given by the great captive, impossible of fulfilment in any way other than by the mysterious course of the plenipotentiary. This mystery is still unsolved and the commission undiscovered, but in France at least the conflict still rages. As late as 1908 a caustic critic was challenged to a duel by the testy and furious family head of the Gourgauds. The other set of circumstances is equally curious. Gourgaud left behind him a journal of his St. Helena life. Its contents are certainly authentic evidence of the writer's character, and as there is no means of checking the authenticity of what is recorded about Napoleon and his Longwood household, the record may possibly be and probably is accurate. The sore spirit of the writer required a confidant, and since there was no congenial soul to receive his outpourings he relieved himself as other sentimental egoists have done in the pages of a journal. From these the most conscientious efforts have been made to construct a psychology of the Emperor. The result is a morbid psychology of a caged falcon, the revival of bitter controversy as to the treatment of the great prisoner by a Tory ministry, and generally of a rather abstracted but intense interest in the Napoleonic legend. Hence the prolonged vogue of a celebrity which should have been ephemeral. The general is in no proper sense a historical factor except as the influence of his behavior in Europe served to quicken the existing lively interest in Napoleon. As far as his earliest testimony went, and many inclined to heed it, the master he had served was in excellent health, was kindly treated, and in general was better off than could have been expected. This of course lashed the imperialists to fury; their information was to the diametrically opposite effect.
Antecedent to Gourgaud's departure was that of Las Cases, but his journey was so impeded, his health so shaken, and his devotion so discounted, that whatever he accomplished in molding public opinion was logically subsequent to the work of the general. Spanish by origin, French by six centuries of devotion, his family was of the higher nobility. He himself had been an emigrant, but had returned to become a member of the Council of State. As a great civil official he had learned to love Napoleon and deliberately chose exile with him rather than honors and service under the restored Bourbons. In 1816 he wrote, and endeavored to forward secretly, letters containing his views as to the disgraceful treatment of Napoleon. These were intercepted and the writer was condemned in Lowe's first fury to depart. On second thought the governor begged him to remain under certain restrictions; these Las Cases would not accept, possibly because he saw himself of greater use in Europe than in St. Helena. He reached the Cape of Good Hope in January, 1817, was there detained eight months, was then forwarded to England, where he was forbidden to land, thence to Belgium, and finally, in December, a physical derelict, he found shelter in Frankfort-on-the-Main, where he lived for a time under the strictest surveillance. His faculties were soon restored to a certain rather impaired activity, and in 1818 he laid a powerful protest against the treatment of Napoleon before the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle. No less a person than the Emperor's mother was his agent and intermediary. A meeting of reactionary sovereigns and their ministers, terrified by the throes of a revolutionary spirit more and more personified in Bonaparte, could in no case be receptive to such a remonstrance, and was utterly cold and scornful in the face of Gourgaud's evidence to the well-being and kind treatment of Napoleon, already published. Even with the most enlightened and liberal public of Europe, that of Great Britain, Las Cases' controversial publications fell rather flat. Readers were weary of the theme, since O'Meara was now and had been for some time past in possession of the Napoleonic field.
Dr. O'Meara, the Emperor's body-physician, was a warm-hearted Irishman, faithful, able, and devoted. That he received substantial gratuities from his patient is no longer questioned, and these transfers of money have been called by a harsh name; yet it is easy for a loyal but illogical devotee to confuse salary, gifts, fees, bribes, each with each, and one with the other; the crime was not quite so heinous with a man of his character as it would have been in persons of severer quality and mold. It seems equally certain that the stern pedant acting as governor would gladly have employed the same inducements to secure him as a spy. At least he did not qualify as the channel of a double espionage, and for that reason fell under the grave suspicion of authority. The diagnosis of Napoleon's malady as very grave, which he had made, was confirmed in January, 1819, by Stokoe, the ship's surgeon of the Conqueror, the British flag vessel then in the harbor. But from O'Meara it was not accepted; he was dismissed from service and on July twenty-fifth, 1818, sailed homeward. On August seventeenth the London "Morning Post" began to print communications sent from St. Helena by him, and shortly after he landed, in October, there appeared a pamphlet by him attacking Sir Hudson Lowe. His voluminous "Voice from St. Helena" was not published until after Napoleon's death. Like the rest of the contemporary memoirs and memorials, the value of his writings lies in their effect on the liberal sentiment of the world. The Metternich system of repression and intervention, which worked its will in dynastic government for a generation after Napoleon, engendered a newer liberalism which forgot the tyranny of Napoleonic imperialism and remembered the Consulate as expressing a well-organized form of government, adapted superbly for crushing systems, dynastic or aristocratic or plutocratic, which oppressed mankind by denying the only possible equality, equality of opportunity, the Napoleonic "carrière ouverte aux talents." By all sympathetic nationalists, constitutionalists, and radicals these books were literally devoured, and in France particularly their effect was lasting. There could never have been a second Napoleon except as he was thought likely to reproduce the Consulate; when his rule had proved to be imperialistic the country was disenchanted. Liberty with order is so ardently desired! but too often the devices to secure it beget license with chaos. The literal correctness of O'Meara's reporting, like that of the rest, cannot be controverted by any rebutting testimony, but the nature portrayed is the same morbid, sensational, notoriety-seeking, unwholesome, and pathological specimen as that furnished by the others.
Dr. Stokoe was speedily disgraced because it was now certain that any bulletin of serious illness was evidence of conspiracy by the Emperor and his friends for his escape. It is still affirmed that this second physician yielded to the Emperor's blandishments and disobeyed Lowe's orders. His successor, Dr. Verling, was Lowe's man, and, finding his position intolerable, resigned with the insinuation that he could not accept bribes. The party strife demanded either that Napoleon must be entirely well and well treated, or else utterly moribund and abominably used. Neither was the case, but a mortal disease had declared itself, his grand marshal was seriously alarmed, and the members of the Bonaparte family in Europe were dreaming of Napoleon's escape or planning the renewal of his household by fresh blood. The Bertrands and the Montholons, though faithful and devoted, were simply worn out. A Corsican physician, Dr. Antommarchi, and an Italian priest, Buonavita, were added to the household in September, 1819. Mme. Montholon with her child was already at home seeking substitutes, having departed from St. Helena in July. Neither event had any special consequences. Mme. Montholon found a possible successor to the grand marshal in the person of Planat, an officer of the Hundred Days. Negotiations for his sailing were protracted; such was Napoleon's condition before they were concluded that Montholon would not consider deserting his post, though Bertrand was quite willing to see Planat supplant himself. Buonavita was ill and returned to Europe. Antommarchi was detested by his patient, a new priest and a new doctor were found, and the faithful Pauline desired to join her exiled brother. By this time the year 1820 had passed and the fateful spring of 1821 was well advanced. All preparations for relieving the household and the guard at St. Helena were now, of course, futile. Three years of suffering had culminated in the death of the exile.
The documentary material for the St. Helena epoch is very scanty. The "Mémorial" of Las Cases and the "Voice" of O'Meara are both valuable as works but not as transcripts. Of Gourgaud's "Journal" the value is greater, but the medium of transmission most abnormal. The volumes of Mrs. Abell and Lady Malcolm furnish very slight material; the papers of the outsiders like Montchenu, Balmain, and Sturmer, like even Lowe himself, furnish side-lights only; the souvenirs of Mme. Montholon are trifling and cannot bear critical examination. The recitals of Montholon were thought of importance until careful scrutiny showed how he had drawn on Las Cases and O'Meara, how scanty, scrappy, and confused his own notes were, and finally, when his letters to his wife were printed, how completely these unfalsified documents contradicted the other publications in the few interesting points on which they touch, both in the English edition of Colburn and the carefully edited and reedited French edition. The more the slight authentic material is examined the more certain it appears that it is hopeless to read from it Napoleon's character, even in the unnatural environment of St. Helena, least of all for the years of real life. Conduct is the only test of belief, not the invalid lamentations or cynical banter of dreary, hopeless imprisonment. And when all this talk of a man in anguish is dubiously reported, distorted by the medium of a heart-sick listener, or by the transcription of men bored to extinction, its value is obviously still further diminished. The story has been briefly narrated of how the legend was engendered, of how it was planted and watered on the continent of Europe, and its influence on subsequent generations has been indicated. This is the sum total of what history finds as its material during the closing years of Napoleon's life. The souvenirs of Bertrand and Marchand are as yet inaccessible, if indeed they exist. Some day their possible publication may shed a few rays of new light on minor points: they cannot greatly enlarge or substantively reconstruct the slight historical material we have been able to discover. For valuable generalizations we must fall back on the many abundant facts of Napoleon's long career, on the very few facts of his conduct when mewed and exasperated at St. Helena, on the effects which these in sum have produced in history. The world at large marvels at the general, the statesman, the conqueror, the emperor; it is apt to pass unnoticed the judge and tamer of two epochs, the mediator between a ruined past, a chaotic present, and a future, orderly at least, though streaked with the stains of tyranny.