St. Helena

The ministry of Lord Liverpool, though ultra-Tory, was nevertheless embarrassed by the course of affairs. On June twentieth the premier wrote to Castlereagh that he wished Napoleon had been captured by Louis XVIII, and executed as a rebel. This amazing suggestion was the result of the progress made within a year by the doctrine of legitimacy. Although Talleyrand had observed the Hundred Days from the safe seclusion of Carlsbad, and was coldly received by his ‘legitimate’ sovereign when he returned to Paris under Wellington’s ægis, yet there was no one equally able to restore a ‘legitimate’ government, and, with the aid of Wellington, who assumed without question the chief place in reconstructing France, he was soon in full activity.
In strict logic, the allies reasoned that Napoleon was their common prisoner, and, as the chief malefactor, he should meet the fate which was to be Ney’s, and later that of Murat. By long familiarity with such notions, the Czar had finally been converted to the once abhorrent idea of legitimacy, and was hatching the scheme of the Holy Alliance; even he would have made no objection. But English opinion, however irritated, would not tolerate the idea of death as a penalty for political offenses. Whatever ministers felt or said, they dared consider no alternative in dealing with Napoleon except that of imprisonment.
Accordingly, St. Helena, the spot suggested at Vienna as being the most remote in the habitable world, was designated and the island was borrowed from the East India Company. Acts of Parliament were passed which established a special government for it, and cut it off from all outside communication, “for the better detaining in custody Napoleon Bonaparte.” The Continental allies, therefore, on August second, declared the sometime Emperor to be their common prisoner. To England they yielded the right to determine his place of detention, but to each of themselves—Austria, Russia, and Prussia—was reserved the right of sending thither a commissioner who should determine the fact of actual imprisonment.
It was in Torbay that the newspapers brought on board the ‘Bellerophon’ first announced what was under consideration. On July 31st, with inconsistent ceremony, the determination was formally announced by an embassy consisting of Lord Keith, the admiral; Sir Henry Bunbury, an under-secretary of state; and Mr. Meike, secretary to the admiral. To whom did this highest official authority address itself? To General Bonaparte, a private citizen! Their message was read in French, and Napoleon displayed perfect self-control. Asked if he had anything to say, the ex-Emperor, without temper or bitterness, appealed against the judgment of governments both to posterity and to the British people.
He was, he said, a voluntary guest; he wished to be received as such under the law of nations, and to be domiciled as an English citizen. During the interval before naturalization he would dwell under superintendence anywhere in England, thirty leagues from any seaport. He could not live in St. Helena; he was accustomed to ride twenty miles a day; what could he do on that little rock at the end of the world? He could have gone to his father-in-law, or to the Czar, but while the tricolor was still flying he had confided in British hospitality. Though defeated, he was still a sovereign, and deserved to be treated as such. With emphasis he declared that he preferred death to St. Helena.
The embassy withdrew in silence from the moving scene. Lord Keith had previously expressed gratitude to Napoleon for personal attentions to a young relative who had been captured at Waterloo. Him, therefore, the imperial prisoner now recalled, and asked if there were any tribunal to which appeal might be made. The answer was a polite negative, with the assurance that the British government would mitigate the situation as far as prudence would permit. “How so?” said Napoleon. “Surely St. Helena is preferable to a smaller space in England,” answered Keith, “or being sent to France, or perhaps to Russia.” “Russia!” exclaimed Napoleon, taken off his guard. “God preserve me from it!” This was the only moment of excitement; the witnesses of the long and trying scene have left on record the profound impression made on them by Napoleon’s dignity and admirable conduct throughout.
Subsequently the prisoner composed a written protest appealing to history. An enemy who for 20 years had waged war against the English people had come voluntarily to seek an asylum under English laws; how did England respond to such magnanimity? In his own mind, at least, he instituted and therefore wrote a comparison between-himself and Themistocles, who took refuge with the Persians, and was kindly treated. The parallel broke down in that the great Greek had never forced his enemy into entangling alliances, as Napoleon had forced England into successive coalitions for self-preservation. Moreover, his surrender was not voluntary: his life would not have been worth a moment’s purchase either in France or elsewhere on the Continent, to have fled by sea would have been to invite capture. “Wherever,” as he himself repeatedly said—”wherever there was water to float a ship, there was to be found a British standard.” Still there were many in England who took his view; much sympathy was aroused, and some futile efforts for his release were made.
For the journey to St. Helena, Napoleon was transferred to Admiral Cockburn’s ship, the ‘Northumberland’. The suite numbered thirty, and was chosen by Napoleon himself. Its members were Bertrand, Montholon, and Las Cases, with their families, together with Gourgaud and, following in a later ship, a Pole of doubtful duty and dubious personality, the self-styled Colonel Piontkowski. There were 16 servants, of whom 12 were Napoleon’s. The voyage was tedious and uneventful. The admiral adhered to English customs, and discarded the etiquette observed toward crowned heads; but he remained on the best of terms with his illustrious prisoner.
There were occasional misunderstandings, and sometimes ill-natured gossip, in which the admiral was denounced behind his back as a ‘shark’; but such little gusts of temper passed without permanent consequences. Napoleon had secured the excellent library he desired, and every day read or wrote during most of the morning; the evenings he devoted to games of hazard for low stakes, or to chess, which he played very badly. He was careful as to his diet, took abundant regular exercise, and, since his health was excellent, he appeared in the main cheerful and resigned.
The island of St. Helena is the craggy summit of an ancient volcano, rising 2700 feet above the sea, and contains 45 square miles. Its shores are precipitous, but it has an excellent harbour, that of Jamestown, which was then a port of call on the voyage from England, by the Cape of Good Hope, to India. It lies four thousand miles from London, one thousand one hundred and forty from the coast of Africa, 1180 from the nearest point in South America. There were a few thousand inhabitants of mixed race, and the tropical climate, though moist and enervating, is fairly salubrious. Under the act passed by Parliament, England increased the territorial waters around the island to a ring three times the usual size, and policed them by ‘hovering’ vessels, which made the approach of suspicious craft virtually impossible. This, with numerous other precautionary measures of minor importance, made St. Helena an impenetrable jail. It was October 16th, 1815, when Napoleon landed on its shores.
The residence provided for the imperial captive was a rather ordinary farm-house in the center of the island, on a plateau two thousand feet high. The grounds were level, and bounded by natural limits, so that they were easy to guard, and could be observed in all their extent by sentries; eventually a circuit of twelve miles was marked out, and within this the prisoner might move at will; if he wished to pass the line, he must be attended by an English officer. Considering the conceptions of state and chivalry then prevalent, the place was mean; long after, when enlarged and repaired, the house was thought not unsuitable for the entertainment of an imprisoned Zulu chieftain. Longwood, for this is the familiar name, might at a pinch have sufficed for the lodging of General Bonaparte; it was certainly better than a dungeon; but its modest comfort was far from the luxurious elegance which had become a second nature to the Emperor Napoleon.
Such as it was to be, however, it was still uninhabitable in October, and its destined occupant was, until December ninth, the guest of a hospitable merchant, Mr. Balcombe, at his villa known as The Briars. The sentinels and patrols remained six hundred paces from the door during the day; at night the cordon of guards was drawn close around the house; twice in twenty-four hours the orderly must assure himself of the prisoner’s actual presence, and human ingenuity could devise no precaution which was not taken by land and sea to make impossible any secret communication, inward or outward. Cockburn’s serene good-nature rendered it out of the question for the captive to do more than declare his policy of protest and exasperation, until April, 1816, when the admiral departed, and was replaced by Sir Hudson Lowe. The latter was a vulnerable foe. A creature of routine, and fresh from a two years’ residence as English commissioner in Blucher’s camp, he had thoroughly absorbed the temper both of the Tory ministry and of the Continental reactionaries. Neither irascible, severe, nor ill-natured, he was yet punctilious, and in no sense a match for the brilliant genius of his antagonist. With the arrival of this unfortunate official properly begins the St. Helena period of Napoleon’s life—a period considered by many to be instructive; but, as regards the talk and futile calculations in which he indulged, comparable only to that of his ineffectual agitations in Corsica.
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.
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 Eneid. 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 180 millions, which Napoleon had estimated at over 220.
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 3rd 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 “Tete … armee.” 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 11 in the morning the supreme agonies began; a little before 6 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 behaviour 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 defence 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.
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 Chateauvieux, 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 14th 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 35 years old and had been a soldier for 16, 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 favour 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 Eugene (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 endeavoured 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 25th, 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 ‘carriere 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 ‘Memorial’ 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.