Baron Walter Runciman Runciman

“ I left you peace; I return and find war! I left you victories; I find reverses! I left you the millions of Italy; I find despoiling laws and misery throughout!" But ere this terrific indictment had been thrust at them, they had become conscious that their dissolute and chaotic regime was at an end, and that Napoleon had become the ruler of the France he had left prosperous and found tottering to pieces on his return from Egypt.
Josephine had played her part in the drama with surprising shrewdness and marked devotion to her husband's cause. ”

“ A monarch who rules under the tender mercies of a capricious people, and worse still, a capricious and not too scrupulous monarchy of monarchs, is not to be envied, and this was exactly the position of Louis Philippe. He was beset by the noisy clamour of many factions, besides having to keep a shrewd eye on those lofty men to whom he had to look with perpetual nervous tension for the stability and endurance of his throne. He knew the heart of the nation was centred on St. Helena, and that a wave of repentance was passing over the land. ”

“ To all those who had access to Napoleon, the burning love he had for his son was well known, and in one of those outbursts of passionate anguish he declares to the Countess of Montholon that it was for him alone that he returned from Elba, and if he still formed some expectations in exile, they were for him also. He declares that he is the source of his greatest anguish, and that every day he costs him tears of blood. He imagines to himself the most horrid events, which he cannot remove from his mind. ”

“ The genuine female traducer is an awful scourge, especially if she be political. No male can equal her in refined aggressive cunning. She can circulate a filthy libel by writing a virtuous letter, and never a flaw will appear to trip her into responsibility for it. And her sardonic smile is an inarticulate revelation of all she wishes to convey. It is more than a mere oration. It emits the impression of a bite.
Madame de Staël showed an aptitude for this ignoble aggressiveness towards Napoleon after she had exhausted every form of strategy to allure him into a flirtation with her. ”

“ What had they to fear from a man whose political career ended when he gave himself up to the captain of the Bellerophon, and whose health was now shattered by disease and ill-usage? Had the common people of this nation known all that was being perpetrated in their name, the Duke of Wellington and all his myrmidons could not have withstood the revolt against it, and were such treatment to be meted out to a political prisoner of our day, the wrath of the nation might break forth in a way that would teach tyrants a salutary lesson. ”

“ The mother was a regular visitor, and no one was more welcome at Malmaison than she. These incidents of magnanimity, characteristic of Josephine, would make her not only attractive but lovable, were it not there are also left on record flaws which show that she was seriously lacking in probity and fidelity to him to whom she owed everything. Her maternal affection and loving care of her children are without reproach, and her generosity to worthy and unworthy people was extraordinary. She loved Napoleon with peculiar eccentricity. His honour and interests were never a consideration. ”

“ Gourgaud, in fact, was more knave than fool, as his subsequent beseeching appeals on behalf of Napoleon to Marie Louise and other personages in France very clearly prove.
But take these men and women as a whole, view the circumstances and conditions of life on this rock of vile memory, inquire as minutely as you may into their conduct, and you see, towering above all, that their supreme interest is centred on him whom they voluntarily followed into exile. He is their ideal of human greatness, their friend, and their Emperor. ”

“ Vast sums were annually expended for no other purpose than to put their afflicted prisoner through the torture of a living purgatory.
Napoleon did not heed their silly stories of shooting exploits, though he knew the underlying purpose of them. It was the darker, sordid wickedness that was daily practised on him that ate like a canker into mind and body until he was a shattered wreck. It was the foul treatment of this great man that caused Dr. Barry O'Meara to revolt and openly proclaim that the captive of St. Helena was being put to death. ”

“ Your father insisted that you should break your marriage vow and found in you a willing accomplice in the outrage committed against me. You had shared my throne, and I had reason to expect that every human instinct would call you to my side in my exile, and the thought that burns into my soul is that in the infamy of years, posterity will not be reproached for averting its eye from you as well as from that heartless father who requested you to forsake me. ”

“ Here the Emperor's voice assumed a peculiar accent of ironical melancholy and of profound sadness: 'Yes, our existence has shone with all the splendour of the crown and sovereignty; and yours, Montholon, Bertrand, reflected that splendour, as the dome of the Invalides, gilded by us, reflects the rays of the sun. But reverses have come; the gold is effaced little by little. The rain of misfortunes and outrages with which we are deluged every day carries away the last particles; we are only lead, gentlemen, and soon we shall be but dust. Such is the destiny of great men ”

“ No writer has been able to give proof that it was withdrawn, even when he was overwhelmed with disaster which drained his empire of vast masses of its population. No cruel inhuman despot could magnetise with an enduring fascination multitudes of men and women as he did. It was not his incomparable genius, nor his matchless military successes in battle. He was loved because he was lovable, and was trusted because he inspired belief in his high motives of amelioration of all down-trodden people. ”

“ I say again, that apart from the violence of the treatment of the Powers towards him (and they all had a shameful share in it) , it was a fatal blunder to send this great mind to perish on a rock when, by adopting a more humane policy, his incomparable genius might have been used to carry out the reforms he had set his mind on after his return from Elba. The tumult which surrounded his career had changed; he saw with a clear vision the dawn of a new era, and at once proclaimed to Benjamin Constant and to the French nation his great scheme of renewing the heart of things. ”

“ A couple of generations had come into existence from 1815 to 1840, but even to those who knew him only as a captive, he was as much their Emperor and their hero and martyr as he was to his contemporaries. The pride of race, the glory of the Empire and of its great founder, was suckled into them from the time of birth, and as they grew into manhood and womanhood they became permeated with a passionate devotion to his cause. ”

“ Nothing approaching the perfidy of it could happen in the present age. It is unthinkable that either the sagacious, peaceloving, peacemaking monarch on the throne or his Ministers and people would lend themselves to committing the senseless blunders that disgraced our name at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Even allowing that it was inevitable we should wage war against the head of the French nation, nothing can ever blot out the stain of having refused him the asylum he asked for, after we had taken so large a share in bringing about his downfall. ”

“ The image of Josephine is constantly soaring around him, and he pours forth ebullitions of frantic devotion at the cannon's mouth, in the Canton, anywhere, and everywhere. He is as rich in phrase as he is in courage and resource. He finds time to scrawl a few burning words of passion which indicate that his soul is at once aflame with thoughts of her and the grim military task he has undertaken. ”

“ They kneel at his feet and appeal to him to continue to be the good, kind father he has ever been, and to receive their mother back to his affections.
It is all over now with Napoleon. He is never proof against tears, so sends for their mother, who falls into his arms and faints. She is tenderly laid into his bed, saved from her woeful fate, and when Lucien Bonaparte arrived by command next morning, to take instructions for the impending divorce proceedings, that horror had disappeared from their outlook, and both Josephine and Napoleon were wrapped in a drowsy joy. ”

“ But surely, in the interest of political, historical, and personal rectitude, the dying man's message to the world should absolve him from having his lucid, succinct conversations jargoned into a tattered tedium. It is either a perversion of understanding or a misanthropic egoism that can twist Napoleon's discourses on religious topics into meaning that he ever was seriously thinking of giving preference to the worship of the sun, or contemplating becoming a follower of Mohammed, or that he ever showed real evidences of being an unbeliever in the God of his race. ”

“ Europe was a second time in mourning, bowing its head in reverence and shame. Never have there been such universal tokens of condemnation of the captivity and the creatures who engineered it, and never such unequalled joy and homage as were paid to the memory of the great dead. During the eight days the lying-in-state lasted, more than two hundred thousand people came to the Invalides daily. Thousands never got within the coveted grounds, yet they came in increasing numbers each successive day, notwithstanding the rigour of the biting weather. ”

“ History is pregnant with proof that their cry for peace was an impudent hypocrisy. They might have had it at any time, but this did not suit their policy of legitimacy. Countless thousands of human beings were slaughtered to satisfy the aversion of kings and nobles to the plan of one man who towered above them, and insisted on breaking up the nefarious system of feudalism and kingship by divine right. They loathed both him and his system. They plotted for his assassination, and intrigued with all the ferocity of wild animals against his humane and enlightened government. ”

“ Their souls throb with fierce emotion at the agony caused by the venomously malignant tyranny. The meanest privileges of humanity are denied him, and if they plotted in order that the world might learn of the hideous oppression, who, with a vestige of holy pity in him, will deny that their motive was laudable? Let critics say what they will, these devoted followers of a fallen and sorely stricken chief are an example of imperishable loyalty. They had their differences, their petty jealousies, and at times bemoaned their hard fate, and this oft-times caused the Emperor to quickly rebuke them. ”

“ Indeed, we need no further justification for Napoleon's statements as to what the official intention was towards him. Without a doubt Dr. Max Lenz is too reckless in his generosity towards Lowe, for his actions from beginning to end of his career prove that he was a dreadful creature. The thought of him and of those incarnate spiders who kept spinning their web, and for six mortal years disgracing humanity, is in truth enough to unsettle one's reason. ”

“ These ideals are in striking contrast to the policy of the oligarchy of Europe, who were fighting to suppress knowledge and to re-establish the worst form of superstition and despotism.
It is a deplorable thought that the nations (and especially Great Britain) who allied themselves against this man of the people and sent him to an inhuman death might have saved themselves the eternal condemnation of future ages had they made their peace with him, as the sagacious Charles James Fox would have done had he lived. ”

“ These bloodsucking creatures were always in the road of reform, always steeped overhead in political intrigue, always concerned in plots against the life of Napoleon, and always shrieking with resentment when they and their accomplices were caught. Some writers are so completely imbued with the righteousness of murdering Napoleon, they convey the impression that when any attempt failed, the perpetrators, instead of being punished, should have had the decoration of the Legion of Honour placed upon them by himself. ”

“ It is hard to believe that a man could be so perversely crooked as Sir Hudson Lowe. How human it was for the exile to long to hear a message from the lips of one who was credited with having seen and spoken to the mother of his son, and how inhuman of Lowe to put any obstacles in the way of his desire being gratified! ”