William Makepeace Thackeray

“ Napoleon and his braves ought not to quit each other. Under the immense gilded dome of the Invalides he would find a sanctuary worthy of himself. A dome imitates the vault of heaven, and that vault alone" (meaning of course the other vault) "should dominate above his head. His old mutilated Guard shall watch around him: the last veteran, as he has shed his blood in his combats, shall breathe his last sigh near his tomb, and all these tombs shall sleep under the tattered standards that have been won from all the nations of Europe." ”

“ You and I, dear Miss Smith, know the exact value of heraldic bearings. We know that though the greatest pleasure of all is to ACT like a gentleman, it is a pleasure, nay a merit, to BE one—to come of an old stock, to have an honorable pedigree, to be able to say that centuries back our fathers had gentle blood, and to us transmitted the same. There IS a good in gentility: the man who questions it is envious, or a coarse dullard not able to perceive the difference between high breeding and low. ”

“ They say that on the passage of Napoleon's coffin down the Seine, old soldiers and country people walked miles from their villages just to catch a sight of the boat which carried his body and to kneel down on the shore and pray for him. God forbid that we should quarrel with such prayers and sorrow, or question their sincerity. Something great and good must have been in this man, something loving and kindly, that has kept his name so cherished in the popular memory, and gained him such lasting reverence and affection. ”

“ Where, for instance, would the Empire of Napoleon have been, if Ney and Lannes had never sported such a thing as a coat-of-arms, and had only written their simple names on their shields, after the fashion of Desaix's scutcheon yonder?—the bold Republican who led the crowning charge at Marengo, and sent the best blood of the Holy Roman Empire to the right-about, before the wretched misbegotten imperial heraldry was born, that was to prove so disastrous to the father of it. It has always been so. They won't amalgamate. A country must be governed by the one principle or the other. ”

“ Ah, my dear, when big and little men come to be measured rightly, and great and small actions to be weighed properly, and people to be stripped of their royal robes, beggars' rags, generals' uniforms, seedy out-at-elbowed coats, and the like—or the contrary say, when souls come to be stripped of their wicked deceiving bodies, and turned out stark naked as they were before they were born—what a strange startling sight shall we see, and what a pretty figure shall some of us cut! Fancy how we shall see Pride, with his Stultz clothes and padding pulled off, and dwindled down to a forked radish! ”

“ The very fact of a squeeze dissipates all solemnity. One great crowd is always, as I imagine, pretty much like another. In the course of the last few years I have seen three: that attending the coronation of our present sovereign, that which went to see Courvoisier hanged, and this which witnessed the Napoleon ceremony. The people so assembled for hours together are jocular rather than solemn, seeking to pass away the weary time with the best amusements that will offer. ”

“ The greatest official honors had been rendered by the English authorities to the memory of the Emperor—the most striking testimonials of respect had marked the adieu given by St. Helena to his coffin; and from this moment the mortal remains of the Emperor were about to belong to France. When the funeral-car stopped, the Prince de Joinville advanced alone, and in presence of all around, who stood with their heads uncovered, received, in a solemn manner, the imperial coffin from the hands of General Middlemore. ”

“ And although it was not to be expected that the great French nation should forego its natural desire of recovering the remains of a hero so dear to it for the sake of the individual interest of the landlady in question, it must have been satisfactory to her to find, that the peculiarity of her position was so delicately appreciated by the august Prince who commanded the expedition, and carried away with him animae dimidium suae—the half of the genteel independence which she derived from the situation of her hotel. In a word, politeness and friendship could not be carried farther. ”

“ From the morning the three French vessels of war had assumed the usual signs of deep mourning: their yards crossed and their flags lowered. Two French merchantmen, 'Bonne Amie' and 'Indien,' which had been in the roads for two days, had put themselves under the Prince's orders, and followed during the ceremony all the manoeuvers of the 'Belle Poule.' The forts of the town, and the houses of the consuls, had also their flags half-mast high. ”

“ With this profound reflection, we turned away to the right towards the hanging-bridge (where we met a detachment of young men of the Ecole de l'Etat Major, fine-looking lads, but sadly disfigured by the wearing of stays or belts, that make the waists of the French dandies of a most absurd tenuity) , and speedily passed into the avenue of statues leading up to the Invalides. All these were statues of warriors from Ney to Charlemagne, modelled in clay for the nonce, and placed here to meet the corpse of the greatest warrior of all. ”

“ The English Government makes him a present of the bones of Napoleon: English workmen work for nine hours without ceasing, and dig the coffin out of the ground: the English Commissioner hands over the key of the box to the French representative, Monsieur Chabot: English horses carry the funeral car down to the sea-shore, accompanied by the English Governor, who has actually left his bed to walk in the procession and to do the French nation honor. ”

“ Fancy Humility, eased of its sad load of cares and want and scorn, walking up to the very highest place of all, and blushing as he takes it! Fancy,—but we must not fancy such a scene at all, which would be an outrage on public decency. Should we be any better than our neighbors? No, certainly. And as we can't be virtuous, let us be decent. Figleaves are a very decent, becoming wear, and have been now in fashion for four thousand years. And so, my dear, history is written on fig-leaves. ”

“ In those gentle silly tears of yours there is something touches one, be they never so foolish. I don't think there were many such natural drops shed that day as those which just made their appearance in the grandmother's eyes, and then went back again as if they had been ashamed of themselves, while the good lady and her little troop walked across the road. Think how happy she will be when night comes, and there has been no murder of English, and the brood is all nestled under her wings sound asleep, and she is lying awake thanking God that the day and its pleasures and pains are over. ”

“ Certain things are there in the world that they will not allow to be called by their right names, and will insist upon our admiring, whether we will or no. Woe be to the man who would enter too far into the recesses of that magnificent temple where our Goddess is enshrined, peep through the vast embroidered curtains indiscreetly, penetrate the secret of secrets, and expose the Gammon of Gammons! ”

“ At their very first lie, our first parents made for it, and there it is still the great Humbug Plant, stretching its wide arms, and sheltering beneath its leaves, as broad and green as ever, all the generations of men. ”

“ When we arrived in the open air we passed through the court of the Invalids, where thousands of people had been assembled, but where the benches were now quite bare. Then we came on to the terrace before the place: the old soldiers were firing off the great guns, which made a dreadful stunning noise, and frightened some of us, who did not care to pass before the cannon and be knocked down even by the wadding. The guns were fired in honor of the King, who was going home by a back door. All the forty thousand people who covered the great stands before the Hotel had gone away too. ”

“ The grandfather, who is as proud of his wife as he was thirty years ago when he married, and pays her compliments still twice or thrice in a day, and when he leads her into a room looks round at the persons assembled, and says in his heart, "Here, gentlemen, here is my wife—show me such another woman in England,"—this gentleman had hired a room on the Champs Elysees, for he would not have his wife catch cold by exposing her to the balconies in the open air. ”

“ Thus, my dear, coquettes of your fascinating sex cover their persons with figgery, fantastically arranged, and call their masquerading, modesty. Cowards fig themselves out fiercely as "salvage men," and make us believe that they are warriors. Fools look very solemnly out from the dusk of the leaves, and we fancy in the gloom that they are sages. And many a man sets a great wreath about his pate and struts abroad a hero, whose claims we would all of us laugh at, could we but remove the ornament and see his numskull bare. ”

“ It has just brought old Moncey the Governor of the Invalids, the honest old man who defended Paris so stoutly in 1814. He has been very ill, and is worn down almost by infirmities: but in his illness he was perpetually asking, "Doctor, shall I live till the 15th? Give me till then, and I die contented." One can't help believing that the old man's wish is honest, however one may doubt the piety of another illustrious Marshal, who once carried a candle before Charles X. in a procession, and has been this morning to Neuilly to kneel and pray at the foot of Napoleon's coffin. ”

“ In the middle of the Invalid Avenue, there used to stand, on a kind of shabby fountain or pump, a bust of Lafayette, crowned with some dirty wreaths of "immortals," and looking down at the little streamlet which occasionally dribbled below him. The spot of ground was now clear, and Lafayette and the pump had been consigned to some cellar, to make way for the mighty procession that was to pass over the place of their habitation. ”

“ If you entertained an idea that war was imminent, would it not have been far better to have made your preparations in quiet, and when you found the war rumor blown over, to have said nothing about what you intended to do? ”

“ This, Madam, is History, in which a man always appears dealing with the world in his apron, or his laced livery, but which has not the power or the leisure, or, perhaps, is too high and mighty to condescend to follow and study him in his privacy. ”

“ Besides justly reprehending the French propensity towards braggadocio, it proves very strongly a point on which I am the only statesman in Europe who has strongly insisted. In the "Paris Sketch Book" it was stated that THE FRENCH HATE US. They hate us, my dear, profoundly and desperately, and there never was such a hollow humbug in the world as the French alliance. Men get a character for patriotism in France merely by hating England. ”

“ On the 8th of October, after a voyage of six-and-sixty days, the "Belle Poule" arrived in James Town harbor; and on its arrival, as on its departure from France, a great firing of guns took place. First, the "Oreste" French brig-of-war began roaring out a salutation to the frigate; then the "Dolphin" English schooner gave her one-and-twenty guns; then the frigate returned the compliment of the "Dolphin" schooner; then she blazed out with one-and-twenty guns more, as a mark of particular politeness to the shore—which kindness the forts acknowledged by similar detonations. ”

“ You must not fancy that the cannon, or rather the cannon-balls, were in the habit of furrowing the bosoms of French braves, or any other braves, with cicatrices: on the contrary, it is a known fact that cannon-balls make wounds, and not cicatrices (which, my dear, are wounds partially healed) ; nay, that a man generally dies after receiving one such projectile on his chest, much more after having his bosom furrowed by a score of them. ”

“ Most of them had fine tricolor hangings with appropriate inscriptions to the glory of the French arms.
All along the Champs Elysees were urns of plaster-of-Paris destined to contain funeral incense and flames; columns decorated with huge flags of blue, red, and white, embroidered with shining crowns, eagles, and N's in gilt paper, and statues of plaster representing Nymphs, Triumphs, Victories, or other female personages, painted in oil so as to represent marble. Real marble could have had no better effect, and the appearance of the whole was lively and picturesque in the extreme. ”

“ The sword and pistol, however, had no doubt their effect—the former was in its sheath, the latter not loaded, and I hear that the French ladies are quite in raptures with these charming loups-de-mer.
Let the warlike accoutrements then pass. It was necessary, perhaps, to strike the Parisians with awe, and therefore the crew was armed in this fierce fashion; but why should the captain begin to swagger as well as his men? and why did the Prince de Joinville lug out sword and pistol so early? ”

“ On these columns golden eagles were placed; and the newspapers did not fail to remark the ingenious position in which the royal birds had been set: for while those on the right-hand side of the way had their heads turned TOWARDS the procession, as if to watch its coming, those on the left were looking exactly the other way, as if to regard its progress. Do not fancy I am joking: this point was gravely and emphatically urged in many newspapers; and I do believe no mortal Frenchman ever thought it anything but sublime.
Do not interrupt me, sweet Miss Smith. I feel that you are angry. ”

“ If, respected Madam, you say that there is something BETTER than gentility in this wicked world, and that honesty and personal wealth are more valuable than all the politeness and high-breeding that ever wore red-heeled pumps, knights' spurs, or Hoby's boots, Titmarsh for one is never going to say you nay. ”