The Tragedy of St. Helena

erciless they are in their declamation and intrigue. They hint at faults, and if this is too ineffective, they invent them. Men in prominent public positions rarely es

ing or two which would paralyse belief. They could show how correct they have been in consistently proclaiming that so and so was a very much overestimated man, and never ought to have been put into such a high position; "and besides, I don't want to say all I know, but his depravity! Well, there, I could, if I

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 fla

ase of her character to serve their own ends. She had a talent which was used for mischief, but her vulgarity and egotism were quite deplorable. She would have risked the torments of Hades if she could but have embarked upon a liaison with Napoleon. She plied him with letters well seasoned with passion, but all to no purpose. She came to see him at the Rue Chantereine, and was sent away. She invited him to balls to which he never went. But she had opportunit

ters to him were passionate, and Napoleon told Gourgaud at St. Helena that she even threatened to kill her son if Benjamin would do what she wished him to. This fussy

e eye. Her great grievance was the First Consul's, and subsequently the Emperor's, coldness towards her. He estimated her at her true value. He treated her with the courtesy due to a French citizen, but nothing more, and when she misbehaved in his presence, he rebuked her with due con

ong opposition from a section of the clergy. Madame de Sta?l and the friends whom she had whipped up, many of them being the principal generals, were mischievously opposed to it, and brought pressure to bear so that he might be induced to establish the Protestant religion. Napoleon ignored them all. He knew he was on the right ground, and that the nation as a whole was with him. France was essentially a Roman Catholic country, and the head of it gave back to her people what was regarded as the true faith. The exile frequ

nsolidate. "Let her be judged as a man," said Napoleon, and in truth he was right in deciding in this way, as her whole attitude aped the masculine. He was right, too, in showing how wholly objectionable she had made herself to him. He had been led to adopt a sort of "For God's sake, what does she want?" idea of her during the early years of his rule, though he never at any time showed weakness in his actual dealings with her. He disliked women who asserted themselves as men, and he disliked the amorous offspring of Necker more because he loathed women who threw themselves into the arms of men; she had

of gifted lunatic that had got the idea of seducing him into her head. She became so mischievous that he bundled her out of France. "As long as I live," said he, "she shall not return." He advised that she should live in Berlin, Vienna, Milan, or London, the latter for preference. There she would have full scope for her genius in producing pamphlets. "Oh yes," says the "god who had descended on earth"; "she ha

I know what they mean. Why should she be so an

in the most absurd, tasteless attire. This woman of genius and folly lacked the wisdom of gauging t

less taste. It improves good looks, and, if need be, it covers up defects; but in any case it is the bounden duty of women to dress with some regard to conventional custom.

man despot and she a high-minded, virtuous Frenchwoman, and a genius in the art of government. They quote her as a great authority. Her knowledge of his evil deeds and mistakes of administration is set forth as being flawless. They bemoan his treatment of this amiable female, and in the midst of their ecstasy of compassion and wrath they hand down to posterity a record of unheard-of woes. There is little doubt Napoleon's remark that "the Neckers were an odd lot,

rn flawless justice only existed. They recognised that she was a personality, but her antics puzzled them, and well they might. She bewailed her isolation with a throbbing heart, and after committing indiscretions that Robespierre would have sent her head flying for, she was suddenly bereaved of her neglected husband. This event gave Benjamin Constant a better chance, but the Baroness aimed at higher game. She was held in the

y a young lady, and nursed into consciousness and convalescence by loving care, which enabled him to reach Madrid, and ultimately Geneva, where, in the radiance of youthful infatuation, he rode with reckless energy down a risky steep part of the city, so that he might pass the window of the lady, who was more than old enough to be his mother, and in a few months was to be made his wife. A child was born to them in 1812, and in order to

never fought. There does not seem to have been very much to fight a duel about. Constant had a quarrel with his father in which he involved Madame de Sta?l, and Rocca resented it like a gallant youthful husband, who was at that stage when it is thought desirable to shoot or other

ost part she wrote with superficial feeling and without real soul. During the Napoleonic regime, time was a creeping horror to her, but she found pleasure in the thought that it was a torture to her suffering heart. George Eliot knew and used her extraordinary power; Madame de Sta?l wasted hers. Nevertheless she had many friends who loved

have lost!" And the distracted Benjamin Constant, filled with remorse, reproached himself for some undefin

ere an attachment for the son of a person named M. Baranti, which very nearly cheated Rocca from becoming her husband, and the faithless Benjamin Constant from being, erroneo

posed author of all her woes. She readily found amongst his enemies (and thus the enemies of France) those who yearned with her in the hope she freely and openly expressed that her native land should suffer defeats, and in this her desire was fully acquiesced in by the combination of hysterical and purblind Kings, aided by a coterie of irreconcilables, who welcomed the destruction of their fatherland in order that the man who had made it the glory and the envy of the world sho

aitorous daughter of Jacques Necker, Minister of Finance to Louis XVI., an

s inflamed Charles de Remusat to urge his mother to enter into competition with this work, the result being the production of Madame de Remusat's memoirs, edited by her grandson, M. Paul de Remusat. Charles (her son) had reproached her for having destroyed memoirs she had written previously,[23] but lurking in her mind was the thought of all the favours she and her family had received, and her correspondence, teeming with adulation for the man whom

e says that she was witty and of a refined mind, and though she was less "good-looking" than her companions, she had the advantage of being able to "charm his mind," and she was almost the only woman with whom he condescended to converse. She relates

fe from time to time, and Josephine's goodness was repaid by seeing Madame in feline fashion purring at her Imperial master's affections, and on the authority of Madame de Remusat she "becomes cold and jealous." Finding that Napoleon did not appreciate her love-making, she, like Madame de Sta?l under similar circumstances, took to intriguing, which got her quickly into disgrace. She is anxious to make her fall as light as possible in the public eye, so relates that he told her that "his desire was to make her a great lady, but he could not be expected to do this unless she showed devotion." But in spite of the wife's defection, as is always Napoleon's way, he does

they occurred have been published, and the memoirs put side by side with these throbbings of the heart reveal an incomparable basenes

t "In war he foresaw the means of calling away our attention from the reflections which, sooner or later, his government could not fail to suggest to us, and he reserved it in order to dazzle, or at least to enforce silence on us. Bonaparte fe

nging husband became swollen with over-indulgence and smitten with wounded pride, they regarded language such as now appears in her memoirs as mere froth. She practically says that she held the same views in 1

y offers like him!"[24] "Whilst he creates, so to speak, new nations in his progress, people must be struck, from one end of Europe to the other, by the remarkably prosperous

covered with, the pomp and even the magnificence surrounding us, and in which I delight, because it is proof that success has crowned

scribe to these feelings some other cause than that which really inspires them; besides, it seems to me that

the Emperor again, and how much that pleasure will be felt here! This splendid

that was at Boulogne will find itself, three weeks later, in Germany. You ask for the capture of a town? Here is the surrender of Ulm. You are not satisfied!! You are craving for more victories? Here they are: Here is Vienna which you wanted, and also a pitched battle, in order

at the moment, I should, I believe, have thrown my arms round his neck, although I should

ory, a panegyric, a book, in fact, that would show him to be immeasurably above all men living or dead. She fears that people cannot

s, that calm assurance in the midst of danger, with that wise foresight and that prompt res

as accurate. She believes "that even persons who are hardest to please must be compelled to admit that he is a most amiable sovereign." She is smitten with the feeling of gratitude, and says it is so sweet that she really rega

great distance from them. She eulogises his great qualities to her son, and advises him "to study all that she was able to tell him of th

refuting therein all her former eulogies and opinions so vividly told in the "Letters of Madame de Remusat." Now that adversity so terrible overshadows the matchless hero of the letters, she throws every scruple aside, and warms to her task in writing unstinted, gross, and manifest libels. Contrast with the "letters" these quotations from the memoirs. She avows that "nothing is so base as his soul. It is closed against all generous impulses; he never could admire a noble action." "He possesses an innate depravity of nature, and has a special taste for evil." "His absence brought solace, and made people breathe freely." "He is devoid of every kind of personal courage, and generous impulses are foreig

e over and over again declares that "his comely manners were irresistible"; but in the

h she longed for the King's return," and describes the hero of her letters as a ruthless destroyer of all w

o persevere in her task for more than two years." That is, it took her more than two years to write the "truths" contained in the memoirs disavowing the "truths" so vehemently given in the letters; the former book pregnant with th

by favours conferred upon them." He had many examples of this truth, but none more striking than the above. Madame de Remusat and her husband were raised from poverty to affluence by Napoleon, and the me

TNO

oleon might firmly establish himself on the throne, and the discovery of anti-Napoleon MSS. might have acted seriously against herself an

Madame de Remusat

Madame de Remusat

., vol. i

d., vol.

Madame de Remusat

., vol. i

Madame de Remusat