As Nap paced sleeplessly his rock kingdom under the flaky stars, did memory ever conjure up a strange night scene in old Vincennes? The young Duc d’Enghien, last of the race of the great Conde, was asleep in bed. Suddenly, by order of the First Consul, the French soldiery aroused the sleeper, dragged him from his luxurious couch, hurried him across the French frontier, tried him by a military commission, and then, in a ditch of the castle grounds, that very night, by order of the First Consul, they shot to death the gay young man. And they tied a lantern to his breast that it might serve as target to his heart. Did Nap see that night scene from under the flaky stars of St. Helena? His _Memoires_ do not so record.
Did the treacherously yielding waves that lapped his island home ever suggest to Nap that horror scene, when after Austerlitz, as the fleeing enemy were escaping over the frozen lake, the French artillery, by order of the Emperor, played heavily upon the ice; it cracked, broke, crashed down, and thousands sank within the treacherous waves. Or did they softly sigh of Berezina, when the heavily laden bridge broke down and his own devoted soldiers and friends--those who had stood by him at Borodino, in Moscow, and in the dread Retreat--struggled in the icy waters? Nap’s _Memoires_ do not so record.
And the dark rolling billows surf-capped--did they at times suggest low mounds in churchyards, or ominous ridges on recent battle grounds? Half a million men had died that Nap might rise and--fall. All Europe, from Lisbon to Moscow was dotted with their graves. Surely in the retrospective leisure of exile, however it may have been in the fever of the empire-strife, there was regret for all the young life suddenly darkened into death; there was awakening self-knowledge regretful, remorseful; there was lamentation at the futility of it all, the horror, the agony, the shame; there was prayer, the bitter prayer of Thais of the Desert, “Thou who hast made me have mercy on me!” Maybe: not ours to know the enigmatic heart of man; we only say there is no record of such feelings in Nap’s memoirs.
Did the year 1809 loom sullen in retrospect? That year held in record the capture of Pope Pius VII. and his confinement at Savona; the ban of excommunication pronounced against Napoleon by his illustrious prisoner; and Nap’s divorce from Josephine.