Napoleon himself may have laughed at it. We know that at St. Helena he applauded English caricatures of a similar character, notably one which represented George III. as a corpulent old man standing on the English coast, hurling in fury a huge beet at the head of Napoleon on the other side of the Channel, and saying to him, "Go and make yourself some sugar!"[35] We know also that while he relished the satirical pictures aimed at his enemies and rivals, he was very far from enjoying those which reflected disagreeably upon himself. "If caricatures," said he one day at St. Helena, "sometimes avenge misfortune, they form a continual annoyance to power; and how many have been made upon me! I think I have had my share of them." [Footnote 35: "Napoleon at St. Helena," p. 90, by John S. C. Abbott, New York, Harper & Brothers.] [Illustration: A Great Man's Last Leap--Napoleon going on Board the English Frigate, assisted by the Faithful Bertrand. (Paris, 1815.)] Even he did not care for caricature when he was right. If it can be said that Napoleon Bonaparte conferred upon France one lasting good, it was beet-root sugar; but the satire aimed at that useful article does not appear to have offended him. In a newspaper of June, 1812, we read: "A caricature has been executed at Paris, in which the emperor and the King of Rome are the most prominent characters. The emperor is represented as sitting at the table in the nursery with a cup of coffee before him, into which he is squeezing beet-root. Near to him is seated the young King of Rome, voraciously sucking the beet-root. The nurse, who is steadfastly observing him, is made to say, '_Suck, dear_, suck; your father _says_ it is sugar.'" He did not care, probably, for that. It would have been far otherwise if a draughtsman had touched upon his mad invasion of Russia. It was not until his power was gone that French satirists tried their pencils upon him, and then with no great success. With the downfall of Napoleon was involved the prostration of France. Humiliation followed humiliation. The spirit of Frenchmen was broken, and their resources were exhausted. In the presence of such events as the Russian catastrophe, the march of the allies upon Paris, Napoleon's banishment to Elba, the Hundred Days, Waterloo, the encampment of foreign armies in the public places of Paris, the flight of the emperor, and his final exile, the satirist was superseded, and burlesque itself was outdone by reality. When at last Paris was restored to herself, and peace again gave play to the human mind, Napoleon was covered with the majesty of what seemed a sublime misfortune. That peerless histrionic genius took the precaution in critical moments to let the world know what character he was enacting, and accordingly, when he stepped on board the English man-of-war, he announced himself to mankind as Themistocles magnanimously seeking an asylum at the hands of the most powerful of his enemies.