Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870 -- Travel -- Italy; Italy -- Description and travel; Novelists, English -- 19th century -- Biography
Sir Hudson (that you could have seen his regimentals!) was a perfect
mammoth of a man, to Napoleon; hideously ugly, with a monstrously
disproportionate face, and a great clump for the lower-jaw, to express
his tyrannical and obdurate nature. He began his system of persecution,
by calling his prisoner ‘General Buonaparte;’ to which the latter
replied, with the deepest tragedy, ‘Sir Yew ud se on Low, call me not
thus. Repeat that phrase and leave me! I am Napoleon, Emperor of
France!’ Sir Yew ud se on, nothing daunted, proceeded to entertain him
with an ordinance of the British Government, regulating the state he
should preserve, and the furniture of his rooms: and limiting his
attendants to four or five persons. ‘Four or five for _me_!’ said
Napoleon. ‘Me! One hundred thousand men were lately at my sole command;
and this English officer talks of four or five for _me_!’ Throughout the
piece, Napoleon (who talked very like the real Napoleon, and was, for
ever, having small soliloquies by himself) was very bitter on ‘these
English officers,’ and ‘these English soldiers;’ to the great
satisfaction of the audience, who were perfectly delighted to have Low
bullied; and who, whenever Low said ‘General Buonaparte’ (which he always
did: always receiving the same correction), quite execrated him. It
would be hard to say why; for Italians have little cause to sympathise
with Napoleon, Heaven knows.
There was no plot at all, except that a French officer, disguised as an
Englishman, came to propound a plan of escape; and being discovered, but
not before Napoleon had magnanimously refused to steal his freedom, was
immediately ordered off by Low to be hanged. In two very long speeches,
which Low made memorable, by winding up with ‘Yas!’—to show that he was
English—which brought down thunders of applause. Napoleon was so
affected by this catastrophe, that he fainted away on the spot, and was
carried out by two other puppets. Judging from what followed, it would
appear that he never recovered the shock; for the next act showed him, in
a clean shirt, in his bed (curtains crimson and white), where a lady,
prematurely dressed in mourning, brought two little children, who kneeled
down by the bedside, while he made a decent end; the last word on his
lips being ‘Vatterlo.’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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