Dr. F. Antomarchi, a native of Corsica, and a professor of anatomy at Florence, at the request of Cardinal Fesch and of “Madame Mère,” and with the consent of the British government, went to Saint Helena in 1819 as physician to the exiled Emperor. He closed his master’s eyes in death; and immediately before the official _post-mortem_ examination, held the next day, he made the mask in question. He said in his report that the face was relaxed, but that the mask was correct so far as the shape of the forehead and nose was concerned. And unquestionably it is the most truthful portrait of Bonaparte that exists. When Napoleon thought himself closely observed, he had, according to Sir Walter Scott, “the power of discharging from his countenance all expression save that of an indefinite smile, and presenting to the curious investigator the fixed and rigid eyes of a marble bust.” As he is here observed, no matter how curiously or how closely, he is seen as he was. It is the face of Napoleon off his guard. Bonaparte’s distinguishing traits were selfishness, combativeness, destructiveness, acquisitiveness, secretiveness, self-esteem, and love of approbation. He had some vague notion of benevolence and of veneration, but he was blind to the dictates of truth and of justice, and he was so utterly deficient in conscientiousness that he does not seem to have been conscious of its existence. His entire character was summed up once in four broken-English words, by an ignorant little local guide in Berlin. Fritz, showing a party of Americans through the royal palace at Charlottenburg, worked himself up to a pitch of patriotic frenzy in describing the conduct of the parvenu French Emperor during his occupancy of the private apartments of the legitimate German Queen, and he concluded his harangue by saying, quietly and decidedly, “But then, you know, Napoleon was no gentleman!” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration: NAPOLEON I.] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ That seems to tell the whole story. He was, in his way, the greatest man who ever lived. He stepped from a humble cradle in an Italian provincial town on to the throne of France; he made his commonplace brothers and sisters and his ignorant henchmen kings and queens of all the European countries within his reach; he locked a pope in a closet, as if he had been a naughty boy; he re-drew the map of half the world; he re-wrote history; his name will live as long as books are read; no man out of so little ever accomplished so much—but yet he was _no_ gentleman! The Bonaparte mask, in bronze, as here shown is very rare. Only four are known to exist. The copy in the Paris Mint—_Hotel des Monnaies_—is without the gilded wreath which this copy possesses. It is said to have “been taken from the Emperor’s face at St. Helena, twenty hours after his death.”