After his last abdication, he retired once more to Malmaison, where he passed the few days that remained, until he bade a final farewell to the scenes which he had known at the dawn of his prosperity. No man can tell his thoughts during those lonely hours. His wife was in the palace of her ancestors, and his child was to know him no more. He could hear the din of marching soldiers, and the roar of distant battle, but they were nothing to him now. His wand was broken, the spell was over, the spirits that ministered to him had vanished, and the enchanter was left powerless and alone. But, in the still watches of the night, a familiar form may have stood beside him, and a well-known voice again whispered to him in the kindly tones of by-gone years. The crown, the sceptre, the imperial purple, the long line of kings, for which he had renounced a woman worth them all, must have faded from his memory in the swarming recollections of his once happy home. He could not look around him without seeing in every object an accusing angel; and if a human heart throbbed in his bosom, retribution came before death. Yet call him not up for judgment, without reflecting that his awful elevation and the gigantic task he had assumed had perverted a heart naturally kind and affectionate, and left him little leisure to devote to the virtues which decorate domestic life. The numberless anecdotes related of him, the charm with which he won to himself all whom he attempted to conciliate, the warm attachment of those immediately about him, tend to the belief that there was much of good in him. But his eye was continually fixed on the star he saw blazing before him, and in his efforts to follow its guidance, he heeded not the victims he crushed in his onward progress. He considered men as mere instruments to extend his dominion, and he used them with wasteful expenditure, to advance his projects or to secure his conquests. But he was not cruel, nor was he steeled to human misery. Had he been what he is sometimes represented, he never could have retained the ascendency over the minds of his followers, which, regardless of defeat and suffering and death, lived on when even hope had gone.