The Malmaison, where the Emperor rested, was empty. Joséphine was dead[356]; Bonaparte found himself alone in that retreat. There he had commenced his fortune; there he had been happy; there he had become intoxicated with the incense of the world; there, from the heart of his tomb, issued orders that shook the world. In those gardens where formerly the feet of the crowd raked up the sanded walks, the grass and brambles grew green; I had ascertained this when walking there. Already, for want of tending, the exotic trees were pining away; on the canals the black Australian swans no longer floated; the cage no longer held the tropical birds prisoners: they had flown away to await their host in their own country. Bonaparte might, however, have found a subject of consolation by turning his eyes upon his early days: fallen kings are afflicted above all because, looking upwards from their fall, they see only a splendid inheritance and the pomps of their cradle: but what did Napoleon discern prior to his prosperity? The manger of his birth in a Corsican village. Higher-minded, when flinging off the purple mantle, he would have proudly resumed the goat-herd's sayon; but men do not place themselves back at their origin when it was humble; it seems that an unjust Heaven deprives them of their patrimony when, in fate's lottery, they do naught but lose what they have won; and nevertheless Napoleon's greatness arises from the fact that he had started from himself: none of his blood had gone before him and prepared his power. At the sight of those abandoned gardens, of those untenanted apartments, of those galleries faded by the routs, of those rooms in which song and music had ceased, Napoleon was able to go over his career: he was able to ask himself whether, with a little more moderation, he might not have preserved his delights. Foreigners, enemies, were not banishing him now; he was not departing as a _quasi_ victor, leaving the nations in admiration of his passage, after the prodigious campaign of 1814: he was retiring beaten. Frenchmen, friends, were demanding his immediate abdication, urging his departure, refusing even to have him as a general, sending him messenger after messenger, to oblige him to quit the soil over which he had shed as much glory as scourges. Added to this harsh lesson, came other warnings: the Prussians were prowling around the neighbourhood of the Malmaison; Blücher, full of wine, staggering, ordered them to seize, to "hang" the conqueror who had "put his foot on the neck of Kings." The rapidity of the fortunes, the vulgarity of the manners, the promptness of the elevation and degradation of the personages of to-day will, I fear, take away a part of the nobility of history: Rome and Greece did not speak of "hanging" Alexander and Cæsar.