"The nations have called Bonaparte a scourge; but the scourges of God retain something of the eternity and grandeur of the divine wrath whence they emanate: 'Ye dry bones ... I will send spirit into you, and you shall live[416].' Born in an island to go and die in an island, on the boundaries of three continents; cast in the midst of the seas in which Camoëns seemed to foretell him by placing there the genius of the tempests, Bonaparte cannot stir on his rock but we are apprized of it by a concussion; a step of the new Adamastor at the other Pole makes itself felt at this. If Napoleon, escaping from the hands of his gaolers, were to retire to the United States, his looks fixed upon the Ocean would be enough to disturb the nations of the Old World; his mere presence on the American shore of the Atlantic would oblige Europe to camp on the opposite shore[417]." This article reached Bonaparte at St. Helena; a hand which he thought hostile poured the last balsam on his wounds; he said to M. de Montholon: "If, in 1814 and 1815, the royal confidence had not been placed in men whose souls were enervated by circumstances too strong for them, or who, renegades to their country, saw safety and glory for their master's throne only in the yoke of the Holy Alliance; if the Duc de Richelieu, whose ambition it was to deliver his country from the presence of the foreign bayonets, if Chateaubriand, who had just rendered such eminent services at Ghent, had had the direction of affairs, France would have issued powerful and dreaded from those two great national crises. Chateaubriand has been gifted by nature with the Promethean fire: his works witness it. His style is not that of Racine, it is that of the prophet. If ever he arrives at the helm of State, it is possible that Chateaubriand may go astray: so many others have found their ruin there! But what is certain is that all that is great and national must be fitting to his genius, and that he would have indignantly rejected the ignominious acts of the then administration[418]." [Sidenote: Napoleon's verdict on myself.] Such were my last relations with Bonaparte. Why should I not admit that that opinion "tickles my heart's proud weakness"? Many little men to whom I have rendered great services have not judged me so favourably as the giant whose might I had dared to attack. *