While the Napoleonic world was becoming obliterated, I inquired into the places where Napoleon himself had passed from view. The tomb at St. Helena has already worn out one of the willows his contemporaries: the decrepit and fallen tree is daily mutilated by the pilgrims. The sepulchre is surrounded by a cast-iron grating; three flag-stones are laid cross-wise over the grave; a few irises grow at the head and feet; the spring of the valley still flows in the spot where prodigious days dried up. Travellers brought by the tempest think it the proper thing to chronicle their obscurity on the brilliant sepulchre. An old woman has established herself close by, and lives on the shadow of a memory; a pensioner stands sentry in a sentry-box. The old Longwood, at two hundred steps from the new, is abandoned. Across an enclosure filled with dung, one arrives at a stable; it used to serve Bonaparte as a bed-room. A negro shows you a sort of passage occupied by a hand-mill and says: "Here he died." The room in which Napoleon first saw the light was probably neither larger nor more luxurious. At the new Longwood, Plantation House, inhabited by the Governor, one sees the Duke of Wellington in portraiture and the pictures of his battles. A glass-doored cupboard contains a piece of the tree near which the English general stood at Waterloo; this relic is placed between an olive-branch gathered in the Garden of Olives and some ornaments worn by South-Sea savages: a curious association on the part of the abusers of the waves. It is useless for the victor here to try to substitute himself for the vanquished, under the protection of a branch from the Holy Land and the memory of Cook; it is enough that, at St. Helena, one finds solitude, the Ocean and Napoleon. If one were to search into the history of the transformation of the shores made illustrious by tombs, cradles, palaces, what variety of things and destinies would one not see, since such strange metamorphoses are worked even in the obscure dwellings to which our puny lives are attached! In what hut was Clovis born? In what chariot did Attila see the light? What torrent covers Alaric's burying-place? What jackal stands where stood Alexander's coffin of gold or crystal? How many times have those ashes changed their place? And all those mausoleums in Egypt and India: to whom do they belong? God alone knows the cause of those changes linked with the mystery of the future: for men there are truths hidden in the depths of time; they manifest themselves only with the help of the ages, even as there are stars so far removed from the earth that their light has not yet reached us. *