But while I was writing this, time has progressed: it has produced an event which would partake of greatness, if events did not nowadays tumble into the mud. We have asked in London to have Bonaparte's remains restored; the request has been entertained: what does England care for old bones? She will make us as many presents of that sort as we like. Napoleon's remains have come back to us at the moment of our humiliation; they might have undergone the right of search; but the foreigner showed himself compliant: he gave a pass to the ashes. The translation of Napoleon's relics is an offense against fame. No burial in Paris will ever be as good as Slane Valley: who would wish to see Pompey elsewhere than in the furrow of sand thrown up by a poor freedman, assisted by an old legionary? What shall we do with those magnificent relics in the midst of our miseries? Will the hardest granite represent the perpetuity of Bonaparte's works? If even we possessed a Michael Angelo to carve the funeral statue?--How would one fashion the monument? To little men mausoleums, to great men a stone and a name. If, at least, they had suspended the coffin on the coping of the Arc de Triomphe, if the nations had seen their master from afar borne on the shoulders of his victories? Was not Trajan's urn in Rome set at the top of his column? Napoleon, among us, will be lost in the mob of those tatterdemalions of dead who steal away in silence. God grant that he may not be exposed to the vicissitudes of our political changes, protected though he may be by Louis XIV., Vauban and Turenne! Beware of those violations of tombs so common in our country! Let a certain side of the Revolution triumph, and the conqueror's dust may go to join the dusts which our passions have scattered: men will forget the vanquisher of the nations to remember only the oppressor of their liberties. The bones of Napoleon will not reproduce his genius: they will teach his despotism to second-rate soldiers. [Sidenote: Napoleon's home-coming.]