Be this as it may, a frigate was supplied to a son[419] of Louis-Philippe: a name dear to our ancient naval victories protected it on the waves. Sailing from Toulon, where Bonaparte had embarked in his might for the conquest of Egypt, the new Argo came to St. Helena to claim what no longer existed. The sepulchre, with its silence, continued to rise motionless in Slane or Geranium Valley. Of the two weeping willows, one had fallen; Lady Dallas, the wife of a governor of the island, had planted, to replace the decayed tree, eighteen young willows and four-and-thirty cypresses; the spring, still there, flowed as when Napoleon drank its water. During a whole night, under the direction of an English captain named Alexander, the men worked at opening the monument. The four coffins fitted one within the other, the mahogany coffin, the lead coffin, the second mahogany or West-Indian wood coffin, and the tin coffin, were discovered intact. They proceeded to the inspection of those mummified moulds in a tent, in the centre of a circle of officers, some of whom had known Bonaparte. "When the last coffin was opened," says the Abbé Coquereau[420], "our looks plunged in. They met a whitish mass which covered the whole length of the body. Dr. Gaillard, touching it, distinguished a white satin cushion which lined the inside of the upper plank of the coffin: it had become unfastened and lay about the remains like a winding-sheet.... "The whole body seemed as though covered with a light foam; one would have said that we were looking at it through a transparent cloud. It was certainly his head: a pillow raised it slightly; his wide forehead, his eyes, the sockets of which were outlined beneath the eye-lids, still fringed with a few lashes; his cheeks were swollen, his nose alone had suffered, his mouth, half-open, displayed three teeth of great whiteness; on his chin the mark of the beard was perfectly clear; his two hands especially seemed to belong to some one who still breathed, so quick were they in tone and colouring; one of them, the left hand, was raised a little higher than the right; his nails had grown after death: they were long and white; one of his boots had come unsewn and let through four of his toes of a dull white." * What was it that struck the disinterrers? The inanity of earthly things? Man's vanity? No, the beauty of the dead man; his nails only had lengthened, to tear, I presume, what remained of liberty in the world. His feet, restored to humility, no longer rested on crown cushions; they lay bare in their dust. The son of Condé also was dressed in the moat at Vincennes; yet Napoleon, so well preserved, had been reduced to exactly those "three teeth" which the bullets had left in the jaw of the Duc d'Enghien.