The Tragedy of St. HelenaRunciman, Walter Runciman, Baron
History
The Tragedy of St. Helena
Runciman, Walter Runciman, Baron
Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, 1769-1821 -- Captivity, 1815-1821
Her career was chequered and restless. She had influence, which she
used oft-times recklessly, and led less gifted people than herself
into committing needless errors. She wrote and spoke with a wit and
sarcasm which charmed all but those at whom it was directed. Her
bitter rebuffs and severe trials were mainly of her own making. For
the most part she wrote with superficial feeling and without real
soul. During the Napoleonic regime, time was a creeping horror to her,
but she found pleasure in the thought that it was a torture to her
suffering heart. George Eliot knew and used her extraordinary power;
Madame de Stael wasted hers. Nevertheless she had many friends who
loved her society. Wellington was brought under her influence. Byron,
who shrank from her at first, says, "She was the best creature in the
world." She had been at some pains to try to bring Lord and Lady Byron
together. She was capable of impressing people with her charm, but
magnetic influence she had none when living, and has left none behind.
Rocca exclaimed, when he heard that she had passed to the shadows,
"What crown could replace that which I have lost!" And the distracted
Benjamin Constant, filled with remorse, reproached himself for some
undefined suffering he had caused her, and did penance all night
through in the death-chamber of his divine Juliet.
This crazy woman seems to have been capricious in everything. She made
and broke liaisons with amazing rapidity while undergoing a compulsory
sojourn at Coppet. She formed there an attachment for the son of a
person named M. Baranti, which very nearly cheated Rocca from becoming
her husband, and the faithless Benjamin Constant from being,
erroneously perhaps, associated with her name as the author of the
manuscript of St. Helen, and she the notoriety of writing "Ten Years
of Exile," which was published after her death.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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