Yet this hot-headed, jealous chronicler, guided by blind passion and never by reason while these moods were on him, has been held up as an authority that may be relied upon as to the doings and sayings of Napoleon and his immediate followers at the "Abode of Darkness." It is a well-known axiom that persons who speak or write anything while jealousy or temper holds them in its grip may not be counted as reliable people to follow, and that is exactly what happened in Gourgaud's case. He was the Peter of the band of disciples at St. Helena, and it may be considered fairly reasonable to assume that those who have written up the General as a sound historian have done so with a view to backing up prejudices, big or small, against the Emperor. But surely they have committed a very grave error in singling out as their hero of veracity a man who, in his more normal and charitable moods, pours out praise and pity for his Imperial chief in astonishing profusion. O'Meara's position was very different from any of the other diarists or writers. He was well aware that if he wrote an honest history it meant his complete ruin, yet he faced it, and defied the world to controvert his statements. "In face of the world," he says, "I challenge investigation," and "investigation" was made with a vengeance worthy of the Inquisition. If a word or a sentence could by any possible means be made to appear faulty, a scream of denunciation was sent forth from one end of Europe to the other, but the crime had sunk too deeply into the hearts of an outraged public for these ebullitions to have any real effect. There might be flaws in diction and even matters of fact, but the sordid reality of the documentary and verbal story that came to them was never doubted. The big heart of the British nation was beginning to be moved in sympathy towards the martyr long before his death, and of course long before O'Meara's book appeared, though the doctor's advent in Europe was made the occasion of a vigorous exposure of the progress of the great assassination. A wave of public opinion was gathering force; the Government, stupid and treacherous as they were, saw it rising, and renewed their silly efforts to stem it by causing atrocious duplicity to be instituted at home and on the martyr rock. Indeed, nothing was beneath their dignity so long as they succeeded in deceiving an agitated populace and accomplishing their own evil ends.