The first question that Napoleon put to the Corsican Antommarchi, his physician, when he entered his room in St. Helena, was: "Have you a Filippini?" Many of his countrymen had been his companions throughout his career; he had raised many to elevated stations—Bacciocchi, Arena, Cervioni, Arrighi, Saliceti, Casabianca, Abbatucci, Sebastiani. His relation to that Colonna who had been the friend of Paoli, and who had once been hostile to him, was to the last one of intimate friendship. It is said that Paoli had commissioned Colonna to lay an ambuscade for Napoleon near Ajaccio, and take him alive or dead; such, at least, is the report. Colonna refused. He remained the friend of both, of Napoleon as well as Paoli—and that without playing the hypocrite, for he was a high-spirited man. He was the first who knew of Napoleon's flight from Elba; and in the will which he made in St. Helena, the Emperor intrusted to him the charge of his mother. Colonna discharged this trust conscientiously, and till Letitia's death remained with her as her friend and manager of her affairs. He then retired to Vico, near Ajaccio. The dying Napoleon received extreme unction from the hands of a Corsican, the priest Vignale, who was afterwards murdered in his native island. He died thus among brother Corsicans, who had not forsaken him. CHAPTER VII. TWO COFFINS. "Where are the princes who held mightiest sway? Where are the heroes all, the wise and bold? The world endures when thou hast pass'd away, And none has read its riddle deep and old. The course of things is full of teachings wise, But, reckless still, we close unheeding eyes."—FIRDUSI. As I called up before my mind the history of Napoleon, his splendid empire, the peoples and princes that this headlong comet had drawn onward in his train, the flood of events he had thrown upon the world, the influence he had exercised over unnumbered human destinies—there came over me, in his now desolate and silent house, at once a sadness and its consolation. All those boundless passions that devoured half the world and were not satisfied, where are they, and what power have they now? They are as a dream, as a great fable that Father Time tells his children. Our thanks are due to Time—the silent and mysterious power that again levels all, humbles heaven-aspiring potentates, checks unscrupulous self-aggrandizement, and effectually ostracizes over-grown ambition. Where is Napoleon? What is left of him? A name and a relic, which an easily blinded nation now publicly worships. What lately happened beyond the Rhine, appears to me like the celebration of Napoleon's suppressed funeral of 1821.[N] But the dead do not rise again. After the gods have come their ghosts; and after the hero-tragedy, the satyr-farce. The breath of a charnel-house has spread through the world from beyond the Rhine, since they wakened a dead man there. I went from the house of Letitia to the church where her coffin stands.