In other books than this you will read of how the wreck of Napoleon, the man, and the wreck of Napoleon, the Emperor, found their way to Paris; how the well-meaning but weak-headed La Fayette, dreaming of an impossible Republic, worked in reality for the Bourbon restoration in working against Napoleon; how the Chambers, honeycombed by the intrigues of Fouché, demanded the second abdication; how the wreck of Napoleon floated aimlessly down the current of misfortune; how he signed away his throne; how the masses thronged about his palace, wildly clamoring for him to put himself at the head of a national uprising; how he sends his empty coach and six through the mob, and makes off by the back way in a cab; how he stops at Malmaison, weeps for his lost Josephine, listens to all kinds of counsel, takes none, and has no plan; how the soldiers, marching past in straggling detachments, cheer him with the same old enthusiasm, and how he calmly remarks, “They had better have stood and fought at Waterloo.” Napoleon was no longer the volcanic man of action, of connected ideas, of sustained exertion, of inflexible purpose. The Waterloo campaign had been a sputtering of the candle in the socket--a brief eruption of a Vesuvius that made Europe quiver; and then all was over. From Malmaison he is ordered off by Fouché, and he meekly obeys. At Rochefort he dawdles, doubts, delays, and does nothing. Logically, he becomes a prisoner to those by whom he has been beaten. To St. Helena, and a few years of torture; to hopeless captivity and the bitter inbrooding that eat the heart out; to the depths of humiliation and the canker of impotent rage; to weary days of depression and dreary nights of pain; to a long agony of vain regrets, of wrath against fate, of soul-racking memories--to these go Napoleon Bonaparte, the greatest man ever born of woman. At last, the reprieve comes. At last there comes the day when the little man can no longer torture the big one. Sir Hudson Lowe may at length rest easy--the sweat of the final pain gathers on his captive’s brow. English sentinels may slacken their vigilance now--the death rattle is in the prisoner’s throat. The storm comes up from out the wrathful sea, and the terrible anger of the tempest beats upon the tropical rock. The thunder, peal on peal, volleys over the crags, and the glare of the lightning lights up the track of devastation. Within the renovated cow-house, and within a room which will soon be used again as a cow-stall, is stretched the dying warrior.