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Napoleon's Tomb and Versailles.
In the Eighth of His letters From Abroad Editor Poe Writes of the Wonderful Shrine by Which
France Honors the Memory of Napoleon and of the Sins of the French Babylon Which Were Fol
lowed by the Fires of the French Revolution- A Terrible Chapter in the Sowing and Reaping
of Nations. ''
are stirred by mighty deeds wrought in spite of
frowning circumstances, and so long as men's
hearts are moved by .the tragedy of a great man's
fall, just so long will the blood quicken when Na
poleon's name Is mentioned, and just so long: will
men make pilgrimage here, as I have done, to
Notre Dame where he was crowned, to St. Denis
where he married, to his tomb here where he is
buried, and to the Museum of History where so
mnny relics both of his palmy days and of his
twilight in lonely St. Helena are shown to inter
ested thousands.
- . -
Of so much interest is the career of Napoleon,
and I have seen- so many traces of his footsteps
here some of his letters his coronation robes,
He was not a young man swept off his feet by
youthful enthusiasm:, he: was a man upon whose
head were the snows of more than three-score
winters but wliose mind is as active as ever, and
he was . talking to me last spring of his trip to
Europe a year ago and especially of the magnifi
cent mausoleum whicli the French people have
erected as the last resting place-of -Napoleon Bona
parte. -
"By Heaven," he exclaimed, "it was worth the
trip across the Atl antic to stand : at the tomb of
that colossal man!" lv ."--yV. .
I am now almost prepared agree, with him :
certainly I have seen - noihing- more impressive
since I left America. . The splendid structure,
beautiful and airy as a palace,, built entirely of
white marble and surmounted by a gilded dome,
itself challenges interest and admiration; but it
is only when .we enter the spacious chapel thai
the sublimity of -the builder's conception dawns
upon us. Here is solemnity , unmarred by any
suggestion of the funereal: the majesty of death
without any trace of its gruesomeness. Massive
bronze doors guard the entrance to where the
body rests in its immense sarcophagus, and by the
side of the doors, are two kingly statues bearing
in their hands the symbols of earthly power and
dominion, the one the globe and the sword, the
other the crown and the sceptre. On. either side
stained glass windows such as I have seen no
where else in the world let in the light in a golden
flood suggesting the beauty and the calm of an
unending sunset. Above you are the words from
Napoleon's will, written in exile in distant St.
Helena: "I desire that my body shall rest on the
banks of the Seine, and among the French people
whom'. I have loved so well." There is pathos Un
speakable about the words and about the tragedy
which they, call to mind. Once he could have
willed kingdoms and crowns; the proudest
thrones of Europe had been at his disposal, and
he had given sceptres to his brothers and his
favorites as if crowns were but the baubles of an
hour. Now the Napoleon who makes his last tes
tament sees Death, the conqueror of conquerors,
coming as a welcome relief, and he who
"once trod the ways of glory
And sounded all the depths and shoals of honor,"
can will little but his body itself, and cannot know
that even this request for a burial place will be
granted. Weary and heartsick, broken with the
storms of state, how it would have rejoiced his
heart could he have known with what honor his
ashes wojild finally be entombed in his loved Paris
and how here for aeons to come travelers from
every corner of the earth would pause to pay
tribute to one of the mightiest men who ever
walked this'globe of ours.
, , ' ." . , - ;
The fame of Napoleon is the surer because of
the threefold character of his appeal to human in
terest the romance of his rise, the epic of his
achievements, the tragedy of his fall: each in
itself sublime. Born of humble parents and upon
a narrow island, his imperial mind and will won
him place after place until he became the mighti
est name in a thousand years of history. Power
such as the Caesars had not known was his, and
when he walked into the church of St. Denis here to
wed the daughter of a King, he might have dream
ed not Without warrant of becoming the master of
all Europe. He had great faults, I grant, but in
character few of our chief est warrior-rulers stand
above him, and so long as the minds of men
his bed-room and reception rooms at Versailles,
the unpromising ooking rooms overlooking the
Seine where he lodged before he became famous,
his chair and bench and f camp-bed . from St.
Helena, and his sword, saddle,; hat and his famous
war coat that it is hard.not to give an entire ar
ticle to this one subject; but I must hurry on, for
Paris is full of historic and notable spots, and I
am trying to tell in a letter what should be told
in a book. y .
'. & - '
Our first full day in Paris was spent at Ver
sailles, where the French Kings once lived in
shameless splendor and unconcern, and where a
corrupt and profligate court once piled up wrath
against the day of wrath, until the storm broke
in blood and fury upon them some six score years
ago. For long, long decades had the weary peas
ants of France toiled from year's end to year's
end, only to see King and priest and noble seize
the lion's share, of their hard-won harvests, gov
ernment and church all the while growing more
haughty and rotten and corrupt, and the peasant's
lot harder and more hopeless:" Stolid and spirit
less perhaps tnis peasant seemed to .the proud
nobles who lived upon his labors and despised
him, who felt that neither he nor his family had
any rights that they were bound to respect; and
yet an Edwin Markham would have seen in this
oppressed and clouted figure the portent and
prophecy of the coming Revolution. '
"O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings---
With those who shaped him to the thing he is
When this dumb Terror shall reply to God
After the silence of the centuries?"
Let us go then to Versailles to-day and see
where the French Babylon once reared its lofty
head, where women 'as vile as they were beautiful
once ruled the court of France, and where the
peasant's hard-earned taxes were wasted in vice
and gambling and display. Here before us now
is the gorgeous bed upon which Louis XIV., - "the
Grand Monarch," died in 1715, and we may well
wonder if in- death the avenging angel did not
whisper to him of the impending doom which its
folly had done so much to insure; or if neither he
nor his yet more worthless successor, Louis XV
.(who died in the room to our left) did not once
stumble upon a hearing or reading of that pas
sage wherein we are told that the cries of the
defrauded laborer have "entered into the ears of
the Lord of Sabaoth," and
"Your riches are corrupted and your gar-
ments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver
is cankered and the rust of them shall be a
s witness, against you, and shall eat your flesh
as it were fire."
. S
We may not know whether or not this fearful
warning ever came to the ears of the pleasure
loTing court that once flitted through the roval
palace of Versailles, but the record of these his
toric walls only affords fresh proof that the Apos
tle's language is sound political as it is religious
doctrine. "The mills of the gods grind slowly,
but they grind exceeding small." The avenging
Nemesis of nations never sleeps; the relentless
rectitude of Nature never fails. On heedless ears
too often falls the phrase, "The wages of sin is
death," and yet all human history, even more
loudly than the Book of God itself, proclaims the
truth of this everlasting doctrine. To-day "care
less seems the Great Avenger" as we look upon
Versailles, and with our mind's eye people it again
with those lordly figures who "have lived in pleas
ure on the earth and been wanton, who have con
demned and killed the just"; but yonder in the
distance looms the Place la Concorde where with
our mind's eye we see the bloody guillotine, and
the heads of King and Queen and nobles required
in this final settlement with long delayed and
patient justice. The debt of the ages is settled.
Those who have sowed the wind have reaped the
whirlwind or alas! in too many cases, not they
themselves, but their children and children's chil
dren. &
This is the tragedy of life that Naturte, itself
immortal, reckons not of man's mortality! Your
father owed a debt and died having enjoyed but
hot "having settled: and you," standing in his
place, must pay. Your father through sin and
crime made grievous debt to Nature, and his chil-'
dren, with meaner souls and diseased bodies,
must pay the price. And even so one generation
of citizens permits injustice, fosters evil, wheth
er by indifference or by vicious intent, it matters
not and the next generation must pay the price
in war and riot and revolution. Our Revolution
ary fathers in America, North and South, tempted
of Mammon, permitted and encouraged the sin of
human slavery; our fathers a generation ago, from
North and South, , paid the awful price in peace
and blood and treasure. The French nobility for
centuries ground the faces of the poor, violated their
homes, robbed them of the fruits of their labor,
until the French Revolution, the hideous progeny
of their long, long years of evil, came forth in
the fulness of time to plague their children and
must stand forever as one of the most fearful
nightmares of human history. Read Dickens's
"Tale of Two Cities" and the story of the prison
er in the Bastille (Dr. Manette, I think, is the
name), and you will wonder how any one could
have expected any other harvest from such a sow
ing. For the excesses of the Revolution I have no
excuse; no one is further than I from wishing to
palliate, its own shameful crimes. But no one
who knows history can stand to-day at Versailles
and think of its corrupt court, the symbol of
wrong and oppression, and then stand to-morrow
at the Place la Concorde and think of the hun
dreds of nobles whose lives the infuriated populace
here required, and not see that the one follows tha
other as inevitably as the night, the day.
With nations as with individuals, it is the
weary round of history: to-day you' make the
debt; to-morrow you must pay the price. What
soever man or nation soweth that also shall man
or nation reap. CLARENCE H. POE.
Paris, France.
Every day that is born into this world comes
like a burst of music, and rings itself all the day
through, and thou shalt make it a dance, a dirge,
or a life march, as thou wilt. Thomas Carlyle.