Chapter 1

TRANCE.

DEAR ARCHY,--I am tempted to write you a letter more than I had originally intended,--a supplementary and final one.

The powers which we have seen employed to shake the nerves and unsettle the mind in the service of superstition,--can they be turned to no useful purpose?

To answer this question, I will give you a brief account of the two most vigorous attempts which have been made to turn the elements we have been considering to a profitable end. I have in my thoughts the invention of ether-inhalation and the induction of trance in mesmerism. The witch narcotised her pupils in order to produce in them delusive visions; the surgeon stupifies his patient to prevent the pain of an operation being felt. The fanatic preacher excites convulsions and trance in his auditory to persuade them that they are visited by the Holy Spirit; Mesmer produced the same effects as a means of curing disease.

Let us first look into the simpler problem of ether-inhalation.

It occurred to Mr Jackson, a chemist in the United States, that it might be possible, and unattended with risk, so to stupify a patient with the vapour of sulphuric ether that he might undergo a surgical operation without suffering. He communicated the idea to Mr Morton, a dentist, who carried it into execution with the happiest results. The patient became unconscious,--a tooth was extracted;--no sign of pain escaped at the time;--there was no recollection of suffering afterwards. Led by the report of this success, in the course of the autumn of 1846, Messrs Bigelow, Warren, and Heywood ventured to employ the same means in surgical operations of a more serious description. The results obtained on these occasions were not less satisfactory than the first had been. Since then, in England, France, and Germany, this interesting experiment has been repeated in numberless cases, and its general success may be considered to be established.

The effects produced by the inhalation of the vapour of sulphuric ether, present a superficial resemblance to those produced by exposure to carbonic acid; but they are more closely analogous to the effects of inhaling nitrous oxide; and they may be compared and contrasted with those of opium and alcoholic liquors. But the patient is neither in the state of asphyxia, nor is he narcotised, nor drunk. The effects produced are peculiar, and deserve a name of their own.

To give you a distinct idea of the ordinary phenomena of etherisation, I will cite three or four instances from a report on this subject by Dr Heyfelder, Knight, professor of medicine, and director of the surgical clinic at Erlangen.

Dr Heyfelder himself, a strong and healthy man, after inhaling the vapour of ether for a minute, experienced an agreeable warmth in his whole person; after the second minute, he felt a disposition to cough, and diminution of ordinary sensibility. Then an impression supervened that some great change was about to take place within him. At the expiration of the third minute, he _lost sensibility and consciousness_. In this state he remained two minutes. The pulse was unaffected. Upon coming to himself, he felt a general sense of exhaustion, with weakness of the back and knees. For the remainder of the day he walked unsteadily, and his mind was confused.

A. T., aged thirty-six, a tall strong servant-maid, after inhaling for seventeen minutes, became unconscious, and appeared not to feel a trifling wound with a surgical needle. In a minute consciousness returned. She laughed immoderately, spoke of an agreeable feeling of warmth, and said she had had pleasant dreams. The pulse was slower, the breathing deeper, during the inhalation. The same person upon inhaling, on another occasion, with a better apparatus, became insensible after two minutes. The eyes appeared red and suffused; a carious tooth was then extracted, which caused her to moan slightly. On returning to herself she complained of giddiness, but said she had experienced none but agreeable feelings. She had no idea that the tooth had been extracted.

K. A., aged twenty-nine, upon beginning the inhalation, showed signs of excitement, but in nine minutes lay relaxed like a corpse. A tooth was extracted. Two minutes afterwards she awoke, moaning and disturbed. She stated that she _had not felt the extraction of the tooth, but she had heard it_.

C. S., aged twenty-two, a strong and healthy young man, a student of surgery, on commencing the inhalation, coughed, and there was a flow of saliva and of tears. In three and a half minutes the skin appeared insensible to pain. Consciousness remained perfect and undisturbed. The skin was warm; the eyes were open; the hearing as usual; the speech, however, was difficult. This state continued eighteen minutes, during which, at _his request_, two teeth with large fangs were extracted. He held himself perfectly still. He said, afterwards, that _he felt the application of the instrument, but was sensible of no pain_, during the extraction of the teeth.

W. S., aged nineteen, a strong and healthy young man, a law-student, after inhaling the ether-vapour a minute, began to move his arms about, struck his knees, stamped with his feet, laughed. In three minutes the laughter and excitement had increased. The eyes rolled, he sprang up, talked volubly; the pulse was strong and frequent. In seven minutes he breathed deeply, the eyelids closed, the pulse sank. In eight minutes he began to snore, but heard when called to. In nine minutes the eyes were suffused; the optic axes were directed upwards and outwards. At the end of twelve minutes a tooth was extracted, when he uttered an exclamation and laughed. On his return to himself, he said that he had _felt the laceration, or tear, but had experienced no pain_. He thought he had been at a carousal.

If I add to these sketches that the patient sometimes becomes pale, sometimes flushed,--that the pupils of the eyes are generally dilated and fixed, sometimes natural and fixed, sometimes contracted,--that violent excitement sometimes manifests itself attended with the persistence or even exaltation of the ordinary sensibility,--that sometimes hysteric fits are brought on; sometimes a state resembling common intoxication,--you will have had the means of forming a sufficiently exact and comprehensive idea of the features of etherisation.

Then, if we exclude the cases in which excitement, instead of collapse, is induced, and, in general, cases complicated with disorder of the head or chest, it appears that the inhalation of ether is not attended with questionable or injurious consequences; and that it places the patient in a condition in which the performance of a surgical operation may be prudently contemplated. If the operation require any length of time,--from thirty to forty minutes, for instance,--the state of insensibility may be safely maintained, by causing the inhalation to be resumed as often as its effects begin to wear off. In minor cases of surgery, in which union of the wound _by adhesion_ is necessary to the success of the operation--in harelip, for instance--an exacter comparison is, perhaps, requisite than has yet been made of the relative results obtained on etherised and non-etherised patients. In graver cases, some of which always end fatally, symptoms, again, may occasionally supervene, or continue from the time of the operation, which are directly attributable to the etherisation. But, in all probability, the entire proportion of recoveries in etherised cases will be found to be increased, through the injurious effects being averted which are produced by fear and suffering. There is every reason to expect that a saving of human life will be thus realised,--an advantage over and above the deliverance from pain and terror.

So the invention of etherisation deserves to be rated as a signal benefit to humanity. Nor is it to be lost sight of, that the invention is quite in its infancy; and that any sound objections which may, at present, be raised against it, are not unlikely to be obviated through the modifications and improvements of which it is no doubt susceptible. The amount of success already obtained, may further be deemed sufficient to make us secure that the object of extinguishing the sufferings of surgery will never _again_ be lost sight of by the medical profession and the public. One item, partial indeed, but a tolerably severe one, in the catalogue of the physical ills to which flesh is heir, is thus so far in a fair way of being got rid of.

The method of Mesmer was an attempt to cure bodily disease by making a forcible impression on the nerves. And no doubt can be entertained that many of his patients were the better for the violent succussion of the system which his developed practice put them through.

But mesmerism contained two things,--a bold empirical practice and a mystical theory. Mesmer strove, by the latter, to explain the effects which his practice produced. An odd fate his method and his theory will have had. His method was considered, by many of his contemporaries, as of solid importance; his theory was for the most part ridiculed as that of a half-crazed enthusiast and impostor. Now, no reasonable person can regard his practice in any other light than as a rough and hazardous experiment. But his theory, in the mean time, is ceasing to be absurd; for it admits of being represented as a very respectable anticipation of Von Reichenbach's recent discoveries.

Mesmer, a native of Switzerland, was born in 1734. He became a student at Vienna, where his turn for the mystical led him to the studies of alchemy and astrology. In the year 1766, he published a treatise on the influence of the planets upon the human frame. It contains the idea that a force extends throughout space through which the stars can affect the body. In attempting to identify this force, Mesmer first supposed it to be electricity. Afterwards, about the year 1773, he adopted the belief that it must be ordinary magnetism. So at Vienna, from 1773 to 1775, he employed the practice of stroking diseased parts of the body with magnets. But, in 1776, making a tour in Bavaria and Switzerland, he fell in with the notorious Father Gassner, who had at that time undertaken the cure of the blind prince-bishop of Ratisbon by exorcism. Then Mesmer observed that, without employing magnets, Gassner obtained very much the same kind of effects upon the human body which he had produced with their aid. The fact was not lost upon him. He threw away his magnets, and henceforth operated with the hand alone. In 1777, his reputation a little damaged by a failure in the case of the musician Paradies, Mesmer left Vienna, and the following year betook himself to Paris. The great success which he obtained there drew upon him the indignation and jealousy of the faculty, who did not scruple to brand him with the stigma of charlatanism. They averred that he threw difficulties in the way of a satisfactory examination of his method; but perhaps he had reason to suspect want of fairness in the proposed inquiry. He refused, from the government, an offer of twenty thousand francs to divulge his method; but he was ready to explain it, it is true, under a pledge of secresy, to individuals for one hundred louis. But his practice itself gave most support to the allegations against him. His patients were received and treated with an air of mystery and studied effect. The apartment, hung on every side with mirrors, was dimly lighted. A profound silence was observed, broken only by strains of music, which occasionally floated through the rooms. The patients were arranged around a large vessel, which contained a heterogeneous mixture of chemical ingredients. With this and with each other, they were placed in relation, by holding cords or jointed rods; and among them moved slowly and mysteriously Mesmer himself, affecting one by a touch, another by a look, a third by continued stroking with the hand, a fourth by pointing at him with a rod.

What followed is easily conceivable from the scenes referred to in my last letter, which are witnessed at religious revivals. One person became hysterical, then another; one was seized with catalepsy, then others; some with convulsions; some with palpitations of the heart, perspirations, and other bodily disturbances. These effects, however various and different, went all by the name of "salutary crises." The method was supposed to produce, in the sick person, exactly the kind of action propitious to his recovery. And it may easily be imagined that many patients found themselves better after a course of this rude empiricism; and that the impression made by these events, passing daily in Paris, must have been very considerable. To the ignorant the scene was full of wonderment.

To ourselves, regarding it from our present vantage-ground, it contains absolutely nothing of the marvellous. We discern the means which were in operation, and which are theoretically sufficient to produce the result. Those means consisted in,--first, high-wrought expectation and excited fancy, enough alone to set some of the most excitable into fits;--secondly, the contagious power of nervous disorder to cause the like disorder in others, a power augmenting with the number of persons infected;--thirdly, the physical influence upon the body of the _Od force_ discovered by Von Reichenbach, which is produced in abundance by chemical decomposition, which can be communicated to, and conveyed by inanimate conductors, and which finally emanates with great vivacity from the subtle chemistry of the living human frame itself. The reality of this third cause you must allow me to take for granted without farther explanation. Von Reichenbach's papers, the credit of which is guaranteed by their publication in Liebig and Woehler's Annals of Chemistry, have been now some time translated into English, and are in the hands of most English readers.

It is remarkable that Jussieu, the most competent judge in the commission which, in 1784 condemned mesmerism as a scientific imposition, was so much struck with the effects he witnessed, that he recommended the subject, nevertheless, to the farther investigation of medical men. His objections were to the theory. He laid it down, in the separate report which he made, that the only physical cause in operation was animal heat; curiously overlooking the point, that common heat was not capable of doing the same things, and that, therefore, the effects _must be owing to the agency of that something else_ which animal heat contained in addition to common heat.

It is unnecessary to follow Mesmer through his minor performances. The relief sometimes obtained by stroking diseased parts with the hand had before been proclaimed by Dr Greatorex, whose pretensions had no less an advocate than the Honourable Robert Boyle. The extraordinary tales of Mesmer's immediate and instantaneous personal power over individuals are probably part exaggeration, part the real result of his confidence and practice in the use of the means he wielded. Mesmer died in 1815.

Among his pupils, when at the zenith of his fame, was the Marquis de Puysegur. Returning from serving at the siege of Gibraltar, this young officer found mesmerism the mode at Paris, and appears to have become, for no other reason, one of the initiated. At the end of the course of instruction, he professed himself to be no wiser than when he began; and he ridiculed the credulity and the faith of his brothers, who were stanch adherents of the new doctrine. However he did not forget his lesson; and on going, the same spring, to his estate at Basancy, near Soissons, he took occasion to mesmerise the daughter of his agent, and another young person, for the toothach, who declared themselves, in a few minutes, cured. This questionable success was sufficient to lead M. de Puysegur, a few days after, to try his hand on a young peasant of the name of Victor, who was suffering with a severe fluxion upon the chest. What was M. de Puysegur's surprise when, at the end of a few minutes, Victor went off into a kind of tranquil sleep, without crisis or convulsion, and in that sleep began to gesticulate, and talk, and enter into his private affairs. Then he became sad; and M. de Puysegur tried mentally to inspire him with cheerful thoughts; he hummed a lively tune to himself, _inaudibly_, and immediately Victor began to sing the air. Victor remained asleep for an hour, and awoke composed, with his symptoms mitigated.

The case of Victor revolutionised the art of mesmerism. The large part of his life in which M. Puysegur had nothing to do but to follow this vein of inquiry, was occupied in practising and advocating a gentle manipulation to induce sleep, in preference to the more violent crises. I have no plea for telling you how M. de Puysegur served in the first French revolutionary armies; how he quitted the service in disgust; how narrowly he escaped the guillotine; how he lived in retirement afterwards, benevolently endeavouring to do good to his sick neighbours by mesmerism; how he survived the Restoration; and how, finally, he died of a cold caught by serving again in the encampment at Rheims to assist as an old _militaire_ at the _sacre_ of Charles X.

For he had, to use the phrase of the moment, fulfilled his mission the day that he put Victor to sleep. He had made a vast stride in advance of his teacher. Not but that Mesmer must frequently have produced the same effect, but _he_ had passed it over unheeded, as one only of the numerous forms of salutary crisis; nor that M. de Puysegur himself estimated, or that the knowledge had then been brought together which would have enabled him to estimate, the value, or the real nature and meaning, of the step which he had made. To himself he appeared to be largely extending the domain of mesmerism, of which he had, in truth, discovered and gone beyond the limits.

The state which he had so promptly and fortunately induced in Victor, was _neither more nor less than common trance_--the commonest form, perhaps, of the great family of nervous disorders, to which ordinary sleep-walking belongs, and of which I have already sketched the divisions and relations in the fifth letter of this series. All that remains, combining originality and value, of Mesmer's art, is, that it furnishes the surest method of inducing this particular condition of the system. Employed with collateral means calculated to shake the nerves and excite the imagination, mesmerism causes the same variety of convulsive and violent seizures which extremes of fanatical frenzy excite; when it is employed in a gentle form and manner, with accessaries that only soothe and tranquillise, the most plain and unpretending form of trance quietly steps upon the scene.

Perhaps you will wonder that I seem to attach so much importance to the power which mesmerism offers us, of producing at pleasure mere ordinary trance; and, unluckily, it is easy to overrate that importance; because, for any plan we are yet in possession of, the induction of trance, through mesmerism, is, in truth, a very uncertain and capricious affair. It is but a limited number of persons who can be affected by mesmerism; and the good to be obtained from the process is proportionately limited.

The first object to which artificial induction of trance may be turned, is the cure or alleviation of certain forms of disease.

It has been mentioned that in many so-called cataleptic cases, a condition of violent spasm is constantly present, _except_ when the patient falls into an alternative state of trance. _The spontaneous supervention of trance relieves the spasm._

I mentioned, too, in the fifth letter of this series, the case of Henry Engelbrecht, who, after a life of asceticism, and a week of nearly total abstinence, fell into a death-trance. _On waking from it, he felt refreshed and stronger._

These results are quite intelligible. In trance, the nervous system is put _out of gear_. The strain of its functions is suspended. Now, perhaps for the first time since birth, the nervous system, a part or the whole, experiences entire repose. The effect of this must be as soothing to it, as is to a diseased joint the disposing it in a relaxed position on a pillow. In this state of profound rest, it is natural that the nervous system should recruit its forces; that if previously weak and irritable, it should emerge from the trance stronger and more composed; that the induction of trance many days repeated, and maintained daily an hour or more, should finally enable the nerves to recover any extent of mere loss of tone, with its dependent morbid excitability, and to shake off various forms of disorder dependent upon that cause. So might it be expected, that epilepsy, that hysteric and cataleptic fits, that nervous palsy, that tic-doloreux, when caused by no structural impairment of organ, should get weak under the use of this means--other means, of course, not being thereby excluded, which peculiar features of individual cases render advisable. And experience justifies this reasonable anticipation. And it is found practically that, for purely nervous disorders, the artificial induction of trance is, generally speaking, the most efficient remedy. Nay, in cases of a more serious complexion, where organic disease exists, some unnecessary suffering and superfluous nervous irritability may be thus allayed and discarded. Even more may be said in favour of the availability of this practice. There are few diseases of any kind, and of other parts, in which the nervous system does not, primarily or secondarily, become implicated. And so far does disease in general contain an element which often may be reached and modified with salutary effect, through the means I am now advocating. When the prejudices of medical men against the artificial induction of trance have subsided, and its sanative agency has been fairly tried, and diligently studied, there is no doubt it will take a high rank among the resources of medicine.

In surgery, artificial trance is capable of playing a not less important part than in medicine.

For, as it has been already mentioned, an ordinary feature of trance is the entire suspension of common feeling. As long as the trance is maintained, the patient is impassive to all common impressions on the touch; the smartest electric shock, a feather introduced into the nose, burning, or cutting with a knife, excite no sensation. So that surgical operations may be performed without suffering during trance just as in the stupor produced by the ether inhalation. Then, as trance soothes the nerves, the patient, over and above the extinction of pain, is in a fitter state than otherwise for the infliction of physical violence. Likewise the trance may be induced not only at the time of the operation, but with equal safety on all the subsequent occasions when the wound has to be disturbed and dressed,--so that, in addition, all the after suffering attendant upon great operations may be thus avoided. The drawback against the method, is the uncertainty there exists of being able to induce trance artificially in any given case. But the trial is always worth making; and the number who can, with a little patience, be put thus as it were to sleep, is undoubtedly greater than is imagined.

The most celebrated case in which an operation has been performed upon a patient in the state of artificial trance, is that of Madame Plantin. She was sixty-four years of age, and laboured under scirrhus of the breast. She was prepared for the operation by M. Chapelain, who on several successive days threw her into trance by the ordinary mesmeric manipulations. She was _then_ like an ordinary sleep-walker, and would converse with indifference about the contemplated operation, the idea of which, when she was in her natural state, filled her with terror. The operation of removing the diseased breast was performed at Paris on the 12th of April 1829, by M. Jules Cloquet: it lasted from ten to twelve minutes. During the whole of this time, the patient _in her trance_ conversed calmly with M. Cloquet, and exhibited not the slightest sign of suffering. Her expression of countenance did not change, nor were the voice, the breathing, or the pulse, at all affected. After the wound was dressed, the patient was awakened from the trance, when, on learning that the operation was over, and seeing her children round her, Madame Plantin was affected with considerable emotion: whereupon M. Chapelain, to compose her, put her back into the state of trance.

I copy the above particulars from Dr Foissac's "_Rapports et Discussions de l'Academie Royale de Medicine sur le Magnetisme Animal_."--Paris, 1833. "My friend, Dr Warren of Boston, informed me that, being at Paris, he had asked M. Jules Cloquet if the story were true. M. Cloquet answered, "Perfectly." "Then why," said Dr Warren, "have you not repeated the practice?" M. Cloquet replied, "that he had not dared: that the prejudice against mesmerism was so strong at Paris, that he probably would have lost his reputation and his income by so doing."

Here, then, we discover two purposes of partial, indeed, but signal utility, compassable by the induction of trance, at the very outset of our inquiry into its utility. It will appear by-and-by that this resource promises to afford yet farther assistance to the physician. In the mean time, let us look at a relation of the subject which may appear more interesting to the general reader.

It has been mentioned that, in ordinary trance, the relations of consciousness to the nervous system are altered; that the laws of sensation and perception are suspended, or temporarily changed; that the mind appears to gain new powers. For a long time we had to trust to the chance turning up of cases of spontaneous trance, in the experience of physicians of observation, for any light we could hope would be thrown on those extraordinary phenomena. Now we possess around us, on every side, adequate opportunities for completely elucidating these events, if we please to employ them. The philosopher, when his speculations suggest a new question to be put, can summon the attendance of a trance, as easily as the Jupiter of the Iliad summoned a dream. Or, looking out for two or three cases to which the induction of trance may be beneficial, the physician may have in his house subjects for perpetual reference and daily experiment.

A gentleman with whom I have long been well acquainted, for many years Chairman of the Quarter Sessions in a northern county, of which the last year he was High Sheriff, has, like M. de Puysegur, amused some of his leisure hours, and benevolently done not a little good, by taking the trouble of mesmerising invalids, whom he has thus restored to health. In constant correspondence with, and occasionally having the pleasure of seeing this gentleman, I have learned from him the common course in which the new powers of the mind which belong to trance are developed under its artificial induction. The sketch which I propose to give of this subject will be taken on his descriptions, which, I should observe, tally in all essential points with what I meet with in French and German authors. The little that I have myself seen of the matter, I will mention preliminarily; the most astounding things, it appears to me safer to shelter under the authority of Petetin, who, towards the close of the last century, _in ignorance of mesmerism_, described these phenomena _as they came before him spontaneously in catalepsy_.

The method of inducing trance that is found to be most successful, is to sit immediately fronting, and close to the patient, holding his hands or thumbs, or pointing the extended hands towards his forehead, and slowly moving them in passes down his face, shoulders, and arms. It is now clear that the force brought into operation on this occasion, is the Od force of Von Reichenbach. So the patients sometimes speak of seeing the luminous aura proceeding from the finger-points of the operator, which Von Reichenbach's performers described. There are many who are utterly insensible to this agency. Others are sensible of it in slight, and in various ways. A small proportion, three in ten perhaps, are susceptible to the extent of being thrown into trance.

In some, a common fit of hysterics is produced. In others, slight headach, and a sense of weight on the eyebrows, and difficulty of raising the eyelids supervene.

In one young woman, whom I saw mesmerized for the first time by Dupotel, nothing resulted but a sense of pricking and tingling wherever he pointed with his hand; and her arm on one or two occasions jumped in the most natural and conclusive manner, when, her eyes being covered, he directed his outstretched finger to it.

A gentleman, about thirty years of age, when the mesmerizer held his outstretched hands pointed to his head, experienced no disposition to sleep; but in two or three minutes, he began to shake his head and twist his features about; at last, his head was jerked from side to side, and forwards and backwards, with a violence that looked alarming. But he said, when it was over, that the motion had not been unpleasant; that he had moved in a sort voluntarily; although he could not refrain from it. If the hands of the operator were pointed to his arm instead of his head, the same violent jerks came in it, and gradually extended to the whole body. I asked him to try to resist the influence, by holding his arm out in strong muscular tension. This had the effect of retarding the attack of the jerks, but, when it came on, it was more violent than usual.

A servant of mine, aged about twenty-five, was mesmerized by Lafontaine, for a full half hour, and, no effect appearing to be produced, I told him he might rise from the chair, and leave us. On getting up, he looked uneasy and said his arms wore numb. They were perfectly paralysed from the elbows downwards, and numb to the shoulders. This was the more satisfactory, that neither the man himself, nor Lafontaine, nor the four or five spectators, expected this result. The operator triumphantly drew a pin and stuck-it into the man's hand, which bled but had no feeling. Then heedlessly, to show it gave pain, Lafontaine stuck the pin into the man's thigh, whose flashing eye, and half suppressed growl, denoted that the aggression would certainly have been returned by another, had the arm which should have done it not been really powerless. However, M. Lafontaine made peace with the man, by restoring him the use and feeling of his arms. This was done by dusting them, as it were, by quick transverse motions of his extended hands. In five minutes nothing remained of the palsy but a slight stiffness, which gradually wore off in the course of the evening.

Genuine and ordinary trance, I have seen produced by the same manipulations in from three minutes, to half an hour. The patient's eyelids have dropped, he has appeared on the point of sleeping, but he has not sunk back upon his chair; then he has continued to sit upright, and seemingly perfectly insensible to the loudest sound or the acutest and most startling impressions on the sense of touch. The pulse is commonly a little increased in frequency; the breathing is sometimes heavier than usual.

Occasionally, as in Victor's case, the patient quickly and spontaneously emerges from the state of trance-sleep into trance half-waking; a rapidity of development which I am persuaded occurs much more frequently among the French than with the English or Germans. English patients, especially, for the most part require a long course of education, many sittings, to have the same powers drawn out. And these are by far the most interesting cases. I will describe from Mr Williamson's account, the course he has usually followed in developing his patient's powers, and the order in which they have manifested themselves.

On the first day, perhaps, nothing can be elicited. But after some minutes the stupor seems as it were less embarrassing to the patient, who appears less heavily slumbrous, and breathes lighter again; or it may be the reverse, particularly if the patient is epileptic; after a little, the breathing may be deeper, the state one of less composure. Pointing with the hands to the pit of the stomach, laying the hands upon the shoulders, and slowly moving them on the arms down to the hands, the whole with the utmost quietude and composure on the part of the operator, will dispel the oppression.

And the interest of the first sitting is confined to the process of awakening the patient, which is one of the most marvellous phenomena of the whole. The operator lays his two thumbs on the space between the eyebrows, and as it were vigorously smooths or irons his eyebrows, rubbing them from within, outwards seven or eight times. Upon this, the patient probably raises his head and his eyebrows, and draws a deeper breath as if he would yawn; he is half awake, and blowing upon the eyelids, or the repetition of the previous operation, or dusting the forehead by smart transverse wavings of the hand, or blowing upon it, causes the patient's countenance to become animated; the eyelids open, he looks about him, recognises you, and begins to speak. If any feeling of heaviness remains, any weight or pain of the forehead, another repetition of the same manipulations sets all right. And yet this patient would not have been awakened, if a gun had been fired at his ear, or his arm had been cut off.

At the next sitting, or the next to that, the living statue begins to wake in its tranced life. The operator holds one hand over the opposite hand of his patient, and makes as if he would draw the patient's hand upwards, raising his own with short successive jerks, yet not too abrupt. Then the patient's hand begins to follow his; and often having ascended some inches, stops in the air cataleptic. This fixed state is always relieved by transverse brushings with the hand, or by breathing in addition, on the rigid limb. And it is most curious to see the whole bodily frame, over which spasmodic rigidness may have crept, thus thawed joint by joint. Then the first effect shown commonly is this motion, the patient's hand following the operator's. At the same sitting, he begins to hear, and there is intelligence in his countenance, when the operator pronounces his name: perhaps his lips move, and he begins to answer pertinently as in ordinary sleep-walking. But he hears the operator alone best, and him even in a whisper. _Your_ voice, if you shout, he does not hear: unless you take the operator's hand, and then he hears _you_ too. In general, however, now the proximity of others seems in some way to be sensible to him; and he appears uneasy when they crowd close upon him. It seems that the force of the relation between the operator and his patient naturally goes on increasing, as the powers of the sleep-walker are developed; but that this is not necessarily the case, and depends upon its being encouraged by much commerce between them, and the exclusion of others from joining in this trance-communion.

And now the patient--beginning to wake in trance, hearing and answering the questions of the operator, moving each limb, or rising even, as the operator's hand is raised to draw him into obedient following--enters into a new relation with his mesmeriser. He _adopts sympathetically every voluntary movement of the other_. When the latter rises from his chair, _he_ rises; when he sits down, _he_ sits down; if he bows, _he_ bows; if he make a grimace, _he_ makes the same. Yet his eyes are closed. He certainly does not see. His mind has interpenetrated to a small extent the nervous system of the operator; and is in relation with his voluntary nerves and the anterior half of his cranio-spinal chord. (These are the organs by which the impulse to voluntary motion is conveyed and originated.) Farther into the other's being, he has not yet got. So he does not _what the other thinks of, or wishes him to do_; but only what the other either does, or goes through the mental part of doing. So Victor sang the air, which M. de Puysegur only mentally hummed.

The next strange phenomenon marks that the mind of the untranced patient has interpenetrated the nervous system of the other _a step farther_, and is in relation besides with the posterior half of the cranio-spinal chord and its nerves. For now the entranced person, who has no feeling, or taste, or smell of his own, _feels, tastes, and smells every thing that is made to tell on the senses of the operator_. If mustard or sugar be put in his own mouth, he seems not to know that they are there; if mustard is placed on the tongue of the operator, the entranced person expresses great disgust, and tries as if to spit it out. The same with bodily pain. If you pluck a hair from the operator's head, the other complains of the pain you give _him_.

To state in the closest way what has happened--the phenomena of sympathetic motion and sympathetic sensation, thus displayed, are exactly such as might be expected to follow, if the mind or conscious principle of the entranced person were brought into relation with the cranio-spinal chord of the operator and its nerves, and with no farther portion of his nervous system. Later, it will be seen the interpenetration can extend farther.

But before this happens, a new phenomenon manifests itself, not of a sympathetic character. The operator contrives to wake the entranced person to the knowledge that he possesses new faculties. _He develops in him new organs of sensation_, or rather helps to hasten his recognition of their possession.

It is to be observed, however, that many and many who can be thrown into trance will not progress so far as to the present step. Others make a tantalising half advance towards reaching it _thus_; and then stop. They are asked, "Do you see any thing?" After some days at length, they answer, "Yes"--"What?" "A light." "Where is the light?" Then they intimate its place to be either before them, or at the crown of the head, or behind one ear, or quite behind the head. And they describe the colour of the light, which is commonly yellow. And each day it occupies the same direction, and is seen equally when the room is light or dark. Their eyes in the mean time are closed. And here, with many, the phenomenon stops.

But, with others, it goes thus strangely farther. In this light they begin to discern objects, or they see whatever is presented to them in the direction in which the light lies, whether before the forehead or at the crown of the head, or wherever it may be. Sometimes the range of this new sense is very limited, and the object to be seen must be held near to the new organ. Sometimes it must touch it; generally, however, the sense commands what the eye would, if it were placed there.

One tries first to escape the improbability of an extempore organ of sense being thus established, by supposing that the mind of the entranced person has only penetrated a little deeper than before into yours, and perceives what you see. But I had the following experiment made, which excludes this solution of the phenomenon. The party standing behind the entranced person, whose use it was to see with the back of her head, held behind him a pack of cards, and then, drawing one of them, presented it, without seeing it himself, to her new organ of vision. She named the card justly each time the experiment was repeated.

The degree of light suiting this new vision varies in different cases: sometimes bright daylight is best; generally they prefer a moderate light. Some distinguish objects and colours in a light so obscure that the standers-by cannot distinguish the same with their eyes.

The above phenomena have been, over and over again, verified by the gentleman whom I before referred to, Mr J. W. Williamson of Whickham; and not only have I received the accounts of them from himself, but from two other gentlemen, who repeatedly witnessed their manifestation in patients at Mr Williamson's residence.

A parallel transposition of the sense of hearing I will exemplify from the details of a case of catalepsy, or spontaneous trance, as they are given by the observer, Dr Petetin, an eminent civil and military physician of Lyons, where he was president of the Medical Society. The work in which they are given is entitled, "Memoire sur la Catalepsie. 1787."

M. Petetin attended a young married lady in a sort of fit. She lay seemingly unconscious; when he raised her arm, it remained in the air where he placed it. Being put to bed, she commenced singing. To stop her, the doctor placed her limbs each in a different position. This embarrassed her considerably, but she went on singing. She seemed perfectly insensible. Pinching the skin, shouting in her ear, nothing aroused attention. Then it happened that, in arranging her, the doctor's foot slipped; and, as he recovered himself, half leaning over her, he said, "how provoking we can't make her leave off singing!" "Ah, doctor," she cried, "don't be angry! I won't sing any more," and she stopped. But shortly she began again; and in vain did the doctor implore her, by the loudest entreaties, addressed to her ear, to keep her promise and desist. It then occurred to him to place himself in the same position as when she heard him before. He raised the bed-clothes, bent his head towards her stomach, and said, in a loud voice, "Do you, then, mean to sing forever?" "Oh, what pain you have given me!" she exclaimed--"I implore you speak lower;" at the same time she passed her hand over the pit of her stomach. "In what way, then, do you hear?" said Dr Petetin. "Like any one else," was the answer. "But I am speaking to your stomach." "Is it possible!" she said. He then tried again whether she could hear with her ears, speaking even through a tube to aggravate his voice;--she heard nothing. On his asking her, at the pit of her stomach, if she had not heard him,--"No," said she, "I am indeed unfortunate."

A cognate phenomenon to the above is _the conversion of the patient's new sense of vision in a direction inwards_. He looks into himself, and sees his own inside as it were illuminated or transfigured.

A few days after the scone just described, Dr Petetin's patient had another attack of catalepsy. She still heard at the pit of her stomach, but the manner of hearing was modified. In the mean time her countenance expressed astonishment. Dr Petetin inquired the cause. "It is not difficult," she answered, "to explain to you why I look astonished. I am singing, doctor, to divert my attention from a sight which appals me. I see my inside, and the strange forms of the organs, surrounded with a network of light. My countenance must express what I feel,--astonishment and fear. A physician who should have my complaint for a quarter of an hour would think himself fortunate, as nature would reveal all her secrets to him. If he was devoted to his profession, he would not, as I do, desire to be quickly well." "Do you see your heart?" asked Dr Petetin. "Yes, there it is; it beats at twice; the two sides in agreement; when the upper part contracts, the lower part swells, and immediately after that contracts. The blood rushes out all luminous, and issues by two great vessels which are but a little apart."

There are many cases like the above on record, perfectly attested. There is no escaping from the facts. We have no resource but to believe them. Things if possible still more marvellous remain behind. The more advanced patient penetrates the sensoria of those around her, and knows their thoughts and all the folds of their characters. She is able, farther, to perceive objects, directly, at considerable--indefinite distances. She can foresee coming events in her own health. Finally, she can feel and discern by a kind of intuition, what is the matter with another person either brought into her presence, or who is, in certain other ways, identified by her. As the evidence of the possession of these faculties by entranced persons is complete, and admits of no question, an important use, I repeat, of the artificial induction of trance is, that it will multiply occasions of sifting this extraordinary field of psychological inquiry.

In the mean time I will not trespass upon your patience farther, nor weary you with farther instances, beyond giving the sequel of the case of catalepsy of which I have above mentioned some particulars. You will see in it a shadowing out of most of the other powers, which I have said are occasionally manifested by persons in trance, which sometimes attain an extraordinary vigour and compass, and which are maintained, or are maintainable, for several years, being manifested for that time, though not without caprice and occasional entire failures, on the patient reverting to the entranced condition. One of the most interesting features in what follows is, that it is evident M. Petetin was entirely unacquainted with mesmerism; and, at the same time, that he had all but discovered and developed the art of mesmeric manipulation himself.

The following morning, (to give the latter part of the case of catalepsy,) the access of the fit took place, according to custom, at eight o'clock in the morning. Petetin arrived later than usual; he announced himself by speaking to the fingers of the patient, (by which he was heard.) "You are a very lazy person this morning, doctor," said she. "It is true, madam; but if you knew the reason, you would not reproach me." "Ah," said she, "I perceive, you have had a headach for the last four hours; it will not leave you till six in the evening. You are right to take nothing; no human means can prevent its running its course." "Can you tell me on which side is the pain?" said Petetin. "On the right side; it occupies the temple, the eye, the teeth: I warn you that it will invade the left eye, and that you will suffer considerably between three and four o'clock; at six you will be free from pain." The prediction came out literally true. "If you wish me to believe you, you must tell me what I hold in my hand?" "I see through your hand an antique medal."

Petetin inquired of his patient at what hour her own fit would cease: "at eleven." "And the evening accession, when will it come on?" "At seven o'clock." "In that case it will be later than usual." "It is true; the periods of its recurrence are going to change to so and so." During this conversation, the patient's countenance expressed annoyance. She then said to M. Petetin, "My uncle has just entered; he is conversing with my husband, _behind the screen_; his visit will fatigue me, beg him to go away." The uncle, leaving, took with him by mistake her husband's cloak, which she perceived, and sent her sister-in-law to reclaim it.

In the evening, there were assembled, in the lady's apartment, a good number of her relations and friends. Petetin had, intentionally, placed a letter within his waistcoat, on his heart. He begged permission, on arriving, to wear his cloak. Scarcely had the lady, the access having come on, fallen into catalepsy, when she said, "And how long, doctor, has it come into fashion to wear letters next the heart?" Petetin pretended to deny the fact; she insisted on her correctness; and, raising her hands, designated the size, and indicated exactly the place of the letter. Petetin drew forth the letter, and held it, closed, to the fingers of the patient. "If I were not a discreet person," she said, "I should tell the contents; but to show you that I know them, they form exactly two lines and a half of writing;" which, on opening the letter, was shown to be the fact.

A friend of the family, who was present, took out his purse and put it in Dr Petetin's bosom, and folded his cloak over his chest. As soon as Petetin approached his patient, she told him that he had the purse, and named its exact contents. She then gave an inventory of the contents of the pockets of all present; adding some pointed remark when the opportunity offered. She said to her sister-in-law that the most interesting thing in _her_ possession was a letter;--much to her surprise, for she had received the letter the same evening and had mentioned it to no one.

The patient, in the mean time, lost strength daily, and could take no food. The means employed failed of giving her relief, and it never occurred to M. Petetin to inquire of her how he should treat her. At length, with some vague idea that she suffered from too great electric tension of the brain, he tried, fantastically enough, the effect of making deep inspirations, standing close in front of the patient. No effect followed from this absurd proceeding. _Then he placed one hand on the forehead, the other on the pit of the stomach of the patient_, and continued his inspirations. The patient now opened her eyes; her features lost their fixed look; she rallied rapidly from the fit, which lasted but a few minutes instead of the usual period of two hours more. In eight days, under a pursuance of this treatment, she entirely recovered from her fits, and with them ceased her extraordinary powers. But, during these eight days, her powers manifested a still greater extension; she foretold what was going to happen to her; she discussed, with astonishing subtlety, questions of mental philosophy and physiology; she caught what those around her meant to say, before they expressed their wishes, and either did what they desired, or begged that they would not ask her to do what was beyond her strength.

In conclusion, let me animadvert upon the injustice with which, to its own loss, society has treated mesmerism. The use of mesmerism in nervous disorders, its use towards preventing suffering in surgical operations, have been denied and scoffed at in the teeth of positive evidence. The supposition of physical influence existing that can emanate from one human being and affect the nerves of another, was steadily combated as a gratuitous fiction, till Von Reichenbach's discoveries demonstrated its soundness. And, finally, the marvels of _clairvoyance_ were considered an absolute proof of the visionary character of animal magnetism, because the world was ignorant that they occur independently of that influence, which only happens to be one of the modes of inducing the condition of trance in which they spontaneously manifest themselves. Adieu, dear Archy.

Yours, &c.

MAC DAVUS.

HISTORY OF THE CAPTIVITY OF NAPOLEON AT ST HELENA.[10]

Whatever may be the pursuits of our posterity, whether the mind of nations will turn on philosophy or politics, whether on a descent to the centre of the earth, or on the model of a general Utopia--whether on a telegraphic correspondence with the new planet, by a galvanised wire two thousand eight hundred and fifty millions of miles long, or on a Chartist government--we have not the slightest reason to doubt, that our generation will be regarded as having lived in the most brilliant time of the by-gone world.

The years from 1789 to 1815 unquestionably include the most stirring period since the great primal convulsion, that barbarian deluge, which changed the face of Europe in the fifth century. But the vengeance which called the Vandal from his forest to crush the Roman empire, and after hewing down the Colossus which, for seven hundred years, had bestrode the world, moulded kingdoms out of its fragments, was of a totally different order from that which ruled over our great day of Change. In that original revolution, man, as the individual, was scarcely more than the sufferer. It was a vast outburst of force, as uncircumscribed as uncontrollable, and as unconnected with motives merely human, as an inroad of the ocean. It was a vast expanse of human existence, rushing surge on surge over the barriers of fair and fertile empire. It was hunger, and love of seizure, and hot thirst of blood, embodied in a mass of mankind rushing down upon luxury and profligacy, and governmental incapacity embodied in other masses of mankind. An invasion from the African wilderness with all its lions and leopards in full roar, could scarcely have less been urged by motives of human nature.

But the great revolution which in our time shook Europe, and is still spreading its shock to the confines of the world, was _human_ in the most remarkable degree. It was the work of impulses fierce and wild, yet peculiarly belonging to man. It was a succession of lights and shadows of human character, contrasted in the most powerful degree, as they passed before the eye of Europe--the ambition of man, the rage of man, the voluptuousness, the ferocity, the gallantry, and the fortitude of man, in all the varieties of human character. It was man in the robes of tragedy, comedy, and pantomime, but it was every where _man_. Every great event on which the revolution was suspended for the time, originated with some remarkable individual, and took its shape even from some peculiarity in that individual.

Thus, the period of mob-massacre began with the sudden ascendency of Marat--a hideous assassin, who regarded the knife as the only instrument of governing, and proclaimed as his first principle of political regeneration, that "half a million of heads must fall."

The second stage, the Reign of Terror, began with Robespierre, a village lawyer; in whose mingled cruelty and craft originated the bloody mockeries of that "Revolutionary Tribunal," which, under the semblance of trial, sent all the accused to the guillotine, and in all the formalities of justice committed wholesale murder.

The third stage was the reign of the Directory--the work of the voluptuous Barras--and reflecting his profligacy in all the dissoluteness of a government of plunder and confiscation, closing in national debauchery and decay.

The final stage was War--under the guidance of a man whose whole character displayed the most prominent features of soldiership. From that moment, the republic bore the sole impress of war. France had placed at her head the most impetuous, subtle, ferocious, and all-grasping, of the monarchs of mankind. She instantly took the shape which, like the magicians of old commanding their familiar spirits, the great magician of our age commanded her to assume. Peace--the rights of man--the mutual ties of nations--the freedom of the serf and the slave--the subversion of all the abuses of the ancient thrones--all the old nominal principles of revolutionary patriotism, were instantly thrown aside, like the rude weapons of a peasant insurrection, the pike and the ox-goad, for the polished and powerful weapons of royal armouries. In all the conquests of France the serf and the slave were left in their chains; the continental kingdoms, bleeding by the sword until they lay in utter exhaustion, were suffered to retain all their abuses; the thrones, stripped of all their gold and jewels, were yet suffered to stand. Every pretext of moral and physical redress was contemptuously abandoned, and France herself exhibited the most singular of all transformations.--The republic naked, frantic, and covered with her own gore, was suddenly seen robed in the most superb investitures of monarchy; assuming the most formal etiquette of empire, and covered with royal titles. This was the most extraordinary change in the recollections of history, and for the next hundred, or for the next thousand years, it will excite wonder. But the whole period will be to posterity what Virgil describes the Italian plains to have been to the peasant of his day, a scene of gigantic recollections; as, turning up with the ploughshare the site of ancient battles, he finds the remnants of a race of bolder frame and more trenchant weapons--the weightier sword and the mightier arm.

What the next age may develop in the arts of life, or the knowledge of nature, must remain in that limbo of vanity, to which Ariosto consigned embryo politicians, and Milton consigned departed friars--the world of the moon. But it will scarcely supply instances of more memorable individual faculties, or of more powerful effects produced by those faculties. The efforts of Conspiracy and Conquest in France, the efforts of Conservatism and Constitution in England, produced a race of men whom nothing but the crisis could have produced, and who will find no rivals in the magnitude of their capacities, the value of their services, in their loftiness of principle, and their influence on their age; until some similar summons shall be uttered to the latent powers of mankind, from some similar crisis of good and evil. The eloquence of Burke, Pitt, Fox, and a crowd of their followers, in the senate of England, and the almost fiendish vividness of the republican oratory, have remained without equals, and almost without imitators--the brilliancy of French soldiership, in a war which swept Europe with the swiftness and the devastation of a flight of locusts--the British campaigns of the Peninsula, those most consummate displays of fortitude and decision, of the science which baffles an enemy, and of the bravery which crushes him--will be lessons to the soldier in every period to come.

But the foremost figure of the great history-piece of revolution, was the man, of whose latter hours we are now contemplating. Napoleon may not have been the ablest statesman, or the most scientific soldier, or the most resistless conqueror, or the most magnificent monarch of mankind--but what man of his day so closely combined all those characters, and was so distinguished in them all? It is idle to call him the child of chance--it is false to call his power the creation of opportunity--it is trifling with the common understanding of man, to doubt his genius. He was one of those few men, who are formed to guide great changes in the affairs of nations. The celebrity of his early career, and the support given to him by the disturbances of France, are nothing in the consideration of the philosopher; or perhaps they but separate him more widely from the course of things, and assimilate him more essentially with those resistless influences of nature, which, rising from we know not what, and operating we know not how, execute the penalties of Heaven:--those moral pestilences which, like the physical, springing from some spot of obscurity, and conveyed by the contact of the obscure, suddenly expand into universal contagion, and lay waste the mind of nations.

In the earlier volumes of the Journal of Count Montholon, the assistance of Las Cases was used to collect the imperial _dicta_. But on the baron's being sent away from St Helena--an object which he appears to have sought with all the eagerness of one determined to make his escape, yet equally resolved on turning that escape into a subject of complaint--the duty of recording Napoleon's opinions devolved on Montholon. In the year 1818, Napoleon's health began visibly to break. His communications with O'Meara, the surgeon appointed by the English government, became more frequent; and as Napoleon was never closely connected with any individual without an attempt to make him a partisan, the governor's suspicions were excited by this frequency of intercourse. We by no means desire to stain the memory of O'Meara (he is since dead) with any dishonourable suspicion. But Sir Hudson Lowe cannot be blamed for watching such a captive with all imaginable vigilance. The recollection of the facility which too much dependance on his honour gave to Napoleon's escape from Elba, justly sharpened the caution of the governor. The fear of another European conflagration made the safeguard of the Ex-Emperor an object of essential policy, not merely to England, but to Europe; and the probability of similar convulsions rendered his detention at St Helena as high a duty as ever was intrusted to a British officer.

We are not now about to discuss the charges made against Sir Hudson Lowe; but it is observable, that they are made solely on the authority of Napoleon, and of individuals dismissed for taking too strong an interest in that extraordinary man. Those complaints may be easily interpreted in the instance of the prisoner, as the results of such a spirit having been vexed by the circumstances of his tremendous fall; and also, in the instance of those who were dismissed, as a species of excuse for the transactions which produced their dismissal. But there can be no doubt that those complaints had not less the direct object of keeping the name of the Ex-Emperor before the eyes of Europe; that they were meant as stimulants to partisanship in France; and that, while they gratified the incurable bile of the fallen dynasty against England, they were also directed to produce the effect of reminding the French soldiery that Napoleon was still in existence.

Yet there was a pettiness in all his remonstrances, wholly inconsistent with greatness of mind. He thus talks of Sir Hudson Lowe:--

"I never look on him without being reminded of the assassin of Edward II. in the Castle of Berkeley, heating the bar of iron which was to be the instrument of his crime. Nature revolts against him. In my eyes she seems to have marked him, like Cain, with a seal of reprobation."

Napoleon's knowledge of history was here shown to be pretty much on a par with his knowledge of scripture. The doubts regarding the death of Edward II. had evidently not come to his knowledge; and, so far as Cain was concerned, the sign was not one of reprobation, but of protection--it was a mark that "no man should slay him."

But all those complaints were utterly unworthy of a man who had played so memorable a part in the affairs of Europe. He who had filled the French throne had seen enough of this world's glory; and he who had fallen from it had been plunged into a depth of disaster, which ought to have made him regardless ever after of what man could do to him. A man of his rank ought to have disdained both the good and ill which he could receive from the governor of his prison. But he wanted the magnanimity that bears misfortune well: when he could no longer play the master of kingdoms, he was content to quarrel about valets; and having lost the world, to make a little occupation for himself in complaining of the want of etiquette in his dungeon. But the spirit of the intriguer survived every other spirit within him, and it is by no means certain that the return of O'Meara and Gourgaud to Europe was not a part of that intrigue in which Napoleon played the Italian to the last hour of his life. It is true that the general returned under a certificate of ill health, and it is also perfectly possible that the surgeon was unconscious of the intrigue. But there can be no doubt of the design; and that design was, to excite a very considerable interest in Europe, on behalf of the prisoner of St Helena. Gourgaud, immediately after his arrival, wrote a long letter to Marie Louise, which was palpably intended more for the Emperors of Russia and Austria than for the feelings of the Ex-Empress, of whose interest in the matter the world has had no knowledge whatever.

In this letter it was declared, that Napoleon was dying in the most frightful and prolonged agony. "Yes, Madame," said this epistle, "he whom Divine and human laws unite to you by the most sacred ties--he whom you have beheld an object of homage to almost all the sovereigns of Europe, and over whose fate I saw you shed so many tears when he left you, is perishing by a most cruel death--a captive on a rock in the midst of the ocean, at a distance of two thousand leagues from those whom he holds most dear."

The letter then proceeds to point out the object of the appeal. "These sufferings may continue for a long time. There is still time to save him: the moment seems very favourable. The Sovereigns are about to assemble at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle--passions seem calmed--Napoleon is now far from being formidable. In these circumstances let your Majesty deign to reflect what an effect a great step on your part would produce--that, for instance, of going to this Congress, and there soliciting a termination to the Emperor's sufferings, of supplicating your august father to unite his efforts with yours, in order to have Napoleon confided to his charge, if policy did not permit him to be restored to liberty; and how great would be your Majesty's own happiness: It would be said, the sovereigns of Europe, after having vanquished the great Napoleon, abandoned him to his most cruel enemies, they conducted him towards his grave by the most prolonged and barbarous torments, the continuation of his agony urged him even to demand more active executioners; he seemed forgotten, and without hope of aid; but Marie Louise remained to him, and he was restored to life."

Whether this letter ever reached its address is not clear; but if it did, it produced no discoverable effect.

But the absence of those confidants increased the troubles of the unlucky Montholon in a formidable degree, and Napoleon's habit of dictating his thoughts and recollections, (which he frequently continued for hours together, and sometimes into the middle of the night,) pressed heavily on the Count and Bertrand; the latter being excluded after six in the evening, when the sentinels were posted for the night, as he resided with his family, and thus devolving the task of the night on Montholon. Those dictations were sometimes on high questions of state, and on theories of war; sometimes on matters of the day, as in the following instance.

The death of the Princess Charlotte, which threw the mind of England into such distress, had just been made known at St Helena. Napoleon spoke of it as reminding him of the perilous child-birth of Marie Louise. "Had it not been for me," said he, "she would have lost her life, like this poor Princess Charlotte. What a misfortune! young and beautiful, destined to the throne of a great nation, and to die for want of proper care on the part of her nearest relations! Where was her husband? where was her mother? why were they not beside her, as I was beside Marie Louise? She, too, would have died, had I left her to the care of the professional people. She owes her life to my being with her during the whole time of danger; for I shall never forget the moment when the accoucheur Dubois came to me pale with fright, and hardly able to articulate, and informed me that a choice must be made between the life of the mother and that of the child. The peril was imminent; there was not a moment to be lost in decision. 'Save the mother,' said I--'it is her right. Proceed just as you would do in the case of a citizen's wife of the Rue St Denis.' It is a remarkable fact, that this answer produced an electric effect on Dubois. He recovered his _sang froid_, and calmly explained to me the causes of the danger. In a quarter of an hour afterwards, the King of Rome was born; but at first the infant was believed to be dead, he had suffered so much on coming into the world, and it was with much difficulty that the physicians recalled him to life."

It will probably be recollected as a similar instance of the advantage of care and decision, that Queen Caroline was rescued from the same hazard. Her accouchment was preceded by great suffering, and her strength seemed totally exhausted. The attendants were in a state of extreme alarm, when Lord Thurlow said, in his usual rough way, "Don't think of princesses here: treat her like the washerwoman, and give her a glass of brandy." The advice was followed, and the Princess speedily recovered.

Connected with the history of this short-lived son, is an anecdote, which Napoleon related as an instance of his own love of justice. When the palace was about to be built for the King of Rome at Passy, it was necessary to purchase some buildings which already stood on the ground. One of these was a hut belonging to a cooper, which the architects valued at a thousand francs. But the cooper, resolving to make the most of his tenure, now demanded ten times the sum. Napoleon ordered the money to be given to him; but when the contract was brought to him to sign, the fellow said, that "as an Emperor disturbed him," he ought to pay for turning him out, and must give him thirty thousand francs. "The good man is a little exacting," said Napoleon, "still there is some sense in his argument. Give him the thirty thousand, and let me hear no more about it." But the cooper, thinking that he had a fine opportunity, now said that he could not take less than forty thousand. The architect did not know what to say; he dared not again mention the matter to the Emperor, and yet it was absolutely necessary to have the house. Napoleon learned what was passing, and was angry, but allowed the offer of the forty thousand. Again the dealer retracted, and demanded fifty thousand. "He is a despicable creature," said the Emperor. "I will have none of his paltry hut: it shall remain where it is, as a testimony of my respect for the law."

The works were still going on at the time of the exile, in 1814; and, the cooper, finding himself in the midst of rubbish and building materials, groaned over the consequences of his folly, or rather of his extortion, for he had thus, deservedly, lost the opportunity of making his fortune.

The death of Cipriani, the _maitre d'hotel_, occurred about this time, and was startling from its suddenness. He was serving Napoleon's dinner, when he was attacked by such violent pains, that he was unable to reach his chamber without assistance. He rolled on the ground, uttering piercing cries. Four-and-twenty hours afterwards his coffin was carried to the cemetery of Plantation House! Cipriani had been employed in the secret police, and had distinguished himself by some difficult missions in the affairs of Naples and Northern Italy. It was only after the banishment to Elba that he had formed a part of the household. It was to Cipriani that the taking of Capri was owing. In 1806, Sir Hudson Lowe commanded at Capri, as lieutenant-colonel of a legion, composed of Corsican and Neapolitan deserters. The position of Capri in the Bay of Naples was of some importance for carrying on communications with those hostile to the French interest in Italy. Salicetti, prime minister of Naples, was vainly pondering on the capture of Capri; when it occurred to him to employ Cipriani, to put it into his power by surprise or treachery. Among the Corsicans under Sir H. Lowe's command, was one Suzanelli, a profligate, who had reduced himself by his debaucheries to acting as a spy. Cipriani soon ascertained that they had been fellow-students at college.

The whole story is curious, as an instance of the dexterity of Italian treachery, and of the difficulty which an honest man must always find in dealing with that people. Cipriani instantly found out Suzanelli, who was then in Naples, and said, "I know all, but we are fellow-countrymen--we have eaten the same soup: I do not desire to make you lose your head: choose between the scaffold, and making your fortune from your own country.--You are the spy of the English: help me to expel them from Capri, and your fortune is made. Refuse, and you are my prisoner, and will be shot within twenty-four hours." "I take your offer," was the answer. "What do you want with me?" Cipriani proposed to give him double what he received from the English, on condition of handing over all the letters which he received for Naples, and delivering the answers as if he had received them from the writers. Suzanelli thenceforth communicated all news relative to the movements of old Queen Caroline, and the British in the Mediterranean. Sir Hudson Lowe's confidence in Suzanelli was so much increased by the apparently important communications which the Neapolitan police had purposely made to him, that he rewarded him profusely, and at length accepted his offer of furnishing recruits to the Corsican legion at Capri. When the garrison was corrupted through the medium of those recruits, and an expedition was prepared at Naples, Suzanelli, in order to hoodwink the governor of Capri, whose vigilance might be awakened by the preparations, sent him a detailed report of the strength and object of the expedition, but telling him that it was meant to attack the Isle of Ponza. The expedition, under General La Marque, sailed at night, and the French effected their landing by surprise. The Royal Maltese regiment contained a great number of Suzanelli's recruits. They laid down their arms, and surrendered the forts in their charge. The commandant succeeded with difficulty in shutting himself up in the citadel with the royal Corsican regiment. It was inaccessible by assault, but the French dragged some heavy guns to a commanding height, and after a cannonade the garrison capitulated.

This story is not exactly true; for the capitulation was _not_ the result of the cannonade; but water and provisions had totally failed. The attempt made by an English frigate to succour the island had been frustrated by a violent gale, and there was no resource but to give up the island. Yet, if our memory is exact, there was _no_ capitulation; for the garrison escaped without laying down their arms.

It is proverbial, that great events frequently depend upon very little causes. All the world now blames the precipitancy of Napoleon in leaving Elba while the Congress was assembled. If he had waited until it was dissolved, he would have gained all the time which must have been lost by the Allies in reuniting their councils. The princes and diplomatists would have been scattered; the armies would have marched homewards; months would probably have elapsed before they could again have been brought into the field; and during that period, there would have been full opportunity for all the arts of intrigue and insinuation, which Napoleon so well knew how to use. Or, if he had delayed his return for a twelvemonth longer, he would have only found the obstacles so much the more diminished. In short, to him, the gain of time was every thing.

His own narrative on the subject now was, that he had been misled; that he was fully sensible of the advantages of delay, but that accident had betrayed him. He had established a secret correspondence with Vienna, through which he received weekly accounts of all that had passed in Congress, and was prepared to act accordingly. One of his agents, De Chaboulon, arrived at Elba, at the same period with the Chevalier D'Istria, (whom the King of Naples had sent with the despatch received from his ambassador at Vienna,) announcing the closing of the Congress, and the departure of the Emperor Alexander. On this intelligence Napoleon determined immediately to set sail for France, without waiting for the return of Cipriani, whom he had sent on a special mission. Had he waited for that return, the Emperor Alexander would have been on his way to Russia. But the result of his precipitancy was, that by rushing into France, while the emperors and diplomatists were still in combination, they were enabled to level the blow at him immediately. Instead of negotiations, he was pursued with a hue and cry; and instead of being treated as a prince, he was proclaimed an outlaw. Cipriani arrived in Elba on the 27th of February, but Napoleon had sailed on the evening of the 26th. So delicate was the interval between total ruin and what might have been final security; for Cipriani brought news of the Congress, and despatches from Vienna, which would have proved the importance of delaying the departure of the expedition.

But it must now be acknowledged that, if there ever was a human being under the influence of infatuation, that being was Napoleon, in the latter stages of his career. For ten years the favourite of fortune, the long arrear had begun to be paid in the year 1812. His expedition to Moscow was less a blunder than a frenzy. There was, perhaps, not one man in a thousand in Europe but foresaw the almost inevitable ruin of his army. We can recollect the rejoicing with which this perilous advance was viewed in England, and the universal prediction that the Russian deserts would be the grave of his army, if not of his empire. Poland had been conquered in a march and a month. The residence of Napoleon at Warsaw for the winter would have raised a Polish army for him, and would have given him a year for the march to Moscow. But he was _infatuated_: there is no other solution of the problem. He rushed on, captured the capital, and was ruined. Even with Moscow in ashes round him, he still persisted in the folly of supposing that he could persuade into peace an empire which had just given so tremendous an evidence of its fidelity and its fortitude. He was infatuated. He was detained amid the embers until it was impossible to remain longer, and equally impossible to escape the horrors of a Russian winter in a march of six hundred miles. His hour was come. Of an army which numbered four hundred thousand men on crossing the Niemen, probably not one thousand ever returned; for the broken troops which actually came back had been reinforcements which reached the Grand Army from time to time. He reached Paris with the stamp of fallen sovereignty on his brow: the remainder of his career was a struggle against his sentence. Waterloo was merely the scaffold: he was under irretrievable condemnation long before.

In his captivity, Napoleon was liberal in his donatives. On the departure of Balcombe, in whose house he had remained for some time on his arrival in the island, he gave him a bill for seventy-two thousand francs, with the grant of a pension of twelve thousand,--saying to him "I hear that your resignation of your employment is caused by the quarrels drawn upon you through the hospitality which you showed me: I should not wish you to regret ever having known me."

A quarrel relative to the bulletins of Napoleon's health, produced an order from the governor for the arrest of O'Meara. There was a vast quantity of peevishness exercised on the subject, and Napoleon attempted to raise this trifling affair into a general quarrel of the commissioners. But on his declaring that he would no longer receive the visits of O'Meara while under arrest, the governor revoked the order, and O'Meara continued his attendance until instructions were received from Lord Bathurst, to remove him from his situation in the household of the Emperor, and send him to England. This gave another opportunity for complaint. "I have lived too long," said Buonaparte; "your ministers are very bold. When the Pope was my prisoner, I would have cut off my arm rather than have signed an order for laying hands on his physician."

Before leaving the island, O'Meara drew up a statement of his patient's health, in which he seems to have regarded the liver as the chief seat of his disease. A copy of this paper reached home, when Cardinal Fesch and the mother of Napoleon had it examined by her own physician and four medical professors of the university. They also pronounced the disease to consist of an obstruction of the liver. So much for the certainty of medicine. The whole report is now known to have been a blunder. Napoleon ultimately died of a fearful disease, which probably has no connexion with the liver at all. His disease was cancer in the stomach.

The result of those quarrels, however, was to give a less circumscribed promenade to Napoleon. On the decline of his health being distinctly stated to Sir Hudson Lowe, he enlarged the circle of his exercise, and Napoleon resumed his walks and works. From this period, too, he resumed those dictations which, in the form of notes, contained his personal opinions, or rather those apologies for his acts, which he now became peculiarly anxious to leave behind him to posterity.

Whatever may be the historic value of those notes, it is impossible to read them without the interest belonging to transactions which shook Europe, and without remembering that they were the language of a man by far the most remarkable of his time, if not the most remarkable for the result of his acts, since the fall of the Roman empire. In speaking of the return from Elba--"I took," said he, "that resolution as soon as it was proved to me that the Bourbons considered themselves as the continuance of the Third Dynasty, and denied the legal existence of the Republic, and the Empire, which were thenceforth to be regarded only as usurping governments. The consequences of this system were flagrant. It became the business of the bishops to reclaim their sees; the property of the clergy, and the emigrants must be restored. All the services rendered in the army of Conde and in La Vendee, all the acts of treachery committed in opening the gates of France to the armies which brought back the king, merited reward. All those rendered under the standard of the Republic and the Empire were acts of felony." He then gave his special view of the overthrow of the French monarchy.

"The Revolution of 1789 was a general attack of the masses upon the privileged classes. The nobles had occupied, either directly or indirectly, all the posts of justice, high and low. They were exempt from the charges of the state, and yet enjoyed all the advantages accruing from them, by the exclusive possession of all honourable and lucrative employments. The principal aim of the Revolution was to abolish those privileges." He then declared the advantages of the Revolution. "It had established the right of every citizen, according to his merit, to attain to every employment; it had broken down the arbitrary divisions of the provinces, and out of many little nations formed a great one. It made the civil and criminal laws the same every where--the regulations and taxes the same every where. The half of the country changed its proprietors."

This statement is true, and yet the mask is easily taken off the Revolution. The whole question is, whether the means by which it was purchased were not wholly unnecessary. It cost seven years of the most cruel and comprehensive wickedness that the world ever saw; and, when at last its violence overflowed the frontiers, it cost nearly a quarter of a century of slaughter, of ruthless plunder and savage devastation, concluding with the capture of the French capital itself, twice within two years, and the restoration of the royal family by the bayonets of the conquerors.

Yet every beneficial change which was produced by the Revolution, at this enormous waste of national strength and human happiness, had been offered by the French throne before a drop of blood was shed; and was disdained by the leaders of the populace, in their palpable preference for the havoc of their species.

In the beginning of November, 1818, Sir Hudson Lowe communicated to Count Montholon a despatch from Lord Bathurst announcing the departure from Italy of two priests, a physician, a _maitre d'hotel_ and cook, sent by Cardinal Fesch, for the service of Longwood. This news was received by the household with joy, in consequence of Napoleon's declining health. Towards the end of November he became worse; and Dr Stock, the surgeon of one of the ships on the station, was sent for, and attended him for a while. Liver complaint was Napoleon's disease in the opinion of the doctor; the true disease having escaped them all. The paroxysm passed off, and for six weeks his constitution seemed to be getting the better of his disease.

The complaints of the governor's conduct appear to have been kept up with the same restless assiduity. If we are to judge from a conversation with Montholon, those complaints were of the most vexatious order. "It is very hard," said Sir Hudson, "that I who take so much care to avoid doing what is disagreeable, should be constantly made the victim of calumnies; that I should be presented as an object of ridicule to the eyes of the European powers; that the commissioners of the great powers should say to me themselves, that Count Bertrand had declared to them that I was a fool; that I could not be sure that the Emperor was at Longwood; that I had been forty days without seeing him; and that he might be dead without my knowing any thing of it." He further said that the newspapers, and particularly the _Edinburgh Review_, were full of articles which represented him as an assassin. But in the mean time, it was necessary that the orderly officer should see Napoleon every day, and that this might be done in any way he pleased. All that was necessary was, that he should be seen.

Yet this demand of seeing him, which was thus expressed in moderate terms, and obviously essential to his safe keeping, was answered in the lofty style of a melodrama. "Count Bertrand and myself have both informed you, sir, that you should never violate the Emperor's privacy without forcing his doors, and shedding blood."

A great deal of the pretended irritation of Napoleon and his household, arose from the governor's omission of the word Emperor in his notes; and on this subject a cavil had existed even in England. Yet what could be more childish than such a cavil, either in England or in St Helena? It is a well-known diplomatic rule, that no title which a new power may give to itself can be acknowledged, except as a matter of distinct negotiation; and those Frenchmen must have known that the governor had no right to acknowledge a title, which had never been acknowledged by the British Cabinet.

At length the quarrel rose to bullying. The governor having insisted on his point, that Napoleon should be seen by the orderly officer; this was fiercely refused; and at length Bertrand made use of offensive language, filling up the offence by a challenge to the governor. The most surprising matter in the whole business is, that Sir Hudson did not instantly send the blusterer to the black-hole. It was obvious that the idea of fighting with men under his charge was preposterous. But he still, and we think injudiciously, as a matter of the code of honour, wrote, that if Count Bertrand had not patience to wait another opportunity, as he could not fight his _prisoner_, he might satisfy his rage by fighting Lieutenant-Colonel Lyster, the bearer of his reply, who was perfectly ready to draw his sword. Of this opportunity, however, the Count had the wisdom to avoid taking advantage.

The whole question now turned on the admission of the orderly officer, to have personal evidence that Napoleon was still in the island--a matter of obvious necessity, for Europe at that time teemed with the projects of Revolutionary Frenchmen for setting him free. His escape would have ruined the governor; but even if it had been a matter of personal indifference to him, his sense of the public evils which might be produced by the return of this most dangerous of all incendiaries would doubtless have made his detention one of the first duties.

However, finding at last that the state of Napoleon's health might afford a sufficient guarantee against immediate escape, and evidently with the purpose of softening the irritation between them as much as possible, it was finally, though "temporarily," agreed to take Montholon's word for his being at Longwood. On the 21st of September, the priests and Dr Antomarchi arrived. Napoleon, always active and inventive, now attempted to interest the Emperor of Russia in his liberation. It must be owned, that this was rather a bold attempt for the man who had invaded Russia, ravaged its provinces, massacred its troops, and finished by leaving Moscow in flames. But he dexterously limited himself to explaining the seizure of the Duchy of Oldenburg, which was the commencement of the rapacious and absurd attempt to exclude English merchandise from the Continent. Oldenburg was one of the chief entrances by which those manufactures made their way into Germany. Its invasion, and the countless robberies which followed, had been among the first insolences of Napoleon, and the cause of the first irritations of Alexander, as his sister was married to the reigning prince. Napoleon lays the entire blame on Davoust, whom he charges with both the conception and the execution. But if he had disapproved of the act, why had he not annulled it? "I was on the point of doing so," said Napoleon, "when I received a menacing note from Russia; but," said he, "from the moment when the honour of France was implicated, I could no longer disapprove of the marshal's proceedings." He glides over the invasion of Russia with the same unhesitating facility. "I made war," said he, "against Russia, in spite of myself. I knew better than the libellers who reproached me with it, that Spain was a devouring cancer which I ought to cure before engaging myself in a terrible struggle, the first blow of which would be struck at a distance of five hundred leagues from my frontiers. Poland and its resources were but poetry, in the first months of the year 1812." He then adroitly flatters the Russian nation. "I was not so mad as to think that I could conquer Russia without immense efforts. I knew the bravery of the Russian army. The war of 1807 had proved it to me." He then hints at the subject of his conversations at Erfurth, and discloses some of those curious projects, by which France and Russia were to divide the world. He says that Alexander offered to exchange his Polish provinces for Constantinople. Under this arrangement Syria and Egypt would have supplied to France the loss of her colonies. He then admits that he had desired to marry the Grand-duchess; and, finally asserting that the dynasty of the Bourbons was forced upon the people, he declares himself willing to accept of Russian intervention to save himself from the "martyrdom of that rock."

It is evident that the conduct of the governor was constantly guided by a wish to consult the convenience of his prisoner; but the most important point of all was to guard against his escape. Gradually the relaxations as to the limits of his movements became more satisfactory even to the household themselves; and for some time in the latter period of 1819 Napoleon was suffered to ride to considerable distances in the island, without the attendance of all English officer. He now took long rides--among others, one to the house of Sir William Doveton, on the other side of the island. In the evenings he dictated narratives relative to some of the more prominent points of his history, for the purpose of their being sent to Europe, where he was determined, at least, never to let the interest of his name die, and where, though he was practically forgotten, this clever but utterly selfish individual deceived himself into the belief that thousands and tens of thousands were ready to sacrifice every thing for his restoration. On one of these evenings he gave his own version of the revolt of Marshal Ney.

It will be remembered that Ney, when the command of the troops was given to him by Louis XVIII. made a dashing speech to the King, declaring that "he would bring back the monster in an iron cage." But it happened that he had no sooner seen the monster, than he walked over to him with his whole army. This was an offence not to be forgiven; and the result was, that on the restoration of the King, Ney was tried by a court-martial, and shot.

Of course, there could be but one opinion of this unfortunate officer's conduct; but it is curious to observe the romantic colour which Napoleon's dexterous fancy contrived to throw over the whole scene.

"Marshal Ney," said he, "was perfectly loyal, when he received his last orders from the King. But his fiery soul could not fail to be deeply impressed by the intoxicating enthusiasm of the population of the provinces, which was daily depriving him of some of his best troops, for the national colours were hoisted on all sides." Notwithstanding this, Ney, when the Emperor was ready at Lyons, resisted his recollections, until he received the following letter from the Emperor. "Then he yielded, and again placed himself under the banner of the empire."

The letter was the following pithy performance:--"Cousin, my major-general sends you the order of march. I do not doubt that the moment you heard of my arrival at Lyons, you again raised the tricolored standards among your troops. Execute the orders of Bertrand, and come and join me at Chalons. I will receive you as I did the morning after the battle of Moscow." It must be acknowledged that the man who could have been seduced by this letter must have been a simpleton: it has all the arrogance of a master, and even if he had been perfectly free, it was evident that obedience would have made him a slave. But he had given a solemn pledge to the King; he had been given the command of the army on the strength of that pledge; and in carrying it over to the enemy of the King, he compromised the honour and hazarded the life of every man among them. The act was unpardonable, and he soon found it to be fatally so.

Napoleon makes no reference to the pledge, to the point of honour or the point of duty, but pronounces his death a judicial assassination. Still, he is evidently not quite clear on the subject; for he says, that even if he had been guilty, his services to his country ought to have arrested the hand of justice.

Napoleon sometimes told interesting tales of his early career. One of those, if true, shows how near the world was to the loss of an Emperor. After the siege of Toulon, which his panegyrists regard as the first step to his good fortune, he returned to Paris, apparently in the worst possible mood for adventure. He was at this period suffering from illness. His mother, too, had just communicated to him the discomforts of her position.--She had been just obliged to fly from Corsica, where the people were in a state of insurrection, and she was then at Marseilles, without any means of subsistence. Napoleon had nothing remaining, but an assignat of one hundred sous, his pay being in arrear. "In this state of dejection I went out," said he, "as if urged to suicide by an animal instinct, and walked along the quays, feeling my weakness, but unable to conquer it. In a few more moments I should have thrown myself into the water, when I ran against an individual dressed like a simple mechanic, and who, recognising me, threw himself on my neck, and cried, 'Is it you, Napoleon? what joy to see you again!' It was Demasis, a former comrade of mine in the artillery regiment. He had emigrated, and had returned to France in disguise, to see his aged mother. He was about to go, when, stopping, he said, 'What is the matter? You do not listen to me. You do not seem glad to see me. What misfortune threatens you? You look to me, like a madman about to kill himself.'"

This direct appeal awoke Napoleon's feelings, and he told him every thing. "Is that all?" said he; opening his coarse waistcoat, and detaching a belt, he added, "here are thirty thousand francs in gold, take them and save your mother." "I cannot," said Napoleon, "to this day, explain to myself my motives for so doing, but I seized the gold as if by a convulsive movement, and ran like a madman to send it to my mother. It was not until it was out of my hands, that I thought of what I had done. I hastened back to the spot where I had left Demasis, but he was no longer there. For several days I went out in the morning, returning not until evening, searching every place where I hoped to find him."

The end of the romance is as eccentric as the beginning. For fifteen years Napoleon saw no more of his creditor. At the end of that time he discovered him, and asked "why he had not applied to the Emperor." The answer was, that he had no necessity for the money, but was afraid of being compelled to quit his retirement, where he lived happily practising horticulture.

Napoleon now paid his debt, as it maybe presumed, magnificently; made him accept three hundred thousand francs as a reimbursement from the Emperor for the thirty thousand lent to the subaltern of artillery; and besides, made him director-general of the gardens of the crown, with a salary of thirty thousand francs. He also gave a government place to his brother.

Napoleon, who seems always to have had some floating ideas of fatalism in his mind, remarked that two of his comrades, Demasis and Philipeau, had peculiar influence on his destiny. Philipeau had emigrated, and was the engineer employed by Sir Sydney Smith to construct the defences of Acre. We have seen that Demasis stopped him at the moment when he was about to drown himself. "Philipeau," said he, "stopped me before St Jean d'Acre: but for him, I should have been master of this key of the East. I should have marched upon Constantinople, and rebuilt the throne of the East."

This idea of sitting on the throne of the Turk, seems never to have left Napoleon's mind. He was always talking of it, or dreaming of it. But it may fairly be doubted, whether he could ever have found his way out of Syria himself. With his fleet destroyed by Nelson, and his march along the coast--perhaps the only practicable road--harassed by the English cruisers; with the whole Turkish army ready to meet him in the defiles of Mount Taurus; with Asia Minor still to be passed; and with the English, Russian, and Turkish fleets and forces ready to meet him at Constantinople, his death or capture would seem to be the certain consequence of his fantastic expedition. The strongest imaginable probability is, that instead of wearing the diadem of France, his head would have figured on the spikes of the seraglio.

Suicide is so often the unhappy resource of men indifferent to all religion, that we can scarcely be surprised at its having been contemplated more than once by a man of fierce passions, exposed to the reverses of a life like Napoleon's. Of the dreadful audacity of a crime, which directly wars with the Divine will, which cuts off all possibility of repentance, and which thus sends the criminal before his Judge with all his sins upon his head, there can be no conceivable doubt. The only palliative can be, growing insanity. But in the instance which is now stated by the intended self-murderer, there is no attempt at palliation of any kind.

"There was another period of my life," said Napoleon, "when I attempted suicide; but you are certainly acquainted with this fact." "No, sire," was Montholon's reply.

"In that case, write what I shall tell you: for it is well that the mysteries of Fontainbleau should one day be known."

We condense into a few sentences this singular narrative, which begins with an interview demanded by his marshals on the 4th of April 1815, when he was preparing to move at the head of his army to attack the Allies. The language of the marshals was emphatic.

"The army is weary, discouraged, disorganised; desertion is at work among the ranks. To re-enter Paris cannot be thought of: in attempting to do so we should uselessly shed blood."

Their proposal was, his resignation in favour of his son.

Caulaincourt had already brought him the Emperor Alexander's opinion on the subject. The envoy had thus reported the imperial conversation:--"I carry on no diplomacy with you, but I cannot tell you every thing. Understand this, and lose not a moment in rendering an account to the Emperor Napoleon of our conversation, and of the situation of his affairs here; and return again as quickly, bringing his abdication in favour of his son. As to his personal fate, I give you my word of honour that he will be properly treated. But lose not an hour, or all is lost for him, and I shall no longer have power to do any thing either for him or his dynasty."

Napoleon proceeds. "I hesitated not to make the sacrifice demanded of my patriotism. I sat down at a little table, and wrote my Act of Abdication in favour of my son." But on that day Marmont with his army had surrendered. The Allies instantly rejected all negotiation, after this decisive blow in their favour. The Act of Resignation had not reached them, and they determined on restoring the old monarchy at once. On this the desertion was universal; and every man at Fontainbleau was evidently thinking only of being the first to make his bargain with the Bourbons. Napoleon, as a last experiment, proposed to try the effect of war in Italy.

But all shook their heads, and were silent. He at length signed the unequivocal Abdication for himself, and his family.

"From the time of my retreat from Russia," said he, "I had constantly carried round my neck, in a little silken bag, a portion of a poisonous powder which Ivan had prepared by my orders, when I was in fear of being carried off by the Cossacks. My life no longer belonged to my country; the events of the last few days had again rendered me master of it. Why should I endure so much suffering? and who knows, that my death may not place the crown on the head of my son? France was saved."--

"I hesitated no longer, but, leaping from my bed, mixed the poison in a little water, and drank it, with a sort of happiness.

"But time had taken away its strength; fearful pains drew forth some groans from me; they were heard, and medical assistance arrived. It was not Heaven's will that I should die so soon--St Helena was in my _Destiny_."

It may easily be supposed that projects were formed for carrying the prisoner from St Helena. One of those is thus detailed. The captain of a vessel returning from India, had arranged to bring a boat to a certain point of the coast without running the risk of being stopped. This person demanded a million of francs, not, as he said, for himself, but for the individual whose concurrence was necessary. The million was not to be payable until the vessel had reached America. This renders it probable that the captain was a Yankee. At all events, it shows how necessary was the vigilance of the governor, and how little connected with tyranny were his precautions against evasion. Another project was to be carried out, by submarine vessels, and on this experiment five or six thousand Louis were expended in Europe. But Napoleon finished his inquiry into these matters by refusing to have any thing to do with them. It is probable that he expected his release on easier terms than those of breaking his neck, as Montholon observes, "in descending the precipices of St Helena," or being starved, shot, or drowned on his passage across the Atlantic. But as his object was constantly to throw obloquy on the Bourbons, he placed his fears to the account of their treachery.

"I should not," said he, "be six months in America without being assassinated by the Count d'Artois's creatures. Remember the isle of Elba. Did he not send the _Chouan Brulard_ there to organise my assassination? And besides, we should always obey our destiny. Every thing is written in Heaven. It is my martyrdom which will restore the crown of France to my dynasty. I see in America nothing but assassination or oblivion. I prefer St Helena."

In the beginning of 1821, Napoleon began to grow lethargic. He had generally spent the day in pacing up and down his apartment, and dictating conversations and political recollections. But he now sat for hours listlessly and perfectly silent on the sofa. It required the strongest persuasion to induce him to take the air either on foot or _en caleche_.

Napoleon to the last was fond of burlesquing the hypocrisy or romance of the Revolution. The 18th of _Brumaire_, which made him First Consul, and had given him two colleagues, gave him the opportunity of developing the patriotism of the Republic. Shortly after that period, Sieyes, supping with the heads of the Republican party, said to them, at the same time throwing his cap violently on the ground, "There is no longer a Republic. I have for the last eight days been conferring with a man who knows every thing. He needs neither counsel nor aid; policy, laws, and the art of government are all as familiar to him as the command of an army. I repeat to you, there is no longer a Republic."

Sieyes was well known to be what the French call an _idealogue_. He was a theorist on governments, which he invented in any convenient number. For the Consulate he had his theory ready. The First Consul was to be like an epicurean divinity, enjoying himself and taking care for no one. But this tranquillity of position, and nonentity of power, by no means suited the taste of Napoleon. "'Your Grand Elector," said he (the title which seems to have been intended for his head of his new constitution,) "would be nothing but an idle king. The time for do-nothing kings is gone by--six millions of francs and the Tuilleries, to play the stage-king in, put his signature to other peoples work, and do nothing of himself, is a dream. Your Grand Elector would be nothing but a pig to fatten, or a master, the more absolute because he would have no responsibility.' It was on quitting me after this conversation," said Napoleon, "that Sieyes said to Roger Ducos, 'My dear Colleague, we have not a President, we have a master. You and I have no more to do, but to make our fortunes before making our _paquets_.'" This was at least plain speaking, and it discloses the secret of ninety-nine out of every hundred of the Republicans.

An amusing anecdote of the memorable Abbe is then told. He was Almoner to one of the Princesses of France. One day, while he was reading mass, the Princess, from some accidental circumstance, retired, and her ladies followed her. Sieyes, who was busy reading his missal, did not at first perceive her departure; but when he saw himself abandoned by all the great people, and had no auditory left but the domestics, he closed the book, and left the altar, crying, "I do not say mass for the rabble!" This certainly was not very democratic, and yet Sieyes was soon afterwards the most rampant of all possible democrats.

The history of his patriotism, however, alike accounted for his former contempt and his subsequent fraternisation. Previously to the Revolution he was poor, neglected, and angry; but, as he was known to be a man of ability, his name was mentioned to De Brienne, who, though an archbishop, was Prime Minister. He was desired to attend at his next levee; he attended, and was overlooked. He complained to his friend, who repeated the complaint to the archbishop, who desired him to appear at his levee; but was so much occupied with higher people, that the clever but luckless Abbe was again overlooked. He made a third experiment, on the promise that he should obtain audience; but he found the Archbishop enveloped in a circle of _epaulets_, _grands cordons_, and mitres. To penetrate this circle was impossible, and the Abbe, now furious at what he regarded as a mockery, rushed to his chamber, seized a pen, and wrote his powerful and memorable pamphlet entitled, "What is the third Estate?" a fierce, but most forcible appeal to the vanity of the lower orders, pronouncing them _the_ nation. This was a torch thrown into a powder magazine--all was explosion; the church, the noblesse, and the monarchy were suddenly extinguished, and France saw this man of long views and powerful passions, suddenly raised from hunger and obscurity, to the highest rank and the richest sinecurism of the republic.

Antomarchi was not fortunate in his attendance on Napoleon. Of course he felt, like every other foreigner, the ennui of the island, and he grew impatient to return to Europe. At last he applied for permission, which Napoleon gave him in the shape of a discharge, with the following sting at the end. "During the fifteen months which we have spent in this country, you have given his Majesty no confidence in your moral character. You can be of no use to him in his illness, and your residing here for several months longer would have no object, and be of no use." However, a reconciliation was effected, and the doctor was suffered to remain. But all the household now began to be intolerably tired. Three of the household, including the Abbe, requested their conge.

There is in the spirit of the foreigner a kind of gross levity, an affectation of frivolity with respect to women, and a continual habit of vulgar vanity, which seems to run through all ranks and ages of the continental world. What can be more offensively trifling, than the conduct which Napoleon narrates of himself, when Emperor, at Warsaw.

A Madame Waleska seems to have been the general belle of the city. On the night when Napoleon first saw this woman, at a ball, General Bertrand and Louis de Perigord appeared as her public admirers. "They both," said he, "kept hovering emulously round her." But Napoleon, Emperor, husband, and mature as he was, chose to play the gallant on this evening also. Finding the two Frenchmen in the way of his attentions, he played the Emperor with effect on the spot. He gave an order to Berthier, then head of his staff, instantly to send off M. Perigord "to obtain news of the 6th corps," which was on the Passarge. Thus one inconvenience was got rid of, but Bertrand was still present, and during supper his attentions were so marked that, as he leaned over Madame's chair, his aiguilettes danced on her shoulders. "Upon this," said Napoleon, "my impatience was roused to such a pitch that I touched him on the arm and drew him to the recess of a window, where I gave him orders 'to set out for the head-quarters of Prince Jerome,' and without losing an hour to bring me a report of the siege of Breslau." Such it is to come in the way of Emperors. "The poor fellow was scarcely gone," adds Napoleon, "when I repented of my angry impulse; and I should certainly have recalled him, had I not remembered at the same minute that his presence with Jerome would be useful to me." And this was the conduct of a man then in the highest position of life, whose example must have been a model to the multitude, and in whom even frivolity would be a crime.

Napoleon had long lived in a state of nervous fear, which must have made even his high position comfortless to him. He had been for years in dread of poison. "I have escaped poisoning," said he, "ten times, if I have once." In St Helena he never eat or drank any thing which had not been tasted first by one of the household! Montholon, during the night, constantly tasted the drink prepared for him. On this subject, Napoleon told the following anecdote.

"He was one day leaving the dinner-table with the Empress Josephine, and two or three other persons, when, as he was about to put his hand in his pocket for his snuff-box, he perceived it lying on the mantel-piece, in the saloon which he was entering. He was about to open it and take a pinch, when his good star caused him to seat himself. He then felt that his snuff-box was in one of his pockets. This excited inquiry, and on sending the two boxes to be chemically tested, the snuff on the mantel-piece was discovered to be poisoned." After this, it is somewhat absurd in M. Montholon to give his hero credit for _sang froid_, and say of him, that no one could take fewer precautions against such dangers than the Emperor. His whole life seems to have been precautionary; still, he sententiously talked the nonsense of fatalism.

"Our last hour is written above," was his frequent remark. He had some absurdities on the subject of medicine, which would have very effectually assisted the fulfilment of this prediction. He had all idea that he should cure himself of his immediate disease, and perhaps of every other, by swallowing orange-flower water, and soup _a la reine_.

The governor, during this period, constantly offered the services of an English physician; and Dr Arnott was at last summoned, who pronounced the disease to be very serious, and to be connected with great inflammation in the region of the stomach. It was now, for the first time, ascertained that his disease was ulceration of the stomach. There is an occasional tribute to the humane conduct of the governor at this time. On April eleventh, there is this memorandum:--

"Sir Hudson Lowe has left us in perfect tranquillity, since Dr Arnott has been admitted, though he comes every day to the apartments of the orderly officer, for the purpose of conferring with the physician."

Napoleon, now conscious of the dangerous nature of his disease, made his will. He had conceived that he was worth in various property about two hundred millions of francs, which he left by will, but of which we believe the greater part was impounded by the French government, as being public property.

He now held a long conversation on the prospects of his son, whom he regarded as not altogether beyond the hope of ascending the throne of France. He predicted the fall of the reigning family. "The Bourbons," said he, "will not maintain their position after my death." With an exactness equally odd, but equally true, he predicted the rise of another branch of the dynasty: "My son will arrive, after a time of troubles; he has but one party to fear, that of the Duke of Orleans. That party has been germinating for a long time. France is the country where the chiefs of parties have the least interest. To rest for support on them, is to build their hopes on sand."

There is a brilliant shrewdness now and then, in his contempt of the showy exhibitors in public life. "The great orators," said he, "who rule the assemblies by the brilliancy of their eloquence, are in general men of the most mediocre talents. They should not be opposed in their own way, for they have always more noisy words at command than you. In my council there were men possessed of much more eloquence than I was, but I always defeated them by this simple argument,--Two and two make four.

"My son will be obliged to allow the liberty of the press. This is a necessity in the present day. My son ought to be a man of new ideas, and of the cause which have made triumphant every where.

"Let my son often read and reflect on history: that is the only true philosophy. Let him read and meditate on the wars of the great Captains. That is the only means of rightly learning the science of war."

In April, the signs of debility grew still more marked. On the 26th, at four in the morning, after a calm night, he had what Montholon regards as a dream, but what Napoleon evidently regarded as a vision. He said with extraordinary emotion, "I have just seen my good Josephine, but she would not embrace me; she disappeared at the moment when I was about to take her in my arms; she was seated _there_; it seemed to me that I had seen her yesterday evening; she is not changed--still the same, full of devotion to me; she told me that we were about to see each other again, never more to part. She assured me of that. Did you see her?"

Montholon attributed this scene to feverish excitement, gave him his potion, and he fell asleep; but on awaking he again spoke of the Empress Josephine.

It is difficult in speaking of dreams and actual visions, to know the distinction. That the mind may be so perfectly acted upon during the waking hours as to retain the impressions during sleep, is the experience of every day. And yet we know so little of the means by which truths may be communicated to the human spirit while the senses are closed, that it would be unphilosophical to pronounce even upon those fugitive thoughts as unreal. That Napoleon must have often reflected on his selfish and cruel desertion of Josephine, it is perfectly natural to conceive. That he may have bitterly regretted it, is equally natural, for, from that day, his good fortune deserted him. And he might also have discovered that he had committed a great crime, with no other fruit than that of making a useless alliance, encumbering himself with an ungenial companion, and leaving an orphan child dependant on strangers, and continually tantalised by the recollections of a fallen throne. Those feelings, in the solitude of his chamber, and the general dejection of his captivity, must have so often clouded his declining hours, that no miracle was required to embody them in such a vision as that described. And yet, so many visitations of this kind have undoubtedly occurred, that it would be rash to pronounce that this sight of the woman who had so long been the partner of his brilliant days might not have been given, to impress its moral on the few melancholy hours which now lay between him and the grave.

It is painful, after a scene which implies some softness of heart, to find him unrepentant of one of the most repulsive, because the most gratuitous crime of his career. In the course of the day, Bertrand, in translating an English journal, inadvertently began to read an article containing a violent attack on the conduct of Caulaincourt and Savary in the seizure of the Duc d'Enghien. Napoleon, interrupting him, suddenly cried, "This is shameful." He then sent for his will, and interlined the following words:--"I caused the Duc d'Enghien to be arrested and tried, because that step was essential to the interest, honour, and safety of the French people, when the Count d'Artois was maintaining, by his own confession, sixteen assassins in Paris. Under similar circumstances I should act in the same way." Having written these few lines he gave back the will. From this period he was engaged in writing codicils and appointing executors. He gave to Marchand a diamond necklace, valued at 200,000 francs. He wound up those transactions by an extraordinary letter,--no less than the form of an announcement of his own death. It was in these words:--

"Monsieur le Gouverneur, the Emperor Napoleon breathed his last on the ---- after a long and painful illness. I have the honour to communicate this intelligence to you.

"The Emperor had ordered me to communicate, if such be your desire, his last wishes. I beg you to inform me, what are the arrangements, prescribed by your government for the transportation of his remains to France, as well as those relating to the persons of his suite. I have the honour to be, &c., COUNT MONTHOLON."

An act of this order implied a good deal of self-possession. But, even to the last day he continued to occupy his mind with subjects sufficiently trying at any period. On one of those nights he made Montholon bring a table to his bed-side, and dictated for two hours; the subjects being, the decoration of Versailles, and the organisation of the National Guard. On the 30th of April he was given over by the physicians. On the 3rd of May his fever continued, and his mind was evidently beginning to be confused. On the 5th of May he passed a very bad night and became delirious. "Twice," said Montholon, "I thought I distinguished the unconnected words, _France--Armee--Tete d'Armee--France_."

His final hour now visibly approached. From six in the morning, until half-past five in the evening of that day, he remained motionless, lying on his back, with his right hand out of the bed, and his eyes fixed, seemingly absorbed in deep meditation, and without any appearance of suffering; his lips were slightly contracted; his whole face expressed pleasant and gentle impressions.

But he seems to have been awake to external objects to the last. For whenever Antommarchi attempted to moisten his lips, he repulsed him with his hand, and fixed his eyes on Montholon, as the only person whom he would permit to attend him. At sunset he died.

The immediate cause of his death was subsequently ascertained by the surgeons to have been an extensive ulceration of the stomach.

On the 9th of May the body was buried with military honours. On the 30th, Montholon, with the household, quitted St Helena.

Thus obscurely, painfully, and almost ignominiously, closed the career of the most brilliant, ambitious, and powerful monarch of his time. No man had ever attained a higher rank, and sunk from it to a lower. No man had ever been so favoured by fortune. No man had ever possessed so large an influence over the mind of Europe, and been finally an object of hostility so universal. He was the only man in history, against whom a Continent in arms pronounced sentence of overthrow: the only soldier whose personal fall was the declared object of a general war:--and the only monarch whose capture ensured the fall of his dynasty, extinguished an empire, and finished the loftiest dream of human ambition in a dungeon.

Napoleon, since his fall, has been denied genius. But if genius implies the power of accomplishing great ends by means beyond the invention of others, he was a genius. Every act of his career was a superb innovation. As a soldier, he changed the whole art of war. Instead of making campaigns of tactics, he made campaigns of triumphs. He wasted no time in besieging towns; he rushed on the capital. He made no wars of detachments, but threw a colossal force across the frontier, held its mass together, and fought pitched battles day after day, until he trampled down all resistance by the mere weight of a phalanx of 250,000 men. Thus, in 1800, at Marengo, he reconquered Italy in twelve hours. In 1805, he broke down Austria in a three months' war. In 1806, he crushed the Prussian army in four-and-twenty hours, and walked over the monarchy. In 1807, he drove the Russians out of Germany, fought the two desperate battles of Eylau and Friedland, and conquered that treaty of Tilsit, by which he gave the Emperor Alexander a shadow of empire in Asia, in exchange for the substance of universal empire in Europe.

But his time was come. His wars had been wholly selfish. To aggrandise his own name, he had covered Europe with blood. To place _himself_ at the head of earthly power, he had broken faith with Turkey, with Russia, with Germany, and with Spain. The blood, the spoil, and the misery of millions were upon his head. His personal crimes concentrated the vengeance of mankind upon his diadem. For the last three years of his political and military existence, he seems to have lain under an actual spell. Nothing but the judicial clouding of his intellect can account for the precipitate infirmities of his judgment. His march to Russia, as we have already observed, was a gigantic absurdity in the eyes of all Europe--his delay at Moscow was a gigantic absurdity in the eyes of every subaltern in his army. But his campaigns in France were only a continuation of those absurdities. With fifty thousand men he was to conquer three hundred thousand, backed by an actual million ready to rush into the province of France. How was resistance possible? Treaty was his only hope: yet he attempted to resist, and refused to treat. He was beaten up to the walls of Paris. The Allies then offered him France: he still fought, and only affected to negociate. At length the long infatuation was consummated in his march _from_ Paris; the Allies marched _to_ Paris; and Napoleon was instantly deposed, outlawed, and undone.

Even his second great experiment for power was but the infatuation repeated. Every act was an error: his return from Elba ought to have been delayed for at least a year. His campaign of 1815 ought to have made head against the Prussians and Germans in the south, while he left the English and Prussians to waste their strength against his fortresses. Even in Belgium, he ought to have poured the whole mass of his army on the English at once, instead of violating his own first principle of war, and dividing it into three armies, Ney's at Quatre-Bras, Grouchy's at Wavre, and his own at Ligny.

Still, when routed at Waterloo, he had a powerful force in the field, the remnant of his army, with Grouchy's corps. With those he ought to have moved on slowly towards Paris, garrisoning the fortresses, breaking up the roads, throwing every obstacle in the way of the Allies, and finally, at the head of his 60,000 veterans, with the national guard of the capital and the surrounding districts, (amounting to not less than 100,000 men,) at once making a front against the Allies, and negociating.

Above all things, he ought _never_ to have separated himself from the army; as he thus stripped his party of all power at the moment, and virtually delivered himself a prisoner to the Bourbonists in the capital. Whatever might be the difficulty of deciding on his conduct at the time, it is now perfectly easy to see, that all these were blunders of the first magnitude, and that every step was direct to his ruin.

He was no sooner in Paris, than he was made a prisoner; escaped being shot, only through the mercy of the Allies; and, for the general quiet of France and Europe, was consigned, for the remainder of his few and melancholy years, to the prison of St Helena.

The name of Napoleon has a great place in history. He was a great moving power of the day of change, a great statesman, a brilliant soldier, and a splendid ruler of the mightiest dominion that had existed under one sceptre, since the days of Charlemagne. He was a man of vast projects, vast means, and vast opportunities. But he had no greatness of mind; he had but one purpose, personal aggrandizement; and for that purpose, he adopted every vice of the heart of man.

Without being bloodthirsty by nature, he was cruel by habit; without being naturally avaricious, he was a universal spoiler; and without savagely hating mankind, he spurned the feelings, the sufferings, and the life of man. He was hollow, fierce, and remorseless, where his own objects were concerned, and whether he cheated his party in the state, or rode over a field covered with his dying troops, he regarded the treachery as legitimate, and the slaughter as meritorious, if they raised him a step nearer to the aim of his ambition.

With the most splendid chances for establishing a name of perpetual honour, this selfishness defeated them all. On his accession to the throne, he might have secured Peace, as the principle of all European government. He might have developed all the natural powers of his empire, covered its rivers with commerce, filled its cities with opulence, restored the neglected fertility of its plains, and rendered its capital the centre of the most brilliant civilisation which the world had ever seen. But War was for the _fame_ of Napoleon, and he chose the havoc of war.

In 1812 he might have restored the kingdom of Poland, and stamped perpetual renown on his diadem, by an act of imperial justice. But he preferred sacrificing it to the alliance of Austria--for the purpose of devastating Russia. He might have exercised his boundless influence over Spain, to bring the faculties of that noble country to the light, and add the contributions of twelve millions of a half-forgotten race of mankind, to the general happiness of the world. But he preferred being called its conqueror, shedding its blood in torrents. To France herself he might have given a rational liberty, have animated her literature, taught common sense to her vanity, thrown the field open to her genius, and guided her natural ardour, flexibility, and spirit of enterprise, to achievements for the good of man, to which all the trophies of the sword are pale. But he cast away all those illustrious opportunities, and thought only of the shout of the rabble.

Napoleon's career was _providential_; there is no name in history, whose whole course bears so palpable a proof of his having been created for a _historic_ purpose. Europe, in the partition of Poland, had committed a great crime,--France, in the murder of her king, had committed a great crime. The three criminal thrones, and the regicidal republic, were alike to be punished. Napoleon was the appointed instrument for both purposes. He first crushed the democracy, and then he broke the strength of the three powers in the field--he thrice conquered the Austrian capital--he turned Prussia into a province,--and his march to Russia desolated her most populous provinces, and laid her Asiatic capital in ashes.

But France, which continually paid for all those fearful triumphs in her blood, was still to suffer a final and retributive punishment. Her armies were hunted from the Vistula to the Rhine, and from the Rhine to the Seine. She saw her capital twice captured--her government twice swept away--her conquests lost--her plunder recovered by its original possessors, and her territory garrisoned by an army of strangers--her army disbanded--her empire cut down to the limits of the old monarchy--her old masters restored, and her idol torn from his altar. Thus were thrown away the fruits of the Revolution, of the regicide, of the democracy, and of a quarter of a century of wretchedness, fury, and blood.

On Napoleon himself fell the heaviest blow of all. All the shames, sorrows, and sufferings of France were concentered on his head. He saw his military power ruined--his last army slaughtered--his last adherents exiled--his family fugitive,--his whole dynasty uncrowned, and himself given up as a prisoner to England, to be sent to an English dungeon, to be kept in English hands; to finish his solitary and bitter existence in desertion and disease, and be laid in an English grave,--leaving to mankind perhaps the most striking moral of blasted ambition ever given to the world.

* * * * *

In 1840 England, at the solicitation of France, suffered the remains of Napoleon to be brought to Europe. They were received in Paris with military pomp, and on the 15th of December were entombed in the chapel of the Invalides.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] _History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St Helena._ By General Count MONTHOLON Vols. iii. and iv. London: H. Colburn.

JUANCHO THE BULL-FIGHTER.

M. Theophile Gautier, best known as a clever contributor to the critical _feuilleton_ of a leading Paris newspaper, also enjoys a respectable reputation as tale-teller and tourist. His books--although for the most part slight in texture, and conveying the idea that the author might have done better had he taken more pains--have certain merits of their own. His style, sometimes defaced by affectation and pedantry, has a lively smartness not unfrequently rising into wit. And in description he is decidedly happy. Possessing an artist's eye, he paints with his pen; his colouring is vivid, his outline characteristic. These qualities are especially exemplified in a spirited and picturesque, but very _French_ narrative, of an extensive ramble in Spain, published about four years ago. He has now again drawn upon his Peninsular experience to produce a tale illustrative of Spanish life and manners, chiefly in the lower classes of society. His hero is a bull-fighter, his heroine a _grisette_. Of bull-fights, especially within the last few years, one has heard enough and to spare, since every literary traveller in Spain thinks it incumbent on him to describe them. But this is the first instance we remember where the incidents of the bull-ring, and the exploits and peculiarities of its gladiators, are taken as groundwork for a romantic tale. The attempt has been crowned with very considerable success.

The construction of M. Gautier's little romance is simple and inartificial, the incidents are spirited, the style is fresh and pleasant. Its character is quite Spanish, and one cannot doubt the author's personal acquaintance with the scenes and types he sketches--although here and there he has smoothed down with a little French polish the rugged angles of Spanish nationality, and in other places he may be accused of melodramatising rather over much. Through the varnish which it is the novelist's privilege to lay on with a more or less sparing brush, we obtain many interesting and correct glimpses of classes of people whose habits and customs are unknown to foreigners, and are likely to continue so, in great measure, until the appearance of Spanish writers able and willing to depict them. The three principal personages of the tale--the only important ones--are, a young gentleman of Madrid, a bull-fighter named Juancho, and an orphan girl of humble birth and great beauty. The story hinges upon the rivalry of the gentleman and the _torero_ for the good graces of the grisette. There is a secondary plot, associated and partly interwoven with the principal one, but which serves little purpose, save that of prolonging a short tale into a volume. It will scarcely be necessary to refer to it in sketching the trials of the gentle Militona, and the feats and misfortunes of the intrepid and unhappy Juancho.

It was on a June afternoon of the year 184--that Don Andres de Salcedo--a cavalier of good family, competent fortune, handsome exterior, amiable character, and four-and-twenty years of age--emerged from a house in the Calle San Bernardo at Madrid, where he had passed a wearisome hour in practising a duet of Bellini's with Dona Feliciana Vasquez de los Rios. This young lady, still in her teens, moderately pretty and tolerably rich, Andres had from childhood been affianced with, and was accustomed to consider as his future wife, although his sentiments towards her were, in fact, of a very tepid description. Betrothed as children by their parents, there was little real love between them: they met without pleasure and parted without pain; their engagement was an affair of habit, not of the heart.

It was a _dia de toros_, as Monday is called in Madrid--that being the day when bull-fights usually take place--and Andres, passionately addicted to the Spanish sport, left the mansion of his mistress without any lover-like reluctance, and hurried to the bull-ring. Through the spacious street of Alcala, then crowded to suffocation with vehicles of every description, horsemen, and pedestrians, all hurrying to the point of grand attraction, the young man pressed onward with that alert and active step peculiar to Spaniards--unquestionably the best walkers in the world--joyfully fingering his ticket of _Sombra por la tarde_.[11] It entitled him to a place close to the barrier; for Andres, despising the elegance of the boxes, preferred leaning against the ropes intended to prevent the bulls from leaping amongst the spectators. Thence each detail of the combat is distinctly seen, each blow appreciated at its just value; and in consideration of these advantages, Andres willingly resigned his elbows to the contact of motley-jacketed muleteers, and his curls to the perfume of the manolo's cigar.

Although a bridegroom-elect ought not, strictly speaking, to perceive the existence of other women than his intended, such scrupulous fidelity is very rare except in romances: and Don Andres, albeit descended neither from Don Juan Tenorio nor Don Juan de Marana, was led to the circus by other attractions besides the brave swordsmanship of Luca Blanco and of Montes' nephew. At the bull-fight on the previous Monday he had seen a young girl of rare and singular beauty, whose features had imprinted themselves on his memory with a minuteness and indelibility quite extraordinary, considering the short time he had been able to observe them. So casual a meeting should have left no more trace than the picture to which one accords a passing glance. No word or sign had been exchanged between Andres and the manola, (she apparently belonged to that class,) who had been separated by several benches. Andres had no reason to believe that the young girl had remarked his admiration, or even perceived him. Her eyes, fixed upon the arena, had not for an instant wandered from the incidents of the bull-fight, in which she appeared to take an exclusive interest. It would have been natural to forget her on the threshold of the circus; but, instead of that, her image had haunted Andres all the week, recurring perpetually to his memory with increased distinctness and perseverance. And it was a vague hope, unacknowledged even to himself, of beholding the lovely manola, that now doubled his usual impatience to reach the scene of the bull-fight.

At the very moment Andres passed under one of the three arcades of the gate of Alcala, a _calesin_, or light calash, dashed through the crowd, amidst a concert of curses and hisses, the usual sounds with which the Spanish populace assail whatever deranges them in their pleasures, and infringes upon the sovereignty of the pedestrian. This vehicle was of outrageous magnificence. The body, borne by two enormous scarlet wheels, was covered with groups of Cupids, and with Anacreontic attributes, such as lyres, tambourines, Pandaean pipes, cooing doves, and hearts pierced with arrows, executed at some remote period by a pencil more remarkable for audacity than correctness of design. The mule harnessed to this gaudy car, had the upper half of his body closely clipped, bore a lofty panoply of coloured worsted upon his head, and was covered with bells from nose to tail. A ferocious-looking charioteer, stripped to his shirt-sleeves, a sheepskin jacket dangling from his shoulder, sat sideways upon the shaft, and belaboured with his whip-handle the lean flanks of his beast, which sprang forward with redoubled fury at each repetition of the stimulant.

There was nothing remarkable in the appearance of such a vehicle on a Monday afternoon at the Alcala gate; and if we have honoured it with especial notice, it is because, upon beholding it, the countenance of Don Andres was illumined by an expression, of the most agreeable surprise. The cabriolet contained two persons: one of these was a little old woman, in an antiquated black dress, whose gown, too short by an inch, disclosed the hem of one of those yellow woolen petticoats commonly worn by Castilian peasants. This venerable creature belonged to the class of women known in Spain as _Tia_ Pelona, _Tia_ Blasia, according to their name, and which answer to the French Mother Michel, Mother Godichon, in the society Paul de Kock delights to sketch. Her large, black, cadaverous physiognomy was relieved by dark sunken eyes, and by a pair of mustaches shading the corners of her lips. Although she had long passed the age of coquetry, she arranged her elbows under her serge mantilla with an air of no small pretension, and flirted with a certain dexterity a large green paper fan. It could hardly be the sight of this amiable creature that brought a smile of satisfaction across the features of Don Andres.

The second occupant of the cabriolet was a young girl, sixteen or eighteen years old--sixteen rather than eighteen. A black silk mantilla, drooping from the top of a tall tortoiseshell comb, round which a magnificent plait of hair was twisted, formed a frame to her lovely countenance, whose paleness bordered on the olive. Her foot, worthy of a Chinese beauty, was extended on the front of the calash, showing a delicate satin shoe and a tight silk stocking with coloured clocks. One of her hands, slender and well formed, although a little sun-burnt, played with the corners of her mantilla, and on the other, which held a white handkerchief, sparkled several silver rings--the richest treasures of the manola's jewel-case. Buttons of jet glittered on her sleeve, completing this strictly Spanish costume. Andres recognised the charming creature whose image had haunted him during the whole of the past week. Accelerating his pace, he entered the bull-ring at the same time with the two women. Chance had so distributed the numbers of the stalls that Andres found himself seated next to the young manola.

Whilst the benches of the amphitheatre became rapidly covered with spectators, the bull-fighters assembled in a large white-washed apartment, serving as a green-room for the actors in the sanguinary drama. Amongst these was a man of five or eight-and-twenty, whose tawny complexion, jet-black eyes, and crisp curling hair, told of an Andalusian origin. A more robust body and better shaped limbs could hardly be seen. They exhibited strength and agility combined in the happiest proportions. Equally well qualified to run and to wrestle, Nature, had she had the express intention of making a bull-fighter, could not have succeeded better than when she moulded this slender Hercules. Through the opening of his cloak glittered the spangles and embroidery of his pink and silver vest, and the jewel of the ring that confined the ends of his cravat; this jewel was of considerable value, proving, as did the whole of the costume, that its owner belonged to the aristocracy of his profession. His _mono_ of new ribbons, attached to the lock of hair reserved expressly for that purpose, spread in gay profusion over his nape; his montero, of the most glossy black, was loaded with silk ornaments of the same colour; his pumps, extraordinarily small and thin, would have done honour to a shoemaker, and might have served a goddess of the ballet.

Nevertheless, Juancho--such was the name of the torero--had not the frank, open air of a handsome young fellow with gay garments on his back, about to be applauded by a host of pretty women. Did apprehension of the approaching contest disturb his serenity? Had he seen in his dreams an infernal bull bearing a matador empaled upon his horns of red-hot steel? Nothing of the sort. This gloomy air was his wont since a twelvemonth. Without being on bad terms with his comrades, there no longer existed between him and them that jovial and careless familiarity usual amongst persons who share the chances of a perilous profession. He did not repulse advances, but he made none; and although an Andalusian, he was often taciturn. If he at times threw off his melancholy, it was to run into the opposite extreme, and abandon himself to a gaiety as violent as it was factitious. Then he would drink like a fish, dance like a madman, and quarrel about every thing and about nothing. The fit over, he relapsed into his previous moody reserve.

The hour fixed for the commencement of the sport approached. Juancho rose from his bench, threw off his cloak, took his sword, and mingled with the motley group of _toreros_ and _chulos_, _banderillos_ and _espadas_. The cloud had left his brow; his eyes sparkled, his nostril was dilated. A singular expression of daring animated his fine features. His foot pressed the ground energetically, and the nerves of his instep quivered beneath the knitted silk like the tense-strings on a guitar-handle. Juancho was really a splendid fellow, and his costume wonderfully set off his physical perfections. A broad red sash encircled his graceful waist; the silver embroideries covering his vest formed, at the collar and pockets, and on the sleeves, patches where the groundwork of the garment disappeared under the complications of the arabesques. It was no longer pink embroidered with silver, but silver embroidered with pink. So loaded were the shoulders with twist, filigree, knots and ornaments of all kinds, that the arms seemed to issue from two crushed crowns. The satin hose, braided and spangled on the seams, were admirably adjusted to limbs combining power and elegance. The whole dress was the masterpiece of Zapata of Granada,--of that Zapata, unrivalled for _majo_ costumes, who weeps when he takes one home, and offers his customer more money to resign it to him than he had asked for making it. The learned in such matters did not consider the suit dear at ten thousand reals. Worn by Juancho, it was worth twenty thousand.

The last flourish of trumpets sounded; the arena was cleared of dogs and boys, and the troop of bull-fighters entered. A murmur of admiration greeted Juancho when he made his obeisance before the queen's box; he bent the knee with so good a grace, with an air at once, so humble and so proud, and rose again so gracefully and easily, that the severest critics and oldest frequenters of the circus declared none had ever done it better.

Meanwhile Andres, delighted to have found the manola, paid little attention to the preliminaries of the fight, and the first bull had already ripped up a horse before he bestowed a single look upon the arena. He gazed at the young girl by his side, with an intentness that would doubtless have embarrassed her had she perceived it. He thought her more charming than ever; and certainly a more perfect type of Spanish beauty had never sat upon the blue granite benches of the Madrid circus. With admiration amounting to ecstasy, Andres contemplated the delicate profile, the thin, well-formed nose, with nostrils pink-tinted, like the interior of a tropical shell; the full temples, where, beneath the slightest possible tint of amber, meandered an imperceptible network of blue veins; the mouth, fresh as a flower, ripe and ruddy as a fruit, slightly opened by a half smile, and illuminated by a gleam of mother-of-pearl; and above all, the eyes, whose glances, passing between a thick double fringe of black lashes, possessed an irresistible fascination. It was the Greek form with the Arab character: the style of beauty would have had something startling in a London or Paris drawing-room, but was perfectly in its place at a bull-fight and under the ardent sky of Spain.

The old woman, less attentive than the young one to the progress of the sport, watched the proceedings of Andres with the look of a dog who scents a thief. As he persisted in his contemplation of his pretty neighbour, the old lady's anger gradually increased; she fidgeted on her seat, rattled her fan, pushed her companion with her elbow, and asked her all sorts of questions to oblige her to turn her head. But the young girl either did not or would not understand; she gave short answers, and resumed her attentive and serious attitude.

"The devil take the old witch!" muttered Andres. "Tis a thousand pities they have abolished the Inquisition! With such a face as that, she would have been treated, without form of trial, to a ride on an ass, dressed in a _san-benito_ and a sulphur shirt. She belongs to the seminary of Barahona, and washes young girls for the sorcerers' sabbath."

Juancho, whose turn to kill had not yet come, stood carelessly in the centre of the circus, paying no more attention to the bulls than if they had been so many sheep. He scarcely deigned to take two or three steps aside when the furious beasts showed a disposition to attack him. His large bright black eye glanced round boxes, galleries, and benches, where thousands of fans, of every hue, fluttered and palpitated like butterflies' wings. He evidently sought some one. At last a gleam of joy flashed across his brown features, and he made the slightest possible movement of his head, the sort of salutation that actors sometimes address to their acquaintances before the curtain. It was directed to the bench on which sat the old woman and the young girl.

"Militona," said the duenna in a low voice, "Juancho sees us. Be cautious! that young man ogles you, and Juancho is jealous."

"What is that to me?" replied Militona in the same tone.

"You know he does not jest with those who displease him."

"I have not looked at the gentleman, and besides, am I not my own mistress?"

In saying she had not looked at Andres, Militona was guilty of a slight equivocation. She had not _looked_ at him, perhaps, for women can see without looking, but she could have given a most minute description of his person. And out of respect to truth, we must here mention that she took Don Andres de Salcedo for what he really was, a very smart and good-looking cavalier.

Andres, as a pretext for commencing a conversation, called one of those dealers in oranges, preserved fruits, lozenges, and other sweetmeats, who circulate in the corridor of the bull-ring, and offer their wares to the spectators at the end of long sticks.

"Senorita, will you accept some comfits?" said Andres, with an engaging smile to his beautiful neighbour, offering her the open box.

The young girl turned quickly round, and looked at him with an air of uneasy surprise.

"They are lemon and mint," said he, as if to decide her.

Militona, suddenly making up her mind, plunged her little fingers into the box, and took a pinch of the lozenges.

"Luckily Juancho has his back turned," muttered a _majo_ who stood just by, "or there would be blood on his knife to-night."

"Will this lady take some?" continued Andres in a tone of exquisite politeness, holding out the box to the horrible old woman, who was so disconcerted by this piece of audacity that in her confusion she took every one of the sugar-plums. Nevertheless, whilst emptying the box into the palm of her hand, black as that of a mummy, she cast a furtive and frightened glance at the circus, and heaved an enormous sigh.

At that moment the orchestra sounded the death: it was Juancho's turn to kill. He approached the municipal box, made the usual salutation and demand, and threw his montero into the air in right cavalier style. The audience, usually so tumultuous, became profoundly silent. The bull Juancho had to kill was of formidable breed; seven horses, stretched lifeless upon the sand, their bowels protruding from hideous wounds, told of his fury and vigour. The two picadores had left the arena, sorely bruised and crippled by numerous falls, and the supernumerary waited in the corridor, foot in stirrup and lance in fist, ready to replace them. The chulos prudently kept themselves in the vicinity of the palisade, one foot on the wooden ledge which aids them to leap it in case of danger; and the victorious bull ranged the circus--stained here and there by large puddles of blood, which the attendants dared not approach to scatter with sawdust--striking the doors with his horns, and tossing the dead horses into the air. Juancho approached the monstrous beast with that firm and deliberate step before which lions themselves retreat. The bull, astonished at sight of a fresh adversary, paused, uttered a deep roar, shook the slaver from his muzzle, scratched the earth with his hoof, lowered his head two or three times, and made a few paces backwards. Juancho was magnificent to behold: his countenance expressed dauntless resolution; his fixed and steadfast eyes, whose pupils, surrounded by white, resembled stars of jet, darted invisible rays which pierced the bull like steel darts; unconsciously, he subjected the brute to that magnetism by which Van Amburgh sends his trembling tigers crouching to the extremity of their den. Each forward step made by the man was responded to by a backward one of the ferocious beast. At this triumph of moral over brute force, the audience, seized with enthusiasm, burst into frantic applause, shouting and stamping, yelling out _vivas_, and ringing the species of bells which amateurs take with them to the bull-fights. Walls and ceilings cracked beneath this storm of admiration, the paint crumbled off and flew about in whirlwinds of white dust. The torero, thus applauded, raised his head, with flashing eyes and joyful heart, to the place where Militona sat, as if to lay at her feet the admiration of a whole city. The moment was badly chosen. Militona had dropped her fan, and Don Andres, who had snatched it up with all the precipitation of a person desirous to strengthen with an additional thread the slender chain of a new acquaintance, returned it to her with a happy smile and gallant gesture. The young girl could not do less than acknowledge the polite attention by a gracious smile and inclination of her head. Smile and bow were detected by Juancho; his lips grew pale, his complexion green, the orbits of his eyes became blood-shot, his hand contracted on his sword-hilt, and the point of the weapon, which he held low, was thrust, by a convulsive movement, thrice into the sand. The bull, no longer under the spell of the fascinating glance, approached his adversary, who neglected to put himself on guard. The interval between man and beast was terribly small.

"Master Juancho is not easily frightened," observed some of the more callous spectators.

"Juancho, have a care!" cried others, more humane; "Juancho _de mi vida_, Juancho of my heart, Juancho of my soul, the bull is upon you!"

As to Militona, whether it was that the habit of bull-fights had blunted her sensibility, or that she had entire confidence in the consummate skill of Juancho, or because she took little interest in the man over whom she exercised such influence, her face continued as calm as if nothing unusual was occurring; only a slight flush appeared in the centre of her cheek, and the lace of her mantilla rose and fell upon her bosom with increased rapidity.

The cries of the spectators roused Juancho from his stupor: he drew hastily back, and waved the scarlet folds of the _muleta_ before the eyes of the bull. The instinct of self-preservation, the pride of the gladiator, struggled in his breast with the desire to watch Militona; a moment's neglect, a glance on one side, might cost him his life. It was an infernal predicament for a jealous man. To behold, beside the woman he loved, a gay, handsome, and attentive rival, while he, in the middle of a circus, the eyes of twelve thousand spectators riveted upon him, had, within a few inches of his breast, the sharp horns of a ferocious beast which, under pain of dishonour, he could only kill in a certain manner and by a wound in a certain place.

The torero, once more master of the _jurisdiction_, as it is said in tauromachian slang, settled himself firmly on his heels, and manoeuvred with the muleta to make the bull lower his head.

"What could he say to her," thought Jauncho, "that young fellow on whom she smiled so sweetly?" Swayed by the reflection, he again forgot his formidable antagonist, and involuntarily raised his eyes. The bull, profiting by the momentary inattention, rushed upon the man; the latter, taken unawares, leaped backwards, and, by a mechanical movement, made a thrust with his sword. Several inches of the blade entered, but in the wrong place. The weapon met the bone; a furious movement of the bull made it rebound from the wound amidst a spout of blood, and fall to the ground some paces off. Juancho was disarmed, and the bull more dangerous than ever, for the misdirected thrust had served but to exasperate him. The chulos ran to the rescue, waving their pink and blue cloaks. Militona grew pale; the old woman uttered lamentable ejaculations, and sighed like a stranded whale. The public, beholding Juancho's inconceivable awkwardness, commenced one of those tremendous uproars in which the Spanish people excel: a perfect hurricane of insulting epithets, of vociferations and maledictions. "Away with the dog!" was shouted on all sides; "Down with the thief, the assassin! To the galleys with him! To Ceuta! The clumsy butcher, to spoil such a noble beast!" And so on, through the entire vocabulary of abuse which the Spanish tongue so abundantly supplies. Juancho stood erect under the storm of insult, biting his lips, and tearing with his right hand the lace frills of his shirt. His sleeve, ripped open by the bull's horn, disclosed his arm a long violet scar. For an he tottered, and seemed about to fall, suffocated by the violence of his emotions; but he promptly recovered himself, ran to his sword, picked it up, straightened the bent blade with his foot, and placed himself with his back towards the place where Militona sat. At a sign he made, the chulos led the bull towards him by tantalising it with their cloaks; and this time he dealt the animal a downward thrust, in strict conformity with the laws of the sport--such a one as the great Montes of Chiclana himself would not have disowned. The sword was planted between the shoulders, and its cross-hilt, rising between the horns of the bull, reminded of those Gothic engravings where St Hubert is seen kneeling before a stag which bears a crucifix in its antlers.

The bull fell heavily on its knees before Juancho, as if doing homage to his superiority, and after a short convulsion rolled over, its four feet in the air.

"Juancho has taken a brilliant revenge! What a splendid thrust! He is superior to Arjona and the Chiclanero; do you not think so, Senorita?" cried Andres enthusiastically to his neighbour.

"For God's sake, sir, not another word!" replied Militona very quickly, without turning her head and scarcely moving her lips. The words were spoken in a tone at once so imperative and so imploring, that Andres immediately saw it was not the artifice of a young girl begging to be let alone, and hoping to be disobeyed. Neither could modesty dictate the injunction. Nothing he had said called for such rigour, and manolas, the grisettes of Madrid, are not usually--be it said without calumny--of such extreme susceptibility. Real terror, apprehension of a danger unknown to Andres, was indicated by the hasty sentence.

"Can she be a princess in disguise?" said Andres to himself, considerably puzzled how to act. "If I hold my tongue, I shall look like a fool, or, at any rate, like a very middling sort of Don Juan: if I persist, I shall perhaps cause the poor girl some disagreeable scene. Can she be afraid of the duenna? Hardly. When that amiable old sorceress devoured my comfits, she became in some sort an accomplice. It cannot be she whom my infanta dreads. Is there a father, brother, husband, or jealous lover in the neighbourhood?" But on looking around, Andres could discover no one who seemed to pay the slightest attention to the proceedings of the beautiful manola.

From the moment of the bull's death till the end of the fight, Juancho did not once look at Militona. He despatched with unparalleled dexterity two other bulls that fell to his share, and was applauded as vehemently as he had previously been hissed. Andres, either not deeming it prudent, or not finding a good pretext to renew the conversation, didn't speak another word to Militona, and even left the circus a few minutes before the conclusion of the performances. Whilst stepping across the benches, he whispered something to a boy of quick and intelligent physiognomy, and then immediately disappeared.

The boy, when the audience rose to depart, mingled in the crowd, and, without any apparent design, attached himself to the steps of Militona and the duenna. He saw them get into their cabriolet, and when the vehicle rolled away on its great scarlet wheels, he hung on behind, as if giving way to a childish impulse, and was whirled through a cloud of dust, singing at the top of his voice the popular ditty of the Bulls of Puerto.

"Well done!" exclaimed Andres, who, from an alley of the Prado, which he had already reached, saw cab and boy rattle past: "in an hour I shall know the address of the charming manola."

Andres had reckoned without the chapter of accidents. In the Calle de los Desamparados, a cut across the face from the whip of the surly _calesero_, forced the ragged Mercury to let go his hold. Before he could pick himself up, and rub the dust and tears from his eyes, the vehicle was at the farther end of the street, and although Perico, impressed with the importance of his mission, followed it at the top of his speed, he lost sight of it in the labyrinth of lanes adjacent to the Plaza de Lavapies--literally, Washfeet Square--a low quarter of Madrid. The most he could ascertain was, that the calesin had deposited its burthen in one of four streets, but in which of them it was impossible to say. With the bait of a dollar before his eyes, however, the urchin was not to be discouraged; and late that night, as Don Andres was returning from a wearisome tertulia, whither he had been compelled to accompany Dona Feliciana de los Rios, he felt a pull at the skirt of his coat. It was Perico.

"Caballero," said the child, "she lives in the Calle del Povar, the third house on the right. I saw her at her window, taking in the water jar."

It is difficult to describe the style of architecture of the house inhabited by Militona, unless we designate it as the order composite. Its front was characterised by a total absence of symmetry; the walls, sadly out of the perpendicular, seemed about to fall, and would doubtless have done so but for the support of sundry iron curves and crosses, which held the bricks together, and of two adjacent houses of more solid construction. From the lower part of the ricketty fabric the plaster had peeled off in large scales, exposing the foundation wall; whilst the upper stories, better preserved, exhibited traces of old pink paint, as if the poor house blushed for shame of its miserable condition. Near the roof of broken and disorderly tiles, which marked out a brown festoon against the bright blue sky, was a little window, surrounded by a recent coat of white plaster. On the right of this casement hung a cage, containing a quail: on the left another cage, of minute dimensions, decorated with red and yellow beads, served as palace to a cricket. A jar of porous earth, suspended by the ears to a string, and covered with a pearly moisture, held water cooling in the evening breeze, and from time to time allowed a few drops to fall upon two pots of sweet basil that stood beneath it. The window was that of Militona's apartment.

If the reader will venture to ascend with us this dark and broken staircase, we will follow Militona as she trips lightly up it on her return from the bull-fight; whilst old Aldonsa tolls behind, calling upon the saints for succour, and clinging to the greasy rope that does duty as a banister. On reaching the topmost landing-place, the pretty manola raised a fragment of matting that hung before one of those many-panelled doors common in Madrid, took her key and let herself in. The interior of the room was humble enough. Whitewash replaced paper; a scratched mirror--which reflected very imperfectly the charming countenance of its owner--a plaster cast of St Antony, flanked by two blue glass vases containing artificial flowers, a deal table, two chairs, and a little bed covered with a muslin quilt, composed the entire furniture. We must not forget an image of Our Lady, rudely painted and gilt on glass, engravings of the fight of the second of May, of the funeral of Daoiz and Velarde, and of a _picador_ on horseback; a tambourine, a guitar, and a branch of palm, brought from church on the previous Palm Sunday. Such was Militona's room; and although it contained but the barest necessaries of life, it had not the chill and dreary look of misery. A cheerful gleam illuminated it; the red brick floor was gay and pleasant to the eye; there was no shade on the white walls, or cobweb on the raftered roof--all was fresh, and bright, and cheerful in the poor garret. In England it would have been perfect destitution, in Spain it was almost comfort, and more than was necessary for happiness.

The old woman was at last at the top of the stairs; she entered the room and let herself fall upon one of the two chairs, which cracked under her weight. "The water jar, Militona, for mercy's sake! I am half suffocated with the heat and dust; and those accursed lozenges have put my throat in a flame."

"You should not have eaten so many, _tia_," said the young girl, smiling, and placing the jar to the old lady's lips. Aldonsa drank eagerly, passed the back of her hand over her mouth, and fanned herself in silence.

"Talking of lozenges," said she after a pause, "how furiously Juancho looked at us! I am sure he missed the bull because that young spark spoke to you. Juancho is jealous as a tiger, and if he has fallen in with yonder pretty gentleman, he will have made him repent his gallantry. I would not give much for the young man's skin; it will have some famous holes in it. Do you remember the slash he gave Luca, for offering you a nosegay at the festival of San Isidro?"

"I hope Juancho will commit no violence," exclaimed the young girl--"What frightful slavery to be thus persecuted by his ferocious love!"

"It is your fault," retorted Aldonsa. "Why are you so pretty?"

A sharp rap at the door, sounding as if given by an iron finger, interrupted the conversation. The old woman got up and looked through the little grating, inserted, according to Spanish custom, in the centre of the door. Through the bars appeared the countenance of Juancho, pale beneath the bronzed tint with which the sun of the arena had overlaid it. Aldonsa opened the door and the torero entered. His features betrayed the violent emotions that had agitated him in the bull-ring. To the shame of having been hissed was superadded rage at not having quitted the circus soon enough to overtake the young man who had been so attentive to Militona. Where could he now find him? Doubtless he had followed the manola and spoken to her again. And at the thought, Juancho's hand mechanically sank to his girdle to seek his knife.

The torero sat down upon the second chair. Militona stood at the window, pulling a flower to pieces; the old woman fanned herself more rapidly than ever: an awkward silence reigned in the apartment. Aldonsa was the first to break it.

"Does your arm hurt you, Juancho?"

"No," replied the bull-fighter, fixing his deep gaze upon Militona.

"You should bandage it, and apply salt and water," said the old woman, determined not to let the conversation drop.

Juancho made no reply, but addressed himself to Militona.

"Who was the young man who sat beside you at the bull-fight?"

"I do not know him. I never saw him before."

"But you would like to know him?"

"The supposition is polite. Well, and what if I should?"

"I would kill him, the dainty gentleman in polished boots and white gloves."

"You talk like a madman, Juancho. What right have I given you to be jealous of me? You love me, you say--is that my fault? Am I obliged to adore you, because you have taken it into your head to find me pretty?"

"True enough," interposed the old woman, "she is not obliged. Nevertheless, you would make a handsome couple. Prettier hand never rested on more vigorous arm; and if you danced a cachuca together at the garden of the Delicias, people would stand on the chairs to look at you."

"Have I played the coquet with you, Juancho? Have I sought, by word, or look, or smile, to engage your affections?"

"No," replied the torero in a gloomy voice.

"I never promised you any thing, or gave you any hope: I always bade you forget me. Why torment and offend me by your unjustifiable violence? You crippled poor Luca, an honest fellow, who amused me and made me laugh, and you wounded your friend Gines almost to death, because he happened to touch my hand. Do you think such conduct advances you in my good opinion? And to-day at the circus you behaved absurdly; whilst watching me, you let the bull come upon you, and gave a miserable thrust."

"But I love you, Militona!" exclaimed the bull-fighter passionately. "I love you with all my heart and soul; I see but you in the world, and a bull's horn entering my breast would not make me turn my head when you smile upon another man. True, my manners are not gentle, for I have passed my life in contests with savage beasts, in slaying and exposing myself to be slain. I cannot be soft and simpering like those delicate young gentlemen who pass their time in reading the papers and having their hair curled! But if you will not be mine," resumed Juancho after a pause, striking the table violently with his fist, "at any rate no one else shall call you his." And with these words he got up and left the room. "I will find him!" he muttered, as he strode down the stairs, "and cool his courtship with three inches of steel."

All that night Juancho kept watch and ward in front of Militona's dwelling, in hopes of falling in with her new admirer. Militona learned this from old Aldonsa, who lived in the house, and she felt seriously alarmed lest the handsome cavalier who had been so courteous to her at the circus, and whom she could not remember without a certain interest, should come to harm at the hands of the terrible torero who thus tyrannised over her inclinations and scared away all aspirants to her favour. Juancho, meanwhile, steady in his resolve to exterminate his rival, had betaken himself, on coming off guard in the Calle del Povar, to a tailor's in the Calle Mayor, and there had exchanged his usual majo's dress for a suit of black and a round hat. Thus metamorphosed into a sober citizen, he passed the day and evening in the Prado, the most elegant coffee-houses, the theatres--in every place, in short, where he thought it likely he should meet the object of his anger. But nowhere could he find him, and that for the best of reasons. At the very hour that the torero purchased the disguise intended to facilitate his revenge, Don Andres, in the back shop of a clothes-dealer on the Rastro--the great Madrid market for second-hand articles of every description--donned the complete costume of a manolo, trusting it would aid him in his designs upon Militona. Equipped in a round jacket of snuff-coloured cloth, abundantly decorated with small buttons, in loose pantaloons, a silk sash, a dark cloak and velvet-trimmed hat, which garments, although not quite new, were not wanting in a certain elegance, and sat trimly upon his well-made person, Andres hurried to the Calle del Povar. He at once recognised the window described to him by Perico; a curtain was drawn before it on the inner side, and nothing indicated that the room had an occupant.

"Doubtless she is gone out," thought Andres, "and will return only when her day's work is finished. She must be a needle-woman, cigar-maker, embroideress, or something of that kind," and he walked on.

Militona had not gone out. She was cutting out a dress upon her little table. The occupation required no great mystery, but nevertheless her door was bolted, for fear probably of some sudden invasion on the part of Juancho, rendered doubly dangerous by the absence of Tia Aldonsa. As she worked, Militona's thoughts travelled faster than her needle. They ran upon the young man who had gazed at her the previous evening, at the circus, with so tender and ardent a gaze, and who had spoken a few words to her in a voice that still sounded pleasantly in her ear.

It was night, and Juancho, straitened and uncomfortable in his modern costume, and wearied with fruitless researches, paced the alleys of the Prado with hasty steps, looking every man in the face, but without discovering his rival. At the same hour, Andres, seated in an _orchateria de chufas_ (orgeat-shop) nearly opposite Militona's house, quietly consumed a glass of iced lemonade. He had placed himself on picket there, with Perico for his vedette. Juancho would have passed him by without recognising him, or thinking of seeking his enemy under the round jacket and felt hat of a manolo, but Militona, concealed in the corner of her window, had not been deceived for an instant by the young man's disguise. Love has sharper eyes than hatred. Devoured by anxiety, the manola asked herself what could be the projects of the persevering cavalier, and dreaded the terrible scene that must ensue should Juancho discover him. Andres, his elbows upon the table, watched every one who went in or out of the house; but night came and Militona had not appeared. He began to doubt the correctness of his emissary's information, when a light in the young girl's window showed that the room was inhabited. Hastily writing a few words in pencil on a scrap of paper, he called Perico, who lingered in the neighbourhood, and bade him take the billet to the pretty manola. Perico slipped into the house, fumbled his way up stairs, and discovered Militona's door by the light shining through the cracks. Two discreet taps; the wicket was half opened, and the note taken in.

"It is to be hoped she can read," thought Andres, as he paid for his lemonade, left the shop, and walked slowly up and down the street. This was what he had written:--

"One who cannot forget you, and who would grieve to do so, ardently desires to see you again; but after your last words at the circus, and ignorant of your position, he fears to place you in peril by seeking an interview. Danger to himself would be no obstacle. Extinguish your lamp, and throw your answer from the window."

In a few minutes the lamp disappeared, the window opened, and Militona took in her water-jar. In so doing she upset one of the pots of sweet basil, which fell into the street and was broken to pieces. Amidst the brown earth scattered upon the pavement, something white was visible. It was Militona's answer. Andres called a _sereno_, or watchman, who just then passed, with his lantern at the end of his halbert, and begging him to lower the light, read the following words, written in a tremulous hand, and in large irregular letters:--

"Begone instantly.... I have no time to say more. To morrow, at ten o'clock, in the church of San Isidro. For Heaven's sake begone! your life is at stake."

"Thank you, my good man," said Andres, putting a real into the sereno's hand, "you may go."

The street was quite deserted, and Andres was walking slowly away, when the apparition of a man, wrapped in a cloak, beneath which the handle of a guitar formed an acute angle, excited his curiosity, and he stepped into the dark shadow of a low archway. The man threw back the folds of his cloak, brought his guitar forward, and began that monotonous thrumming which serves as accompaniment to serenades and seguidillas. The object of this prelude evidently was to awaken the lady in whose honour it was perpetrated; but Militona's window continued closed and dark; and at last the man, compelled to content himself with an invisible auditory,--in spite of the Spanish proverb, which says, no woman sleeps so soundly that the twang of a guitar will not bring her to the window,--began to sing in a strong Andalusian accent. The serenade consisted of a dozen verses, in which the singer celebrated the charms of a cruel mistress, vowed inextinguishable love, and denounced fearful vengeance upon all rivals. The menaces, however, were far more abundant, in this rude ditty, than the praises of beauty or protestations of affection.

"_Caramba_!" thought Andres, when the song concluded, "what ferocious poetry! Nothing tame about those couplets. Let us see if Militona is touched by the savage strain. This must be the terrible lover by whom she is so frightened. She might be alarmed at less."

Don Andres advanced his head a little; a moonbeam fell upon it, and Juancho's quick eye detected him. "Good!" said Andres to himself, "I am caught. Now then, cool and steady."

Juancho threw down his guitar, which resounded mournfully on the pavement, and ran up to Andres, whose face was now in the full moonlight, and whom he at once recognised.

"What do you here at this hour?" said the bull-fighter, in a voice that trembled with passion.

"I listen to your music; it is a refined amusement."

"If you listened, you heard that I allow no one to set foot in this street when I sing."

"I am naturally very disobedient," replied Andres, with perfect coolness.

"You will change your character to-day."

"Certainly not--I am attached to my habits."

"Defend yourself, then, or die!" cried Juancho, drawing his knife, and rolling his cloak round his arm. His movements were imitated by Andres, who placed himself on guard with a promptness that showed knowledge of the weapon, and somewhat surprised the bull-fighter. Andres had long practised the _navaja_ under one of the best teachers in Seville, as at Paris one sees young men of fashion take lessons of _savate_ and singlestick, reduced to mathematical principles by Lecourt and Boucher.

Juancho hovered about his adversary, advancing his left arm, protected by numerous folds of cloth, as a buckler, his right drawn back to give more swing and force to the blow; now stooping with knees bent, then rising up like a giant, and again sinking down like a dwarf; but the point of his knife was always met by the cloaked arm of Andres. Alternately retreating and suddenly and impetuously attacking, he sprang right and left, balancing his blade on his hand, as though about to hurl it at his foe. Andres replied several times to these varied attacks by such rapid and well-directed thrusts, that a less adroit combatant than Juancho would hardly have parried them. It was truly a fine fight, and worthy a circle of spectators learned in the art; but, unfortunately, the windows were all closed, and the street was empty. Academicians of San Lucar, of the Potro of Cordova, of the Albaycin of Granada, and of the _barrio_ of Triana,[12] why were ye not there to witness the doughty deeds of those valiant champions?

The two champions, vigorous though they were, grew fatigued with such violent exertions; the sweat streamed from their temples, their breasts heaved like the bellows of a forge, their feet were heavier on the ground, their movements less elastic. Juancho felt the point of Andres' knife pierce his sleeve, and his rage redoubled; with a desperate bound, and at risk of his life, he sprang, like a panther, upon his enemy. Andres fell backwards, and, in his fall, burst open the imperfectly-fastened door of Militona's house, in front of which the duel occurred. Juancho walked quietly away. The _sereno_, who just then passed the end of the street, uttered his monotonous cry;--"_Las once y media, y sereno._"[13]

In an agony of anxiety, Militona had listened from her window to the noise of this conflict; she would have called for help, but her tongue clove to her palate, and terror compressed her throat with its iron fingers. At last, half frantic, and unconscious of what she did, she staggered downstairs, and reached the door just as it was forced open by the weight of Andres' inanimate body.

The next morning, soon after day-break, when the torero, in cloak and slouched hat, walked into the neighbourhood of the Plaza de Lavapies to hear what was said of the night's events, he learned, to his intense horror, that Andres, severely but not mortally wounded, had been conveyed to Militona's room, and placed in her bed, where he now lay, carefully tended by the manola, of whose humane and charitable conduct the gossips of the quarter were loud in praise. When Juancho heard this, his knees shook, and he was forced to support himself against the wall. His rival in the chamber, and on the bed, of Militona! He could scarcely refrain from rolling on the ground, and tearing his breast with his nails. Recovering himself, he entered the house and ascended the stairs with a heavy and sinister-sounding step. "In her chamber! In her chamber!" he muttered. And, as he spoke, he instinctively opened and shut his long Albacete knife. On reaching the top of the stairs, he knocked violently at the manola's door.

Andres started on his bed of suffering; Militona, who was seated near him, turned deadly pale, and rose to her feet as if impelled by springs. Tia Aldonsa looked horribly frightened, and devoutly crossed herself. The blow was so imperative as to command attention; a repetition of the summons would have forced the door from its hinges. With trembling hand Aldonsa opened the wicket, and beheld Juancho's face at the aperture. Medusa's mask, livid amidst its grim and snaky locks, could hardly have produced a more terrible effect upon the poor old woman. Speechless and petrified, she stood with fixed eyeballs, open mouth, and hands extended. True it was, that the torero's head, seen through the grating, had no very amiable and encouraging aspect; his eyes were injected with blood; his face was livid, and his cheek-bones, whence the usual ruddy tinge had fled, formed two white spots in his cadaverous countenance; his distended nostrils palpitated like those of ferocious beasts that had scent of a prey; his teeth were pressed upon his lip, which was swollen and bloody from the bite. Jealousy, fury, and revenge had set their stamp on his distorted features.

"Blessed Lady of Almudena!" muttered the old woman, "deliver us from this peril, and I promise you a wax taper with a velvet handle."

Courageous as he was, Andres experienced that uneasy feeling to which the bravest men are subject when exposed to a danger against which they are defenceless. He mechanically extended his hand to seek some weapon.

As nobody opened the door, Juancho applied his shoulder to it and gave a push; the planks cracked, and the plaster crumbled from round the lock and hinges. Then Militona, placing herself before Andres, said in a calm and firm voice to the old woman, who was half crazed with terror:

"Aldonsa, open the door; I insist upon it."

Aldonsa drew the bolt, and, standing close to the wall, pulled the door back upon her for protection, like a helot letting a tiger into the arena, or a servant admitting into the bull-ring some furious native of Gaviria or Colmenar. Juancho, who expected more resistance, entered slowly, as if disconcerted by the absence of obstacles. But a single glance at Andres, stretched in Militona's bed, brought back all his fury. He seized the door, to which Tia Aldonsa, who thought her last hour come, clung with all her might, and shutting it in spite of the poor old woman's efforts, placed his back against it and crossed his arms upon his breast.

"Angels of heaven!" muttered Aldonsa, her teeth chattering with terror, "he will murder us all three. I will call out of the window."

And she made a step in that direction. But Juancho, guessing her intention, seized her by the gown, and with a single jerk replaced her against the wall, her skirt half torn off.

"Hag!" he cried, "if you attempt to call out, I will twist your neck like a fowl's, and send your old soul to the devil. Come not between me and the object of my wrath, or I crush you on my path."

And he pointed to Andres, who, pale and feeble, in vain endeavoured to raise his head from the pillow. It was a horrible situation. No noise had been made that could alarm the neighbours, who, moreover, would have been more likely to lock themselves in their rooms for fear of Juancho, than to render assistance. There were no means of apprising the police, or obtaining succour from without. Poor Andres, severely wounded, weak from loss of blood, without arms, and unable to use them had he had any, lay at the mercy of a ruffian intoxicated with rage and jealousy. All this because he had ogled a pretty manola at a bull-fight. It is allowable to suppose that at that moment he regretted the tea-table, piano, and prosaic society of Dona Feliciana de los Rios. Nevertheless, on casting a supplicatory glance at Militona, as if to implore her not to risk her safety in his defence, he found her so marvellously lovely in her pallor and emotion, that he could not think her acquaintance dearly purchased even by this great peril. She stood erect, one hand on the edge of Andres' bed, whom she seemed resolved to protect, the other extended towards the door with a gesture of supreme majesty.

"What do you here, murderer?" she cried, in clear and thrilling tones. "You sought a lover; you find a wounded and helpless man. Begone! Fear you not lest the wound break out afresh at your presence? Are you not sick of bloodshed? Do you come as an assassin?"

The young girl accentuated the last word in so singular a manner, and accompanied it with so piercing and terrible a look, that Juancho was embarrassed, reddened, turned pale, and the ferocity of his countenance was exchanged for an expression of uneasiness. After a pause, he spoke in a choked and faltering voice.

"Swear, by the relics of Monte Sagrado, and by the image of the Virgin del Pilar, by your dead father, and your sainted mother, that you do not love this man, and I instantly depart."

Andres awaited Militona's reply with intense anxiety. She made none. Her long black lashes drooped over her cheek, which was suffused with a faint tinge of pink. Although this silence was perhaps his doom to death, Andres felt his heart leap with joy.

"If you will not swear," continued Juancho, "affirm it. I will believe you; you have never lied. But if you keep silence, I must kill him." And he approached the bed with uplifted knife.

"You love him?"

"Yes!" exclaimed the young girl, with flashing eyes and a voice trembling with passion and indignation. "I love him. If he dies on my account, let him know at least that he is beloved. Let him carry to his grave that word, his consolation and your torture."

With a bound, Juancho stood beside Militona, whose arm he rudely grasped.

"Do not repeat it," he exclaimed, "or I throw you, with my knife in your heart, upon the body of your minion."

"What care I!" cried the courageous girl. "Think you I will live, if he dies?"

Andres made a desperate effort to raise himself. He endeavoured to call out; a reddish foam rose to his lips--his wound had opened. He fell back senseless upon his pillow.

"If you do not depart," cried Militona to the torero, "I hold you vile, base, and a coward. I believe all that has been said of you; I believe that you could have saved Domingues when the bull knelt upon his breast, and that you would not, because you were meanly jealous of him."

"Militona! Militona! you have a right to hate me, although never did man love woman as I love you; but you have no right to despise me. No human power could save Domingues."

"If you would not have me think you an assassin, depart!"

"Yes, I will wait till he is cured," replied Juancho, in a gloomy tone.--"Take good care of him. I have sworn, that whilst I live, no man shall call you his."

During this stormy scene, old Aldonsa had slipped out to sound an alarm in the neighbourhood. Five or six men now rushed into the room, seized Juancho and dragged him out with them. But on the landing-place he shook them from him, as a bull shakes off a pack of dogs, and forcing his way through all opposition, reached the street and was lost to view in the maze of buildings that surrounds the Plaza de Lavapies.

The friends of Don Andres de Salcedo, uneasy at his disappearance, had already applied to the police to obtain news of his fate. Researches were made, and Argamasilla and Covachuelo, two of the most wily alguazils of the secret police, at last succeeded in ferreting out traces of the missing cavalier. Orders were given to arrest Juancho the bull-fighter, on a charge of assassination. But the Madrid police are not very celebrated for courage and decision, and the two thief-catchers above named, to whom the execution of the warrant was intrusted, proceeded on their mission with infinite delicacy, awed by the notorious strength and fierceness of the torero. Evil tongues were ready to assert that they took considerable pains not to meet with the man for whose capture they affected to be anxious. At last, however, a clumsy spy reported to them that the object of their timid researches had just entered the circus with as calm an air as if he had no crime upon his conscience, or fear of the arm of justice. Argamasilla and Covachuelo could no longer evade the performance of their duty, and were compelled to betake themselves to the place pointed out.

The unwelcome information was correct. Juancho had gone to the circus,--driven thither by the force of habit rather than by any interest in the sport that had once engrossed his thoughts and energies. Since the terrible scene in Militona's room had convinced him she loved another, his courage and energy seemed to have deserted him. He was morose, listless, and indifferent to every thing. Nevertheless he had instinctively wandered down to the bull-ring, to look at some remarkably fine beasts that had been brought to the stable for the next day's fight. He was still there, and was walking across the arena, when Argamasilla and Covachuelo arrived with a little squad of assistants, and Covachuelo, with infinite ceremony and courtesy, informed Juancho that he was under the painful necessity of conducting him to prison. Juancho shrugged his shoulders contemptuously and walked on. The alguazil made a sign, and two men laid hands upon the torero, who brushed them away as though they had been flies upon his sleeve. The whole band then precipitated themselves upon him; he struggled furiously, and knocked them about like nine-pins, but, sensible that he must at last be overpowered by numbers, he managed gradually to get near the _toril_,[14] and then, shaking off his assailants by a sudden effort, he opened the door, and took refuge in that dangerous asylum. His enemies endeavoured to follow him, but whilst they tried to force the door, it suddenly flew open, and a bull, hunted from his stall by Juancho, dashed with lowered horns and dreadful bellow amongst the terrified troop. The poor devils had but just time to climb the barriers, and one of them only escaped with a terrible rent in his lower garments.

This daring proceeding of the besieged greatly disconcerted the besiegers. Nevertheless they plucked up courage, and, after a while, ventured to return to the charge. This time two bulls rushed out, and as the police dispersed and got away with all the agility of fear, the wild animals, seeing no human foes, turned their wrath against each other, crossed their horns, and with muzzles in the dust of the circus, made furious efforts for mastery.

"Comrade," cried Covachuelo to Juancho, "we know the extent of your ammunition. You have still five bulls to let off; after that you will be compelled to surrender unconditionally. If you capitulate and come out at once, I will take you to prison with due regard for your feelings, without handcuffs, in a coach at your own expense, and will say nothing in my report of the resistance you have made, which would aggravate your case."

Juancho, careless about his liberty, ceased his defence, and gave himself up to Argamasilla and Covachuelo, who took him to prison with all the honours of war.

The torero's case was a bad one. The public prosecutor represented the nocturnal combat as an attempted assassination. Fortunately Andres, whom a good constitution and Militona's unremitting care speedily restored to health, interceded for him, representing the affair as a duel, fought with an unusual weapon certainly, but with one which he could accept, because he was acquainted with its management. The generous young man, happy in Militona's love, thought poor Juancho had suffered sufficiently on his account, without being sent to the galleys for a wound now perfectly healed. Andres held his present happiness cheaply bought at the price of a stab. And as a murder can hardly be very severely punished, when the victim is in perfect health and pleads for his assassin, the result of Salcedo's mediation, and of the interest he made, was the release of Juancho, who left his prison with the bitter regret of owing his liberty to the man he most hated upon earth, and from whom he would sooner have died than receive a favour.

"Unhappy wretch that I am!" he exclaimed, when he once more found himself unfettered and in sunshine. "Henceforward, I must hold this man's life sacred, or deserve the epithet of coward and villain. Oh! I would a thousand times have preferred the galleys! In ten years I should have returned and could have revenged myself."

From that day Juancho disappeared. It was said that he had been seen galloping on his famous black horse in the direction of Andalusia. Be that as it might, he was no more seen in Madrid.

The departure of the bull-fighter was shortly followed by the marriage of Andres and Militona, Andres having been released from his previous engagement with Dona Feliciana de los Rios, who had discovered, during his illness, that she had in fact very little affection for her betrothed husband, and had encouraged the attentions of a rich English traveller. The double marriage took place on the same day and in the same church. Militona had insisted on making her own wedding dress; it was a masterpiece, and seemed cut out of the leaves of a lily. It was so well made, that nobody remarked it. Feliciana's dress was extravagantly rich. When they came out of church, every body said of Feliciana, "What a lovely gown!" and, of Militona, "What a charming person!"

Two months had elapsed, and Don Andres de Salcedo and his lady lived in retirement at a delicious country villa near Granada. With good sense that equalled her beauty, Militona refused to mix in the society to which her marriage elevated her, until she should have repaired the deficiencies of an imperfect education. The departure of a friend for the Manillas, compelled her husband to visit Cadiz, and she accompanied him. They found the Gaditanos raving of a torero who performed prodigies of skill and courage. Such temerity had never before been witnessed. He gave out that he came from Lima in South America, and was then engaged at Puerto-de-Santa-Maria. Thither Andre's, who felt his old tauromachian ardour revive at the report of such prowess, persuaded his wife to accompany him, and at the appointed hour they took their places in a box at the circus. On all sides they heard praises of this famous torero. His incredible feats were in every body's mouth, and all declared that if he was not killed, he would very soon eclipse the fame of the great Montes himself.

The fight began, and the torero made his appearance. He was dressed in black; his vest, garnished with ornaments of silk and jet, had a sombre richness harmonizing with the wild and almost sinister countenance of its wearer; a yellow sash was twisted round his meagre person, which seemed composed solely of bone and muscle. His dark countenance was traversed by furrows, traced, as it seemed, rather by the hand of care than by lapse of years; for although youth had disappeared from his features, middle age had not yet set its stamp upon them. There was something in the face and figure of the man which Audres thought he remembered; but he could not call to mind when or where he had seen him. Militona, on the other hand, did not doubt for an instant. In spite of his small resemblance to his former self, she at once recognised Juancho.

The terrible change wrought in so short a time had something that alarmed her. It proved how terrible was the passion that had thus played havoc with this man of iron frame.

Hastily opening her fan to conceal her face, she said to Andres in a hurried voice:

"It is Juancho."

But her movement was too late; the torero had seen her; with his hand he waved a salutation.

"Juancho it really is!" cried Andres; "the poor fellow is sadly changed; he has grown ten years older. Ah! _he_ is the new torero, of whom they talk so much: he has returned to the bull-ring."

"Let us go, Andres," said Militona to her husband. "I know not why, but I am very uneasy; I feel sure something will happen."

"What can happen," replied Andres, "except the death of horses and the fall of a few picadores?"

"I fear lest Juancho should commit some extravagance,--some furious act."

"You cannot forget that unlucky stab, or lucky one, I should rather call it, since to it I owe my present happiness." And Andres tenderly pressed the hand of his bride, to whose cheeks the blood that for an instant had left them, now began to return. "If you knew Latin--which you fortunately do not--I would tell you that the law of _non bis in idem_ guarantees my safety. Besides the honest fellow has had time to calm himself."

Juancho performed prodigies. He behaved as if invulnerable; took bulls by the tail and made them waltz, put his foot between their horns and leaped over them, tore off the ribbons with which they were adorned, planted himself right in their path and harassed them with unparalleled audacity. The delighted spectators were outrageous in their applause, and swore that such a bull-fight had never been witnessed since the days of the Cid Campeador. The other bull-fighters, electrified by the example of their chief, seemed equally reckless of danger. The picadores advanced to the very centre of the circus, the banderillos drove their darts into the flanks of the bull without once missing. When any of them were hard pressed, Juancho was ever at hand, prompt to distract the attention of the furious beast, and draw its anger on himself. One of the chulos fell, and would have been ripped from navel to chin, had not Juancho, at risk of his life, forced the bull from its victim. Every thrust he gave was delivered with such skill and force that the sword entered exactly between the shoulders, and disappeared to the hilt. The bulls fell at his feet as though struck by lightning, and a second blow was never once required.

"_Caramba_!" exclaimed Andres, "Montes, the Chiclanero, Arjona, Labi, and the rest of them, had better take care; Juancho will excel them all, if he has not done so already."

But such exploits as these were not destined to be repeated; Juancho attained that day the highest sublimity of the art; he did things that will never be done again. Militona herself could not help applauding; Andres was wild with delight and admiration; the delirium was at its height; frantic acclamations greeted every movement of Juancho.

The sixth bull was let into the arena.

Then an extraordinary and unheard-of thing occurred: Juancho, after playing the bull and manoeuvring his cloak with consummate dexterity, took his sword, and, instead of plunging it into the animal's neck, as was expected, hurled it from him with such force, that it turned over and over in the air, and stuck deep in the ground at the other end of the circus.

"What is he about," was shouted on all sides. "This is madness--not courage! What new scheme is this? Will he kill the bull with his bare hands?"

Juancho cast one look at Militona--one ineffable look of love and suffering. Then he remained motionless before the bull. The beast lowered its head. One of its horns entered the breast of the man, and came out red to the very root. A shriek of horror from a thousand voices rent the sky.

Militona fell back upon her chair in a deathlike swoon.

FOOTNOTES:

[11] _Sombra por la tarde_,--"shade for the afternoon." The tickets for the bull-fight vary in value according as they are for the sunny or shady side of the arena.

[12] Places of bad fame in the respective towns, frequented by thieves and suspicious characters.

[13] "Half-past eleven, and a fine night."

[14] The stable where the bulls are kept.

THE EMERALD STUDS.

A REMINISCENCE OF THE CIRCUIT.