Part 11

It seems to be certain that he organized, if he did not originate, the frightful September massacres. There were many hundreds of Royalists in the prisons, who were becoming a nuisance. The Revolution was hanging fire, and well-meaning enthusiasts began to fear that the dull clod of a populace would not rise in its might to end the aristocracy; so it was decided to abolish these unfortunate prisoners. A tribunal was formed to sit in judgment; outside waited a great crowd of murderers hired for the occasion. The prisoners were led before the tribunal, and released into the street, where they were received by the murderers and were duly “released”--from this sorrowful world. The most famous victim was the good and gentle Princess de Lamballe, Superintendent of the Queen’s Household. The judge at her trial was the notorious Hébert, anarchist, atheist, and savage, afterwards executed by his friend Robespierre when he had served his turn. Madame collapsed with terror, and fainted repeatedly during the mockery of a trial, but when Hébert said the usual ironical, “Let Madame be released,” she walked to the door. When she saw the murderers with their bloody swords she shrank back and shrieked, “Fi--horreur.” They cut her in pieces; but decency forbids that I should say what they did with all the pieces. Carlyle, who here speaks truth, has a dark saying about “obscene horrors with moustachio _grands-levres_,” which is near enough for anatomists to understand. The murderers then stuck her head on a pike, and held her fair curls before the Queen’s window as an oriflamme in the name of Liberty. Madame was but one of 1,100 whose insane butchery must be laid to the door of Marat; though some friends of the Bolsheviks endeavour to acquit him we can only say that if it was not his work it looks uncommonly like it.

The battle between the Girondins, who were bad fellows, but less bad than their enemies of the “Mountain”--Robespierre, Danton, and Marat--continued; it was a case of _arcades ambo_, which Bryon translates “blackguards both,” though Virgil, who wrote the line--in the Georgics--probably meant something much coarser. The “Mountain” began to get the upper hand, and the Girondins fled for their lives, or went to the guillotine. The Revolution was already “devouring its children.”

At Caen in Normandy there lived a young woman, daughter of a decayed noble family which in happier days had been named d’Armont, now Corday. Her name was Marie Charlotte d’Armont, and she is known to history as Charlotte Corday. She had been well educated, had read Rousseau, Voltaire, and the encyclopædists, besides being fascinated by a dream of an imaginary State which she had been taught to call the Roman Republic, in which the “tyrannicide” Brutus loomed much larger and more glorious than in reality. Some Girondists fled to Caen to escape the vengeance of Marat; Charlotte, horrified, resolved that the monster should die; she herself was then nearly twenty-five years of age. I have a picture of her which seems to fit in very well with one’s preconceived ideas of her character. She was five feet one inch in height, with a well-proportioned figure, and she had a wonderful mass of chestnut hair; her eyes were large, grey, and set widely apart; the general expression of her face was thoughtful and earnest. Perhaps it would hardly be respectful to call her an “intense” young lady; but there was a young lady who sometimes used to consult me who might very well have sat for the portrait; she possessed a type of somewhat--dare I say?--priggish neurosis which I imagine was not unlike the type of character that dwelt within Charlotte Corday--extreme conscientiousness and self-righteousness. Such a face might have been the face of a Christian martyr going to the lions--if any Christian martyrs were ever thrown to the lions, which some doubt. She went silently to Paris, attended only by an aged man-servant, and bought a long knife in the Palais Royal; thence she went to Marat’s house, and tried to procure admission. Simonne--the loyal Simonne--denied her, and she returned to her inn. Again she called at the house; Marat heard her pretty voice, and ordered Simonne to admit her. It was the evening of July 13, four years all but one day since the storming of the Bastille, and Marat sat in his slipper-bath, pens, ink, and paper before him, frightful head peering out of the opening, hot compresses concealing his hair. Charlotte told him that there were several Girondists hiding at Caen and plotting against the Revolution. “Their heads shall fall within a fortnight,” croaked Marat. Then, he being thus convicted out of his own mouth, she drew forth from her bosom her long knife, and plunged it into his chest between the first and second ribs, so that it pierced the aorta. Marat gave one cry, and died; Charlotte turned to face the two women who rushed in, but not yet was she to surrender, for she barricaded herself behind some furniture and other movables till the soldiers arrived. To them she gave herself up without trouble.

At her trial she made no denial, but proudly confessed, saying, “Yes, I killed him.” Fouquier-Tinville sneered at her: “You must be well practised at this sort of crime!” She only answered: “The monster!--he seems to think I am an assassin!” She thought herself rather the agent of God, sent by Him to rid the world of a loathsome disorder, as Brutus had rid Rome of Julius Cæsar.

In due course she was guillotined, and an extraordinary thing happened. A young German named Adam Lux had been present at the trial, standing behind the artist who was painting the very picture of which I have a reproduction--it is said that Charlotte showed no objection to being portrayed--and the young man had been fascinated by the martyresque air of her. He attended the execution, romance and grief weighing him down; then he ran home, and wrote a furious onslaught on the leaders of the Mountain who had executed her, saying that her death had “sanctified the guillotine,” and that it had become “a sacred altar from which every taint had been removed by her innocent blood.” He published this broadcast, and was naturally at once arrested. The revolutionary tribunal sentenced him to death, and he scornfully refused to accept a pardon, saying that he wished to die on the same spot as Charlotte, so they let him have his wish. The incident reminds one of a picture-show, and it is not remarkable that an American, named Lyndsay Orr, has written a sentimental article about it.

The people of Paris went mad after Marat’s death; his body, which was said to be decaying with unusual rapidity, was surrounded by a great crowd which worshipped it blasphemously, saying, “O Sacred Heart of Marat!” This worship of Marat, which showed how deeply his teaching had bitten into the hearts of the people, culminated in the Reign of Terror, which began on September 5, 1795, whereby France lost, according to different estimates, between half a million and a million innocent people. Some superior persons seem to think that Marat had little or no influence on the Revolution, but to my mind there can be no doubt that the Terror was largely the result of his preaching of frantic violence, and it is a lesson that we ourselves should take to heart, seeing that there are persons in the world to-day who would emulate Marat if they possessed his enormous courage.

I need not narrate the history of the Reign of Terror, which was even worse than the terror which the Bolsheviks established in Russia. Not even Lenin and Trotsky devised anything so atrocious as the _noyades_--wholesale drownings--in the Loire, or the _mariages républicains_ on the banks of that river, and it is difficult to believe that the teaching of Marat had nothing to do with that frightful outbreak of bestiality, lust, and murder.

The evil that men do lives after them. There was little good to be buried in Marat’s grave, doctor though he was.

Napoleon I

There is not, and may possibly never be, an adequate biography of this prodigious man. It is a truism to say that he has cast a doubt on all past glory; let us hope that he has rendered future glory impossible, for to judge by the late war it seems impossible that any rival to the glory of Napoleon can ever arise. In the matter of slaying his fellow-creatures he appears to have reached the summit of human achievement; possibly also in all matters of organization and administration. Material things hardly seemed to affect him; bestriding the world like a colossus he has given us a sublime instance of Intellect that for many years ruthlessly overmastered Circumstance. That Intellect was finally itself mastered by disease, leaving behind it a record which is of supreme interest to mankind; a record which, alas, is so disfigured by prejudice and falsehood that it is difficult to distinguish between what is true and what is untrue. Napoleon himself possessed so extraordinary a personality that nearly every one whom he met became a fervent adorer. With regard to him we can find no half-tones, no detached reporters; therefore it is enormously difficult to find even the basis for a biography. Fortunately, that is not now our province. It is merely necessary that we shall attempt to make a consistent story of the reports of illness which perplex us in regard to his life and death; it adds interest to the quest when we are told that sometimes disease lent its aid to Fate in swaying the destinies of battles. And yet, even after Napoleon has lived, there are some historians who deny the influence of a “great man” upon history, and would attribute to “tendencies” and “ideas” events which ordinary people would attribute to individual genius. Some persons think that Napoleon was merely an episode--that he had no real influence upon history; it is the custom to point to his career as an exemplification of the thesis that war has played very little real part in the moulding of the course of the world. Into all this we need not now enter, beyond saying that he was the “child of the French Revolution” who killed his own spiritual father; the reaction from Napoleon was Metternich, Castlereagh, and the Holy Alliance; the reaction from these forces of repression was the late war. So it is difficult to agree that Napoleon was only an “episode.” We have merely to remark that he was the most interesting of all men, and, so far as we can tell, will probably remain so. As Fielding long ago pointed out in _Jonathan Wild_, a man’s “greatness” appears to depend on his homicidal capacity. To make yourself a hero all you have to do is to slaughter as many of your fellow-creatures as God will permit. How poor the figures of Woodrow Wilson or Judge Hughes seem beside the grey-coated “little corporal”! Though it is quite probable that either of these most estimable American peacemakers have done more good for the human race than was achieved by any warrior! So sinful is man that we throw our hats in the air and whoop for Napoleon the slaughterer, rather than for Woodrow Wilson, who was “too proud to fight.”

When Napoleon was sent to St. Helena he was followed by a very few faithful friends, who seem to have spent their time in hating one another rather than in comforting their fallen idol. It is difficult to get at the truth of these last few years because, though most of the eye-witnesses have published their memoirs, each man seems to have been more concerned to assure the world of the greatness of his own sacrifice than to record the exact facts. Therefore, though Napoleon urged them to keep diaries, and thereby make great sums of money through their imprisonment, yet these diaries generally seem to have aimed rather at attacking the other faithful ones than at telling us exactly what happened.

The post-mortem examination of Napoleon’s body was performed by Francesco Antommarchi, a young Corsican physician, anatomist, and pathologist, who was sent to St. Helena about eighteen months before Napoleon’s death in the hope that he, being a Corsican, would be able to win the Emperor’s confidence and cure the illness of which he was already complaining. Unfortunately, Antommarchi was a very young man, and Napoleon suspected both his medical skill and the reason of his presence. Napoleon used to suffer from severe pains in his stomach; he would clasp himself, and groan, “O, mon pylore!” By that time he was suffering from cancer of the stomach, and Antommarchi did not suspect it. When Napoleon groaned and writhed in agony it is said that Antommarchi merely laughed, and prescribed him tartar emetic in lemonade. Napoleon was violently sick, and thought himself poisoned; he swore he would never again taste any of Antommarchi’s medicine. Once again Antommarchi attempted to give him tartar emetic in lemonade; it was not in vain that Napoleon had won a reputation for being a great strategist, for, when Antommarchi’s back was turned he handed the draught to the unsuspecting Montholon. In ten minutes that hero reacted in the usual manner, and extremely violently. Napoleon was horrified and outraged in his feelings; quite naturally he accused Antommarchi of trying to poison him, called him “assassin,” and refused to see him again. Another fault that Napoleon found with the unhappy young man was that whenever he wanted medical attendance Antommarchi was not to be found, but had to be ferreted out from Jamestown, three and a half miles away; so altogether Antommarchi’s attendance could not be called a success. Napoleon in his wrath was “terrible as an army with banners.” Even at St. Helena, where the resources of the whole world had been expended in the effort to cage him helpless, it must have been no joke to stand up before those awful eyes, that scorching tongue; and it is no wonder that Antommarchi preferred to spend the last few weeks idling about Jamestown rather than forcing unwelcome attention upon his terrible patient.

Worst of all, Antommarchi at first persuaded himself that Napoleon’s last illness was not serious. When Napoleon cried in his agony, “O, mon pylore!” and complained of a pain that shot through him like a knife, Antommarchi merely laughed and turned to his antimony with catastrophic results. It shakes our faith in Antommarchi’s professional skill to read that until the very last moment he would not believe that there was much the matter. The veriest blockhead--one would imagine--must have seen that the Emperor was seriously ill. Many a case of cancer of the stomach has been mistaken for simple dyspepsia in its early stages, but there comes a time when the true nature of the disease forces itself upon even the most casual observer. The rapid wasting, the cachexia, the vomiting, the pain, all impress themselves upon both patient and friends, and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Antommarchi must have been both careless and negligent. When the inevitable happened, and Napoleon died, it was Antommarchi who performed the autopsy, and found a condition which it is charitable to suppose may have masked the last symptoms and may have explained, if it did not excuse, the young anatomist’s mistaken confidence.

We conclude our brief sketch of the unhappy Antommarchi by saying that when he returned to Europe he published the least accurate and most disingenuous of all accounts of Napoleon’s last days. His object seems to have been rather to conceal his own shortcomings than to tell the truth. This book sets the seal on his character, and casts doubt on all else that comes from his pen. He may have been, as the _Lancet_ says, a “trained and competent pathologist”; he was certainly a most unfortunate young man.

The post-mortem was performed in the presence of several British military surgeons, who appear to have been true sons of John Bull, with all the prejudice, ignorance, and cocksureness that in the eyes of other nations distinguish us so splendidly. Though truthfulness was not a strong point with Antommarchi, he seems to have known his pathology, and has left us an exceedingly good and well-written report of what he found. Strange to relate, the body was found to be still covered thickly with a superficial layer of fat, and the heart and omenta were also adipose. This would seem impossible in the body of a man who had just died from cancer of the stomach, but is corroborated by a report from a Dr. Henry, who was also present, and is not unknown. I remember the case of an old woman who, though hardly at all wasted, was found at the autopsy to have an extensive cancerous growth of the pylorus; the explanation was that the disease had been so acute that it slew her before there had been time to produce much wasting. At one point Napoleon’s cancerous ulcer had perforated the stomach, and the orifice had been sealed by adhesions. Dr. Henry proudly states that he himself was able to thrust his finger through it. The liver was large but not diseased; the spleen was large and “full of blood”--probably Antommarchi meant engorged. The intestine was covered by small bright-red patches, evidently showing inflammation of lymphatic tissue such as frequently occurs in general infections of the body. The bladder contained gravel and several definite calculi. There was hardly any secondary cancerous development, except for a few enlarged glands. Antommarchi and the French generally had diagnosed before death that he was suffering from some sort of hepatitis endemic to St. Helena, and the cancer was a great surprise to them--not that it would have mattered much from the point of view of treatment.

Napoleon’s hands and feet were extremely small; his skin was white and delicate; his body had feminine characteristics, such as wide hips and narrow shoulders; his reproductive organs were small and apparently atrophied. He is said to have been impotent for some time before he died. There was little hair on the body, and the hair of the head was fine, silky, and sparse. Twenty years later his body was exhumed and taken to France, and Dr. Guillard, who was permitted to make a brief examination, stated that the beard and nails appeared to have grown since death; there was very little sign of decomposition; men who had known him in life recognized his face immediately it was uncovered.

Leonard Guthrie points out that some of these signs seem to indicate a condition of hypo-pituitarism--the opposite to the condition of hyper-pituitarism which causes “giantism.” Far-fetched as this theory may appear, yet it is possible that there may be something in it.

The autopsy showed beyond cavil that the cause of death was cancer of the stomach, and it is difficult to see what more Antommarchi could have done in the way of treatment than he did, although certainly an irritant poison like tartar emetic would not have been good for a man with cancer of the stomach, even if it did not actually shorten his life. But Napoleon was not a good patient. He had seen too much of army surgery to have a great respect for our profession; indeed, it is probable that he had no respect for anybody but the Emperor Napoleon. He, at least, knew his business. He could manœuvre a great army in the field and win battles--and lose them too. But even a lost Napoleonic battle--there were not many--was better managed than a victory of any other man; whereas when you were dealing with these doctor fellows you could never tell whether their results were caused by their treatment or by the intervention of whatever gods there be. Decidedly Antommarchi was the last man in the world to be sent to treat the fallen, but still imperious, warrior.

The symptoms of impending death seem to have been masked by a continued fever, and probably Antommarchi was not really much to blame. This idea is to some extent borne out by a couple of specimens in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, which are said to have belonged to the body of Napoleon. The story is that they were surreptitiously removed by Antommarchi, and handed by him to Barry O’Meara, who in his turn gave them to Sir Astley Cooper. That baronet handed them to the museum, where they are now preserved as of doubtful origin. But their genuineness depends upon whether we can believe that Antommarchi would or could have removed them, and whether O’Meara was telling the truth to Sir Astley Cooper. It is doubtful which of the two first-mentioned men is the less credible, and Cooper could not have known how untruthful O’Meara was to show himself, or he would probably not have thought for one moment that the specimens were genuine. O’Meara was a contentious Irishman who, like most other people, had fallen under the sway of Napoleon’s personal charm. He published a book in which he libelled Sir Hudson Lowe, whose hard fate it was to be Napoleon’s jailer at St. Helena--that isle of unrest. For some reason Lowe never took action against his traducer until it was too late, so that his own character, like most things connected with Napoleon, still remains a bone of contention. But O’Meara had definitely put himself on the side of the French against the English, and it was the object of the French to show that their demigod had died of some illness endemic to that devil’s island, aggravated by the barbarous ill-treatment of the brutal British. We on our side contended that St. Helena was a sort of earthly paradise, where one should live for ever. The fragments are from _somebody’s_ ileum, and show little raised patches of inflamed lymphoid tissue; Sir William Leishman considers the post-mortem findings, apart from the cancer, those of some long-continued fever, such as Mediterranean fever.

Mediterranean or Malta fever is a curious specific fever due to the _Micrococcus melitensis_, which shows itself by recurrent bouts of pyrexia, accompanied by constipation, chronic anæmia, and wasting. Between the bouts the patient may appear perfectly well. There are three types--the “undulatory” here described; the “intermittent,” in which the attacks come on almost daily; and the “malignant,” in which the patient only lives for a week or ten days. It is now known to be contracted by drinking the infected milk of goats, and it is almost confined to the shores of the Mediterranean and certain parts of India. It may last for years, and it is quite possible that Napoleon caught it at Elba, of which Mediterranean island he was the unwilling emperor in 1814. Thence he returned to France, as it was said, because he had not elba-room on his little kingdom. It is certain that for years he had been subject to feverish attacks, which army surgeons would now possibly classify as “P.U.O.,” and it is quite possible that these may in reality have been manifestations of Malta fever.