CHAPTER VII.

TWO COFFINS.

"Where are the princes who held mightiest sway? Where are the heroes all, the wise and bold? The world endures when thou hast pass'd away, And none has read its riddle deep and old. The course of things is full of teachings wise, But, reckless still, we close unheeding eyes."—FIRDUSI.

As I called up before my mind the history of Napoleon, his splendid empire, the peoples and princes that this headlong comet had drawn onward in his train, the flood of events he had thrown upon the world, the influence he had exercised over unnumbered human destinies—there came over me, in his now desolate and silent house, at once a sadness and its consolation.

All those boundless passions that devoured half the world and were not satisfied, where are they, and what power have they now? They are as a dream, as a great fable that Father Time tells his children. Our thanks are due to Time—the silent and mysterious power that again levels all, humbles heaven-aspiring potentates, checks unscrupulous self-aggrandizement, and effectually ostracizes over-grown ambition.

Where is Napoleon? What is left of him?

A name and a relic, which an easily blinded nation now publicly worships. What lately happened beyond the Rhine, appears to me like the celebration of Napoleon's suppressed funeral of 1821.[N] But the dead do not rise again. After the gods have come their ghosts; and after the hero-tragedy, the satyr-farce. The breath of a charnel-house has spread through the world from beyond the Rhine, since they wakened a dead man there.

I went from the house of Letitia to the church where her coffin stands.

The street of the King of Rome leads to the Cathedral of Ajaccio. This church is a heavy building, with a plain facade; above its portal are some defaced armorial bearings. They are, doubtless, those of the extinct Republic of Genoa. The interior of the cathedral has a motley and rustic appearance. Heavy pillars divide it into three naves (_drei Schiffe_); the dome is small, like the gallery.

Near the choir, to the right, a little chapel, hung with black, has been put up. Two coffins, covered with black velvet, stand therein, before an altar, coarsely decorated in the style we find in village churches. Clumsy wooden candlesticks have been placed at the head and foot of each coffin; and above each hangs a perpetual, but extinguished lamp. On the coffin to the left lies a cardinal's hat and an amaranth-wreath; on the coffin to the right an imperial crown and an amaranth-wreath.

They are the coffins of Cardinal Fesch and Madame Letitia. They were brought hither from their Italian tombs in the year 1851. Letitia died in her Roman palace, in the Place di Venezia, on the 2d of February 1836, and her coffin had since stood in a church of the little town of Corneto, near Rome.

No marble, no sculpture, nothing of the pomp of death, adorns the spot where a woman lies who gave birth to an emperor, three kings, and three princesses.

I was astonished at the unconscious irony, the deep tragic meaning that lay, as it seemed to me, in the almost rustic simplicity of Letitia's tomb. It was like a princely tomb in the scenes of a theatre. Her coffin rests on a high wooden platform; the clumsy candlesticks are of wood, the gold is tinsel. The canopy of the chapel would fain look like velvet, but it is of common taffeta, and the long silver fringes are only silver paper. The golden imperial diadem on the coffin is of gilded wood. The amaranthine wreath of Letitia alone is genuine.

I was told that this chapel was merely temporary, and that a new cathedral was to be built, with a beautiful tomb for Letitia. Improbable enough; the Corsicans are very poor, and for my part, I should be sorry to see it. The worthy citizens of Ajaccio do not know how wise they have been. A profound philosophy speaks from this chapel—what sort of crowns were those that Letitia of Ajaccio and her children wore? For one short evening they were princes, then they hurriedly threw away sceptre and purple, and vanished. History itself, therefore, has laid the tinselled crown on the coffin of the daughter of the citizen Ramolino. Let it lie—it is not the less beautiful that it is counterfeit, like the lofty fortunes of the bastard kings that this woman bore.

Never, so long as the world has stood, has a mother's heart beat higher than the heart of the woman in this coffin. She saw her children, one after another, stand at the loftiest zenith of human glory; and, one after another, saw the same children fall. She has paid Destiny its debt.

Truly, it is hard for him who stands by this coffin to restrain his emotion, so sad, so moving is the great tragedy of a mother's heart that lies therein enclosed. What an undeserved fate!—and how came it that, in the bosom of this gay, young, unpretending woman, those world-convulsing forces and those men and city-devouring passions were to ripen?