The Second Funeral of Napoleon
Page: 6

cannon-balls, were in the habit of furrowing the bosoms of French
braves, or any other braves, with cicatrices: on the contrary, it is
a known fact that cannon-balls make wounds, and not cicatrices
(which, my dear, are wounds partially healed); nay, that a man
generally dies after receiving one such projectile on his chest,
much more after having his bosom furrowed by a score of them. No,
my love; no bosom, however heroic, can stand such applications, and
the author only means that the French soldiers faced the cannon and
took them. Nor, my love, must you suppose that the column was
melted: it was the cannon was melted, not the column; but such
phrases are often used by orators when they wish to give a
particular force and emphasis to their opinions.

Well, again, although Napoleon might have slept in peace under "this
audacious trophy," how could he do so and carriages go rattling by
all night, and people with great iron heels to their boots pass
clattering over the stones? Nor indeed could it be expected that a
man whose reputation stretches from the Pyramids to the Kremlin,
should find a column of which the base is only five-and-twenty feet
square, a shelter vast enough for his bones. In a word, then,
although the proposal to bury Napoleon under the column was
ingenious, it was found not to suit; whereupon somebody else
proposed the Madelaine.

"It was proposed," says the before-quoted author with his usual
felicity, "to consecrate the Madelaine to his exiled manes"--that
is, to his bones when they were not in exile any longer. "He ought
to have, it was said, a temple entire. His glory fills the world.
His bones could not contain themselves in the coffin of a man--in
the tomb of a king!" In this case what was Mary Magdalen to do?
"This proposition, I am happy to say, was rejected, and a new one--
that of the President of the Council adopted. Napoleon and his
braves ought not to quit each other. Under the immense gilded dome
of the Invalides he would find a sanctuary worthy of himself. A
dome imitates the vault of heaven, and that vault alone" (meaning of
course the other vault) "should dominate above his head. His old