CHAPTER X.
A FINAL PICTURE.
One afternoon I stood by the tomb of Napoleon in the Invalides in Paris, and I can never forget the strange, weird, indescribable feeling which came over me as I looked down amid the surrounding silence on the mass of brown-red marble which enclosed his remains. What brings so strong a sense of the emptiness and transitoriness of life as standing face to face with the unbreakable stillness of death especially when the ashes, laid low and still, created such wild and cyclonic tumult in their living day as those of Napoleon? In the cold and majestic isolation of his tomb far from the side of Josephine, who lies in quiet and gentle rest; far from that other consort who never really loved him far from the Countess Walewska-one of the most pathetic and touching figures in his strange and fierce life; far from the poor boy over whose cradle he more than once was seen to be in mournful forecast of his joyless destiny; above all, far from those wild shouts and hurrahs of mighty armies which found in his word and eye that inspiration to meet and defeat numbers, dangers, and death alone he lies in death as he lived in life. The whole scene struck
