esults from prolonged
inability to take food, the body was remarkably stout--a fact which
shows that that tenacious will had its roots in an abnormally firm
vitality.[590]

After being embalmed, the body was laid out in state, and all
beholders were struck with the serene and beautiful expression of the
face: the superfluous flesh sank away after death, leaving the
well-proportioned features that moved the admiration of men during the
Consulate.

Clad in his favourite green uniform, he fared forth to his
resting-place under two large weeping willow trees in a secluded
valley: the coffin, surmounted by his sword and the cloak he had worn
at Marengo, was borne with full military honours by grenadiers of the
20th and 66th Regiments before a long line of red-coats; and their
banners, emblazoned with the names of "Talavera," "Albuera,"
"Pyrenees," and "Orthez," were lowered in a last salute to our mighty
foe. Salvos of artillery and musketry were fired over the grave: the
echoes rattled upwards from ridge to ridge and leaped from the
splintery peaks far into the wastes of ocean to warn the world beyond
that the greatest warrior and administrator of all the ages had sunk
to rest.

His ashes were not to remain in that desolate nook: in a clause of his
will he expressed the desire that they should rest by the banks of the
Seine among the people he had loved so well. In 1840 they were
disinterred in presence of Bertrand, Gourgaud, and Marchand, and borne
to France. Paris opened her arms to receive the mighty dead; and Louis
Philippe, on whom he had once prophesied that the crown of France
would one day rest, received the coffin in state under the dome of the
_Invalides_. There he reposes, among the devoted people whom by his
superhuman genius he raised to bewildering heights of glory, only to
dash them to the depths of disaster by his monstrous errors.

* * * * *

Viewing his career as a whole, it seems just and fair to assert that
the fundamental cause of his overthrow is to be found, not in the
failings of the French, for they served him with a fidelity that would
wring tears of pity from Rhadamanthus; not in the treachery of this or
that general or politician, for that is little when set against the
loyalty of forty millions of men; but in the character of the man and
of his age. Never had mortal man so grand an opportunity of ruling
over a chaotic Continent: never had any great leader an