follow a religion simpler
and more adapted to their morality than ours." In ten years their
founder conquered half the world, which Christianity took three
hundred years to accomplish. Or again, he refers to the fact that
Laplace, Monge, Berthollet, and Lagrange were all atheists, though
they did not proclaim the fact; as for himself, he finds the idea of
God to be natural; it has existed at all times and among all peoples.
But once or twice he ends this vague talk with the remarkable
confession that the sight of myriad deaths in war has made him a
materialist. "Matter is everything."--"Vanity of vanities!"[588]

Mirrored as these dialogues are in the eddies of Gourgaud's moods,
they may tinge his master's theology with too much of gloom: but,
after all, they are by far the most lifelike record of Napoleon's
later years, and they show us a nature dominated by the tangible. As
for belief in the divine Christ, there seems not a trace. A report has
come down to us, enshrined in Newman's prose, that Napoleon once
discoursed of the ineffable greatness of Christ, contrasting His
enduring hold on the hearts of men with the evanescent rule of
Alexander and Caesar. One hopes that the words were uttered; but they
conflict with Napoleon's undoubted statements. Sometimes he spoke in
utter uncertainty; at others, as one who wished to believe in
Christianity and might perhaps be converted. But in the political
testament designed for his son, the only reference to religion is of
the diplomatic description that we should expect from the author of
the "Concordat": "Religious ideas have more influence than certain
narrow-minded philosophers are willing to believe: they are capable of
rendering great services to Humanity. By standing well with the Pope,
an influence is still maintained over the consciences of a hundred
millions of men."

Equally vague was Napoleon's own behaviour as his end drew nigh. For
some time past a sharp internal pain--the stab of a penknife, he
called it--had warned him of his doom; in April, 1821, when vomiting
and prostration showed that the dread ancestral malady was drawing on
apace, he bade the Abbe Vignali prepare the large dining-room of
Longwood as a _chapelle ardente_; and, observing a smile on
Antommarchi's face, the sick man hotly rebuked his affectation of
superiority. Montholon, on his return to England, informed Lord
Holland that extreme unction was administered before the end came,
Napoleon havin