your
insults." This undoubtedly was a bitter attack, and the plainspoken
words used must have wounded Lowe intensely. Probably Napoleon
himself, on reflection, thought them too severe, even though they may
be presumed to be literally true, and it may be taken for granted that
they would never have been uttered but for the spiteful provocation.

A more discerning man would have foreseen that he could not treat a
great being like the late Emperor of the French as though _he_ were a
Corsican brigand without having to pay a severe penalty. An ordinary
prisoner might have submitted with amiable resignation to the
disciplinary methods which, to the oblique vision of Sir Hudson Lowe,
seemed to be necessary, but to treat the Emperor as though he were in
that category was a perversion of all decency, and no one but a Hudson
Lowe would have attempted it. It is quite certain that the dethroned
arbiter of Europe never, in his most exalted period, treated any of
his subordinates with such airs of majesty as St. Helena's Governor
adopted towards him.

Lowe seems to have had an inherent notion that the position in which
he was placed entitled him to pursue a policy of unrelenting severity,
and that homage should be paid as his reward. He thirsted for respect
to be shown himself, and was amazed at the inordinate ingratitude of
the French in not recognising his amiable qualities. It was his habit
to remind them that but for his clemency in carrying out the
instructions of Bathurst and those who acted with him, their condition
could be made unendurable. He was incapable of grasping the lofty
personality of the persecuted guest of England.

The popular, though erroneous, idea that Napoleon was, and ever had
been, a beast of prey, fascinated him; his days were occupied in
planning out schemes of closer supervision, and his nights were
haunted with the vision of his charge smashing down every barrier he
had racked his intellect to construct, and then vanishing from the
benevolent custody of his saintly Government to again wage sanguinary
war and spill rivers of blood. The awful presentiment of escape and
the consequences of it were ever lacerating his uneasy spirit, and
thus he never allowed himself to be forgotten; restrictions impishly
vexatious were ordered with monotonous regularity. Napoleon aptly
described Lowe as "being afflicted with an inveterate itch."

Montholon, in vol. i. p. 184, relates how Lowe would often leap out of
be