exposition of the arguments for and against the burial of the Emperor
under the Column of the Place Vendome. The idea was a fine one, granted;
but, like all other ideas, it was open to objections. You must not
fancy that the cannon, or rather the 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