The French seem to like to keep memorials of whatever they do, and of
whatever their forefathers have done, even if it be ever so little to
their credit; and perhaps they do not take matters sufficiently to heart
to detest anything that has ever happened. What surprised me most were
the golden sceptre and the magnificent sword and other gorgeous relics of
Charlemagne,--a person whom I had always associated with a sheepskin
cloak. There were suits of armor and weapons that had been worn and
handled by a great many of the French kings; and a religious book that
had belonged to St. Louis; a dressing-glass, most richly set with
precious stones, which formerly stood on the toilet-table of Catherine
de' Medici, and in which I saw my own face where hers had been. And
there were a thousand other treasures, just as well worth mentioning as
these. If each monarch could have been summoned from Hades to claim his
own relics, we should have had the halls full of the old Childerics,
Charleses, Bourbons and Capets, Henrys and Louises, snatching with
ghostly hands at sceptres, swords, armor, and mantles; and Napoleon would
have seen, apparently, almost everything that personally belonged to
him,--his coat, his cocked hats, his camp-desk, his field-bed, his
knives, forks, and plates, and even a lock of his hair. I must let it
all go. These things cannot be reproduced by pen and ink.


Hotel de Louvre, January 9th.--. . . . Last evening Mr. Fezaudie called.
He spoke very freely respecting the Emperor and the hatred entertained
against him in France; but said that he is more powerful, that is, more
firmly fixed as a ruler, than ever the first Napoleon was. We, who look
back upon the first Napoleon as one of the eternal facts of the past, a
great bowlder in history, cannot well estimate how momentary and
insubstantial the great Captain may have appeared to those who beheld his
rise out of obscurity. They never, perhaps, took the reality of his