The corpse was transferred to another coffin brought from France, and was carried over the rough rocks of St. Helena by English soldiers.  All the honors that in that remote island England could give to her former captive were respectfully offered; and early in December, 1840, news arrived in Paris that the “Belle Poule” had reached Havre.

This was sooner than her arrival had been looked for, and at once all Paris was in a scramble of preparation.  Laborers and artists worked night and day.  The weather was piercingly cold.  Indeed, no less than three hundred English were said to have died of colds contracted on the day of the funeral procession.

The body was landed at Courbevoie from a flat-bottomed barge that had been constructed to bring it up the Seine.  Courbevoie is about two miles from the Arch of Triumph, which is again nearly the same distance from the Place de la Concorde.

Between each gilded lamp-post, with its double burners, and beneath long rows of leafless trees, were colossal plaster statues of Victory, alternating with colossal vases burning incense by day, and inflammable materials for illumination by night.  Thus the procession attending the body had about five miles to march from the place of disembarkation to the Invalides, on the left bank of the Seine.  The spectators began to assemble before dawn.  All along the route scaffoldings had been erected, containing rows upon rows of seats.  All the trees, bare and leafless at that season, were filled with freezing gamins.  All the wide pavements were occupied.  Before long, rows of National Guards fringed the whole avenue.  They were to fall in behind the procession as it passed, and accompany it to the Invalides.

The arrival of the funeral barge had been retarded while the authorities hastened the preparations for its reception.  When the body of Napoleon was about to re-land on French soil, “cannon to right of it, cannon to left of it, volleyed and thundered.”  The coffin was received beneath what was called a votive monument,—­a column one hundred feet in height, with an immense gilded globe upon the top, surmounted by a gilded eagle twenty feet high.  Banners and tripods were there ad libitum, and a vast plaster bas-relief cast in the “Belle Poule’s” honor.

The coffin, having been landed, was placed upon a catafalque, the cannon gave the signal to begin the march, and the procession started.  The public was given to understand that in a sort of funeral casket blazing with gold and purple, on the top of the catafalque, twenty feet from the ground, was enclosed the coffin of the Emperor; but it was not so.  The sailors of the “Belle Poule” protested that the catafalque was too frail, and the height too great.  They dared not, they said, attempt to get the lead-lined coffin up to the place assigned for it, still less try to get it down again.  It was consequently deposited, for fear of accident, on a low platform between the wheels.