How, then, are we to explain Gourgaud’s conduct at St. Helena and afterwards?  Now, in threading the mendacious labyrinths of St. Helena literature it is hard ever to find a wholly satisfactory clue; but Basil Jackson’s “Waterloo and St. Helena” (p. 103) seems to supply it in the following passage: 

“To finish about Gourgaud, I may add that on his reaching England, after one or two interviews with the Under-Secretary of State, he fell into the hands of certain Radicals of note, who represented to him the folly of his conduct in turning against Napoleon; that, as his adherent, he was really somebody, whereas he was only ruining himself by appearing inimical.  In short, they so worked upon the poor weak man, that he was induced to try and make it appear that he was still l’homme de l’Empereur: this he did by inditing a letter to Marie Louise, in which he inveighed against the treatment of Napoleon at the hands of the Government and Sir H. Lowe, which being duly published, Gourgaud fell to zero in the opinion of all right-minded persons.”

This seems consonant with what we know of Gourgaud’s character:  frank, volatile, and sensitive, he could never have long sustained a policy of literary and diplomatic deceit.  He was not a compound of Chatterton and Fouche.  His “Journal” is the artless outpouring of wounded vanity and brings us close to the heart of the hero-worshipper and his hero.  At times the idol falls and is shivered but love places it on the shrine again and again, until the fourth anniversary of Brienne finds the spell broken.  Even before he leaves St. Helena the old fascination is upon him once more; and then Napoleon seeks to utilize his devotion for the purpose of a political mission.  Gourgaud declines the role of agent, pledges his word to the Governor, and keeps it; but, thanks to British officialism or the seductions of the Opposition, hero-worship once more gains the day and enrolls him beside Las Cases and Montholon.  This we believe to be the real Gourgaud, a genuine, lovable, but flighty being, as every page of his “Journal” shows.

One cannot but notice in passing the extraordinary richness of St. Helena literature.  Nearly all the exiles kept diaries or memoirs, or wrote them when they returned to Europe.  And, on the other hand, of all the 10,000 Britons whom Napoleon detained in France for eleven years, not one has left a record that is ever read to-day.  Consequently, while the woes of Napoleon have been set forth in every civilized tongue, the world has forgotten the miseries causelessly inflicted on 10,000 English families.  The advantages possessed by a memoir-writing nation over one that is but half articulate could not be better illustrated.  For the dumb Britons not a single tear is ever shed; whereas the voluble inmates of Longwood used their pens to such effect that half the world still believes them to have been bullied twice a week by Lowe, plied with gifts of poisoned coffee, and nearly eaten up by rats at night.  On this last topic we are treated to tales of part of a slave’s leg being eaten off while he slept at Longwood—­nay, of a horse’s leg also being gnawed away at night—­so that our feelings are divided between pity for the sufferers and envy at the soundness of their slumbers.