“Napoleon slept himself when read to, but he was very observant and jealous if others slept while he read.  He watched his audience vigilantly, and ’Mme. Montholon, vous dormez’ was a frequent ejaculation in the course of reading.  He was animated with all that he read, especially poetry, enthusiastic at beautiful passages, impatient of faults, and full of ingenious and lively remarks on style."[587]

During this same halcyon season two priests, who had been selected by the Bonapartes, arrived in the island, as also a Corsican doctor, Antommarchi.  Napoleon was disappointed with all three.  The doctor, though a learned anatomist, knew little of chemistry, and at an early interview with Napoleon passed a catechism on this subject so badly that he was all but chased from the room.  The priests came off little better.  The elder of them, Buonavita by name, had lived in Mexico, and could talk of little else:  he soon fell ill, and his stay in St. Helena was short.  The other, a Corsican named Vignali, having neither learning, culture, nor dialectical skill, was tolerated as a respectable adjunct to the household, but had little or no influence over the master.  This is to be regretted on many grounds, and partly because his testimony throws no light on Napoleon’s religious views.

Here we approach a problem that perhaps can never be cleared up.  Unfathomable on many sides of his nature, Napoleon is nowhere more so than when he confronts the eternal verities.  That he was a convinced and orthodox Catholic few will venture to assert.  At Elba he said to Lord Ebrington:  “Nous ne savons d’ou nous venons, ce que nous deviendrons”:  the masses ought to have some “fixed point of faith whereon to rest their thoughts.”—­“Je suis Catholique parce que mon pere l’etoit, et parce que c’etoit la religion de la France.”  He also once or twice expressed to Campbell scorn of the popular creed:  and during his last voyage, as we have seen, he showed not the slightest interest in the offer of a priest at Funchal to accompany him.  At St. Helena the party seems to have limited the observances of religion to occasional reading of the Bible.  When Mme. Montholon presented her babe to the Emperor, he teasingly remarked that Las Cases was the most suitable person to christen the infant; to which the mother at once replied that Las Cases was not a good enough Christian for that.

Judging from the entries in Gourgaud’s “Journal,” this young General pondered more than the rest on religious questions; and to him Napoleon unbosomed his thoughts.—­Matter, he says, is everywhere and pervades everything; life, thought, and the soul itself are but properties of matter, and death ends all.  When Gourgaud points to the majestic order of the universe as bearing witness to a Creator, Napoleon admits that he believes in “superior intelligences”:  he avers that he would believe in Christianity if it had been the original and universal creed: