but then the Mohammedans “follow a religion simpler and more adapted to their morality than ours.”  In ten years their founder conquered half the world, which Christianity took three hundred years to accomplish.  Or again, he refers to the fact that Laplace, Monge, Berthollet, and Lagrange were all atheists, though they did not proclaim the fact; as for himself, he finds the idea of God to be natural; it has existed at all times and among all peoples.  But once or twice he ends this vague talk with the remarkable confession that the sight of myriad deaths in war has made him a materialist.  “Matter is everything.”—­“Vanity of vanities!"[588]

Mirrored as these dialogues are in the eddies of Gourgaud’s moods, they may tinge his master’s theology with too much of gloom:  but, after all, they are by far the most lifelike record of Napoleon’s later years, and they show us a nature dominated by the tangible.  As for belief in the divine Christ, there seems not a trace.  A report has come down to us, enshrined in Newman’s prose, that Napoleon once discoursed of the ineffable greatness of Christ, contrasting His enduring hold on the hearts of men with the evanescent rule of Alexander and Caesar.  One hopes that the words were uttered; but they conflict with Napoleon’s undoubted statements.  Sometimes he spoke in utter uncertainty; at others, as one who wished to believe in Christianity and might perhaps be converted.  But in the political testament designed for his son, the only reference to religion is of the diplomatic description that we should expect from the author of the “Concordat”:  “Religious ideas have more influence than certain narrow-minded philosophers are willing to believe:  they are capable of rendering great services to Humanity.  By standing well with the Pope, an influence is still maintained over the consciences of a hundred millions of men.”

Equally vague was Napoleon’s own behaviour as his end drew nigh.  For some time past a sharp internal pain—­the stab of a penknife, he called it—­had warned him of his doom; in April, 1821, when vomiting and prostration showed that the dread ancestral malady was drawing on apace, he bade the Abbe Vignali prepare the large dining-room of Longwood as a chapelle ardente; and, observing a smile on Antommarchi’s face, the sick man hotly rebuked his affectation of superiority.  Montholon, on his return to England, informed Lord Holland that extreme unction was administered before the end came, Napoleon having ordered that this should be done as if solely on Montholon’s responsibility, and that the priest, when questioned on the subject, was to reply that he had acted on Montholon’s orders, without having any knowledge of the Emperor’s wishes.  It was accordingly administered, but apparently he was insensible at the time.[589] In his will, also, he declared that he died in communion with the Apostolical Roman Church, in whose bosom he was born.  There, then, we must leave this question, shrouded in the mystery that hangs around so much of his life.