A notable Englishman, Lord Acton, says (like Mueller) that “his goodness was the most splendid that has appeared on earth.”  And there are innumerable instances which prove that his sympathies and goodness to those who were notoriously undeserving was a fatal passion with him.  But there is no opinion, blunt though it be, that so completely touches one as that of the plain English sailors who said at Elba that “Boney was a d——­d good fellow after all.”  “They may talk about this man as they like,” said one of the crew of the Northumberland, “but I won’t believe the bad they say of him,” and this view seems to have been generally held by the men who composed the crew of the vessel that took the Emperor to St. Helena.  It is noteworthy that English man-of-war’s-men, and also merchant seamen of these stirring times, should have formed so favourable an impression of Napoleon, especially as the Press of England teemed with hostility against him.  Articles attributing every form of indescribable bestiality, corruption, gross cruelty to his soldiers, subordinate officers, and even Marshals, appeared with shameful regularity.  In these articles were included the most absurd as well as the most serious charges.

I include the following story as a specimen, and take it in particular as being quoted quite seriously by certain anti-Napoleonic writers in the endeavour to bolster up a feeble case.  Prejudice and distorted vision prevented them from seeing the absurdity of such attempts to blacken the character of Napoleon.  Let the reader judge!

It is related that, at the time of the Concordat, Napoleon remarked to Senator Volney, “France wants a religion.”  Volney’s courageous (!) reply was, “France wants the Bourbons,” and the Emperor is thereupon supposed to have been attacked by a fit of ungovernable fury, and to have kicked the Senator in the stomach!

The more serious charges included incest with his sister Pauline and his stepdaughter Hortense, and the poisoning of his plague-stricken soldiers at Jaffa.

His palaces were said to be harems, and his libertinism to put Oriental potentates to the blush.  So industrious were these foes to human fairness that they manufactured a silly story just before the rupture of the Treaty of Amiens, to the effect that Napoleon had made a violent attack on Lord Whitworth, the British Ambassador.  So violent was he in his gestures, the Ambassador feared lest the First Consul would strike him.  Even Oscar Browning is obliged to refute this unworthy fabrication as being absurd on the face of it, but it has taken ninety years to produce the authentic document from the British Archives which disproves the scandal.  Napoleon was too much absorbed in things that mattered to take notice of the stupid though virulent stories that were constantly being concocted against him.  When he was appealed to by his friends to have the libels suitably dealt with, he merely shrugged his shoulders, as was his custom, and said, “All this rubbish will be answered, if not in my time, by posterity.  It pleases the chatterers and scandalmongers, and I haven’t time to be perturbed, or to meddle with it.”