with the difficulty of making their sentence appear to have any conformity with the charge and the evidence, drew up in fact, two different sentences:  one before the duke was executed, which bore the article, “immediate execution”; the other a more careful document, intended alone to meet the public eye, in which not a word about immediate execution occurs.  The duke was not executed, therefore, at six in the morning of the 21st of March, upon that sentence which was made public at the time, as the authority for his death.

Every circumstance in the dismal tale, from the quantity of linen packed up at Strasburg, to the preparation of the grave in the ditch of Vincennes, attests the fact that the fate of the unfortunate young man (for he was but 32 years old when he fell) had been determined on, to the minutest particular, long before he was summoned to a mock trial, before an incompetent tribunal.  If ever man was murdered, it was the Duke d’Enghien.

Such was the fate of the gallant and generous youth, who, by his fiery courage, won the battle of Bertsheim; and who, when his followers, to whom the republicans had so often refused quarter, seemed disposed to retaliate in the hour of victory, threw himself between them and their discomfited countrymen, exclaiming, “They are French—­they are unfortunate; I place them under the guardianship of your honour.”

The horror with which this remorseless tragedy was heard of in Paris, soon spread throughout all Europe; and from that day the name of Buonaparte was irremediably associated with the ideas of sullen revenge and tyrannic cruelty.  The massacre of Jaffa had been perpetrated in a remote land, and many listened with incredulity to a tale told by the avowed enemies of the homicide.  But this bloody deed was done at home, and almost in the sight of all Paris.  Of the fact there could be no doubt; and of the pretexts set forth by the organs of the French government, there were few men of any party who affected not to perceive the futility.  Hitherto Napoleon had been the fortunate heir of a revolution, in whose civil excesses he had scarcely participated—­henceforth he was the legitimate representative and symbol of all its atrocities.

In so far as Buonaparte had the power to suppress all mention of this catastrophe, it was, at the time, suppressed.  But in after days, at St. Helena, when dictating the apology of his life to the companions of his exile, he not only spoke openly of the death of the Duke d’Enghien, but appears to have dwelt upon it often and long.  Well aware that this was generally regarded as the darkest trait in his history, he displayed a feverish anxiety to explain it away.  But the Sultan Akber wore a signet, inscribed, “I never knew any one that lost his way in a straight road;” and he that is conscious of innocence can have no temptation to multiply the lines of his defence.  Buonaparte, according to the mood of the moment, or the companion whom he addressed, adopted different methods of vindicating himself.  They were inconsistent as well as diverse; and even Las Cases seems to have blushed for his hero when he recorded them.