This letter was read in French by Sir Henry Bunbury.  Napoleon listened without look or gesture of impatience or surprise.  Being then asked if he had anything to reply, he with perfect calmness of voice and manner protested against the orders to which he had been listening, and against the right claimed by the English Government to dispose of him as a prisoner of war.  “I came into your ship,” said he, “as I would into one of your villages.  If I had been told I was to be a prisoner, I would not have come.”  He then expatiated at great length on the title given him—­General Buonaparte—­and on the right which he had to be considered as a sovereign prince; he was, he said, three months before, as much Emperor of Elba as Louis was King of France, and, by invading another monarch’s dominions, could not have forfeited his own rank as a monarch.  He next adverted to the ignoble attitude in which England would place herself in the eyes of the world by abusing his confidence—­hinted that either his father-in-law or the Czar would have treated him far differently—­and concluded by expressing his belief that the climate and confinement of St. Helena would kill him, and his resolution, therefore, not to go to St. Helena.  By what means he designed to resist the command of the English government, Napoleon did not say:  there can be no doubt he meant Lord Keith and Sir H. Bunbury to understand, that, rather than submit to the voyage in question, he would commit suicide; and what he thus hinted, was soon expressed distinctly, with all the accompaniments of tears and passion, by two French ladies on board the Bellerophon—­Madame Bertrand and Madame Montholon.  But all this appears to have been set down, from the beginning, exactly for what it was worth.  He who had chosen to outlive Krasnoi, and Leipzig, and Montmartre, and Waterloo, was not likely to die by his own hand in the Bellerophon.  We desire not to be considered as insinuating, according to the custom of many, that Napoleon ought to have rushed voluntarily on some English bayonet, when the fate of the 18th of June could no longer be doubtful.  Laying all religious and moral obligations out of view (as probably he did), Napoleon himself said truly, that “if Marius had fallen on his sword amidst the marches of Minturnae, he would never have enjoyed his 7th consulate.”  No man ever more heartily than Napoleon approved the old maxim, that while there is life there is hope; and, far from thinking seriously at any time of putting an end to his own days, we must doubt if, between his abdication at the Elysee and the time wherein he felt the immediate approach of death, there occurred one day, or even one hour, in which some hope or scheme of recovering his fortunes did not agitate his mind.