ed_:
there is no other solution of the problem. He rushed on, captured the
capital, and was ruined. Even with Moscow in ashes round him, he still
persisted in the folly of supposing that he could persuade into peace an
empire which had just given so tremendous an evidence of its fidelity
and its fortitude. He was infatuated. He was detained amid the embers
until it was impossible to remain longer, and equally impossible to
escape the horrors of a Russian winter in a march of six hundred miles.
His hour was come. Of an army which numbered four hundred thousand men
on crossing the Niemen, probably not one thousand ever returned; for the
broken troops which actually came back had been reinforcements which
reached the Grand Army from time to time. He reached Paris with the
stamp of fallen sovereignty on his brow: the remainder of his career was
a struggle against his sentence. Waterloo was merely the scaffold: he
was under irretrievable condemnation long before.

In his captivity, Napoleon was liberal in his donatives. On the
departure of Balcombe, in whose house he had remained for some time on
his arrival in the island, he gave him a bill for seventy-two thousand
francs, with the grant of a pension of twelve thousand,--saying to him
"I hear that your resignation of your employment is caused by the
quarrels drawn upon you through the hospitality which you showed me: I
should not wish you to regret ever having known me."

A quarrel relative to the bulletins of Napoleon's health, produced an
order from the governor for the arrest of O'Meara. There was a vast
quantity of peevishness exercised on the subject, and Napoleon attempted
to raise this trifling affair into a general quarrel of the
commissioners. But on his declaring that he would no longer receive the
visits of O'Meara while under arrest, the governor revoked the order,
and O'Meara continued his attendance until instructions were received
from Lord Bathurst, to remove him from his situation in the household of
the Emperor, and send him to England. This gave another opportunity for
complaint. "I have lived too long," said Buonaparte; "your ministers are
very bold. When the Pope was my prisoner, I would have cut off my arm
rather than have signed an order for laying hands on his physician."

Before leaving the island, O'Meara drew up a statement of his patient's
health, in which he seems to have regarded the liver as the chief seat
of his disease. A copy of this pape