Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 07.pdf/626



CURRENT TOPICS. Marshal Ney. — Although Dr. Owens seems to have given credulity a rest during the past season, yet midsummer was not suffered to go by without some madness, and so the public have been called upon to believe that Marshal Ney was not executed by the Bourbons after Waterloo, but escaped to this country and died in North Carolina, in 1846, in the order of pedagogy. This is a very ingenious tale, and not too improbable for belief by the people who take stock in the Bacon business. Substantially told, it is as follows : when the Marshal was led out to be shot, he whispered to the firing-party, " Aim high." Contrary to all custom, their pieces had not been handed to them ready-loaded, but they had been permitted to load them, and so they humanely omitted the bullets. (Ney's caution was therefore su perfluous.) At the explosion he fell and pressed up on his breast a theatrical preparation to simulate blood. If his body was examined, the surgeon must have been in the plot, and so must the burying party, for he mounted a fast horse and rode eighty miles that night, took ship for this country and settled in North Carolina. To disarm inquiry (?) he took the name of Peter S. Ney. He set at work to qualify himself as a school teacher, and passed the rest of his life in that vocation, in which he was very successful. He had a remarkable knowledge of Napoleon and his campaigns. He was a remarkably skillful swords man. He fainted (not feinted) away on bearing of Napoleon's death, and afterwards tried to commit suicide. He looked upon the wine when it was red, more or less. He was recognized on several occa sions, but prevailed on those persons to depart on their own recognizance and keep their counsel. On his deathbed he declared that he was Marshal Ney. He had prepared a memoir of his life and adventures, but it has disappeared, which is an unfortunate over sight. It is said that after Louis Napoleon came to power the Marshal's coff1n was opened and discovered to be empty. The reason given for his secrecy was his fear that if the Bourbons learned of the fraud, they would confiscate his property, which had been allowed to

descend to his family. He asserted that it was agreed between Napoleon and himself, on the first abdica tion, that the former should return to France when the time was ripe. It is difficult to reconcile this with Ney's hesitation about going over to Napoleon, and with Napoleon's hesitation about employing Ney in the Waterloo campaign, which he did not overcome until the very eve of Quatre Bras, two days before the great battle. Ney was the son of a cooper, and his early educa tion had been narrow, and yet this person is repre sented as having become a liberal scholar and an ef fective teacher. Why this engaging story has been kept so still all the years before and since the peda gogue's death is not explained. In short, the tale is not more plausible than Archbishop Whately's contention that Napoleon never lived. We feel moved to try our own hand at these matters, and to suggest that Napoleon did not die at St. Helena, but was brought back alive in the pageant of 1840, hav ing at the time of his pretended death been given a sleeping potion (a la Juliet), which should prove potent unless his body was exposed to the air. We discover ourselves believing this already. How else can one account for the perfect preservation of the great man's remains when his coffin was opened just previous to the removal to France nineteen years later? He was only in a trance, natural or artificial, accidental or designed, and this being granted, the rest is easy as winking. Really we must work this up. To be sure, it will be a little difficult to account for his inaction during the Crimean war, and we must assume that he was really dead in 1870, for if he had been alive the army never would have been penned up in Metz or Sedan, nor have surrendered so tamely. But how we would have liked to see him pitted against that paper-strategist, von Moltke! Yet how do we account for Peter's tale, assuming that it has been truthfully reported? Why, on the safe old the ory that he allowed his imagination to run riot when he had dallied long with the wine-cup. There is a kind of poetical balance effected by the story, for as the world was once assured of a lost Bourbon up in Canada, so now it is treated to a lost Bonapartist down in Carolina. Let one cancel the other.