Note 19 — INTRODUCTION. (continued 3)
Reading edition
After my removal from Longwood, Sir Hudson Lowe, who had seized my papers, looked over this Journal, with my permission. He, of course, met with parts which were very displeasing to him; and he said to me: “What a pretty legacy you are preparing for my children, Count!”—“That is not my fault,” replied I; “it depends only on yourself to render it otherwise; I shall be happy to have reason to strike out any thing respecting you, as I did the other day with regard to Sir Robert Wilson.” Upon which he asked me what I had written about Sir Robert, and I pointed out the place. After reading all that had been written, and my reasons for cancelling it, he said, with a thoughtful and mortified air: “Yes, I see; but I can’t tell what to make of it; for I know Wilson well, and he has proved himself a warm friend of the Bourbons.”
We leaped for joy when we heard of the deliverance of Lavalette. Some one observed, that his deliverer, Wilson, could not be the same individual who had written so many offensive things concerning the Emperor. “And why not?” said Napoleon. “You“You know but little of men, and the passions that actuate them. What leads you to suppose that Sir Robert Wilson is not a man of enthusiasm and violent passions, who wrote what he then believed to be true? And while we were enemies we contended with each other; but in our present adversity he knows better: he may have been abused, and deceived, and may be sorry for it; and he is perhaps now as sincere in wishing us well as he formerly was in seeking to injure us.”
Either sagacity or chance so happily led the Emperor to this conclusion that it may be said he was enabled to read character at a distance. Sir R. Wilson was indeed the man who wrote against Napoleon. Vexed to see a great people deprived of their natural rights, he reproached the allies as bitterly as though they had imposed chains on himself, and no one has manifested stronger indignation at the treatment of Napoleon, or testified a more ardent wish to see it end.