St. Helena

THE PINNACLE OF GLORY -- Wilson Wright--Macmillan ($2.50).

Death is the final curtain to every man's performance, but sometimes it would be more decent, more dramatic to ring it down beforehand. The applause for Napoleon's last bow was at Waterloo, not on St. Helena. But the story of Napoleon's slow fattening for death, anti-climactic though it seems to his career, is a tragi-comedy in itself. Author "Wilson Wright" (William Reitzel) has made the most of it, re-stirring the teacup-tempest with an impartial spoon. From contemporary, controversial accounts of Napoleon's dying days he has pieced together a convincingly human episode, a comedy that ends inevitably in death.

The little colony that voluntarily accompanied their fallen Emperor into exile on a far-off island in the South Atlantic soon found that St. Helena's was a poor climate for noble sentiments. Though their English captors attempted, in their way, to be humane, their blundering tactlessness soon drove the exiles to a frenzy of outraged sensibility. Napoleon's honor was touchy, and Sir Hudson Lowe, the British Governor, was a choleric, literal-minded martinet. The French and their warders were at loggerheads from the start. Said Napoleon of Sir Hudson: "The man is a coward of long experience and a gaoler from taste." Napoleon and his entourage shut themselves up in Longwood, their uncomfortable quarters high up in the hills, while Sir Hudson fumed in Jamestown. Both parties kept up a constant barrage of verbal and written insults, orders, recriminations, complaints. In order to annoy Sir Hudson and make it appear that he was being starved, Napoleon had some of his silver plate sold at public auction; Sir Hudson got back at him by searching the Longwood laundry for smuggled letters.

When Napoleon finally refused to have anything to do with Sir Hudson, hid himself in the house, the Governor ordered a luckless officer to report daily on his prisoner's presence. For weeks the officer and Napoleon played hide-&-seek. After fruitless days of snooping, the desperate man broke into Longwood one day, caught Napoleon in the bathtub, was pursued down passageways with royal imprecations. When Napoleon, for something to do, had a sunken garden built, the excavations to Sir Hudson's fevered mind, looked like earthworks.

One by one Napoleon's followers found that exile was not the pinnacle of glory he had suggested it might be. One after another they quarreled, struck attitudes, were glad to go, until only two trusted followers were left. After five years of it even they, though they shed tears, sighed with relief when a stomach ulcer at last gave their master eternity, themselves and their jailers release.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.