Waterbury evening Democrat., 1888-01-12
GLORY AND THE GRAVE.


 There was something strangely sad, and yet strongly suggestive, in scene wit messed this week in quiet retreat in Eng land. Gray tells us how the boast of her aldry and pomp of power, and all that glory ever gave, await the inevitable hour of death; but seldom has the pathway to the grave been strewn with so many memories of the mutability of human greatness as in the decay and death of the Bonaparte dynasty. On Monday the re- mains of Napoleon III and of his son the Prince Imperial of France were removed from their temporary resting place at Chislehurst and deposited in the tomb prepared for them at Farnborough by the devotion of the widowed wife and child less mother, the ex-Empress Eugenie. The last of the Bonapartes-for we take no note of the living pretenders-consigned to the last resting place on earth in the s'perfde Albion" of French abhorrence!
 It is history of glory, of greatness and of grief, that of the Bonaparte dynasty. The Corsican adventurer becoming chief of nation-the little corporal rising to military command-reigningas as an emperor and dying in exile = resting at last in a palace tomb under the dome of the Hotel des Invalides and having 8 monument raised to his glory made of the captured cannon of his battle fields-in the Place Vendome The time o;,o against his race the Column Vendome was torn down and the notion was entertained of scattering the ashes of 'tmost sacred majesty to the four winds of heaven. But the French, however impulsive, are not iconoclasts. The Column has been restored and the tomb of Napoleon remains undisturbed.
 We are not writing history, but merely pointing moral. The fatal step in arrest ing the progress of Napoleon's greatness was the cruelty of his divorce from Josephine, his counsellor and guide, to wed Maria Louisa of Austria for the State rea- sons of leaving an heir to his empire. The heir was given, but not left His title was Duke of Reichstadt, and by compliment King of Rome, and they dubbed him Ma poleon II in order to keep up the fiction of imperial succession But the glory had waned; and Waterloo was the culmination of the waning. The remainder we have told-defeat, capture, exile, death; and he who had ruled the world, and dictated ~ terms to Kings, had his heart nibbled by rats in that St Helena fortress.
 Louis Napoleon looms up next in the rec ord of Bonaparte vicissitudes "The nephew of his Uncle," he presumed too much; he was reckless adventurer; prisoner in the fortress of Ham for six years; escaped in 1846 to England and became familiar figure in the purlieus of St James and the Bread Sanctuary of Westminster Unrecognized by the Court he was shail fellow we'll met'' with the young bloods of the metropolis; impecunious, he lived by his wits and was not scrupulous and at one time served as special constable dur ing chartist agitation in London; and when 1S48 came France was included in the general upheaval of European monar- chies. The French Revolution of 1S4S brought Loris Napoleon to the surface. He was chosen President of the Republic and swore an oath of fealty to it's integrity But he plotted and planned for the Imperial Power of his dead uncle; and then came the bloodiest page in ensanguined French his tory-the ''coup d. ctat" of December, 1852. Read Victor Hugo !" History of a Great Crime;" and withvall the charms of romance and the solid facts of sober his tory, an appreciative understanding will be had of the guilt by which Empire was built on the ruins of Republic. But the guilt came home to the perjured Prince He won beautiful bride-was blessed with an heir to his Imperalism-th Tuileries became the theatre of courtly joy and personal triumph; but the aveng- ing angel lowered over all. From over the Rhine came the notes of the Nemesis; al Sedan the Prince Imperial received his baptism of blood, as his Emperor father said; but at Sedan came the close of the Imperialism. Napoleon III abdicated and sought and found refuge in England, and died ard was buried there; his son, for whom hopes of restoration were entertained, joined the English forces to fight for England in the Zulu warfare, ,- and was ::killed-fghting for the ancient foe-For that same "perfide Albion" of his nation, the Prince sacrificed his young life and put an end now and for ever to the Napoleon dynasty.
 It is as we have said, solemn lesson of the evanescence of earthly glory, that re- interment of the Benapartists, father and son, on Monday, r.fat from their own land and as it were in the bosom of the enemy's country. For Napoleon III, in life there was never much love; and for his purjured usurpations, not many regrets; for the Prince Imperial there was pity be- cause of his youth, and for his mother; but general consensus of "served him right for the espousal of the cause of his country's foe. The only beings in the Napoleon dynasty for whom there was