Glasgow Courier. — 1846-08-13 (Glasgow, Strathclyde, Scotland)

NAPOLEON'S CONTEMPLATED SUICIDE. We translate the following intensely interesting account of two remarkable events in the life of Napoleon, from Montholon's St. Helena Captivity. In the evening, our conversation having carried him back to the recollections of the Convention, and of his sojourn at Paris after the siege of Toulon, he (Napoleon) gave me the following details:— • • •  ---- • "I found myself in one of those mawkish conditions which suspend the faculties of the brain and make life a burden. My mother had just confessed to me all the horrors of her situation. Obliged to flee from the war which the Corsican mountaineers were carrying on, she was at Marseilles, without any means of existence, relying solely on her own heroic virtugs to defend the honour of her daughters against the misery and corruptions of any kind which belonged to the manners of that epoch of social chaos. The wicked conduct of the representative Aubry having deprived me of my salary, all my resources were exhausted; I had left but a single atrigttat of a hundred sous. I went out, dragged, as if it were by an instinct, towards suicide; and I proceeded along the quays, conscious of my weakness, but without the power to overcome it. A few moments more, and I should have plunged into the water, when chance brought me in contact with an individual clothed in simple habit, who, recognising me, jumped upon my neck, exclaiming, "Is it indeed you, Napoleon? How rejoiced lam to see you!" It was Demasis, my old artillery comrade; he had emigrated, and returned in disguise to France, to see his mother. He was turning to leave me: "What is the matter?" asked he; "you do not listen to me—you are not glad to see Die ! What misfortune threatens you? You appear like a maniac, who is going to kill himself!" This direct appeal to the impression which governed me, produced a revolution, and without reflection I revealed all to him. "Is that all?" said he, opening his shabby vest, and loosening a belt which he put in my hands. "Here are 300,000 francs in gold; take them, and save your mother!" Without being able, even at this day to explain it, I seized that gold by a convulsive movement, and Iran like a madman, to give it to my mother. It was no sooner out of my hands, than I reflected upon what I had been doing. I retired in haste to the place where I had left Demasis, but he had gone. Many days in succession I went out in the morning, visited all the places where I could hope to find him, and did not return till evening. All my pursuits made at that time, as well as those I made at my advent to power, were vain. It was only at the end of the empire that by chance I found Demasis. It was my turn to question him, and to ask him what he had thought of my strange conduct, and why, in 15 years, I had not heard of him. He would have acted as I had done, he said; and as he had no need of the money, he had not asked for it, although he was very sure that I would not be at all embarrassed in reimbursing him • but lie feared that I would force him from the retirement in which he lived, happy in the employment of horticulture. I had the greatest difficulty in the world to make him accept of 300,000 francs as an imperial reimbursement for the 300,000 francs, lent to a regimental comrade; and in spite of him I made him accept the office of administrator-general of the gardens of the crown, at a salary of 30,000 francs, with the honours of officer of the household. I also gave a very handsome place to his brother. Two of my comrades of the military school and of the regiment, those with whom I was perhaps the most closely bound by the sympathies of youth, Demasis and Phillippeau, have, by one of those mysteries of Providence, had an Immense influence over my destiny. Demasis, as I have just related, prevented me, at a moment of intended self-destruction, and Phillippeau arrested me, before St. Jean d'Acre ; had it not been for him, I had been master of that key of the East—l had marched upon Constantinople, and re-edified the throne of the East.