Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 December 1883 — HISTORY OF A CARRIAGE. [ARTICLE]

HISTORY OF A CARRIAGE.

The Vehicle Which Bore Napoleon Bonaparte to Waterloo. It is quite in accordance with the irony of fate that the state carriages of Napoleon HL should be exhibited in England at sixpence a head. Not for the first time has the genial showman made money out of the carriages of a Bonaparte. More than sixty years ago an enterprising gentleman named Bullock, the founder of the London Museum, now the Egyptian hall, Piccadilly, wrote to Mr. William Jerdan, afterward well known as the editor of the Literary Gazette, telling him that he was about to offer his collection for public sale, but that he was resolved to be his own auctioneer, and asking Mr. Jerdan to write “some kind of a little introductory address” to be delivered on the occasion, “especially as regarded a certain Bonapartian relic” —the famous imperial traveling carriage, which was captured by a party of Prussian dragoons, commanded by Baron Kohler, on the night of Waterloo. The history of this carriage is of the most curious nature. When it was lost Napoleon and his staff fled from the field on horsback, but the Emperor was in wretched health and could scarcely keep his saddle. At Philippeville search was made for a carriage to convey the imperial fugitive and his suit, but nothing was found, available for the purpose beyond an old postchaise, half broken to pieces; and in this dilapidated chariot the vanquished usurper was about to resume his flight when some carriages belonging to Marshal Soult entered the town, and these the Emperor’s servants immediately seized for their master’s use. Soult lost his carriages, and was proscribed into the bargain by the Bourbons for his adherence to Napoleon; but fate, always ironical, compensated him by permitting him to live long enough to be present <as the Ambassador Extraordinary of France at the coronation of Queen Victoria. In order to attend that memorable pageant the Marshal caused to be built one of the grandest of state carriages ever seen, the model of which was for many years a familiar object in a coach-trim mer’s window in Longacre. Napolean’s traveling carriage was built at Brussels for the conveyance of the then master of Europe on his fatal expedition to Russia. It carried him to Moscow and back to Dresden and Paris. In 1814 it bore him to the shores of the Mediterranean, and was shipped with him to Elba. In March, 1815, the carriage was reshipped to Cannes. Napoleon’s triumphant journey to Paris was made in this carriage; nor would he quit it, although a state carriage had been dispatched from the French capital to meet him. It bore him, finally, to Waterloo and to destruction. With this heavy but admirably filled “berline” a greater literary interest is associated than lurks in the fact that Mr. Bullock asked Mr. Jerdan to write an auctioneer’s puff about the “Bonapartian relic.’” Its roominess and commodiousness appear to have attracted the attention of an illustrious English poet. In any case, Mr. J. C. Jeaffreson, in “The Real Lord Byron,” tells us that when the noble Childe, after his separation from his wife, repaired to the continent, he had built for him at Brussels a traveling carriage which was an exact replica of the imperial “berline” captured at Waterloo. Mr. Jeaffreson adds that Byron, characteristically enough, quarreled with the Brussels coachmaker about the bill.— London Telegraph.