MEN WHO SAW NAPOLEON.

Northern Advocate, 8 September 1913, Page 3

MEN WHO SAW NAPOLEON.

CENTENARIAN'S VISIT TO ST

HELENA AS A CHILD.

This afternoon, in a stuffy little room in a small house in a Paris suburb, says the Paris correspondent of the "Daily Mail," 1 held a hand that had been grasped by Napoleon and heard what is probably the only voice left in the world that once fell upon the Emperor's ears.

The simple old man who connects the long dead past with the living present is M. Pierre Schamel-Roy. He is nearly 106 years old, and his father was a soldier's orderly who spent his life in close personal attendance on the Emperor. Born in the Palace of Versailles, and one of the little playmates of the King of Rome, Napoleon's son, M. Schamel-Roy, remembers seeing the Emperor three times, all of them at St. Helena, where he was taken to visit his fatheu, who had followed Napoleon into exile. He saw the Emperor once more as he lay dead at St. Helena.

M. Schamel-Roy is a handsome old fellow, of strong features, though sunken face, with a hooked nose and a flowing, silky, snow-white beard. It was in the high, quavering voice of extreme old age that he spoke to me. When I mentioned the name of the Emperor, it was as if the weight of years had suddenly fallen from him. "I/Empereur," he said. "Oui, j'ai tv I'Empereur, ,, . KING OF ROME'S DOLL. He told me how on one of his visits as a child to St. Helena "I was taken," he said, "to Sir Hudson Lowe. He demanded whether 1 had not. a letter for the Emperor. I said Wo," but he was not satisfied. "Strip that young Parisian for me,' said Sir Hudson Lowe. So I was stripped and searched, but they found nothing and I was allowed to see the Emperor. I knelt before , him and kissed his hand. He patted me on the head and called me a loyal little fellow. I was then about, twelve years old at that time."' It is the Emperor's dark and piercing eyes that are the old man's most vivid recollection of that far-off meeting. Among his treasures is a little doll that was once the plaything of the young King of Rome."lt is just as it left, the Prince Imperial," he told me. "ft is dirty as you see, but it was his little hands that soiled it." -M. Gchamel-Roy was for many years costumier at the Opera. He has now a pension from the State of Is 8d a day, but he will be obliged to leave his present lodging in a week's time as he finds the rent, £11 a year, too much for him.