Volume 1

The memoirs of Dr. Thomas W. Evans : recollections of the second French empire / edited by Edward A. Crane, M. D.

  • Evans, Thomas W. (Thomas Wiltberger), 1823-1897.
Date:
1905
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The memoirs of Dr. Thomas W. Evans : recollections of the second French empire / edited by Edward A. Crane, M. D. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of kindness and goodness, which it is quite impossible to describe. His manner under such circumstances was really irresistible. I had many occasions to feel its charm. I have sometimes thought that the Emperor owed his singular power of winning the esteem and affection of those with whom he had spoken, although but once, to the softness of his voice and to a peculiar hesitancy of manner—especially when opening a conversation—which might be taken for diffidence, the most delicate form of flattery that one man can offer to another. When misfortunes befell his friends, or bereave- ments came to those who were near to him, the Emperor never failed to console them with kind words or to remember them by acts of gracious consideration. On the occasion of the loss of the steamer Arctic, in the autumn of 1854—when my wife and I were informed that a dear sister and her husband and child, who were returning to New York from a visit they had paid us, had all three perished— the Emperor, and the Empress also, expressed for us their deepest sympathy. One morning the Emperor said to me, after re- ferring to this painful event, that he wished to give me, as a token of his regard, a keepsake that I might perhaps doubly esteem. He then handed to me a case within which he said there was a diamond that had been taken from the hilt of a sword which had belonged to his uncle, Napoleon, and had been worn by him, and which he had caused to be reset in a scarf-pin.