Herriot's Napoleon

Suppose that the Emperor Napoleon-- had fled to the U. S., instead of surrendering to Britons. How much would that have changed the history of the world?

Recently this quickening question occurred to paunchy but smart M. Edouard Herriot, onetime Prime Minister of France (June, 1924-April, 1925), and still, after many and many years, Mayor of the great industrial city of Lyons. Last week a brand new play by versatile Mayor Herriot was being rehearsed in Paris, and the prognostication was that it would be called: Napoleon, Empereur de I'Ameri-que.

The first scene shows Napoleon listening to a Danish sea captain, who offers to smuggle the defeated Emperor of the French to America.

"Could you hide me on your ship?" asks the most famous man in the world, a little incredulously.

"Easily, Sire!" exclaims the Dane, "I could stow you away in a single empty wine cask."

A foreword to the program of Mayor Herriot's melodrama will recall that the incident of the Danish sea captain is historic. The real Napoleon chose surrender and St. Helena, instead of a risky, ignominious flight to America. But the stage Napoleon cries: "In a wine-cask then! Give me five years, and I shall conquer the New World!"

Succeeding scenes portray the "Little Corporal's" landing in New York amid wild acclaim, and the consternation of President Madison. Seemingly Mayor Herriot thinks that U. S. "minute men" would have flocked to Napoleon's standard, and that desertions from the U. S. Army would have been numerous. As the drama unfolds, the Emperor besieges Washington, which quickly falls. He then launches a prodigious war of conquest. "Within five years," patriotic Mayor Herriot has made Napoleon Emperor of the three Americas, great lord of all that lies between 'Alaska and the nethermost tip of Chile.

Quick curtain! For Politician Herriot, a staunch Republican, even a Socialist, does not quite dare to write the inevitable epilogue--Napoleon's reconquest of France.