“His trade here was that of a ditcher. Napoleon went to St. Helena; Quoil came to Walden Woods”

In our reading from Walden, Thoreau talks about a man Hugh Quoil, who supposedly fought in the Battle of Waterloo. He references Napoleon’s exile to St. Helena. I thought Quoil got the better end of the deal since he wasn’t stranded on an island in the middle of the Atlantic.

But really he ends up meeting the same fate as Napoleon, but maybe a little less spectacularly, too. Quoil dies on the road and has his house at Walden torn down. Whereas when Napoleon died on St. Helena, the great Emperor’s funeral was attended by millions in Paris.

I thought this passage was trying to speak to the fleeting nature of our lives in these places. But he has another line that seems like he, as someone who is living in a place previously uninhabited, to be the oldest one in the village.