The Modern Regime Volume I Part 1

The Modern Regime.

Volume 1(Napoleon I.).

PREFACE

The following third and last part of the Origins of Contemporary France is to consist of two volumes. After the present volume, the second is to treat of the Church, the School and the Family, describe the modern milieu and note the facilities and obstacles which a society like our own encounters in this new milieu: here, the past and the present meet, and the work already done is continued by the work which is going on under our eyes.--The undertaking is hazardous and more difficult than with the two preceding parts. For the Ancient Regime and the Revolution are henceforth complete and finished periods; we have seen the end of both and are thus able to comprehend their entire course. On the contrary, the end of the ulterior period is still wanting; the great inst.i.tutions which date from the Consulate and the Empire, either consolidation or dissolution, have not yet reached their historic term: since 1800, the social order of things, notwithstanding eight changes of political form, has remained almost intact. Our children or grandchildren will know whether it will finally succeed or miscarry; witnesses of the denouement, they will have fuller light by which to judge of the entire drama. Thus far four acts only have been played; of the fifth act, we have simply a presentiment.--On the other hand, by dint of living under this social system, we have become accustomed to it; it no longer excites our wonder; however artificial it may be it seems to us natural. We can scarcely conceive of another that is healthier; and what is much worse, it is repugnant to us to do so. For, such a conception would soon lead to comparisons and hence to a judgment and, on many points, to an unfavorable judgment, one which would be a censure, not only of our inst.i.tutions but of ourselves. The machine of the year VIII,[1101] applied to us for three generations, has permanently shaped and fixed us as we are, for better or for worse. If, for a century, it sustains us, it represses us for a century. We have contracted the infirmities it imports--stoppage of development, instability of internal balance, disorders of the intellect and of the will, fixed ideas and ideas that are false. These ideas are ours; therefore we hold on to them, or, rather, they have taken hold of us.

To get rid of them, to impose the necessary recoil on our mind, to transport us to a distance and place us at a critical point of view, where we can study ourselves, our ideas and our inst.i.tutions as scientific objects, requires a great effort on our part, many precautions, and long reflection.--Hence, the delays of this study; the reader will pardon them on considering that an ordinary opinion, caught on the wing, on such a subject, does not suffice. In any event, when one presents an opinion on such a subject one is bound to believe it. I can believe in my own only when it has become precise and seems to me proven.

Menthon Saint-Bernard, September, 1890.

BOOK FIRST. NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

CHAPTER I. HISTORICAL IMPORTANCE OF HIS CHARACTER AND GENIUS.

If you want to comprehend a building, you have to imagine the circ.u.mstances, I mean the difficulties and the means, the kind and quality of its available materials, the moment, the opportunity, and the urgency of the demand for it. But, still more important, we must consider the genius and taste of the architect, especially whether he is the proprietor, whether he built it to live in himself, and, once installed in it, whether he took pains to adapt it to how own way of living, to his own necessities, to his own use.--Such is the social edifice erected by Napoleon Bonaparte, its architect, proprietor, and princ.i.p.al occupant from 1799 to 1814. It is he who has made modern France; never was an individual character so profoundly stamped on any collective work, so that, to comprehend the work, we must first study the character of the Man.[1102]

I. Napoleon's Past and Personality.

He is of another race and another century.--Origin of his paternal family.--Transplanted to Corsica.--His maternal family.--Laet.i.tia Ramolino.--Persistence of Corsican souvenirs in Napoleon's mind.--His youthful sentiments regarding Corsica and France.--Indications found in his early compositions and in his style.--Current monarchical or democratic ideas have no hold on him.--His impressions of the 20th of June and 10th of August after the 31st of May.

--His a.s.sociations with Robespierre and Barras without committing himself.--His sentiments and the side he takes Vendemiaire 13th.--The great Condottiere.--His character and conduct in Italy.--Description of him morally and physically in 1798.--The early and sudden ascendancy which he exerts.

a.n.a.logous in spirit and character to his Italian ancestors of the XVth century.

Disproportionate in all things, but, stranger still, he is not only out of the common run, but there is no standard of measurement for him; through his temperament, instincts, faculties, imagination, pa.s.sions, and moral const.i.tution he seems cast in a special mould, composed of another metal than that which enters into the composition of his fellows and contemporaries. Evidently he is not a Frenchman, nor a man of the eighteenth century; he belongs to another race and another epoch.[1103]

We detect in him, at the first glance, the foreigner, the Italian,[1104]

and something more, apart and beyond these, surpa.s.sing all similitude or a.n.a.logy.-Italian he was through blood and lineage; first, through his paternal family, which is Tuscan,[1105] and which we can follow down from the twelfth century, at Florence, then at San Miniato; next at Sarzana, a small, backward, remote town in the state of Genoa, where, from father to son, it vegetates obscurely in provincial isolation, through a long line of notaries and munic.i.p.al syndics. "My origin,"

says Napoleon himself,[1106] "has made all Italians regard me as a compatriot.... When the question of the marriage of my sister Pauline with Prince Borghese came up there was but one voice in Rome and in Tuscany, in that family, and with all its connections: 'It will do,' said all of them, 'it's amongst ourselves, it is one of our own families...'" When the Pope later hesitated about coming to Paris to crown Napoleon, "the Italian party in the Conclave prevailed against the Austrian party by supporting political arguments with the following slight tribute to national amour propre: 'After all we are imposing an Italian family on the barbarians, to govern them. We are revenging ourselves on the Gauls.'" Significant words, which will one day throw light upon the depths of the Italian nature, the eldest daughter of modern civilization, imbued with her right of primogeniture, persisting in her grudge against the transalpines, the rancorous inheritor of Roman pride and of antique patriotism.[1107]

From Sarzana, a Bonaparte emigrates to Corsica, where he establishes himself and lives after 1529. The following year Florence is taken and subjugated for good. Henceforth, in Tuscany, under Alexander de Medici, then under Cosmo I. and his successors, in all Italy under Spanish rule, munic.i.p.al independence, private feuds, the great exploits of political adventures and successful usurpations, the system of ephemeral princ.i.p.alities, based on force and fraud, all give way to permanent repression, monarchical discipline, external order, and a certain species of public tranquility. Thus, just at the time when the energy and ambition, the vigorous and free sap of the Middle Ages begins to run down and then dry up in the shriveled trunk,[1108] a small detached branch takes root in an island, not less Italian but almost barbarous, amidst inst.i.tutions, customs, and pa.s.sions belonging to the primitive medieval epoch,[1109] and in a social atmosphere sufficiently rude for the maintenance of all its vigor and harshness.--Grafted, moreover, by frequent marriages, on the wild stock of the island, Napoleon, on the maternal side, through his grandmother and mother, is wholly indigenous.

His grandmother, a Pietra-Santa, belonged to Sartene,[1110] a Corsican canton par excellence where, in 1800, hereditary vendettas still maintained the system of the eleventh century; where the permanent strife of inimical families was suspended only by truces; where, in many villages, n.o.body stirred out of doors except in armed bodies, and where the houses were crenellated like fortresses. His mother, Laet.i.tia Ramolini, from whom, in character and in will, he derived much more than from his father,[1111] is a primitive soul on which Civilization has taken no hold. She is simple, all of a piece, unsuited to the refinements, charms, and graces of a worldly life; indifferent to comforts, without literary culture, as parsimonious as any peasant woman, but as energetic as the leader of a band. She is powerful, physically and spiritually, accustomed to danger, ready in desperate resolutions. She is, in short, a "rural Cornelia," who conceived and gave birth to her son amidst the risks of battle and of defeat, in the thickest of the French invasion, amidst mountain rides on horseback, nocturnal surprises, and volleys of musketry.[1112]

"Losses, privations, and fatigue," says Napoleon, "she endured all and braved all. Hers was a man's head on a woman's shoulders."

Thus fas.h.i.+oned and brought into the world, he felt that, from first to the last, he was of his people and country.

"Everything was better there," said he, at Saint Helena,[1113] "even the very smell of the soil, which he could have detected with his eyes shut; nowhere had he found the same thing. He imagined himself there again in early infancy, and lived over again the days of his youth, amidst precipices, traversing lofty peaks, deep valleys, and narrow defiles, enjoying the honors and pleasures of hospitality, "treated everywhere as a brother and compatriot," without any accident or insult ever suggesting to him that his confidence was not well grounded." At Bocognano,[1114] where his mother, pregnant with him, had taken refuge, "where hatred and vengeance extended to the seventh degree of relations.h.i.+p, and where the dowry of a young girl was estimated by the number of her Cousins, I was feasted and made welcome, and everybody would have died for me." Forced to become a Frenchman, transplanted to France, educated at the expense of the king in a French school, he became rigid in his insular patriotism, and loudly extolled Paoli, the liberator, against whom his relations had declared themselves. "Paoli,"

said he, at the dinner table,[1115]" was a great man. He loved his country. My father was his adjutant, and never will I forgive him for having aided in the union of Corsica with France. He should have followed her fortunes and have succ.u.mbed only with her." Throughout his youth he is at heart anti-French, morose, "bitter, liking very few and very little liked, brooding over resentment," like a vanquished man, always moody and compelled to work against the grain. At Brienne, he keeps aloof from his comrades, takes no part in their sports, shuts himself in the library, and opens himself up only to Bourrienne in explosions of hatred: "I will do you Frenchmen all the harm I can!"--"Corsican by nation and character," wrote his professor of history in the Military Academy, "he will go far if circ.u.mstances favor him."[1116]--Leaving the Academy, and in garrison at Valence and Auxonne, he remains always hostile, denationalized; his old bitterness returns, and, addressing his letters to Paoli, he says: "I was born when our country perished. Thirty thousand Frenchmen vomited on our sh.o.r.es, drowning the throne of liberty in floods of blood--such was the odious spectacle on which my eyes first opened! The groans of the dying, the shrieks of the oppressed, tears of despair, surrounded my cradle from my birth... I will blacken those who betrayed the common cause with the brush of infamy.... vile, sordid souls corrupted by gain!"[1117]

A little later, his letter to b.u.t.tafuoco, deputy in the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly and princ.i.p.al agent in the annexation to France, is one long strain of renewed, concentrated hatred, which, after at first trying to restrain it within the bounds of cold sarcasm, ends in boiling over, like red-hot lava, in a torrent of scorching invective.--From the age of fifteen, at the Academy and afterwards in his regiment, he finds refuge in imagination in the past of his island;[1118] he recounts its history, his mind dwells upon it for many years, and he dedicates his work to Paoli. Unable to get it published, he abridges it, and dedicates the abridgment to Abbe Raynal, recapitulating in a strained style, with warm, vibrating sympathy, the annals of his small community, its revolts and deliverances, its heroic and sanguinary outbreaks, its public and domestic tragedies, ambuscades, betrayals, revenges, loves, and murders,--in short, a history similar to that of the Scottish highlanders, while the style, still more than the sympathies, denotes the foreigner. Undoubtedly, in this work, as in other youthful writings, he follows as well as he can the authors in vogue--Rousseau, and especially Raynal; he gives a schoolboy imitation of their tirades, their sentimental declamation, and their humanitarian grandiloquence.

But these borrowed clothes, which incommode him, do not fit him; they are too tight, and the cloth is too fine; they require too much circ.u.mspection in walking; he does not know how to put them on, and they rip at every seam. Not only has he never learned how to spell, but he does not know the true meaning, connections, and relations of words, the propriety or impropriety of phrases, the exact significance of imagery;[1119] he strides on impetuously athwart a pell-mell of incongruities, incoherencies, Italianisms, and barbarisms, undoubtedly stumbling along through awkwardness and inexperience, but also through excess of ardor and of heat;[1120] his jerking, eruptive thought, overcharged with pa.s.sion, indicates the depth and temperature of its source. Already, at the Academy, the professor of belles-lettres[1121]

notes down that "in the strange and incorrect grandeur of his amplifications he seems to see granite fused in a volcano." However original in mind and in sensibility, ill-adapted as he is to the society around him, different from his comrades, it is clear beforehand that the current ideas which take such hold on them will obtain no hold on him.

Of the two dominant and opposite ideas which clash with each other, it might be supposed that he would lean either to one or to the other, although accepting neither.--Pensioner of the king, who supported him at Brienne, and afterwards in the Military Academy; who also supported his sister at Saint-Cyr; who, for twenty years, is the benefactor of his family; to whom, at this very time, he addresses entreating or grateful letters over his mother's signature--he does not regard him as his born general; it does not enter his mind to take sides and draw his sword in his patron's behalf;' in vain is he a gentleman, to whom, d'Hozier has certified; reared in a school of n.o.ble cadets, he has no n.o.ble or monarchical traditions.[1122]--Poor and tormented by ambition, a reader of Rousseau, patronized by Raynal, and tacking together sentences of philosophic fustian about equality, if he speaks the jargon of the day, it is without any belief in it. The phrases in vogue form a decent, academical drapery for his ideas, or serve him as a red cap for the club; he is not bewildered by democratic illusions, and entertains no other feeling than disgust for the revolution and the sovereignty of the populace.--At Paris, in April,1792, when the struggle between the monarchists and the revolutionaries is at its height, he tries to find "some successful speculation,"[1123] and thinks he will hire and sublet houses at a profit. On the 20th of June he witnesses, only as a matter of curiosity, the invasion of the Tuileries, and, on seeing the king at a window place the red cap on his head, exclaims, so as to be heard,"

Che Caglione!" Immediately after this: "How could they let that rabble enter! Mow down four or five hundred of them with cannons and the rest would run away." On August 10, when the tocsin sounds, he regards the people and the king with equal contempt; he rushes to a friend's house on the Carrousel and there, still as a looker-on, views at his ease all the occurrences of the day.[1124] Finally, the chateau is forced and he strolls through the Tuileries, looks in at the neighboring cafes, and that is all: he is not disposed to take sides, he has no Jacobin or royalist inclination. His features, even, are so calm "as to provoke many hostile and distrustful stares, as someone who is unknown and suspicious."--Similarly, after the 31st of May and the 2nd of June, his "Souper de Beaucaire" shows that if he condemns the departmental insurrection it is mainly because he deems it futile: on the side of the insurgents, a defeated army, no position tenable, no cavalry, raw artillerymen, Ma.r.s.eilles reduced to its own troops, full of hostile sans-culottes and so besieged, taken and pillaged. Chances are against it: "Let the impoverished regions, the inhabitants of Vivaris, of the Cevennes, of Corsica, fight to the last extremity, but if you lose a battle and the fruit of a thousand years of fatigue, hards.h.i.+p, economy, and happiness become the soldier's prey."[1125] Here was something with which the Girondists could be converted!--None of the political or social convictions which then exercised such control over men's minds have any hold on him. Before the 9th of Thermidor he seemed to be a "republican montagnard," and we follow him for months in Provence, "the favorite and confidential adviser of young Robespierre," "admirer"

of the elder Robespierre,[1126] intimate at Nice with Charlotte Robespierre. After the 9th of Thermidor has pa.s.sed, he frees himself with bombast from this compromising friends.h.i.+p: "I thought him sincere,"

says he of the younger Robespierre, in a letter intended to be shown, "but were he my father and had aimed at tyranny, I would have stabbed him myself." On returning to Paris, after having knocked at several doors, he takes Barras for a patron. Barras, the most brazen of the corrupt, Barras, who has overthrown and contrived the death of his two former protectors.[1127] Among the contending parties and fanaticisms which succeed each other he keeps cool and free to dispose of himself as he pleases, indifferent to every cause and concerning himself only with his own interests.--On the evening of the 12th of Vendemiaire, on leaving the Feydeau theatre, and noticing the preparations of the sectionists,[1128] he said to Junot:

"Ah, if the sections put me in command, I would guarantee to place them in the Tuileries in two hours and have all those Convention rascals driven out!"

Five hours later, summoned by Barras and the Conventionalists, he takes "three minutes" to make up his mind, and, instead of "blowing up the representatives," he mows down the Parisians. Like a good condottiere, he does not commit himself, considers the first that offers and then the one who offers the most, only to back out afterwards, and finally, seizing the opportunity, to grab everything.--He will more and more become a true condottiere, that is to say, leader of a band, increasingly independent, pretending to submit under the pretext of the public good, looking out only for his own interest, self-centered, general on his own account and for his own advantage in his Italian campaign before and after the 18th of Fructidor.[1129] He is, however, a condottiere of the first cla.s.s, already aspiring to the loftiest summits, "with no stopping-place but the throne or the scaffold,"[1130]

"determined[1131] to master France, and through France Europe. Without distraction, sleeping only three hours during the night," he plays with ideas, men, religions, and governments, exploiting people with incomparable dexterity and brutality. He is, in the choice of means as of ends, a superior artist, inexhaustible in glamour, seductions, corruption, and intimidation, fascinating, and yet more terrible than any wild beast suddenly released among a herd of browsing cattle. The expression is not too strong and was uttered by an eye-witness, almost at this very date, a friend and a competent diplomat: "You know that, while I am very fond of the dear general, I call him to myself the little tiger, so as to properly characterize his figure, tenacity, and courage, the rapidity of his movements, and all that he has in him which maybe fairly regarded in that sense."[1132]

At this very date, previous to official adulation and the adoption of a recognized type, we see him face to face in two portraits drawn from life, one physical, by a truthful painter, Guerin, and the other moral, by a superior woman, Madame de Stael, who to the best European culture added tact and worldly perspicacity. Both portraits agree so perfectly that each seems to interpret and complete the other. "I saw him for the first time,"[1133] says Madame de Stael, "on his return to France after the treaty of Campo-Formio. After recovering from the first excitement of admiration there succeeded to this a decided sentiment of fear." And yet, "at this time he had no power, for it was even then supposed that the Directory looked upon him with a good deal of suspicion." People regarded him sympathetically, and were even prepossessed in his favor;

"thus the fear he inspired was simply due to the singular effect of his person on almost all who approached him. I had met men worthy of respect and had likewise met men of ferocious character; but nothing in the impression which Bonaparte produced on me reminded me of either. I soon found, in the various opportunities I had of meeting him during his stay in Paris, that his character was not to be described in terms commonly employed; he was neither mild nor violent, nor gentle nor cruel, like certain personages one happens to know. A being like him, wholly unlike anybody else, could neither feel nor excite sympathy; he was both more and less than a man; his figure, intellect, and language bore the imprint of a foreign nationality.. .. far from being rea.s.sured on seeing Bonaparte oftener, he intimidated me more and more every day. I had a confused impression that he was not to be influenced by any emotion of sympathy or affection. He regards a human being as a fact, an object, and not as a fellow-creature. He neither hates nor loves, he exists for himself alone; the rest of humanity are so many ciphers. The force of his will consists in the imperturbable calculation of his egoism. He is a skillful player who has the human species for an antagonist, and whom he proposes to checkmate... Every time that I heard him talk I was struck with his superiority; it bore no resemblance to that of men informed and cultivated through study and social intercourse, such as we find in France and England. His conversation indicated the tact of circ.u.mstances, like that of the hunter in pursuit of his prey. His spirit seemed a cold, keen sword-blade, which freezes while it wounds.

I felt a profound irony in his mind, which nothing great or beautiful could escape, not even his own fame, for he despised the nation whose suffrages he sought... "--"With him, everything was means or aims; spontaneity, whether for good or for evil, was entirely absent."

No law, no ideal and abstract rule, existed for him;

"he examined things only with reference to their immediate usefulness; a general principle was repugnant to him, either as so much nonsense or as an enemy."

Now, if we contemplate Guerin's portrait,[1134] we see a spare body, whose narrow shoulders under the uniform wrinkled by sudden movements, the neck swathed in its high twisted cravat, the temples covered by long, smooth, straight hair, exposing only the mask, the hard features intensified through strong contrasts of light and shade, the cheeks hollow up to the inner angle of the eye, the projecting cheek-bones, the ma.s.sive, protuberant jaw, the sinuous, mobile lips, pressed together as if attentive, the large, clear eyes, deeply sunk under the broad, arched eyebrows, the fixed, oblique look, as penetrating as a rapier, and the two creases which extend from the base of the nose to the brow, as if in a frown of suppressed anger and determined will. Add to this the accounts of his contemporaries[1135] who saw or heard the curt accent or the sharp, abrupt gesture, the interrogating, imperious, absolute tone of voice, and we comprehend how, the moment they accosted him, they felt the dominating hand which seizes them, presses them down, holds them firmly and never relaxes its grasp.

Already, at the receptions of the Directory, when conversing with men, or even with ladies, he puts questions "which prove the superiority of the questioner to those who have to answer them."[1136] "Are you married?" says he to this one, and "How many children have you?"to another. To that one, "When did you come here?" or, again, "When are you going away? He places himself in front of a French lady, well-known for her beauty and wit and the vivacity of her opinions, "like the stiffest of German generals, and says: 'Madame, I don't like women who meddle with politics!'" Equality, ease, familiarity and companions.h.i.+p, vanish at his approach. Eighteen months before this, on his appointment as commander-in-chief of the army in Italy, Admiral Decres, who had known him well at Paris,[1137] learns that he is to pa.s.s through Toulon: "I at once propose to my comrades to introduce them, venturing to do so on my acquaintance with him in Paris. Full of eagerness and joy, I start off.

The door opens and I am about to press forwards," he afterwards wrote, "when the att.i.tude, the look, and the tone of voice suffice to arrest me. And yet there was nothing offensive about him; still, this was enough. I never tried after that to overstep the line thus imposed on me." A few days later, at Albenga,[1138] certain generals of division, and among them Augereau, a vulgar, heroic old soldier, vain of his tall figure and courage, arrive at headquarters, not well disposed toward the little parvenu sent out to them from Paris. Recalling the description of him which had been given to them, Augereau is abusive and insubordinate beforehand: one of Barras' favorites, the Vendemiaire general, a street general, "not yet tried out on the field of battle,[1139] hasn't a friend, considered a loner because he is the only one who can thinks for himself, looking peaky, said to be a mathematician and a dreamer!" They enter, and Bonaparte keeps them waiting. At last he appears, with his sword and belt on, explains the disposition of the forces, gives them his orders, and dismisses them. Augereau has remained silent; It is only when he gets out of doors does he recover himself and fall back on his accustomed oaths. He admits to Ma.s.sena that "that little b.a.s.t.a.r.d of a general frightened him." He cannot "comprehend the ascendancy which made him feel crushed right away."[1140]

Extraordinary and superior, made for command[1141] and for conquest, singular and of an unique species, is the feeling of all his contemporaries. Those who are most familiar with the histories of other nations, Madame de Stael and, after her, Stendhal, go back to the right sources to comprehend him, to the "petty Italian tyrants of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries," to Castruccio-Castracani, to the Braccio of Mantua, to the Piccinino, the Malatestas of Rimini, and the Sforzas of Milan. In their opinion, however, it is only a chance a.n.a.logy, a psychological resemblance. Really, however, and)historically it is a positive relations.h.i.+p. He is a descendant of the great Italians, the men of action of the year 1400, the military adventurers, usurpers, and founders of governments lasting their life-time. He inherits in direct affiliation their blood and inward organization, mental and moral.[1142] A bud, collected in their forest, before the age of refinement, impoverishment, and decay, has been transported into a similar and remote nursery, where a tragic and militant regime is permanently established. There the primitive germ is preserved intact and transmitted from one generation to another, renewed and invigorated by interbreeding. Finally, at the last stage of its growth, it springs out of the ground and develops magnificently, blooming the same as ever, and producing the same fruit as on the original stem. Modern cultivation and French gardening have pruned away but very few of its branches and blunted a few of its thorns: its original texture, inmost substance, and spontaneous development have not changed. The soil of France and of Europe, however, broken up by revolutionary tempests, is more favorable to its roots than the worn-out fields of the Middle Ages and there it grows by itself, without being subject, like its Italian ancestors, to rivalry with its own species; nothing checks the growth; it may absorb all the juices of the ground, all the air and suns.h.i.+ne of the region, and become the Colossus which the ancient plants, equally deep-rooted and certainly as absorbent, but born in a less friable soil and more crowded together, could not provide.

II. The Leader and Statesman

Intelligence during the Italian Renaissance and at the present day.--Integrity of Bonaparte's mental machinery.

--Flexibility, force, and tenacity of his attention.--Another difference between Napoleon's intellect and that of his contemporaries.--He thinks objects and not words.--His antipathy to Ideology.--Little or no literary or philosophical education.--Self-taught through direct observation and technical instruction.--His fondness for details.--His inward vision of physical objects and places.

--His mental portrayal of positions, distances, and quant.i.ties.

"The human plant," said Alfieri, "is in no country born more vigorous than in Italy"; and never, in Italy, was it so vigorous as from 1300 to 1500, from the contemporaries of Dante down to those of Michael Angelo, Caesar Borgia, Julius II., and Macchiavelli.[1143] The first distinguis.h.i.+ng mark of a man of those times is the soundness of his mental instrument. Nowadays, after three hundred years of service, ours has lost somewhat of its moral fiber, sharpness, and versatility: usually the compulsory specialization has caused it to become lop-sided making it unfit for other purposes. What's more, the increase in ready-made ideas and cliches and acquired methods incrusts it and reduces its scope to a sort of routine. Finally, it is exhausted by an excess of intellectual activity and diminished by the continuity of sedentary habits. It is just the opposite with those impulsive minds of uncorrupted blood and of a new stock.--Roederer, a competent and independent judge, who, at the beginning of the consular government, sees Bonaparte daily at the meetings of the Council of State, and who notes down every evening the impressions of the day, is carried away with admiration:[1144]

"Punctual at every sitting, prolonging the session five or six hours, discussing before and afterwards the subjects brought forward, always returning to two questions, 'Can that be justified?[1145]' 'Is that useful?' examining each question in itself, in these two respects, after having subjected it to a most exact and sharp a.n.a.lysis; next, consulting the best authorities, the pasts, experience, and obtaining information about bygone jurisprudence, the laws of Louis XIV. and of Frederick the Great.... Never did the council adjourn without its members knowing more than the day before; if not through knowledge derived from him, at least through the researches he obliged them to make. Never did the members of the Senate and the Legislative Corps, or of the tribunals, pay their respects to him without being rewarded for their homage by valuable instructions. He cannot be surrounded by public men without being the statesman, all forming for him a council of state."

"What characterizes him above them all," is not alone the penetration and universality of his comprehension, but likewise and especially "the force, flexibility, and constancy of his attention. He can work eighteen hours at a stretch, on one or on several subjects. I never saw him tired. I never found his mind lacking in inspiration, even when weary in body, nor when violently exercised, nor when angry. I never saw him diverted from one matter by another, turning from that under discussion to one he had just finished or was about to take up. The news, good or bad, he received from Egypt, did not divert his mind from the civil code, nor the civil code from the combinations which the safety of Egypt required. Never did a man more wholly devote himself to the work in hand, nor better devote his time to what he had to do. Never did a mind more inflexibly set aside the occupation or thought which did not come at the right day or hour, never was one more ardent in seeking it, more alert in its pursuit, more capable of fixing it when the time came to take it up."

He himself said later on:[1146]

"Various subjects and affairs are stowed away in my brain as in a chest of drawers. When I want to take up any special business I shut one drawer and open another. None of them ever get mixed, and never does this incommode me or fatigue me. If I feel sleepy I shut all the drawers and go to sleep."

Never has brain so disciplined and under such control been seen, one so ready at all times for any task, so capable of immediate and absolute concentration. Its flexibility[1147] is wonderful, "in the instant application of every faculty and energy, and bringing them all to bear at once on any object that concerns him, on a mite as well as on an elephant, on any given individual as well as on an enemy's army. ...

When specially occupied, other things do not exist for him; it is a sort of chase from which nothing diverts him." And this hot pursuit, which nothing arrests save capture, this tenacious hunt, this headlong course by one to whom the goal is never other than a fresh starting-point, is the spontaneous gait, the natural, even pace which his mind prefers.

"I am always at work," says he to Roederer.[1148] "I meditate a great deal. If I seem always equal to the occasion, ready to face what comes, it is because I have thought the matter over a long time before undertaking it. I have antic.i.p.ated whatever might happen. It is no spirit which suddenly reveals to me what I ought to do or say in any unlooked-for circ.u.mstance, but my own reflection, my own meditation. ...

I work all the time, at dinner, in the theatre. I wake up at night in order to resume my work. I got up last night at two o'clock. I stretched myself on my couch before the fire to examine the army reports sent to me by the Minister of War. I found twenty mistakes in them, and made notes which I have this morning sent to the minister, who is now engaged with his clerks in rectifying them."--

His a.s.sociates weaken and sink under the burden imposed on them and which he supports without feeling the weight. When Consul,[1149] "he sometimes presides at special meetings of the section of the interior from ten o'clock in the evening until five o'clock in the morning..