De Napoléon

On Napoleon

Suares

I

The world is full of his name, and for a long time yet, it seems full of his work. He exhausted the glory of the man who wills and who reigns. Napoleon is the sovereign spectacle of action. Like action itself, odious and admirable. But greatness carries everything. And those who have a powerful soul forgive everything in power. Every sort of contradiction in him, but all reconciled. Hence he is both hated and admired. France has never ceased to be vain of him, like a woman whose husband was master of all men. She cannot think of him without trembling; and in her trembling, as much as she misses him, she fears him, she fears the regret she keeps.

He is whatever one wishes — bourgeois and Jacobin, man of the people and soldier, emperor of the legions, prefect of prefects, grand pontiff of the various churches. But even were he a god, he is always a gang leader. All men of war admire in him the master of war, the prince of generals. The genius of arms is his: not the torrent of invasions, but the consummate art of maneuver, and the unequaled poet of strategy. To the State and to peace, he gave the forms of the army and of war. He has the passion for unity: such is the genius of the solitary man, with no deep bonds except to himself.

II

He is the man of the Revolution: he is therefore the man of destiny. He accomplishes the enormous work that the Revolution prepares for him. He is like, with his large head of a sulking child, the infant who gathers up the pieces of the game. The Revolution threw him in a heap the stones, the fresh beams, and the debris; he seizes the building site, and he builds the house with its two wings of stock exchange and barracks. And triumphal arches open all the avenues.

Good-natured in his family, and even weak with his own, a faithful friend, he appears heartless like the Revolution. An upstart like her, like her all reason. Moreover, using reason without scruples, he subjects to it everything that stands in his way. He thinks: reason is myself. And there you have the crimes of order and reason of State.

III

They called him: the Usurper. But nothing stronger can be said of the conqueror, when one childishly refuses to give him his name. Legitimate power owes, first of all, its tranquility and its exercise only to the weakness of men. He who usurps power is he who deserves it, if he keeps it: he is the solitary man who dared. There is nothing more beautiful under heaven than the man who dares. He who is bold enough to found his right upon his power, that man at least has more than power: he has authority.

That is why he who is force is also order; and order far more even than force; for order is the second age of force, and all the wheat of the ear.

IV

He is thought Italian, because he cannot pronounce his “u”s. He is called Tuscan, because there were Buonapartes at San Miniato. Besides, they are found in Treviso and in Udine. But certainly, Napoleon is the least Venetian of the sons of the Mediterranean. What does he care for voluptuousness, and the flesh? and women?

He lives on beans and rough wine. A little coffee. He does not smoke. He takes snuff, to occupy his fingers, looking at his beautiful short, plump hand. He needs, in everything concerning the flesh, only snacks. He knows how to sleep when he wishes, thanks to which he almost does without sleep. He knows how to be a lover at the appointed hour: they prepare for him, in conquered capitals, a woman and a supper. He dispatches the supper in half a quarter of an hour; the woman, in six minutes.

V

Once, he loved with passion: he was twenty-seven, and had just had the itch. Having the itch is a fine beginning to the game: the skin burns. Ambition is another kind of itch, where the heart itches forever. In this first love, Bonaparte avenges himself for having waited too long for fortune and glory. He avenges himself for having thought of becoming a Turk. The ripe Creole, halfway between the courtesan and the marquise, without sense, without morals, without wit, has all the charm of the carnal idol. She has a taste for perfumes and dress. She covers herself in lace and silk. She is greedy. She chatters at the end of a branch, on the island coconut tree, the warm tree of pleasure. She adores herself. And he, the chaste ambitious man with hollow cheeks, the lean lion, believes he holds in her all the refinement of the old world. This man who spends nothing on his table, nothing on his clothes, nothing on anything at all, imagines that he possesses, in this woman, everything that tempts others and everything he disdains: he seizes luxury and the flesh; he believes he enjoys in her all the follies: perhaps he even enjoys being a dupe.

Later, he has another love of reason for Marie-Louise. The forty-five-year-old man, the fat eagle, with the large crop, his belly full on short thighs, wants to feel, in a chosen victim, the world throbbing. He exults at pressing between his talons the daughter of the Habsburgs, and he laughs at the pendulous lip that always pouts. Ah, if he could have fathered a child on the daughter of Louis XVI!

Marriage, which ruined Napoleon, all the same completed him; then, he is all calculation. How fine to see the man of fact, the god of the real, grasp nothing of reality except as a geometer, who models every form on the figures of his mind! Love of the head is the favorite exercise of tyrants.

VII

No doubt, to speak of the Corsican is to name Napoleon: one must still paint him. Corsica made his entire maternal line. But the land has its secrets, even if it does everything. The Corsicans are not all Bonapartes, even if every Corsican recognizes himself in him.

Corsica is an ancient nation, more ancient even than Rome or thirteenth-century Italy. Nothing Greek in her. But she has the deep scent of the Orient. At sea, on a summer night, the perfume of Corsica intoxicates the nostrils, like the tunic of the Shulamite unfurled. It is a scent of citron and myrrh, of incense, thyme and cypress: sweeter than orange blossom, warmer than carnation, fresher than spices, as if a spring flowed over sandalwood and clove. In his exile on Elba, each evening, the west wind carried the living scent of Corsica to Napoleon, turned toward the setting sun. And, closing his eyes, he let himself be haunted by it; he let himself be rocked by it; for this perfume coos, like the turtledove, that comes and goes, and wraps the solitary listener in its wing and in its gentle moaning.

Corsica is a village Phoenicia, with the Punic genius. The clan is the soul of Corsica. They live by clans, as they did thirty centuries ago. They have the morality of the clan, which is the respect of strength: always faithful to the strongest. And the strongest is the most intelligent. This people venerates intelligence like the Jew or the Arab. For them as for those others, in intelligence there is success, cunning, and justice, the excuse for perfidy if need be, and the legitimate use of violence. Thus, vengeance is not a right but a duty; and the clan never fails in it.

VIII

The Corsican is the cousin of the Genoese, but not of the Latin species people claim. The Ligurians, great men of action in every domain, from Julius II to Mazzini, born sailors, full of cunning and resource, willful and wily, sometimes treacherous and often prophets, animated by the spirit that outpaces the times, and that hurls them headlong into action — they are Roman by culture and choice, not by instinct or origin.

Ligurian, Corsican, Napoleon has the Punic genius in all its power. He is the Carthaginian consul of Rome. He is the new Hannibal, the sword in one hand and the code in the other.

IX

Napoleon is the man of the clan; but his clan is the nucleus of the world. Selfish like conquest, like possession of omnipotence, selfish to the point where he no longer appears to be. For he is alone on his side; and on the other, all the rest of mankind, the material on which his will works. He treats the Revolution, France, and Europe like an allied village, or an enemy village he has conquered for his family. When Europe escapes him, France remains; when France, the remnants of the Grand Army; when the army, the island of Elba; and when Elba, his jailers in the hell of Saint Helena. And even there, he seizes hold of posterity. A nature naive in self-love to the point of simplicity. This simplicity nourishes strength. Master of the world, the god of the clan cuts the figure of a great bourgeois, so perfectly does he administer his empire and his Olympus of glory with economy.

X

Simplicity that confounds analysis: a self more powerful and more complete, more continuous than all the elements that compose it. Everything is an object to him, to seize, to devour, to keep or to break: it is the idea of a child playing with universal life, never doubting himself, and thereby giving credit to all things; for things are nothing except in relation to the use he makes of them. Magnificent simplicity, entirely contrary to the artist’s! As he thinks, he decides; he takes sides as he makes contact: never does he forget himself. Never does he stray from his line. He is the Corsican oak, which can believe the entire earth made solely for its roots, and the sky solely to dispense sun and rain. Never was a man so little of the West. He was not vulnerable in the head or in the heart, nor even in the heel, like all those whom dreams have dipped, from birth, in the Atlantic wave.

So be it. And at least, let one look squarely at the means of conquest! Ah, let one never begrudge victory the right to be selfish: for victory is the only charity of action.

Where then is the unity of this man, in whom unity is so strong? One is master in action to the measure that one is one. None has the instinct for it more than he, the great Punic.

Napoleon is THE MAN OF VALUE, in every domain, in every place, in every time. No one has known as he did the value of every object, of every idea, and of every act. He is a prodigious machine for weighing values — men and events. To weigh, to think. He places everything on his scales, and he has no use for what will not be placed there. He is not a mathematician: he is arithmetic incarnate. On the evening of Friedland, twenty thousand dead, sixty thousand wounded, it is he who says: “One night in Paris will repair all that.” He is not blind, he is not insensible: he has a view of this enormous charnel house; its stench is in his nostrils. It was June. But neither the horror, nor the sadness, nor the putrefaction, nor the cries of the dying occupy him. His business is elsewhere: having surveyed the immense carnage, he weighed it; then he compensated for it, according to the rules of his arithmetic, which is his justice. As soon as he weighs, he compensates. And no less surely, he rewards.

War, the calculus of masses, is the supreme calculus of values in the order of bodies.

He who commands in war commands all markets. He reigns over the values of matter; he gives the legal standard to all of them. That is why the greatest of men born to weigh values and fix them, Napoleon, is also the greatest of men of war. He staked everything on war when he had to; and since Napoleon, in war a nation risks life and death. War is the operation that encompasses all others: it is the temporal measure between interests and nations.

This great judge of value, as a conqueror who needs the lives of other men, was bound to make military valor the supreme value. And courage, indeed, is the highest value in his eyes. The war leader is nothing without the valor of his soldiers: that is the worst torment for Alexander.

It is not their lives he cares for, but the gift they know how to make of them. Napoleon is therefore thrifty and very wisely sparing of them. He knows that he depends closely on those who are willing to die for him. Napoleon forgave everything to courage. He hated nothing so much in his lieutenants turned princes as their attachment to life and to goods. He could not conceive that these mighty parvenus, at forty-five and at fifty, should no longer wish to risk their lives and all the goods of life on a throw of the dice, as they had done at thirty, to win glory and fortune.

XIV

The war leader speculates on men: they are the raw material of his game. But if wheat, sugar, wool, gold and copper always let themselves be handled, it happens that men refuse. The same men keep getting killed, until the day when they are dead indeed: the day also when they withdraw from the game and want to live.

XV

By dint of handling values, Napoleon forgot that human valor is subject to change, and that it is not solely passive. Hence, while so profound and so much master of himself in success, when he weighs men well, he seems so strangely blind in reverses, so brutally obstinate in defeat. He always calculates just as well; but he does not notice that the units and elements of his calculation are no longer the same. He performs the same operations with quantities that are no longer of the same order; and he is astonished to find no correct solution to the problem.

XVI

His politics were those of victory. In disaster, he was not caught short on the battlefield; but he lost his footing in negotiation. He needed at least the king and the jack of trumps to discard well.

He regarded a man as a fact, every passion as a cipher, every action as a number, every life ultimately as a sign entering into his arithmetic.

Living beings and the particular feelings that animate them are, in the eyes of this sovereign accountant, merely elements of his operations. It is he who multiplies, subtracts, divides according to the rules of his will; and everything always ends in addition. The coffers must be filled, and he sees to it with inflexible care. There you have the omnipotence of reason. And here its weakness: the sense of feeling is what he lacks.

He does not even deny it: he makes use of it and mistrusts it; he evaluates it in titles, he estimates it in currency of exchange; and he esteems it little. For, it is true, it is the most variable value. It is not reliable enough for the Emperor of value: he is astonished by these frenzied exchange rates. So long as he is there, he refuses to believe that this value can reduce all others to nothing. Master of France, he fails to recognize the force that gave her to him.

Such is the origin of his grossest errors, in which he was compelled to persevere. With the Pope, an old man in prison, whom he thought to reduce to the role of chaplain. With Tsar Alexander, whom he believed he had seduced to the point of lulling his self-regard, as if the self-regard of a young sovereign slept with only one eye. With the sorry Habsburgs, who may well have lost everything in the shipwreck, but who always keep the thick lip; and it swells with rage when they must put their blonde daughter in the bed of the Ligurian captain, who smells of garlic and cologne.

The emperor weighs provinces and kingdoms; but he has no scales fine enough to weigh feelings. There are no ledgers kept up to date for passions, as there are for regiments.

XVIII

The triumph of the Punic idea is no doubt the triumph of reason: at the very least, that of ancient thought.

One can always reduce the species of reason to values in quantity. More than ever here, Napoleon is the flail of the Revolution, threshing the grain of the world. For the Revolution is an attempt to found the human race on reason and the values of reason. Sovereign reason considers only numbers; absolute mistress, she is a table of values always kept current. She omits, precisely, only life, feelings, and passions.

XIX

In peace, Napoleon trains for war through the implacable exercise of reason. It is admirable how a State founded on reason governs itself by the maxims of force. His law is without mercy.

XX

Knowledge of gold and of true power depends on reason. By the hatred one sees in him for domestic thieves, parasites, and graft, one senses that the respect for gold was a dominant habit in Napoleon. No one loved fortune less for its own sake; but he had penetrated the meaning of gold. He does not love gold like a miser. The miser is the slave of the sign. Napoleon, beneath the sign, adheres to the fact as the pia mater to the brain. He venerates gold as a conqueror. The conqueror has his own way of venerating, which is jealous possession. If he could have, Napoleon would have been the sole banker of the universe: he dreamed of holding all the gold and all the credit of the planet.

XXI

Napoleon, the first since the great politicians of Rome, knew that gold is the sign of strength and the tool of power. There remains the man capable of conquering and handling them. Iron is the handle and lever of gold; but gold is the point of iron, which pierces everything. Iron scatters gold, and gold dissolves iron.

Also, Napoleon could not suffer graft. The slightest theft from the State, he punished like treason. The code is terrible against counterfeiters: is this not the last word of reason, and its thumb turned down in the arena?

Behind the man of war, one does not lose sight of the arbiter of values. In Napoleon, it is the same man. By which one should not understand that the man of the stock exchange is the man of war. One of the two contains the other; but the conqueror is the great man, not your swineherds of Chicago. Let the serfs of opinion, today, not have the audacity to compare Austerlitz and Jena with a coup in suet and pigs. When Napoleon reigns, Ouvrard is forced to serve.

XXII

Destiny, says Napoleon, is politics.

Politics is the exact balance of commerce. Do not despise commerce, if you have a sense of Latin. All the proconsuls and all the knights rise up; commerce is the great business of the world: it is the negation of rest — neg-otium — movement, the action that affirms. It is man in the act of willing. It is not about trade and making a fortune! It is about forcing fortune, and muzzling fate. Let her follow her master to the hunt, the bitch! Let her point for him!

To complete the man of value in Napoleon, there was the Latin spirit, the judge in the Roman manner: the head of order, which seeks to create the unity of the species, and which imposes it. For the Roman mind, order lies in unity.

A single value, a single currency, a single signature: an immutable standard for every form of wealth and of action. Even of thought. The sublime absurdity of Napoleon’s ideas on art and poets. This is why Napoleon never understood that anyone should oppose to him the genius of artists, the freedom of parties, the independence of peoples, the rights of individuals. In his eyes, there is no private person. Every individual belongs first to the State.

He had fixed the legal type of all these rebellious values. He had taken their guardianship and keeping. He was ready to sacrifice everything to them, and in part himself. He could not admit that anyone should seek variables or obliques to the political and moral perpendiculars he had lowered from the fixed point: the interest of the State, as he had conceived it and confused it with his own interest. In everything the concern for unity, and if you will, the mania.

A single State, an empire surrounded by feudatory kingdoms. A single spirit, a single lycee, a single school. The Continental Blockade is unity in the economic order. The codes, unity in the realm of laws; and one may say that the deep vice of these codes, which conquered Europe, is assuredly the contempt for species: they deny change; they ignore the individual. In criminal law, they push this ignorance to atrocity, to stupidity. Napoleon would gladly have rolled the same roller over churches and religions. In Cairo, he plays the Muslim, and the old orthodox in Moscow. He is furious at not having a new Gospel to promulgate, with the Vicar of Jesus Christ. He believed himself to be the Revolution and the old regime, reason and faith.

A few traits of his morality, a few numbers of his arithmetic.

He himself says that his name means: the lion of the desert. Where does he draw that meaning? But how the name suits him! the desert being of Carthage and the lion of Rome. He loves the desert; he is profoundly moved by it. And life is his prey: everything is prey to him. He breathes only for dominion.

XXVI

The man of destiny will always be the man of chance. Politics is the lucky accident; and the great man who wins the game makes the vanquished believe he foresaw every move. He speaks of tamed chance when he wins; and when he loses, of fatality. But these ideas are for the people. Speaking to himself, Napoleon invokes his star: and when it is favorable, he makes it shine in the eyes of his soldiers. He is a gambler like Hannibal. At every moment, one senses that he no more believes in his fortune than in anything else. But no less either. He believes in the throw of the dice; and above all that one can always load them, with the help of fortune, which is chance turned accomplice. The fortune of a conqueror is always subject to a few extraordinary throws of the dice. He himself — it is his genius — dares to attempt them. The great Caesar was not afraid to admit as much, because he had every kind of courage.

XXVII

Napoleon speaks of his star as a believer speaks of his patron saint. He praises it, he boasts of it, he accuses it. I am sure he prays to it. What gambler is not superstitious? Napoleon has his fetishes and his secrets for warding off bad luck. The spoken word is his talisman of choice: he gives much to words that serve as titles, and to the imprecations of false anger; he also gives much to spectacle. In all his comedy with the Pope and with the Kings, I see a magic ceremony. Such a man had too great a head not to feel the absurdity of these masquerades and the odiousness of crowns piled on that fine brow, which they diminish and weigh down, but which they could never enlarge.

XXVIII

He gambles on facts, the bold adventurer. He has often hidden the gaming table beneath the trappings, sacred to all men, of eloquence, royal pomp, and prophecy. But at bottom he was gambling the empire on a chance, at Waterloo as before Saint-Roch. His mother was not deceived, her eye on him — that eye of the nursemaid who expects everything and is never fooled, the eye that knew the man’s body in the cradle, the eye of the woman who changed her little one in swaddling clothes. A gambler herself, Letizia, the old Fate, put millions away, in the solar times of Austerlitz and Jena, in provision for the dark season. And she dared say of her sons, all bunched together in a ball, the great one with the small, as they are tangled on a mother’s distaff: “They will be very glad later that I was here. It will not last.” What a remark! And what a perspective! A triumphal arch leading to a dungeon. Of all ideas, the last that would ever have occurred to one of our kings: chance, master of the prince, and king of kings! One cannot always win, and one must accept that one may lose.

XXIX

If… The word of chance! It is the banner of the game. The word that flutters, the word that trembles, the word that falls. If… The conjunction of will and power, the knot tying fact to hypothesis, the present to the future. The word that returns ceaselessly in Napoleon’s speech: “If… I would have pacified all parties. I would have reconciled men and centuries. I would have brought happiness to France. I would have changed the face of the world. If…”

This great realist dreams by I and by If, to infinity. And ceaselessly, in everything, to create order, he must change the face of the world.

XXX

What other means but force? The great artist lives only to possess the world and remake it to his liking. Napoleon is the poet of action: war is his magnificent art. He kneads the human clay; he sculpts in the living mass, warm, in the flesh and the purple of blood.

XXXI

He was very talkative, but never without design. He makes others talk, to learn what he wants to know. Once he knows it, conversation is no longer anything for him, having an opinion, but a skirmish in which he imposes it, and sometimes a battle. Such is conversation at Nineveh: a pleasure without contradiction.

Power of the imagination: he knows it; but not enough in himself. At every instant, he believes what he wants; he sees himself as he imagines. And such is his power over the weak that one still sees him as he wanted to be seen.

There is cause for laughter and for admiration when he speaks of his love for peace, of all he wanted to do with it. It is to make peace that he goes to Moscow, putting Europe to fire and sword: and if he could have, he would have gone to make peace in India, in Persia, and in China.

He does not lie. He sees what he dreams, like the artist at work. Ha! Give me a world or two to conquer, so that I may make peace there, so that I may carve it, from the solid block, in the image of what I want, of what I am!

XXXII

He is without pity for everything that disturbs value, for everything that debases the gold standard, as he fixes it in every domain.

He drives out the man who will not serve the State: and if he is unfit for it, he proscribes him: what good is he? Cowardice in the army, failure to serve in the ranks of the Empire — two crimes Napoleon does not forgive.

He therefore abhors the woman who plays the man. He turns his back on Madame de Stael; he will not put the plume on that turban of infinite pretensions. And when a Turkish grenadier, fishing for a compliment, asks the First Consul which woman he prefers, he answers: “The one who bears the most children.” A brutal remark, not in the French manner, but in the ancient, and less Scipio’s than Hannibal’s.

To play the man, indeed, is the surest way for a woman to stop bearing children. Feathered women have not yet found the recipe for turning their ridiculous husbands into wet nurses.

To his Josephine, when he still loves her as too ardent a lover, he does not give her “beloved,” nor “my heart,” nor “my love.” He calls her: my good friend, my good one. Had she given him a son, he would never have repudiated her. He says, later, to his mistresses of an hour, when he opens the door for them, taking leave after a brief effusion: “You are a good girl!” Supreme praise in his mouth: a good woman, a good mother. Never was a man less a lover of love.

He puts in it perhaps less bourgeois vulgarity than the accent of a sworn weigher, or an assayer of gold: a good woman, a good girl, a good coin; she is worth what she is worth; she does not lie about her stamp or her fineness.

XXXIII

He holds to every value, to the point of being their dupe. A man of antiquity in everything, he is the hero of the family. He puts forth branches; he is in the family like the trunk in the roots and the boughs. He respects in the eldest the only quality he does not possess. He believes in his brothers, even when he judges them. He shows them infinite indulgence. He could crush them — he even should — and he spares them: often I seem to see a lion with its lice; and when they torment him, he flicks them off with his claw, instead of annihilating them on his bedding. Astonishing in irony, he is amused by this vermin; he lets himself be devoured. He is a dupe, wants to be, and knows it.

XXXV

He had heart for those of his clan. He had none for France.

There is absolutely nothing of the Christian in him. That is why feeling is a value, in his eyes, only in others. He makes use of the immense love he inspires in the Gauls, always mad for justice and knights of glory. He keeps a cool head; he leads them by reason; but it is passionate only in them. To stifle their cries, he gorges them with victories. But more than once, he frightens them. In political affairs, he is more terrible than Nero: because he is immovably reasonable. The State is the stone monster. Napoleon is the State: his crimes are glacial. Reason of State, crime of State — right of the State, for Napoleon. Subject to destiny, he takes himself for destiny; he inexorably subjects others to it. The crimes of destiny are hardly more than accidents. A certain rainy morning, in the shadows of a very dark and very foul night, the Duke of Enghien died by accident, in the moat of Vincennes.

XXXVI

Napoleon is impassive. Certainly, he loves France. And how not? Where would he ever have made such a fortune? France is the divine lever. Hannibal lacked nothing but a France: Rome would have perished.

In spite of everything, he did not have the heart of old France, the one he had received from the new France, and that she had given him, without his knowing, in giving him her heart. He was not capable of forgetting himself for her. As with the State, for Napoleon, France is himself; it is his son, his blood. When France separates from Napoleon and his boy, Napoleon has no more pity for France. The great pity that lies in the kingdom of France, he did not feel it when it bled. After Russia and Leipzig, he could refuse the Rhine frontier — out of pride! He did not want to leave France smaller than he had received her. Sire, you should not have believed yourself greater than she.

XXXVII

Napoleon has the deepest contempt for the Bourbons: a contempt without violence, such as one has for sickly braggarts, for minors, for imbeciles. Legitimate contempt, if I dare say so with a laugh. And in truth, the Bourbons have never washed themselves clean of that contempt. Obscurely, the people heaps it upon them. The last degree of contempt a people has for its kings: it ignores them, totally.

Napoleon killed the kings.

XXXVIII

The man of value and of the strictest exchange detests nothing so much as the man of irony: for irony scrambles all values and upsets the rates of exchange.

Irony is counterfeit currency itself in matters of judgment. And yet, counterfeit currency is recognized by comparison with good. Irony is a more subtle forger: it debases the metal, in the name of a higher right, in the hands of those who give and those who receive; it confounds the denominations. It lends a sovereign value to what may have none, or a middling one. In substituting itself, it debases the finest credit in the world; it wears it down, it disfigures it. It corrupts the signature. The seal, which was worth gold bars, is worth no more than copper. Irony, in the end, demonetizes the staters of Syracuse, to transfer their worth, not to what has none — far worse — to the fictitious value, which sometimes is real, but which above all is disruptive, being the unknown value. And the more unknown it is, the more ruinous it is to all established habits. Irony is the king’s counterfeit currency. It is the negation of value.

That is how Napoleon never ceased to hate Talleyrand, without managing to do without him. Talleyrand was his weakness, his vice, his silk stocking, his one perverted taste, his Western taste. Talleyrand irritated and tempted him from his very name, which he could never manage to pronounce as it is written: Taillerand, he said.

What would Napoleon not have given to crush this prince of corruption, or to inspire in him a little of his own sound conscience? But the glacial intelligence of the accursed cripple escaped reproach: that mind remains incorruptible in all the putrefactions of action and morals. He eludes even contempt, through the superior contempt of the skeptic and the accomplished egoist. He blunts the tyrant’s violence with the impassive mask he opposes to insults; and he is stronger than threats, stronger than blows, placing between them and himself the cruel distance of irony, and the infinite remoteness of a politeness never caught at fault, and which surrenders nothing of itself.

At every moment, a disconcerted Napoleon lost his footing before Talleyrand; and growling against him, he was seduced, perhaps frightened by this demon of secret irony. At every moment, he marveled with rage at enduring his presence, and at not yet having annihilated him.

XXXIX

It takes a French peasant, and above all a peasant from the South, to understand all that Napoleon was, all that he received from France, all that he gave her, and all that he allowed her to return in exchange.

Napoleon is, like Joan of Arc, a supreme occasion of the race. But Joan belongs to the race, and Napoleon does not. While Joan of Arc carries the entire ideal of the nation, to the point of creating the nation itself, it is the nation that gives its ideal to Napoleon, and that charges him with it. He should be crushed by it, and he is not. He does not abdicate his own genius. Napoleon is a sublime force, but without love. The ideal of France is infinitely stronger than he, and just as sublime. He is only a man, after all; and she, even after him, endures. Nothing endures but through love.

When the Army of the South chose Napoleon for its master and its idol, there was a conqueror in each of those lean peasants, with their cat-like spines, moving by leaps and laughter, without clothes and without shoes. Never mind the pillage, the soldier’s love, the coarse manners, the camp violence, and all the crimes of war. Each of those brown ploughmen was a living flame. It burned for the Messiah, for Justice and for Reason, as they called it. Are these empty words, in the hearts of these sons of the soil? Words? No — the banners of France free and delivering mankind: the same France, the same standards that proclaimed, under Joan of Arc, Jesus and the King.

Napoleon has no equal, so long as he equals the genius of France. If he speaks for himself, for his house, for his order, France turns away from him. Greater, no doubt, for having lost himself thus. His weakness is not the man’s; but rather, that a moment came when the sovereign man’s strength separated from the national strength. And the weakness of France paralyzed the sovereign man’s strength. France was falling from exhaustion, and Napoleon was tireless. There is where this great man of value lost the sense of value. Whether he dies of an ulcer of the stomach or the liver: no one was healthier than he: he dies of no longer being.

Value and health, what a man can do and what he is worth for living — it is all one. And perhaps, in what he is worth, there lies profoundly all that is needed. Full value is fate fixed and in possession of all its strength. Hero of possession as much as of conquest, Napoleon resurrected the world of the ancients on the scale of modern fate. He is the man who exhausted power, having summed up in himself all the values of action.

August 1910.