Napoleon (O'Connor 1896).djvu/72

Exported from Wikisource on June 29, 2024

56

Napoleon.

'Ah,' he said, giving himself a blow on the forehead, 'it must be admitted that the Emperor is sometimes hard to serve.' "

And the final result is that Napoleon drives from his Court and his Cabinet every man of sense and honour. "Independence of any kind, even eventual and merely possible, puts him out of humour; intellectual or moral superiority is of this order, and he gradually gets rid of it."

"Towards the last he no longer tolerates alongside of him any but subject or captive spirits; his principal servants are machines or fanatics a devout worshipper like Maret, a gendarme like Savary, ready to do his bidding. From the outset he has reduced his Ministers to the condition of clerks, for he is administrator as well as ruler, and in each department he watches details as closely as the entire mass; accordingly he requires simply for head men active scribes, mute executioners, docile and special hands, no honest and free advisers. 'I should not know what to do with them,' he said, 'if they were not to a certain extent mediocre in mind and character.' "

And the result is the deadening in him of all real human feeling.

"Therefore, outside of explosions of nervous sensibility, 'he has no consideration for men—other than that of a foreman for his workmen,' or, more precisely, for his tools; once the tool is worn out, little does he care whether it rusts

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Table of Contents

Title page

Napoleon (O'Connor 1896).djvu/72

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