Far from gaining re-assurance in meeting Buonaparte oftener, he intimidated me daily more and more. I confusedly felt that no emotion of the heart could possibly take effect upon him. He looks upon a human being as a fact or as a thing, but not as a fellow-creature. He does not hate any more than he loves; there is nothing for him but himself; all other beings are so many ciphers. The force of his will lies in the imperturbable calculation of his selfishness.... His successes are as much to be credited to the qualities which he lacks as to the talents which he possesses. Neither pity, nor attraction, nor religion, nor attachment to any idea whatsoever, could make him swerve from the main path he had chosen. Every time I heard him talk I was struck with his superiority; this, however, had no resemblance to the superiority of men trained and cultivated by study or by society, a class of which England and France can offer examples. But his courses of remark indicated a tact for seizing upon circumstances like that which the hunter has for seizing upon his prey. Sometimes he recounted the political and military incidents of his life in a manner to interest greatly; he had even, in narrations that admitted gayety, a trace of Italian imagination. Still, nothing could get the better of my revulsion for what I perceived in him. I felt, in his soul, a sword, cold and cutting, that froze while it wounded; I felt, in his mind, a fundamental irony from which nothing great, nothing beautiful, not his own glory even, could escape; for he despised the nation whose suffrages he sought; and no single spark of enthusiasm mixed with his wish to astonish mankind. It was during the interval between the return of Buonaparte (from Italy), and his setting out for Egypt toward the end of 1787, that I several times saw him in Paris; and never could I overcome the difficulty which I experienced in breathing in his presence. I was one day seated at table between him and the Abbe Sieyes; singular situation, could I have foreseen the future! [Sieyes, two years later, became one in a triumvirate of "consuls," of whom Napoleon was another.] I scrutinized carefully the face of Napoleon; but every time he detected my observing glances he had the art to rob his eyes of all expression, as if they were changed to marble. His countenance was then immobile, save a vague smile that he brought upon his lips at a venture, in order to throw out any one who might wish to mark the external signs of his thought. It was not a light thing, and Madame de Stael did not feel it a light thing, to hold out as she did, never once dipping her colors, against the will and the power of the man whom she thus describes.