“Ce n’est pas avec les règles de Montécuculli et de Turenne manœuvrant sur la Renchen qu’il faut juger de telles entreprises. Les uns guerroyaient pour avoir tel ou tel quartier d’hiver; l’autre, pour conquérir le monde. Il lui fallait souvent non pas seulement gagner une bataille, mats la gagner de telle façon qu’elle épouvantât l’Europe et amenât des résultats gigantesques. Ainsi les vues politiques intervenaient sans cesse dans le génie stratégique. * * Quelque habile qu’on soit, il y a presque toujours dans ce jeu terrible des risques proportionnés à la grandeur des profits. Le succès est devenu plus chanceux. Les armées étaient plus nombreuses. Ses ennemis, à son exemple, ont eu aussi des masses. * * La machine n’était plus maniable; il a été écrasé.” (Foy, liv. i.) Napoléon’s was a game of double or quits played with the hardihood of a determined gambler. The value of the stakes became multiplied with alarming rapidity, as in the arithmetical problem of the horse-shoe-nails. All the military population and resources of the empire became involved in the chances of the die, and he lost the last throw. General Foy narrates the following anecdote. He was probably himself the interlocutor: “Dans la campagne de France, aux premiers mois de 1814, Napoléon parlait à Troyes en Champagne, avec un de ses généraux, de l’état des choses. ‘Les ennemis, disait celui-ci, sont trop nombreux; il faut que la France se lève’--‘Eh! comment voulez-vous que la France se lève, interrompit avec vivacité Napoléon; il n’y a pas de noblesse, _et j’ai tué la liberté!_’” Of the love which the French people bore to Napoléon, let his march to Cannes be a witness, where the inhabitants, as he passed, surrounded him in hundreds of thousands with unmistakeable demonstrations of blind enthusiasm and delight. Not even the terrible conscription could rase his impression from their hearts. The general equity of his internal administration, the exact system of his public accounts, the effectual discharge of duty which he required of the state servants, the abolition of idle privileged classes, and the cessation of fraud in the management of the revenue or its punishment when detected, caused the people to love him as they everywhere love justice. Napoléon, with all his other splendid faculties, was a skilful financier; he was opposed to public loans, and left no debt. He had no private views, and his active energies were unimpaired in his vassals’ service. The utility of his public works was commensurate with their grandeur, providing at once employment for the poor and embellishment for the country. His Code was a monument of legislative wisdom, and his Cadastre an invaluable equalizer and register of taxation and the liabilities of property. But withal he was a detestable tyrant. II. “Such stone immense as feigned Æolides In Orcus tortured flung.”