“Well, suppose it was Eugène--must you needs break his shoulder bones?” Without further rebuke Napoleon walked out of the gallery. Through the folly of Isabey, the secret leaked out, and there was just enough of the ludicrous about it to embarrass both the actors, and Isabey went to play leap-frog elsewhere. Napoleon was fond of children, knew how to talk to them, play with them, and win their confidence. The man never lived who knew better than he the route to the heart of a soldier, a peasant, or an ambitious boy. With these he could ever use exactly the right word, look, smile, and deed. He was familiar with his friends, joked them, put his arms around them, and walked with them leaning upon them: he never joked with men like Fouché, Talleyrand, Bernadotte, Moreau, and St. Cyr. These men he used, but understood and disliked. Fat women he could not endure, and a pregnant woman showing herself when she should have been in seclusion, excited his disgust. One of the pictures he most liked to gaze upon was that of a tall, slender woman, robed in white, and walking beneath the shade of noble trees. A fastidious, exacting busybody, he was forever on the lookout for violations of good taste on the part of the ladies of his court. He detested the low dresses which exposed the bosom to the vulgar gaze; and if he saw some one dressed in peculiarly unbecoming style, he was rude enough to give words to his irritation. “Dear me! are you never going to change that gown?” This was very, very impolite, but the costume was one which he abhorred, and the wearer had inflicted it upon him “more than twenty times.” Possibly if there were a greater number of outspoken Napoleons, there would be fewer absurdities in fashionable female attire. To some of Napoleon’s sharp sayings, the haughty dames and damsels of the old aristocracy made some crushing replies--according to their _Memoirs_. It is fairly safe to say that these crushing retorts were made in the seclusion of the homes of the fair retorters. The man whose stern look and bitter tongue awed into embarrassed silence such a veteran in word-play as Madame de Staël, was not likely to be crushed by such pert and shallow beings as Madame de Chevreuse and her kind. For facts, events, his memory was prodigious; for names and dates, it was not good. Sometimes he would ask the same man about court three or four different times what his name was. In his later years his memory became very fickle, and he was known to forget having given the most important orders. He could not remember a charge he ordered Ségur to make in Spain; nor could he recall that he had ordered the charge of the heavy cavalry at Waterloo. Noted at school for his skill in mathematics, and using that science constantly in his military operations, it is said that he could rarely add up a column of figures correctly.