Never had Napoleon’s power seemed so great, nor his court so splendid. His vassal kings came to Paris with brilliant retinues, the kings of Saxony, Bavaria, Westphalia, Würtemberg, and Naples, the Viceroy of Italy, the Queen of Holland, besides princes and dukes by the dozen. Paris had become the capital of Continental Europe, and from Paris went forth the law to eighty million people. All Frenchmen realized the grandeur of this huge empire; but many a wise Frenchman was oppressed by anxieties. What if the Emperor should suddenly die? Would the succession go quietly to his brothers, or would the mighty fabric fall to pieces? All this power, all this splendor, hung as by a single hair upon the life of Napoleon; and there were others besides Talleyrand and Fouché who speculated upon what should be done if the Emperor should fall in battle. When the bullet struck his toe at Ratisbonne, the troops broke ranks and crowded toward him in their breathless eagerness to know whether he were seriously hurt; and the far-seeing said, “Suppose the ball had struck two feet higher!” When it became known that a young German fanatic, Staps, bent on assassinating the Emperor, had almost reached him with his knife when stopped, the same uneasy feeling prevailed. Too much depended on this one life. The Emperor had no bodily heir; by Josephine he would never have one; the favorite nephew, Hortense’s son, the little Napoleon, might have been adopted, but he died of croup in Holland. * * * * * His power in the north being now secure, it was expected that Napoleon would take charge of the war in the south, and end it. He could easily have done so. England had less than thirty thousand troops there, and the native soldiers, Spaniards and Portuguese, could not have stood against French veterans led by the greatest soldiers of all time. Besides, he could have crushed resistance by the mere weight of numbers. Why did he never return to Spain? Joseph was blundering as stupidly as mortal could; the French commanders were not acting in concert, but were pulling against each other; things were going as badly as the English could reasonably expect; and nowhere in the Empire was its Emperor needed worse than here. But Napoleon, once so quick to rush to the point of danger, let the “Spanish ulcer” run, year in and year out, with an apathy for which it is impossible to account. Either he had grown fonder of his personal ease, or the dreary kind of warfare necessary to reduce a national uprising did not appeal to his imagination, or he feared that in his absence the north might again give trouble, or he took an imperial pride in seeming to say to the world that the insurrection in the south was too trifling a matter for his personal attention and could be left to his lieutenants.