This is a curious condition which manifests itself by momentary loss of consciousness; the patient may become suddenly dreamy and purposeless, and may perform curious involuntary actions--even crimes--while _apparently_ conscious. When he recovers he knows nothing about what he has been doing, and may even resume the interrupted action which had occupied him at the moment of the seizure. Some such explanation may account for Napoleon’s fits of furious passion, that seem to have been followed by periods of lethargy and vomiting. It is a sort of pleasing paradox--and mankind dearly loves paradox--to say that supremely great men suffer from epilepsy. It was said of Julius Cæsar, of St. Paul, and of Mohammed. These men are said to have suffered from “falling sickness,” whatever that may have been; there are plenty of conditions which may make men fall to the ground, without being epileptic: Ménière’s disease, for instance. It is ridiculous to suppose that Julius Cæsar and Napoleon--by common consent the two greatest of the sons of men--should have been subject to a disease which deteriorates the intellect. It is possible that some such trouble as “_petit mal_” may have been at the bottom of the curious stories of a certain listless torpor that appears to have overcome Napoleon at critical moments in his later battles. Something of the kind happened at Borodino in 1812, the bloodiest and most frightful battle in history till that time. Napoleon indeed won, in the sense that the exhausted Russians retreated to Moscow, whither he pursued them to his ill-fortune; but the battle was not fought with anything like the supreme genius which he displayed in his other campaigns. Similarly, he is said to have been thus stricken helpless after Ligny, when he defeated Blucher in 1815. He wasted precious hours in lethargy, which should have been spent in his usual furious pursuit of his beaten foe. To this day the French hold that, but for Napoleon’s inexplicable idleness after Ligny, there would have been no St. Helena; and, with all the respect due to Wellington and his thin red line, it is by no means certain that the French are wrong. But nations will continue to squabble about Waterloo till there shall be no more war; and 1814 had been the most brilliant of his campaigns--probably of any man’s campaigns.