But at this point the fatal charlatan-element got the upper-hand. He apostatized from his old faith in facts, took to believing in semblances; strove to connect himself with Austrian dynasties, popedoms, with the old false feudalities which he once saw clearly to be false; considered that _he_ would found 'his dynasty' and so forth; that the enormous French revolution meant only that! The man was 'given up to strong delusion that he should believe a lie;' a fearful but most sure thing. He did not know true from false now when he looked at them; the fearfulest penalty a man pays for yielding to untruth of heart. _Self_ and false ambition had now become his god: _self_-deception once yielded to, _all_ other deceptions follow naturally, more and more. What a paltry patch-work of theatrical paper-mantles, tinsel and mummery, had this man wrapped his own reality in, thinking to make it more real thereby! His hollow Pope's-Concordat, pretending to be a reestablishment of Catholicism, felt by himself to be the method of extirpating it, '_la vaccine de la religion_;' his ceremonial coronations, consecrations by the old Italian chimera in Notre Dame there; 'wanting nothing to complete the pomp of it but the half million who had died to put an end to all that!' Cromwell's inauguration was by the sword and Bible; what we must call a genuinely _true_ one. Sword and Bible were borne before him, without any chimera. Were not these real emblems of Puritanism; its true decoration and insignia? It had used them both in a very real manner, and pretended to stand by them now! But this poor Napoleon mistook; he believed too much in the _dupeability_ of men; saw no fact deeper in man than hunger and this. He was mistaken. Like a man that should build upon cloud; his house and he falls down in confused wreck, and depart out of the world. Alas! in all of us this charlatan-element exists; and might be developed, were the temptation strong enough. 'Lead us not into temptation!' But it is fatal, I say, that it _be_ developed. The thing into which it enters as a cognizable ingredient is doomed to be altogether transitory; and, however huge it may _look_, is in itself small. Napoleon's working, accordingly, what was it with all the noise it made? A flash as of gunpowder wide spread; a blazing up as of dry heath. For an hour the whole universe seems wrapt in smoke and flame; but only for an hour. It goes out. The universe, with its old mountains and streams, its stars above and kind soil beneath, is still there.