royal power; his strength was derived from the citizen masses, his rank from his genius; and therefore you see him pass without effort from the market-square to the throne, from the kings and queens who crowded round him at Erfurt[233] to the bakers and oilmen who danced in his barn at Porto-Ferrajo. He had something of the people among princes, and of the prince among the people. At five o'clock in the morning, in silk stockings and buckled shoes, he presided over his masons in the island of Elba. Established in his Empire, inexhaustible in iron since the days of Virgil, Insula inexhaustis Chalybum generosa metallis[234], Bonaparte had not forgotten the outrages to which he had lately been subjected; he had not renounced his intention of tearing off his winding-sheet; but it suited him to seem buried, only to make some appearance of a phantom around his monument. That is why he was eager, as though thinking of nothing else, to go down into his quarries of specular iron and adamant; one would have taken him for the ex-inspector of Mines of his former States. He repented of having once appropriated the revenue of the forges of "Ilva" to the Legion of Honour: 500,000 francs now seemed to him worth more than a blood-bathed cross on the breast of his grenadiers. "What was I thinking of?" he said. "But I have issued many stupid decrees of that nature." He made a commercial treaty with Leghorn and proposed to make another with Genoa. At all hazards, he began to make five or six furlongs of high-road and designed the sites of four large towns, just as Dido laid out the boundaries of Carthage. A philosopher who had seen too much of human greatness, he declared that he intended thenceforth to live like a justice of the peace in an English county: and notwithstanding, on climbing a height which overlooks Porto-Ferrajo, these words escaped him at the sight of the sea which flowed up on every side at the foot of the cliffs: "The devil! It must be owned that my island is very small!" He had visited his domain within a few hours; he wished to join to it a rock called Pianosa. "Europe will accuse me," he said, laughing, "of already having made a conquest." The Allied Powers made merry over the fact that they had in derision left him four hundred soldiers: he needed no more to bring them all back to the flag.