This reply struck me. When a government is not solidly established, every man whose conscience goes for nothing becomes, according to the greater or lesser amount of energy in his character, a quarter, or a half, or three-quarters of a conspirator; he awaits the decision of fortune: more traitors are made by events than by opinions. Suddenly the telegraph announced to Napoleon's braves and to the doubters that the man had landed[243]: Monsieur[244] hurried to Lyons, with the Duc d'Orléans and Marshal Macdonald, and returned forthwith. Marshal Soult, denounced in the Chamber of Deputies, gave up his office on the 11th of March to the Duc de Feltre[245]. Bonaparte found facing him, as Minister of War of Louis XVIII. in 1815, the general who had been his last Minister of War in 1814. The boldness of the enterprise was unprecedented. From the political point of view, this enterprise might be regarded as the irremissible crime and capital fault of Napoleon. He knew that the Princes still assembled at the Congress, that Europe still under arms would not suffer him to be reinstated; his judgment must have warned him that a success, if he obtained one, would be only for a day: he was offering up to his passion for reappearing on the scene the repose of a people which had lavished its blood and its treasures upon him; he was laying open to dismemberment the country from which he derived all that he had been in the past and all that he will be in the future. In this fantastic conception lay a ferocious egoism and a terrible absence of gratitude and generosity towards France. All this is true according to practical reason, for a man with a heart rather than brains; but, for beings of Napoleon's nature, there exists a reason of another sort; those creatures of lofty renown have ways of their own: comets describe curves which evade calculation; they belong to nothing, they seem good for nothing; if a globe finds itself on their passage, they shatter it and return into the abysses of the sky; their laws are known to God alone. Extraordinary individuals are monuments of human intelligence; they are not its rule. Bonaparte, therefore, was persuaded to his enterprise less by the false reports of his friends than by the needs of his genius: he took up the cross by virtue of the faith that was in him. To a great man, to be born is not everything: he must die. Was Elba an end for Napoleon? Could he accept the sovereignty of a vegetable-patch, like Diocletian[246] at Salona? If he had waited till later, would he have had more chances of success, at a time when his memory would have aroused less emotion, when his old soldiers would have left the army, when new social positions would have been adopted? Well, then, he committed a fool-hardy act against the world: at the commencement he must have believed that he had not deceived himself as to the spell of his power. [Sidenote: The return from Elba.]