If it were possible to call this universal imposture into question, if men who have not seen the days of the Empire were to insist upon regarding as sincere all that they come upon in printed documents, or even all that they might dig up in certain boxes at the public offices, it would be enough to appeal to an unexceptionable witness, to the "Conservative" Senate; there, in the decree which I have quoted above, you have seen its own words: * "Taking into consideration that the liberty of the press has been constantly submitted to the arbitrary censorship of his police, and that, at the same time, he has always made use of the press to fill France and Europe with fabricated facts and false maxims; that acts and reports, passed by the Senate, have undergone alterations when made public, etc." Is there any reply possible to this declaration? The life of Bonaparte was an incontestable truth, which imposture had taken upon itself to write. * [Sidenote: Pride and affectation.] A monstrous pride and an incessant affectation spoil Napoleon's character. At the time of his dominion, what need had he to exaggerate his stature, when the God of Armies had furnished him with the war chariot "whose wheels are living"? He took after the Italian blood; his nature was complex: great men, a very small family upon earth, unhappily find only themselves to imitate them. At once a model and a copy, a real personage and an actor representing that personage, Napoleon was his own mime; he would not have believed himself a hero, if he had not dressed himself up in a hero's costume. This curious weakness gives something false and equivocal to his astonishing realities: one is afraid of taking the king of kings for Roscius, or Roscius for the king of kings. Napoleon's qualities are so much adulterated in the gazettes, the pamphlets, the poems and even in the songs overrun with imperialism, that those qualities are completely unrecognisable. All the touching things ascribed to Bonaparte in the _ana_ about the "prisoners," the "dead," the "soldiers," are idle trash to which the actions of his life give the lie. The _Grand-mère_ of my illustrious friend Béranger is only an admirable ballad: Bonaparte had nothing of the good fellow about him. Dominion personified, he was hard; that coldness formed the antidote to his fiery imagination; he found in himself no word, he found only a deed, and a deed ready to chafe at the smallest independence: a gnat that flew without his orders was a rebellious insect in his eyes. It was not enough to lie to the ears, it was necessary to lie to the eyes: here, in an engraving, we see Bonaparte taking off his hat to the Austrian wounded; there, we have a little _tourlourou_[379] who prevents the Emperor from passing; further on, Napoleon touches the plague-stricken of Jaffa, and he never touched them; he crosses Mount St. Bernard on a spirited horse amid a whirl of snow-flakes, and it was the finest weather in the world.