The Emperor meddled with everything; his intelligence never rested; he had a sort of perpetual agitation of ideas. In the impetuousness of his nature, instead of a free and continuous train, he advanced by leaps and bounds, he flung himself upon the universe and shook it; he would have none of it, of that universe, if he was obliged to wait for it: an incomprehensible being, who found the secret of debasing his most towering actions by despising them, and who raised his least elevated actions to his own level. Impatient of will, patient of character, incomplete and as though unfinished, Napoleon had gaps in his genius: his understanding resembled the sky of that other hemisphere under which he was to go to die, the sky whose stars are separated by empty spaces. One asks one's self by what spell Bonaparte, so aristocratic, so hostile to the people, came to achieve the popularity which he enjoyed: for that forger of yokes has most certainly remained popular with a nation whose pretension was to raise altars to independence and equality; here is the solution of the enigma: Daily experience makes us recognise that the French are instinctively drawn towards power; they do not love liberty; equality alone is their idol. Now equality and despotism have secret connections. In those two respects, Napoleon had his fount in the hearts of the French, militarily inclined towards dominion, democratically enamoured of the level. Once on the throne, he made the people sit down beside him: a proletarian king, he humbled the kings and nobles in his ante-chambers; he levelled the ranks, not by lowering but by raising them: the descending level would have charmed the plebeian envy more, the ascending level was more flattering to its pride. French vanity was puffed up also by the superiority which Bonaparte gave us over the rest of Europe; another cause of Napoleon's popularity has to do with the affliction of his last days. After his death, as men became better acquainted with what he had suffered at St. Helena, they began to be moved; they forgot his tyranny to remember that, after conquering our enemies, after subsequently drawing them into France, he had defended us against them; we imagine that he might save us to-day from the disgrace into which we have sunk: his fame was recalled to us by his misfortune; his glory profited by his adversity. Lastly, the marvels of his arms have bewitched the young, while teaching us to worship brute force. His unexampled fortune has left to the overweening conceit of every ambition the hope of arriving at the point which he attained. And yet this man, so popular through the roller which he had passed over France, was the mortal enemy of equality and the greatest organizer of aristocracy within democracy.