This summing up of the Machabees on Alexander seems made for Napoleon: "They have put crowns _upon themselves_, and evils have been multiplied in the earth." Scarce twenty years have passed since Bonaparte's death, and already the French Monarchy and the Spanish Monarchy[415] are no more. The map of the world has changed; we have had to learn a new geography: parted from their lawful sovereigns, nations have been flung to sovereigns taken at haphazard; famous actors have stepped down from the stage to which nameless actors have climbed; the eagles have taken flight from the crest of the tall pine, fallen into the sea, while frail shell-fish have fastened on to the sides of the still protecting trunk. As, in the final result, all runs to its end, "the terrible spirit of novelty which was passing over the world," as the Emperor said, to which he had opposed the cross-bar of his genius, resumes its course; the conqueror's institutions decay; he will be the last of the great individual existences; nothing henceforth will predominate in low and levelled societies; the shade of Napoleon will tower alone at the extremity of the destroyed old world, like the phantom of the deluge at the edge of its abyss: a distant posterity will discern that shade across the gulf into which unknown centuries will fall, until the appointed day of the social re-birth. * Since it is my own life which I am writing while busying myself with others, great and small, I am obliged to mix this life with men and things, when it happens to be recalled. Did I, in one flight, without ever stopping, pass through the memory of the transported one who, in his ocean prison, awaited the execution of God's decree? No. The peace which Napoleon had not concluded with the kings his gaolers he had made with me: I was a son of the sea like himself; my nativity was one of the rock like his. I flatter myself to have known Napoleon better than they who saw him oftener and approached him more closely. Napoleon at St. Helena, ceasing to have occasion to maintain his anger with me, had abandoned his hostility; I, becoming more just in my turn, wrote the following article in the _Conservateur_: