Next morning Napoleon and Marmont met. The culprit was loaded with reproaches for the affair at Athies, and treated as a stern father might treat a careless child. No better evidence of the Emperor's low state is needed. Marmont was now the hero of the hour; his peccadillos might well have been forgotten for the sake of securing his continued faithfulness. With Napoleon at his best, this would surely have been the case; but aware that at most the war could be a matter of only a few weeks, the desperate man overdid his role of self-confidence, being too rash, too severe, too haughty. Not that he was without some hope. Although for two years the shadow had been declining on the dial of Napoleon's fortunes, and although under adverse conditions one brilliant combination after another had crumbled, yet his ideas were as great as ever, the adjustment of plans to changing conditions was never more admirable. The trouble was that effort and result did not correspond, and this being so, what would have been trifling misdemeanors in prosperity seemed to him in adversity to be dangerous faults. The great officers of state and army, imitating their master's ambitions, had acquired his weaknesses, but had failed in securing either his strength or his adroitness. With him they had lost that fire of youth which had carried them and him always just over the line of human expectation, and so his nice adjustments failed in exasperating ways at the very turn of necessity. Hard words and stinging reproofs are soon forgotten in generous youth; they rankle in middle life; and even the invigorating address or inspiring word, when heard too often for twenty years, fails of effect. The beginning of the end was the loss of Soissons at the critical instant. Napoleon was uncertain and touchy; his marshals were honeycombed with disaffection; the populations, though flashing like powder at his touch, had nowhere risen _en masse_. Thereafter the great captain was no longer waging a well-ordered warfare. Like an exhausted swordsman, he lunged here and there in the grand style; but his brain was troubled, his blade broken. Some untapped reservoirs of strength were yet to be opened, some untried expedients were to be essayed, but the end was inevitable. The movement on Rheims was the spasmodic stroke of the dying gladiator. CHAPTER VIII THE STRUGGLES OF EXHAUSTION[9] [Footnote 9: References: Houssaye, Napoleon a l'ile d'Elbe, in Revue historique, tom. 51, pp. 1-25. Metternich's Memoirs.]