VI.
HIS MOMENTS OF COWARDICE.
It is also this extreme sensibility which accounts for those few moments of abject cowardice that stand out in the career of one of the most fearless human beings who ever lived. He himself has always the dread that there would be a breakdown in the nervous system—a loss of balance. "My nerves," he says of himself, "are very irritable, and when in this state, were my pulse not always regular, I should risk going crazy." But his pulse does not always beat regularly.
"He is twice taken unawares at times when the peril was alarming and of a new kind. He, so clear-headed and so cool under fire, the boldest of military heroes, and the most audacious of political adventurers, quails twice in a Parliamentary storm, and again in a popular crisis. On the 18th of Brumaire, in the Corps Législatif, 'he turned pale, trembled, and seemed to lose his head at the shouts of outlawry. . . . They had to drag him out . . . they even thought for a moment that he was going to faint.' After the abdication at Fontainebleau, on encountering the rage and imprecations which greeted him in Provence, he seemed for some days to be morally shattered; the animal instinct asserts its
