V.
THE BRIDEGROOM.
Meantime the expectant bridegroom presents us at this period of his life with a picture which is very unlike that which most of us had formed of him in our imaginings; a picture in which we can scarcely recognise the cruel, terrible, and fateful being who was able to retain a face impassive as marble in the midst of the carnage of battle-fields, and who sent lightly so many hundreds of thousands of human beings to slaughter. The childish excitement, the keen anxiety, the curious outbreaks, even of self-distrust, and what I may call the antics and frivolities of Napoleon at this epoch, are useful as helping to make us understand. how thoroughly human he was after all. And yet it is a picture which is, on the whole, repellent to me. One of Napoleon's critics. described him as Jupiter Scapin—half demigod, half "Merry Andrew." The grotesque puerilities. under all this iron mask and in this heart of steel, rather add to the sense of horror at all the gigantic evil he was capable of creating. A man of doom, who was at least consistently grave, self-controlled, and terrible, would be less repellent than this creature of contradictions, at once so lofty and so mean, so awful and so grotesque, so proud and so grovelling.
But let me tell the story of his acts and
