permitted him to think of eating at all. Now, at least during the years 1810 and 1811, after which he liberated himself, there was a regular big breakfast at a fixed hour with his wife, a breakfast with one soup, then entrees, one roast, two sweets, four hors-d'œuvre, and a complete dessert, instead of the four little dishes with which, up to then, he had been content."
XV.
HORSEPLAY.
And now I complete the picture of Napoleon at this period by an extract which will show him, I will not say in a ridiculous light, but in a grotesque one. This picture reveals that curious mixture of greatness and levity which makes him one of the most astounding amalgams of qualities in human history-that amalgam which produced for him the paradoxical epithet of Jupiter Scapin, to which I have already alluded.
"Since his poverty-stricken youth, solitary and melancholy, there has remained with him-when chances of development arrived too late-a taste for hand games, noisy and active playfulness. This could not express itself at the right time, and the result is now seen. His forty-one years endeavour to accommodate themselves to the eighteen years of Marie Louise. He is more of a child than she is, with a species of passion for the amusements
