XIX.
HIS RUDENESS.
Napoleon's awkwardness with women was the theme of everybody who knew him intimately, and observed him closely. One of these says:
"It would be difficult to imagine any one more awkward than Napoleon in a drawing-room. . . . 'I never heard a harsher voice, or one so inflexible. When he smiled it was only with the mouth and a portion of the cheeks; the brow and eyes remained immovably sombre. . . . This combination of gaiety and seriousness, had something in it terrible and frightful.' On one occasion, at St. Cloud, Varnhagen heard him exclaim over and over again twenty times before a group of ladies, 'How hot!'"
This awkwardness of men of action when with women is not at all uncommon. There are examples even in our own day. "Small talk" is really a difficulty with men whose whole being is intent on great enterprises and on the ruling of men. Napoleon, living always two years ahead of himself—with all these images and recollections of terrible battle-fields, great combinations, world-wide empire—found it impossible to attune his mind to the trifles of the hour.
His restless, vivid, and realistic mind seems, indeed, always under an unpleasant restraint in
