away in a corner or is cast aside on a heap of scrap iron. Portalis, Minister of Justice, enters his room one day with a downcast look, and his eyes filled with tears. 'What is the matter with you, Portalis?' inquired Napoleon. 'Are you ill?' 'No, sire, but very wretched. The poor Archbishop of Tours, my old schoolmate' 'Eh, well, what has happened to him?' 'Alas, sire, he has just died.' 'What do I care? He was no longer good for anything.'"
XXIV.
HIS ESTIMATE OF HUMANITY.
Surrounded by such creatures, it is not unnatural that the original and instinctive cynicism of Napoleon's nature should be aggravated. In the end, all faith in anything but the base and the selfish in human nature disappeared. His scepticism was not affected as it often is-it was genuine conviction. Nay more, it was almost a fanatical faith-a faith that was one of the chief causes which led to his final destruction. Everybody who knew him agrees in describing this disbelief in anything but the base in man as a fixed idea.
"'His opinions on men,' writes M. de Metternich, 'centred on one idea, which, unfortunately, with him had acquired in his mind the force of an axiom; he was persuaded that no man who was
