prompted you; you cannot be different from other people; it is all personal interest. Now, take Massena. He has glory and honours enough; but he is not content. He wants to be a prince like Murat or Bernadotte. He would risk being shot to-morrow to be a prince. That is the incentive of Frenchmen.' 'I never heard him,' said Madame de Rémusat, 'express any admiration or comprehension of a noble action.' 'His means,' says the same writer, 'for governing men were all derived from those which tend to debase them. . . . He tolerated virtue only when he could cover it with ridicule.'"
His disbelief in anything but the base was, as I have said, one of the causes of his downfall, for it led to some of his grossest miscalculations; or, as Taine well puts it:—
"Such is the final conception on which Napoleon has anchored himself, and into which he sinks deeper and deeper, no matter how directly and violently he may be contradicted by palpable facts; nothing will dislodge him, neither the stubborn energy of the English, nor the inflexible gentleness of the Pope, nor the declared insurrection of the Spaniards, nor the mute insurrection of the Germans, nor the resistance of Catholic consciences, nor the gradual disaffection of the French. The reason is, that his conception is imposed upon him by his character; he sees man as he needs to see him."
