over his life and have communicated itself to his works; and though this serenity was alternated by periods of despair, he allowed no more of this to appear in his work than his esthetic sense approved of.  Like all highly organized people he sounded the gamut of joy and sorrow.  His journal entries tell the story.  One day, exulting in life and its possibilities he writes, “Oh, it would be glorious to live life over a thousand times.”  At another time he calls upon his God in abject despair to help him through the passing hour.  At one time life is so difficult a problem that he sees not how it can be continued at all.  Then he loses himself in his creations and soars into regions where his troubles cannot follow.  This joyousness is the portion of many extraordinary people.  Haydn and Mozart had it.  “He has among other qualities that of great joyousness,” says Carlyle, in speaking of Richter.  “Goethe has it to some extent and Schiller too.  It is a deep laughter, a wild laughter, and connected with it, there is the deepest seriousness.”

CHAPTER X

AT THE ZENITH OF HIS FAME

     Fate bestoweth no gift which it taketh not back.  Ask not aught of
     sordid humanity; the trifle it bestoweth is a nothing. 
          
                                                     —­HAFIZ.

Napoleon’s star, hitherto so uniformly in the ascendant, was now on the wane.  His victories at the battles of Luetzen and Bautzen in May of 1813, could not atone for the disaster of Moscow in the previous year.  The crushing defeat encountered by the French at the battle of Vittoria by the English under Wellington, and the battle of Leipzig in October of the same year showed the world that here was only a man after all; a man subject to the usual limitations and mutations of mankind.  The demigod was dethroned, the pedestal knocked from under, and all Europe rejoiced.  The nightmare of fear which had so long pervaded all classes, was after all only a bad dream; the incubus could be shaken off, and mankind again resume its normal mode of living.  Waterloo was already foreshadowed in the events of this year, and the people were wild with joy.

The alliance which followed Napoleon’s marriage to the Austrian Archduchess did not have the good political results which Metternich expected from it.  The war indemnity of fifteen millions of dollars, the cession of provinces whereby three and one half millions of people were lost to Austria, the reduction of the army to 150,000 men, exactions made by Napoleon at the time of the marriage, did not tend to make him popular.  The alliance existed in name, not in sentiment.  He was still regarded as the conqueror, not the ally.  Austria had been lukewarm all along, and when she changed front in 1813, and joined the coalition against him, acting in concert with England, Russia and Prussia, the measure had the moral support of the nation.  This was three years after his marriage to the Archduchess.