Such was Napoleon!  Superior to the passions of men by his native greatness, and also by the circumstance of being controlled by a still greater passion! for when, indeed, are these masters of the world ever entirely masters of themselves?  Meantime blood was again about to flow; and thus, in their great career, the founders of empires press forward to their object, like Fate, whose ministers they seem, (and whose march neither wars nor earthquakes, nor all the scourges which Providence permits, ever arrest,) without deigning to make the utility of their purposes comprehensible to their victims.

BOOK III.

CHAP.  I.

The time for deliberation had passed, and that for action at last arrived.  On the 9th of May, 1812, Napoleon, hitherto always triumphant, quitted a palace which he was destined never again to enter victorious.

From Paris to Dresden his march was a continued triumph.  The east of France, which he first traversed, was a part of the empire entirely devoted to him; very different from the west and the south, she was only acquainted with him by means of benefits and victories.  Numerous and brilliant armies, attracted by the fertility of Germany, and which imagined themselves marching to a prompt and certain glory, proudly traversed those countries, scattering their money among them, and consuming their productions.  War, in that quarter, always bore the semblance of justice.

At a later period, when our victorious bulletins reached them, the imagination, astonished to see itself surpassed by the reality, caught fire; enthusiasm possessed these people, as in the times of Austerlitz and Jena; numerous groups collected round the couriers, whose tidings were listened to with avidity; and the inhabitants, in a transport of joy, never separated without exclamations of “Long live the emperor!  Long live our brave army!”

It is, besides, well known, that this portion of France has been warlike from time immemorial.  It is frontier ground; its inhabitants are nursed amidst the din of arms; and arms are, consequently, held there in honour.  It was the common conversation in that quarter, that this war would liberate Poland, so much attached to France; that the barbarians of Asia, with whom Europe was threatened, would be driven back into their native deserts; that Napoleon would once more return, loaded with all the fruits of victory.  Would not the eastern departments profit most by that event?  Up to that time, were they not indebted for their wealth to war, which caused all the commerce of France with Europe to pass through their hands?  Blockaded, in fact, in every other quarter, the empire only breathed and received its supplies through its eastern provinces.