When he had gone, we all felt very blue; because he had been the joy of our lives.  He left the command to Kleber—­a great lout of a fellow who soon afterward lost the number of his mess.  An Egyptian assassinated him.  They put the murderer to death by making him sit on a bayonet; that’s their way, down there, of guillotining a man.  But he suffered so much that one of our soldiers felt sorry for him and offered him his water-gourd.  The criminal took a drink, and then gave up the ghost with the greatest pleasure.

But we didn’t waste much time over trifles like that.

Napoleon sailed from Egypt in a cockle-shell of a boat called Fortune.  He passed right under the noses of the English, who were blockading the coast with ships of the line, frigates, and every sort of craft that could carry sail, and in the twinkling of an eye he was in France; because he had the ability to cross the sea as if with a single stride.  Was that natural?  Bah!  The very minute he reached Frejus, he had his foot, so to speak, in Paris.  There, of course, everybody worships him.  But the first thing he does is to summon the government.  “What have you been doing with my children the soldiers?” he said to the lawyers.  “You are nothing but a lot of poll-parrots, who fool the people with your gabble, and feather your own nests at the expense of France.  It is not right; and I speak in the name of all who are dissatisfied.”

They thought, at first, that they could get rid of him by talking him to death; but it didn’t work.  He shut ’em up in the very barrack where they did their talking, and those who didn’t jump out of the windows he enrolled in his suite, where they soon became mute as fish and pliable as a tobacco-pouch.  This coup made him consul; and as he wasn’t one to doubt the Supreme Being who had kept good faith with him, he hastened to fulfil his own promise by restoring the churches and reestablishing religion; whereupon the bells all rang out in his honor and in honor of the good God.

Everybody then was satisfied:  first, the priests, because they were protected from persecution; second, the merchants, because they could do business without fearing the “we-grab-it-all” of the law; and finally the nobles, because the people were forbidden to put them to death, as they had formerly had the unfortunate habit of doing.

But Napoleon still had his enemies to clear away, and he was not a man to drop asleep over his porringer.  His eye took in the whole world—­as if it were no bigger than a soldier’s head.  The first thing he did was to turn up in Italy—­as suddenly as if he had poked his head through a window; and one look from him was enough.  The Austrians were swallowed up at Marengo as gudgeons are swallowed by a whale.  Then the French victory sang a song of triumph that all the world could hear, and it was enough.  “We won’t play any more!” declared the Germans.

“Nor we either,” said the others.