“After that, Napoleon went to Milan to be crowned king of Italy, and there the grand triumph of the soldier began.  Every man who could write was made an officer.  Down came pensions; it rained duchies; treasures poured in for the staff which didn’t cost France a penny; and the Legion of Honor provided incomes for the private soldiers,—­of which I receive mine to this day.  So here were the armies maintained as never before on this earth.  But besides that, the Emperor, knowing that he was to be the emperor of the whole world, bethought him of the bourgeois, and to please them he built fairy monuments, after their own ideas, in places where you’d never think to find any.  For instance, suppose you were coming back from Spain and going to Berlin—­well, you’d find triumphal arches along the way, with common soldiers sculptured on the stone, every bit the same as generals.  In two or three years, and without imposing taxes on any of you, Napoleon filled his vaults with gold, built palaces, made bridges, roads, scholars, fetes, laws, vessels, harbors, and spent millions upon millions,—­such enormous sums that he could, so they tell me, have paved France from end to end with five-franc pieces, if he had had a mind to.

“Now, when he sat at ease on his throne, and was master of all, so that Europe waited his permission to do his bidding, he remembered his four brothers and his three sisters, and he said to us, as it might be in conversation, in an order of the day, ’My children, is it right that the blood relations of your Emperor should be begging their bread?  No.  I wish to see them in splendor like myself.  It becomes, therefore, absolutely necessary to conquer a kingdom for each of them,—­to the end that Frenchmen may be masters over all lands, that the soldiers of the Guard shall make the whole earth tremble, that France may spit where she likes, and that all the nations shall say to her, as it is written on my copper coins, ‘God protects you!’ ‘Agreed,’ cried the army.  ’We’ll go fish for thy kingdoms with our bayonets.’  Ha! there was no backing down, don’t you see!  If he had taken it into his head to conquer the moon, we should have made ready, packed knapsacks, and clambered up; happily, he didn’t think of it.  The kings of the countries, who liked their comfortable thrones, were naturally loathe to budge, and had to have their ears pulled; so then—­Forward, march!  We did march; we got there; and the earth once more trembled to its centre.  Hey! the men and the shoes he used up in those days!  The enemy dealt us such blows that none but the grand army could have stood the fatigue of it.  But you are not ignorant that a Frenchman is born a philosopher, and knows that a little sooner, or a little later, he has got to die.  So we were ready to die without a word, for we liked to see the Emperor doing that on the geographies.”

Here the narrator nimbly described a circle with his foot on the floor of the barn.