NAPOLEON.  Wait.  This talent involves the shedding of human blood.

THE ORACLE.  Are you a surgeon, or a dentist?

NAPOLEON.  Psha!  You do not appreciate me, madam.  I mean the shedding of oceans of blood, the death of millions of men.

THE ORACLE.  They object, I suppose.

NAPOLEON.  Not at all.  They adore me.

THE ORACLE.  Indeed!

NAPOLEON.  I have never shed blood with my own hand.  They kill each other:  they die with shouts of triumph on their lips.  Those who die cursing do not curse me.  My talent is to organize this slaughter; to give mankind this terrible joy which they call glory; to let loose the devil in them that peace has bound in chains.

THE ORACLE.  And you?  Do you share their joy?

NAPOLEON.  Not at all.  What satisfaction is it to me to see one fool pierce the entrails of another with a bayonet?  I am a man of princely character, but of simple personal tastes and habits.  I have the virtues of a laborer:  industry and indifference to personal comfort.  But I must rule, because I am so superior to other men that it is intolerable to me to be misruled by them.  Yet only as a slayer can I become a ruler.  I cannot be great as a writer:  I have tried and failed.  I have no talent as a sculptor or painter; and as lawyer, preacher, doctor, or actor, scores of second-rate men can do as well as I, or better.  I am not even a diplomatist:  I can only play my trump card of force.  What I can do is to organize war.  Look at me!  I seem a man like other men, because nine-tenths of me is common humanity.  But the other tenth is a faculty for seeing things as they are that no other man possesses.

THE ORACLE.  You mean that you have no imagination?

NAPOLEON [forcibly] I mean that I have the only imagination worth having:  the power of imagining things as they are, even when I cannot see them.  You feel yourself my superior, I know:  nay, you are my superior:  have I not bowed my knee to you by instinct?  Yet I challenge you to a test of our respective powers.  Can you calculate what the methematicians call vectors, without putting a single algebraic symbol on paper?  Can you launch ten thousand men across a frontier and a chain of mountains and know to a mile exactly where they will be at the end of seven weeks?  The rest is nothing:  I got it all from the books at my military school.  Now this great game of war, this playing with armies as other men play with bowls and skittles, is one which I must go on playing, partly because a man must do what he can and not what he would like to do, and partly because, if I stop, I immediately lose my power and become a beggar in the land where I now make men drunk with glory.

THE ORACLE.  No doubt then you wish to know how to extricate yourself from this unfortunate position?

NAPOLEON.  It is not generally considered unfortunate, madam.  Supremely fortunate rather.