On his return to France he displayed his old activity; and the most credible witnesses assert that his faculties showed no marked decline.  Guizot, who saw a good deal of him, writes:  “I perceive in the intellect and conduct of Napoleon during the Hundred Days no sign of enfeebling:  I find in his judgment and actions his accustomed qualities.”  In a passage quoted above (p. 449) Mollien notes that his master was a prey to lassitude after some hours of work, but he says nothing on the subject of disease; and in a man of forty-six, who had lived a hard life and a “fast” life, we should not expect to find the capacity for the sustained intellectual efforts of the Consulate.  Meneval noticed nothing worse in his master’s condition than a tendency to “reverie”:  he detected no disease.  The statement of Pasquier that his genius and his physical powers were in a profound decline is a manifest exaggeration, uttered by a man who did not once see him before Waterloo, who was driven from Paris by him, and strove to discourage his supporters.  Still less can we accept the following melodramatic description, by Thiebault, of Napoleon’s appearance on Sunday, June 11th:  “His look, once so formidable and piercing, had lost its strength and even its steadiness:  his face had lost all expression and all its force:  his mouth, compressed, had none of its former witchery:  and his gait was as perplexed as his demeanour and gestures were undecided:  the ordinary pallor of his skin was replaced by a strongly pronounced greenish tinge which struck me.”

Let us follow this wreck of a man to the war and see what he accomplished.  At dawn on June 12th he entered his landau and drove to Laon, a distance of some seventy miles.  On the next day he got through an immense amount of work, and proceeded to Beaumont.  On the 15th of June he was up at dawn, mounted his horse, and remained on horseback, directing the operations against the Prussians, for nearly eighteen hours.  This time was broken by one spell of rest.  Near Charleroi, says Baudus, an officer of Soult’s staff, he was overcome by sleep and heeded not the cheers of a passing column:  at this Baudus was indignant, but most unjustly so.  Napoleon needed these snatches of sleep as a relief to prolonged mental tension.  At night he returned to Charleroi, “overcome with fatigue.”  On the next day he was still very weary, says Segur; he did not exert himself until the battle of Ligny began at 2.30; but he then rode about till nightfall, through a time of terrible heat.  Fatigue showed itself again early on the morrow, when he declined to see Grouchy before 8 a.m.  Yet his review of the troops and his long discussions on Parisian politics were clearly due, not to torpor, but to the belief that he had sundered the allies, and could occupy Brussels at will; for when he found out his mistake, he showed all the old energy, riding with the vanguard from Quatre Bras to La Belle Alliance through the violent rain.