The remarkable testimony of Wieland and Mueller, both men of distinction, is of more than ordinary value, seeing that they were not his countrymen, but on the side of those who waged war against him.  Mueller admits that he conquered him, and the world must admit that he is gradually, but surely, conquering it in spite of the colossal libels that have been spoken and written of him for the ostensible purpose of vindicating the Puritans and making him appear as the Spoliator and Antichrist whose thirst for blood, so that he might attain glory, was an inexhaustible craze in him.  To them he is the Ogre that staggers the power of belief, and yet he defies the whole world to prove that he ever declared war or committed a single crime during the whole carnival of warfare that drenched Europe in human blood.

Up to the present, the world has lamentably failed to do anything of the sort.  His opponents, libellers, and progeny of his mean executioners, are all losing ground, and he is gaining everywhere.  There is an unseen hand at work revealing the awful truth.  This dignified, calm, unassuming man, while surrounded by a crowd of Kings and Princes, who were competing with each other to do him homage and show their devotion, startles them by telling a story of when he was “a simple Lieutenant in the 2nd Company of Artillery.”  Possibly some of his guests were observed to be putting on airs that were always distasteful to the Emperor, and this was his scornful way of rebuking them.  Or it might be that he wished to take the opportunity of informing Europe that he had no desire to conceal his humble beginning, though at that time he was recognised first man in it.  Historians, when he was at the height of his power, ransacked musty archives assiduously to find out and prove that he had royal blood in him.  They professed to have discovered that he was connected with the princely family of Treviso, and the comical way in which he contemptuously brushed aside this fulsome flattery must have lacerated the pride of courtiers who sought favours by such methods.

Bearing on the royal blood idea, Gourgaud in his Journal relates that the Emperor told him the following stories:—­

“At one time in my reign there was a disposition to make out that I was descended from the Man in the Iron Mask.  The Governor of Pignerol was named Bompars.  They said he had married his daughter to his mysterious prisoner, the brother of Louis XIV., and had sent the pair to Corsica under the name of ‘Bonaparte,’” and then with fine humour he adds:—­“I had only to say the word and everybody would have believed the fable.”

He never forgot that he was Napoleon, hence never said the word.

His insincere father-in-law has been industriously searching for royal blood too, and this is what his son-in-law says of him:—­