Meanwhile, fresh disagreements with the pope complicated the relations of France.  Napoleon then addressed himself to cardinal Fesch.  Fesch was a zealous churchman, and overflowing with Italian vivacity:  he defended the papal pretensions with obstinate ardour; and such was the warmth of his discussions with the emperor, on a former occasion, that the latter got into a passion, and told him, “that he would compel him to obey.”  “And who contests your power?” returned the cardinal:  “but force is not argument; for if I am right, not all your power can make me wrong.  Besides, your majesty knows that I do not fear martyrdom.”—­“Martyrdom!” replied Buonaparte, with a transition from violence to laughter; “do not reckon on that, I beseech you, M. le Cardinal:  martyrdom is an affair in which there must be two persons concerned; and as to myself, I have no desire to make a martyr of any individual.”

It is said that these discussions assumed a more serious character towards the end of 1811.  An eye-witness asserts that the cardinal, till that time a stranger to politics, then began to mix them up with his religious controversies; that he conjured Napoleon not thus to fly in the face of men, the elements, religion, earth and heaven, at the same time; and that, at last, he expressed his apprehension of seeing him sink under such a weight of enmity.

The only reply which the emperor made to this vehement attack was to take him by the hand, and leading him to the window, to open it, and inquire, “Do you see that star above us?”—­“No, sire.”—­“Look again.”—­“Sire, I do not see it.”—­“Very well! I see it!” replied Napoleon.  The cardinal, seized with astonishment, remained silent, concluding that there was no human voice sufficiently loud to make itself heard by an ambition so gigantic, that it already reached the heavens.

As to the witness of this singular scene, he understood in quite a different sense these words of his sovereign.  They did not appear to him like the expression of an overweening confidence in his destiny, but rather of the great distinction which Napoleon meant to infer as existing between the grasp of his genius and that of the cardinal’s policy.

But granting even that Napoleon’s soul was not exempt from a tendency to superstition, his intellect was both too strong and too enlightened to permit such vast events to depend upon a weakness.  One great inquietude possessed him; it was the idea of that same death, which he appeared so much to brave.  He felt his strength decaying; and he dreaded that when he should be no more, the French empire, that sublime trophy of so many labours and victories, would fall a prey to dismemberment.