rose, and by a shift to the right placed the Princess Elisa above the Queen.  ‘Now,’ said he, ’do not forget that in the imperial family I am the only King.’ (Iung’s Lucien, tome ii. p. 251), This rule he seems to have adhered to, for when he and his brothers went in the same carriage to the Champ de Mai in 1815, Jerome, titular King of Westphalia, had to take the front seat, while his elder brother, Lucien, only bearing the Roman title of Prince de Canino, sat on one of the seats of honour alongside Napoleon.  Jerome was disgusted, and grumbled at a King having to give way to a mere Roman Prince, See Iung’s Lucien, tome ii. p, 190.]—­

At this period, when the Consulate for life was only in embryo, flattering counsels poured in from all quarters, and tended to encourage the First Consul in his design of grasping at absolute power.

Liberty rejected an unlimited power, and set bounds to the means he wished and had to employ in order to gratify his excessive love of war and conquest.  “The present state of things, this Consulate of ten years,” said he to me, does not satisfy me; “I consider it calculated to excite unceasing troubles.”  On the 7th of July 1801, he observed, “The question whether France will be a Republic is still doubtful:  it will be decided in five or six years.”  It was clear that he thought this too long a term.  Whether he regarded France as his property, or considered himself as the people’s delegate and the defender of their rights, I am convinced the First Consul wished the welfare of France; but then that welfare was in his mind inseparable from absolute power.  It was with pain I saw him following this course.  The friends of liberty, those who sincerely wished to maintain a Government constitutionally free, allowed themselves to be prevailed upon to consent to an extension of ten years of power beyond the ten years originally granted by the constitution.  They made this sacrifice to glory and to that power which was its consequence; and they were far from thinking they were lending their support to shameless intrigues.  They were firm, but for the moment only, and the nomination for life was rejected by the Senate, who voted only ten years more power to Bonaparte, who saw the vision of his ambition again adjourned.

The First Consul dissembled his displeasure with that profound art which, when he could not do otherwise, he exercised to an extreme degree.  To a message of the Senate on the subject of that nomination he returned a calm but evasive and equivocating answer, in which, nourishing his favourite hope of obtaining more from the people than from the Senate, he declared with hypocritical humility, “That he would submit to this new sacrifice if the wish of the people demanded what the Senate authorised.”  Such was the homage he paid to the sovereignty of the people, which was soon to be trampled under his feet!