“And yet,” said Madame Martin, “nobody is sure that he kicked Volney.”

“Everything becomes known in the end,” replied the Princess, gayly.  “Napoleon did nothing at all.  He did not even kick Volney, and his head was that of an idiot.”

General Lariviere felt that he should say something.  He hurled this phrase: 

“Napoleon—­his campaign of 1813 is much discussed.”

The General wished to please Garain, and he had no other idea.  However, he succeeded, after an effort, in formulating a judgment: 

“Napoleon committed faults; in his situation he should not have committed any.”  And he stopped abruptly, very red.

Madame Martin asked: 

“And you, Monsieur Vence, what do you think of Napoleon?”

“Madame, I have not much love for sword-bearers, and conquerors seem to me to be dangerous fools.  But in spite of everything, that figure of the Emperor interests me as it interests the public.  I find character and life in it.  There is no poem or novel that is worth the Memoirs of Saint Helena, although it is written in ridiculous fashion.  What I think of Napoleon, if you wish to know, is that, made for glory, he had the brilliant simplicity of the hero of an epic poem.  A hero must be human.  Napoleon was human.”

“Oh, oh!” every one exclaimed.

But Paul Vence continued: 

“He was violent and frivolous; therefore profoundly human.  I mean, similar to everybody.  He desired, with singular force, all that most men esteem and desire.  He had illusions, which he gave to the people.  This was his power and his weakness; it was his beauty.  He believed in glory.  He had of life and of the world the same opinion as any one of his grenadiers.  He retained always the infantile gravity which finds pleasure in playing with swords and drums, and the sort of innocence which makes good military men.  He esteemed force sincerely.  He was a man among men, the flesh of human flesh.  He had not a thought that was not in action, and all his actions were grand yet common.  It is this vulgar grandeur which makes heroes.  And Napoleon is the perfect hero.  His brain never surpassed his hand—­that hand, small and beautiful, which grasped the world.  He never had, for a moment, the least care for what he could not reach.”

“Then,” said Garain, “according to you, he was not an intellectual genius.  I am of your opinion.”

“Surely,” continued Paul Vence, “he had enough genius to be brilliant in the civil and military arena of the world.  But he had not speculative genius.  That genius is another pair of sleeves, as Buffon says.  We have a collection of his writings and speeches.  His style has movement and imagination.  And in this mass of thoughts one can not find a philosophic curiosity, not one expression of anxiety about the unknowable, not an expression of fear of the mystery which surrounds destiny.  At Saint Helena, when he talks of God and of the soul, he seems to be a little