Garain, who had founded his political fortune on hatred of the Empire, judged sincerely that this return of national taste was only an absurd infatuation.  He saw no danger in it and felt no fear about it.  In him fear was sudden and ferocious.  For the moment he was very quiet; he talked neither of prohibiting performances nor of seizing books, of imprisoning authors, or of suppressing anything.  Calm and severe, he saw in Napoleon only Taine’s ‘condottiere’ who kicked Volney in the stomach.  Everybody wished to define the true Napoleon.  Count Martin, in the face of the imperial centrepiece and of the winged Victorys, talked suitably of Napoleon as an organizer and administrator, and placed him in a high position as president of the state council, where his words threw light upon obscure questions.  Garain affirmed that in his sessions, only too famous, Napoleon, under pretext of taking snuff, asked the councillors to pass to him their gold boxes ornamented with miniatures and decked with diamonds, which they never saw again.  The anecdote was told to him by the son of Mounier himself.

Montessuy esteemed in Napoleon the genius of order.  “He liked,” he said, “work well done.  That is a taste most persons have lost.”

The painter Duviquet, whose ideas were those of an artist, was embarrassed.  He did not find on the funeral mask brought from St. Helena the characteristics of that face, beautiful and powerful, which medals and busts have consecrated.  One must be convinced of this now that the bronze of that mask was hanging in all the old shops, among eagles and sphinxes made of gilded wood.  And, according to him, since the true face of Napoleon was not that of the ideal Napoleon, his real soul may not have been as idealists fancied it.  Perhaps it was the soul of a good bourgeois.  Somebody had said this, and he was inclined to think that it was true.  Anyway, Duviquet, who flattered himself with having made the best portraits of the century, knew that celebrated men seldom resemble the ideas one forms of them.

M. Daniel Salomon observed that the fine mask about which Duviquet talked, the plaster cast taken from the inanimate face of the Emperor, and brought to Europe by Dr. Antommarchi, had been moulded in bronze and sold by subscription for the first time in 1833, under Louis Philippe, and had then inspired surprise and mistrust.  People suspected the Italian chemist, who was a sort of buffoon, always talkative and famished, of having tried to make fun of people.  Disciples of Dr. Gall, whose system was then in favor, regarded the mask as suspicious.  They did not find in it the bumps of genius; and the forehead, examined in accordance with the master’s theories, presented nothing remarkable in its formation.

“Precisely,” said Princess Seniavine.  “Napoleon was remarkable only for having kicked Volney in the stomach and stealing a snuffbox ornamented with diamonds.  Monsieur Garain has just taught us.”