The contemplation of my fine little regiment of French military memoirs had brought me to the question of Napoleon himself, and you see that I have a very fair line dealing with him also.  There is Scott’s life, which is not entirely a success.  His ink was too precious to be shed in such a venture.  But here are the three volumes of the physician Bourrienne—­that Bourrienne who knew him so well.  Does any one ever know a man so well as his doctor?  They are quite excellent and admirably translated.  Meneval also—­the patient Meneval—­who wrote for untold hours to dictation at ordinary talking speed, and yet was expected to be legible and to make no mistakes.  At least his master could not fairly criticize his legibility, for is it not on record that when Napoleon’s holograph account of an engagement was laid before the President of the Senate, the worthy man thought that it was a drawn plan of the battle?  Meneval survived his master and has left an excellent and intimate account of him.  There is Constant’s account, also written from that point of view in which it is proverbial that no man is a hero.  But of all the vivid terrible pictures of Napoleon the most haunting is by a man who never saw him and whose book was not directly dealing with him.  I mean Taine’s account of him, in the first volume of “Les Origines de la France Contemporaine.”  You can never forget it when once you have read it.  He produces his effect in a wonderful, and to me a novel, way.  He does not, for example, say in mere crude words that Napoleon had a more than mediaeval Italian cunning.  He presents a succession of documents—­gives a series of contemporary instances to prove it.  Then, having got that fixed in your head by blow after blow, he passes on to another phase of his character, his coldhearted amorousness, his power of work, his spoiled child wilfulness, or some other quality, and piles up his illustrations of that.  Instead, for example, of saying that the Emperor had a marvellous memory for detail, we have the account of the head of Artillery laying the list of all the guns in France before his master, who looked over it and remarked, “Yes, but you have omitted two in a fort near Dieppe.”  So the man is gradually etched in with indelible ink.  It is a wonderful figure of which you are conscious in the end, the figure of an archangel, but surely of an archangel of darkness.

We will, after Taine’s method, take one fact and let it speak for itself.  Napoleon left a legacy in a codicil to his will to a man who tried to assassinate Wellington.  There is the mediaeval Italian again!  He was no more a Corsican than the Englishman born in India is a Hindoo.  Read the lives of the Borgias, the Sforzas, the Medicis, and of all the lustful, cruel, broad-minded, art-loving, talented despots of the little Italian States, including Genoa, from which the Buonapartes migrated.  There at once you get the real descent of the man, with all the stigmata clear upon him—­the outward calm, the inward passion, the layer of snow above the volcano, everything which characterized the old despots of his native land, the pupils of Machiavelli, but all raised to the dimensions of genius.  You can whitewash him as you may, but you will never get a layer thick enough to cover the stain of that cold-blooded deliberate endorsement of his noble adversary’s assassination.