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.
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