The company which had formed Mrs. Althorpe’s _cortège_ at the opera, together with two or three other invited guests, were seated around her small but elegant supper-table. A double circle of wax candles in an _or-molu_ chandelier, which hung over the centre of it, cast their pure white light upon the numerous silver dishes and richly cut glass which covered it. After a little while, Mr. Nivernois strode into the room. He was a small man, and the strides which he made were as long as himself. He took his place in a vacant seat which had been reserved for him, opposite to Miss Stanhope. They were talking about Napoleon. He listened in silence, till a pause occurred.
“When nature had finished making the devils,” said he, pouring out for himself a capacious goblet of Chambertin, “it threw together all the rubbish that remained, and out of it formed Napoleon.”
Miss Stanhope laughed. “Do you mean that for praise or censure, Mr. Nivernois?”
“Napoleon’s soul,” he replied, “was something larger than to be enkernelled in the shell of any definition. Put together all the moral epithets the lexicons furnish, of wisdom and of folly, of greatness and of littleness, of magnanimity and meanness, force and feebleness, and every thing else, and fling the whole mass, in a lump, at his character, and you may have some chance of hitting the mark. It would be difficult to say anything of him that would be wholly false; impossible to say anything altogether true. When you have circumnavigated him, you have sailed round the whole world. His character was somewhat like the poet’s vision of the temple of Fame. On one side you behold the severe and classic beauty of a Doric front, with images of antique strength and grace: on another, the grandeur and the gloom of a Gothic structure: on a third, the pride and splendor and magnificent exaggeration of Eastern pomp: on the fourth, the dull, impenetrable mystery of Egypt. His spirit was as various as the morning sky, and his chamberlain, on two successive days, never woke up the same man. The truth is, his life was an acted drama; not of the Æschylus kind, with some unity in it, but a Nat Lee drama of five-and-twenty acts. If we take it that he displayed his sincere character, and was that which he appeared to be, we must conclude that he was a glorious fool, among greater fools; a madman, whose frenzy was, however, the fatality of Europe. So viewed, he was born for bombast, as a trout for rising; his sentences have not a grain of sense to five quarts of syllables; a fortunate adventurer, who appeared at such a conjuncture of politics that his daring served him for talent, his selfishness for sagacity, his passion for power. But I suppose that Bonaparte always wore the buskin; that the historical Napoleon was but a character which the real one put on to dazzle and delude the fancies of men, and fire their passions, till, drunk as with wine, they might be bound and led by him. In his own more actual being, he was a cold, calculating, shrewd and wholly interested schemer. His performances were always for the author’s benefit. This Garrick sometimes blundered in the assumed characters in which he spent his life. He too frequently mistook ferocity for majesty; imagined he was royal when he was only brutal, and thought he was playing the hero when he was only playing the fool. He assumed the madman, generally, when he dealt with men, and only put on the blackguard when he talked to women. He knew the truth of Bacon’s saying that there is in human nature more of the fool than of the wise, and that that which addresses itself to the foolish part of men’s minds will prevail over that which speaks to the wiser. He built a great temple of delusion, in which he, the priest, should continually shout “Glory,” and all the people answer “Amen.” His breast was a natural mirror and antitype of all the passions and follies of the fools called Frenchmen. By studying his own foolishness, he knew what ropes to pull to make their fool’s bells jingle. He is, therefore, of the weaknesses and worser powers of men, the ablest metaphysician that has appeared. One of his remarks opens the mind, as snuff opens the head. He was a poet in practice. Sydney’s rule, “Fool! look into thy heart and write,” he obeyed; and wrote empires. Of course, an adventitious power like this cannot be measured; in fact, when supplied by so seething a fancy and so combining an intellect as he had, it is altogether illimitable; he had only to conceive a new idea to possess a new power. He therefore belongs to that class of men of whom Du Quesnay has said that one and one make a hundred and eleven.