But the inertia of his powers resembled their rise so perfectly as to represent continuous growth, and thus to deceive observers: in a few years he had ordered the Revolutionary chaos of western Europe to his liking, and the resultant organization worked by the principles he had infused into it. As he saw his imperfect and shallow theories of society successively confounded, he had no vigor left to reconstruct them and adapt himself to new situations. His efforts at the rôle of liberator throughout the Hundred Days deserve careful study. He simply could not yield or adapt himself, except in non-essentials. The shifts to which he had resort would have been ridiculous had they not been pathetic. The governmental forms attempted by the Revolution had been successively destroyed by the furious energy of Jacobinism: the Directory was but a compromise, and when it took refuge for safety in the army its performances seemed to the masses sure to bring back the Terror; the Consulate was only a disguised monarchy founded on military force; and as royalism was impossible, there seemed to vast numbers no other alternative than the Empire. That there was no other alternative was due to Napoleon's imperious character, now developed to its utmost extent. He was selfish, hardened, and, though active like his symbolic bee, without capacity for further development. His mother knew that he could not hold out; she said it, and saved money for a rainy day. He himself had haunting premonitions of this truth. His passion to perpetuate himself by founding a dynasty was the real basis for his warlike ardor. Profoundly moved, in fact awe-stricken, by the imperishable hatred of the older dynasties, and yet reveling in his military genius, he waged war ruthlessly and with zest, enjoying the discomfiture of his foes, and delighting in the exercise of his powers. But, after all, war was but a means. He frequently dwelt on the advantages of hereditary succession; he lingered with suspicious frequency over the satisfaction a dynastic ruler must feel in the devotion or, if not that, in the submissiveness of his people; he was hypersensitive to the slightest popular disturbance; and he must have foreboded his own fall, since he was accustomed to wear poison in an amulet around his neck, so that when the great crisis should arrive he might take his own life. "Ah! why am I not my grandson?" he longingly ejaculated.