him pass, go in, and they wait. In the cafe,
where the newspapers are read in common, he lays hold of them as if
through a requisition and uses them as he pleases in the face of the
patient bourgeois.

The central idea of this glorification of the army, be it understood, is
the worship of Napoleon, the supreme, unique, absolute sovereign of the
army and all the rest, while the prestige of this name is as great, as
carefully maintained, in the school as in the army. At the start, he put
his own free scholars (boursiers) into the lycees and colleges, about
3000 boys[6171] whom he supports and brings up at his own expense, for
his own advantage, destined to become his creatures, and who form the
uppermost layer of the school population; about one hundred and fifty of
these scholarships to each lycee, first occupants of the lycee and still
for a long time more numerous than their paying comrades, all of a more
or less needy family, sons of soldiers and functionaries who live on the
Emperor and rely on him only, all accustomed from infancy to regard
the Emperor as the arbiter of their destiny, the special, generous and
all-powerful patron who, having taken charge of them now, will also take
charge of them in the future. A figure of this kind fills and occupies
the entire field of their imagination; whatever grandeur it already
possesses it here becomes still more grand, colossal and superhuman.
At the beginning their enthusiasm gave the pitch to their
co-disciples;[6172] the institution, through its mechanism, labors to
keep this up, and the administrators or professors, by order or through
zeal, use all their efforts to make the sonorous and ringing chord
vibrate with all the more energy. After 1811, even in a private
institution,[6173] "the victories of the Emperor form almost the only
subject on which the imagination of the pupils is allowed to exercise
itself." After 1807,[6174] at Louis le Grand, the prize compositions
are those on the recent victory of Jena. "Our masters themselves," says
Alfred de Vigny, "unceasingly read to us the bulletins of the Grande
Armee, while cries of Vive l'Empereur interrupted Virgil and Plato." In
sum, write many witnesses,[6175] Bonaparte desired to bestow on French
youths the organization of the "Mamelukes," and he nearly succeeded.
More exactly and in his own words, "His Majesty[6176] desired to realize
in a State of forty millions of inhabitants what had been done in Sparta
and in Ath