lls; while you
want one of twenty to live in a cloister, or like a wet-nurse, always
bathing her child." In the absence of her bogy, Mme. de Stael, who
said she loved the gutters of Paris better than the mountain streams
of Switzerland, reappeared in the suburbs of that city. When Napoleon
heard of it he grew furious, and gave orders to seize her as an
intriguer, and to send her back to Geneva, by force if necessary. It
was done, but an awful presentiment took possession of the Emperor
that she had appeared like a crow foreboding a coming tempest. As if
to compensate France for the loss of the exile's literary powers and
those of her friends, many means were devised and tried for the
encouragement of an imperial literature. In his assumed and noisy
contempt for ideals, Napoleon displayed his fear of them: the Academy
was ordered to occupy itself with literary criticism; when in public
assemblies mention was made of Mirabeau or other Revolutionary heroes,
the speaker was to be admonished that he should confine himself to
their style and leave their politics alone; the schools were ordered
to train the children in geography and in history, but the instruction
must be confined to facts, and not be philosophical or religious.

Napoleon's worst qualities and his growing weaknesses were made
manifest this winter in two exhibitions of self-indulgence most
far-reaching in their results. The first bad symptom was his notorious
license, which brought from the Empress expressions of the bitterest
reproach. Growing old at forty-three, not forty, as Napoleon gallantly
but untruthfully wrote to Louis, the aging Creole dismissed from
memory the sins of her own youth and middle age, while in jealous
fury she charged her husband not only with his adulteries, but with
crimes the mere name of which sullies the ordinary records of human
wickedness and folly. She would have followed the Emperor to Poland,
but his repeated dissuasions, although honeyed, were virtual
prohibitions, and she dared not. His unfriendly annalist, Mme. de
Remusat, says he retorted to all Josephine's charges that he needed
but one reply, the persistent I: "I am different from every one else,
and accept the limitations of no other." Her continuous weeping, he
wrote to his consort, showed neither character nor courage. "I don't
like cowards; an empress should have pluck." The second sign of
weakness was the growing neglect of detail in his work. Life has
always been t