, and
repeated by him to Villemain an hour afterwards. The wording is at
second hand and merely a very good imitation, while the ideas are
substantially Napoleon's. Cf. his fantasies about Italy and the
Mediterranean, equally exaggerated ("Correspondence," XXX., 548), and an
admirable improvisation on Spain and the colonies at Bayonne.--De Pradt.
"Memoires sur les revolutions d'Espagne," p.130: "Therefore Napoleon
talked, or rather poetised; he Ossianized for a long time... like a man
full of a sentiment which oppressed him, in an animated, picturesque
style, and with the impetuosity, imagery, and originality which were
familiar to him,... on the vast throne of Mexico and Peru, on the
greatness of the sovereigns who should possess them.. .. and on the
results which these great foundations would have on the universe. I had
often heard him, but under no circumstances had I ever heard him develop
such a wealth and compass of imagination. Whether it was the richness of
his subject, or whether his faculties had become excited by the scene he
conjured up, and all the chords of the instrument vibrated at once, he
was sublime."]

[Footnote 1182: Roederer, III., 541 (February 2, 1809): "I love power.
But I love it as an artist.... I love it as a musician loves his violin,
for the tones, chords, and harmonies he can get out of it."]

CHAPTER II. HIS IDEAS, PASSIONS AND INTELLIGENCE.

I. Intense Passions.

Personality and character during the Italian Renaissance and
during the present time.--Intensity of the passions in
Bonaparte.--His excessive touchiness.--His immediate
violence.--His impatience, rapidity, and need of talking.
--His temperament, tension, and faults.

On taking a near view of the contemporaries of Dante and Michael
Angelo, we find that they differ from us more in character than in
intellect.[1201] With us, three hundred years of police and of courts
of justice, of social discipline and peaceful habits, of hereditary
civilization, have diminished the force and violence of the passions
natural to Man. In Italy, in the Renaissance epoch, they were still
intact; human emotions at that time were keener and more profound than
at the present day; the appetites were ardent and more unbridled; man's
will was more impetuous and more tenacious; whatever motive inspired,
whether pride, ambition, jealousy, hatred, love, envy, or sensuality,
the inward spring strained with an energy a