nd relaxed with a violence
that has now disappeared. All these energies reappear in this great
survivor of the fifteenth century; in him the play of the nervous
machine is the same as with his Italian ancestors; never was there, even
with the Malatestas and the Borgias, a more sensitive and more impulsive
intellect, one capable of such electric shocks and explosions, in which
the roar and flashes of tempest lasted longer and of which the effects
were more irresistible. In his mind no idea remains speculative and
pure; none is a simple transcript of the real, or a simple picture
of the possible; each is an internal eruption, which suddenly and
spontaneously spends itself in action; each darts forth to its goal and
would reach it without stopping were it not kept back and restrained
by force[1202] Sometimes, the eruption is so sudden, that the restraint
does not come soon enough. One day, in Egypt,[1203] on entertaining
a number of French ladies at dinner, he has one of them, who was
very pretty and whose husband he had just sent off to France, placed
alongside of him; suddenly, as if accidentally, he overturns a pitcher
of water on her, and, under the pretence of enabling her to rearrange
her wet dress, he leads her into another room where he remains with her
a long time, too long, while the other guests seated at the table wait
quietly and exchange glances. Another day, at Paris, toward the epoch
of the Concordat,[1204] he says to Senator Volney: "France wants a
religion." Volney replies in a frank, sententious way, "France wants the
Bourbons." Whereupon he gives Volney a kick in the stomach and he falls
unconscious; on being moved to a friend's house, he remains there ill in
bed for several days.--No man is more irritable, so soon in a passion;
and all the more because he purposely gives way to his irritation; for,
doing this just at the right moment, and especially before witnesses,
it strikes terror; it enables him to extort concessions and maintain
obedience. His explosions of anger, half-calculated, half-involuntary,
serve him quite as much as they relieve him, in public as well as in
private, with strangers as with intimates, before constituted bodies,
with the Pope, with cardinals, with ambassadors, with Talleyrand, with
Beugnot, with anybody that comes along,[1205] whenever he wishes to set
an example or "keep the people around him on the alert." The public and
the army regard him as impassible; but, apart from th