on thousands of dying men, and who
has had thousands of men slaughtered, "sobs," after Wagram and after
Bautzen,[1216] at the couch of a dying comrade. "I saw him," says his
valet, "weep while eating his breakfast, after coming from Marshal
Lannes's bedside; big tears rolled down his cheeks and fell on his
plate." It is not alone the physical sensation, the sight of a bleeding,
mangled body, which thus moves him acutely and deeply; for a word, a
simple idea, stings and penetrates almost as far. Before the emotion of
Dandolo, who pleads for Venice his country, which is sold to Austria, he
is agitated and his eyes moisten.[1217] Speaking of the capitulation
of Baylen, at a full meeting of the Council of State,[1218] his voice
trembles, and "he gives way to his grief, his eyes even filling with
tears." In 1806, setting out for the army and on taking leave of
Josephine, he has a nervous attack which is so severe as to bring on
vomiting.[1219] "We had to make him sit down," says an eye-witness, "and
swallow some orange water; he shed tears, and this lasted a quarter
of an hour." The same nervous and stomachic crisis came on in 1808, on
deciding on the divorce; he tosses about a whole night, and laments like
a woman; he melts, and embraces Josephine; he is weaker than she is:
"My poor Josephine, I can never leave you!" Folding her in his arms, he
declares that she shall not quit him; he abandons himself wholly to the
sensation of the moment; she must undress at once, sleep alongside of
him, and he weeps over her; "literally," she says, "he soaked the bed
with his tears."--Evidently, in such an organism, however powerful
the superimposed regulator, there is a risk of the equilibrium being
destroyed. He is aware of this, for he knows himself well; he is afraid
of his own nervous sensibility, the same as of an easily frightened
horse; at critical moments, at Berezina, he refuses to receive the bad
news which might excite this, and, on the informer's insisting on it,
he asks him again,[1220] "Why, sir, do you want to disturb
me?"--Nevertheless, in spite of his precautions, he is twice taken
unawares, at times when the peril was alarming and of a new kind; he, so
clear headed and so cool under fire, the boldest of military heroes
and the most audacious of political adventurers, quails twice in a
parliamentary storm and again in a popular crisis. On the 18th of
Brumaire, in the Corps Legislatif, "he turned pale, trembled, and seemed