or without titles, work and perform their daily tasks
in person, administrative or decorative, day or night, at the appointed
time, for exact compensation, without pickings or stealing and without
waste. His train and his parades, as pompous as under the old monarchy,
admit of the same ordinary and extraordinary expenses--stables, chapel,
food, hunts, journeys, private theatricals, renewals of plate and
furniture, and the maintenance of twelve palaces or chateaux. While,
under Louis XV., it was estimated that "coffee with one roll for each
lady of honor cost the King 2,000 livres a year," and under Louis XVI.,"
the grand broth night and day" which Madame Royale, aged two years,
sometimes drank and which figured in the annual accounts at 5201
livres,[3212] under Napoleon "in the pantries, in the kitchens, the
smallest dish, a mere plate of soup, a glass of sugared water, would
not have been served without the authorization or check of grand-marshal
Duroc. Every abuse is watched; the gains of each are calculated and
regulated beforehand."[3213] Consequently, this or that journey to
Fontainebleau which had cost Louis XVI. nearly 2 million livres, cost
Napoleon, with the same series of fetes, only 150,000 francs, while the
total expense of his civil household, instead of amounting to 25 million
livres, remains under 3 million francs.[3214] The pomp is thus equal,
but the expense is ten times less; the new master is able to derive
a tenfold return from persons and money, because he squeezes the full
value out of every man he employs and every crown he spends. Nobody has
surpassed him in the art of turning money and men to account, and he is
as shrewd, as careful, as sharp in procuring them as he is in profiting
by them.

II. Equitable Taxation.

The apportionment of charges.--New fiscal principle and new
fiscal machinery.

In the assignment of public burdens and of public offices Napoleon
therefore applies the maxims of the new system of rights, and his
practice is in conformity with the theory. For the social order, which,
according to the philosophers, is the only just one in itself, is at the
same time the most profitable for him: he adds equity because equity is
profitable to him.--And first, in the matter of public burdens, there
shall be no more exemptions. To relieve any category of taxpayers or
of conscripts from taxation or from military service would annually
impoverish the treasury by so many m