self, I would have changed it wherever I could have
been allowed to exercise my energy, perseverance, and budgets."

At all events, he believes so; for however lofty and badly supported
the next story of his structure may be, he has always ready a new
story, loftier and more unsteady, to put above it. A few months before
launching himself, with all Europe at his back, against Russia, he said
to Narbonne:[1181]

"After all, my dear sir, this long road is the road to India. Alexander
started as far off as Moscow to reach the Ganges; this has occurred
to me since St. Jean d'Acre.... To reach England to-day I need the
extremity of Europe, from which to take Asia in the rear.... Suppose
Moscow taken, Russia subdued, the czar reconciled, or dead through some
court conspiracy, perhaps another and dependent throne, and tell me
whether it is not possible for a French army, with its auxiliaries,
setting out from Tiflis, to get as far as the Ganges, where it needs
only a thrust of the French sword to bring down the whole of that grand
commercial scaffolding throughout India. It would be the most gigantic
expedition, I admit, but practicable in the nineteenth century. Through
it France, at one stroke, would secure the independence of the West and
the freedom of the seas."

While uttering this his eyes shone with strange brilliancy, and he
accumulates subjects, weighing obstacles, means, and chances: the
inspiration is under full headway, and he gives himself up to it. The
master faculty finds itself suddenly free, and it takes flight; the
artist,[1182] locked up in politics, has escaped from his sheath; he is
creating out of the ideal and the impossible. We take him for what
he is, a posthumous brother of Dante and Michael Angelo. In the clear
outlines of his vision, in the intensity, coherency, and inward logic
of his dreams, in the profundity of his meditations, in the superhuman
grandeur of his conceptions, he is, indeed, their fellow and their
equal. His genius is of the same stature and the same structure; he is
one of the three sovereign minds of the Italian Renaissance. Only, while
the first two operated on paper and on marble, the latter operates on
the living being, on the sensitive and suffering flesh of humanity.

*****

[Footnote 1101: Reforms introduced by Napoleon after his coup d'etat 9
Nov. 1799. (SR.)]

[Footnote 1102: The main authority is, of course, the "correspondance
de l'Empereur Napoleon I.," in thi