ot
satisfied; he wants be a prince like Murat and Bernadotte: he will risk
getting shot to-morrow simply to be a prince."--

Above these princes who have only the rank, the title and the money,
come the grand-dukes and reigning viceroys like Murat, grand-duke of
Berg, and Eugene, viceroy of Italy. Above Eugene and Murat are the
vassal-kings, Louis, Joseph, Jerome, then Murat himself, who, among
these, is in a better place, and Bernadotte, the only sovereign that is
independent; all more or less envied by the marshals, all more or less
rivals of each other, the inferior aspiring to the superior throne,
Murat inconsolable at being sent to Naples and not to Spain, and at
having only five millions of subjects instead of thirteen millions.
From top to bottom of the hierarchy and even to the loftiest places,
comprising thrones, the steps rise regularly above each other in
continuous file, so that each leads to the following one, with nothing
to hinder the first-comer, provided he is lucky, has good legs and does
not fall on the way, from reaching the top of the staircase in twenty
or thirty years. "It was commonly reported in the army--he has been
promoted king of Naples, of Holland, of Spain, of Sweden, as formerly
was said of the same sort of man, who had been promoted sergeant in this
or that company."--Such is the total and final impression which lingers
on in all imaginations; it is in this sense that the people interpret
the new Regime, and Napoleon devotes himself to confirming the popular
interpretation. Accordingly, the first duchy he creates is for Marshal
Lefebvre

"purposely," as he says,[3351] because "this marshal had been a private
and everybody in Paris had known him as a sergeant in the French
guards."

--With such an example before them, and so many others like it, not less
striking, there is no ambition that does not become exalted, and often
to delirium.

"At this time," says Stendhal, who seized the master-idea of the reign,
"there was no apothecary's apprentice in his back shop, surrounded by
his drugs and bottles, filtering and pounding away in his mortar, who
did not say to himself that, if he chanced to make some great discovery,
he would be made a count with fifty thousand francs a year."

In those days there was no under-clerk who, in his labored penmanship,
inscribed names on a piece of parchment, that did not imagine his own
name appearing some day on a senatorial or ministerial diploma. At