truth, or the
significance of his actions which were too contrary to goodness and
truth, too remote from everything human, for him ever to be able to
grasp their meaning. He could not disavow his actions, belauded as they
were by half the world, and so he had to repudiate truth, goodness, and
all humanity.

Not only on that day, as he rode over the battlefield strewn with men
killed and maimed (by his will as he believed), did he reckon as he
looked at them how many Russians there were for each Frenchman and,
deceiving himself, find reason for rejoicing in the calculation that
there were five Russians for every Frenchman. Not on that day alone
did he write in a letter to Paris that "the battle field was superb,"
because fifty thousand corpses lay there, but even on the island of St.
Helena in the peaceful solitude where he said he intended to devote his
leisure to an account of the great deeds he had done, he wrote:

The Russian war should have been the most popular war of modern times:
it was a war of good sense, for real interests, for the tranquillity and
security of all; it was purely pacific and conservative.

It was a war for a great cause, the end of uncertainties and the
beginning of security. A new horizon and new labors were opening out,
full of well-being and prosperity for all. The European system was
already founded; all that remained was to organize it.

Satisfied on these great points and with tranquility everywhere, I
too should have had my Congress and my Holy Alliance. Those ideas were
stolen from me. In that reunion of great sovereigns we should have
discussed our interests like one family, and have rendered account to
the peoples as clerk to master.

Europe would in this way soon have been, in fact, but one people, and
anyone who traveled anywhere would have found himself always in the
common fatherland. I should have demanded the freedom of all navigable
rivers for everybody, that the seas should be common to all, and that
the great standing armies should be reduced henceforth to mere guards
for the sovereigns.

On returning to France, to the bosom of the great, strong, magnificent,
peaceful, and glorious fatherland, I should have proclaimed
her frontiers immutable; all future wars purely defensive, all
aggrandizement antinational. I should have associated my son in the
Empire; my dictatorship would have been finished, and his constitutional
reign would have begun.

Paris would have been