ced in truth to say that the only fears which I had ever heard
expressed were lest he should not get across.

'The soldiers are very jealous that the sailors should always have the
honour,' said I.

'But they have a very small army.'

'Nearly every man is a volunteer, Sire.'

'Pooh, conscripts!' he cried, and made a motion with his hands as if to
sweep them from before him. I will land with a hundred thousand men in
Kent or in Sussex. I will fight a great battle which I will win with a
loss of ten thousand men. On the third day I shall be in London.
I will seize the statesmen, the bankers, the merchants, the newspaper
men. I will impose an indemnity of a hundred millions of their pounds.
I will favour the poor at the expense of the rich, and so I shall have a
party. I will detach Scotland and Ireland by giving them constitutions
which will put them in a superior condition to England. Thus I will sow
dissensions everywhere. Then as a price for leaving the island I will
claim their fleet and their colonies. In this way I shall secure the
command of the world to France for at least a century to come.'

In this short sketch I could perceive the quality which I have since
heard remarked in Napoleon, that his mind could both conceive a large
scheme, and at the same time evolve those practical details which would
seem to bring it within the bounds of possibility. One instant it would
be a wild dream of overrunning the East. The next it was a schedule of
the ships, the ports, the stores, the troops, which would be needed to
turn dream into fact. He gripped the heart of a question with the same
decision which made him strike straight for an enemy's capital.
The soul of a poet, and the mind of a man of business of the first
order, that is the combination which may make a man dangerous to the
world.

I think that it may have been his purpose--for he never did anything
without a purpose--to give me an object-lesson of his own capacity for
governing, with the idea, perhaps, that I might in turn influence others
of the Emigres by what I told them. At any rate he left me there to
stand and to watch the curious succession of points upon which he had to
give an opinion during a few hours. Nothing seemed to be either too
large or too small for that extraordinary mind. At one instant it was
the arrangements for the winter cantonments of two hundred thousand men,
at the next he was discussing with de Caulaincourt the cu