speeches. His style has movement and
imagination. And in this mass of thoughts one can not find a philosophic
curiosity, not one expression of anxiety about the unknowable, not an
expression of fear of the mystery which surrounds destiny. At Saint
Helena, when he talks of God and of the soul, he seems to be a little
fourteen-year-old school-boy. Thrown upon the world, his mind found
itself fit for the world, and embraced it all. Nothing of that mind was
lost in the infinite. Himself a poet, he knew only the poetry of action.
He limited to the earth his powerful dream of life. In his terrible and
touching naivete he believed that a man could be great, and neither time
nor misfortune made him lose that idea. His youth, or rather his sublime
adolescence, lasted as long as he lived, because life never brought him a
real maturity. Such is the abnormal state of men of action. They live
entirely in the present, and their genius concentrates on one point. The
hours of their existence are not connected by a chain of grave and
disinterested meditations. They succeed themselves in a series of acts.
They lack interior life. This defect is particularly visible in Napoleon,
who never lived within himself. From this is derived the frivolity of
temperament which made him support easily the enormous load of his evils
and of his faults. His mind was born anew every day. He had, more than
any other person, a capacity for diversion. The first day that he saw the
sun rise on his funereal rock at Saint Helena, he jumped from his bed,
whistling a romantic air. It was the peace of a mind superior to fortune;
it was the frivolity of a mind prompt in resurrection. He lived from the
outside."

Garain, who did not like Paul Vence's ingenious turn of wit and language,
tried to hasten the conclusion:

"In a word," he said, "there was something of the monster in the man."

"There are no monsters," replied Paul Vence; "and men who pass for
monsters inspire horror. Napoleon was loved by an entire people. He had
the power to win the love of men. The joy of his soldiers was to die for
him."

Countess Martin would have wished Dechartre to give his opinion. But he
excused himself with a sort of fright.

"Do you know," said Schmoll again, "the parable of the three rings,
sublime inspiration of a Portuguese Jew."

Garain, while complimenting Paul Vence on his brilliant paradox,
regretted that wit should be exercised at the expense of morality and
just