hows you their teeth and their claws; you can say of every
one of them: "That is a royal tiger." In fact, they are taken from all
the thrones of the earth. History parades them through the ages. She
prevents them from dying; she takes care of them. They are her tigers.

She does not mingle jackals with them.

She puts and keeps apart the disgusting beasts. M. Bonaparte will be
with Claudius, with Ferdinand VII of Spain, with Ferdinand II of
Naples, in the hyena cage.

He is a bit of a brigand, and a great deal of a knave. One is always
conscious of the poor prince of industry, who lived from hand to mouth
in England; his present prosperity, his triumph, his empire, and his
inflation amount to nothing; the purple mantle trails over shoes down
at heel. Napoleon the Little, nothing more, nothing less. The title of
this book is well chosen.

The meanness of his vices prejudices the grandeur of his crimes. What
would you have? Peter the Cruel massacred, but he did not steal; Henry
III assassinated, but he did not swindle; Timour crushed children under
horses' hoofs, much as M. Bonaparte exterminated women and old men on
the boulevard, but he did not lie. Hear the Arabian historian:
"Timour-Beg, Sahib-Keran (master of the world and of the age, master of
the planetary conjunctions), was born at Kesch, in 1336; he slaughtered
a hundred thousand captives; as he was besieging Siwas, the
inhabitants, to mollify him, sent him a thousand little children,
bearing each a Koran on its head, and crying, 'Allah! Allah!' He caused
the sacred books to be removed with respect, and the children to be
crushed beneath the hoofs of wild horses. He used seventy thousand
human heads, with cement, stone, and brick, in building towers at
Herat, Sebzvar, Tekrit, Aleppo, and Bagdad; he detested lying; when he
had given his word, men could rely upon it."

M. Bonaparte is not of this stature. He has not that dignity which the
great despots of the East and of the West mingle with ferocity. The
amplitude of the Caesars is wanting in him. To bear one's self worthily
and make a fair appearance among all the illustrious executioners who
have tortured mankind in the course of four thousand years, one must
not have any mental hesitation between a general of division and a
bass-drummer on the Champs-Elysees; one must not have been a constable
in London; one must not have undergone, with lowered eyes, in the Court
of Peers, the haughty scorn of M. Magnan;