t is this vulgar
grandeur which makes heroes. And Napoleon is the perfect hero. His brain
never surpassed his hand--that hand, small and beautiful, which grasped
the world. He never had, for a moment, the least care for what he could
not reach."

"Then," said Garain, "according to you, he was not an intellectual
genius. I am of your opinion."

"Surely," continued Paul Vence, "he had enough genius to be brilliant
in the civil and military arena of the world. But he had not speculative
genius. That genius is another pair of sleeves, as Buffon says. We have
a collection of his writings and 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 t