s perusing the bulletins of the grand army, those heroic strophes
penned on the field of battle; there, at intervals, he beheld his
father's name, always the name of the Emperor; the whole of that great
Empire presented itself to him; he felt a flood swelling and rising
within him; it seemed to him at moments that his father passed close
to him like a breath, and whispered in his ear; he gradually got into
a singular state; he thought that he heard drums, cannon, trumpets,
the measured tread of battalions, the dull and distant gallop of the
cavalry; from time to time, his eyes were raised heavenward, and gazed
upon the colossal constellations as they gleamed in the measureless
depths of space, then they fell upon his book once more, and there they
beheld other colossal things moving confusedly. His heart contracted
within him. He was in a transport, trembling, panting. All at once,
without himself knowing what was in him, and what impulse he was
obeying, he sprang to his feet, stretched both arms out of the window,
gazed intently into the gloom, the silence, the infinite darkness, the
eternal immensity, and exclaimed: "Long live the Emperor!"

From that moment forth, all was over; the Ogre of Corsica,--the
usurper,--the tyrant,--the monster who was the lover of his own
sisters,--the actor who took lessons of Talma,--the poisoner of
Jaffa,--the tiger,--Buonaparte,--all this vanished, and gave place
in his mind to a vague and brilliant radiance in which shone, at an
inaccessible height, the pale marble phantom of Caesar. The Emperor had
been for his father only the well-beloved captain whom one admires, for
whom one sacrifices one's self; he was something more to Marius. He was
the predestined constructor of the French group, succeeding the Roman
group in the domination of the universe. He was a prodigious architect,
of a destruction, the continuer of Charlemagne, of Louis XI., of Henry
IV., of Richelieu, of Louis XIV., and of the Committee of Public Safety,
having his spots, no doubt, his faults, his crimes even, being a man,
that is to say; but august in his faults, brilliant in his spots,
powerful in his crime.

He was the predestined man, who had forced all nations to say: "The
great nation!" He was better than that, he was the very incarnation of
France, conquering Europe by the sword which he grasped, and the world
by the light which he shed. Marius saw in Bonaparte the dazzling spectre
which will always rise upon