up at Paris: all talk and no work?
What wonder it runs all wrong! We shall have to go and put our _petit
corporal_ there!' They went and put him there; they and France at large.
Chief-consulship, emperorship, victory over Europe; till the poor
lieutenant of _La Fere_, not unnaturally, might seem to himself the
greatest of all men that had been in the world for some ages.

But at this point the fatal charlatan-element got the upper-hand. He
apostatized from his old faith in facts, took to believing in semblances;
strove to connect himself with Austrian dynasties, popedoms, with the old
false feudalities which he once saw clearly to be false; considered that
_he_ would found 'his dynasty' and so forth; that the enormous French
revolution meant only that! The man was 'given up to strong delusion that
he should believe a lie;' a fearful but most sure thing. He did not know
true from false now when he looked at them; the fearfulest penalty a man
pays for yielding to untruth of heart. _Self_ and false ambition had now
become his god: _self_-deception once yielded to, _all_ other deceptions
follow naturally, more and more. What a paltry patch-work of theatrical
paper-mantles, tinsel and mummery, had this man wrapped his own reality
in, thinking to make it more real thereby! His hollow Pope's-Concordat,
pretending to be a reestablishment of Catholicism, felt by himself to be
the method of extirpating it, '_la vaccine de la religion_;' his
ceremonial coronations, consecrations by the old Italian chimera in Notre
Dame there; 'wanting nothing to complete the pomp of it but the half
million who had died to put an end to all that!' Cromwell's inauguration
was by the sword and Bible; what we must call a genuinely _true_ one.
Sword and Bible were borne before him, without any chimera. Were not these
real emblems of Puritanism; its true decoration and insignia? It had used
them both in a very real manner, and pretended to stand by them now! But
this poor Napoleon mistook; he believed too much in the _dupeability_ of
men; saw no fact deeper in man than hunger and this. He was mistaken. Like
a man that should build upon cloud; his house and he falls down in
confused wreck, and depart out of the world.

Alas! in all of us this charlatan-element exists; and might be developed,
were the temptation strong enough. 'Lead us not into temptation!' But it
is fatal, I say, that it _be_ developed. The thing into which it enters as
a cognizable ing