hich we call the passion of love.

"I have but one passion,[1249] one mistress, and that is France. I sleep
with her. She has never been false to me. She lavishes her blood and
treasures on me. If I need 500,000 men, she gives them to me."

Let no one come between him and her. Let Joseph, in relation to
the coronation, abstain from claiming his place, even secondary and
prospective, in the new empire; let him not put forth his fraternal
rights.[1250] "It is to wound me in the most tender spot." This he does,
and, "Nothing can efface that from my souvenirs. It is as if he had told
an impassioned lover that he had slept with his mistress, or merely that
he hoped to succeed with her. My mistress is power. I have worked too
hard to obtain her, to let her be ravished from me, or even suffer
anybody to covet her." This ambition, as avid as it is jealous, which
becomes exasperated at the very idea of a rival, feels hampered by the
mere idea of setting a limit to it; however vast the acquired power,
he would like to have it still more vast; on quitting the most copious
banquet, he still remains insatiate. On the day after the coronation he
said to Decres:[1251]

"I come too late, there is no longer anything great to accomplish.
I admit that my career is brilliant and that I have made my way
successfully. But what a difference alongside of antiquity! Take
Alexander! After having conquered Asia, and proclaimed himself to the
people as the son of Jupiter, with the exception of Olympias, who knew
what all this meant, and Aristotle, and a few Athenian pedants, the
entire Orient believed him. Very well, should I now declare that I was
the son of God Almighty, and proclaim that I am going to worship him
under this title, every market woman would hoot at me as I walked along
the streets. People nowadays know too much. Nothing is left to do."

And yet, even on this secluded, elevated domain, and which twenty
centuries of civilization keeps inaccessible, he still encroaches, and
to the utmost, in a roundabout way, by laying his hand on the Church,
and next on the Pope; here, as elsewhere, he takes all he can get.
Nothing in his eyes, is more natural; he has a right to it, because he
is the only capable one.

"My Italian people[1252] must know me well enough not to forget
that there is more in my little finger than in all their brains put
together."

Alongside of him, they are children, "minors," the French also, and
likewise the r