ed Continent;[12135] French residents and commanders at
St. Petersburg and Riga as at Dantzic, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Lisbon,
Barcelona, and Trieste. Every able-bodied Frenchman that can be employed
from Cadiz to Moscow in maintaining and administering the conquest. All
the able-bodied youth annually seized by the conscription, and, if
they have escaped this, seized again by decrees.[12136] The entire male
population thus devoted to works of constraint, nothing else in prospect
for either the cultivated or the uncultivated, no military or civil
career other than a prolonged guard duty, threatened and threatening,
as soldier, customs-inspector, or gendarme, as prefect, sub-prefect, or
commissioner of police, that is to say, as subaltern henchman and bully
restraining subjects and raising contributions, confiscating and burning
merchandise, seizing grumblers, and making the refractory toe the
mark.[12137] In 1810, one hundred and sixty thousand of the refractory
were already condemned by name, and, moreover, penalties were imposed
on their families to the amount of one hundred and seventy millions
of francs In 1811 and 1812 the roving columns which tracked fugitives
gathered sixty thousand of them, and drove them along the coast from the
Adour to the Niemen; on reaching the frontier, they were en-rolled in
the grand army; but they desert the very first month, they and their
chained companions, at the rate of four or five thousand a day.[12138]
Should England be conquered, garrisons would have to be maintained
there, and of soldiers equally zealous. Such is the dark future which
this system opens to the French, even with the best of good luck. It
turns out that the luck is bad, and at the end of 1812 the grand army is
freezing in the snow; Napoleon's horse has let him tumble. Fortunately,
the animal has simply foundered; "His Majesty's health was never
better";[12139] nothing has happened to the rider; he gets up on his
legs, and what concerns him at this moment is not the sufferings of his
broken-down steed, but his own mishap; his reputation as a horseman is
compromised; the effect on the public, the hooting of the audience, is
what troubles him, the comedy of a perilous leap, announced with such a
flourish of trumpets and ending in such a disgraceful fall. On reaching
Warsaw[12140] he says to himself, ten times over:

"There is only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous."

The following year, at Dresden, he exposes sti