ll more foolishly, openly,
and nakedly his master passion, the motives which determine him, the
immensity and ferocity of his pitiless pride.

"What do they want of me?" said he to M. de Metternich.[12141] "Do they
want me to dishonor myself? Never! I can die, but never will I yield an
inch of territory! Your sovereigns, born to the throne, may be beaten
twenty times over and yet return to their capitals: I cannot do this,
because I am a parvenu soldier. My domination will not survive the day
when I shall have ceased to be strong, and, consequently, feared."

In effect, his despotism in France is founded on his European
omnipotence; if he does not remain master of the Continent," he must
settle with the corps legislatif.[12142] Rather than descend to an
inferior position, rather than be a constitutional monarch, controlled
by parliamentary chambers, he plays double or quits, and will risk
losing everything.

"I have seen your soldiers," says Metternich to him, "they are children.
When this army of boys is gone, what will you do then?"

At these words, which touch his heart, he grows pale, his features
contract, and his rage overcomes him; like a wounded man who has made a
false step and exposes himself, he says violently to Metternich:

"You are not a soldier You do not know the impulses of a soldier's
breast! I have grown up on the battle-field, and a man like me does not
give a damn for the lives of a million men!"[12143]

His imperial pipe-dreams has devoured many more. Between 1804 and 1815
he has had slaughtered 1,700,000 Frenchmen, born within the boundaries
of ancient France,[12144] to which must be added, probably, 2,000,000
men born outside of these limits, and slain for him, under the title of
allies, or slain by him under the title of enemies. All that the poor,
enthusiastic, and credulous Gauls have gained by entrusting their public
welfare to him is two invasions; all that he bequeaths to them as a
reward for their devotion, after this prodigious waste of their blood
and the blood of others, is a France shorn of fifteen departments
acquired by the republic, deprived of Savoy, of the left bank of the
Rhine and of Belgium, despoiled of the northeast angle by which it
completed its boundaries, fortified its most vulnerable point, and,
using the words of Vauban, "made its field square," separated from
4,000,000 new Frenchmen which it had assimilated after twenty years of
life in common, and, worse still,