orthwith, and pensions and gifts of
duchies poured down in showers. There were fortunes for the staff that
never cost France a penny, and the Legion of Honor was as good as an
annuity for the rank and file; I still draw my pension on the strength
of it. In short, here were armies provided for in a way that had never
been seen before! But the Emperor, who knew that he was to be Emperor
over everybody, and not only over the army, bethinks himself of the
bourgeois, and sets them to build fairy monuments in places that had
been as bare as the back of my hand till then. Suppose, now, that you
are coming out of Spain and on the way to Berlin; well, you would see
triumphal arches, and in the sculpture upon them the common soldiers are
done every bit as beautifully as the generals!

In two or three years Napoleon fills his cellars with gold, makes
bridges, palaces, roads, scholars, festivals, laws, fleets, and harbors;
he spends millions on millions, ever so much, and ever so much more to
it, so that I have heard it said that he could have paved the whole of
France with five-franc pieces if the fancy had taken him; and all this
without putting any taxes on you people here. So when he was comfortably
seated on his throne, and so thoroughly the master of the situation,
that all Europe was waiting for leave to do anything for him that he
might happen to want; as he had four brothers and three sisters, he said
to us, just as it might be by way of conversation, in the order of the
day:

"Children, is it fitting that your Emperor's relations should beg their
bread? No; I want them all to be luminaries, like me in fact! Therefore,
it is urgently necessary to conquer a kingdom for each one of them, so
that the French nation may be masters everywhere, so that the Guard may
make the whole earth tremble, and France may spit wherever she likes,
and every nation shall say to her, as it is written on my coins, 'God
protects you.'"

"All right!" answers the army, "we will fish up kingdoms for you with
the bayonet."

Ah! there was no backing out of it, look you! If he had taken it into
his head to conquer the moon, we should have had to put everything in
train, pack our knapsacks, and scramble up; luckily, he had no wish for
that excursion. The kings who were used to the comforts of a throne, of
course, objected to be lugged off, so we had marching orders. We march,
we get there, and the earth begins to shake to its centre again. What
tim