ortune or get a big
office, and he generally was a man that slept about three hours a
night. They never put down in the books the names of those gentlemen
that succeeded in life that slept all they wanted to; and we all
thought that we could not sleep to exceed three or four hours if we
ever expected to be anything in this world. We have had a wrong
standard. The happy man is the successful man; and the man who makes
somebody else happy, is a happy man. The man that has gained the love
of one good, splendid, pure woman, his life has been a success, no
matter if he dies in the ditch; and if he gets to be a crowned monarch
of the world, and never had the love of one splendid heart, his life
has been an ashen vapor.

A little while ago I stood by the tomb of the first Napoleon, a
magnificent tomb of gilt and gold, fit almost for a dead deity, and
here was a great circle, and in the bottom there, in a sarcophagus,
rested at last the ashes of that restless man. I looked at that tomb,
and I thought about the career of the greatest soldier of the modern
world. As I looked, in imagination I could see him walking up and down
the banks of the Seine contemplating suicide. I could see him at
Toulon; I could see him at Paris, putting down the mob; I could see him
at the head of the army of Italy; I could see him crossing the bridge
of Lodi, with the tri-color in his hand; I saw him in Egypt, fighting
battles under the shadow of the Pyramids; I saw him returning; I saw
him conquer the Alps, and mingle the eagles of France with the eagles
of Italy; I saw him at Marengo, I saw him at Austerlitz; I saw him in
Russia, where the infantry of the snow and the blast smote his legions,
when death rode the icy winds of winter. I saw him at Leipsic; hurled
back upon Paris, banished; and I saw him escape from Elba and retake an
empire by the force of his genius. I saw him at the field of Waterloo,
where fate and chance combined to wreck the fortune of their former
king. I saw him at St. Helena, with his hands behind his back, gazing
out upon the sad and solemn sea, and I thought of all the widows he had
made, of all the orphans, of all the tears that had been shed for his
glory; and I thought of the woman, the only woman who ever loved him,
pushed from his heart by the cold hand of ambition and I said to
myself, as I gazed, "I would rather have been a French peasant and worn
wooden shoes, and lived in a little hut but with a vine runnin