on and the King of Etruria the line in which Philoctetes
says--

"J'ai fait des souverains et n'ai pas voulu l'etre."

["I have made sovereigns, but have not wished to be one myself."]

The application was so marked that it could not fail to become the
subject of conversation between the First Consul and me. "You remarked
it, Bourrienne?" . . . "Yes, General." . . "The fools! . . .
They shall see! They shall see!" We did indeed see. Not content with
making kings, Bonaparte, when his brow was encircled by a double crown,
after creating princes at length realised the object he had long
contemplated, namely, to found a new nobility endowed with hereditary
rights. It was at the commencement of March 1808 that he accomplished
this project; and I saw in the 'Moniteur' a long list of princes, dukes,
counts, barons, and knights of the Empire; there were wanting only
viscounts and marquises.

At the same time that Bonaparte was founding a new nobility he determined
to raise up the old edifice of the university, but on a new foundation.
The education of youth had always been one of his ruling ideas, and I had
an opportunity of observing how he was changed by the exercise of
sovereign power when I received at Hamburg the statutes of the new elder
daughter of the Emperor of the French, and compared them with the ideas
which Bonaparte, when General and First Consul, had often expressed to me
respecting the education which ought to be given youth. Though the sworn
enemy of everything like liberty, Bonaparte had at first conceived a vast
system of education, comprising above all the study of history, and those
positive sciences, such as geology and astronomy, which give the utmost
degree of development to the human mind. The Sovereign, however, shrunk
from the first ideas of the man of genius, and his university, confided
to the elegant suppleness of M. de Fontaines, was merely a school capable
of producing educated subjects but not enlightened men.

Before taking complete possession of Rome, and making it the second city
of the Empire, the vaunted moderation of Bonaparte was confined to
dismembering from it the legations of Ancona, Urbino, Macerata, and
Camerino, which were divided into three departments; and added to the
Kingdom of Italy. The patience of the Holy See could no longer hold out
against this act of violence, and Cardinal Caprara, who had remained in
Paris since the coronation, at last left that capital. Shor