alace was exhibiting the new upholstery, with praises, and
demonstration how glorious it was, and how cheap withal, Napoleon,
making little answer, asked for a pair of scissors, clips one of the
gold tassels from a window-curtain, put it in his pocket, and walked on.
Some days afterwards, he produced it at the right moment, to the horror
of his upholstery functionary; it was not gold but tinsel! In St.
Helena, it is notable how he still, to his last days, insists on the
practical, the real. "Why talk and complain; above all, why quarrel with
one another? There is no _result_ in it; it comes to nothing that one
can _do_. Say nothing, if one can do nothing!" He speaks often so, to
his poor discontented followers; he is like a piece of silent strength
in the middle of their morbid querulousness there.

And accordingly was there not what we can call a _faith_ in him, genuine
so far as it went? That this new enormous Democracy asserting itself
here in the French Revolution is an unsuppressible Fact, which the whole
world, with its old forces and institutions, cannot put down; this was
a true insight of his, and took his conscience and enthusiasm along with
it,--a _faith_. And did he not interpret the dim purport of it well?
"_La carriere ouverte aux talens_, The implements to him who can handle
them:" this actually is the truth, and even the whole truth; it includes
whatever the French Revolution or any Revolution, could mean. Napoleon,
in his first period, was a true Democrat. And yet by the nature of him,
fostered too by his military trade, he knew that Democracy, if it were
a true thing at all, could not be an anarchy: the man had a heart-hatred
for anarchy. On that Twentieth of June (1792), Bourrienne and he sat
in a coffee-house, as the mob rolled by: Napoleon expresses the deepest
contempt for persons in authority that they do not restrain this rabble.
On the Tenth of August he wonders why there is no man to command these
poor Swiss; they would conquer if there were. Such a faith in Democracy,
yet hatred of anarchy, it is that carries Napoleon through all his great
work. Through his brilliant Italian Campaigns, onwards to the Peace
of Leoben, one would say, his inspiration is: "Triumph to the French
Revolution; assertion of it against these Austrian Simulacra that
pretend to call it a Simulacrum!" Withal, however, he feels, and has a
right to feel, how necessary a strong Authority is; how the Revolution
cannot prosper o