Generally there is no mystery in the power of domination: he rules who is indispensable. The Jacobins needed a man, they found him in the unscrupulous Bonaparte; the Directory needed a man, they found him in the expert artillerist; France needed a man, she found him in the conqueror of Italy. And having risen, he did not intermit his industry for a moment. Rehearsing his coronation by means of puppets, or studying with painful care the complicated accounts of his fiscal officers, or absorbing himself in whatever else it might be, he was always the man who knew more about everything than any one else. Throughout his reign he was the fountainhead of every governmental activity: the council of state sharpened not their own, but his thoughts; his secretaries were his pocket note-book; his ministers were the executors of his personal designs; pensions and presents were given by him to his friends, and not to those who served the state as they themselves thought best; every French community received his personal attention, and every Frenchman who came to his general receptions was treated with rude jocularity. In all this he was perfectly natural. At times, however, he felt compelled to attitudinize; perhaps, in the theatrical poses which he assumed for self-protection or for the sake of representing a personified, unapproachable imperial majesty, he copied Talma, with whom he cultivated a sort of intimacy. Possibly, too, his violent sallies were considered dramatic by himself. "Otherwise," he once said, "they would have slapped me on the shoulder every day." "It is sad," remarked Roederer, apropos of a certain event. "Yes, like greatness," was Napoleon's rejoinder.
Napoleon's preëminence lasted just as long as this effective personal supremacy continued. When his faculties refused to perform their continuous, unceasing task, he began to decline; when the material of his calculations transcended all human power, even his own, the descent grew swifter; and the crash came when his abilities worked either intermittently or not at all. Ruin was the consequence of feebleness; the imagination of the world had clothed him with demoniac qualities, but it ceased so to do just in proportion as his superiority to others in plan and execution began to diminish. "There is no empire not founded on the marvelous, and here the marvelous is the truth." These were the words of Talleyrand, addressed to the First Consul on June twenty-first, 1800, just after the news of Marengo had reached Paris. The marvel of the absolute monarchy was the divine right of kings: when men ceased to hold the doctrine, the days of absolutism were numbered. The marvel of Napoleon was his unquestioned human supremacy: when that declined his empire fell.
