There is no doubt that the First Consul realized what he had done and whither he was going. The conspiracies had seriously affected his nerves; more and more he withdrew from the society of all but a few confidants, and surrounded himself with a more rigid etiquette. Mme. Bonaparte gathered to the Tuileries ever larger numbers of the fortune-hunting nobility, who hoped that Bonaparte's elevation would yet prove a stepping-stone to restore the Bourbons. These elegant persons laughed in their sleeves at what they heard and saw. The dress and state of the monarchy were restored, but neither the chief magistrate himself, nor the late republicans who had made good their position at court, had the manners or the morals of those for whom the social institutions of royalty had been developed. The returning nobles thought it very funny that the great man liked seclusion, and found what amusement he took in ghost-stories, in the sighing of the wind, in brusque sallies of coarse wit, or in the rude familiarities of bluff intimacy with plain people; they considered it very absurd that his vices were commonplace and perhaps even worse; they thought it laughable that the newcomers slipped on the polished floors, and it seemed most entertaining that the gentlewomen of the old régime who, like Mme. de Rémusat, had accepted permanent positions as ladies of the palace, were often subjected to treatment and put into positions not foreseen in the training they had received from courtly tutors.
But, for all this, it was not merry at the Tuileries. The chief grew timid and dark before his own achievements, as he sought to master difficulties which ambition does not foresee, but with which it must reckon. No one liked less than Bonaparte to ride abroad surrounded by guards, or to muse in green alleys where, as at Malmaison, every tree was at times the post of a patrol. Yet even he could not alter the necessity, and the system of espionage was extended about him like a cage for his protection. As to friends, they grew fewer and fewer; for one of the First Consul's maxims was the cynical aphorism of Machiavelli, that friends must always be treated as if one day they might be enemies. Even the notion of duty, not to speak of its practice, was foreign to him; generosity, honesty, and sincerity were utopian conceptions of which his world and his experience had never known. The attractive visions and ideals of virtue which mingled with the speculations of Rousseau or Voltaire had become, like the mirage of the desert, empty illusions that heighten the barrenness of self-interest and ambition beneath them. Human greed, passion, vanity--such, Bonaparte declared, are the motive forces by which kings rule; the justice of governors was for him the safeguarding of comfort, of material prosperity, and of the superstitions which under the name of religion create a moral power necessary to the public order.