Valmy, the Prussians would have entered Paris in a few days, the
monarchy would have been restored, and the name of Bonaparte never would
have been heard; and equally unknown would have been the names of a
hundred other French leaders, who distinguished themselves in the
three-and-twenty years that followed the first successes of Dumouriez
and Kellermann. Let honor be given where it is due, and let the fogies
have their just share of it. There can be nothing meaner than to insist
upon stripping gray heads of green laurels.

After the old generals and old soldiers of France had secured
standing-places for the new generation, the representatives of the
latter certainly did make their way brilliantly and rapidly. The school
was a good one, and the scholars were apt to learn, and did credit to
their masters. They carried the tricolor over Europe and into Egypt, and
saw it flying over the capital of almost every member of those
coalitions which had purposed its degradation at Paris. It was the flag
to which men bowed at Madrid and Seville, at Milan and Rome, at Paris
and at the Hague, at Warsaw and Wilna, at Dantzie and in Dalmatia, at
the same time that it was fast approaching Moscow; and it was thought
of with as much fear as hatred at Vienna and Berlin. No wonder that the
world forgot or overlooked the earlier and fewer triumphs of the first
Republican commanders, when dazzled by the glories that shone from
Arcola, the Pyramids, Zürich, Marengo, Hohenlinden, Ulm, Austerlitz,
Jena, Eckmühl, Wagram, Borodino, Lützen, Bautzen, and Dresden. But those
young generals of the Republic and the Empire were sometimes found
unequal to the work of contending against the old generals of the
Coalitionists. Suvaroff was in his seventieth year when he defeated
Macdonald at the Battle of the Trebbia, the Frenchman being but
thirty-four; and a few months later he defeated Joubert, who was thirty,
at Novi. Joubert was one of Bonaparte's generals in his first Italian