is, however, a condottière of the first class, already aspiring to the
loftiest summits, "with no stopping-place but the throne or the
scaffold,"[30] "determined[31] to master France, and through France
Europe. Without distraction, sleeping only three hours during the
night," he plays with ideas, men, religions, and governments,
exploiting people with incomparable dexterity and brutality. He is,
in the choice of means as of ends, a superior artist, inexhaustible in
glamour, seductions, corruption, and intimidation, fascinating, and
yet more terrible than any wild beast suddenly released among a herd
of browsing cattle. The expression is not too strong and was uttered
by an eye-witness, almost at this very date, a friend and a competent
diplomat: "You know that, while I am very fond of the dear general, I
call him to myself the little tiger, so as to properly characterize
his figure, tenacity, and courage, the rapidity of his movements, and
all that he has in him which maybe fairly regarded in that sense."[32]

At this very date, previous to official adulation and the adoption of
a recognized type, we see him face to face in two portraits drawn from
life, one physical, by a truthful painter, Guérin, and the other
moral, by a superior woman, Madame de Staël, who to the best European
culture added tact and worldly perspicacity. Both portraits agree so
perfectly that each seems to interpret and complete the other. "I saw
him for the first time,"[33] says Madame de Staël, "on his return to
France after the treaty of Campo-Formio. After recovering from the
first excitement of admiration there succeeded to this a decided
sentiment of fear." And yet, "at this time he had no power, for it was
even then supposed that the Directory looked upon him with a good deal
of suspicion." People regarded him sympathetically, and were even
prepossessed in his favor;