Even at the Council of State he allows himself to run on, forgetting
the business on hand; he starts off right and left with some
digression or demonstration, some invective or other, for two or three
hours at a stretch,[14] insisting over and over again, bent on
convincing or prevailing, and ending in demanding of the others if he
is not right, "and, in this case, never failing to find that all have
yielded to the force of his arguments." On reflection, he knows the
value of an assent thus obtained, and, pointing to his chair, he
observes:

"It must be admitted that it is easy to be brilliant when one is in
that seat!"

Nevertheless he has enjoyed his intellectual exercise and given way to
his passion, which controls him far more than he controls it.

"My nerves are very irritable," he said of himself, "and when in this
state were my pulse not always regular I should risk going crazy."[15]

The tension of accumulated impressions is often too great, and it ends
in a physical break-down. Strangely enough in so great a warrior and
with such a statesman, "it is not infrequent, when excited, to see him
shed tears." He who has looked upon thousands of dying men, and who
has had thousands of men slaughtered, "sobs," after Wagram and after
Bautzen,[16] at the couch of a dying comrade. "I saw him," says his
valet, "weep while eating his breakfast, after coming from Marshal
Lannes's bedside; big tears rolled down his cheeks and fell on his
plate." It is not alone the physical sensation, the sight of a
bleeding, mangled body, which thus moves him acutely and deeply; for a
word, a simple idea, stings and penetrates almost as far. Before the