emotion of Dandolo, who pleads for Venice his country, which is sold
to Austria, he is agitated and his eyes moisten.[17] Speaking of the
capitulation of Baylen, at a full meeting of the Council of State,[18]
his voice trembles, and "he gives way to his grief, his eyes even
filling with tears." In 1806, setting out for the army and on taking
leave of Josephine, he has a nervous attack which is so severe as to
bring on vomiting.[19] "We had to make him sit down," says an eye-
witness, "and swallow some orange water; he shed tears, and this
lasted a quarter of an hour." The same nervous and stomachic crisis
came on in 1808, on deciding on the divorce; he tosses about a whole
night, and laments like a woman; he melts, and embraces Josephine; he
is weaker than she is: "My poor Josephine, I can never leave you!"
Folding her in his arms, he declares that she shall not quit him; he
abandons himself wholly to the sensation of the moment; she must
undress at once, sleep alongside of him, and he weeps over her ;
"literally," she says, " he soaked the bed with his tears." -
Evidently, in such an organism, however powerful the superimposed
regulator, there is a risk of the equilibrium being destroyed. He is
aware of this, for he knows himself well; he is afraid of his own
nervous sensibility, the same as of an easily frightened horse; at
critical moments, at Berezina, he refuses to receive the bad news
which might excite this, and, on the informer's insisting on it, he
asks him again,[20] "Why, sir, do you want to disturb me?" -
Nevertheless, in spite of his precautions, he is twice taken unawares,
at times when the peril was alarming and of a new kind; he, so clear
headed and so cool under fire, the boldest of military heroes and the
most audacious of political adventurers, quails twice in a
parliamentary storm and again in a popular crisis. On the 18th of
Brumaire, in the Corps Législatif, "he turned pale, trembled, and
seemed to lose his head at the shouts of outlawry . . . . they had to