drag him out . . . . they even thought for a moment that he was going
to faint."[21] After the abdication at Fontainebleau, on encountering
the rage and imprecations which greeted him in Provence, he seemed for
some days to be morally shattered; the animal instincts assert their
supremacy; he is afraid and makes no attempt at concealment.[22] After
borrowing the uniform of an Austrian colonel, the helmet of a Prussian
quartermaster, and the cloak of the Russian quartermaster, he still
considers that he is not sufficiently disguised. In the inn at
Calade, "he starts and changes color at the slightest noise"; the
commissaries, who repeatedly enter his room, "find him always in
tears." "He wearies them with his anxieties and irresolution"; he says
that the French government would like to have him assassinated on the
road, refuses to eat for fear of poison, and thinks that he might
escape by jumping out of the window. And yet he gives vent to his
feelings and lets his tongue run on about himself without stopping,
concerning his past, his character, unreservedly, indelicately,
trivially; like a cynic and one who is half-crazy; his ideas run loose
and crowd each other like the anarchical gatherings of a tumultuous
mob; he does not recover his mastery of them until he reaches Fréjus,
the end of his journey, where he feels himself safe and protected from
any highway assault; then only do they return within ordinary limits
and fall back in regular line under the control of the sovereign
intellect which, after sinking for a time, revives and resumes its
ascendancy. - There is nothing in him so extraordinary as this almost
perpetual domination of the lucid, calculating reason; his willpower
is still more formidable than his intelligence; before it can obtain
the mastery of others it must be master at home. To measure its
power, it does not suffice to note its fascinations; to enumerate the
millions of souls it captivates, to estimate the vastness of the
obstacles it overcomes: we must again, and especially, represent to