workmen,"[73] or, more precisely, for his tools; once the tool is worn
out, little does he care whether it rusts away in a corner or is cast
aside on a heap of scrap-iron. "Portalis, Minister of Justice,[74]
enters his room one day with a downcast look and his eyes filled with
tears. 'What's the matter with you, Portalis?' inquired Napoleon,
'are you ill? 'No, sire, but very wretched. The poor Archbishop of
Tours, my old schoolmate . . .' 'Eh, well, what has happened to him?'
'Alas, sire, he has just died.' 'What do I care? he was no longer good
for anything.'" Owning and making the most of men and of things, of
bodies and of souls, using and abusing them at discretion, even to
exhaustion, without being responsible to any one, he reaches that
point after a few years where he can say as glibly and more
despotically than Louis XIV. himself,

"My armies, my fleets, my cardinals, my councils, my senate, my
populations, my empire."[75]

Addressing army corps about to rush into battle:

"Soldiers, I need your lives, and you owe them to me."

He says to General Dorsenne and to the grenadiers of the guard:[76]

"I hear that you complain that you want to return to Paris, to your
mistresses. Undeceive yourselves. I shall keep you under arms until
you are eighty. You were born to the bivouac, and you shall die
there."

How he treats his brothers and relations who have become kings; how he
reins them in; how he applies the spur and the whip and makes them