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[ Pelet de la Lozère," Opinions de Napoléon au conseil d'état," p.8.—Roederer, III., 380.]
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[ Mollien, "Mémoires," I., 379; II., 230.—Roederer, III., 434. "He is at the head of all things. He governs, administrates, negotiates, works eighteen hours a day, with the clearest and best organized head; he has governed more in three years than kings in a hundred years."—Lavalette, "Mémoires," II., 75. (The words of Napoleon's secretary on Napoleon's labor in Paris, after Leipsic) "He retires at eleven, but gets up at three o'clock in the morning, and until the evening there is not a moment he does not devote to work. It is time this stopped, for he will be used up, and myself before he is."—Gaudin, Duc de Gaëte, "Mémoires," III. (supplement), p.75. Account of an evening in which, from eight o'clock to three in the morning, Napoleon examines with Gaudin his general budget, during seven consecutive hours, without stopping a minute.—Sir Neil Campbell, "Napoléon at Fontainebleau and at Elbe," p.243. "Journal de Sir Neil Campbell a' l'ile d'Elbe": I never saw any man, in any station in life, so personally active and so persistent in his activity. He seems to take pleasure in perpetual motion and in seeing those who accompany him completely tired out, which frequently happened in my case when I accompanied him.. . Yesterday, after having been on his legs from eight in the morning to three in the afternoon, visiting the frigates and transports, even to going down to the lower compartments among the horses, he rode on horseback for three hours, and, as he afterwards said to me, to rest himself.">[
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[ The starting-point of the great discoveries of Darwin is the physical, detailed description he made in his study of animals and plants, as living; during the whole course of life, through so many difficulties and subject to a fierce competition. This study is wholly lacking in the ordinary zoologist or botanist, whose mind is busy only with anatomical preparations or collections of plants. In every science, the difficulty lies in describing in a nutshell, using significant examples, the real object, just as it exists before us, and its true history. Claude Bernard one day remarked to me, "We shall know physiology when we are able to follow step by step a molecule of carbon or azote in the body of a dog, give its history, and describe its passage from its entrance to its exit.">[
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[ Thibaudeau, "Mémoires sur le Consulat," 204. (Apropos of the tribunate): "They consist of a dozen or fifteen metaphysicians who ought to be flung into the water; they crawl all over me like vermin.">[
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[ Madame de Rémusat, I., 115: "He is really ignorant, having read very little and always hastily."—Stendhal, "Mémoires sur Napoleon": "His education was very defective....He knew nothing of the great principles discovered within the past one hundred years," and just those which concern man or society. "For example, he had not read Montesquieu as this writer ought to be read, that is to say, in a way to accept or decidedly reject each of the thirty-one books of the 'Esprit des lois.' He had not thus read Bayle's Dictionary nor the Essay on the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. This ignorance of the Emperor's was not perceptible in conversation, and first, because he led in conversation, and next because with Italian finesse no question put by him, or careless supposition thrown out, ever betrayed that ignorance."—Bourrienne. I., 19, 21: At Brienne, "unfortunately for us, the monks to whom the education of youth was confided knew nothing, and were too poor to pay good foreign teachers.... It is inconceivable how any capable man ever graduated from this educational institution."—Yung, I., 125 (Notes made by him on Bonaparte, when he left the Military Academy): "Very fond of the abstract sciences, indifferent to others, well grounded in mathematics and geography.">[