"I find very little satisfaction in useless sentiments," said he again,[1271] "and Berthier is so mediocre that I do not know why I waste my time on him. And yet when I am not set against him, I am not sure that I do not like him."
He goes no further. According to him, this indifference is necessary in a statesman. The glass he looks through is that of his own policy;[1272] he must take care that it does not magnify or diminish objects.—Therefore, outside of explosions of nervous sensibility, "he has no consideration for men other than that of a foreman for his workmen,"[1273] 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,[1274] 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."[1275]
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:[1276]
"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 trot and jump fences and ditches, may be found in his correspondence; every stray impulse to take the lead, even when justified by an unforeseen urgency and with the most evident good intention, is suppressed as a deviation, is arrested with a brusque roughness which strains the loins and weakens the knees of the delinquent. The amiable Prince Eugene, so obedient and so loyal,[1277] is thus warned:
"If you want orders or advice from His Majesty in the alteration of the ceiling of your room you should wait till you get them; were Milan burning and you asked orders for putting out the fire, you should let Milan burn until you got them... His Majesty is displeased, and very much displeased, with you; you must never attempt to do his work. Never does he like this, and he will never forgive it."
This enables us to judge of his tone with subalterns. The French battalions are refused admission into certain places in Holland:[1278]