the record of the smallest incidents of Napoleon's life, with extracts from not scores but hundreds of memoirs in which he forms the central figure; and this work—evidently the result of years of patient labour—is devoted to proving that of all men who have lived Napoleon was the most generous, the most unselfish, and the most patriotic.
I cannot accept this estimate; but in the pages of M. Lévy's intensely interesting volumes there is the satisfaction of feeling that Napoleon is restored to something of human shape. He is there neither god, nor demon, nor angel—though M. Lévy would have him angelic—but a human being, with plenty of human weaknesses, affections, and even considerateness, athwart all his iron strength, callousness, and voracious ambition.
I.
EARLY YEARS.
Napoleon's early years were, as we already know, full of all the straits and miseries of genteel poverty. His father, as everybody knows, was an easy-going, thriftless, helpless creature, who died at an early age of cancer in the stomach—the only heritage, as Taine sardonically remarks, which he left to his great son. It was from his mother that Napoleon inherited most of his qualities. She came of a commercial family, partly Swiss in origin, and at an age "when most girls are think-
