Page:Works of Heinrich Heine 07.djvu/217

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FRENCH AFFAIRS.
197

to reconcile both errors, who even seek for the numbers in persons with which to explain things. They are not contented to regard Julius Cæsar as the origin of the downfall of Roman freedom, but they assert that the genial Julius was so deeply in debt that, to avoid being put into the jug,[1] he was compelled to jug the world with all his creditors. If I am not mistaken, there is a passage in Plutarch where he speaks of Cæsar's debts as the basis of such an argument. Bourienne, the little, trim, spruce Bourienne, the venal croupier at the hazard-table of the Empire, the pitifully-poor soul, has somewhere indicated in his Memoirs that it was pecuniary difficulties which inspired Napoleon Bonaparte in the beginning of his career to great undertakings.[2] In


  1. Eingestecht, literally "stuck in" or "put up"—as one might say of a man in prison in English slang, that he is "stuck" at last.
  2. Heine would have had no want of illustration for this theory that all genius or desert may be traced to money, or a want of it, had he looked to the United States, where it prevails among the multitude to an incredible extent. Thus Abraham Lincoln's ability is popularly ascribed entirely to his having been extremely poor, and, above all, a wood-chopper. Henry Clay's best card was that he had been the mill-boy of the Slashes; Johnson's, that he was an illiterate tailor; and so on through most modern candidates. Even a college education is hardly a creditable thing to many, unless indeed the student supported himself by teaching or waiting at hotels in vacation, and, above all, endured great hardships. Which is in a great