But besides that, the Emperor, knowing that he was to be the
emperor of the whole world, bethought him of the bourgeois, and to
please them he built fairy monuments, after their own ideas, in places
where you'd never think to find any. For instance, suppose you were
coming back from Spain and going to Berlin--well, you'd find triumphal
arches along the way, with common soldiers sculptured on the stone,
every bit the same as generals. In two or three years, and without
imposing taxes on any of you, Napoleon filled his vaults with gold,
built palaces, made bridges, roads, scholars, fetes, laws, vessels,
harbours, and spent millions upon millions--such enormous sums that he
could, so they tell me, have paved France from end to end with
five-franc pieces, if he had had a mind to.
"Now, when he sat at ease on his throne, and was master of all, so that
Europe waited his permission to do his bidding, he remembered his four
brothers and his three sisters, and he said to us, as it might be in
conversation, in an order of the day, 'My children, is it right that the
blood relations of your Emperor should be begging their bread? No. I
wish to see them in splendour like myself. It becomes, therefore,
absolutely necessary to conquer a kingdom for each of them--to the end
that Frenchmen may be masters over all lands, that the soldiers of the
Guard shall make the whole earth tremble, that France may spit where she
likes, and that all the nations shall say to her, as it is written on my
copper coins, '_God protects you!_' 'Agreed!' cried the army.
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