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Page 14
When pride was hurrying Napoleon towards his fall, he happened to say,
"France has more need of me than I have of France." He spoke the truth.
But why had he become necessary? Because he had committed the destiny of
the French to the chances of an interminable war; because, in spite of
the resources of his genius, that war, rendered daily more hazardous by
his staking the whole of his force, and by the boldness of his
movements, risked in every campaign, in every battle, the fruits of
twenty years of triumph; because his government was so modelled that
with him every thing must be swept away, and that a re-action
proportioned to the violence of the action must burst forth at once both
within and without. The mania of conquest had reversed the state of
things in Europe; we, the eldest born of liberty and independence, were
spilling our blood in the service of royal passions against the cause of
nations, and outraged nations were turning round upon us, more terrible
from being armed with the principles which we had forsaken.
At times, this immense mass of passions which he was accumulating
against him, this multitude of avenging arms ready to be raised, filled
his ambitious spirit with involuntary apprehension. Looking around him,
he was alarmed to find himself solitary, and conceived the idea of
strengthening his power by moderating it. Then it was that he thought of
creating an hereditary peerage, and reconstructing his monarchy on more
secure foundations. But Napoleon saw without illusion to the bottom of
things. The nation, wholly and continually occupied in prosecuting the
designs of its chief, had previously not had time to form any plans for
itself. The day on which it should have ceased to be stunned by the din
of arms, it would have called itself to account for its servile
obedience. It is better, thought he, for an absolute prince to fight
foreign armies, than to have to struggle against the energy of the
citizens. Despotism had been organized for making war; war was continued
to uphold despotism. The die was cast; France must either conquer
Europe, or Europe subdue France.
Napoleon fell: he fell, because with the men of the nineteenth century
he attempted the work of an Attila and a Genghis Khan; because he gave
the reins to an imagination directly contrary to the spirit of his age,
with which nevertheless his reason was perfectly acquainted; because he
would not pause on the day when he felt conscious of his inability to
succeed. Nature has fixed a boundary, beyond which extravagant
enterprises cannot be carried with prudence. This boundary the emperor
reached in Spain, and he overleaped it in Russia. Had he then escaped
destruction, his inflexible presumption would have caused him to find
elsewhere a Baylen and a Moscow-- _History of the War in the
Peninsula, from the French of General Foy._
* * * * *
ROBINSON CRUSOES.
At one of the islands belonging to Juan de Ampues, the pilot ran away.
Cifuentes and his crew, all equally ignorant of navigation, made sail
for San Domingo, were dismasted in a gale of wind, and driven in the
night upon the "Serrana" shoals; the crew, a flask of powder and steel,
were saved, but nothing else. They found sea-calves and birds upon the
island, and were obliged to eat them raw, and drink their blood, for
there was no water. After some weeks, they made a raft with fragments of
the wreck, lashed together with calf-skin thongs: three men went off
upon it, and were lost. Two, and a boy, staid upon the island--one of
whom, Moreno, died four days afterwards raving mad, having gnawed the
flesh off his arms: the survivors, Master John and the boy, dug holes in
the sand with tortoise-shells, and lined them with calf-skins to catch
the rain. Where the vessel was wrecked, they found a stone which served
them for a flint; this invaluable prize enabled them to make a fire.
Two men had been living upon another island two leagues from them, in
similar distress, for five years; these saw the fire, and upon a raft
joined their fellow sufferers. They now built a boat with the fragments
of the wreck, made sails of calf-skins, and caulked her with their fat,
mixed with charcoal: one man and the boy went away in her: Master John,
and one whose name has not been preserved, would not venture in her:
they made themselves coracles with skins, and coasted round the shoals,
which they estimated at twelve leagues long. At low water there were
seventeen islands, but only five which were not sometimes overflowed.
Fish, turtle, sea-calves, birds, and a root like purslane, was their
food. The whites of turtle-eggs, when dried and buried for a fortnight,
turned to water, which they found good drink: five months in the year
these eggs were their chief food. They clothed themselves and covered
their huts with calf-skins, and made an enclosure to catch fish,
twenty-two fathoms long, with stones brought out of the sea--and raised
two towers in the same laborious way, sixteen fathoms in circumference
at the base, and four in height, at the north and south extremities of
the island: upon these they made fires as signals. To avoid the crabs
and snails which tormented them at night, they slept in the day time.
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