I will detach Scotland and Ireland by giving them constitutions
which will put them in a superior condition to England. Thus I will sow
dissensions everywhere. Then as a price for leaving the island I will
claim their fleet and their colonies. In this way I shall secure the
command of the world to France for at least a century to come.'
In this short sketch I could perceive the quality which I have since
heard remarked in Napoleon, that his mind could both conceive a large
scheme, and at the same time evolve those practical details which would
seem to bring it within the bounds of possibility. One instant it would
be a wild dream of overrunning the East. The next it was a schedule of
the ships, the ports, the stores, the troops, which would be needed to
turn dream into fact. He gripped the heart of a question with the same
decision which made him strike straight for an enemy's capital.
The soul of a poet, and the mind of a man of business of the first
order, that is the combination which may make a man dangerous to the
world.
I think that it may have been his purpose--for he never did anything
without a purpose--to give me an object-lesson of his own capacity for
governing, with the idea, perhaps, that I might in turn influence others
of the Emigres by what I told them.
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