political act Bonaparte gained more adherents than by all his victories
he had procured admirers.

Bonaparte's character, his good and his bad qualities, his talents and
his crimes, are too recent and too notorious to require description.
Should he continue successful, and be attended by fortune to his grave,
future ages may perhaps hail him a hero and a great man; but by his
contemporaries it will always be doubtful whether mankind has not
suffered more from his ambition and cruelties than benefited by his
services. Had he satisfied himself by continuing the Chief Magistrate of
a Commonwealth; or, if he judged that a monarchical Government alone was
suitable to the spirit of this country, had he recalled our legitimate
King, he would have occupied a principal, if not the first, place in the
history of France,--a place much more exalted than he can ever expect to
fill as an Emperor of the French. Let his prosperity be ever so
uninterrupted, he cannot be mentioned but as an usurper, an appellation
never exciting esteem, frequently inspiring contempt, and always odious.

The crime of usurpation is the greatest and most enormous a subject can
perpetrate; but what epithet can there be given to him who, to preserve
an authority unlawfully acquired, asssociates in his guilt a Supreme
Pontiff, whom the multitude is accustomed to reverence as the
representative of their God, but who, by this act of scandal and
sacrilege, descends to a level with the most culpable of men? I have
heard, not only in this city but in villages, where sincerity is more
frequent than corruption, and where hypocrites are as little known as
infidels, these remarks made by the people:

"Can the real vicar of Christ, by his inauguration, commit the double
injustice of depriving the legitimate owner of his rights, and of