impious, sacrilegious, revolutionary,--the authors of every evil. It was
they who, for years, destroyed the harvests, shed torrents of blood,
smote with the sword or the axe of the guillotine, crowded war upon war,
heaped ruins upon ruins, bringing misery and disgrace to all mankind.
The old nobility, once so proud of its coats-of-arms and of its
sovereign rights, now enslaved, humiliated, shorn of its independence,
knew no limit to its abuse of the "Corsican savage," who had cut the
roots of the old Germanic tree, previously so majestic. The priests
denounced the nation which had dared to confiscate the patrimony of
Saint Peter, and they cursed in Napoleon the persecutor of the Holy
Vicar of Christ. Women who had lost their husbands or sons in the war
held France responsible for their afflictions. The Frenchmen,
overthrowing and despoiling everything, foes of the human race, the
enemies of morality and religion, brought suffering to princes in their
palaces, to workmen in their factories, to tradespeople in their shops,
to the priests in their churches, to the soldiers in their camps, to the
peasants in their huts. The war of wrath was irresistible. Every one
lamented the mistake that had been made in abandoning the struggle; all
felt that they should have fought to the end, at the cost of every man
and every florin; that a mistake had been made in not assisting Prussia
at the time of the campaign of Jena; and that the moment had come for
all the powers to combine against the common foe and to crush him. Did
he make any pretence of concealing his intention to overthrow every
throne, and to make himself the oldest sovereign? Had he not had the
insolence to say at Milan in 1805, to the Prince of Cardito, the
Neapolitan envoy extraordinary, "Tell your Queen that I shall leave to
her and her family only enough land for their graves"? Had he not
recently, under the walls of Madrid, uttered these significant words to
the Spaniards, "If you don't want my brother Joseph for king, I shall
not force him upon you. I have another throne for him; and as for you, I