Louis Napoleon has a fixed idea; but a fixed idea is not idiocy; he knows what he wants, and he goes straight to it; through justice, through law, through reason, through honour, through humanity, it may be, but straight on none the less.
He is not an idiot.

He is a man of another age than our own.

He seems absurd and mad, because he is out of his place and time.

Transport him to Spain in the 16th century, and Philip II would recognise him; to England, and Henry VIII would smile on him; to Italy, and Caesar Borgia would jump on his neck.

Or even, confine yourself to setting him outside the pale of European civilization,--place him, in 1817, at Janina, and Ali-Tepeleni would grasp him by the hand.
There is in him something of the Middle Ages, and of the Lower Empire.
That which he does would have seemed perfectly simple and natural to Michael Ducas, to Romanus Diogenes, to Nicephorus Botoniates, to the Eunuch Narses, to the Vandal Stilico, to Mahomet II, to Alexander VI, to Ezzelino of Padua, as it seems perfectly simple and natural to himself.