Every march incomprehensible to him makes him uneasy and he thinks himself betrayed."[3368] At Waterloo, dragoons that pass him with their swords drawn and old corporals shout to the Emperor that Soult and Vandamme, who are at this moment about going into battle, are haranguing their troops against him or deserting him; that General Dhenin, who has repulsed a charge of the enemy and whose thigh is fractured by a cannon-ball, has just passed over to the enemy.

The mechanism which, for fifteen years, has worked so well, breaks down of itself through its own action; its cog-wheels have got out of gear; cracks show themselves in the metal which seemed so sound; the divinations of popular instinct verify this; the exaggerations of the popular imagination expand it and suddenly the whole machine rattles down to the ground.
All this is due to Napoleon having introduced into it the craving for success as central motor, as the universal main-spring, unscrupulous ambition, in short, a crude egoism, and in the first place his own egoism, [3369] and this incentive, strained to excess,[3370] puts the machine out of order and then ruins it.

After him, under his successors, the same machinery is to work in the same manner, and break down in the same way, at the expiration of a more or less extensive period.

Thus far, the longest of these periods has lasted less than twenty years.
***** [Footnote 3301: "Most of the French provinces down to the time of Richelieu still possessed a special representative body which consented to and levied the taxes; most of these bodies were supported by the all-powerful minister and replaced by intendants who, from that time on, administered, or rather exhausted, the country, divided into thirty-two generalities.

A few provinces, however, Brittany, Burgundy, Languedoc, a part of Provence, Flanders, Artois, and some small districts in the Pyrenees kept their old representative body and were called pays d'etat, whilst other provinces were designated, by a strange abuse of language, under the name of pays d'election." (Translated from" Madame de Stael et son Temps," vol.I., p.