If nobody knows how to make gunpowder, I do.

I can construct gun-carriages.
If cannon must be cast, I will see that it is done properly.

If tactical details must be taught, I will teach them."[1154] This is why he is competent right from the beginning, general in the artillery, major-general, diplomatist, financier and administrator of all kinds.

Thanks to this fertile apprenticeship, beginning with the Consulate, he shows officials and veteran ministers who send in their reports to him what to do.
"I am a more experienced administrator than they,[1155] when one has been obliged to extract from his brains the ways and means with which to feed, maintain, control, and move with the same spirit and will two or three hundred thousand men, a long distance from their country, one has soon discovered the secrets of administration." In each of the human machines he builds and manipulates, he perceives right away all the parts, each in its proper place and function, the motors, the transmissions, the wheels, the composite action, the speed which ensues, the final result, the complete effect, the net product.
Never is he content with a superficial and summary inspection; he penetrates into obscure corners and to the lowest depths "through the technical precision of his questions," with the lucidity of a specialist, and in this way, borrowing an expression from the philosophers, with him the concept should be adequate to its purpose.[1156] Hence his eagerness for details, for these form the body and substance of the concept; the hand that has not grasped these, or lets them go, retains only the shell, an envelope.

With respect to these his curiosity is "insatiable."[1157] In each ministerial department he knows more than the ministers, and in each bureau he knows as much as the clerks.