The poor Archbishop of Tours, my old schoolmate...' 'Eh, well, what has happened to him ?' 'Alas, sire, he has just died.' 'What do I care?
he was no longer good for anything.'" Owning and making the most of men and of things, of bodies and of souls, using and abusing them at discretion, even to exhaustion, without being responsible to any one, he reaches that point after a few years where he can say as glibly and more despotically than Louis XIV.

himself, "My armies, my fleets, my cardinals, my councils, my senate, my populations, my empire."[1275] Addressing army corps about to rush into battle: "Soldiers, I need your lives, and you owe them to me." He says to General Dorsenne and to the grenadiers of the guard:[1276] "I hear that you complain that you want to return to Paris, to your mistresses.

Undeceive yourselves.

I shall keep you under arms until you are eighty.

You were born to the bivouac, and you shall die there." How he treats his brothers and relations who have become kings; how he reins them in; how he applies the spur and the whip and makes them trot and jump fences and ditches, may be found in his correspondence; every stray impulse to take the lead, even when justified by an unforeseen urgency and with the most evident good intention, is suppressed as a deviation, is arrested with a brusque roughness which strains the loins and weakens the knees of the delinquent.