All the able-bodied youth annually seized by the conscription, and, if they have escaped this, seized again by decrees.[12136] The entire male population thus devoted to works of constraint, nothing else in prospect for either the cultivated or the uncultivated, no military or civil career other than a prolonged guard duty, threatened and threatening, as soldier, customs-inspector, or gendarme, as prefect, sub-prefect, or commissioner of police, that is to say, as subaltern henchman and bully restraining subjects and raising contributions, confiscating and burning merchandise, seizing grumblers, and making the refractory toe the mark.[12137] In 1810, one hundred and sixty thousand of the refractory were already condemned by name, and, moreover, penalties were imposed on their families to the amount of one hundred and seventy millions of francs In 1811 and 1812 the roving columns which tracked fugitives gathered sixty thousand of them, and drove them along the coast from the Adour to the Niemen; on reaching the frontier, they were en-rolled in the grand army; but they desert the very first month, they and their chained companions, at the rate of four or five thousand a day.[12138] Should England be conquered, garrisons would have to be maintained there, and of soldiers equally zealous.

Such is the dark future which this system opens to the French, even with the best of good luck.

It turns out that the luck is bad, and at the end of 1812 the grand army is freezing in the snow; Napoleon's horse has let him tumble.

Fortunately, the animal has simply foundered; "His Majesty's health was never better";[12139] nothing has happened to the rider; he gets up on his legs, and what concerns him at this moment is not the sufferings of his broken-down steed, but his own mishap; his reputation as a horseman is compromised; the effect on the public, the hooting of the audience, is what troubles him, the comedy of a perilous leap, announced with such a flourish of trumpets and ending in such a disgraceful fall.

On reaching Warsaw[12140] he says to himself, ten times over: "There is only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous." The following year, at Dresden, he exposes still more foolishly, openly, and nakedly his master passion, the motives which determine him, the immensity and ferocity of his pitiless pride.
"What do they want of me ?" said he to M.de Metternich.[12141] "Do they want me to dishonor myself?
Never! I can die, but never will I yield an inch of territory! Your sovereigns, born to the throne, may be beaten twenty times over and yet return to their capitals: I cannot do this, because I am a parvenu soldier.