midnight
`` You need not owe Napoleon any grudge on that score , '' said Canalis , with an emphatic tone and gesture . `` It was one of his weaknesses to be jealous of literary genius -- for he had his mean points . Who will ever explain , depict , or understand Napoleon ? A man represented with his arms folded , and who did everything , who was the greatest force ever known , the most concentrated , the most mordant , the most acid of all forces ; a singular genius who carried armed civilization in every direction without fixing it anywhere ; a man who could do everything because he willed everything ; a prodigious phenomenon of will , conquering an illness by a battle , and yet doomed to die of disease in bed after living in the midst of ball and bullets ; a man with a code and a sword in his brain , word and deed ; a clear-sighted spirit that foresaw everything but his own fall ; a capricious politician who risked men by handfuls out of economy , and who spared three heads -- those of Talleyrand , of Pozzo de Borgo , and of Metternich , diplomatists whose death would have saved the French Empire , and who seemed to him of greater weight than thousands of soldiers ; a man to whom nature , as a rare privilege , had given a heart in a frame of bronze ; mirthful and kind at midnight amid women , and next morning manipulating Europe as a young girl might amuse herself by splashing water in her bath ! Hypocritical and generous ; loving tawdriness and simplicity ; devoid of taste , but protecting the arts ; and in spite of these antitheses , really great in everything by instinct or by temperament ; Caesar at five-and-twenty , Cromwell at thirty ; and then , like my grocer buried in Père Lachaise , a good husband and a good father . In short , he improvised public works , empires , kings , codes , verses , a romance -- and all with more range than precision . Did he not aim at making all Europe France ?