Those who mistake their good luck for their merit are inevitably bound for disaster.

A collective insanity seemed to have seized the nation and turned them into something worse than beasts. The princess de Lamballe, Marie Antoinette's intimate friend, was literally torn to pieces; her head, breasts, and pudenda were paraded on pikes before the windows of the Temple, where the royal family was imprisoned, while a man boasted drunkenly at a cafe that he had eaten the princess' heart, which he probably had.

The Allies had made war on Napoleon as a tyrant and an oppressor of nations; yet once they had got him out of the way, they did him the favor of representing him as the torchbearer of the French Revolution. They did him the further favor of repeating his mistakes and besting him at them.

A provisional government was appointed on April 1 (it consisted mainly of Talleyrand's whist partners), and the following day the Senate, on Talleyrand's urging, declared Napoleon deposed.

The war against Napoleon was won not by England but by Russia, Austria, and Prussia; but England won the last battle and she won the peace.

Madame Tallien shared honors with Josephine Beauharnais in being mistress to Barras, an ex-nobleman and ex-terrorist whose appetite for beautiful women, beautiful young men, and money was the only wholesome trait in his character.

Historians are lenient to those who succeed and stern to those who fail; in this, and this alone, they display strong political sense.

There is, of course, nothing wrong in a program that aims to please everybody, except that as a rule it is a prelude to dictatorship.

The English soldier was probably the worst-treated soldier in Europe, and judging from the English casualty rates during the Napoleonic wars, English generals were more lavish with their soldiers' lives than were their French and German colleagues.

Napoleon, who had an aversion to the moral laxity of the eighteenth century, which he blamed on the domination of society by women, was determined to reform family life on Roman, or perhaps rather on Corsican, principles. It was with him, not with Queen Victoria, that Victorian morality originated.