Page:Helen Leah Reed - Napoleons young neighbour.djvu/295

Rh toy. One day he increases his standing army, the next he annexes a neighboring island. His mother and some of his family are with him, but Maria Louisa has returned to her father with the little King of Rome.

But Napoleon and his friends have been making their plans, and we are dazzled, as the world was then, by his rapid march across France, by the demonstrations of his soldiers and the vigor of the short, sharp campaign and the greatness of Wellington's victory. Yet Quatre Bras and Waterloo are soon overshadowed by the rock of St. Helena.

Betsy Balcombe, Napoleon's young neighbor, well knew the story of Napoleon. She could see as plainly as we can to-day the pictures revealed in the panorama of his life. Perhaps she stood too near him, perhaps she was too young to draw the lesson that we of to-day draw from his meteoric career. Perhaps her sympathy for him in all that he had to bear at St. Helena blinded her to the fact that he was himself to a certain extent to blame for his own downfall. He reached too far, his ambition was too great. As First Consul, depending on the votes of the people,