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Rh opportunity ever afforded to an historian has not resisted the assault of hostile time. Even that undaunted panegyrist enumerates six grave errors. Napoleon acknowledged many more. If he displayed emotion of the better kind at Dandolo's last appeal for Venice, and when early friends were "torn by cannon shot, if his firm nerves gave way utterly at Ebersberg when he saw the fighting done by a lieutenant sterner than himself, yet there is no evidence of remorse. Few things denote him more than the manner of his regret for his greatest crime : "La mort meritee du due d'Enghien nuisit a Napoleon dans l'opinion et ne lui fut d'aucune utilite politique." An entire book of Retractations might be made of avowals such as this. In 1805 he said to Talleyrand: "Je me suis tant trompe en ma vie que je n'en rougis pas." And in 1813 to Rcederer : "Une faute ! C'est moi qui ai fait des fautes." He confessed at various times that he had done wrong in crowning his relations, in raising his marshals above the level of their capacity, in restoring the confiscations. The concordat was the worst fault of his reign ; the Austrian match was his ruin ; the birth of his son an onerous complication. The unlucky attack upon Spain was not only a wholesale blunder, as the irrevocable event proved, but a series of blunders in detail. The invasion of Russia was hopeless during the Spanish war. He "ought to have restored Poland ; he ought not to have remained at Moscow ; he ought to have stopped at Smofensk ; he ought not to have crossed the Niemen. At trie Beresina he cried : "Voila ce qui arrive quand on entasse fautes sur fautes ! "He regretted the attempted conquest of San Domingo, the annexation of Holland, the rejection of Talleyrand's warning that France would show less energy than himself. He wished that he had not concluded the armistice after Bautzen, that he had followed up his victory after Dresden, that he had made peace at Prague, at Frankfort, at Chatillon. It would have been better if he had employed Sieyes, if he had never trusted Fouche, if he had not sent Narbonne to Vienna. When he heard of the treaty of February 1815