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He did not admit the want of repose or a wish for retirement. For a moment Mollien had hesitated to accept the post imposed upon him by his master. "You cannot refuse a ministry," said the emperor, suddenly, "this evening you will take the oath." Count Mollien introduced important improvements into the management of the finances.
In the beginning of his supreme power, Napoleon thought to find in victory an inexhaustible source of riches. "It was the ideas of the ancients which Napoleon applied to the right of conquest," said Mollien.
A particular convention accorded the absolute property of the castle of Navarre to Prince Ferdinand, with a revenue of 1,000,000 francs, and 400,000 livres income for each of the Infantas. When the emperor notified to Count Mollien, then Minister of the Treasury, the tenor of the treaty, he added: "That will make 10,000,000. All these sums will be reimbursed by Spain."
It would exceed the limits of our space to describe by what forceful means Napoleon restored the financial equilibrium and assuaged the commercial crisis resulting from the war with England. Mollien soon had reason to know that, so far from avoiding Continental wars, the Emperor thenceforth seemed almost to provoke them, and that the motto War must support war fell far short of the truth.
Woolli and the Gaboon were crossed, and the explorers penetrated into Bondou, which Mollien was to visit a few years later, a district inhabited by a people as fanatic and fierce as those of Fouta Djallon. Caillié knowing nothing of this disastrous beginning, and aware that Gray was glad to receive new recruits, left St. Louis with two negroes, and reached Goree.
He called before him the brokers, the principal clerks at the treasury, and confounding them all by the bursts of his anger, he forgot at the same time the respect he owed to the age and character of Marbois, who was suddenly dismissed, and immediately replaced by Mollien.
"He seemed," writes Mollien, "habitually calm, pensive, and preserved without affectation a serious dignity, with little of that old audacity and self-confidence which had never met with insuperable obstacles.... As his thoughts were cramped in a narrow space girt with precipices instead of soaring freely over a vast horizon of power, they became laborious and
It would exceed the limits of our space to describe by what forceful means Napoleon restored the financial equilibrium and assuaged the commercial crisis resulting from the war with England. Mollien soon had reason to know that, so far from avoiding Continental wars, the Emperor thenceforth seemed almost to provoke them, and that the motto War must support war fell far short of the truth.
Its leaves are used for leaven, its bark furnishes indistructible cordage; and the bees form their hives in the cavities of its trunk. The negroes, too, often shelter themselves from storms in its time-worn caverns. The baobab is indisputably the monarch of African trees, p. 41. Travels in the interior of Africa, to the sources of the Senegal and Gambia, by G. Mollien. Lond. 1820, 4to.
He once said to Mollien: "I seek the good that is practical, not the ideal best: the world is very old: we must profit by its experience: it teaches that old practices are worth more than new theories: you are not the only one who knows trade secrets." This was his general attitude towards the exponents of new financial or commercial views.
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