“But the romantic element in his nature was to be no so much extinguished as transmuted into a romantic ambition, into dreams of a career which should outdo all the heroes of history...The carefully calculated and limited ambition of a a Frederick the Great was no longer enough for Napoleon. The urge to dominate, to dare, to play for the highest stakes was as instinctive to him and as irresistible as the urge of the mountaineer to climb Everest. This element of the irrational, the unlimited, the daemonic is as fundamental to the nature of Napoleon as it is to the character of Mozart's Don Giovannia. Without it, the career of Napoleon is unintelligible.”