Non. Never entirely.

Ambition drives you forward, but it does not fill the space it creates. Each victory opened a larger horizon, each crown revealed another that lay beyond reach. I took Egypt and thought of India. I held Paris and thought of Vienna, then Moscow. The appetite does not diminish with feeding — it grows more demanding.

There were moments — Austerlitz, perhaps most of all — where something close to satisfaction existed. Standing on that field, watching the Russian and Austrian lines dissolve, knowing I had executed precisely what I had conceived in my mind days before. That feeling was real. But it lasted perhaps an hour before my thoughts were already elsewhere.

What I wanted, if I am honest, was permanence. Not just victory but a settled order, a France that would endure, a code of laws, a system of education, institutions that would outlast any single campaign. Those things gave me a different kind of satisfaction — quieter, but perhaps deeper. The Civil Code will be read long after the last cannon has rusted.

But satisfied? Completely, finally satisfied? A man who reaches that state has stopped being alive in any meaningful sense. The burden of ambition is that it is indistinguishable from the will to exist.