The Bronze Eagle: A Story of the Hundred Days

"The dear child," sighed the Duchesse over her knitting, "it is the English blood in her. Those people never know how to accept the inevitable: they are always wanting to fight someone for something and never know when they are beaten."

CHAPTER VII

THE ASCENT OF THE CAPITOL

I

And the triumphal march from the gulf of Jouan continued uninterrupted to Paris.

After Laffray and Grenoble, Lyons, where the silk-weavers of La Guillotière assembled in their thousands to demolish the barricades which had been built up on their bridge against the arrival of the Emperor, and watched his entry into their city waving kerchiefs and hats in his honour, and tricolour flags and cockades fished out of cupboards, where they had lain hidden but not forgotten for one whole year.

After Lyons, Villefranche, where sixty thousand peasants and workmen awaited his arrival at the foot of the tree of Liberty, on the top of which a brass eagle, the relic of some old standard, glistened like gold as it caught the rays of the setting sun.

And Nevers, where the townsfolk urged the regiments as they march through the city to tear the white cockades from their hats! And Chalon-sur-Saône, where the workpeople commandeer a convoy of artillery destined for the army of M. le Comte d'Artois!

The préfets of the various départements, the bureaucracy of provinces and cities, are not only amazed but struck with terror:

"This is a new Revolution!" they cry in dismay.

Yes! it is a new Revolution! the revolt of the peasantry of the poor, the humble, the oppressed! The hatred which they felt against that old regime which had come back to them with its old arrogance and its former tyrannies had joined issue with the cult of the army for the Emperor who had led it to glory, to fortune and to fame.

The people and the army were roused by the same enthusiasm, and marched shoulder to shoulder to join the standard of Napoleon—the little man in the shabby hat and the grey redingote, who for them personified the spirit of the great revolution, the great struggle for liberty and its final victory.

The army of the Comte d'Artois—that portion of it which remained loyal—was powerless against the overwhelming tide of popular enthusiasm, powerless against dissatisfaction, mutterings and constant defections in its ranks. The army would have done well in Provence—for Provence was loyal and royalist, man, woman and child: but Napoleon took the route of the Alps, and avoided Provence; by the time he reached Lyons he had an army of his own and M. le Comte d'Artois—fearing more defections and worse defeats—had thought it prudent to retire.

It has often been said that if a single shot had been fired against his original little band Napoleon's march on Paris would have been stopped. Who shall tell? There are such "ifs" in the world, which no human mind can challenge. Certain it is that that shot was not fired. At Laffray, Randon gave the order, but he did not raise his musket himself; on the walls of Grenoble St. Genis, in command of the artillery and urged by the Comte de Cambray, did not dare to give the order or to fire a gun himself. "The men declare," he had said gloomily, "that they would blow their officers from their own guns."

And at Lyons there was not militiaman, a royalist, volunteer or a pariah out of the streets who was willing to fire that first and "single shot": and though Marshal Macdonald swore ultimately that he would do it himself, his determination failed him at the last when surrounded by his wavering troops he found himself face to face with the conqueror of Austerlitz and Jena and Rivoli and a thousand other glorious fights, with the man in the grey redingote who had created him Marshal of France and Duke of Tarente on the battlefields of Lombardy, his comrade-in-arms who had shared his own scanty army rations with him, slept beside him round the bivouac fires, and round whom now there rose a cry from end to end of Lyons: "Vive l'Empereur!"

II

Victor de Marmont did not wait for the arrival of the Emperor at Lyons: nor did he attempt to enter the city. He knew that there was still some money in the imperial treasury brought over from Elba, and his mind—always in search of the dramatic—had dwelt with pleasure on thoughts of the day when the Emperor, having entered Fontainebleau, or perhaps even Paris and the Tuileries, would there be met by his faithful de Marmont, who on bended knees in the midst of a brilliant and admiring throng would present to him the twenty-five million francs originally the property of the Empress herself and now happily wrested from the cupidity of royalist traitors.

The picture pleased de Marmont's fancy: he dwelt on it with delight, he knew that no one requited a service more amply and more generously than Napoleon: he knew that after this service rendered there was nothing to which he—de Marmont—young as he was, could not aspire—title, riches, honours, anything he wanted would speedily become his, and with these to his credit he could claim Crystal de Cambray once more.

Oh! she would be humbled again by then, she and her father too, the proud aristocrats, doomed once more to penury and exile, unless he—de Marmont—came forth like the fairy prince to the beggarmaid with hands laden with riches, ready to lay these at the feet of the woman he loved.

Yes! Crystal de Cambray would be humbled! De Marmont, though he felt that he loved her more and better than any man had ever loved any woman before, nevertheless had a decided wish that she should be humbled and suffer bitterly thereby. He felt that her pride was his only enemy: her pride and royalist prejudices. Of the latter he thought but little: confident of his Emperor's success, he thought that all those hot-headed royalists would soon realise the hopelessness of their cause—rendered all the more hopeless through its short-lived triumph of the past year—and abandon it gradually and surely, accepting the inevitable and rejoicing over the renewed glory which would come over France.

As for her pride! well! that was going to be humbled, along with the pride of the Bourbon princes, of that fatuous old king, of all those arrogant aristocrats who had come back after years of exile, as arrogant, as tyrannical as ever before.

These were pleasing thoughts which kept Victor de Marmont company on his way between Lyons and Fontainebleau. Once past Villefranche he sent the bulk of his escort back to Lyons, where the Emperor should have arrived by this time: he had written out a superficial report of his expedition, which the sergeant in charge of the little troop was to convey to the Emperor's own hands. He only kept two men with him, put himself and them into plain, travelling clothes which he purchased at Villefranche, and continued his journey to the north without much haste; the roads were safe enough from footpads, he and his two men were well armed, and what stragglers from the main royalist army he came across would be far too busy with their own retreat and their own disappointment to pay much heed to a civilian and seemingly harmless traveller.

De Marmont loved to linger on the way in the towns and hamlets where the news of the Emperor's approach had already been wafted from Grenoble, or Lyons, or Villefranche on the wings of wind or birds, who shall say? Enough that it had come, that the peasants, assembled in masses in their villages, were whispering together that he was coming—the little man in the grey redingote—l'Empereur!

And de Marmont would halt in those villages and stop to whisper with the peasants too: Yes! he was coming! and the whole of France was giving him a rousing welcome! There was Laffray and Grenoble and Lyons! the army rallied to his standard as one man!

And de Marmont would then pass on to another village, to another town, no longer whispering after a while, but loudly proclaiming the arrival of the Emperor who had come into his own again.

After Nevers he was only twenty-four hours ahead of Napoleon and his progress became a triumphant one: newspapers, despatches had filtrated through from Paris—news became authentic, though some of it sounded a little wild. Wherever de Marmont arrived he was received with acclamations as the man who had seen the Emperor, who had assisted at the Emperor's magnificent entry into Grenoble, who could assure citizens and peasantry that it was all true, that the Emperor would be in Paris again very shortly and that once more there would be an end to tyranny and oppression, to the rule of the aristocrats and a number of incompetent and fatuous princes.

He did not halt at Fontainebleau, for now he knew that the Court of the Tuileries was in a panic, that neither the Comte d'Artois, nor the Duc de Berry, nor any of the royal princes had succeeded in keeping the army together: that defections had been rife for the past week, even before Napoleon had shown himself, and that Marshal Ney, the bravest soldier in France, had joined his Emperor at Auxerre.

No! de Marmont would not halt at Fontainebleau. It was Paris that he wanted to see! Paris, which to-day would witness the hasty flight of the gouty and unpopular King whom it had never learned to love! Paris decking herself out like a bride for the arrival of her bridegroom! Paris waiting and watching, while once again on the Tuileries and the Hôtel de Ville, on the Louvre and the Luxembourg, on church towers and government buildings the old tricolour flag waved gaily in the wind.

He slept that night at a small hotel in the Louvre quarter, but the whole evening he spent on the Place du Carrousel with the crowd outside the Tuileries, watching the departure from the palace of the infirm King of France and of his Court. The crowd was silent and obviously deeply moved. The spectacle before it of an old, ailing monarch, driven forth out of the home of his ancestors, and forced after an exile of three and twenty years and a brief reign of less than one, to go back once more to misery and exile, was pitiable in the extreme.

Many forgot all that the brief reign had meant in disappointments and bitter regrets, and only saw in the pathetic figure that waddled painfully from portico to carriage door a monarch who was unhappy, abandoned and defenceless: a monarch, too, who, in his unheroic, sometimes grotesque person, was nevertheless the representative of all the privileges and all the rights, of all the dignity and majesty pertaining to the most ancient ruling dynasty in Europe, as well as of all the humiliations and misfortunes which that same dynasty had endured.

III

It is late in the evening of March 20th. A thin mist is spreading from the river right over Paris, and from the Place du Carrousel the lighted windows of the Tuileries palace appear only like tiny, dimly-flickering stars.

Here an immense crowd is assembled. It has waited patiently hour after hour, ever since in the earlier part of the afternoon a courier has come over from Fontainebleau with the news that the Emperor is already there and would be in Paris this night.

It is the same crowd which twenty-four hours ago shed a tear or two in sympathy for the departing monarch: now it stands here—waiting, excited, ready to cheer the return of a popular hero—half-forgotten, wildly acclaimed, madly welcomed, to be cursed again, and again forgotten so soon. It was a heterogeneous crowd forsooth! made up in great part of the curious, the idle, the indifferent, and in great part, too, of the Bonapartist enthusiasts and malcontents who had groaned under the reactionary tyranny of the Restoration—of malcontents, too, of no enthusiasm, who were ready to welcome any change which might bring them to prominence or to fortune. With here and there a sprinkling of hot-headed revolutionaries, cursing the return of the Emperor as heartily as they had cursed that of the Bourbon king: and here and there a few heart-sick royalists, come to watch the final annihilation of their hopes.

Victor de Marmont, wrapped in a dark cloak, stood among the crowd for a while. He knew that the Emperor would probably not be in Paris before night, and he loved to be in the very midst of the wave of enthusiasm which was surging higher and ever higher in the crowd, and hear the excited whispers, and to feel all round him, wrapping him closely like a magic mantle of warmth and delight, the exaltation of this mass of men and women assembled here to acclaim the hero whom he himself adored. Closely buttoned inside his coat he had scraps of paper worth the ransom of any king.

Among the crowd, too, Bobby Clyffurde moved and stood. He was one of those who watched this enthusiasm with a heart filled with forebodings. He knew well how short this enthusiasm would be: he knew that within a few weeks—days perhaps—the bold and reckless adventurer who had so easily reconquered France would realise that the Imperial crown would never be allowed to sit firmly upon his head. None in this crowd knew better that the present pageant and glory would be short-lived, than did this tall, quiet Englishman who listened with half an ear and a smile of good-natured contempt to the loud cries of "Vive l'Empereur!" which rose spontaneously whenever the sound of horses' hoofs or rattles of wheels from the direction of Fontainebleau suggested the approach of the hero of the day. None knew better than he that already in far-off England another great hero, named Wellington, was organising the forces which presently would crush—for ever this time—the might and ambitions of the man whom England had never acknowledged as anything but a usurper and a foe.

And closely buttoned inside his coat Clyffurde had a letter which he had received at his lodgings in the Alma quarter only a few moments before he sallied forth into the streets. That letter was an answer to a confidential enquiry of his own sent to the Chief of the British Secret Intelligence Department resident in Paris, desiring to know if the Department had any knowledge of a vast sum of money having come unexpectedly into the hands of His Majesty the King of France, before his flight from the capital.

The answer was an emphatic "No!" The Intelligence Department knew of no such windfall. But its secret agents reported that Victor de Marmont, captain of the usurper's body-guard, had waylaid M. le Marquis de St. Genis on the high road not far from Lyons. The escort which had accompanied Victor de Marmont on that occasion had been dismissed by him at Villefranche, and the information which the British Secret Intelligence Department had obtained came through the indiscretion of the sergeant in charge of the escort, who had boasted in a tavern at Lyons that he had actually searched M. de St. Genis and found a large sum of money upon him, of which M. de Marmont promptly took possession.

When Bobby Clyffurde received this letter and first mastered its contents, the language which he used would have done honour to a Toulon coal-heaver. He cursed St. Genis' stupidity in allowing himself to be caught; but above all he cursed himself for his soft-heartedness which had prompted him to part with the money.

The letter which brought him the bad news seemed to scorch his hand, and brand it with the mark of folly. He had thought to serve the woman he loved, first, by taking the money from her, since he knew that Victor de Marmont with an escort of cavalry was after it, and, secondly, by allowing the man whom she loved to have the honour and glory of laying the money at his sovereign's feet. The whole had ended in a miserable fiasco, and Clyffurde felt sore and wrathful against himself.

And also among the crowd—among those who came, heartsick, hopeless, forlorn, to watch the triumph of the enemy as they had watched the humiliation of their feeble King—was M. le Comte de Cambray with his daughter Crystal on his arm.

They had come, as so many royalists had done, with a vague hope that in the attitude of the crowd they would discern indifference rather than exultation, and that the active agents of their party, as well as those of England and of Prussia, would succeed presently in stirring up a counter demonstration, that a few cries of "Vive le roi!" would prove to the army at least and to the people of Paris that acclamations for the usurper were at any rate not unanimous.

But the crowd was not indifferent—it was excited: when first the Comte de Cambray and Crystal arrived on the Place du Carrousel, a number of white cockades could be picked out in the throng, either worn on a hat or fixed to a buttonhole, but as the afternoon wore on there were fewer and fewer of these small white stars to be seen: the temper of the crowd did not brook this mute reproach upon its enthusiasm. One or two cockades had been roughly torn and thrown into the mud, and the wearer unpleasantly ill-used if he persisted in any royalistic demonstration. Crystal, when she saw these incidents, was not the least frightened. She wore her white cockade openly pinned to her cloak; she was far too loyal, far too enthusiastic and fearless, far too much a woman to yield her convictions to the popular feeling of the moment; and she looked so young and so pretty, clinging to the arm of her father, who looked a picturesque and harmless representative of the fallen regime, that with the exception of a few rough words, a threat here and there, they had so far escaped active molestation.

And the crowd presently had so much to see that it ceased to look out for white cockades, or to bait the sad-eyed royalists. A procession of carriages, sparse at first and simple in appearance, had begun to make its way from different parts of the town across the Place du Carrousel toward the Tuileries. They arrived very quietly at first, with as little clatter as possible, and drew up before the gates of the Pavillon de Flore with as little show as may be: the carriage doors were opened unostentatiously, and dark, furtive figures stepped out from them and almost ran to the door of the palace, so eager were they to escape observation, their big cloaks wrapped closely round them to hide the court dress or uniform below.

Ministers, dignitaries of the Court, Councillors of State; majordomos, stewards, butlers, body-servants; they all came one by one or in groups of twos or threes. As the afternoon wore on these arrivals grew less and less furtive; the carriages arrived with greater clatter and to-do, with finer liveries and more gorgeous harness. Those who stepped out of the carriage doors were no longer quick and stealthy in their movements: they lingered near the step to give an order or to chat to a friend; the big cloak no longer concealed the gorgeous uniform below, it was allowed to fall away from the shoulder, so as to display the row of medals and stars, the gold embroidery, the magnificence of the Court attire.

The Emperor had left Fontainebleau! Within an hour he would be in Paris! Everyone knew it, and the excitement in the crowd that watched grew more and more intense. Last night these same men and women had looked with mute if superficial sympathy on the departure of Louis XVIII. through these same palace gates: many eyes then became moist at the sight, as memory flew back twenty years to the murdered king—his flight to Varennes, his ignominious return, his weary Calvary from prison to court house and thence to the scaffold. And here was his brother—come back after twenty-three years of exile, acclaimed by the populace, cheered by foreign soldiers—Russians, Austrians, English—anything but French—and driven forth once more to exile after the brief glory that lasted not quite a year.

But this the crowd of to-day has already forgotten with the completeness peculiar to crowds: men, women, and children too, they are no longer mute, they talk and they chatter; they scream with astonishment and delight whenever now from more and more carriages, more and more gorgeously dressed folk descend. The ladies are beginning to arrive: the wives of the great Court dignitaries, the ladies of the Court and household of the still-absent Empress: they do not attempt to hide their brilliant toilettes, their bare shoulders and arms gleam through the fastenings of their cloaks, and diamonds sparkle in their hair.

The crowd has recognised some of the great marshals, the men who in the Emperor's wake led the French troops to victory in Italy, in Prussia, in Austria: Maret Duc de Bassano is there and the crowd cheers him, the Duc de Rovigo, Marshal Davout, Prince d'Eckmühl, General Excelmans, one of Napoleon's oldest companions at arms, the Duke of Gaeta, the Duke of Padua, a crowd of generals and superior officers. It seems like the world of the Sleeping Beauty and of the Enchanted Castle—which a kiss has awakened from its eleven months' sleep. The Empire had only been asleep, it had dreamed a bad dream, wherein its hero was a prisoner and an exile: now it is slowly wakening back to life and to reality.

The night wears on: darkness and fog envelop Paris more and more. Excitement becomes akin to anxiety. If the Emperor did leave Fontainebleau when the last courier said that he did, he should certainly be here by now. There are strange whispers, strange waves of evil reports that spread through the waiting crowd: "A royalist fanatic had shot at the Emperor! the Emperor was wounded! he was dead!"

Oh! the excitement of that interminable wait!

At last, just as from every church tower the bells strike the hour of nine, there comes the muffled sound of a distant cavalcade: the sound of horses galloping and only half drowning that of the rumbling of coach wheels.

It comes from the direction of the embankment, and from far away now is heard the first cry of "Vive l'Empereur!" The noise gets louder and more clear, the cries are repeated again and again till they merge into one great, uproarious clamour. Like the ocean when lashed by the wind, the crowd surges, moves, rises on tiptoe, subsides, falls back to crush forward again and once more to retreat as a heavy coach, surrounded by a thousand or so of mounted men, dashes over the cobbles of the Place du Carrousel, whilst the clamour of the crowd becomes positively deafening.

"Vive l'Empereur!"

The officers in the courtyard of the palace rush to the coach as it draws up at the Pavillon de Flore: one of them succeeds in opening the carriage door. The Emperor is literally torn out of the carriage, carried to the vestibule, where more officers seize him, raise him from the crowd, bear him along, hoisted upon their shoulders, up the monumental staircase.

Their enthusiasm is akin to delirium: they nearly tear their hero to pieces in their wild, mad, frantic welcome.

"In Heaven's name, protect his person," exclaims the Duc de Vicence anxiously; and he and Lavalette manage to get hold of the banisters and by dint of fighting and pushing succeed in walking backwards step by step in front of the Emperor, thus making a way for him.

Lavalette can hardly believe his eyes, and the Duc de Vicence keeps murmuring: "It is the Emperor! It is the Emperor!"

And he—the little stout man in green cloth coat and white breeches—walks up the steps of his reconquered palace like a man in a dream: his eyes are fixed apparently on nothing, he makes no movement to keep his too enthusiastic friends away: the smile upon his lips is meaningless and fixed.

"Vive l'Empereur!" vociferates the crowd.

Vive l'Empereur for one hundred days: a few weeks of joy, a few weeks of anxiety, a few weeks of indecision, of wavering and of doubt. Then defeat more irrevocable than before! exile more distant! despair more complete.

Vive l'Empereur while we shout with excitement, while we remember the disappointments of the past year, while we hope for better things from a hand that has lost its cunning, a mind that has lost its power.

Vive l'Empereur! Let him live for an hundred days, while we forget our enthusiasm and Europe prepares its final crushing blow. Let him live until we remember once again the horrors of war, the misery, the famine, the devastated homes! until once more we see the maimed and crippled crawling back wearily from the fields of glory, until our ears ring with the wails of widows and the cries of the fatherless.

Then let him no longer live, for he it is who has brought this misery on us through his will and through his ambition, and France has suffered so much from the aftermath of glory, that all she wants now is rest.

IV

Gradually—but it took some hours—the tumult and excitement in and round the Tuileries subsided. The Emperor managed to shut himself up in his study and to eat some supper in peace, while gradually outside his windows the crowd—who had nothing more to see and was getting tired of staring up at glittering panes of glass—went back more or less quietly to their homes.