little consideration. The
same idea may have occurred to him, for when we had at last left the
Paris high road, and had entered the forest, he began of his own accord
to tell me that which I should have most liked to have asked him.

'As to the papers,' said he, 'I have already told you that there is no
one now, except you and me, who knows where they are to be concealed. My
Mameluke carried the spades to the pigeon-house, but I have told him
nothing. Our plans, however, for bringing the packet from Paris have
been formed since Monday. There were three in the secret, a woman and
two men. The woman I would trust with my life; which of the two men has
betrayed us I do not know, but I think that I may promise to find out.'

We were riding in the shadow of the trees at the time, and I could hear
him slapping his riding-whip against his boot, and taking pinch after
pinch of snuff, as was his way when he was excited.

'You wonder, no doubt,' said he, after a pause, 'why these rascals did
not stop the carriage at Paris instead of at the entrance to
Fontainebleau.'

In truth, the objection had not occurred to me, but I did not wish to
appear to have less wits than he gave me credit for, so I answered that
it was indeed surprising.

'Had they done so they would have made a public scandal, and run a
chance of missing their end. Short of taking the berline to pieces, they
could not have discovered the hiding-place. He planned it well--he could
always plan well--and he chose his agents well also. But mine were the
better.'

It is not for me to repeat to you, my friends, all that was said to me
by the Emperor as we walked our horses amid the black shadows and
through the moon-silvered glades of the great forest. Every word of it
is impressed upon my memory, and before I pass away it is likely that I
will place it all upon paper, so that others may read it in the days to
come. He spoke freely of his past, and something also of his future; of
the devotion of Macdonald, of the treason of Marmont, of the little King
of Rome, concerning whom he talked with as much tenderness as any
bourgeois father of a single child; and, finally, of his father-in-law,
the Emperor of Austria, who would, he thought, stand between his enemies
and himself. For myself, I dared not say a word, remembering how I had
already brought a rebuke upon myself; but I rode by his side, hardly
able to believe that this was indeed the great Emperor, the man whose