hem and the
French soldiers at Lyons when the former went into the barracks there.

I was at St. Martin when the Emperor and Empress made their tour
through the new possession. The state carriages had to be left at
Sallanches when the sovereigns went up to the great ball offered them
at Chamounix, and, when they returned, the little mountain carriages
which brought them down halted under the windows of the _auberge_ of
St. Martin, in which I lived, to wait for the state carriages to come
across the river. They had to wait about half an hour, and as they
walked up and down in the road under my window, beside which stood
my loaded rifle, I thought how easily I could change the course of
European politics, for I could have hit any button on the Emperor's
clothes, and I hated him enough to have killed him cheerfully, as
an enemy of mankind; but regicide has always seemed to me a great
mistake, as it would have been in that case, for it would only have
placed the young Prince Imperial on the throne, under the regency of
the Empress. I was then a radical republican, with all the sympathies
of a Parisian Red, for I had not learned that it is less the form of
the government than the character of the governed which makes the
difference between governments. I did not spare the life of the
Emperor from any apprehension of consequences to me, for I had none.
I knew the paths up the mountain at the back of the hotel, and before
the confusion should have been overcome, and a pursuit organized, I
could have been beyond danger, on my way to the Swiss frontier, for
the pine woods came to the back door of the hotel; and beyond that, I
never had the habit of thinking of the consequences of what I proposed
to do. When I returned to Paris, after the autumn had passed, I told
the story to an artist friend, an ultraradical, how I stood at my
window with a loaded rifle by my side, and the Emperor twenty feet
below, and he shouted with fury, "And you didn't kill him?" Time and
fate have punished him more fitly than I should have done, and wise
men leave these things to time and fate.

CHAPTER XVIII

PARIS AGAIN THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA

I remained in Paris all that winter, and took a studio with an
American friend,--Mr. Yewell,--but I could do no work; the headache
never left me, and, though I could draw a little, my vision failed
when it was strained, and I seemed to have lost my color sense. I was
desperate, and, when Garibaldi s