and debate about something, or receive somebody, every five minutes.
Whenever I look out of window, or go to the door, I see an immense black
object at Beaucourt's porch like a boat set up on end in the air with a
pair of white trowsers below it. This is the cocked hat of an official
Huissier, newly arrived with a summons, whose head is thrown back as he
is in the act of drinking Beaucourt's wine." The day came at last, and
all Boulogne turned out for its holiday; "but I" Dickens wrote, "had by
this cooled down a little, and, reserving myself for the illuminations,
I abandoned the great men and set off upon my usual country walk. See my
reward. Coming home by the Calais road, covered with dust, I suddenly
find myself face to face with Albert and Napoleon, jogging along in the
pleasantest way, a little in front, talking extremely loud about the
view, and attended by a brilliant staff of some sixty or seventy
horsemen, with a couple of our royal grooms with their red coats riding
oddly enough in the midst of the magnates. I took off my wide-awake
without stopping to stare, whereupon the Emperor pulled off his cocked
hat; and Albert (seeing, I suppose, that it was an Englishman) pulled
off his. Then we went our several ways. The Emperor is broader across
the chest than in the old times when we used to see him so often at
Gore-house, and stoops more in the shoulders. Indeed his carriage
thereabouts is like Fonblanque's."[192] The town he described as "one
great flag" for the rest of the visit; and to the success of the
illuminations he contributed largely himself by leading off splendidly
with a hundred and twenty wax candles blazing in his seventeen front
windows, and visible from that great height over all the place. "On the
first eruption Beaucourt _danced and screamed_ on the grass before the
door; and when he was more composed, set off with Madame Beaucourt to
look at the house from every possible quarter, and, he said, collect the
suffrages of his compatriots."

Their suffrages seem to have gone, however, mainly in another direction.
"It was wonderful," Dickens wrote, "to behold about the streets the
small French soldiers of the line seizing our Guards by the hand and
embracing them. It was wonderful, too, to behold the English sailors in
the town, shaking hands with everybody and generally patronizing
everything. When the people could not get hold of either a soldier or a
sailor, they rejoiced in the royal grooms, an