d embraced _them_. I don't
think the Boulogne people were surprised by anything so much, as by the
three cheers the crew of the yacht gave when the Emperor went aboard to
lunch. The prodigious volume of them, and the precision, and the
circumstance that no man was left straggling on his own account either
before or afterwards, seemed to strike the general mind with amazement.
Beaucourt said it was _like boxing_." That was written on the 10th of
September; but in a very few days Dickens was unwillingly convinced
that whatever the friendly disposition to England might be, the war with
Russia was decidedly unpopular. He was present when the false report of
the taking of Sebastopol reached the Emperor and Empress. "I was at the
Review" (8th of October) "yesterday week, very near the Emperor and
Empress, when the taking of Sebastopol was announced. It was a
magnificent show on a magnificent day; and if any circumstance could
make it special, the arrival of the telegraphic despatch would be the
culminating point one might suppose. It quite disturbed and mortified me
to find how faintly, feebly, miserably, the men responded to the call of
the officers to cheer, as each regiment passed by. Fifty excited
Englishmen would make a greater sign and sound than a thousand of these
men do. . . . The Empress was very pretty, and her slight figure sat
capitally on her grey horse. When the Emperor gave her the despatch to
read, she flushed and fired up in a very pleasant way, and kissed it
with as natural an impulse as one could desire to see."

On the night of that day Dickens went up to see a play acted at a cafe
at the camp, and found himself one of an audience composed wholly of
officers and men, with only four ladies among them, officers' wives. The
steady, working, sensible faces all about him told their own story; "and
as to kindness and consideration towards the poor actors, it was real
benevolence." Another attraction at the camp was a conjuror, who had
been called to exhibit twice before the imperial party, and whom Dickens
always afterwards referred to as the most consummate master of
legerdemain he had seen. Nor was he a mean authority as to this, being
himself, with his tools at hand, a capital conjuror;[193] but the
Frenchman scorned help, stood among the company without any sort of
apparatus, and, by the mere force of sleight of hand and an astonishing
memory, performed feats having no likeness to anything Dickens had ever