vering 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 a