would be in Paris
again very shortly and that once more there would be an end to tyranny
and oppression, to the rule of the aristocrats and a number of
incompetent and fatuous princes.

He did not halt at Fontainebleau, for now he knew that the Court of the
Tuileries was in a panic, that neither the Comte d'Artois, nor the Duc
de Berry, nor any of the royal princes had succeeded in keeping the army
together: that defections had been rife for the past week, even before
Napoleon had shown himself, and that Marshal Ney, the bravest soldier
in France, had joined his Emperor at Auxerre.

No! de Marmont would not halt at Fontainebleau. It was Paris that he
wanted to see! Paris, which to-day would witness the hasty flight of the
gouty and unpopular King whom it had never learned to love! Paris
decking herself out like a bride for the arrival of her bridegroom!
Paris waiting and watching, while once again on the Tuileries and the
Hotel de Ville, on the Louvre and the Luxembourg, on church towers and
government buildings the old tricolour flag waved gaily in the wind.

He slept that night at a small hotel in the Louvre quarter, but the
whole evening he spent on the Place du Carrousel with the crowd outside
the Tuileries, watching the departure from the palace of the infirm King
of France and of his Court. The crowd was silent and obviously deeply
moved. The spectacle before it of an old, ailing monarch, driven forth
out of the home of his ancestors, and forced after an exile of three and
twenty years and a brief reign of less than one, to go back once more to
misery and exile, was pitiable in the extreme.

Many forgot all that the brief reign had meant in disappointments and
bitter regrets, and only saw in the pathetic figure that waddled
painfully from portico to carriage door a monarch who was unhappy,
abandoned and defenceless: a monarch, too, who, in his unheroic,
sometimes grotesque person, was nevertheless the representative of all
the privileges and all the rights, of all the dignity and majesty
pertaining to the most ancient ruling dynasty in Europe, as well as of
all the humiliations and misfortunes which that same dynasty had
endured.

III

It is late in the evening of March 20th. A thin mist is spreading from
the river right over Paris, and from the Place du Carrousel the lighted
windows of the Tuileries palace appear only like tiny, dimly-flickering
stars.

Here an immense crowd is assembled. It has waited