officers. It seems like the
world of the Sleeping Beauty and of the Enchanted Castle--which a kiss
has awakened from its eleven months' sleep. The Empire had only been
asleep, it had dreamed a bad dream, wherein its hero was a prisoner and
an exile: now it is slowly wakening back to life and to reality.

The night wears on: darkness and fog envelop Paris more and more.
Excitement becomes akin to anxiety. If the Emperor did leave
Fontainebleau when the last courier said that he did, he should
certainly be here by now. There are strange whispers, strange waves of
evil reports that spread through the waiting crowd: "A royalist fanatic
had shot at the Emperor! the Emperor was wounded! he was dead!"

Oh! the excitement of that interminable wait!

At last, just as from every church tower the bells strike the hour of
nine, there comes the muffled sound of a distant cavalcade: the sound of
horses galloping and only half drowning that of the rumbling of coach
wheels.

It comes from the direction of the embankment, and from far away now is
heard the first cry of "Vive l'Empereur!" The noise gets louder and more
clear, the cries are repeated again and again till they merge into one
great, uproarious clamour. Like the ocean when lashed by the wind, the
crowd surges, moves, rises on tiptoe, subsides, falls back to crush
forward again and once more to retreat as a heavy coach, surrounded by
a thousand or so of mounted men, dashes over the cobbles of the Place du
Carrousel, whilst the clamour of the crowd becomes positively deafening.

"Vive l'Empereur!"

The officers in the courtyard of the palace rush to the coach as it
draws up at the Pavillon de Flore: one of them succeeds in opening the
carriage door. The Emperor is literally torn out of the carriage,
carried to the vestibule, where more officers seize him, raise him from
the crowd, bear him along, hoisted upon their shoulders, up the
monumental staircase.

Their enthusiasm is akin to delirium: they nearly tear their hero to
pieces in their wild, mad, frantic welcome.

"In Heaven's name, protect his person," exclaims the Duc de Vicence
anxiously; and he and Lavalette manage to get hold of the banisters and
by dint of fighting and pushing succeed in walking backwards step by
step in front of the Emperor, thus making a way for him.

Lavalette can hardly believe his eyes, and the Duc de Vicence keeps
murmuring: "It is the Emperor! It is the Emperor!"

And he--the little