stout man in green cloth coat and white
breeches--walks up the steps of his reconquered palace like a man in a
dream: his eyes are fixed apparently on nothing, he makes no movement to
keep his too enthusiastic friends away: the smile upon his lips is
meaningless and fixed.

"Vive l'Empereur!" vociferates the crowd.

Vive l'Empereur for one hundred days: a few weeks of joy, a few weeks of
anxiety, a few weeks of indecision, of wavering and of doubt. Then
defeat more irrevocable than before! exile more distant! despair more
complete.

Vive l'Empereur while we shout with excitement, while we remember the
disappointments of the past year, while we hope for better things from
a hand that has lost its cunning, a mind that has lost its power.

Vive l'Empereur! Let him live for an hundred days, while we forget our
enthusiasm and Europe prepares its final crushing blow. Let him live
until we remember once again the horrors of war, the misery, the famine,
the devastated homes! until once more we see the maimed and crippled
crawling back wearily from the fields of glory, until our ears ring with
the wails of widows and the cries of the fatherless.

Then let him no longer live, for he it is who has brought this misery on
us through his will and through his ambition, and France has suffered so
much from the aftermath of glory, that all she wants now is rest.

IV

Gradually--but it took some hours--the tumult and excitement in and
round the Tuileries subsided. The Emperor managed to shut himself up in
his study and to eat some supper in peace, while gradually outside his
windows the crowd--who had nothing more to see and was getting tired of
staring up at glittering panes of glass--went back more or less quietly
to their homes.

Only in the courtyard of the Tuileries, the troopers of the cavalry
which had formed the Emperor's escort from Fontainebleau tethered their
horses to the railings, rolled themselves in their mantles and slept on
the pavements, giving to this portion of the palace the appearance of a
bivouac in a place which has been taken by storm.

One of the last to leave the Place du Carrousel was Bobby Clyffurde. The
crowd was thin by this time, but it was the tired and the
indifferent--the merely curious--who had been the first to go. Those who
remained to the last were either the very enthusiastic who wanted to set
up a final shout of "Vive l'Empereur!" after their idol had entirely
disappeared from their