."

"A title, Sire, would be a welcome addition," said de Marmont lightly,
"and the freedom to go and woo her, until France and my Emperor need me
again."

"Then go and do your wooing, man, and come back here to me in three
months, for I doubt not by then the flames of war will have been kindled
against me again."

CHAPTER VIII

THE SOUND OF REVELRY BY NIGHT

I

But the hand had lost its cunning, the mighty brain its indomitable
will-power. Genius was still there, but it was cramped now by
indecision--the indecision born of a sense of enmity around, suspicion
where there should have been nothing but enthusiasm, and the blind
devotion of the past.

The man who, all alone, by the force of his personality and of his
prestige had reconquered France, who had been acclaimed from the Gulf of
Jouan to the gates of the Tuileries as the saviour of France, the
people's Emperor, the beloved of the nation returned from exile, the man
who on the 20th of March had said with his old vigour and his old pride:
"Failure is the nightmare of the feeble! impotence, the refuge of the
poltroon!" the man who had marched as in a dream from end to end of
France to find himself face to face with the whole of Europe in league
against him, with a million men being hastily armed to hurl him from his
throne again, now found the south of France in open revolt, the west
ready to rise against him, the north in accord with his enemies.

He has not enough men to oppose to those millions, his arsenals are
depleted, his treasury empty. And after he has worked sixteen hours out
of the twenty-four at reorganising his army, his finances, his machinery
of war, he has to meet a set of apathetic or openly hostile ministers,
constitutional representatives, men who are ready to thwart him at every
turn, jealous only of curtailing his power, of obscuring his ascendency,
of clipping the eagle's wings, ere it soars to giddy heights again. And
to them he must give in, from them he must beg, entreat: give up, give
up all the time one hoped-for privilege after another, one power after
another.

He yields the military dictatorship to other--far less competent--hands;
he grants liberty to the press, liberty of debate, liberty of election,
liberty to all and sundry: but suspicion lurks around him; they suspect
his sincerity, his goodwill, they doubt his promises, they mistrust that
dormant Olympian ambition which has precipitated France into humiliation