and brought the strangers' armies within her gates.

The same man was there--the same genius who even now could have mastered
all the enemies of France and saved her from her present subjection and
European insignificance, but the men round him were not the same. He,
the guiding hand, was still there, but the machinery no longer worked as
it had done in the past before disaster had blunted and stiffened the
temper of its steel.

The men around the Emperor were not now as they were in the days of Jena
and Austerlitz and Wagram. Their characters and temperaments had
undergone a change. Disaster had brought on slackness, the past year of
constant failures had engendered a sense of discouragement and
demoralisation, a desire to argue, to foresee difficulties, to foretell
further disasters.

He saw it all well enough--he the man with the far-seeing mind and the
eagle-eyes that missed nothing--neither a look of indecision, nor an
indication of revolt. He saw it all but he could do nothing, for he too
felt overwhelmed by that wave of indecision and of discouragement. Faith
in himself, energy in action, had gone. He envisaged the possibility of
a vanquished and dismembered France.

Above all he had lost belief in his Star: the star of his destiny which,
rising over the small island of Corsica, shining above a humble
middle-class home, had guided him step by step, from triumph to triumph,
to the highest pinnacle of glory to which man's ambition has ever
reached.

That star had been dimmed once, its radiance was no longer unquenchable:
"Destiny has turned against me," he said, "and in her I have lost my
most valuable helpmate."

And now the whole of Europe had declared war against him, and in a final
impassioned speech he turns to his ministers and to the representatives
of his people: "Help me to save France!" he begs, "afterwards we'll
settle our quarrels."

One hundred days after he began his dream-march, from the gulf of Jouan
in the wake of his eagle, he started from Paris with the Army which he
loved and which alone he trusted, to meet Europe and his fate on the
plains of Belgium.

II

And in Brussels they danced, danced late into the night. No one was to
know that within the next three days the destinies of the whole world
would be changed by the hand of God.

And how to hide from timid eyes the sense of this oncoming destiny? how
to stop for a few brief hours the flow of women's tears?

The ball should ha