lon was
celebrated. The device non pluribus impar re-appeared on the stone rays
representing a sun upon the front of the barracks on the Quai d'Orsay.
Where there had been an Imperial Guard, there was now a red house. The
Arc du Carrousel, all laden with badly borne victories, thrown out
of its element among these novelties, a little ashamed, it may be, of
Marengo and Arcola, extricated itself from its predicament with the
statue of the Duc d'Angouleme. The cemetery of the Madeleine, a terrible
pauper's grave in 1793, was covered with jasper and marble, since the
bones of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette lay in that dust.

In the moat of Vincennes a sepulchral shaft sprang from the earth,
recalling the fact that the Duc d'Enghien had perished in the very
month when Napoleon was crowned. Pope Pius VII., who had performed the
coronation very near this death, tranquilly bestowed his blessing on the
fall as he had bestowed it on the elevation. At Schoenbrunn there was
a little shadow, aged four, whom it was seditious to call the King of
Rome. And these things took place, and the kings resumed their thrones,
and the master of Europe was put in a cage, and the old regime became
the new regime, and all the shadows and all the light of the earth
changed place, because, on the afternoon of a certain summer's day, a
shepherd said to a Prussian in the forest, "Go this way, and not that!"

This 1815 was a sort of lugubrious April. Ancient unhealthy and
poisonous realities were covered with new appearances. A lie wedded
1789; the right divine was masked under a charter; fictions became
constitutional; prejudices, superstitions and mental reservations, with
Article 14 in the heart, were varnished over with liberalism. It was the
serpent's change of skin.

Man had been rendered both greater and smaller by Napoleon. Under this
reign of splendid matter, the ideal had received the strange name of
ideology! It is a grave imprudence in a great man to turn the future
into derision. The populace, however, that food for cannon which is so
fond of the cannoneer, sought him with its glance. Where is he? What is
he doing? "Napoleon is dead," said a passer-by to a veteran of Marengo
and Waterloo. "He dead!" cried the soldier; "you don't know him."
Imagination distrusted this man, even when overthrown. The depths of
Europe were full of darkness after Waterloo. Something enormous remained
long empty through Napoleon's disappearance.

The kings p