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el des Invalides. THIRD LADY Such rodomontade is cheap: what matters it! [A galaxy of marshals, forming Napoleon's staff, now enters the Platz immediately before the windows. In the midst rides the EMPEROR himself. The ladies are silent. The procession passes along the front until it reaches the entrance to the Royal Palace. At the door NAPOLEON descends from his horse and goes into the building amid the resonant trumpetings of his soldiers and the silence of the crowd.] SECOND LADY [impressed] O why does such a man debase himself By countenancing loud scurrility Against a queen who cannot make reprise! A power so ponderous needs no littleness-- The last resort of feeble desperates! [Enter fifth lady.] FIFTH LADY [breathlessly] Humiliation grows acuter still. He placards rhetoric to his soldiery On their distress of us and our allies, Declaring he'll not stack away his arms Till he has choked the remaining foes of France In their own gainful glut.--Whom means he, think you? FIRST LADY Us? THIRD LADY Russia? Austria? FIFTH LADY Neither: England.--Yea, Her he still holds the master mischief-mind, And marrer of the countries' quietude, By exercising untold tyranny Over all the ports and seas. SECOND LADY Then England's doomed! When he has overturned the Russian rule, England comes next for wrack. They say that know!... Look--he has entered by the Royal doors And makes the Palace his.--Now let us go!-- Our course, alas! is--whither? [Exeunt ladies. The curtain drops temporarily.] SEMICHORUS I OF IRONIC SPIRITS [aerial music] Deeming himself omnipotent With the Kings of the Christian continent, To warden the waves was his further bent. SEMICHORUS II But the weaving Will from eternity, [Hemming them in by a circling sea] Evolved the fleet of the Englishry. SEMICHORUS I The wane of his armaments ill-advised, At Trafalgar, to a force despised, Was a wound which never has cicatrized. SEMICHORUS II This, O this is the cramp that grips! And freezes the Emperor's finger-tips From signing a peace with the Land of Ships. CHORUS The Universal-empire plot Demands the rule of that wave-walled spot;
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