d
shirts, and great-coats, and bread, and cartridges; but he always kept
up his majesty; for, don't you see, 'twas his business to reign. No
matter for that, however; a sergeant, and even a common soldier, could
say to him, 'my Emperor,' just as you say to me sometimes, 'my good
friend.' He gave us an answer if we appealed to him; he slept in the
snow like the rest of us; and, indeed, he had almost the air of a human
man. I who speak to you, I have seen him with his feet among the
grape-shot, and no more uneasy than you are now--standing steady,
looking through his field-glass, and minding his business. 'Twas that
kept the rest of us quiet. I don't know how he did it, but when he spoke
he made our hearts burn within us; and to show him we were his children,
incapable of balking, didn't we rush at the mouths of the rascally
cannon, that belched and vomited shot and shell, without so much as
saying, 'Look out!' Why! the dying must needs raise their heads to
salute him and cry, 'LONG LIVE THE EMPEROR!'

"I ask you, was that natural? would they have done that for a human man?

"Well, after he had settled the world, the Empress Josephine, his wife,
a good woman all the same, managed matters so that she did not bear him
any children, and he was obliged to give her up, though he loved her
considerably. But, you see, he had to have little ones for reasons of
state. Hearing of this, all the sovereigns of Europe quarrelled as to
which of them should give him a wife. And he married, so they told us,
an Austrian archduchess, daughter of Caesar, an ancient man about whom
people talk a good deal, and not in France only--where any one will
tell you what he did--but in Europe. It is all true, for I myself who
address you at this moment, I have been on the Danube, and have seen the
remains of a bridge built by that man, who, it seems, was a relation of
Napoleon in Rome, and that's how the Emperor got the inheritance of that
city for his son. So after the marriage, which was a fete for the whole
world, and in honour of which he released the people of ten years'
taxes--which they had to pay all the same, however, because the
assessors didn't take account of what he said--his wife had a little
one, who was King of Rome. Now, there's a thing that had never been seen
on this earth; never before was a child born a king with his father
living. On that day a balloon went up in Paris to tell the news to Rome,
and that balloon made the journey i