ated; and he did more prodigies in defending France
than ever he had done in conquering Italy, the East, Spain, Europe, and
Russia. He meant to bury every invader under the sod, and teach 'em to
respect the soil of France. So he let them get to Paris, that he might
swallow them at a mouthful, and rise to the height of his genius in a
battle greater than all the rest--a mother-battle, as 'twere. But there,
there! the Parisians were afraid for their twopenny skins, and their
trumpery shops; they opened the gates. Then the Ragusades began, and
happiness ended. The Empress was fooled, and the white banner flaunted
from the windows. The generals whom he had made his nearest friends
abandoned him for the Bourbons--a set of people no one had heard tell
of. The Emperor bade us farewell at Fontainebleau: 'Soldiers!'--I can
hear him now; we wept like children; the flags and the eagles were
lowered as if for a funeral: it was, I may well say it to you, it was
the funeral of the Empire; her dapper armies were nothing now but
skeletons. So he said to us, standing there on the portico of his
palace: 'My soldiers! we are vanquished by treachery; but we shall meet
in heaven, the country of the brave. Defend my child, whom I commit to
you. Long live Napoleon II!' He meant to die, that no man should look
upon Napoleon vanquished; he took poison, enough to have killed a
regiment, because, like Jesus Christ before his Passion, he thought
himself abandoned of God and his talisman. But the poison did not hurt
him.

"See again! he found he was immortal.

"Sure of himself, knowing he must ever be THE EMPEROR, he went for a
while to an island to study out the nature of these others, who, you may
be sure, committed follies without end. Whilst he bided his time down
there, the Chinese, and the wild men on the coast of Africa, and the
Barbary States, and others who are not at all accommodating, know so
well he was more than man that they respected his tent, saying to touch
it would be to offend God. Thus, d'ye see, when these others turned him
from the doors of his own France, he still reigned over the whole world.
Before long he embarked in the same little cockleshell of a boat he had
had in Egypt, sailed round the beard of the English, set foot in France,
and France acclaimed him. The sacred cuckoo flew from spire to spire;
all France cried out with one voice, 'LONG LIVE THE EMPEROR!' In this
region, here, the enthusiasm for that wonder of the