ed ancestors set her heart beating hard. Presently, her
face alive with feeling, a furnace in her eyes, she repeated a paragraph
from Napoleon's letters to Josephine:

The enemy have lost, my dearest, eighteen thousand men, prisoners,
killed, and wounded. Wurmzer has nothing left but to throw himself
into Mantua. I hope soon to be in your arms. I love you to
distraction. All is well. Nothing is wanting to your husband's
happiness, save the love of Josephine.

She sprang to her feet. "And she, wife of a hero, was in common intrigue
with Hippolyte Charles at the time! She had a conqueror, a splendid
adventurer, and coming emperor, for a husband, and she loved him
not. I--I could have knelt to him--worshipped him. I"--With a little
hysterical, disdainful laugh, as of the soul at itself, she leaned upon
the window, looking into the village below, alternately smiling and
frowning at the thought of this adventurer down at the Louis Quinze.
"Yet, who can tell? Disraeli was half mountebank at the start," she
said. "Napoleon dressed infamously, too, before he was successful." But
again she laughed, as at an absurdity.

During the next few days Valmond was everywhere--kind, liberal, quaint,
tireless, at times melancholy; "in the distant perspective of the
stage," as Monsieur De la Riviere remarked mockingly. But a passing
member of the legislature met and was conquered by Valmond, and carried
on to neighbouring parishes the wondrous tale.

He carried it through Ville Bambord, fifty miles away; and the story
of how a Napoleon had come to Pontiac reached the ears of old Sergeant
Eustache Lagroin of the Old Guard, who had fought with the Great Emperor
at Waterloo, and in his army on twenty other battle-fields. He had been
at Fontainebleau when Napoleon bade farewell to the Old Guard, saying:
"For twenty years I have ever found you in the path of honour and
glory. Adieu, my children! I would I were able to press you all to my
heart--but I will at least press your eagle. I go to record the great
deeds we have done together."

When the gossip came to Lagroin, as he sat in his doorway, babbling of
Grouchy and Lannes and Davoust, the Little Corporal outflanking them
all in his praise, his dim blue eyes flared out from the distant sky of
youth and memory, his lips pursed in anger, and he got to his feet, his
stick fiercely pounding the ground.

"Tut! tut!" said he. "A lie! a pretty lie! I knew all the
Napoleons--Jose