certain if the Emperor returned to Paris. 'He would not reach the Tuileries alive,' she was asserted to have said. And she obstinately insisted on a forward march, on MacMahon effecting a junction, despite every obstacle, with the army of Metz; in which views she was supported by the minister of war, General de Palikao, who had planned a victorious, lightning march for MacMahon, so that the latter might join hands with Bazaine. Gazing dreamily in front of him, with his paper lying on his knees, Maurice now fancied that he could understand everything: The two conflicting plans; MacMahon's hesitation to undertake this dangerous flank march with such indifferent troops; and the impatient, increasingly fretful orders which reached him from Paris, urging him into this madly rash adventure. Whilst picturing the tragical struggle, Maurice had a clear vision of the Emperor, deprived of his imperial authority which he had confided to the Empress-Regent, and divested of the supreme command of the army which he had entrusted to Marshal Bazaine, so that he had now become a mere nothing—a vague, undefined shadow of an Emperor, a nameless and cumbersome inutility, whom no one knew what to do with, whom Paris rejected, and who no longer had any place in the army since he had undertaken not to give it a single order.
On the following morning, when Maurice awoke after a stormy night, which he had spent rolled up in his blanket outside his tent, he was relieved to hear that the plan of retreating upon Paris had gained the upper hand. There was some talk of a fresh council held the previous evening, which had been attended by the ex-vice-Emperor,[14] M. Rouher, whom the Empress had despatched to head quarters in view of hastening the march upon Verdun, but whom Marshal MacMahon seemed to have convinced of the danger that would attend such a movement. Had any bad news of Bazaine come to hand? No one dared to assert this. However, the absence of news was sufficiently significant. All the officers with any common sense pronounced themselves in favour of waiting for the enemy under Paris; and, feeling convinced that he and his comrades would begin falling back the very next day, since it was said that orders to that effect had been issued, Maurice in his delight determined to satisfy a childish craving. He wished, once in a way, to escape the mess-platter and to breakfast somewhere at a cloth-spread table, with a bottle of wine, a decanter of water, and a plate before him—all the things which it seemed to him he had been deprived of for many months. He had some money in his pocket, so he slipped away with a beating heart, as if bent on some spree, and began to search about him for an inn.
It was on the outskirts of the village of Courcelles, beyond the canal, that he found the breakfast he had dreamt of. He had been told the day before that the Emperor had taken up his quarters at a private house in this village, and having strolled there out of curiosity, he remembered having noticed at the corner of a couple of roads a tavern with an arbour, where dangled some beautiful bunches of grapes already ripe and golden. There were some green-painted tables under the creeping vine, and through the open doorway of the spacious kitchen one could espy the loud-ticking clock, the cheap coloured prints pasted on the walls, and the fat hostess attending to the roasting-jack. A bowling alley stretched in the rear of the house, and the whole place had the gay, attractive, free-and-easy aspect of an old-fashioned guinguette.
A well-built, full-breasted girl, who showed her white teeth, came to ask Maurice if he wished to breakfast.
'Of course I do. Give me some eggs, a chop, and some cheese—and some white wine.' Then calling her back he asked, 'Isn't the Emperor quartered in one of those houses?'
'Yes, in the one in front of us; but you can't see it—it is behind the trees that rise above that high wall.'
Maurice then installed himself in the arbour, took off his belt that he might be more at his ease, and selected a table on which the sunrays, filtering through the vine leaves, were casting golden spots. His eyes kept on returning to that high yellow wall which screened the Emperor from view. The house was indeed a hidden and mysterious one; not even the tiles of the roof could be seen. The entrance was on the other side, facing the village street—a narrow street, where neither shop nor even window was to be seen, for it wound along between monotonous blank walls. The grounds in the rear of the house looked like an ait of dense verdure amid the neighbouring buildings. Among these, on the other side of the highway, Maurice noticed a large courtyard surrounded by stables and coach-houses, and filled with vans and carriages, amid which men and horses were continually coming and going.
'And are all those traps for the Emperor?' Maurice jokingly asked the servant, as she spread a clean white cloth on his table.
'Yes, for the Emperor and no one else,' she answered, with a gay sprightly air, pleased to have an opportunity of showing her fresh white teeth. Then she began to enumerate all there was; having learnt this, no doubt, from the grooms who had been coming to drink at the tavern since the day before. To begin with, there was the staff of twenty-five officers, the sixty Cent-Gardes, the escort-detachment of Guides,[15] the six Gendarmes of the provostship service; then the household, comprising seventy-three persons, chamberlains, valets and footmen, cooks and scullions; next four saddle-horses and two carriages for the Emperor, ten horses for the equerries, and eight for the outriders and grooms, without counting forty-seven posting horses; then a char à bancs and twelve baggage vans, two of which, reserved to the cooks, had excited the girl's admiration by the large quantity of kitchen utensils, plates, and bottles that could be seen inside them, all in beautiful order. 'Ah! sir,' she said to Maurice, 'I never saw such saucepans before! They shine like the sun! And there are all sorts of dishes and vessels, and things I can't even tell the use of! And wine, too—bordeaux, and burgundy, and champagne enough to give a splendid wedding feast.'
Well pleased at sight of the clean white cloth and the light golden wine sparkling in his glass, Maurice ate a couple of boiled eggs with a gluttonous enjoyment he had never before experienced. Whenever he turned his head to the left he obtained, through one of the entrances to the arbour, a view of the vast tent-covered plain, the swarming city that had just sprung up amid the stubble between Rheims and the canal. Only a few meagre clumps of trees dotted the grey expanse, where three mills upreared their slender arms. Above the confused roofs of Rheims, intermingled with the crests of chestnut trees, the colossal pile of the cathedral stood out in the blue atmosphere, looking, though far away, quite gigantic by the side of the low houses. And, on seeing it, recollections of schoolboy days came back to Maurice. Lessons that he had learnt and hemmed and hawed over returned to his mind: the coronations of the French Kings in Rheims Cathedral, the holy oil, Clovis, Joan of Arc—all the departed glories of ancient France.
Then, again thinking of the Emperor hidden away in that modest private house so discreetly closed, Maurice turned his eyes once more on the high yellow wall, and was surprised to read on it the inscription, 'Vive Napoléon!' traced in huge letters with a bit of charcoal, beside some clumsy obscene drawings. The rain had washed away the yellow distemper that had previously concealed the writing, and the inscription was evidently an old one. How singular to find upon that wall this acclamation, born of the warlike enthusiasm of long ago, and intended, undoubtedly, for the uncle, the conquering Napoleon, not his nephew! At sight of it, all Maurice's childhood arose before him, carolling in his mind, and again he listened to the tales of his grandfather, a soldier of the Grand Army. His mother was dead, and his father had been obliged to accept a post of tax collector, no opportunities for winning glory being vouchsafed to the sons of the heroes of France after the fall of the First Empire. And the grandfather lived with them on a most meagre pension, fallen to the level of this modest home, and having but one consolation, that of recounting his campaigns to his grandchildren, the twins, boy and girl, each with the same fair hair, and whose mother he, in some measure, was. He would seat Henriette on his left knee, and Maurice on his right, and then, during long hours, there followed Homeric tales of battle.
These tales did not seem to belong to history; different periods were blended, and all the nations of the earth met together in one great, fearful collision. The English, the Austrians, the Prussians, the Russians passed by—now in turn, now all at the same time—just as alliances willed it, and without it being possible to say why some were beaten rather than others. But beaten they were, inevitably beaten in advance by a great dash of heroism and
