The Eagle of the Empire | Page 8

old veterans were pitifully few
in number, thousands of them were in foreign prisons, many more
thousands of them were dead. Disease was rife among the youthful
recruits, unused to such hard campaigning, as he had summoned to the
colors. Without food and without arms, they were beginning to desert
their Eagles. The spirit of the marshals and great officers whom he had
raised from the dust to affluence and power was waning. They were
worn out with much fighting. They wanted peace, almost at any price.
He remembered their eager questions when he had joined the army a
month ago.
"What reinforcements has your majesty brought?"
"None," he had been compelled to answer.
"What, then, shall we do?" queried one after the other.
"We must try fortune with what we have," he had declared
undauntedly.
Well, they had tried fortune. Brienne, where he had been a boy at
school, had been the scene of a brilliantly successful action. They had
lost no glory at La Rothière afterward--although they gained nothing
else--where with thirty thousand men he had beaten back through one
long bloody day and night thrice that number, only to have to retreat in
the end for the salvation of those who had been left alive. And, to him
who had been wont to spend them so indifferently, men had suddenly
become precious, since he could get no more. Every dead or wounded
man was now unreplaceable, and each loss made his problem harder to
solve. Since those two first battles he had been forced back, step by
step, mile by mile, league by league, everywhere; and all his lieutenants
likewise. Now Schwarzenberg, with one hundred and thirty thousand
men, confronted him on the Seine and the Aube, and Blücher, with

eighty thousand men, was marching on Paris by way of the Marne, with
only Macdonald and his beaten and dispirited men, not ten thousand in
number, to hold the fiery old Prussian field marshal in check.
"How had it all come to this, and why?" the man asked himself, and,
with all his greatness and clearness of vision, the reason did not occur
to him. For he had only himself to blame for his misfortunes. He was
not the man that he had been. For a moment his old spirit had flashed
out in the common room of the inn two hours before, but the reaction
left him heavy, weary, old, lonely. Physically, he felt unequal to the
strain. His human frame was almost worn out. Mere men cannot long
usurp the attributes of God. Intoxicated with success, he had grasped at
omnipotence, and for a time had seemed to enjoy it, only to fail. The
mills of the gods do grind slowly, but they do grind immeasurably
small in the end.
What a long, bloody way he had traversed since Toulon, since Arcola,
since the bridge at Lodi, since Marengo? Into what far-off lands it had
led him: Italy, Egypt, Syria, Spain, Austria, Prussia and the great, white,
cold empire of the North. And all the long way paved with
corpses--corpses he had regarded with indifference until to-day.
It was cold in the room, in spite of the fire in the stove. It reminded him
of that dreadful retreat. The Emperor covered his face with his hand.
No one was there. He could afford to give away. There rose before him
in the darkness the face of the wife of his youth, only to be displaced by
the nearer woman, the Austrian wife and the little son whom he had so
touchingly confided to the National Guard a month ago when he left
Paris for the last try with fortune for his empire and his life. Would the
allies at last and finally beat him; would Francis Joseph, weak monarch
whom he hated, take back his daughter, and with her Napoleon's son,
and bring him up in Austria to hate the name of France and his father?
The Emperor groaned aloud.
The darkness fell upon the world outside, upon the room within, upon
the soul of the great Captain approaching the nadir of his fortunes, his
spirit almost at the breaking point. To him at last came Berthier and
Maret. They had the right of entrance. The time for which he had asked

had passed. Young Marteau admitted them without question. They
entered the room slowly, not relishing their task, yet resolute to
discharge their errand. The greater room outside was alight from fire
and from lanterns. Enough illumination came through the door into the
bed-chamber for their purpose--more than enough for the Emperor. He
turned his head away, lest they should see what they should see. The
two marshals bowed and stood silent.
"Well?" said the Emperor at last, his voice unduly harsh, as if to cover