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.
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