CHAPTER XXVII

Les Adieux De Fontainebleau

'Twas thus that Napoleon left us;

Our people were weeping and mute,
As he passed through the lines of his Guard,
And our drums beat the notes of salute.

—Thackeray, The Chronicle of the Drum.

"MARCH!" said General Petit, and the grenadiers of the Imperial Guard advanced across the palace park, through the great gates, into the Cour du Cheval Blanc and on to the foot of the Horseshoe Staircase.

"Halt!" said General Petit. There they stood motionless, those great grenadiers—those veterans who had faced the cannon in the marshes of Arcole, who had battled at the pyramids while "forty centuries looked down upon them," who had climbed the wall of St. Jean d'Acre, who had charged the Austrian centre on Marengo's plain, who had seen the sun rise on the heights of Austerlitz, who had fought with fire in the streets of Moscow. There they stood, hundreds of statues made of bronze and crowned with laurel. To reproduce them, France must have had again a twenty years of victory. The light breeze gently waved their plumes; the horses that stood harnessed to the carriage near the great curved staircase champed their bits. Thus they waited.

How many Kings and mighty men of France had gone up and down that Horseshoe Staircase! How

many Queens and gilded favorites had swept triumphant through that courtyard! Francis the First, doing the honors to the Emperor Charles the Fifth; Catherine of Medici, and by her side her craven son, planning the Bartholomew; Henry of Navarre, with his white plume of Ivry and his "charmante Gabrielle "; Louis XIII and his scarlet-robed Prime Minister, Richelieu the omnipotent; the Grand Monarch and his stately court; "le Bien-Aime," and the Pompadour.

But the traveler who stands to-day in that courtyard of the Fontainebleau Chateau forgets the Valois and the Bourbon, forgets Francis of Angouleme and Henry of Navarre; for the old concierge who walks by his side does not tell him of the hunts and tourneys of the second Henry, or of the fetes and pompous journeys of the Grand Monarque, but, stopping at the foot of the Horseshoe Staircase, he says these words: "Here Napoleon took leave of his Guard, April 20th, 1814. Since then this court has been called Cour des Adieux."

Twelve o'clock! The click of spurs was heard upon the marble floor of the palace vestibule. The Emperor appeared in the great doorway. The Garde Imperiale presented arms.

He came rapidly down the staircase and advanced to where they stood, and then he said—but everyone knows what he said, for the words have been printed again and again. They mean little now—they are mere words. But it was different when they were first spoken on that April morning, by the Emperor Napoleon to the soldiers of his Old Guard, in the courtyard of the Palace Fontainebleau. They were

his good friends, who had marched at his side and camped about his tent, had stemmed the tide of defeat and turned it into victory, and closed around him, like a brazen wall, when the Russian guns swept the icy plains at Moscow.

He was their Little Corporal, who, after twenty years of triumph and of glory, had come to say goodbye.

So they listened while he spoke, and they saw him kiss the eagle, and they watched him as he entered his carriage, and they followed the carriage with their eyes as it drove along the courtyard, out of the gate, and disappeared. Then slowly and sadly they marched to their barracks. And all was quiet in the courtyard of the Palace Fontainebleau.

CHAPTER XXVIII

"VIVE LE ROI!"

"But what good came of it at last?"

Quoth little Peterkin.

Why, that I cannot tell," said he;

"But 'twas a famous victory."

—Southey, Battle of Blenheim.

BRIGHTLY shone the sun on the 3rd of May, 1814. It was a lovely day, and surely if a day ought ever to be lovely that day should have been so. Why? Had not the sun and "Nec pluribus impar" been the emblem and motto of that wonderfully high-heeled and big-wigged grandiloquent monarch, King Louis Quatorze? And in the old days at Versailles was it not true that "the rain of Marly never wet one," and that when the king had planned to go a hunting it was always clear in deference to the royal will? What could be more appropriate, therefore, than that the sun should shine brightly on that 3rd of May, 1814, when the Grand Monarque's descendant, Louis-Stanislas-Xavier de Bourbon, after a somewhat extended foreign tour of twenty-four years, was to make, by the kind assistance of Messrs. George of England, Alexander of Russia, Francis of Austria, and Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, his serio-comic entree into his good city of Paris, and settle down in the Tuileries Palace for the rest of his natural life. Therefore shine brightly, sun; chirp gaily, little birds;

run quickly from the sky, clouds! And the sun, birds and sky, knowing that it was proper for them to shine, sing, and be clear, did so, and the day was lovely.

There had been great rejoicing a few days before at Compiegne, where the Marshals and Generals of the Empire had gone to welcome King Louis de Bourbon. How happy they all were to see him, and the old custom of kissing the royal hands could not be revived too quickly. But in this case it happened that the royal hands were scrofulous ones, and as people are not generally fond of kissing scrofulous hands, although they may be royal, His Most Christian Majesty kindly consented to put royal green gloves on the royal scrofulous hands, and the Marshals, Generals, Counts and Barons kissed the royal green gloves and were happy. Then they all sat promptly down to dinner, for His Most Christian Majesty was always punctual. "L'exactitude est la politesse des rois" (Punctuality is the politeness of kings) was his motto, and, by the way, the only thing he ever said worth remembering, for all those Latin sentences which he used to rattle off so glibly were cribbed from classic authors.

What a dinner it was!—four soups, four removes, four great dishes, four great entremets, and thirty-two entrees. And when the Most Christian Majesty sent some vermouth to Marshal Macdonald, and Marshal Macdonald, who was much more at home facing cannon-balls than eating big dinners of Most Christian Majesties, forgot to rise and cry "Vivat," the kind King forgave him so gracefully and royally that it touched the hearts of everybody, and even the marble Apollo in the royal dining-room shed tears.