The Bronze Eagle (30 page)

When he had gone at last, Crystal's thoughts veered back once more to
Clyffurde and to his treachery.

"What abominable deceit,
ma tante
!" she cried, and quite against her
will tears of wrath and of disappointment rose to her eyes. "What
villainy! what odious, execrable treachery!"

Madame shrugged her shoulders and took up her knitting.

"These days, my dear," she said with unwonted placidity, "the world is
so full of treachery that men and women absorb it by every pore."

"But I shall not leave it at that," rejoined Crystal resolutely. "I'll
find a means of punishing that vile traitor . . . I'll make him feel the
hatred which he has so richly deserved—I shall not rest till I have
made him suffer as he makes me suffer now. . . ."

"My dear—my dear—" protested Mme. la Duchesse, not a little shocked at
the girl's vehemence.

[Pg 235]
Indeed, Crystal's otherwise sweet, gentle, yielding personality seemed
completely transformed: for the moment she was just a sensitive woman
who has been hit and hurt, and whose desire for retaliation is keener,
more relentless than that of a man. All the soft look in her blue eyes
had gone—they looked dark and hard—her fair curls were matted against
her damp forehead; indeed, Madame thought that for the moment all
Crystal's beauty had gone—the sweet, submissive beauty of the girl, the
grace of movement, the shy, appealing gentleness of her ways. She now
looked all determination, resentment, and, above all, revenge.

"The dear child," sighed the Duchesse over her knitting, "it is the
English blood in her. Those people never know how to accept the
inevitable: they are always wanting to fight someone for something and
never know when they are beaten."

[Pg 236]

And the triumphal march from the gulf of Jouan continued uninterrupted
to Paris.

After Laffray and Grenoble, Lyons, where the silk-weavers of La
Guillotière assembled in their thousands to demolish the barricades
which had been built up on their bridge against the arrival of the
Emperor, and watched his entry into their city waving kerchiefs and hats
in his honour, and tricolour flags and cockades fished out of cupboards,
where they had lain hidden but not forgotten for one whole year.

After Lyons, Villefranche, where sixty thousand peasants and workmen
awaited his arrival at the foot of the tree of Liberty, on the top of
which a brass eagle, the relic of some old standard, glistened like gold
as it caught the rays of the setting sun.

And Nevers, where the townsfolk urged the regiments as they march
through the city to tear the white cockades from their hats! And
Chalon-sur-Saône, where the workpeople commandeer a convoy of artillery
destined for the army of M. le Comte d'Artois!

The préfets of the various départements, the bureaucracy of provinces
and cities, are not only amazed but struck with terror:

"This is a new Revolution!" they cry in dismay.

Yes! it is a new Revolution! the revolt of the peasantry
[Pg 237]
of the poor,
the humble, the oppressed! The hatred which they felt against that old
regime which had come back to them with its old arrogance and its former
tyrannies had joined issue with the cult of the army for the Emperor who
had led it to glory, to fortune and to fame.

The people and the army were roused by the same enthusiasm, and marched
shoulder to shoulder to join the standard of Napoleon—the little man in
the shabby hat and the grey redingote, who for them personified the
spirit of the great revolution, the great struggle for liberty and its
final victory.

The army of the Comte d'Artois—that portion of it which remained
loyal—was powerless against the overwhelming tide of popular
enthusiasm, powerless against dissatisfaction, mutterings and constant
defections in its ranks. The army would have done well in Provence—for
Provence was loyal and royalist, man, woman and child: but Napoleon took
the route of the Alps, and avoided Provence; by the time he reached
Lyons he had an army of his own and M. le Comte d'Artois—fearing more
defections and worse defeats—had thought it prudent to retire.

It has often been said that if a single shot had been fired against his
original little band Napoleon's march on Paris would have been stopped.
Who shall tell? There are such "ifs" in the world, which no human mind
can challenge. Certain it is that that shot was not fired. At Laffray,
Randon gave the order, but he did not raise his musket himself; on the
walls of Grenoble St. Genis, in command of the artillery and urged by
the Comte de Cambray, did not dare to give the order or to fire a gun
himself. "The men declare," he had said gloomily, "that they would blow
their officers from their own guns."

And at Lyons there was not militiaman, a royalist, volunteer or a pariah
out of the streets who was willing to fire that first and "single shot":
and though Marshal Macdonald
[Pg 238]
swore ultimately that he would do it
himself, his determination failed him at the last when surrounded by his
wavering troops he found himself face to face with the conqueror of
Austerlitz and Jena and Rivoli and a thousand other glorious fights,
with the man in the grey redingote who had created him Marshal of France
and Duke of Tarente on the battlefields of Lombardy, his comrade-in-arms
who had shared his own scanty army rations with him, slept beside him
round the bivouac fires, and round whom now there rose a cry from end to
end of Lyons: "Vive l'Empereur!"

Victor de Marmont did not wait for the arrival of the Emperor at Lyons:
nor did he attempt to enter the city. He knew that there was still some
money in the imperial treasury brought over from Elba, and his
mind—always in search of the dramatic—had dwelt with pleasure on
thoughts of the day when the Emperor, having entered Fontainebleau, or
perhaps even Paris and the Tuileries, would there be met by his faithful
de Marmont, who on bended knees in the midst of a brilliant and admiring
throng would present to him the twenty-five million francs originally
the property of the Empress herself and now happily wrested from the
cupidity of royalist traitors.

The picture pleased de Marmont's fancy: he dwelt on it with delight, he
knew that no one requited a service more amply and more generously than
Napoleon: he knew that after this service rendered there was nothing to
which he—de Marmont—young as he was, could not aspire—title, riches,
honours, anything he wanted would speedily become his, and with these to
his credit he could claim Crystal de Cambray once more.

Oh! she would be humbled again by then, she and her father too, the
proud aristocrats, doomed once more to penury and exile, unless he—de
Marmont—came forth like
[Pg 239]
the fairy prince to the beggarmaid with hands
laden with riches, ready to lay these at the feet of the woman he loved.

Yes! Crystal de Cambray would be humbled! De Marmont, though he felt
that he loved her more and better than any man had ever loved any woman
before, nevertheless had a decided wish that she should be humbled and
suffer bitterly thereby. He felt that her pride was his only enemy: her
pride and royalist prejudices. Of the latter he thought but little:
confident of his Emperor's success, he thought that all those hot-headed
royalists would soon realise the hopelessness of their cause—rendered
all the more hopeless through its short-lived triumph of the past
year—and abandon it gradually and surely, accepting the inevitable and
rejoicing over the renewed glory which would come over France.

As for her pride! well! that was going to be humbled, along with the
pride of the Bourbon princes, of that fatuous old king, of all those
arrogant aristocrats who had come back after years of exile, as
arrogant, as tyrannical as ever before.

These were pleasing thoughts which kept Victor de Marmont company on his
way between Lyons and Fontainebleau. Once past Villefranche he sent the
bulk of his escort back to Lyons, where the Emperor should have arrived
by this time: he had written out a superficial report of his expedition,
which the sergeant in charge of the little troop was to convey to the
Emperor's own hands. He only kept two men with him, put himself and them
into plain, travelling clothes which he purchased at Villefranche, and
continued his journey to the north without much haste; the roads were
safe enough from footpads, he and his two men were well armed, and what
stragglers from the main royalist army he came across would be far too
busy with their own retreat and their own disappointment to pay much
heed to a civilian and seemingly harmless traveller.

[Pg 240]
De Marmont loved to linger on the way in the towns and hamlets where the
news of the Emperor's approach had already been wafted from Grenoble, or
Lyons, or Villefranche on the wings of wind or birds, who shall say?
Enough that it had come, that the peasants, assembled in masses in their
villages, were whispering together that he was coming—the little man in
the grey redingote—l'Empereur!

And de Marmont would halt in those villages and stop to whisper with the
peasants too: Yes! he was coming! and the whole of France was giving him
a rousing welcome! There was Laffray and Grenoble and Lyons! the army
rallied to his standard as one man!

And de Marmont would then pass on to another village, to another town,
no longer whispering after a while, but loudly proclaiming the arrival
of the Emperor who had come into his own again.

After Nevers he was only twenty-four hours ahead of Napoleon and his
progress became a triumphant one: newspapers, despatches had filtrated
through from Paris—news became authentic, though some of it sounded a
little wild. Wherever de Marmont arrived he was received with
acclamations as the man who had seen the Emperor, who had assisted at
the Emperor's magnificent entry into Grenoble, who could assure citizens
and peasantry that it was all true, that the Emperor would be in Paris
again very shortly and that once more there would be an end to tyranny
and oppression, to the rule of the aristocrats and a number of
incompetent and fatuous princes.

He did not halt at Fontainebleau, for now he knew that the Court of the
Tuileries was in a panic, that neither the Comte d'Artois, nor the Duc
de Berry, nor any of the royal princes had succeeded in keeping the army
together: that defections had been rife for the past week, even before
Napoleon had shown himself, and that Marshal Ney, the
[Pg 241]
bravest soldier
in France, had joined his Emperor at Auxerre.

No! de Marmont would not halt at Fontainebleau. It was Paris that he
wanted to see! Paris, which to-day would witness the hasty flight of the
gouty and unpopular King whom it had never learned to love! Paris
decking herself out like a bride for the arrival of her bridegroom!
Paris waiting and watching, while once again on the Tuileries and the
Hôtel de Ville, on the Louvre and the Luxembourg, on church towers and
government buildings the old tricolour flag waved gaily in the wind.

He slept that night at a small hotel in the Louvre quarter, but the
whole evening he spent on the Place du Carrousel with the crowd outside
the Tuileries, watching the departure from the palace of the infirm King
of France and of his Court. The crowd was silent and obviously deeply
moved. The spectacle before it of an old, ailing monarch, driven forth
out of the home of his ancestors, and forced after an exile of three and
twenty years and a brief reign of less than one, to go back once more to
misery and exile, was pitiable in the extreme.

Many forgot all that the brief reign had meant in disappointments and
bitter regrets, and only saw in the pathetic figure that waddled
painfully from portico to carriage door a monarch who was unhappy,
abandoned and defenceless: a monarch, too, who, in his unheroic,
sometimes grotesque person, was nevertheless the representative of all
the privileges and all the rights, of all the dignity and majesty
pertaining to the most ancient ruling dynasty in Europe, as well as of
all the humiliations and misfortunes which that same dynasty had
endured.

It is late in the evening of March 20th. A thin mist is spreading from
the river right over Paris, and from the
[Pg 242]
Place du Carrousel the lighted
windows of the Tuileries palace appear only like tiny, dimly-flickering
stars.

Here an immense crowd is assembled. It has waited patiently hour after
hour, ever since in the earlier part of the afternoon a courier has come
over from Fontainebleau with the news that the Emperor is already there
and would be in Paris this night.

It is the same crowd which twenty-four hours ago shed a tear or two in
sympathy for the departing monarch: now it stands here—waiting,
excited, ready to cheer the return of a popular hero—half-forgotten,
wildly acclaimed, madly welcomed, to be cursed again, and again
forgotten so soon. It was a heterogeneous crowd forsooth! made up in
great part of the curious, the idle, the indifferent, and in great part,
too, of the Bonapartist enthusiasts and malcontents who had groaned
under the reactionary tyranny of the Restoration—of malcontents, too,
of no enthusiasm, who were ready to welcome any change which might bring
them to prominence or to fortune. With here and there a sprinkling of
hot-headed revolutionaries, cursing the return of the Emperor as
heartily as they had cursed that of the Bourbon king: and here and there
a few heart-sick royalists, come to watch the final annihilation of
their hopes.

Victor de Marmont, wrapped in a dark cloak, stood among the crowd for a
while. He knew that the Emperor would probably not be in Paris before
night, and he loved to be in the very midst of the wave of enthusiasm
which was surging higher and ever higher in the crowd, and hear the
excited whispers, and to feel all round him, wrapping him closely like a
magic mantle of warmth and delight, the exaltation of this mass of men
and women assembled here to acclaim the hero whom he himself adored.
Closely buttoned inside his coat he had scraps of paper worth the ransom
of any king.