A Sheaf of Bluebells

Transcriber's Note: Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.

A Sheaf of Bluebells
By Baroness Orczy, Author of The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Elusive Pimpernel, etc.
TORONTO: WILLIAM BRIGGS 1917
Printed in Great Britain

A SHEAF OF BLUEBELLS
Among the many petitions presented that year by émigrés desirous of returning to France under the conditional amnesty granted to them by the newly-crowned Emperor, was one signed by Mme. la Marquise de Mortain and by her son Laurent, then aged twenty-one years, and one signed by M. le Comte de Courson for himself and his daughter Fernande. Gaillard says in his memoirs of Fouché that the latter was greatly averse to the petition being granted; but that Napoleon, then on the point of starting for his campaign in Prussia, was inclined to leniency in this matter—leniency which roused the ire and contempt of the Minister of Police—the man who, of a truth, and above the Emperor himself, was virtual dictator of France these days.
A brood of plotters and intriguers, he said scornfully. I should have thought your Majesty had had enough of those soi-disant great ladies and gentlemen of Normandy and Brittany. I wouldn't have them inside these dominions if I had my way.
It seems that this phrase: If I had my way, highly amused the Emperor. Was it not a well-known fact that in all matters pertaining to the internal organization of the new Empire of France, Fouché ruled far more absolutely than did Napoleon? He knew more. He suspected more. Minister of Police and Minister of the Interior at this time, Fouché had made himself feared even—so it was said—by his imperial and capricious master.
And so—the obscure secretary who was present at this interview tells us—the Emperor laughed, and for once Fouché did not have his way. On the eve of the campaign which was to culminate in the humiliation of Prussia and the Peace of Tilsit, the soldier-Emperor had a throe of compassion, of mercy, a shrugging of the shoulders which meant immunity from exile for hundreds of men and women—a home for countless wanderers in foreign lands.