"Oh! when I think," she exclaimed, "that in four years you will have to be a soldier, that that man will snatch you from me, he who has always taken away and never given anything in return, and that he will send you to be killed on a field of battle like Moskova or Leipzig!... Oh, my child! my poor child!"
My mother only expressed a general feeling, but the hatred of her fellows was expressed in different ways, according to their different temperaments and characters; with my mother, as we have seen, it was in sighs and tears; with other mothers, it would be in fierce threats; with others, insulting epithets.
I remember, there lived on the place de la Fontaine the wife of a gunsmith, whose son was at the Abbé Grégoire's school with me; her name was Madame Montagnon. During the heat of summer afternoons, when the greatest heat of the day had declined, she sat at her threshold with her spinning-wheel, and all the time she was spinning she sang a song against Bonaparte.
I only remember the first four lines of it, which begun thus:—
"Le Corse de Madame Ango
N'est pas le Corse de la Corse,
Car le Corse de Marengo
Est d'une bien plus dure écorce."
And—as Mademoiselle Pivert re-read the famous volume of The Thousand and One Nights, which contained the story of The Wonderful Lamp, every day in the week—so Madame Montagnon had scarcely finished the last couplet against the Corsican of Marengo when she began the first over again.
Now it will be readily understood that this hatred, which began to show itself after the Russian disasters, was aggravated by terror in proportion as the enemy drew nearer, step by step, town by town, narrowing the circle being drawn round France.
Finally, at the beginning of 1814, it suddenly became known that the enemy had set foot on French soil.
By that time all confidence in Napoleon's genius had disappeared. That stupendous adventurer's genius was his good fortune.