Have you remarked that at Ligny, Quatre-Bras, and Waterloo, Napoleon, who on days of battle never left his saddle, hardly mounted a horse?
Have you noticed that when, by a last and supreme effort, he tried to grasp the victory which was slipping from him, and put himself at the head of his Old Guard to charge the enemy himself, it was on foot that he charged?
Why was this? I will tell you.
When the battle was lost, when the English charge broke into the heart of our squares, when Blücher's batteries hailed bullets all round Napoleon; when the whole of that vast plain was like a furnace, a cemetery, or a valley of Jehoshaphat; when in the midst of all the shouts the fatal cry Sauve qui peut! was heard above all else; when the bravest were flying; when General Cambronne and the Guard alone stopped to die; Napoleon threw one last look on the vast extent over which the angel of extermination was hovering, and he called his brother Jérôme to him.
"Jérôme," he said, "the battle of Mont-Saint-Jean is lost, but that of Laon is won. Go and rally all the men you can, forty thousand, thirty thousand, even twenty thousand; stop at Laon with them; the position is impregnable, and I leave it to you not to let it be taken. In the meantime I will cross the country with twenty-five men and two good guides, and rejoin Grouchy, who is not more than five or six leagues from here, with thirty-five thousand men; then, while you arrest the progress of the enemy before Laon, I will fall on their flanks and scatter them into the centre of France: French patriotism will do the rest."
Then, like Richard III., after the battle in which he lost his crown and finally his life, he cried:
"A horse! a horse!"
His horse was brought him; he got up into the saddle with difficulty, selected his escort, called up his guides, and set his horse to a gallop.
But when he had gone about twenty-five steps he suddenly pulled up.