Napoleon was at Fontainebleau, the empress at Blois; a Provisional Government, occult and unknown, carried on its operations on the ground floor of a house in the rue Saint-Florentin. Is it necessary that I should add that the house in the rue Saint-Florentin belonged to M. de Talleyrand? On 16 March Napoleon had written from Rheims:—
"DEAR BROTHER,—In accordance with the verbal instructions I gave you, and the wishes expressed in all my letters, you must on no account allow the Empress and the King of Rome to fall into the hands of the enemy. You will not have any news from me for several days. If the enemy advances upon Paris in such force that you decide any resistance to be useless, send away my son and the regent, the grand dignitaries, ministers, officers of the Senate, presidents of the State Council, chief officers of the Crown, Baron de la Bouillerie and the treasure, towards the Loire. Do not desert my son, and remember that I would rather know that he was in the Seine than that he had fallen into the hands of the enemies of France. The fate of Astyanax, prisoner of the Greeks, has always seemed to me the unhappiest in history.
"NAPOLEON"
This letter was addressed to Joseph. The treasure referred to by Napoleon was, be it understood, his own private possessions. On 28 March the departure of the empress was discussed. MM. de Talleyrand, Boulay (de la Meurthe), the Duc de Cadore and M. de Fermon were of opinion that the empress should remain. Joseph, with the emperor's letter in his hand, insisted upon her departure. It was decided that she should leave on the following day, at nine o'clock in the morning. Afterwards M. de Talleyrand was blamed for having urged that Marie-Louise should stay in Paris. A pale and cold smile flitted over the vast chasm which served the diplomatist for a mouth.
"I knew that the empress would defy me," he said, "and that, if I advised her going, she would stay. I urged that she should stay to further her departure."
O monseigneur, Bishop of Autun! you put into the mouth of Harel, in le Nain Jaune, the famous epigram, "Speech was given to man to conceal his thoughts." And, monseigneur, you were eminently capable of exemplifying the truth of the saying yourself.
On the morning of 29 March, through the uncurtained windows of the Tuileries, the empress's women could have been seen in the dubious light of the growing dawn, by the still more dubious light of lamps and dying candles, running about, pale with fatigue and fear, after a whole night spent in preparing for the journey. The departure, as we have said, was fixed for nine o'clock. At ten o'clock the empress had not yet left her apartments. She was hoping to the last that a counter order would arrive either from the emperor or from Joseph. At half-past ten the King of Rome clung to the curtains of the palais des Tuileries in tears; for he too, poor child, did not want to go.
Alas! at a distance of seventeen years between, three children, all suffering through the mistakes of their fathers, clung in vain to those same curtains: for sixty years the Tuileries was little more than a royal hostelry wherein the fleeting dynasties put up in turn. By a quarter to eleven, the empress, clad like an amazon in brown, stepped into a carriage with the King of Rome, surrounded by a strong detachment of the Imperial Guard. On the same day and at the same hour, the emperor set off from Troyes for Paris with his flying squadrons. It is well known that the emperor was arrested at Fromenteau, but what follows is not known, or but imperfectly known.
When time and occasion serve—apropos of the July Revolution, probably—we shall revert to one of the men whom fate, for some unknown reason, branded with a fatal seal. We refer to Marmont. We will show what he was, rather than what he did: he was superb, during that retreat, in which he left neither gun nor prisoner in the hands of the enemy; superb when—like a lion at bay against the walls of the customhouse at Paris, surrounded by Russians and Prussians, in the main street of Belleville, his right arm still in a sling, after the battle of Arapiles, holding his sword in his left hand, mutilated at Leipzig, his clothes riddled with bullets, wedged in between the dead and the wounded who fell all round him, with only forty grenadiers behind him—he forced his way to the barrier where he abandoned, pierced with wounds, the fifth horse that had been killed under him since the beginning of the campaign! Alas! why did he not cross Paris from the barrier of Belleville to the barrier of Fontainebleau? Why did he stop at his house in the rue Paradis-Poissonnière? Why did he not go to Napoleon, with his coat in shreds and his face blackened with powder? How determinedly fate seemed to oppose him! How different would have been the verdict of the future! But we, who are now a part of that future, and well-nigh disinterested spectators of all those great events, we who by nature are without private hatreds, and by position have nothing to do with political animosities, it is for us to enlighten posterity, for we are poised between the worlds aristocratic and democratic, the one in its decadence and the other in its adolescence: it is ours to seek for truth wherever it may be buried, and to exalt it wherever it may be found.
And now, having defined our position, let us return to Napoleon and Marie-Louise. Let us pass over several days and say naught of great betrayals and shameful dishonour; even so we are not, unhappily, at the end of these things. From 29 March to 7 April the following events happened:—