“Get me sent back to Italy; Barras would not let me go.”
“The deuce!” said Talma; “don’t you know the song, general, ‘We won’t go back to the woods when the laurels are clipped’?”
“Oh! Roscius, Roscius!” said Bonaparte, smiling, “have you grown a flatterer during my absence?”
“Roscius was the friend of Cæsar, general, and when the conqueror returned from Gaul he probably said to him about the same thing I have said to you.”
Bonaparte laid his band on Talma’s shoulder.
“Would he have said the same words after crossing the Rubicon?”
Talma looked Bonaparte straight in the face.
“No,” he replied; “he would have said, like the augur, ‘Cæsar, beware of the Ides of March!’”
Bonaparte slipped his hand into his breast as if in search of something; finding the dagger of the Companions of Jehu, he grasped it convulsively. Had he a presentiment of the conspiracies of Arena, Saint-Regent, and Cadoudal?
Just then the door opened and a servant announced: “General Bernadotte!”