The General entrusts the keys of the Bonne Gate to Colonel Roussille. He has barely time to execute his hasty flight, having arranged to escape out of Grenoble by the St. Laurent Gate on the north of the town. In the meanwhile a carter from the suburb of St. Joseph outside the Bonne Gate has harnessed a team of horses to one of his wagons and brought along a huge joist: twenty pairs of willing and stout arms are already manipulating this powerful engine for the breaking open of the resisting gate. Already the doors are giving way, the hinges creak; and while Général Marchand and préfet Fourier with their small body of faithful soldiers rush precipitately across the deserted streets of the town, Colonel Roussille makes ready to open the Gate of Bonne to the Emperor and to his soldiers.
"My regiment was prepared to turn against me," he says to his men, "but I shall not turn against them."
Then he formally throws open the gate.
Ecstatic delight, joyful enthusiasm, succeeds the frantic cries of a while ago. Napoleon entering the city of Grenoble was nearly crushed to death by the frenzy of the crowd. Cheered to the echoes, surrounded by a delirious populace which hardly allowed him to move, it was hours before he succeeded in reaching the Hôtel des Trois-Dauphins, where he was resolved to spend the night, since it was kept by an ex-soldier, one of his own Old Guard of the Italian campaign.
The enthusiasm was kept up all night. The town was illuminated. Until dawn men and women paraded the streets singing the "Marseillaise" and shouting "Vive l'Empereur!"
In a small room, simply furnished but cosy and comfortable, the great adventurer, who had conquered half the world and lost it and had now set out to conquer it again, sat with half a dozen of his most faithful friends: Cambronne and Raoul, Victor de Marmont and Emery.
On the table spread out before him was an ordnance map of the province; his clenched hand rested upon it; his eyes, those eagle-like, piercing eyes which had so often called his soldiers to victory, gazed out straight before him, as if through the bare, white-washed walls of this humble hotel room he saw the vision of the brilliant halls of the Tuileries, the imperial throne, the Empress beside him, all her faithlessness and pusillanimity forgiven, his son whom he worshipped, his marshals grouped around him; and with a gesture of proud defiance he threw back his head and said loudly:
"Until to-day I was only an adventurer. To-night I am a prince once more."
IV
It was the next morning in that same sparsely-furnished and uncarpeted room of the Hôtel des Trois-Dauphins that Napoleon spoke to Victor de Marmont, to Emery and Dumoulin about the money which had been stolen last year from the Empress and which he understood had been deposited in the cellars of the Hôtel de Ville.