It has often been said that if a single shot had been fired against his original little band Napoleon's march on Paris would have been stopped. Who shall tell? There are such "ifs" in the world, which no human mind can challenge. Certain it is that that shot was not fired. At Laffray, Randon gave the order, but he did not raise his musket himself; on the walls of Grenoble St. Genis, in command of the artillery and urged by the Comte de Cambray, did not dare to give the order or to fire a gun himself. "The men declare," he had said gloomily, "that they would blow their officers from their own guns."
And at Lyons there was not militiaman, a royalist, volunteer or a pariah out of the streets who was willing to fire that first and "single shot": and though Marshal Macdonald swore ultimately that he would do it himself, his determination failed him at the last when surrounded by his wavering troops he found himself face to face with the conqueror of Austerlitz and Jena and Rivoli and a thousand other glorious fights, with the man in the grey redingote who had created him Marshal of France and Duke of Tarente on the battlefields of Lombardy, his comrade-in-arms who had shared his own scanty army rations with him, slept beside him round the bivouac fires, and round whom now there rose a cry from end to end of Lyons: "Vive l'Empereur!"
II
Victor de Marmont did not wait for the arrival of the Emperor at Lyons: nor did he attempt to enter the city. He knew that there was still some money in the imperial treasury brought over from Elba, and his mind—always in search of the dramatic—had dwelt with pleasure on thoughts of the day when the Emperor, having entered Fontainebleau, or perhaps even Paris and the Tuileries, would there be met by his faithful de Marmont, who on bended knees in the midst of a brilliant and admiring throng would present to him the twenty-five million francs originally the property of the Empress herself and now happily wrested from the cupidity of royalist traitors.
The picture pleased de Marmont's fancy: he dwelt on it with delight, he knew that no one requited a service more amply and more generously than Napoleon: he knew that after this service rendered there was nothing to which he—de Marmont—young as he was, could not aspire—title, riches, honours, anything he wanted would speedily become his, and with these to his credit he could claim Crystal de Cambray once more.
Oh! she would be humbled again by then, she and her father too, the proud aristocrats, doomed once more to penury and exile, unless he—de Marmont—came forth like the fairy prince to the beggarmaid with hands laden with riches, ready to lay these at the feet of the woman he loved.
Yes! Crystal de Cambray would be humbled! De Marmont, though he felt that he loved her more and better than any man had ever loved any woman before, nevertheless had a decided wish that she should be humbled and suffer bitterly thereby. He felt that her pride was his only enemy: her pride and royalist prejudices. Of the latter he thought but little: confident of his Emperor's success, he thought that all those hot-headed royalists would soon realise the hopelessness of their cause—rendered all the more hopeless through its short-lived triumph of the past year—and abandon it gradually and surely, accepting the inevitable and rejoicing over the renewed glory which would come over France.
As for her pride! well! that was going to be humbled, along with the pride of the Bourbon princes, of that fatuous old king, of all those arrogant aristocrats who had come back after years of exile, as arrogant, as tyrannical as ever before.
These were pleasing thoughts which kept Victor de Marmont company on his way between Lyons and Fontainebleau. Once past Villefranche he sent the bulk of his escort back to Lyons, where the Emperor should have arrived by this time: he had written out a superficial report of his expedition, which the sergeant in charge of the little troop was to convey to the Emperor's own hands. He only kept two men with him, put himself and them into plain, travelling clothes which he purchased at Villefranche, and continued his journey to the north without much haste; the roads were safe enough from footpads, he and his two men were well armed, and what stragglers from the main royalist army he came across would be far too busy with their own retreat and their own disappointment to pay much heed to a civilian and seemingly harmless traveller.
De Marmont loved to linger on the way in the towns and hamlets where the news of the Emperor's approach had already been wafted from Grenoble, or Lyons, or Villefranche on the wings of wind or birds, who shall say? Enough that it had come, that the peasants, assembled in masses in their villages, were whispering together that he was coming—the little man in the grey redingote—l'Empereur!