And de Marmont would halt in those villages and stop to whisper with the peasants too: Yes! he was coming! and the whole of France was giving him a rousing welcome! There was Laffray and Grenoble and Lyons! the army rallied to his standard as one man!
And de Marmont would then pass on to another village, to another town, no longer whispering after a while, but loudly proclaiming the arrival of the Emperor who had come into his own again.
After Nevers he was only twenty-four hours ahead of Napoleon and his progress became a triumphant one: newspapers, despatches had filtrated through from Paris—news became authentic, though some of it sounded a little wild. Wherever de Marmont arrived he was received with acclamations as the man who had seen the Emperor, who had assisted at the Emperor's magnificent entry into Grenoble, who could assure citizens and peasantry that it was all true, that the Emperor would be in Paris again very shortly and that once more there would be an end to tyranny and oppression, to the rule of the aristocrats and a number of incompetent and fatuous princes.
He did not halt at Fontainebleau, for now he knew that the Court of the Tuileries was in a panic, that neither the Comte d'Artois, nor the Duc de Berry, nor any of the royal princes had succeeded in keeping the army together: that defections had been rife for the past week, even before Napoleon had shown himself, and that Marshal Ney, the bravest soldier in France, had joined his Emperor at Auxerre.
No! de Marmont would not halt at Fontainebleau. It was Paris that he wanted to see! Paris, which to-day would witness the hasty flight of the gouty and unpopular King whom it had never learned to love! Paris decking herself out like a bride for the arrival of her bridegroom! Paris waiting and watching, while once again on the Tuileries and the Hôtel de Ville, on the Louvre and the Luxembourg, on church towers and government buildings the old tricolour flag waved gaily in the wind.
He slept that night at a small hotel in the Louvre quarter, but the whole evening he spent on the Place du Carrousel with the crowd outside the Tuileries, watching the departure from the palace of the infirm King of France and of his Court. The crowd was silent and obviously deeply moved. The spectacle before it of an old, ailing monarch, driven forth out of the home of his ancestors, and forced after an exile of three and twenty years and a brief reign of less than one, to go back once more to misery and exile, was pitiable in the extreme.
Many forgot all that the brief reign had meant in disappointments and bitter regrets, and only saw in the pathetic figure that waddled painfully from portico to carriage door a monarch who was unhappy, abandoned and defenceless: a monarch, too, who, in his unheroic, sometimes grotesque person, was nevertheless the representative of all the privileges and all the rights, of all the dignity and majesty pertaining to the most ancient ruling dynasty in Europe, as well as of all the humiliations and misfortunes which that same dynasty had endured.
III
It is late in the evening of March 20th. A thin mist is spreading from the river right over Paris, and from the Place du Carrousel the lighted windows of the Tuileries palace appear only like tiny, dimly-flickering stars.
Here an immense crowd is assembled. It has waited patiently hour after hour, ever since in the earlier part of the afternoon a courier has come over from Fontainebleau with the news that the Emperor is already there and would be in Paris this night.