At ten paces away from the foremost ranks Napoleon halts:
"Soldiers," he cries loudly. "Here I am! your Emperor, do you know me?"
Again he advances and with a calm gesture throws open his well-worn grey redingote.
"Fire!" cries St. Genis in mad exasperation.
"Fire!" commands Delessart in a voice rendered shaky with overmastering emotion.
Silence reigns supreme. Napoleon still advances, step by step, his redingote thrown open, his broad chest challenging the first bullet which would dare to end the bold, adventurous, daring life.
"Is there one of you soldiers here who wants to shoot his Emperor? If there is, here I am! Fire!"
Which of these soldiers who have served under him at Jena and Austerlitz could resist such a call. His voice has lost nothing yet of its charm, his personality nothing of its magic. Ambitious, ruthless, selfish he may be, but to the army, a friend, a comrade as well as a god.
Suddenly the silence is broken. Shouts of "Vive l'Empereur!" rend the air, they echo down the narrow valley, re-echo from hill to hill and reverberate upon the pine-clad heights of Taillefer. Broken are the ranks, white cockades fly in every direction, tricolours appear in their hundreds everywhere. Shakos are waved on the points of the bayonets, and always, always that cry: "Vive l'Empereur!"
Sapeurs and infantrymen crowd around the little man in the worn grey redingote, and he with that rough familiarity which bound all soldiers' hearts to him, seizes an old sergeant by the ends of his long moustache: