The Eagle of the Empire: A Story of Waterloo

by Cyrus Townsend Brady

Promising himself to deal with the matter even more thoroughly in the morning, he had at last dismissed his subordinates and retired. If Marteau was within the city walls—and it was impossible to see how he could have got out of the town without a pass after twelve o'clock at night—he would find him if he had to search every house in the town. The spirit of the old man was high and aflame. To be so braved, to have his command the scene of such an outbreak of disloyalty and treason to the King was more than he could bear with equanimity.

There was another regiment in the town that had formerly been known as the Seventh-of-the-Line, commanded by Colonel Labédoyère, and there were detachments of artillery. The Eagle of the Seventh had never been sent to the War Office in Paris. It, too, had disappeared. But that had been months before the Marquis' time, and he had no responsibility for that. Colonel Labédoyère was more than suspected of lukewarmness, but as he was a young man of great influence, high social standing and much personal popularity no steps had as yet been taken against him. The Marquis determined to have it out with him also at the first convenient season, and unless he could be assured of his absolute devotion to King Louis, he would report to the Minister of War the necessity of the Colonel's removal.

The old man was fully alive to the Napoleonic sentiment among the soldiers, a sentiment which arose from a variety of motives. In the first place, war was the trade of most of the soldiers. They lived on it, thrived by it, delighted in it. The permanence of the monarchy meant peace. There would be little chance for advancement and none at all for plunder. Self-interest predisposed every old soldier to continue an imperialist.

In the second place, the finances of France were naturally in a most disordered condition. The pay of officers and men was greatly in arrears; promises made had not been kept, and there was much heart-felt dissatisfaction on that account. The pay of a soldier is in no sense an adequate compensation for the risks he runs, the perils to which he voluntarily and willingly subjects himself, but it is a universal experience that although his pay is in no degree commensurate, yet the soldier whose pay is withheld instantly becomes insubordinate and mutinous, however high or patriotic the motives back of his enlistment.

Again the officers had, most of them, been degraded in rank. Many of them had been retired on pittances which were not paid. Those who were lucky enough to be retained in active service were superseded by superannuated, often incompetent old officers of the old royal army before the revolution, or by young scions of nobility with no knowledge or fitness to command veterans, to whom the gross-bodied, uninspiring, gouty old King did not appeal. Again, the regimental names and associations had been changed and the old territorial or royal and princely designations had been reëstablished; the Napoleonic victories had been erased from the battle-flags; the Eagles had been taken away.

The plain people of France were more or less apathetic toward Emperor or King. France had been drained of its best for so long that it craved rest and peace and time to recuperate above everything else. It had been sated with glory and was alike indifferent to victory or defeat. But the army was a seething mass of discontent. It had nothing to gain by the continuance of present conditions and everything to lose. It was a body of soldiers-of-fortune held in control temporarily by circumstances but ready to break the leash and respond instantly to the call of the greatest soldier-of-fortune of all.

And while all this is true it must also be admitted that there were many officers and men like Marteau who were profoundly humiliated and distressed over conditions in France and who, passionately wrapped up in and devoted to the Emperor, had spurned commissions and dignities and preferments. If they were obscure men they remained in France unnoticed; if they were great men they had expatriated themselves and sought seclusion and safety in other countries, oftentimes at great personal sacrifice of property, ease and comfort.

The King, who was by no means lacking in shrewdness and wit, and his chief advisers in Paris, did not fail to realize something of this, but keen-sighted men like the Marquis d'Aumenier, away from the person of the monarch, realized it much more fully, although even he had not the least idea of the wide extent and depth of this feeling. But the old man knew instinctively that he must control things in Grenoble at least with an iron hand and that no temporizing was possible. The return of Marteau, who was a man of parts and power, he admitted—he recalled how well he had borne himself before the little group in the drawing-room!—followed by the midnight gathering, the joy of the veterans, their worship almost of the Eagle, enlightened him. He would put down sedition with an iron hand, he swore to himself. The King had committed this important place to him. It was, in a certain sense, a frontier city if the impossible happened. Well, the King should find that he had not reposed trust in the Marquis for nothing.

So the old man thought as he lay sleepless during the night. He was not the only one who lay sleepless during the night. Laure d'Aumenier sought rest and oblivion in vain. She had been more moved by Marteau's conduct and bearing and presence in the old Château d'Aumenier, a year ago, than she had been willing to admit until she thought him dead. The Marteaux had always been a good-looking, self-respecting people. Madame Marteau, his mother, had been an unusual woman who had, it was said, married beneath her when she became the wife of old Jean Marteau, although she never in her long married life thought of it in that way. The present Jean Marteau was as handsome and distinguished looking a man as there was in France. The delicacy and refinement of his bearing and appearance did not connote weakness either, as she could testify.

The young woman owed her life and honor to the young soldier. But long before that chance meeting they had been companions in childhood, intimate companions, too. The boy had been her servitor, but he had been more. He had been her protector and friend. In her memory she could recall incident after incident when he had helped her, shielded her. Never once had he failed to show anything but devotion absolute and unbounded toward her.