CHAPTER XI
THAT TERRIBLE MIDNIGHT AT THE INVALIDES
The Battalion Eagles of 1804, those of the second and third battalions withdrawn by the decree of 1808, together with the Light Cavalry (Hussar, Chasseur, and Dragoon) Eagles recalled in the autumn of 1805, and a number of Light Infantry Eagles returned to the Ministry of War at the end of 1807, perished in the flames of the great holocaust of trophy-flags at the Invalides on the night of March 30, 1814, the night of the surrender of Paris to the Allies.
It was on that tragic Wednesday night that the great sacrifice was made, amid the bowed and weeping old soldiers of France, the veterans of a hundred battlefields, on the most terrible and mournful occasion in the wide-ranging annals of the great institution which the Grand Monarque, in the full pride of his power, at the topmost pinnacle of his renown, founded and opened in person with grandiose martial pomp and State display. All was over for France on that night—
“Around a slaughtered army lay,
No more to conquer and to bleed:
The power and glory of the war
Had passed to the victorious Czar.”
The two marshals charged with the defence of Paris, Marmont and Mortier, had on that afternoon placed the submission of the capital in the hands of Alexander of Russia on the heights of Montmartre, whence, and from the Buttes Chaumont and the other northern heights from right to left, 300 loaded cannon pointed threateningly down over the vanquished and panic-stricken city, supported by the bayonets and sabres of 120,000 men, Russians and Prussians, Bavarians, Würtemburgers, and Austrians, flushed and exultant in their hour of supreme triumph, the soldiers of all the nations of the Continent at war with Napoleon.
NAPOLEON WITHIN TWELVE MILES
It was at ten o’clock on that fateful night for France that the great destruction of trophies at the Invalides took place. Napoleon had set his last stake, had attempted his desperate last manœuvre, and had failed. He had been foiled and baffled when within reach almost of his goal. At that very hour indeed, only twelve miles away, he had just been stopped in his wild midnight gallop, his final forlorn-hope effort to reach the capital, by the news that all hope was past, that the worst had happened, that Paris had fallen.