She gave him a look of astonishment. Amid all these abominations, but little of which she understood, she bustled about assiduously, retaining her gay freshness, with her fine hair and her clear eyes, the eyes of the child she was. 'No, I know nothing,' she said; 'at twelve o'clock I took up a letter for Marshal MacMahon. The Emperor was with him. They remained shut up together for nearly an hour, the marshal in bed, and the Emperor on a chair close to the mattress. I know that, because I saw them when the door was opened.'
'What were they saying?'
She again looked at him, and could not help laughing.
'Why, I don't know,' she answered. 'How could I know? Nobody in the world knows what they said to one another.'[30]
That was true, and Delaherche made a gesture as though to apologise for his foolish question. Still the idea of that supreme conversation worried him; how interesting it must have been! What decision could they have come to?
'And now,' added Rose, 'the Emperor has gone back into his private room, where he's conferring with two generals who arrived just now from the battlefield.' She paused and glanced towards the house-steps: 'Look! here comes one of the generals—and look! here's the other.'
Delaherche hastily stepped out of the lodge and recognised Generals Douay and Ducrot, whose horses were waiting. He watched them get into the saddle again and gallop off. After the abandonment of the plateau of Illy, each, on his own side, had hastened into the town to warn the Emperor that the battle was lost. They furnished him with precise details of the situation; the army and Sedan were now completely enveloped, and the disaster would prove frightful.
For a few minutes the Emperor walked up and down his room in silence, with the wavering step of a sick man. The only person there besides himself was an aide-de-camp, standing erect and silent near a door. And, with a disfigured face which was now twitching with a nervous tic, Napoleon kept pacing to and fro between the chimney-piece and the window. His back appeared to have become more bent, as though a world had fallen upon it; and his dim eyes, veiled by their heavy lids, bespoke the resignation of the fatalist who has played and lost his final game with Destiny. Each time, however, that he reached the window, set ajar, he gave a start which, for a second, made him pause; and during one of those brief halts he raised a trembling hand and muttered: 'Oh! those guns, those guns! one has heard them ever since the morning.'
From that spot, indeed, the roaring of the batteries of the Marfée and Frénois hills reached the ear with extraordinary violence—it was a rolling thunder, which not merely rattled the window panes, but shook the very walls, a stubborn, incessant, exasperating uproar. And the Emperor must have reflected that the struggle was henceforth a hopeless one, that all resistance was becoming a crime. What could it avail, why should more blood be spilt, more limbs be shattered, more heads be carried off, more and more dead be ever and ever added to those already scattered across the country-side? Since they, the French, were vanquished, since it was all over, why continue the massacre any longer? Sufficient abomination and suffering already cried out aloud under the sun.