"Your Emperor was banished to a rock"—The Exiled Emperor
(From the Painting by W Q Orchardson, entitled "Napoleon on board the Bellerophon.")]
[Click on the image to enlarge it.]
"Yes; he disappeared," the veteran admitted. "For after that came the Russian Campaign. Ah, but it was a cold one! Such snow, such ice; so cold, so cold! It was then I lost my eye. My leg I left at Austerlitz, my arm at Jena; my eye I dropped somewhere in the Beresina,—so much the better. I could not see that freeze-out. Then they sent me here. And since that I do not know what has happened. They tell me—you tell me—much. But to believe such foolish stories! Bah! I am not a baby. They tell me that the emperor—my emperor—was exiled to Elba; that he returned again to France; that he reigned a hundred days; that a battle was fought at—where was it?"
"Waterloo," suggested the scholar.
"Eh, yes, you say, at Waterloo; and you say we lost it? As if we could lose a battle, and Napoleon there! Then you will say that the empire was no longer an empire, but a kingdom; and that he who governed was called Louis the Eighteenth, and others after him, but not my emperor. Bah! foolish stories all!"
"But they are true, old Nonesuch," said the youngster sadly.
"Yes; they are true," echoed the other veterans. And the scholar added, "Yes; and your emperor was banished by those rascal English to a rock—the rock of St. Helena—a horrid rock, miles and miles out in the ocean. But he is here among us again, the Soldiers' Home, in the midst of his veterans, in the heart of his beautiful Paris."
