“Gorgeous lines of soldiery formed in statuesque ranks along the pebbly walks and hot asphalt ways facing the palace. Save for the waving plumes, the glistening wall rested immobile and silent as the granite sphinxes whose solemn eyes blinked sleepily under the ardent sunshine. There was just the perception of a movement in the shining cuirasses as the swelling notes of a cavalry bugle echoed and re-echoed in sonorous blasts through the crowded aisles of the park and died away far over the turrets of the palace. The Imperial Guards, flaming in scarlet and glittering casques, formed in serried ranks from the Rivoli gates and the Place du Carrousel to the borders of the Seine. Outriders in the magenta and gold of the line dashed in excited movement along the gravelled roadways, adjusting the obstacles, for the imperial advent. Squadrons of the guards formed on each side of the wide way through which the procession was to pass to the Champs Élysées. On a signal from the trumpets, they divided, facing their horses inward, and waited immovable as the Egyptian figures at the golden gate. A thin column of smoke curled upward from the Arch of the Carrousel, a loud, cracking detonation of artillery announced that majesty was about to leave the palace, another that majesty was in the vestibule, and the long line of fire made by the red-breeched troopers moved, as with one impulse, into an attitude of respectful attention.” From the central porch of the Tuileries, as the guards came to a salute, a short, stout figure, clad in a gentleman’s walking-dress, appeared, and slowly descended the velvet-carpeted steps. To the salutations of the soldiers and the populace he slightly raised his hat. The crowd in the rear broke into shouts of “Vive l’Empereur!” Halting, as the lackeys held the door of the landau open, the emperor half turned.
A lady, tall, slight, and graceful, appeared in the group at the door-way. She was speaking with animation to the chamberlain, with her face to the multitude. Her black eyes were full of life and vivacity, and her hair, coiled in great masses over her shapely head, shone like burnished copper as the sunbeams fall upon it. “She tripped lightly down the broad steps, a sunshade in her right hand serving as a walking-cane, while with her left she upheld with charming daintiness a robe of silver-gray color. As the outlines of her figure became distinct upon the crimson carpet, a tumultuous cry of ‘Vive l’Impératrice!’ resounded far back in the shrubberies of the garden. The lady bowed with gracious recognition, and, giving her hand to the emperor, stepped into the landau. At the same moment a graceful youth of fourteen, mounted on a jet-black pony, shot out from the entrance of the Carrousel, and riding close to the carriage, reined in suddenly, and raising his hat, brought it down to the saddle as he bent to the occupants. ‘Vive le Prince Impérial!’ shouted the crowd; and the emperor, empress, and prince bowed gravely in response.
“The trumpets broke into another long blast, the postilions touched their horses; majesty was en route, the prince riding beside the imperial carriage, the troopers falling into groups of four.
“Who of all that crowd, filling the palace gardens and thronging the banks of the Seine, would have then told Cæsar that he should never again pass those fateful portals in state?
“The Parisians afterwards recalled the event as the Romans had the journey of the great Julius from the tearful pleadings of Calpurnia to the base of Pompey’s statue. But there was nothing of the Ides of March in the emperor’s reception on the present occasion. The acclamations of the multitude were spontaneous and hearty, and all hats flew off when the benignant smiles of Eugénie supplemented the gracious inclinations of Napoleon.”
On the 15th of July, 1870, Louis Napoleon declared war with Prussia. The numerous vicissitudes of his eventful life may have suggested to him the possibility that the war, if long protracted, might prove unfavorable to his hopes; but no seer could have predicted to him that, in seven weeks from that day, he would be defeated, dethroned, and a prisoner in the hands of the one man among all the crowned heads of Europe whom he most hated, and that all the hopes which he had cherished of the perpetuation of a Bonaparte dynasty in France would be at an end.
We cannot, in this short sketch, attempt to portray the progress of this war, which, in its rapid movement, its terrible destructiveness, and its stupendous results, is without a parallel in history. Suffice it that, with the defeat of the French army at Sedan, the star fell. An empire which had progressed through nearly twenty years, ran out in a moment like a reel of thread. Napoleon was sent as state prisoner to Wilhelmshöhe, the Germans entered France, marched to Paris, and William, king of Prussia, slept in the palace of the Grand Monarque.
And now occurred one of those strange anomalies which the history of France so often presents.
It is the 18th of January, 1871. The grand gallery of Versailles is filled with an eager, anxious throng. But it is not such a throng as has been wont to gather here. Where are the cavaliers, with their red-heeled boots and slashed doublets, and the grandes dames, with their lofty plumes and flashing jewels?
The top-boot, the clanking spur, the sword, and sabre-tache, these are the accoutrements of this band of stern, martial men who now stand beneath Le Brun’s gorgeous frescoes. At one end of the gallery a throne is erected, and its presence reminds us of that silver throne erected here in 1685, at whose foot the Doge of Genoa bowed in homage, and upon whose summit, the personification of pompous pride and royal prerogative, stood King Louis XIV. But no king or emperor of France stands upon the throne of the Versailles gallery on this 18th day of January, 1871. A king is there, it is true, but he is William, king of Prussia, who is this day to be proclaimed Emperor of Germany. It seems like fate, like an avenging Nemesis, that in this palace of Versailles, whose marble portals bear the inscription, “To all the glories of France,”—in this Grande Galerie des Glaces, the scene of so many glories, and triumphs of the houses of Bourbon and of Bonaparte,—the crown of United Germany should be placed, with mighty shout and loud acclaim, upon the head of that stern old warrior, William I. of Hohenzollern.