“It is true, Monseigneur? You have escaped such perils as M. de Persigny describes?”
Said the little gentleman with the sallow face and the dull, lusterless gray eyes, caressing the brown chin-tuft that was later to be dubbed “an imperial,” and worn by all ranks and classes of men:
“I fancy there was something of the kind. I hardly noticed. I realized nothing but that, after all my cruel years of exile, I was on the road to Paris at last!”
He had been horribly seasick during the Channel crossing, and had bestowed heartfelt curses on the broken granite of the railway-line. He had paled and shuddered at the thought of the smash in which he might have been involved. But to come up to the Idea Napoleonic, it was necessary to be heroic. And with so grave a face and with such imperturbable effrontery did Persigny hold the candle, that the person belauded ended by believing all that was said.
Even now, to many of his friends and supporters, the shadow of the purple Imperial mantle gave dignity to the wearer of the chocolate-colored coat, green plush waistcoat, and big-hipped, braided trousers. His own faith in his Mission and his Star lent him the power to convince and to impress.
His was not a star of happy omen for England, who sheltered and befriended him with the kind of good-humored pity that is not unmixed with contempt. Plagued with the gadfly of debt, tormented by the Tantalus-thirst of the born spendthrift who sees gold lavished by other hands, and who has never funds at command to dissipate, what rage and hatred must have seethed under his smooth ingratiating demeanor, when, with one or another of his henchmen at his elbow, he sat down to the lavish table spread by the sumptuous mistress of Gewgaw House, or planned landscape-gardens with the master of Brodrick Castle.
That had been for years his fate, to fawn for bare subsistence upon those he hated. Compelled to this, the son of proud, faithless, extravagant, voluptuous Hortense must have suffered the pains of Hell. Not a hell whence Hope was altogether banished. He had hoped when he made the attempt on Strasburg; had hoped when the body of the Great Emperor was solemnly removed from St. Helena to be magnificently interred in Paris. Still hoping, he had hired a London-and-Margate steamer, a husband’s boat, for himself and his party of sixty adherents; had purchased a second-hand live eagle, trained to alight upon its owner’s shoulder for a gobbet of raw meat; had landed, with this disconsolate bird, at Vimereux, near Boulogne; had hugged the Column, attired in the historic uniform of the 40th of the Line; had ridden with his followers to the town Barracks, where were quartered the 46th; had ordered these warriors, per the mouth of a subaltern of their Regiment, to turn out upon the parade-ground; had bidden them thrill at the sight of the eagle, swear loyalty to the little cocked hat—salute the nephew of their late Emperor, and march with him to Paris.
We are acquainted with the burlesque ending of that enterprise, the pricking of the balloon by the bayonets of National Guards—the pantomimic flattening of the Pretender and his followers beneath the collapsed folds of the emptied bag, has been held up to the popular derision by innumerable caricaturists of the day. We are aware—I quote from an obscure comic publication of the period, long since dead of its own indigestible wit—how the Boulogne Picnic began with Fowl, and ended with Ham.... And yet, though the asserter of Imperial claims was jeered at as a mountebank;—even though that marionette-invasion ludicrously failed, how many grave and weightily-important personages had not the Prince-Pretender infected with his own conviction, that to him, and to him alone, had been entrusted the lofty mission of saving, elevating, ennobling, delivering France....
He murmured now, looking at Henriette between half-closed lids, with eyes that appraised every charm, and took deliberate stock of her whole armory of beauties: