“One day, when I visited the Zoological Garden in their Regent’s Park, I saw something that I shall not forget. A great hooded snake of the cobra species—they called it a hamadryad—had just been brought up from the East India Docks. When he found himself a prisoner in his iron-framed, plate-glass cage, he reared himself up in magnificent fury. His forked tongue quivered between his frothing jaws; he vibrated, poised upon his lower coils; struck again and again—and did nothing but bruise himself. Something that he could not break—a barrier adamantine and invisible, lay between him and the staring human faces he so hated. The clear jets of deadly venom that he spurted in his efforts to reach them trickled harmlessly down the glass....”
He went on:
“I saw myself at Ham when I looked at that creature in its loneliness and impotence, surrounded by the keepers who jeered and mocked.... Death in its fangs and death in its heart, and that barrier of glass between.... There were workmen with tools among those who stared at him. One shattering blow of a pick, and he would have been free—that living Terror, to kill, and kill, and kill!...”
He looked about him, and said, with his affected mildness:
“The pick-blow that cracks the glass of my cage will be the coup d’État, but not until I am Emperor of France will the barrier be done away with.... Do you know what Queen Victoria once said of me to Lady Stratclyffe? ‘My dear, let me beg of you not to mention M. Bonaparte before Albert. He considers him hardly a person to be spoken of—not at all a person to know! And yet how can one deny him some measure of respect and consideration—as a near relative of Napoleon the Great.’”
He had another struggle with his rending devil, and said, when he had found his speech again:
“‘Great!’ Was he so great, that man for whose sake Victoria would accord me ‘respect and consideration’? True, he humbled Emperors, browbeat and bullied Kings.... He kicked the board of Europe, and armies were jumbled in confusion. His screaming eagles carried panic, and terror, and devastation as far as the Pyramids. The East bowed her jeweled forehead in the dust before him—a nation of beef-fed islanders put him to the rout!”
His eyes, wide open now and glazed, looked upon the men who listened, unseeing as the eyes of a somnambulist. He said in that voice that was a croak:
“And he died, the prisoner and slave of England. Before I die, England shall be mine!”