She had been so happy there.... She would never forget, even though she lived to be an old, old woman, that half-hour spent in easy, confidential talk with her Imperial Prince.
The littered third-class carriage expanded, became the formal drawing-room of the Prefecture.... Lingeringly Mademoiselle went over the interview, and the parting—ah, me! there had been no farewell!... And yet, upon the step of departure, standing upon the muddy curbstone of the Place, full of soldiers and scowling people, she had looked wistfully up at the row of four big round-topped shining windows on the balconied first floor of the Prefecture and seen...
Only a boy's face, blurred and stained with crying. Only a boy's hand, waved behind the pane. As she whispered "Adieu!" looking up at him with passionate love and loyalty, she wondered if ever they two would meet on earth again.
It was to be never again for the boy and girl whose chivalrous and noble natures had struck out, at first meeting, the white spark that kindles to Friendship's sacred flame.
What misfortunes were coming, thick and fast, upon the luckless child of the Empire!... What a cup of dreadful judgment was to be offered to those guiltless lips!...
So young, so noble, so unfortunate! The pity of it!... He who might have breathed new life into the dry bones of the Napoleonic Legend, and given France an Emperor without fear and without reproach.
What a string of waking nightmares, the days that were to follow!... That journey by road to Mézières ... that brief sojourn at Sedan. The sudden flight to Avesnes, where the guns could be heard thundering, betokening the defeat of a demoralized, dejected army, conquered almost before the shock of battle, paralyzed by the premonition of inevitable disaster, as much as by the perfect preparedness, the masterly strategy, and the overwhelming numbers of the enemy....
From Landrécies to Maubeuge follow the boy sorrowfully....
What an hour was that when his protectors stripped him of his darling uniform, dressed him in civilian garments, took him out by the hotel back-door, and smuggled him into the omnibus that was to convey him to Belgian ground.
His father a prisoner, his mother a fugitive, crowds hustling him in their curiosity to see the son of the toppled Napoleon, what wonder that the memory of that journey haunted him his brief life long.