"Vive le Prince Impérial!"
The boy bowed to her, blushing at her beauty and her loyal enthusiasm,—the equerry, slimmest of the officers in attendance, dismounted and picked up the flowers. A trumpet sounded, a short, sharp order was given, there was a trampling of hoofs and a clinking of bridles as the files wheeled right and left, leaving a broad road open between a double rank of saluting troopers, and the Prince with his Governor and following rode down this open vista and cantered away by route of the Avenue de l'Impératrice, in the direction of the Bois de Boulogne.
The boy held in his whip-hand the bunch of violets handed him by the equerry. Only a little grayish sand clung to some of the dark, shining leaves. He sniffed their fragrance and glanced back as the trumpet rang out behind them, and the Avenue was once more blocked with mounted Chasseurs.
XIX
He was fourteen, delicate and rather backward for his age, owing to the inevitable drawbacks of his environment. Since the salvo of a hundred-and-one guns announcing the birth of a Prince Imperial had crashed from the battery of the Esplanade of the Invalides, to be echoed from every fortress throughout the Empire; and bells had pealed from every steeple, flags had broached from every staff-head, and dusk-fall had seen every city, town, or village, ablaze with illumination,—had he not been environed with precautions, lapped in luxury? Where another baby would have slumbered in a wicker bassinette, the child of France cried in a cradle of artistic goldsmithery. And the three great official bodies of the State, the Delegates from all the constituted Authorities paid homage. And they enrolled him in the First Regiment of Grenadiers of the Imperial Guard on the day of his birth, and pinned the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor on his bib when he was forty-eight hours old.
To gratify the paternal ambition of a father who had dreaded the stigma of childlessness, this graft of his race was to be forced into precocious maturity. You might have seen the little creature at six months of age strapped in a cane chair-saddle upon the back of a Shetland pony. At five he could ride a military charger. Dressed in the white-faced blue uniform of the First Grenadiers of the Guard, his tiny face hidden in a huge fur shako with a white plume and galons and a huge brass-eagled fore-plate, you saw him with the Emperor at Imperial Reviews.
It is uncertain whether he was ever soothed to sleep with the French equivalent of the rhyme of Baby Bunting, whether he ever learned of the Archer who shot at a frog, or was thrilled by the adventures of Jack the Giant Killer. We know that the Napoleonic tradition was his ABC, the Third Empire his primer. At the time of the war with Italy, he being then some three years of age, his utterances on the subject were quoted in the daily papers as miracles of wisdom—marvels of acumen. His seventh birthday had been celebrated by the production of a Military Spectacle, in the course of which real cannon were fired and real military evolutions performed upon the stage. His great-uncle on a white horse, in the little cocked hat and gray capote of History, was the hero, you may be sure; and three hundred soldiers' sons of his own age filled the dress circle, stalls and upper tiers. One likes the pretty story of the fair-haired child going down among these little comrades to distribute smiles and bonbons. One can understand the father's pride in the laborious pot-hooks and hangers that compliment him upon the taking of Mexico—word of ill omen in Imperialist ears!—and the scrawled postscript that tells how his horse kicked at exercise that morning, but that he sat tight and did not fall. It was not for a long, long time to dawn upon the expanding mind behind the beautiful, bright blue eyes, that the Throne Imperial of France was a saddle insecurely girthed upon a kicking charger, and that the paternal horsemanship had been, and frequently was severely taxed in the effort to stick on.
You may imagine the query, Why?—forming in the mind of seven years. Perhaps you see him in his lace-collared, belted blouse and wide Breton breeches of black velvet, scarlet silk stockings and buckled shoes, curled up upon the blue-and-golden cushion of the gilded chair of State upon the three-step daïs in the Throne Boom of the Tuileries, where, while their Imperial Majesties dined, he loved to play hide-and-seek with his tutor and an aide-de-camp or so; and wearied with play, conceive him dreaming under the gorgeous crimson velvet canopy powdered with golden N's and symbolical bees, edged with laurel leaves of beaten gold, and surmounted by a great golden eagle, perched with outstretched wings upon a laurel Crown.
Under the brooding wings of the Eagle on the Crown this child of the Empire wondered about many things.... Did any discovery connected with the peculiar duties devolving upon the Cent Gardes and the Tuileries Police ever make the bright young head toss restlessly on its pillow of down? For he must one day have learned that noiseless footsteps patroled the corridors, that observant eyes twinkled at every keyhole—that sharp ears were listening at every chink for suspicious sounds not only by night, for the terror that walketh in the noonday is the peculiar bugbear of Emperors and Kings and Presidents.