SECOND LADY
He comes even now
From sacrilege. I learn that, since the fight,
In marching here by Potsdam yesterday,
Sans-Souci Palace drew his curious feet,
Where even great Frederick’s tomb was bared to him.
FOURTH LADY
All objects on the Palace—cared for, kept
Even as they were when our arch-monarch died—
The books, the chair, the inkhorn, and the pen
He quizzed with flippant curiosity;
And entering where our hero’s bones are urned
He seized the sword and standards treasured there,
And with a mixed effrontery and regard
Declared they should be all dispatched to Paris
As gifts to the Hotel des Invalides.
THIRD LADY
Such rodomontade is cheap: what matters it!
[A galaxy of marshals, forming Napoléon’s staff, now enters the
Platz immediately before the windows. In the midst rides the
EMPEROR himself. The ladies are silent. The procession passes
along the front until it reaches the entrance to the Royal Palace.
At the door NAPOLÉON descends from his horse and goes into the
building amid the resonant trumpetings of his soldiers and the
silence of the crowd.]
SECOND LADY [impressed]
O why does such a man debase himself
By countenancing loud scurrility
Against a queen who cannot make reprise!
A power so ponderous needs no littleness—
The last resort of feeble desperates!
[Enter fifth lady.]
FIFTH LADY [breathlessly]
Humiliation grows acuter still.
He placards rhetoric to his soldiery
On their distress of us and our allies,
Declaring he’ll not stack away his arms
Till he has choked the remaining foes of France
In their own gainful glut.—Whom means he, think you?
FIRST LADY
Us?
THIRD LADY
Russia? Austria?
FIFTH LADY
Neither: England.—Yea,
Her he still holds the master mischief-mind,
And marrer of the countries’ quietude,
By exercising untold tyranny
Over all the ports and seas.
SECOND LADY
Then England’s doomed!
When he has overturned the Russian rule,
England comes next for wrack. They say that know!...
Look—he has entered by the Royal doors
And makes the Palace his.—Now let us go!—
Our course, alas! is—whither?
[Exeunt ladies. The curtain drops temporarily.]
SEMICHORUS I OF IRONIC SPIRITS [aerial music]
Deeming himself omnipotent
With the Kings of the Christian continent,
To warden the waves was his further bent.