A ghostly souvenir of 1815 may give us pause for a moment. There is no need to rehearse the story of Marshal Ney, bravest of the sons of France, Napoleon's le brave des braves, whose surpassing services in the field might have spared him a traitor's end. A few days after he had "gathered into his bosom" the bullets of a file of soldiers in the Avenue de l'Observatoire, behind the Luxembourg, the public prosecutor, M. Bellart, was entertaining at dinner the great men of the bar, the army, and society. At midnight, the door of the inner salon was suddenly thrown open, and a footman announced: Le Maréchal Ney!
M. Bellart and his guests, smitten to stone, looked dumbly towards the door. The talk stopped in every corner, the music stopped, the play at the card-tables stopped. In a moment, the tension passed. It was not the great Marshal, nor his astral. It was a blunder of the footman, who had confounded the name with that of a friend of the family, M. Maréchal Aîné.
CHAPTER III.
THE DUNGEON OF VINCENNES.
I.
Louis XI. strolled one day in the precincts of Vincennes, wrapped in his threadbare surtout edged with rusty fur, and plucking at the queer little peaked cap with the leaden image of the Virgin stuck in the band. There was a smile on the sallow and saturnine face.
At his Majesty's right walked a thick-set, squab man of scurvy countenance, wearing a close-fitting doublet, and armed like a hangman. On the King's left went a showy person, vulgar and mean of face, whose gait was a ridiculous strut.
Louis stopped against the dungeon and tapped the great wall with his finger.
"What's just the thickness of this?" he asked.