‘Ah, Monsieur de Laval,’ said the Emperor with a friendly nod.  ‘Have you heard anything yet of your charming cousin?’

‘Nothing, Sire,’ I answered.

’I fear that her efforts will be in vain.  I wish her every success, for we have no reason at all to fear this miserable poet, while the other is formidable.  All the same, an example of some sort must be made.’

The darkness was drawing in, and Constant had appeared with a taper to light the candles, but the Emperor ordered him out.

‘I like the twilight,’ said he.  ’No doubt, Monsieur de Laval, after your long residence in England you find yourself also most at home in a dim light.  I think that the brains of these people must be as dense as their fogs, to judge by the nonsense which they write in their accursed papers.’  With one of those convulsive gestures which accompanied his sudden outbursts of passion he seized a sheaf of late London papers from the table, and ground them into the fire with his heel.  ‘An editor!’ he cried in the guttural rasping voice which I had heard when I first met him.  ’What is he?  A dirty man with a pen in a back office.  And he will talk like one of the great Powers of Europe.  I have had enough of this freedom of the Press.  There are some who would like to see it established in Paris.  You are among them, Talleyrand.  For my part I see no need for any paper at all except the Moniteur by which the Government may make known its decisions to the people.’

‘I am of opinion, Sire,’ said the minister, ’that it is better to have open foes than secret ones, and that it is less dangerous to shed ink than blood.  What matter if your enemies have leave to rave in a few Paris papers, as long as you are at the head of five hundred thousand armed men?’

‘Ta, ta, ta!’ cried the Emperor impatiently.  ’You speak as if I had received my crown from my father the late king.  But even if I had, it would be intolerable, this government by newspaper.  The Bourbons allowed themselves to be criticised, and where are they now?  Had they used their Swiss Guards as I did the Grenadiers upon the eighteenth Brumaire what would have become of their precious National Assembly?  There was a time when a bayonet in the stomach of Mirabeau might have settled the whole matter.  Later it took the heads of a king and queen and the blood of a hundred thousand people.’

He sat down, and stretched his plump, white-clad legs towards the fire.  Through the blackened shreds of the English papers the red glow beat upwards upon the beautiful, pallid, sphinx-like face—­the face of a poet, of a philosopher—­of anything rather than of a ruthless and ambitious soldier.  I have heard folk remark that no two portraits of the Emperor are alike, and the fault does not lie with the artists but with the fact that every varying mood made him a different man.  But in his prime, before his features became heavy, I, who have seen sixty years of mankind, can say that in repose I have never looked upon a more beautiful face.