I was at St. Martin when the Emperor and Empress made their tour through the new possession.  The state carriages had to be left at Sallanches when the sovereigns went up to the great ball offered them at Chamounix, and, when they returned, the little mountain carriages which brought them down halted under the windows of the auberge of St. Martin, in which I lived, to wait for the state carriages to come across the river.  They had to wait about half an hour, and as they walked up and down in the road under my window, beside which stood my loaded rifle, I thought how easily I could change the course of European politics, for I could have hit any button on the Emperor’s clothes, and I hated him enough to have killed him cheerfully, as an enemy of mankind; but regicide has always seemed to me a great mistake, as it would have been in that case, for it would only have placed the young Prince Imperial on the throne, under the regency of the Empress.  I was then a radical republican, with all the sympathies of a Parisian Red, for I had not learned that it is less the form of the government than the character of the governed which makes the difference between governments.  I did not spare the life of the Emperor from any apprehension of consequences to me, for I had none.  I knew the paths up the mountain at the back of the hotel, and before the confusion should have been overcome, and a pursuit organized, I could have been beyond danger, on my way to the Swiss frontier, for the pine woods came to the back door of the hotel; and beyond that, I never had the habit of thinking of the consequences of what I proposed to do.  When I returned to Paris, after the autumn had passed, I told the story to an artist friend, an ultraradical, how I stood at my window with a loaded rifle by my side, and the Emperor twenty feet below, and he shouted with fury, “And you didn’t kill him?” Time and fate have punished him more fitly than I should have done, and wise men leave these things to time and fate.

CHAPTER XVIII

PARIS AGAIN THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA

I remained in Paris all that winter, and took a studio with an American friend,—­Mr. Yewell,—­but I could do no work; the headache never left me, and, though I could draw a little, my vision failed when it was strained, and I seemed to have lost my color sense.  I was desperate, and, when Garibaldi set out on the Marsala expedition, I was just on the point of sailing to join him when I received a letter from the father of my fiancee, telling me that her perplexities and distress of mind over our marriage had so increased that they feared for her reason if she were not set at rest.  I took the next steamer, and ended the vacillation by insisting on being married at once.  Nothing but a morbid self-depreciation had prevented her from coming to a decision in the matter long before, and there was no other solution than to assume command