Then Delaherche, who all this time had been frantically shouting to Weiss without intermission, addressed him one last appeal: 

“You won’t come?  Very well! then I shall leave you to your fate.  Adieu!”

It was seven o’clock, and he had delayed his departure too long.  So long as the houses were there to afford him shelter he took advantage of every doorway, of every bit of projecting wall, shrinking at every volley into cavities that were ridiculously small in comparison with his bulk.  He turned and twisted in and out with the sinuous dexterity of the serpent; he would never have supposed that there was so much of his youthful agility left in him.  When he reached the end of the village, however, and had to make his way for a space of some three hundred yards along the deserted, empty road, swept by the batteries on Liry hill, although the perspiration was streaming from his face and body, he shivered and his teeth chattered.  For a minute or so he advanced cautiously along the bed of a dry ditch, bent almost double, then, suddenly forsaking the protecting shelter, burst into the open and ran for it with might and main, wildly, aimlessly, his ears ringing with detonations that sounded to him like thunder-claps.  His eyes burned like coals of fire; it seemed to him that he was wrapt in flame.  It was an eternity of torture.  Then he suddenly caught sight of a little house to his left, and he rushed for the friendly refuge, gained it, with a sensation as if an immense load had been lifted from his breast.  The place was tenanted, there were men and horses there.  At first he could distinguish nothing.  What he beheld subsequently filled him with amazement.

Was not that the Emperor, attended by his brilliant staff?  He hesitated, although for the last two days he had been boasting of his acquaintance with him, then stood staring, open-mouthed.  It was indeed Napoleon III.; he appeared larger, somehow, and more imposing on horseback, and his mustache was so stiffly waxed, there was such a brilliant color on his cheeks, that Delaherche saw at once he had been “made up” and painted like an actor.  He had had recourse to cosmetics to conceal from his army the ravages that anxiety and illness had wrought in his countenance, the ghastly pallor of his face, his pinched nose, his dull, sunken eyes, and having been notified at five o’clock that there was fighting at Bazeilles, had come forth to see, sadly and silently, like a phantom with rouged cheeks.

There was a brick-kiln near by, behind which there was safety from the rain of bullets that kept pattering incessantly on its other front and the shells that burst at every second on the road.  The mounted group had halted.

“Sire,” someone murmured, “you are in danger—­”

But the Emperor turned and motioned to his staff to take refuge in the narrow road that skirted the kiln, where men and horses would be sheltered from the fire.