If Willis and his two friends were not accumulating wealth, at all events they were earning the bread they ate honestly and worthily.  They had all three laid their shoulders vigorously to the wheel and kept it jogging along marvellously for a month.  By that time, a detailed report of the seizure of their property had been placed before the director of the Domaine Extraordinaire, who was the sovereign authority in all matters pertaining to the exchequer of the empire.  He saw at once that this capture was extremely harsh, and probably thought that, if it became known, it would raise a storm of indignation about the ears of his department.  Here were two young men—­Moseses, as it were, saved from the bulrushes.  Lost in the desert from the period of their birth, and ignorant of the dissensions then raging in Europe, they were unquestionably beyond the ordinary operation of the law.  This will never do, he probably said to himself; the civilization which these two young men have come through so many perils to seek ought not to appear to them, the moment they arrived in Europe, in the form of spoliation and barbarism.

The name of this extraordinary director of Domaine Extraordinaire was M. de la Boullerie, and, when we fall in with the name of a really good-hearted man, we delight to record it.  He felt that the two young men had been hardly dealt with, but he had not the power to order a restitution of the property, now that the seizure had been made, and sundry perquisities, of course, deducted by the excise officials.  Accordingly, he referred the matter to the Emperor, who commanded the goods to be immediately restored intact.  Napoleon, at the same time, praised the functionary we have named for calling his attention to the merits of the case, and thanked him for such an opportunity of repairing an injustice.[I]

There are many such instances of generosity as the foregoing in the career of the great Emperor—­mild rays of the sun in the midst of thunderstorms; sweet flowers blowing here and there, in the bosom of the gigantic projects of his life—­which many will esteem more highly than his miracles of strategy and the renown of his battles.  As nothing that tends to elevate the soul is out of place in this volume, we may be permitted to insert one or two of these anecdotes.

In 1806, Napoleon was at Potsdam.  The Prussians were humbled to the dust, and the outrage of Rossbach had been fearfully avenged.  A letter was intercepted, in which Prince Laatsfeld, civil governor of Berlin, secretly informed the enemy of all the dispositions of the French army.  The crime was palpable, capital, and unpardonable.  There was nothing between the life and death of the prince, except the time to load half a dozen muskets, point them to his breast, and cry—­Fire.  The princess flew to the palace, threw herself at the feet of the Emperor, beseeched, implored, and seemed almost heart-broken.  “Madam,” said Napoleon, “this letter is the only proof that exists of your husband’s guilt.  Throw it into the fire.”  The fatal paper blazed, crisped, passed from blue to yellow, and the treachery of Prince Laatsfeld was reduced to ashes.