the Pope, chilled by long waiting, was ready to grace the ceremony.  First he anointed Emperor and Empress with the holy oil; then, at the suitable place in the Mass he blessed their crowns, rings, and mantles, uttering the traditional prayers for the possession of the virtues and powers which each might seem to typify.  But when he was about to crown the Emperor, he was gently waved aside, and Napoleon with his own hands crowned himself.  A thrill ran through the august assembly, either of pity for the feelings of the aged pontiff or of admiration at the “noble and legitimate pride” of the great captain who claimed as wholly his own the crown which his own right arm had won.  Then the cortege slowly returned to the middle of the nave, where a lofty throne had been reared.

Another omen now startled those who laid store by trifles.  It was noticed that the sovereigns in ascending the steps nearly fell backwards under the weight of their robes and trains, though in the case of Josephine the anxious moment may have been due to the carelessness, whether accidental or studied, of her “mantle-bearers.”  But to those who looked beneath the surface of things was not this an all-absorbing portent, that all this religious pomp should be removed by scarcely eleven years from the time when this same nave echoed to the shouts and gleamed with the torches of the worshippers of the newly enthroned Goddess of Reason?

Revolutionary feelings were not wholly dead, but they now vented themselves merely in gibes.  On the night before the coronation the walls of Paris were adorned with posters announcing:  The last Representation of the French Revolution—­for the Benefit of a poor Corsican Family. And after the event there were inquiries why the new throne had no glands d’or; the answer suggested because it was sanglant.[320] Beyond these quips and jests the Jacobins and royalists did not go.  When the phrase your subjects was publicly assigned to the Corps Legislatif by its courtier-like president, Fontanes, there was a flutter of wrath among those who had hoped that the new Empire was to be republican.  But it quickly passed away; and no Frenchman, except perhaps Carnot, made so manly a protest as the man of genius at Vienna, who had composed the “Sinfonia Eroica,” and with grand republican simplicity inscribed it, “Beethoven a Bonaparte.”  When the master heard that his former hero had taken the imperial crown, he tore off the dedication with a volley of curses on the renegade and tyrant; and in later years he dedicated the immortal work to the memory of a great man.

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CHAPTER XXI

THE BOULOGNE FLOTILLA