kings and a mob of princes surrounding Napoleon like the rays of the sun.  You understand, of course, that every soldier had the chance to mount a throne, provided always he had the merit; so a corporal of the Guard was a sight to be looked at as he walked along, for each man had his share in the victory, and ’twas plainly set forth in the bulletin.  What victories they were!  Austerlitz, where the army manoeuvred as if on parade; Eylau, where we drowned the Russians in a lake, as though Napoleon had blown them into it with the breath of his mouth; Wagram, where the army fought for three days without grumbling.  We won as many battles as there are saints in the calendar.  It was proved then, beyond a doubt, that Napoleon had the sword of God in his scabbard.  The soldiers were his friends; he made them his children; he looked after us, he saw that we had shoes, and shirts, and great-coats, and bread, and cartridges; but he always kept up his majesty; for, don’t you see, ’twas his business to reign.  No matter for that, however; a sergeant, and even a common soldier, could say to him, ‘my Emperor,’ just as you say to me sometimes, ’my good friend.’  He gave us an answer if we appealed to him; he slept in the snow like the rest of us; and, indeed, he had almost the air of a human man.  I who speak to you, I have seen him with his feet among the grape-shot, and no more uneasy than you are now—­standing steady, looking through his field-glass, and minding his business.  ’Twas that kept the rest of us quiet.  I don’t know how he did it, but when he spoke he made our hearts burn within us; and to show him we were his children, incapable of balking, didn’t we rush at the mouths of the rascally cannon, that belched and vomited shot and shell, without so much as saying, ‘Look out!’ Why! the dying must needs raise their heads to salute him and cry, ‘LONG LIVE THE EMPEROR!’

“I ask you, was that natural? would they have done that for a human man?

“Well, after he had settled the world, the Empress Josephine, his wife, a good woman all the same, managed matters so that she did not bear him any children, and he was obliged to give her up, though he loved her considerably.  But, you see, he had to have little ones for reasons of state.  Hearing of this, all the sovereigns of Europe quarrelled as to which of them should give him a wife.  And he married, so they told us, an Austrian archduchess, daughter of Caesar, an ancient man about whom people talk a good deal, and not in France only—­where any one will tell you what he did—­but in Europe.  It is all true, for I myself who address you at this moment, I have been on the Danube, and have seen the remains of a bridge built by that man, who, it seems, was a relation of Napoleon in Rome, and that’s how the Emperor got the inheritance of that city for his son.  So after the marriage, which was a fete for the whole world, and in honour of which he released the people of ten years’ taxes—­which they had to pay all the same, however, because the assessors didn’t take account of what he said—­his wife had a little one, who was King of Rome.  Now, there’s a thing that had never been seen on this earth; never before was a child born a king with his father living.  On that day a balloon went up in Paris to tell the news to Rome, and that balloon made the journey in one day.