“I beg your pardon,” said Fitzgerald in French.

“It is of no consequence,” replied the stranger, laughing.  “This is always a devil of a corner on a windy day.”  His French had a slight German twist to it.

Briefly they inspected each other, as strangers will, carelessly, with annoyance and amusement interplaying in their eyes and on their lips, all in a trifling moment.  Then each raised his hat and proceeded, as tranquilly and unconcernedly as though destiny had no ulterior motive in bringing them thus really together.  And yet, when they had passed and disappeared from each other’s view, both were struck with the fact that somewhere they had met before.

Fitzgerald went into the tomb, his head bared.  The marble underfoot bore the imprint of many shoes and rubbers and hobnails, of all sizes and—­mayhap—­of all nations.  He recollected, with a burn on his cheeks, a sacrilege of his raw and eager youth, some twelve years since; he had forgotten to take off his hat.  Never would he forget the embarrassment of that moment when the attendant peremptorily bade him remove it.  He, to have forgotten!  He, who held Napoleon above all heroes!  The shame of it!

To-day many old soldiers were gathered meditatively round the heavy circular railing.  They were always drawn hither on memorable anniversaries.  Their sires and grandsires had carried some of those tattered flags, had won them.  The tides of time might ebb and flow, but down there, in his block of Siberian porphyry, slept the hero.  There were some few tourists about this afternoon, muttering over their guide-books, when nothing is needed on this spot but the imagination; and that solemn quiet of which the tomb is ever jealous pressed down sadly upon the living.  Through the yellow panes at the back of the high altar came a glow suggesting sunshine, baffling the drab of the sky outside; and down in the crypt itself the misty blue was as effective as moonshine.

Napoleon had always been Fitzgerald’s ideal hero; but he did not worship him blindly, no.  He knew him to have been a brutal, domineering man, unscrupulous in politics, to whom woman was either a temporary toy or a stepping-stone, not over-particular whether she was a dairy-maid or an Austrian princess; in fact, a rascal, but a great, incentive, splendid, courageous one, the kind which nature calls forth every score of years to purge her breast of the petty rascals, to the benefit of mankind in general.  Notwithstanding that he was a rascal, there was an inextinguishable glamour about the man against which the bolts of truth, history, letters, biographers broke ineffectually.  Oh, but he had shaken up all Europe; he had made precious kings rattle in their shoes; he had redrawn a hundred maps; and men had laughed as they died for him.  It is something for a rascal to have evolved the Code Napoleon.  What a queer satisfaction it must be, even at this late day, nearly a hundred years removed, to any Englishman, standing above this crypt, to recollect that upon English soil the Great Shadow had never set his iron heel!