Then there were books about Napoleon, a whole shelf of them.  A lot of authors had thought him worth writing about.  He examined several volumes.  One was full of dreadful caricatures that the English had delighted in.  He found this most offensive and closed it quickly.  Probably that explained why he had always felt an instinctive antipathy for the English.

“If you’re interested in Napoleon things—­” said the officious clerk, and Bean went cold.  He wondered if the fellow suspected something.

“Not at all, not at all!” he protested, and refused to look at any more books.

He took his print of the coronation, securely wrapped, and went to another store several blocks away.  He could get a Napoleon book there, where they wouldn’t be suspicious.  He found one that looked promising, “Napoleon, Man and Lover,” and still another entitled “The Hundred Days.”  The latter had illustrations of the tomb, which he noted was in Paris.  Its architecture impressed him, and his hands trembled as he held the book open.  He had been buried with pomp, even with flamboyance.  Robber and killer he might have been, but the picture showed a throng of admiring spectators looking down to where the dead colossus was chested, and on the summit of the dome that rounded above that kingly sarcophagus, a discriminating nation had put the cross of Christ in gold.

Let people say what they would!  With all this glory of sepulchre there must be something in the man not to be wholly ashamed of.

And yet “Napoleon, Man and Lover,” which he read that night, confirmed his first impression that this strangely uncovered incident in his Karmic past was, on the whole, scandalous; not a thing he would like to have “get about.”  He sympathized with the poor boy driven from his Corsican home, with the charity student of Brienne, with the young artillery officer, dreaming impossible dreams.  But as lover—­he blushed for that ruthless dead self of his; the Polish woman, the little actress, sending for them as if they were merchandise.  It seemed to him that even the not too-fastidious Bulger would have been offended by such direct brutality.

Well, he was paying dearly for it now; afraid to venture into the presence of a couple of swell dames not invincibly austere, lacking the touch-and-go gallantry of a mere Bulger who had probably never been anybody worth mentioning.

And there was the poor pathetic Louise of Prussia.  Bean had already fallen in love with her face, observed in advertisements of the Queen Quality Shoe.  He recalled the womanly dignity of the figure descending the shallow steps, the arch accost of the soft eyes, the dimple in the round check.  She had been sent to sue him, the invader, to soften him with blandishments.  He had kept her waiting like a lackey, then had sought cynically to discover how far her devotion to her country’s safety would carry her.  And when her pitiful little basket of tricks had been emptied, her little traps sprung, he had sent her back to her husband with a message that crushed her woman’s pride and shattered the hopes of her people.  He had heard the word “bounder.”  It seemed to him that Napoleon had shown himself to be just that—­a fearful and impossible bounder.  He tingled with shame.  He wished he might speak to that Queen now as a gentleman would.