armies, exclaimed rudely, “Gentlemen, be quick, otherwise all deliberation will become useless.  Believe me, I speak from experience; Napoleon always follows very closely the couriers who announce his arrival.”  Napoleon was in fact close at hand.  After a short moment of hesitation, two companies of sappers which had been dispatched to cut down a bridge, joined their former commander.  A battalion of infantry soon followed their example.  Finally, upon the very glacis of the fortress, in presence of the numerous population which crowned the ramparts, the fifth regiment of the line to a man assumed the tricolour cockade, substituted for the white flag the eagle,—­witness of twenty battles,—­which it had preserved, and departed with shouts of Vive l’Empereur! After such a commencement, to attempt to hold the country would have been an act of folly.  General Marchand caused accordingly the gates of the city to be shut.  He still hoped, notwithstanding the evidently hostile disposition of the inhabitants, to sustain a siege with the sole assistance of the third regiment of engineers, the fourth regiment of artillery, and some weak detachments of infantry, which had not abandoned him.

From that moment, the civil authority had disappeared.  Fourier thought then that he might quit Grenoble, and repair to Lyons, where the princes had assembled together.  At the second restoration, this departure was imputed to him as a crime.  He was very near being brought before a court of assizes, or even a provost’s court.  Certain personages pretended that the presence of the Prefect of the chief place of l’Isere might have conjured the storm; that the resistance might have been more animated, better arranged.  People forgot that nowhere, and at Grenoble even less than anywhere else, was it possible to organize even a pretext of resistance.  Let us see then, finally, how this martial city,—­the fall of which Fourier might have prevented by his mere presence,—­let us see how it was taken.  It is eight o’clock in the evening.  The inhabitants and the soldiers garrison the ramparts.  Napoleon precedes his little troop by some steps; he advances even to the gate; he knocks (be not alarmed, Gentlemen, it is not a battle which I am about to describe,) he knocks with his snuff-box! “Who is there?” cried the officer of the guard.  “It is the Emperor!  Open!”—­“Sire, my duty forbids me.”—­“Open—­I tell you; I have no time to lose.”—­“But, sire, even though I should open to you, I could not.  The keys are in the possession of General Marchand.”—­“Go, then, and fetch them.”—­“I am certain that he will refuse them to me.”—­“If the General refuse them, tell him that I will dismiss him.”

These words petrified the soldiers.  During the previous two days, hundreds of proclamations designated Bonaparte as a wild beast which it was necessary to seize without scruple; they ordered everybody to run away from him, and yet this man threatened the general with deprivation of his command!  The single word dismissal, effaced the faint line of demarcation which separated for an instant the old soldiers from the young recruits; one word established the whole garrison in the interest of the emperor.