Of course I succumbed.  Such things have an international value, and were not merely the sordid pickings from deserted private dwellings.  Who would not rob a fleeing Emperor of his possessions?

After this we went into the English camp unostentatiously, and by some means men came forward from nowhere, and without greeting or superfluous words showed me what they had.  The English are good traders; they never waste their words; and as I looked I thought of the anguish which the patrons of the Hotel Drouot or Christie’s would have felt could they have seen this marvellous collection.  For these common men had made one of such taste and value that there could be no doubt where the things had been obtained.  Every piece was good and a century or two old.  There were enamels and miniatures which must have lain undisturbed for countless years watching the Manchu Emperors come and go.  There were beautiful stones and snuff-boxes, and many other things.  There might be none of the black pearls of General Monttauban, Comte de Palikao, that had delighted the Empress Eugenie half a century ago, but there were objets de vertu such as duchesses love.

In the end, I, too, became commercial and arranged that some men should come and find me that same evening, bringing as much as they could carry of the spoils they had amassed.  They were to be paid in gold coin or in gold bars just as I pleased, weight for weight, and a quarter in my favour.  That was soon settled.  In the evening the men duly came, not the few I had supposed, but so many that they filled my courtyards, yet managing to remain curiously, silent.  For them an important turning-point had been reached; they would make small fortunes if the thing went through successfully.  With scales in front of me and gold alongside, we weighed and calculated unendingly—­weight for weight, with that one quarter in my favour.  It took two hours and more, for these common men were very careful, and everything had to be written down and recorded with strange marks and numbers, denoting the private division of profits which would afterwards follow.  In the end everything was finished with and bought.  Then the men stood up and shook themselves as if they had been bathed in a perspiration of anxiety, and the spokesman, a dark man with a quick tongue, which showed that he had not always been a soldier, thanked me curtly.  When they had drunk, at my request, he explained to me how it was done.  There was something dramatic in the way he described.  It was so simple.  I recorded what he said so as not to forget.  “When it’s dark” he said, in a low voice, with no introduction, “there’s only the picquets.  They have everything to themselves excepting that the Frenchies are just alongside.  The Frenchies watch us close, but we watch them closer, and there’s always a way.  Rounds are not kept up the whole night, for everything is slack now, and when they are finished the fun begins.  The reliefs, lying on the ground, strip off everything so that they can crawl like snakes and that no one can get hold of them.  They crawl in through holes, over walls, with never a match or a light to show them how.  In the end they get inside.”  The man laughed a little hoarsely, spat, and again went on.