No, I’m not going to speak to that person in the cocked hat and dress-coat under these circumstances.  Conversation with him out of the best phrase-books would be uninteresting.  Diplomatic row between the two countries would be the least dreaded result of it.  A suspected conspirator against the life of Napoleon, without a chance for explanation, I saw myself clubbed, gagged, bound, searched (my minute notes of the Tuileries confiscated), and trundled off to the Conciergerie, and hung up to the ceiling in an iron cage there, like Ravaillac.

I drew back into the shade and rapidly walked to the western gate.  It was closed, of course.  On the gate-piers stand the winged steeds of Marly, never less admired than by me at that moment.  They interested me less than a group of the Corps d’Afrique, who lounged outside, guarding the entrance from the square, and unsuspicious that any assassin was trying to get out.  I could see the gleam of the lamps on their bayonets and hear their soft tread.  Ask them to let me out?  How nimbly they would have scaled the fence and transfixed me!  They like to do such things.  No, no—­whatever I do, I must keep away from the clutches of these cats of Africa.

And enough there was to do, if I had been in a mind to do it.  All the seats to sit in, all the statuary to inspect, all the flowers to smell.  The southern terrace overlooking the Seine was closed, or I might have amused myself with the toy railway of the Prince Imperial that ran nearly the whole length of it, with its switches and turnouts and houses; or I might have passed delightful hours there watching the lights along the river and the blazing illumination on the amusement halls.  But I ascended the familiar northern terrace and wandered amid its bowers, in company with Hercules, Meleager, and other worthies I knew only by sight, smelling the orange-blossoms, and trying to fix the site of the old riding-school where the National Assembly sat in 1789.

It must have been eleven o’clock when I found myself down by the private garden next the palace.  Many of the lights in the offices of the household had been extinguished, but the private apartments of the Emperor in the wing south of the central pavilion were still illuminated.  The Emperor evidently had not so much desire to go to bed as I had.  I knew the windows of his petits appartements—­as what good American did not?—­and I wondered if he was just then taking a little supper, if he had bidden good-night to Eugenie, if he was alone in his room, reflecting upon his grandeur and thinking what suit he should wear on the morrow in his ride to the Bois.  Perhaps he was dictating an editorial for the official journal; perhaps he was according an interview to the correspondent of the London Glorifier; perhaps one of the Abbotts was with him.  Or was he composing one of those important love-letters of state to Madame Blank which have since delighted the lovers of literature?  I am not a spy, and I scorn to look into people’s windows late at night, but I was lonesome and hungry, and all that square round about swarmed with imperial guards, policemen, keen-scented Zouaves, and nobody knows what other suspicious folk.  If Napoleon had known that there was a