a hotel."

"Where should she stay?"

"With a friend."

"She knows no one in Paris."

"I beg your pardon, Monsieur Roland; she knows citizen Bonaparte, First
Consul, and his wife."

"You are not going to lodge my mother at the Luxembourg. I warn you that
that would embarrass her very much."

"No; but I shall lodge her in the Rue de la Victoire."

"Oh, general!"

"Come, come; that's settled. Go, now, and get back as soon as possible."

Roland took the First Consul's hand, meaning to kiss it; but Bonaparte
drew him quickly to him.

"Embrace me, my dear Roland," he said, "and good luck to you."

Two hours later Roland was rolling along in a post-chaise on the road to
Orleans. The next day, at nine in the morning, he entered Nantes, after
a journey of thirty-three hours.

CHAPTER XXIX. THE GENEVA DILIGENCE

About the hour when Roland was entering Nantes, a diligence, heavily
loaded, stopped at the inn of the Croix-d'Or, in the middle of the main
street of Chatillon-sur-Seine.

In those days the diligences had but two compartments, the coupe and the
interior; the rotunda is an adjunct of modern times.

The diligence had hardly stopped before the postilion jumped down and
opened the doors. The travellers dismounted. There were seven in all,
of both sexes. In the interior, three men, two women, and a child at the
breast; in the coupe, a mother and her son.

The three men in the interior were, one a doctor from Troyes, the second
a watchmaker from Geneva, the third an architect from Bourg. The two
women were a lady's maid travelling to Paris to rejoin her mistress, and
the other a wet-nurse; the child was the latter's nursling, which she
was taking back to its parents.

The mother and son in the coupe were people of position; the former,
about forty years of age, still preserving traces of great beauty, the
latter a boy between eleven and twelve. The third place in the coupe was
occupied by the conductor.

Breakfast was waiting, as usual, in the dining-room; one of those
breakfasts which conductors, no doubt in collusion with the landlords,
never give travellers the time to eat. The woman and the nurse got out
of the coach and went to a baker's shop nearby, where each bought a hot
roll and a sausage, with which they went back to the coach, settling
themselves quietly to breakfast, thus saving the cost, probably too
great for their means, of a meal at the hotel.

The doctor, the watchmaker, the arc