ps, peered nervously to the front, for he saw that it would
require but little to create a panic among his men.

"We are betrayed; everybody can see it," shouted Chouteau.

Murmurs of reproach arose on every side, the sullen muttering of their
discontent exasperated by their fears. Yes, yes! they had been brought
there to be sold, to be delivered over to the Prussians. In the baleful
fatality that pursued them, and among all the blunders of their
leaders, those dense intelligences were unable to account for such an
uninterrupted succession of disasters on any other ground than that of
treachery.

"We are betrayed! we are betrayed!" the men wildly repeated.

Then Loubet's fertile intellect evolved an idea: "It is like enough
that that pig of an Emperor has sat himself down in the road, with his
baggage, on purpose to keep us here."

The idle fancy was received as true, and immediately spread up and down
the line; everyone declared that the imperial household had blocked the
road and was responsible for the stoppage. There was a universal chorus
of execration, of opprobrious epithets, an unchaining of the hatred
and hostility that were inspired by the insolence of the Emperor's
attendants, who took possession of the towns where they stopped at night
as if they owned them, unpacking their luxuries, their costly wines and
plate of gold and silver, before the eyes of the poor soldiers who were
destitute of everything, filling the kitchens with the steam of savory
viands while they, poor devils, had nothing for it but to tighten the
belt of their trousers. Ah! that wretched Emperor, that miserable man,
deposed from his throne and stripped of his command, a stranger in his
own empire; whom they were conveying up and down the country along with
the other baggage, like some piece of useless furniture, whose doom
it was ever to drag behind him the irony of his imperial state:
cent-gardes, horses, carriages, cooks, and vans, sweeping, as it were,
the blood and mire from the roads of his defeat with the magnificence of
his court mantle, embroidered with the heraldic bees!

In rapid succession, one after the other, two more shells fell;
Lieutenant Rochas had his _kepi_ carried away by a fragment. The
men huddled closer together and began to crowd forward, the movement
gathering strength as it ran from rear to front. Inarticulate cries were
heard, Lapoulle shouted furiously to go ahead. A minute longer and there
would have been