the villages through which they had
passed--Courcelles, le Chene, Raucourt; assuming in men's imagination
the dimensions of a huge train that had blocked the road and arrested
the march of armies, and which now, shorn of their glory, execrated
by all, had come in shame and disgrace to hide themselves among the
sous-prefect's lilac bushes.

While Delaherche was raising himself on tiptoe and trying to peer
through the windows of the _rez-de-chaussee_, an old woman at his side,
some poor day-worker of the neighborhood, with shapeless form and hands
calloused and distorted by many years of toil, was mumbling between her
teeth:

"An emperor--I should like to see one once--just once--so I could say I
had seen him."

Suddenly Delaherche exclaimed, seizing Maurice by the arm:

"See, there he is! at the window, to the left. I had a good view of him
yesterday; I can't be mistaken. There, he has just raised the curtain;
see, that pale face, close to the glass."

The old woman had overheard him and stood staring with wide-open
mouth and eyes, for there, full in the window, was an apparition that
resembled a corpse more than a living being; its eyes were lifeless, its
features distorted; even the mustache had assumed a ghastly whiteness in
that final agony. The old woman was dumfounded; forthwith she turned her
back and marched off with a look of supreme contempt.

"That thing an emperor! a likely story."

A zouave was standing near, one of those fugitive soldiers who were
in no haste to rejoin their commands. Brandishing his chassepot and
expectorating threats and maledictions, he said to his companion:

"Wait! see me put a bullet in his head!"

Delaherche remonstrated angrily, but by that time the Emperor had
disappeared. The hoarse murmur of the Meuse continued uninterruptedly;
a wailing lament, inexpressibly mournful, seemed to pass above them
through the air, where the darkness was gathering intensity. Other
sounds rose in the distance, like the hollow muttering of the rising
storm; were they the "March! march!" that terrible order from Paris that
had driven that ill-starred man onward day by day, dragging behind him
along the roads of his defeat the irony of his imperial escort, until
now he was brought face to face with the ruin he had foreseen and come
forth to meet? What multitudes of brave men were to lay down their lives
for his mistakes, and how complete the wreck, in all his being, of
that sick man, that sen