nk
they still lingered on in the peaceful quiet of the great cool dining
room.

And at that same hour Napoleon III. was in the weaver's lowly cottage
on the Donchery road. As early as five o'clock in the morning he had
insisted on leaving the Sous-Prefecture; he felt ill at ease in Sedan,
which was at once a menace and a reproach to him, and moreover he
thought he might, in some measure, alleviate the sufferings of his
tender heart by obtaining more favorable terms for his unfortunate army.
His object was to have a personal interview with the King of Prussia. He
had taken his place in a hired caleche and been driven along the broad
highway, with its row of lofty poplars on either side, and this first
stage of his journey into exile, accomplished in the chill air of early
dawn, must have reminded him forcibly of the grandeur that had been his
and that he was putting behind him forever. It was on this road that he
had his encounter with Bismarck, who came hurrying to meet him in an
old cap and coarse, greased boots, with the sole object of keeping him
occupied and preventing him from seeing the King until the capitulation
should have been signed. The King was still at Vendresse, some nine
miles away. Where was he to go? What roof would afford him shelter while
he waited? In his own country, so far away, the Palace of the Tuileries
had disappeared from his sight, swallowed up in the bosom of a
storm-cloud, and he was never to see it more. Sedan seemed already to
have receded into the distance, leagues and leagues, and to be parted
from him by a river of blood. In France there were no longer imperial
chateaus, nor official residences, nor even a chimney-nook in the house
of the humblest functionary, where he would have dared to enter and
claim hospitality. And it was in the house of the weaver that he
determined to seek shelter, the squalid cottage that stood close to the
roadside, with its scanty kitchen-garden inclosed by a hedge and
its front of a single story with little forbidding windows. The room
above-stairs was simply whitewashed and had a tiled floor; the only
furniture was a common pine table and two straw-bottomed chairs. He
spent two hours there, at first in company with Bismarck, who smiled
to hear him speak of generosity, after that alone in silent misery,
flattening his ashy face against the panes, taking his last look at
French soil and at the Meuse, winding in and out, so beautiful, among
the broad fertil