e fields.

Then the next day and the days that came after were other wretched
stages of that journey; the Chateau of Bellevue, a pretty bourgeois
retreat overlooking the river, where he rested that night, where he shed
tears after his interview with King William; the sorrowful departure,
that most miserable flight in a hired caleche over remote roads to the
north of the city, which he avoided, not caring to face the wrath of the
vanquished troops and the starving citizens, making a wide circuit over
cross-roads by Floing, Fleigneux, and Illy and crossing the stream on
a bridge of boats, laid down by the Prussians at Iges; the tragic
encounter, the story of which has been so often told, that occurred on
the corpse-cumbered plateau of Illy: the miserable Emperor, whose state
was such that his horse could not be allowed to trot, had sunk under
some more than usually violent attack of his complaint, mechanically
smoking, perhaps, his everlasting cigarette, when a band of haggard,
dusty, blood-stained prisoners, who were being conducted from Fleigneux
to Sedan, were forced to leave the road to let the carriage pass and
stood watching it from the ditch; those who were at the head of the line
merely eyed him in silence; presently a hoarse, sullen murmur began to
make itself heard, and finally, as the caleche proceeded down the line,
the men burst out with a storm of yells and cat-calls, shaking their
fists and calling down maledictions on the head of him who had been
their ruler. After that came the interminable journey across the
battlefield, as far as Givonne, amid scenes of havoc and devastation,
amid the dead, who lay with staring eyes upturned that seemed to be full
of menace; came, too, the bare, dreary fields, the great silent forest,
then the frontier, running along the summit of a ridge, marked only by
a stone, facing a wooden post that seemed ready to fall, and beyond
the soil of Belgium, the end of all, with its road bordered with gloomy
hemlocks descending sharply into the narrow valley.

And that first night of exile, that he spent at a common inn, the Hotel
de la Poste at Bouillon, what a night it was! When the Emperor showed
himself at his window in deference to the throng of French refugees and
sight-seers that filled the place, he was greeted with a storm of hisses
and hostile murmurs. The apartment assigned him, the three windows of
which opened on the public square and on the Semoy, was the typical
tawdry b