t, so good and ready to render a service, always forgetting
himself for others, had succeeded in procuring an umbrella, when he met
my wife and mother-in-law, who were escaping like the others, took them
on his arm, and conducted them to the palace without their having
received the least injury. For an hour he traveled back and forth from
the palace to the park, and from the park to the garden, and had the
happiness to be useful to a great number of ladies whose toilets he saved
from entire ruin. It was an act of gallantry which inspired infinite
gratitude, because it was performed in a manner evincing such kindness of
heart.

CHAPTER XXXI.

This seemed to be a year of fetes, and I dwell upon it with pleasure
because it preceded one filled with misfortunes. The years 1811 and 1812
offered a striking contrast to each other. All those flowers lavished on
the fetes of the King of Rome and his august mother covered an abyss, and
all this enthusiasm was changed to mourning a few months later. Never
were more brilliant fetes followed by more overwhelming misfortunes. Let
us, then, dwell a little longer upon the rejoicings which preceded 1812.
I feel that I need to be fortified before entering upon reminiscences of
that time of unprofitable sacrifices, of bloodshed without preserving or
conquering, and of glory without result. On the 25th of August, the
Empress's fete was celebrated at Trianon; and from early in the morning
the road from Paris to Trianon was covered with an immense number of
carriages and people on foot, the same sentiment attracting the court,
the citizens, the people, to the delightful place at which the fete was
held. All ranks were mingled, all went pell-mell; and I have never seen
a crowd more singularly variegated, or which presented a more striking
picture of all conditions of society. Ordinarily the multitude at fetes
of this kind is composed of little more than one class of people and a
few modest bourgeois that is all; very rarely of people with equipages,
more rarely still people of the court; but here there were all, and there
was no one so low that he could not have the satisfaction of elbowing a
countess or some other noble inhabitant of the Faubourg St. Germain, for
all Paris seemed to be at Versailles. That town so beautiful, but yet so
sadly beautiful, which seemed since the last king to be bereft of its
inhabitants, those broad streets in which no one was to be seen, those
squares, the