ived in great poverty and known
constant anxiety. She had lost her money, and her husband had died at
the hand of a treacherous assassin. All her children had gone before
her, and in spite of all her misfortunes, and old though she was, she
still strove to bring up her grandchildren "to love their lawful King,"
for whose sake she had now nothing left to sacrifice.
Perhaps in the course of that tragic night when the defeated Napoleon
found himself alone in deserted Fontainebleau, the great Emperor's mind
may have reverted jealously to those stubborn royalists whom neither
their Princes' apathy nor the certainty of never being rewarded could
daunt. At that very moment the generals whom he had loaded with titles
and wealth were hastening to meet the Bourbons. He had not one friend
left among the hundred million people he had governed in the day of his
power. His mameluke had quitted him, his valet had fled. And if he
thought of Georges guillotined in the Place de la Greve, of Le Chevalier
who fell at the wall at Grenelle, of d'Ache stabbed on the road, he must
also have thought of the speech ascribed to Cromwell: "Who would do the
like for me?"
And perhaps of all his pangs this was the cruellest and most vengeful.
His cause must, in its turn, be sanctified by misfortune to gain its
fanatics and its martyrs.
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