ong, full,
echoing over and over again across the plains in thunder that joined her
name with the name of France and of Napoleon, and hurled it upward in
fierce, tumultuous, idolatrous love to those cruel, cloudless skies that
shone above the dead. She was their child, their treasure, their idol,
their young leader in war, their young angel in suffering; she was all
their own, knowing with them one common mother--France. Honor to her was
honor to them; they gloried with heart and soul in this bright, young
fearless life that had been among them ever since her infant feet had
waded through the blood of slaughter-fields, and her infant lips had
laughed to see the tricolor float in the sun above the smoke of battle.

And as she heard, her face became very pale, her large eyes grew dim and
very soft, her mirthful mouth trembled with the pain of a too intense
joy. She lifted her head, and all the unutterable love she bore her
country and her people thrilled through the music of her voice.

"Francais!"

That was all she said; in that one word of their common nationality she
spoke alike to the Marshal of the Empire and to the conscript of the
ranks. "Francais!" That one title made them all equal in her sight;
whoever claimed it was honored in her eyes, and was precious to her
heart, and when she answered them that it was nothing, this thing which
they glorified in her, she answered but what seemed the simple truth in
her code. She would have thought it "nothing" to have perished by
shot, or steel, or flame, in day-long torture for that one fair sake of
France.

Vain in all else, and to all else wayward, here she was docile and
submissive as the most patient child; here she deemed the greatest and
the hardest thing that she could ever do far less than all that she
would willingly have done. And as she looked upon the host whose
thousand and ten thousand voices rang up to the noonday sun in her
homage, and in hers alone, a light like a glory beamed upon her face
that for once was white and still and very grave--none who saw her face
then ever forgot that look.

In that moment she touched the full sweetness of a proud and pure
ambition, attained and possessed in all its intensity, in all its
perfect splendor. In that moment she knew that divine hour which, born
of a people's love and of the impossible desires of genius in its youth,
comes to so few human lives--knew that which was known to the young
Napoleon when, in the ho