el des Invalides.

THIRD LADY

Such rodomontade is cheap: what matters it!

[A galaxy of marshals, forming Napoleon's staff, now enters the
Platz immediately before the windows. In the midst rides the
EMPEROR himself. The ladies are silent. The procession passes
along the front until it reaches the entrance to the Royal Palace.
At the door NAPOLEON descends from his horse and goes into the
building amid the resonant trumpetings of his soldiers and the
silence of the crowd.]

SECOND LADY [impressed]

O why does such a man debase himself
By countenancing loud scurrility
Against a queen who cannot make reprise!
A power so ponderous needs no littleness--
The last resort of feeble desperates!

[Enter fifth lady.]

FIFTH LADY [breathlessly]

Humiliation grows acuter still.
He placards rhetoric to his soldiery
On their distress of us and our allies,
Declaring he'll not stack away his arms
Till he has choked the remaining foes of France
In their own gainful glut.--Whom means he, think you?

FIRST LADY

Us?

THIRD LADY

Russia? Austria?

FIFTH LADY

Neither: England.--Yea,
Her he still holds the master mischief-mind,
And marrer of the countries' quietude,
By exercising untold tyranny
Over all the ports and seas.

SECOND LADY

Then England's doomed!
When he has overturned the Russian rule,
England comes next for wrack. They say that know!...
Look--he has entered by the Royal doors
And makes the Palace his.--Now let us go!--
Our course, alas! is--whither?

[Exeunt ladies. The curtain drops temporarily.]

SEMICHORUS I OF IRONIC SPIRITS [aerial music]

Deeming himself omnipotent
With the Kings of the Christian continent,
To warden the waves was his further bent.

SEMICHORUS II

But the weaving Will from eternity,
[Hemming them in by a circling sea]
Evolved the fleet of the Englishry.

SEMICHORUS I

The wane of his armaments ill-advised,
At Trafalgar, to a force despised,
Was a wound which never has cicatrized.

SEMICHORUS II

This, O this is the cramp that grips!
And freezes the Emperor's finger-tips
From signing a peace with the Land of Ships.

CHORUS

The Universal-empire plot
Demands the rule of that wave-walled spot;