l it
would know how to preserve them there.

The emperor delivered the eagle to it with his own hands; he also
satisfied Ney's corps. His favours were as great in themselves as they
were in their form. The value of the gift was enhanced by the manner in
which he bestowed it. He was successively surrounded by each regiment as
by a family. There he appealed in a loud voice to the officers,
subalterns, and privates, inquiring who were the bravest of all those
brave men, or the most successful, and recompensing them on the spot.
The officers named, the soldiers confirmed, the emperor approved: thus,
as he himself observed, the elections were made instantaneously, in a
circle, in his presence, and confirmed with acclamations by the troops.

These paternal manners, which made the private soldier the military
comrade of the ruler of Europe; these forms, which revived the
still-regretted usages of the republic, delighted the troops. He was a
monarch, but the monarch of the Revolution; and they could not but love
a fortunate sovereign who led them on to fortune; in him there was every
thing to excite, and nothing to reproach them.

Never did field of victory exhibit a spectacle more capable of exalting;
the presentation of that eagle so richly merited, the pomp of these
promotions, the shouts of joy, the glory of those warriors, recompensed
on the very spot where it had just been acquired; their valour
proclaimed by a voice, every accent of which rung throughout attentive
Europe; by that great captain whose bulletins would carry their names
over the whole world, and more especially among their countrymen, and
into the bosoms of their families, which they would at once cheer and
make proud: how many favours at once! they were absolutely intoxicated
with them: he himself seemed at first to allow himself to share their
transports.

But when he was out of sight of his troops, the attitude of Ney and
Murat, and the words of Poniatowski, who was as frank and judicious in
council as he was intrepid in the field, tranquillized him; and when the
close heat of the day began to overpower him, and he learned from the
reports that his men had proceeded eight leagues without overtaking the
enemy, the spell was entirely dissolved. On his return to Smolensk, the
jolting of his carriage over the relics of the fight, the stoppages
caused on the road by the long file of the wounded who were crawling or
being carried back, and in Smolensk itsel