ad of triumphant legions was now with a small, weak, ill-equipped,
unfed army, striving to protect his own capital. France was receiving
the pitiless treatment which she had accorded other lands. With what
measure she had meted out, it was being measured back to her again.
The cup of trembling, filled with bitterness, was being held to her
shrinking lips, and she must perforce drain it to the dregs. After all
Napoleon's far-flung campaigns, after all his overwhelming victories,
after the vast outpouring of blood and treasure, after all his glory
and all his fame, the end was at hand.

The prostrate Emperor stared out through the low window into the gray
sky with its drift of snow across the panes. He heard faintly the
tumult outside. Disaster, ruin, despair entered his heart. The young
conscripts were disheartened by defeat, the steady old veterans were
pitifully few in number, thousands of them were in foreign prisons,
many more thousands of them were dead. Disease was rife among the
youthful recruits, unused to such hard campaigning, as he had summoned
to the colors. Without food and without arms, they were beginning to
desert their Eagles. The spirit of the marshals and great officers
whom he had raised from the dust to affluence and power was waning.
They were worn out with much fighting. They wanted peace, almost at
any price. He remembered their eager questions when he had joined the
army a month ago.

"What reinforcements has your majesty brought?"

"None," he had been compelled to answer.

"What, then, shall we do?" queried one after the other.

"We must try fortune with what we have," he had declared undauntedly.

Well, they had tried fortune. Brienne, where he had been a boy at
school, had been the scene of a brilliantly successful action. They
had lost no glory at La Rothiere afterward--although they gained
nothing else--where with thirty thousand men he had beaten back through
one long bloody day and night thrice that number, only to have to
retreat in the end for the salvation of those who had been left alive.
And, to him who had been wont to spend them so indifferently, men had
suddenly become precious, since he could get no more. Every dead or
wounded man was now unreplaceable, and each loss made his problem
harder to solve. Since those two first battles he had been forced
back, step by step, mile by mile, league by league, everywhere; and all
his lieutenants likewise. Now Schwarzenb