erg, with one hundred and
thirty thousand men, confronted him on the Seine and the Aube, and
Bluecher, with eighty thousand men, was marching on Paris by way of the
Marne, with only Macdonald and his beaten and dispirited men, not ten
thousand in number, to hold the fiery old Prussian field marshal in
check.

"How had it all come to this, and why?" the man asked himself, and,
with all his greatness and clearness of vision, the reason did not
occur to him. For he had only himself to blame for his misfortunes.
He was not the man that he had been. For a moment his old spirit had
flashed out in the common room of the inn two hours before, but the
reaction left him heavy, weary, old, lonely. Physically, he felt
unequal to the strain. His human frame was almost worn out. Mere men
cannot long usurp the attributes of God. Intoxicated with success, he
had grasped at omnipotence, and for a time had seemed to enjoy it, only
to fail. The mills of the gods do grind slowly, but they do grind
immeasurably small in the end.

What a long, bloody way he had traversed since Toulon, since Arcola,
since the bridge at Lodi, since Marengo? Into what far-off lands it
had led him: Italy, Egypt, Syria, Spain, Austria, Prussia and the
great, white, cold empire of the North. And all the long way paved
with corpses--corpses he had regarded with indifference until to-day.

It was cold in the room, in spite of the fire in the stove. It
reminded him of that dreadful retreat. The Emperor covered his face
with his hand. No one was there. He could afford to give away. There
rose before him in the darkness the face of the wife of his youth, only
to be displaced by the nearer woman, the Austrian wife and the little
son whom he had so touchingly confided to the National Guard a month
ago when he left Paris for the last try with fortune for his empire and
his life. Would the allies at last and finally beat him; would Francis
Joseph, weak monarch whom he hated, take back his daughter, and with
her Napoleon's son, and bring him up in Austria to hate the name of
France and his father? The Emperor groaned aloud.

The darkness fell upon the world outside, upon the room within, upon
the soul of the great Captain approaching the nadir of his fortunes,
his spirit almost at the breaking point. To him at last came Berthier
and Maret. They had the right of entrance. The time for which he had
asked had passed. Young Marteau admitted them without