were anyone but myself to announce them to
your Majesty----"
"So the Emperor refuses my services! He forgets the victories of
Aboukir, Eylau, and Moscow?"
"No, sire; but he remembers the treaty of Naples, the taking of Reggio,
and the declaration of war of the viceroy of Italy."
The beggar struck his forehead.
"Yes, yes! I daresay he thinks I deserve his reproaches, and yet it
seems to me that he ought to remember that there are two men in me--the
soldier whom he made his brother, and the brother whom he made a king....
Yes, as brother I have treated him ill--very ill, but as king, upon my
soul, I could not have acted differently.... I had to choose between my
sword and my crown, and between a regiment and a people. Listen, Brune:
you do not know how it all happened. There was an English fleet, the
guns of which were growling in the port, there was a Neapolitan
population howling in the streets. If I had been alone, I would have
passed through the fleet with one boat, through the crowd with my sword
alone, but I had a wife and children. Yet I hesitated; the idea of being
called traitor and deserter caused me to shed more tears than the loss of
my throne, or perhaps the death of those I love best, will ever wring
from me.... And so he will have nothing more to do with me? He refuses
me as general, captain, private? Then what is left for me to do?"
"Sire, your Majesty must leave France immediately."
"And if I don't obey?"
"My orders are to arrest you and deliver you up to a court-martial!"
"Old comrade, you will not do that?"
"I shall do it, praying God to strike me dead in the moment I lay hands
on you!"
"That's you all over, Brune. You have been able to remain a good, loyal
fellow. He did not give you a kingdom, he did not encircle your brow
with a band of iron which men call a crown and which drives one mad; he
did not place you between your conscience and your family. So I must
leave France, begin my vagabond life again, and say farewell to Toulon,
which recalls so many memories to me! See, Brune," continued Murat,
leaning on the arm of the marshal, "are not the pines yonder as fine as
any at the Villa Pamfili, the palms as imposing as any at Cairo, the
mountains as grand as any range in the Tyrol? Look to your left, is not
Cape Gien something like Castellamare and Sorrento--leaving out Vesuvius?
And see, Saint-Mandrier at the farthest point of the gulf, is it not like
my rock of Ca
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