Silesian simplicity and campaigning appetite were rather astonished by the exiguity of the _plats_ placed before him, whereof he managed to consume some five-and-twenty, after admiring the wonders of the Palace Royal, and the rich uniforms of almost every nation with which the streets were crowded, he betook himself to the Place Vendôme to gaze at the fallen conqueror's triumphant column. It was surrounded by a mob of fickle Parisians, eager to cast down from its high estate the idol they so recently had worshipped. One daredevil fellow climbed upon the Emperor's shoulders, slung a cord round his neck, dragged up a great ship's cable and twisted it several times about the statue. The rabble seized the other end of the rope, and with cries of "_à bas ce canaille!_" tugged furiously at it. Their efforts were unavailing, Napoleon stood firm, until the Allied sovereigns, who, from the window of an adjacent house, beheld this disgraceful riot, sent a company of Russian grenadiers to disperse the mob. The masses gave way before the bayonet, but not till the same man who had fastened the rope, again climbed up, and with a white cloth shrouded the statue of the once adored Emperor from the eyes of his faithless subjects. It is well known that, a few weeks later, the figure was taken down by order of the Emperor Alexander, who carried it away as his sole trophy, and gave it a place in the winter palace at St Petersburg. When Louis XVIII. returned to Paris, a broad white banner, embroidered with three golden lilies, waved from the summit of the column; but this in its turn was displaced, by the strong south wind that blew from Elba in March 1815, when Napoleon re-entered his capital. A municipal deputation waited upon him to know what he would please to have placed on the top of the triumphant column. "A weathercock" was the little corporal's sarcastic reply. Since that day, the lilies and the tricolor have again alternated on the magnificent column, until the only thing that ought to surmount it, the statue of the most extraordinary man of modern, perhaps of any, times, has resumed its proud position, and once more overlooks the capital which he did so much to improve and embellish.