There could have been no greater contrast than that of the life that now began for Eugénie in Hastings, with her brilliant career as Empress, or even with that troubled war-time and the dangers and excitements through which she had passed. Torn by alternations of hope, fear, and disappointment, she had scarcely had time during the past month to think of herself, much less give way to her feelings. Here, at the Marine Hotel, for the first time she found leisure to look back on what had happened and to review her past life—that inevitable time of reckoning from which no life is wholly free. Hitherto she had known nothing but gratified desires, glittering triumphs, and realized ambitions. She had had no cause to distrust friends or doubt their loyalty, no experience of ingratitude. Rarely forgetful of a service done her, and incapable of falsehood herself, she had preserved an almost childlike faith in human nature. Now, for the first time, fate was to make her thoroughly familiar with this bitterest chapter in the book of experience. Scarcely had she turned her back on the Tuileries before her own servants rifled her apartments. Later, when news came that the rabble had broken into the palace and wrought havoc there, Eugénie’s first thought was “Poor Trochu!” “Why do you pity him?” asked her companion, in surprise. “Because he has sworn so often to me that only over his dead body should any assailant enter my palace, that I feel sure he must be dead,” was the reply. That this General, who so basely deserted his sovereign in the hour of danger, was on the contrary quite well and enjoying life in his self-appointed position as head of the Government is only a single instance of how those who in time of prosperity bowed lowest before the Empress were the first to desert her in misfortune. Every newspaper that she saw showed her the meaning of adversity. Those who had received the most signal marks of favor were the loudest now to denounce the defenceless woman. With petty spite, the Government of National Defence had destroyed all the emblems of imperialism and done everything in its power to represent the dynasty, which for nearly twenty years had upheld the welfare and prosperity of France, as a curse to the country. Anxious to discover, if possible, something derogatory to the character of the Empress, it had caused the palace to be searched for any private papers she might have left behind, but without success. Even the few letters that were published for the purpose of exposing her disclosed nothing in the least compromising.