The representation went off with extraordinary _éclat_. The only persons among the spectators who were not enraptured with the spectacle, were the obese King of Würtemberg, who was sound asleep in his chair, and who was never awake except at dinner-time; his son, the Crown Prince, who was breathing out his soul in the ear of the young Duchess of Oldenburg; and that youthful widow herself, whose eyes beamed with a lustre born, not of the outward show, but of inward feeling. With these exceptions, all were delighted; and when Thierry, in the intervals of the performance, took up his guitar and discoursed eloquent music, the entire audience declared that they had never heard so exquisite a voice, nor seen so king-like a fellow. The loudest in his praise, and the best-dressed man among the eulogizers, was the nonagenarian Prince De Ligne; an old dandy, of whom his tailors made, as nearly as dress could do it, a comparatively young-looking man. He was more carefully dressed than ever on this eventful night. It was the night on which he went through the snow, to keep, at least he said so, an assignation of a tender nature on the ramparts, and where he was kept waiting so long in vain by his Cynthia of the minute, that he caught a cold which, within a very short space of time, carried him into a bronze coffin, and covered him up in a marble tomb. All Vienna laughed, except the tailors; for though he patronized these, he never paid them. Thierry was standing by the burying-place when he first heard of the return of Napoleon. “Well,” thought he, “there are no crowns to be had here. The kingdom of good-fellowship is a sorry monarchy. Perhaps something may turn up under the Corsican.” ACT III. The “Corsican” however had run out his brief second imperial career, when one of the many who had hoped to profit by his rise was prostrated by his fall. The name of this one was Thierry. With the world before him where to choose, he turned his steps to South America, and went in search of a people who might happen to be in want of a king. It was always his fortune, or misfortune, wherever such a servant of the people was required, to present his credentials only after the situation was filled up. He was at Poyais just a week subsequent to the attainment of the caciqueship of that pseudo El Dorado by Gregor M’Gregor. He was in Hayti when the garrison of St. Marc revolted against Christophe the king, and when the citizens and troops of Cape Haytien invited Boyer to relieve them of royalty and the Marquises of Marmalade. He heard the pistol shot at Sans Souci which terminated the career of Christophe and his house; and he witnessed the abject submission of the sable heir-apparent, who has not only since honoured Great Britain with his presence, but who has, at the invitation of the law, submitted (some six or seven years ago) to the rotatory penalties and the weak gruel of Brixton, for forgetting his royal dignity, and, with it, common humanity.