The days immediately preceding the battle of Waterloo they spend at Heidelberg, occupied in studying the Psalms. The intelligence of the reverses at Ligny and Quatre-Bras on the 16th and 17th of June reaches Alexander when he is thus employed; the Psalms console him and convince him of the justice of his cause. He prays and fasts. On the 18th of June the battle of Waterloo is fought. Alexander immediately sets out for Paris, but with the understanding that Madame de Krüdener is to follow promptly. His greatest grief at this moment is that his brother Constantine is not converted too. Before leaving Heidelberg our prophetess visits the prisoners who are awaiting their sentence of death and preaches to them with great effect; then she follows the Czar, whose Christian disposition affords her intense satisfaction. In Paris her influence reaches its culminating point. The Czar calls upon her on the evening of her arrival. Her apartments in the Hôtel Montchenu are so situated that he can come to her at any hour of the day from the Elysée-Bourbon Palace by a private garden door. No dissipation, no amusement had now any temptation for the man whom the Parisians remembered as being so gay but a few years previously. "I am a disciple of Christ," he said; "I go about with the Gospel in my hands, and know nothing else." And Madame de Krüdener writes of him: "Alexander is the elect of God. He is treading the path of renunciation." Only language borrowed from the Apocalypse could express what she saw in him--a founder of the kingdom of Christ upon earth, an angel of peace with the flaming sword of power, the prince of light, &c, &c. Napoleon, on the other hand, she, like Adam Müller and his followers, believed to be the devil himself. Alexander was to restore the power of Christianity upon earth, and to obliterate the last trace of the Revolution and its deeds. Alexander's reverence and gratitude knew no bounds. In the beginning of September a great review of 150,000 Russian troops was held at the Camp des Vertus in Champagne. Madame de Krüdener's presence could not be dispensed with. The Czar's carriage was sent for her early in the morning, and he received her, not like a favourite subject, but like a messenger from heaven, sent to lead his troops to victory. "Bare-headed, or wearing the little straw-hat which she generally carried hanging from her arm; her still fair hair hanging in plaits upon her shoulders, with a stray curl falling on her brow; dressed in a plain, dark robe, to which its cut and her bearing imparted elegance, and which was confined at the waist by a simple girdle--thus she arrived at dawn of day, thus she stood at the moment of prayer in front of the astonished army."[3]