Alas! at a distance of seventeen years between, three children, all suffering through the mistakes of their fathers, clung in vain to those same curtains: for sixty years the Tuileries was little more than a royal hostelry wherein the fleeting dynasties put up in turn. By a quarter to eleven, the empress, clad like an amazon in brown, stepped into a carriage with the King of Rome, surrounded by a strong detachment of the Imperial Guard. On the same day and at the same hour, the emperor set off from Troyes for Paris with his flying squadrons. It is well known that the emperor was arrested at Fromenteau, but what follows is not known, or but imperfectly known. When time and occasion serve--_apropos_ of the July Revolution, probably--we shall revert to one of the men whom fate, for some unknown reason, branded with a fatal seal. We refer to Marmont. We will show what he was, rather than what he did: he was superb, during that retreat, in which he left neither gun nor prisoner in the hands of the enemy; superb when--like a lion at bay against the walls of the customhouse at Paris, surrounded by Russians and Prussians, in the main street of _Belleville_, his right arm still in a sling, after the battle of Arapiles, holding his sword in his left hand, mutilated at Leipzig, his clothes riddled with bullets, wedged in between the dead and the wounded who fell all round him, with only forty grenadiers behind him--he forced his way to the barrier where he abandoned, pierced with wounds, the fifth horse that had been killed under him since the beginning of the campaign! Alas! why did he not cross Paris from the barrier of Belleville to the barrier of Fontainebleau? Why did he stop at his house in the rue Paradis-Poissonnière? Why did he not go to Napoleon, with his coat in shreds and his face blackened with powder? How determinedly fate seemed to oppose him! How different would have been the verdict of the future! But we, who are now a part of that future, and well-nigh disinterested spectators of all those great events, we who by nature are without private hatreds, and by position have nothing to do with political animosities, it is for us to enlighten posterity, for we are poised between the worlds aristocratic and democratic, the one in its decadence and the other in its adolescence: it is ours to seek for truth wherever it may be buried, and to exalt it wherever it may be found. And now, having defined our position, let us return to Napoleon and Marie-Louise. Let us pass over several days and say naught of great betrayals and shameful dishonour; even so we are not, unhappily, at the end of these things. From 29 March to 7 April the following events happened:--