Napoleon’s route led him through Valence, where there was not only the miscellaneous crowd to cheer him, but some true and tried personal friends. For example, there was old Mademoiselle Bou, who had credited him for board. Napoleon greeted her affectionately and made her some valuable presents, which are now to be seen in the museum of the town. Indeed, the news, flashed to all parts of France, “Bonaparte has come!” created a kind of universal transport. One deputy, Baudin by name, died of joy. Chancellor Pasquier relates that he was at the theatre one evening in Paris, when he saw two very pretty women, sitting in the box next to him, receive a message. They rose in excitement and hurried away. These very pretty women, as Pasquier learned, were the sisters of Bonaparte. A courier had brought the news that their brother had landed at Fréjus. Béranger says in his autobiography: “I was sitting in our reading room with thirty or forty others, when suddenly the news was brought in that Bonaparte had returned from Egypt. At the words every man in the room started to his feet, and burst into one long shout of joy!” By the signal telegraph of that day, the news had flown to the capital, and in a short while carriages were rumbling along the road out of Paris toward Lyons, bearing relatives and friends to meet the returning hero. One of these lumbering vehicles bore the uneasy Josephine. At Lyons, Napoleon, suspicious of political foes perhaps, changed his course, and hastened toward Paris by a different road. Would-be assassins, if there were any, as well as faithful friends, would fix their plans for nothing. When Napoleon got down from his carriage before his house in the street which was called, in compliment to him, the street of Victory, there was no wife, no relative, no friend to greet him. His home was a dismal picture of darkness, silence, desertion; and it chilled him with a painful shock which he never ceased to remember. The anxious Josephine, the faithless wife, had gone to meet him, to weep away her sins on his breast, had missed him because of his change of route; and Napoleon, not knowing this, believed she had fled his home to escape his just anger. Bitter days and nights this eminently human Bonaparte had known; bitter days and nights he was to know again; but it may be doubted whether any of them gave to him a bitterer cup to drink than this of his return from Egypt.