And here let me most conscientiously affirm that, partly from my keen sense of the solemnity of such an appeal, and the grave responsibility I take upon myself in making it; but more especially in order to impress you, oh reader, with the full significance of this apocalyptic and somewhat minatory utterance (that it may haunt your finer sense during your midnight hours of introspective self-communion), I have done my best, my very best, to couch it in the obscurest and most unintelligible phraseology I could invent. If I have failed to do this, if I have unintentionally made any part of my meaning clear, if I have once deviated by mistake into what might almost appear like sense--mere common-sense--it is the fault of my half-French and wholly imperfect education. I am but a poor scribe! Thus roughly have I tried to give an account of this, the most important of our joint discoveries in the strange new world revealed to us by chance. More than twenty years of our united lives have been devoted to the following out of this slender clew--with what surprising results will, I trust, be seen in subsequent volumes. We have not had time to attempt the unravelling of our English ancestry as well--the Crays, and the Desmonds, the Ibbetsons, and Biddulphs, etc.--which connects us with the past history of England. The farther we got back into France, the more fascinating it became, and the easier--and the more difficult to leave. What an unexampled experience has been ours! To think that we have seen--actually seen--_de nos propres yeux vu_--Napoleon Bonaparte himself, the arch-arbiter of the world, on the very pinnacle of his pride and power; in his little cocked hat and gray double-breasted overcoat, astride his white charger, with all his staff around him, just as he has been so often painted! Surely the most impressive, unforgettable, ineffaceable little figure in all modern history, and clothed in the most cunningly imagined make-up that ever theatrical costumier devised to catch the public eye and haunt the public memory for ages and ages yet to come! It is a singularly new, piquant, and exciting sensation to stare in person, and as in the present, at bygone actualities, and be able to foretell the past and remember the future all in one! To think that we have even beheld him before he was first consul--slim and pale, his lank hair dangling down his neck and cheeks, if possible more impressive still as innocent as a child of all that lay before him! Europe at his feet--the throne--Waterloo-St. Helena--the Iron English Duke--the pinnacle turned into a pillory so soon! _"O corse a cheveux plats, que la France etait belle Au soleil de Messidor!"_