For a few minutes the Emperor walked up and down his room in silence, with the wavering step of a sick man. The only person there besides himself was an aide-de-camp, standing erect and silent near a door. And, with a disfigured face which was now twitching with a nervous tic, Napoleon kept pacing to and fro between the chimney-piece and the window. His back appeared to have become more bent, as though a world had fallen upon it; and his dim eyes, veiled by their heavy lids, bespoke the resignation of the fatalist who has played and lost his final game with Destiny. Each time, however, that he reached the window, set ajar, he gave a start which, for a second, made him pause; and during one of those brief halts he raised a trembling hand and muttered: 'Oh! those guns, those guns! one has heard them ever since the morning.' From that spot, indeed, the roaring of the batteries of the Marfée and Frénois hills reached the ear with extraordinary violence--it was a rolling thunder, which not merely rattled the window panes, but shook the very walls, a stubborn, incessant, exasperating uproar. And the Emperor must have reflected that the struggle was henceforth a hopeless one, that all resistance was becoming a crime. What could it avail, why should more blood be spilt, more limbs be shattered, more heads be carried off, more and more dead be ever and ever added to those already scattered across the country-side? Since they, the French, were vanquished, since it was all over, why continue the massacre any longer? Sufficient abomination and suffering already cried out aloud under the sun. Once more did the Emperor reach the window, and again he began to tremble, with his hands raised: 'Oh! those guns, those guns! Will they never stop?' Perhaps the terrible thought of his responsibility was arising within him, with a vision of the thousands of bleeding corpses stretched upon the ground over yonder, through his fault. Perhaps, though, it was but the melting of his heart--the pitiful heart of a dreamer, of a man in reality good-natured and haunted by humanitarian notions. And albeit Fate had dealt him this frightful blow--which was crushing and sweeping away his fortune as though it were but a bit of straw--he yet found tears for others, was distracted that this useless butchery should still continue, and lacked the strength to endure it any longer. That villainous cannonade was now rending his breast, at each moment increasing his agony. 'Oh! those guns, those guns! Make them stop firing at once--at once.'