To what sanctuary? From earthquake shocks there is no sheltering cell! --Is this what men call conquest? Must it close As historied conquests do, or be annulled By modern reason and the urbaner sense?-- Such issue none would venture to predict, Yet folly 'twere to nourish foreshaped fears And suffer in conjecture and in deed.-- If verily our country be dislimbed, Then at the mercy of his domination The face of earth will lie, and vassal kings Stand waiting on himself the Overking, Who ruling rules all; till desperateness Sting and excite a bonded last resistance, And work its own release. SECOND LADY He comes even now From sacrilege. I learn that, since the fight, In marching here by Potsdam yesterday, Sans-Souci Palace drew his curious feet, Where even great Frederick's tomb was bared to him. FOURTH LADY All objects on the Palace--cared for, kept Even as they were when our arch-monarch died-- The books, the chair, the inkhorn, and the pen He quizzed with flippant curiosity; And entering where our hero's bones are urned He seized the sword and standards treasured there, And with a mixed effrontery and regard Declared they should be all dispatched to Paris As gifts to the Hotel des Invalides. THIRD LADY Such rodomontade is cheap: what matters it! [A galaxy of marshals, forming Napoleon's staff, now enters the Platz immediately before the windows. In the midst rides the EMPEROR himself. The ladies are silent. The procession passes along the front until it reaches the entrance to the Royal Palace. At the door NAPOLEON descends from his horse and goes into the building amid the resonant trumpetings of his soldiers and the silence of the crowd.] SECOND LADY [impressed] O why does such a man debase himself By countenancing loud scurrility Against a queen who cannot make reprise! A power so ponderous needs no littleness-- The last resort of feeble desperates! [Enter fifth lady.] FIFTH LADY [breathlessly] Humiliation grows acuter still. He placards rhetoric to his soldiery On their distress of us and our allies, Declaring he'll not stack away his arms Till he has choked the remaining foes of France In their own gainful glut.--Whom means he, think you? FIRST LADY Us? THIRD LADY Russia? Austria? FIFTH LADY Neither: England.--Yea, Her he still holds the master mischief-mind, And marrer of the countries' quietude, By exercising untold tyranny Over all the ports and seas. SECOND LADY Then England's doomed! When he has overturned the Russian rule, England comes next for wrack. They say that know!... Look--he has entered by the Royal doors And makes the Palace his.--Now let us go!-- Our course, alas! is--whither? [Exeunt ladies. The curtain drops temporarily.] SEMICHORUS I OF IRONIC SPIRITS [aerial music]