At half-past ten the aeronaut, Madame Blanchard, set forth in a balloon from the Champ de Mars, to throw down papers announcing the great news to the populace. The telegraph, unimpeded by any mist,--for it was a lovely spring day,--began to work in every direction, and by two o'clock answers had been received from Lyons, Brussels, Antwerp, Brest, and other large towns of the Empire. All of course gave expression to the wildest enthusiasm. In the course of the day Napoleon wrote to his father-in-law, the Emperor of Austria, to inform him of the happy event. "These are very good letters," he said; "I have never written better ones." Officers of the Emperor's household, pages, and couriers were despatched with letters and messages for the great bodies of the State, for the towns and cities, for the Ambassadors and Ministers of France and other powers. The Empress Josephine was not forgotten; Napoleon sent a page to her in her castle of Navarre, in Normandy. On the very day of his birth the King of Rome was privately christened at nine o'clock in the evening, in the chapel of the Tuileries, surrounded by his family and the court; the Emperor took his place in the middle of the chapel, on a chair with a prayer desk before it, beneath a canopy. Between the altar and the rail, on a granite base covered with white velvet, had been set a superb vermilion vase which served for the baptismal font. When Napoleon approached to present his son, there was a moment of religious silence, which contrasted with the noisy gayety of the vast crowd which had gathered near the Tuileries from every quarter of the city to see the fireworks and the magnificent illumination. "The houses," Constant says in his Memoirs, "were illuminated voluntarily. Those who try to make out from the outside appearance the real thoughts of a people on occasions like this, observed that the highest stories in the remotest quarters were as bright as the most sumptuous mansions. The public buildings, which are generally most brilliant in contrast with the darkness of the neighboring houses, now were scarcely to be distinguished in the profusion of lights which the rejoicing public had set in every window. The boatmen improvised a festival which lasted nearly all night, and attracted a huge and happy crowd to the banks of the river. The populace who had been through so many emotions, had celebrated so many victories in the last thirty years, displayed as much enthusiasm as if this were the first of its festivities in honor of a happy change in its destiny," March 22, Napoleon received in the throne-room at the Tuileries the great bodies of the State. "Your people," said the President of the Senate, "greet with unanimous applause this new star rising above the horizon of France, whose first ray scatters every shadow of future gloom."