One night, that of the 25th of February, at the end of a ball of which the Princess Borghese was doing the honours, he made his escape with victory, long his comrade and accomplice; he crossed a sea covered with our fleets, met two frigates, a ship of 74 guns and the man-of-war brig _Zéphyr_, which spoke and questioned him; he himself replied to the captain's questions; the sea and the waves saluted him, and he pursued his course. The deck of the _Inconstant_, his little ship, served him as a room for exercise and as a writing-closet; he dictated amid the winds and had copies made, on that shifting table, of three proclamations to the army and to France; some feluccas, carrying his companions in adventure, flew the white flag strewn with stars around his admiral bark. On the 1st of March, at three o'clock in the morning, he struck the coast of France between Cannes and Antibes, in the Golfe Jouan; he landed, strolled along the _riviera_, gathered violets, and bivouacked in a plantation of olive-trees. The dumfoundered population retired. He avoided Antibes and threw himself into the mountains of Grasse, passing through Sernon, Barrème, Digne and Gap. At Sisteron, twenty men could have stopped him, and he found nobody. He went on, meeting no obstacle among those inhabitants who, a few months earlier, had wished to cut his throat. Whenever a few soldiers entered the void which formed around his gigantic shadow, they were invincibly drawn on by the attraction of his eagles. His fascinated enemies sought him and did not see him; he hid himself in his glory, as the lion of the Sahara hides himself in the rays of the sun to avoid the sight of the dazzled hunters. Enveloped in a fiery cyclone, the bloody phantoms of Areola, Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, Friedland, Eylau, the Moskowa, Lützen, Bautzen formed his retinue with a million of dead. From the midst of this column of fire and smoke, there issued, at the entrance to the towns, a few trumpet-blasts mingled with the signals of the tricoloured _labarum_: and the gates of the town fell. When Napoleon crossed the Niemen, at the head of four-hundred thousand foot and a hundred thousand horse, to blow up the palace of the Tsars in Moscow, he was less astonished than when, breaking his ban and flinging his irons in the faces of the kings, he came alone, from Cannes to Paris, to sleep peacefully at the Tuileries.