A few days more, and those swearers of the Champ de Mai will carry back their devotion to Louis XVIII. in the halls of the Tuileries; they will approach the sacred table of the God of Peace, in order to have themselves appointed ministers at the banquets of war[316]; heralds-at-arms and brandishers of the royal insignia at the coronation of Bonaparte, they will fulfil the same functions at the coronation of Charles X.[317]; then, as the commissaries of another power[318], they will lead that King a prisoner to Cherbourg, scarce finding a little corner free in their consciences to hang up in it the badge of their new oath. It is hard to be born in times of improbity, in those days when two men talking together study how to keep back words from their tongue, for fear of offending each other and of mutually making one another blush. Those who had not been able to tie themselves to Napoleon by his glory, who had not been able to adhere from gratitude to the benefactor from whom they had received their riches, their honours and their very names, were they likely to sacrifice themselves now to his needy hopes? Would they link themselves to a precarious and reincipient fortune, the ingrates whom a fortune consolidated by unexampled successes and by a possession of sixteen years of victories had failed to fix? So many chrysalides who, between two spring-times, had put off and put on, shed and resumed the skin of the Legitimist and the Revolutionary, of the Napoleonist and the Bourbonist; so many words given and broken; so many crosses moved from the knight's breast to the horse's tail and from the horse's tail to the knight's breast; so many doughty warriors changing their banners and strewing the lists with their pledges of perjured faith; so many noble dames, the attendants by turns of Marie-Louise and Marie-Caroline[319], were calculated to leave in the depths of Napoleon's heart naught but distrust, horror and contempt; that great man grown old stood alone among all those traitors, men and fortune, on a tottering earth, under a hostile sky, in front of his accomplished destiny and the judgment of God. * Napoleon had found no faithful friends, but the phantoms of his past glory; these escorted him, as I have told you, from the spot at which he landed to the capital of France. But the eagles which had "flown from steeple to steeple" from Cannes to Paris alighted wearily upon the chimneys of the Tuileries, able to go no further.