God had pronounced one of those words by which the silence of eternity is at rare intervals interrupted. Then, in the midst of the present generation, rose the hammer that struck the hour which Paris had only once heard sound: on the 25th of December 496, Rheims announced the baptism of Clovis, and the gates of Lutetia opened to the Franks; on the 30th of March 1814, after the baptism of blood of Louis XVI., the old hammer, which had so long remained motionless, rose once more in the belfry of the ancient monarchy: a second stroke resounded, the Tartars penetrated into Paris. In the interval of thirteen hundred and eighteen years, the foreigner had insulted the walls of the capital of our empire without ever being able to enter it, except when he glided in, summoned by our own divisions. The Normans besieged the city of the _Parisii_; the _Parisii_ gave flight to the hawks which they carried on their wrists; Odo[128], child of Paris and future King, "_rex futurus_," Abbon[129] says, drove back the pirates of the North: the Parisians let fly their eagles in 1814; the Allies entered the Louvre. Bonaparte had waged an unjust war against Alexander, his admirer, who had begged on his knees for peace; Bonaparte had ordered the carnage of the Moskowa; he had forced the Russians themselves to bum Moscow; Bonaparte had plundered Berlin, humiliated its King, insulted its Queen[130]: what reprisals were we, then, to expect? You shall see. I had wandered in the Floridas round unknown monuments, devastated of old by conquerors of whom no trace remains, and I was saved for the sight of the Caucasian hordes encamped in the court-yard of the Louvre. In those events of history which, according to Montaigne, "are but weake testimonies of our worth and capacity[131]," my tongue cleaves to my palate: _adhæret lingua mea faucibus meis._[132] The Allied Army entered Paris on the 31st of March 1814, at mid-day, ten days only after the anniversary of the death of the Duc d'Enghien, 21 March 1804. Was it worth Bonaparte's while to commit an action of such long remembrance for a reign which was to last so short a time? The Emperor of Russia and the King of Prussia rode at the head of their troops. I saw them defile along the boulevards. Feeling stupefied and dumfoundered within myself, as though my name as a Frenchman had been tom from me to substitute for it the name by which I was thenceforth to be known in the mines of Siberia, I felt, at the same time, my exasperation increase against the man whose glory had reduced us to that disgrace.