“It was indeed the Emperor, just in the same place and carriage, with one aide-de-camp near him and one opposite him, as I had seen him before. But his companions were neither Jerome nor Letort. Letort was killed, and Jerome was commissioned to rally the army by Laon. “It was just the same man, it was just the same pale, sickly, impassive face, but his head was bent a little more forward on his chest. “Was it merely from fatigue, or from grief at having staked the world and lost it? “As on the first occasion, he raised his head when he felt the carriage pull up, and threw exactly vague look around him which became so penetrating when he fixed it upon a person or scanned the horizon, those two unknown elements behind which danger might always lurk. “‘Where are we?’ he asked. “‘At Villers-Cotterets, sire.’ “‘Good! eighteen leagues from Paris?’ “‘Yes, sire.’ “‘Go on.’” In his second abdication, signed on the 22nd June, the Emperor declared that his public life was finished, and proclaimed his son as Napoleon II., Emperor of the French. But the child for whom his father had anticipated so glorious a career in 1811, who had been born with the mighty title of King of Rome, was never destined to wear the crown of France. That insignia of royal rank was donned once more by Louis XVIII. The mighty conqueror had run his course. He threw himself on the mercy of the nation to which he had shown no mercy, and which he had hated with exceeding hatred. Great Britain consigned him to the island rock of St Helena, far away on the broad bosom of the Atlantic, and in the well-known picture by the late Sir W. Q. Orchardson, “Napoleon on the ‘Bellerophon,’” we see Napoleon taking his final farewell of France. He stands alone, bearing, in place of the weight of Empire, the almost insupportable burden of shattered hopes. Gone dynasty and throne and kindred, everything that was worth while in his complex life, but the Imperial Dignity will never be discarded. He remains Napoleon the Great. The rigidity of the mouth and the stern and unbending demeanour tell you that the will is still unconquered. [Illustration: Napoleon on Board the “Bellerophon” By Sir W. Q. Orchardson, R.A. By permission of the Berlin Photographic Co., London, W.]