After the last Eagle had gone past the throne, when Napoleon had left on his way back to the Tuileries, as the troops were moving off the ground to return to their quarters, unanticipated trouble suddenly arose in connection with the old flags. What happened may best, perhaps, be described in the words of an eye-witness, a General present on the Field of Mars, Baron Thiébault: “Immediately after the Emperor had gone and the seats all round were empty, finding it tiresome to be loaded with the double set of standards, all the more so, no doubt, as it was raining, the standard-bearers apparently could think of nothing better than to rid themselves of the superseded flags. They began everywhere to throw them down, that is, to drop them where they stood in the mud. There they were trampled under foot by the soldiers as they passed along on their way back to quarters.” The outrage scandalised the older soldiers, and very nearly brought about a mutiny among some of them. “Indignant,” to continue in General Thiébault’s words, “at such an outrage to national emblems which the Army had been honouring and defending for thirteen years past, many of the men in the regiments began to grumble and make angry protestations. Presently oaths and violent imprecations burst out on all sides; and then some of the grenadiers became mutinous and defiant. They declared that they would go back, regardless of the consequences, and forcibly recover possession of the old colours.” [Sidenote: THE SITUATION JUST SAVED] The situation speedily became so threatening that General Thiébault hastened off to warn Murat of what was happening. As he went he came across one of the adjutants of the Commandant of the Military School. On the spur of the moment he gave him orders to get together what men he could of the party who had been keeping the parade ground. Of these Thiébault took personal charge and sent them round at once to collect the thrown-down colours and carry them inside the Ecole Militaire. Apparently that satisfied the soldiers--anxious, most of them, to get out of the wet as soon as possible. General Thiébault tried after that to find Murat, intending to report to him; but Murat had by then left the Field of Mars. In the end the General decided, as perhaps the wisest course, to refrain from saying anything; not to take official notice of what had happened. After all he was not on duty at the parade; he was only in Paris as an invited guest at the Coronation festivities. Nobody, as a fact, said a word of the affair. By the authorities all reference to it seems purposely to have been hushed up. Not a hint of anything of the sort appeared in the _Moniteur_, which published a fairly full report of the day’s proceedings; not a word in any of the other Parisian papers.