give them to her; if she should not, put them in the corner of your country-place, note the exact location of the spot, which you will send to her by some safe person.  When one has served me well he should not be in want.  Your wife will build a farm, in which she will invest this money; she will live with your mother and sister, and you will not have the fear of leaving her in need.”  Even more moved by the provident kindness of the Emperor, who thus deigned to consider the interests of my family affairs, than delighted with the great value of the present he had made me, I could hardly find words to express to him my gratitude; and such was, besides, my carelessness of the future, so far from me had been the thought that this great Empire could come to an end, that this was the first time I had really considered the embarrassed condition in which I would have left my family, if the Emperor had not thus generously provided for them.  I had, in fact, no fortune, and possessed in all the world only my pillaged house, and the fifty thousand francs destined to repair it.

Under these circumstances, not knowing when I should see my wife again, I made arrangements to follow the advice his Majesty had been kind enough to give me; converted my hundred thousand francs into gold, which I put into five bags; and taking with me the wardrobe boy Denis, whose honesty was above suspicion, we followed the road through the forest to avoid being seen by any of the persons who occupied my house.  We cautiously entered a little inclosure belonging to me, the gate of which could not be seen on account of the trees, although they were now without foliage; and with the aid of Denis I succeeded in burying my treasure, after taking an exact note of the place, and then returned to the palace, being certainly very far from foreseeing how much chagrin and tribulation those hundred thousand francs would cause me, as we shall see in the succeeding chapters.

CHAPTER XXVII.

Here more than ever I must beg the indulgence of my readers as to the order in which I relate the events I witnessed during the Emperor’s stay at Fontainebleau, and those connected with them which did not come to my knowledge until later.  I must also apologize for any inaccuracy in dates of which I may be guilty, though I remember collectively, so to speak, all that occurred during the unhappy twenty days which ensued between the occupation of Paris and the departure of his Majesty for the Island of Elba; for I was so completely absorbed in the unhappy condition of my good master that all my faculties hardly sufficed for the sensations I experienced every moment.  We suffered in the Emperor’s sufferings; it occurred to none of us to imprint on his memory the recollection of so much agony, for we lived, so to speak, only provisionally.