“Ah, my poor child, what a sad meeting is this!  I would cheerfully have surrendered my house to the Emperor, but the people he has about him have no sense of decency.  They lay hands on everything, without so much as saying, ‘By your leave,’ and I am afraid they will burn the house down with their great fires!  He, poor man, looks like a corpse, and such sadness in his face—­”

And when the young man took leave of her with a few murmured words of comfort she went with him to the door, and leaning over the banister:  “Look!” she softly said, “you can see him from where you are.  Ah! we are all undone.  Adieu, my child!”

Maurice remained planted like a statue on one of the steps of the dark staircase.  Craning his neck and directing his glance through the glazed fanlight over the door of the apartment, he beheld a sight that was never to fade from his memory.

In the bare and cheerless room, the conventional bourgeois “parlor,” was the Emperor, seated at a table on which his plate was laid, lighted at either end by wax candles in great silver candelabra.  Silent in the background stood two aides-de-camp with folded arms.  The wine in the glass was untasted, the bread untouched, a breast of chicken was cooling on the plate.  The Emperor did not stir; he sat staring down at the cloth with those dim, lusterless, watery eyes that the young man remembered to have seen before at Rheims; but he appeared more weary than then, and when, evidently at the cost of a great effort, he had raised a couple of mouthfuls to his lips, he impatiently pushed the remainder of the food from him with his hand.  That was his dinner.  His pale face was blanched with an expression of suffering endured in silence.

As Maurice was passing the dining room on the floor beneath, the door was suddenly thrown open, and through the glow of candles and the steam of smoking joints he caught a glimpse of a table of equerries, chamberlains, and aides-de-camp, engaged in devouring the Emperor’s game and poultry and drinking his champagne, amid a great hubbub of conversation.  Now that the marshal’s dispatch had been sent off, all these people were delighted to know that the retreat was assured.  In a week they would be at Paris and could sleep between clean sheets.

Then, for the first time, Maurice suddenly became conscious of the terrible fatigue that was oppressing him like a physical burden; there was no longer room for doubt, the whole army was about to fall back, and the best thing for him to do was to get some sleep while waiting for the 7th corps to pass.  He made his way back across the square to the house of his friend Combette, where, like one in a dream, he ate some dinner, after which he was mistily conscious of someone dressing his foot and then conducting him upstairs to a bedroom.  And then all was blackness and utter annihilation; he slept a dreamless, unstirring sleep.  But after an uncertain length of time—­hours,