As he sat apart from me for some time, silent and motionless, I could not help imagining in how many a hard-fought day he had borne a part, for he evidently, from his age and bearing, had been one of the soldiers of the empire.  I invited him to partake of my bottle of Medoc, by which he seemed flattered.  When the flask became low, and was replaced by another, he appeared to have lost much of his constrained air, and seemed forgetting rapidly the suspicious circumstances which he supposed attached to me—­waxed wondrous confidential and communicative, and condescended to impart some traits of a life which was not without its vicissitudes, for he had been, as I suspected, one of the “Guarde”—­the old guarde—­was wounded at Marengo, and received the croix d’honneur in the field of Wagram, from the hands of the Emperor himself.  The headlong enthusiasm of attachment to Napoleon, which his brief and stormy career elicited even from those who suffered long and deeply in his behalf, is not one of the least singular circumstances which this portion of history displays.  While the rigours of the conscription had invaded every family in France, from Normandie to La Vendee—­while the untilled fields, the ruined granaries, the half-deserted villages, all attested the depopulation of the land, those talismanic words, “l’Empereur et la gloire,” by some magic mechanism seemed all-sufficient not only to repress regret and suffering, but even stimulate pride, and nourish valour; and even yet, when it might be supposed that like the brilliant glass of a magic lantern, the gaudy pageant had passed away, leaving only the darkness and desolation behind it—­the memory of those days under the empire survives untarnished and unimpaired, and every sacrifice of friends or fortune is accounted but little in the balance when the honour of La Belle France, and the triumphs of the grand “armee,” are weighted against them.  The infatuated and enthusiastic followers of this great man would seem, in some respects, to resemble the drunkard in the “Vaudeville,” who alleged as his excuse for drinking, that whenever he was sober his poverty disgusted him.  “My cabin,” said he, “is a cell, my wife a mass of old rags, my child a wretched object of misery and malady.  But give me brandy; let me only have that, and then my hut is a palace, my wife is a princess, and my child the very picture of health and happiness;” so with these people—­intoxicated with the triumphs of their nation, “tete monte” with victory—­they cannot exist in the horror of sobriety which peace necessarily enforces; and whenever the subject turns in conversation upon the distresses of the time or the evil prospects of the country, they call out, not like the drunkard, for brandy, but in the same spirit they say—­“Ah, if you would again see France flourishing and happy, let us once more have our croix d’honneur, our epaulettes, our voluntary contributions, our Murillos, our Velasquez, our spoils from Venice, and our increased