and Marie Antoinette lay in that dust.
In the moat of Vincennes a sepulchral shaft sprang from the earth, recalling the fact that the Duc d'Enghien had perished in the very month when Napoleon was crowned.
Pope Pius VII., who had performed the coronation very near this death, tranquilly bestowed his blessing on the fall as he had bestowed it on the elevation. At Schoenbrunn there was a little shadow, aged four, whom it was seditious to call the King of Rome.
And these things took place, and the kings resumed their thrones, and the master of Europe was put in a cage, and the old regime became the new regime, and all the shadows and all the light of the earth changed place, because, on the afternoon of a certain summer's day, a shepherd said to a Prussian in the forest, "Go this way, and not that!"
This 1815 was a sort of lugubrious April.
Ancient unhealthy and poisonous realities were covered with new appearances. A lie wedded 1789; the right divine was masked under a charter; fictions became constitutional; prejudices, superstitions and mental reservations, with Article 14 in the heart, were varnished over with liberalism.
It was the serpent's change of skin.
Man had been rendered both greater and smaller by Napoleon. Under this reign of splendid matter, the ideal had received the strange name of ideology!
It is a grave imprudence in a great man to turn the future into derision.
The populace, however, that food for cannon which is so fond of the cannoneer, sought him with its glance.
Where is he?
What is he doing?
"Napoleon is dead," said a passer-by to a veteran of Marengo and Waterloo.
"He dead!" cried the soldier; "you don't know him."
Imagination distrusted this man, even when overthrown.
The depths of Europe were full of darkness after Waterloo.
Something enormous remained long empty through Napoleon's disappearance.
The kings placed themselves in this void.
Ancient Europe profited by it to undertake reforms.
There was a Holy Alliance; Belle-Alliance, Beautiful Alliance, the fatal field of Waterloo had said in advance.