The Bronze Eagle Part 21

"Let us drink to that proposition, my dear Marchand," concludes M. le Comte with a smile.

Hardly had the two men concluded this toast, when a fearful din is heard, "regular howls" proceeding from the suburb of Bonne. The windows of the hotel give on the ramparts and the house itself dominates the Bonne Gate and the military ground beyond it. Hastily Marchand jumps up from the table and throws open the window. He and the Comte step out upon the balcony.

The din has become deafening: with a hand that slightly trembles now General Marchand points to the extensive grounds that lie beyond the city gate, and M. le Comte quickly smothers an exclamation of terror.

A huge crowd of peasants armed with scythes and carrying torches which flicker in the frosty air have invaded the slopes and flats of the military zone. They are yelling "Vive l'Empereur!" at the top of their voices, and from walls and bastions reverberates the answering cry "Vive l'Empereur!" vociferated by infantrymen and gunners and sapeurs, and echoed and re-echoed with pa.s.sionate enthusiasm by the people of Gren.o.ble a.s.sembled in their thousands in the narrow streets which abut upon the ramparts.

And in the midst of the peasantry, surrounded by them as by a cordon, Napoleon and his small army, just reinforced by the 7th regiment of infantry, have halted--expectant.

Napoleon's aide-de-camp, Capitaine Raoul, accompanied by half a dozen lancers, comes up to the palisade which bars the immediate approach to the city gates.

"Open!" he cries loudly, so loudly that his young, firm voice rises above the tumult around. "Open! in the name of the Emperor!"

Marchand sees it all, he hears the commanding summons, hears the thunderous and enthusiastic cheers which greet Captain Raoul's call to surrender. He and the Comte de Cambray are still standing upon the balcony of the hotel that faces the gate of Bonne and dominates from its high ground the ramparts opposite. White-cheeked and silent the two men have gazed before them and have understood. To attempt to stem this tide of popular enthusiasm would inevitably be fatal. The troops inside Gren.o.ble were as ready to cross over to "the brigand's" standard as was Colonel de la Bedoyere's regiment of infantry.

The ramparts and the surrounding military zone were lit up by hundreds of torches; by their flickering light the two men on the balcony could see the faces of the people, and those of the soldiers who were even now being ordered to fire upon Raoul and the Lancers.

Colonel Roussille, who is in command of the troops at the gate, sends a hasty messenger to General Marchand: "The brigand demands that we open the gate!" reports the messenger breathlessly.

"Tell the Colonel to give the order to fire," is Marchand's peremptory response.

"Are you coming with me, M. le Comte?" he asks hurriedly. But he does not wait for a reply. Wrapping his cloak around him, he goes in the wake of the messenger. M. le Comte de Cambray is close on his heels.

Five minutes later the General is up on the ramparts. He has thrown a quick, piercing glance round him. There are two thousand men up here, twenty guns, ammunition in plenty. Out there only peasants and a heterogeneous band of some fifteen hundred men. One shot from a gun perhaps would send all that crowd flying, the first fusillade might scatter "the band of brigands," but Marchand cannot, dare not give the positive order to fire; he knows that rank insubordination, positive refusal to obey would follow.

He talks to the men, he harangues, he begs them to defend their city against this "horde of Corsican pirates."

To every word he says, the men but oppose the one cry: "Vive l'Empereur!"

The Comte de Cambray turns in despair to M. de St. Genis, who is a captain of artillery and whose men had hitherto been supposed to be tried and loyal royalists.

"If the men won't fire, Maurice," asks the Comte in despair, "cannot the officers at least fire the first shot?"

"M. le Comte," replies St. Genis through set teeth, for his heart was filled with wrath and shame at the defection of his men, "the gunners have declared that if the officers shoot, the men will shatter them to pieces with their own batteries."

The crowds outside the gate itself are swelling visibly. They press in from every side toward the city loudly demanding the surrender of the town. "Open the gates! open!" they shout, and their clamour becomes more insistent every moment. Already they have broken down the palisades which surround the military zone, they pour down the slopes against the gate. But the latter is heavy, and ma.s.sive, studded with iron, stoutly resisting axe or pick.

"Open!" they cry. "Open! in the Emperor's name!"

They are within hailing distance of the soldiers on the ramparts: "What price your plums?" they shout gaily to the gunners.

"Quite cheap," retort the latter with equal gaiety, "but there's no danger of the Emperor getting any."

The women sing the old couplet:

"Bon! Bon! Napoleon Va rentrer dans sa maison!"

and the soldiers on the ramparts take up the refrain:

"Nous allons voir le grand Napoleon Le vainqueur de toutes les nations!"

"What can we do, M. le Comte?" says General Marchand at last. "We shall have to give in."

"I'll not stay and see it," replies the Comte. "I should die of shame."

Even while the two men are talking and discussing the possibilities of an early surrender, Napoleon himself has forced his way through the tumultuous throng of his supporters, and accompanied by Victor de Marmont and Colonel de la Bedoyere he advances as far as the gate which still stands barred defiantly against him.

"I command you to open this gate!" he cries aloud.

Colonel Roussille, who is in command, replies defiantly: "I only take orders from the General himself."

"He is relieved of his command," retorts Napoleon.

"I know my duty," insists Roussille. "I only take orders from the General."

Victor de Marmont, intoxicated with his own enthusiasm, maddened with rage at sight of St. Genis, whose face is just then thrown into vivid light by the glare of the torches, cries wildly: "Soldiers of the Emperor, who are being forced to resist him, turn on those treacherous officers of yours, tear off their epaulettes, I say!"

His shrill and frantic cries seem to precipitate the inevitable climax.

The tumult has become absolutely delirious. The soldiers on the ramparts tumble over one another in a mad rush for the gate, which they try to break open with the b.u.t.t-end of their rifles; but they dare not actually attack their own officers, and in any case they know that the keys of the city are still in the hands of General Marchand, and General Marchand has suddenly disappeared.

Feeling the hopelessness and futility of further resistance, he has gone back to his hotel, and is even now giving orders and making preparations for leaving Gren.o.ble. Prefet Fourier, hastily summoned, is with him, and the Comte de Cambray is preparing to return immediately to Brestalou.

"We shall all leave for Paris to-morrow, as early as possible," he says, as he finally takes leave of the General and the prefet, "and take the money with us, of course. If the King--which G.o.d forbid!--is obliged to leave Paris, it will be most acceptable to him, until the day when the allies are once more in the field and ready to crush, irretrievably this time, this Corsican scourge of Europe."

One or two of the royalist officers have succeeded in ma.s.sing together some two or three hundred men out of several regiments who appear to be determined to remain loyal.

St. Genis is not among these: his men had been among the first to cry "Vive l'Empereur!" when ordered to fire on the brigand and his hordes.

They had even gone so far as to threaten their officers' lives.

Now, covered with shame, and boiling with wrath at the defection, St.

Genis asks leave of the General to escort M. le Comte de Cambray and his party to Paris.

"We shall be better off for extra protection," urges M. le Comte de Cambray in support of St. Genis' plea for leave. "I shall only have the coachman and two postillions with me. M. de St. Genis would be of immense a.s.sistance in case of footpads."

"The road to Paris is quite safe, I believe," says General Marchand, "and at Lyons you will meet the army of M. le Comte d'Artois. But perhaps M. de St. Genis had better accompany you as far as there, at any rate. He can then report himself at Lyons. Twenty-five millions is a large sum, of course, but the purpose of your journey has remained a secret, has it not?"

"Of course," says M. le Comte unhesitatingly, for he has completely erased Victor de Marmont from his mind.

"Well then, all you need fear is an attack from footpads--and even that is unlikely," concludes General Marchand, who by now is in a great hurry to go. "But M. de St. Genis has my permission to escort you."

The General entrusts the keys of the Bonne Gate to Colonel Roussille. He has barely time to execute his hasty flight, having arranged to escape out of Gren.o.ble by the St. Laurent Gate on the north of the town. In the meanwhile a carter from the suburb of St. Joseph outside the Bonne Gate has harnessed a team of horses to one of his wagons and brought along a huge joist: twenty pairs of willing and stout arms are already manipulating this powerful engine for the breaking open of the resisting gate. Already the doors are giving way, the hinges creak; and while General Marchand and prefet Fourier with their small body of faithful soldiers rush precipitately across the deserted streets of the town, Colonel Roussille makes ready to open the Gate of Bonne to the Emperor and to his soldiers.

"My regiment was prepared to turn against me," he says to his men, "but I shall not turn against them."

Then he formally throws open the gate.

Ecstatic delight, joyful enthusiasm, succeeds the frantic cries of a while ago. Napoleon entering the city of Gren.o.ble was nearly crushed to death by the frenzy of the crowd. Cheered to the echoes, surrounded by a delirious populace which hardly allowed him to move, it was hours before he succeeded in reaching the Hotel des Trois-Dauphins, where he was resolved to spend the night, since it was kept by an ex-soldier, one of his own Old Guard of the Italian campaign.