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A pretty, white-necked waitress came up and asked him with a great display of flashing teeth:

“Will monsieur have breakfast?”

“Of course I will! Give me some eggs, a cutlet, and cheese. And a bottle of white wine!”

She turned to go; he called her back. “Tell me, is it not in one of those houses that the Emperor has his quarters?”

“There, monsieur, in that one right before you. Only you can’t see it, for it is concealed by the high wall with the overhanging trees.”

He loosed his belt so as to be more at ease in his capote, and entering the arbor, chose his table, on which the sunlight, finding its way here and there through the green canopy above, danced in little golden spangles. And constantly his thoughts kept returning to that high wall behind which was the Emperor. A most mysterious house it was, indeed, shrinking from the public gaze, even its slated roof invisible. Its entrance was on the other side, upon the village street, a narrow winding street between dead-walls, without a shop, without even a window to enliven it. The small garden in the rear, among the sparse dwellings that environed it, was like an island of dense verdure. And across the road he noticed a spacious courtyard, surrounded by sheds and stables, crowded with a countless train of carriages and baggage-wagons, among which men and horses, coming and going, kept up an unceasing bustle.

“Are those all for the service of the Emperor?” he inquired, meaning to say something humorous to the girl, who was laying a snow-white cloth upon the table.

“Yes, for the Emperor himself, and no one else!” she pleasantly replied, glad of a chance to show her white teeth once more; and then she went on to enumerate the suite from information that she had probably received from the stablemen, who had been coming to the inn to drink since the preceding day; there were the staff, comprising twenty-five officers, the sixty cent-gardes and the half-troop of guides for escort duty, the six gendarmes of the provost-guard; then the household, seventy-three persons in all, chamberlains, attendants for the table and the bedroom, cooks and scullions; then four saddle-horses and two carriages for the Emperor’s personal use, ten horses for the equerries, eight for the grooms and outriders, not mentioning forty-seven post-horses; then a char a banc and twelve baggage wagons, two of which, appropriated to the cooks, had particularly excited her admiration by reason of the number and variety of the utensils they contained, all in the most splendid order.

“Oh, sir, you never saw such stew-pans! they shone like silver. And all sorts of dishes, and jars and jugs, and lots of things of which it would puzzle me to tell the use! And a cellar of wine, claret, burgundy, and champagne–yes! enough to supply a wedding feast.”

The unusual luxury of the snowy table-cloth and the white wine sparkling in his glass sharpened Maurice’s appetite; he devoured his two poached eggs with a zest that made him fear he was developing epicurean tastes. When he turned to the left and looked out through the entrance of the leafy arbor he had before him the spacious plain, covered with long rows of tents: a busy, populous city that had risen like an exhalation from the stubble-fields between Rheims city and the canal. A few clumps of stunted trees, three wind-mills lifting their skeleton arms in the air, were all there was to relieve the monotony of the gray waste, but above the huddled roofs of Rheims, lost in the sea of foliage of the tall chestnut-trees, the huge bulk of the cathedral with its slender spires was profiled against the blue sky, looming colossal, notwithstanding the distance, beside the modest houses. Memories of school and boyhood’s days came over him, the tasks he had learned and recited: all about the sacre of our kings, the sainte ampoule, Clovis, Jeanne d’Arc, all the long list of glories of old France.

Then Maurice’s thoughts reverted again to that unassuming bourgeoise house, so mysterious in its solitude, and its imperial occupant; and directing his eyes upon the high, yellow wall he was surprised to read, scrawled there in great, awkward letters, the legend: Vive Napoleon! among the meaningless obscenities traced by schoolboys. Winter’s storms and summer’s sun had half effaced the lettering; evidently the inscription was very ancient. How strange, to see upon that wall that old heroic battle-cry, which probably had been placed there in honor of the uncle, not of the nephew! It brought all his childhood back to him, and Maurice was again a boy, scarcely out of his mother’s arms, down there in distant Chene-Populeux, listening to the stories of his grandfather, a veteran of the Grand Army. His mother was dead, his father, in the inglorious days that followed the collapse of the empire, had been compelled to accept a humble position as collector, and there the grandfather lived, with nothing to support him save his scanty pension, in the poor home of the small public functionary, his sole comfort to fight his battles o’er again for the benefit of his two little twin grandchildren, the boy and the girl, a pair of golden-haired youngsters to whom he was in some sense a mother. He would place Maurice on his right knee and Henriette on his left, and then for hours on end the narrative would run on in Homeric strain.