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.

But small attention was paid to dates; his story was of the dire shock
of conflicting nations, and was not to be hampered by the minute
exactitude of the historian. Successively or together English,
Austrians, Prussians, Russians appeared upon the scene, according to
the then prevailing condition of the ever-changing alliances, and it
was not always an easy matter to tell why one nation received a
beating in preference to another, but beaten they all were in the end,
inevitably beaten from the very commencement, in a whirlwind of genius
and heroic daring that swept great armies like chaff from off the
earth. There was Marengo, the classic battle of the plain, with the
consummate generalship of its broad plan and the faultless retreat of
the battalions by squares, silent and impassive under the enemy's
terrible fire; the battle, famous in story, lost at three o'clock and
won at six, where the eight hundred grenadiers of the Consular Guard
withstood the onset of the entire Austrian cavalry, where Desaix
arrived to change impending defeat to glorious victory and die. There
was Austerlitz, with its sun of glory shining forth from amid the
wintry sky, Austerlitz, commencing with the capture of the plateau of
Pratzen and ending with the frightful catastrophe on the frozen lake,
where an entire Russian corps, men, guns, horses, went crashing
through the ice, while Napoleon, who in his divine omniscience had