Meanwhile the Prussians rushed in from the right. Wellington's Guards
rose and charged. Havoc came down with the darkness. A single regiment
of the Old Guard was formed by Napoleon into a last square around
which to rally the fugitives. The Emperor stood in the midst and
declared his purpose to die with them. Marshal Soult forced him out of
the melee, and the famous square, commanded by Cambronne--flinging his
profane objurgation into the teeth of the English--perished with the
wild cry of "_Vive l'Empereur!_"

Hugo says that the panic of the French admits of an explanation; that
the disappearance of the great man was necessary for the advent of a
great age; that in the battle of Waterloo there was more than a storm,
that is, the bursting of a meteor. "At nightfall," he continues,
"Bernard and Bertrand seized by the skirt of his coat in a field near
Genappe a haggard, thoughtful, gloomy man, who, carried so far by the
current of the rout, had just dismounted, passed the bridle over his
arm, and was now with wandering eye returning alone to Waterloo. It
was Napoleon, the immense somnambulist of a shattered dream!"

On the spot where French patriotism afterward planted the bronze lion
to commemorate forever the extinction of the Old Guard of the French
Empire, and of Napoleon the Great, the traveler from strange lands
pauses, at the distance of eighty years from the horrible cataclysm,
and reflects with wonder how within the memory of living men human
nature could have been raised by the passion of battle to such sublime
heroism as that displayed in these wheatfields and orchards where the
Old Guard of France sank into oblivion, but rose to immortal fame.