jailer, deep thoughts arise as one considers the vanity of political
calculations, the emptiness of glory, of power, and of genius.

Poor boy! His birth was greeted with countless thanksgivings,
celebrations, and joyous applause. Paris was beside itself when in the
morning of March 20, 1811, there sounded the twenty-second report of a
cannon, announcing that the Emperor had, not a daughter, but a son. He
lay in a costly cradle of mother-of-pearl and gold, surmounted by a
winged Victory which seemed to protect the slumbers of the King of Rome.
The Imperial heir in his gilded baby-carriage drawn by two snow-white
sheep beneath the trees at Saint Cloud was a charming object. He was but
a year old when Gerard painted him in his cradle, playing with a cup and
ball, as if the cup were a sceptre and the ball were the world, with
which his childish hands were playing. When on the eve of the battle
of Moskowa, Napoleon was giving his final orders for the tremendous
struggle of the next day, a courier, M. de Bausset, arrived suddenly
from Paris, bringing with him this masterpiece of Gerard's; at once the
General forgot his anxieties in his paternal joy. "Gentlemen," said
Napoleon to his officers, "if my son were fifteen years old, you may be
sure that he would be here among this multitude of brave men, and not
merely in a picture." Then he had the portrait of the King of Rome set
out in front of his tent, on a chair, that the sight of it might be an
added excitement to victory. And the old grenadiers of the Imperial
Guard, the veterans with their grizzly moustaches,--the men who were
never to abandon their Emperor, who followed him to Elba, and died at
Waterloo,--heroes, as kind as they were brave, actually cried with joy
as they gazed at the portrait of this boy whose glorious future they
hoped to make sure by their brave deeds.

But what a sad future it was! Within less than two years Cossacks were