Page:The Count of Monte-Cristo (1887 Volume 1).djvu/83

 

N one of those old aristocratical mansions, built by Puget, situated in the Rue du Grand Cours opposite the fountain of Medusa, a second marriage feast was being celebrated, on the same day and at the same hour; only, while the actors in one scene were plain people, sailors and soldiers, in the other they belonged to the heads of Marseillaise society,—magistrates who had resigned their office during the usurper's reign; officers who had deserted our ranks to join the army of Condé; youths who had been brought up by their family, hardly yet assured of their existence, in spite of the substitutes they had paid for, to hate and execrate the man whom five years of exile ought to have converted into a martyr, and fifteen of restoration elevated to a demi-god.

The guests were at table, and the conversation was animated and heated with all the passions of the epoch—passions more terrible, active, and bitter in the south, because for five years religious hatreds had reënforced political hatreds.

The emperor, now king of the petty isle of Elba, after having held sovereign sway over one half of the world, counting us, his subjects, a population of five or six thousand,—after having been accustomed to hear the Vive Napoléons of one hundred and twenty millions uttered in ten different languages,—was looked upon as a man ruined forever for France and the throne.

The magistrates talked of political blunders; the military talked of Moscow and Leipsic, and the women of his divorce from Josephine. It seemed to this royalist world, joyous and triumphant, less at the fall of the man than at the annihilation of the principles he represented, as if life were again beginning after a peaceful dream.

An old man, decorated with the cross of Saint Louis, now rose and