Page:The invasion of the Crimea vol. 2.djvu/207

 PRECEDING THE INVASION. 177 Faubourg, had left England on the lOtli of April chap. XII 1854; and on the following day both he and His L_ Royal Highness the Duke of Cambridge were received in state at the Tuileries. The presence of a member of our Eoyal Family was welcome to the new Emperor : he understood its signi- ficance. The Parisians love to see a momentous idea so impersonated as to be visible to the eyes of the body ; and when their monarch attained to be seen riding between the near kinsman of the English Queen and the appointed commander of her army in the field — when on a bright spring day he showed his guest some thirty thousand of his best troops in the Champs de Mars, and the scarlet of the ancient enemy sparkled gaily by the side of the blue and the gold — the people seemed to accept the scene as a fitting picture of the great alliance of the West. Almost for the first time in the history of France, the accustomed cheers given to the Head of the State were mingled with cheers for England. But now the time for concerted action had come; and though France and England were already allied by such bonds as are made with parchment and wax, it remained to be seen whether the great rivals could act together in arms. The conjuncture, indeed, drew them to- wards each other ; but it was certain that the coherence of the union would greatly depend on one man. It might seem that he who had first sworn to maintain the French Eepublic, and had afterwards destroyed it by stealtli in the night- VOLu II. M