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Though the fatal year of 1870 summons the legions of France under the last of the Napoleons to defeat, Paris, queen of cities, has yet to see its days of fire and flame. The Prussians thunder at its gates. It is "l'annee terrible. "Dissension and rapine within. The mad wolves of the Commune are yet to rage over the bloody paths of the German conqueror.
To a fellow of the name of Dagee, who sang the coronation of Napoleon the First in two hundred of the most disgusting and ill-digested lines that ever were written, containing neither metre nor sense, was assigned a place in the administration of the forest department, worth twelve thousand livres in the year besides a present, in ready money, of one hundred napoleons d'or.
Amelia's followed half an hour afterwards. I don't know what made the Major note it so accurately. Jos, however, remained behind over the play-table; he was no gambler, but not averse to the little excitement of the sport now and then, and he had some Napoleons chinking in the embroidered pockets of his court waistcoat.
He returned and reported them to be four ten-pound Parrotts and two brass Napoleons; also that it would require a number of men to place them in position. I ordered him to report the same to General Wagner, and ask permission, but before receiving a reply was ordered by you to move forward my regiment on the left of the Fifty-Eighth Indiana Volunteers."
It was the number twenty-five: thirty-five napoleons for one, a hundred and forty dollars! Kitty uttered an ejaculation of delight. Many looked enviously at the winner as the neat little stack of gold was pushed toward her. She took the gold and placed it on black. Again she won. Then fortune packed up and went elsewhere. She lost steadily, winning but one bet in every ten.
Such a drama takes no long while to play out: development and catastrophe can often be measured by nothing clumsier than the moment-hand. "Faites votre jeu, mesdames et messieurs," said the automatic voice of destiny from between the mustache and imperial of the croupier: and Gwendolen's arm was stretched to deposit her last poor heap of napoleons. "Le jeu ne va plus," said destiny.
The surmises made as to the low state of his funds when he entered the room had been partly true; but time had been when he was able to gamble in a more costly fashion even than here, and to play among those who had taken his winnings and losings simply as a matter of course. And now the game had begun, and the twelve napoleons were duly deposited.
And to stand at the very top of your calling in a great city is something in itself, that is, if you like money, and influence, and a seat on the platform at public lectures, and gratuitous tickets to all sorts of places where you don't want to go, and, what is a good deal better than any of these things, a sense of power, limited, it may be, but absolute in its range, so that all the Caesars and Napoleons would have to stand aside, if they came between you and the exercise of your special vocation.
Now in Paris you can dine every day exactly as it suits your means and mood. You may dine for a couple of francs in a quiet, unknown street, and very well; or you may dine for a couple of napoleons in a flaming saloon, with windows opening on a crowded boulevard. London is deficient in dining capability." "You should belong to a club. Do you not?"
We may go a step further and declare that the actual people of any age can live in the memory of after ages only when the facts of their characters and their careers have been transmuted into a sort of fiction by the minds of creative historians. Actually, in 1815, there was but one Napoleon; now there are as many Napoleons as there are biographies and histories of him.
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