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Invalided soldiers begged to resume their service. Hundreds of these brave soldiers forgot their sufferings, and covered with honorable wounds went forth again to confront the enemy. Alas! very few of those who then left the Hotel des Invalides were fortunate enough to return.
And while the crisis is going on, Mirabeau is away, sad at heart for the dying, crabbed old father whom he loved. Muskets are to be got from the Invalides; 28,000 National Guards are provided with matchlocks. And now to the Bastile! But to describe this siege perhaps transcends the talent of mortals. After four hours of world-bedlam, it surrenders. The Bastile is down.
Thanks to these contributions, even an exacting Parisian would have been pleased with the rooms the young couple had taken in the Rue Saint-Dominique, near the Invalides. Everything seemed in harmony with their love, pure, honest, and sincere. At last the great day dawned for it was to be a great day not only for Wenceslas and Hortense, but for old Hulot too.
To go round the Hotel des Invalides with Larrey was to live over the campaigns of Napoleon, to look on the sun of Austerlitz, to hear the cannons of Marengo, to struggle through the icy waters of the Beresina, to shiver in the snows of the Russian retreat, and to gaze through the battle smoke upon the last charge of the red lancers on the redder field of Waterloo.
The principal attraction of the city to strangers is the famous Golden Temple, so called because the cupola is covered with a thin layer of the precious metal, having the same effect as that of the dome of the Invalides at Paris, or that of the Boston State House.
At noon all the civil and military authorities assembled at the Invalides; and the body was transferred from the dome into the church, and placed on a catafalque in the shape of a great Egyptian pyramid, raised on an elevated platform, and approached through four large arches, the posts of which were entwined with garlands of laurels interlaced with cypress.
In contrast to all this the gay bourgeois district of Passy rises up across the Seine; while the rich aristocratic quarters of the Invalides and the Faubourg St. Germain spread out close by. Thus the Beauchene works on the quay, as their owner laughingly said, turned their back upon misery and looked towards all the prosperity and gayety of this world.
The Expiatory Chapel raised to the memory of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette on the site of the old cemetery of the Madeleine where they lay, until transferred to St. Denis, in one red burial with the brave Swiss Guards who vainly spent their lives for them is now threatened with demolition. Three new bridges of the Invalides, the Archevêché and Arcole were added, and fifty-five new streets.
I liked Florac none the less, I own, because that one of the conditions of the Colonel's present life, which appeared the hardest to most people, affected Florac but little. To be a Pensioner of an Ancient Institution? Why not? Might not a man retire without shame to the Invalides at the close of his campaigns, and, had not Fortune conquered our old friend, and age and disaster overcome him?
The white-haired workman whom Marius had encountered in the vicinity of the Invalides recurred to his mind. It now seemed probable that that workingman and M. Leblanc were one and the same person. So he disguised himself? That man had his heroic and his equivocal sides. Why had he not called for help? Why had he fled? Was he, or was he not, the father of the young girl?
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