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Updated: June 13, 2025
But their great chief is silent and gloomy. Roland, the bravest of the brave, has been left behind with all the paladins, save Ganelon, beyond the gates of Spain. Last night the emperor dreamed he seemed to stand by Cizra's pass in Roncesvalles, when Ganelon appeared before him, wrenched the emperor's spear from out his hand, waved it on high, then dashed it in pieces. What did it mean?
Swords were then drawn, glasses clinked, the Representatives were thrown out at the windows, the imperial mantle fell upon the shoulders of Bonaparte, until the next morning again drove away the spook, and astonished Paris learned, from not very reserved Vestals and indiscreet Paladins, the danger it had once more escaped.
But when the Empire was in the full noonday of glory, and Napoleon was sending the flower of his troops to the Peninsula, her disappointed hopes revived. Natural curiosity prompted her to make an effort to see the heroes who were conquering Europe in obedience to a word from the Emperor in the order of the day; the heroes of a modern time who outdid the mythical feats of paladins of old.
She now presided at entertainments which were the gossip of the city, and to which stupid dukes aspired in vain; for Scarron would never have a dull man at his table, not even if he were loaded with diamonds and could trace his pedigree to the paladins of Charlemagne.
We will not describe the charge. Enthusiasts are not wanting who would rather have ridden in it than have won the highest distinction to which civilians can aspire. Who dares to object that it was not ultimately successful? Such a taunt has never been weighed in the balance against the glories of Thermopylæ. I frequently meet in society one of the Paladins of that fatal Roncesvalles.
The clouds were considerably cleared away from the meaning of Socialism by the Fabians of the 'nineties; by Mr. Bernard Shaw, a sort of anti-romantic Quixote, who charged chivalry as chivalry charged windmills, with Sidney Webb for his Sancho Panza. In so far as these paladins had a castle to defend, we may say that their castle was the Post Office.
Or, again, if we had the story of the fall of King Arthur told from the stand-point of Mordred, it would only be a matter of a word or two; in a turn, in the twinkling of an eye, we should find ourselves sympathising with the efforts of an earnest young man to frustrate the profligacies of high-placed paladins like Lancelot and Tristram, and ultimately discovering, with deep regret but unshaken moral courage, that there was no way to frustrate them, except by overthrowing the cold and priggish and incapable egotist who ruled the country, and the whole artificial and bombastic schemes which bred these moral evils.
All this without any assistance from Madame, who dined and supped with the ladies and Monsieur, rode out sometimes in a caleche with one of them, often sulked with the company, made herself feared for her harsh and surly temper frequently even for her words; and passed her days in a little cabinet she had chosen, where the windows were ten feet from the ground, gazing perpetually on the portraits of Paladins and other German princes, with which she had tapestried the walls; and writing every day with her own hand whole volumes of letters, of which she always kept autograph copies.
The two Paladins, on their horses, dropped right into the middle of the Saracens, and began making such havoc about them, that Marsilius, who overlooked the fight from a mountain, thought his soldiers had turned one against the other.
Moreover the prominence given to food and eating is unrivalled except by Rabelais: the poet must have lounged with delight through the narrow mediæval lanes, crowded with booths and barrows, sniffing with rapture the mingled scents of cheese, pork, fish, spices, and a hundred strange concomitant market smells. Roncisvalle, Charlemagne, the paladins, paganism, Christendom what of them?
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