For such as have only known France since the strictly utilitarian days that followed the great _débâcle_; days when the notion that any kind of smartness is incompatible with “republican efficiency seems to have become an obsession” it is difficult to realize the gilded magnificence of the _Garde Impériale_. Still less, perhaps, in these anti-militarist times, the idolatry of the people for its _beaux militaires_. Of a truth, on a sunny day, they brightened the park walks almost as much as the Geraniums in the great stone urns, or the forbidden golden fruit in the orange tubs!
The authorities were sedulous, especially in such places as St. Cloud, to keep the pleasant side—the pride, the pomp and circumstance—of soldiering in evidence. The happy little town was awakened in the morning, was apprised of noon and again of sundown, by the incredibly joyous “sonneries” of the _Lanciers de l’Impératrice_, whose trumpeters specially gathered from far and wide, could sound all tuckets and points of war in an admirable harmony of high overtones blended with the noble, grave sounds of the ordinary calls.... Entrancing music to the little boy, in the glycine-clad house of the _rue du Château_, who would start awake, hearken, and then turn round and go to sleep again in great content. The drums of the _garde montante_, headed by the olympian _tambour-major_, sedulously tossing and twirling his cane, daily rattled the window panes as in great pomp it ascended the hill, palace-wards. It never failed to draw the same crowd to the same doorsteps. Estaffettes clattered hourly along the narrow paved streets, on their way to and from Paris; glittering, clinking, full of official importance, and with an eagerness no doubt wholly uncalled for by any existing necessity.
All that colour and bustle and pleasant make-believe of strength and “tradition,” was typical of all one has since learned to associate with that Empire on the high road to ruin. But it had its attractive side for those who had not found it out; and, seen through the prism of distance, a picturesqueness that modern France, so systematically democratized, is scarce like to know again.
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