Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MY TRIUMPHAL ARCH I BEGAN life at four or five years old as a fervent Napoleonist. The great emperor had not been dead a quarter of a century when I was a little child. He was certainly alive in the hearts of the French people and of the children growing up among them. Influenced by the cook, we adored his memory, and the textit{concierge had a clock with a laurel wreath which from some reason kindled all our enthusiasm. As a baby holding my father's finger I had stared at the second funeral of Napoleon sweeping up the great roadway of the Champs Elys6es. The ground was white with new-fallen snow, and I had never seen snow before ; it seemed to me to be a part of the funeral, a mighty pall indeed spread for the obsequies of so great a warrior. It was the snow I thought about, though I looked with awe at the black and glittering carriages which came up like ships sailing past us, noiselessly one by one. They frightened me, for I thought there was a dead emperor in each. This weird procession gave a strange importance to the memory of the great emperor, and also to the little marble statuette of him on the nursery chimney- piece. It stood with folded arms contemplating the decadence of France, black and silent and reproachful. France was no longer an empire, only a kingdom just like any other country; this fact I and the cook bitterly resented. Besides the statuette there was a snuff-box, belonging I know not to whom, that was a treasure of emotional awe. It came out on Sundays, and sometimes of an evening just before bed-time. At first as you looked you saw nothing but the cover of a wooden box ornamented by a drawing in brown sepia, the sketch of a tombstone and a weeping willow-tree— nothing more. Then if you looked again, indicated by ingenious twigs and lines there gradua...