AS THEY CLIMBED UP THEY WERE CLUBBED WITH MUSKETS
HISTORICAL ROMANCES OF FRANCE
THE INVASION OF
FRANCE IN 1814
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH OF
ERCKMANN-CHATRIAN
ILLUSTRATED
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK::::::::::::::::::::::1911
COPYRIGHT, 1889, 1898
BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
ILLUSTRATIONS
As they climbed up they were clubbed with muskets . . . Frontispiece
There was a general shout of "Long live France!"
Big Dubreuil; the friend of the allies
Yégof saluted each phantom with sparkling eyes
"Let us overwhelm them, as at Blutfeld!"
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
The invasion of France by the allied armies after the battle of Leipsichad proved the German campaign even more disastrous than that of Russiathe year before, was not only essentially the death-blow to the powerof Napoleon, but was the first real taste France had had for many yearsof an experience she had so often previously meted out to herneighbors. In spite of all she had suffered from the conscription andfrom exhaustion of men and treasure in offensive war—or at least warwaged outside her own territory—the great Invasion meant for hersomething far more terrible than any reverses she had yet undergone.Napoleon was not only not invincible, it appeared, he was not even ableto defend the frontiers he had found firmly established on hisaccession to power. The allies had announced that they were warringnot against France but against the French Emperor—"against thepreponderance that Napoleon had too long exercised beyond the limits ofhis empire." Everywhere in France except in the official world ofParis, the once enchanted name of Napoleon had become recognized as asynonym of national disaster.
Nevertheless nothing—except, perhaps, the similar circumstances of thePrussian invasion in 1870—has ever so well attested the fundamentaland absorbing patriotism of the French people as their heroicresistance to this invasion and their instinctive and universal refusalto separate in this crisis the cause of their Emperor from their own.The presence of a foreign foe on whatever pretext within theirboundaries sufficed to arouse them en masse. No such enthusiasm hadbeen known since the days of the Republic's and the Consulate'svictories as was awakened, in the thick of national disaster and amidthe ruin of all ambitious hopes, by the thought of an enemy within theborders of la patrie. And in "The Invasion" of MM. Erckmann-Chatrianthis enthusiasm and devotion find a chronicle which is mostrealistically impressive. So soon as the peasants of the outlyingvillages of the eastern frontier learn of the impending descent of theCossacks and Germans, without thought of their own comfort andsafety—whi