Domestic Peace

"The incident recorded in this sketch took place towards the end of the
month of November, 1809, the moment when Napoleon's fugitive empire attained the
apogee of its splendor. The trumpet-blasts of Wagram were still sounding an echo
in the heart of the Austrian monarchy. Peace was being signed between France and
the Coalition. Kings and princes came to perform their orbits, like stars, round
Napoleon, who gave himself the pleasure of dragging all Europe in his train--a
magnificent experiment in the power he afterwards displayed at Dresden. Never,
as contemporaries tell us, did Paris see entertainments more superb than those
which preceded and followed the sovereign's marriage with an Austrian
archduchess. Never, in the most splendid days of the Monarchy, had so many
crowned heads thronged the shores of the Seine, never had the French aristocracy
been so rich or so splendid. The diamonds lavishly scattered over the women's
dresses, and the gold and silver embroidery on the uniforms contrasted so
strongly with the penury of the Republic, that the wealth of the globe seemed to
be rolling through the drawing-rooms of Paris. Intoxication seemed to have
turned the brains of this Empire of a day. All the military, not excepting their
chief, reveled like parvenus in the treasure conquered for them by a million men
with worsted epaulettes, whose demands were satisfied by a few yards of red
ribbon."

- Excerpted from "Domestic Peace"