Modern history furnishes no parallel to this unique revenge of the French emperor.

Berlin, for more than a year, the scene of the vainglorious boastings and parades of the guardsmen, was made the witness of their humiliation and punishment, that those who witnessed their triumphant march forth to Jena and Auerstaedt, should behold their ignominious return from Prenzlau!

And this passage was under the eyes of Berlin which knew them so well, as well as the curious gaze of their French conquerors, whose uniforms were now everywhere in evidence where their own had been.

Those who witnessed this march of those haughty young men now disarmed, on foot and surrounded by their French guards, who, however, treated them courteously, it is said,-declared that no words could describe their despair at the unparalleled calamities which their inconsiderate pride and passions had brought upon the country wherever they went, great crowds beset their steps, some lamenting their sufferings, others loudly and coarsely reproaching them as the authors of all the public misfortunes.

The gates of the strong fortress of Spandau at length opened to receive the hapless, wearied captives, who were glad to find such a refuge after all the humiliations they had undergone, and there we may leave them.

FLIGHT OF THE ROYAL COURT FROM BERLIN

In their flight from Berlin to Graudenz, and later to Konigsberg in the farthest extremity of East Prussia, the King and Queen were accompanied by the royal family, the cabinet ministers, and the royal court and

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attendants, save only the gallant old Prince Ferdinand, brother to Frederic the Great, who remained quietly in his palace to face the enemy upon their arrival. He alone, of all the royal family, had strenuously opposed the war with France, and predicted defeat to Prussia, but was over-ridden by the hot-heads who clamored for

war.

He was treated by Napoleon with the greatest courtesy and kindness, and as a special rank of consideration to him as the brother of so great a king, his young son, Prince Augustus of Prussia, captured near Prenzlau while bravely combatting at the head of his regiment, was permitted to remain with him in Berlin on his parole, instead of being sent a prisoner to France as would otherwise have happened.

Contemporaneous writers give interesting descriptions of the curious, not to say fantastic, appearance presented by the immense cavalcade embracing the royal court that hurried away from the capital in the wake of the royal fugitives. At this period, the princesses, grand-duchesses, duchesses and other noble ladies of Germany are represented to have dressed in exceedingly bad taste, and, displaying neither art nor grace, to have covered their heads with plumes, bits of gold, and silver gauze, fastened with quantities of diamond-headed pins. And in consequence of the enormous hoops worn by those ladies, that the equipages used by the German nobility were all of necessity, absurdly large and clumsy coaches, which were drawn by several horses, of a by no means fine appearance, harnessed with ropes, and placed so far apart that an immense space was required in which. to turn the carriages.

The only parallel, perhaps, to this interesting, if

ludicrous, flight of an assemblage of such numbers and distinction, is found in the repeated similar flights of the Imperial Court of Austria from Vienna to Hungary, upon the rapid approaches of the French invaders to that city in the wars of 1797, 1800, 1805 and 1809.

Certainly Jena, as well as Hohenlinden and Ulm, must have been revelations of the possession of an undreamed of capacity for sudden, strenuous movement and activities, to vast numbers of hitherto haughty, serene personages of both sexes, obese and otherwise, who would have considered themselves quite removed from anything even suggestive of haste, much less of undignified flight.

Yet such were the latent powers of rapid movement developed by these eminent persons in those lumbering vehicles, even over the wretched, sandy roads of the Prussian Poland of that day, that by no efforts, on the part of the swiftest of the French light horsemen, could any of them ever be overhauled!

In such unheroic flight did the good people of Berlin behold their rulers and the haughty declaimers for war save themselves, while leaving them to their fate.

Referring to this flight of the court and nobility from Berlin, as well as the Teutonic feminine hysteria in urging on the war, the Emperor said to the Prussian Count Neal who presented himself in his majesty's salon at the Royal Palace: "Well, sir, your women wished for war: behold the result. You ought to govern your families. better." (Several letters from the count's warlike daughter had been intercepted. "Napoleon," it was said in these letters by the young countess to her correspondents throughout Prussia, "will not dare to go to war! Let us then wage it against him!") "No," said his majesty to M. Neal, "I do not wish for war: not from a want