equally unworthy of confidence, and tell you
that you have seen everything, when in
reality you have seen comparatively nothing.

Yesterday I found myself in a museum
which, although you may or may not have
seen it twenty times, I succeeded in
persuading myself was entirely novel, and might
have been specially added to the Louvre as a
testimonial of gratitude for my visit to Paris
at this inclement season of the year. This
was the Musée des Souverains, the Museum
of the Paraphernalia of the Kings and
Emperors of France; and, forgive me if
I am irreverent, a palatial Monmouth Street
or Holywell Street for the display of secondhand sovereigns.

Kings are but men, I know. The sword,
the sceptre and the sway—the crown, the
chrysm and the orb, will not save them from
headaches if they drink too much wine; from
corns, if they persist in wearing tight boots;
from death, when their time comes. Yet a
king, be he a mere drivelling idiot, passing
his leisure in making pasteboard coaches; a
mischievous lunatic, or a tipsy beer and
tobacco reveller; fills, under any circumstance,
so conspicuous a place on the world's
stage—is, right or wrong, so talked about,
written about, sung about, painted about,
during his lifetime—that some degree of
interest attaches itself at last, perforce, even
to the clothes he wore, the knives he ate
with, and the chairs he sate upon. Respect
for the individual is not indispensable for
the entertainment of curiosity respecting
him. A king is but a man; but, the old
clothes of a king are surely more interesting
than those of a cadger; and this is why the
museum of secondhand sovereigns in the
Louvre is full of interest and instruction for
me, and why I have chosen it as a text for
this paper.

Here is a room of noble proportions. The
floors of polished oak, the walls of crimson
damask, thickly sewn with golden bees; the
ceiling sumptuously carved and gilded, and
rainbow-tinted with paintings by the first
artists in France. Lofty glass-cases with
curtains of crimson silk line this room. These
cases hold the old clothes of Napoleon the
Great.

See, here is the famous redingote gris—
the gray great coat, made familiar to us by a
thousand pictures and a thousand songs. I
don't think, intrinsically, it would fetch more
than half a dozen shillings. I am afraid
Mr. Moses Hart of Holywell Street would
not be disposed to give even that amount for
it; yet here it is beyond price and purchase.
It has held the body of the man whose name
is blazoned on the ceiling; whose initial,
pregnant with will and power, N, is on wall
and escutcheon, on casque and morion, on
vase and cup, on keystone and pediment, on
coin and ring, on spoon and fork, on the step
of the altar, the judge's bench, the footstool
of the throne, everywhere in this land. This
common coat of coarse gray duffel hangs in
the midst of velvet and silk, gold and silver
embroidery, stern, calm and impassible, and
throws all their theatrical glories into
shadow; even as the man who wore the coat,
made all the kings and emperors and princes
that were his tools, his slaves, or his victims,
look like common people beside him, as he
sat in his box at the theatre at Erfurt
throning it over a pitful of kings, or causing
the blood of a chamberlain of the Holy
Roman Empire to run cold within him by
beginning a story with " When I was a
lieutenant in the regiment of Lafère."

I would the Emperor's boots were here,—
those notable jack-boots which Raffet and
Charlet knew so well how to draw; the boots
which, muddy, dusty, worn, ruined, anxious,
frown at you, moody and despairing, in Paul
Delaroche's picture of Napoleon at Fontainbleau.
People talk of the Emperor's cocked
hat; but, the boots are far more characteristic
of the Man. Curiously they are associated
with him in some of the most momentous
phases of his career. The boot was pierced
by a bullet at Bellinzona, and there Napoleon
received his almost only wound. For
the want of boots—for, he had no money to
buy them—Napoleon Buonaparte could not
go the Indies. If those boots could have then
been obtained—bought, borrowed from Talma,
wheedled from an unsuspecting tradesman—
there would probably have been no Eighteenth
Brumaire, no empire of France, no kingdom
of Italy, no Russian campaign, no Austrian
marriage, no Spanish ulcer, no Moscow, no
Waterloo, no St. Helena. But, not even with
St. Helena ended the boots of Buonaparte.
Twenty years after his death, when his
grave under the willows was opened, and
his coffin unscrewed that his person might
be verified by the King of France's son who
was come to take it home, the most
noteworthy appearances in the bier (after the
features of that face which the fingers of
death had not been able entirely to efface,
nor the grave to vanquish) were the boots.
The Museum of Secondhand Sovereigns is
incomplete without the encasements of those
feet of Hercules.

The boots indeed are wanting, but the
secondhand clothes of Napoleon are here,
ranged all of a row, more like Monmouth
Street, or the theatrical warehouse in
Vinegar Yard, than ever are some
half-dozen pairs of white satin shoes,
profusely embroidered with gold, crumpled,
creased, and (to tell the truth) remarkably
grubby, not to say dirty. The Colossus
had small feet, and the shoes might belong to
a woman. And could he, the iron man, have
worn these gewgaws, that might have danced
upon a rope, or pirouetted on the opera
boards, or patted over the polished flooring
of the Petites Maisons, but hardly could have
belonged to him who crossed the Bridge of
Lodi, and trod down empires and trampled