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THE BLINDED BOURBONS by Victor Hugo
     ("Qui leur eût dit l'austère destineé?")

     {II. v., November, 1836.}
     Who then, to them{1} had told the Future's story?
     Or said that France, low bowed before their glory,
         One day would mindful be
     Of them and of their mournful fate no more,
     Than of the wrecks its waters have swept o'er
         The unremembering sea?

     That their old Tuileries should see the fall
     Of blazons from its high heraldic hall,
         Dismantled, crumbling, prone;{2}
     Or that, o'er yon dark Louvre's architrave{3}
     A Corsican, as yet unborn, should grave
         An eagle, then unknown?

     That gay St. Cloud another lord awaited,
     Or that in scenes Le Nôtre's art created
         For princely sport and ease,
     Crimean steeds, trampling the velvet glade,
     Should browse the bark beneath the stately shade
         Of the great Louis' trees?

     Fraser's Magazine.

     {Footnote 1: The young princes, afterwards Louis XVIII. and Charles X.}

     {Footnote 2: The Tuileries, several times stormed by mobs, was so
     irreparably injured by the Communists that, in 1882, the Paris Town
     Council decided that the ruins should be cleared away.}

     {Footnote 3: After the Eagle and the Bee superseded the Lily-flowers,
     the Third Napoleon's initial "N" flourished for two decades, but has
     been excised or plastered over, the words "National Property" or
     "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" being cut in the stone profusely.}

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