Bishops came, great personages, great ladies of his circle watched and drew him on one side, and still he held his tongue.

A truceless warfare was being waged around him: on one side the believers and the men of fanciful minds whom the Mysterious strongly interested; on the other the unbelievers and the statesmen who distrusted the disturbances of the imagination;--and still and ever he held his tongue.

Then, all at once, with the sudden decision of a naturally timid man, he spoke out.

The rumour spread that he had yielded to the entreaties of his wife Eugenie.

No doubt she did intervene, but the Emperor was more deeply influenced by a revival of his old humanitarian dreams, his genuine compassion for the disinherited.* Like the Bishop, he did not wish to close the portals of illusion to the wretched by upholding the unpopular decree which forbade despairing sufferers to go and drink life at the holy source.