In Chapter 18, Thackeray offers a brief bit of historical context for the events of the novel—while his Vanity Fair unfolds in England, Napoleon escapes exile and begins to make his way back across France. Thackeray uses a combination of metaphor and personification to connect his story with Napoleon's conflict:
Our surprised story now finds itself for a moment among very famous events and personages, and hanging on to the skirts of history. When the eagles of Napoleon Bonaparte, the Corsican upstart, were flying from Provence, where they had perched after a brief sojourn in Elba, and from steeple to steeple until they reached the towers of Notre Dame, I wonder whether the Imperial birds had any eye for a little corner of the parish of Bloomsbury, London, which you might have thought so quiet, that even the whirring and flapping of those mighty wings would pass unobserved there?
Thackeray's story, thus personified, is helpless before Napoleon's relentless march—all it can do is cling to the "skirts of history" and hope for the best. Thackeray describes Napoleon's ambitious return in the metaphorical language of an eagle flying through the French countryside, church by church, until at last landing on the spires of Notre Dame herself in Paris.
The point of this metaphor is to imply that the war (the “flapping" of this eagle's "mighty wings”) is strong enough to sweep Thackeray's story up with it—and effect even those living a quiet posh life in London, however small their role in global history might seem.
As Thackeray's narrator continues, “Napoleon is flinging his last stake, and poor little Emmy Sedley’s happiness forms, somehow, part of it.” Sure enough, the reader is about to learn, the war has ruined Amelia’s father’s fortune and left her without anything—which will, in turn, cause her relationship with George Osborne to disintegrate after George's father condemns it. The narrator tends to cast the events of the narrative in terms of their effect on various characters' fortunes, and this moment is no different: by ruining Amelia Sedley, Napoleon himself drives the narrative of Vanity Fair forward.
In Chapter 44, the Crawley family's servants begin to turn against Becky as her suspicious relationship with Lord Steyne blossoms and her cruelty toward her own son, Rawdy, grows unbearable. The narrator explains the risk of such a mutiny—a "servants' inquisition"—in a hypothetical scenario that sees the servants transform into personifications of gossip:
Bon Dieu! it is awful, that servants’ inquisition! You see a woman in a great party in a splendid saloon, surrounded by faithful admirers, distributing sparkling glances, dressed to perfection, curled, rouged, smiling and happy: Discovery walks respectfully up to her, in the shape of a huge powdered man with large calves and a tray of ices – with Calumny (which is as fatal as truth) behind him, in the shape of the hulking fellow carrying the wafer-biscuits. Madam, your secret will be talked over by those men at their club at the public-house to-night.
In the narrator's aside, Discovery and Calumny (or defamation) arrive in the form of servants who spy on an unidentified woman—perhaps a glamorous version of Becky—at a party. They extract what information they can and discuss it privately amongst their fellow servants.
Although Thackeray sets up Vanity Fair to be a satire of the English upper class, no one escapes his withering gaze. In this case, Thackeray invites the reader to turn away from Becky's relentless greed and ambition to consider the ambition of the many people caught in her wake—and their agency to determine their own fate. In Thackeray's world, everyone is caught up in the Vanity Fair.
