appeared delighted, that a command was given to Marshal Ney; not that
he held any intelligence with him; but because he knew the weakness
and fickleness of his character. He directed the Grand Marshal to
write to him. "You will inform him," said he, "of the delirium excited
by my return, and of all the forces sent against me having joined my
army in succession. You will tell him, that the troops under his
command will infallibly follow the example of their brave comrades,
sooner or later: and that the efforts he might make would have no
farther effect, than at most to retard the fall of the Bourbons a few
days. Give him to understand, that he will be responsible to France,
and to me, for the civil war and bloodshed, of which he would be the
cause. _Flatter him_," added the Emperor, "but do not _caress_ him too
much; he would think me afraid of him, and require to be entreated."
Letters were written also to all the commanders of corps, that were
known to be quartered in the neighbouring departments. None of them
were in a supplicatory style: the Emperor already spoke as a master;
he did not entreat, he commanded.
Every thing being finished, on the 13th Napoleon departed; and
profoundly moved with the affection the Lyonese had shown him, he
bade them adieu in the following words:
"Lyonese,
"At the moment of quitting your city to repair to my capital, I feel
it necessary, to make known to you the sentiments with which you have
inspired me: you have always ranked with the foremost in my
affections. On the throne or in exile, you have always displayed the
same feelings towards me: the lofty character that distinguishes you,
has merited my entire esteem: in a period of greater tranquillity, I
shall return, to consider the welfare of your manufactures, and of
your city.
"Lyonese, I love you."
These last words were the ingenuous expression of his feelings: in
dictating, he pronounced them with that indefinable charm, that was
impressed on his words when they came from the heart.
So much has been said of the hardness of Napoleon's heart, and the
harshness of his language, that whatever is at variance with the
received opinion must appear fabulous. Yet it is a truth, and they who
have been about the Emperor's person will vouch for it, that he was
far from being so unfeeling, as he was commonly thought. His military
education, and the necessity of commanding fear and respect, had
rendered him grave, severe, and inflexible; and had accustomed him, to
check and despise the suggestions of his sensibility. But when nature
resumed her rights, he felt a delight in yielding to the movements of
his soul, and he then expressed the emotions or sentiments, that had
overpowered him, in an ardent and impassioned tone, and with a
sweetness and grace, as seducing as it was inimitable.
Indeed the Lyonese merited the esteem and love, that Napoleon avowed
for them. Though yet young, I have more than once seen popular
displays of enthusiasm and infatuation; yet never did I see any thing
comparable to the transports of joy and tenderness, that burst from
the Lyonese. Not only the quays, and the places near the palace of the
Emperor, but even the most distant streets rung with perpetual
acclamations[59]. Workmen and their masters, the common people and
the citizens, rambled about the city arm in arm, singing, dancing, and
giving themselves up to the impulse of the most ardent gaiety.
Strangers stopped one another, shook hands, embraced, and
congratulated each other on the return of the Emperor, as if he had
conferred on them fortune, life, and honour.
[Footnote 59: The author of a libel entitled _Les
Quinze Semaines_, "The Fifteen Weeks," asserts,
that shouts were heard of "Death for ever! Guilt
for ever! Down with virtue! Down with God!" Such a
charge requires no refutation: I mention it here
only to show, to what a point the spirit of party,
and the rancorous passions, have misled writers,
who call themselves royalists. It has been equally
asserted, that the people plundered and destroyed a
number of shops and warehouses. This, too, is
false: no disorder occurred, except in Bellecour
Square, where the people broke the windows and
tables of the Bourbon coffee-house, known to be the
place where the ultra-royalists assembled; and this
disorder was quieted and suppressed immediately.]
The national guard, affected by the confidence he had shown it, by
entrusting to it the care of his person, participated with equal
ardour the general intoxication; and the day of Napoleon's departure
was a day of sorrow and regret to the city of Lyons, as that of his
arrival had been a day of real festivity.
We slept at Macon. The Emperor would not alight at the prefect's, but
went to lodge at the sign of the Savage. He found it was no longer
necessary, to wait at the gates of the towns, as at Grenoble and
Lyons: the people and the magistrates ran out to meet him, and
disputed the honour of being foremost, to do him homage, and express
their good wishes.
The next morning he received the felicitations of the national guard,
the municipal body, &c. One of the colleagues of the mayor gave us a
long, ridiculous harangue, which amused us much. When he had finished,
the Emperor said to him: "You were much astonished, then, at hearing
of our having landed?"--"Yes, faith:" answered the orator: "when I
knew you had landed, I said to every body, the man must be mad, he
will never be able to escape."--Napoleon could not help laughing at
this simplicity. "I know," said he, with a sarcastic smile, "that you
are all a little inclined to be frightened; you gave me a proof of
this last campaign; you should have behaved as the men of Chalons did;
you did not maintain the honour of the Burgundians."--"It was not our
fault, Sire," said one of the party: "we were badly commanded; you had
not given us a good mayor."--"That is very possible; we have all been
guilty of foolish actions, and they must be forgotten: the safety and
happiness of France are henceforward the only objects, to which we
ought to attend." He dismissed them in a friendly manner.
The prefect had taken flight. The Emperor asked me his name. It was
one Germain, whom he had made a count, and a gentleman of the
bedchamber, without well knowing why. "What!" said he to me, "does
that little Germain fancy it necessary to shun me? he must be brought
back:" and he thought no more of him.
He directed me, to cause an account of the events at Grenoble and
Lyons to be inserted in the newspaper of the department. The editor, a
furious royalist, had hidden himself. I entrusted to the new
subprefect the business of fulfilling the Emperor's orders; but,
whether it were carelessness or incapacity on his part, he had
recourse to the printer of the paper, who supplied him with an article
far from answering our views.
It began with a very just, but ill-timed eulogy of the goodness of
Louis XVIII.; and ended with declaring in substance, that so good a
king was not fitted to reign over the French, and that they required a
sovereign such as Napoleon, &c.
The Emperor, who would read every thing, asked me for the paper. I
pretended I could not lay my hand upon it: but, after a thousand
attempts to put him off from seeing it, I was at length obliged to
bring it him. I thought he would have given me a severe reprimand, but
he contented himself with saying: "Change that man, he is a fool; and
desire him for the future, never to attempt a eulogy of me." I sent
for him, scolded him, and, like me, he was let off for the fright.
It was at Macon, that we first received official news of what was
going on at Paris. It was brought us by M. ***. The unskilful manner
in which the royalist party superintended the police of the roads, was
truly astonishing. Not one of its emissaries escaped us, while ours
went and came without any obstruction. Rage or fear must have turned
the brains of all the royalists. M. *** assured the Emperor, that the
national guard appeared determined to defend the king, and that the
king had declared, he would not quit the Tuileries. "If he choose to
wait for me there," said Napoleon, "I have no objection: but I doubt
it much. He suffers himself to be lulled by the boastings of the
emigrants; and when I get within twenty leagues of Paris, they will
abandon him, as the nobles of Lyons abandoned the Count d'Artois. What
indeed could he do with the old puppets that are about him? One of our
grenadiers would knock down a hundred of them with the butt-end of
his musket.... The national guard shouts at a distance; when I am at
the barriers it will be silent. Its business is not to raise a civil
war, but to maintain peace and order in the country. The majority is
sound; there is nothing rotten in it but a few officers; and them I
will expel. Return to Paris; tell my friends not to implicate
themselves, and within ten days my grenadiers will mount guard at the
Tuileries: go."
We arrived at Chalons on the 14th, at an early hour. It was terrible
weather, yet the whole population had come out of the city, to see the
Emperor a few minutes the sooner. On approaching the walls, he
perceived artillery and ammunition waggons, and was surprised at it.
"They were intended," said the people, "to act against you; but we
have stopped them on their way, and present them to you."--"That's
right, my lads; you have always been good citizens."
He was well pleased, to find himself among the Chalonese, and received
them with much affection and regard. "I have not forgotten," said he,
"that you resisted the enemy for forty days, and valiantly defended
the passage of the Saone. Had all the French possessed your courage
and patriotism, not a single foreigner would have escaped out of
France." He expressed to them his desire of knowing the brave men, who
had most distinguished themselves; and on their unanimous testimony,
he granted on the spot the decoration of the Legion of Honour to the
mayor of St. Jean Delonne. "It was for the brave men like him and
you," said he to them, "that I instituted the Legion of Honour, and
not for emigrants pensioned by our enemies." When the audience was
ended, he said to me: "The mayor of Chalons is not come; yet it was I
who appointed him: but he is related to an ancient family, and
probably has his scruples. The inhabitants complain of him, and will
make him suffer for it. You must go and see him. If he object to you
his oath, tell him, that I absolve him from it; and make him sensible,
that, if he wait till he is freed from it by Louis XVIII., he will
wait a long time. Say to him, in short, what you please; I care little
about his visit; it is for his own sake I wish him to come. If he do
not come, the people will stone him to death after I am gone. Germain
was lucky to escape[60]; let his example be a lesson to him."
[Footnote 60: He attempted to harangue the
Chalonese, but they allowed him only time to take
to his heels.]
I repaired immediately to the municipality, where I found the mayor,
and a few municipal counsellors. He appeared to me a man of merit. I
informed him, that it was my usual office, to introduce to his Majesty
the municipal authorities; that I had observed with surprise, he had
not been as eager as the mayors of other cities, to pay his duty to
the Emperor; and that I was come to remove his fears, &c. He answered
me frankly, that he had great respect and admiration for Napoleon;
but, having sworn fealty to Louis XVIII., he thought it his duty to
keep his oath, till he was absolved from it. I had my answer ready.
"I, like you," said I, "consider perjury as the most degrading act, of
which man can be guilty. But it is necessary, to make a distinction
between a voluntary oath, and the stipulated oath, which people take
to their government. In the eye of reason, this oath is merely an act
of local submission; a pure and simple formality, which the monarch,
whoever he may be, has a right to require of his subjects; but which
cannot, as it ought not, enchain their persons and faith to
perpetuity. France, since 1789, has sworn by turns to be faithful to
royalty, to the convention, to the republic, to the directory, to the
consulship, to the empire, to the charter: if those Frenchmen, who
had taken an oath to royalty, had sought to oppose the establishment
of a republic, by way of acquitting themselves of their oaths; if
those, who had taken an oath to the republic, had opposed the
establishment of the empire, &c.; into what a state of anarchy and
disorder, into what a deluge of blood and evils, would they not have
plunged our unhappy country? On similar occasions, the national will
ought to be the sole guide of our conscience and our actions: the
moment it is manifested, it is the duty of good citizens, to yield and
obey."
"These principles," replied he, "may be very good as a general rule;
but our present case is an exception, never before known. When the
governments, that have existed since the revolution, were overturned,
the new government seized the authority, and it ought to be presumed,
that the assent of the nation was on its side: but here it is a
different affair; the royal government subsists; the Emperor abdicated
voluntarily; and till the king has renounced the crown, I shall
consider him as the sovereign of France."
"If you wait for the king's renunciation," rejoined I, "before you
acknowledge the Emperor, you will wait a long time. Has not the king
pretended, that he has not ceased to reign over France these
five-and-twenty years? And if he thought himself sovereign of France
at a time, when the imperial government was rendered legitimate by the
unanimous suffrages of France, and acknowledged by all Europe, do you
think he will renounce the crown at present?
"The time when kings reigned in virtue of right divine is far removed
from us: their rights are no longer founded on any thing but the
formal or tacit consent of nations: the moment nations reject them,
the contract is broken; the conditional oaths taken to them are
annulled in law and in fact, without their intervention or consent
being necessary; for, as the proclamations of Napoleon say, kings are
made for the people, not the people for kings.
"As to the abdication of Napoleon, whether voluntary or compulsive,
and the rights newly acquired by Louis XVIII., it would be requisite,
in order to answer this part of your objections, to inquire, whether
the chief of a nation have a right to relinquish the authority
entrusted to him, without the consent of that nation; and whether a
government imposed by foreigners, either through influence or force of
arms, unite those characters of legitimacy, which you ascribe to it.
I have read in our publicists, that we owe obedience to a government
_de facto_: and since the Emperor has in fact resumed the sceptre, I
think we cannot do better, than submit to his laws; with the proviso,"
added I jocularly, "of leaving to posterity the task of deciding the
question of right between Napoleon and Louis XVIII.
"However," continued I, "I leave you perfectly at liberty to embrace
which side you judge best: it is not my intention to take you by
surprise, or to put any violence on your conscience; and I beg you to
consider the attempts I have made to convince you, only as a proof of
my desire to bring you over to my opinion by the force of reason."
"Well, sir," said he, "I yield to your observations: be so good as to
announce me to his Majesty."
The next day he was displaced!
On the 16th we slept at Avalon. Napoleon was received there as he had
been every where; that is to say, with demonstrations of joy, that
were actually bordering on madness. People crowded, thronged, to see,
to hear, to speak to him; his quarters were instantly surrounded,
besieged, by such a numerous and obstinate multitude, that it was
impossible for us to enter or go out, without walking on the heads of
all the population of the country. Those men who made part of the
national guard would remain on duty from morning to night. Women of
the greatest distinction in the place spent the day and night on the
stairs and in the passages, to watch for his going by. Three of them,
tired with standing the whole day for want of seats, requested
permission to sit down by us: it was in the hall (adjoining the
Emperor's chamber), in which some mattresses had been laid on the
floor, in order that we might gain a few minutes' rest. It was
pleasant enough, to see these three young and elegant Bonapartists
timidly huddling together on a little couch in the midst of our dirty
guardroom. We endeavoured to keep them company but our eyes closed in
spite of us. "Go to sleep," said they to us, "we will watch over the
Emperor." In fact, fatigue got the better of gallantry; and, to our
shame be it spoken, we were soon asleep at their feet. When we awoke,
we found one of these ladies keeping guard at Napoleon's door. We
heard of it, and thanked her for her attachment, in very polite and
pleasing terms.
I think it was at Avalon[61], that an officer of the staff came and
brought us Marshal Ney's submission, and his orders of the day[62].
These orders of the day were printed that night; but the Emperor,
after having read them over, directed them to be changed and
reprinted. I know not whether his Majesty judged it proper to alter
them, or whether the printer had made any mistake.
[Footnote 61: I dare not positively affirm it, for
in my memorandums I have confounded together
Chalons, Avalon, &c.]
[Footnote 62:
ORDERS OF THE DAY.
_The Marshal Prince of the Moskowa, to the troops
of his Government._
Officers, non-commissioned officers, and soldiers!
The cause of the Bourbons is lost for ever. The
legitimate dynasty, which the French nation has
adopted, is about to re-ascend the throne: it
belongs to the Emperor Napoleon alone, our
sovereign, to reign over our fine country. Whether
the nobility of the Bourbons take the step of
expatriating itself again, or consent to live among
us, is no concern of ours. The sacred cause of
liberty, and of our independence, will no longer
suffer from their fatal influence. They have
endeavoured to debase our military glory; but they
have found themselves mistaken. This glory is the
fruit of labours too noble for us to lose the
remembrance of it. Soldiers! those days are no
more, when nations were governed by stifling their
rights. Liberty is at length triumphant and
Napoleon, our august Emperor, is about to confirm
it for ever. Henceforth let this lovely cause be
ours, and that of all Frenchmen: let all the brave
fellows, whom I have the honour to command, be
thoroughly imbued with this grand truth.
Soldiers! I have often led you to victory; I am now
going to conduct you to that immortal phalanx,
which the Emperor Napoleon is conducting to Paris,
and which will be there in a few days, and our
hopes and our happiness will be for ever realized.
Long live the Emperor!
Lons le Saulnier, the 13th of March, 1815.
The marshal of the empire,
PRINCE OF THE MOSKOWA.]
On the 17th the Emperor arrived at Auxerre, where he was received for
the first time by a prefect. He alighted at the prefect's house. On
the mantel-piece of the first saloon were the busts of the Empress,
and of her son; and in the next was a whole-length portrait of
Napoleon, in his imperial robes: it might have been supposed, that the
reign of the Emperor had never been interrupted.
Napoleon immediately received the congratulations of all the
authorities, and of the tribunals. These congratulations began to be
no longer a mark of attachment in our eyes, but the fulfilment of a
duty. After having discoursed with them on the grand interests of the
state, the Emperor, whose good humour was inexhaustible, began to
joke about the court of Louis XVIII. "His court," said he, "has the
air of that of King Dagobert: we see nothing in it but antiques; the
women are old and frightfully ugly; there were no pretty women in it
but mine, and those were so ill-treated, that they were obliged to
desert it. All those people are made up of nothing but haughtiness and
pride: I have been reproached with being proud; I was so to strangers;
but never did any one see me suffer my chancellor to set one knee to
the ground to receive my orders, or oblige my prefects and mayors to
wait at table on my courtiers and dowagers[63]. They say, that the men
about the court are little better than the women; and that, to
distinguish them from my generals, whom I had covered with gold lace,
they are dressed like beggars. My court, it is true, was superb: I was
fond of magnificence; not for myself, a plain soldier's coat was
sufficient for me; I was fond of it, because it encourages our
manufactures: without magnificence there is no industry. I abolished
at Lyons all that parchment nobility; it was never sensible of what it
owed me: it was I that exalted it, by making counts and barons of my
best generals. Nobility is a chimera; men are too enlightened to
believe, that some among them are noble, others not: they all spring
from the same stock; the only distinction is that of talents, and of
services rendered the state: our laws know no others."
[Footnote 63: He alluded to the installation of the
council of state, where the chancellor actually
dropped on one knee, to ask and receive the King's
orders.
And to the city entertainment, where the prefect,
his wife, and the municipal body, waited at table
on the King and his suite, consisting of forty
ladies of the old court, and only four ladies of
the new nobility, two of whom were the wives of the
marshals on duty.]
The Emperor imagined, that he should find Ney at Auxerre on his
arrival: "I cannot conceive," said he to General Bertrand, "why Ney is
not here: I am surprised at it, and uneasy: has he changed his
opinions? I cannot think so; he would never have suffered Gamot[64]
to implicate himself. Yet we must know on what we are to depend; see
to it." A few hours after, the marshal arrived. It was about eight
o'clock, and Count Bertrand came to inform the Emperor of it. "The
marshal, before he comes into your Majesty's presence," said he, "is
desirous of collecting his ideas, and justifying in writing his conduct
both previous and subsequent to the events of Fontainbleau."--"What
need is there of any justification to me?" answered Napoleon: "tell
him, that I love him still, and that I will embrace him to-morrow." He
would not receive him the same day, as a punishment for having had to
wait for him.
[Footnote 64: M. Gamot, prefect of Auxerre, had
married the sister of Madame Ney.]