Napoleon's Journey to Frejus--Voyage to Elba--his conduct and
occupations there--Discontents in France--Return of Prisoners of
War--Jealousy of the Army--Union of the Jacobins and
Buonapartists--Their intrigues--Napoleon escapes from Elba.
Four commissioners, one from each of the great Allied Powers, Austria,
Russia, Prussia, and England, accompanied Buonaparte on his journey. He
was attended by Bertrand, Grand Master of the Palace, and some other
attached friends and servants; and while fourteen carriages were
conveying him and his immediate suite towards Elba, 700 infantry and
about 150 cavalry of the Imperial Guard (all picked men, and all
volunteers), marched in the same direction, to take on them the military
duties of the exiled court.
During the earlier part of his progress Napoleon continued to be
received respectfully by the civil functionaries of the different towns
and departments, and with many tokens of sympathy on the part of the
people; and his personal demeanour was such as it had been wont to
appear in his better days. At Valence he met Augereau, whose conduct
during the campaign had moved his bitterest displeasure; the interview
was short--the recriminations mutual, and, for the first time perhaps,
the fallen Emperor heard himself addressed in that tone of equality and
indifference to which, for so many years, he had been a stranger.
Thenceforth the course of his journey carried him more and more deeply
into the provinces wherein his name had never been popular, and
contemptuous hootings began by degrees to be succeeded by clamours of
fierce resentment. On more than one occasion the crowd had threatened
personal violence when the horses were changing, and he appears to have
exhibited alarm such as could hardly have been expected in one so
familiar with all the dangers of warfare. But civil commotions, as we
have seen in the case of the revolution of Brumaire, were not
contemplated by Napoleon so calmly as the tumults of the field. At this
time besides he was suffering under a bodily illness, the fruit of
debauchery, which acts severely on the stoutest nerves. It is admitted
on all hands that he showed more of uneasiness and anxiety than accords
with the notion of a heroic character. At length he disguised himself,
and sometimes appearing in an Austrian uniform, at others riding on
before the carriages in the garb of a courier, reached in safety the
place of embarkation.
A French vessel had been sent round from Toulon to Cannes, for the
purpose of conveying him to Elba; but there happened to be an English
frigate also in the roads, and he preferred sailing under any flag
rather than the Bourbon. His equanimity seemed perfectly re-established
from the moment when he set his foot on the British deck. He conversed
affably with Captain Usher and the officers; and by the ease and
plainness of his manners, his intelligent curiosity as to the
arrangements of the ship, and the warm eulogies which he continued to
pronounce on them, and on the character of the English nation at large,
he succeeded in making a very favourable impression on all the
crew--with the exception of Hinton, a shrewd old boatswain, who, unmoved
by all the imperial blandishments, growled, at the close of every fine
speech, the same homely comment, "humbug." Saving this hard veteran, the
usual language of the forecastle was, that "Buonaparte was a very good
fellow after all"; and when, on finally leaving the _Undaunted_, he
caused some 200 _Napoleons_ to be distributed among the sailors, they
"wished his honour long life, and better luck the next time."
He came within view of his new dominions on the afternoon of the 4th of
May, and went ashore in disguise the same evening, in order to ascertain
for himself whether the feelings of the Elbese at all resembled those of
the Provencals. Finding that, on the contrary, the people considered his
residence as likely to increase in every way the consequence and
prosperity of their island, he returned on board the ship, and at noon,
the day after, made his public entrance into the town of Porto Ferraio,
amidst all possible demonstrations of welcome and respect.
The Russian and Prussian commissioners did not accompany him beyond the
coast of Provence: the Austrian Baron Kholer, and the English Sir Neil
Campbell, landed with Napoleon, and took up their residence at Ferraio.
He continued for some time to treat both of these gentlemen with every
mark of distinction, and even cordiality: made them the companions of
his table and excursions; and conversed with apparent openness and
candour on the past, the present, and the future. "There is but one
people in the world," said he to Colonel Campbell--"the English--the
rest are only so many populaces. I tried to raise the French to your
level of sentiment, and failing to do so, fell of course. I am now
politically dead to Europe. Let me do what I can for Elba.... It must be
confessed," said he, having climbed the hill above Ferraio, from whence
he could look down on the whole of his territory as on a map--"it must
be confessed," said the Emperor, smiling, "that my island is very
small."
The island, however, was his; and, as on the eye itself a very small
object near at hand fills a much greater space than the largest which is
distant, so, in the mind of Napoleon, that was always of most importance
in which his personal interests happened for the time to be most
concerned. The island--mountainous and rocky, for the most part barren,
and of a circumference not beyond sixty miles--was his; and the Emperor
forthwith devoted to Elba the same anxious care and industry which had
sufficed for the whole affairs of France, and the superintendence and
control of half Europe besides. He, in less than three weeks, had
explored every corner of the island, and projected more improvements of
all sorts than would have occupied a long lifetime to complete. He even
extended his empire by sending some dozen or two of his soldiers to take
possession of a small adjacent islet, hitherto left unoccupied for fear
of corsairs. He established four different residences at different
corners of Elba, and was continually in motion from one to another of
them. Wherever he was, in houses neither so large nor so well furnished
as many English gentlemen are used to inhabit, all the etiquettes of the
Tuileries were, as far as possible, adhered to; and Napoleon's eight or
nine hundred veterans were reviewed as frequently and formally as if
they had been the army of Austerlitz or of Moscow. His presence gave a
new stimulus to the trade and industry of the islanders; the small port
of Ferraio was crowded with vessels from the opposite coasts of Italy;
and, such was still the power of his name, that the new flag of Elba
(covered with Napoleon's _bees_), traversed with impunity the seas most
infested with the Moorish pirates.
Buonaparte's eagerness as to architectural and other improvements was,
ere long, however, checked in a manner sufficiently new to him--namely,
by the want of money. The taxes of the island were summarily increased;
but this gave rise to discontent among the Elbese, without replenishing
at all adequately the Emperor's exchequer. Had the French government
paid his pension in advance, or at least quarterly, as it fell due, even
that would have borne a slender proportion to the demands of his
magnificent imagination. But Napoleon received no money whatever from
the Bourbon court; and his complaints on this head were unjustly and
unwisely neglected. These new troubles embittered the spirit of the
fallen Chief; and the first excitement of novelty being over he sank
into a state of comparative indolence, and apparently of listless
dejection; from which, however, he was, ere long, to be roused
effectually, by the course of events in that great kingdom, almost in
sight of whose shores he had been most injudiciously permitted to
preserve the shadow of sovereign state.
Louis XVIII., advanced in years, gross and infirm in person, and devoted
to the luxuries of the table, was, in spite of considerable talents and
accomplishments, and a sincere desire to conciliate the affections, by
promoting the interests, of all orders of his people, but ill-adapted
for occupying, in such trying times, the throne which, even amidst all
the blaze of genius and victory, Napoleon had at best found uneasy and
insecure.[67] The King himself was, perhaps, less unpopular than almost
any other member of his family; but it was his fatal misfortune, that
while, on the whole, every day increased the bitterness of those who had
never been sincerely his friends, it tended to chill the affections of
the royalists who had partaken his exile, or laboured, ere success was
probable, for his return.
Louis had been called to the throne by the French senate, in a decree
which at the same time declared the legislative constitution, as
composed of a hereditary sovereign and two houses of assembly, to be
fixed and unchangeable; which confirmed the rights of all who had
obtained property in consequence of the events of the Revolution, and
the titles and orders conferred by Buonaparte: in a word, which summoned
the Bourbon to ascend the throne of Napoleon--on condition that he
should preserve that political system which Napoleon had violated.
Louis, however, though he proceeded to France on this invitation, did
not hesitate to date his first act in the twentieth year of his reign;
and though he issued a charter, conferring, as from his own free will,
every privilege which the senate claimed for themselves and the nation,
this mode of commencement could not fail to give deep offence to those,
not originally of his party, who had consented to his recall. These men
saw, in such assumptions, the traces of those old doctrines of _divine
right_, which they had through life abhorred and combated; and asked
why, if all their privileges were but the gifts of the King, they might
not, on any tempting opportunity, be withdrawn by the same authority?
They, whose possessions and titles had all been won since the death of
Louis XVI., were startled when they found, that, according to the royal
doctrine, there had been no legitimate government all that time in
France. The exiled nobles, meanwhile, were naturally the personal
friends and companions of the restored princes: their illustrious names,
and, we must add, their superior manners, could not fail to excite
unpleasant feelings among the new-made dukes and counts of Buonaparte.
Among themselves it was no wonder that expectations were cherished, and
even avowed, of recovering gradually, if not rapidly, the estates of
which the Revolution had deprived them. The churchmen, who had never
gone heartily into Napoleon's ecclesiastical arrangements, sided of
course with these impoverished and haughty lords; and, in a word, the
first tumult of the restoration being over, the troops of the Allies
withdrawn, and the memory of recent sufferings and disasters beginning
to wax dim amidst the vainest and most volatile of nations, there were
abundant elements of discontent afloat among all those classes who had
originally approved of, or profited by, the revolution of 1792.
Of these the most powerful and dangerous remains to be noticed; and,
indeed, had the Bourbons adopted judicious measures concerning _the
army_, it is very probable that the alarms of the other classes now
alluded to might have subsided. The Allies, in the moment of universal
delight and conciliation, restored at once, and without stipulation, the
whole of the prisoners who had fallen into their hands during the war.
At least 150,000 veteran soldiers of Buonaparte were thus poured into
France ere Louis was well-seated on the throne; men, the greater part of
whom had witnessed nothing of the last disastrous campaigns; who had
sustained themselves in their exile by brooding over the earlier
victories in which themselves had had a part; and who now, returning
fresh and vigorous to their native soil, had but one answer to every
tale of misfortune which met them: "These things could never have
happened had we been here."
The conquerors, in their anxiety to procure for Louis XVIII. a warm
reception among the French, had been led into other mistakes, which all
tended to the same issue. They had (with some exceptions on the part of
Prussia) left the pictures and statues, the trophies of Napoleon's
battles, untouched in the Louvre--they had not even disturbed the
monuments erected in commemoration of their own disgraces. These
instances of forbearance were now attributed by the fierce and haughty
soldiery of Buonaparte, to the lingering influence of that terror which
their own arms under his guidance had been accustomed to inspire.
Lastly, the concessions to Napoleon himself of his imperial title, and
an independent sovereignty almost within view of France, were
interpreted in the same fashion by these habitual worshippers of his
renown. The restored King, on his part, was anxious about nothing so
much as to conciliate the affections of the army. With this view he kept
together bands which, long accustomed to all the licence of warfare,
would hardly have submitted to peace even under Napoleon himself. Even
the Imperial Guard, those chosen and devoted children of the Emperor,
were maintained entire on their old establishment; the Legion of Honour
was continued as before; the war ministry was given to Soult, the
ablest, in common estimation, of Buonaparte's surviving marshals; and
the other officers of that high rank were loaded with every mark of
royal consideration. But these arrangements only swelled the
presumption of those whose attachment they were meant to secure. It was
hardly possible that the King of France should have given no military
appointments among the nobles who had partaken his exile. He gave them
so few, that they, as a body, began to murmur ere the reign was a month
old: but he gave enough to call up insolent reclamations among those
proud legionaries, who in every royalist, beheld an emblem of the
temporary humiliation of their own caste. When, without dissolving or
weakening the Imperial (now _Royal_) Guard, he formed a body of
household troops, composed of _gentlemen_, and entrusted them with the
immediate attendance on his person and court, this was considered as a
heinous insult; and when the King bestowed the cross of the Legion of
Honour on persons who would have much preferred that of St. Louis, the
only comment that obtained among the warriors of Austerlitz and
Friedland, was, that which ascribed to the Bourbons a settled design of
degrading the decoration which they had purchased with their blood.
In a word, the French soldiery remained cantoned in the country in a
temper stern, gloomy, and sullen; jealous of the Prince whose bread they
were eating; eager to wipe out the memory of recent disasters in new
victories; and cherishing more and more deeply the notion (not perhaps
unfounded) that had Napoleon not been betrayed at home, no foreigners
could ever have hurled him from his throne. Nor could such sentiments
fail to be partaken, more or less, by the officers of every rank who had
served under Buonaparte. They felt, almost universally, that it must be
the policy of the Bourbons to promote, as far as possible, others rather
than themselves. And even as to those of the very highest class--could
any peaceful honours compensate, to such spirits as Ney and Soult, for a
revolution, that for ever shrouded in darkness the glittering prizes on
which Napoleon had encouraged them to speculate? Were the comrades of
Murat and Bernadotte to sit down in contentment as peers of France,
among the Montmorencies and the Rohans, who considered them at the best
as low-born intruders, and scorned, in private society, to acknowledge
them as members of their order? If we take into account the numerous
personal adherents whom the Imperial government, with all the faults of
its chief, must have possessed--and the political humiliation of
France, in the eyes of all Europe, as well as of the French people
themselves, immediately connected with the disappearance of Napoleon--we
shall have some faint conception of that mass of multifarious griefs and
resentments, in the midst of which the unwieldy and inactive Louis
occupied, ere long, a most unenviable throne--and on which the
eagle-eyed Exile of Elba gazed with reviving hope even before the summer
of 1814 had reached its close.
Ere then, as we have seen, the demeanour and conduct of Napoleon were
very different from what they had been when he first took possession of
his mimic empire. Ere then his mother, his sister Pauline (a woman,
whose talents for intrigue equalled her personal charms), and not a few
ancient and attached servants, both of his civil government and of his
army, had found their way to Elba, and figured in "his little senate."
Pauline made repeated voyages to Italy, and returned again. New and busy
faces appeared in the circle of Porto Ferraio--and disappeared
forthwith--no one knew whence they had come or whither they went; an air
of bustle and of mystery pervaded the atmosphere of the place. Sir Neil
Campbell found it more and more difficult to obtain access to the
presence of Buonaparte--which the refusal of the English government to
acknowledge the Imperial title, and this officer's consequent want of
any very definite character at Elba, left him no better means of
overcoming than to undertake journeys and voyages, thereby gaining a
pretext for paying his respects at every departure and return. Sir Neil
early suspected that some evil was hatching, and repeatedly remarked on
the absurdity of withholding Napoleon's pension, thereby tempting him,
as it were, to violence. But neither the reports nor the reclamations of
this gentleman appear to have received that attention which they
merited.
What persons in France were actually in communication on political
subjects with the turbulent court of Elba, during that autumn and the
following winter, is likely to remain a secret: that they were neither
few nor inactive, nor unskilful, the event will sufficiently prove. The
chiefs of the police and of the post-office had been removed by Louis;
but the whole inferior machinery of these establishments remained
untouched; and it is generally believed, that both were early and
sedulously employed in the service of the new conspiracy. We have seen
that Soult was commander-in-chief of the army; and it is very difficult,
on considering the subsequent course of events, to doubt that he also
made a systematic use of his authority with the same views, distributing
and arranging the troops according to far other rules than the interests
of his royal master.
Ere the autumn closed, Buonaparte granted furloughs on various pretexts
to about 200 of his guardsmen; and these were forthwith scattered over
France, actively disseminating the praises of their chief, and, though
probably not aware how soon such an attempt was meditated, preparing the
minds of their ancient comrades for considering it as by no means
unlikely that he would yet once more appear in the midst of them. It is
certain that a notion soon prevailed that Napoleon would revisit the
soil of France in the spring of the coming year. He was toasted among
the soldiery, and elsewhere also, under the _soubriquet_ of Corporal
Violet. That early flower, or a ribbon of its colour, was the symbol of
rebellion, and worn openly, in the sight of the unsuspecting Bourbons.
Their security was as profound as hollow; nor was it confined to them.
The representatives of all the European princes had met in Vienna, to
settle finally a number of questions left undecided at the termination
of the war. Talleyrand was there for France, and Wellington for England;
and yet it is on all hands admitted, that no surprise was ever more
sudden, complete, and universal than theirs, when on the 11th of March,
1815, a courier arrived among them with the intelligence that Napoleon
Buonaparte had reared his standard in Provence.[68]
[Footnote 67: When the King first came to Paris, there appeared a
caricature representing an eagle flying away from the Tuileries, and a
brood of porkers entering the gate; and His Majesty was commonly called
by the rabble, not Louis _dix huit_, but Louis _Cochon_ (the pig), or
Louis _des huitres_ (of the oysters).]
[Footnote 68: The Emperor Alexander alone preserved perfect
self-possession; and, turning to the Duke of Wellington, exclaimed "Eh
bien, Wellington, c'est a vous encore une fois sauver le monde."]