BOOK V

The Hundred Days in Paris--Effect of the passage of the Legitimacy

in France--Bonaparte's astonishment--He is obliged to capitulate

to ideas which he thought smothered--His new system--Three

enormous gamblers remain--Illusions of the Liberals--Clubs

and Federates--Juggling away of the Republic: the Additional

Act--Convocation of the Chamber of Representatives--A useless

Champ de Mai--Cares and bitterness of Bonaparte--Resolution in

Vienna--Movement in Paris--What we were doing at Ghent--M. de

Blacas--The Battle of Waterloo--Confusion at Ghent--What the

Battle of Waterloo was--Return of the Emperor--Reappearance of La

Fayette--Renewed abdication of Bonaparte--Stormy scenes in the House

of Peers--Threatening portents for the Second Restoration--The

departure from Ghent--Arrival at Mons--I miss the first opportunity

of fortune in my political career--M. de Talleyrand at Mons--His

scene with the King--I stupidly interest myself on M. de Talleyrand's

behalf--Mons to Gonesse--With M. le Comte Beugnot I oppose Fouché's

nomination as minister: my reasons--The Duke of Wellington gains the

day--Arnouville--Saint-Denis--Last conversation with the King.

I show you the wrong side of events which history does not display:

history exhibits only the right side. Memoirs have the advantage of

presenting both surfaces of the texture: in this respect they depict

the whole complexion of humanity better, by exposing, as in the

tragedies of Shakespeare, low and exalted scenes. There is everywhere

a cottage beside a palace, a man who weeps beside a man who laughs, a

ragman carrying his basket beside a king losing his throne: what was

the fall of Darius[308] to the slave present at the Battle of Arbela?

Ghent, then, was only a tiring-room behind the slips of the spectacle

opened in Paris. Some famous personages still remained in Europe. I

had, in 1800, commenced my career with Alexander and Napoleon; why had

I not followed those leading actors, my contemporaries, on the great

stage? Why only at Ghent? Because Heaven casts you where it wills. From

the "little Hundred Days" at Ghent let us pass to the "great Hundred

Days" in Paris.

I have told you the reasons which ought to have stopped Bonaparte in

Elba and the urgent reasons, or rather the necessity drawn from his

nature, which compelled him to issue from exile. But the march from

Cannes to Paris exhausted all that remained of the old man. In Paris,

the talisman was shattered.

The few moments for which the reign of lawfulness had reappeared had

sufficed to render impossible the re-establishment of arbitrariness.

Despotism muzzles the masses and enfranchises individuals, within a

certain limit; anarchy lets loose the masses and enslaves individual

independence. Hence, despotism resembles liberty, when it follows

after anarchy; it remains what it really is when it replaces liberty:

Bonaparte, a liberator after the Constitution of the Directory, was

an oppressor after the Charter. He felt this so well that he thought

himself obliged to go further than Louis XVIII. and to return to the

sources of national sovereignty. He, who had trodden the people under

foot as its master, was reduced to create himself anew a tribune of the

people, to court the favour of the suburbs, to parody the revolutionary

infancy, to lisp an old language of liberty which forced his lips into

a grimace, while each syllable angered his sword.

His destiny as a power was, in fact, so well accomplished that the

genius of Napoleon was no longer recognised during the Hundred Days.

That genius was the genius of success and order, not that of defeat

and liberty: now he could do nothing through victory, which had

betrayed him, nothing for order, since it existed without him. In his

astonishment he said:

"To what a condition have the Bourbons reduced France for me, in a few

months! It will take me years to restore her."

It was not the work of the Legitimacy which the conqueror saw, but the

work of the Charter; he had left France dumb and prostrate, he found

her erect and speaking: in the ingenuousness of his absolute mind, he

took liberty for disorder.

And yet Bonaparte was obliged to capitulate with the ideas which he

was unable to conquer at first sight. In the absence of any real

popularity, workmen hired at forty sous a head came, at the end of

their day's work, to howl, "Long live the Emperor!" in the Carrousel.

That was called "going to the crying." Proclamations at first announced

marvels of forgetting and forgiving; individuals were declared

free, the nation free, the press free; nothing was wanted but the

peace, independence and happiness of the people; the whole imperial

system was changed; the golden age was about to return. In order to

conform practice with theory, France was divided into seven great

police sections; the seven lieutenants were invested with the same

powers which were enjoyed under the Consulate and the Empire by the

directors-general: it is well-known what those protectors of individual

liberty were at Lyons, Bordeaux, Milan, Florence, Lisbon, Hamburg,

Amsterdam. Over these lieutenants, in a hierarchy "more and more

favourable to liberty," Bonaparte placed commissaries-extraordinary,

after the fashion of the representatives of the people under the

Convention.

[Sidenote: The hundred days.]

The police, directed by Fouché, informed the world, by means of

solemn proclamations, that it would thenceforward serve only to

spread philosophy, that it would act only in accordance with virtuous

principles.

Bonaparte re-established, by decree, the National Guard of the Kingdom,

the mere name of which used formerly to make his head swim. He found

himself compelled to annul the divorce pronounced under the Empire

between despotism and demagogy and to favour their renewed alliance:

from this hymen was to spring, on the Champ de Mai, a liberty wearing

the red cap and the turban on its head, the mameluke's sabre in its

belt and the revolutionary axe in its hand, a liberty surrounded by

the shades of those thousands of victims sacrificed on the scaffolds

or in the burning campaigns of Spain and the icy deserts of Russia.

Before success, the mamelukes were Jacobins; after success, the

Jacobins were to become mamelukes: Sparta was for the moment of danger,

Constantinople for that of triumph.

Bonaparte would, indeed, have liked to recover possession for himself

alone, but that was impossible for him; he found men prepared to

dispute it with him: first, the earnest Republicans, delivered from

the chains of despotism and the laws of the Monarchy, desired to

retain an independence which is, perhaps, but a noble error; next, the

madmen of the old faction of the Mountain: these latter, humiliated at

having been nothing more under the Empire than the police-spies of a

despot, seemed resolved to resume on their own account that liberty of

doing everything of which, during fifteen years, they had yielded the

privilege to a master.

But not the Republicans, nor the Revolutionaries, nor the satellites

of Bonaparte were strong enough to establish their separate power,

or mutually to subjugate each other. Threatened from without by an

invasion, pursued from within by public opinion, they understood that,

if they became divided, they were lost: in order to escape the danger,

they adjourned their quarrel; some brought their systems and illusions

to the common defense, others their terror and perversity. None was in

earnest in this compact; each, once the crisis passed, resolved to turn

it to his profit; all sought beforehand to make sure of the results of

victory. In that awful _trente-et-un_ three enormous gamblers kept the

bank by turns: liberty, anarchy and despotism, all three cheating and

striving to win a game which was lost for all.

Full of that thought, they did not proceed rigorously against a

forlorn hope which was urging on revolutionary measures: federates

had been formed in the _faubourgs_ and federations were being

organized under stem oaths in Brittany, Anjou, Lyonnais and Burgundy;

the _Marseillaise_ and the _Carmagnole_ were heard sung; a club,

established in Paris, corresponded with other clubs in the provinces;

the resurrection of the _Journal des Patriotes_ was announced. But

on that side what confidence were the resuscitated of 1793 able to

inspire? Was it not known how they explained liberty, equality,

the rights of man? Were they more moral, more wise, more sincere,

after their enormities than before? Was it because they had tainted

themselves with all the vices that they had become capable of all the

virtues? One cannot abdicate crime as easily as a crown: the brow once

girt with the hideous circlet retains ineffaceable marks from its

contact.

The idea of reducing an ambitious man of genius from the rank of

Emperor to that of Generalissimo or President of the Republic was a

chimera: the red cap which they had fixed on the head of his busts

during the Hundred Days would only have foreboded to Bonaparte the

resumption of the diadem, were it given to the athletes who race

through the world to run the same course twice.

Still, some Liberals of the better sort promised themselves the

victory: mistaken men, like Benjamin Constant, dolts, like M.

Simonde-Sismondi[309], spoke of placing the Prince of Canino[310] at

the Ministry of the Interior, Lieutenant-general Comte Carnot at

the War Office, the Comte Merlin[311] at the Ministry of Justice. In

appearance despondent, Bonaparte made no opposition to democratic

movements which, in the last result, supplied his army with conscripts.

He allowed himself to be attacked in pamphlets; caricatures repeated

"Elba" to him as parrots cried "Péronne" to Louis XI[312]. They

preached liberty and equality to the man escaped from prison,

addressing him in the second person singular; he listened to these

remonstrances with an air of compunction. Suddenly, bursting the

shackles in which they had pretended to bind him, he proclaimed, by

his own authority, not a plebeian Constitution, but an aristocratic

Constitution, an "Additional Act" to the Constitutions of the

Empire[313].

[Sidenote: The "Additional Act."]

The contemplated Republic was changed by this adroit piece of juggling

into the old Imperial Government, rejuvenated with feudality. The

"Additional Act" lost Bonaparte the Republican Party and made

malcontents in almost all the other parties. License reigned in

Paris, anarchy in the provinces; the civil and military authorities

contended with each other; here men threatened to burn the manors and

murder the priests; there they hoisted the White Flag and shouted,

"Long live the King!" Finding himself attacked, Bonaparte retreated;

he withdrew the nomination of the mayors of communes from his

commissaries-extraordinary and restored that nomination to the people.

Alarmed at the multiplicity of negative votes against the "Additional

Act," he abandoned his _de facto_ dictatorship and convened the Chamber

of Representatives by virtue of that Act which was not yet accepted.

Blundering from rock to rock, he was scarcely delivered from one danger

before stumbling against another: the sovereign of a day, how was he to

establish an hereditary peerage which the spirit of equality repelled?

How to govern the two Chambers? Would they yield a passive obedience?

What would be the relations of the Chambers with the proposed assembly

of the Champ de Mai, which had no real object, since the "Additional

Act" was brought into operation before the suffrages had been counted?

Would that assembly, consisting of thirty thousand electors, not

believe itself to be the representatives of the nation?

This Champ de Mai, so pompously announced and celebrated on the 1st

of June, resolved itself into a simple march-past of troops and a

distribution of colours before a despised altar. Napoleon, surrounded

by his brothers, the State dignitaries, the marshals, the civil and

judicial bodies, proclaimed the sovereignty of the people in which he

did not believe. The citizens had imagined that they themselves would

frame a Constitution on that solemn day, the peaceful middle class

expected that then would be declared Napoleon's abdication in favour

of his son, an abdication concocted at Bâle between the agents of

Fouché and of Prince Metternich: and there was nothing but a ridiculous

political trap! The "Additional Act," for the rest, stood forth as

an act of homage to the Legitimacy; save for a few differences, and,

in particular, excluding "the abolition of confiscation," it was the

Charter.

*

Those sudden changes, that confounding of all things, announced the

last struggles of despotism. Nevertheless, the Emperor could not

receive the death-stroke from within, for the power which was combating

him was as debilitated as himself; the revolutionary Titan, whom

Napoleon had floored of old, had not recovered his native energy; the

two giants were now aiming useless blows at one another; it was nothing

more than the contest of two shadows.

To these general impossibilities were added, for Bonaparte, domestic

tribulations and palace cares; he announced to France the return of the

Empress and the King of Rome, and neither one nor the other came back.

Speaking of the Queen of Holland, who, thanks to Louis XVIII., had

become Duchesse de Saint-Leu, he said:

"When one has accepted the prosperity of a family, one must embrace its

adversity."

Joseph, who had hastened from Switzerland, only asked him for money;

Lucien alarmed him through his Liberal connections; Murat, after first

conspiring against his brother-in-law, had been in too great a hurry,

on returning to him, to attack the Austrians: stripped of the Kingdom

of Naples, a runaway of ill-omen, he was awaiting, under arrest, near

Marseilles, the catastrophe which I will describe to you later[314].

[Sidenote: Twofold traitors.]

And then, was the Emperor able to trust his former partisans and his

self-styled friends? Had they not infamously abandoned him at the

moment of his fall? That Senate which formerly crawled at his feet,

now ensconced in the peerage, had it not decreed its benefactor's

deposition? Could he believe those men, when they came and said to him:

"The interests of France are inseparable from your own. If fortune

betrays your efforts, reverses, Sire, would not impair our perseverance

and would redouble our attachment to your person."

Your perseverance! Your attachment redoubled by misfortune! You said

this on the 11th of June 1815: what had you said on the 2nd of April

1814? What will you say a few weeks later, on the 19th of July 1815?

The Ministry of the Imperial Police was in correspondence, as you have

seen, with Ghent, Vienna and Bâle; the marshals to whom Bonaparte was

compelled to give the command of his soldiers had but now taken the

oath to Louis XVIII.; they had issued the most violent proclamations

against him, Bonaparte[315]: since that time, it is true, they had

re-espoused their sultan; but, if he had been arrested at Grenoble,

what would they have done with him? Is it enough to break an oath to

restore its whole strength to another violated oath? Are two perjuries

equivalent to one fidelity?

A few days more, and those swearers of the Champ de Mai will carry

back their devotion to Louis XVIII. in the halls of the Tuileries;

they will approach the sacred table of the God of Peace, in order

to have themselves appointed ministers at the banquets of war[316];

heralds-at-arms and brandishers of the royal insignia at the coronation

of Bonaparte, they will fulfil the same functions at the coronation of

Charles X.[317]; then, as the commissaries of another power[318], they

will lead that King a prisoner to Cherbourg, scarce finding a little

corner free in their consciences to hang up in it the badge of their

new oath. It is hard to be born in times of improbity, in those days

when two men talking together study how to keep back words from their

tongue, for fear of offending each other and of mutually making one

another blush.

Those who had not been able to tie themselves to Napoleon by his glory,

who had not been able to adhere from gratitude to the benefactor from

whom they had received their riches, their honours and their very

names, were they likely to sacrifice themselves now to his needy hopes?

Would they link themselves to a precarious and reincipient fortune, the

ingrates whom a fortune consolidated by unexampled successes and by a

possession of sixteen years of victories had failed to fix? So many

chrysalides who, between two spring-times, had put off and put on, shed

and resumed the skin of the Legitimist and the Revolutionary, of the

Napoleonist and the Bourbonist; so many words given and broken; so many

crosses moved from the knight's breast to the horse's tail and from the

horse's tail to the knight's breast; so many doughty warriors changing

their banners and strewing the lists with their pledges of perjured

faith; so many noble dames, the attendants by turns of Marie-Louise

and Marie-Caroline[319], were calculated to leave in the depths of

Napoleon's heart naught but distrust, horror and contempt; that great

man grown old stood alone among all those traitors, men and fortune, on

a tottering earth, under a hostile sky, in front of his accomplished

destiny and the judgment of God.

*

Napoleon had found no faithful friends, but the phantoms of his past

glory; these escorted him, as I have told you, from the spot at which

he landed to the capital of France. But the eagles which had "flown

from steeple to steeple" from Cannes to Paris alighted wearily upon the

chimneys of the Tuileries, able to go no further.

Napoleon did not hurl himself at the head of the roused populace

upon Belgium, before an Anglo-Prussian army had assembled there: he

stopped; he tried to negociate with Europe and humbly to maintain the

treaties of the Legitimacy. The Congress of Vienna urged against M.

le Duc de Vicence the abdication of the 11th of April 1814: by that

abdication, Bonaparte "recognised that he was the sole obstacle to

the restoration of peace in Europe" and consequently "renounced, for

himself and his heirs, the thrones of France and Italy." Now, since he

had come to restore his power, he was manifestly violating the Treaty

of Paris and placing himself again in the political situation anterior

to the 31st of March 1814: therefore it was he, Bonaparte, who was

declaring war against Europe, and not Europe against Bonaparte. These

logical quibbles of diplomatic attorneys, as I remarked in connection

with M. de Talleyrand's letter, were worth what they might be before

the battle.

[Sidenote: Napoleon's last campaign.]

The news of Bonaparte's landing at Cannes had reached Vienna on the 6th

of March, in the middle of an entertainment at which was represented

the assembly of the divinities of Olympus and Parnassus. Alexander had

just received the proposal for an alliance between France, Austria and

England; he hesitated a moment between the two pieces of intelligence,

and then said:

"The question is not of myself, but of the safety of the world."

And an estafette carried orders to St. Petersburg to dispatch the

Guards. The withdrawing armies stopped short; their long line faced

about, and eight hundred thousand enemies turned their eyes towards

France. Bonaparte prepared for war; he was expected in new Catalaunian

Fields[320]: God had summoned him to the battle which was to put an end

to the reign of battles.

The heat of the wings of the renown of Marengo and Austerlitz had

sufficed to hatch armies in that France which is one great nest of

soldiers. Bonaparte had restored to his legions their epithets of

"invincible," "terrible" and "incomparable;" seven armies resumed

the titles of Armies of the Pyrenees, of the Alps, of the Jura, the

Moselle, the Rhine: great memories which served as a frame for supposed

troops, for expected triumphs. A real army was mustered in Paris

and at Laon: one hundred and fifty mounted batteries, ten thousand

picked soldiers entered into the guards; eighteen thousand sailors

distinguished at Lützen and Bautzen; thirty thousand veterans, officers

and non-commissioned officers, in garrison in the fortified towns;

seven departments in the North and East ready to rise in a body; one

hundred and eighty thousand men of the National Guard mobilized;

volunteer corps in Lorraine, Alsace and Franche-Comté; federates

offering their pikes and their strength; Paris turning out three

thousand muskets a day: those were the Emperor's resources. Perhaps

he might yet once more have overturned the world, had he been able to

resolve, while liberating the country, to summon the foreign nations

to independence. The moment was propitious: the kings, after promising

their subjects constitutional government, had shamefully gone from

their word. But liberty was distasteful to Napoleon, since he had drunk

of the cup of power; he preferred to be vanquished with soldiers rather

than to vanquish with peoples. The army corps which he successively

sent towards the Netherlands amounted to seventy thousand men.

*

We Emigrants, in the city of Charles V., were like the women of that

city: seated behind their windows, they watch the soldiers, in a little

slanting mirror, passing down the street. Louis XVIII. was there in

a corner, completely forgotten: scarcely did he from time to time

receive a note from the Prince de Talleyrand returning from Vienna,

a few lines from the members of the diplomatic body resident about

the Duke of Wellington as commissaries, Messieurs Pozzo di Borgo, de

Vincent[321], etc., etc. They had plenty to do besides thinking of

us! A man unacquainted with politics would never have believed that

an impotent hidden on the banks of the Lys would be flung back upon

the throne by the collision of thousands of soldiers ready to cut each

other's throats: soldiers of whom he was neither the King nor the

general, who were not thinking of him, who knew of neither his name nor

his existence. Of two such close spots as Ghent and Waterloo, never did

one appear so dim, the other so dazzling: the Legitimacy lay in the

store-house, like an old broken waggon.

We knew that Bonaparte's troops were approaching; to cover us we had

only two little companies under the orders of the Duc de Berry, a

Prince whose blood could not avail us, for it was already demanded

elsewhere. One thousand horse, detached from the French army, would

have carried us off in a few hours. The fortifications of Ghent were

demolished; the enceinte which remained would have been the more easily

carried in that the Belgian population was not in our favour. The scene

which I had witnessed at the Tuileries was repeated: His Majesty's

carriages were secretly got ready; the horses were ordered. We faithful

ministers would have splashed after by God's grace. Monsieur left for

Brussels, charged to watch the movements from near at hand.

M. de Blacas had become anxious and melancholy; I, poor man, consoled

him. People in Vienna were not favourably disposed to him; M. de

Talleyrand laughed at him; the Royalists accused him of being the cause

of Napoleon's return. Thus, whatever happened, no further honoured

exile for him in England, no further possibility of first places in

France: I was his only support. I used to meet him pretty often in the

Horse-market, where he trotted about alone; harnessing myself to his

side, I fell in with "his sad thought." This man whom I have defended

at Ghent and in England, whom I defended in France after the Hundred

Days and even in the preface to the _Monarchie selon la Charte_, has

always been adverse to me: that would be nothing, if he had not been

an evil for the Monarchy. I do not repent my past simplicity; but I

am bound, in these Memoirs, to rectify the surprises sprung upon my

judgment and my good heart.

*

[Sidenote: Excitement at Ghent.]

On the 18th of June 1815, I left Ghent at noon by the Brussels gate;

I was going to finish my walk alone on the high-road. I had taken

Cæsar's _Commentaries_ with me, and I strolled slowly along, immersed

in my reading. I was more than a league from the town, when I thought

I heard a dull rumbling: I stopped, looked up at the sky, which was

fairly laden with clouds, taking counsel with myself whether I should

continue to walk on, or go back towards Ghent for fear of a storm.

I listened; I heard nothing more save the cry of a moor-hen in the

rushes and the sound of a village-clock. I pursued my way: I had not

taken thirty steps before the rumbling began again, now short, now

long and at irregular intervals; sometimes it was perceptible only

through a trembling of the air, which communicated itself to the ground

over those immense plains, so distant was it. Those detonations, less

extensive, less undulating, less connected than those of thunder,

gave rise in my mind to the idea of a battle. I found myself in front

of a poplar planted at the corner of a hop-field. I crossed the road

and leant erect against the trunk of the tree, my face turned in the

direction of Brussels. A southerly wind springing up carried to me more

distinctly the sound of artillery. That great battle, nameless as yet,

of which I listened to the echoes at the foot of a poplar, and of which

a village clock had just rung out the unknown funerals, was the Battle

of Waterloo!

A silent and solitary hearer of the formidable judgment of the

destinies, I should have been less moved if I had found myself in

the fray: the peril, the fire, the press of Death would have left me

no time for meditation; but, alone under a tree, in the fields of

Ghent, like the shepherd of the flocks which passed around me, I was

overwhelmed by the weight of my reflexions: what was that battle?

Was it decisive? Was Napoleon there in person? Were lots being cast

upon the world, as upon Christ's vesture? In the event of success or

reverse for one side or the other, what would be the consequence for

the nations: liberty or slavery? But what blood was flowing! Was not

each sound that reached my ear the last sigh of a Frenchman? Was it

a new Crécy, a new Poitiers, a new Agincourt, in which France's most

implacable enemies were about to revel? If they triumphed, was not

our glory lost? If Napoleon won the day, what became of our liberty?

Although a success on Napoleon's side opened up to me an eternal exile,

the mother-land at that moment gained the mastery in my heart; my

prayers were for the oppressor of France, if, while saving our honour,

he was to snatch us from foreign domination.

Was Wellington triumphing? Then the Legitimacy would re-enter Paris

behind those red uniforms which had just renewed their die in the

blood of the French! Then the royalty would have as state-carriages

at its coronation the ambulance-waggons filled with our maimed

grenadiers! What manner of restoration would it be, accomplished under

such auspices?... That is but a very small portion of the ideas that

tormented me. Each gun-shot gave me a shock and doubled the beating

of my heart. At a few leagues from an immense catastrophe, I did not

see it, I could not touch the huge funeral monument growing minute by

minute at Waterloo, even as from the shore of Bulak, on the bank of the

Nile, I had vainly stretched out my hands towards the Pyramids.

No traveller appeared; a few women in the fields, peacefully weeding

rows of vegetables, did not seem to hear the noise to which I was

listening. But see, a courier came riding up: I left the foot of my

tree and placed myself in the middle of the road; I stopped the courier

and questioned him. He belonged to the Duc de Berry and came from

Alost:

"Bonaparte entered Brussels yesterday (17 June), after a sanguinary

combat. The battle was to have recommenced to-day (18 June). They think

the Allies have suffered a decisive defeat, and the order is given to

retreat."

The courier continued his road.

I followed him, hastening my steps: I was passed by the carriage of

a merchant who was fleeing post with his family; he confirmed the

courier's story.

[Sidenote: Confusion at Ghent.]

All was in confusion when I returned to Ghent: they were closing the

gates of the city; only the wickets remained half-open; ill-armed

civilians and a few soldiers in depot were keeping sentry. I went to

the King's.

Monsieur had just arrived by a circuitous route: he had left Brussels

upon the false news that Bonaparte was about to enter it and that a

first lost battle left no hope of winning a second. They were saying

that, as the Prussians had not formed their lines, the English had been

crushed.

At these bulletins, the stampede became general: the possessors of some

resources left; I, who am accustomed never to have anything, was always

ready and prepared. I wanted to let Madame de Chateaubriand move out

before me; she was a great Bonapartist, but did not like cannon-shots:

she refused to leave me.

In the evening, council at His Majesty's: we heard Monsieur's reports

over again, as well as the _on dits_ picked up at the military

commandant's or at the Baron d'Eckstein's[322]. The waggon to contain

the Crown diamonds was put to: I had no need of a waggon to remove my

treasure. I put the black-silk handkerchief in which I wrap my head at

night into my flaccid minister-of-the-interior's portfolio, and placed

myself at the Sovereign's disposal, with that important document of the

affairs of the Legitimacy. I was richer in my first emigration, when

my knapsack did duty as my pillow and served as a swaddling-band for

_Atala_: but, in 1815, _Atala_ was a big gawky little girl of thirteen

or fourteen, who was going about alone in the world and who, to her

father's honour, had got herself too much talked about.

On the 19th of June, at one o'clock in the morning, a letter from M.

Pozzo, brought to the King by express, reestablished the truth of the

facts. Bonaparte had never entered Brussels; he had decidedly lost

the Battle of Waterloo. Leaving Paris on the 12th of June, he joined

his army on the 14th. On the 15th, he forced the enemy's lines on

the Sambre. On the 16th, he beat the Prussians in those plains of

Fleurus[323] where victory seems to be always faithful to the French.

The villages of Ligny and Saint-Amand were carried. At Quatre-Bras, a

further success: the Duke of Brunswick[324] remained among the dead.

Blücher[325], in full retreat, fell back upon a reserve of thirty

thousand men under the orders of General Bülow[326]; the Duke of

Wellington, with the English and Dutch, set his back against Brussels.

On the morning of the 18th, before the first gun had been fired, the

Duke of Wellington declared that he would be able to hold out until

three o'clock; but that, at that time, if the Prussians did not come

into sight, he would necessarily be destroyed: driven back upon

Planchenois and Brussels, he was shut out from all retreat. He had been

surprised by Napoleon, his strategic position was detestable; he had

accepted it and had not chosen it.

The French, at first, on the left wing of the enemy, took the

heights commanding the Château d'Hougoumont as far as the farms of

the Haye-Sainte and Papelotte; on the right wing, they attacked the

village of Mont Saint-Jean; the farm of the Haye-Sainte was carried

in the centre by Prince Jerome. But the Prussian reserves appeared in

the direction of Saint-Lambert at six o'clock in the evening: a new

and furious attack was delivered upon the village of the Haye-Sainte;

Blücher arrived with fresh troops and cut off the squares of the

Imperial Guard from the rest of our forces. Around this immortal

phalanx, the torrent of fugitives carried all with it among waves

of dust, fiery smoke and grape-shot, in darkness ploughed with

congreve-rockets, amid the roar of three hundred pieces of artillery

and the headlong gallop of five-and-twenty thousand horses: it was

as it were the summary of all the battles of the Empire. Twice the

French shouted, "Victory!" and twice their shouts were stifled under

the pressure of the enemy's columns. The fire from our lines died out;

the cartridges were exhausted; some wounded grenadiers, amid thirty

thousand slain and a hundred thousand blood-stained cannon-balls,

cooled and conglomerated at their feet, remained erect, leaning on

their muskets, with broken bayonets and empty barrels. Not far from

them, the man of battles listened, with a fixed stare, to the last

cannon-shot he was to hear in his life. In that field of carnage,

his brother Jerome was still fighting with his expiring battalions

overwhelmed by numbers; but his courage was unable to retrieve the

victory.

[Sidenote: The battle of Waterloo.]

The number of killed on the side of the Allies was estimated at

eighteen thousand men, on the side of the French at twenty-five

thousand; twelve hundred British officers had perished; almost all

the Duke of Wellington's aides-de-camp were killed or wounded; there

was not a family in England but went into mourning. The Prince of

Orange[327] was hit by a bullet in the shoulder; the Baron de Vincent,

the Austrian Ambassador, was shot through the hand. The English were

beholden for the success to the Irish and to the Highland Brigade, whom

our cavalry charges were unable to break. General Grouchy's[328] corps,

not having advanced, was not present in the action. The two armies

crossed steel and fire with a valour and desperation inspired by a

national enmity of ten centuries. Lord Castlereagh, giving an account

of the battle in the House of Lords[329], said:

"The British and French soldiers, after the action, washed their

blood-stained hands in the same stream, and from opposite banks

congratulated each other on their courage."

Wellington had always been baleful to Bonaparte, or rather the rival

genius to France, the English genius, barred the road to victory.

To-day, the Prussians lay claim to the honour of this decisive battle,

as against the English; but in war it is not the action accomplished

but the name that makes the triumpher: it was not Bonaparte who won the

real Battle of Jena[330].

The blunders of the French were important: they made mistakes as to

friendly or hostile bodies; they occupied the position of Quatre-Bras

too late; Marshal Grouchy, whose instructions were to hold the

Prussians in check with his thirty-six thousand men, allowed them to

pass without seeing them: hence the reproaches which our generals cast

at one another. Bonaparte attacked in front, according to his custom,

instead of turning the English, and, with a master's presumption,

occupied himself in cutting off the retreat of an enemy who was not

beaten.

Many falsehoods and some rather curious truths have been retailed

concerning this catastrophe. The phrase, "The Guard dies but does

not surrender," is an invention which no one dares now to defend. It

appears to be certain that, at the commencement of the action, Soult

made some strategic observations to the Emperor, and that Napoleon

replied, drily:

"Because Wellington defeated you, you persist in thinking him a great

general."

At the end of the fighting, M. de Turenne[331] urged Bonaparte to

retire, to avoid falling into the hands of the enemy: Bonaparte,

emerging from his thoughts as from a dream, at first flew into a

passion; then, suddenly, in the midst of his rage, he flung himself

upon his horse and fled.

*

On the 19th of June, a salute of a hundred guns at the Invalides

announced the successes of Ligny, Charleroi and Quatre-Bras; they

were celebrating victories that had died the day before at Waterloo.

The first messenger to bring to Paris the news of this defeat, one

of the greatest in history in its results, was Napoleon himself. He

re-entered the barriers on the night of the 21st: as who should say

returning from his shades to inform his friends that he was no more. He

stayed at the Élysée-Bourbon; when he arrived from Elba, he had stayed

at the Tuileries: those refuges, instinctively chosen, revealed the

change in his destiny.

[Sidenote: Flight of Napoleon.]

Fallen in a noble fight abroad, Napoleon had, in Paris, to endure the

assaults of the advocates who wished to exploit his misfortunes: he

regretted that he had not dissolved the Chamber before his departure

for the army; he often also repented that he had not had Fouché and

Talleyrand shot. But it is certain that Bonaparte, after Waterloo,

forbade himself any kind of violence, whether because he obeyed the

natural calm of his temperament, or because he was daunted by fate; he

no longer said, as before his first abdication:

"They shall see what the death of a great man is."

The time for that spirited language was past. Opposed as he was to

liberty, he thought of breaking up the Chamber of Representatives,

presided over by Lanjuinais, who from a citizen became a senator, from

a senator a peer, who since became a citizen again, and who from a

citizen was about again to become a peer. General La Fayette, deputy,

read from the tribune a motion declaring "the Chamber in permanent

session, any attempt to dissolve it a crime of high treason, whosoever

should be guilty of it a traitor to the country and to be tried as

such" (21 June 1815).

The general's speech began with these words:

"Gentlemen, now when, for the first time since many years,

I raise a voice which the old friends of liberty will still

recognise, I feel called upon to speak to you of the danger

of the country. . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . This is the time to rally round the Tricolour Flag,

the flag of '89, the flag of liberty, equality and public

order."

The anachronism of this speech caused a momentary illusion; people

thought they saw the Revolution, personified by La Fayette, rise from

the tomb and stand pale and wrinkled in the tribune. But those motions

of order, revived after Mirabeau, were now no more than worn-out

weapons taken from an old arsenal. If La Fayette nobly united the end

and the commencement of his life, it was not in his power to weld

together the two ends of the broken chain of time. Benjamin Constant

waited on the Emperor at the Élysée-Bourbon; he found him in his

garden. The crowd was filling the Avenue de Marigny and shouting, "Long

live the Emperor!" a touching cry coming from the popular heart: it was

addressed to the vanquished! Bonaparte said to Benjamin Constant:

"What duty do these owe me? I found them and left them poor."

This is perhaps the only speech that came from his heart, if,

nevertheless, the deputy's emotion did not deceive his hearing.

Bonaparte, foreseeing the event, anticipated the summons they were

preparing to serve on him. He abdicated so as not to be compelled to

abdicate.

"My political life is ended," he said; "I declare my son Emperor of the

French, under the name of Napoleon II."

A useless disposition, like that of Charles X. in favour of Henry V.:

one gives crowns only when one possesses them, and men upset the will

of adversity. Moreover, the Emperor was no more sincere on descending

the throne a second time than he had been in his first retirement; when

the French commissaries went to inform the Duke of Wellington that

Napoleon had abdicated, he replied:

"I knew that a year ago."

The Chamber of Representatives, after some debates in which Manuel[332]

addressed the House, accepted its Sovereign's new abdication, but

vaguely and without appointing a Regency.

An Executive Commission was created[333]: the Duc d'Otrante presided

over it; three ministers, a councillor of State and a general of the

Emperor's composed it, and stripped their master once more: these were

Fouché, Caulaincourt, Carnot, Quinette[334] and Grenier[335].

During these transactions, Bonaparte was turning over his ideas in his

head:

"I have no army left," he said; "I have nothing but fugitives. The

majority of the Chamber of Deputies are good; I have only La Fayette,

Lanjuinais and a few others against me. If the nation rises, the enemy

will be crushed; if, instead of rising, they quarrel, all will be lost.

The nation has not sent deputies to overthrow me, but to support me.

I am not afraid of them, whatever they may do; I shall always be the

idol of the people and the army: if I were to say a word, they would be

beaten to death. But if we quarrel, instead of acting in concert, we

shall meet with the fate of the Lower Empire."

[Sidenote: His second abdication.]

A deputation from the Chamber of Representatives having come to

congratulate him on his new abdication, he replied:

"I thank you: I wish that my abdication may bring happiness to France;

but I am not hopeful."

He repented soon after, when he heard that the Chamber of

Representatives had appointed a Commission of Government composed of

five members. He said to the ministers:

"I have not abdicated in favour of a new Directory; I have abdicated

in favour of my son: if they do not proclaim him, my abdication is

null and void. It is not by appearing before the Allies with hang-dog

looks and bent knee that the Chambers will force them to recognise the

national independence."

He complained that La Fayette, Sébastian[336], Pontécoulant[337],

Benjamin Constant had conspired against him, that, besides, the

Chambers had not enough energy. He said that he alone could repair all,

but that the leaders would never consent, that they would rather be

swallowed up in the abyss than unite with him, Napoleon, to close it.

On the 27th of June, at the Malmaison, he wrote this sublime letter:

"In abdicating the power, I did not renounce the citizen's

noblest right, the right of defending my country. In these

grave circumstances, I offer my services as a general,

regarding myself still as the first soldier of the

mother-land."

The Duc de Bassano having represented to him that the Chambers would

not be for him:

"Then I see," he said, "one must always give in. That infamous Fouché

is deceiving you: only Caulaincourt and Carnot are worth anything; but

what can they do, with a traitor, Fouché, and two simpletons, Quinette

and Grenier, and two Chambers which do not know what they want? You

all believe, like fools, in the fine promises of the foreigners; you

believe they will set the pot boiling, and that they will give you a

prince of their making, do you not? You are wrong[338]."

Plenipotentiaries were sent to the Allies. On the 29th of June,

Napoleon demanded two frigates, stationed at Rochefort, to take him out

of France. Meanwhile he had retired to the Malmaison.

The debates in the House of Peers were lively. Long an enemy of

Bonaparte, Carnot, who signed the order for the massacres of Avignon

without having time to read it, had found time during the Hundred

Days to immolate his republicanism to the title of count. On the 22nd

of June, he had read, in the Luxembourg, a letter from the Minister

of War containing an exaggerated report on the military resources

of France. Ney, newly arrived, was unable to hear this report

unangered. Napoleon, in his bulletins, had spoken of the marshal with

ill-disguised dissatisfaction, and Gourgaud accused Ney of being the

chief cause of the loss of the Battle of Waterloo. Ney rose and said:

"The report is untrue, untrue in every respect: Grouchy can have only

twenty to twenty-five thousand men under his orders, at the most. There

is not a single soldier of the Guard left to be rallied: I commanded

it; I saw it slaughtered bodily before leaving the battle-field. The

enemy is at Nivelle with eighty thousand men; he can be in Paris in

six days: you have no other means of saving the country than to open

negociations."

[Sidenote: Debates in the peers.]

The Aide-de-camp Flahaut[339] endeavoured to support the report of the

Minister of War. Ney replied, with fresh vehemence:

"I repeat, you have no other way of safety except negociation. You

must recall the Bourbons. As for myself, I shall retire to the United

States."

At these words, Lavallette and Carnot overwhelmed the marshal with

reproaches; Ney replied, with disdain:

"I am not one of those men to whom their own interest is everything.

What have I to gain by the return of Louis XVIII.? To be shot for the

crime of desertion. But I owe the truth to my country."

In the sitting of the Peers of the 23rd, General Drouot, recalling this

scene, said:

"I heard with regret what was said yesterday to disparage the glory

of our arms, to exaggerate our disasters and disparage our resources.

My astonishment was so much the greater because those speeches were

delivered by a distinguished general who, through his great valour and

his military attainments, has so often deserved the gratitude of the

nation."

In the sitting of the 22nd, a second storm had burst out at the heel

of the first: the question was Bonaparte's abdication; Lucien was

insisting that his nephew should be recognized as Emperor. M. de

Pontécoulant interrupted the speaker, and asked by what right Lucien, a

foreigner and a Roman prince, permitted himself to give a sovereign to

France:

"How," he added, "can we recognise a child living in a foreign country?"

At this question, La Bédoyère[340], speaking excitedly from his seat:

"I have heard voices around the throne of the fortunate sovereign; they

withdraw from it to-day when he is unfortunate. There are people who

do not want to recognise Napoleon II., because they want to receive

the law from the foreigner, to whom they give the name of Allies....

Napoleon's abdication is indivisible. If you refuse to recognise his

son, he must remain sword in hand, surrounded by Frenchmen who have

shed their blood for him and who are still all covered with wounds....

He will be abandoned by base generals who have already betrayed him....

But if you declare that every Frenchman who deserts his flag shall

be covered with infamy, his house razed to the ground, his family

outlawed, then there will be no more traitors, no more intrigues such

as have occasioned the late catastrophes, some of whose authors are

perhaps sitting among us."

The House rose in an uproar:

"Order! Order! Order!" they bellowed, feeling the thrust.

"Young man, you forget yourself!" cried Masséna[341].

"Do you think you are still in the guard-room?" asked Lameth.

All the portents of the Second Restoration were threatening: Bonaparte

had returned at the head of four hundred Frenchmen, Louis XVIII. was

returning behind four hundred thousand foreigners; he passed near the

bloody pool of Waterloo to go to Saint-Denis as though to his funeral.

It was while the Legitimacy was thus advancing that the interpellations

of the House of Peers resounded; they contained something, I know not

what, of those terrible revolutionary scenes of the great days of our

troubles, when the dagger was passed round on the bench from hand to

hand among the victims. A few soldiers whose baleful fascination had

brought about the ruin of France, by producing the second foreign

invasion, struggled on the threshold of the palace; their prophetic

despair, their gestures, their words from the tomb, seemed to announce

a treble death: death to themselves, death to the man whom they had

blessed, death to the man whom they had proscribed.

*

While Bonaparte was retiring to the Malmaison with the finished Empire,

we were leaving Ghent with the recommencing Monarchy. Pozzo, who

knew how little question of the Legitimacy there was in high places,

hastened to write to Louis XVIII. to set out and arrive in good time,

if he wished to reign before the place was taken: it was to that note

that Louis XVIII. owed his crown in 1815.

At Mons, I missed the first occasion of fortune in my political career;

I was my own obstacle, and I found myself incessantly in my way. This

time my "good qualities" played me the ill turn which my faults might

have done me.

[Sidenote: Talleyrand again.]

M. de Talleyrand, in all the pride of a negociation which had enriched

him, claimed that he had rendered the greatest services to the

Legitimacy, and was returning as the master. Astonished that they

had not already followed, for the return to Paris, the road which he

had traced out, he was much more dissatisfied to find M. de Blacas

still with the King. He looked upon M. de Blacas as the scourge of

the Monarchy; but this was not the real motive of his aversion: he

beheld in M. de Blacas the favourite, and consequently the rival; he

also feared Monsieur, and had flown into a passion when, a fortnight

earlier, Monsieur had made him an offer of his hotel on the Lys. To

ask for M. de Blacas' removal was most natural; to demand it was too

reminiscent of Bonaparte.

M. de Talleyrand drove into Mons at six o'clock in the evening,

accompanied by the Abbé Louis: M. de Ricé, M. de Jaucourt and a few

other boon companions flew to him. Full of an ill-humour such as he

had never yet displayed, the ill-humour of a king who believes his

authority to have been slighted, he refused at first to go to Louis

XVIII., replying to those who urged him to do so with his ostentatious

phrase:

"I am never in a hurry; it will be time enough tomorrow."

I went to see him; he tried upon me all those wheedling tricks

with which he used to seduce small ambitious men and important

nincompoops. He took me by the arm, leant upon me while he spoke to

me: familiarities denoting high favour and calculated to turn my head,

although with me they were quite lost; I did not even understand. I

invited him to come to the King's, where I was going.

Louis XVIII. was in one of his great sorrows: it was a question of

parting with M. de Blacas; the latter could not return to France;

opinion had risen against him. Although I had had reason to complain

of the favourite in Paris, I had displayed no resentment towards him

at Ghent. The King had been pleased with my conduct; in his emotion he

treated me marvellously well. M. de Talleyrand's remarks had already

been repeated to him:

"He boasts," he said to me, "of having a second time put back the crown

on my head, and he threatens to go back again to Germany: what do you

think of that, Monsieur de Chateaubriand?"

I replied:

"Your Majesty must have been misinformed; M. de Talleyrand is only

tired. If the King consents, I will return to see the minister."

The King appeared gratified; what he liked least was worries; he longed

for his repose, even at the expense of his affections.

M. de Talleyrand, in the midst of his flatterers, was more arrogant

than ever. I represented to him that, at so critical a moment, he could

not dream of going away. Pozzo preached at him in the same sense:

although he had not the slightest inclination for him, he liked, at

that moment, to see him at the head of affairs, as an old acquaintance;

besides, he believed him to be in favour with the Tsar. I made no

headway on M. de Talleyrand's mind, the prince's familiars fought

against me; even M. Mounier thought that M. de Talleyrand ought to

retire. The Abbé Louis, who snapped at everybody, said to me, shaking

his jaw three times: "If I were the prince, I should not remain a

quarter of an hour at Mons."

I answered:

"Monsieur l'abbé, you and I can go where we please, no one will notice

us; it is different with M. de Talleyrand."

I insisted again and said to the prince:

"Do you know that the King is continuing his journey?"

M. de Talleyrand appeared surprised, and then said to me, loftily, as

did the Balafré to those who wished to put him on his guard against the

designs of Henry III.:

"He will not dare!"

I returned to the King's, where I found M. de Blacas. I told His

Majesty, to excuse his minister, that he was ill, but that he would

most certainly have the honour of paying his court to the King the next

day.

"As he pleases," replied Louis XVIII.: "I leave at three o'clock;" and

then he added these words, in an affectionate tone: "I am going to part

with M. de Blacas; the place will be vacant, Monsieur de Chateaubriand."

[Sidenote: The great man snubbed.]

It was the Royal Household laid at my feet A wary politician would

have ceased to trouble his head about M. de Talleyrand and would have

had the horses put to his carriage to follow or precede the King: I

remained stupidly at my inn.

M. de Talleyrand, unable to persuade himself that the King would go,

had gone to bed: at three o'clock they woke him to tell him that the

King was starting; he could not believe his ears:

"Tricked! Betrayed!" he cried.

They got him out of bed, and there he was, for the first time in his

life, in the street at three o'clock in the morning, leaning on M. de

Ricé's arm. He reached the King's house; the two leaders of the team

had already half their bodies through the gate-way. The people motioned

to the postillion to pull up; the King asked what was the matter; they

cried:

"Sire, it is M. de Talleyrand."

"He's asleep," said Louis XVIII.

"He is here, Sire."

"Come on!" replied the King.

The horses moved backward with the carriage; the door was opened, the

King got down and dragged himself back to his apartment, followed

by the limping minister. There M. de Talleyrand began an angry

explanation. His Majesty listened to him, and answered:

"Prince de Bénévent, so you're leaving us? The waters will do you good:

you must send us your news."

The King left the prince open-mouthed, had himself taken back to his

berlin, and drove away.

M. de Talleyrand was foaming with rage; Louis XVIII.'s composure had

staggered him: he, M. de Talleyrand, who prided himself so greatly on

his composure, to be beaten on his own ground, given the slip, on a

square at Mons, like the most insignificant of men: he could not get

over it! He remained dumb, watched the coach moving off, and then,

seizing the Duc de Lévis by a button of his spencer:

"Go, monsieur le duc, go and say how I am treated! I have put back

the crown on the King's head"--he was always harking back to that

crown--"and I am going back to Germany to begin the new Emigration."

M. de Lévis, listening absent-mindedly, lifting himself on his toes,

said:

"Prince, I am going; the King must have at least one great lord with

him."

M. de Lévis flung himself into a hired cariole which was conveying the

Chancellor of France: the two grandees of the Capetian Monarchy were

going, side by side, to catch it up, sharing expenses, in a Merovingian

_benna._

I had asked M. de Duras to endeavour to effect a reconciliation, and to

send me the first news of it:

"What!" said M. de Duras. "You are remaining behind, after what the

King said to you?"

M. de Blacas, when leaving Mons in his turn, thanked me for the

interest I had shown him.

I went back and found M. de Talleyrand embarrassed; he was now

regretting that he had not followed my advice and that, like a

wrong-headed subaltern, he had refused to go to the King in the

evening; he feared that arrangements would be made without him, that he

would not be able to participate in the political power and to profit

by the financial jobbing which was preparing. I told him that, although

I differed from his opinion, I remained none the less attached to him,

as an ambassador to his minister; that, besides, I had friends with the

King, and that I hoped soon to hear something good. M. de Talleyrand

was all tenderness; he leant upon my shoulder: certainly, at that

moment, he thought me a very great man.

It was not long before I received a note from M. de Duras; he wrote to

me from Cambrai that the affair was arranged and that M. de Talleyrand

would receive orders to start: this time the prince did not fail to

obey.

What devil was prompting me? I had not followed the King, who had, so

to speak, offered or rather given me the ministry of his Household and

who was offended at my obstinacy in remaining at Mons: I was breaking

my neck on behalf of M. de Talleyrand whom I hardly knew, whom I did

not esteem, whom I did not admire; for M. de Talleyrand who was about

to enter into combinations quite different from mine, who lived in an

atmosphere of corruption in which I could not breathe!

[Sidenote: I neglect fortune.]

It was from Mons itself, amid all his worries, that the Prince de

Bénévent sent M. de Perray to Naples to receive the millions of one of

his Viennese bargains. M. de Blacas was at the same time travelling

with the Naples Embassy in his pocket, and some other millions which

the generous exile of Ghent had given him at Mons. I had kept on good

terms with M. de Blacas, precisely because everybody detested him; I

had incurred M. de Talleyrand's friendship for my fidelity to a whim of

his mood; Louis XVIII. had positively called me about his person, and I

preferred the baseness of a faithless man to the King's favour: it was

only too just that I should receive the reward of my stupidity, that I

should be abandoned by all for having tried to serve all. I returned

to France without the wherewithal to pay my journey, while treasures

poured down upon those in disgrace: I deserved that correction. It is

very well to fence one's way as a poor knight when the whole world is

cased in gold; but still one must not make enormous mistakes: had I

remained with the King, the combination of the Talleyrand and Fouché

Ministry would have become almost impossible; had the Restoration

commenced with a moral and honourable ministry, all the combinations of

the future might have been different. My carelessness of my own person

deceived me as to the importance of facts: the majority of men have

the fault of reckoning themselves too high; I have the fault of not

reckoning myself high enough: I wrapped myself in my habitual disdain

of my fortune; I ought to have seen that the fortune of France was at

that moment linked with that of my small destinies: such entanglements

are very common in history.

*

Leaving Mons at last, I arrived at Cateau-Cambrésis; M. de Talleyrand

joined me there: we seemed as though we had come to remake the treaty

of peace of 1559 between Henry II. of France[342] and Philip II. of

Spain[343].

At Cambrai it appeared that the Marquis de La Suze, a quarter-master of

the time of Fénelon, had disposed of the billets of Madame de Lévis,

Madame de Chateaubriand and myself. We remained in the street, in the

midst of the bon-fires, of the crowd circulating around us, and of the

inhabitants crying, "Long live the King!" A student, hearing that I was

there, took us to his mother's house.

The friends of the different monarchies of France were beginning to

make their appearance; they were not coming to Cambrai for the league

against Venice[344], but to combine against the new Constitutions; they

were hastening to lay at the King's feet their successive loyalties and

their hatred of the Charter: a passport which they considered necessary

with Monsieur; I and two or three reasonable Gileses already smelt of

Jacobinism.

On the 28th of June, appeared the Declaration of Cambrai. In it the

King said:

"I wish to remove from my person only those men whose reputation is a

subject of grief to France and of dismay to Europe."

Now behold, the name of Fouché was pronounced with gratitude by the

Pavillon Marsan! The King laughed at his brother's new passion, and

said:

"He has not received it by divine inspiration."

I have already told you that, when passing through Cambrai after the

Hundred Days, I vainly sought my lodging of the time of the Navarre

Regiment and the coffee-house which I frequented with La Martinière:

all had vanished with my youth.

From Cambrai, we went to sleep at Roye: the mistress of the inn took

Madame de Chateaubriand for Madame la Dauphine; she was carried in

triumph to a large room in which stood a table laid for thirty persons:

the room, lighted by wax-candles, tallow-candles and a great fire, was

stifling. The hostess did not wish to receive payment, and said:

"I look askance at myself for not having got myself guillotined for our

kings."

Last spark of a fire which had animated the French for so many

centuries.

General Lamothe, brother-in-law to M. Laborie, came, despatched by the

authorities of the capital, to tell us that it would be impossible

for us to appear in Paris without the tricolour cockade. M. de La

Fayette and other commissaries, very ill received, for the rest, by the

Allies, went fawning from one staff-office to the other, begging from

the foreigners for a master of some sort for France: any king, at the

Cossack's own option, would do excellently, provided that he did not

descend from St. Louis and Louis XIV.

[Sidenote: The journey to Paris.]

At Roye we held a council: M. de Talleyrand had a pair of hacks put to

his carriage and went to the King's. His equipage took up the width

of the square, from the minister's inn to the Kings door. He stepped

out of his car with a memorandum, which he read to us: he considered

the course we should have to follow on our arrival; he ventured a few

words on the necessity of admitting all, without distinction, to the

distribution of places; he hinted that we might extend our generosity

as far as the judges of Louis XVI. His Majesty coloured and, striking

the two arms of his chair, with both hands, cried:

"Never!"

A "never" of twenty-four hours!

At Senlis we called at a canon's: his servant-maid received us like

dogs; as to the canon, who was not St. Regulus[345], the patron saint

of the town, he would not so much as look at us. His maid had orders

to show us no other service than to buy us something to eat, for our

own money: the _Génie du Christianisme_ availed me nothing. Yet Senlis

ought to have been of good omen to us, since it was in that town that

Henry IV. escaped from the hands of his gaolers in 1576:

"I have no regret," exclaimed the King who was Montaigne's

fellow-countryman, as he made his escape, "save for two things which I

have left in Paris: the Mass and my wife."

From Senlis we went to the birth-place of Philip Augustus, otherwise

Gonesse. On approaching the village we saw two persons coming

towards us: it was Marshal Macdonald and my faithful friend Hyde de

Neuville[346]. They stopped our carriage and asked us where M. de

Talleyrand was; they made no difficulties about telling me that they

were looking for him in order to inform the King that His Majesty

must not think of passing the gates before he had taken Fouché as his

minister. Anxiety came over me, for, in spite of the manner in which

Louis XVIII. had pronounced himself at Roye, I did not feel greatly

reassured. I questioned the marshal:

"What, monsieur le maréchal!" I asked. "Is it certain that we cannot

return except on such harsh conditions?"

"Faith, monsieur le vicomte," replied the marshal, "I am not quite

convinced of it."

The King stopped two hours at Gonesse. I left Madame de Chateaubriand

in her carriage in the middle of the highroad, and went to the council

at the mayor's offices. There a measure was brought under deliberation

upon which depended the future fate of the monarchy. The discussion

began: I, alone with M. Beugnot, maintained that in no case ought Louis

XVIII. to admit M. Fouché to his counsels. The King listened: I saw

that he would have liked to keep his word given at Roye; but he was

absorbed by Monsieur and driven by the Duke of Wellington.

[Sidenote: Fouché.]

In a chapter of the _Monarchie selon la Charte_, I have recapitulated

the reasons upon which I laid stress at Gonesse. I was excited; the

spoken word has a strength which becomes weaker in the written word:

"Wherever an open tribune exists," I said, in this chapter,

"no one liable to be exposed to reproaches of a certain

kind can be placed at the head of the government There are

certain speeches, certain phrases, which would oblige such a

minister to resign on leaving the Chamber. This impossibility

resulting from the free principle of representative

government was not felt at a time when all illusions united

to place a famous man in office, notwithstanding the too

well-founded repugnance of the Crown. The rise of that man

was bound to produce one of these two things: either the

abolition of the Charter or the fall of the ministry at the

opening of the session. Can one picture the minister to

whom I refer listening in the Chamber of Deputies to the

discussion concerning the 21st of January, liable every

moment to be apostrophized by some deputy from Lyons, and

always threatened with the terrible _Tu es ille vir!_ Men

of that kind cannot be employed ostensibly, except with

the mutes of the seraglio of Bajazet or the mutes of the

Legislative Body of Bonaparte. What will become of the

minister if a deputy, ascending the tribune with a _Moniteur_

in his hand, reads the report of the Convention of the 9th

of August 1795; if he demands the expulsion of Fouché,

as unworthy by virtue of that report which 'ejected him,

Fouché'--I am quoting literally--'as a thief and a terrorist,

whose atrocious and criminal conduct conferred dishonour and

opprobrium upon any assembly whatever of which he became a

member[347]?'"

Those are the things which have been forgotten!

After all, supposing they had had the misfortune to think that a man

of that kind could ever be useful: they ought to have kept him behind

the scenes, consulted his deplorable experience; but to do violence to

the Crown and to public opinion, in a barefaced manner to summon such a

minister as that to affairs, a man whom Bonaparte, at that very moment,

treated as infamous: was that not to declare that they disclaimed

liberty and virtue? Is a crown worth so great a sacrifice? It left them

powerless to remove anybody: whom could they exclude, after accepting

Fouché?

Parties acted without thinking of the form of government which they had

adopted; every one spoke of the Constitution, of liberty, of equality,

of the right of peoples, and no one wanted them; fashionable verbiage:

one asked, without thinking, for news of the Charter, hoping all the

time that it would soon die the death. Liberals and Royalists leant

towards absolute government, modified by our habits: such is the temper

and trend of France. Material interests prevailed: they did not want,

they said, to disown what had been done during the Revolution; each was

burdened with his own life and claimed the right to load his neighbour

with it: evil, they asserted, had become an element in public life

which must thenceforth combine with the governments and enter as a

vital principle into society.

My crotchet, relative to a Charter set in motion by religious and

moral action, was the cause of the ill-will which certain parties

have borne me: for the Royalists, I was too much attached to liberty;

for the Revolutionaries, I had too great a scorn for crimes. Had I not

been there, to my great detriment, to make myself the school-master of

constitutionalism, the Ultras and the Jacobins would from the earliest

days have put the Charter into the pocket of their fleury dress-coats

or their carmagnoles _à la Cassius._

M. de Talleyrand had no liking for M. Fouché; M. Fouché detested and,

strangest of all, despised M. de Talleyrand: it was difficult to

achieve that success. M. de Talleyrand, who at first would have been

pleased not to be coupled to M. Fouché, feeling that the latter was

inevitable, consented to the proposal; he did not perceive that, with

the Charter (especially when he was united with the man of the Lyons

grape-shot), he was hardly more possible than Fouché.

Promptly what I had declared was verified: they obtained no profit

from the admission of the Duc d'Otrante, they obtained nothing but

opprobrium; the approaching shadow of the Chambers was enough to cause

the disappearance of ministers too much exposed to the plain-speaking

of the tribune.

My opposition was of no avail: according to the custom of weak

characters, the King closed the sitting without deciding anything; the

Order in Council was to be settled at the Château d'Arnouville.

No council, strictly speaking, was held at this last residence: only

the intimates and those associated with the secret were assembled. M.

de Talleyrand, having distanced us, entered into intelligence with his

friends. The Duke of Wellington arrived: I saw him drive past in a

calash; the plumes of his hat waved in the air; he had come to confer

with M. Fouché and M. de Talleyrand upon France, as a twofold present

which the Battle of Waterloo was making to our country. When it was

represented to him that the regicide of M. le Duc d'Otrante was perhaps

a drawback, he replied:

"That's a trifle!"

An Irish Protestant, an English general unacquainted with our manners

and our history, a mind seeing in the French year 1793 only the

English precedent of the year 1649 was charged to shape our destinies!

Bonaparte's ambition had reduced us to this state of wretchedness.

I rambled by myself in the gardens which the Comptroller-general

Machault[348] left, at the age of ninety-three years, to go and die

at the Madelonnettes; for Death, in his great review, passed none

over then. I was no longer sent for; the familiarities of a common

misfortune had ceased between the Sovereign and the subject: the King

was getting ready to return to his palace, I to my retreat. The vacuum

forms anew round monarchs so soon as they recover their power. I have

rarely passed, without making serious reflexions, through the silent

and uninhabited rooms of the Tuileries which led me to the King's

closet: for me, deserts of another kind, infinite solitudes in which

the very worlds vanished before God, the only real Being.

Bread was scarce at Arnouville; but for an officer named Dubourg[349],

who was hurrying away from Ghent like ourselves, we should have fasted.

M. Dubourg went marauding; he brought us back half a sheep to the house

of the mayor, who had run away. If the servant of the mayor, a Heroine

of Beauvais left alone, had had any arms, she would have received us

like Jeanne Hachette[350].

[Sidenote: Saint-Denis.]

We proceeded to Saint-Denis: along both sides of the road-way stretched

the bivouacs of the Prussians and English; in the distance, the eye

met the spires of the abbey: into its foundations Dagobert[351] threw

his jewels, in its vaults the successive dynasties buried their kings

and their great men; four months since, we had laid the bones of Louis

XVI. there to replace the other dust. When I returned from my first

exile in 1800, I had crossed this same plain of Saint-Denis: then only

Napoleon's soldiers were encamped there; Frenchmen still took the place

of the old bands of the Constable de Montmorency[352].

A baker harboured us. In the evening, at nine o'clock, I went to pay

my court to the King. His Majesty was lodged in the abbey buildings:

they had all the difficulty in the world to prevent the little girls of

the Legion of Honour[353] from crying, "Long live Napoleon!" I first

entered the church: a piece of wall adjoining the cloister had fallen;

the old abbey church was lit only by a lamp. I said my prayer at the

entrance to the vault where I had seen Louis XVI. lowered: full of

dread as to the future, I do not know that I ever felt my heart drowned

in a more profound and more religious melancholy. Next I went to His

Majesty's: shown into one of the rooms which preceded the King's, I

found no one there; I sat down in a corner and waited. Suddenly, a

door opened: silently vice entered leaning on the arm of crime, M. de

Talleyrand walking supported by M. Fouché; the infernal vision passed

slowly before me, penetrated into the King's closet, and vanished.

Fouché was coming to swear fealty and homage to his lord; the trusty

regicide on his knees laid the hands which caused the head to fall of

Louis XVI. between the hands of the brother of the Royal Martyr; the

apostate bishop was surety for the oath.

On the next day, the Faubourg Saint-Germain arrived; everything

concerned itself with the nomination, already obtained, of Fouché:

religion as well as impiety, virtue as well as vice, the Royalist as

well as the Revolutionary, the foreigner as well as the Frenchman; on

every hand the cry was heard:

"No safety for the King without Fouché; no salvation for France without

Fouché: he alone has saved the country, he alone can complete his

work."

[Illustration: Fouché, Duc D'Otrante.]

The old Duchesse de Duras was one of the noble dames who joined most

eagerly in the pæan; the Bailli de Crussol[354], a survivor of Malta,

chimed in: he declared that, if his head was still on his shoulders,

it was because M. Fouché had permitted it. The timorous ones had stood

in such terror of Bonaparte that they had taken the butcher of Lyons

for a Titus[355]. During more than three months, the drawing-rooms of

the Faubourg Saint-Germain looked upon me as a miscreant, because I

disapproved of the nomination of their ministers. Poor people, they

had prostrated themselves at the feet of the "upstarts;" they none

the less made a great noise about their nobility, their hatred of the

Revolutionaries, their unshaken fidelity, the inflexibility of their

principles: and they adored Fouché.

Fouché had seen the incompatibility of his ministerial existence with

the game of the Representative Monarchy: as he could not amalgamate

with the elements of a legal government, he endeavoured to make the

political elements homogeneous to his own nature. He had created a

factitious terror: inventing imaginary dangers, he made pretensions to

oblige the Crown to recognise Bonaparte's two Chambers and to receive

the Declaration of Rights which had been hurriedly completed; a few

words even were murmured as to the necessity of exiling Monsieur and

his sons: to isolate the King would have been the masterpiece.

[Sidenote: State of Paris.]

People continued to be gulled: in vain the National Guard climbed over

the walls of Paris and came to protest its devotion; it was asserted

that this guard was ill-disposed. The faction had had the gates closed

in order to prevent the population, which had remained Royalist

during the Hundred Days, from hurrying up, and it was said that this

population was threatening to butcher Louis XVIII. on his way. The

blindness was marvellous, for the French Army was falling back upon

the Loire, one hundred and fifty thousand allies occupied the outposts

of the capital, and they continued to pretend that the King was not

strong enough to penetrate into a city where not a soldier remained,

where none was left but civilians, quite capable of restraining a

handful of federates, if these had taken it into their heads to stir.

Unfortunately, the King, through a series of fatal coincidences,

seemed to be the leader of the English and Prussians; he thought

himself surrounded with liberators, and he was accompanied by enemies;

he appeared environed by an escort of honour, and this escort was in

reality only the gendarmes taking him out of his kingdom: he was merely

crossing Paris in the company of the foreigners whose memory would one

day serve as a pretext for the banishment of his House.

The Provisional Government formed after the abdication of Bonaparte

was dissolved by means of a kind of indictment of the Crown: a

stepping-stone upon which it was hoped one day to build a new

revolution.

At the First Restoration, I was of opinion that the tricolour cockade

should be kept: it was resplendent in all its glory; the white cockade

was forgotten; by retaining colours warranted by so many triumphs, men

were not preparing a rallying-token for a coming revolution. Not to

adopt the white cockade would have been wise; to abandon it after it

had been worn by Bonaparte's own Grenadiers was an act of cowardice:

one cannot pass with impunity under the Caudine Forks; that which

dishonours is fatal: a slap in the face does you no harm physically,

and yet it kills you.

Before leaving Saint-Denis, I was received by the King and had the

following conversation with him:

"Well?" said Louis XVIII., opening the dialogue with this exclamation.

"Well, Sire, you are taking the Duc d'Otrante?"

"I needs had to: from my brother down to the Bailli de Crussol (and the

latter is not suspect), every one said that we could not do otherwise.

What do you think?"

"Sire, the thing is done: I beg your Majesty's permission to say

nothing."

"No, no, speak: you know how I resisted since Ghent."

"Sire, I only obey your orders; pardon my loyalty: I think the Monarchy

is finished."

The King kept silence; I was beginning to tremble at my boldness, when

His Majesty resumed:

"Well, Monsieur de Chateaubriand, I am of your opinion."

This conversation concludes my story of the Hundred Days.

[308] Darius III., the last King of Persia (_d._ 331 B.C.), defeated by

Alexander at Arbela and assassinated by Bessus Satrap of Bactriana in

his flight.--T.

[309] Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de Sismondi (1773-1842), the

Swiss Calvinist historian and economist, author of, among many other

voluminous works, the _Histoire des Français_, in 29 volumes, an

erudite but prejudiced compilation.--T.

[310] Lucien Bonaparte.--T.

[311] Philippe Antoine Comte Merlin (1754-1838), known as Merlin de

Douay, to distinguish him from Merlin de Thionville, a jurisconsult

of the highest eminence and the lowest principles. He had sat in

the Constituent Assembly and the Convention, held office under

the Directory and the Empire, gave in his adhesion to the First

Restoration, accepted office again from Napoleon in 1814, and was

exiled in 1815 as a regicide who had held functions during the Hundred

Days. He retired to Brussels, returning to France after the Usurpation

of 1830.--T.

[312] Louis XI. King of France (1423-1479) was held as a prisoner at

Péronne by Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, in 1468, and compelled

to sign the treaty known by the name of that town.--T.

[313] The "Additional Act" was published in the _Moniteur_ of 23 April

1815.--B.

[314] Murat had placed himself at the Emperor's disposal on landing at

Cannes. Napoleon, dreading the contagion of ill-fortune, did not reply

to the dethroned King, and had him forbidden the access to Paris by

Fouché.--B.

[315] _Vide_ the proclamation by Marshal Soult, _supra.--Author's Note._

[316] An allusion to Marshal Soult.--B.

[317] Marshal Moncey carried the constable's sword at the coronation of

Charles X.; Marshals Soult, Mortier and Jourdan the sceptre, the hand

of justice and the crown respectively.--B.

[318] Louis-Philippe.--T.

[319] Marie Caroline Ferdinande Louise Duchesse de Berry (1798-1870),

daughter of Ferdinand I. King of Naples, and married to the Duc de

Berry in 1816. She followed Charles X. into exile after the Revolution

of 1830, and in 1832 made a descent, first upon Marseilles and secondly

upon the Vendée, where she tried in vain to effect a general rising.

She sought refuge at Nantes, where she lay hidden for five months,

until sold to the police of M. Thiers by a Jewish convert called Deutz,

and imprisoned at Blaze. Here, in 1833, she gave birth to a child, the

offspring of her secret marriage with the Comte Lucchesi-Palli. She was

shortly afterwards released, and spent the remainder of her days in

retirement.--T.

[320] The term applied to the vast plain near Châlons-sur-Marne where

Attila's immense army was destroyed, in 451, by the combined forces of

the Franks, Burgundians and Goths.--T.

[321] The Baron de Vincent, Austrian Ambassador to the Court of

France.--B.

[322] Ferdinand Baron d'Eckstein (1790-1861) was a native of Denmark,

of Jewish parentage. He became a Catholic in 1806, fought as a

volunteer in the French ranks in 1813, and on the fall of the Empire

entered the Dutch service and was appointed Governor of Ghent, where he

gained the favour of Louis XVIII. He followed the King to France, and

was made a baron and given various offices in succession. He spent the

last thirty years of his life writing in favour of religion in his own

paper, the _Catholique_, and others.--B.

[323] On the 1st of July 1690, the Duc de Luxembourg defeated the

Prince of Waldeck at Fleurus; on the 26th of June 1794, General Jourdan

defeated the Imperials under Coburg; and, on the 16th of June 1815,

Napoleon routed Blücher. This last battle is more generally known as

that of Ligny.--T.

[324] Frederic William Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg (1771-1815), son

of the Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg mortally wounded at Auerstädt in

1806.--T.

[325] Field-Marshal Gebhardt Leberecht von Blücher, Count and Prince

Blücher von Wahlstadt (1742-1819).--T.

[326] Friedrich Wilhelm von Billow, Count von Dennewitz (1765-1816).--T.

[327] William I. King of the Netherlands (1772-1843), then Prince

of Orange and Sovereign Prince of the Netherlands, commanding an

army-corps at Waterloo. His son, William Prince of Orange (1792-1848),

later King William II. of the Netherlands, was also present at the

battle and also wounded.--T.

[328] Emmanuel Maréchal Marquis de Grouchy (1766-1847) received his

marshal's baton during the Hundred Days. The Restoration refused to

recognise the general's new dignity, which was not confirmed to him

until 1831. The Marquis de Grouchy was made a peer by Louis-Philippe in

1832.--T.

[329] Lord Castlereagh was leader of the House of Commons. He moved

the vote of thanks to the Duke of Wellington, giving an account of the

Battle of Waterloo, on the 23rd of June 1815.--T.

[330] Of the two battles that took place on the 14th of October 1806,

the more important was that of Auerstädt, where Marshal Davout had on

his hands the greater part of the Prussian Army, commanded by the King

of Prussia in person and the Duke of Brunswick; at Jena, Napoleon,

with superior forces, had to do with the weaker portion of the enemy's

army. Davout had 60,000 men in front of him and Napoleon only 40,000.

The Emperor, in his 5th Bulletin, completely inverted the state of

things. While reducing the numbers of the army which Davout had to

fight against from sixty to forty thousand, he raised those to which he

himself was opposed from forty to eighty thousand, making of the Battle

of Auerstädt only a very secondary episode in the Battle of Jena,

whereas it was really a capital and decisive event. It was thus that

the admirable victory of Auerstädt came to be effaced and eclipsed by

that of Jena.--B.

[331] Henri Amédée Mercure Comte de Turenne (1776-1852) was an officer

in the King's Regiment, when the Revolution broke out. He refused

to emigrate and wished to continue his military service, but was

imprisoned as a suspect under the Terror and not released until the

9 Thermidor, when he served in the Army of the Western Pyrenees. The

decree of 1794 against the nobles obliged him to leave the army; he

remained in private life until the proclamation of the Empire, when he

was one of the first to rally to the new power. He held various offices

in Napoleon's Civil and Military Households, and was created a count of

the Empire in 1813. Turenne was present at Napoleon's leave-taking at

Fontainebleau, but failed to obtain leave to accompany the Emperor to

Elba. Louis XVIII. made him a knight of St. Louis and a sub-lieutenant

in the Grey Musketeers. Under the Hundred Days, he resumed his service

with Napoleon, who made him a peer, and fought at Ligny and Waterloo,

where he made desperate efforts against the English Guards. The Second

Restoration deprived him of his titles and functions, but received

him into favour in 1829. Turenne, however, sided with the Monarchy of

July, and was again created a peer of France by Louis-Philippe. He

was smitten with blindness a few years later, and ended his days in

retirement--B.

[332] Jacques Antoine Manuel (1775-1827), a noted orator and advocate.

He opposed the monarchy throughout the Restoration, and in 1823

was expelled by force from the Chamber of Deputies. Manuel was not

re-elected. He remained a popular hero, and his body was followed to

the grave by over 100,000 persons.--T.

[333] 22 June 1815.--B.

[334] Nicolas Marie Baron Quinette (1762-1821) had been a member of

the Convention voting for the death of the King, and Minister of the

Interior to Napoleon (1799), who made him a baron of the Empire. In

1814, he adhered to the Restoration, and was created a peer of France,

but returned to the Emperor during the Hundred Days, and at the Second

Restoration was banished as a relapsed regicide.--T.

[335] General Paul Comte Grenier (1768-1827) served with distinction in

the wars of the Revolution and the Empire. He was vice-president of the

Chamber in 1815 and, under the Second Restoration, sat as a deputy from

1813 to 1822.--B.

[336] General Horace François Bastien Comte Sébastiani de La Porta

(1775-1851), one of Napoleon's most intrepid cavalry generals. He

accepted the Restoration in 1814, but returned to Napoleon during

the Hundred Days, and was left without employment under the Second

Restoration. He sat as a Corsican deputy from 1816 to 1824 and 1826 to

1830, sitting in the Extreme Left and maintaining an active opposition

to the Government Under Louis-Philippe, he was Minister of Foreign

Affairs from 1830 to 1833, and subsequently Ambassador to Naples

(1834) and London (1835-1840). On his return from the latter embassy

he was created a marshal. His last years were clouded over by the

assassination of his daughter, the Duchesse de Praslin, by her husband

(17 August 1847).--T.

[337] Louis Gustave Le Doulcet, Comte de Pontécoulant (1764-1853), had,

as a member of the Convention, resisted the excesses of 1793 and was

outlawed and fled to Zurich. He returned after the Terror and filled

various military and diplomatic offices under Napoleon, who created

him a count (1808). Louis XVIII. made him a peer of France, and for

over thirty years he took a prominent part in the work of the House of

Peers.--T.

[338] _Vide_ the Works of Napoleon, vol. I., the last pages.--_Author's

Note._

[339] Auguste Charles Joseph Comte de Flahaut de La Billarderie

(1785-1870), a peer of the Hundred Days, a peer of France from 1831 to

1848, a senator of the Second Empire, Ambassador to London from 1860

to 1862, Grand Chancellor of the Legion of Honour from 1861 to 1870.

Flahaut was a general of division in 1813, at the age of twenty-eight.

He died on the 1st of September 1870, on the day of the disaster of

Sedan, and did not behold the fall of the dynasty to which he was

attached by intimate and secret affections. The Duc de Moray, natural

brother to Napoleon III., was his son.--B.

[340] Charles Angélique François Huchet, Comte de La Bédoyère

(1786-1815), served with distinction under Napoleon and became a

colonel at the age of 26. After the first abdication, his family

obtained for him the Cross of St. Louis and the command of the 7th

Regiment of the Line. Nevertheless he was the first colonel to join

Napoleon with his regiment after the return from Elba. The Emperor made

him a general and raised him to the peerage (2 June 1815). After the

second abdication, La Bédoyère was arrested, tried by court-martial

for treason, and shot (19 August 1815) in the twenty-ninth year of his

age.--T.

[341] André Masséna, Maréchal Prince d'Essling, Duc de Rivoli

(1758-1817), one of Napoleon's earlier and greatest generals, of

Italian Jewish origin. Louis XVIII. created him a peer of France in

December 1814.--T.

[342] Henry II. King of France (1518-1559) signed the famous "Unhappy

Peace" of Cateau-Cambrésis after the Battle of Saint-Quentin, a peace

by which France lost a large portion of her conquests.--T.

[343] Philip II. King of Spain, England, Naples and Sicily

(1527-1598).--T.

[344] The League of Cambrai was formed in 1508 by the Emperor

Maximilian I., King Louis XII. of France, King Ferdinand the Catholic

of Spain and Pope Julius II. against the Republic of Venice.--T.

[345] St Regulus, first Bishop of Senlis (_fl._ 1300), honoured on the

30th of March.--T.

[346] Jean Guillaume Baron Hyde de Neuville (1776-1857) was an agent of

the Emigrant Princes before he was seventeen years of age, and served

their cause throughout. He was French Minister to the United States

(1816), later to Portugal, later Minister of Marine (1828). In 1830,

Hyde de Neuville refused to accept the Government of Louis-Philippe and

defended the cause of the Duc de Bordeaux in the Lower Chamber, almost

unaided.--T.

[347] Sitting of the Convention on the 22 Thermidor Year III. (9 August

1795) _Moniteur_, (14 August 1795).--B.

[348] Jean Baptiste Machault d'Arnouville (1701-1794) was

appointed Comptroller-general of Finance under Louis XV. in 1745.

In 1750, he became Keeper of the Seals, while retaining his

Comptroller-generalship; but he was disgraced in 1754, owing to the

efforts of the clergy, whose privileges he had attacked, and the

intrigues of Madame de Pompadour. Machault retired to his property at

Arnouville, where he lived for forty years, until, in 1794, he was

flung into the Madelonnettes prison, as a suspect, where he died.--T.

[349] We shall meet with my friend General Dubourg again in the Days of

July.--_Author's Note._

Frédéric Dubourg-Butler (1778-1850) fought in the Royalist Army in the

Vendée, in the Republican Army under Bernadotte, in the Russian Army

in 1812. He returned to France after the fell of the Empire. In 1815,

as an officer on the staff of the Duc de Feltre, Minister of War, he

followed the King to Ghent, and received the command of the Artois

Regiment, but almost immediately fell into disgrace. He disappeared for

fifteen years, and sprang up, on the 29th of July 1830, at the Hôtel de

Ville, improvised himself into a general, and for a moment played the

part of head of the "military section of the Provisional Government,"

whereupon he disappeared afresh. We do not find him again until the

24th of February 1848, when the new Provisional Government awarded him

the retiring pension of a brigadier-general. This pension was no doubt

very irregularly paid, for in 1850 the poor devil put an end to the

romance of his life by swallowing an over-dose of opium.--B.

[350] Jeanne Hachette (_b. circa_ 1454) of Beauvais defended that place

in 1472, at the head of a regiment of women, against the Burgundians

under Charles the Bold. Her real name is uncertain: historians vary

between Fouquet, Fourquet and Lainé; she was called Hachette after the

axe which she bore during the siege.--T.

[351] Dagobert I. King of France (602-638) founded the Abbey of

Saint-Denis in 632.--T.

[352] Anne Maréchal Connétable de Montmorency (1493-1567) was slain at

the Battle of Saint-Denis, in which he defeated the Protestants.--T.

[353] An imperial educational establishment for the daughters of

members of the Legion of Honour had been founded in the buildings of

the old abbey in 1809.--T.

[354] Alexandre Charles Emmanuel Bailli de Crussol (1743-1815). Louis

XVIII. had created him a peer of France in 1814.--T.

[355] Titus Flavius Savinus Vespasianus, Roman Emperor (40-81), "the

delight of the human race."--T.