BOOK IV

Napoleon at Elba--Commencement of the Hundred Days--The return from Elba--Torpor of the Legitimacy--Article by Benjamin Constant--Order of the day of Marshal Soult--A royal session--Petition of the School of Law to the Chamber of Deputies--Plan for the defense of Paris--Flight of the King--I leave with Madame de Chateaubriand--Confusion on the road--The Duc d'Orléans and the Prince de Condé--Tournai--Brussels--Memories--The Duc de Richelieu--The King summons me to join him at Ghent--The Hundred Days at Ghent--Continuation of the Hundred Days at Ghent--Affairs in Vienna.

Bonaparte had refused to embark in a French ship, setting value at that time only on the English Navy, because it was victorious; he had forgotten his hatred, the calumnies, the outrages with which he had overwhelmed perfidious Albion; he saw none now worthy of his admiration save the triumphant party, and it was the _Undaunted_ that conveyed him to the harbour of his first exile. He was not without anxiety as to the manner in which he would be received. Would the French garrison hand over to him the territory which it was guarding? Of the Italian islanders, some wished to call in the English, others to remain free of all masters; the Tricolour and the White Flag waved on near headlands. All was arranged nevertheless. When it became known that Bonaparte was bringing millions with him, opinions generously decided to receive "the august victim." The civil and religious authorities were brought round to the same conviction. Joseph Philip Arrighi, the Vicar-General, issued a charge:

"Divine Providence," said the pious injunction, "has decreed that in future we shall be the subjects of Napoleon the Great. The island of Elba, raised to so sublime an honour, receives the Lord's Anointed in its bosom. We order that a solemn _Te Deum_ be sung by way of thanksgiving," etc.

[Sidenote: Napoleon in Elba.]

The Emperor had written to General Dalesme[231], commanding the French garrison, that he must make known to the people of Elba that "he had selected" their island for his residence in consideration of the gentleness of their manners and of their climate. He set foot on land at Porto-Ferrajo[232], amid the dual salute of the English frigate which had brought him and the batteries on shore. Thence he was taken under the parish canopy to the church, where the _Te Deum_ was sung. The beadle, the master of ceremonies, was a short, fat man, who was unable to join his hands across his person. Napoleon was next conducted to the mayor's, where his lodging was prepared. They unfurled the new Imperial Standard, a white ground intersected by a red stripe strewn with three gold bees. Three violins and two basses followed him with scrapings of delight The throne, hastily erected in the public ball-room, was decorated with gilt paper and pieces of scarlet cloth. The actor's side of the prisoner's nature accommodated itself to these displays: Napoleon made a serious business of trifles, even as he used to amuse his Court with little old-time games inside his palace at the Tuileries, going out afterwards to kill men by way of pastime. He formed his Household: it consisted of four chamberlains, three orderly-officers, and two harbingers of the palace. He stated that he would receive the ladies twice a-week, at eight o'clock in the evening. He gave a ball. He took possession, for his own residence, of the pavilion intended for the engineers. Bonaparte was constantly meeting in his life the two sources from which it had issued: democracy and the royal power; his strength was derived from the citizen masses, his rank from his genius; and therefore you see him pass without effort from the market-square to the throne, from the kings and queens who crowded round him at Erfurt[233] to the bakers and oilmen who danced in his barn at Porto-Ferrajo. He had something of the people among princes, and of the prince among the people. At five o'clock in the morning, in silk stockings and buckled shoes, he presided over his masons in the island of Elba.

Established in his Empire, inexhaustible in iron since the days of Virgil,

Insula inexhaustis Chalybum generosa metallis[234],

Bonaparte had not forgotten the outrages to which he had lately been subjected; he had not renounced his intention of tearing off his winding-sheet; but it suited him to seem buried, only to make some appearance of a phantom around his monument. That is why he was eager, as though thinking of nothing else, to go down into his quarries of specular iron and adamant; one would have taken him for the ex-inspector of Mines of his former States. He repented of having once appropriated the revenue of the forges of "Ilva" to the Legion of Honour: 500,000 francs now seemed to him worth more than a blood-bathed cross on the breast of his grenadiers.

"What was I thinking of?" he said. "But I have issued many stupid decrees of that nature."

He made a commercial treaty with Leghorn and proposed to make another with Genoa. At all hazards, he began to make five or six furlongs of high-road and designed the sites of four large towns, just as Dido laid out the boundaries of Carthage. A philosopher who had seen too much of human greatness, he declared that he intended thenceforth to live like a justice of the peace in an English county: and notwithstanding, on climbing a height which overlooks Porto-Ferrajo, these words escaped him at the sight of the sea which flowed up on every side at the foot of the cliffs:

"The devil! It must be owned that my island is very small!"

He had visited his domain within a few hours; he wished to join to it a rock called Pianosa.

"Europe will accuse me," he said, laughing, "of already having made a conquest."

The Allied Powers made merry over the fact that they had in derision left him four hundred soldiers: he needed no more to bring them all back to the flag.

Napoleon's presence on the coast of Italy, which had witnessed the commencement of his glory and which retains his memory, agitated everybody. Murat was his neighbour; his friends, strangers secretly or publicly landed at his retreat; his mother and his sister, the Princess Pauline, visited him; they expected soon to see Marie-Louise and her son arriving. A woman[235] did in fact appear, with a child[236]; she was received with great mystery, and went to live in a secluded villa in the most remote corner of the island: on the shores of Ogygia, Calypso spoke of her love to Ulysses, who, instead of listening to her, thought of how to defend himself against the suitors. After a two days' repose, the Swan of the North put out to sea again, to land among the myrtles of Baja, carrying away her little one in her white yawl.

[Sidenote: Madame Walewska.]

If we had been less trustful, it would have been easy for us to perceive an approaching catastrophe. Bonaparte was too near his cradle and his conquests: his funeral island should have been more distant and surrounded by more waves. It is inexplicable how the Allies had come to think of banishing Napoleon to the rocks where he was to serve his apprenticeship in exile: was it possible to believe that at the sight of the Apennines, that when smelling the powder of the fields of Montenotte, Areola and Marengo, that on discovering Venice, Rome and Naples, his three fair slaves, his heart would not be seized with irresistible temptations? Had they forgotten that he had stirred up the earth and that he had admirers and debtors everywhere, all of whom were his accomplices? His ambition was deceived, not extinguished; misfortune and revenge rekindled its flames: when the Prince of Darkness from the verge of the created universe looked upon man and the world, he resolved to destroy them.

Before bursting forth, the terrible captive restrained himself for some weeks. In the huge public bank at faro which he was holding, his genius negociated a fortune or a kingdom. The Fouchés, the Guzmans d'Alfarache swarmed. The great actor had long made his police the home of melodrama and had reserved the upper stage for himself; he amused himself with the vulgar victims who disappeared through the trap-doors of his theatre.

Bonapartism, in the first year of the Restoration, passed on from simple desire to action in the measure as its hopes increased and as it became better acquainted with the weak character of the Bourbons. When the intrigue had been hatched without, it was hatched within, and the conspiracy became flagrant. Under the able administration of M. Ferrand[237], M. de Lavallette[238] undertook the correspondence: the mails of the Monarchy carried the despatches of the Empire. Concealment was abandoned; the caricatures foretold a desired return: one saw eagles entering by the windows of the Palace of the Tuileries, through the doors of which issued a flock of turkeys; the _Nain jaune_[239] or _vert_ spoke of "_plumes de cane._" Warnings came from every side, and were disbelieved. The Swiss Government had gone out of its way to no purpose to inform His Majesty's Government of the intrigues of Joseph Bonaparte, who had retreated to the Pays de Vaud. A woman arriving from Elba gave the most circumstantial details of what was happening at Porto-Ferrajo, and the police sent her to prison. People held for certain that Napoleon would not venture any attempt before the dissolution of the Congress and that, in any case, his views would turn upon Italy. Others, still better advised, prayed that the "Little Corporal," the "Ogre," the "Prisoner," might land on the French coast; that would be too great a stroke of luck; they would settle him at one blow! M. Pozzo di Borgo[240] declared at Vienna that the delinquent would be strung up to the nearest tree. Were it possible to have certain papers, one would there find the proof that, as early as 1814, a military conspiracy was contrived and went side by side with the political conspiracy which the Prince de Talleyrand was conducting at Vienna, at Fouché's instigation. Napoleon's friends wrote to him that, if he did not hasten his return, he would find his place taken at the Tuileries by the Duc d'Orléans[241]: they imagine that this revelation served to hurry the Emperor's return. I am convinced of the existence of these plottings, but I also believe that the determinative cause which decided Bonaparte was simply the nature of his genius.

[Sidenote: Bonapartist intrigues.]

The conspiracy of Drouet d'Erlon[242] and Lefebvre-Desnoëttes had broken out. A few days before those generals rose in arms, I was dining with M. le Maréchal Soult, who had been appointed Minister of War on the 3rd of December 1814: a simpleton was describing Louis XVIII.'s time of exile at Hartwell; the marshal listened; to each detail he answered with the words:

"That's historical."

They used to bring His Majesty's slippers:

"That's historical!"

On days of abstinence the King used to take three new-laid eggs before commencing his dinner:

"That's historical!"

This reply struck me. When a government is not solidly established, every man whose conscience goes for nothing becomes, according to the greater or lesser amount of energy in his character, a quarter, or a half, or three-quarters of a conspirator; he awaits the decision of fortune: more traitors are made by events than by opinions.

Suddenly the telegraph announced to Napoleon's braves and to the doubters that the man had landed[243]: Monsieur[244] hurried to Lyons, with the Duc d'Orléans and Marshal Macdonald, and returned forthwith. Marshal Soult, denounced in the Chamber of Deputies, gave up his office on the 11th of March to the Duc de Feltre[245]. Bonaparte found facing him, as Minister of War of Louis XVIII. in 1815, the general who had been his last Minister of War in 1814.

The boldness of the enterprise was unprecedented. From the political point of view, this enterprise might be regarded as the irremissible crime and capital fault of Napoleon. He knew that the Princes still assembled at the Congress, that Europe still under arms would not suffer him to be reinstated; his judgment must have warned him that a success, if he obtained one, would be only for a day: he was offering up to his passion for reappearing on the scene the repose of a people which had lavished its blood and its treasures upon him; he was laying open to dismemberment the country from which he derived all that he had been in the past and all that he will be in the future. In this fantastic conception lay a ferocious egoism and a terrible absence of gratitude and generosity towards France.

All this is true according to practical reason, for a man with a heart rather than brains; but, for beings of Napoleon's nature, there exists a reason of another sort; those creatures of lofty renown have ways of their own: comets describe curves which evade calculation; they belong to nothing, they seem good for nothing; if a globe finds itself on their passage, they shatter it and return into the abysses of the sky; their laws are known to God alone. Extraordinary individuals are monuments of human intelligence; they are not its rule.

Bonaparte, therefore, was persuaded to his enterprise less by the false reports of his friends than by the needs of his genius: he took up the cross by virtue of the faith that was in him. To a great man, to be born is not everything: he must die. Was Elba an end for Napoleon? Could he accept the sovereignty of a vegetable-patch, like Diocletian[246] at Salona? If he had waited till later, would he have had more chances of success, at a time when his memory would have aroused less emotion, when his old soldiers would have left the army, when new social positions would have been adopted?

Well, then, he committed a fool-hardy act against the world: at the commencement he must have believed that he had not deceived himself as to the spell of his power.

[Sidenote: The return from Elba.]

One night, that of the 25th of February, at the end of a ball of which the Princess Borghese was doing the honours, he made his escape with victory, long his comrade and accomplice; he crossed a sea covered with our fleets, met two frigates, a ship of 74 guns and the man-of-war brig _Zéphyr_, which spoke and questioned him; he himself replied to the captain's questions; the sea and the waves saluted him, and he pursued his course. The deck of the _Inconstant_, his little ship, served him as a room for exercise and as a writing-closet; he dictated amid the winds and had copies made, on that shifting table, of three proclamations to the army and to France; some feluccas, carrying his companions in adventure, flew the white flag strewn with stars around his admiral bark. On the 1st of March, at three o'clock in the morning, he struck the coast of France between Cannes and Antibes, in the Golfe Jouan; he landed, strolled along the _riviera_, gathered violets, and bivouacked in a plantation of olive-trees. The dumfoundered population retired. He avoided Antibes and threw himself into the mountains of Grasse, passing through Sernon, Barrème, Digne and Gap. At Sisteron, twenty men could have stopped him, and he found nobody. He went on, meeting no obstacle among those inhabitants who, a few months earlier, had wished to cut his throat. Whenever a few soldiers entered the void which formed around his gigantic shadow, they were invincibly drawn on by the attraction of his eagles. His fascinated enemies sought him and did not see him; he hid himself in his glory, as the lion of the Sahara hides himself in the rays of the sun to avoid the sight of the dazzled hunters. Enveloped in a fiery cyclone, the bloody phantoms of Areola, Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, Friedland, Eylau, the Moskowa, Lützen, Bautzen formed his retinue with a million of dead. From the midst of this column of fire and smoke, there issued, at the entrance to the towns, a few trumpet-blasts mingled with the signals of the tricoloured _labarum_: and the gates of the town fell. When Napoleon crossed the Niemen, at the head of four-hundred thousand foot and a hundred thousand horse, to blow up the palace of the Tsars in Moscow, he was less astonished than when, breaking his ban and flinging his irons in the faces of the kings, he came alone, from Cannes to Paris, to sleep peacefully at the Tuileries.

Beside the prodigy of the invasion of one man must be placed another which was the consequence of the first: the Legitimacy was seized with a fainting-fit; the failure of the heart of the State attacked the members and rendered France motionless. For twenty days, Bonaparte marched on by stages; his eagles flew from steeple to steeple and, along a road of two hundred leagues the Government, masters of everything, disposing of money and men, found neither the time nor the means to cut a bridge, to throw down a tree, so as to delay, at least by an hour, the progress of a man to whom the populations offered no opposition, but whom also they did not follow.

This torpor on the part of the Government seemed the more deplorable inasmuch as public opinion in Paris was greatly excited; it would have countenanced anything, despite the defection of Marshal Ney. Benjamin Constant wrote in the newspapers:

"After visiting our country with every plague, he left the soil of France. Who would not have thought that he was leaving it for ever? Suddenly he appears, and again promises Frenchmen liberty, victory and peace. The author of the most tyrannical Constitution that ever ruled France, he speaks to-day of liberty! But it was he who, during fourteen years, undermined and destroyed liberty. He had not the excuse of memory, the habit of power; he was not born in the purple. It was his fellow-citizens whom he enslaved, his equals whom he loaded with chains. He had not inherited power; he desired and meditated tyranny: what liberty is he able to promise? Are we not a thousand times more free than under his empire? He promises victory, and three times he forsook his troops, in Egypt, in Spain and in Russia, abandoning his companions in arms to the triple agony of cold, destitution and despair. He brought upon France the humiliation of invasion; he lost the conquests which we had made before him. He promises peace, and his name alone is a signal for war. The nation unhappy enough to serve him would again become the object of European hatred; his triumph would be the commencement of a combat to the death against the civilized world.... He has therefore nothing to claim, nor to offer. Whom could he convince, or whom seduce? War at home, war abroad: those are the gifts which he brings us."

[Sidenote: Soult's order of the day.]

Marshal Soult's Order of the Day, dated 8 March 1815, repeats very nearly the ideas of Benjamin Constant, with an effusion of loyalty:

"SOLDIERS,

"The man who lately, before the eyes of Europe, abdicated the power which he had usurped, and which he had so fatally abused, has landed on French soil, which he was never to see again.

"What does he want? Civil war. What does he seek? Traitors. Where will he find them? Shall it be among those soldiers whom he has so often deceived and sacrificed by misleading their valour? Shall it be in the heart of those families which the mere sound of his name still fills with terror?

"Bonaparte despises us enough to believe us capable of abandoning a lawful and dearly-beloved Sovereign to share the fate of a man who is no longer more than an adventurer. He believes this, the madman, and his last act of insanity reveals him to us as he is!

"Soldiers, the French Army is the bravest army in Europe; it will also be the most faithful.

"Let us rally round the banner of the lilies, at the voice of the father of the people, the worthy heir of the virtues of Henry the Great. He himself has traced for you the duties which you have to fulfil. He places at your head that Prince, the model of French knighthood, who, by his happy return to our country, has already once driven out the usurper, and who to-day, by his presence among us, will destroy his sole and last hope."

Louis XVIII. appeared on the 16th of March in the Chamber of Deputies; the destinies of France and of the world were at stake. When His Majesty entered, the deputies and the strangers in the galleries uncovered and rose; cheers shook the walls of the house. Louis XVIII. slowly mounted the steps of his throne; the Princes, the marshals and the captains of the guards ranged themselves on either side of the King. The cheers ceased; none spoke: in that interval of silence, one seemed to hear the distant footsteps of Napoleon. His Majesty, seated, cast his eyes over the assembly, and in a firm voice delivered this speech:

[Sidenote: The King's speech.]

"GENTLEMEN,

"At this critical moment, when the public enemy has penetrated into a part of my kingdom and threatens the liberty of all the remainder, I come into your midst to knit yet more closely the ties which, uniting you to myself, constitute the strength of the State; I come, by addressing you, to make manifest my feelings and my wishes to the whole of France.

"I have seen my country again; I have reconciled it with foreign Powers, who will, you may be sure, be faithful to the treaties which have restored peace to us; I have laboured for the good of my people; I have received, I continue daily to receive the most touching marks of its love; could I, at sixty years of age, better end my career than by dying in its defense?

"I fear nothing, therefore, for myself; but I fear for France: he who comes to kindle among us the torches of civil war brings with him also the scourge of foreign war; he comes to put back our country under his iron yoke; he comes, lastly, to destroy the Constitutional Charter which I have given you, that Charter which will be my proudest title in the eyes of posterity, that Charter which all Frenchmen cherish and which I here swear to maintain: let us then rally round it."

The King was still speaking, when a fog spread darkness through the house; eyes were turned towards the ceiling to ascertain the cause of that sudden gloom. When the King-Lawgiver ceased to speak, the cries of "Long live the King!" were renewed, amid tears.

"The assembly," the _Moniteur_ truly says, "electrified by the King's sublime words, stood up, its hands stretched towards the throne. One heard only the words: 'Long live the King! We will die for the King! The King in life and death!' repeated with an enthusiasm which will be shared by every French heart"

It was, in fact, a pathetic sight: an old, infirm King who, in reward for the murder of his family and twenty-three years of exile, had brought France peace, liberty, forgiveness of all outrages and all misfortunes; this patriarch of sovereigns coming to declare to the deputies of the nation that, at his age, after seeing his country again, he could not better end his career than by dying in defense of his people! The Princes swore fidelity to the Charter; those tardy oaths were closed with that of the Prince de Condé and with the adhesion of the father of the Duc d'Enghien. This heroic race on the verge of extinction, this race of the patrician sword seeking behind liberty a shield against a younger, longer and more cruel plebeian sword offered, by reason of a multitude of memories, a spectacle that was extremely sad.

When Louis XVIII.'s speech became known outside, it aroused unspeakable enthusiasm. Paris was wholly Royalist, and remained so during the Hundred Days. The women in particular were Bourbonists.

The youth of to-day worships the memory of Bonaparte, because it is humiliated by the part which the present Government makes France play in Europe; the youth of 1814 hailed the Restoration, because the latter had thrown down despotism and set up liberty. In the ranks of the Royal Volunteers were included M. Odilon Barrot[247], a large number of pupils of the School of Medicine and the whole of the School of Law[248]; the last, on the 13th of March, addressed this petition to the Chamber of Deputies:

"GENTLEMEN,

"We offer our services to our King and country; the whole School of Law asks to go to the front. We will abandon neither our King nor our Constitution. Faithful to French honour, we ask you for arms. The feeling of love which we bear to Louis XVIII. is answerable to you for the constancy of our devotion. We want no more irons, we want liberty. We have it, and they come to snatch it from us. We will defend it to the death. Long live the King! Long live the Constitution!"

In this energetic, natural and sincere language, one feels the generosity of youth and the love of liberty. They who come to tell us to-day that the Restoration was received by France with dislike and sorrow are ambitious men who are playing a game, or new-comers who have never known Bonaparte's oppression, or old imperialized revolutionary liars who, after applauding the return of the Bourbons with the rest, now, according to their habit, insult the fallen and return to their instincts of murder, police and servitude.

*

The King's Speech had filled me with hope. Conferences were held at the house of the President of the Chamber of Deputies, M. Lainé. I there met M. de La Fayette: I had never seen him except at a distance, at another period, under the Constituent Assembly. The proposals were various and for the most part weak, as happens in peril: some wished the King to leave Paris and fall back upon the Havre; others spoke of moving him to the Vendée; one stammered out unfinished sentences; another said that we must wait and see what was coming: what was coming was very visible, for all that. I expressed a very different opinion: oddly enough, M. de La Fayette supported it, and warmly[249]. M. Lainé and Marshal Marmont were also of my opinion. I said:

[Illustration: La Fayette.]

[Sidenote: My advice to the government.]

"Let the King keep his word; let him stay in his capital. The National Guard is on our side. Let us make sure of Vincennes. We have the arms and the money; with the money we shall overcome weakness and cupidity. If the King leaves Paris, Paris will admit Bonaparte; Bonaparte master of Paris is master of France. The army has not gone over to the enemy as a whole; several regiments, many generals and officers have not yet betrayed their oaths: if we hold firm, they will remain faithful. Let us disperse the Royal Family, let us keep only the King. Let Monsieur go to the Havre, the Duc de Berry[250] to Lille, the Duc de Bourbon to the Vendée, the Duc d'Orléans to Metz; Madame la Duchesse and M. le Duc d'Angoulême[251] are already in the South. Our different points of resistance will prevent Bonaparte from concentrating his forces. Let us barricade ourselves in Paris. Already the national guards of the neighbouring departments are coming to our aid. Amid this movement, our old Monarch, protected by the will of Louis XVI., will remain peacefully seated on his throne at the Tuileries, with the Charter in his hand; the diplomatic body will range itself round him; the two Chambers will meet in the two wings of the Palace; the King's Household will encamp in the Carrousel and in the Tuileries Gardens. We shall line the quays and the water-terrace with guns: let Bonaparte attack us in this position; let him carry our barricades one by one; let him bombard Paris, if he please and if he have mortars; let him make himself odious to the whole population, and we shall see the result of his enterprise! Let us resist for but three days, and victory is ours. The King, defending himself in his palace, will arouse universal enthusiasm. Lastly, if he must die, let him die worthy of his rank; let Napoleon's last exploit be to cut an old man's throat. Louis XVIII., in sacrificing his life, will win the only battle he will have fought; he will win it for the benefit of the freedom of the human race."

Thus I spoke: one is never entitled to say that all is lost so long as one has attempted nothing. What could have been finer than an old son of St. Louis overthrowing, with Frenchmen, in a few moments, a man whom all the confederate kings of Europe had taken so many years to lay low?

This resolution, desperate in appearance, was very reasonable at bottom and offered not the smallest danger. I shall always remain convinced that, had Bonaparte found Paris hostile and the King present, he would not have tried to force them. Without artillery, provisions, or money, he had with him only troops collected at random, still wavering, astonished at their sudden change of cockade, at their oaths taken headlong on the roads: they would promptly have become divided. A few hours' delay and Napoleon was lost; it but needed a little heart. Already, even, we could rely on a portion of the army; the two Swiss regiments were keeping their faith: did not Marshal Gouvion Saint-Cyr make the Orleans garrison resume the white cockade two days after Bonaparte's entry into Paris? From Marseilles to Bordeaux, all recognised the King's authority during the whole month of March: at Bordeaux, the troops were hesitating; they would have remained with Madame la Duchesse d'Angoulême, if the news had come that the King was at the Tuileries and that Paris was being defended. The provincial towns would have imitated Paris. The loth Regiment of the line fought very well under the Duc d'Angoulême; Masséna was proving himself crafty and uncertain; at Lille, the garrison responded to Marshal Mortier's stirring proclamation. If all those proofs of a possible fidelity took place in spite of a flight, what would they not have been in the case of a resistance?

Had my plan been adopted, the foreigners would not have ravaged France afresh; our Princes would not have returned with the hostile armies; the Legitimacy would have been saved through itself. One thing alone would have to be feared after success: the too great confidence of the Royalty in its strength, and, consequently, attempts upon the rights of the nation.

Why did I arrive at a period in which I was so ill-placed? Why have I been a Royalist against my instinct, at a time when a miserable race of courtiers was unable either to hear or to understand me? Why was I flung into that troop of mediocrities, who took me for a raver when I spoke of courage, for a revolutionary when I spoke of liberty?

A fine question of defense, indeed! The King had no fear, and my plan rather pleased him through a certain "Louis-Quatorzian" grandeur; but other faces had lengthened. They packed up the Crown diamonds (formerly purchased out of the privy-purse of the Sovereigns), leaving thirty-three million crowns in the treasury and forty-two millions in securities. Those sixty-five millions were the produce of taxation: why was it not returned to the people, rather than left to tyranny!

A dual procession passed up and down the stair-cases of the Pavillon de Flore; people were asking what they were to do: no answer. They applied to the captain of the guards; they questioned the chaplains, the precentors, the almoners: nothing. Vain talk, vain retailing of news. I saw young men weep with rage when uselessly asking for orders and arms; I saw women faint with anger and contempt. Access to the King was impossible; etiquette closed the door.

[Sidenote: A Royal order: "Hunt him down."]

The great measure decreed against Bonaparte was an order to "hunt him down[252]:" Louis XVIII., with no legs, "hunting down" the conqueror who bestrode the earth! This form of the ancient laws, renewed for the occasion, is enough to show the compass of mind of the statesmen of that period. "To hunt down" in 1815! "Hunt down!" And "hunt" whom? "Hunt" a wolf? "Hunt" a brigand chieftain? "Hunt" a felon lord? No: "hunt" Napoleon, who had "hunted down" kings, who had seized and branded them for all time on the shoulder with his indelible "N"!

From this order, when considered more closely, sprang a political truth which no one saw: the Legitimate House, estranged from the nation for three-and-twenty years, had remained at the day and place at which the Revolution had caught it, whereas the nation had progressed in point of time and space. Hence the impossibility of understanding and meeting one another; religion, ideas, interests, language, earth and heaven, all were different for the people and for the King, because they were separated by a quarter of a century equivalent to centuries.

But if the order "to hunt down" appears strange, owing to the preservation of the old idiom of the law, had Bonaparte originally the intention of acting better, although employing a newer language? Papers of M. d'Hauterive[253], catalogued by M. Artaud[254], prove that it cost great difficulty to prevent Napoleon from having the Duc d'Angoulême shot, in spite of the official document in the _Moniteur_, a show document which remains to us: he thought it wrong of the Prince to have defended himself. And yet the fugitive from Elba, when leaving Fontainebleau, had recommended the soldiers to be "faithful to the monarch" whom France had chosen. Bonaparte's family had been respected; Queen Hortense had accepted from Louis XVIII. the title of Duchesse de Saint-Leu; Murat, who still reigned in Naples, saw his kingdom sold by M. de Talleyrand only during the Congress of Vienna.

This period, in which all are lacking in frankness, oppresses the heart: every one threw out a profession of faith as it were a foot-bridge to cross the difficulty of the day, free to change his direction, the difficulty once passed; youth alone was sincere, because it was near its cradle. Bonaparte solemnly declared that he renounced the crown; he departed, and returned after nine months. Benjamin Constant printed his vehement protest against the tyrant, and he changed in twenty-four hours. It will be seen later, in another book of these Memoirs, who inspired him with the noble impulse to which the fickleness of his nature did not permit him to remain faithful. Marshal Soult excited the troops against their old leader; a few days later he was roaring with laughter at his own proclamation in Napoleon's closet at the Tuileries, and became Major-general of the army at Waterloo; Marshal Ney kissed the King's hands, swore to bring him Bonaparte locked up in an iron cage, and handed over to the latter all the corps under his command. And the King of France, alas? He declared that, at the age of sixty years, he could not better end his career than by dying in defense of his people ... and fled to Ghent! At sight of this incapacity for truth in men's feelings, at the want of harmony between their words and their deeds, one feels seized with disgust for the human kind.

Louis XVIII., on the 16th of March, was declaring his intention of dying in the midst of France; had he kept his word, the Legitimacy might have lasted another century; nature herself seemed to have taken from the old King the power of retreating by chaining him about with wholesome infirmities; but the future destinies of the human race would have been trammelled by the accomplishment of the resolution of the author of the Charter. Bonaparte hastened to the assistance of the future; that Christ of the power for evil took the new man sick of the palsy by the hand, and said to him:

"Arise, take up thy bed, and walk[255]."

*

It was evident that a scamper was being contemplated: for fear of being detained, they did not even warn those who, like myself, would have been shot within an hour after Napoleon's entry into Paris. I met the Duc de Richelieu in the Champs-Élysées:

"They are deceiving us," he said; "I am keeping watch here, for I do not propose to await the Emperor at the Tuileries all by myself."

[Sidenote: Flight of Louis XVIII.]

On the evening of the 19th, Madame de Chateaubriand had sent a servant to the Carrousel, with instructions not to return until he had the certainty of the flight of the King. At midnight, as the man had not come in, I went to my room. I had just gone to bed, when M. Clausel de Coussergues entered. He told us that His Majesty had left and had gone in the direction of Lille. He brought me this news on the part of the Chancellor, who, knowing me to be in danger, was violating secrecy on my behalf and sent me twelve thousand francs recoverable on my salary as Minister to Sweden. I was obstinately bent on remaining, not wishing to leave Paris until I should be physically certain of the royal removal. The servant who had been sent to reconnoitre returned: he had seen the Court carriages go by. Madame de Chateaubriand pushed me into her carriage, at four o'clock in the morning on the 20th of March. I was in such a fit of fury that I knew neither where I was going nor what I was doing.

We passed out through the Barrière Saint-Martin. At dawn, I saw crows coming down peacefully from the elms on the high-road where they had spent the night, to take their first meal in the fields, without troubling their heads about Louis XVIII. and Napoleon: they were not obliged to leave their country and, thanks to their wings, they were able to laugh at the bad road along which I was being jolted. Old friends of Combourg, we were more alike in the old days when, at break of day, we used to breakfast on mulberries from the brambles in the thickets of Brittany!

The roadway was broken up, the weather rainy, Madame de Chateaubriand poorly: she looked every moment through the little window at the back of the carnage to see if we were not being pursued. We slept at Amiens, where Du Cange[256] was born; next at Arras, the birth-place of Robespierre[257]: there I was recognised. When we sent for horses, on the morning of the 22nd, the postmaster said that they had been engaged for a general who was taking to Lille the news of "the triumphal entry of the Emperor-King into Paris;" Madame de Chateaubriand was dying of fright, not for herself, but for me. I ran to the post-office and removed the difficulty with money.

On arriving under the ramparts of Lille, at two in the morning of the 23rd, we found the gates closed; the orders were not to open them to any one whomsoever. They could not, or would not, tell us if the King had entered the town. I induced the postillion for a few louis to make for the other side of the place, outside the glacis, and to drive us to Tournay; in 1792, I had covered the same road on foot, during the night, with my brother. On arriving at Tournay, I learnt that Louis XVIII. had certainly entered Lille with Marshal Mortier, and that he meant to defend himself there. I despatched a courier to M. de Blacas, asking him to send me a permit to be received into the place. My courier returned with a permit from the commandant, but not a word from M. de Blacas. Leaving Madame de Chateaubriand at Tournay, I was getting into the carriage again to go to Lille, when the Prince de Condé arrived. We learnt through him that the King had gone and that Marshal Mortier had had him accompanied to the frontier. From these explanations it became clear that Louis XVIII. was no longer at Lille when my letter arrived there.

The Duc d'Orléans followed close after the Prince de Condé. Under an apparent dissatisfaction, he was glad, at bottom, to find himself out of the hurly-burly; the ambiguousness of his declaration and of his behaviour bore the stamp of his character. As to the old Prince de Condé, the Emigration was his household god. He had no fear of Monsieur de Bonaparte, not he; he fought if they liked or went away if they liked: things were a little muddled in his brain; he was none too clear as to whether he should stop at Rocroi to give battle there or go to dine at the White Hart. He struck his tents a few hours before us, telling me to recommend the coffee at the inn to the members of his Household whom he had left behind him. He did not know that I had sent in my resignation on the death of his grandson; he was not very sure that he had had a grandson; he only felt a certain increase of glory in his name, which might come from some Condé whom he had forgotten.

Do you remember my first passing through Tournay with my brother, at the time of my first emigration? Do you remember, in that connection, the man transformed into a donkey, the girl from whose ears grew corn-spikes, the rain of ravens that set everything on fire[258]? In 1815, indeed, we ourselves were a rain of ravens; but we set nothing on fire. Alas, I was no longer with my unfortunate brother! Between 1792 and 1815, the Republic and the Empire had passed: what revolutions had also been accomplished in my life! Time had ravaged me like the rest. And you, the young generations of the moment, let twenty-three years come, and then tell me in my tomb what has become of your loves and your illusions of to-day.

The two brothers Bertin had arrived at Tournay: M. Bertin de Vaux[259] returned from there to Paris; the other Bertin, Bertin the Elder, was my friend. You know through these Memoirs what it was that attached me to him.

[Sidenote: I follow the King to Ghent.]

From Tournay we went to Brussels: there I found no Baron de Breteuil, nor Rivarol, nor all those young aides-de-camp who had become dead or old, which is the same thing. No news of the barber who had given me shelter. I did not take up the musket, but the pen; from a soldier I had become a paper-stainer. I was looking for Louis XVIII.; he was at Ghent, where he had been taken by Messieurs de Blacas and de Duras[260]: their first intention had been to ship the King to England. If the King had consented to this plan, he would never have reascended the throne.

Having gone into a lodging-house to look at an apartment, I perceived the Duc de Richelieu smoking, half-outstretched on a sofa, at the back of a dark room. He spoke to me of the Princes in the most brutal manner, declaring that he was going to Russia and that he would not hear another word about those people. Madame la Duchesse de Duras, on arriving in Brussels, had the sorrow to lose her niece there.

I loathe the Brabant capital; it has never served me except as a passage to my exiles; it has always brought sorrow upon myself or my friends.

An order of the King summoned me to Ghent. The Royal Volunteers and the Duc de Berry's little army had been disbanded at Béthune, in the middle of the mud and of the accidents of a military breaking-up: touching farewells had been exchanged. Two hundred men of the King's Household remained and were quartered at Alost; my two nephews, Louis and Christian de Chateaubriand, formed part of that corps.

I had been given a billet of which I did not avail myself; a baroness whose name I have forgotten came to see Madame de Chateaubriand at the inn and offered us an apartment in her house: she implored us with so good a grace!

"You must pay no attention," she said, "to anything my husband says: his head is a little... you understand? My daughter also is a trifle eccentric; she has terrible moments, poor child! But the rest of the time she is as gentle as a lamb. Alas, it is not she who causes me the greatest trouble, but my son Louis, the youngest of my children: without God's help, he will be worse than his father!"

Madame de Chateaubriand politely refused to go and live with such rational people.

The King, well-lodged, having his service and his guards, formed his council. The empire of that great monarch consisted of a house in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, which house was situated in a town which, although the birthplace of Charles V.[261], had been the chief town of a prefecture of Bonaparte's: those names comprise between them a goodly number of centuries and events.

[Sidenote: And join his Ministry.]

The Abbé de Montesquiou being in London, Louis XVIII. appointed me Minister of the Interior _ad interim._[262] My correspondence with the "departments" did not give me much to do; I easily kept up my correspondence with the prefects, sub-prefects, mayors and deputy-mayors of our good towns, on the inner side of our frontiers; I did not repair the roads much, and I let the steeples tumble down; my budget hardly enriched me; I had no secret funds; only, by a crying abuse, I was a "pluralist:" I was still His Majesty's Minister Plenipotentiary to the King of Sweden, who, like his fellow-townsman Henry IV.[263], reigned by right of conquest, if not by right of birth. We discoursed round a table covered with a green cloth in the King's closet. M. de Lally-Tolendal, who was, I think, Minister of Public Instruction, delivered speeches even more voluminous and more inflated than his cheeks: he quoted his illustrious ancestors the Kings of Ireland and muddled up his father's[264] trial with those of Charles I. and Louis XVI. He refreshed himself in the evening, after the tears, the sweat and the words which he had shed at the council, with a lady who had come all the way from Paris out of enthusiasm for his genius; he virtuously strove to cure her, but his eloquence betrayed his virtue and drove the dart more deeply.

Madame la Duchesse de Duras had come to join M. le Duc de Duras among the exiles. I will speak no more ill of misfortune, because I have spent three months with that admirable woman, talking of all that upright minds and hearts can find in a conformity of tastes, ideas, principles and feelings. Madame de Duras was ambitious for me: she alone saw at once what I might be worth in political life; she always deplored the envy and short-sightedness which kept me removed from the King's counsels; but she even much more deplored the obstacles which my character placed in the way of my fortune: she scolded me, she wanted to correct me of my indifference, my candour, my ingenuousness, and to make me adopt habits of courtierism which she herself could not endure. Nothing, perhaps, leads to greater attachment and gratitude than to feel one's self under the patronage of a superior friendship which, by virtue of its ascendancy over society, passes off your defects as good qualities, your imperfections as an attraction. A man protects you through his worth, a woman through your worth: that is why, of those two empires, one is so hateful, the other so sweet.

Since I have lost that great-hearted person, gifted with a soul so noble, with an intelligence which combined something of the strength of the thought of Madame de Staël with the grace of the talent of Madame de La Fayette[265], I have never ceased, while mourning her, to reproach myself with any unevenness of temper with which I may sometimes have wounded hearts that were devoted to me. Let us keep a close watch upon our character! Let us remember that, with a profound attachment, we can nevertheless poison days which we would buy back again at the price of all our blood. When our friends have sunk into the grave, what means have we to repair our trespasses? Our useless regrets, our vain repentings, are those a remedy for the pain that we have given them? They would have preferred one smile from us during their life than all our tears after their death.

The charming Clara[266] was at Ghent with her mother. We two made up bad couplets to the air of the _Tyrolienne._ I have held many pretty little girls on my knees who are young grandmothers to-day. When you have left a woman, married in your presence at sixteen years of age, if you return sixteen years later, you find her of the same age still:

"Ah, madame, you have not put on a day!"

No doubt: but it is the daughter to whom you are saying so, the daughter whom you will also lead up to the altar. But you, a sad witness to both hymens, you treasure up the sixteen years which you received at each union: a wedding-present which will hasten your own marriage with a white-haired lady, rather thin.

[Sidenote: Marshal Victor.]

Marshal Victor had come to join us, at Ghent, with an admirable simplicity: he asked for nothing, never teased the King with his assiduity; one scarcely saw him; I do not know whether he ever had the honour and the favour of being invited on a single occasion to His Majesty's dinner-party. I have met Marshal Victor since; I have been his colleague in office, and I have always perceived the same excellent nature. In Paris, in 1823, M. le Dauphin was very harsh to that honest soldier: it was very good of this Duc de Bellune to repay such easy ingratitude with such modest devotion[267]! Candour carries me away and touches me, even when, on certain occasions, it attains the final expression of its ingenuousness. For instance, the marshal told me of his wife's[268] death in the language of a soldier, and he made me weep: he pronounced coarse words so quickly, and changed them so chastely, that one might even have written them.

M. de Vaublanc[269] and M. Capelle[270] joined us. The former used to say that he had some of everything in his portfolio. Do you want some Montesquieu? Here you are. Some Bossuet? Here it is! In proportion as the game seemed about to take a different turn, more travellers arrived. The Abbé Louis and M. le Comte Beugnot alighted at the inn where I was lodging. Madame de Chateaubriand was suffering from terrible fits of choking, and I was sitting up with her. The two new-comers installed themselves in a room separated from my wife's only by a thin partition; it was impossible not to hear, unless by stopping one's ears: between eleven and twelve at night the new arrivals raised their voices. The Abbé Louis, who spoke like a wolf and in jerks, was saying to M. Beugnot:

"You, a minister? You'll never be one again! You have committed one stupidity after the other!"

I could not clearly hear M. le Comte Beugnot's answer, but he spoke of thirty-three millions left behind in the Royal Treasury. The abbé, apparently in anger, pushed a chair, which fell down. Through the uproar I caught these words:

"The Duc d'Angoulême? He'll have to buy his national property at the gates of Paris. I shall sell what remains of the State forests. I shall cut down everything. The elms on the highroads, the Bois de Boulogne, the Champs-Élysées: what's the use of all that, eh?"

Brutality formed M. Louis' principal merit; his talent lay in a stupid love of material interests. If the Minister of Finance drew the forests after him, he had doubtless a different secret from that of Orpheus, who "made the woods go after him with his fail; fiddling." In the slang of the time, M. Louis was known as a "special" man; his speciality of finance had led him to accumulate the tax-payers' money in the Treasury in order to let it be taken by Bonaparte. Napoleon had had no use for this special man, who was in no sense an unique man, and who was at the most good enough for the Directory.

The Abbé Louis had gone to Ghent to claim his office; he was in very good favour with M. de Talleyrand, with whom he had solemnly officiated at the first federation in the Champ de Mars: the bishop was the celebrant, the Abbé Louis the deacon, and the Abbé Desrenaudes[271] the sub-deacon. M. de Talleyrand, recollecting this admirable profanation, used to say to the Baron Louis:

"Abbé, you were very fine as the deacon in the Champ de Mars!"

We endured this shame under the great tyranny of Bonaparte: ought we to have endured it later?

The "Most Christian" King had screened himself from any reproach of bigotry: he owned in his Council a married bishop, M. de Talleyrand; a priest living in concubinage, M. Louis; a non-practising abbé, M. de Montesquiou.

The last-named, a man as feverish as a consumptive, gifted with a certain glibness of speech, had a narrow and disparaging mind, a malignant heart, a sour character. One day, when I had made a speech at the Luxembourg on behalf of the liberty of the press, the descendant of Clovis, passing in front of me, who went back only to the Breton Mormoran, caught me a great blow with his knee in my thigh, which was not in good taste; I gave him one back, which was not polite: we played at the Duc de La Rochefoucauld and the Coadjutor[272]. The Abbé de Montesquiou humorously called M. de Lally-Tolendal "an English beast."

[Sidenote: The fish dinners at Ghent.]

In the rivers at Ghent they catch a very dainty white fish: we used, _tutti quanti_, to go to eat this good fish in a suburban road-side inn, while waiting for the battles and the end of empires. M. Laborie never failed us at our meetings: I had first met him at Savigny when, fleeing from Bonaparte, he came in at Madame de Beaumont's by one window and made his way out by another. Indefatigable at work, renewing his errands as often as his bills, as fond of doing services as others are of receiving them, he has been calumniated: calumny is not the impeachment of the calumniated, but the excuse of the calumniator. I have seen men grow tired of the promises in which M. Laborie was so rich; but why? Illusions are like torture: they always help to pass an hour or two[273]. I have often led by the head, with a golden bridle, old hacks of memory unable to stand on their legs, which I took for young and frisky hopes.

I also met M. Mounier[274] at the white-fish dinners, a sensible and upright man. M. Guizot deigned to honour us with his presence[275].

A _Moniteur_[276] had been started at Ghent: my report to the King of the 12th of May[277], inserted in that journal, proves that my feelings on the liberty of the press and on foreign domination have at all times been the same. I can quote the following passages to-day; they in no way belie my life:

"SIRE,

"You were preparing to crown the institutions of which you had laid the foundation-stone.... You had fixed a period for the commencement of the hereditary peerage; the ministry would have gained greater unity; the ministers I would have become members of the two Chambers, according to the true spirit of the Charter; a law would have been brought in to allow the election of a member of the Chamber of Deputies before the age of forty, so that citizens might have had a real political career. It was proposed to discuss a penal code for press offenses, after the adoption of which law the press would have been entirely free, for that freedom is inseparable from all representative government....

"Sire, and this is the occasion solemnly to protest it: all your ministers, all the members of your Council, are inviolably attached to the principles of a wise liberty; they derive from you that love of laws, of order and of justice without which there can be no happiness for a people. Sire, let us be permitted to say that we are ready to shed the last drop of our blood for you, to follow you to the ends of the earth, to share with you the tribulations which it will please the Almighty to send you, because we believe before God that you will maintain the Constitution which you have given to your people, and that the sincerest wish of your royal heart is the liberty of Frenchmen. Had it been otherwise, Sire, we would all have died at your feet in defense of your sacred person; but we would have been only your soldiers, we would have ceased to be your councillors and your ministers....

"Sire, at this moment we share your royal sadness; there is not one of your councillors and ministers who would not give up his life to prevent the invasion of France. You, Sire, are a Frenchman, we are Frenchmen! Alive to the honour of our country, proud of the glory of our arms, admirers of the courage of our soldiers, we would be willing, in the midst of your battalions, to shed the last drop of our blood to bring them back to their duty or to share lawful triumphs with them. We can only look with the deepest sorrow upon the ills that are ready to break over our country."

Thus, at Ghent, did I propose to add to the Charter that which it still lacked, while displaying my sorrow at the new invasion which was threatening France: nevertheless, I was only an exile whose wishes were in contradiction with the facts which could again open the gates of my country to me. Those pages were written in the States of the allied sovereigns, among kings and Emigrants who detested the liberty of the press, in the midst of armies marching to conquest of whom we were, so to speak, the prisoners: these circumstances perhaps add some strength to the feelings which I venture to express.

[Sidenote: The _Rapport au Roi._]

My report on reaching Paris made a great noise; it was reprinted by M. Le Normant the Younger, who risked his life upon this occasion, and for whom I had all the difficulty in the world to obtain a barren warrant of printer to the King. Bonaparte acted, or allowed others to act, in a manner unworthy of him: on the occasion of my report, they did what the Directory had done on the appearance of Cléry's Memoirs; they falsified fragments of it: I was made to propose to Louis XVIII. stupid ideas for the revival of feudal rights, for the tithes of the clergy, for the recovery of the national property, as though the printing of the original piece in the _Moniteur de Gand_ at a fixed and known date, did not confound the imposture. The pseudonymous writer entrusted with the production of an insincere pamphlet was a soldier fairly high up in rank: he was dismissed after the Hundred Days; his dismissal was ascribed to his conduct towards me; he sent his friends to me; they begged me to intervene, lest a man of merit should lose his sole means of existence: I wrote to the Minister of War and obtained a retiring-pension for this officer[278]. He is dead: his wife has remained attached to Madame de Chateaubriand by a feeling of gratitude to which I was far from having any claim. Certain proceedings are too highly prized; the most ordinary persons are susceptible to such feelings of generosity. A name for virtue is cheaply acquired: the superior mind is not that which pardons, but that which has no need of pardon.

I do not know where Bonaparte, at St. Helena, discovered that I had "rendered essential services at Ghent:" if he judged the