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."

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.