Chapter XIII: Book V (2)

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.