While to all appearances engrossed with the little affairs of Elba, Napoleon was, in fact, planning the most dramatic act of his life. On the 26th of February, 1815, the guard received an order to leave the island. With a force of eleven hundred men, the emperor passed the foreign ships guarding Elba, and on the afternoon of the 1st of March landed at Cannes on the Gulf of Juan. At eleven o’clock that night he started towards Paris. He was trusting himself to the people and the army. If there never was an example of such audacious confidence, certainly there never was such a response. The people of the South received him joyfully, offering to sound the tocsin and follow him _en masse_. But Napoleon refused; it was the soldiers upon whom he called. “We have not been conquered [he told the army]. Come and range yourselves under the standard of your chief; his existence depends upon you; his interests, his honor, and his glory are yours. Victory will march at double-quick time. The eagle with the national colors will fly from steeple to steeple to the towers of Notre Dame. Then you will be able to show your scars with honor; then you will be able to boast of what you have done; you will be the liberators of the country....” At Grenoble there was a show of resistance. Napoleon went directly to the soldiers, followed by his guard. “Here I am; you know me. If there is a soldier among you who wishes to kill his emperor, let him do it.” “Long live the emperor!” was the answer; and in a twinkle six thousand men had torn off their white cockades and replaced them by old soiled tricolors. They drew them from the inside of their caps, where they had been concealing them since the exile of their hero. “It is the same that I wore at Austerlitz,” said one as he passed the emperor. “This,” said another, “I had at Marengo.” [Illustration: NAPOLEON’S RETURN FROM THE ISLAND OF ELBA, MARCH, 1815.] From Grenoble the emperor marched to Lyons, where the soldiers and officers went over to him in regiments. The royalist leaders who had deigned to go to Lyons to exhort the army found themselves ignored; and Ney, who had been ordered from Besançon to stop the emperor’s advance, and who started out promising to “bring back Napoleon in an iron cage,” surrendered his entire division. It was impossible to resist the force of popular opinion, he said. From Lyons the emperor, at the head of what was now the French army, passed by Dijon, Autun, Avallon, and Auxerre, to Fontainebleau, which he reached on March 19th. The same day Louis XVIII. fled from Paris. The change of sentiment in these few days was well illustrated in a French paper which, after Napoleon’s return, published the following calendar gathered from the royalist press. February 25.—“The _exterminator_ has signed a treaty offensive and defensive. It is not known with whom.” February 26.—“The _Corsican_ has left the island of Elba.”