Almost the first act of Louis XVIII. was the removal of the mutilated
remains of the king and queen and his sister Elizabeth to the royal
vault in the Church of St. Denis. He then gave orders for a _Chapelle
Expiatoire_ to be erected over the grave where they had been lying for
two decades, and for masses to be said for the repose of the souls of
his murdered relatives. Paris was full of returning royalists.
Banished exiles with grand old names, who had been earning a scanty
living by teaching French and dancing in Vienna, London, and even in
New York, were hastening to Paris for a joyful Restoration; and Louis
XVIII., while Russian and Austrian troops guarded him on the streets of
his own capital, was freely talking about ruling by divine right!
That king was reigning under a liberal charter (as the new constitution
was called)--a charter which guaranteed almost as much personal liberty
as the one obtained in England from King John in 1215; and the palpable
absurdity of supposing that he and his supporters might at the same
time revive and maintain Bourbon traditions, as if there had been no
Revolution, was at least not an indication of much sagacity.
But there was a very smooth surface. The tricolor had disappeared.
Napoleon's generals had gone unresistingly over to the Bourbons.
Talleyrand adapted himself as quickly to the new regime as he had to
the Napoleonic; was witty at the expense of the empire and the emperor,
who, as he said, "was not even a Frenchman"; and was as crafty and as
useful an instrument for the new ruler as he had been for the
pre-existing one.
But something was happening under the surface. While the
plenipotentiaries were busy over their task of restoring boundaries in
Europe, and the other restoration was going on pleasantly in Paris, a
rumor came that Napoleon was in Lyons. A regiment was at once
despatched to drive him back; and Marshal Ney, "the bravest of the
brave," was sent with orders to arrest him.
The next news that came to Paris was that the troops were frantically
shouting "_Vive l'empereur_!" and Ney was embracing his beloved
commander and pledging his sword in his service.
At midnight the king left the Tuileries for the Flemish frontier, and
before the dawn Napoleon was in his Palace of Fontainebleau (March
20th), which he had left exactly eleven months before. The night after
the departure of the king there suddenly appeared lights passing
swiftly over the Font de la Concorde; then came the tramp of horses'
feet, and a carriage attended on each side by cavalry with drawn
swords. The carriage stopped at the first entrance to the garden of
the Tuileries, and a small man with a dark, determined face was borne
into the palace the Bourbon had just deserted.
There was consternation in the Council Chamber in London when the Duke
of Wellington entered and announced that Napoleon was in Paris, and all
must be done over again!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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