The battle of Leipzig was to the people of Germany what Jena and Austerlitz had been to Napoleon. The news of this great victory was electrifying. From the Baltic to the Alps the air resounded with rejoicings. There are no persuasions needed to make people leave a sinking ship. Jerome Bonaparte fled from his kingdom of Westphalia--the Rheinbund dissolved--Holland, Switzerland, Italy fell away. Wurtemberg joined the allies and the great movement for emancipation became national, not Prussian. The allied princes offered to Napoleon that the Rhine, the Alps, the Pyrenees, and the sea should be the frontiers of France. Still believing in his invincibility, he scorned the proposition. His star had certainly deserted him, for while he was collecting his broken forces in Germany, and while hope was reviving over small victories, the allied armies, unknown to him, were advancing on Paris! He learned it too late. History holds no picture more powerfully impressive than that of this man waiting at Fontainebleau, twelve leagues from Paris, still believing in his power to retrieve, and unconscious that he is already deposed! And the magic of his influence, the power of the spell he cast over mankind, is illustrated by the fact that even now, knowing him to have been a tyrant and a scourge as we do, rejoicing in his defeat as we must, we still cannot look at that picture without a moistened eye and almost a regret at his downfall! Alexander, and Frederick William, and the allied armies were in Paris, which had capitulated, and at their bidding had consented to the deposition of Napoleon. On the 6th of April, 1814, Louis XVIII., brother of the murdered Louis, was proclaimed King of France, and to the man who had been master of Europe was assigned--the island of Elba on the coast of Italy. But in March of the following year, while sovereigns were still wrangling over the disorder he had left, and while Talleyrand was scheming for his new master as faithfully as he had for the old, the startling news came that Napoleon had landed in France. Louis XVIII. vanished into thin air before the man whom the people were receiving with wild acclamations of delight. Europe again united, and again Napoleon was seen advancing, as of old, with a great army. Blücher was in command of one division of the allied armies and Wellington of the other. The battle of Waterloo began on the morning of the 18th of June, 1815. To England was to belong the glory of Napoleon's final downfall. Wellington accomplished his defeat, and then Blücher came in time to make that defeat an annihilation. The mistake of the year before was not to be repeated. From that moment until his death at St. Helena, in 1821, Napoleon was a prisoner and an exile. He had finished the work he had been appointed to do, and Fate had flung him aside! CHAPTER XVIII.