The combined efforts of the great powers of Europe overthrew Napoleon early in the year 1814. In spite of amazing efforts on his part, the allied armies marched to Paris; and the emperor, finding himself almost deserted, was compelled to abdicate. The allied powers made the great mistake, as events proved, of allowing him to take possession in full sovereignty of the little island of Elba. A man of more chivalrous spirit would probably have felt that it was a mockery to call him emperor of so minute an empire, and would have preferred to disappear entirely from the observation of a world in which he had risen to so vast a height and fallen so decisively. Napoleon took his small kingdom seriously, and seems to have been contented for a time, until reports of the state of affairs in France led him to think that he might recover his throne. The legitimate line of the Bourbon kings had been restored on Napoleon's overthrow, in the person of Louis XVIII., brother of the king executed in 1793. How far this restoration was acceptable at the time to the French nation as a whole it is difficult to judge. Certainly the knot of selfish politicians who seized the opportunity of speaking in the name of France desired it for their own ends. Certainly also the allied sovereigns, who for the moment held the fate of France in their hands, most or all of them thought it the most desirable course in the interests of Europe generally. But the Bourbons, like their English forerunners in disaster, had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. The great mass of Frenchmen had no wish to lose the great fruits of the Revolution, abolition of aristocratic privilege, limitation of the royal authority, curtailment of the vast influence of the clergy. Still less were they willing to see the crown and the royalist exiles resume possession of the lands of which they had been deprived, and which had mostly been sold to new owners. Least of all were they inclined to allow the rejection, in favour of the Bourbon white flag, of the tricolour which was the emblem alike of the liberty and equality won by the Revolution, and of the military glories won by Napoleon. The king himself seems to have been at least willing to abide by the constitution he had proclaimed, and to accept the great social results of the Revolution; but his brother and destined successor, and many of the restored exiles, made no secret of their desire to revert to the _ancien régime_. Naturally a large amount of discontent was engendered, and of this Napoleon took advantage to try his luck once more. On March 1, 1815, he landed near Cannes with a few hundred followers. The population of the provinces through which his way to Paris lay were on the whole favourable, more so probably than the average of the whole of France. The soldiers could nowhere be induced to fight against the emperor; and many of the officers, though by no means all, set them the example of defection. The king fled into