"Sire," exclaimed the countess, "I kneel before you, because it is my purpose to implore of your majesty the happiness which you alone can restore to us; it will be a double pleasure to possess Louis XVIII. once more, when Alexander I. shall have given him to us!" "Is it then true that the French people are still devoted to the Bourbon family?" "Yes, sire, they are our only hope; on them we bestow our whole love!" "Ah, that is excellent," cried Alexander; "are all French ladies filled with the same enthusiasm as yourself, madame?" "Well, if this is the case, it will be France that recalls Louis XVIII., and it will not be necessary for us to conduct him back. Let the legislative bodies declare their will, and it shall be done[32]." [Footnote 32: Mémoires d'une Femme de Qualité, vol. i., p. 179.] And of all women, Countess Ducayla was the one to bring the legislative bodies to the desired declaration. She hastened to communicate the hopes with which the emperor had inspired her to all Paris; on the evening after her interview with the emperor, she gave a grand _soirée_, to which she invited the most beautiful ladies of her party, and a number of senators. "I desired by this means," says she in her memoirs, "to entrap the gentlemen into making a vow. How simple-minded I was! Did I not know that the majority of them had already made and broken a dozen vows?" On the following day the senate assembled, and elected a provisional government, consisting of Talleyrand, the Duke of Dalberg, the Marquis of Jancourt, Count Bournonville, and the Abbé Montesquieu. The senate and the new provisional government thereupon declared Napoleon deposed from the throne, and recalled Louis XVIII. But while the senate thus publicly and solemnly proclaimed its legitimist sentiments in the name of the French people, it at the same time testified to its own unworthiness and selfishness. In the treaty made by the senate with its recalled king, it was provided in a separate clause, "that the salary which they had hitherto received, should be continued to them for life." While recalling Louis XVIII., these senators took care to pay themselves for their trouble, and to secure their own future. CHAPTER II. THE BOURBONS AND THE BONAPARTES. The allies hastened to consider the declaration of the senate and provisional government as the declaration of the people, and recalled to the throne of his fathers Louis XVIII., who, as Count de Lille, had so long languished in exile at Hartwell.