After he was made king, however, Lafayette wrote him a note of congratulation and appeared in uniform at his first royal audience wearing the white cockade. That certainly seemed like a change of front, but Lafayette thought it a necessity. "It had to be Napoleon or the Bourbons," he wrote Jefferson. "These are the only possible alternatives in a country where the idea of republican executive power is regarded as a synonym for excesses committed in its name." He accepted the government of Louis XVIII as more liberal than that of the emperor. Time and again after this he aided in the overthrow of one man or party, only to turn against the new power he had helped create. He even tried to work with Napoleon again after Louis XVIII fled to Ghent and Bonaparte returned from Elba to found his "new democratic empire," known as the Hundred Days. Waterloo came at the end of it; then Lafayette voiced the demand for the emperor's abdication and pressed it hard. "What!" he cried in answer to Lucien Bonaparte's appeal to the Chamber of Deputies not to desert his brother, because that would be a violation of national honor, "you accuse us of failing in duty toward honor, toward Napoleon! Do you forget all we have done for him? The bones of our brothers and of our children cry aloud from the sands of Africa, from the banks of the Guadalquivir and the Tagus, from the [Pg 282]shores of the Vistula and the glacial deserts of Russia. During more than ten years three million Frenchmen have perished for this man who wants to-day to fight all Europe. We have done enough for him. Our duty now is to save our country!" Lafayette was one of the deputation sent by the Chamber to thank the ex-emperor after his abdication, and admired Napoleon's self-possession during that trying scene. He thought Napoleon "played grandly the role necessity forced upon him." Lafayette was also one of the commission sent to negotiate with the victorious allies. It was there that he gave his spirited answer to the demand that Napoleon be given up. "I am astonished you should choose a prisoner of Olmütz as the person to whom to make that shameful proposal."