Macdonald was at the battle of Hanau, the last stand made by this discomfited host in Hesse Cassel. There the French were attacked by the Austrians and Bavarians, whom they routed, and then continued retreating, the whole of their cavalry hewing a passage, sword in hand, through the lines of the enemy. He was now despatched by the Emperor to Cologne, with orders to organize a new army. These instructions he found the impossibility of fulfilling, so he abandoned the Rhine, along the banks of which the bayonets of the allies were glittering everywhere, and falling back into the interior of ancient France, with the war-worn veterans of his shattered column, he formed the left wing of the retreating army; and at its head, during the campaign of 1814, he gave more than one severe repulse to the Prussians, who were pressing towards Paris under Marshal Blucher. These encounters were chiefly on the banks of the Marne, and especially at Nangis, in the north of France, where he fought a severe action with the allies on the 17th of February; but these struggles and all the valour of the French Imperialists were vain, for ere long the capital was taken; then Germany found itself freed from oppression; Holland rang with acclamations on the downfall of Napoleon; and Wellington had halted in his long career of victory, on the banks of the Garonne, and by the hill of Toulouse. Macdonald adhered to the fallen Emperor--the child of Destiny--and was with him in the old palace of Fontainebleau at the time of his abdication from the most splendid of European thrones. Hope had fled. His army was dispersed and crumbling to pieces; its great officers and leaders had abandoned him; and such is the instability of human affairs, that the people of whose blood he had been so lavish--the people to whom he had been a demi-god--were turning with ardour to another monarch, and welcomed the foemen against whom they had struggled for more than twenty years of war and carnage that were without parallel. "The wreck of the army assembled at Fontainebleau," says General Bourienne, "the remains of a million of men levied in fifteen months--comprising the corps of Marshals Oudinot, Ney, Macdonald, and General Gerard--did not exceed twenty-five thousand." Various interviews that took place between Napoleon and the Duke of Tarentum about this time are carefully detailed by this gossiping old soldier, in the supplement to the _Biographie Universelle_, and other memoirs. Macdonald with his corps had marched in with all speed from Montereau, on receipt of an order from the Emperor, that he meant to march on Paris--a resolution that filled his officers with consternation. On the marshal's arrival at the palace, the generals waited on him in a body, to request that he would place before the Emperor, the rashness and desperation of attempting to recapture Paris from the allies.