Beside the prodigy of the invasion of one man must be placed another which was the consequence of the first: the Legitimacy was seized with a fainting-fit; the failure of the heart of the State attacked the members and rendered France motionless. For twenty days, Bonaparte marched on by stages; his eagles flew from steeple to steeple and, along a road of two hundred leagues the Government, masters of everything, disposing of money and men, found neither the time nor the means to cut a bridge, to throw down a tree, so as to delay, at least by an hour, the progress of a man to whom the populations offered no opposition, but whom also they did not follow. This torpor on the part of the Government seemed the more deplorable inasmuch as public opinion in Paris was greatly excited; it would have countenanced anything, despite the defection of Marshal Ney. Benjamin Constant wrote in the newspapers: "After visiting our country with every plague, he left the soil of France. Who would not have thought that he was leaving it for ever? Suddenly he appears, and again promises Frenchmen liberty, victory and peace. The author of the most tyrannical Constitution that ever ruled France, he speaks to-day of liberty! But it was he who, during fourteen years, undermined and destroyed liberty. He had not the excuse of memory, the habit of power; he was not born in the purple. It was his fellow-citizens whom he enslaved, his equals whom he loaded with chains. He had not inherited power; he desired and meditated tyranny: what liberty is he able to promise? Are we not a thousand times more free than under his empire? He promises victory, and three times he forsook his troops, in Egypt, in Spain and in Russia, abandoning his companions in arms to the triple agony of cold, destitution and despair. He brought upon France the humiliation of invasion; he lost the conquests which we had made before him. He promises peace, and his name alone is a signal for war. The nation unhappy enough to serve him would again become the object of European hatred; his triumph would be the commencement of a combat to the death against the civilized world.... He has therefore nothing to claim, nor to offer. Whom could he convince, or whom seduce? War at home, war abroad: those are the gifts which he brings us." [Sidenote: Soult's order of the day.] Marshal Soult's Order of the Day, dated 8 March 1815, repeats very nearly the ideas of Benjamin Constant, with an effusion of loyalty: "SOLDIERS, "The man who lately, before the eyes of Europe, abdicated the power which he had usurped, and which he had so fatally abused, has landed on French soil, which he was never to see again.