A dual procession passed up and down the stair-cases of the Pavillon de Flore; people were asking what they were to do: no answer. They applied to the captain of the guards; they questioned the chaplains, the precentors, the almoners: nothing. Vain talk, vain retailing of news. I saw young men weep with rage when uselessly asking for orders and arms; I saw women faint with anger and contempt. Access to the King was impossible; etiquette closed the door. [Sidenote: A Royal order: "Hunt him down."] The great measure decreed against Bonaparte was an order to "hunt him down[252]:" Louis XVIII., with no legs, "hunting down" the conqueror who bestrode the earth! This form of the ancient laws, renewed for the occasion, is enough to show the compass of mind of the statesmen of that period. "To hunt down" in 1815! "Hunt down!" And "hunt" whom? "Hunt" a wolf? "Hunt" a brigand chieftain? "Hunt" a felon lord? No: "hunt" Napoleon, who had "hunted down" kings, who had seized and branded them for all time on the shoulder with his indelible "N"! From this order, when considered more closely, sprang a political truth which no one saw: the Legitimate House, estranged from the nation for three-and-twenty years, had remained at the day and place at which the Revolution had caught it, whereas the nation had progressed in point of time and space. Hence the impossibility of understanding and meeting one another; religion, ideas, interests, language, earth and heaven, all were different for the people and for the King, because they were separated by a quarter of a century equivalent to centuries. But if the order "to hunt down" appears strange, owing to the preservation of the old idiom of the law, had Bonaparte originally the intention of acting better, although employing a newer language? Papers of M. d'Hauterive[253], catalogued by M. Artaud[254], prove that it cost great difficulty to prevent Napoleon from having the Duc d'Angoulême shot, in spite of the official document in the _Moniteur_, a show document which remains to us: he thought it wrong of the Prince to have defended himself. And yet the fugitive from Elba, when leaving Fontainebleau, had recommended the soldiers to be "faithful to the monarch" whom France had chosen. Bonaparte's family had been respected; Queen Hortense had accepted from Louis XVIII. the title of Duchesse de Saint-Leu; Murat, who still reigned in Naples, saw his kingdom sold by M. de Talleyrand only during the Congress of Vienna.