The heat of the wings of the renown of Marengo and Austerlitz had sufficed to hatch armies in that France which is one great nest of soldiers. Bonaparte had restored to his legions their epithets of "invincible," "terrible" and "incomparable;" seven armies resumed the titles of Armies of the Pyrenees, of the Alps, of the Jura, the Moselle, the Rhine: great memories which served as a frame for supposed troops, for expected triumphs. A real army was mustered in Paris and at Laon: one hundred and fifty mounted batteries, ten thousand picked soldiers entered into the guards; eighteen thousand sailors distinguished at Lützen and Bautzen; thirty thousand veterans, officers and non-commissioned officers, in garrison in the fortified towns; seven departments in the North and East ready to rise in a body; one hundred and eighty thousand men of the National Guard mobilized; volunteer corps in Lorraine, Alsace and Franche-Comté; federates offering their pikes and their strength; Paris turning out three thousand muskets a day: those were the Emperor's resources. Perhaps he might yet once more have overturned the world, had he been able to resolve, while liberating the country, to summon the foreign nations to independence. The moment was propitious: the kings, after promising their subjects constitutional government, had shamefully gone from their word. But liberty was distasteful to Napoleon, since he had drunk of the cup of power; he preferred to be vanquished with soldiers rather than to vanquish with peoples. The army corps which he successively sent towards the Netherlands amounted to seventy thousand men. * We Emigrants, in the city of Charles V., were like the women of that city: seated behind their windows, they watch the soldiers, in a little slanting mirror, passing down the street. Louis XVIII. was there in a corner, completely forgotten: scarcely did he from time to time receive a note from the Prince de Talleyrand returning from Vienna, a few lines from the members of the diplomatic body resident about the Duke of Wellington as commissaries, Messieurs Pozzo di Borgo, de Vincent[321], etc., etc. They had plenty to do besides thinking of us! A man unacquainted with politics would never have believed that an impotent hidden on the banks of the Lys would be flung back upon the throne by the collision of thousands of soldiers ready to cut each other's throats: soldiers of whom he was neither the King nor the general, who were not thinking of him, who knew of neither his name nor his existence. Of two such close spots as Ghent and Waterloo, never did one appear so dim, the other so dazzling: the Legitimacy lay in the store-house, like an old broken waggon.