"I have heard voices around the throne of the fortunate sovereign; they withdraw from it to-day when he is unfortunate. There are people who do not want to recognise Napoleon II., because they want to receive the law from the foreigner, to whom they give the name of Allies.... Napoleon's abdication is indivisible. If you refuse to recognise his son, he must remain sword in hand, surrounded by Frenchmen who have shed their blood for him and who are still all covered with wounds.... He will be abandoned by base generals who have already betrayed him.... But if you declare that every Frenchman who deserts his flag shall be covered with infamy, his house razed to the ground, his family outlawed, then there will be no more traitors, no more intrigues such as have occasioned the late catastrophes, some of whose authors are perhaps sitting among us." The House rose in an uproar: "Order! Order! Order!" they bellowed, feeling the thrust. "Young man, you forget yourself!" cried Masséna[341]. "Do you think you are still in the guard-room?" asked Lameth. All the portents of the Second Restoration were threatening: Bonaparte had returned at the head of four hundred Frenchmen, Louis XVIII. was returning behind four hundred thousand foreigners; he passed near the bloody pool of Waterloo to go to Saint-Denis as though to his funeral. It was while the Legitimacy was thus advancing that the interpellations of the House of Peers resounded; they contained something, I know not what, of those terrible revolutionary scenes of the great days of our troubles, when the dagger was passed round on the bench from hand to hand among the victims. A few soldiers whose baleful fascination had brought about the ruin of France, by producing the second foreign invasion, struggled on the threshold of the palace; their prophetic despair, their gestures, their words from the tomb, seemed to announce a treble death: death to themselves, death to the man whom they had blessed, death to the man whom they had proscribed. * While Bonaparte was retiring to the Malmaison with the finished Empire, we were leaving Ghent with the recommencing Monarchy. Pozzo, who knew how little question of the Legitimacy there was in high places, hastened to write to Louis XVIII. to set out and arrive in good time, if he wished to reign before the place was taken: it was to that note that Louis XVIII. owed his crown in 1815. At Mons, I missed the first occasion of fortune in my political career; I was my own obstacle, and I found myself incessantly in my way. This time my "good qualities" played me the ill turn which my faults might have done me. [Sidenote: Talleyrand again.]