"On emerging from your civil discords, you chose as your leader a man who appeared upon the world's stage endowed with the characteristics of greatness. On the ruins of anarchy he founded only despotism; he ought at least out of gratitude to have _become a Frenchman_ like yourselves: he has never been one. Without aim or object, he has never ceased to undertake unjust wars, like an adventurer seeking fame. Perhaps he is still dreaming of his gigantic designs, even while unequalled reverses are inflicting such striking punishment upon the pride and abuse of victory. He has not known how to reign either in the national interest or even in the interest of his own despotism. He has destroyed all that he wished to create, and re-created all that he wished to destroy. He believed in force alone; to-day force overwhelms him: a just retribution for an insensate ambition." Incontestable truths and well-earned curses; but who was it that uttered those curses? What became of my poor little pamphlet, squeezed in between those virulent addresses? Did it not disappear entirely? On the same day, the 4th of April, the Provisional Government proscribed the signs and emblems of the Imperial Government: if the Arc de Triomphe had existed, it would have been pulled down. Mailhe[165], who was the first to vote for the death of Louis XVI., Cambacérès, who was the first to greet Napoleon by the title of Emperor, eagerly recognised the acts of the Provisional Government. On the 6th, the Senate drafted a constitution: it rested nearly on the bases of the future Charter; the Senate was preserved as an Upper Chamber; the senatorial dignity was declared permanent and hereditary; to the title to their property was attached the endowment of the senatorships; the Constitution made those titles and properties transmissible to the descendants of the holder: fortunately, those ignoble hereditary rights bore the Fates within themselves, as the ancients used to say. The sordid effrontery of those senators, who, in the midst of the invasion of their country, did not for a moment lose sight of themselves, strikes one even in the immensity of public events. Would it not have been more convenient for the Bourbons, on attaining power, to adopt the established government, a dumb Legislative Body, a secret and servile Senate, a fettered press? On reflexion, one finds the thing to be impossible: the natural liberties, righting themselves in the absence of the arm that bent them, would have resumed their vertical line under the weakness of the compression. If the legitimate Princes had disbanded Bonaparte's army, as they ought to have done (this was Napoleon's opinion in the island of Elba), and if, at the same time, they had retained the Imperial Government, to break the instrument of glory in order to keep only the instrument of tyranny would have been too much: the Charter was the ransom of Louis XVIII. *