"To us he again spoke of Louis XVIII., and said he would never effect anything with the French nation if he treated them with too much forbearance. He would, from necessity, be obliged to lay large imposts upon them, and hence cause himself to be immediately hated. He likewise told us that 'eighteen years before, he had marched through this place with some thousand men to liberate two Royalists who were to have been executed for wearing the white cockade. In spite, however, of the fury of the populace with which he had to contend, he fortunately saved them, and to-day, he continued, would that man be murdered by this same populace, who should refuse to wear a white cockade,--so contradictory and vacillating are they in everything they do.' "Having learnt that two squadrons of Austrian hussars were stationed at Luc, an order was sent at his request to the commanders to await our arrival there, in order to escort the Emperor to Fréjus[176]." Here ends Count Waldburg's narrative: those accounts are painful to read. What! Were the commissaries unable to afford better protection to him for whom they had the honour to be responsible? Who were they, to affect these airs of superiority with such a man? Bonaparte truly said that, if he had wished, he might have travelled accompanied by a portion of his guard. It is evident that men were indifferent to his fate; they enjoyed his degradation; they gladly acquiesced in the marks of indignity which the victim demanded for his safety: it is so sweet to hold beneath one's feet the destiny of him who walked over the highest heads, to avenge pride with insult! Therefore the commissaries do not expend a word, not even a word of philosophic sensibility, on such a change of fortune, to remind man of his nothingness and of the greatness of the judgments of God! In the ranks of the Allies, Napoleon had had numerous adulators: he who has gone on his knees before brute force is not entitled to triumph over misfortune. Prussia, I admit, had need of an effort of virtue to forget what she had suffered, herself, her King and her Queen; but that effort should have been made. Alas! Bonaparte had taken pity on nothing; all hearts had cooled towards him. The moment in which he showed himself most cruel was at Jaffa[177]; the smallest, on the way to Elba: in the first case, military necessity served as his excuse; in the second, the harshness of the foreign commissaries changes the course of the reader's feelings and lessens his own abasement. The Provisional Government of France does not itself seem to me quite without reproach: I reject the calumnies of Maubreuil[178]; nevertheless, amid the terror with which Napoleon still inspired his former servants, a fortuitous catastrophe might have presented itself in their eyes in the light only of a misfortune.