What I said above of the warriors, with the object which I was proposing to attain, was true as regards the leaders; but I lied with respect to the soldiers. I have present in my memory, as though I saw it still, the spectacle which I witnessed when Louis XVIII., entering Paris on the 3rd of May, went to visit Notre-Dame: they had wished to spare the King the sight of the foreign troops; a regiment of the old foot-guards kept the line from the Pont-Neuf to Notre-Dame, along the Quai des Orfèvres. I do not believe that human faces ever wore so threatening and so terrible an expression. Those grenadiers, covered with wounds, the conquerors of Europe, who had seen so many thousands of cannon-balls pass over their heads, who smelt of fire and powder; those same men, robbed of their captain, were forced to salute an old king, disabled by time, not war, watched as they were by an army of Russians, Austrians and Prussians, in Napoleon's invaded capital. Some, moving the skin of their foreheads, brought down their great bear-skin busbies over their eyes, as though to keep them from seeing; others lowered the corners of their mouth in angry scorn; others again showed their teeth through their mustachios, like tigers. When they presented arms, it was with a furious movement, and the sound of those arms made one tremble. Never, we must admit, have men been put to so great a test and suffered so dire a torment. If, at that moment, they had been summoned to vengeance, it would have been necessary to exterminate them to the last, or they would have swallowed the earth. At the end of the line was a young hussar, on horse-back; he held a drawn sword, and made it leap and as it were dance with a convulsive movement of anger. His face was pale; his eyes rolled in their sockets; he opened and shut his mouth by turns, clashing his teeth together, and stifling cries of which one heard only the first sound. He caught sight of a Russian officer: the look which he darted at him cannot be described. When the King's carriage passed before him, he made his horse spring, and certainly he had the temptation to fling himself upon the King. The Restoration committed an irreparable mistake at its outset: it ought to have disbanded the army, while retaining the marshals, generals, military governors and officers in their pensions, honours and rank; the soldiers would afterwards have successively returned into the reconstituted army, as they have since done into the Royal Guard: the Legitimate Monarchy would not then have had against it, from the first, those soldiers of the Empire, organized, divided into brigades, denominated as they had been in the days of their victories, unceasingly talking together of the time that was past, nourishing regrets and feelings hostile to their new master.