To the greater part of the nation, the Charter possessed the drawback of being "granted:" this most useless word stirred up the burning question of royal or popular sovereignty. Louis XVIII. also dated his boon from the nineteenth year of his reign, considering that of Bonaparte as null and void, in the same way as Charles II[197]. had taken a clean leap over Cromwell's head: it was a kind of insult to the sovereigns, who had all recognised Napoleon and who were at that very moment in Paris. That obsolete language and those pretensions of the ancient monarchies added nothing to the lawfulness of the right and were mere puerile anachronisms[198]. That apart, the Charter, replacing despotism, bringing us legal liberty, was calculated to satisfy conscientious men. Nevertheless, the Royalists, who gained so many advantages by it, who, issuing from their village, or their paltry fireside, or the obscure posts on which they had lived under the Empire, were called to a lofty and public existence, received the boon only in a grudging spirit; the Liberals, who had accommodated themselves whole-heartedly to the tyranny of Bonaparte, thought the Charter a regular slave-code. We have returned to the time of Babel, but we no longer work at a common monument of confusion: each builds his tower to his own height, according to his strength and stature. For the rest, if the Charter appeared defective, it was because the Revolution had not run its course; the principles of equality and democracy lay at the bottom of men's minds and worked in a contrary direction to the monarchical order. The Allied Princes lost no time in leaving Paris. Alexander, when going away, had a religious sacrifice celebrated on the Place de la Concorde[199]. An altar was erected where the scaffold of Louis XVI. had stood. Seven Muscovite priests performed the service, and the foreign troops defiled before the altar. The _Te Deum_ was sung to one of the beautiful airs of the old Greek music. The soldiers and the sovereigns bent their knee to the ground to receive the benediction. The thoughts of the French were carried back to 1793 and 1794, when the oxen refused to go over pavements which the smell of blood made hateful to them. What hand had led to the expiatory festival those men of all countries, those sons of the ancient barbarian invasions, those Tartars, some of whom dwelt in sheep-skin tents beneath the Great Wall of China? Those are spectacles which the feeble generations that will follow my century shall no longer see. [Sidenote: The first Restoration.]