Caroline met the frigate which was bringing Ferdinand[460] back. The ship of the fugitive Queen fired a salute, the ship of the recalled King did not return it: Prosperity does not recognise her sister Adversity. Thus do illusions, faded for the one, begin anew for the other; thus do the fickle destinies of humanity pass each other in the winds and on the billows: smiling or baleful, one and the same abyss bears them or engulfs them. Murat was achieving his career elsewhere. On the 25th of May 1815, at ten o'clock at night, he landed in the Golfe Juan, where his brother-in-law had landed. Fortune made Joachim play the parody of Napoleon. The latter did not believe in the strength of misfortune, nor in the succour which it brings to great minds: he forbade the dethroned King the approach to Paris; he consigned to the lazar-house this man stricken with the plague of the conquered; he shut him up in a country-house called _Plaisance_, near Toulon. He would have done better to show less dread of a contagion with which he had himself been seized: who knows what a soldier like Murat might have altered in the Battle of Waterloo? The King of Naples, in his trouble, wrote to Fouché on the 19th of June 1815: "I shall reply to those who accuse me of commencing hostilities too soon that it was done at the Emperor's formal demand and that, for three months, he did not cease to reassure me as to his sentiments by accrediting ministers to me and writing to me that he relied on me and would never abandon me. It is only when people saw that I had lost, together with the throne, the means of continuing the powerful diversion which had lasted three months that they tried to mislead public opinion by insinuating that I acted on my own behalf and without the Emperor's knowledge." There existed a generous and beautiful woman; when she arrived in Paris, Madame Récamier received her and would not abandon her in times of misfortune. Among the papers which she has left behind were found two letters from Murat written in the month of June 1819; they are useful to the study of history: [Sidenote: Letters from Murat.] 6 _June_ 1815.