In the midst of the splendid festivities in Vienna; in the midst of the pomps and parades, the jubilations over the fall of the one Throned Democrat of the world; in the midst of the congratulations, the gayeties, the feasting and dancing, the illuminations and the joyous music, there comes the clap of thunder from the clear sky. _Napoleon has left Elba!_ In Dumas’s story, “Twenty Years After,” do you remember that thrilling chapter in which the news is brought to the immortal Three that their deadly foe, Mordaunt, _whom they supposed they had killed_, is alive? Do you remember how Athos, the loftiest man of the Three, rose _and took down his sword_, which he had momentarily hung upon the wall, _gravely buckling it around him_? A desperate man is on his track; his sword must be at his hand. So it was with the European Kings, at Vienna. They had banded themselves together to break the scepter of the Crowned Democrat whose Civil Code, with its glorious maxims, all tending to _Justice_ and to _Equality before the law_, was a deadly menace to the existence of _Divine Right_ and _Special Privilege_. They had deceived their own peoples with lies about Napoleon, and with promises of reforms which they never meant to keep; they had deluged France with a flood of foreign invasion that swept all before it; they had bought the Fouchés and Talleyrands; they had seduced the Murats and Bernadottes and Moreaus and Marmonts; they had captured Napoleon’s wife and child, and had deafened their ears and hardened their hearts to the appeals of the husband and father. They had stricken the sword out of his hand, the crown off his head. They thought that they had made an end of this “Disturber of the Public Peace”--this enthroned Democrat, whose levelling watchword of “_All careers open to talent_,” they hated as a tyrant hates a rebel, as _despotism hates liberty_. And now _Napoleon was in France again._ No wonder that consternation seized Vienna. “_Look to yourself; the lion is loose!_” was the warning cry which a King of France had sounded in the ears of a false and affrighted King of England, ages before. If Richard Coeur de Lion’s escape from the Castle of Dürrenstein turned to water the blood of Philip and John, the sensation in Europe was as nothing compared to that created by Napoleon’s escape from Elba.