The final resurrection and triumph of Napoleon no one could foresee on March 31, 1814, when he lay in a stupor of weariness and soul-sickness at Fontainebleau, while the Allies were entering Paris.

It was a sad day out there at the old palace; in the capital was spasmodic jubilation. Talleyrand, of the Council of Regency, had managed to remain in Paris when the Empress fled. Talleyrand became the moving spirit of royalist intrigue. He may not have intended the return of the Bourbons, may have been tricked by Vitrolles as Lord Holland relates; but he had meant all the while to overthrow Napoleon, and had countenanced, if not suggested, plans for his assassination.

To prove to Czar Alexander that France hungered and thirsted for the Bourbons, Talleyrand got up cavalcades of young aristocrats who rode about shouting, “Down with the tyrant! Long live Louis XVIII.!” High-born ladies, also, began to take active part in the business, it being an axiom with Talleyrand that if you wish to accomplish anything important, you “must set the women going.” Ladies of the old nobility, elegantly dressed, were in the streets, distributing white cockades, and drumming up recruits. Royalism and clericalism bugled for all their forces; and while Napoleon’s friends, disorganized, awaited leaders, the day was carried for the Bourbons.

So that when the Allies marched into Paris, as masters, on March 31, 1814, the royalist faction welcomed the invaders as “Liberators.”

How had these royalists got back to France, to freedom, and to wealth? Through the magnanimity of “the tyrant” whom it was now so easy to abuse. How had those high-priests of the Church, who were Talleyrand’s aides in treachery, regained their places, their influence, their splendid importance? Through the leniency of the man who was now abandoned, denounced, sold to the enemies of France.

And how had the wars commenced which Napoleon had inherited, and which he had never been able to end? By the determination of kings and aristocracies to check the spread of French principles, to crush democracy in its birth, and to restore to its old place organized superstition, class-privilege, and the divine right of kings. In the long fight, the new doctrine had gone down; and the old had risen again. Royalists, clericals, class-worshippers, fell into transports of joy. Glorious Easter, with a sun-burst, flooded them with light. They thronged the streets in gala dress; they filled the air with glad outcry; they kissed the victor’s bloody hand, and hailed him as a god.

They followed Czar Alexander through the streets to Talleyrand’s house, with such extravagance of joyful demonstration that you might have thought him a French hero fresh from victories won over foreign foes. Cossacks, driving before them French prisoners, were enthusiastically cheered as they passed through the streets. Aristocratic women, by the hundred, trooped after the foreigners who led the parade, threw themselves with embraces upon the horses, and kissed the very boots of the riders. And these troops, mark you, were those who had made havoc in the provinces of France, with a ferocity and a lust which had not only wreaked its fill upon helpless maid and matron, but had revelled in the sport of compelling fathers, husbands, and sons to witness what they could neither prevent nor revenge, and which had coldly slain the victims after the bestial appetite had been glutted.

Cheer the Cossack bands as they prod with lances the bleeding French captives who have seen their homes burnt, and their wives and daughters violated and butchered! Hug the horses, and kiss the feet of the foreigners who have come to beat down your people, change your government, quell your democracy, force back into power a king and a system that had led the nation to misery and shame!

Do all this, O high-born ladies of France, for the triumph of to-day is yours! But when passion has cooled and reason returned; when overwhelming pressure from without has been removed and France has become herself again, your excesses of servility to-day will but have hastened the speed of the To-morrow in which your precious Bourbons, and your precious feudalism will be driven forever forth from the land into which foreign bayonets have brought them. The man who lingers at Fontainebleau is to-day no longer Emperor to the high and mighty ones in Paris. To confederated monarchs he is “Bonaparte”; to banded conspirators he is “Bonaparte”; to recreant marshals, ungrateful nobles, grasping clericals, treacherous Dalbergs and Talleyrands, he is “Bonaparte.” Foreign and domestic foes make their appointment at his triumphal column in the Place Vendome, tugging and pulling to drag his statue down, as they have dragged him down.

The Empire is a wreck, the Napoleonic spell broken for all time to come. Down with the Corsican and his works! Up with the Bourbon lilies, and the glories of the Old RÉgime!

So runs the current—the shouts of the honest devotee and of the time-server whose only aim in life is to find out which is the winning side. Far-seeing, indeed, would be the sage,—wise as well as brave,—who, in this hour of national degradation, should dare to say that all this carnival of royalism would pass like a dream;—would dare to say that the fallen Emperor would rise again and would sweep his enemies from his path, and would come once more to rule the land—with the majesty and the permanence which belongs to none but the immortal dead.

Troops had collected in the neighborhood of Fontainebleau to the number of forty or fifty thousand. The younger officers and the men of the rank and file were still devoted to the Emperor. Whenever he appeared he was met with the same old acclamations; and shouts of “To Paris” indicated the readiness of the army for the great battle which it was thought he would fight under the walls of Paris. After his first torpor, Napoleon had recovered himself, had formed his plans, and had convinced himself that the allied army could be cut off and destroyed. But in order for him to succeed it was necessary that treason in Paris should give him a chance to win, and treason gave him no such chance. The high-priests and the nobles whose hands Napoleon had strengthened by his Concordat and the recall of the ÉmigrÉs, made the streets of Paris hot with the hurry of their feet as they ran here, there, and yonder, marshalling their partisans. The AbbÉs Montesquieu and Louis, the Archbishop of Malines, cordially working with Talleyrand and Dalberg, and assisted by banker Laffitte and others of that kind, honeycombed the Senate and the various public bodies with conspiracy, drawing into one common net those who merely wished to end the war by getting rid of Napoleon, as well as those who were original Bourbonites. In this crisis there was none to take the lead for Napoleon. He had deprived the masses of the people of all initiative; had given them civil liberty, but had taken away from them all political importance. Into the hands of the nobles and the priests he had replaced power, wealth, influence, class organization. When the Church and the aristocracy turned upon him, where was the power of resistance to come from? The army was a tower of strength to the Emperor, it is true; but even here there was mortal weakness, for the higher officers, who had been ennobled, were imbued with the spirit of their class. If the Senate, and the Church, and the aristocracy should declare against Napoleon, it soon became evident that his marshals would declare against him also. He had so bedizened them with titles, loaded them with honors, and gorged them with riches, that they could get nothing more by remaining loyal, even though he should finally triumph. Upon the other hand, should he fail, they would lose everything; hence to desert him was plainly the safe thing to do. Napoleon was holding a review of his troops at Fontainebleau when Caulaincourt was seen to approach him, and whisper something in his ear. He drew back as though he had been struck, and bit his lips, while a slight flush passed over his face. Recovering himself at once, he continued the review. Caulaincourt’s whispered news had been that the Senate had deposed him.

“The allied sovereigns will no longer treat with Bonaparte nor any member of his family.” This declaration had cleared the way for the creation (April 1) of a provisional government by the French Senate, which provisional government was composed of Talleyrand and four other clerical and aristocratic conspirators.

The beginning having been made, the rest was easy. On April 3 the Senate decreed the Emperor’s deposition, alleging against him certain breaches of the Constitution, which breaches the Senate had unmurmuringly sanctioned at the time of their commission. Various public bodies in and around Paris began to declare against him, having no more right to depose him than the Senate possessed, but adding very sensibly to the demoralization of his supporters. Even yet the army was true; even yet when he appealed to the troops, the answering cry was, “Live the Emperor!” Thus while in Paris his petted civil functionaries, his restored clericals, and his nobles were jostling one another in the tumultuous rush of desertion, and while the swelling stream of the great treason was rolling onward as smoothly as Talleyrand could wish, there was one cause of anxiety to the traitors,—the attitude of the French army.

On April 4 the Emperor held his usual review; it proved to be the last. The younger officers and the troops were as enthusiastic as ever, but the marshals were cold. After the parade they followed Napoleon to his room. Only in a general way is known what passed at this conference. The marshals were tired of the war, and were determined that it should come to an end. Napoleon had formed his plans to march upon Paris and fight a great battle to save his crown. Marshal Macdonald had approved the plan and was ready to second his chief; the others would listen to no plans, and were resolute in their purpose to get rid of this chief. It seems to be certain that if a surrender could not be got from Napoleon by fair means, the marshals were ready to try those that were foul. If he could not be persuaded, he was to be intimidated; and if threats failed, he was to be assassinated. Talleyrand’s provisional government was equally determined and unscrupulous. Napoleon was to be killed if he could not otherwise be managed. Foremost among the marshals demanding his abdication, and apparently threatening his life, was Marshal Ney, whose tone and bearing to his chief are said to have been brutally harsh.

After having exhausted argument and persuasion upon these officers, Napoleon dismissed them, and drew up his declaration that he resigned the throne in favor of his son.

“Here is my abdication!” he said to Caulaincourt; “carry it to Paris.” He appeared to be laboring to control intense emotion, and Caulaincourt burst into tears as he took the paper.

As long as the French army appeared to be devoted to the Emperor, the Allies had not openly declared for the Bourbons. They had encouraged the idea that they would favor a regency in favor of Napoleon’s son, conceding to its fullest extent the right of the French people to select their own rulers. It was by the skilful use of this pretence that many of the French officers had been led astray. It was by this mingling of the sweet with the bitter that Napoleon’s first act of abdication had been wrung from him by the marshals. Succeeded by the son he adored, France would not be wholly lost to him, since it remained to his dynasty.

But here again Marmont ruined all. Played upon by Laffitte and Talleyrand’s clique,—flattered, cajoled, and adroitly seduced,—this marshal of France made a secret bargain with the Allies which took from the Emperor the strongest body of troops then at hand.

Thus it happened that when the Ney-Macdonald delegation, bearing the conditional abdication, returned to Paris, and were urging upon the Czar the claims of Napoleon’s son, the conference was interrupted by an excited messenger who had come to announce to Alexander that Marmont’s corps had been led into the allied lines. This astounding intelligence ended the negotiations. The Czar promptly dropped the veil, and disclosed the real policy of the Allies. The marshals went back to Fontainebleau to demand an abdication freed from conditions.

Marmont had dealt the final blow to a tottering cause—“Marmont, the friend of my youth, who was brought up in my tent, whom I have loaded with honors and riches!” as the fallen Emperor exclaimed, in accents of profound amazement and grief. Yes, when the miserable renegade sat down to plot with Talleyrand the complete ruin of the Empire, it was in a luxurious palace which Napoleon had given him. What officer had ruined a campaign in Spain and thereby done grievous injury to the Emperor in Russia? Who had disobeyed orders, brought on the night surprise at Laon, and wrecked Napoleon’s pursuit of BlÜcher? Who had lost the line of communications, by movements against orders, and had let Napoleon’s most important despatches fall into the hands of the enemy? Who had caused the defeat at FÈre-Champenoise; who had so feebly resisted the allied advance upon Paris that their progress astonished themselves? Who had surrendered a vast city of eight hundred thousand souls to foreigners, when he must have known that Napoleon was coming to the rescue as fast as horse could run? Marmont, the spoiled favorite; Marmont, the vainglorious weakling; Marmont, the false-hearted traitor! Verily he reaped his reward. To the Bourbons he became a hero, and so remained for a season. But France—the real France—hated him as North America hates Benedict Arnold. The time came when he who had betrayed Napoleon for the Bourbons, betrayed the elder Bourbons for the House of Orleans. Despised by all parties, he wandered about Europe as wretched as he deserved to be. And the day came when the gondoliers at Venice pointed him out scornfully to each other, and refused to bend an oar for the miscreant.

“You see him yonder! That is Marmont. Well, he was Napoleon’s friend, and he betrayed him!”

Undaunted even by Marmont’s defection, Napoleon issued a proclamation, and began his preparations to retire beyond the Loire, and fight it out. His conditional abdication rejected, war could not be worse than peace, and he explained his plan of campaign to his marshals. They cut him short, brusquely, menacingly. The Emperor stood alone, forsaken by all his lieutenants, and made an imploring address to them, pleading with them to make one final effort for France. His words fell on hearts that were turned to stone. They harshly declared that the confidence of the army was gone. Macdonald said that they must have unconditional abdication.

The Emperor promised to reply next day, and, as his marshals filed out, he said, in bitterness of spirit,—“Those men have neither heart nor bowels; I am conquered less by fortune than by the egotism and ingratitude of my companions-in-arms.”

Who has not read of that panic of apostasy which now ran like a torrent? From the setting sun at Fontainebleau to that which was rising in Paris, all turned—turned with the haste of panic-stricken pardon-seekers, or of greed-devoured place-hunters. From the highest to the lowest, the fallen Emperor’s attendants left him. Princes, dukes, marshals, generals,—all creations of his,—fled from him as from the contagion of pestilence. Even Berthier, the favorite, the confidant, the pampered and petted—even Berthier bit his nails for a brief season of hesitancy, and then abandoned his friend to his misery. Marmont’s treason had hurt, had wrung a cry of amazement and pain from that tortured spirit; but Berthier’s was a crueller stab. “Berthier, you see that I have need of consolation, that my true friends should surround me. Will you come back?” Berthier went, and he did not come back.

They left him, singly and in squads, till he and his faithful guard were almost all that remained. His very valets, the Mameluke he brought from Egypt, and Constant whose Memoirs portray his master so lovingly, could not resist the panic of the hour; they turned their backs upon their master, and, according to that master’s statements in his instructions to his executors, they robbed him before they fled. But there were some who did not go, a few who stood the storm. May their glorious names live forever! Among these it is pleasant to find the name of his old schoolmate, Colonel Bussy.

Bertrand, Gourgaud, Montholon, Bassano, Cambronne, Caulaincourt, Lavalette, Druot, and some others did not blanch. Nor did the Old Guard falter. The “growlers” had followed the chief—murmuring sometimes, but following—all through the terrors of the last campaign; they were ready to follow him again.

And there were womanly hearts that warmed to the lonely monarch, and would have consoled him—first of all, Josephine. She had watched his every movement though the campaign with an agony of interest and apprehension. His name was ever in her thoughts and on her lips. Of all who came from the army she would ask: How does he look? Is he pale? Does he sleep? Does he believe his star has deserted him? Often the harassed Emperor found time to write to her, brief notes full of kindness and confidence. These she would take to her privacy, read, and weep over. She understood the great man, at the last; she had not done so at first. From Brienne he wrote her, “I have sought death in many battles, but could not find it. I would now hail it as a boon. Yet I should like to see Josephine once more.” This note she carried in her bosom. When she heard of the abdication, she was frantic with grief, and she would have flown to his side, only she thought of one who had the better right,—Maria Louisa. As the broken monarch sat in the gloom, his great head sunk on his breast, two other noble-hearted women appeared at Fontainebleau. One of them was the beautiful Polish lady, Madame Walewski; the name of the other is not given. They were announced, and the Emperor promised to see them. After waiting many hours, they went away. Napoleon had fallen into revery again and had forgotten they were there. It is said that he took poison, intending to kill himself. This has been questioned; but it is certain that he swallowed some drug which brought on a sudden and alarming illness, during which he said he was going to die. “I cannot endure the torments I experience. They have dragged my eagles in the dirt! They have misunderstood me! Marmont gave me the last blow! I loved him. Berthier’s desertion has broken my heart! My old friends, my old companions-in-arms!”

Says Constant: “What a night! what a night! While I live I shall never think of it without a shudder.”

On the morning after this attempted suicide, Napoleon “appeared much as usual,” and met his marshals to give them his answer to their demand for unconditional abdication. Even yet he made one more attempt to inspire them to effort, to infuse into them something of his own courage. It was all in vain. Then he scrawled the few lines in which he laid down his great office, and handed them the paper.

“You claim that you need rest! Very well, then, take it!” “What shall we demand of the Allies in your behalf?” the marshals inquired.

“Nothing. Do the best you can for France; for myself, I ask nothing.”

They went away upon their errand, and once more the Emperor sank into a stupor of despondency. Much of the time he spent seated upon a stone bench, near the fountain, in the English garden which he had himself laid out at the back of the palace. Just as he had lain, novel in hand, upon the sofa at Moscow, silent and moody day by day; and just as he had sat in the chÂteau of DÜben, in 1813, idly tracing big letters on white paper; so he now sat by the hour on the stone bench in the garden at Fontainebleau, saying nothing, and kicking his heel into the gravel until his boot had made a hole a foot deep in the earth.

Deserted as he had been, Napoleon was yet a man to be dreaded; and the Allies were most anxious to come to terms with him, and to get him out of the country. Partly from fear of what he might do if driven to despair, and partly out of generosity to a fallen foe, the Czar influenced the other powers to sign the treaty of Fontainebleau with Napoleon, whereby he was to retain his title of Emperor, to receive a yearly pension of $400,000 from France, and remain undisturbed as Emperor of Elba. His son, as successor to his wife, was to have a realm composed of Parma, Placentia, and Guastalla.

Resigning himself to his fate, Napoleon received the Commissioners whom the Allies sent to take charge of his journey to his new empire, and busied himself in the selection of the books and baggage he intended to take with him. With assumed gayety he said to Constant, whom the Emperor evidently believed would follow him, “Eh, well, my son, get your cart ready: we will go and plant our cabbages.”

But every now and then the full sweep of bitter reality would come over him, and he would clap his hand to his forehead, crying:—

“Great God! Is it possible?”

His departure was fixed for April 20, 1814. The Imperial Guard formed in the White Horse Court of the palace. The Emperor appeared upon the stairs, pale and firm. A dozen or more stanch friends waited to bid him farewell. He shook hands with them all. The line of carriages was waiting; but he passed hastily by them, and advanced toward the soldiers drawn up in the court.

It was seen then that he would speak to the troops, and dead silence reigned. The old, proud bearing was there again,—pride softened by unutterable sadness,—and the voice was full and sonorous as he spoke the few words which reached all hearts that day, reach them now, and will reach them as long as human blood is warm.

“Soldiers of the Old Guard, I bid you farewell! For twenty years I have led you in the path of honor and glory. In these last days, as in the days of our prosperity, you have never ceased to be models of fidelity and courage. With men such as you, our cause could never have been lost; we could have maintained a civil war for years. But it would have rendered our country unhappy. I have therefore sacrificed all my interests to those of France. Her happiness is my only thought. It will still be the object of my wishes. Do not regret my fate. If I have consented to live, it is in order to promote your glory. I trust to write the deeds we have achieved together. Adieu, my children! I would that I could press you all to my heart. Let me embrace your general and your eagle!”

He took General Petit, commander of the Guard, in his arms, and he pressed the eagle to his lips.

The soldiers sobbed, even the Commissioners were touched; and Napoleon, hurrying through the group which had gathered round him, reached his carriage, fell back on the cushions, and covered his face with his hands.

There was the word of command, the crunching and grinding of wheels, and the carriages were soon lost to sight.