The Count of Provence was living in England when Napoleon’s Senate called him to the throne. He was one of those who had “digged the pit” for his brother, Louis XVI.; and who, when that brother was falling into it, discreetly ran away to foreign lands. After several changes of asylum on the Continent, he had gone to England as a last refuge. France had well-nigh forgotten him. A generation of Frenchmen who knew not the Bourbons had grown up; and the abuses of the Old Order were known to the younger generation only as an almost incredible story, told in the evenings by older people, as the family circled about the hearthstone. So completely had the Revolution swept away the foul wrongs of the Bourbon system, that the younger generation could never be made to understand why their fathers hated it with such bitterness. Reined in by the iron hand of Napoleon, the nobles and the clericals of the Empire seemed to be harmless enough. Why should the noble and the priest of the Old Order have been so much worse than these?

The graybeards in France knew; but the younger people could no more realize the former situation than could the children of Daniel Boone, George Rogers Clarke, John Sevier, or of the New England pioneers, understand the horrors of Indian warfare. The story of Bourbon misrule, class tyranny, and church greed fell upon the ear with a sound deadened by the lapse of twenty odd years.

Bourbon emissaries had pledges and soft words for all parties. To Napoleon’s nobles were given the assurance that they should remain noble; to his generals, that they should retain their honors and their wealth. To the priests it was not necessary to say that they should have even more than the Concordat gave, for the priests knew how dearly the Bourbons loved the old pact between Church and State. To pacify men of liberal ideas, promises were made that the restored Bourbons would rule as constitutional kings, recognizing in good faith the changes wrought by the Revolution. Napoleon’s Senate was not so forgetful of its own safety, and of the interests of France, that it failed to put the contract in writing. The Constitution of a limited monarchy was formulated, and the Count of Artois, brother and representative of Louis XVIII., accepted its conditions.

In England the new King was given an ovation upon his departure for France, and he took occasion to write to the Prince Regent that, next to God, he owed his crown to Great Britain. This statement was not good policy, for neither in France nor among the potentates of the Continent did it tend to popularize the speaker; but it was the truth, nevertheless. The settled purpose of Pitt had been the restoration of the Bourbons, and upon this basis it is now known that he built the first European coalition against republican France. Canning and Castlereagh had but inherited the principles of the abler Pitt. In a speech in Parliament (April 7, 1814), Lord Castlereagh proclaimed that his “object had long been to restore Europe to that ancient social system which her late convulsions had disjointed and overthrown.”

As Hobhouse says, “When he talks so plainly, even Lord Castlereagh can be understood; when he professes such principles, even Lord Castlereagh may be believed.”

Fresh from his London ovation, and full of his ideas of divine right, Louis met the French legislative body at CompiÈgne, and evaded their request for a declaration of the royal policy. It became evident that he intended to set aside the pledges made in his name, and to rule as absolute sovereign. To this purpose he was urged by clericals, nobles, and his own inclinations, for, as Napoleon said, “the Bourbons had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” With a royal disregard of facts, he had mentally abolished Napoleon’s empire, all of its glories, all of its shame, and had appropriated the entire era to himself. In his own mind he had become King of France at the death of the boy, Louis XVII.; and the year 1814 was the nineteenth year of his reign! Here, indeed, was cause for tribulation among the eminent turncoats who had exchanged Napoleon for the Bourbon! If the Empire had been but a hallucination, what would become of the nobles created by the Emperor, the honors conferred by him, the lands whose titles had been granted by him, the great institutions which had been founded by him? What would become of his peers, his judges, his marshals, his schools, hospitals, and public charities? Where would the Legion of Honor be? What was to become of the revolutionary principle that all Frenchmen were equals in law, and that all careers were open to merit? Questions like these buzzed throughout the land, and the hum of inquiry soon grew into the murmurs of alarm, of anger. If Bourbons came back to power in any such temper as that, what would become of eminent statesmen who had overturned the ancient monarchy, abolished the nobility, confiscated the wealth of the Church, and guillotined the King? What would be the fate of Talleyrand, FouchÉ, and Company? Aghast at such a prospect as unhampered and vengeful Bourbonism threatened, eminent renegades who had negotiated Napoleon’s downfall with the Czar Alexander appealed to the Russian monarch to stand between themselves and the danger. Like most mortals, the Czar had a strict code of morals for his neighbors. Ready to break pledges himself, it shocked him to see Louis ignore the conditions upon which he had been summoned to France. In courtly phrase the Bourbon was notified that until he confirmed the promises Artois had made to the Senate, there should be no royal entry into Paris. Even under this pressure, Louis would not yield an iota of the precious dogma of divine right. Refusing to concede that the people had any inherent powers whatever, and stubbornly maintaining that all power, privilege, and sovereignty rested in him alone, he graciously published a proclamation in which he granted to the people, of his own free will, certain civil and political rights, ignoring the Senate altogether. This “Charter” having been signed, the King made his triumphal entry into Paris, May 3, 1814.

On the evening of the same day, as the sun was sinking in the Mediterranean, the mountains of the island of Elba rose upon the sight of the crew of the British vessel, the Undaunted, and Napoleon had his first glimpse of his little realm in the sea.

His journey from Fontainebleau to FrÉjus, on the French coast, had been, at first, soothed by many expressions of kindness and of sympathy from the people who thronged the line of travel; but as the fallen Emperor reached the province where the White Terror had once raged, and was to rage again, popular expressions underwent a complete change. Mobs of hooting royalists surrounded his carriage, and dinned into his ears the most brutal insults. Only his escort saved him from being torn to pieces. At Avignon he missed, almost by miracle, the dreadful fate which overtook Marshal Brune there, after Waterloo. Napoleon believed that these royalist mobs were set upon him by Talleyrand’s provisional government, and perhaps his suspicion was correct. It is certain that a certain nobleman, Maubreuil by name, afterward charged Talleyrand with having employed him to kill Napoleon; and when Talleyrand denied the story, Maubreuil took the first occasion to beat him—a beating which Talleyrand was wise enough not to endeavor to punish by prosecution.

Surrounded by savage mobs who jeered him, insulted him, threatened him, and made desperate efforts to seize him, Napoleon is said to have lost his nerve. Unfriendly witnesses allege that he trembled, paled, shed tears, and cowered behind Bertrand, seeking to hide. What is more certain, is that he disguised himself in coat and cap of the Austrian uniform, mounted the horse of one of the attendants, and rode in advance of the carriages to escape recognition. Courage, after all, seems to be somewhat the slave of habit: a soldier may brave death a hundred times in battle, and yet become unnerved at the prospect of being torn to pieces by a lot of maddened human wolves. It should be remembered, however, that the only real evidence we have of Napoleon’s terror was the wearing of the disguise. If this makes him a coward, he falls into much distinguished company, for history is full of examples of similar conduct on the part of men who are admitted to have been brave.

Napoleon had banished from court his light sister Pauline, because of some impertinence of the latter to the Empress Maria Louisa. This light sister was now living at a chÂteau which was on his route to the coast, and he spent a day and a half with her. Shocked to see her imperial brother in the Austrian uniform, she refused to embrace him until he had put it off and put on his own.

While Napoleon was staying at the chÂteau, a crowd of people from the surrounding country gathered in the courtyard. He went down and mingled with them. Soon noticing an old man who wore a red ribbon in his button-hole, Napoleon went up to him and said:—

“Are you not Jacques Dumont?”

Too much surprised to reply at once, the veteran at length faltered, “Yes, my lord; yes, General; yes, yes, sire!”

“You were with me in Egypt?”

“Yes, sire!” and the hand was brought to the salute.

“You were wounded; it seems to me a long while ago?”

“At the battle of Trebbia, sire.”

The veteran by this time was shaking with emotion, and all the crowd had clustered thickly about these two.

Taking off his cross of the Legion of Honor, Napoleon put it upon his old soldier; and while the veteran wept, the crowd shouted, “Live the Emperor!” “My name! To remember my name after fifteen years!” the old man continued to repeat; and so great was the sensation this little incident was creating that the Commissioners who had charge of the exile grew alarmed, and hastened to get him back into the house.

The captain and the crew of the British frigate had never seen the French Emperor save through the glasses of the English editors. Any one who knows how great is the power of an unbridled press to blacken the fairest name, distort beyond recognition the loftiest character, and blast the hopes of the noblest career, can readily comprehend what was the current British opinion of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1814. Seen through the eyes of Tory editors and pamphleteers, he was a man contrasted with whom Lucifer might well hope to become a popular hero.

Great was the surprise of Captain Usher and his sailors to see a handsome, quiet, polite, and self-controlled gentleman, who talked easily with everybody, conformed without fuss to all the ship regulations, gave himself no airs of superhuman loftiness, and took an intelligent interest in the ship and in the folks about him. So great was the charm of his manner, and of his conversation, that English prejudice wore away; and the sailors began to say, “Boney is a good fellow, after all.”

It is amusing to note that Sir Walter Scott records with pride the fact that there was one sturdy sailor who was not to be softened, who retained his surliness to the last, and whose gruff comment upon all the good-humored talk of the Emperor was the word, “Humbug!” The name of this unyielding Briton was Hinton; and both Sir Walter and his son-in-law Lockhart record his name with a sort of Tory veneration. In spite of the unyielding Hinton, the sailors of the Undaunted grew fond enough of Napoleon to accept a handsome gratuity from him at the journey’s end; and the boatswain, addressing him on the quarter-deck in the name of the crew, “Thanked his honor, and wished him long life and prosperity in the island of Elba, and better luck next time.”

Neither Sir Walter Scott nor his son-in-law Lockhart, report Hinton’s remarks upon this occasion; and they leave us in doubt as to whether his virtue held out against the golden temptation, or whether he pocketed his share, with a final snort of, “Humbug!”

On May 4, 1814, the Emperor made his official landing in Elba, whose inhabitants (about thirteen thousand souls) received him well. He made a thorough investigation of his new empire, its industries, resources, etc., and sitting his horse upon a height from which he could survey his whole domain, remarked good-humoredly that he found it rather small.

Soon joined by his mother and by his sister Pauline, also by the seven hundred troops of the Old Guard assigned him by the Treaty of Fontainebleau, Napoleon’s establishment at Porto Ferrajo resembled the Tuileries in miniature. Imperial etiquette stiffened most of its joints, and put on much of its formidable armor. Visitors poured into Elba by the hundred, and with many of these Napoleon conversed with easy frankness, speaking of past events with the tone of a man who was dead to the world.

His restless energies found some employment in the affairs of his little kingdom, and in the planning of all sorts of improvements upon which he lavished freely the funds he had brought from France. With Pauline’s money he bought a country-seat, where he spent much time, and where he could occasionally be seen helping to feed the chickens.

His mother had come and his sister, but where was wife and child? The allied sovereigns had pledged themselves by formal treaty to send Maria Louisa to him under escort, and the promise had been broken. Wife and child had been enveloped with hostile influences, kept well out of his reach, hastened from France, and carried to Vienna.

Historians gloss over the intrigue which followed—as foul a conspiracy against human virtue and sacred human relations as ever soiled the records of the human race.

The Emperor Francis of Austria and Metternich, his minister, were determined that Maria Louisa should never rejoin her husband, treaty or no treaty. They knew her character, and for his daughter the royal father laid the most infamous snare. He deliberately encouraged Neipperg, an Austrian libertine of high degree; and Napoleon’s wife, entangled in the meshes of this filthy intrigue which had found her all too ready to yield, no longer wished to return to the husband she had betrayed.

No wonder the authors who gloat over Napoleon’s sins find no comfort here; and hurry on to other topics. They have made horrible accusations against him and his sister Pauline, on the mere word of a spiteful Madame de RÉmusat, and of an unscrupulous liar like FouchÉ. But the accusations might be true, and nevertheless Napoleon would shine like a superior being beside such an exemplar of divine right as the Emperor Francis, who coldly and deliberately, as a matter of state policy, pushed his own daughter into the arms of a libertine! We have read of the crimes of the vulgar, the canaille, the Marats, and the HÉberts; does any page of modern history hold a story more sickening than this? Did any criminal of the vulgar herd stoop to depths more loathsome than Francis, Emperor “by the grace of God,” wallowed in?

After having broken their treaty upon the sacred subject of wife and child, the allied kings found it easy enough to violate it upon matters less important. They did not respect the property of the Bonaparte family as they had agreed; they did not pay the Bonaparte pensions; they did not bestow the principalities promised for Napoleon’s son; and they paid no respect to that provision of the compact which secured to Napoleon inviolably the island of Elba. Bitter personal enemies of the fallen Emperor, Pozzo di Borgo, Lord Wellington, Talleyrand, and others, agreed that he must be removed to a greater distance from Europe, St. Helena being the place which met with most favor. The fact that the allied kings had pledged themselves to allow him to remain at Elba, seems not to have entered into the discussions at all. He who had broken no treaties was already an outlaw in the counsels of those who had broken all: they could deal with him as they chose. “In the name of the most Holy Trinity” they had pledged faith to him; they could as easily breach the last treaty as its predecessors, being kings by the grace of God, and owing no fealty to ordinary moralities.

The British ministry began to negotiate with the East India Company for the island of St. Helena; and the purpose of the allied kings to send him there as a prisoner of war not only reached Napoleon at Elba, but actually found its way into the Moniteur, the official gazette of France.

The fact that Louis XVIII. did not pay one cent of the $400,000 which the Treaty of Fontainebleau had provided for Napoleon’s annual revenue, was of itself a source of serious embarrassment to him, justifying him in setting aside a contract which his enemies did not regard; but it had less to do with his movements, perhaps, than any other breach of the treaty. He cared nothing for money; little for personal luxury. “I can get along with one horse, and with a dollar a day,” he declared with democratic independence. Besides, he could easily have secured from Europe the sums he needed, as he himself publicly declared on his return to France. But when he found that his wife and child would never be surrendered; that Talleyrand and the Bourbons were still bent upon having him assassinated; that if he could not be killed he was to be taken away to a distant rock and held as a prisoner of war, the impulse became irresistible to make one desperate effort to escape the impending doom. Those who watched over his personal safety had already stopped, disarmed, and sent away two would-be assassins: who could tell whether the third would be stopped? It came to him that the Allies had agreed to send him to St. Helena: who could say when a British man-of-war might bear down upon little Elba? Brooding over his wrongs, and over the perils of his situation, Napoleon gave way to occasional bursts of anger, declaring that he would die the death of a soldier, arms in hand, before he would submit to the proposed removal.

A Scotchman of rank who visited Elba at this time wrote: “Bonaparte is in perfect health, but lodged in a worse house than the worst description of dwellings appropriated to our clergy in Scotland, yet still keeping up the state of Emperor, that is, he has certain officers with grand official names about him. We were first shown into a room where the only furniture was an old sofa and two rush-bottom chairs, and a lamp with two burners, only one of which was lighted. An aide-de-camp received us, who called a servant and said that one of the lights had gone out. The servant said it had never been lighted. ‘Light it, then,’ said the aide-de-camp. Upon which the servant begged to be excused, saying that the Emperor had given no orders upon the subject. We were then received by Bonaparte in an inner room. The Emperor wore a very old French Guard uniform with three orders, and had on very dirty boots, being just come in from his country house.”

Then the writer describes a conversation in which Napoleon spoke without apparent reserve of his past life. Referring to the doings of the Bourbons in France, he remarked that they had better mind what they were about, as there were still five hundred thousand excellent soldiers there. “But what is all that to me?” he exclaimed with a rapid turn; “I am to all intents and purposes dead.”

“His manner,” says the Scotchman, “was that of a blunt, honest, good-hearted soldier’s, his smile, when he chose it, very insinuating. He never has anybody to dinner. Bertrand says that they are in the greatest distress for money, as the French court does not pay the stipulated salary to Bonaparte.

“The following day the Emperor set off for his country house. He was in an old coach with four half-starved horses; on the wheel-horse sat a coachman of the ordinary size, and the bridles had the imperial eagle on them; on the leaders there was a mere child, and the bridles had the coronet of a British viscount on them. He had General Bertrand in the carriage, and two or three officers behind on small ponies, which could not, by all the exertions of their riders, keep up with the carriage, emaciated as those poor horses were.”

The Scotchman contrasts the wretched little establishment at Elba with the splendor of the Tuileries where he went to see Louis XVIII. dine in public,—separate table for king, separate tables for princes of the blood-royal; attendant courtiers standing in full dress, duchesses only being permitted to sit; everything served on gold plate; the dining hall, a hundred feet long, brilliantly lighted and hung with gobelin tapestries, “and a very fine concert going on all the time.”

The contrast between these two pictures, striking as it was to the Scotchman, was no less so to Napoleon, who felt the squalor of Elba and longed for the lost grandeur of France. If there had been a secret bargain between the fallen Emperor and the Bourbons that they should prepare the country for his speedy return, they could hardly have gone to work in a more effective manner to accomplish that result. They had not been in possession of the throne six months before the nation was fairly seething with discontent.

Note.—While the Congress of Vienna was in session, Dr. Richard Bright, an Englishman, was visiting the city and saw the pageant. He describes many of the august sovereigns who were in attendance, and gives an account of the festivities, amusements, and polite dissipations which were in progress. But perhaps the most interesting page the Doctor wrote was that in which he relates his visit to Napoleon’s son, who was then with his mother at the palace of SchÖnbrunn. “We found that all the servants about the palace were Frenchmen, who still wore the liveries of Napoleon.... We ... were ushered into a room where the infant [King of Rome] was sitting on the floor amusing himself amidst a profuse collection of playthings.... He was at that moment occupied with a toy which imitated a well-furnished kitchen. He was the sweetest child I ever beheld; his complexion light, with fine, white, silky hair, falling in curls upon his neck. He was dressed in the embroidered uniform of an hussar, and seemed to pay little attention to us as we entered, continuing to arrange the dishes in his little kitchen. I believe he was the least embarrassed of the party. He was rather too old to admit of loud praise of his beauty, and rather too young to enter into conversation. His appearance was so engaging that I longed to take him in my arms, but his situation forbade such familiarity. Under these circumstances, we contrived a few trifling questions, to which he gave such arch and bashful answers as we have all often received from children of his age.”

Madame Montesquieu was still with the child, but, after a while, she and all the other French attendants were dismissed. The effort was made to wean the poor boy of all things French, and to transform him into an Austrian.

It may be proper here to add that he died of consumption at the early age of twenty-one. It is darkly hinted that the same malevolent influences which destroyed the respectability of Napoleon’s wife led the son into excesses which undermined his constitution. To the last he was passionately fond of his father, and when Marmont visited Vienna in 1831 the Duke de Reichstadt (as the boy was called in Austria) eagerly drew from him all that he would tell of the great Emperor.

The cage in which Napoleon’s only legitimate son was kept was gilded with pension and title and outward show of deference, but it was a cage, nevertheless, and he died in it (1832).