XIV. suaded his gunners to recognise the Prince as Napo- CHAP. leon II. Vaudrey then caused detachments to march to the houses of the Prefect and of General Voirol, the General commanding the garrison, and made them both prisoners, placing sentries at their doors. All this he achieved without alarming any of the other regiments. Supposing that there really existed among the troops a deep attachment to the name and family of Bonaparte, little more seemed needed for winning over the whole garrison than that the heir of the great Emperor should have the personal qualities requisite for the success of the enterprise. Prince Louis was brought into the presence of the captive General, and tried to gain him over, but was repulsed. Afterwards the Prince, surrounded with men personating an imperial staff, was conducted to the barrack of the 46th Regiment; and the men, taken entirely by surprise, were told that the person now introduced to them was their Emperor. What they saw was a young man with the bearing and countenance of a weaver a weaver oppressed by long hours of monotonous indoor work, which makes the body stoop and keeps the eyes downcast; but all the while and yet it was broad daylight-this young man, from hat to boot, was standing dressed up in the historic costume of the man of Austerlitz and Marengo. It seems that this painful exhibition began to undo the success which Vaudrey had achieved; but strange things had happened in Paris before; and the soldiery could not with certainty know that XIV. CHAP. the young man might not be what they were told he was-Napoleon II., the new-made Emperor of the French. Their perplexity gave the Prince an opportunity of trying whether the sentiment for the Bonapartes were really existing or not, and if it were, whether he was the man to kindle it. But by-and-by Talandier, the Colonel of the regiment, having been at length apprised of what was going on, came into the yard. He instantly ordered the gates to be closed, and then-fierce, angry, and scornful-went straight up to the spot where the proposed Emperor and his Imperial Staff' were standing. Of course this apparition-the apparition of the indignant Colonel whose barrack had been invaded was exactly what was to be expected, exactly what was to be combated; but yet, as though it were something monstrous and undreamt of, it came upon the Prince with a crushing power. To him, a literary man, standing in a barrack-yard in the dress of the great conqueror, an angry Colonel, with authentic warrant to command, was something real, and therefore, it seems, dreadful. In a moment Prince Louis succumbed to him. Some thought that, after what had been done that morning, the Prince owed it to the unfortunate Vaudrey (whom he had seduced into the plot) to take care not to let the enterprise collapse without testing his fortune to the utmost by a strenuous, not to say desperate resistance; but this view did not prevail. One of the ornaments which the Prince wore was a sword; yet, without striking a blow, he suffered himself to be publicly XIV. stripped of his grand cordon of the Legion of Honour CHA P. and all his other decorations.* According to one account, the angry Colonel inflicted this dishonour with his own hands, and not only pulled the grand cordon from the Prince's bosom, but tore off his epaulettes, and trampled both epaulettes and grand cordon under foot. When he had been thus stripped the Prince was locked up. The decorated followers, who had been impersonating the Imperial Staff, underwent the same fate as their chief. Before judging the Prince for his conduct during these moments, it would be fair to assume that, the Colonel having once been suffered to enter the yard, and to exert the ascendancy of his superior firmness, the danger of attempting resistance to him would have been great-would have been greater than any which the common herd of men are at all inclined to encounter. Besides, the mere fact that the Prince had wilfully brought himself into such a predicament shows that, although it might fail him in very trying moments, he had extraordinary daring of a particular kind. It would be unjust to say flatly that a man so willing as he was to make approaches to dangers was timid; it would be fairer to say that his characteristic was a faltering boldness. He could not alter his nature, and his nature was to be venturesome beforehand, but to be so violently awakened and After stating Despatch of General Voirol, Moniteur, 2d Nov. the arrival of Lt.-Col. Talandier in the barrack-yard, the despatch says, 'Dans une minute L. N. Bonaparte et les miserables qui avaient pris 'parti pour lui ont été arretés, et les décorations dont ils étaient revêtus 'ont été arrachées par les soldats du 46me' XIV. CHAP. shocked by the actual contact of danger as to be left without the spirit, and seemingly without the wish or the motives, for going on any farther with the part of a desperado. The truth is, that the sources of his boldness were his vanity and his theatric bent; and these passions, though they had power to bring him to the verge of danger, were not robust enough to hold good against man's natural shrinking from the risk of being killed-being killed within the next minute. Conscious that in point of hat and coat and boots he was the same as the Emperor Napoleon, he imagined that the great revoir of 1815 between the men and the man of a hundred fights could be acted over again between modern French troops and himself but it is plain that this belief had resulted from the undue mastery which he had allowed for a time to his ruling propensity, and not from any actual overthrow of the reason; for, when checked, he did not, like a madman or a dare-devil, try to carry his venture through; nor did he even, indeed, hold on long enough to try, and try fairly, whether the Bonapartist sentiment to which he wished to appeal were really existent or not: on the contrary, the moment he encountered the shock of the real world he stopped dead; and, becoming suddenly quiet, harmless, and obedient, surrendered himself (as he always has done) to the first firm man who touched him. The change was like that seeming miracle which is wrought when a hysteric girl, who seems to be carried headlong by strange hallucinations, and to be clothed with the terrible power of madness, is XIV. suddenly cured and silenced by a rebuke and a sharp CHAP. angry threat. Accepting a small sum of money from the Sovereign whom he had been trying to dethrone, Prince Louis was shipped off to America by the goodnatured King of the French. But if he was wanting in the quality which enables a man to go well through with a venture, his ruling propensity had strength enough to make him try the same thing over and over again. His want of the personal qualifications for enterprises of this sort being now known in the French Army, and ridicule having fastened upon his name, he could not afterwards seduce into his schemes any officers of higher rank than a lieutenant. Yet he did not desist. Before long he was planning another 'return from Elba,' but this time with new dresses and decorations. So long as he was preparing counterfeit flags and counterfeit generals and counterfeit soldiers, and teaching a forlorn London bird to play the part of an omen and guide the destiny of France, he was perfectly at home in that kind of statesmanship; and the framing of the plebiscites and proclamations, which formed a large part of his cargo, was a business of which he was master; but if his arrangements should take effect, then what he had to look for was, that at an early hour on a summer morning he would find himself in a barrack-yard at Boulogne surrounded by a band of * £600. The dresses were made to counterfeit the uniform of the 42d, one of the regiments quartered at Boulogne; and buttons having on them the number of the regiment were forged for the purpose at Birmingham. |