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Chaumont, stipulating that each should bring forward his 150,000 men, and that England should resume her subsidies to support them.

Meantime, Napoleon pursued the mountain road through the valleys of the Durance and the Drac to Grenoble. On the morning of the 7th of March, he advanced from La Mure, and perceived a battalion of infantry, with some guns, drawn up across the road between him and the village of La Frey. The little lake of La Frey was on one side of them, the mountain on the other. Napoleon's little band halted for half an hour, till information was brought of the sentiments of the troops. He then advanced, when an aide-de-camp of General Marchand, not present, ordered the soldiers to fire. They hesitated, and the chef de bataillon in command gave word to retreat. At this, Napoleon's band came up quickly with arms reversed, the Emperor crying out as he opened his coat, "Do you know me? Will you fire on your Emperor?" Instead of a volley, each soldier put his shako on the end of his bayonet, lifted it in the air, and cried, Vive l'Empereur. On that little field, and with these few words, was France won. A regiment commanded by Labédoyère soon joined the now augmented band, before whom the gates of Grenoble flew open.

On the 10th, Napoleon entered Lyons. The Count d'Artois had come thither to animate the citizens against the invader, and Marshal Macdonald made the same efforts with the soldiers. In vain; the latter was obliged to escape at full gallop. At Lyons, the Emperor issued proclamations, dissolving the chambers, and summoning the electoral body of the nation to assemble on the 1st of May on the Champ de Mars, to assist at the coronation of Maria Louisa and her son, and to sanction the new liberal institutions which the nation required.

* Mémoires d'un Touriste par Beyle.

Talleyrand, Marmont, Augereau, and two or three others were denounced as traitors, and their property sequestered. After three days' stay at Lyons, Napoleon marched along the Saone. Ney commanded a corps of some thousand men in Franche-Comté, which command he had accepted with the assurance that he would bring Napoleon captive. At Besançon, however, he soon found himself and his little army powerless, the military flocking to Napoleon as he marched past, and rendering idle any attempt to repel or to resist. Ney consulted his lieutenants, one of whom was the royalist De Bourmont. None of them counselled resistance; and all left for Ney was, like Macdonald, to abandon his army and withdraw. This did not suit the fiery marshal. Napoleon triumphant might re-enter on his old path of victory, and take signal vengeance upon the invaders. Ney could not resist such a prospect. He issued a proclamation to the troops, telling them the Bourbons and their cause were for ever lost, and that they and he had but to rally to their old Emperor. As Napoleon observed, Ney, from impulsiveness, was but a child.

In Paris, Louis the Eighteenth had made efforts to conciliate the citizens and the constitutional party. He convoked the chambers, and addressed them, reviewed the national guard, proposed to appoint more liberal ministers, yet suspected the imperialist ministers in

office.

ment.

Soult was thus dismissed from the war departA military conspiracy had well-nigh burst forth in the north, to which Fouché had been privy, but it came to nothing. The soldiers looked to Napoleon alone, and had faith in none of his lieutenants. They were soon gratified; Louis the Eighteenth left the Tuileries for Lille on the evening of the 19th, and Napoleon was borne into them, on the 20th, by a crowd of officers. Davoust became instantly the war minister of Napoleon; Carnot, home minister; Caulaincourt took the foreign department; Cambacères and Fouché, justice and the

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CHAP. police. The garrison of Lille would not abide the presence of Louis the Eighteenth. He therefore withdrew to Ghent, the Duke of Orleans and Marshal Macdonald quitting him on the frontier; not so Marmont and Berthier. There was some resistance in the south, the Duchess of Angoulême at Bordeaux, her husband on the Rhone, both displaying courage which was equally vain. The Duke was made prisoner.

It is not surprising that the allied sovereigns or their ministers should have laid great stress on the necessity of conciliating the French public by means of a constitution. Neither is it to be wondered at that Louis the Eighteenth acquiesced in and adopted their opinion. But that Napoleon, on his return, should have supposed that the convening of chambers and promulgation of a constitution could bring to him any efficient support, is surprising.* The truth is, that the class of men for whom the word constitution had a meaning, or the thing itself any interest, was small in the extreme; they made a great noise in the saloons of the capital, and in the press, when it chanced to be free. But they had neither influence nor echo amongst the masses, nor yet with the middle and commercial classes. These desired peace, the return of credit, the resumption of industry, and they feared Napoleon as the enemy and the obstacle to all. But these men and opinions, however dominant in the capital, were in a small minority throughout the country. Napoleon traversed every provincial town and rural district in triumph. In Paris alone he was received with silence and misgiving.

His chance of final success was not brilliant, was not indeed possible, unless the population widely rallied to him. But the constitution was no bait for either the military or for that large class imbued with the military

*Napoleon's idea at Fontainebleau was, that he had fallen not so inuch from the power of the allies as

that he had "put the people against him.”—Mém. de Lafayette.

spirit. The best way to have rallied them was to have been true to his policy and his own spirit, to have restored the conscription, set aside the moderates, the constitutionalists, and appealed to the revolutionists to uphold the revolution. He should at the same time

have got rid of, or kept aloof from, the rotten and superannuated either of his own or the revolutionary party. In lieu of the old marshals, he could have found far more energetic and determined lieutenants among the colonels and generals of divisions. He should, in fact, have appealed to the military spirit of the nation and neglected all others. For all others were inimical to him.

Some writers, even amongst his intimates, complain that he returned from Elba with activity benumbed and intelligence blunted. They see proofs of this in the tardiness of his military operations. But this was the fault of the generals he chose. If his sagacity failed him, and his usual foresight was less sharp, it was far more in his civil than in his military administration. In the latter, indeed, he suffered his arms to be bound. He refused to make use of the conscription. In his instructions to his journalists, he rather bade them flatter the hopes of peace in the citizen party than appeal to the populace to rise against the pretensions of the invader.

The first abdication of Napoleon having set free the pens of French writers, two of the most eminent of them, Chateaubriand and Benjamin Constant, had covered him with invective.* The latter, the friend of De Staël and Lafayette, thought it necessary to conceal himself from the Emperor's vengeance. Informed of his presence in Paris, Napoleon merely asked to see him, and, when he did so, at once besought him to forget the past, and sit down to draw up the plan of an imperial constitution. Unfortunately for Constant and for Napoleon, there was nothing original or striking to be invented in

* Bonaparte and the Bourbons.

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the
the way of a constitution. It was beaten ground, long
since occupied by the English. And in striving to avoid
what was common-place, and fully known, it was only
possible to fall into the absurd. Sieyes' repeated efforts
had been a melancholy example. Constant, therefore,
like the author of the charter, could but copy the
English constitution, two chambers and an hereditary
peerage; Constant's friend, Madame de Staël, mocking
the very idea as impracticable in France and unpopular.
Napoleon, indeed, at first objected, but saw no other
alternative, his experience of the revolution tending to
make him dread a single assembly. The press was
declared free, a great concession. But Napoleon would
not give up the right of confiscation. To pretend that
what he promulgated was but a continuance of the old
system, not an abrogation, it was announced as an Addi-
tional Act to the constitution of the empire.

The principal care of Napoleon, however, was to raise and organise an army to face the enemy. The most surprising circumstance of his career is the few soldiers he was able to collect, a proof that his dabbling in constitutions was not the way to do it. The Bourbons had either under arms or ready to assume them 230,000 men, thanks to Talleyrand's warlike policy at Vienna. But there could not be less than 400,000 men in the country, either dismissed or returned prisoners, or who had served their time. Had a truly war spirit then animated the French population, Napoleon would have found himself at the head of 600,000 men. The conscription, abolished by the Bourbon charter, were it revived, would have brought the youth of the country to his standard. But the French recruit had been too much used to compulsion to join the ranks as a volunteer. "A nation," says De

Staël, "does not fight merely to ward off evil, when no ultimate good appears as the aim and reward of victory." If such was the insufficient reply of the home population to Napoleon's demand for forces, there was nothing to

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