The next victim was no less a personage than the King of Naples. He was Murat, ex-tavern waiter, peerless cavalry leader, and husband of Napoleon's shrew sister, Caroline Bonaparte. The emperor, after conquering the separate Italian states, had placed his ex-waiter brother-in-law on the Neapolitan throne.
When Jeanne reached Naples, Queen Caroline received her with open arms and invited her to be a guest at the palace. Murat's admiration for the lovely visitor was undisguisable. And—though it has been denied by one biographer that Jeanne was responsible for his treason—almost at once after her arrival, he began to intrigue with Napoleon's enemies. Form your own conclusions, as did folk of the time.
Soon afterward, weakened by the idiotic Russian campaign, Napoleon was set upon by a host of foes. Men who had licked his boots fell over one another to join the alliance against him.
The lion was wounded, and the dog pack was at his throat.
As soon as Napoleon had been hustled off into exile, the Recamiers returned to Paris, as did practically all the army of people he had banished. The banker's fortune was looking up, and they could live in something of their old style there.
Paris, in those first weeks of the "Restoration," was as full of kings, emperors, princes, and dukes as a subway rush-hour train of newspaper readers. One could hardly walk a block without stumbling over a monarch or a commander-in-chief or a princeling.
The heads of the allied armies were still there, strutting gallantly about—they would have run up a tree, two years earlier—and bragging of Napoleon's fall.
There was Alexander, Czar of Russia, gigantic and bearlike, who had once cringed to Napoleon, then frozen and starved him in the Moscow campaign, and now was one of the chiefs of the alliance. There, too, was Blucher, who had tumbled off his horse at Waterloo, but who, none the less, had done more than is placed to his credit to win the victory that forever crushed Napoleon. It was he and his Prussians, not Wellington and the English, who really won Waterloo for the Allies.
Other sovereigns, other generals, there were, too. And, foremost among them, a long, lean Irishman, with a bony face and a great hooked beak of a nose. He was Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, titular Victor of Waterloo and Man of the Hour.
The Duke of Wellington was not happily married. I think no retroactive libel law can attack me for saying this, for he himself made no secret of it. And he was far from being an exponent to stern British morality.