So one day—one whole day—was lost, when not one second should have been lost.
However, towards ten that night, it was decided that M. le count d'Artois should set off for Lyons, and M. le duc de Bourbon for la Vendée.
Next day, the 6th, the papers were silent; but the telegraph spoke again. It announced that Napoleon was definitely advancing towards Grenoble and Lyons via Digne and Gap.
It was only then at about two o'clock in the afternoon that it was decided to summon the Chambers and to draw up the Proclamation and Ordonnance we read in the Moniteur.
Villers-Cotterets was more inclined to Royalist than to Bonapartist feeling. The château which, under Louis XV. and Louis XVI., had been occupied by the duc d'Orléans and by Madame de Montesson and their court; the château where Philippe-Égalité spent his frequent exiles and pursued his finest hunting expeditions; the forest to which half the working population owed its livelihood, in which they worked, and from which three-quarters of the poor people got their beech-nuts and firewood; the forest which was part of the estates of the House of Orléans, since the marriage of Philippe, brother of Louis XIV., with Madame Henriette; the château and forest, we reiterate, had spread aristocratic traditions in the town, which the Revolution had done very little to efface, although it had placed its soldiers, and the Empire its beggars, in the dwelling-house of an ancient line of princes.
So the first impression this news of Napoleon's landing in the Gulf of Juan produced at Villers-Cotterets was more hostile than joyous.
The women specially distinguished themselves by a fiery outbreak of threats, which tended even towards imprecations.
Among these women there was one more fiery and energetic than all the rest: she was the wife of a hatter called Cornu.
Those, then, to whom this return of Napoleon was a hope (I will not say a delight, for at that period no one could guess the rapidity of the march which, thirteen days after the day on which we had learnt of his landing on the most distant point in France, was to take him to the Tuileries), instead of rejoicing, seemed more melancholy than ever, and entered their houses with lowered heads.