The prefect had taken flight. The Emperor asked me his name. It was one Germain, whom he had made a count, and a gentleman of the bedchamber, without well knowing why. "What!" said he to me, "does that little Germain fancy it necessary to shun me? he must be brought back:" and he thought no more of him.
He directed me, to cause an account of the events at Grenoble and Lyons to be inserted in the newspaper of the department. The editor, a furious royalist, had hidden himself. I entrusted to the new subprefect the business of fulfilling the Emperor's orders; but, whether it were carelessness or incapacity on his part, he had recourse to the printer of the paper, who supplied him with an article far from answering our views.
It began with a very just, but ill-timed eulogy of the goodness of Louis XVIII.; and ended with declaring in substance, that so good a king was not fitted to reign over the French, and that they required a sovereign such as Napoleon, &c.
The Emperor, who would read every thing, asked me for the paper. I pretended I could not lay my hand upon it: but, after a thousand attempts to put him off from seeing it, I was at length obliged to bring it him. I thought he would have given me a severe reprimand, but he contented himself with saying: "Change that man, he is a fool; and desire him for the future, never to attempt a eulogy of me." I sent for him, scolded him, and, like me, he was let off for the fright.
It was at Macon, that we first received official news of what was going on at Paris. It was brought us by M. ***. The unskilful manner in which the royalist party superintended the police of the roads, was truly astonishing. Not one of its emissaries escaped us, while ours went and came without any obstruction. Rage or fear must have turned the brains of all the royalists. M. *** assured the Emperor, that the national guard appeared determined to defend the king, and that the king had declared, he would not quit the Tuileries. "If he choose to wait for me there," said Napoleon, "I have no objection: but I doubt it much. He suffers himself to be lulled by the boastings of the emigrants; and when I get within twenty leagues of Paris, they will abandon him, as the nobles of Lyons abandoned the Count d'Artois. What indeed could he do with the old puppets that are about him? One of our grenadiers would knock down a hundred of them with the butt-end of his musket.... The national guard shouts at a distance; when I am at the barriers it will be silent. Its business is not to raise a civil war, but to maintain peace and order in the country. The majority is sound; there is nothing rotten in it but a few officers; and them I will expel. Return to Paris; tell my friends not to implicate themselves, and within ten days my grenadiers will mount guard at the Tuileries: go."
We arrived at Chalons on the 14th, at an early hour. It was terrible weather, yet the whole population had come out of the city, to see the Emperor a few minutes the sooner. On approaching the walls, he perceived artillery and ammunition waggons, and was surprised at it. "They were intended," said the people, "to act against you; but we have stopped them on their way, and present them to you."—"That's right, my lads; you have always been good citizens."
He was well pleased, to find himself among the Chalonese, and received them with much affection and regard. "I have not forgotten," said he, "that you resisted the enemy for forty days, and valiantly defended the passage of the Saône. Had all the French possessed your courage and patriotism, not a single foreigner would have escaped out of France." He expressed to them his desire of knowing the brave men, who had most distinguished themselves; and on their unanimous testimony, he granted on the spot the decoration of the Legion of Honour to the mayor of St. Jean Delonne. "It was for the brave men like him and you," said he to them, "that I instituted the Legion of Honour, and not for emigrants pensioned by our enemies." When the audience was ended, he said to me: "The mayor of Chalons is not come; yet it was I who appointed him: but he is related to an ancient family, and probably has his scruples. The inhabitants complain of him, and will make him suffer for it. You must go and see him. If he object to you his oath, tell him, that I absolve him from it; and make him sensible, that, if he wait till he is freed from it by Louis XVIII., he will wait a long time. Say to him, in short, what you please; I care little about his visit; it is for his own sake I wish him to come. If he do not come, the people will stone him to death after I am gone. Germain was lucky to escape[60]; let his example be a lesson to him."
I repaired immediately to the municipality, where I found the mayor, and a few municipal counsellors. He appeared to me a man of merit. I informed him, that it was my usual office, to introduce to his Majesty the municipal authorities; that I had observed with surprise, he had not been as eager as the mayors of other cities, to pay his duty to the Emperor; and that I was come to remove his fears, &c. He answered me frankly, that he had great respect and admiration for Napoleon; but, having sworn fealty to Louis XVIII., he thought it his duty to keep his oath, till he was absolved from it. I had my answer ready. "I, like you," said I, "consider perjury as the most degrading act, of which man can be guilty. But it is necessary, to make a distinction between a voluntary oath, and the stipulated oath, which people take to their government. In the eye of reason, this oath is merely an act of local submission; a pure and simple formality, which the monarch, whoever he may be, has a right to require of his subjects; but which cannot, as it ought not, enchain their persons and faith to perpetuity. France, since 1789, has sworn by turns to be faithful to royalty, to the convention, to the republic, to the directory, to the consulship, to the empire, to the charter: if those Frenchmen, who had taken an oath to royalty, had sought to oppose the establishment of a republic, by way of acquitting themselves of their oaths; if those, who had taken an oath to the republic, had opposed the establishment of the empire, &c.; into what a state of anarchy and disorder, into what a deluge of blood and evils, would they not have plunged our unhappy country? On similar occasions, the national will ought to be the sole guide of our conscience and our actions: the moment it is manifested, it is the duty of good citizens, to yield and obey."
"These principles," replied he, "may be very good as a general rule; but our present case is an exception, never before known. When the governments, that have existed since the revolution, were overturned, the new government seized the authority, and it ought to be presumed, that the assent of the nation was on its side: but here it is a different affair; the royal government subsists; the Emperor abdicated voluntarily; and till the king has renounced the crown, I shall consider him as the sovereign of France."
"If you wait for the king's renunciation," rejoined I, "before you acknowledge the Emperor, you will wait a long time. Has not the king pretended, that he has not ceased to reign over France these five-and-twenty years? And if he thought himself sovereign of France at a time, when the imperial government was rendered legitimate by the unanimous suffrages of France, and acknowledged by all Europe, do you think he will renounce the crown at present?