It happened as the Emperor foresaw. M. Werner appeared no more.
Thus ended this negotiation, which might perhaps have realized many hopes, had not M. Fouché occasioned its failure.
At the period when it took place, England, in its celebrated Memoir of the 25th of April, and Austria, in that it published the 9th of May following, had authentically declared, subsequently to my first interview at Bâle, that they had not engaged by the treaty of the 29th of March, to restore Louis XVIII. to the throne; and that their intentions in pursuing the war were not, to impose on France any particular government whatever.
These declarations gave great weight to the proposals of M. Werner. The Emperor thought them sincere; and in one of those moments of openness, which he was not always sufficiently master of himself to suppress, he said at his levee: "Well, gentlemen, they offer me the regency already: it depends only on myself, whether I shall accept it." These inconsiderate words made some impression; and they who remembered them have since asserted, that, if the Emperor had not been enamoured of the crown, he might have placed his son on the throne, and spared France the carnage of Mont St. Jean. The Emperor descending from his throne, to place on it his son, and peace, would have added, no doubt, a noble page to his history: but, ought he to have accepted the loose proposals of M. Werner, and trusted to the faith of his enemies? I think not. The first question to be decided, before treating of a regency, was this: What is to be done with Napoleon? and it has been seen, that on this point the allies held the profoundest silence.
I am far from thinking, that the Emperor would have consented in any case, to lay aside his crown, which he considered as the price of twenty years toil and victory; I only maintain, that he cannot be blamed on this occasion, for having retained it.
This confidential avowal to his courtiers is not the only indiscretion, of which they laid hold, to charge him with imaginary faults. What will appear surprising is, that, with the character for negation and dissimulation ascribed to him, he was capable of indiscretions.
Napoleon conceived in secret, and conducted to their close in mystery, schemes, that did not call his passions into play, because then he never ceased to be master of himself: but it was excessively rare for him, to preserve a continued, and complete dissimulation in affairs, that strongly agitated his soul. The object, on which he was then occupied, assailed his mind, and heated his imagination: his head, continually at work, abounded in ideas, that diffused themselves in spite of him, and displayed themselves externally by broken words, and demonstrations of joy or anger, that afforded a clew to his designs, and entirely destroyed the mystery, in which he would have enveloped them.
This narration, which I would not interrupt, has made me lose sight of Napoleon. I left him meditating the constitution he had promised the French, and now return to him.
Napoleon had at first announced his intention of amalgamating the ancient constitutions with the charter, and composing from the whole a new constitution, which should be subjected to the free discussion of the delegates of the nation. But he thought, that present circumstances, and the agitation of men's minds, would not permit subjects of such high importance, to be debated publicly without danger; and he resolved to confine himself for the moment, to sanction by a particular act, supplementary to the constitutions of the empire, the new guarantees, that he had promised the nation.
Napoleon was swayed also by another consideration. He considered the constitutions of the empire as the title-deeds of his crown; and he was afraid, if he annulled them, that he should effect a sort of novation, that would give him the appearance of beginning a new reign. For Napoleon, such is human weakness, after having devoted to ridicule the pretensions of "the King of Hartwell," was inclined to persuade himself, that his own reign had not been interrupted by his residence in the island of Elba.