The man who, all alone, by the force of his personality and of his prestige had reconquered France, who had been acclaimed from the Gulf of Jouan to the gates of the Tuileries as the saviour of France, the people's Emperor, the beloved of the nation returned from exile, the man who on the 20th of March had said with his old vigour and his old pride: "Failure is the nightmare of the feeble! impotence, the refuge of the poltroon!" the man who had marched as in a dream from end to end of France to find himself face to face with the whole of Europe in league against him, with a million men being hastily armed to hurl him from his throne again, now found the south of France in open revolt, the west ready to rise against him, the north in accord with his enemies.
He has not enough men to oppose to those millions, his arsenals are depleted, his treasury empty. And after he has worked sixteen hours out of the twenty-four at reorganising his army, his finances, his machinery of war, he has to meet a set of apathetic or openly hostile ministers, constitutional representatives, men who are ready to thwart him at every turn, jealous only of curtailing his power, of obscuring his ascendency, of clipping the eagle's wings, ere it soars to giddy heights again. And to them he must give in, from them he must beg, entreat: give up, give up all the time one hoped-for privilege after another, one power after another.
He yields the military dictatorship to other—far less competent—hands; he grants liberty to the press, liberty of debate, liberty of election, liberty to all and sundry: but suspicion lurks around him; they suspect his sincerity, his goodwill, they doubt his promises, they mistrust that dormant Olympian ambition which has precipitated France into humiliation and brought the strangers' armies within her gates.
The same man was there—the same genius who even now could have mastered all the enemies of France and saved her from her present subjection and European insignificance, but the men round him were not the same. He, the guiding hand, was still there, but the machinery no longer worked as it had done in the past before disaster had blunted and stiffened the temper of its steel.
The men around the Emperor were not now as they were in the days of Jena and Austerlitz and Wagram. Their characters and temperaments had undergone a change. Disaster had brought on slackness, the past year of constant failures had engendered a sense of discouragement and demoralisation, a desire to argue, to foresee difficulties, to foretell further disasters.
He saw it all well enough—he the man with the far-seeing mind and the eagle-eyes that missed nothing—neither a look of indecision, nor an indication of revolt. He saw it all but he could do nothing, for he too felt overwhelmed by that wave of indecision and of discouragement. Faith in himself, energy in action, had gone. He envisaged the possibility of a vanquished and dismembered France.
Above all he had lost belief in his Star: the star of his destiny which, rising over the small island of Corsica, shining above a humble middle-class home, had guided him step by step, from triumph to triumph, to the highest pinnacle of glory to which man's ambition has ever reached.
That star had been dimmed once, its radiance was no longer unquenchable: "Destiny has turned against me," he said, "and in her I have lost my most valuable helpmate."
And now the whole of Europe had declared war against him, and in a final impassioned speech he turns to his ministers and to the representatives of his people: "Help me to save France!" he begs, "afterwards we'll settle our quarrels."
One hundred days after he began his dream-march, from the gulf of Jouan in the wake of his eagle, he started from Paris with the Army which he loved and which alone he trusted, to meet Europe and his fate on the plains of Belgium.