“Napoleon in his flight crossed the battlefield of Quatre Bras. It was still strewn with the unburied slain, nearly four thousand corpses stripped quite naked by plunderers; and with what feelings Napoleon in the darkness of the night rode through those acres of the slain may be guessed. He drew rein for a moment in that field of the dead, and one who stood near him records how ’his face was pale as wax and the tears ran down his cheeks’—and thus across the useless battlefields of that terrible campaign Napoleon fled on his way to Paris—and beyond it to St. Helena.”[2]
[CHAPTER VI]
BELGIAN KINGS
A TRYING period of fifteen years followed the battle of Waterloo. The Congress of Vienna made Holland and Belgium one kingdom under the name of the United Netherlands. But this ill-advised union failed. The Dutch King, William I, was tyrannical and tactless, and ruled entirely in the interests of Holland. Although the population of Belgium was 1,500,000 more than that of the northern states of the Netherlands, four-fifths of the army officers and by far the larger part of the government officials were Dutch. Belgians were forced to pay the public debt of Holland, and the poorer classes, under the weight of intolerable taxes, faced starvation. They had fought too long for freedom to endure subjugation. Only a little encouragement was needed to spur them on to action.
THÉÂTRE DE LA MONNAIE, BRUSSELS.
The throng that was assembled in the Brussels Théâtre de la Monnaie on the evening of the 25th of August, 1830, listened for a time quietly enough to Auber’s new opera of “Musette de Portici.” But when the Italian tenor in a stirring solo made an appeal to his countrymen to rise against foreign tyranny, the excitement of the audience could not be controlled. Springing to their feet, they caught up the words of the refrain and sang them over and over again. They rushed from the opera house into the street, still singing,
“A mon pays je dois la vie,