Of these the most powerful and dangerous remains to be noticed; and, indeed, had the Bourbons adopted judicious measures concerning the army, it is very probable that the alarms of the other classes now alluded to might have subsided. The Allies, in the moment of universal delight and conciliation, restored at once, and without stipulation, the whole of the prisoners who had fallen into their hands during the war. At least 150,000 veteran soldiers of Buonaparte were thus poured into France ere Louis was well-seated on the throne; men, the greater part of whom had witnessed nothing of the last disastrous campaigns; who had sustained themselves in their exile by brooding over the earlier victories in which themselves had had a part; and who now, returning fresh and vigorous to their native soil, had but one answer to every tale of misfortune which met them: "These things could never have happened had we been here."
The conquerors, in their anxiety to procure for Louis XVIII. a warm reception among the French, had been led into other mistakes, which all tended to the same issue. They had (with some exceptions on the part of Prussia) left the pictures and statues, the trophies of Napoleon's battles, untouched in the Louvre—they had not even disturbed the monuments erected in commemoration of their own disgraces. These instances of forbearance were now attributed by the fierce and haughty soldiery of Buonaparte, to the lingering influence of that terror which their own arms under his guidance had been accustomed to inspire. Lastly, the concessions to Napoleon himself of his imperial title, and an independent sovereignty almost within view of France, were interpreted in the same fashion by these habitual worshippers of his renown. The restored King, on his part, was anxious about nothing so much as to conciliate the affections of the army. With this view he kept together bands which, long accustomed to all the licence of warfare, would hardly have submitted to peace even under Napoleon himself. Even the Imperial Guard, those chosen and devoted children of the Emperor, were maintained entire on their old establishment; the Legion of Honour was continued as before; the war ministry was given to Soult, the ablest, in common estimation, of Buonaparte's surviving marshals; and the other officers of that high rank were loaded with every mark of royal consideration. But these arrangements only swelled the presumption of those whose attachment they were meant to secure. It was hardly possible that the King of France should have given no military appointments among the nobles who had partaken his exile. He gave them so few, that they, as a body, began to murmur ere the reign was a month old: but he gave enough to call up insolent reclamations among those proud legionaries, who in every royalist, beheld an emblem of the temporary humiliation of their own caste. When, without dissolving or weakening the Imperial (now Royal) Guard, he formed a body of household troops, composed of gentlemen, and entrusted them with the immediate attendance on his person and court, this was considered as a heinous insult; and when the King bestowed the cross of the Legion of Honour on persons who would have much preferred that of St. Louis, the only comment that obtained among the warriors of Austerlitz and Friedland, was, that which ascribed to the Bourbons a settled design of degrading the decoration which they had purchased with their blood.
In a word, the French soldiery remained cantoned in the country in a temper stern, gloomy, and sullen; jealous of the Prince whose bread they were eating; eager to wipe out the memory of recent disasters in new victories; and cherishing more and more deeply the notion (not perhaps unfounded) that had Napoleon not been betrayed at home, no foreigners could ever have hurled him from his throne. Nor could such sentiments fail to be partaken, more or less, by the officers of every rank who had served under Buonaparte. They felt, almost universally, that it must be the policy of the Bourbons to promote, as far as possible, others rather than themselves. And even as to those of the very highest class—could any peaceful honours compensate, to such spirits as Ney and Soult, for a revolution, that for ever shrouded in darkness the glittering prizes on which Napoleon had encouraged them to speculate? Were the comrades of Murat and Bernadotte to sit down in contentment as peers of France, among the Montmorencies and the Rohans, who considered them at the best as low-born intruders, and scorned, in private society, to acknowledge them as members of their order? If we take into account the numerous personal adherents whom the Imperial government, with all the faults of its chief, must have possessed—and the political humiliation of France, in the eyes of all Europe, as well as of the French people themselves, immediately connected with the disappearance of Napoleon—we shall have some faint conception of that mass of multifarious griefs and resentments, in the midst of which the unwieldy and inactive Louis occupied, ere long, a most unenviable throne—and on which the eagle-eyed Exile of Elba gazed with reviving hope even before the summer of 1814 had reached its close.
Ere then, as we have seen, the demeanour and conduct of Napoleon were very different from what they had been when he first took possession of his mimic empire. Ere then his mother, his sister Pauline (a woman, whose talents for intrigue equalled her personal charms), and not a few ancient and attached servants, both of his civil government and of his army, had found their way to Elba, and figured in "his little senate." Pauline made repeated voyages to Italy, and returned again. New and busy faces appeared in the circle of Porto Ferraio—and disappeared forthwith—no one knew whence they had come or whither they went; an air of bustle and of mystery pervaded the atmosphere of the place. Sir Neil Campbell found it more and more difficult to obtain access to the presence of Buonaparte—which the refusal of the English government to acknowledge the Imperial title, and this officer's consequent want of any very definite character at Elba, left him no better means of overcoming than to undertake journeys and voyages, thereby gaining a pretext for paying his respects at every departure and return. Sir Neil early suspected that some evil was hatching, and repeatedly remarked on the absurdity of withholding Napoleon's pension, thereby tempting him, as it were, to violence. But neither the reports nor the reclamations of this gentleman appear to have received that attention which they merited.
What persons in France were actually in communication on political subjects with the turbulent court of Elba, during that autumn and the following winter, is likely to remain a secret: that they were neither few nor inactive, nor unskilful, the event will sufficiently prove. The chiefs of the police and of the post-office had been removed by Louis; but the whole inferior machinery of these establishments remained untouched; and it is generally believed, that both were early and sedulously employed in the service of the new conspiracy. We have seen that Soult was commander-in-chief of the army; and it is very difficult, on considering the subsequent course of events, to doubt that he also made a systematic use of his authority with the same views, distributing and arranging the troops according to far other rules than the interests of his royal master.
Ere the autumn closed, Buonaparte granted furloughs on various pretexts to about 200 of his guardsmen; and these were forthwith scattered over France, actively disseminating the praises of their chief, and, though probably not aware how soon such an attempt was meditated, preparing the minds of their ancient comrades for considering it as by no means unlikely that he would yet once more appear in the midst of them. It is certain that a notion soon prevailed that Napoleon would revisit the soil of France in the spring of the coming year. He was toasted among the soldiery, and elsewhere also, under the soubriquet of Corporal Violet. That early flower, or a ribbon of its colour, was the symbol of rebellion, and worn openly, in the sight of the unsuspecting Bourbons.
Their security was as profound as hollow; nor was it confined to them. The representatives of all the European princes had met in Vienna, to settle finally a number of questions left undecided at the termination of the war. Talleyrand was there for France, and Wellington for England; and yet it is on all hands admitted, that no surprise was ever more sudden, complete, and universal than theirs, when on the 11th of March, 1815, a courier arrived among them with the intelligence that Napoleon Buonaparte had reared his standard in Provence.[68]