Paris, March 22, 1811
My dear,
I have your letter. I thank you for it. My son is fat, and in excellent health. I trust he may continue to improve. He has my chest, my mouth and my eyes. I hope he will fulfill his destiny.
Josephine, who was staying at Evreux, commanded a festival to be held in the town, and when she returned to Malmaison Napoleon secretly had the baby sent to the country for her to see.
Yet it soon seemed as if the loss of Josephine had, indeed, deprived Napoleon of his good fortune. He quarreled with the pope and even kept him a prisoner in the palace of Fontainebleau. This quarrel alienated Catholic Frenchmen, and they included practically all those with Bourbon leanings. To punish Russia for not agreeing to his plan for humiliating England by cutting off its trade with the continent he entered the country in the invasion which destroyed his army by a death more bitter than that encountered in battle.
During his fearful retreat from Moscow two adventurers almost succeeded in bringing about a coup d’état in Paris by reading to a body of the soldiers a proclamation purporting to be from the Senate, and by capturing the Prefect of Police and the City Hall. The news reached Napoleon and when he realized that so much had been accomplished without any outcry being made for a continuance of the Napoleonic line, he left the army and went post haste to the city, where he found hostile placards constantly being posted. His presence quieted the ominous disturbance, and he drove impressively with the empress to the Senate in a glassed carriage drawn by cream-colored horses, and there and elsewhere spread falsely reassuring reports minimizing the losses in Russia. Very soon, however, the truth carried mourning to almost every home in France, and with it hatred of the man who had brought it to pass.
In January, 1813, the Emperor left once more for the front after appointing Marie Louise as regent and confiding her and the King of Rome to the care of the National Guard assembled before the Tuileries.
There is no doubt that the genius that had sent Napoleon to victory after victory with almost clairvoyant intelligence was now failing. He lacked decision and his generals were not trained to help him. He made blunder after blunder coldly disheartening to sorrowful France. “Have the people of Paris gone crazy?” he cried angrily when he heard that public prayers were being offered for the success of the campaign.
Prayers were needed. The “army of boys,” all that Napoleon could raise after the disastrous retreat from Moscow, was defeated at Leipsic late in 1813, and the allies—England, Russia, Prussia, Sweden and Austria—pressed upon Paris both from the north and the south. The city was no longer guarded by defensible walls and her reliance could be only in her garrison of about twenty-five thousand men. Marie Louise, the regent, fled from the city on March 29, 1814, and on the next day Napoleon left Fontainebleau at the head of a few cavalry to lend his aid, but found that the city already had yielded. On the thirty-first the King of Prussia and the Czar entered Paris on the north by the faubourg Saint Martin, finding a welcome from the white-cockaded royalists. Within three weeks Napoleon had abdicated and had started for his modest throne on the island of Elba, and a fortnight later Louis XVIII, brother of Louis XVI, made his formal entry. The people, trained to Napoleon’s magnificence, looked coldly on the fat, plainly dressed elderly man who drove to the Tuileries in a carriage belonging to his predecessor, whose arms had been badly erased and imperfectly covered by those of the Bourbons.
Paris was glad to be rid of the man it had come to look upon as a vampire draining the strength of France to feed his personal ambition, yet the city by no means enjoyed the presence of the allies. They insisted on the return to Italy of many of the art treasures on which the Parisians had come to look with the pride of possession. There were constant quarrels of citizens with the invading officers and the townsfolk were nettled at the frank curiosity with which they and their