NAPOLEON’S TOMB.
city were scrutinized by the many travelers of all nations who poured in immediately. It was then that a rope was laid about the neck of Napoleon on the Vendôme column and he was lowered to the ground to be replaced by the Bourbon flag.
Less than a year afterwards Paris was aquiver over the report that the chained lion had broken loose and was advancing to the city in the march which he declared at Saint Helena was the happiest period of his life. The fickle peasants who had pursued him out of the country so that he had had to disguise himself as a white-cockaded postboy to escape them, now received him joyfully. At his approach Louis fled from the Tuileries, but Napoleon did not occupy the palace. It was at the palace of the Élysée that he worked out his plans against the allies, and it was there that he signed his abdication when the defeat at Waterloo put an end to the Hundred Days. Three days later he went to Malmaison, and he never saw Paris again. He died in 1821 at Saint Helena. In December, 1840, Louis Philippe caused his remains to be brought to Paris where they were borne beneath the completed Arch of the Star and down the Champs Élysées, and were laid under the Dome of the Invalides that the request of his will might be granted: “I desire that my ashes repose on the banks of the Seine among the French people whom I have so greatly loved.”
CHAPTER XX
PARIS OF THE LESSER REVOLUTIONS
IT was the 25th of June, 1815, when Napoleon left Paris for the last time. On July 7 the allies entered the city after some unimportant skirmishing on the outskirts, and on the next day Louis XVIII again took up his residence in the Tuileries. The Second Restoration of the Bourbons had come to pass.
Louis found himself received with even less enthusiasm than on his first appearance, and his people loved him less and less during the nine years of his reign. He confirmed his earlier charter establishing personal and religious freedom and equality before the law and the freedom of the press. He fell more and more, however, under the influence of the conservative element, with the result that he permitted a savage persecution of the Bonapartists, let education come under sectarian control, and imposed on the laboring classes a narrow ecclesiasticism which aroused their ire. When he was forced by Russia, Austria and Prussia to fight in support of the tyrannical king of Spain, Ferdinand VII, against a democratic movement, he placed the Bourbons of the Restoration on record as sympathetic with autocracy.
Paris was in no peaceful state. There were many of Napoleon’s old soldiers in town who were constantly quarreling with the monarchists in restaurants and theaters. An assassin killed the Duke of Berry, the son of Louis’ brother who succeeded him as Charles X. The execution for political conspiracy of four young men known as the “four sergeants of La Rochelle” made a great stir among the lower classes of the city, always an inflammable element.