On the 6th of April, 1814, Louis XVIII., brother of the murdered Louis, was proclaimed King of France, and to the man who had been master of Europe was assigned—the island of Elba on the coast of Italy.
But in March of the following year, while sovereigns were still wrangling over the disorder he had left, and while Talleyrand was scheming for his new master as faithfully as he had for the old, the startling news came that Napoleon had landed in France. Louis XVIII. vanished into thin air before the man whom the people were receiving with wild acclamations of delight.
Europe again united, and again Napoleon was seen advancing, as of old, with a great army. Blücher was in command of one division of the allied armies and Wellington of the other.
The battle of Waterloo began on the morning of the 18th of June, 1815. To England was to belong the glory of Napoleon's final downfall. Wellington accomplished his defeat, and then Blücher came in time to make that defeat an annihilation.
The mistake of the year before was not to be repeated. From that moment until his death at St. Helena, in 1821, Napoleon was a prisoner and an exile. He had finished the work he had been appointed to do, and Fate had flung him aside!
CHAPTER XVIII.
Now came the difficult task of reconstruction and redistribution of territory. In what form should they arise out of this chaos? The dream of the people, like that of Hermann eighteen hundred years before, was of a German UNITY; not a renewal of the empire, but a great and new national life, in some firmer and truer form than it had yet known. But these were only dreams, vague and without any practical ideas as to their realization.
In the meantime men well versed in the arts and tricks of governing were deciding how all should be arranged. The plan proposed by Metternich, that master of diplomacy, who was minister to the Emperor of Austria, was the one adopted.
There was to be a confederation of thirty-nine German states. The Act of Union, by which this was effected, had a pleasant sound to the ear of the German people. But the Union existed only in a mutual defense against foreign foes, and a mutual aid in keeping the people of Germany well in check! The one outward and visible expression of this Unity was in a General Diet, to be held at Frankfort, under the presidency of Austria!