Let us get out of this draught of wind from the frozen summits of eminent respectability, and turn to a man whose heart-beat had not been chilled in any social or judicial ice-box.
Constant writes:—
“... The Emperor’s glance rested on the Empress and on the King of Rome. He added in a voice that betrayed emotion, indicating by look and gesture his son, ‘I confide him to you, gentlemen!’ At these words, a thousand cries, a thousand arms arose, swearing to guard this precious trust. The Empress, bathed in tears, would have fallen if the Emperor had not caught her in his arms. At this sight the enthusiasm reached its climax; tears fell from every eye, and there was not one of the spectators who did not seem ready to shed his blood for the imperial family.”
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At the beginning of 1814 France was threatened by four armies, aggregating half a million men. Wellington was at the Pyrenees in the south, Bernadotte was in the Netherlands, while Blücher and Schwarzenberg, crossing the Rhine higher up, but at different points, were marching upon Paris by the Seine and the Marne.
With a confidence which events justified, the Emperor left Soult to oppose Wellington. As to Bernadotte, he was neither trusted by the Allies nor feared by Napoleon. The recreant Frenchman had merely come to terms with the Allies because they had promised to take Norway from Denmark and give it to Sweden. In addition to this, the Czar of Russia had dangled before Bernadotte’s eyes, as a tempting bait, the crown of France—a fact which of itself proves the hollowness of the overtures made to Napoleon from Frankfort. So well was the crafty Prince-Royal of Sweden understood by those who had bought him, that he was kept under strict personal surveillance by each of the four great allied powers,—Russia, Austria, Prussia, and Great Britain. From an army led by such a man, Napoleon had little to fear; and he gave his whole personal energies to Blücher and Schwarzenberg, especially to Blücher. This old hussar who had served under Frederick the Great, and who was now more than seventy years of age, was the most energetic of all the officers arrayed against France; and he gave Napoleon more trouble than all the others put together. He could easily be outgeneralled, he could be beaten any number of times by such a captain as Napoleon; but there was no such thing as conquering him. Routed one day, he was ready to fight again the next. Outmanœuvred at one point, he turned up ready for battle at another. His marches were swift, his resources inexhaustible, his pluck and determination an inspiration, not only to the Prussians, but to all the allied armies. He was not much of a general, was a good deal of a brute; but he was about as well fitted for the task of wearing down Napoleon’s strength as any officer Europe could have put into the field.
Moving slowly from the Rhine toward Paris, meeting no resistance which could hinder their march, the Allies, who were making war upon Napoleon alone, and who had no grudge against France, and whose wish it was, as they proclaimed, to see France “great, prosperous, and happy,” gave rein to such license, committed such havoc upon property, and such riotous outrage upon man, woman, and child, that the details cannot be printed. In Spain, Napoleon had shot his own soldiers to put an end to pillage; in Russia he had done the same. At Leipsic he had refused to burn the suburbs to save his army. In his invasions of Prussia and Austria he had held his men so well in hand that non-combatants were almost as safe, personally, as they had been under their own king. At Berlin the French Emperor publicly disgraced a prominent French officer for having written an insulting letter to a German lady.
In France the sovereigns whose every proclamation and treaty ran under the sanctimonious heading, “In the name of the Holy and Indivisible Trinity,” let loose upon the country savage hordes of Cossacks, Croats, and Prussian fanatics who wreaked their vengeance upon the non-combatant peasantry and villagers until the invasion of the “Saviors of Society” became a saturnalia of lust and blood and arson, which no language fit for books can describe.
The Prussians had almost reached Brienne when the Emperor took the field with a small force, and drove them from St. Dizier. He then came upon Blücher at Brienne, suddenly, while the Prussian general was feasting at the château, and captured one of the higher officers at the foot of the stairs. The Emperor believed he had nabbed Blücher himself, and he shouted, “We will hold on to that old fighter; the campaign will not last long!”
But Blücher had fled through the back door, and had escaped. The battle raged over the school grounds and the park where Napoleon had read and meditated in his boyhood. During the fight he found himself storming the school buildings, where the Prussians were posted; and he pointed out to his companions the tree in the park under which he had read Jerusalem Delivered.