The soldiers sobbed, even the Commissioners were touched; and Napoleon, hurrying through the group which had gathered round him, reached his carriage, fell back on the cushions, and covered his face with his hands.
There was the word of command, the crunching and grinding of wheels, and the carriages were soon lost to sight.
CHAPTER XLIV
The Count of Provence was living in England when Napoleon’s Senate called him to the throne. He was one of those who had “digged the pit” for his brother, Louis XVI.; and who, when that brother was falling into it, discreetly ran away to foreign lands. After several changes of asylum on the Continent, he had gone to England as a last refuge. France had well-nigh forgotten him. A generation of Frenchmen who knew not the Bourbons had grown up; and the abuses of the Old Order were known to the younger generation only as an almost incredible story, told in the evenings by older people, as the family circled about the hearthstone. So completely had the Revolution swept away the foul wrongs of the Bourbon system, that the younger generation could never be made to understand why their fathers hated it with such bitterness. Reined in by the iron hand of Napoleon, the nobles and the clericals of the Empire seemed to be harmless enough. Why should the noble and the priest of the Old Order have been so much worse than these?
The graybeards in France knew; but the younger people could no more realize the former situation than could the children of Daniel Boone, George Rogers Clarke, John Sevier, or of the New England pioneers, understand the horrors of Indian warfare. The story of Bourbon misrule, class tyranny, and church greed fell upon the ear with a sound deadened by the lapse of twenty odd years.
Bourbon emissaries had pledges and soft words for all parties. To Napoleon’s nobles were given the assurance that they should remain noble; to his generals, that they should retain their honors and their wealth. To the priests it was not necessary to say that they should have even more than the Concordat gave, for the priests knew how dearly the Bourbons loved the old pact between Church and State. To pacify men of liberal ideas, promises were made that the restored Bourbons would rule as constitutional kings, recognizing in good faith the changes wrought by the Revolution. Napoleon’s Senate was not so forgetful of its own safety, and of the interests of France, that it failed to put the contract in writing. The Constitution of a limited monarchy was formulated, and the Count of Artois, brother and representative of Louis XVIII., accepted its conditions.
In England the new King was given an ovation upon his departure for France, and he took occasion to write to the Prince Regent that, next to God, he owed his crown to Great Britain. This statement was not good policy, for neither in France nor among the potentates of the Continent did it tend to popularize the speaker; but it was the truth, nevertheless. The settled purpose of Pitt had been the restoration of the Bourbons, and upon this basis it is now known that he built the first European coalition against republican France. Canning and Castlereagh had but inherited the principles of the abler Pitt. In a speech in Parliament (April 7, 1814), Lord Castlereagh proclaimed that his “object had long been to restore Europe to that ancient social system which her late convulsions had disjointed and overthrown.”
As Hobhouse says, “When he talks so plainly, even Lord Castlereagh can be understood; when he professes such principles, even Lord Castlereagh may be believed.”
Fresh from his London ovation, and full of his ideas of divine right, Louis met the French legislative body at Compiègne, and evaded their request for a declaration of the royal policy. It became evident that he intended to set aside the pledges made in his name, and to rule as absolute sovereign. To this purpose he was urged by clericals, nobles, and his own inclinations, for, as Napoleon said, “the Bourbons had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” With a royal disregard of facts, he had mentally abolished Napoleon’s empire, all of its glories, all of its shame, and had appropriated the entire era to himself. In his own mind he had become King of France at the death of the boy, Louis XVII.; and the year 1814 was the nineteenth year of his reign! Here, indeed, was cause for tribulation among the eminent turncoats who had exchanged Napoleon for the Bourbon! If the Empire had been but a hallucination, what would become of the nobles created by the Emperor, the honors conferred by him, the lands whose titles had been granted by him, the great institutions which had been founded by him? What would become of his peers, his judges, his marshals, his schools, hospitals, and public charities? Where would the Legion of Honor be? What was to become of the revolutionary principle that all Frenchmen were equals in law, and that all careers were open to merit? Questions like these buzzed throughout the land, and the hum of inquiry soon grew into the murmurs of alarm, of anger. If Bourbons came back to power in any such temper as that, what would become of eminent statesmen who had overturned the ancient monarchy, abolished the nobility, confiscated the wealth of the Church, and guillotined the King? What would be the fate of Talleyrand, Fouché, and Company? Aghast at such a prospect as unhampered and vengeful Bourbonism threatened, eminent renegades who had negotiated Napoleon’s downfall with the Czar Alexander appealed to the Russian monarch to stand between themselves and the danger. Like most mortals, the Czar had a strict code of morals for his neighbors. Ready to break pledges himself, it shocked him to see Louis ignore the conditions upon which he had been summoned to France. In courtly phrase the Bourbon was notified that until he confirmed the promises Artois had made to the Senate, there should be no royal entry into Paris. Even under this pressure, Louis would not yield an iota of the precious dogma of divine right. Refusing to concede that the people had any inherent powers whatever, and stubbornly maintaining that all power, privilege, and sovereignty rested in him alone, he graciously published a proclamation in which he granted to the people, of his own free will, certain civil and political rights, ignoring the Senate altogether. This “Charter” having been signed, the King made his triumphal entry into Paris, May 3, 1814.