The news of Bonaparte's landing at Cannes had reached Vienna on the 6th of March, in the middle of an entertainment at which was represented the assembly of the divinities of Olympus and Parnassus. Alexander had just received the proposal for an alliance between France, Austria and England; he hesitated a moment between the two pieces of intelligence, and then said:
"The question is not of myself, but of the safety of the world."
And an estafette carried orders to St. Petersburg to dispatch the Guards. The withdrawing armies stopped short; their long line faced about, and eight hundred thousand enemies turned their eyes towards France. Bonaparte prepared for war; he was expected in new Catalaunian Fields[320]: God had summoned him to the battle which was to put an end to the reign of battles.
The heat of the wings of the renown of Marengo and Austerlitz had sufficed to hatch armies in that France which is one great nest of soldiers. Bonaparte had restored to his legions their epithets of "invincible," "terrible" and "incomparable;" seven armies resumed the titles of Armies of the Pyrenees, of the Alps, of the Jura, the Moselle, the Rhine: great memories which served as a frame for supposed troops, for expected triumphs. A real army was mustered in Paris and at Laon: one hundred and fifty mounted batteries, ten thousand picked soldiers entered into the guards; eighteen thousand sailors distinguished at Lützen and Bautzen; thirty thousand veterans, officers and non-commissioned officers, in garrison in the fortified towns; seven departments in the North and East ready to rise in a body; one hundred and eighty thousand men of the National Guard mobilized; volunteer corps in Lorraine, Alsace and Franche-Comté; federates offering their pikes and their strength; Paris turning out three thousand muskets a day: those were the Emperor's resources. Perhaps he might yet once more have overturned the world, had he been able to resolve, while liberating the country, to summon the foreign nations to independence. The moment was propitious: the kings, after promising their subjects constitutional government, had shamefully gone from their word. But liberty was distasteful to Napoleon, since he had drunk of the cup of power; he preferred to be vanquished with soldiers rather than to vanquish with peoples. The army corps which he successively sent towards the Netherlands amounted to seventy thousand men.
*
We Emigrants, in the city of Charles V., were like the women of that city: seated behind their windows, they watch the soldiers, in a little slanting mirror, passing down the street. Louis XVIII. was there in a corner, completely forgotten: scarcely did he from time to time receive a note from the Prince de Talleyrand returning from Vienna, a few lines from the members of the diplomatic body resident about the Duke of Wellington as commissaries, Messieurs Pozzo di Borgo, de Vincent[321], etc., etc. They had plenty to do besides thinking of us! A man unacquainted with politics would never have believed that an impotent hidden on the banks of the Lys would be flung back upon the throne by the collision of thousands of soldiers ready to cut each other's throats: soldiers of whom he was neither the King nor the general, who were not thinking of him, who knew of neither his name nor his existence. Of two such close spots as Ghent and Waterloo, never did one appear so dim, the other so dazzling: the Legitimacy lay in the store-house, like an old broken waggon.
We knew that Bonaparte's troops were approaching; to cover us we had only two little companies under the orders of the Duc de Berry, a Prince whose blood could not avail us, for it was already demanded elsewhere. One thousand horse, detached from the French army, would have carried us off in a few hours. The fortifications of Ghent were demolished; the enceinte which remained would have been the more easily carried in that the Belgian population was not in our favour. The scene which I had witnessed at the Tuileries was repeated: His Majesty's carriages were secretly got ready; the horses were ordered. We faithful ministers would have splashed after by God's grace. Monsieur left for Brussels, charged to watch the movements from near at hand.
M. de Blacas had become anxious and melancholy; I, poor man, consoled him. People in Vienna were not favourably disposed to him; M. de Talleyrand laughed at him; the Royalists accused him of being the cause of Napoleon's return. Thus, whatever happened, no further honoured exile for him in England, no further possibility of first places in France: I was his only support. I used to meet him pretty often in the Horse-market, where he trotted about alone; harnessing myself to his side, I fell in with "his sad thought." This man whom I have defended at Ghent and in England, whom I defended in France after the Hundred Days and even in the preface to the Monarchie selon la Charte, has always been adverse to me: that would be nothing, if he had not been an evil for the Monarchy. I do not repent my past simplicity; but I am bound, in these Memoirs, to rectify the surprises sprung upon my judgment and my good heart.
*
Excitement at Ghent.