"Gentlemen, now when, for the first time since many years, I raise a voice which the old friends of liberty will still recognise, I feel called upon to speak to you of the danger of the country. . . . . .
. . . . . . . . .
. . . . This is the time to rally round the Tricolour Flag, the flag of '89, the flag of liberty, equality and public order."
The anachronism of this speech caused a momentary illusion; people thought they saw the Revolution, personified by La Fayette, rise from the tomb and stand pale and wrinkled in the tribune. But those motions of order, revived after Mirabeau, were now no more than worn-out weapons taken from an old arsenal. If La Fayette nobly united the end and the commencement of his life, it was not in his power to weld together the two ends of the broken chain of time. Benjamin Constant waited on the Emperor at the Élysée-Bourbon; he found him in his garden. The crowd was filling the Avenue de Marigny and shouting, "Long live the Emperor!" a touching cry coming from the popular heart: it was addressed to the vanquished! Bonaparte said to Benjamin Constant:
"What duty do these owe me? I found them and left them poor."
This is perhaps the only speech that came from his heart, if, nevertheless, the deputy's emotion did not deceive his hearing. Bonaparte, foreseeing the event, anticipated the summons they were preparing to serve on him. He abdicated so as not to be compelled to abdicate.
"My political life is ended," he said; "I declare my son Emperor of the French, under the name of Napoleon II."
A useless disposition, like that of Charles X. in favour of Henry V.: one gives crowns only when one possesses them, and men upset the will of adversity. Moreover, the Emperor was no more sincere on descending the throne a second time than he had been in his first retirement; when the French commissaries went to inform the Duke of Wellington that Napoleon had abdicated, he replied:
"I knew that a year ago."
The Chamber of Representatives, after some debates in which Manuel[332] addressed the House, accepted its Sovereign's new abdication, but vaguely and without appointing a Regency.
An Executive Commission was created[333]: the Duc d'Otrante presided over it; three ministers, a councillor of State and a general of the Emperor's composed it, and stripped their master once more: these were Fouché, Caulaincourt, Carnot, Quinette[334] and Grenier[335].
During these transactions, Bonaparte was turning over his ideas in his head: