"Then I see," he said, "one must always give in. That infamous Fouché is deceiving you: only Caulaincourt and Carnot are worth anything; but what can they do, with a traitor, Fouché, and two simpletons, Quinette and Grenier, and two Chambers which do not know what they want? You all believe, like fools, in the fine promises of the foreigners; you believe they will set the pot boiling, and that they will give you a prince of their making, do you not? You are wrong[338]."
Plenipotentiaries were sent to the Allies. On the 29th of June, Napoleon demanded two frigates, stationed at Rochefort, to take him out of France. Meanwhile he had retired to the Malmaison.
The debates in the House of Peers were lively. Long an enemy of Bonaparte, Carnot, who signed the order for the massacres of Avignon without having time to read it, had found time during the Hundred Days to immolate his republicanism to the title of count. On the 22nd of June, he had read, in the Luxembourg, a letter from the Minister of War containing an exaggerated report on the military resources of France. Ney, newly arrived, was unable to hear this report unangered. Napoleon, in his bulletins, had spoken of the marshal with ill-disguised dissatisfaction, and Gourgaud accused Ney of being the chief cause of the loss of the Battle of Waterloo. Ney rose and said:
"The report is untrue, untrue in every respect: Grouchy can have only twenty to twenty-five thousand men under his orders, at the most. There is not a single soldier of the Guard left to be rallied: I commanded it; I saw it slaughtered bodily before leaving the battle-field. The enemy is at Nivelle with eighty thousand men; he can be in Paris in six days: you have no other means of saving the country than to open negociations."
Debates in the peers.
The Aide-de-camp Flahaut[339] endeavoured to support the report of the Minister of War. Ney replied, with fresh vehemence:
"I repeat, you have no other way of safety except negociation. You must recall the Bourbons. As for myself, I shall retire to the United States."
At these words, Lavallette and Carnot overwhelmed the marshal with reproaches; Ney replied, with disdain:
"I am not one of those men to whom their own interest is everything. What have I to gain by the return of Louis XVIII.? To be shot for the crime of desertion. But I owe the truth to my country."
In the sitting of the Peers of the 23rd, General Drouot, recalling this scene, said: