Bonaparte, therefore, was persuaded to his enterprise less by the false reports of his friends than by the needs of his genius: he took up the cross by virtue of the faith that was in him. To a great man, to be born is not everything: he must die. Was Elba an end for Napoleon? Could he accept the sovereignty of a vegetable-patch, like Diocletian[246] at Salona? If he had waited till later, would he have had more chances of success, at a time when his memory would have aroused less emotion, when his old soldiers would have left the army, when new social positions would have been adopted?
Well, then, he committed a fool-hardy act against the world: at the commencement he must have believed that he had not deceived himself as to the spell of his power.
The return from Elba.
One night, that of the 25th of February, at the end of a ball of which the Princess Borghese was doing the honours, he made his escape with victory, long his comrade and accomplice; he crossed a sea covered with our fleets, met two frigates, a ship of 74 guns and the man-of-war brig Zéphyr, which spoke and questioned him; he himself replied to the captain's questions; the sea and the waves saluted him, and he pursued his course. The deck of the Inconstant, his little ship, served him as a room for exercise and as a writing-closet; he dictated amid the winds and had copies made, on that shifting table, of three proclamations to the army and to France; some feluccas, carrying his companions in adventure, flew the white flag strewn with stars around his admiral bark. On the 1st of March, at three o'clock in the morning, he struck the coast of France between Cannes and Antibes, in the Golfe Jouan; he landed, strolled along the riviera, gathered violets, and bivouacked in a plantation of olive-trees. The dumfoundered population retired. He avoided Antibes and threw himself into the mountains of Grasse, passing through Sernon, Barrème, Digne and Gap. At Sisteron, twenty men could have stopped him, and he found nobody. He went on, meeting no obstacle among those inhabitants who, a few months earlier, had wished to cut his throat. Whenever a few soldiers entered the void which formed around his gigantic shadow, they were invincibly drawn on by the attraction of his eagles. His fascinated enemies sought him and did not see him; he hid himself in his glory, as the lion of the Sahara hides himself in the rays of the sun to avoid the sight of the dazzled hunters. Enveloped in a fiery cyclone, the bloody phantoms of Areola, Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, Friedland, Eylau, the Moskowa, Lützen, Bautzen formed his retinue with a million of dead. From the midst of this column of fire and smoke, there issued, at the entrance to the towns, a few trumpet-blasts mingled with the signals of the tricoloured labarum: and the gates of the town fell. When Napoleon crossed the Niemen, at the head of four-hundred thousand foot and a hundred thousand horse, to blow up the palace of the Tsars in Moscow, he was less astonished than when, breaking his ban and flinging his irons in the faces of the kings, he came alone, from Cannes to Paris, to sleep peacefully at the Tuileries.
Beside the prodigy of the invasion of one man must be placed another which was the consequence of the first: the Legitimacy was seized with a fainting-fit; the failure of the heart of the State attacked the members and rendered France motionless. For twenty days, Bonaparte marched on by stages; his eagles flew from steeple to steeple and, along a road of two hundred leagues the Government, masters of everything, disposing of money and men, found neither the time nor the means to cut a bridge, to throw down a tree, so as to delay, at least by an hour, the progress of a man to whom the populations offered no opposition, but whom also they did not follow.
This torpor on the part of the Government seemed the more deplorable inasmuch as public opinion in Paris was greatly excited; it would have countenanced anything, despite the defection of Marshal Ney. Benjamin Constant wrote in the newspapers:
"After visiting our country with every plague, he left the soil of France. Who would not have thought that he was leaving it for ever? Suddenly he appears, and again promises Frenchmen liberty, victory and peace. The author of the most tyrannical Constitution that ever ruled France, he speaks to-day of liberty! But it was he who, during fourteen years, undermined and destroyed liberty. He had not the excuse of memory, the habit of power; he was not born in the purple. It was his fellow-citizens whom he enslaved, his equals whom he loaded with chains. He had not inherited power; he desired and meditated tyranny: what liberty is he able to promise? Are we not a thousand times more free than under his empire? He promises victory, and three times he forsook his troops, in Egypt, in Spain and in Russia, abandoning his companions in arms to the triple agony of cold, destitution and despair. He brought upon France the humiliation of invasion; he lost the conquests which we had made before him. He promises peace, and his name alone is a signal for war. The nation unhappy enough to serve him would again become the object of European hatred; his triumph would be the commencement of a combat to the death against the civilized world.... He has therefore nothing to claim, nor to offer. Whom could he convince, or whom seduce? War at home, war abroad: those are the gifts which he brings us."
Soult's order of the day.
Marshal Soult's Order of the Day, dated 8 March 1815, repeats very nearly the ideas of Benjamin Constant, with an effusion of loyalty:
"Soldiers,
"The man who lately, before the eyes of Europe, abdicated the power which he had usurped, and which he had so fatally abused, has landed on French soil, which he was never to see again.
"What does he want? Civil war. What does he seek? Traitors. Where will he find them? Shall it be among those soldiers whom he has so often deceived and sacrificed by misleading their valour? Shall it be in the heart of those families which the mere sound of his name still fills with terror?
"Bonaparte despises us enough to believe us capable of abandoning a lawful and dearly-beloved Sovereign to share the fate of a man who is no longer more than an adventurer. He believes this, the madman, and his last act of insanity reveals him to us as he is!
"Soldiers, the French Army is the bravest army in Europe; it will also be the most faithful.
"Let us rally round the banner of the lilies, at the voice of the father of the people, the worthy heir of the virtues of Henry the Great. He himself has traced for you the duties which you have to fulfil. He places at your head that Prince, the model of French knighthood, who, by his happy return to our country, has already once driven out the usurper, and who to-day, by his presence among us, will destroy his sole and last hope."