And then, was the Emperor able to trust his former partisans and his self-styled friends? Had they not infamously abandoned him at the moment of his fall? That Senate which formerly crawled at his feet, now ensconced in the peerage, had it not decreed its benefactor's deposition? Could he believe those men, when they came and said to him:
"The interests of France are inseparable from your own. If fortune betrays your efforts, reverses, Sire, would not impair our perseverance and would redouble our attachment to your person."
Your perseverance! Your attachment redoubled by misfortune! You said this on the 11th of June 1815: what had you said on the 2nd of April 1814? What will you say a few weeks later, on the 19th of July 1815?
The Ministry of the Imperial Police was in correspondence, as you have seen, with Ghent, Vienna and Bâle; the marshals to whom Bonaparte was compelled to give the command of his soldiers had but now taken the oath to Louis XVIII.; they had issued the most violent proclamations against him, Bonaparte[315]: since that time, it is true, they had re-espoused their sultan; but, if he had been arrested at Grenoble, what would they have done with him? Is it enough to break an oath to restore its whole strength to another violated oath? Are two perjuries equivalent to one fidelity?
A few days more, and those swearers of the Champ de Mai will carry back their devotion to Louis XVIII. in the halls of the Tuileries; they will approach the sacred table of the God of Peace, in order to have themselves appointed ministers at the banquets of war[316]; heralds-at-arms and brandishers of the royal insignia at the coronation of Bonaparte, they will fulfil the same functions at the coronation of Charles X.[317]; then, as the commissaries of another power[318], they will lead that King a prisoner to Cherbourg, scarce finding a little corner free in their consciences to hang up in it the badge of their new oath. It is hard to be born in times of improbity, in those days when two men talking together study how to keep back words from their tongue, for fear of offending each other and of mutually making one another blush.
Those who had not been able to tie themselves to Napoleon by his glory, who had not been able to adhere from gratitude to the benefactor from whom they had received their riches, their honours and their very names, were they likely to sacrifice themselves now to his needy hopes? Would they link themselves to a precarious and reincipient fortune, the ingrates whom a fortune consolidated by unexampled successes and by a possession of sixteen years of victories had failed to fix? So many chrysalides who, between two spring-times, had put off and put on, shed and resumed the skin of the Legitimist and the Revolutionary, of the Napoleonist and the Bourbonist; so many words given and broken; so many crosses moved from the knight's breast to the horse's tail and from the horse's tail to the knight's breast; so many doughty warriors changing their banners and strewing the lists with their pledges of perjured faith; so many noble dames, the attendants by turns of Marie-Louise and Marie-Caroline[319], were calculated to leave in the depths of Napoleon's heart naught but distrust, horror and contempt; that great man grown old stood alone among all those traitors, men and fortune, on a tottering earth, under a hostile sky, in front of his accomplished destiny and the judgment of God.
*
Napoleon had found no faithful friends, but the phantoms of his past glory; these escorted him, as I have told you, from the spot at which he landed to the capital of France. But the eagles which had "flown from steeple to steeple" from Cannes to Paris alighted wearily upon the chimneys of the Tuileries, able to go no further.
Napoleon did not hurl himself at the head of the roused populace upon Belgium, before an Anglo-Prussian army had assembled there: he stopped; he tried to negociate with Europe and humbly to maintain the treaties of the Legitimacy. The Congress of Vienna urged against M. le Duc de Vicence the abdication of the 11th of April 1814: by that abdication, Bonaparte "recognised that he was the sole obstacle to the restoration of peace in Europe" and consequently "renounced, for himself and his heirs, the thrones of France and Italy." Now, since he had come to restore his power, he was manifestly violating the Treaty of Paris and placing himself again in the political situation anterior to the 31st of March 1814: therefore it was he, Bonaparte, who was declaring war against Europe, and not Europe against Bonaparte. These logical quibbles of diplomatic attorneys, as I remarked in connection with M. de Talleyrand's letter, were worth what they might be before the battle.
Napoleon's last campaign.