Chapter 40
Section 40 of A Short History of France by Mary Duclos. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Read by Pamela Nagami. Part 4. Chapter 5. The Hundred Days. One day at the Congress of Vienna, so the story goes,
the statesmen there assembled were discussing anxiously the unrest in Italy, when Lord Wellington, seated beside a great round table on which was spread a map of Europe, cast his eyes negligently over the chart of Italy. Good God! he exclaimed. How close Bonaparte is to the Italian coast!
There will be no peace in Lombardy so long as he is at Elba. Was it, as Savory Duke of Rovigo declares in his memoirs, a foreign officer, an admirer of Napoleon, who left Vienna for Elba, in order to tell the Emperor that the Allies contemplated moving him further afield? Was it the Prince Eugène, betraying the confidence of Alexander,
who informed his stepfather of a project in the air? The transportation of Napoleon was a theme so openly debated at Vienna that the news of it may have reached him from more sources than one. At any rate, it is certain that he believed in a plot either to assassinate him or to kidnap him on the part of the Allies.
He had abducted so many persons himself that he knew the scheme might enter the sphere of practical politics. Was he to suffer the fate of the Duc d'Anghiens? Napoleon had occupied the first months of his exile in organizing Elba. He was there, like Prospero in his aisle, like the prophet in his chamber on the wall,
just on the marge of a world which he did not cease to survey. But funds soon ran short. The yearly two million of francs guaranteed by the Allies were never paid, for the canny King Louis XVIII took a malign pleasure in letting the ex-usurper taste the pleasures of poverty and exile.
Napoleon had to borrow from a banker in Genoa the sum which permitted him to fortify his aisle, place batteries along the coast, improve its artillery, and lay in a store of provisions and ammunition. The Allies and their press gang should have no easy task. This occupied a week or two.
Then time again began to drag. My island is very small, sighed the emperor of Elba. No news of wife or son. But his mother and the lovely silly sister he preferred came to keep him company. They brought news.
News indeed percolated through from every quarter. How unpopular the Bourbons were. How the Allies meant to drive Murat from Naples. How Austria was regaining all the old ground in Italy. How France was as priest-ridden, the nobles as powerful,
the people as dissatisfied as if the revolution had never taken place. One-sided, inaccurate news enough. But it served to occupy and to infuriate the exile. Meanwhile in Milan the Malkan tense cried, Vive l'empereur, and did not mean the emperor of Austria.
And in France they cried, Vive le roi, and added low, De Rome. On the 22nd of February 1815, a certain Monsieur Fleury de Chaboulon arrived in the island of Elba
and had a long interview with Napoleon. The emperor saw him again on the morrow. This talk with Fleury was doubtless only the last drop that causes the vase to overflow. Napoleon was already at an end of his patience. The same impulsive temperament which had made him hurry on so many an event
rushed into the hall at Saint-Claude during the deliberation of the Saint-Cson. Risk his life by his return from Egypt when he ran the blockade. Gallop home so often from Spain or Russia on receipt of bad news. Now sent him on a more tremendous quest before the times were ripe. How mad an enterprise to dare with the 900 men of his guard the United Armies of Europe,
all still maintaining on a footing of war and mobilized. When the nations assembled at Vienna had so many causes of quarrel among themselves as would supply half a dozen international conflicts. Had Napoleon known how to possess his soul in patience until his enemies were safely by the ears, he might yet have died a renyant monarch.
Had I waited 12 hours longer, he said on Saint Helena to Montoulon, I should have been in possession of news which would have caused me to delay. But his genius was of a sort which is not a long patience. Buffon's definition was not true of him. Had I waited 15 days, the news of my arrival would no longer have found the sovereigns all
assembled in Vienna. But his nature was such that on the very morrow of that conversation with Fleury, in which he had fixed his departure for the 1st of April, he set sail for France with 900 soldiers at his disposal in the solitary gunboat which composed his navy and three small trading vessels at anchor in the port.
It was the 26th of February. On the way they passed a French cruiser that remarked nothing extraordinary in their trim. How's the Emperor? shouted the captain, seeing they hailed from his island, where there is a considerable trade in iron. Napoleon seized the speaking-tube.
Oh, he's all right, he replied. Il va à merveille. His spirits and his hopes were high. The sequel sounds like a page from the Légion des Sièques. The landing near Cun, the bivouac in a garden of olives, the startled peasants hurrying to the
scene and the village mayor who says reproachfully to Napoleon. We were just beginning to enjoy our peace and quietness, and here you come to disturb and unsettle us again. Words added the Emperor, which pierced me to the heart. And then the apparition of the courier of the Prince of Monaco who comes riding by in his
gold-laced vest. Napoleon recognizes him as an old equerry of Josephines and inquires of him as to his probable chances. The workmen and the soldiers are for you, says the horseman, but not the others, and don't count on Provence.
In order to see how the land lies, the Emperor dispatches to Antibes five and twenty grenadiers under an officer to announce his return and bid the garrots and open their gates. But the time drags on. The grenadiers are seen no more of being detained in prison at Antibes. Then comes the Prince of Monaco in person, astonished to find himself of so much
importance vis-à-vis to Napoleon. Where are you going? Home, said the little Prince. So am I, said Napoleon. His opinion asked.
The Prince prophesies no easy triumph. But civil war, the people being for Napoleon, the governing and intellectual classes for the King. Then the Emperor leaves the plains, the rich, disaffected country, and takes to the mountains making for Grenoble, the cradle of the revolution. There he is received with enthusiasm.
Next at Lyon, and on the 20th of March at four o'clock in the morning, just eleven months after his sad farewell to the old guard, he arrives at Fontainebleau. His 900 soldiers had not yet discharged a single rifle. Until the middle of the month, the King in Paris was treating B.P.'s escapade with sovereign indifference.
When the aerial telegraph brought to Paris the news of Napoleon's arrival in Provence, the King tossed aside the dispatch. Take this paper to the Minister of War and tell him to do what's necessary. The necessary being evidently to set the madman against the nearest wall in order a platoon to shoot.
It's a plot, said the King. It's a conspiracy, said the court. It would have been folly, they said, to feel the least uneasiness. Next thing they heard Napoleon was at Lyon. On the 15th of March the King announced to the two chambers that on the morrow he would
communicate his intentions. A throne was prepared in the Palais Bourbon. The King, the royal family, the Marshals, the Ministers, and the two chambers were united. Louis XVIII arose and in an affecting speech declared that he would gladly give his life to defend the Charter and the Constitution, which at last had brought liberty to France.
J'ai travaillé au bonheur de mon peuple. Pourrais-je à 60 ans mieux terminer ma carrière qu'en mourant pour sa défense? These words were received with a storm of enthusiasm. The King and his brother embraced. The princes and the legislators cried as with one voice,
We will live and die for the King and the Constitution. And no doubt, Louis' instinct would have led him to stay in Paris, but his lymphatic, indifferent nature made him often the tool of his ministers. If he had stayed in Paris, it is doubtful if Napoleon would have gained an entrance there. But those about the King thought too much of his safety and too little of his honor.
After all, it was natural. Louis XVIII was the brother of the unhappy Louis XVI. So at midnight on the 19th of March the royal traveling coach grew up before the pavillon de flore and the old King left the Tuileries, infirm and suffering sorely from his gout, leaning heavily on the arms of his ministers.
The night was wild and wet, the rain fell in torrents, the wind extinguished the flaring light of the torches. Louis would have no escort. Alone he set out in the darkness at the full speed of his equipage for Flanders, where he made a halt at Lille and finally for the town of Ghent.
Twenty-four hours after this midnight flitting, Napoleon slept in the King's bed in Paris. Thus, in twenty days' journey without a shot fired, the Emperor exchanged his villa in Elba for the Tuileries. It is perhaps the most wonderful expedition in all history. But from the moment of his entry into Paris, Napoleon felt a certain chill fall across the
quality of his greeting. Throughout the hundred days he was never completely sure of Paris. Under the charter, Paris had tasted of liberty. The stifling despotism, the forced assent, the mailed fist of the imperial administration had been removed and Paris, quick-witted, critical, sensitive, artistic Paris, had breathed again and had soon accepted the Bourbon.
What did it matter if they were a little ridiculous? The fat king and his red velvet gaiters, the awkward, mannish dauphine in her straight-up-and-down white English frocks and unbecoming close bonnet, they were good, honest folk who let a petulant city say its say. Paris had no great wish to go to school again. In fact, the France of 1814 had two faces like Janus, the one looking toward the past, the other eagerly envisaging the future.
There was a popular, heroic France, the child of the revolution, the heir of the empire, patriotic to the innermost fiber of the soul, martial and simple, which was mortified to the quick by the invasion of the allies. To this France, Louis XVIII was odious. But there was a new France whose eager appetites were not all for glory, a France which, after the huge interruption of the revolution and the empire,
longed to resume the tasks and experiments and letters in science in industrial organization which had occupied the middle years of Louis XVI. In 1814, the steamboat existed already in America. In 1814, George Stevenson was constructing his iron horse. In 1814, James Watt was elected a member of the Académie des Sciences in Paris. There was a France, intensely occupied with spinning jenis and chemical experiments,
that dreamed of vast factories and the renewal of the world by organized industry. There was a France, voiced by Chateaubriand Madame de Staulle, who knew itself capable of a magnificent revival in art and literature. A France that felt itself the equal of the classic age, though so long curved and stifled and silenced by the empire. And this France dreaded and hated Napoleon, because its ideal was beauty, culture, wealth, prosperity and peace. If sometimes this France
had dreamed of a change of dynasty, it was not in favor of the emperor. At most, the infant king of Rome under a complacent regency. Better still, the Duke of Orléans, young Louis Philippe, whom everyone declared so charming, so wise, so liberal. The sovereigns and statesmen assembled at Vienna were much of the same way of thinking. Louis XVIII was held to have disqualified himself by abandoning his kingdom in the hour of need. Besides, he had grievously offended the Tsar
in 1814 by what Alexander deemed his Bourbon insolence. The autocrat of Russia had offered his sister as a bride for the heir of the French throne, and Louis had let him understand that the Romanovs were people of no birth, that the princess was a heretic or at least a schismatic, and that there was madness in her family. Alexander was already considerably disenchanted when in the spring of 1815 he learned at Vienna that planned of Talleyrand and King Louis to found an alliance
between England, France and Austria, an alliance evidently intended to keep Russia in her proper place. Small wonder then if the Tsar envisaged a new arrangement of the monarchy in France. He inclined to the candidature of Louis Philippe. Other powers supported the King of Rome. As for Napoleon, all agreed that he was impossible. Meanwhile, the emperor was making his last desperate bid for success. His eagles, which had flown from village Spire to village Steeple all
the way from Cannes to the capital, had, as Chateaubriand puts it, fallen exhausted among the chimney stacks of the Tuileries. Napoleon in Paris perceived that he was no longer the idol of the nation. His one chance was to conciliate the malcontents of every party, until by some brusque act of power he could bind them or fuse them in a party of his own. He went warily at first, much as he had pensively picked his path in politics on his return from
Egypt, striving to accommodate the imperialists of the army, the republicans of the working class, and even those anarchists of every shade whom in his heart he held in horror. Soon, too soon no doubt, he showed his hand. On the 23rd of April he published an additional act to the constitution of the empire, an act which was in fact under another name, the charter of Louis XVIII. Here he seemed to say, Am I, a constitutional monarch, quite reconciled with
liberty and peace, behold me at the head of a parliamentary government, perfectly ready to march with the times. It was but a means of gaining time. The emperor confessed in later years that had Waterloo been a glorious victory for the French, he would soon have sent his chambers to the right about, and even as an expedient it proved a poor tool. The patriots were disgusted, they had hoped for a republic. The army was alarmed at this extension of the civil power. The Bonapartists
deplored all these liberal concessions and said Napoleon was growing old, and the monarchists and the liberals were neither convinced nor conciliated. The emperor felt with a sense of bewildered insecurity that his magic worked no more, his old prestige had vanished. Still, a great victory which would avenge France and redeem the long humiliation of the past year might renew the charm and reestablish the power. Napoleon was not without hope that he might
yet detach Austria and England from the circle of his enemies. He too had heard of that projected league, the last word of confidential diplomacy, and like most such mysteries, the secret of Policinal, Punch's secret that everybody knows. To Austria therefore and to England he wrote protesting his desire to keep the peace and his acceptance of the restricted frontiers of France, but neither emperor nor king would take his word. So then he must fight them all, and where was his
army? Louis XVIII had left the treasury full, not in vain had he practiced a policy of peace and retrenchment. France is naturally so rich and so economical a country that if her sovereigns will but leave her alone, she recovers, incredibly soon, from the most savage bleedings of her army surgeons. So after one brief year of Louis' humdrum calm there was no lack of money, and neither would there be any lack of men, for every Frenchman is born a soldier if time were
granted to equip and train the troops. Napoleon reckoned that by the 1st of October he could place in the field an army of eight or nine hundred thousand men. Unhappily for him, Europe was armed to the teeth. What especially bad time he had chosen to come back. By the middle of May, was on the Meuse and Wellington on the Scheldt. The Russians were expected on the Rhine in June, and Lord Casselray was telling the commons that first and last the coalition could count on
twelve hundred thousand soldiers. Already more than half of this number were ready to strike. Napoleon had in hand between five and six hundred thousand, of which not half were fully armed, instructed and equipped. Many were absent in foreign garrisons. Not two hundred thousand were in France, ready to take the field. And of these he had to detach thirty thousand men to quell a new rising in Vendée. But could he wait? Could he let the enemy cross the frontier and begin
over again the campaign in France? It was clearly his best chance to beat the Prussians and the English before Austria and Russia were ready to take the field. Napoleon was a master of speed, secrecy, surprise. Notwithstanding the overwhelming numbers of the allies, it was just possible that he might succeed, pouncing suddenly on the two adversaries, crashing right through their point of junction, falling on them so to speak with both fists and hammering hard till one fell stunned to
the right and tether to the left. This bold and brilliant plan was probably the best that a small, highly trained force could execute against two large but less coherent armies. But it needed the Napoleon of yesterday. And Napoleon was no longer that. He had no longer the same force, the same passion, the same power of work. He had come back from Elba immensely fat, discursive, somnolent, oddly acquiescent in the slackness, the baseness, the faint-hearted treacheries of
mediocre men. Things that would have driven him to fury in 1810 now scarcely awoke a smile. He knew that Fouché was betraying him to his enemies, yet he found it convenient to retain Fouché as Minister of Police. He trusted very few of any of his marshals had they not all abandoned him. But he worked with them without reproach. His indulgence was infinite. In fact, Napoleon was growing old. He was in his 46th year. Nevertheless, in flashes the old genius illuminated him still.
The old unmatched decision, mastery, and brilliance. The sudden silent swoop with which he brought his armies across the frontier. The manner with which he arrayed this vast ambush, masked by low hills and the frontier fortresses, within a few leagues of an unsuspecting enemy are worthy of his inspired campaigns. On the 14th of June, 1815, a hundred and fifteen thousand men, three hundred and fifty cannon, were drawn up, unrevealed between Philippe Ville and Maudeuge, and if, on the morrow, the treason
of General Bourbon revealed their presence to the Prussians, the English were still unprepared. End of Section 40.
