had very reluctantly, and owing to the pressure of the tsar, awarded to him as a possession. He was to keep the title of emperor. Marie Louise was to have the duchy of Parma for herself and her son. She did not go with her consort. Following the advice of her father, she repaired to Vienna along with the little king of Rome. As for France, she received the Bourbons, along with the old frontiers.
Meanwhile Napoleon, after narrow escapes from royalist mobs in Provence, was conducted in the British cruiser “Undaunted” to Elba. There he spent eleven months in uneasy retirement, watching with close interest the course of events in France. As he foresaw, the shrinkage of the great empire into the realm of old France caused infinite disgust, a feeling fed every day by stories of the tactless way in which the Bourbon princes treated veterans of the Grand Army. Equally threatening was the general situation in Europe. The demands of the tsar Alexander were for a time so exorbitant as to bring the powers at the congress of Vienna to the verge of war. Thus, everything portended a renewal of Napoleon’s activity. The return of French prisoners from Russia, Germany, England and Spain would furnish him with an army far larger than that which had won renown in 1814. So threatening were the symptoms that the royalists at Paris and the plenipotentiaries at Vienna talked of deporting him to the Azores, while others more than hinted at assassination.
He solved the problem in characteristic fashion. On the 26th of February 1815, when the English and French guardships were absent, he slipped away from Porto Ferrajo with some 1000 men and landed near Antibes on the 1st of March. Except in royalist Provence he received everywhere a welcome which attested the attractive power of his personality and the nullity of the Bourbons. Firing no shot in his defence, his little troop swelled until it became an army. Ney, who had said that Napoleon ought to be brought to Paris in an iron cage, joined him with 6000 men on the 14th of March; and five days later the emperor entered the capital, whence Louis XVIII. had recently fled.
Napoleon was not misled by the enthusiasm of the provinces and Paris. He knew that love of novelty and contempt for the gouty old king and his greedy courtiers had brought about this bloodless triumph; and he felt instinctively that he had to deal with a new France, which would not tolerate despotism. On his way to Paris he had been profuse in promises of reform and constitutional rule. It remained to make good those promises and to disarm the fear and jealousy of the great powers. This was the work which he set before himself in the Hundred Days (19th of March to 22nd of June 1815). Were his powers, physical as well as mental, equal to the task? This is doubtful. Certainly the evidence as to his health is somewhat conflicting. Some persons (as, for instance, Carnot, Pasquier, Lavalette and Thiébault) thought him prematurely aged and enfeebled. Others again saw no marked change in him; while Mollien, who knew the emperor well, attributed the lassitude which now and then came over him to a feeling of perplexity caused by his changed circumstances. This explanation seems to furnish a correct clue. The autocrat felt cramped and chafed on all sides by the necessity of posing as a constitutional sovereign; and, while losing something of the old rigidity, he lost very much of the old energy, both in thought and action. His was a mind that worked wonders' in well-worn grooves and on facts that were well understood. The necessity of devising compromises with men who had formerly been his tools fretted him both in mind and body. But when he left parliamentary affairs behind, and took the field, he showed nearly all the power both of initiative and of endurance which marked his masterpiece, the campaign of 1814. To date his decline, as Chaptal does, from the cold of the Moscow campaign is clearly incorrect. The time of lethargy at Elba seems to have been more unfavourable to his powers than the cold of Russia. At Elba, as Sir Neil Campbell noted, he became inactive and proportionately corpulent. There, too, as sometimes in 1815, he began to suffer intermittently from ischury, but to no serious extent. On the whole it seems safe to assert that it was the change in France far more than the change in his health which brought about the manifest constraint of the emperor in the Hundred Days. His words to Benjamin Constant—“I am growing old. The repose of a constitutional king may suit me. It will more surely suit my son”—show that his mind seized the salient facts of the situation; but his instincts struggled against them. Hence the malaise both of mind and body.
The attempts of the royalists gave him little concern: the duc d’Angouléme raised a small force for Louis XVIII. in the south, but at Valence it melted away in front of Grouchy’s command; and the duke, on the 9th of April, signed a convention whereby they received a free pardon from the emperor. The royalists of la Vendée were later in moving and caused more trouble. But the chief problem centred in the constitution. At Lyons, on the 13th of March, Napoleon had issued an edict dissolving the existing chambers and ordering the convocation of a national mass meeting, or Champ de Mai, for the purpose of modifying the constitution of the Napoleonic empire. That work was carried out by Benjamin Constant in concert with the emperor. The resulting Acte additionel (supplementary to the constitutions of the empire) bestowed on France an hereditary chamber of peers and a chamber of representatives elected by the “electoral colleges” of the empire, which comprised scarcely one hundredth part of the citizens of France. As Chateaubriand remarked, in reference to Louis XVIII.’s constitutional charter, the new constitution—La Benjamine, it was dubbed—was merely a slightly improved charter. Its incompleteness displeased the liberals; only 1,532,527 votes were given for it in the plébiscite, a total less than half of those of the plébiscites of the Consulate. Not all the gorgeous display of the Champ de Mai (held on the 1st of June) could hide the discontent at the meagre fulfilment of the promises given at Lyons. Napoleon ended his speech with the words: “My will is that of the people: my rights are its rights.” The words rang hollow, as was seen when, on the 3rd of June, the deputies chose, as president of their chamber, Lanjuinais, the staunch liberal who had so often opposed the emperor. The latter was with difficulty dissuaded from quashing the election. Other causes of offence arose, and Napoleon in his last communication to them warned them not to imitate the Greeks of the later Empire, who engaged in subtle discussions when the ram was battering at their gates. On the morrow (12th of June) he set out for the northern frontier. His spirits rose at the prospect of rejoining the army. At St Helena he told Gourgaud that he intended in 1815 to dissolve the chambers as soon as he had won a great victory.
In point of fact, the sword alone could decide his fate, both in internal and international affairs. Neither France nor Europe took seriously his rather vague declaration of his contentment with the rôle of constitutional monarch of the France of 1815. No one believed that he would be content with the “ancient limits.” So often had he declared that the Rhine and Holland were necessary to France that every one looked on his present assertions as a mere device to gain time. So far back as the 13th of March, six days before he reached Paris, the powers at Vienna declared him an outlaw; and four days later Great Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia bound themselves to put 150,000 men into the field to end his rule. Their recollection of his conduct during the congress of Châtillon was the determining fact at this crisis; his professions at Lyons or Paris had not the slightest effect; his efforts to detach Austria from the coalition, as also the feelers put forth tentatively by Fouché at Vienna, were fruitless. The coalitions, once so brittle as to break at the first strain, had now been hammered into solidity by his blows. If ever a man was condemned by his past, Napoleon was so in 1815.
On arriving at Paris three days after Waterloo he still clung to the hope of concerting national resistance; but the temper of the chambers and of the public generally forbade any such attempt. The autocrat and Lucien Bonaparte were almost alone in believing that by dissolving the chambers and declaring himself dictator, he could save France from the armies of the powers now converging on Paris. Even Davout, minister of war, advised him that the destinies of France rested solely with
