CHAPTER XIII
THE HUNDRED DAYS
NOIRTIER was a true prophet, and things progressed rapidly, as he had predicted. Every one knows the history of the famous return from Elba, a return which, without example in the past, will probably remain without imitation in the future.
Louis XVIII. made but a faint attempt to parry this unexpected blow; his lack of confidence in men deprived him of his confidence in events; the royalty, or rather the monarchy, he had scarcely reconstructed tottered on its precarious foundation, and it needed but a sign of the emperor to hurl to the ground all this edifice composed of ancient prejudices and new ideas. Villefort, therefore, gained nothing save the king's gratitude, which was rather likely to injure him at the present time, and the Cross of the Legion of Honor, which he had the prudence not to wear, although M. de Blacas had duly forwarded the brevet.
Napoleon would, doubtless, have deprived Villefort of his office had it not been for Noirtier, who was all-powerful at the court of the Hundred Days, by the dangers he had faced and the services he had rendered, and thus the Girondin of '93 and the senator of 1806 protected him who so lately had been his protector. All Villefort's influence barely enabled him to stifle the secret Dantès had so nearly divulged. During this re-appearance of the empire, whose second fall could be easily foreseen, the king's procureur alone was deprived of his office, being suspected of royalism.
However, scarcely was the imperial power established — that is, scarcely had the emperor reëntered the Tuileries and issued his numerous orders from that little cabinet into which we have introduced our readers, and on the table of which he found Louis XVIII.'s snuff-box,
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