But what was Napoleon's position! Any government but the strongest would have sunk under such a blow, but Napoleon's government was the strongest, and at its strongest moment. Opposition had long been dead; public opinion was paralysed; no immediate rising was to be feared. Should he then simply take the lesson home, and make peace with Alexander? Impossible; he must efface the disaster by new triumphs. But, as this was evident to all, Alexander could not but perceive that he must not lose a moment, but must hasten forward and rouse Germany, before Napoleon should have had time to levy a new army. 1813 must be filled with a war in Germany, as 1812 with war in Russia.
    Napoleon abandoned the wreck of his army at Smorgoni on December 5 (as he had left his Egyptian army thirteen years before), travelling in a carriage placed upon a sledge, and accompanied by Caulaincourt and Duroc. He had an interview with Maret outside Vilna, and then travelled to Warsaw, where he saw his ambassador De Pradt, who has left an account of his confused talk. Here, as in the famous 29th bulletin, published a little later. We observe that he consoles himself for the loss of his army by reflecting that his own health was never better–he kept on repeating this. Then he said, ‘From the sublime to the ridiculous there is but a step'; for the retreat from Moscow strikes him as ridiculous! From Warsaw he passed to Dresden, where he saw his ally the King of Saxony, and wrote letters to the Emperor of Austria and to the King of Prussia. He then made his way by Erfurt and Mainz to Paris, where he arrived on December 18. The bulletin had appeared two days before.
    He had said to De Pradt that he intended to raise 300,000 men and appear on the Niemen again in the spring. The first part of this intention he fulfilled, for in April he reappeared in the field with 300,000 men; but the campaign was fought not on the line of the Niemen, nor of the Vistula. nor of the Oder, and he had to fight a battle before he could even reach the Elbe, for a great event took place less than a fortnight after his arrival in Paris, the defection of the Prussian contingent under Yorck from the grand army; this event led to the rising of Prussia against Napoleon. Yorck's convention with the Russians is dated December 30. On January 22, 1813, Stein appeared at Konigsberg and procured the assembling of the estates of East Prussia, in which assembly the Prussian landwehr was set on foot. On February 27 he concluded for the Czar the treaty of Kalisch with Prussia, by which the old Coalition of 1806 may be said to have been revived. Prussia now rushed to arms in a wholly new spirit emulating Spain and Russia in devotion and adding to devotion an intelligence peculiar to herself. At the same time measures were taken to break up the Confederation of the Rhine. Tettenborn cleared the French out of the northern departments in March; Saxony too passed into the hands of the allies, and it was hoped that the king himself might be induced to follow the example of the King of Prussia. But April came, and Napoleon took the field again.
    By rapidity and energy he was still able to take the offensive. Though Russia and Prussia were now as Spain, yet the process of calling out and drilling their population was only just begun, and it proceeded slowly. Their united available force at the opening of the campaign scarcely exceeded 100,000 men. Austria and the middle states did not abandon Napoleon. With tact and with judicious concession he might yet retrieve his position; perhaps no one as yet had begun to think of his fall. He left St Cloud for Mainz on April 15. His object was Saxony, where Dresden, the scene of his last display of omnipotence less than a year ago, was now the residence of the Czar and the King of Prussia united against him. Eugene was maintaining himself on the lower Saale with an army of about 70,000 men, and Napoleon was to march by way of Erfurt to join him. Between Erfurt, Bamberg, and Mainz he had by this time about 150,000 men, troops indeed without discipline and with imperfect drill, youths, the last hope of France, but well officered and not wanting in the enthusiasm which his name still inspired. There was, however, a serious deficiency of cavalry. Meanwhile Davoust, stationed on the Weser with 30,000 men, was holding down the insurrection of North Germany.
    The was which now commenced ended not only to the disadvantage of Napoleon, but unlike any former war, it ended in a complete defeat of France, nay, in the conquest of France, an event to which nothing parallel had been seen in modern Europe. Nor was this result attained by any political or revolutionary means, e.g., by exciting a republican or Bourbon party against Napoleon's authority, but by sheer military superiority. The great conqueror was in his turn completely conquered.
    This strange reverse seems traceable to two principal causes. He had loss in Russia the unparalleled army, which had been bequeathed to him by the Revolution, and which had been the instrument of his military achievements. He had succeeded in uniting against himself Austria, Russia and Prussia. Upon the incurable mutual distrust of these three Powers the greatness of France during the whole period had been based. This had driven Prussia from the first coalition, and held her aloof from the second and third. Moreover, the treacherous policy initiated by Catharine at the outset had passed to Alexander, and had been blended in him with characteristic frivolity. He had ruined Austria in 1805 and Prussia in 1806 by this mixture of frivolity and treachery. In 1807 he had gone openly over to the enemy, and between 1807 and 1812 the German Powers had been held in subjection as much by him as by Napoleon. Napoleon's insensate blindness had flung away this strong support, and had achieved what might have seemed impossible – had united the three Powers in cordial alliance. In place of the old bitterness towards Prussia there now reigned in Austria the conviction, which Metternich was fond of expressing, that the restoration of Prussia was a vital Austrian interest, and it had become equally clear to Russia that the restoration of Austria and Prussia was necessary to her.
    The war, though technically one, is really three distinct wars. There is first the war with Russia and Prussia, which occupies the month of May and is concluded by an armistice on June 4. There is next a war with Russia, Prussia and Austria, which begins in August and is practically terminated in October by the expulsion of Napoleon from Germany. Thirdly, there is an invasion of France by the same allied powers. This began in January 1814, and ended in April with the fall of Napoleon.
    In the first of these wars Napoleon maintained on the whole his old superiority. It has excited needless admiration that with his raw levies he should still have been able to win victories, since of his two enemies Russia had suffered as much as himself in 1812, and Prussia's army was at the beginning of the year actually to make. In the first days of May he advanced down the valley of the Saale, making for Leipsic by Naumburg, Weissenfels, and Lutzen. On the 2nd was fought the battle commonly called from Lutzen, though the Germans usually name it from the village of Gross-Gorschen. By this battle, in which the great military reformer of Prussia, Scharnhorst, received the wound of which he died soon after, the allies were forced to retreat across the Elbe, and Dresden was restored to the King of Saxony. The Prussians attribute their ill-success partly to the insufficiency of the Russian commander Wittgenstein, under whom they fought. Napoleon soon pursued the allies across the Elbe and another battle was fought on May 20 and 21 at Bautzen on the Spree. Here again Napoleon remained master of the field, though his loss seems to have been considerably greater than that of the enemy. The allies retired into Silesia, and a pause took place, which led to the armistice of Poischwitz, signed on June 4. During this armistice Napoleon formed the resolution which led to his downfall.
    He might seem now to have almost retrieved his losses. If he could not revive the great army of the Revolution, which lay buried (or unburied) in Russia, he had reasserted the ascendancy of France. Politically he had suffered but one substantial loss, in the rebellion of Prussia. The blows of Lutzen and Bautzen had arrested the movement which threatened to dissolve the Confederation of the Rhine and to unite all Germany against him. They had also shaken the alliance of Prussia and Russia. Between the generals of the two armies there reigned much jealousy; the old question, raised after Austerlitz and Friedland, was beginning to be asked again by the Russians, Why should they fight for others?
    At Tilsit Napoleon had dissolved the Coalition by forming as it were a partnership with Russia. It might seem possible now to form a similar partnership with Austria. This course had indeed been entered upon at the marriage of the archduchess. Napoleon seems to have taken the alliance seriously. He conceived it as the final suppression of the Revolution, as a complete adhesion on his own part to conservatism. The language of the bulletins at this time is ultra-conservative. Thus the enemy is described as ‘preaching anarchy and insurrection.' Stein is charged with ‘rousing the rabble against the proprietors.' But though he had borrowed the Austrian tone, he had not yet enlisted Austrian interests on his side. It was evidently in his power to confer on Austria the greatest advantages, and, as it were, to divide his power with her. Less than this he could not offer, since the losses of France and Russia had given to Austria a decisive weight, but it might seem that he could offer it without much humiliation, as the alliance with Austria had subsisted since 1810 and had been cemented by marriage. If he did not thus win Austria, he might expect her to adhere to the other side, for in such a crisis neutrality was out of the question. Could Napoleon then hope to overcome a quadruple alliance of England, Russia, Prussia and Austria? Such a hope was not justified by the victories of Lutzen and Bautzen. The force of Prussia increased every day, and the Spanish enthusiasm with which her new army fought had been displayed even on those fields; the force of Austria had been impaired by no Russian campaign; while France was evidently near the end of her resources. The legerdemain by which, in 1800, 1805, 1806, Napoleon had made conquests was now worn out; his blows were no longer followed by abject submission and surrender; he was not even able, for want of cavalry, to make his victories decisive. Thus ample concessions to Austria were indispensable; but, these assumed, his position might seem hopeful.
    He took the momentous resolution to make no such concessions, saw Austria join the Coalition, and after a campaign of two months found his army driven in tumultuous ruin across the Rhine. This step is the counterpart of Tilsit, and destroyed the work of Tilsit. To understand it we must in the first place weigh his own words, spoken to Schwarzenberg: ‘My situation is difficult; I should ruin myself if I concluded a dishonourable peace. An old government, where the ties between sovereign and people are old, may sign burdensome conditions, when the pressure of circumstances requires it. But I am new; I must heed opinion more, for I need it. Were such a peace announced, at first, no doubt, we should hear nothing but jubilation; but soon would follow loud criticism on the Government. I should lose the respect, and with that the confidence of my people, for the Frenchman has a lively imagination; he loves glory and excitement; he is sensitive. Do you know what was the first cause of the fall of the Bourbons? It dates from Rosbach.' This view is evidently sound, but it does not explain why he did not at least try his utmost by bribes and promises to win Austria to his interest. Nevertheless, he seems not to have been attracted by this plan, though it was open to him for several months, and though the clamour for peace which his own army and his own marshals raised compelled him to profess to take it into consideration. He continued deliberately to contemplate in preference a war against Russia, Prussia, and Austria united, and regarded the armistice simply as a delay, which would enable him to bring up new forces. Metternich has left us an account of the interview, lasting ten hours, which he had with Napoleon on June 28, in the Marcolini palace at Dresden. It reveals to us Napoleon's contempt for a power he has so often defeated, his inability to believe that Austria can still have spirit to resist; at the same time we become aware that he believes himself to be necessary to the Austrian emperor, as being the bulwark of all thrones and of monarchy itself against the Revolution. Here too we meet with the famous dramatic passage, which we can hardly suppose to have been invented by Metternich, where Napoleon, on being told that his troops were 'not soldiers, but children,' answered, turning pale – ‘You are no soldier; you do not know what passes in a soldier's mind; I grew up in the field, and a man like me troubles himself little about the life of a million of men' (the actual expression he used, adds Metternich, cannot be reported), - and then flung his hat into a corner of the room. That this was a true description of his way of thinking had become visible to most since the Russian catastrophe, and the audacious frankness with which he blurts it out is quite in his characteristic manner.
    We cannot but feel how difficult it is to follow the movements of a mind which has wandered into such strange latitudes. His judgement, too, which was naturally most correct, must have been bewildered by the strangeness of his career. He must have formed the habit of counting upon sudden interventions of fortune; nay, he must have been well aware that he had risen so high not by following probabilities, but by running enormous risks.
    But it is by no means certain, after all, that Austria was to be bought or bribed. Her course, so far as we can trace it, was firm and honourable; it seems that the sacrifice of the Archduchess in 1809 ought not to be regarded as Austria's final surrender of self-respect. She quietly withdraws her auxiliary corps from the French army, and takes up the position of a mediator, arming vigorously to sustain this position. She then offers terms. By accepting these Napoleon would have conciliated her, and he would have gained much more – for instance, an army of veteran troops still shut up in Prussian fortresses. But he would not have purchased an immediate peace at this price.
    A congress met at Prague in the course of July, but Napoleon did not allow its deliberations to make serious progress. He paid no attention to an ultimatum presented on August 8, which consisted of six principal conditions: (1) Partition of the Duchy of Warsaw between Austria, Prussia and Russia; (2) restitution to Prussia of Dantzig and its territory; (3) cession of the Illyrian provinces to Austria; (4) restoration to independence of Hamburg and Lubeck, and rearrangement of the 32nd Military Division; (5) dissolution of the Confederation of the Rhine; (6) reconstruction of Prussia on the scale of 1806. On midnight of August 10-11 the armistice was declared to be at an end, and the doom of Napoleon was sealed. It was a strange decision on his part, but perhaps he judged rightly that he had no choice but between ruin and absolute, impossible victory!

    Europe now plunges again into a struggle as desperate and as destructive as that of 1812. More evidently even than in 1812 is Napoleon responsible for this ruin of all civilisation. He cannot any longer speak even of the liberty of the seas, for he is forced himself to admit that the Continental system is dead, and yet refuses to surrender that ascendancy for which the Continental system had all along been the pretext. Infatuated France, however, has by this time furnished more than 400,000 men to perish in a contest where there might be chances, but could be no probabilities of victory. His headquarters are now at Dresden, and his armies are arranged along the whole course of the Elbe from Bohemia to its mouth. This position has been somewhat weakened by the adhesion of Austria to the Coalition, for Austria masses her troops on the north-west of Bohemia, threatening Dresden and Napoleon's communications from the left side of the Elbe. The force of the allies (approaching 500,000 men) consists of three great armies, of which the first, principally Austrian, and commanded by Prince Schwarzenberg, is stationed on the Eger in Bohemia; the sovereigns are here. The old Prusso-Russian army, which had made the convention of Poischwitz, is still in Silesia. It contains more Russians than Prussians, but a Prussian officer is now put at the head of it. This is Blucher, the dashing general of hussars, now an old man of seventy years; on his staff are some of the leading theorists and enthusiasts of the new Prussian army, such as Gneisenau. But the bulk of the Prussian force is stationed in the Mark of Brandenburg. In this final muster of the armies of Europe we see that the moral forces have passed over from France to the allies. In the French camp there resigns weariness and desire for peace, among the Prussians and Russians heroic ardour and devotion. But the old mismanagement reappears on the side of the allies. In the Bohemian camp Schwarzenberg's authority was almost annulled by the presence of the sovereigns; in Silesia the heroic Prussian general is in command of an army mainly Russian. But in the Mark perhaps the greatest blunder was made, for here the main Prussian force was put under the orders of the Crown Prince of Sweden, the Frenchman Bernadotte, wholly alien to the German cause, and bent upon propitiating French public opinion with a view to the succession of Napoleon. Bernadotte is not the only member of the old republican opposition who is seen in the allied camp, now that Napoleon's fall begins to be thought of as possible. Moreau, the man who helped in 1799 to found the consulate, desiring probably to see France ruled by a series of Washingtons, each holding office for a short term, appears in the Austrian camp. If Napoleon was to be dethroned, who had better right to succeed him?
    The campaign opens with a blow aimed at Berlin, where perhaps Napoleon wished to extinguish the popular insurrection at its source. Oudinot marches on it from Baruth, and is supported by a force from Magdeburg; Davoust sends another corps from Hamburg. Bernadotte proposes to retire and sacrifice Berlin, but in spite of him Bulow fights on August 23 the battle of Grossbeeren, within a few miles of the capital. Here first the landwehr distinguished itself, and Berlin was saved. The attack from Magdeburg was defeated by Hirschfeld at Hagelberg on the 27th. Meanwhile Napoleon himself, at the head of 150,000 men, had marched against Blucher on the Katzbach. Blucher retired before him, and he was compelled to return to the defence of Dresden, but he left Macdonald with perhaps 50,000 or 60,000 men to hold Blucher in check. Almost immediately after his departure (August 26) Macdonald was defeated by Blucher in the battle of Katzbach. Thus the campaign began with two Prussian victories. But when the great army of Bohemia moved upon Dresden, Napoleon showed his old superiority. On August 27 he inflicted on it a terrible defeat. Here Moreau, the hero of Hohenlinden, was mortally wounded by a cannon-ball. It seemed for a moment likely that this battle, followed up with Napoleon's overwhelming rapidity, would decide the campaign. He prepared to cut off his enemy's retreat into Bohemia. But the news of Grossbeeren and Katzbach arrived; Napoleon is also said to have been attacked by illness; he altered his plan in the moment of execution. The grand stroke of the campaign failed, and, instead of cutting off the retreat of the grand army, Vandamme was taken prisoner with 10,000 men at Kulm, after a battle in which he had lost half that number (August 30). It was evident that the times of Marengo and Austerlitz were over. Napoleon's ability and authority were as great as ever; he controlled larger armies; he opposed a Coalition which was as unwieldy as former Coalitions; and yet he had suffered four defeats in a single week and had won but one victory. Within another week he suffered another blow. Ney, making a new advance on Berlin, was defeated with great loss at Dennewitz by the Prussians under Bulow (September 6).
    Here then ends Napoleon's ascendancy; henceforth he fights in self-defence or in despair. Yet the massacre was to continue with unabated fury for nearly two months longer. He spent the greater part of September in restless marches from Dresden, now into Silesia, now into Bohemia, by which he wore out his strength without winning any substantial advantage. Towards the end of the month a new phase of the war begins. From the beginning the allies had given each other rendezvous in the plain of Leipsic. Hitherto Napoleon had held the line of the Elbe, and had presented a single mass to the three separate armies of the Coalition. Now that his collapse begins to be visible, commences the converging advance on Leipsic. The Silesian army crossed the Elbe at Wartenburg on October 3, and on the next days the northern army also crossed at several points. At the same moment the Confederation of the Rhine began rapidly to dissolve. A troop of Cossacks under Czernicheff upset the kingdom of Westphalia (October 1). Bavaria abandoned Napoleon, and concluded the treaty of Ried with Austria (October 8). But for form's sake – we may almost say – a final massacre was still necessary. It took place on a satisfactory scale between October 14 and 19, and ended in the decisive defeat of Napoleon and the capture of Leipsic. Perhaps nearly half a million of men were engaged in these final battles. It is reckoned that in the last three days the Prussians lost sixteen, the Russians twenty-one, and the Austrians fourteen thousand men – total, fifty one thousand. Napoleon left twenty-three thousand behind him in the hospitals, and fifteen thousand prisoners; his dead may have been fifteen thousand. He lost also three hundred pieces of artillery. The sufferings of the wounded almost exceed anything told of the retreat from Moscow. It is a misfortune that the victors allowed him to cross the Rhine in safety; had they pressed the pursuit vigorously, helped as they now were by the Bavarians, they might have brought his career to an end at this point. But for such a decisive measure perhaps even their political views were not yet ripe. However, as at the Berezina in 1812, so now, he had to clear his road by another battle. The Bavarians under Wrede met him at Hanau, eager to earn some merit with the victorious Coalition; but he broke his way through them (October 30, 31), and arrived at Frankfort. On November 1, 2 he carried the remains of his army, some 70,000 men, across the Rhine at Mainz.

    The work of eight years was undone; Napoleon was thrown back to the position he had occupied at the rupture of the peace of Amiens. The Russian disaster had cancelled Friedland; Leipsic had cancelled Austerlitz. But could Napoleon consent to humble himself? If he could not make concessions in the summer, still less could he do so now. Could he return and reign quietly at Paris, a defeated general, his reputation crushed by the two greatest disasters of history? At least he might by abdicating have spared France already mortally exhausted, the burden of another war. It is among the most unpardonable even of his crimes to have dragged his unhappy country through yet another period of massacre, though nothing that could even appear to be a national interest was at stake. In November advances were made to him by the allies, in which peace was proposed on the basis of the ‘natural frontiers.' This would have secured to France the main fruits of the First Revolutionary War, that is, Belgium, the Left Bank, Savoy, and Nice. Such terms seem generous when we consider the prostration of France, and the overwhelming superiority of the allies. But though the Prussian war-party loudly protested against them, and maintained the necessity of weakening France so as to render her harmless, Austria favoured them, being jealous alike of Prussia and of the spirit of liberty which the war was rousing in the German population. A little compliance on the part of Napoleon might at this moment have made the general desire for peace irresistible. But he showed no such disposition. He first evaded the proposal, and then, too late, accepted it with suspicious qualifications. After having been decimated, France must now be invaded and subjugated, for him.
    On December 1 the allies issued their manifesto from Frankfort, in which they declare themselves at war not with France but with Napoleon (an imitation of the Revolutionary principle ‘Peace with peoples, war with Governments'), and the invasion followed with almost Napoleonic rapidity. The three armies remain separate as they had been in Germany. The great army under Schwarzenberg passes through Switzerland, and makes its way to the plateau of Langres (the source of the Seine, Aube, and Marne), where it begins to arrive about the middle of January; Blucher's Silesian army crosses the middle Rhine to Nancy; the northern army, nominally under Bernadotte, passes through Holland. In the course of the march Switzerland and Holland were swept into the Coalition the resources of which now became overwhelming. It would be difficult to state for what object Napoleon called on France to fight another campaign, particularly as the allies guaranteed to her a larger territory than she had possessed under the old monarchy. His officers indeed wondered what personal object he could have. They were astonished to hear him talk of another campaign in Germany to be undertaken next spring, of being soon on the Vistula again, &c. He was no doubt prey to illusions, his fortune having accustomed him to expect results ten times greater than the probabilities justified, but his confidence was founded on (1) the great force which still remained to him shut up in German fortresses, (2) the mutual jealousy of the allies, (3) his own connection with the Emperor of Austria, (4) the patriotism which would be roused among the French, as in 1792, by the invasion. But his calculations were confounded by the rapidity of the invaders, who gave him no time to call out the nation. The Senate did indeed grant him 300,000 men, but to levy, drill, and arm them was impossible, and he had neglected to fortify Paris. In the armies which had returned from Germany there began desertion of all who were not French. The campaign opened at the end of January, and was over at the end of March. The scene of it was the country between the Marne, Aube, and Seine, partly also the department of Aisne. At first, though successful at Brienne, Napoleon seemed unable to resist the superior numbers of the enemy. He was defeated at La Rothiere. But the invaders were as yet irresolute; they divided their forces. This gave him an opportunity. He attached Blucher, and, though with greatly inferior forces, won four battles in four days, at Champaubert (February 10), at Montmirail (11), at Chateau-Thierry (12), at Vauchamps (13). For the moment this brilliant success gave the campaign quite another character; the hopes and patriotic feelings of the French were roused. A congress had already been opened at Chatillon, and under the impression of these victories it would have been easy to conclude a peace, had not Napoleon's position made a reasonable peace inadmissible to him. He felt this, and fell back upon illusions, and upon attempts to sever Austria from the Coalition. At the beginning of March the Coalition was strengthened by the treaty of Chaumont, in which each of the four powers bound themselves for twenty years to keep 150,000 men on foot. Directly afterwards Napoleon received a crushing blow from the fall of Soissons and the junction of Blucher's army with the northern army under Bulow, which had entered France by way of Holland and Belgium. Their united force amounted to more than 100,000 men. The battles of Craonne and Laon followed, in which Napoleon, without suffering actual defeat, saw his resources dwindle away. On March 18 the conferences at Chatillon came to an end, the plenipotentiaries of the armies declaring Napoleon to have no intention but that of gaining time. About the 24th the allies came to the resolution to march on Paris. They had before them only Marmont and Mortier, for Napoleon himself had resolved to manoeuvre in their rear, and had marched to St Dizier. The marshals, after the engagement of Fere Champenoise, made good their retreat to Paris, where the enemy followed them on the 29th. Joseph Bonaparte withdrew Marie Louise and the King of Rome to Tours. On the 30th the allies attacked in three divisions – the Silesian army on the side of Montmartre, Prince Eugene of Wurtemberg and Barclay de Tolly by Pantin and Romanville, the Crown Prince of Wurtemberg and Giulay by Vincennes and Charenton. In the afternoon, after an obstinate resistance, the marshals offered a capitulation, and engaged to evacuate the town before seven o'clock in the morning. Napoleon, advancing by forced marches, was too late. The military struggle is over; the political struggle begins.
    Since 1804 there had been in independent political life in France. During the Russian expedition, indeed, a certain General Malet had spread a false rumour of Napoleon's death in Russia, and had produced a forged decree of the Senate restoring the republic. His attempt had for the moment had so much success that Napoleon had painfully felt the precariousness of his dynasty, the purely provisional character of the monarchy he had founded. Laine of Bordeaux again had been bold enough, when Napoleon made his last appeal for help to the Corps Legislatif, to conjure him, while he defended the country, to maintain the entire execution of the laws which guarantee to the citizen liberty, security, and property, and to the nation the free exercise of its political rights. Napoleon had replied with an outburst of indignation. But now at last it became necessary to take an independent resolution, for in the influential classes it began to be understood that Napoleon must fall, and in particular the generals asked themselves for what rational purpose troops were still levied and battles still fought. But not even the germs were visible of any authority that could replace that of Napoleon. Should he be succeeded by another general, or by a regency for his son, or by the Bourbons? The first course might have been possible had some Moreau been at hand; even as it was, Bernadotte, who, like Napoleon, was a Jacobin developed into a prince, made pretensions which were favoured by the Czar. Such a course would have been a revival of the consulate, but it would not have satisfied the republican party, while it would have been rejected by monarchists of every shade. In favour of the regency, as against the Bourbons, there was much to be said. It would not begin with a fantastic transformation-scene, and it would have a hold on the popular imagination. The decision fell out by a sort of accident. To a regency the natural road was by an abdication, which would preserve the principle of inheritance. Such an abdication Napoleon gave. On April 4 he reviewed his troops at Fontainebleau, and announced his intention of attacking the allies in Paris. They received his words with enthusiasm; but just at this point the mainstay if his power failed him. The military aristocracy, the marshals, refused to follow him, and Napoleon recognised in a moment that the end was come. Though in arguing with them he said that a regency of Marie Louise, whom he called ‘a child', was impossible. Yet he now abdicated on condition that his son should succeed under the regency of the empress. Ney, Macdonald, and Caulaincourt set out for Paris to negotiate the establishment of the regency.
    Napoleon's power rested first on the support of the great military magnates, but secondly on that of the great civil dignitaries, lavishly enriched by him, whose organ was the Senate. While the marshals forced him to abdicate, his reign had been brought to an end in a wholly different way by the Senate. Talleyrand, vice president of this body, who had for some time been intriguing in favour of the house of Bourbon, pronounced openly in favour of it before the sovereigns when they entered Paris. ‘The regency', he said, ‘was an intrigue; the Bourbons alone were a principle.' He convoked the Senate on April 1, and on April 2 it voted the deposition of Napoleon and his family. This decision was ratified the next day by the Corps Legislatif.
    Then occurred the abdication in favour of his family, which had the support of the army. The instrument was brought to Paris by not less than three famous marshals, Ney and Macdonald having been joined on their way from Fontainebleau by Marmont. The two solutions were thus brought at the same time before the allied sovereigns, of whom Alexander was not favourably disposed to the Bourbons, and Francis was the father of Marie Louise. For a moment the balance trembled.
    But Marmont had been brought in contact, during his defence of Paris, with Talleyrand, and had committed himself to him before the marshals took their independent course. After evacuating Paris he had been stationed on the Essonne. Here he had entered into an engagement to place his corps at the service of the new provisional Government which the Senate had constituted; the arrangement was that on April 5 the corps should quit its position and march into Normandy. But when the marshals passing through his camp from Fontainebleau told him of their commission, he had revealed the secret of this engagement with expressions of penitence; he had countermanded his orders to the inferior officers, and had gone with the marshals to Paris. In his absence, however, General Souham, influenced by a fear that the plot had become known to Napoleon, gave orders to the troops to marsh on Versailles. This appearance of division in the army was fatal to Napoleon's family. It decided Alexander to declare for the Bourbons, and Caulaincourt was instructed to demand from Napoleon an abdication pure and simple. In return he was to retain the title of emperor, and to have the island of Elba in sovereignty, while Marie Louise was to have a principality in Italy. The unconditional abdication was signed at Fontainebleau on April 11.
    By an irony of fortune the Government founded at Brumaire, in which everything had been sacrificed to military efficiency, was the only one of the three Governments of France since 1879 which actually succumbed before an invader. The total result of so many conquests was that France, which, when Napoleon's name was first heard of, was in substantial possession of Belgium, the left bank of the Rhine, Savoy, and Nice, had now lost the first two acquisitions; and we shall see what measures he took to deprive her of the other two. His fatal power of bewildering the popular mind was already at work again. This last campaign, the most unpatriotic he ever fought, had seemed to redeem his faults, and had given him the name of heroic defender of his country. It was a view which made way fast, as soon as he had the restored Bourbons for a foil.

    In the meantime, however, all the hatred, long suppressed, of individuals and of parties broke loose upon him. For the moment he seems to have utterly lost heart. On the night of April 11, after signing the unconditional abdication, he is said to have taken a dose of a poison which ever since the Russian campaign he had kept by him. But vomitings, we are told, came on and saved him. On the 20th, when he bade farewell to his soldiers, he had resolved to live, in order ‘to record the great deeds we have done together. He soon found another object for life; but a year later, after another downfall far more complete and ignominious, he clings to life, and he clings to it afterwards in captivity. The soldiers idolised him still, and his parting scene at Fontainebleau, when he kissed the eagle, was pathetic; but when he reached the south of France, he met with other demonstrations of feeling. At Avignon and Orgon the crowd attacked the carriages, and wanted to throw the tyrant into the Rhone. He was compelled to disguise himself. At the coast he was met by an English frigate, which landed him on May 4 at Porto Ferraio, in Elba. It seems to have been arranged among the sovereigns that his wife and child were not to join him, nor did he complain of this. Marie Louise set out for her old home on April 23, and was at Schonbrunn again before the end of May. About the same time Josephine died at Malmaison, in the arms of her children Eugene and Hortense.
    It must have occurred to Napoleon very soon after his arrival in Elba that he was not yet driven to autobiography. Never was a great state in a position so untenable and monstrous as France after he quitted the helm. In twenty years of thrilling events, in the emotions first of tragedy and then of epic poetry, the French had forgotten the Bourbon court, when suddenly the old Comte de Provence (under the name of Louis XVIII.) and the Comte de Artois, Conde and the Duc d'Angouleme and the Orpheline du Temple, reappeared and took possession of the country before even a royalist party had formed itself in France. Politically indeed they brought liberty, for they created a parliament, where all assemblies had been mute and servile for fourteen years; but they unsettled all domestic affairs, the position of public men, the prospects of the army, the title of estates, in a manner so sudden and intolerable, especially at a moment when the country had suffered conquest from without, that some new convulsion seemed manifestly imminent. Disgraced, bewildered, and alarmed at the same time, the French could think with regret even of the reign of Napoleon. The wholesale massacre of the last two years might have been expected to seem like a bad dream as soon as the spell was snapped, but it began to seem regrettable in comparison with the present humiliation. Another event happened which was like a new revolution. The prisoners and the troops shut up in German fortresses returned to France under the treaty, perhaps not less than 300,000 men. What could be more evident than that, if all these soldiers could take the field again, and under Napoleon, France might yet escape the humiliation of a Government imposed by the foreigner, and perhaps also recover her lost frontiers? The congress of Vienna entered upon business in September, and with this a new chapter of politics opened. France ceased to be the general bugbear, and the new alliances began to be formed in order to check the aggressive spirit of Russia. The European Coalition, once dissolved, might prove not easy to reconstitute. Internal politics also had altered. A wild party of ultras had sprung up among the royalists; the church was beginning to give disquiet to the holders of national property; the army was enraged by seeing emigres, who had fought against France, appointed in great numbers to the command of regiments.
    It was not the first time that Napoleon had gone into a sort of exile. As he had disappeared in the East, and returned to make Brumaire, so he might come from Elba to rescue France. The situation was not less intolerable than in 1799. As then, so now, had he nor returned, a revolution would nevertheless have taken place. Fouche was weaving a military plot, which would have carried to power perhaps the duke of Orleans, perhaps the king of Rome.
    He entered upon the last of his thousand adventures on February 26, 1815, when he set sail from Porto Ferraio with Generals Bertrand and Drouot and 1,100 soldiers. On March 1 he reached the French coast at the gulf Jouan between Cannes and Antibes. Twenty days after he entered the Tuileries in triumph.
    He had judged the feelings of the army correctly, and also the effect which would be produced by his prodigious fame. These causes were more than enough to overthrow a Government so totally without root as that of the Bourbons. From the coast he took the way across the mountains of Provence by Sisteron and Gap to Grenoble. The soldiers sent from this town to stop him were disarmed when he uncovered his breast and asked, which of them would fire on his emperor? He was then joined by the royalist La Bedoyere. Macdonald at Lyon stood firm, but was deserted by his soldiers. Ney, who commanded in the east, at first declared himself violently against his old chief, but the military feeling afterwards gained him, and he joined Napoleon at Auxerre. The king left the Tuileries on the 19th, retiring northward, and on the next day Napoleon entered Paris.
    At Brumaire he had put down Jacobinism, and given the nation order and repose. Now he was summoned, in the name of independence, to protect the acquisitions of the Revolution, and to defend the national honour against the triumphant foreigner. The Hundred Days are the period of popular or democratic imperialism. Those who sided with him told him frankly that he must turn over a new leaf, and he professed himself ready to do so. It would be rash to say that this was impossible. He was but in his forty-sixth year; his return from Elba was an astonishing proof that he still possessed that elasticity of spirit, that power of grasping the future, which he had often shown so remarkably. Here then, as at a second Brumaire, might begin a third Napoleonic period. The mad crusade against England and the world-empire which sprang out of it were now to be forgotten; the oppressor of Tyrol and Spain was to stand out as a heroic representative of the free modern people against the Holy Alliance. This last and most audacious of his transformations was already most prosperously begun. But at this point fortune deserted him once for all. Napoleon Liberator remained a poetical idea, transforming his past life into legend, and endowing French politics with a new illusion; the attempt to realise it came to an end in hundred days (March 13 to June 22).
    The ultimate cause of this failure seems to have been a change in Napoleon himself. It had long been remarked that the Emperor Napoleon was wholly different from the General Bonaparte of the Italian campaigns. Bonaparte had been lean, shy, laconic, all fire and spirit, the very type of republican virtue imagined by Rousseau; the Emperor was fat and talkative, and had his fits, according to Marmont, of indolent ease. Once or twice there had been attacks of illness, by which he had been temporarily incapacitated; but this had been hushed up. On the whole he had never yet been wanting to himself. In the campaign of 1814 his activity had been prodigious, and the march to Paris in twenty days, with which he had opened 1815, had been a great display of vigour. But he could not maintain himself at this level. A physical decay had begun in him, affecting through his body, not indeed his mind, but his will and his power of application. ‘I do not know him again,' said Carnot. ‘He talks instead of acting, he the man of rapid decisions; he asks opinions, he the imperious dictator, who seemed insulted by advice; his mind wanders, though he used to have the power of attending to everything when and as he would; he is sleepy, and he used to be able to sleep and wake at pleasure.' This last symptom was the most striking; in some of the most critical and terrible moments of the Waterloo campaign he seems to have been scarcely able to keep himself awake.
    The constitutional history of the Hundred Days may be despatched summarily, since it led to nothing. On March 13 an imperial decree was issued from Lyons dissolving the two chambers established by the Bourbons, and convoking an extraordinary assembly in Field of May for the purpose ‘of correcting and modifying our constitutions, and of assisting at the coronation of the Empress, our dear and well-beloved spouse, and of our dear and well-beloved son.' But the prospect soon changed, and, as it was necessary that the empire, like the monarchy, should have its charter, it seemed impossible to wait till May. Napoleon had recourse to Benjamin Constant, that is, he marked his change of policy by sending for the leader of the opposition. The ‘Acte Additionnel aux Constitutions de l'Empire,' dated April 22, was drawn by Constant, examined by a committee, and then adopted by the council of state. The most remarkable feature of it is the preamble, in which he explains his change of attitude by saying that ‘formerly he had endeavoured to organise a grand federal system in Europe, which he had regarded as agreeable to the spirit of the age and favourable to the progress of civilisation,' that ‘for this purpose he had adjourned the introduction of free institutions,' but that ‘henceforward he had no other object but to increase the prosperity of France by strengthening public liberty.
    This neat misrepresentation deserves notice as having imposed on many people. For the rest it is to be observed that the act creates an hereditary peerage. The Field of May was held, but not till June 1. Napoleon appeared in a grand costume and distributed flags, but the ‘well-beloved spouse and son' were not there; Europe had declared against him. On the 12th he set out for the campaign.
    The Great Powers had issued, immediately on hearing of Napoleon's disembarkation (March 13), a declaration putting him outside all civil and social relations, and consigning him to public vengeance as ‘an enemy and disturber of the peace of the world.' On March 25 they reconstituted the Coalition. Was this a disappointment to Napoleon? A war of liberation was perhaps necessary to him. To be freely accepted by the French people, and then to be rejected by Europe, gave him precisely the opportunity he sought of standing forth as the heroic champion of national independence. He had now all the soldiers who at the time of his first fall had been locked up in fortresses or foreign prisons. His position was therefore such as it had been in 1813, not in 1814, and he proposed to defend not a vast empire but simply France, so that he had on his side patriotism and liberalism. All this, and his own genius! Would not so much suffice? Probably he remembered Brumaire, how low the fortune of France at that time had been, and how suddenly Marengo had restored all. For the moment, however, the inequality of numbers was great. In June the allies had in the field more than 700,000, Napoleon little more than 200,000, men. There were already English troops in Belgium, where they were engaged in establishing the new kingdom of the Netherlands, and there were Prussian troops in the Rhenish province which had just been given to Prussia. It was a question for Napoleon, whether he should assume a defensive attitude and allow the allies to invade France – this in itself would have suited his new policy best – or carry the war into Belgium, a country long united with France, and attack the English and Prussians. He shrank from inflicting a new invasion upon France, especially on account of the strength of the royalist party in many regions, and thus it was that the scene of the campaign was laid in Belgium. The English had their headquarters at Brussels, the Prussians at Liege. He formed the plan of dividing them and beating them in turn, as he had served the Austrians and Sardinians at the very beginning of his career. Many circumstances, however, were different. Wellington and Blucher with Gneisenau were superior to Colli and Beaulieu; the Napoleon of 1815 was vastly inferior to the Bonaparte of 1796.
    Of all the Napoleon campaigns this proved by far the most rapid and decisive. Even the Marengo campaign had lasted a month, but this was decided in three days. Leaving Paris on the 12th, Napoleon was in Paris again on the 21st, his own fate and that of his empire and that of France decided. Everything concurred to make this short struggle the most interesting military occurrence of modern history: its desperate intensity, its complete decisiveness, the presence for the first and last time of the English army in the front of the European contest, the presence of the three most renowned commanders, Napoleon, Wellington, and Blucher. Accordingly it has been debated with infinite curiosity, and misrepresented on all sides with infinite partiality. Napoleon's army amounted to 122,401 men; it contained a large number of veterans, besides many who had seen the campaigns of 1813-14, and was perhaps the finest army he had ever commanded. That of Wellington was composed of Englishmen, Hanoverians, Brunswickers, Nassauers, Germans, and Netherlanders; the total is stated at 105,950. But in the Netherlanders of the newly established kingdom no confidence could be placed, and yet these amounted to nearly 30.000 men; the English too (about 35,000) were in a great part raw recruits (the Peninsular veterans being mainly absent in America): altogether Wellington pronounced it ‘the worst army ever brought together'. The army of Blucher numbered 116,897 disciplined troops, animated by an intensely warlike spirit. Napoleon's opening was prosperous. He maintained so much secrecy, and used so much rapidity, that he succeeded in throwing himself between the two armies. On the 15th he advanced and occupied Charleroi. On the 16th he engaged the Prussians at Ligny and the English at Quatre Bras, desiring to block the crossroad between Quatre Bras and Sombreffe, and so to sever the two armies. Napoleon personally commanded against the Prussians and here he gained his last victory. The battle was very bloody; about 12,000 Prussians fell, and Blucher himself was wounded. At Quatre Bras Ney met Wellington and was forced to retreat. But the defeat of Blucher made it necessary for Wellington to fall back on Brussels in order to effect a junction with the Prussians. The 17th was spent in this retrograde movement, and on the 18th Wellington accepted battle on the heights of Mont St Jean, from which the French name the day, while the English give it the name of Waterloo, a village four miles nearer to Brussels, where Wellington wrote his despatch. He accepted battle in full reliance upon the help of the Prussians, who are not therefore to be considered as having saved him from defeat.
    Military writers point out several errors, some of them considerable, committed by Wellington, but their criticism of Napoleon, which begins by sweeping away a mass of falsehood devised by him and his admirers in order to throw the blame on others, is so crushing that it seems to show us Napoleon, after his brilliant commencement, acting as an indolent and inefficient general. He first, though mere want of energy, allows the Prussians to escape him after Ligny, and then sends Marshal Grouchy with 30,000 men in the wrong direction in pursuit of them. Owing to this mismanagement, Grouchy is at Wavre on the day of Waterloo, fighting a useless battle against the Prussian corps of Thielmann, while Blucher is enabled to keep his engagement to Wellington. Everywhere during these days Napoleon appears negligent, inactive, inaccessible, and rather a Darius than an Alexander, so that it has been plausibly maintained that he must have been physically incapacitated by illness. The battle itself was one of the most remarkable and terrible fought, but it was perhaps on both sides rather a soldiers' than a general's battle. It consisted of five distinct attacks on the English position: - (1) an attack on the English right by the division Reille, (2) an attack on the left by the division D'Erlon (here Picton was killed), (3) a grand cavalry attack, where the splendid French cavalry ‘foamed itself away' upon the English squares, (4) a successful attack by Ney on La Haye Sainte (which Wellington is thought to have too much neglected; it was after this that the French prospect seemed brightest), (5) the charge of the guard. In the middle of the third act of this drama the Prussians began to take part in the action. The battle seems to have begun about 11.30, and about 8 o'clock in the evening the cry ‘Sauve qui peut' arose from the guard. A general advance of the English decided the victory, and then the pursuit was very thoroughly accomplished by the Prussians under Gneisenau. Napoleon at first took refuge in a square. At Genappe he left this, and arrived at Charleroi about daybreak with an escort of about twenty horsemen.

    He lost probably more than 30,000 out of 72,000 men, but the grand army was utterly dissolved. The whole loss of the allies was somewhat more than 22,000. Had Napoleon been victorious, he would have opened the war prosperously, for half a million soldiers, in addition to those of Wellington and Blucher, were on the march for France; being completely defeated, he had no resource, but was ruined at once. France was conquered, as she had been conquered the year before; but her second fall appears far more humiliating and dismal than her first, when we consider how enthusiastically she had rallied to Napoleon, and how instantaneously Napoleon and she had been struck down together. It was a moment of unrelieved despair for the public men who gathered round him in his return to Paris, and among these were several whose fame was of earlier date than his own. La Fayette, the man of 1789; Carnot, organiser of victory to the Convention; Lucien, who had decided the revolution of Brumaire, - all these met in that comfortless deliberation. Carnot was for a dictatorship of public safety, that is, for renewing his great days of 1793; Lucien too liked the Roman sound of the word dictator. 'Dare!' he said to his brother, but the spring of that terrible will was broken at last. ‘I have dared too much already', said Napoleon. Meanwhile, in the Chamber of Representatives the word was not dictatorship but liberty. Here La Fayette caused the assembly to vote itself permanent, and to declare guilty of high treason whoever should attempt to dissolve it. He hinted that, if the word abdication were not soon pronounced on the other side, he would himself pronounce the word ‘decheance.' The second abdication took place on June 22. ‘I offer myself a sacrifice to the hatred of the enemies of France. My public life is finished, and I proclaim my son, under the title of Napoleon II., Emperor of the French.' On the 25th he retired to Malmaison, where Josephine had died the year before. He had by no means yet ceased to hope. When his son was passed over by the Chamber of Representatives, who named an executive commission of five, he protested that he had not intended to make way for a new Directory; and, as Carnot and Caulaincourt were on this commission, the circumstances of Brumaire seem to have flashed into his memory. He saw again two Directors supporting him, and the other three (Fouche, Grenier, and Quinette – ‘a traitor and two babies,' as he expressed it) might remind him of Barras, Moulins, and Gohier. On the 27th he went so far as to offer his services once more as general ‘regarding myself still as the first soldier of the nation.' He was met by a refusal, and left Malmaison on the 29th for Rochefort, well furnished with books on the United States.
    France was by this time entering upon another Reign of Terror. Massacre had begun at Marseille as early as the 25th. What should Napoleon do? He had been formerly the enemy of every other nation, and now he was the worst enemy, if not of France, yet of the triumphant faction in France. He lingered some days at Rochefort, where he had arrived on July 3, and then, finding it impossible to escape the vigilance of the English cruisers, went on the 15th on board the ‘Bellerophon' and surrendered himself to Captain Maitland. It was explained to him that no conditions could be accepted, but that he would be ‘conveyed to England to be received in such manner as the Prince Regent should deem expedient.' He had written at the Ile d'Aix the following characteristic letter to the Prince Regent:- ‘Royal Highness, - A prey to the factions which divide my country and to the enmity of the powers of Europe, I have terminated my public career, and I come, like Themistocles, to seat myself at the hearth of the British people. I place myself under the protection of its laws, which I claim from your Royal Highness as the most powerful, the most constant, and the most generous of my enemies.'
    It was perhaps the only course open to him. In France his life could scarcely have been spared, and Blucher talked of executing him on the spot where the Duc d'Enghien had fallen. He therefore could do nothing but what he did. His reference to Themistocles shows that he was conscious of being the worst enemy that England had ever had. Perhaps he remembered that at the rupture of the treaty of Amiens he had studied to envenom the contest by detaining the English residents in France. Still he might reflect, on the other hand, that England was the only great country which had not been trampled down and covered with massacre by his soldiers. It would have been inexcusable if the English Government had given way to vindictive feelings, especially as they could well afford to be magnanimous, having just won the greatest of all victories. But it was necessary to deprive him of the power of exciting new wars, and the experiment of Elba had shown that this involved depriving him of his liberty. The frenzy which had cost the lives of millions must be checked. This was the principle laid down in the declaration of March 15, by which he had been excommunicated as a public enemy. It was therefore necessary to impose some restraint upon him. He must be separated from his party and from all the revolutionary party in Europe. So long as he remained in Europe this would involve positive imprisonment. The only arrangement therefore which would allow him tolerable personal comfort and enjoyment of life was to send him out of Europe. From these considerations grew the decision of the Government to send him to St Helena. An Act of Parliament was passed ‘for the better detaining in custody Napoleon Bonaparte,' and another Act for subjecting St Helena to a special system of government.
    He was kept on board the ‘Bellerophon' till August 4, when he was transferred to the ‘Northumberland'. On October 15 he arrived at St Helena, accompanied by Counts Montholon, Las Cases, and Bertrand, with their families, General Gourgaud, and a number of servants. In April 1816 arrived Sir Hudson Lowe, an officer who had been knighted for bringing the news of the capture of Paris in 1814, as governor.
    The rest of his life, which continued till May 5, 1821, was occupied partly in quarrels with this governor, which have now lost their interest, partly in the task he had undertaken at the time of his first abdication, that of relating his past life. He did not himself write this narrative, nor does it appear that he even dictated it word for word. It is a report made partly by General Gourgaud, partly by Count Montholon, of Napoleon's impassioned recitals; but they assure us that this report, as published, has been read and corrected throughout by him. It gives a tolerably complete account of the period between the siege of Toulon and the battle of Marengo. On the later period there is little, except a memoir on the campaign of 1815, to which the editors of the Correspondence have been able to add another on Elba and the Hundred Days.
    These memoirs have often been compared to the Commentaries of Caesar, and their value would indeed be priceless, if they related to a period imperfectly known. But an age which has abundance of information, and takes history very seriously, is struck particularly by the elaborate falsifications which they contain. A vast number of misstatements, many of them evidently intentional, have been brought home to him, and in several cases he has tried to foist into history apocryphal documents.
    By dwelling almost exclusively upon the earliest period and on the Waterloo campaign, they helped forward the process by which he was idealised after his death. They reminded the world that the Prometheus now agonising on the lonely rock, who had lately fallen in defending a free nation against a coalition of kings and emperors, was the same who, in his youth, had been the champion of the First French Republic against the First Coalition. They consigned the long interval to oblivion. Hence the Napoleonic legend, which has grown up in the very midst of the 19th century, and would perhaps never have been seriously shaken but for the failure of the Second Empire. Look at Napoleon's career between 1803 and 1914, when it was shaped most freely by his own will; you see a republic skilfully undermined and a new hereditary monarchy set up in its place. This new monarchy stands out as the great enemy and oppressor of nationalities, so that the nationality movement, when it begins in Spain and Tyrol and spreads through North Germany, is a reaction against Napoleon's tyranny. But in 1815 he succeeded in posing as a champion and martyr of the nationality principle against the Holy Alliance. The curtain fell upon this pose. It brought back the memory of that Bonaparte, who at the end of the 18th century had seemed the antique republican hero dreamed of by Rousseau, and men forgot once more how completely he had disappointed their expectations. By looking only at the beginning and at the end of his career, and by disregarding all the intermediate period, an imaginary Napoleon has been obtained, who is a republican, not a despot, a lover of liberty, not an authoritarian, a champion of the Revolution, not the destroyer of the Revolution, a hero of independence, not a conqueror, a friend of the people, not a contemner of the people, a man of heart and virtue, not a ruthless militarist, cynic, and Machiavellian. This illusion led to the restoration of the Napoleonic dynasty in 1852.
    He died of a cancer in the stomach in May 5, 1821. In his will he declared himself a Catholic, wished his ashes to repose ‘on the banks of the Seine, in the midst of the French people whom he had loved so well' spoke tenderly of Marie Louise and his son, and of all his relatives except Louis, whom he ‘pardoned' for the libel he published in 1820, disavowed the Manuscript de Sainte Helene, a mystification which had recently had much success, defended the execution of D'Enghien, imputed the two conquests of France to Marmont, Augereau, Talleyrand, and La Fayette, whom he ‘forgave,' and devoted the English oligarchy, to whom he ascribed his premature death, to the vengeance of the English people. In a codicil he added a truly Corsican touch, bequeathing 10,000 francs to the subaltern officer Cantillon, ‘who has undergone a trial upon the charge of having endeavoured to assassinate Lord Wellington, of which he was pronounced innocent. Cantillon had as much right to assassinate that oligarchist as the latter had to send me to perish upon the rock of St Helena.'
    He was buried at Longwood in St Helena; but in the reign of Louis Philippe his remains were removed by permission of the English Government to the Invalides at Paris, where a stately dome was erected over the sarcophagus that contains them.