The Empire fell, and Beranger hesitated for some time to take part against the Bourbons.  It was not till after the battle of Waterloo and the return of Louis XVIII. under convoy of the allied armies, that he began to feel the passion of patriotism blaze up anew within him and dictate stinging songs which soon became darts of steel.  Meanwhile he wrote pretty songs, in which a slight sentiment of melancholy mingled with and heightened the intoxication of wine and pleasure. La bonne Vieille is his chef-d’oeuvre in this style.  He arranged the design of these little pieces carefully, sketching his subjects beforehand, and herein belongs to the French school, that old classic school which left nothing to chance.  He composed his couplets slowly, even those which seem the most easy.  Commonly the song came to him through the refrain;—­he caught the butterfly by the wings;—­when he had seized the refrain, he finished at intervals, and put in the nicer shadings at leisure.  He wrote hardly ten songs a year at the time of his greatest fecundity.  It has since been remarked that they smell of the lamp here and there; but at first no one had eyes except for the rose, the vine, and the laurel.

The Bourbons, brought back for the second time in 1815, committed all manner of blunders:  they insulted the remains of the old grande armee; they shot Marshal Ney and many others; a horrible royalist reaction ensanguined the South of France.  The Jesuit party insinuated itself at Court, and assumed to govern as in the high times of the confessors of Louis XIV.  It was hoped to conquer the spirit of the Revolution, and to drive modern France back to the days before 1789; hence thousands of hateful things impossible to be realized, and thousands of ridiculous ones.  Towards 1820 the liberal opposition organized itself in the Chambers and in the press.  The Muse of Beranger came to its assistance under the mask of gay raillery.  He was the angry bee that stung flying, and whose stings are not harmless; nay, he would fain have made them mortal to the enemy.  He hated even Louis XVIII., a king who was esteemed tolerably wise, and more intelligent than his party.  “I stick my pins,” said Beranger, “into the calves of Louis XVIII.”  One must have seen the fat king in small-clothes, his legs as big as posts and round as pin-cushions, to appreciate all the point of the epigram.

Beranger had been very intimate since 1815 with the Deputy Manuel, a man of sense and courage, but very hostile to the Bourbons, and who, for words spoken from the Tribune, was expelled from the Chamber of Deputies and declared incapable of reelection.  Though intimate with many influential members of the opposition, such as Laffitte the banker, and General Sebastiani, it was only with Manuel that Beranger perfectly agreed.  It is by his side, in the same tomb, that he now reposes in Pere la Chaise, and after the death of Manuel he always slept on the mattress upon which