The Hundred Days were over.  The Allies once more poured into France, and in their train came back the poor, despised, antiquated Bourbons, identifying themselves with the common enemy, and becoming a byword and a reproach, which were to cling to them until they should be driven into hopeless banishment.  The King reentered Paris, accompanied by foreign soldiers.  I saw him pass the Boulevard, and I then hastened across the Garden to await his arrival at the Tuileries, standing near the spot where, three months before, I had seen Napoleon.  The tricolor was no longer there, but the white flag again floated over the place so full of historical recollections.  Louis XVIII soon reached this ancestral abode of his family, and having mounted, with some difficulty and expenditure of breath, to the second story, he waddled into the balcony which overlooked the crowd silently waiting for the expected speech, and, leaning ponderously on the railing, he kissed his hand, and said, in a loud voice, “Good day, my children.”  This was the exordiam, body, and peroration of his address, and it struck his audience so ludicrously, that a laugh spread among them, until it became general, and all seemed in the best possible humor.  The King laughed, too, evidently regarding his reception as highly flattering.  The affair turned out well, for the multitude parted in a merry mood, considering his Majesty rather a jolly old gentleman, and making sundry comparisons between him and the late tenant, illustrative of the difference between King Stork and King Log.

Paris was crowded with foreign soldiers.  The streets swarmed with them; their encampments filled the public gardens; they drilled in the open squares and on the Boulevards; their sentinels stood everywhere.  Their presence was a perpetual commentary on the vanity of that glory which is dependent on the sword.  They gazed at triumphal monuments erected to commemorate battles which had subjected their own countries to the iron rule of conquest.  They stood by columns on which the history of their defeat was cast from their captured cannon, and by arches whose friezes told a boastful tale of their subjugation.  They passed over bridges whose names reminded them of fields which had witnessed their headlong rout.  They strolled through galleries where the masterpieces of art hung as memorials that their political existence had been dependent on the will of a victorious foe.  Attempts were made to destroy these trophies of national degradation; but, in some instances, the skill of the architect and the fidelity of the builder were an overmatch for the hasty ire of an incensed soldiery, and withstood the attacks until admiration for the work brought shame on their efforts to demolish it.