from the French royalists, as also did the Duc d’Angouleme, who arrived soon after.  The young prince at once proclaimed Louis XVIII.  King of France, and allowed the royalist mayor to declare that the allies were advancing to Paris merely in order to destroy Napoleon and replace him by the rightful monarch.  Strongly as Wellington’s sympathies ran with the aim of this declaration, he emphatically repudiated it.  Etiquette compelled him to do so; for the allies were still negotiating with Napoleon; and his own tact warned him that the Bourbons must never come into France under the cloak of the allies.

The allied sovereigns had as yet done nothing to favour their cause; and the wiser heads among the French royalists saw how desirable it was that the initiative should come from France.  The bad effects of the Bordeaux manifesto were soon seen in the rallying of National Guards and peasants to the tricolour against the hated fleur-de-lys; and Beresford’s men could do little more than hold their own.[437] If that was the case in the monarchical south, what might not Napoleon hope to effect in the east, now that the Bourbon “chimaera” threatened to become a fact?

The news as to the state of Paris was less satisfactory.  That fickle populace cheered royalist allusions at the theatres, hissed off an “official” play that represented Cossack marauders,[438] and caused such alarm to Savary that he wrote to warn his master of the inability of the police to control the public if the war rolled on towards Paris.  Whether Savary’s advice was honestly stupid, or whether, as Lavalette hints, Talleyrand’s intrigues were undermining his loyalty to Napoleon, it is difficult to say.  But certainly the advice gave Napoleon an additional reason for flinging himself on Schwarzenberg’s rear and drawing him back into Lorraine.  He had reason to hope that Augereau, reinforced by some of Suchet’s troops, would march towards Dijon and threaten the Austrians on the south, while he himself pressed on them from the north-east.  In that case, would not Austria make peace, and leave Alexander and Bluecher at his mercy?  And might he not hope to cut off the Comte d’Artois, and possibly also catch Bernadotte, who had been angling unsuccessfully for popular support in the north-east?

But, while basing all his hopes on the devotion of the French peasantry and the pacific leanings of Austria, the French Emperor left out of count the eager hatred of the Czar and the Prussians.  “Bluecher would be mad if he attempted any serious movement,” so Napoleon wrote to Berthier on the 20th, apparently on the strength of his former suggestion that Joseph should persuade Bernadotte to desert the allies and attack Bluecher’s rear.[439] At least, it is difficult to find any other reason for Napoleon’s strange belief that Bluecher would sit still while his allies were being beaten; unless, indeed, we accept Marmont’s explanation that Napoleon’s brain now rejected all unpleasing news and registered wishes as facts.