Introspection, however, was alien to his being; he was made for the camp rather than the study; his critical powers, if turned in for a time on himself, quickly swung back to work upon men and affairs; and they found the needed exercise in organizing his Liliputian Empire and surveying the course of European politics.  In the first weeks he was up at dawn, walking or riding about Porto Ferrajo and its environs, planning better defences, or tracing out new roads and avenues of mulberry trees.  “I have never seen a man,” wrote Campbell, “with so much activity and restless perseverance:  he appears to take pleasure in perpetual movement, and in seeing those who accompany him sink under fatigue.”  About seven hundred of his Guards were brought over on British transports; and these, along with Corsicans and Tuscans, guarded him against royalist plotters, real or supposed.  In a short time he purchased a few small vessels, and annexed the islet of Pianosa.  These affairs and the formation of an Imperial Court for the delectation of his mother and his sister Pauline, who now joined him, served to drive away ennui; but he bitterly resented the Emperor Francis’s refusal to let his wife and son come to him.  Whether Marie Louise would have come is more than doubtful, for her relations to Count Neipperg were already notorious; but the detention of his son was a heartless action that aroused general sympathy for the lonely man.  The Countess Walewska paid him a visit for some days, bringing the son whom she had borne him.[458]

Meanwhile Europe was settling down uneasily on its new political foundations.  Considering that France had been at the mercy of the allies, she had few just grounds of complaint against them.  The Treaties of Paris (May 30th, 1814) left her with rather wider bounds than those of 1791; and she kept the art treasures reft by Napoleon.  Perfidious Albion yielded up all her French colonial conquests, except Mauritius, Tobago, and St. Lucia.  Britons grumbled at the paltry gains brought by a war that had cost more than L600,000,000:  but Castlereagh justified the policy of conciliation.  “It is better,” said he, “for France to be commercial and pacific than a warlike and conquering State.”  We insisted on her ceding Belgium to the House of Orange, while we retained the Dutch colonies conquered by us, the Cape, Demerara, and Curacoa—­paying L6,000,000 for them.

The loss of the Netherlands, the Rhineland, and Italy galled French pride.  Loud were the murmurs of the throngs of soldiers that came from the fortresses of Germany, or the prisons of Spain, Russia, and England—­70,000 crossed over from our shores alone—­at the harshness of the allies and the pusillanimity of the Bourbons.  The return from war to peace is always hard; and now these gaunt warriors came back to a little France that perforce discharged them or placed them on half-pay.  Perhaps they might have been won over by a tactful Court:  but the Bourbons,