especially that typical emigre, the Comte d’Artois, were nothing if not tactless, witness their shelving of the Old Guard and formation of the Maison du Roi, a privileged and highly paid corps of 6,000 nobles and royalist gentlemen.  The peasants, too, were uneasy, especially those who held the lands of nobles confiscated in the Revolution.  To indemnify the former owners was impossible in face of the torrent of exorbitant claims that flowed in.  And the year 1814, which began as a soul-stirring epic, ended with sordid squabbles worthy of a third-rate farce.

Moreover, at this very time, the former allies seemed on the brink of war.  The limits of our space admit only of the briefest glance at the disputes of the Powers at the Congress of Vienna.  The storm centre of Europe was the figure of the Czar.  To our ambassador at Vienna, Sir Charles Stewart, he declared his resolve to keep western Poland and never to give up 7,000,000 of his “Polish subjects."[459] Strange to say, he ultimately gained the assent of Prussia to this objectionable scheme, provided that she acquired the whole of Saxony, while Frederick Augustus was to be transplanted to the Rhineland with Bonn as capital.  To these proposals Austria, England, and France offered stern opposition, and framed a secret compact (January 3rd, 1815) to resist them, if need be, with armies amounting to 450,000 men.  But, though swords were rattled in their scabbards, they were not drawn.  When news reached Vienna of the activity of Bonapartists in France and of Murat in Italy, the Powers agreed (February 8th) to the Saxon-Polish compromise which took shape in the map of Eastern Europe.  The territorial arrangements in the west were evidently inspired by the wish to build up bulwarks against France.  Belgium was tacked on to Holland; Germany was huddled into a Confederation, in which the princes had complete sovereign powers; and the Kingdom of Sardinia grew to more than its former bulk by recovering Savoy and Nice and gaining Genoa.

This piling up of artificial barriers against some future Napoleon was to serve the designs of the illustrious exile himself.  The instinct of nationality, which his blows had aroused to full vigour, was now outraged by the sovereigns whom it carried along to victory.  Belgians strongly objected to Dutch rule, and German “Unitarians,” as Metternich dubbed them, spurned a form of union which subjected the Fatherland to Austria and her henchmen.  Hardest of all was the fate of Italy.  After learning the secret of her essential unity under Napoleon, she was now parcelled out among her former rulers; and thrills of rage shot through the peninsula when the Hapsburgs settled down at Venice and Milan, while their scions took up the reins at Modena, Parma, and Florence.