He counted on some such change in public opinion; and it enabled him to defy with impunity the beginnings of a Parliamentary opposition.  The Senate had been puffily obsequious, as usual; but the Corps Legislatif had mistaken its functions.  Summoned to vote new taxes, it presumed to give advice.  A commission of its members agreed to a report on the existing situation, drawn up by Laine, which gave the Emperor great offence.  Its crime lay in its outspoken requests that peace should be concluded on the basis of the natural frontiers, that the rigours of the conscription should be abated, and that the laws which guaranteed the free exercise of political rights should be maintained intact.  The Emperor was deeply incensed, and, despite the advice of his Ministers, determined to dissolve the Chamber forthwith (December 31st).  Not content with this exercise of arbitrary power, he subjected its members to a barrack-like rebuke at the official reception on New Year’s Day.—­He had convoked them to do good, and they had done evil.  Two battles lost in Champagne would not have been so harmful as their last action.  What was their mandate compared with his?  France had twice chosen him by some millions of votes:  while they were nominated only by a few hundreds apiece.  They had flung mud at him:  but he was a man who might be slain, never dishonoured.  He would fight for the nation, hurl back the foe, and conclude an honourable peace.  Then, for their shame, he would print and circulate their report.—­Such was the gist of this diatribe, which he shot forth in strident tones and with flashing eyes.  He had the copies of the report destroyed, and dismissed the deputies to their homes throughout France.

The country, in the main, took his side; and doubtless the national instinct was sound; for the allies had crossed the Rhine, and France once more was in danger.  As in 1793, when the nation welcomed the triumph of the dare-devil Jacobins over the respectable parliamentary Girondins, as promising a vigorous rule and the expulsion of the monarchical invaders, so now the soldiers and peasants, if not the middle classes, rejoiced at the discomfiture of the talkers by the one necessary man of action.  The general feeling was pithily expressed by an old peasant:  “It’s no longer a question of Bonaparte.  Our soil is invaded:  let us go and fight.”

This was the feeling which the Emperor ruthlessly exploited.  He decreed the enrolment of a great force of National Guards, exacted further levies for the regular army, and ordered a levee en masse for the eastern Departments.  The difficulties in his way were enormous.  But he flung himself at the task with incomparable verve.  Soldiers were wanting:  youths were dragged forth, even from the royalist districts of the extreme north and west and south.  Money was wanting:  it was extorted from all quarters, and Napoleon not only lavished 55,000,000 francs from his own private hoard, but seized that of his parsimonious mother.[397] Cannon, muskets, uniforms were wanting:  their manufacture was pushed on with feverish haste:  Napoleon ordered his War Office to “procure all the cloth in France, good and bad,” so as to have 200,000 uniforms ready by the end of February; and he counted on having half a million of effectives in the field at the close of spring.