He obeyed on that first Sunday after Waterloo, driving off quietly to Malmaison, there to be joined by Hortense Beauharnais and a few faithful friends.  At that ill-omened abode, where Josephine had breathed her last shortly after his first abdication, he spent four uneasy days.  At times he was full of fight.  He sent to the “Moniteur” a proclamation urging the army to make “some efforts more, and the Coalition will be dissolved.”  The manifesto was suppressed by Fouche’s orders.

Meanwhile the invaders pressed on rapidly towards Compiegne.  They met with no attempts at a national rising, a fact which proves the welcome accorded to Napoleon in March to have been mainly the outcome of military devotion and of the dislike generally felt for the Bourbons.  It is a libel on the French people to suppose that a truly national impulse in his favour would have vanished with a single defeat.  In vain did the Provisional Government sue for an armistice that would stay the advance.  Wellington refused outright; but Bluecher declared that he would consider the matter if Napoleon were handed over to him, dead or alive.  On hearing of this, Wellington at once wrote his ally a private remonstrance, which drew from Gneisenau a declaration that, as the Duke was held back by parliamentary considerations and by the wish to prolong the life of the villain whose career had extended England’s power, the Prussians would see to it that Napoleon was handed over to them for execution conformably to the declaration of the Congress of Vienna.[530]

But the Provisional Government acted honestly towards Napoleon.  On the 26th Fouche sent General Becker to watch over him and advise him to set out for Rochefort, en route to the United States, for which purpose passports were being asked from Wellington.  Becker found the ex-Emperor a prey to quickly varying moods.  At one time he seemed “sunk into a kind of mollesse, and very careful about his ease and comfort”:  he ate hugely at meals:  or again he affected a rather coarse joviality, showing his regard for Becker by pulling his ear.  His plans varied with his moods.  He declared he would throw himself into the middle of France and fight to the end, or that he would take ship at Rochefort with Bertrand and Savary alone, and steal past the English squadron; but when Mme. Bertrand exclaimed that this would be cruel to her, he readily gave up the scheme.[531]

It is not easy to gauge his feelings at this time.  Apart from one outburst to Lavalette of pity for France, he seems not to have realized how unspeakably disastrous his influence had been on the land which he found in a victoriously expansive phase, and now left prostrate at the feet of the allies and the Bourbons.  Hatred and contempt of the upper classes for their “fickle” desertion of him, these, if we may judge from his frequent allusions to the topic during the voyage, were the feelings uppermost in his mind; and this may explain why he wavered between the thought of staking all on a last effort against the allies and the plan of renewing in America the career now closed to him in Europe.