In Holland, no sooner had the story of Leipsig reached it than a complete, though bloodless revolution was effected.  The cry of orange boven, “up with the orange,” burst simultaneously from every part of the country:  the French governors, yielding to a power which they perceived the absurdity of attempting to resist, retired on the instant, and the long-exiled Stadtholder, the Prince of Orange, returning in triumph from England, assumed the administration of affairs in November, 1813.  A few French garrisons remained shut up in strong places, of which the most important was Bergen-op-Zoom; and Bernadotte now co-operated with the Russian corps of Witzingerode, the Prussians of Bulow, and a British force of 10,000, under Sir T. Graham,[65] with the view of completing the deliverance of Holland; which was ere long effected, with the exception of Bergen-op-Zoom, from whose walls the English were repulsed with dreadful slaughter.

On the side of Italy the aspect of affairs was almost as dark.  General Hiller, having conducted an Austrian army through the Tyrol, as soon as the decision of his government was taken, had defeated Eugene Beauharnois, and driven him behind the Adige.  The Croats, the Tyrolese, all the Illyrians were rising, and—­so far from giving aid in the defence of the French soil—­it was manifest that the Viceroy could hardly hope to maintain himself much longer in Lombardy.  An English naval force had already taken Trieste:  the Adriatic was free; and, to complete Napoleon’s perplexity as to this quarter, it was no longer a secret that Murat, his brother-in-law, his creature, was negotiating with Austria, and willing, provided that Naples were guaranteed to him, to array the force of that state also on the side of the confederacy.

As little comfort could Buonaparte derive if he turned to the Pyrenees.  He had sent Soult thither from Dresden, to retrieve if possible the fortunes of the army defeated in June at Vittoria; and that most able general, with considerable reinforcements, had entered Spain, and attempted to relieve the siege of Pamplona—­of which strong place, as well as St. Sebastian Lord Wellington had resolved to be master before he should pass the French frontier with his victorious army.  But Soult also had been twice defeated; the fortresses had fallen:  except a detached, and now useless force under Suchet in Catalonia, there remained no longer a single French soldier in Spain.  The Peninsula had at length been delivered by the genius of Wellington; and his army were cantoned within the territory of France ere the close of the campaign.  Such were the tidings which reached Napoleon from his Italian and Spanish frontiers, at the very moment when it was necessary for him to make head against the Russians, the Austrians, and the Germans, chiefly armed and supplied at the expense of England, and now rapidly concentrating in three great masses on different points of the valley of the Rhine.