Having uttered these furious words, Napoleon repaired to his council of state, and there denounced the legislative senate, as composed of one part of traitors and eleven of dupes. In place of assisting, said he, they impede me.  Our attitude alone could have repelled the enemy—­they invite him.  We should have presented a front of brass—­they lay open wounds to his view.  I will not suffer their report to be printed.  They have not done their duty, but I will do mine—­I dissolve the Legislative Senate.  And the Emperor did accordingly issue his decree, proroguing indefinitely that assembly, the last feeble shadow of popular representation in France.

The greatest confusion already began to pervade almost every department of the public service.  The orders of the government were more peremptory than ever, and they were hourly more neglected.  Whole bands of conscripts, guilty of endeavouring to escape, were tried by military commissions and decimated.  Even close to the barriers of Paris such executions were constantly going on; and all in vain.  The general feeling was that of sullen indifference.  Hireling musicians paraded the streets, singing fine-new ballads in honour of the Emperor, to the long-forgotten tune of ca ira; the passengers gathered round them, and drowned the strains in hooting and laughter.  In every saloon discussions such as the police had long suppressed were urged without ceremony. This will not continue; the cord is too much stretched—­it will soon be over; such was the universal language.  Talleyrand, hearing an officer express his alarm and astonishment, made answer in words which have passed into a proverb:—­It is the beginning of the end.

During this uneasy pause, Napoleon at last dismissed his venerable prisoner of Fontainebleau.  It is not unlikely that, in the altered state of Italy, he thought the arrival of the Pope might tend to produce some dissension among his enemies in that quarter; and, in effect, when Pius reached Rome, he found the capital of the Catholic world in the hands of Murat, who had ere then concluded his treaty with Francis, and was advancing into the north of Italy, in the view of co-operating in the campaign against Beauharnois, with the Austrians on the one side, and on the other, with an English force recently landed at Leghorn, under Lord William Bentinck.

He also unlocked the gates of Valencay on Ferdinand of Spain; and, without doubt, the letter, in which he announced this intention to his injured victim, will ever be recorded among the prime instances of his audacity.  He informed Ferdinand that the English were spreading jacobin principles in Spain, and attacking the foundations of the throne, the aristocracy, and the church; and that he, therefore, was anxious to see him at the head of affairs in the kingdom, provided he would expel the English, and re-establish its relations with France, on the footing of the peace which gave Godoy his title.  Ferdinand