Louis XVIII., advanced in years, gross and infirm in person, and devoted to the luxuries of the table, was, in spite of considerable talents and accomplishments, and a sincere desire to conciliate the affections, by promoting the interests, of all orders of his people, but ill-adapted for occupying, in such trying times, the throne which, even amidst all the blaze of genius and victory, Napoleon had at best found uneasy and insecure.[67] The King himself was, perhaps, less unpopular than almost any other member of his family; but it was his fatal misfortune, that while, on the whole, every day increased the bitterness of those who had never been sincerely his friends, it tended to chill the affections of the royalists who had partaken his exile, or laboured, ere success was probable, for his return.

Louis had been called to the throne by the French senate, in a decree which at the same time declared the legislative constitution, as composed of a hereditary sovereign and two houses of assembly, to be fixed and unchangeable; which confirmed the rights of all who had obtained property in consequence of the events of the Revolution, and the titles and orders conferred by Buonaparte:  in a word, which summoned the Bourbon to ascend the throne of Napoleon—­on condition that he should preserve that political system which Napoleon had violated.  Louis, however, though he proceeded to France on this invitation, did not hesitate to date his first act in the twentieth year of his reign; and though he issued a charter, conferring, as from his own free will, every privilege which the senate claimed for themselves and the nation, this mode of commencement could not fail to give deep offence to those, not originally of his party, who had consented to his recall.  These men saw, in such assumptions, the traces of those old doctrines of divine right, which they had through life abhorred and combated; and asked why, if all their privileges were but the gifts of the King, they might not, on any tempting opportunity, be withdrawn by the same authority?  They, whose possessions and titles had all been won since the death of Louis XVI., were startled when they found, that, according to the royal doctrine, there had been no legitimate government all that time in France.  The exiled nobles, meanwhile, were naturally the personal friends and companions of the restored princes:  their illustrious names, and, we must add, their superior manners, could not fail to excite unpleasant feelings among the new-made dukes and counts of Buonaparte.  Among themselves it was no wonder that expectations were cherished, and even avowed, of recovering gradually, if not rapidly, the estates of which the Revolution had deprived them.  The churchmen, who had never gone heartily into Napoleon’s ecclesiastical arrangements, sided of course with these impoverished and haughty lords; and, in a word, the first tumult of the restoration being over, the troops of the Allies withdrawn, and the memory of recent sufferings and disasters beginning to wax dim amidst the vainest and most volatile of nations, there were abundant elements of discontent afloat among all those classes who had originally approved of, or profited by, the revolution of 1792.