Guard, he formed a body of household troops, composed of gentlemen, and entrusted them with the immediate attendance on his person and court, this was considered as a heinous insult; and when the King bestowed the cross of the Legion of Honour on persons who would have much preferred that of St. Louis, the only comment that obtained among the warriors of Austerlitz and Friedland, was, that which ascribed to the Bourbons a settled design of degrading the decoration which they had purchased with their blood.

In a word, the French soldiery remained cantoned in the country in a temper stern, gloomy, and sullen; jealous of the Prince whose bread they were eating; eager to wipe out the memory of recent disasters in new victories; and cherishing more and more deeply the notion (not perhaps unfounded) that had Napoleon not been betrayed at home, no foreigners could ever have hurled him from his throne.  Nor could such sentiments fail to be partaken, more or less, by the officers of every rank who had served under Buonaparte.  They felt, almost universally, that it must be the policy of the Bourbons to promote, as far as possible, others rather than themselves.  And even as to those of the very highest class—­could any peaceful honours compensate, to such spirits as Ney and Soult, for a revolution, that for ever shrouded in darkness the glittering prizes on which Napoleon had encouraged them to speculate?  Were the comrades of Murat and Bernadotte to sit down in contentment as peers of France, among the Montmorencies and the Rohans, who considered them at the best as low-born intruders, and scorned, in private society, to acknowledge them as members of their order?  If we take into account the numerous personal adherents whom the Imperial government, with all the faults of its chief, must have possessed—­and the political humiliation of France, in the eyes of all Europe, as well as of the French people themselves, immediately connected with the disappearance of Napoleon—­we shall have some faint conception of that mass of multifarious griefs and resentments, in the midst of which the unwieldy and inactive Louis occupied, ere long, a most unenviable throne—­and on which the eagle-eyed Exile of Elba gazed with reviving hope even before the summer of 1814 had reached its close.

Ere then, as we have seen, the demeanour and conduct of Napoleon were very different from what they had been when he first took possession of his mimic empire.  Ere then his mother, his sister Pauline (a woman, whose talents for intrigue equalled her personal charms), and not a few ancient and attached servants, both of his civil government and of his army, had found their way to Elba, and figured in “his little senate.”  Pauline made repeated voyages to Italy, and returned again.  New and busy faces appeared in the circle of Porto Ferraio—­and disappeared forthwith—­no one knew whence they had come or whither they went; an air of bustle and of mystery pervaded the atmosphere of the place.