domestic administration and of military ambition, and desirous of nothing but the opportunity of devoting, to the true welfare of peaceful France, those unrivalled talents and energies which he had been rash enough to abuse in former days.  With these suggestions they mingled statements perhaps still more audacious.  According to them, Napoleon had landed with the hearty approbation of the Austrian court, and would be instantly rejoined by the Empress and his son.  The Czar also was friendly; even England had been sounded ere the adventure began, and showed no disposition to hazard another war for the sake of the Bourbons.  The King of Prussia, indeed, remained hostile—­but France was not sunk so low as to dread that state single-handed.  It was no secret, ere this time, that some disputes of considerable importance had sprung up among the great powers whose representatives were assembled at Vienna; and such was the rash credulity of the Parisians, that the most extravagant exaggerations and inventions which issued from the saloon of the Duchess de St. Leu (under which name Hortense Beauharnois, wife of Louis Buonaparte, had continued to reside in Paris)—­and from other circles of the same character, found, to a certain extent, credence.  There was one tale which ran louder and louder from the tongue of every Buonapartist, and which royalist and republican found, day after day, new reason to believe; namely, that the army were, high and low, on the side of Napoleon; that every detachment sent to intercept him, would but swell his force; in a word, that—­unless the people were to rise en masse—­nothing could prevent the outlaw from taking possession of the Tuileries ere a fortnight more had passed over the head of Louis.

It was at Lyons, where Napoleon remained from the 10th to the 13th, that he formally resumed the functions of civil government.  He published various decrees at this place; one, commanding justice to be administered everywhere in his name after the 15th; another abolishing the Chambers of the Peers and the Deputies, and summoning all the electoral colleges to meet in Paris at a Champ-de-Mai,[70] there to witness the coronation of Maria Louisa and of her son, and settle definitively the constitution of the state; a third, ordering into banishment all whose names had not been erased from the list of emigrants prior to the abdication of Fontainebleau; a fourth, depriving all strangers and emigrants of their commissions in the army; a fifth, abolishing the order of St. Louis, and bestowing all its revenues on the Legion of Honour; and a sixth, restoring to their authority all magistrates who had been displaced by the Bourbon government.  These proclamations could not be prevented from reaching Paris; and the Court, abandoning their system of denying or extenuating the extent of the impending danger, began to adopt more energetic means for its suppression.