On the evening of the 20th of March, Napoleon once more entered Paris.  He came preceded and followed by the soldiery, on whom alone he had relied, and who, by whatever sacrifices, had justified his confidence.  The streets were silent as the travel-worn cavalcade passed along; but all that loved the name or the cause of Napoleon were ready to receive him in the Tuileries; and he was almost stifled by the pressure of those enthusiastic adherents, who the moment he stopped, mounted him on their shoulders, and carried him so in triumph up the great staircase of the palace.  He found, in the apartments which the King had just vacated, a brilliant assemblage of those who had in former times filled the most prominent places in his own councils and court:  among the rest was Fouche.  This personage was not the only one present who had recently intrigued with the Bourbons against Buonaparte—­with as much apparent ardour, and perhaps with about as much honesty, as in other times he had ever brought to the service of the Emperor.  “Gentlemen,” said Napoleon, as he walked round the circle, “it is disinterested people who have brought me back to my capital.  It is the subalterns and the soldiers that have done it all.  I owe everything to the people and the army.”

[Footnote 69:  The allusion is to Marmont’s conduct at Essonne, and Augereau’s hasty abandonment of Lyons when the Austrians approached it in March, 1814.]

[Footnote 70:  Napoleon took the idea and name of this assembly from the history of the early Gauls.]

CHAPTER XXXIX

The Hundred Days—­Declaration of the Congress at Vienna—­Napoleon prepares for War—­Capitulation of the Duke d’Angouleme—­Insurrection of La Vendee—­Murat advances from Naples—­Is Defeated—­And takes refuge in France—­The Champ-de-Mai—­Dissatisfaction of the Constitutionalists.

The reports so zealously circulated by the Buonapartists, that some at least of the great European powers were aware, and approved, of the meditated debarkation at Cannes—­and the hopes thus nourished among the French people, that the new revolution would not disturb the peace of the world—­were very speedily at an end.  The instant that the news of Napoleon’s daring movement reached Vienna, the Congress published a proclamation in these words:—­“By breaking the convention which established him in Elba, Buonaparte destroys the only legal title on which his existence depended.  By appearing again in France, with projects of confusion and disorder, he has deprived himself of the protection of the law, and manifested to the universe that there can be neither peace nor truce with him.  The powers consequently declare that Napoleon Buonaparte has placed himself without the pale of civil and social relations, and that, as an enemy and disturber of the tranquillity of the world, he has rendered himself liable to public vengeance.”  These sentiments underwent no