personal safety in a fishing vessel, which landed him near Toulon, about the end of May.  Napoleon was in vain entreated to receive him at Paris.  He refused, asking, with bitter scorn—­if the war between France and Naples, which subsisted in 1814, had ever been terminated by treaty?  Murat lingered for some time in obscurity near Toulon; and, relanding on the coast of Naples after the King of the Two Sicilies had been re-established on that throne, in the vain hope of exciting an insurrection and recovering what he had lost, was seized, tried, and executed.  This vain, but high-spirited, man, met his fate with heroic fortitude; and Napoleon, at St. Helena, often said that the fortune of the world might have been changed, had there been a Murat to head the French cavalry at Waterloo.

The result of this rash expedition enabled Austria to concentrate all her Italian forces also for the meditated re-invasion of France.  The Spanish army began to muster towards the passes of the Pyrenees:  the Russians, Swedes, and Danes were already advancing from the north:  the main armies of Austria, Bavaria, and the Rhenish princes were rapidly consolidating themselves along the Upper Rhine.  Blucher was once more in command of the Prussians, in the Netherlands; and Wellington, commanding in chief the British, Hanoverians, and Belgians, had also established his headquarters at Brussels by the end of May.  Every hour the clouds were thickening apace, and it became evident, that, if Napoleon remained much longer in Paris, the war would burst simultaneously on every frontier of his empire.

He had no intention to abide at home the onset of his enemies; but the situation of civil affairs was such as to embarrass him, in the prospect of departure, with difficulties which, in former days, were not used to perplex the opening of his campaigns.

Hard indeed was his task from the beginning—­to conciliate to himself heartily the political faction who detested, and had assisted in overthrowing the government of the Bourbons, and this without chilling the attachment of the military, who despised these coadjutors, both as theorists and as civilians, and had welcomed Napoleon only as the certain harbinger of war, revenge, and plunder.  How little his soldiery were disposed to consider him as owing anything to a civil revolution, appeared almost from the commencement of his march from Cannes.  It was observed that these haughty bands moved on in contemptuous silence whenever the populace cheered his approach, and shouted Vive l’Empereur only when there were no pequin[71] voices to mingle in the clamour.  Every act of Napoleon after he reached Paris, that was meant to conciliate the common people of the capital, was the theme of angry comment among these martial circles.  Such measures as he adopted in deference to the prejudices of the old republican party, were heard of with equal contempt.  The pacific language of his first proclamations was considered as a fair stratagem—­and no more.  To them the man was nothing but as the type of the system:  they desired to hear of nothing in France but the great Caesar, and the legions to whom he owed his greatness, and who had the same right to a new career of battles, as he to his Imperial crown, at once the prize of past, and the pledge of future victories.