The members of the adjourned Legislative Body went as usual to take leave of the Emperor, who received them on a Sunday, and after delivering to them the speech, which is very well known, dismissed the rebels with great ill-humour, refusing to hear any explanation.  “I have suppressed your address,” he began abruptly:  “it was incendiary.  I called you round me to do good—­you have done ill.  Eleven-twelfths of you are well-intentioned, the others, and above all M. Laine, are factious intriguers, devoted to England, to all my enemies, and corresponding through the channel of the advocate Deseze with the Bourbons.  Return to your Departments, and feel that my eye will follow you; you have endeavoured to humble me, you may kill me, but you shall not dishonour me.  You make remonstrances; is this a time, when the stranger invades our provinces, and 200,000 Cossacks are ready to overflow our country?  There may have been petty abuses; I never connived at them.  You, M. Raynouard, you said that.  Prince Massena robbed a man at Marseilles of his house.  You lie!  The General took possession of a vacant house, and my Minister shall indemnify the proprietor.  Is it thus that you dare affront a Marshal of France who has bled for his country, and grown gray in victory?  Why did you not make your complaints in private to me?  I would have done you justice.  We should wash our dirty linen at home, and not drag it out before the world.  You, call yourselves Representatives of the Nation.  It is not true; you are only Deputies of the Departments; a small portion of the State, inferior to the Senate, inferior even to the Council of State.  The Representatives of the People!  I am alone the Representative of the People.  Twice have 24,000,000 of French called me to the throne:  which of you durst undertake such a burden?  It had already overwhelmed (ecrase), your Assemblies, and your Conventions, your Vergniauds and your Guadets, your Jacobins and your Girondins.  They are all dead!  What, who are you? nothing—­all authority is in the Throne; and what is the Throne? this wooden frame covered with velvet?—­no, I am the Throne!  You have added wrong to reproaches.  You have talked of concessions—­concessions that even my enemies dared not ask!  I suppose if they asked Champaigne you would have had me give them La Brie besides; but in four months I will conquer peace, or I shall be dead!  You advise! how dare you debate of such high matters (de si graves interets)!  You have put me in the front of the battle as the cause of war—­it is infamous (c’est une atrocite).  In all your committees you have excluded the friends of Government—­ extraordinary commission—­committee of finance—­committee of the address, all, all my enemies.  M. Laine, I repeat it, is a traitor; he is a wicked man, the others are mere intriguers.  I do justice to the eleven-twelfths; but the factions I know, and will pursue.  Is it, I ask again, is it while the enemy is in France that you should have done this?