“Madame, and my very dear wife,—­

I send you twenty banners taken by my army at the battles of Wachau, Leipzig, and Hanau.  This is an homage it gives me pleasure to render to you.  I desire that you will accept it as a mark of my entire satisfaction with the manner in which you have administered the regency which I confided to you.”

Under the Consulate and during the first six years of the Empire, whenever the Emperor had returned to Paris after a campaign, it was because that campaign was finished, and the news of a peace concluded in consequence of a victory had always preceded him.  For a second time he returned from Mayence under different circumstances.  In this case, as on the return from Smorghoni, he left the war still in progress, and returned, not for the purpose of presenting to France the fruit of his victories, but to demand new subsidies of men and money in order to repair the defeat and losses sustained by our army.  Notwithstanding this difference in the result of our wars, the welcome accorded to his Majesty by the nation was still the same, apparently at least; and the addresses by the different towns of the interior were not less numerous, nor less filled with expressions of devotion; and those especially who were the prey of fears for the future showed themselves even more devoted than all others, fearing lest their fatal premonitions should be discovered.  For my own part, it had never occurred to me that the Emperor could finally succumb in the struggle he was maintaining; for my ideas had never reached this point, and it is only in reflecting upon it since that I have been able to comprehend the dangers which threatened him at the period we had now reached.  He was like a man who had passed the night on the edge of a precipice, totally unaware of the danger to which he was exposed until it was revealed by the light of day.  Nevertheless, I may say that every one was weary of the war, and that all those of my friends whom I saw on the return from Mayence spoke to me of the need of peace.

Within the palace itself I heard many persons attached to the Emperor say the same thing when he was not present, though they spoke very differently in the presence of his Majesty.  When he deigned to interrogate me, as he frequently did, on what I had heard people say, I reported to him the exact truth; and when in these confidential toilet conversations of the Emperor I uttered the word peace, he exclaimed again and again, “Peace!  Peace!  Ah! who can desire it more than I?  There are some, however, who do not desire it, and the more I concede the more they demand.”