I have already mentioned that in the month of August the King named me Councillor of State.  On the 19th of the following month I was appointed Minister of State and member of the Privy Council.  I may close these volumes by relating a circumstance very flattering to me, and connected with the last-mentioned nomination.  The King had directed M. de Talleyrand to present to him, in his official character of President of the Council of Ministers, a list of the persons who might be deemed suitable as members of the Privy Council.  The King having read the list, said to his Minister, “But, M. de Talleyrand, I do not see here the names of two of our best friends, Bourrienne and Alexis de Noailles.”—­“Sire, I thought their nomination would seem more flattering in coming directly from your Majesty.”  The King then added my name to the list, and afterwards that of the Comte Alexis de Noailles, so that both our names are written in Louis XVIII.’s own hand in the original Ordinance.

I have now brought to a conclusion my narrative of the extraordinary events in which I have taken part, either as a spectator or an actor, during the course of a strangely diversified life, of which nothing now remains but recollections.

   —­[I discharged the functions of Councillor of State until 1818, at
   which time an Ordinance appeared declaring those functions
   Incompatible with the title of Minister of State—­Bourrienne.]—­

CHAPTER XII.

The cent Jours.

The extraordinary rapidity of events during the Cent fours, or Hundred Days of Napoleon’s reign in 1815, and the startling changes in the parts previously filled by the chief personages, make it difficult to consider it as an historical period; it more resembles a series of sudden theatrical transformations, only broken by the great pause while the nation waited for news from the army.

The first Restoration of the Bourbons had been so unexpected, and was so rapidly carried out, that the Bonapartists, or indeed all France, had hardly realized the situation before Napoleon was again in the Tuileries; and during the Cent Jours both Bonapartists and Royalists were alike rubbing their eyes, asking whether they were awake, and wondering which was the reality and which the dream, the Empire or the Restoration.

It is both difficult and interesting to attempt to follow the history of the chief characters of the period; and the reader must pardon some abrupt transitions from person to person, and from group to group, while the details of some subsequent movements of the Bonaparte family must be thrown in to give a proper idea of the strange revolution in their fortunes.  We may divide the characters with which we have to deal into five groups,—­the Bonaparte family, the Marshals, the Statesmen of the Empire, the Bourbons, and the Allied Monarchs.  One figure and one name will be missing, but if we omit all account of poor, bleeding, mutilated France, it is but leaving her in the oblivion in which she was left at the time by every one except by Napoleon.