Historical Tales [calibre 5.4.1]

NAPOLEON’S RETURN FORM ELBA.

"Colonel," said Napoleon, "it is you who will replace me on the throne."

It was night when they reached Grenoble. The royalist authorities had closed the gates, but the ramparts were thronged with men. The darkness was profound, but Labédoyère called out loudly,—

"Soldiers, it is I, Labédoyère, colonel of the Seventh. We bring you Napoleon. He is yonder. It is for you to receive him and to repeat with us the rallying-cry of the former conquerors of Europe: Live the Emperor!"

His words were followed by a ringing shout from the ramparts. Many ran to the gates. Finding them closed and barred they furiously attacked them with axes, while the peasants outside hammered on them as fiercely. Thus doubly assailed they soon gave way, and the stream of new-comers rushed in, torches and flambeaux illuminating the scene. Napoleon had no little difficulty in making his way through the crowd, which was delirious with joy, and reaching an inn, the Three Dauphins, where he designed to pass the night.

On the 9th he left Grenoble, followed by six thousand of his old soldiers. His march was an ovation. He reached Lyons on the 10th. Several regiments had been collected here to oppose him, but they all trampled the white cockade of the king underfoot, assumed the tricolor, and fraternized with the Emperor's troops.

Marshal Ney was the only hope left to the royalists. He had, they said, promised Louis XVIII. to bring back Napoleon in an iron cage. This hope vanished when Ney issued a proclamation beginning, "The cause of the Bourbons is lost forever;" which was followed, on March 18, by his embracing the Emperor openly at Auxerre.

All was over for Louis XVIII. Near midnight of March 19 some travelling carriages rolled away from the court-yard of the Touileries in a torrent of rain, and amid a furious wind-storm that extinguished the carriage lights. It was Louis XVIII. going into exile. On the 20th, at nine o'clock in the evening, the Emperor Napoleon drove through the streets of Paris towards the abandoned palace through hosts of shouting soldiers and a population that was wild with joy. The officers tore him from his carriage and carried him on their arms, kissing his hands, embracing his old gray overcoat, not letting his feet touch ground till they had borne him to the foot of the grand stairway of the Tuileries.

It was twenty days since he had landed, and France was his, the people, the soldiers, alike mad with delight, none, to all appearance, dreaming of what renewed miseries this ill-omened return of their worshipped emperor meant.

It meant, as we now know, bloodshed, slaughter, and ruin; it meant Waterloo and St. Helena; it meant a hundred days of renewed empire, and then the final end of the power of the great conqueror. On August 7, less than five months from the date of the triumphant entry to the Tuileries, Napoleon stepped on board the British frigate Northumberland, to be borne to the far-off isle of St. Helena, his future home.

Twenty-five years after the date of these events Napoleon returned again to France, but under very different auspices from those described. On the 29th of November, 1840, there anchored at Cherbourg, amid the salutes of forts and ships, a French war-vessel called the Belle Poule, on which were the mortal remains of the great conqueror, long since conquered by death, and now brought back to the land over which he had so long reigned. On December 8 the coffin was transferred to the steamer Normandie, amid a salute of two thousand guns, and taken by it to the Seine. On December 15 the coffin, placed on a splendid car drawn by sixteen horses, moved in solemn procession through the streets of Paris, attended by the noblest escort the city could provide, and passing through avenues thronged with adoring multitudes, who forgot the injuries the great soldier had done to France and remembered only his fame. The funeral train was received by King Louis Philippe, the royal family, and all the high dignitaries of the government at the Church of the Invalides, in which a noble and worthy final resting-place had been prepared for the corpse of the once mighty emperor. "Napoleon," says Bourrienne, "had again and finally conquered. While every throne in Europe was shaking, the Great Conqueror came to claim and receive from posterity the crown for which he had sacrificed so much. In the Invalides the Emperor had at last found a resting-place, 'by the banks of the Seine, among the French people whom he had loved so well.'"