CHARACTER OF NAPOLEON 1. 239 molated a million of men on fields of battle; drew Europe upon France, which he left vanquished, drowned in her own blood, despoiled of the fruit of 20 years' victories, desolate, and having nothing to invigorate her but the germ of modern civilization within her. Who, then, could have foreseen that the wise man of 1800 would be the madman of 1812 and 1813? Yes, it might have been foreseen, had people called to mind that great power bears within itself an incurable folly-the temptation of doing everything when one can do everything, even the evil after the good. Thus in this great career, where military men, administrators, and politicians may find so much to learn, let citizens also learn this one thing-never to deliver up their country to one man, be he who he may, or be the circumstances what they may. In closing this long history of our triumphs and our reverses, it is the last cry which escapes from my heart—a sincere cry which I desire to see penetrate the heart of all Frenchmen, and show them that liberty should never be alienated, and that to escape being alienated it should never be abused." In the Times journal we find these retributive remarks :— “It seems absurd in the present day to deny that it was the boundless and selfish ambition of Napoleon which led to the two invasions of France, or to affirm that his fall was brought about by the coalition of hostile parties. Napoleon declared that France desired another Government; and the men whom his insatiable and selfish ambition had forced to become his adversaries were the men of his own choice, and assuredly were neither Republicans nor Legitimists. The decree deposing him was drawn up by his own senators, and their proclamation of the 2nd of April, 1814, was as follows: : 'Frenchmen! On emerging from civil dissensions you chose for your chief a man who appeared on the theatre of the world with an air of grandeur. You reposed in him all your hopes; those hopes which have been deceived; on the ruins of anarchy he has founded only despotism. He was bound in gratitude to, at least, become a Frenchman with you; he has not done so. He has never ceased to undertake, without aim or motive, unjust wars, like an adventurer impelled by thirst for glory. In a few years he has destroyed at once your wealth and your population. Every family is in mourning, but he is regardless of our calamities. Possibly he still dreams of his gigantic designs, even after unheard-of reverses have punished in so signal a manner his pride and his abuse of victory. He has shown himself not even capable of reigning for the interests of his despotism. He has destroyed all that he wished to create. He has believed in no other power but that of force. Force now overwhelms him,—the just retribution of mad ambition."" Napoleon delighted in mortifying flatterers. After his return from Austerlitz, Denon presented him with silver medals, illustrative of his victories. The first represented a French eagle tearing an English leopard. "What's this?" asked Napoleon. Denon explained. "Thou rascally flatterer, you say that the French eagle crushes the English leopard; yet I cannot put a fishing-boat to sea that is not taken. I tell you it is the leopard that strangles the eagle. Melt down the medal and 240 THE FRENCH INVASION OF RUSSIA. never bring me such another." He found similar fault with the medal of Austerlitz. "Put Battle of Austerlitz on one side, with the date; the French, Prussian, and Austrian eagles on the other, without distinction-posterity will distinguish the vanquisher." TERRITORY AND MONEY-COST OF NAPOLEON'S WARS. By the treaty of Chaumont, France was to be reduced to its ancient limits; Germany formed into a federative union ; Holland, Switzerland, and the lesser States of Italy, were to be independent; Spain and Portugal were to have their ancient sovereigns; and the restoration of the Bourbons left to the French people. If Napoleon refused these terms, the four Powers bound themselves to maintain against him each an army of 150,000; Great Britain paying, in addition, an annual subsidy of 5.000,000l., besides 20/. for each foot, and 30%. for each horse-soldier short of her contingent. By the treaty of Paris, or rather Fontainebleau, Napoleon renounced for himself and his descendants the empire of France and the kingdom of Italy, but retained the title of emperor with the island of Elba, and an income of 2,500,000f. (or 104,166l. 35. 4d.) from the revenues of the ceded countries, and 2,000,000f. from that of France, besides an annuity of 1,000,000 francs for Josephine. Four hundred soldiers were given to him as a body-guard, and the Duchies of Parma and Placentia were settled on Maria Louisa and her son. By the treaty of Paris (1815), France lost the fortresses of Landau, Sarre Louis, Philippeville, and Marienburg, with their adjacent territory; Huningen was demolished; all the frontier fortresses were to be held for five years, by an allied army of 150,000 men, under Wellington; 28,000,000l. were to be paid for the expenses of the war, besides 29,500,000l. as indemnities for the spoliations inflicted on the different States during the Revolution, and 4,000,000l. to the minor States. So that the total sum France had to pay, besides maintaining the Army of Occupation, was 61,500,000/-From Dates, Battles, and Events, by Lord Eustace Cecil, 1857. THE FRENCH INVASION OF RUSSIA. In this vast project and the preparations for it, the character of its originator, Napoleon I., stands clearly revealed. In the selection of the point of attack, in the measures taken to assure success, in the organizing his immense forces, in the dexterity with which his plans were concealed, we see the master of the art of war, the consummate strategist, the indefatigable administrator. But if we consider the design itself with reference to the state of Europe, to the true policy for the French Empire, and to the real resources of the French armies, it appears simply a splendid chimera, and its author a visionary carried away by the lust of conquest and unbridled ambition. Granting that Napoleon was stronger than the Czar, what chance had he of subjugating Russia? Was he not certain to throw that Power once more into the arms of England? Was he not for a chance incurring a peril of an evident and most terrible kind-the uprising of Europe against his despotism? How insensate, too, the project appears when we remember that, at this very juncture, Spain continued defiant and unsubdued, that an English General had established his hold over part of the Peninsula, that the pride and flower of the Imperial armies was being destroyed in this internecine contest! The scheme of invading Russia, in fact, was what M. Thiers describes it, "mere folly;" it was one of those extravagant conceptions, like that of attacking England in the East, or of setting up a universal Monarchy, which often overcame Napoleon's judgment. And its unreasonableness becomes even more apparent when we examine the nature and composition of the forces arrayed for this wonderful attempt. In this respect Napoleon's Correspondence contains a number of interesting details, and throws a good deal of new light on the subject. The best and most faithful soldiers of France were engaged in 1811-12 in the struggle beyond the Pyrenees, consumed in skirmishes with the guerillas, misdirected by generals at feud with each other, or baffled by the unconquerable warriors whom Wellington was conducting to victory. The gigantic hosts that were to enter Russia were made up, to a considerable extent, of allies or subjects beyond old France, of the contingents of the Confederation of the Rhine, of Italians, Spaniards, and Portuguese, of the reluctant conscripts of Belgium and Holland, of the half savage mercenaries of the Illyrian provinces. Was this vast congeries of motley races, indifferent, ill-trained, or hostile, an army fitted to carry the fortunes of the Empire across resentful Germany, to affront the perils of a Russian campaign, to bear with devotion extraordinary hardships? The failure of Napoleon's manoeuvres at the very outset of the war, the comparative slowness of his advance, and the frightful horrors of the retreat from Moscow, caused not only by the severity of the cold, but by reckless indiscipline and despair, are the answers of history to this question.-Times journal. SUCCESS OF TALLEYRAND. Not long before the death of Talleyrand, an able English writer, speaking of his brilliant apophthegms, said: "What are they all to the practical skill with which this extraordinary man has contrived to baffle all the calamities of thirty years, full of the ruin of all power, ability, courage, and fortune? Here the survivor of the age of the Bastile, the age of the guillotine, the age of the prison-ship, the age of the sword. After baffling the Republic, the Democracy, the Despotism, and the Restoration, he figures in his eightieth year as the Ambassador to England, the Minister of France, and retires from both offices only to be chief counsellor, almost the coadjutor of the king. That where the ferocity of Robespierre fell, where the sagacity of Napoleon fell, where the experience of the Bourbons fell, this one old man, a priest in a land of daring spirits, where conspiracy first and soldiership after, were the great R 242 LORE IN THE FRENCH SENATE. means of power, should survive all, succeed in everything, and retain his rank and influence through all changes, is unquestionably among the most extraordinary instances of conduct exhibited in the world." SUCCESSION TO THE THRONE OF FRANCE. Not a little remarkable is it to observe, that from the accession of Louis XIV. to the present time not a single king or governor of France -though none of them, with the exception of Louis XVIII., have been childless has been succeeded at his demise by his son. Louis XIV. survived his son, his grandson, and several of his great-grandchildren, and was succeeded at last by one of the younger children of his grandson, the Duke of Burgundy. Louis XV. survived his son, and was succeeded by his grandson. Louis XVI. left a son behind him; but that son perished in the filthy dungeon to which the cruelties of the terrorists had confined him. The King of Rome, to whom Napoleon fondly hoped to bequeath the boundless empire he had won, died a colonel in the Austrian service. Louis XVIII. was, as we have said, childless. The Duke de Berri fell by the hand of an assassin in the lifetime of Charles X.; and his son, the Duke de Bordeaux, is an exile from the land which his ancestors regarded as their own estate. The eldest son of Louis Philippe perished by an untimely accident; and his grandson and heir does not sit upon the throne of his grandfather. Thus, then, it appears that for upwards of two hundred years, in no one of the dynasties to which France has been subjected has the son succeeded to the throne of the father.-Times journal, 1856. HISTORICAL LORE IN THE FRENCH SENATE. Baron Dupin, in a speech in the French Senate, is reported to have made the following astounding statement : "La France occupe, depuis quatorze siècles, le premier rang parmi les nations Chrétiennes. Clovis, quand il eut été baptisé par l'influence de la Reine Clotilde, passa en Italie, pour forcer les Lombards à respecter le Saint Père; il mérita ainsi le nom de fils aîné de l'Eglise." Can it be believed that this strange reading of national history caused no remark in the French Senate, that none of the "fathers of the country" remembered what must be familiar to every schoolboy in France-viz., that Clovis, who was baptized at Reims, and who may well, for aught we know, have done so to please his wife Clotilde, never "went into Italy," where in his time the Lombards or Longobards had never been heard of, and where they could, therefore, never have been wanting in respect to the Holy Father? What would the House of Lords say if told by one of their number that King Alfred spared the lives of the citizens of Calais, or that King Arthur was at the siege of Acre in Palestine? Yet the blunder would scarcely be more unaccountable.-Letter to the Times. THE REIGN OF LOUIS XVIII. 243 66 THE REIGN OF LOUIS XVIII. M. Ponjoulet, in his History of France from 1814 to the present day, gives the following thoughtful and spirited portrait of this sovereign :— 'Historians hostile to the House of Bourbon have not spared Louis XVIII., and they have assigned to him as his sole merit the pride of being King of France. But to the reign of Louis XVIII. attaches an importance and a lustre peculiar to itself. This Prince was the man of his time and of the circumstances reserved for his destiny. An Emperor who was always on horseback had fatigued the world. France, from her immense desire for repose, was not displeased at having a King quietly seated in his arm-chair, but whose fathers had known what battles were. The nation was vexed and wearied out by a restless and terrible will; and a sovereign whom his infirmities unfitted for a life of activity was, as it were, naturally sent to establish among us a constitutional system of government. Amid the disasters which an ambition that had grown to insanity brought upon us, we wanted a King, the most ancient of kings, who could speak from the height on which the grandeur of twelve centuries placed him; a King whose misfortunes invested with interest; whose soul was thoroughly French; whose moderation inclined him to political compromises; and whose clear perception enabled him at his mature age to judge of men and things. Such a King was found in Louis XVIII. Never was any prince's position more difficult than his; he had so many knots of policy to unloose that he left each for its own hour, and acted with hesitation. Called to bear the sceptre at a late period of life, he had, nevertheless, during his long experience, acquired a considerable knowledge of mankind. His will was persistent even when he appeared to yield. Nothing troubled him: his soul was firm, and his intellect keen; but why should we not admit that he was crafty? Politics are so intricate that a little subtlety is pardonable in a constitutional Sovereign. Sly, but not malignant, he satisfied or revenged himself with quotations from Horace. Ever master of himself, he was ever courteous; and politeness presupposes a certain kindness of disposition and a command of one's self. Had Louis XVIII. been hasty or passionate he could not have performed the task which Providence marked out for him. The eighteenth century had left its marks in his thoughts; but if at times the man was frivolous, the King was never so. "During the ten years of his reign he practised in all sincerity the répresentative régime, and it is to the constitutional predominance of this or that political system that should be assigned the successive changes in the conduct of Louis XVIII.'s Government. He delivered us promptly from the foreign armies which, it was pretended, he needed to prop up his throne. He paid our ransom, and debts which were none of his incurring; he gave us liberty, re-established our credit, led us once more to glory, and imparted to our country an immense movement of confidence. Conspiracy was ever busy during his reign, and, in spite of the assaults on his crown, if he only consulted his heart, not a drop of blood would have been shed. Napoleon had exhibited the |