It was there he understood that the end had come, and that he rode forward and stood over a shell about to explode. An officer, on the point of uttering a warning cry, was stopped by another, who said : "Don't you see that he is doing it on purpose, and wants to have it over?" Mr. Seeley states that, in 1814, Fouché was weaving a military plot. The proceedings of that exceedingly able man barely fit in to so plain a form of words. He made a merit of trying to maintain the Bourbons, and, in a secret interview, had given some remarkable advice : "Servez-vous à la fois de la vertu qui a éclaté dans l'oppression, de l'énergie qui à été developpée dans nos désordres, et des talents qui se sont produits dans le delire. On ne gouverne pas plus les etats avec les souvenirs et les répugnances qu'avec les remords." Blacas of course replied that legitimacy can no more coalesce with revolution than truth with error. Then Fouché, exclaiming that the king, if he had ten crowns* with such an adviser, would lose them all, tried the younger branch. That is how Napoleon afterwards told Meneval that he had dethroned not Lewis XVIII., but the Duke of Orleans.
Tn such a mass of facts and allusions there are probably not a few which a vindictive Bonapartist would mark with a sign of interrogation. He might object that the French at Acre were not reduced to musketry fire ; that the primate of the confederation did not hold the See of Mentz ; that Moreau was in the Russian, not the Austrian camp ; that the Holy Alliance did not come into existence for three months after the Hundred Days ; that the first indication of the policy of the concordat dates not from Tolentino in February 1797, but at least as far back as the previous October, when Bonaparte wrote : "J'ambitionne bien plus le titre de sauveur que celui de destructeur du Saint-Siège" ; that if the story of his getting drunk with punch at Campo Formio is derived from Huffer, it is right to add that Hüffer warns us against believing it ; that the institutions which "brought the country to bankruptcy, civil war, and almost bar-
