ared 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.

The disaster of 1814 had rather dispersed than crushed the Bonaparte
family, and they rallied immediately on the return from Elba. The final
fall of the Empire was total ruin to them. The provisions of the Treaty
of Fontainebleau, which had been meant to ensure a maintenance to them,
had not been carried out while Napoleon was still a latent power, and
after 1815 the Bourbons were only too happy to find a reason for not
paying a debt they had determined never to liquidate it was well for any
of the Bourbons in their days of distress to receive the bounty of the
usurper, but there was a peculiar pleasure in refusing to pay the price
promised for his immediate abdication.

The flight of the Bonapartes in 1815 was rapid. Metternich writes to