: this was refused.

It can hardly be denied that the fate of the Bonapartes was a hard one.
Napoleon had been undisputed sovereign of France for fourteen years,
Louis had been King of Holland for four years, Jerome was King of
Westphalia for six years, Caroline was Queen of Naples for seven years.
If Napoleon had forfeited all his rights by leaving Elba after the
conditions of his abdication had been broken by the Allies, still there
was no reason why the terms stipulated for the other members of the
family should not have been carried out, or at least an ordinary income
insured to them. With all Napoleon's faults he was always ready to
shower wealth on the victims of his policy:--The sovereigns of the
Continent had courted and intermarried with the Bonapartes in the tame of
that family's grandeur: there was neither generosity nor wisdom in
treating them as so many criminals the moment fortune had declared
against them. The conduct of the Allies was not influenced simply by the
principle of legitimacy, for the King of Saxony only kept his throne by
the monarchs falling out over the spoil. If sovereigns were to be
respected as of divine appointment, it was not well to make their
existence only depend on the fate of war.

Nothing in the history of the Cent Jours is more strange than the small
part played in it by the Marshals, the very men who are so identified in
our minds with the Emperor, that we might have expected to find that
brilliant band playing a most prominent part in his last great struggle,
no longer for mere victory, but for very existence. In recording how the
Guard came up the fatal hill at Waterloo for their last combat, it would
seem but natural to have to give a long roll of the old historic names as
leading or at least accompanying them; and the reader is apt to ask,
where were the men whose very titles recalled such glorious
battle-fields, such achievements, and such rewards showered down by the
man who, almost alone at the end of the day, rode forward to invite that
death from which it was such cruel kindness to save him?

Only three Marshals were in Belgium in 1815, and even of them one did but
count his promotion from that very year, so it is but natural for French
writers to dream of what might have been the course of the battle if
Murat's plume had waved with the cavalry, if Mortier had been with the
Guard, and if Davoust or one of his tried brethren had taken the place of
Grouchy. There is, h