flames at Moscow, followed by the arctic
cold, converted the campaign into a vast tragedy.

With indomitable courage another grand army had filled the vacant
places, and was putting down a great uprising in Germany. But his star
was waning. An overwhelming defeat at Leipsic was followed by a march
upon Paris. And in the spring of 1814, Alexander, the young Russian
emperor, the friend who was to aid him in securing an eternal peace for
Europe, was dictating the terms of surrender in Paris.

Within a week Napoleon had abdicated. The title of emperor he was
permitted to retain, but the empire which he was to leave to the infant
son of Maria Louisa, now two years old, had shrunk to the little island
of Elba, on the west coast of Italy!

CHAPTER XVII.

The allied powers named Louis XVIII., the brother of Louis XVI., for
the vacant throne, who promised the people to reign under a
constitutional government.

The man who had deserted his brother in his extremity, a man who
represented nothing--not loyalty to the past, nor sympathy with a
single aspiration of the present--was king. As he passed under
triumphal arches on the way to the Tuileries, there was sitting beside
him a sad, pale-faced woman; this was the Duchesse d'Angouleme, the
daughter of Louis XVI., the little girl who was prisoner in the Temple
twenty years before. What must she have felt and thought as she passed
the very spot where had stood the scaffold in 1793!

Almost the first act of Louis XVIII. was the removal of the mutilated
remains of the king and queen and his sister Elizabeth to the royal
vault in the Church of St. Denis. He then gave orders for a _Chapelle
Expiatoire_ to be erected over the grave where they had been lying for
two decades, and for masses to be said for the repose of the souls of
his murdered relatives. Paris was full of returning royalists.
Banished exiles with grand old names, who had been earning a scanty
living by teaching French and dancing in Vienna, London, and even in
New York, were hastening to Paris for a joyful Restoration; and Louis
XVIII., while Russian and Austrian troops guarded him on the streets of
his own capital, was freely talking about ruling by divine right!

That king was reigning under a liberal charter (as the new constitution
was called)--a charter which guaranteed almost as much personal liberty
as the one obtained in England from King John in 1215; and the palpable
absurdity of supposing t