Parisians, that the most
extravagant exaggerations and inventions which issued from the saloon of
the Duchess de St. Leu (under which name Hortense Beauharnois, wife of
Louis Buonaparte, had continued to reside in Paris)--and from other
circles of the same character, found, to a certain extent, credence.
There was one tale which ran louder and louder from the tongue of every
Buonapartist, and which royalist and republican found, day after day,
new reason to believe; namely, that the army were, high and low, on the
side of Napoleon; that every detachment sent to intercept him, would but
swell his force; in a word, that--unless the people were to rise _en
masse_--nothing could prevent the outlaw from taking possession of the
Tuileries ere a fortnight more had passed over the head of Louis.

It was at Lyons, where Napoleon remained from the 10th to the 13th, that
he formally resumed the functions of civil government. He published
various decrees at this place; one, commanding justice to be
administered everywhere in his name after the 15th; another abolishing
the Chambers of the Peers and the Deputies, and summoning all the
electoral colleges to meet in Paris at a _Champ-de-Mai_,[70] there to
witness the coronation of Maria Louisa and of her son, and settle
definitively the constitution of the state; a third, ordering into
banishment all whose names had not been erased from the list of
emigrants prior to the abdication of Fontainebleau; a fourth, depriving
all strangers and emigrants of their commissions in the army; a fifth,
abolishing the order of St. Louis, and bestowing all its revenues on the
Legion of Honour; and a sixth, restoring to their authority all
magistrates who had been displaced by the Bourbon government. These
proclamations could not be prevented from reaching Paris; and the Court,
abandoning their system of denying or extenuating the extent of the
impending danger, began to adopt more energetic means for its
suppression.

It was now that Marshal Ney volunteered his services to take the command
of a large body of troops, whose fidelity was considered sure, and who
were about to be sent to Lons-le-Saunier, there to intercept and arrest
the invader. Well aware of this great officer's influence in the army,
Louis did not hesitate to accept his proffered assistance; and Ney, on
kissing his hand at parting, swore that in the course of a week he would
bring Buonaparte to his majesty's feet in a cage, like a wil