an
entire reconstruction of Europe--two empires, and seventeen new
kingdoms with new sovereigns either from or in the interest of the
imperial houses! "Rhapsodies," he said, "which proved that all Europe
might crumble without exciting a single emotion of sorrow,
astonishment, or satisfaction in a people degraded beneath all others,
beneath all imagination, and which, worn out, demoralized to the point
where every trace of even national feeling is wiped out, by nineteen
years of revolution and crimes, now looks on with cold-blooded
indifference at what is passing beyond its own frontiers. Wise men
think that the treaties, being as advantageous to Russia as to France,
necessarily contain a germ which in developing will prove dangerous to
the latter." In reality there was not now a state in Europe toward
which the French empire did not stand in strained relations, not a
nationality besides the French which did not feel its self-respect
wounded, and resent the abasement.

This, however, was not the panorama which the Emperor unfolded in
Paris. He reached St. Cloud quietly on the evening of July
twenty-seventh. The people of Paris learned the news incidentally, and
burst into spontaneous rejoicings, illuminating the city, and sending
addresses in which the terms of adulation were exhausted. Napoleon was
no longer an actor in merely human history: he was a man of the
heroic age; he was beyond admiration; nothing but love could rise to
his lofty place. On August sixteenth the Emperor opened the
legislature in person. "Since your last session," he said, "new wars,
new triumphs, new treaties, have changed the face of Europe." If the
house of Brandenburg still reigned, he continued, it was due to the
sincere friendship he felt for the Czar. A French prince would rule on
the Elbe, and would know how to conciliate his subjects, while ever
mindful of his most sacred duties. Saxony had recovered her
independence, the peoples of Dantzic and the duchy of Warsaw their
country and their rights. All nations rejoiced to see the direful
influence of England destroyed. France was united to the Confederation
of the Rhine by its laws, by the federative system to the countries of
Holland, Switzerland, and Italy; her new relations with Russia were
cemented by reciprocal esteem. In all this, he affirmed, his pole-star
had been the happiness of his people, dearer to him than his own
glory. He would like maritime peace, and for its sake would ove