. His conversations with the thinking men who were then
about him, M. Mole and the Duke of Vicenza, confirm this opinion. He
sought still to keep the public in the uncertainty that he himself no
longer felt. The Manifesto of the Congress of the 13th of March was not
published in the 'Moniteur' until the 5th of April, and the treaty of
the 25th of March only on the 3rd of May. Napoleon added long
commentaries to these documents, to prove that it was impossible they
could express the final intentions of Europe. At Vienna, both by
solemnly official letters and secret emissaries, he made several
attempts to renew former relations with the Emperor Francis, his
father-in-law, to obtain the return of his wife and son, to promote
disunion, or at least mistrust, between the Emperor Alexander and the
sovereigns of England and Austria, and to bring back to his side Prince
Metternich, and even M. de Talleyrand himself. He probably did not
expect much from these advances, and felt little surprise at not
finding, in family ties and feelings, a support against political
interests and pledges. He understood and accepted without a sentiment of
anger against any one, and perhaps without self-reproach, the situation
to which the events of his past life had reduced him. It was that of a
desperate gamester, who, though completely ruined, still plays on,
alone, against a host of combined adversaries, a desperate game, with no
other chance of success than one of those unforeseen strokes that the
most consummate talent could never achieve, but that Fortune sometimes
bestows upon her favourites.

It has been, pretended, even by some of his warmest admirers, that at
this period the genius and energy of Napoleon had declined; and they
sought in his tendency to corpulence, in his attacks of languor, in his
long slumbers, the explanation of his ill fortune. I believe the
reproach to be unfounded, and the pretext frivolous. I can discover in
the mind or actions of Napoleon during the hundred days, no symptoms of
infirmity; I find, in both, his accustomed superiority. The causes of
his ultimate failure were of a deeper cast: he was not then, as he had
long been, upheld and backed by general opinion, and the necessity of
security and order felt throughout a great nation; he attempted, on the
contrary, a mischievous work, a work inspired only by his own passions
and personal wants, rejected by the morality and good sense, as well as
by the true interes