erly as his
craven cowardice would permit against the Imperial administration, and
coming sometimes unpleasantly across the police. When the Bourbons
returned, he, as might have been expected, became a royalist, and wrote
a pamphlet setting forth the horrors of the system from which the
Restoration had delivered France, and magnifying the wisdom and goodness
which had dictated the charter. He who had voted for the death of Louis,
he who had moved the decree for the trial of Marie Antoinette, he whose
hatred of monarchy had led him to make war even upon the sepulchres of
ancient monarchs, assures us, with great complacency, that "in this work
monarchical principles and attachment to the House of Bourbon are nobly
expressed." By this apostasy he got nothing, not even any additional
infamy; for his character was already too black to be blackened.

During the hundred days he again emerged for a very short time into
public life; he was chosen by his native district a member of the
Chamber of Representatives. But, though that assembly was composed in a
great measure of men who regarded the excesses of the Jacobins with
indulgence, he found himself an object of general aversion. When the
President first informed the Chamber that M. Barere requested a hearing,
a deep and indignant murmur ran round the benches. After the battle of
Waterloo, Barere proposed that the Chamber should save France from the
victorious enemy, by putting forth a proclamation about the pass of
Thermopylae and the Lacedaemonian custom of wearing flowers in times of
extreme danger. Whether this composition, if it had then appeared, would
have stopped the English and Prussian armies, is a question respecting
which we are left to conjecture. The Chamber refused to adopt this last
of the Carmagnoles.

The Emperor had abdicated. The Bourbons returned. The Chamber of
Representatives, after burlesquing during a few weeks the proceedings of
the National Convention, retired with the well-earned character of
having been the silliest political assembly that had met in France.
Those dreaming pedants and praters never for a moment comprehended their
position. They could never understand that Europe must be either
conciliated or vanquished; that Europe could be conciliated only by the
restoration of Louis, and vanquished only by means of a dictatorial
power entrusted to Napoleon. They would not hear of Louis; yet they
would not hear of the only measures which could kee