m. With all Napoleon's faults he was always ready to
shower wealth on the victims of his policy:--The sovereigns of the
Continent had courted and intermarried with the Bonapartes in the tame of
that family's grandeur: there was neither generosity nor wisdom in
treating them as so many criminals the moment fortune had declared
against them. The conduct of the Allies was not influenced simply by the
principle of legitimacy, for the King of Saxony only kept his throne by
the monarchs falling out over the spoil. If sovereigns were to be
respected as of divine appointment, it was not well to make their
existence only depend on the fate of war.

Nothing in the history of the Cent Jours is more strange than the small
part played in it by the Marshals, the very men who are so identified in
our minds with the Emperor, that we might have expected to find that
brilliant band playing a most prominent part in his last great struggle,
no longer for mere victory, but for very existence. In recording how the
Guard came up the fatal hill at Waterloo for their last combat, it would
seem but natural to have to give a long roll of the old historic names as
leading or at least accompanying them; and the reader is apt to ask,
where were the men whose very titles recalled such glorious
battle-fields, such achievements, and such rewards showered down by the
man who, almost alone at the end of the day, rode forward to invite that
death from which it was such cruel kindness to save him?

Only three Marshals were in Belgium in 1815, and even of them one did but
count his promotion from that very year, so it is but natural for French
writers to dream of what might have been the course of the battle if
Murat's plume had waved with the cavalry, if Mortier had been with the
Guard, and if Davoust or one of his tried brethren had taken the place of
Grouchy. There is, however, little real ground for surprise at this
absence of the Marshals. Death, time, and hardships had all done their
work amongst that grand array of commanders. Some were old men, veterans
of the Revolutionary wars, when first created Marshals in 1804; others,
such as Massena, were now but the wreck of themselves; and even before
1812 Napoleon had been struck with the failing energy of some of his
original companions: indeed, it might have been better for him if he had
in 1813, as he half resolved, cast away his dislike to new faces, and
fought his last desperate campaigns with younger