authority to do so.
The Bourbons could not even use this argument. If the Allies had
evacuated France Louis le Desiree would have ordered his carriage and
have been at the frontier before they had reached it. If Frenchmen
actually fired the shots which killed Ney, the Allies at least shared the
responsibility with the French Government. Lastly, it would seem that
the Duke would have asked for the life of Ney if the King, clever at such
small artifices, had not purposely affected a temporary coldness to him.
Few men would have been so deterred from asking for the life of a dog.
The fact is, the Duke of Wellington was a great general, he was a
single-hearted and patriotic statesman, he had a thousand virtues, but
he was never generous. It cannot be said that he simply shared the
feelings of his army, for there was preparation among some of his
officers to enable Ney to escape, and Ney had to be guarded by men of
good position disguised in the uniform of privates. Ney had written to
his wife when he joined Napoleon, thinking of the little vexations the
Royalists loved to inflict on the men who had conquered the Continent.
"You will no longer weep when you leave the Tuileries." The unfortunate
lady wept now as she vainly sought some mercy for her husband. Arrested
on the 5th of August, sentenced on the 6th of December, Ney was shot on
the 7th of December, and the very manner of his execution shows that, in
taking his life there was much more of revenge than of justice.

If Ney were to be shot, it is obvious that it should have been as a high
act of justice. If neither the rank nor the services of the criminal
were to save him, his death could not be too formal, too solemn, too
public. Even an ordinary military execution is always carried out with
grave and striking forms: there is a grand parade of the troops, that all
may see with their own eyes the last act of the law. After the execution
the troops defile past the body, that all may see the criminal actually
dead: There was nothing of all this in the execution of Ney. A few
chance passers, in the early morning of the 7th of December 1815, saw a
small body of troops waiting by the wall of the garden of the Luxemburg.
A fiacre drove up, out of which got Marshal Ney in plain clothes, himself
surprised by the everyday aspect of the place. Then, when the officer of
the firing party (for such the spectators now knew it to be) saw whom it
was he was to fire on, he became, it is