ime his celebrated song of the _Roi d'Yvetot_, in which, while he
caricatured the little play-king, the king in the cotton nightcap, he
seemed to be slyly satirizing the great conquering Emperor himself.

The Empire fell, and Beranger hesitated for some time to take part
against the Bourbons. It was not till after the battle of Waterloo and
the return of Louis XVIII. under convoy of the allied armies, that he
began to feel the passion of patriotism blaze up anew within him and
dictate stinging songs which soon became darts of steel. Meanwhile he
wrote pretty songs, in which a slight sentiment of melancholy mingled
with and heightened the intoxication of wine and pleasure. _La bonne
Vieille_ is his _chef-d'oeuvre_ in this style. He arranged the design of
these little pieces carefully, sketching his subjects beforehand, and
herein belongs to the French school, that old classic school which left
nothing to chance. He composed his couplets slowly, even those
which seem the most easy. Commonly the song came to him through the
refrain;--he caught the butterfly by the wings;--when he had seized the
refrain, he finished at intervals, and put in the nicer shadings at
leisure. He wrote hardly ten songs a year at the time of his greatest
fecundity. It has since been remarked that they smell of the lamp here
and there; but at first no one had eyes except for the rose, the vine,
and the laurel.

The Bourbons, brought back for the second time in 1815, committed all
manner of blunders: they insulted the remains of the old _grande armee_;
they shot Marshal Ney and many others; a horrible royalist reaction
ensanguined the South of France. The Jesuit party insinuated itself at
Court, and assumed to govern as in the high times of the confessors of
Louis XIV. It was hoped to conquer the spirit of the Revolution, and to
drive modern France back to the days before 1789; hence thousands of
hateful things impossible to be realized, and thousands of ridiculous
ones. Towards 1820 the liberal opposition organized itself in the
Chambers and in the press. The Muse of Beranger came to its assistance
under the mask of gay raillery. He was the angry bee that stung flying,
and whose stings are not harmless; nay, he would fain have made them
mortal to the enemy. He hated even Louis XVIII., a king who was esteemed
tolerably wise, and more intelligent than his party. "I stick my pins,"
said Beranger, "into the calves of Louis XVIII." One must have seen
t