The Christian Kings that made saintly war on Napoleon, and combined to commit an atrocious crime in the name of the founder of our faith, were dead.  God in His mercy had dispensed with their sagacious guidance in human affairs, and it may be they were paying a lingering penalty for the diabolical act at the very time their prisoner’s ashes reached the shores of his beloved country and convulsed it with irrepressible joy.  They and many of their accomplices were gone.  Four Popes had reigned and passed on to their last long sleep.  The Spanish nation, which contributed to his downfall, had been smitten with the plague of chronic revolution.  They had been deprived of the great guiding spirit who alone could administer that wholesome discipline which was so necessary to keep the turbulent spirits in restraint.  Only Bernadotte, whom Napoleon had put in the way of becoming King of Norway and Sweden, remained to represent the galaxy of Kings.  A few of the traitor Marshals were left, but Augereau had died soon after the banishment and Berthier had committed suicide a few day before the Battle of Waterloo by jumping out a window.  Soult, Oudinot, and the guilty Marmont were in evidence in these days of great national rejoicing.  Davoust, Jourdan, Macdonald, and Massena had passed behind the veil.  It was the defection of Berthier and Marmont, whom he regarded as his most trusted and loyal comrades-in-arms, that crushed the Emperor at the time of the first abdication.  It was a cruel stab, which sunk deep into his soul, and never really healed, but the most heartless incident in connection with this betrayal was the appointment of Marmont, the betrayer, by the Emperor Francis to be the military instructor of Napoleon’s son while he was held in captivity and ignorance at Vienna.

Fouche, whose treason and predatory misdeeds should have had him shot long before the dawn of disaster to the Empire came, joined the Ministry of Louis XVIII., whom he had arduously assisted to the throne, but in 1816 he was included in the decree against the murderers of Louis XVI., and had to make himself scarce.  He went to Prague, then to Trieste, and died there in 1820.

Talleyrand died at Paris in 1838.

Both men were unscrupulous intriguers, without an atom of moral sense or loyalty, and both possessed ability, differing in kind, perhaps, which they used in the accomplishment of their own ends.  France can never overestimate the great evil these two men did to the national cause.  Napoleon’s power and penetrating vision kept them in check only when he could grasp the nettle.  Even when absent on his campaigns, they knew he was kept in close touch with what was going on.  It was not until treason became entangled within treason that their evil designs had fuller scope and more disastrous results.  Bourrienne, another rascal already referred to in this book, lost his fortune and his reason in 1830, and died in a lunatic asylum at Caen of apoplexy in