to force Fouche and the tri-coloured cockade upon the King, it was deemed necessary to keep away from his Majesty all who might persuade him to resist the proposed measures.  Madame de Bourrienne told me that on her arrival at St. Denis she called upon M. Hue and M. Lefebvre, the King’s physician, who both acquainted her with those fatal resolutions.  Those gentlemen, however, assured her that the King would resolutely hold out against the tri-coloured cockade, but the nomination of the ill-omened man appeared inevitable.

Fouche Minister of the Police!  If, like Don Juan, I had seen a statue move, I could not have been more confounded than when I heard this news.  I could not credit it until it was repeated to me by different persons.  How; indeed, could I think that at the moment of a reaction the King should have entrusted the most important ministerial department to a man to whose arrest he had a hundred days before attached so much consequence? to a man, moreover, whom Bonaparte had appointed, at Lyons, to fill the same office!  This was inconceivable!  Thus, in less than twenty-four hours, the same man had been entrusted to execute measures the most opposite, and to serve interests the most contradictory.  He was one day the minister of usurpation, and the next the minister of legitimacy!  How can I express what I felt when Fouche took the oath of fidelity to Louis XVIII. when I saw the King clasp in his hands the hands of Fouche!  I was standing near M. de Chateaubriand, whose feelings must have been similar to mine, to judge from a passage in his admirable work, ‘La Monarchie selon la Charte’.  “About nine in the evening,” he says, “I was in one of the royal antechambers.  All at once the door opened, and I saw the President of the Council enter leaning on the arm of the new minister.  Oh, Louis-le-Desire!  Oh, my unfortunate master! you have proved that there is no sacrifice which your people may not expect from your paternal heart!”

Fouche was resolved to have his restoration as well as M. de Talleyrand, who had had his the year before; he therefore contrived to retard the King’s entry into Paris for four days.  The prudent members of the Chamber of Peers, who had taken no part in the King’s Government in 1814, were the first to declare that it was for the interest of France to hasten his Majesty’s entrance into Paris, in order to prevent foreigners from exercising a sort of right of conquest in a city which was a prey to civil dissension and party influence.  Blucher informed me that the way in which Fouche contrived to delay the King’s return greatly contributed to the pretensions of the foreigners who, he confessed, were very well pleased to see the population of Paris divided in opinion, and to hear the alarming cries raised by the confederates of the Faubourgs when the King was already at St. Denis.