and that entered Russia only twenty
thousand returned. More than a third of a million brave men had left
their bones on the chill snows and iron earth of the land they sought
to humble.

Uprisings, alliances and campaigns by the hitherto beaten nations
followed. Napoleon won the battle of Lutzen, but the English Duke of
Wellington defeated the French at Vittoria. At last in the great battle
of Leipzig in October, 1813, the French were routed.

In the following year the Allies made ready to crush Napoleon. He was
now on the defensive with enemies hemming him in on every side, and
although he fought a brilliant campaign it was hopeless. On April 11,
1814, Napoleon was compelled to resign the crown, and obliged to go
into exile; and the island of Elba in the Mediterranean Sea was chosen
as the place for him to end his days.

For the last time before his exile, Napoleon addressed his soldiers in
farewell, and the tears ran down the rough cheeks of the veterans as
they bade good-by to the man who had so often led them to victory. And
then Napoleon passed through southern France on his way to Elba amid
the hisses and execrations of his people, who had already forgotten the
victories he had won for France and thought now only of their misery
and the dear ones they had lost on the barren snow fields of Russia.

Instead of Napoleon the brother of the former king, Louis the
Sixteenth, was placed on the throne of France--an old, fat, wheezy man
of no particular ability. It seemed as if the great conqueror were
downed at last.

But Napoleon intended differently. As he stayed at Elba surrounded by a
little court and with the title of Emperor which the Allies had allowed
him to keep, he kept looking toward the coast of France and plotting
how to return. It is more than probable that his life was in danger at
Elba. At all events he found the life intolerable, and desired once
again to play the leading part in European affairs.

In the meantime the French people grew weary of fat old Louis the
Eighteenth, whose name of "Louis Dix Huit" was changed by the French as
a joke into "Louis Des Huitres," or Louis of the Oysters, so fond was
the old gourmand of his shellfish. They began to sigh for Napoleon and
look forward to the spring when they hoped he might be able to escape
from his island of confinement and rejoin his soldiers in Paris. And
this very thing soon happened.

Napoleon made a successful plan to escape from Elba and wa