Napoleon
was in the hands of the English, and was to be carried a life-prisoner
to the island of St. Helena.

Louis XVIII., who had been waiting at Ghent, immediately returned to
the Tuileries, and to his foolish task of posing as a liberal king to
his people, and as a reactionary one to his royalist adherents. The
country was full of disappointed, imbittered imperialists, and of angry
and revengeful royalists. The Chamber of Peers immediately issued a
decree for the perpetual banishment of the family of Bonaparte from
French soil; the extremists demanding that the families of the men who
had consented to the death of Louis XVI. be included in the decree.
Sentence of death was passed upon Marshal Ney, as a traitor to France.
Some might have said that a greater traitor was at the Tuileries; but
the most picturesque in that heroic group of Napoleon's marshals was
shot to death.

There was, in fact, a determined purpose to undo all the work of the
Revolution; to restore the supremacy and the property of the Church,
and the power of the nobility. In the meantime, the people, perfectly
aware that the returned exiles were impoverished, were paying taxes to
maintain foreign troops which were in France for the sole purpose of
enabling the king's government to accomplish these things!

Here was material enough for discord in a troubled reign which lasted
nine years. Louis XVIII. died September 16, 1824; and the Count of
Artois, the brother of two kings, was proclaimed Charles X. of France.

If there had been any doubt about the real sentiments of Louis XVIII.,
it must have been dispelled by the last act of his reign, when, at the
bidding of the Holy Alliance, he sent French soldiers to put down the
Spanish liberals in their fight for a constitution.

But Charles X. did not intend to assume the thin mask worn by his
brother. He had marked out a different course. All disguise was to be
thrown aside in a Bourbon reign of the ante-revolutionary sort. The
press was strictly censored, the charter altered, the law of
primogeniture restored; and when saluted on the streets of Paris by
cries of "Give us back our charter!" the answer made to his people by
this infatuated man was, "I am here to receive homage, not counsel."

One wonders that a brother of Louis XVI., one who had been a fugitive
from a Paris mob in 1789--if he had a memory--dared to exasperate the
people of France.

On the 29th of July a revolt had become a R