ile 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 February, 1834. It is a notable fact that nearly the whole of the
prominent figures in the drama of the Empire and its fall had passed
beyond the portal before the great captain's remains were brought back
to France. These individuals are only remembered now as uninspired
small men, benighted in mind, who had wrought ignobly to bring about
the fall of a powerful leader, and to the end of their days were
associated with and encouraged a fiendish persecution of the Emperor
while he lived, and of his family before and after his death.

But the pious care of his tomb by a regiment of British soldiers, paid
for by British taxpayers, from 1821 until the patriotic exhumation in
1840; by stately and solemn permission of the British Government,
excels the comic genius of a gang of plethoric parochial innkeepers.
If it were not so degrading to the national pride of race, we might
regard it as taking rank amongst the drollest incidents of human life.
What a gang of puffy, mildewed creatures were at the head British
affairs in those days! Indeed, they expose the human soul at its
worst, and a curious feature is their ingrained belief in the
integrity of all their doings, which beggars the English vocabulary
describe. How the peo