as fiercely.
Thus doubly assailed they soon gave way, and the stream of new-comers
rushed in, torches and flambeaux illuminating the scene. Napoleon had no
little difficulty in making his way through the crowd, which was
delirious with joy, and reaching an inn, the Three Dauphins, where he
designed to pass the night.

On the 9th he left Grenoble, followed by six thousand of his old
soldiers. His march was an ovation. He reached Lyons on the 10th.
Several regiments had been collected here to oppose him, but they all
trampled the white cockade of the king underfoot, assumed the tricolor,
and fraternized with the Emperor's troops.

Marshal Ney was the only hope left to the royalists. He had, they said,
promised Louis XVIII. to bring back Napoleon in an iron cage. This hope
vanished when Ney issued a proclamation beginning, "The cause of the
Bourbons is lost forever;" which was followed, on March 18, by his
embracing the Emperor openly at Auxerre.

All was over for Louis XVIII. Near midnight of March 19 some travelling
carriages rolled away from the court-yard of the Touileries in a torrent
of rain, and amid a furious wind-storm that extinguished the carriage
lights. It was Louis XVIII. going into exile. On the 20th, at nine
o'clock in the evening, the Emperor Napoleon drove through the streets
of Paris towards the abandoned palace through hosts of shouting soldiers
and a population that was wild with joy. The officers tore him from his
carriage and carried him on their arms, kissing his hands, embracing his
old gray overcoat, not letting his feet touch ground till they had borne
him to the foot of the grand stairway of the Tuileries.

It was twenty days since he had landed, and France was his, the people,
the soldiers, alike mad with delight, none, to all appearance, dreaming
of what renewed miseries this ill-omened return of their worshipped
emperor meant.

It meant, as we now know, bloodshed, slaughter, and ruin; it meant
Waterloo and St. Helena; it meant a hundred days of renewed empire, and
then the final end of the power of the great conqueror. On August 7,
less than five months from the date of the triumphant entry to the
Tuileries, Napoleon stepped on board the British frigate Northumberland,
to be borne to the far-off isle of St. Helena, his future home.

Twenty-five years after the date of these events Napoleon returned again
to France, but under very different auspices from those described. On
the 29th of