f 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.

I know for a fact that Louis XVIII. wished to have nothing to do with
Fouche, and indignantly refused to appoint him when he was first
proposed. But he had so nobly served Bonaparte during the Hundred Days
that it was necessary he should be rewarded. Fouche, besides, had gained
the support of a powerful party among the emigrants of the Faubourg St.
Germain, and he possessed the art of rendering h