112 EUROPEAN POLITICS. [1814. 



easily watched, but too near to make a landing there 

 improbable, or even difficult ; and accordingly, in less 

 than twelve months namely, on the 1st of March 

 1815 Xapolcon did land at Cannes in Provence, not 

 far from where I am now writing ; so that if the world 

 had been searched to find the residence the most 

 dangerous to France, the most far-seeing men would 

 have fixed upon Elba. 



It has always been a marvel to me that so clever 

 and sagacious a man as Talleyrand should not have 

 foreseen the probable result of this arrangement. Per- 

 haps he yielded from a conviction that the soldier-like 

 attachment to their chief might have so far influenced 

 the French armies, then near Fontainebleau and in the 

 provinces of the Loire, that any harshness in the treat- 

 ment of Bonaparte might have raised a flame it would 

 have been difficult to extinguish. But there was one 



o 



result of the abdication which created unbounded 

 astonishment the marvellous rapidity in the change 

 of public opinion in France that the man who but a 

 few short weeks before had apparently possessed the 

 entire affections of the nation he ruled over, should 

 have been all at once forgotten ; that he should have 

 been quietly, and almost without observation, allowed 

 to be escorted by foreign officers to the place of em- 

 barkation in the south ; disappearing, unnoticed and 

 unrcgretted, from the soil over which he had so long 

 and so recently exercised the most absolute and un- 

 disputed dominion. 



This conduct is a painful illustration of the charac- 

 ter of Frenchmen, and excites reflections one has no 

 pleasure in dwelling on. Mackintosh felt this acutely, 

 and in discussing with me the events I have here 



