'The shadow of the news of Napoleon's entry into Paris had scarcely reached the school before all the pupils, by common consent, had sold their lilies, and those that had none gave money instead, to buy a tricolour flag. We wanted to hoist it at once over the school, but the headmaster, M. Payen, expressly forbade it until the post had confirmed the news. In less than an hour we had made more than two hundred lovely transparencies The finest of all was done by one of the pupils, the best at drawing; he did a portrait of Napoleon and Marie-Louise, and above thero^ in the middle, an eagle spreading its wings, with the motto We never deserted it. Now everything is nearly over in the school... there's only one party, onJy one shout, only one voice: 'Vive L'Empereur!*
It would be heard for a hundred days; but after Waterloo came a fresh thunderclap and another despairing letter:
"June 25, 1815. Yesterday when we came back from our walk the newspapers had arrived. Our class masters told us about it, and from joy we were plunged all at once into the deepest dejection. Complete silence reigned in the courtyard; we were just having our snack, and the bread dropped from our hands; everybody cried out, 'It's impossible! How could it happen?' The headmaster sent for the oldest among us, and after telling us the news, begged us not to shout anything that might compromise us, but to keep quiet.. /
Difficult advice to follow for young people with hot heads. On the following days, as they continued to go out with their eagles and their tricolour cockades, the royalists of Limoges prepared to beat them up, and the affray was only just averted. To defend themselves, fifty of the senior pupils had armed themselves c in a formidable manner 7 . Some hid pistols in their shakos. Others pulled out the metal pegs on which they hung their coats in the dormitory, sharpened them on a stone seat, stuck a cork on the point and hid them in their breeches. 'Woe to anybody attempting to attack us in that state; we were prepared to answer them! 5 But the headmaster was informed, and prevented us from going out for a fortnight, not to punish us but to avoid the unpleasantness that our behaviour might have brought upon him in the town. For Limoges is up in arms against us.'
With Louis XVIII on the throne again, the town had certainly been seized with a fresh wave of fine royalist ardour. Thousands of white flags flew from the windows of the houses; the Corsican was everywhere referred to as the wild beast, the man-eater. Round his bust, in one of the squares, faggots were piled up, and Limoges burnt the effigy of Napoleon as Rouen had burnt Joan of Arc.
These great deeds were finally interrupted by a regiment of Lancers which, on its way through the region, stopped to put in its word. The mere sight of it calmed things down, since the brawlers knew they would have their ears cut off if they said a word against the ex-Emperor. For in the France now disowning him two sections of the population had remained faithful to him: the army that he had made so great and the young whom he had nourished with his fame.
The same could not be said of the veteran dignitaries and officials, laden with honours for the last fifteen years. When the disaster came about most of them hastened to turn their gold-laced coats inside out; some of them even repeated this operation three times: after Foiitainebleau, after Elba and after the Hundred Days. If it is true that a fool is a man that never changes his mind, never did France contain so many intelligent citizens as between 1814 and 1815.
A little book published at the beginning of the second Restoration, the Dictionary of Weathercocks, lists a few of the newly converted. There were virtuosi like Talleyrand and Fouche, traitors by nature as much as by interest; but there were also a number of inoffensive creatures, often quite honest men, who merely wanted to retain their functions, their titles or there prebends, and in order to do so they had gone from one camp to the other. In such troubled times the volte-face had become almost a necessity of daily life.
Unfortunately many of these fickle characters wielded too ready a pen. The advice given to criminals and lovers, 'Never write!' is equally valuable in politics, and certain personages of 1815 would have done well to follow it, to begin with Mgr Le Coz, Archbishop of Besangon.
His case is one of the most typical, for this prelate had for many years shown absolute devotion to the Napoleonic cause. Hailing from the Revolution - for he had been the Constitutional Bishop of Rennes — he resigned after the Concordat and was later regularly appointed to the archbishopric of the Jura. Politics apart, he was anything but a 'bad priest*. His pastoral visitations and his many acts of charity had made him popular throughout the cantons of the Dauphine, where he was known as the father of the poor. In 1813 he published a pastoral letter on the subject of Love for one's Native Country, quivering with Bonapartism, and even surpassed this when greeting the regency of Marie-Louise:
Besangon, October 19,1813
'For the last twenty years or so, Madame, it has been impossible for us not to see the hand of God directing the life — so extraordinary, so glorious — of our immortal Napoleon. ... No, Madame, the history of the most famous of the Kings of Israel, destined from childhood to take the place of a prince cursed by Heaven, does not show us more clearly the leading finger of Divine Providence ...'
'Physical and moral fogs' were, unfortunately, to darken the horizon of Besangon. The bad news that was spreading apace, the prospect of a siege to be sustained against the Austrian Army, shook the population of the town, who deserted the church in a body during the Te Deum celebrated on the anniversary of the Coronation. It was clear that 'the fire was going out'.
It was soon to go out at the Archbishop's Palace itself, or rather it was to be replaced by another flame, and from the prelate's inkpot two unexpected letters would issue in the following spring. The first was addressed to the Comte d'Artois:
April 28,1814.
'The cherished name of Louis XVIII has been proclaimed in our twelve hundred parishes, proclaimed by every mouth, together with that of Your Royal Highness, but still more in every heart. Never have we ceased in this diocese, Mon-seigneur, to long for the return of our former masters. But what intensity was imparted each day to our longing by the sceptre of iron that has just been broken!
£ At last the Day of the Lord has risen, for we do not doubt that this is a miraculous stroke of the all-powerful hand of God. ./
These protestations seem to have found little credence at the Tuileries, for when he passed through Besan§on in October, 1814, the Comte d'Artois sent word to the Archbishop forbidding him to come and pay his respects. The precaution was even taken of posting gendarmes at his door, and a ceremony took place in the cathedral in honour of His Royal Highness, at which the head of the clergy was unable to appear. What an affront to Mgr Le Coz!
This only made it easier for him, however, to alter course again when Napoleon arrived from the Gulf of Juan, and we are the richer by a fresh masterpiece:
March 25,1815
'To the Emperor,
'Sire, you really are a prodigious man. This is the cry of all these regions, and this cry, soon to be repeated throughout Europe, will go on through the centuries. In December 1813, in a Pastoral Letter on love for one's country, I demonstrated to my diocesans that by the choice of the French people and by the sanction of Heaven you were their true and lawful Sovereign. It is certain. Sire, that an invisible hand is leading your Imperial Majesty; it is certain that an angel of the Lord covers you with his immortal shield. Ah, may his spirit of wisdom never cease to inspire you!'
In this correspondence the worthy man has already drawn attention three times to the intervention of the divine hand. Would he see it a fourth time, driving Ney's cavalry towards the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean and hurling the Empire into a certain historical lane? Fortunately for his memory, he was spared fresh flattery of the Bourbons: in the course of a pastoral visitation he had the sense to contract pneumonia and to die of it, which was really the only way to avoid changing his mind any more.