on ro March he was received rapturously by throngs of Lyonnais silk
workers. Napoleon learned that I ,ouis XVJJJ's brother, the comte
d' Artois, had come to I ,yons to organize resistance but had fo und
imperial sentiment so strong that he had decamped back to Paris.
On 13 March Napoleon left Lyons and headed north-west through
Tournus, Chalon, Autun and Avallon to Auxerre. There he was joined
by Marshal Ney, who had earlier boasted to Louis XVIII that he would
bring Bonaparte back to Paris in an iron cage. Ney had taken an oath of
loyalty to the King and did not change his loyalty without heart
searching, but three factors seem to have weighed with him. One was the
obvious fact that the Bourbons had no popular support, and Ney could
not even be sure of his troops' loyalty if he ordered them into battle
against the Emperor. Secondly, Ney and his wife, who was known to be
an ex-chambermaid, had been snubbed once too often by the royalist
snobs at the Bourbon court. Thirdly, Ney, an unbalanced and emotional
man, had been genuinely moved by the simplicity of the note the
Emperor sent him fr om Lyons, in which Napoleon took his fidelity for
granted: 'I shall receive you as I did on the morrow of the battle of the
Moskova.'
Ney's defection swayed other waverers. Proceeding from Auxerre via
Joigny, Sens and Pont-sur-Yonne, Napoleon reached Paris at 9 p.m. on
20 March. He was carried up the steps of the Tuileries by a crowd that
seemed almost crazed with excitement. Incredibly, the Emperor had
made good all his boasts. He had reached Paris in time fo r his son's
birthday and he had done so without shedding a drop of blood. By any
reckoning, the twenty-day march from Antibes to Paris was one of the
high points in his life. As Balzac later wrote incredulously: 'Before him
did ever a man gain an Empire simply by showing his hat?'
In his sensational triumph Napoleon had made just one mistake, but it
was to prove costly. He did not wait until Europe's ministers and
sovereigns had dispersed after their conclave in Vienna before crossing
fr om Elba. Consequently they were all still together when news of his
return came in. As soon as he got back to Elba, Campbell sent news of
the Emperor's flight to the Austrian consul at Genoa, who in turn sent
the message to Vienna by swift courier. Metternich's valet brought in the
letter and woke him at 7 a.m. on 7 March, but the minister, who had been
working until3 a.m., put the envelope on the table and tried to go back to
sleep. Unable to do so, he then opened the letter, sprang out of bed and
was with Emperor Francis by 8 a.m. Fifteen minutes later Metternich
was in conversation with the Czar and at 8.30 with the Kaiser. At ro a.m
the plenipotentiaries to the Conference met, and couriers were dispatched
marcin
(Marcin)
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