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Rh like a blind man, and expressing his joy only by a smile. When he arrived on the landing-place of the first floor, the ladies wished to come to meet him; but a crowd of officers from the higher floor leaped before them, and they would have been crushed to death if they had shown less agility. At last the Emperor succeeded in entering his apartments; the doors were shut, not without difficulty, and the crowd dispersed, satisfied at having seen him. Towards eleven o'clock in the evening, I received an order to go to the Tuileries; I found in the saloon the old Ministers, and in the midst of them the Emperor, talking about the affairs of government with as much ease as if we had gone ten years back. He had just come out of his bath, and had put on his undress regimentals. The subject of the conversation, and the manner in which it was carried on, the presence of the persons who had so long been employed under him, contributed to efface completely from my memory the family of the Bourbons and their reign of nearly a year."

Napoleon found a different France from that over which he had ruled so long:

"The eleven months of the King's reign had thrown us back to 1792, and the Emperor soon