Memoirs of Napoleon, vol 15 | Page 5

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 himself indispensable. I have heard many honest men say very seriously that to him was due the tranquillity of Paris. Moreover, Wellington was the person by whose influence in particular Fouche was made one of the counsellors of the King. After all the benefits which foreigners had conferred upon us Fouche was indeed an acceptable present to France and to the King.
I was not ignorant of the Duke of Wellington's influence upon the affairs of the second Restoration, but for a long time I refused to believe that his influence should have outweighed all the serious considerations opposed to such a perfect anomaly as appointing Fouche the Minister of a Bourbon. But I was deceived. France and the King owed to him Fouche's introduction into the Council, and I had to thank him for the impossibility of resuming a situation which I had relinquished for the purpose of following the King into Belgium. Could I be Prefect of Police under a Minister whom a short time before I had received orders to arrest, but who eluded my agents? That was impossible. The King could not offer me the place of Prefect under Fouche, and if he had I could not have accepted it. I was therefore right in not relying on the assurances which had been given me; but I confess that if I had been told to guess the cause why they could not be realised I never should have thought that cause would have been the appointment of Fouche as a Minister of the King of France. At first, therefore, I was of course quite forgotten, as is the custom of courts when a faithful subject refrains from taking part in the intrigues of the moment.
I have already frequently stated my opinion of the pretended talent of Fouche; but admitting his talent to have been as great as was supposed, that would have been an additional reason for not entrusting the general police of the kingdom to him. His principles and conduct were already sufficiently known. No one could be ignorant of the language he held respecting the Bourbons, and in which be indulged as freely after he became the Minister of Louis XVIII. as when he was the Minister of Bonaparte. It was universally known that in his conversation the Bourbons were the perpetual butt for his sarcasms, that he never mentioned them but in terms of disparagement, and that he represented them as unworthy of governing France. Everybody must have been aware that Fouche, in his heart, favoured a Republic, where the part of President might have been assigned to him. Could any one have forgotten the famous postscript he subjoined to a letter he wrote from Lyons to his worthy friend Robespierre: "To celebrate the fete of the Republic suitably, I have ordered 250 persons to be shot?" And to this man, the most furious enemy of the restoration of the monarchy, was consigned the task of consolidating it for the second time! But it would require another Claudian to describe this new Rufinus!
Fouche never regarded a benefit in any other light than as the means of injuring his benefactor. The King, deceived, like many other persons, by the reputation which Fouche's partisans had conjured up for him, was certainly not aware that Fouche had always discharged the functions of Minister in his own interest, and never for the interest of the Government which had the weakness to entrust him with a power always dangerous in his hands. Fouche had opinions, but he belonged to no party, and his political success is explained by the readiness with which he always served the party he knew must triumph, and which he himself overthrew in its turn. He maintained himself in favour from the days of blood and terror until the happy time of