breath, and did not regret the loss of that which had animated
a preceding generation, in a view of a peace which was to bring
wealth, comfort, and tranquillity into their own homes.

The _bourgeoisie_ of France trusted that it had seen the last of the
Great Revolution. It stood between the working-classes, who had no
voice in the politics of the Restoration, and the old nobility,--men
who had returned to France full of exalted expectations. The king
had to place himself on one side or the other. He might have been
the true Bourbon and headed the party of the returned _émigrés_,--in
which case his crown would not have stayed long upon his head; or
he might have made himself king of the _bourgeoisie_, opposed to
revolution, Napoleonism, or disturbances of any kind,--the party,
in short, of the Restoration of Peace: a peace that might outlast
his time; _et après moi le déluge!_

But animals which show neither teeth nor claws are seldom left in
peace, and Louis XVIII.'s reign--from 1814 to 1824--was full of
conspiracies. The royalty of the Restoration was only an ornament
tacked on to France. The Bourbon dynasty was a necessary evil, even
in the eyes of its supporters. "The Bourbons," said Chateaubriand,
"are the foam on the revolutionary wave that has brought them back
to power;" whilst every one knows Talleyrand's famous saying "that
after five and twenty years of exile they had nothing remembered
and nothing forgot." Of course the old nobility, who flocked back to
France in the train of the allied armies, expected the restoration
of their estates. The king had got his own again,--why should not
they get back theirs? And they imagined that France, which had
been overswept by successive waves of revolution, could go back
to what she had been under the old régime. This was impossible.