As soon as the Emperor quitted Lyons he wrote to Ney, who with his army
was at Lons-le-Saulnier, to come and join him. Ney had set off from the
Court with a promise to bring Napoleon, "like a wild beast in a cage, to
Paris." Scott excuses Ney's heart at the expense of his head, and
fancies that the Marshal was rather carried away by circumstances, by
vanity, and by fickleness, than actuated by premeditated treachery, and
it is quite possible that these protestations were sincerely uttered when
Ney left Paris, but, infected by the ardour of his troops, he was unable
to resist a contagion so much in harmony with all his antecedents, and to
attack not only his leader in many a time of peril, but also the
sovereign who had forwarded his career through every grade of the army.

The facts of the cane were these:--

On the 11th of March Ney, being at Besancon, learned that Napoleon was at
Lyons. To those who doubted whether his troops would fight against their
old comrades he said, "They shall fight! I will take a musket from a
grenadier and begin the action myself! I will run my sword to the hilt
in the body of the first man who hesitates to fire." At the same time he
wrote to the Minister of War at Paris that he hoped to see a fortunate
close to this mad enterprise.

He then advanced to Lons-le-Saulnier, where, on the night between the
13th and 14th of March, not quite three days after his vehement
protestations of fidelity, he received, without hesitation, a letter from
Bonaparte, inviting him, by his old appellation of the "Bravest of the
Brave," to join his standard. With this invitation Ney complied, and
published an order of the day that declared the cause of the Bourbons,
which he had sworn to defend, lost for ever.