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battalion, and baring his bosom, thus addressed them: —“Behold me! If there is one soldier among you who wishes to kill his Emperor, led him come forward from the ranks and fire upon me.” The effect was instantaneous. The arms of every soldier was hurled to the ground; they eagerly tore off the white cockade, and enthusiastically mounted the national colours, while the air resounded with cries of the "Emperor forever!" After halting two days at Lyons, Napoleon departed for Paris, where he arrived on the 19th March.
The journey of Bonaparte from Cannes to Paris, has no parallel in history. Every soldier sent against him joined his force. Where resistance seemed for a moment to he threatened, it was disarmed by the sound of his voice. The ascendancy of a victorious leader over soldiers, —the talent of moving armed multitudes by a word, —the inextinguishable attachment of an army to him in whom its glory is concentrated, and embodied, was never before so brilliantly and tremendously exemplified. It is, in short, an event of which the scene could have been laid by a romance writer, hold enough to have imagined it, in no other time and country, than France in the year 1815.
On the 13th June at night, Napoleon quitted Paris to place himself at the head of his troops, and advanced on Belgium. The different corps had been united in the neighbourhood of Beaumont, where he found at his disposal 120,000 of the best soldiers of France; of whom 95,000 were cavalry, and supported by 300 pieces of artillery. Blucher with 30,000 Prussians occupied Charleroi, and the left bank of the Sambre; and General Bulow, with 30,000, was cantoned between Liege and Hannut. The Duke of Wellingion’s
