Not since Henry VI of England was crowned King of France in Notre Dame had the great nation suffered a humiliation so entire as during that Conference of the Allies which occupied Paris during the summer of 1815, in order to arrange the future of Europe and to assume the government of France. The defeat of 1814 had been nothing compared to this complete abasement, France lay prone - while her enemies yelped and bayed about her, each eyeing some juicy, tender morsel to set its fangs in, snatch asunder, and carry to its lair unreproved.
The leanest States were the hungriest and the most pitiless: Prussia and the Germans, greedy beyond all bounds. Nothing was too small for them - they stripped the walls of the public picture galleries; they threatened to blow up the Iena bridge, memorial of their defeat ("Do as you will," said Louis XVIII; "I warn you, I shall have myself carried on to the bridge in my armchair"); and no project for the dismemberment of France appeared to them preposterous. They would fain have had the kingdom occupied for the space of seven years by an army of two hundred and forty thousand men; they wanted a war indemnity of twelve hundred millions; they claimed French Flanders, Alsace, Lorraine, Savoy, Burgundy, Franche-Comt�, part of Champagne, and part of Dauphin�. They wished to separate from the mother-country some four million seven hundred and sixty thousand souls; and, naturally, they required the fortresses: Dunkirk, Lille, Metz, Strasburg, Besan�on, Chambery, at least. The very spirit of destruction possessed them...
