He conversed a long time with them on the faults of the Bourbons, and the deplorable situation in which he found France. He confessed to them with noble frankness, that he was not altogether inculpable for its misfortunes. "I was hurried on," said he, "by the course of events, into a wrong path. But, taught by experience, I have abjured that love of glory, so natural to the French, which has had such fatal consequences to them and to me.... I was mistaken in supposing, that the time was arrived for rendering France the metropolis of a great empire: I have renounced for ever that grand enterprise; we have enough of glory, we want repose.
"It is not ambition, that has brought me back to France: it is the love of the country. I could have preferred the tranquillity of the island of Elba to the cares of a throne, had I not known, that France was unhappy, and had need of me.
"On setting foot on our dear France," continued he, after a few unimportant answers from his auditors, "I made a vow to render it free and happy: I bring nothing to it but benefits. I am returned to protect and defend those interests, to which our revolution has given birth: I return to concur with the representatives of the nation in a family compact, that shall preserve for ever the liberty and the rights of every Frenchman: henceforward it will be my ambition, and my glory, to effect the happiness of the great people from whom I hold every thing. I will not, like Louis XVIII., grant you a revocable charter; I will give you an inviolable constitution, and it shall be the work of the people, as well as of myself."
Such were his words. He pronounced them with an air of such satisfaction, he appeared so confident of himself and of the future, that a man would have thought himself criminal to suspect the purity of his intentions, or to doubt the happiness he was about to secure to France.
The language he held at Lyons we perceive was not the same, as that he had uttered at Gap and at Grenoble. In the last-mentioned towns he sought principally to excite in men's minds hatred of the Bourbons, and the love of liberty: he had spoken as a citizen, rather than a monarch. No formal declaration, not a single word, revealed his intentions. It might as well have been supposed, that he thought of restoring the republic, or the consulship, as the empire. At Lyons, there was no longer any thing vague, any thing uncertain: he spoke as a sovereign, and promised to give a national constitution. The idea of the Champ de Mai had recurred to him.