The çoisRenénext day, a boat took him in the direction of the island of Ischia; he joined at sea a smack carrying a few officers of his staff, and set sail with them for France.
Madame Murat, left behind alone, displayed admirable presence of mind. The Austrians were on the point of appearing: in the passing from one authority to another, an interval of anarchy might have been filled with disorders. The Regent did not precipitate her retreat; she allowed the German soldier to occupy the town and had her galleries lighted up at night. The people, seeing the lights from the outside, thinking that the Queen was still there, remained quiet. Meantime Caroline left by a secret stair-case and went on board ship. Seated on the poop, she saw gleaming on the bank the illuminated, but deserted palace from which she was departing, an image of the dazzling dream which she had had during her sleep in the realm of the fairies.
Caroline met the frigate which was bringing Ferdinand[460] back. The ship of the fugitive Queen fired a salute, the ship of the recalled King did not return it: Prosperity does not recognise her sister Adversity. Thus do illusions, faded for the one, begin anew for the other; thus do the fickle destinies of humanity pass each other in the winds and on the billows: smiling or baleful, one and the same abyss bears them or engulfs them.
Murat was achieving his career elsewhere. On the 25th of May 1815, at ten o'clock at night, he landed in the Golfe Juan, where his brother-in-law had landed. Fortune made Joachim play the parody of Napoleon. The latter did not believe in the strength of misfortune, nor in the succour which it brings to great minds: he forbade the dethroned King the approach to Paris; he consigned to the lazar-house this man stricken with the plague of the conquered; he shut him up in a country-house called _Plaisance_, near Toulon. He would have done better to show less dread of a contagion with which he had himself been seized: who knows what a soldier like Murat might have altered in the Battle of Waterloo?
The King of Naples, in his trouble, wrote to Fouché on the 19th of June 1815:
"I shall reply to those who accuse me of commencing hostilities too soon that it was done at the Emperor's formal demand and that, for three months, he did not cease to reassure me as to his sentiments by accrediting ministers to me and writing to me that he relied on me and would never abandon me. It is only when people saw that I had lost, together with the throne, the means of continuing the powerful diversion which had lasted three months that they tried to mislead public opinion by insinuating that I acted on my own behalf and without the Emperor's knowledge."