On the Emperor’s arrival in Paris on the evening of the 20th of March, he found the King’s study precisely in the state in which it had been used; all his papers still remained on the tables. By the Emperor’s desire, these tables were pushed into the corners of the apartment, and others brought. He gave orders that nothing should be touched, intending to examine the papers at his leisure: and as the Emperor himself quitted France without returning to the Tuileries, the King must have found his study and his papers nearly as he had left them.
The Emperor took a hasty glance at some of the papers. He found among them several letters from the King to M. d’Avary at Madeira, where the latter died; they were written in the King’s own hand, and had doubtless been sent back to him. He found also some confidential letters of the King’s, likewise in his own hand. But how came they there? How had they been returned to him? That would be difficult to explain. They consisted of five or six pages, written in very elegant language, and displaying some sense; but very abstract and metaphysical. In one of them, the Prince said to the lady whom he addressed:—“_Judge, Madam, how much I love you; I have left off mourning for your sake._” “And here,” said the Emperor, “the idea of the mourning was followed up by a succession of long paragraphs, quite in an academic style.” The Emperor could not imagine to whom it had been written, or what the _mourning_ alluded to; I could not assist his conjectures on either of these points.
Two or three days after the Emperor had replaced a certain individual at the head of a celebrated institution, he found on one of the tables a memoir from that very person, which, from the terms in which it was couched with reference to himself and the whole of his family, would certainly have prevented him from signing the re-appointment.
There were also many other documents of the same nature: but the most complete records of baseness, deceit, and villany, were found in the apartments of M. Blacas, grand-master of the wardrobe, and minister of the household: these were filled with plans, reports, and petitions of every kind. There were few of these papers in which the writers did not put themselves forward at the expense of Napoleon, whom they were far from expecting to return. They formed altogether such a mass that the Emperor was obliged to appoint a committee of four persons to examine them; he now thinks he was to blame in not having confided that office to a single individual, and with such injunctions that he might have felt confident nothing was suffered to escape. He has since had reason to believe that these papers might have afforded some salutary hints respecting the treachery which surrounded him on his return from Waterloo.