retirement of his apartments in the Tuileries, and left his minister
Blacas to attend to the little details of government, the king deeming
the great ones only worthy of his attention.



CHAPTER VII.

KING LOUIS XVIII.

King Louis XVIII. was, however, in the retirement of his palace, still
the most enlightened and unprejudiced of the representatives of the old
era; he clearly saw many things to which his advisers purposely closed
their eyes. To his astonishment, he observed that the men who had risen
to greatness under Bonaparte, and who had fallen to the king along with
the rest of his inheritance, were not so ridiculous, awkward, and
foolish, as they had been represented to be.

"I had been made to suppose," said Louis XVIII., "that these generals of
Bonaparte were peasants and ruffians, but such is not the case. He
schooled these men well. They are polite, and quite as shrewd as the
representatives of the old court. We must conduct ourselves very
cautiously toward them."

This kind of recognition of the pas