About the same time Piedmont
and Savoy were restored to Victor Emmanuel I, king of Sardinia. Europe
was rapidly assuming a more normal appearance. To settle the
outstanding territorial questions which the overthrow of Napoleon had
raised, a great congress of rulers and diplomats met at Vienna in the
autumn of 1814.
[Sidenote: Napoleon at Elba, 1814-1815]
Within a few months the unusual calm was rudely broken by the sudden
reappearance of Napoleon Bonaparte himself upon the European stage. It
was hardly to be expected that he for whom the whole Continent had been
too small would be contented in tiny Elba. He nursed grievances, too.
He could get no payment of the revenue secured him by the treaty of
Fontainebleau; his letters to his wife and little son were intercepted
and unanswered; he was treated as an outcast. He became aware of a
situation both in France and at Vienna highly favorable to his own
ambition. As he foresaw, the shrinkage of the great empire into the
realm of old France filled many patriotic Frenchmen with disgust, a
feeling fed every day by stories of the presumption of returning
emigres and of the tactless way in which the Bourbon princes treated
veterans of the _Grande Armee_.
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