1813 to 1814: Leipzig to Fontainebleau (revised).

1813 began with a new army. Of some 685,000 who crossed into Russia, 93,000 to 120,000 came back, and most of those were not French. The conscription of March 1813 gave me about 200,000 more, boys and men past their time; the cavalry I never rebuilt, because the horses died in the snow. Prussia declared war in March, Sweden joined the coalition in April, Austria waited and watched.

Lützen, 2 May: I beat the Russians and Prussians and took few prisoners. Bautzen, 20 and 21 May: another victory, but the enemy withdrew in order and my cavalry could not pursue. Ney lost the chance. I agreed the armistice of Pläswitz on 4 June, six weeks. It was a mistake, and the fault was mine: I gave them time to bring up Austria. Metternich offered the Duchy of Warsaw, the Italian frontiers, the restoration of Prussia. I refused. At Dresden on 26 June we spoke for nearly nine hours; what passed comes from Metternich's own account, printed in 1880, and it is self-serving. I still think I was right to refuse the terms, but wrong to give him the time to arm. A statesman's heart must be in his head — I let my anger at the demand carry me, and then I gave him the weeks he needed. Austria declared war on 12 August.

Leipzig, 16 to 19 October, the Battle of the Nations. About 190,000 against perhaps 360,000. I attacked on the first day and held; the second, nothing; on the third the Saxons and Württembergers went over in the middle of the fight. The retreat was ordered for the night of the 18th, and the bridge over the Elster was blown with thousands still beyond it. Perhaps 70,000 lost, dead, wounded or prisoners. The Confederation of the Rhine dissolved. By November I was on the Rhine.

The campaign of France, January to March 1814: about 70,000 against perhaps 350,000. The allies offered the frontiers of 1792. I refused again. Why? Because I still believed. The army was young, the boys of 1814, but they fought like devils, and I thought one more blow, one more march to their rear, would break the coalition as I had broken every coalition before. Champaubert on 10 February, Montmirail on the 11th, Château-Thierry on the 12th, Vauchamps on the 14th, Montereau on the 18th, and I drove them back. Then Ney and Marmont were beaten at La Fère-Champenoise on 25 March. On the 23rd I had swung east against their communications; they marched on Paris instead. I learned it on the night of the 30th, near Juvisy. Paris capitulated on the 31st. That night, sitting by a fire on the road, I understood that I had lost the game: I had counted on them following me, and they did not.

The marshals refused to march. Ney spoke for them. On 4 April I drafted in my own hand an abdication for my son, with the Empress as regent; as Macdonald recalled long after, I then proposed to march the next day anyway. Marmont's corps went over on the 5th. On the 6th I abdicated without conditions. The treaty was signed on 11 April: the title of Emperor, Elba in full sovereignty, two million francs a year, four hundred volunteers of the Guard. I first refused it, then ratified it on the morning of the 13th. The act printed in the Bulletin des lois bears the 11th.

On the night of 12 to 13 April, as Caulaincourt and Fain tell it, I took opium, was sick, and lived. The drug, the dose and the words are doubtful; it may have been an accident. It was a mistake. I will not say more of it — I was not myself, and a man who leads should never be so far from himself that he cannot see the next morning.

On 20 April I said farewell to the Guard in the Cour du Cheval Blanc. No one took the speech down; Fain, who was present, records it, with a second and differently worded version printed beside his: "Soldiers of my Old Guard, I bid you farewell. For twenty years I have found you constantly on the road of honour and glory." I kissed the eagle. That morning I wrote to Marie-Louise: "Farewell, my good Louise. You can always count on the courage, the calm and the friendship of your husband." Then I went south.

The two invasions of France, as I wrote in my will, were due to betrayals — Marmont, Augereau, Talleyrand, Lafayette — and I forgave them. But the deeper fault was my own: I had refused peace twice when I could have kept the throne; I had trusted that my star would hold after Moscow, when the star was already dim. The art of war is a simple art and all execution, and in 1813 and 1814 the execution was not enough to save what the strategy had already lost.