Visit to Paris in 1814

Napoleon had just been shipped to Elba, and the English poured across the Channel to look. Scott reached Paris in the first weeks of peace after twenty years of war: the Louvre stuffed with plunder taken from every capital in Europe, the returning Bourbons, the soldiers, the shopkeepers, and a city trying to work out what it now was. An eyewitness standing at the exact hinge of the age.