What was going on in Europe in early March 1815, when Napoleon escaped from the island of Elba?

1. Austen was finishing the last chapters of Emma.

2. Shelley had just run off with Mary Godwin.

3. Dickens was a chubby toddler.

4. Rossini was writing The Barber of Seville.

5. Beethoven was composing his piano sonata no. 28 in A major.

6. The Duke of Wellington was practicing the violin.

7. Humphry Davy was inventing the first miner's safety lamp.

8. Franz Mesmer, father of the theory of animal magnetism, was dying.

9. Wilhelmine Luise Mencken was eight months' pregnant with a child she would name Otto von Bismarck.