Memoirs of Chateaubriand Volume V — Book I Part 2

PARIS, RUE D'ENFER, _end of November_ 1831. Returning to Paris on the 11th of October, I published my pamphlet at the end of the same month; it is entitled, _De la nouvelle proposition relative au banissement de Charles X. et de sa famille, ou suite de mon dernier écrit: De la Restauration et de la Monarchie élective.

_ When these posthumous Memoirs appear, will the daily polemics, the events of which men are enamoured at this present hour of my life, the adversaries against whom I am fighting, will even the act of banishment of Charles X. and his Family count for anything?

There you have the drawback of all diaries: you find in them ardent discussions of subjects that have become indifferent; the reader sees pass, like shadows, a host of persons whose very names he does not remember: silent supernumeraries, who fill the back of the stage.

Yet it is in these dryasdust portions of the chronicles that one gathers the observations and facts of the history of mankind and men.

I placed first at the commencement of the pamphlet the decree brought forward successively by Messieurs Baude and Briqueville.

After examining the five courses that lay open after the Revolution of July, I said: "The worst of the periods through which we have passed seems to be that in which we are, because anarchy reigns in men's reasons, morals and intellects.

The existence of nations is longer than that of individuals: a paralytic man often remains stretched on his couch for many years before disappearing; an infirm nation lies long on its bed before expiring.

What the new Royalty needed was buoyancy, youth, intrepidity, to turn its back upon the past, to march with France to meet the future.

"All this it neglects: it appeared before us reduced and debilitated by the doctors who were physicking it.

It arrived piteous, empty-handed, having nothing to give, everything to receive, playing the poor thing, begging everybody's pardon, and yet snappish, declaiming against the Legitimacy and aping the Legitimacy, against republicanism and trembling before it.

This abdominous 'system' beholds enemies only in two forms of opposition which it threatens.

To support itself it has built itself a phalanx of re-enlisted veterans: if they bore as many stripes as they have taken oaths, their sleeves would be more motley than the livery of the Montmorencys.

"I doubt whether liberty will long be content with this stew-pot of a domestic monarchy.

The Franks placed liberty in a camp; in their descendants it has retained the taste and love of its first cradle; like the old Royalty, it wants to be raised on the shield and its deputies are soldiers."

[Illustration: Charles X. ] From this general argument I pass on to the details of the system followed in our foreign relations.

The immense mistake of the Congress of Vienna is that it placed a military nation like France in a condition of forced hostility with the neighbouring peoples.

I point to all that the foreigners have gained in territory and power, all that we could have taken back in July.

A mighty lesson!

A striking proof of the vanity of military glory and of the work of conquerors!

If one were to draw up a list of the Princes who have increased the possessions of France, Bonaparte would not figure on it; but Charles X. would occupy a remarkable place!

[Sidenote: Yet another pamphlet.

] Passing from argument to argument, I come to Louis-Philippe: "Louis-Philippe is King," I say; "he wields the sceptre of the child whose immediate heir he is, of the ward whom Charles X. placed in the hands of the Lieutenant-general of the Kingdom as into those of a tried guardian, a faithful trustee, a generous protector.

In that Palace of the Tuileries, instead of an innocent couch, free from insomnia, free from remorse, free from ghosts, what has the Prince found?

An empty throne presented to him by a headless spectre bearing, in its blood-stained hand, the head of another spectre....

"Must we, to finish the business, put a handle to Louvel's blade in the shape of a law, in order to strike a last blow at the proscribed Family?

If it were driven to these shores by the tempest; if Henry, too young as yet, had not attained the years requisite for the scaffold, well then, do you, the masters, give him a dispensation of age to die!"

After speaking to the French Government, I turn to Holyrood and add: "Dare I, in conclusion, take the respectful liberty of addressing a few words to the men of exile?

They have returned to sorrow as into their mother's womb: misfortune, a seduction from which it is difficult for me to defend myself, seems to me to be always in the right; I fear to offend its sacred authority and the majesty which it adds to insulted grandeurs, which henceforth have none but me to flatter them.

But I will overcome my weakness, I will strive to voice words which, in a day of ill-fortune, might give grounds for hope to my country.

"The education of a prince should be analogous to the form of government and the manners of his native land.

Now, there are in France neither chivalry nor knights, neither soldiers of the Oriflamme nor nobles barbed in steel, ready to march behind the White Flag.

There is a people which is no longer the people of other days, a people which, changed by the centuries, has lost the old habits and the ancient manners of our fathers.

Whether we deplore the social transformations that have arisen or glorify them, we must take the nation as it is, facts as they are, enter into the spirit of our time, in order to exercise an action over that spirit.

"All is in God's hand, except the past, which, once fallen from that hand, does not return to it.

"The moment will doubtless arrive when the orphan will leave that palace of the Stuarts, the ill-omened refuge which seems to spread the shadow of its fatality over his youth: the last-born of the Bearnese must mix with children of his own age, attend the public schools, learn all that is known to-day.

Let him become the most enlightened young man of his time; let him be acquainted with the knowledge of the period; let him add to the virtues of a Christian of the age of St. Louis the sagacity of a Christian of our age.

Let travel be his instructor in manners and laws; let him cross the seas, compare institutions and governments, free peoples and enthralled peoples; let him, if he find the occasion while abroad, expose himself, as a simple soldier, to the dangers of war, for none is fit to reign over Frenchmen who has not heard the hiss of the cannon-ball.

Then you will have done for him all that, humanly speaking, you can do.

But, above all, beware of fostering him in ideas of invincible right: far from flattering him with the thought of reascending the throne of his fathers, prepare him never to reascend it; bring him up to be a man, not to be a king: those are his best chances.

"Enough: whatever God's counsel may provide, there will remain to the candidate of my fond and pious loyalty a majesty of the ages which men cannot take from him.

A thousand years attached to his young head will always deck him with a pomp exceeding that of all monarchs.

If, in a private condition, he bear bravely this diadem of days, of memory and of glory, if his hand raise without effort this sceptre of time which his ancestors have bequeathed to him, what empire will he be able to regret?"

[Sidenote: The Comte de Briqueville.

] M.

le Comte de Briqueville, whose motion I thus contested, printed some reflections on my pamphlet; he sent them to me with the following note: "MONSIEUR, "I have yielded to the need, to the duty, to publish the reflections brought to my mind by your eloquent words on my motion.

I obey a feeling no less sincere when I deplore that I should find myself in opposition to you, monsieur, who add to the power of genius so many claims to public consideration.

The country is in danger, and from that moment I cease to believe in a serious dissension between us: this France of ours invites us to unite to save her; assist her with your genius; we shall work, we shall assist her with our strong arms.

On that field, monsieur, is it not true that we shall not be long in coming to an understanding?

You shall be the Tyrtæus[364] of a people of which we are the soldiers, and it will be with the greatest happiness that I shall then proclaim myself the most ardent of your political adherents, as I am already the sincerest of your admirers.

"Your most humble and obedient servant, "The Comte Armand de BRIQUEVILLE.

"PARIS, 15 _November_ 1831." I was not slow in answering, and I broke a second still-born lance against the champion: "PARIS, 15 _November_ 1831. "MONSIEUR, "Your letter is worthy of a gentleman: forgive me for using this old word, which becomes your name, your courage, your love of France.

Like you, I detest the foreign yoke: if the question were that of defending my country, I should not ask to wear the lyre of the poet, but the sword of the veteran, in the ranks of your soldiers.

"I have not yet read your reflections, monsieur; but, if the state of politics led you to withdraw the motion which has so strangely saddened me, how happy I should be to find myself by your side, with no obstacle between us, on the field of liberty, of honour, of the glory of our country!

"I have the honour to be, monsieur, with the most distinguished regard, "Your most humble and most obedient servant, "CHATEAUBRIAND."

PARIS, INFIRMERIE DE MARIE-THÉRÈSE, RUE D'ENFER,

_December_ 1831. A poet[365], mingling the proscriptions of the Muses with those of the laws, attacked the widow and the orphan in a vigorous improvisation.

As these verses were by a writer of talent, they acquired a sort of authority which forbade me to let them pass in silence; I faced about to meet another enemy[366].

The reader would not understand my reply if he did not read the poet's lampoon; I invite you, therefore to cast your eyes over those verses: they are very fine and are to be found everywhere.

My reply has not been published: it appears for the first time in these Memoirs.

Wretched contentions in which revolutions end!

See to what a struggle we come, the feeble successors of those men who, arms in hand, treated great questions of glory and liberty by shaking the universe!

Pygmies to-day utter their little cry among the tombs of the giants buried beneath the mountains which they have overturned upon themselves.

"PARIS, _Wednesday evening_, 9 _November_ 1831. "SIR, "I received this morning the last number of _Némésis_ which you have done me the honour to send me.

To protect myself against the seduction of those praises awarded with so much brilliancy, grace and charm, I need to recall the obstacles that exist between us.

We live in two worlds apart; our hopes and fears are not the same;

you burn what I adore, and I burn what you adore.

You, sir, have grown up amid a crowd of abortions of July; but, even as all the influence which you attribute to my prose will not, according to you, raise up a fallen House, so, according to me, will all the might of your poetry fail to abase that noble House.

Can it be that both you and I are thus placed in two impossible positions?

"You are young, sir, like the future which you dream of and which will trick you; I am old, like time, which I dream of and which escapes me.

If you were to come to sit by my fireside, you obligingly say, you would reproduce my features with your graver: I should strive to make you a Christian and a Royalist.

Since your lyre, at the first chord of its harmony, sang my Martyrs and my Pilgrimage, why should not you complete the course?

Enter the holy place; time has stripped me only of my hair, as it strips a tree of its leaves in winter, but the sap remains in my heart: my hand is still firm enough to hold the torch which would guide your steps under the vaults of the sanctuary.

[Sidenote: Letter to Barthélemy.

] "You declare, sir, that it would need a people of poets to understand my contradictions of 'extinct kingdoms and young republics:' is it likely that you too have not celebrated liberty and yet found some magnificent words for the tyrants who oppressed it?

You quote the Du Barrys, the Montespans, the Fontanges, the La Vallières: you recall royal weaknesses; but did those weaknesses cost France what the debauches of Danton and Camille Desmoulins cost her?

The morals of those plebeian Catalines were reflected even in their speech: they borrowed their metaphors from the piggeries of infamous persons and prostitutes.

Did the frailties of Louis XIV.

and Louis XV.

send the fathers and husbands to the gallows, after dishonouring the daughters and wives?

Did his blood-baths do more to render chaste a revolutionary's lewdness than did her milk-baths to render virginal a Poppæa's pollution?

If Robespierre's hucksters had retailed to the people of Paris the blood from Danton's bathing-tub, as Nero's slaves sold to the inhabitants of Rome the milk from his courtesan's _thermæ_, do you think that any virtue would have been found in the rinsings of the obscene headsmen of the Terror?

"The swiftness and the height of the flight of your muse have deceived you, sir: the sun, which laughs at all misery, must have struck the garments of a widow; they must have seemed 'gilded' to you: I have seen those garments, they were of mourning; they knew nothing of pleasure; the child, in the entrails which bore him, was rocked only to the sound of tears; if he had 'danced nine months in his mother's womb,' as you say, he would then have known joy only before being born, between conception and delivery, between the assassination and the proscription!

'The pallor of fearsome omen' which you remarked on Henry's face is the result of his father's blood-letting, and not of a ball of two hundred and seventy nights.

The old curse was kept up for the daughter of Henry IV.

: _In dolore paries filios.

_ I know none save the Goddess of Reason whose confinements, hastened by adultery, took place amid the dances of Death.

From her public flanks fell unclean reptiles which, at that very instant, began to jig in the ring with the knitting-women around the scaffold, to the sound of the rise and fall of the knife, the refrain of that devils' dance.

"Ah sir, I entreat you, in the name of your rare talent, cease to reward crime and to punish misfortune by the sentences improvised by your muse; do not condemn the first to Heaven, the second to Hell.

If, while remaining attached to the cause of liberty and enlightenment, you were to afford an asylum to religion, humanity, innocence, you would see another sort of Nemesis appear before you in your waking hours, one worthy of all the earth's homage.

And, while waiting to pour over virtue, better than I know how, 'the whole ocean of your fresh ideas,' continue, in the spirit of vengeance which you have adopted, to drag our turpitude to the _gemoniæ_; overthrow the false monuments of a revolution which has not built the temple fit for its cult; turn up their ruins with the plough-share of your satire; sow salt in that field to make it barren, so that no new vileness can shoot there.

I recommend above all, sir, to your attention, that Government which has fallen so low that it trembles before the pride of the obedience, the victory of the defeats, and the glory of the humiliations of the country.

"CHATEAUBRIAND."

PARIS, RUE D'ENFER, _end of March_ 1832. Those travels and those contests came to an end for me in the year 1831; at the beginning of the year 1832, a new annoyance.

The Paris Revolution had left on the streets of Paris a host of Swiss, of Body-guards, of men of all conditions kept by the Court, who were now starving and whom certain monarchical dunderheads, young and foolish under their grey hairs, thought of enlisting for a surprise.

In this formidable plot there was no lack of serious, pale, lean, diaphanous, bent persons, with noble faces, eyes still bright, white heads; that past suggested honour resuscitated, coming to try, with its shadowy hands, to restore the Family which it had been unable to maintain with its living hands.

Often men on crutches pretend to prop crumbling monarchies; but, at this period of society, the restoration of a mediæval monument has become impossible, because the genius which quickened that architecture is dead: what we take for Gothic is merely antiquated.

On the other hand, the heroes of July, whom the _juste-milieu_ had swindled out of the Republic, desired nothing more than to come to an understanding with the Carlists to revenge themselves on a common enemy, remaining free to cut each other's throats after the victory.

M.

Thiers having extolled the system of 1793 as the work of liberty, victory and genius, young imaginations became kindled at the flame of a conflagration of which they saw only the distant reverberation; they have got no further than the poetry of the Terror: a mad and hideous parody which sets back the hour of liberty.

This is to disregard at once time, history and humanity; it is to oblige the world to recoil under the whip of the convict-keeper in order to escape those fanatics of the scaffold.

Money was needed to feed all those malcontents, dismissed heroes of July, or servants out of place: people clubbed together.

Carlist and republican cabals were held in every comer of Paris, and the police, informed of all that went on, sent its spies from club to garret to preach equality and liberty.

I was told of these proceedings, which I opposed.

The two parties wanted to declare me their leader at the assured moment of triumph: a Republican club asked me if I would accept the Presidency of the Republic; I answered: "Yes, most certainly; but after M. de La Fayette."

[Sidenote: The Marquis de La Fayette.

] This was thought modest and proper.

General La Fayette used sometimes to come to Madame Récamier's; I used to make fun of his "best of republics;" I asked him if he would not have done better to proclaim Henry V. and to be the real President of France during the minority of the royal infant.

He agreed and took the jest in good part, for he was a well-bred man.

Each time we met, he would say: "Ah, you are going to pick your quarrel again!"

I used to make him admit that no one had been more caught than himself by his good friend Philip.

In the midst of this excitement and these extravagant plottings, arrived a man in disguise.

He landed at my door with a tow wig on his pate and a pair of green spectacles on his nose, hiding his eyes, which could see quite well without spectacles.

He had his pockets stuffed with bills of exchange, which he displayed; and, suddenly aware that I wanted to sell my house and settle my affairs, he offered me his services.

I could not help laughing at this gentleman (a man, otherwise, of intelligence and resource) who thought himself obliged to buy me for the Legitimacy.

When his offers became too pressing, he saw on my lips a certain scornfulness which obliged him to beat a retreat, and he wrote to my secretary this little note, which I have kept: "SIR, "Yesterday evening I had the honour to see M. le Vicomte de Chateaubriand, who received me with his customary kindness;

nevertheless, I seem to have perceived that he no longer showed his usual geniality.

Tell me, I beg of you, what can have caused me to lose his confidence, which I valued more highly than anything else.

If he has been told 'stories' about me, I am not afraid to expose my conduct to the light of day, and I am prepared to reply to anything that he may have been told: he knows too well the spitefulness of intriguing people to condemn me unheard.

There are timid persons too who make others so; but we must hope that the day will come when we shall see people who are really devoted.

Well, he told me that it was of no use for me to meddle in his business;

I am sorry for that, because I flatter myself that it would have been arranged according to his wishes.

I have little doubt as to the person who has wrought this change in him; if I had been less discreet at the time, this person would not have been in a position to injure me with your excellent 'patron.'

However, I am none the less devoted to him, as you may assure him once more with my respectful homage.

I venture to hope that a day will come when he will be able to know me and to judge of me.

"Pray accept, sir, etc." Hyacinthe answered this note with the following reply at my dictation: "My patron has nothing whatever in particular against the person who has written to me; but he wishes to live outside everything, and does not wish to accept any service."

Shortly afterwards, the catastrophe came.

[Sidenote: A Royalist conspiracy.

] Do you know the Rue des Prouvaires[367], a narrow, dirty, populous street, near Saint-Eustache and the markets?

It was there that the famous supper of the Third Restoration was held.

The guests were armed with pistols, daggers and keys; after drinking, they were to make their way into the gallery of the Louvre and, passing at midnight through a double row of master-pieces, go to strike the usurping monster in the midst of a fête.

The conception was a romantic one: the sixteenth century had returned; one might have believed one's self in the times of the Borgias, the Florentine Medicis and the Parisian Medicis: only the men were different.

On the 1st of February, at nine o'clock in the evening, I was going to bed, when a zealous man and the individual of the bills of exchange forced my door in the Rue d'Enfer to tell me that all was ready, that in two hours Louis-Philippe would have disappeared; they came to enquire if they might declare me the principal chief of the Provisional Government and if I would consent to take the reins of the Provisional Government, in the name of Henry V. , with a council of Regency.

They admitted that the thing was dangerous, but said that I should reap all the greater glory, and that, as I was acceptable to all parties, I was the only man in France in a position to play such a part.

This was pressing me very hard: two hours to decide upon my crown!

Two hours in which to sharpen the big mameluke's sabre which I had bought in Cairo in 1806!

However, I felt no embarrassment and I said to them: "Gentlemen, you know that I have never approved of your enterprise, which seems to me a mad one.

If I were disposed to meddle in it, I would have shared your dangers and would not have waited for your victory to accept the prize of your risks.

You know that I have a serious love of liberty, and it is clear to me, to judge by the leaders of all this business, that they do not want liberty and that, if they remained masters of the field of battle, they would begin by establishing the reign of arbitrariness.

They would have no one, they would have me least of all, to support them in these plans; their success would bring about complete anarchy, and other countries, profiting by our discords, would come to dismember France.

I cannot therefore enter into all this.

I admire your devotion, but mine is not of the same character.

I am going to bed; I advise you to do the same;

and I am very much afraid that I shall hear to-morrow morning of the misfortune of your friends."

The supper took place; the proprietor of the tavern, who had prepared it only with the authorization of the police, knew what he was about.

The police-spies, at table, touched glasses to the health of Henry V. with the best of them; the officers arrived, seized the guests, and once more upset the cup of the Legitimate Royalty.

The Renaud of the royalist adventurers was a cobbler in the Rue de Seine[368], a hero of July, who had fought valiantly during the Three Days and who seriously wounded one of Louis-Philippe's policemen, even as he had killed soldiers of the Guard to drive out Henry V. and the two old Kings.

During this business, I had received a note from Madame la Duchesse de Berry appointing me a "member of a secret government," which she was establishing in her quality as Regent of France.

I took advantage of this occasion to write the following letter to the Princess[369]: [Sidenote: My letter.

] "MADAME,

"I have received with the deepest gratitude the mark of confidence and esteem with which you have consented to honour me; it lays upon my loyalty the duty of doubling my zeal, while not refraining from placing before the eyes of Your Royal Highness what appears to me to be the truth.

"I will speak first of the so-called conspiracies, the rumour of which will perhaps have reached Your Royal Highness.

It is asserted that these have been concocted or provoked by the police.

Leaving the fact on one side, and without insisting upon the intrinsically reprehensible nature of conspiracies, be they true or false, I will content myself with observing that our national character is at once too light and too frank to succeed in such tasks.

And so, during the last forty years, this sort of guilty enterprise has invariably failed.

Nothing is more common than to hear a Frenchman publicly boast of being in a plot: he tells the whole details of it, without forgetting the day, place and hour, to some spy whom he takes for a brother; he says aloud, or rather exclaims to the passers-by: "'We have forty thousand men all told, we have sixty thousand cartridges, in such a street, number so-and-so, the corner-house.'

"And then our Cataline goes off to dance and laugh.

"Secret societies have a long range only because they proceed by revolutions and not by conspiracies; they aim at changing doctrines, ideas and manners, before changing men and things;

their progress is slow, but their results certain.

Publicity of thought will destroy the influence of secret societies; it is public opinion which will now effect in France that which occult congregations accomplish among unemancipated nations.

"The departments in the West and South, which they seem to wish to drive to extremities by means of arbitrary measures and violence, retain the spirit of loyalty for which our old manners were distinguished; but that half of France will never conspire, in the narrow sense of the word: it forms a sort of camp standing at ease under arms.

Admirable as a reserve force of the Legitimacy, it would be insufficient as an advance-guard and would never assume the offensive successfully.

Civilization has made too much progress to allow of the outburst of one of those intestine wars, leading to great results, which were the outlet and the scourge of centuries at once more Christian and less enlightened than our own.

"What exists in France is not a monarchy; it is a republic: one, truly, of the worst quality.

This republic is plastroned with a royalty which receives the blows and prevents them from striking on the Government itself.

"Besides, if the Legitimacy is a considerable force, the right of election is also a preponderating power, even when it is only fictitious, especially in this country where men live only on vanity: the French passion for equality is flattered by the right of election.

"Louis-Philippe's Government abandons itself to a double excess of arbitrariness and obsequiousness which the Government of Charles X. had never dreamt of.

This excess is endured; and why?

Because the people more easily endure the tyranny of a government which they have created than the lawful strictness of the institutions which are not their work.

"Forty years of storms have shattered the strongest souls: apathy is great, egoism almost general; men shrivel up to escape danger, to keep what they possess, to make shift to live in peace.

After a revolution, there remain also cankered men who communicate their contamination to everything even as, after a battle, there remain corpses which pollute the air.

If, by a mere wish, Henry V. could be transported to the Tuileries without trouble, without a shock, without compromising the slightest interest, we should be very near a restoration; but, in order to effect it, if one had to spend as much as one sleepless night, the chances would decrease.

"The results of the Days of July have not turned to the profit of the people, nor to the honour of the army, nor to the advantage of literature, art, commerce or industry.

The State has fallen a prey to the professional ministerialists and to the class which sees the country in its stew-pot, public affairs in its domestic economy.

It is difficult, Madame, for you at your distance to know what is here called the _juste-milieu_: Your Royal Highness must imagine a complete absence of elevation of soul, of nobility of heart, of dignity of character; you must picture to yourself people swelled up with their importance, bewitched with their employs, doting on their money, determined to die for their pensions: nothing will part them from those; it is a question of life or death to them;

they are wedded to them as were the Gauls to their swords, the knights to the Oriflamme, the Huguenots to the white plume of Henry IV.

, the soldiers of Napoleon to the tricolour; they will die only when they are exhausted of oaths to every form of government, after shedding the last drop of those oaths on their last place.

These eunuchs of the sham Legitimacy dogmatize about independence while having the citizens bludgeoned in the streets and the writers crowded into prison; they strike up songs of triumph while evacuating Belgium at the bidding of an English minister and, soon after, Ancona by order of an Austrian corporal.

Between the threshold of Sainte-Pélagie and the doors of the Cabinets of Europe, they strut all puffed out with liberty and soiled with glory.

[Sidenote: To the Duchesse de Berry.

] "What I have said concerning the temper of the French must not discourage Your Royal Highness; but I wish that the road that leads to the throne of Henry V. were better known.

"You know my way of thinking as regards the education of my young King: my opinions are expressed at the end of the pamphlet which I have laid at Your Royal Highness' feet; I could only repeat myself.

Let Henry V. be brought up for his century, with and by the men of his century: my whole system is summed up in those two words.

Let him, above all, be brought up not to be King.

He may reign tomorrow, he may reign only in ten years, he may never reign: for, if the Legitimacy has the different chances of returning which I will presently set out, nevertheless the present edifice might crumble to pieces without the formers rising from its ruins.

You have a firm enough soul, Madame, to be able, without allowing yourself to be cast down, to suppose a judgment of God which would thrust back your illustrious House into the popular sources, even as you have a large enough heart to cherish just hopes without allowing them to intoxicate you.

I must now place this other side of the picture before you.

"Your Royal Highness can defy, can dare everything at your age;

you have more years left to run than have elapsed since the commencement of the Revolution.

Now, what have these latter years not seen?

When the Republic, the Empire, the Legitimacy have passed, shall the amphibious thing known as the _juste-milieu_ not pass?

What!

Was it to arrive at the wretchedness of the men and things of the present moment that we have gone through and expended so many crimes, so much misfortune, talent, liberty and glory?

What!

Europe overturned, thrones tumbling one over the other, generations hurled into the common ditch with the steel in their breasts, the world labouring for half a century, and all this to bring forth the sham Legitimacy?

One could conceive a great republic emerging from this social cataclysm: it would at least be fitted to inherit the conquests of the Revolution, that is, political liberty, liberty and publicity of thought, the levelling of ranks, the admission to all offices, the equality of all before the law, popular election and sovereignty.

But how can we suppose a troop of sordid mediocrities, saved from shipwreck, to be able to employ those principles?

To what a proportion have they not already reduced them!

They detest them, they hanker only after laws of exception; they would like to catch all those liberties in the crown which they have forged, as in a trap; after which they would fiddle-faddle sanctimoniously with canals, railways, a mish-mash of arts, literary arrangements: a world of machinery, loquacity and self-sufficiency denominated 'a model society.'

Woe to any superiority, to any man of genius ambitious of preferment, of glory and pleasure, of sacrifice and renown, aspiring to the triumph of the tribune, the lyre or arms, who should rise up some day in that universe of boredom!

"There is but one chance, Madame, for the sham Legitimacy to continue to vegetate: that is, if the actual state of society were the natural state of that very society at the period in which we live.

If the people, grown old, found itself in sympathy with its decrepit government; if there were a harmony of infirmity and weakness between the governors and the governed, then, Madame, all would be over for Your Royal Highness and for the rest of the French.

But, if we have not come to the age of national dotage and if the immediate Republic be impossible, then the Legitimacy seems called to be born again.

Live your youth, Madame, and you shall have the royal tatters of the poor thing known as the Monarchy of July.

Say to your enemies what your ancestress, Queen Blanche[370], said to hers during the minority of St. Louis: "'No matter; I can wait.'

"Life's beautiful hours have been given you in compensation for your sufferings, and the future will give you as many occasions of happiness as the present has robbed you of days.

"The first reason which militates in your favour, Madame, is the justice of your cause and the innocence of your son.

All the eventualities are not against the good right."

[Sidenote: On the prospects.

] After setting forth in detail the reasons for hope which I hardly entertained, but which I endeavoured to amplify in order to console the Princess, I continued: "There, Madame, you see the precarious state of the sham Legitimacy at home; abroad its position is no more assured.

If Louis-Philippe's Government had felt that the Revolution of July cancelled the earlier transactions, that a new national constitution entailed a new political right and changed social interests; if it had shown judgment and courage at the outset of its career, it could, without firing a single cartridge, have endowed France with the frontier which has been taken from her, so keen was the assent of the peoples, so great the stupefaction of the kings.

The sham Legitimacy would have paid ready money for its crown with an increase of territory and would have entrenched itself behind that bulwark.

Instead of profiting by its republican element to go fast, it has been afraid of its own principles; it has dragged itself on its belly; it has abandoned the nations which have risen for it and through it; it has turned them from the clients that they were into adversaries; it has extinguished warlike enthusiasm;

it has changed into a pusillanimous wish for peace an enlightened desire to restore the balance of power between ourselves and the neighbouring States, or at least to claim from those States, enlarged out of all proportion, the shreds tom from our old country.

Thanks to his faint-heartedness and lack of genius, Louis-Philippe has recognised treaties which are not connatural with the Revolution, treaties with which it cannot live and which the foreigners themselves have violated.

"The _juste-milieu_ has left the foreign Cabinets time to recover themselves and to form their armies.

And, as the existence of a democratic monarchy is incompatible with the existence of the continental monarchies, a state of hostilities might issue from this incompatibility in spite of protocols, financial embarrassments, mutual fears, prolonged armistices, gracious dispatches and demonstrations of friendship.

If our _bourgeois_ Royalty has resigned itself to accept insult?

, if men dream of peace, still the state of things may become such as to necessitate war.

"But whether war shatter the sham Legitimacy or not, I know, Madame, that you will never fix your hopes in the foreigner; you would rather that Henry V. should never reign than see him triumph under the patronage of an European coalition: you place your hopes in yourself and in your son.

In whatever manner we might argue about the Ordinances, they could never affect Henry V. ; innocent of all, he has the election of the ages and his native misfortunes in his favour.

If unhappiness touches us in the solitude of a tomb, it moves us still more when it keeps watch beside a cradle: for then it is no longer the memory of a thing that is past, of a being who is miserable but who has ceased to suffer; it is a painful reality; it saddens an age which ought to know only joy; it threatens a whole life which has done nothing to deserve its rigours.

"For you, Madame, your adversities provide a powerful authority.

Bathed in your husband's blood, you have carried in your womb the son whom politics named "the child of Europe" and religion "the child of miracle."

What influence do you not exercise over public opinion when you are seen to be keeping unaided, for the exiled orphan, the heavy crown which Charles X. shook from his whitened head and from whose weight two other brows escaped, sufficiently laden with sorrow to permit them to reject this new burden!

Your image presents itself to our memory with those feminine graces which seem to occupy their natural place, when seated on the throne.

The people entertain no prejudice against you; they pity your sorrows, they admire your courage; they remember your days of mourning; they are grateful to you for mingling later in their pleasures, for sharing their tastes and their festivals; they find a charm in the vivacity of this foreign Frenchwoman, who has come from a land endeared to our glory by the days of Fornovo[371], of Marignano[372], of Areola[373] and of Marengo[374].

The Muses regret their protectress, born under that fair sky of Italy which inspired her with the love of the arts and which turned a daughter of Henry IV.

into a daughter of Francis I. "France, since the Revolution, has often changed leaders, and has not yet seen a woman at the helm of the State.

God wills, perhaps, that the reins of this unmanageable people, which slipped from the devouring hands of the Convention, broke in the victorious hands of Bonaparte, and were taken up in vain by Louis XVIII.

and Charles X. , should be fastened again by a young Princess, who would know how to make them at once less fragile and less light."

[Sidenote: On the legitimacy.

] Lastly reminding Madame that she had been good enough to think of me as a member of the secret government, I concluded my letter as follows: "In Lisbon there stands a magnificent monument on which one reads this epitaph: HERE LIES BASCO FUGUERA AGAINST HIS WILL.

My mausoleum shall be a modest one, and I shall not rest there unwillingly.

"You know, Madame, the order of ideas in which I perceive the possibility of a restoration: the other combinations would be beyond the range of my mind; I should confess my insufficiency.

It would be overtly, by proclaiming myself the man of your consent, of your confidence, that I should find some strength; but I should feel no aptitude to act as a nocturnal minister plenipotentiary, a _chargé d'affaires_ to the darkness.

If Your Royal Highness were patently to appoint me your ambassador to the people of 'New France' I should inscribe in large letters over my door: LEGATION OF OLD FRANCE.

Things would happen as God pleased; but I would have nothing to do with secret devotions; I know how to be guilty of loyalty only in _flagrante delicto.

_ "Madame, without refusing Your Royal Highness the services which you have the right to command of me, I entreat you to allow the plan which I have formed of ending my days in retirement.

My ideas cannot be acceptable to the persons who enjoy the confidence of the noble exiles of Holyrood: once misfortune were past, the natural antipathy to my principles and person would revive with prosperity.

I have beheld the rejection of the plans which I had put forward for the greatness of my country, to give France frontiers within which she could exist safe from invasion, to remove from her the disgrace of the Treaties of Vienna and Paris.

I have heard myself treated as a renegade, when I was defending religion; as a revolutionary, when I was striving to establish the throne on the basis of the public liberties.

I should find the same obstacles increased by the hatred which the faithful of the Court, the town and the country would have conceived from the lesson inflicted upon them by my conduct on the day of trial.

I have too little ambition, too great a longing for repose to make my attachment a burden to the Crown and to thrust upon it my importunate presence.

I have done my duty without thinking for a moment that it gave me a right to the favour of an august Family: happy in being permitted to embrace its adversity, I see nothing higher than that honour;

it will find no more zealous servant than myself; but it will find those who are younger and abler.

I do not believe myself a necessary man, and I think that there are no necessary men left at this day: useless henceforth, I am going to retire into solitude to busy myself with the past.

I hope, Madame, still to live long enough to add to the history of the Restoration the glorious page which your future destinies promise to France.

"I am, Madame, "with the most profound respect, "Your Royal Highness' most humble and most "obedient servant, "CHATEAUBRIAND."

The letter was obliged to await a safe messenger; time went on, and I added the following postscript to my dispatch: [Sidenote: The cholera.

] "PARIS, 12 _April_, 1832. "MADAME, "All things grow old early in France; each day opens out new chances for politics and commences a series of events.

We now have M.

Périer's illness[375] and the plague sent by God.

I have sent to M. the Prefect of the Seine the sum of 12,000 francs which the outlawed daughter of St. Louis and Henry IV.

has destined for the relief of the unfortunate: a worthy use of her noble indigence!

I shall strive, Madame, to be the faithful interpreter of your sentiments.

I have never in my life received a mission with which I felt myself more honoured.

"I am, with the most profound respect, etc." Before speaking of the affair of the 12,000 francs for the cholera-stricken sufferers mentioned in the above postscript, I must speak of the cholera.

I had not met with the plague during my journey in the East: it came to visit me at home; the fortune which I had run after awaited me seated at my door.