Chapter VII: Book III (2)

"To us he again spoke of Louis XVIII., and said he would
never effect anything with the French nation if he treated
them with too much forbearance. He would, from necessity,
be obliged to lay large imposts upon them, and hence cause
himself to be immediately hated. He likewise told us that
'eighteen years before, he had marched through this place
with some thousand men to liberate two Royalists who were
to have been executed for wearing the white cockade. In
spite, however, of the fury of the populace with which he
had to contend, he fortunately saved them, and to-day, he
continued, would that man be murdered by this same populace,
who should refuse to wear a white cockade,--so contradictory
and vacillating are they in everything they do.'

"Having learnt that two squadrons of Austrian hussars were
stationed at Luc, an order was sent at his request to the
commanders to await our arrival there, in order to escort the
Emperor to Fréjus[176]."

Here ends Count Waldburg's narrative: those accounts are painful to read. What! Were the commissaries unable to afford better protection to him for whom they had the honour to be responsible? Who were they, to affect these airs of superiority with such a man? Bonaparte truly said that, if he had wished, he might have travelled accompanied by a portion of his guard. It is evident that men were indifferent to his fate; they enjoyed his degradation; they gladly acquiesced in the marks of indignity which the victim demanded for his safety: it is so sweet to hold beneath one's feet the destiny of him who walked over the highest heads, to avenge pride with insult! Therefore the commissaries do not expend a word, not even a word of philosophic sensibility, on such a change of fortune, to remind man of his nothingness and of the greatness of the judgments of God! In the ranks of the Allies, Napoleon had had numerous adulators: he who has gone on his knees before brute force is not entitled to triumph over misfortune. Prussia, I admit, had need of an effort of virtue to forget what she had suffered, herself, her King and her Queen; but that effort should have been made. Alas! Bonaparte had taken pity on nothing; all hearts had cooled towards him. The moment in which he showed himself most cruel was at Jaffa[177]; the smallest, on the way to Elba: in the first case, military necessity served as his excuse; in the second, the harshness of the foreign commissaries changes the course of the reader's feelings and lessens his own abasement.

The Provisional Government of France does not itself seem to me quite without reproach: I reject the calumnies of Maubreuil[178]; nevertheless, amid the terror with which Napoleon still inspired his former servants, a fortuitous catastrophe might have presented itself in their eyes in the light only of a misfortune.

One would gladly doubt the truth of the facts reported by Count Waldburg-Truchsess, but General Koller, in a _Sequel to Waldburgs Itinerary_, has confirmed a part of his colleague's narrative; General Schouvaloff, on his part, has certified, in conversation with myself, the exactness of the facts: his measured words said more than Waldburg's expansive recital. Lastly, Fabry's[179] _Itinéraire_ is composed of authentic French documents furnished by eye-witnesses.

[Sidenote: His humiliation.]

Now that I have done justice on the commissaries and the Allies, is it really the conqueror of the world whom one sees in Waldburg's _Itinerary?_ The hero reduced to disguises and tears, weeping under a post-boy's jacket in the corner of a back-room at an inn! Was it thus that Marius bore himself on the ruins of Carthage, that Hannibal died in Bithynia, Cæsar in the Senate? How did Pompey disguise himself? By covering his head with his toga! He who had donned the purple taking shelter beneath the white cockade, uttering the cry of safety: "God save the King!"--that King, one of whose heirs he had had shot! The master of the nations encouraging the commissaries in the humiliations which they heaped upon him in order the better to hide him, delighted to have General Koller whistling before him and a coachman smoking in his face, compelling General Schouwaloff's aide-de-camp to enact the part of the Emperor, while he, Bonaparte, wore the dress of an Austrian colonel and wrapped himself in the cloak of a Russian general. He must have loved life cruelly: those immortals cannot consent to die.

Moreau said of Bonaparte:

"His chief characteristics are falsehood and the love of life: let me beat him, and I should see him at my feet begging me for mercy."

Moreau thought thus, being unable to grasp Bonaparte's nature; he fell into the same error as Lord Byron. At least, at St. Helena, Napoleon, dignified by the Muses, although petty in his quarrels with the English Governor, had to support only the weight of his own immensity. In France, the evil which he had done appeared to him personified by the widows and orphans, and constrained him to tremble before the hands of a few women.

This is too true; but Bonaparte should not be judged by the rules applied to great geniuses, because he was lacking in magnanimity. There are men who have the faculty of rising, and who have not the faculty of descending. Napoleon possessed both faculties: like the rebellious angel, he was able to contract his incommensurable stature, so as to enclose it within a measured space; his ductility furnished him with means of safety and regeneration: with him, all was not finished when he seemed to have finished. Changing his manners and costume at will, as perfect in comedy as in tragedy, this actor knew how to appear natural in the slave's tunic as in the king's mantle, in the part of Attalus or in the part of Cæsar. Another moment and you shall see, from the depth of his degradation, the dwarf raising his Briarean head; Asmodeus will come forth in a huge column of smoke from the flask into which he had compressed himself. Napoleon valued life for what it brought him; he had the instinct of that which yet remained to him to paint; he did not wish his canvas to fail him before he had completed his pictures.

[Sidenote: Scott's _Life of Napoleon._]

Writing of Napoleon's fears, Sir Walter Scott[180], less unfair than the commissaries, frankly remarks that the unkindness of the people made much impression on Bonaparte, that he even shed tears, that he showed more fear of assassination than seemed consistent with his approved courage; "but," he adds, "it must be recollected that the danger was of a new and particularly horrible description, and calculated to appall many to whom the terrors of a field of battle were familiar. The bravest soldier might shudder at a death like that of the de Witts." Napoleon was made to undergo this revolutionary anguish in the same places where he commenced his career with the Terror.

The Prussian General, once interrupting his recital, thought himself obliged to reveal a disorder which the Emperor did not conceal: Count Waldburg may have confused what he saw with the sufferings which M. de Ségur[181] witnessed in the Russian campaign, when Bonaparte, compelled to alight from his horse, leant his head against the guns. Among the number of the infirmities of illustrious warriors, true history reckons only the dagger which pierced the heart of Henry IV., or the ball which killed Turenne.

After describing Bonaparte's arrival at Fréjus, Sir Walter Scott, rid of the great scenes, joyfully falls back upon his talent; he "goes his way gossiping," as Madame de Sévigné says; he chats of Napoleon's passage to Elba, of the seduction exercised by Napoleon over the English sailors, excepting Hinton[182], who could not hear the praises given to the Emperor without muttering the word "humbug." When Napoleon left the ship, Hinton wished "His Honour" good health and better luck the next time. Napoleon typified all the littlenesses and all the greatnesses of mankind.

*

While Bonaparte, known to the universe, was escaping amid curses from France, Louis XVIII., everywhere forgotten, was leaving London under a canopy of white banners and crowns. Napoleon, on landing in the island of Elba, found back his strength there. Louis XVIII., on landing at Calais[183], might have seen Louvel[184]; he met General Maison[185], commissioned, sixteen years after, to put Charles X. on board at Cherbourg. Charles X., apparently to render him worthy of his future mission, later gave M. Maison the baton of a marshal of France, even as a knight, before fighting, conferred knighthood upon the man of lower rank with whom he deigned to measure swords.

I dreaded the effect of Louis XVIII.'s appearance. I hastened to go ahead of him to the residence whence Joan of Arc[186] fell into the hands of the English and where I was shown a volume struck by one of the cannon-balls hurled against Bonaparte. What would people think at the sight of the royal invalid replacing the horseman who might have said with Attila:

"The grass no longer grows wherever my horse has passed."

With no mission or taste for it, I undertook (I was clearly under a spell) a somewhat difficult task, that of describing the arrival at Compiègne, of causing the son of St. Louis to be seen as I idealized him by the aid of the Muses. I expressed myself thus:

"The King's coach was preceded by the generals and the
marshals of France who had gone to meet his Majesty. There
were no more cries of 'God save the King!' but confused
clamours amid which one distinguished only accents of tender
emotion and joy. The King wore a blue coat, marked only by a
star and a pair of epaulettes; his legs were encased in wide
gaiters of red velvet, edged with a narrow gold braid. Seated
in his arm-chair, with his old-fashioned gaiters, holding
his cane between his knees, he suggests Louis XIV.[187] at
fifty years of age.... Marshals Macdonald[188], Ney[189],
Moncey[190], Sérurier[191], Brune[192], the Prince de
Neuchâtel[193], all the generals, all the persons present
alike received the most affectionate words from the King. So
great in France is the power of the legitimate Sovereign, the
magic attached to the name of the King. A man arrives alone
from exile, despoiled of everything, without a following,
guards, or riches; he has nothing to give, almost nothing to
promise. He alights from his carriage, leaning on the arm of
a young woman; he shows himself to captains who have never
seen him, to grenadiers who hardly know his name. Who is that
man? Tis the King! Every one falls at his feet[194]!"

[Sidenote: Return of Louis XVIII.]

What I said above of the warriors, with the object which I was proposing to attain, was true as regards the leaders; but I lied with respect to the soldiers. I have present in my memory, as though I saw it still, the spectacle which I witnessed when Louis XVIII., entering Paris on the 3rd of May, went to visit Notre-Dame: they had wished to spare the King the sight of the foreign troops; a regiment of the old foot-guards kept the line from the Pont-Neuf to Notre-Dame, along the Quai des Orfèvres. I do not believe that human faces ever wore so threatening and so terrible an expression. Those grenadiers, covered with wounds, the conquerors of Europe, who had seen so many thousands of cannon-balls pass over their heads, who smelt of fire and powder; those same men, robbed of their captain, were forced to salute an old king, disabled by time, not war, watched as they were by an army of Russians, Austrians and Prussians, in Napoleon's invaded capital. Some, moving the skin of their foreheads, brought down their great bear-skin busbies over their eyes, as though to keep them from seeing; others lowered the corners of their mouth in angry scorn; others again showed their teeth through their mustachios, like tigers. When they presented arms, it was with a furious movement, and the sound of those arms made one tremble. Never, we must admit, have men been put to so great a test and suffered so dire a torment. If, at that moment, they had been summoned to vengeance, it would have been necessary to exterminate them to the last, or they would have swallowed the earth.

At the end of the line was a young hussar, on horse-back; he held a drawn sword, and made it leap and as it were dance with a convulsive movement of anger. His face was pale; his eyes rolled in their sockets; he opened and shut his mouth by turns, clashing his teeth together, and stifling cries of which one heard only the first sound. He caught sight of a Russian officer: the look which he darted at him cannot be described. When the King's carriage passed before him, he made his horse spring, and certainly he had the temptation to fling himself upon the King.

The Restoration committed an irreparable mistake at its outset: it ought to have disbanded the army, while retaining the marshals, generals, military governors and officers in their pensions, honours and rank; the soldiers would afterwards have successively returned into the reconstituted army, as they have since done into the Royal Guard: the Legitimate Monarchy would not then have had against it, from the first, those soldiers of the Empire, organized, divided into brigades, denominated as they had been in the days of their victories, unceasingly talking together of the time that was past, nourishing regrets and feelings hostile to their new master.

The miserable resurrection of the Maison Rouge[195], that mixture of soldiers of the old Monarchy and fighting men of the new Empire, augmented the evil: to believe that veterans distinguished on a thousand battle-fields would not be offended at seeing young men, very brave no doubt, but for the most part new to the calling of arms, wearing symbols of high military rank without having earned them, was to betray a want of knowledge of human nature.

[Sidenote: Declaration of Saint-Ouen.]

Alexander had been to visit Louis XVIII. during the stay which the latter made at Compiègne. Louis XVIII. offended him by his haughtiness: this interview led to the Declaration of Saint-Ouen of the 2nd of May. The King said in this that he had resolved to give, as the basis of the Constitution which he proposed to award to his people, the following guarantees: representative government divided into two bodies, taxes freely granted, public and individual liberty, liberty of the press, liberty of public worship, sacred inviolability of property, irrevocability of the sale of national goods, irremovable judges and an independent judicial bench, every Frenchman admissible to every employment, etc., etc.

This declaration, although it was in keeping with Louis XVIII.'s intelligence, nevertheless pertained neither to him nor to his advisers; it was simply the time which was issuing from its rest: its wings had been folded, its soaring suspended since 1792; it was now resuming its flight, or its course. The excesses of the Terror, the despotism of Bonaparte had caused ideas to turn back again; but, so soon as the obstacles that had been opposed to them were destroyed, they flowed into the bed which they were at the at same time to follow and to dig. Matters were taken up at the point at which they had been stopped; all that had passed was as though it had not happened: the human race, thrust back to the commencement of the Revolution, had only lost forty years[196] of its life; well, what is forty years in the general life of society? That gap disappears when the cut fragments of time have been joined together.

The Treaty of Paris, between the Allies and France, was concluded on the 30th of May 1814. It was agreed that, within two months, all the Powers engaged on either side in the present war should send plenipotentiaries to Vienna to settle the final arrangements in a general congress.

On the 4th of June, Louis XVIII. appeared in royal session in a collective assembly of the Legislative Body and a fraction of the Senate. He delivered a noble speech: old, by-gone, worn-out, these wearisome details now serve only as an historic thread.

To the greater part of the nation, the Charter possessed the drawback of being "granted:" this most useless word stirred up the burning question of royal or popular sovereignty. Louis XVIII. also dated his boon from the nineteenth year of his reign, considering that of Bonaparte as null and void, in the same way as Charles II[197]. had taken a clean leap over Cromwell's head: it was a kind of insult to the sovereigns, who had all recognised Napoleon and who were at that very moment in Paris. That obsolete language and those pretensions of the ancient monarchies added nothing to the lawfulness of the right and were mere puerile anachronisms[198]. That apart, the Charter, replacing despotism, bringing us legal liberty, was calculated to satisfy conscientious men. Nevertheless, the Royalists, who gained so many advantages by it, who, issuing from their village, or their paltry fireside, or the obscure posts on which they had lived under the Empire, were called to a lofty and public existence, received the boon only in a grudging spirit; the Liberals, who had accommodated themselves whole-heartedly to the tyranny of Bonaparte, thought the Charter a regular slave-code. We have returned to the time of Babel, but we no longer work at a common monument of confusion: each builds his tower to his own height, according to his strength and stature. For the rest, if the Charter appeared defective, it was because the Revolution had not run its course; the principles of equality and democracy lay at the bottom of men's minds and worked in a contrary direction to the monarchical order.

The Allied Princes lost no time in leaving Paris. Alexander, when going away, had a religious sacrifice celebrated on the Place de la Concorde[199]. An altar was erected where the scaffold of Louis XVI. had stood. Seven Muscovite priests performed the service, and the foreign troops defiled before the altar. The _Te Deum_ was sung to one of the beautiful airs of the old Greek music. The soldiers and the sovereigns bent their knee to the ground to receive the benediction. The thoughts of the French were carried back to 1793 and 1794, when the oxen refused to go over pavements which the smell of blood made hateful to them. What hand had led to the expiatory festival those men of all countries, those sons of the ancient barbarian invasions, those Tartars, some of whom dwelt in sheep-skin tents beneath the Great Wall of China? Those are spectacles which the feeble generations that will follow my century shall no longer see.

[Sidenote: The first Restoration.]

In the first year of the Restoration, I assisted at the third transformation of society: I had seen the old Monarchy turn into the Constitutional Monarchy, and the latter into the Republic; I had seen the Republic change into military despotism; I had seen military despotism turn back into a free Monarchy, the new ideas and the new generations return to the old principles and the old men. The marshals of the Empire become marshals of France; with the uniforms of Napoleon's Guard were mingled the uniforms of the bodyguards and the Maison Rouge, cut precisely after the old patterns; the old Duc d'Havré[200], with his powdered wig and his black cane, ambled along with shaking head, as Captain of the Body-guards, near Marshal Victor[201], limping in the Bonaparte style; the Duc de Mouchy[202], who had never seen a shot fired, went in to Mass near Marshal Oudinot[203], riddled with wounds; the Palace of the Tuileries, so proper and soldierly under Napoleon, became filled, instead of the smell of powder, with the odours of the breakfasts which ascended on every side: under messieurs the lords of the Bed-chamber, with messieurs the officers of the Mouth and the Wardrobe, everything resumed an air of domesticity. In the streets, one saw decrepit Emigrants wearing the airs and clothes of former days, most respectable men no doubt, but appearing as outlandish among the modern crowd as did the Republican captains among the soldiers of Napoleon. The ladies of the Imperial Court introduced the dowagers of the Faubourg Saint-Germain and taught them "their way about" the palace. There arrived deputations from Bordeaux, adorned with armlets; parish captains from the Vendée, wearing La Rochejacquelein hats. These different persons retained the expression of the feelings, thoughts, habits, manners familiar to them. Liberty, which lay at the root of that period, made things exist together which, at first sight, appeared as though they ought not to exist; but one had difficulty in recognising that liberty, because it wore the colours of the Ancient Monarchy and of the Imperial Despotism. Everyone, too, was badly acquainted with the language of the Constitution: the Royalists made glaring errors when talking Charter; the Imperialists were still less well-informed; the Conventionals, who had become, in turn, counts, barons, senators of Napoleon and peers of Louis XVIII., lapsed at one time into the Republican dialect which they had almost forgotten, at another into the Absolutist idiom which they had learned thoroughly. Lieutenant-generals had been promoted to game-keepers. Aides-de-camp of the last military tyrant were heard to prate of the inviolable liberty of the peoples, and regicides to sustain the sacred dogma of the Legitimacy.

These metamorphoses would be hateful, if they did not in part belong to the flexibility of the French genius. The people of Athens governed itself; orators appealed to its passions in the public places; the sovereign crowd was composed of sculptors, painters, artizans, "who are wont to be spectators of speeches and hearers of deeds[204]," as Thucydides says. But when, good or bad, the decree had been delivered, who issued to execute it from amid that incoherent and inexpert mass? Socrates, Phocion, Pericles, Alcibiades.

*

Is it the Royalists who are "to blame for the Restoration," as is urged to-day? Not in the least: it was as though one should say that thirty millions of men had stood aghast, while a handful of Legitimists accomplished a detested restoration, against the wish of all, by waving a few handkerchiefs and putting a ribbon of their wives' in their hats! The vast majority of Frenchmen was, it is true, full of joy; but that majority was not a _Legitimist_ one in the limited sense of the word, applicable only to the rigid partisans of the old Monarchy. The majority was a mass composed of every shade of opinion, happy at being delivered, and violently incensed against the man whom it accused of all its misfortunes: hence the success of my pamphlet. How many avowed aristocrats were numbered among those who proclaimed the King's name? Messieurs Mathieu and Adrien de Montmorency; the Messieurs de Polignac, escaped from their jail; M. Alexis de Noailles; M. Sosthène de La Rochefoucauld. Did those seven or eight men, whom the people neither recognised nor followed, lay down the law to a whole nation?

Madame de Montcalm had sent me a bag containing twelve hundred francs to distribute among the pure Legitimist race: I sent it back to her, not having succeeded in placing a crown-piece. An ignominious cord was fastened round the neck of the statue which surmounted the column in the Place Vendôme; there were so few Royalists to raise a hubbub around glory and to pull at the rope that the authorities themselves, Bonapartists all, had to lower their master's image with the aid of a scaffold; the colossus was forced to bow his head: he fell at the feet of the sovereigns of Europe, who had so often lain prostrate before him. It was the men of the Republic and of the Empire who enthusiastically greeted the Restoration. The conduct and ingratitude of the persons raised by the Revolution were abominable towards him whom they affect to-day to regret and admire.

[Sidenote: Its supporters.]

Imperialists and Liberals, it is you into whose hands the power fell, you who knelt down before the sons of Henry IV. It was quite natural that the Royalists should be happy to recover their Princes and to see the end of the reign of him whom they regarded as an usurper; but you, the creatures of that usurper, surpassed the feelings of the Royalists in exaggeration. The ministers, the high dignitaries vied with each other in taking the oath to the Legitimacy; all the civil and judicial authorities crowded on each other's heels to swear hatred against the proscribed new dynasty and love to the ancient race whom they had a hundred and a hundred times condemned. Who drew up those proclamations, those adulatory addresses, so insulting to Napoleon, with which France was flooded? The Royalists? No: the ministers, the generals, the authorities chosen and maintained in office by Bonaparte. Where was the jobbing of the Restoration done? At the Royalists'? No: at M. de Talleyrand's. With whom? With M. de Pradt, almoner to "the God Mars" and mitred mountebank. Where and with whom did the Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom dine on his arrival? At the Royalists' and with Royalists? No: at the Bishop of Autun's, with M. de Caulaincourt. Where were entertainments given to "the infamous foreign princes?" At the country-houses of the Royalists? No: at Malmaison, at the Empress Joséphine's. To whom did Napoleon's dearest friends, Berthier, for instance, carry their ardent devotion? To the Legitimacy. Who spent their existences with the Emperor Alexander, with that brutal Tartar? The classes of the Institute, the scholars, the men of letters, the philosophers, philanthropists, theophilanthropists and others; they returned enchanted, laden with praises and snuff-boxes. As for us poor devils of Legitimists, we were admitted nowhere; we went for nothing. Sometimes we were told, in the streets, to go home to bed; sometimes we were recommended not to shout "God Save the King!" too loud, others having undertaken that responsibility. So far from compelling anyone to be a Legitimist, those in power declared that nobody would be obliged to change his conduct or his language, that the Bishop of Autun would be no more compelled to say Mass under the Royalty than he had been compelled to attend it under the Empire. I saw no lady of the castle-keep, no Joan of Arc proclaim the rightful sovereign with falcon on wrist or lance in hand; but Madame de Talleyrand[205], whom Bonaparte had fastened to her husband like a sign-board, drove through the streets in a calash, singing hymns on the pious Family of the Bourbons. A few sheets fluttering from the windows of the familiars of the Imperial Court made the good Cossacks believe that there were as many lilies in the hearts of the converted Bonapartists as white rags at their casements. It is wonderful how far contagion will go in France, and a man would cry, "Off with my head!" if he heard his neighbour cry the same. The Imperialists went so far as to enter our houses and make us Bourbonists put out, by way of spotless flags, such white remnants as our presses contained. This happened at my house; but Madame de Chateaubriand would have none of it, and valiantly defended her muslins.

*

[Sidenote: The Restoration ministry.]

The Legislative Body, transformed into a Chamber of Deputies, and the House of Peers, composed of 154 members, appointed for life, and including over 60 senators, formed the two first Legislative Chambers. M. de Talleyrand, installed at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, left for the Congress of Vienna, the opening of which was fixed for the 3rd of November, in execution of Clause 32 of the Treaty of the 30th of May; M. de Jaucourt held the portfolio during an interim which lasted until the Battle of Waterloo. The Abbé de Montesquiou became Minister of the Interior, having M. Guizot[206] as his secretary-general; M. Malouet[207] entered the Admiralty: he died, and was succeeded by M. Beugnot[208]; General Dupont[209] obtained the War Office; he was replaced by Marshal Soult[210], who distinguished himself through the erection of the funeral monument at Quiberon; the Duc de Blacas[211] was Minister of the Royal Household; M. Anglès[212], Prefect of Police; Councillor Dambray[213], Minister of Justice; the Abbé Louis[214], Minister of Finance.

On the 21st of October, the Abbé de Montesquiou introduced the first law on the subject of the press; it submitted every writing of less than twenty pages of print to the censorship: M. Guizot worked out this first law of liberty.

Carnot[215] addressed a letter to the King; he admitted that the Bourbons "had been joyfully received;" but, taking no account of the shortness of the time, nor of all that the Charter granted, he gave haughty lessons together with risky advice: all this is worth nothing when one has to accept the rank of minister and the title of count of the Empire; it is not becoming to show one's self proud towards a weak and liberal Prince when one has been submissive towards a violent and despotic Prince, when, a worn-out machine of the Terror, one has found one's self unequal to the calculation of the proportions of Napoleonic warfare. I sent to the press, in reply, my _Réflexions politiques_[216]; they contain the substance of the _Monarchie selon la Charte._ M. Lainé[217], the President of the Chamber of Deputies, spoke of this work to the King with praise. The King always seemed charmed with the services which I had the happiness to render him; Heaven seemed to have thrown over my shoulders the mantle of herald of the Legitimacy: but the greater the success of the work, the less did its author please His Majesty. The _Réflexions politiques_ divulged my Constitutional doctrines: the Court received an impression from them which my fidelity to the Bourbons has been unable to wipe out. Louis XVIII. used to say to his intimates:

"Beware of ever admitting a poet into your affairs: he will ruin all. Those people are good for nothing."

[Sidenote: The Duchesse de Duras.]

A powerful and lively friendship at that time filled my heart: the Duchesse de Duras[218] had imaginative powers, and even some of the facial expression of Madame de Staël: she has given a proof of her talent as an author in _Ourika._ On her return from the Emigration, she led a secluded life, for many years, in her Château d'Ussé, on the banks of the Loire, and I first heard speak of her in the beautiful gardens at Méréville, after having passed near her in London without meeting her. She came to Paris for the education of her charming daughters, Félicie[219] and Clara[220]. Relations of family, province, literary and political opinion opened the door of her company to me. Her warmth of soul, her nobility of character, her loftiness of mind, her generosity of sentiment made her a superior woman. At the commencement of the Restoration, she took me under her protection; for, in spite of all that I had done for the Legitimate Monarchy and the services which Louis XVIII. confessed that he had received from me, I had been placed so far on one side that I was thinking of retiring to Switzerland. Perhaps I should have done well: in those solitudes which Napoleon had intended for me as his ambassador to the mountains, might I not have been happier than in the Palace of the Tuileries? When I entered those halls on the return of the Legitimacy, they made upon me an impression almost as painful as on the day when I saw Bonaparte there prepared to kill the Duc d'Enghien. Madame de Duras spoke of me to M. de Blacas. He replied that I was quite free to go I where I would. Madame de Duras was so tempestuous, so courageous on behalf of her friends, that a vacant embassy was dug up, the Embassy to Sweden. Louis XVIII., already wearied of my noise, was happy to make a present of me to his good brother, King Bernadotte. Did the latter imagine that I was being sent to Stockholm to dethrone him? By the Lord, ye princes of the earth, I dethrone nobody; keep your crowns, if you can, and above all do not give them to me, for I "will none of them."

Madame de Duras, an excellent woman, who allowed me to call her my sister, and whom I had the happiness of seeing in Paris during many years, went to Nice to die[221]: one more wound re-opened. The Duchesse de Duras saw much of Madame de Staël. I cannot conceive how I did not come across Madame Récamier[222], who had returned from Italy to France; I should have greeted the succour which came in aid of my life. Already I no longer belonged to those mornings which console themselves; I was on the verge of those evening hours which stand in need of consolation.

*

On the 30th of December of the year 1814, the Legislative Chambers were prorogued to the 1st of May 1815, as though they had been convoked for the assembly of Bonaparte's _champ-de-mai._ On the 18th of January, the remains were exhumed of Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI. I was present at this exhumation in the cemetery[223] in which Fontaine[224] and Percier[225] have since, at the pious call of Madame la Dauphine, and in imitation of a sepulchral church at Rimini, raised what is perhaps the most remarkable monument in Paris. This cloister, formed of a concatenation of tombs, strikes the imagination and fills it with sadness. I have spoken, in Book IV. of these Memoirs, of the exhumations of 1815[226]. In the midst of the bones, I recognised the Queen's head by the smile which that head had given me at Versailles.

[Sidenote: The 21st of January.]

On the 21st of January, was laid the first stone of the ground-work of the statue which was to be erected on the Place Louis XV., and which was never erected. I wrote the funeral splendour of the 21st of January; I said:

"The monks who came with the Oriflamme[227] to meet the
shrine of St. Louis will not receive the descendant of the
Sainted King. In the subterraneous abodes where dwelt those
annihilated kings and princes, Louis XVI. will lie alone!...
How is it that so many dead have risen? Why is Saint-Denis
deserted? Let us rather ask why its roof has been restored,
why its altar is left standing. What hand has reconstructed
the vault of those caverns and prepared those empty tombs?
The hand of that same man who was seated on the throne of the
Bourbons[228]! O Providence, he thought that he was preparing
sepulchres for his race, and he was but building the tomb of
Louis XVI.[229]!"

I long wished that the image of Louis XVI. might be set up on the spot where the martyr shed his blood: I should no longer be of that opinion. The Bourbons must be praised for thinking of Louis XVI. at the first moment of their return. They were bound to touch their foreheads with his ashes, before placing his crown on their heads. Now I think that they ought not to have gone further. It was not in Paris, as in London, a committee which tried the monarch: it was the whole Convention; thence the annual reproach which a repeated funeral ceremony seemed to make to the nation, apparently represented by a complete assembly. Every people has fixed anniversaries for the celebration of its triumphs, its disorders, or its misfortunes, for all have, in an equal measure, desired to keep up the memory of one and the other: we have had solemnities for the barricades, songs for St. Bartholomew's Night, feasts for the death of Capet; but is it not remarkable that the law is powerless to create days of remembrance, whereas religion has made the obscurest saint live on from age to age? If the fasts and prayers instituted for the sacrifice of Charles I. still survive[230], it is because, in England, the State unites religious to political supremacy and because, by virtue of that supremacy, the 30th of January 1649 has become a _feria._ In France things go differently: Rome alone has the right to command in religion; thenceforth, of what value is an order published by a prince, a decree promulgated by a political assembly, if another prince, another assembly have the right to expunge them? I therefore think to-day that the symbol of a feast which may be abolished, or the evidence of a tragic catastrophe not consecrated by religion, is not fitly placed on the road of the crowd carelessly and heedlessly pursuing its pleasures. At the time in which we live, it is to be feared lest a monument raised with the object of impressing horror of popular excesses might prompt the longing to imitate them: evil tempts more than good; when wishing to perpetuate the sorrow, one often perpetuates only the example. The centuries do not adopt the bequests of mourning: they have present cause enough for weeping, without undertaking to shed hereditary tears as well.

[Sidenote: Reflections at Saint-Denis.]

On beholding the catafalque leaving the Cemetière de Desclozeaux[230b], laden with the remains of the Queen and King, I felt a strong emotion; I followed it with my eyes with a fatal presentiment. At last Louis XVI. resumed his couch at Saint-Denis; Louis XVIII., on his side, slept at the Louvre. The two brothers were together commencing a new era of legitimate kings and sceptres: vain restoration of the throne and the tomb, of which time has already swept away the dual dust.

Since I have spoken of those funeral ceremonies, which were so often repeated, I will tell you of the incubus with which I used to be oppressed when, after the ceremony, I walked in the evening in the half-undraped basilica: that I dreamt of the vanity of human greatness among those devasted tombs follows as the vulgar moral issuing from the spectacle itself; but the workings of my mind did not stop at that: I penetrated into the very nature of man. Is all emptiness and absence in the region of the sepulchres? Is there nothing in that nothingness? Are there no existences of nihility, no thoughts of dust? Have those bones no modes of life with which we are unacquainted? Who knows of the passions, the pleasures, the embraces of those dead? Are the things which they have dreamt, thought, expected like themselves idealities, engulfed pell-mell with themselves? Dreams, futures, joys, sorrows, liberties and slaveries, powers and weaknesses, crimes and virtues, honours and infamies, riches and miseries, talents, geniuses, intelligences, glories, illusions, loves: are you but perceptions of a moment, perceptions that pass with the destruction of the skulls in which they take birth, with the extinction of the bosom in which once beat a heart? In your eternal silence, O tombs, if tombs you be, is nought heard but a mocking and eternal laughter? Is that laughter the God, the sole derisive reality, which will survive the imposture of this universe? Let us close our eyes; let us fill up life's despairing abyss with those great and mysterious words of the martyr:

"I am a Christian!"

[128] Odo King of France (_d._ 898), the first king of the Capet Dynasty.--T.

[129] Abbon (_d._ 923), nicknamed the Crooked, author of a Latin poem on the siege of Paris by the Normans.

[130] Louisa Augusta Wilhelmina Amelia Queen of Prussia (1776-1810), the beautiful wife of Frederic William III., and daughter of the Duke of Mecklemburg-Strelitz. Napoleon was said to be enamoured of Louisa of Prussia.--T.

[131] Florio's MONTAIGNE, Booke III. chap. VIII.--T.

[132] _Ps._ XXI. 16. In the Vulgate: _Et lingua mea adhasit faucibus meis._--B.

[133] The Emperor Alexander had expressed a wish to say, not at the Tuileries, but at the Élysée; he remained there only a few hours, and accepted the offer of the Prince of Talleyrand, who hastened to place at his disposal his house in the Rue Saint-Florentin.--B.

[134] Pope Pius VII.--T.

[135] Fabian Wilhelm Prince von der Osten-Sacken (1752-1837) had fought in all the campaigns against Turkey, Poland and France, and been taken prisoner by Masséna at Zurich. Alexander appointed him Governor of Paris in 1814.--T.

[136] Paul Count Schouvaloff (_circa_ 1775-1823), a distinguished Russian general, the same who later escorted Napoleon to Fréjus.--T.

[137] Madame Charles Bonaparte (1750-1836), _née_ Ramolino, Napoleon's mother. When Bonaparte assumed the title of Emperor, he bestowed upon his mother that of Madame Mère and Imperial Highness.--T.

[138] Cardinal Fesch, Archbishop of Lyons, was Madame Mère's half-brother.--T.

[139] Nikolaus Field-Marshal Prince Esterhazy von Galantha (1765-1833), the Hungarian magnate who, in 1797, had organized an army in Hungary to repel the French invasion.--T.

[140] Jerome Bonaparte, King of Westphalia (1784-1860), Napoleon's youngest and most worthless brother, distinguished for little save his personal courage. From Jerome the present Bonapartist pretenders are descended. He had married a daughter of the King of Wurtemberg, who, after Waterloo, gave him the title of Comte de Montfort. He returned to France in 1848, and prepared the way for the election to the Presidency of his nephew, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, afterwards Napoleon III. Jerome, who resumed his royal title under the Second Empire, was successively appointed Governor of the Invalides (1848), a marshal of France (1850), and President of the Senate (1851).--T.

[141] _Cf._ my description of the Hundred Days at Ghent, _infra,_ and the portrait of M. de Talleyrand given at the end of these Memoirs.--_Author's Note_ (Paris, 1839).

[142] The full title of Chateaubriand's work was _De Bonaparte, des Bourbons et de la nécessité de se rallier à nos princes légitimes pour le bonheur de la France et celui de l'Europe._ Extracts from the famous pamphlet were published in the _Journal des Débats_ on the 4th of April 1814, and the work itself was placed on sale the next day, Wednesday the 5th of April.--B.

[143] Hugues Maret, Duc de Bassano (1763-1839), was the editor of the bulletins of the National Assembly in 1789, and thus laid the foundations of the _Moniteur universel._ In 1792, he was sent as Ambassador to Naples, was captured by the Austrians on the road, and was kept in confinement until 1795, when he was exchanged for the daughter of Louis XVI. Bonaparte appointed Maret Secretary-General to the Consuls and later, in 1804, made him Secretary of State. In this capacity Maret accompanied Napoleon on all his campaigns, drawing up most of the instructions and bulletins. He was in 1811 created Duc de Bassano, and was appointed Foreign Minister and Minister of War in 1813. He was exiled in 1815, not returning to France until 1820. The Duc de Bassano was a minister of Louis-Philippe for the space of one week only (10 to 18 November 1834). To Napoleon he had been an invaluable and indefatigable servant.--T.

[144] François Séverin Desgraviers-Marceau (1769-1796) enlisted at the age of sixteen, became a captain in the Vendée in 1793 and, in the same year, when only twenty-four years old, was, upon Kléber's recommendation, appointed General-in-Chief of the Western Army. On the 12th of December, he won the bloody battle of Mans over the Vendeans. In 1794, he was employed as a general of division in the Army of Sambre-et-Meuse, and contributed to the victory of Fleurus. In 1796, he protected the retreat of Jourdan's Army, and had several times repelled the enemy when he fell mortally wounded near Altkirchen, at the age of twenty-seven years. Marceau was noted for his humanity and disinterestedness, as much as for his courage and strategic talent His native city of Chartres erected a monument to him in 1850.--T.

[145] Lazare Hoche (1768-1797) received the command of the Army of the Moselle at the age of twenty-five. In 1793-94, he cleared the Austrians out of Alsace. He was thrown into prison for a short time, at the instance of Pichegru, over whose head he had been promoted, but recovered his liberty on the 9 Thermidor, and was placed at the head of the Army of the Vendée. He defeated the Emigrants at Quiberon and succeeded in pacifying the whole district. In 1796, he commanded the army which was intended to effect a landing in Ireland, but was driven back by storms. He was next, in February 1797, placed in command of the Army of Sambre-et-Meuse, consisting of 80,000 men, and defeated the Austrians in three engagements, but died, in September, of a complaint of the bowels. Hoche has a statue at Versailles, where he was born.--T.

[146] Barthélemy Cathérine Joubert (1769-1799) served with great distinction in Italy, as second to Bonaparte, in 1795 and 1796; in 1798, he himself commanded the Army of Italy and at first obtained great successes. On the 15th of August 1799, however, he was unexpectedly attacked by the Russians at Novi, saw his army routed, and was mortally wounded while attempting to effect a rally. The Directory were considering whether they should place Joubert in the supreme power, when his death occurred.--T.

[147] Masséna routed the Russians at Zurich on the 26th of August 1799.--T.

[148] Camille Jordan (1771-1821), a moderate French citizen of liberal opinions, and author of some wise and temperate works.--T.

[149] Louis Jean Népomucène Lemercier (1771-1840), a notable playwright and a member of the French Academy.--T.

[150] Jean Denis Comte Lanjuinais (1753-1827), a moderate member of the Convention, of which, after escaping from arrest, he was made President in 1795. In 1800, he was made a senator, and, although he voted against the life consulship, he was later created a count of the Empire. In 1814, he voted for the deposition of Napoleon and was made a peer by Louis XVIII.--T.

[151] Charles François Lebrun, Duc de Plaisance (1739-1824), the third of the three Consuls. Under the Empire, Bonaparte created him Duc de Plaisance, High Treasurer, and Administrator-General of Holland. He gave in his adhesion to the recall of the Bourbons in 1814, and was created a peer under the Restoration.--T.

[152] Here I omit quotations from Marie Joseph de Chénier, Madame de Staël, Benjamin Constant, Béranger, Courier, Victor Hugo, Sheridan and Lord Byron.--T.

[153] M. de Talleyrand occupied the house which forms the corner of the Place de la Concorde and the Rue Saint-Florentin. After the death of the Prince de Talleyrand, it was taken by the Princesse de Lieven. It is now the property of M. Alphonse de Rothschild.--B.

[154] The Abbé Dominique Dufour de Pradt (1759-1837), was Grand Vicar at Rouen on the outbreak of the Revolution. He emigrated in 1791, returned in 1801, and became successively almoner to the Emperor, a baron, Bishop of Poitiers and Archbishop of Mechlin. In 1812, he was sent as Ambassador to Warsaw, but acquitted himself very badly in this capacity, and was deprived of his almoner-ship and sent back to his diocese. He thereupon became a violent enemy of Napoleon, and was one of the first to declare against him when the Allies entered Paris. Nevertheless, he was coldly received by the Bourbons and obliged to resign his archbishopric, receiving a pension of 12,000 francs by way of indemnity. He wrote a mass of occasional matter, including a History of his Polish Embassy. The publication referred to above is his _Récit historique sur la restauration de la royauté en France le 31 mars_ 1814.--T.

[155] Pierre de Ruel, Maréchal Marquis de Beurnonville (1752-1821), had served in the Republican armies, was made Minister of War in 1792, but was captured by Dumouriez and delivered to the Austrians: he was one of the French officers exchanged in 1795 for Louis XVI.'s daughter, who became Duchesse d'Angoulême. Under the Consulate and Empire, he was sent as Ambassador to Berlin and Madrid. He became a senator in 1805, a count of the Empire in 1808. Louis XVIII. created him a peer of France in 1814, a marshal of France in 1816, gave him his marquisate in 1817 and the Order of the Holy Ghost in 1820.--T.

[156] Arnail François Marquis de Jaucourt (1757-1852) was a colonel in the royal service at the age of twenty-five. Under the Revolution, he pronounced for the Constitutional Monarchy and was obliged to emigrate. Napoleon made him a senator in 1803, First Chamberlain to King Joseph in 1804, a count in 1808; and Jaucourt remained faithful until the flight of Joseph and Marie-Louise, when he consented to join the Provisional Government. Louis XVIII. made him a minister of State and a peer of France; but he held office for only short periods, devoting himself mainly to the interests of Protestantism, a form of worship to which he belonged.--T.

[157] Emmerich Joseph Wolfgang Heribert Duc de Dalberg (1773-1833) left the service of the Grand-duke of Baden for that of Napoleon and was naturalized a Frenchman. He was created a duke of the Empire in 1810 and, for the rest, clung to the fortunes of Talleyrand.--T.

[158] François Xavier Marc Antoine Abbé Duc de Montesquiou-Fezensac (1757-1832) had followed the Comte de Provence (Louis XVIII.) to England after the Revolution. He returned to France after the 9 Thermidor to serve the interests of the Bourbons, but was exiled by Bonaparte. Louis XVIII. made him his Minister of the Interior (1814-1815), and he was for some time at the head of affairs. After the Second Restoration, he was created a peer of France (1815), a count (1817) and a duke (1821) but took no further part in politics. In 1816, he was admitted to the French Academy, although he had no literary qualifications. He died in retirement and poor.--T.

[159] Dupont de Nemours (_vide_ note, _supra_, p. 56) was Secretary to the Provisional Government, rather than a member of it.--B.

[160] The Treaty of Tilsit, between Russia and Prussia on the one hand and France on the other, took place in 1807.--T.

[161] At the commencement of the reign of Louis XVI., the house in the Rue Saint-Florentin belonged to the Duc de Fitz-James, who sold it, in 1787, to the Duchesse de l'Infantado. Hence the name of Hôtel de l'Infantado by which it was generally designated under the Empire and in the early years of the Restoration.--B.

[162] Adresse du Gouvernement provisoire aux armées françaises (2 April 1814).--B.

[163] Charles de Lorraine, Duc de Mayenne (1544-1611), brother to the Duc de Guise and the Cardinal de Lorraine, on whose death he proclaimed himself the Head of the League and Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom, and made war upon Henry III. and the King of Navarre (Henry IV.), but was defeated by the latter at Arques and Ivry. He kept up his resistance after the death of Henry III., and proclaimed a phantom king in the person of the Cardinal de Bourbon. On the death of that Prince, in 1590, he convoked the States-General in the hope of securing his own election, but failed, ended by submitting and, in 1596, made his peace with Henry IV., who made him Governor of the Isle of France.--T.

[164] Charles Comte, later Duc de Cossé-Brissac was appointed Governor of Paris by the Duc de Mayenne in 1594. A few months later, he surrendered the capital to Henry IV., who made him a marshal.--T.

[165] Jean Baptiste Mailhe (1754-1834), member of the Convention for the Haute-Garonne. As the result of the drawing which took place among the departments, he was the first called upon to vote in the trial of the King. In 1814, he sent an address to the Senate to congratulate it on pronouncing the deposition of Napoleon.--B.

[166] Baron Petit (1772-1856) had been Brigadier-General of the Imperial Guard since the 23rd of June 1813. The day after the leave-taking at Fontainebleau, he swore allegiance to Louis XVIII., who made him a knight of St. Louis; but he fought at Cambronne's side at Waterloo, and protected the flight of the Emperor. Louis-Philippe created him a peer of France in 1837, and made him Commander of the Invalides. Napoleon III. appointed him a Senator in 1852.--T.

[167] Franz Baron von Koller (1767-1826), Adjutant-General to Prince von Schwarzenberg, and an Austrian general of the first merit.--T.

[168] Colonel, later General Sir Neil Campbell (1776-1827). Colonel Campbell stayed in Elba at Napoleon's request, and it was during one of his absences in Italy that Napoleon escaped, Campbell's supposed residence having put the English naval captains off their guard.--T.

[169] Friedrich Ludwig Count Truchsess von Waldburg (1776-1844), author of the _Reise von Fontainebleau nach Fréjus_ (1815), from which the following extracts are taken.--T.

[170] Johann Philipp Palm (1766-1806), the victim of this judicial murder. A book was published at Nuremberg, in 1814, by the unfortunate publisher's family, giving a full and touching account of his trial and execution.--T.

[171] Friedrich von Gentz (1764-1832), a noted German publicist, author of the Prussian manifesto against France in 1806, the Austrian manifestoes of 1809 and 1813, the protocols of the Conferences of Vienna (1814) and Paris (1815), and of several remarkable political works.--T.

[172] Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington (1769-1852), did not receive his duchy until the 11th of May 1814. The earlier steps are: Baron Douro and Viscount Wellington (4 September 1809), Earl of Wellington (28 February 1812), and Marquess of Wellington (3 October 1812).--T.

[173] Paul François Charles Augereau, Maréchal Duc de Castiglione (1757-1816), a brilliant, dashing and courageous soldier. He was one of the first to recognise the Bourbons.--T.