Chapter XIV: Book I: 330

Introduction--Trial of the ministers-Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois--Pillage of the Archbishop's Palace--My pamphlet on the _Restauration et la Monarchie élective_--_Études historiques_--Letters to Madame Récamier--Geneva--Lord Byron--Ferney and Voltaire--Useless journey to Paris--M. Armand Carrel--M. de Béranger--The Baude and Briqueville proposition for the banishment of the Elder Branch of the Bourbons--Letter to the author of the _Némésis_--Conspiracy of the Rue des Prouvaires--Letter to Madame la Duchesse de Berry--Epidemics--The cholera--Madame La Duchesse de Berry's 12,000 francs--General Lamarque's funeral--Madame La Duchesse de Berry lands in Provence and arrives in the Vendée.

INFIRMERIE DE MARIE-THÉRÈSE.

PARIS, _October_ 1830.

Out of the turmoil of the Three Days, I am quite surprised to find myself opening the fourth part of this work amid a profound calm; it seems to me that I have doubled the Cape of Storms and penetrated into a region of peace and silence. If I had died on the 7th of August of this year, the last words of my speech in the House of Peers would have been the last lines of my history; my catastrophe, being that of a past of twelve centuries, would have augmented my memory. My drama would have ended magnificently.

But I did not fall under the blow, I was not struck to the ground. Pierre de L'Estoile wrote this page of his Journal on the day following the assassination of Henry IV.:

"And here I end with the life of my King the second register of
my melancholic pastimes and my vain and curious researches, both
public and private, interrupted often since the past month by
the watches of the sad and irksome nights which I have suffered,
similarly this last, for the death of my King.

"I had proposed to close my ephemerides with this register; but so
many new and curious occurrences have presented themselves through
this signal mutation, that I pass to another which also will go
before God pleases: and I doubt 'twill not be very long."

L'Estoile saw the death of the first Bourbon; I have just seen the fall of the last: ought I not to "close here the register of my melancholic pastimes and of my vain and curious researches?" Perhaps; "but so many new and curious researches have presented themselves through this signal mutation, that I pass to another register."

Like L'Estoile, I lament the adversities of the Dynasty of St. Louis; nevertheless, I am obliged to admit, there mingles with my sorrow a certain inward satisfaction: I reproach myself with it, but I cannot prevent it; this satisfaction is that of the slave delivered from his chains. When I abandoned the career of a soldier and a traveller, I felt a certain sadness; now I feel joy, freed convict that I am of the galleys of the world and the Court Faithful to my principles and my oaths, I have betrayed neither liberty nor the King, I carry away neither wealth nor honours; I go as poor as I came. Happy to end a career which was hateful to me, I lovingly return to repose.

Blessed be thou, O my native and dear independence, soul of my life! Come, bring me my Memoirs, that _alter ego_ whose confidant, idol and muse you are. The hours of leisure are fit for story-telling: a shipwrecked mariner, I shall continue to relate my shipwreck to the fishermen on shore. Returning to my primitive instincts, I become a free man and a traveller once again; I end my course as I began it. The closing circle of my days brings me back to the starting-point. On the road which I once took as a careless conscript, I am going to travel as an experienced veteran, with my furlough in my shako, the stripes of time upon my arm, a knapsack full of years upon my back. Who knows? Perhaps I shall, stage by stage, recover the reveries of my youth. I shall call many dreams to my help, to defend me against that horde of truths which are begotten in old days even as dragons hide themselves in ruins. It will depend but on myself to knot together again the two ends of my existence, to blend far-distant periods, to mingle illusions of different ages, since the Prince whom I met in exile on leaving my paternal home I now meet in banishment on my way to my last abode.

I rapidly wrote the little introduction to this part of my Memoirs in the month of October of last year[331]; but I was unable to continue this labour, because I had another on my hands: this was the work[332] which concluded the edition of my Complete Works. From this work again I was diverted, first, by the trial of the ministers and, next, by the sack of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois.

[Sidenote: Trial of the ministers.]

The trial of the ministers[333] and the flurry in Paris made no great impression on me: after the trial of Louis XVI. and the revolutionary insurrections, all is small in the matter of trials and insurrections. The ministers, when coming from Vincennes to the Luxembourg and returning to Vincennes while sentence was being passed, went through the Rue d'Enfer: I could hear the wheels of their carriage from the back of my retreat. How many events have passed before my door!

The defenders of those men did not rise to the level of their task. None took a high enough view of the matter: the advocate predominated too greatly in the speeches. If my friend the Prince de Polignac had chosen me for his second, with what an eye should I have looked upon those perjurers setting themselves up for judges of a perjurer!

"What!" I should have said to them. "It is you who dare to be my client's judges; it is you who, all sullied with your oaths, dare to impute it as a crime to him that he ruined his master when he thought he was serving him: you, the instigators; you who urged him to issue the Ordinances! Change places with him whom you claim the right to judge: he who was accused becomes the accuser. If we have deserved to be struck, it is not by you; if we are guilty, it is not towards you, but towards the people: they are waiting for us in the yard of your palace, and we shall take our heads to them."

After the trial of the ministers, came the scandal of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois[334]. The Royalists, full of excellent qualities, but sometimes stupid and often aggravating, never calculating the range of their measures, always thinking that they would restore the Legitimacy by affecting a colour in their cravats or a flower in their button-holes, occasioned deplorable scenes. It was evident that the Revolutionary Party would profit by the service held in commemoration of the Duc de Berry to make a noise. Now, the Legitimists were not strong enough to oppose this, and the Government was not settled enough to maintain order; and so the church was pillaged. A Voltairean and progressive apothecary[335] triumphed fearlessly over a steeple of the year 1300 and a cross already overthrown by other Barbarians at the end of the ninth century.

Consequently upon the exploits of these enlightened pharmaceutics come the devastation of the Archbishop's Palace, the profanation of the sacred things, and the processions copied from those of Lyons. The executioner and the victims were lacking; but there were plenty of buffoons, masks and diverse carnival delights. The burlesque sacrilegious procession marched on one side of the Seine, while the National Guard, pretending to hasten in aid, defiled on the other. The river separated order and anarchy. It is stated that a man of talent was there as an onlooker and that he said, on seeing the chasubles and books floating on the Seine:

"What a pity they did not throw the Archbishop in!"

A profound utterance, for indeed a drowned archbishop must be a pleasant sight; that makes liberty and enlightenment take so great a step forward! We old witnesses of old deeds are obliged to tell you that you see here but pale and wretched copies. You still possess the revolutionary instinct, but you no longer have its energy; you can be criminal only in imagination; you would like to do evil, but your heart lacks courage and your arm strength; you would like to see fresh massacres, but you would no longer set to work to commit them. If you want the Revolution of July to be great and to remain great, do not let M. Cadet de Gassicourt be its real hero and "Mayeux" its ideal personage[336].

[Sidenote: My new pamphlet.]

PARIS, _end of March_ 1831.

I was out of my reckoning when, after the Days of July were over,
I thought that I was entering a region of peace. The fall of the
three Sovereigns had obliged me to explain myself in the House of
Peers. The proscription of those Kings forbade me to remain dumb.
On the other hand, Philip's newspapers were asking me why I refused
to serve a revolution which consecrated the principles which I
had defended and diffused. I had needs to speak on behalf of the
general truths and to explain my personal conduct. An extract from
a little pamphlet which will be forgotten, _De la Restauration et
de la Monarchie élective_[337], will continue the thread of my
narrative and that of the history of my times:

"Despoiled of the present, possessing but an uncertain future
beyond the tomb, I feel a need that my memory should not be injured
by my silence. I must not hold my peace touching a Restoration in
which I have taken so much part, which is being daily outraged
and which is at length being proscribed before my eyes.... In the
middle-ages, at times of calamity, men used to take a religious and
lock him in a tower, where he fasted on bread and water for the
salvation of the world. I am not unlike this twelfth-century monk:
through the dormer-window of my expiatory jail, I have preached my
last sermon to the passers-by..."

Here is the epitome of that sermon:

"As I predicted in my last speech in the tribune of the Peers, the
Monarchy of July is in an absolute condition of glory or of laws
of exception; it lives by the press, and the press is killing it;
devoid of glory, it will be devoured by liberty; if it attack that
liberty, it will perish. It would be a fine thing if, after driving
out three Kings with barricades, on behalf of the liberty of the
press, we were to be seen erecting new barricades against that
liberty! And yet, what is to be done? Will the redoubled action
of the tribunals and the laws suffice to restrain the writers? A
new government is a child that can walk only in leading-strings.
Are we to put back the nation into swaddling-clothes? Will that
terrible nursling, which has sucked blood in the arms of victory
at so many bivouacs, not burst its bandages? There was but one old
stock, deeply rooted in the past, which could have withstood with
impunity the gales blowing from the liberty of the press. . . .
. . . . . . . . "To listen to the declamations of the moment, it
seems that the exiles of Edinburgh are the poorest fellows living
and that they are nowhere missed. The present, to-day, lacks
nothing but the past: a small thing! As though the centuries did
not make use of each other as pedestals, and as though the last
comer could support itself in mid-air!... It is useless for our
vanity to take offense at memories, to erase the fleurs-de-lys, to
proscribe names and persons: that family, the heir of a thousand
years, has left an immense void by its withdrawal; one feels it
everywhere. Those individuals, so paltry in our eyes, have shaken
Europe in their fall. To however small a degree events produce
their natural effects and bring about their rigorous consequences,
Charles X., in abdicating, will have made all those Gothic kings,
the grand vassals of the past under the suzerainty of the Capets,
abdicate with him. . . . . . . . . . . . "We are marching towards a
general revolution. If the transformation which is being effected
follows its inclination and meets with no obstacles, if popular
reason continues its progressive development, if the education
of the middle classes suffers no interruption, the nations will
become levelled in a uniform liberty; if that transformation is
stayed, the nations will become levelled in a uniform despotism.
This despotism will not last long, because of the advanced age of
intelligence, but it will be harsh, and a long social dissolution
will follow it. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

[Sidenote: Extracts from my pamphlet.]

"Preoccupied as I am with these ideas, it is clear why I was;
bound, as an individual, to remain true to what seemed to me; the
best safeguard of the public liberties, the least perilous road by
which to attain the complement of those liberties.

"It is not that I have the pretension to be a tearful preacher
of sentimental politics, an eternal repeater of white plumes and
commonplaces à la Henry IV. Casting my eyes over the space that
separates the tower of the Temple from the palace in Edinburgh,
I should doubtless find as many calamities heaped up as there
are centuries accumulated on a noble race. A woman of sorrow,
above all, has been loaded with the heaviest burden, as being the
strongest; there is not a heart but breaks at the thought of her:
her sufferings have risen so high that they have become one of the
grandeurs of the Revolution. But, when all is said and done, no
one is obliged to be king: Providence sends particular afflictions
to whom it pleases, always brief ones, because life is short;
and those afflictions are not counted in the general destinies
of the peoples. . . . . . . . . . . . . "Even if the proposition
which for ever banishes the deposed Family from French territory
be a corollary of the deposition of that Family, that corollary
carries no conviction for me.... I should in vain seek my place in
the several categories of persons who have become attached to the
actual order of things. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . "There are
men who, after taking the oath to the Republic One and Indivisible,
to the Directory of five persons, to the Consulate of three, to the
Empire of one alone, to the First Restoration, to the Additional
Act to the Constitutions of the Empire, to the Second Restoration,
have something left to swear to Louis-Philippe: I am not so rich.

"There are men who flung their word on the Place de Grève, in July,
like those Roman goat-herds who play at odd or even among ruins.
Those men... treat as a fool and simpleton whosoever does not
reduce politics to a question of private interests: I am a fool and
a simpleton.

"There are timorous people who would have much preferred not to
swear, but who saw themselves being butchered, together with their
grand-parents, their grandchildren, and all the landlords, if they
had not trembled out their oaths: this is a physical effect which I
have not yet experienced; I shall wait for the infirmity and, if it
comes to me, I shall consider.

"There! are great lords of the Empire linked to their pensions by
sacred and indissoluble bonds, whatever be the hand they fall from:
a pension is in their eyes a sacrament; it stamps a character, like
orders or marriage; no pensioned head can ever cease to be so:
pensions being charged to the Treasury, they remain charged to the
same Treasury. As for me, I have the habit of divorce from Fortune:
I am too old for her and abandon her, lest she should leave me.

"There are high barons of the Throne and the Altar who have not
betrayed the Ordinances: no! But the insufficiency of the means
employed to carry out the Ordinances has excited their spleen:
indignant to find shortcomings in despotism, they have gone to
seek another antechamber. It is impossible for me to share their
indignation and their abode.

"There are men of conscience who are perjurers only to be
perjurers; who, while yielding to force, are none the less for
the right: they weep over that poor Charles X., whom they first
dragged to his ruin by their advice and then put to death by their
oaths; but, if ever he or his House revive, they will be very
thunder-bolts of legitimacy. As for me, I have always been devoted
to death, and I am the funeral procession of the Old Monarchy, like
the poor man's dog.

"Lastly, there are trusty knights who have dispensations from
honour and permits of disloyalty in their pocket: I have none.

"I was the man of the _possible_ Restoration, of the Restoration
accompanied by every kind of liberty. That Restoration took me for
an enemy; it is ruined: I must undergo its fate. Shall I go to
attach the few years that remain to me to a new fortune, like the
hems of dresses which women drag from court to court for all the
world to tread upon? At the head of the young generations, I should
be suspect; following them, is not my place. I am fully aware that
none of my faculties has aged; I understand my century better than
ever; I penetrate more boldly into the future than anybody; but
necessity has pronounced its decree; to end his life opportunely is
a necessary condition for the public man."

[Sidenote: The _Études historiques._]

Lastly, the _Études historiques_[338] have just appeared; I will quote the Introduction, which is a real page of my Memoirs, and contains my history at the very moment at which I am writing: