Chapter XVI: Introduction (2)

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.

At the time of the plague of Athens, in the year 431 before our era, already twenty-two great plagues had ravaged the world. The Athenians imagined that their wells had been poisoned: a popular fancy renewed in all contagions. Thucydides has left us a description of the Attic scourge which has been copied, among the ancients, by Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan[376]; among the moderns, by Boccaccio[377] and Manzoni. It is a remarkable thing that, when writing of the plague of Athens, Thucydides does not say a word of Hippocrates[378], in the same way as he does not name Socrates in connection with Alcibiades. This pestilence first attacked the head, descended to the stomach, thence to the bowels, lastly to the legs; if it went out by the feet, after passing through the whole body, like a long serpent, the patient recovered. Hippocrates called it the "divine evil" and Thucydides the "sacred fire:" they both regarded it as the fire of the heavenly wrath.

One of the most dreadful plagues was that of Constantinople, in the fifth century, under the reign of Justinian: Christianity had already modified the imagination of the peoples and given a new character to a calamity, even as it had changed poetry; the sick seemed to see ghosts hover around them and to hear threatening voices.

The black plague of the fourteenth century, known by the name of the Black Death, took rise in China: it was imagined that it moved rapidly in the shape of a fiery vapour, while spreading a noxious smell. It carried off four-fifths of the inhabitants of Europe.

In 1575, descended upon Milan the contagion which immortalized the charity of St Charles Borromeo. Fifty-four years later, in 1629, that unfortunate city was again exposed to the calamities of which Manzoni[379] has made a painting far superior to the celebrated picture by Boccaccio.

In 1660, the scourge was renewed in Europe and, in those two pestilences of 1629 and 1660, were reproduced the same symptoms of delirium as in the plague of Constantinople.

"Marseilles," says M. Lemontey[380], "was in 1720 concluding the
festivals which had signalized the passage of Mademoiselle de
Valois[381], married to the Duke of Modena[382]. Beside the galleys
still decorated with garlands and filled with musicians lay some
vessels which brought from the ports of Syria the most terrible
calamity."

The fatal ship of which M. Lemontey speaks, having exhibited a clean bill, was for a moment admitted to pratique. That moment was enough to poison the air: a storm increased the evil, and the plague spread to the crash of thunder.

The gates of the city and the windows of the houses were closed. In the midst of the general silence, sometimes a window was heard to open and a corpse to fall. The walls streamed with its cankered blood, and dogs without a master waited below to devour it. In one quarter, all of whose inhabitants had died, they had been walled up at home, as though to prevent death from leaving the house. From these avenues of great family-tombs, one came to open places in which the pavement was covered with sick and dying persons stretched on mattresses and abandoned without aid. Carcases lay half rotten with old clothes mixed with mud; other corpses stood upright against the walls, in the attitude in which they had expired.

All had fled, even the doctors; the bishop, M. de Belsunce[383], wrote:

"They ought to abolish the doctors, or at least to give us abler
and less timorous ones. I have had great difficulty in having one
hundred and fifty half-rotten corpses, which were lying around my
house, removed."

[Sidenote: Earlier plagues.]

One day, the galley-slaves hesitated to fulfil their funeral functions: the apostle climbed into one of the tumbrils, sat down on a heap of corpses and ordered the convicts to proceed; death and virtue went off to the cemetery, drawn by vice and crime filled with dread and admiration. On the Esplanade de la Tourette, beside the sea, bodies had been lying for three weeks; and these, exposed to the sun and melted by its rays, offered merely an infected lake to the sight On this surface of liquefied flesh, only the worms imparted some movement to crushed, vague forms which might possess human shape.

When the contagion began to relax, M. de Belsunce, at the head of his clergy, repaired to the church of the _Accoules_; mounting on an esplanade commanding a view of Marseilles, the harbours and the sea, he gave the benediction, even as the Pope, in Rome, blesses the city and the world: what braver and purer hand could there be to bring down the blessings of Heaven upon so many misfortunes?

It was thus that the plague devastated Marseilles and, five years after these calamities, the following inscription was placed upon the frontage of the Town Hall, resembling the pompous epitaphs which we read on a sepulchre:

MASSILIA PHOCENSIUM FILIA, ROMÆ SOROR, CARTHAGINIS TERROR,
ATHENARUM ÆMULA.

PARIS, RUE D'ENFER, _May_ 1832.

The cholera, starting from the delta of the Ganges in 1817, has spread over a space measuring 2,200 leagues from north to south and 3,500 leagues from east to west; it has wasted 1,400 towns and mowed down 40,000,000 inhabitants. We have a chart tracing the conqueror's march. It has taken fifteen years to come from India to Paris: this means going as fast as Bonaparte; the latter occupied almost the same number of years in passing from Cadiz to Moscow, and he caused the death of only two or three millions of men.

What is the cholera? Is it a mortal wind? Is it insects which we swallow and which devour us? What is this great black death armed with its scythe which, crossing mountains and seas, has come, like one of those terrible pagodas worshipped on the shores of the Ganges, to crush us under its chariot-wheels on the banks of the Seine? If this scourge had fallen in the midst of us in a religious age, if it had spread amid the poetry of manners and of popular beliefs, it would have left a striking picture behind it. Imagine a pall waving by way of a flag from the top of the towers of Notre-Dame; the cannon firing single shots at intervals to warn the imprudent traveller to turn back; a cordon of troops surrounding the city and allowing none to enter or leave; the churches filled with a growing multitude; the priests, by day and night, chanting the prayers of a perpetual agony; the Viaticum carried from house to house with bell and candle; the church-bells incessantly tolling the funeral knell; the monks, crucifix in hand, in the open places, summoning the people to repentance, preaching the wrath and judgment of God, made manifest by the corpses already blackened by Hell's fires.

Then the closed shops; the pontiff, surrounded by his clergy, going, with each rector at the head of his parish, to fetch the shrine of St. Geneviève; the sacred relics carried round the town, preceded by the long procession of the different religious orders, brotherhoods, corporations, congregations of penitents, associations of veiled women, scholars of the University, ministers of the alms-houses, soldiers marching without arms or with pikes reversed; the Miserere chanted by the priests mingling with the hymns of girls and children: all, at certain signals, prostrating themselves in silence and rising to utter fresh complaints.

There was none of all this with us: the cholera came to us in an age of philanthropy, of incredulity, of newspapers, of material administration[384]. This scourge devoid of imagination came upon no old cloisters, nor monks, nor cellars, nor Gothic tombs: like the Terror of 1793, it stalked abroad with a mocking air, in the light of day, in a quite new world, accompanied by its bulletin, which recited the remedies that had been employed against it, the number of victims that it had made, how matters stood, the hopes that were entertained of seeing it come to an end, the precautions that had to be taken to ensure one's self against it, what one should eat, how one ought to dress. And every one continued to attend to his business, and the theatres were filled. I have seen drunkards at the barrier, seated outside the pot-house door, drinking, at a little wooden table, and saying, as they raised their glasses:

"Here's your health, Morbus!"

[Sidenote: The visitation of 1832.]

Morbus, out of gratitude, came running up, and they fell dead under the table. The children played at cholera, calling it "Nicholas Morbus" and "Morbus the Rascal." And yet the cholera had its terrible side: the brilliant sunshine, the indifference of the crowd, the ordinary course of life, which was continued everywhere, gave a new character and a different sort of frightfulness to those days of pestilence. You felt uncomfortable in every limb; you were parched by a cold, dry north wind; the atmosphere had a certain metallic flavour which hurt the throat. In the Rue du Cherche-Midi, wagons of the artillery-depot were used to cart away the dead bodies. In the Rue de Sèvres, which was completely devastated, especially on one side, the hearses came and went from door to door; there were not enough of them to satisfy the demand; a voice would shout from the window:

"Here, hearse, this way!"

The driver answered that he was full up and could not attend to everybody. One of my friends, M. Pouqueville, on his way to dine at my house on Easter Sunday, was stopped at the Boulevard du Mont-Parnasse by a succession of biers, nearly all of which were carried by bearers. He saw, in this procession, the coffin of a young girl, on which was laid a wreath of white roses. A smell of chlorine spread a tainted atmosphere in the wake of this floral ambulance.

On the Place de la Bourse, where processions of workmen used to meet, singing the Parisienne, one often saw funerals pass by towards the Montmartre Cemetery as late as eleven o'clock at night, by the light of pitch torches. The Pont-Neuf was blocked with litters laden with patients for the hospitals or dead who had expired on the road. The toll ceased for some days on the Pont des Arts. The booths disappeared and, as the north-east wind was blowing, all the stall-holders and all the shopkeepers on the quays closed their doors. One met tilted conveyances preceded by a "crow," or mute, with a registrar of births, deaths and marriages walking in front, dressed in mourning, and carrying a list in his hand. There was a dearth of these tabellions, or registrars; they had to send for more from Saint-Germain, the Villette, Saint-Cloud. For the rest, the hearses were piled up with five or six coffins, kept in place with ropes. Omnibuses and hackney-coaches were employed for the same purpose: it was not uncommon to see a cab adorned with a dead body stretched across the apron. A few of the dead were laid out in the churches: a priest sprinkled holy water over those collected faithful of Eternity.

In Athens, the people believed that the wells near the Piræus had been poisoned; in Paris, the tradesmen were accused of poisoning their wine, spirits, sugar-plums and provisions. Several individuals had their clothes torn from their backs, were dragged in the gutter, flung into the Seine. The authorities were to blame for these stupid or guilty opinions.

How did the scourge, like an electric spark, pass from London to Paris? It cannot be explained. This fantastic death often fixes on a spot of the ground, on a house, and leaves the neighbourhood of that infested spot untouched; then it retraces its steps and picks up what it has forgotten. One night, I felt myself attacked: I was seized with a shivering, together with cramp in my legs; I did not want to ring, for fear of frightening Madame de Chateaubriand. I got up; I heaped all I could find in my room on the bed, got back under the blankets, and a copious perspiration pulled me through. But I remained shattered, and it was in this condition of discomfort that I was obliged to write my pamphlet on the 12,000 francs of Madame la Duchesse de Berry.

[Sidenote: The 12,000 francs of Madame.]

I should not have been too sorry to go, carried off under the arm of the eldest son of Vishnu, whose distant glance killed Bonaparte upon his rock at the entrance to the Indian Sea. If all mankind, stricken with this general contagion, came to die, what would happen? Nothing: the world, depopulated, would continue its solitary course, without need of any other astronomer to count its steps than Him who has measured them from all eternity; it would present no change to the eyes of the inhabitants of the other planets; they would see it fulfilling its accustomed functions; upon its surface, our little works, our cities, our monuments would be replaced by forests restored to the sovereignty of the lions; no void would manifest itself in the universe. And nevertheless there would be lacking that human intelligence which knows the stars and rises to a knowledge of their Author. What art thou then, O immensity of the works of God, in which, if the genius of man, which is equal to the whole of nature, came to disappear, it would be no more missed than the smallest atom withdrawn from Creation?

PARIS, RUE D'ENFER, _May_ 1832.

Madame de Berry has her chamber council in Paris, as Charles X. has his: paltry sums were collected in her name to succour the poorer of the Royalists. I proposed to distribute among the cholera patients a sum of twelve thousand francs on behalf of the mother of Henry V. We wrote to Massa, and not only did the Princess approve of the disposition of the funds, but she would have liked us to apportion a more considerable sum: her approval arrived on the day on which I sent the money to the mayors' offices. Thus, everything is strictly true in my explanations concerning the gift of the exile. On the 14th of April, I sent the whole sum to the Prefect of the Seine to be distributed among the indigent class of the cholera-stricken population of Paris. M. de Bondy was not at the Hôtel de Ville when my letter was taken there. The Secretary-general opened my missive, and did not consider himself authorized to receive the money. Three days elapsed; M. de Bondy replied at last that he could not accept the twelve thousand francs, because people would see in it, beneath an apparent benevolence, "a political combination against which the entire population of Paris would protest by its refusal[385]." Then my secretary went to the twelve mayors' offices. Of five mayors who were present, four accepted the gift of a thousand francs; one refused it. Of the seven mayors who were absent, five kept silence; two refused[386]. I was forthwith besieged by an army of paupers: benevolent and charitable societies, workmen of all kinds, women and children. Polish and Italian exiles, men of letters, artists, soldiers, all wrote, all demanded a share in the bounty. If I had had a million, it would have been distributed in a few hours. M. de Bondy was wrong in saying that "the entire population of Paris would protest by its refusal:" the population of Paris will always take money from everybody. The scared attitude of the Government was enough to make one die of laughing: one would have thought that this perfidious legitimist money was going to stir up the cholera patients, to excite an insurrection among the men dying in the hospitals to march to the assault of the Tuileries, with coffins rolling, with tolling of funeral knells, with winding-sheet unfurled under the command of Death. My correspondence with the mayors was prolonged through the complication of the refusal of the Prefect of Paris. Some of them wrote to me to send me back my money or to ask for the return of their receipts for the gifts of Madame la Duchesse de Berry. I sent these back loyally, and I handed the following receipt to the office of the Mayor of the 12th Ward:

[Sidenote: Attitude of the Mayors.]

"I have received from the Mayor's office of the 12th Ward the sum
of one thousand francs which it had at first accepted and which it
has returned to me by order of M. the Prefect of the Seine.

PARIS, 22 _April_ 1832."

The Mayor of the 9th Ward, M. Cronier, was braver: he kept the thousand francs and was dismissed. I wrote him this note:

"29 _April_ 1832.

"SIR,

"I hear with keen sorrow of the disgrace of which Madame la
Duchesse de Berry's benevolence has in your case been the cause or
the pretext. You will have, for your consolation, the esteem of the
public, the sense of your independence, and the happiness of having
sacrificed yourself to the cause of the unfortunate.

"I have the honour, etc., etc."

The Mayor of the 4th Ward is a very different man: M. Cadet de Gassicourt, a poet-apothecary composing little verses, writing in his time, in the time of liberty and the Empire, an agreeable classical declaration against my romantic prose and that of Madame de Staël[387]. M. Cadet de Gassicourt is the hero who took the cross of the front of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois by assault, and who, in a proclamation on the cholera, gave us to understand that possibly those wicked Carlists were the wine-poisoners to whom the people had already done ample justice[388]. And so the illustrious champion wrote me the following letter:

"PARIS, 18 _April_ 1832.

"SIR,

"I was not at the Mayor's office when the person sent by you
called: this will explain to you the delay in my reply.

"M. the Prefect of the Seine, when declining to accept the money
which you undertook to offer him, seems to me to have traced the
line of conduct which the members of the Municipal Council must
follow. I shall imitate M. the Prefect's example the more readily
inasmuch as I think that I know and as I share the sentiments which
must have prompted his refusal.

"I will refer only in passing to the title of 4 Royal Highness'
given with some affectation to the person whose mouth-piece you
constitute yourself: the daughter-in-law of Charles X. is no more
a 'Royal Highness' in France than her father-in-law is King[389]!
But, Sir, there is no one who is not morally convinced that this
lady is very actively at work and that she is spending sums of
money very much more considerable than that of which she has
entrusted the employment to yourself to stir up trouble in our
country and bring about civil war. The alms which she pretends
to make are but a means for drawing upon herself and her party
an attention and a kindly feeling which her intentions are far
from justifying. You will therefore not think it extraordinary
that a magistrate, firmly attached to the constitutional royalty
of Louis-Philippe, should refuse a relief which comes from such
a source and should look to true citizens for purer bounties
addressed sincerely to humanity and the country.

"I am, Sir, with a very distinguished regard, etc.

"F. CADET DE GASSICOURT."

[Sidenote: Cadet de Gassicourt.]

This is a very proud revolt on the part of M. Cadet de Gassicourt against "this lady" and her "father-in-law:" what a progress in enlightenment and philosophy! What indomitable independence! Messieurs Fleurant and Purgon dared not look people in the face except upon their knees[390]; he, M. Cadet, says, with the Cid:

"Then we rise up!"

His liberty is the more courageous inasmuch as that "father-in-law" (in other words, the descendant of St. Louis) is an outlaw. M. de Gassicourt is above all that: he despises equally the nobility of time and of misfortune. With the same contempt for aristocratic prejudices, he takes away my "de" and assumes it for himself, as though it were a conquest snatched from the petty gentry. But could there not have been some ancient historic quarrels between the House of Cadet and the House of Capet? Henry IV., the ancestor of that "father-in-law" who is no more King than that "lady" is a Royal Highness, was one day passing through the Forest of Saint-Germain: eight lords were lying in ambush there to kill the Bearnese; they were taken.

"One of those gallants," says L'Estoile, "was an apothecary who
asked to speak with the King, of whom His Majesty having enquired
of what condition he was, he answered that he was an apothecary.

"'What!' said the King. 'Is it the habit to perform the condition
of an apothecary here? Do you lie in wait for the wayfarers to...?'"

Henry IV. was a soldier, modesty troubled him but little, and he ran away from a word no more than from the enemy.

I suspect M. de Gassicourt, because of his ill-humour towards the descendant of Henry IV., of being himself the descendant of the apothecary-Leaguer. The Mayor of the 4th Ward had doubtless written to me in the hope that I would engage him in mortal combat; but I do not care to engage M. Cadet in anything: I hope that he will forgive me for leaving him this little token of my remembrance.

Since the days when the great revolutions and the great revolutionaries passed before my eyes, everything had shrivelled greatly. The men who caused the fall of an oak, replanted when too old to take root, applied to me; they asked me for a portion of the widow's mite to buy bread: the letter from the Committee of the _décorés de Juillet_, or "Knights of July," is a document worth noting for the instruction of posterity.

"PARIS, 20 _April_ 1832.

"Please address your reply to M. Gibert-Arnaud, "Manager and
Secretary to the Committee, "3, Rue Saint-Nicaise.

"MONSIEUR LE VICOMTE,

"The members of our Committee approach you with confidence to ask
you kindly to honour them with a gift in favour of the Knights
of July. Any benevolence shown to these unhappy fathers of
families, at this time of plague and misery, inspires the sincerest
gratitude. We venture to hope that you will consent to allow your
illustrious name to figure beside those of General Bertrand,
General Exelmans, General Lamarque, General La Fayette, and several
ambassadors, peers of France and deputies.

"We beg you to honour us with a word in reply, and if, contrary to
our expectation, our request should meet with a refusal, be good
enough to return us the present letter.

"With the gentlest sentiments, we beg you, monsieur le vicomte, to
accept the homage of our respectful salutations.

"The active members of the Constitutive Committee of the Knights of
July:

"FAURE, Visiting Member. "CYPRIEN DESMARAIS, Special Commissary.
"GIBERT-ARNAUD, Manager and Secretary. "TOUREL, Assistant Member."

I was too wise not to take the advantage which the Revolution of July here gave me over itself. By distinguishing between persons, one would create helots among the unfortunate, who, because of certain political opinions, might never obtain relief. I lost no time in sending a hundred francs to these gentlemen, with this note:

"PARIS, 22 _April_ 1832.

"GENTLEMEN,

"I am infinitely grateful to you for applying to me to come to the
assistance of some unhappy fathers of families. I hasten to send
you the sum of one hundred francs: I regret that I am not able to
offer you a more considerable gift.

"I have the honour, etc.

"CHATEAUBRIAND."

The following receipt was sent to me by return:

[Sidenote: The knights of July.]

"MONSIEUR LE VICOMTE,

"I have the honour to thank you and to acknowledge the receipt
of the sum of one hundred francs devoted by your kindness to the
succour of the unfortunates of July.

"Greetings and respects.

"GIBERT-ARNAUD,

"Manager and Secretary to the Committee.

"23 _April._"

And so Madame la Duchesse de Berry gave charity to those who had driven her from the country. The transactions show things in their true light. How can one believe in any reality in a country where no one looks after the invalids of his party, where the heroes of yesterday are the destitute persons of to-day, where a little gold makes the multitude hurry to one like pigeons in a farm-yard flocking to the hand that flings grain to them.

Four thousand francs of my twelve remained. I addressed myself to religion; Monseigneur the Archbishop of Paris[391] wrote me this noble letter:

"PARIS, 26 _April_ 1832.

"MONSIEUR LE VICOMTE,

"Charity is catholic like faith, foreign to men's passions,
independent of their movements: one of its chief distinguishing
characteristics is that, as St. Paul says, it worketh no evil[392]:
_non cogitat malum._ It blesses the hand that gives and the hand
that receives, without attributing to the generous benefactor any
other motive than that of doing good and without asking of the
indigent poor any other condition than that of need. It accepts
with deep and feeling gratitude the gift which the august widow
has charged you to confide to it to be employed for the relief
of our unfortunate brothers, the victims of the plague which is
devastating the Capital.

"It will distribute with the most scrupulous fidelity the four
thousand francs which you have handed me on her behalf, and for
which my letter is a new receipt; but I shall have the honour to
send you an account of the distribution when the intentions of the
benefactress have been fulfilled.

"Be so good, monsieur le vicomte, as to present to Madame la
Duchesse de Berry the thanks of a pastor and a father who daily
offers his life to God for his sheep and his children and who calls
on every side for help capable of levelling their wretchedness.
Her royal heart has already doubtless found within itself its
reward for the sacrifice which she has devoted to our misfortunes:
religion ensures to her, moreover, the effect of the divine
promises set forth in the book of the Beatitudes for those who are
'merciful[393].'

"The money has been divided without delay among the rectors of the
twelve principal parishes of Paris, to whom I have addressed the
letter of which I enclose a copy.

"Receive, monsieur le vicomte, the assurance, etc.

"HYACINTHE, Archbishop of Paris."

One is always amazed to realize in how high a degree religion suits even style and gives an immediate gravity and seemliness to commonplaces. This forms a contrast with the heap of anonymous letters which have become mixed with the letters I have quoted. The spelling of these anonymous letters is fairly correct, the hand-writing neat: they are, properly speaking, "literary," like the Revolution of July. They display scribbling jealousies, hatreds, vanities, safe in the inviolability of a cowardice which, refraining to show its face, cannot be made visible by a blow. Here are some samples:

"Will you let us know, you old _républiquinquiste_, the day on
which you would like to grease your moccasins? It will be easy for
us to procure you some Chouan's fat, and, should you want some of
your friends' blood to write their history in, there is no lack of
it in the Paris mud, its element.

"You old brigand, ask your rascally and worthy friend Fitz-James
if he liked the stone which he received in his feudal part Pack of
scoundrels that you are, we'll pull your guts from your stomachs,"
etc., etc.

In another missive, I find a very well-drawn gallows, with these words:

"Go down on your knees to a priest and make an act of contrition,
for we want your old head to put an end to your treacheries."

For the rest, the cholera still continues: the answer which I might address to a known or unknown adversary would perhaps reach him when he was lying on his threshold. If, on the contrary, he were destined to live, where would his reply find me? Perhaps in that resting-place of which no one can be frightened to-day, especially we men who have lengthened out our years between the Terror and the Plague, the first and last horizons of our lives. A truce: let the coffins pass.

PARIS, RUE D'ENFER, 10 _June_ 1832.

General Lamarque's[394] funeral has brought about two days of bloodshed and the victory of the sham Legitimacy over the Republican Party[395]. This incomplete and divided party has made an heroic resistance.

[Sidenote: Paris in state of siege.]

Paris has been declared in a state of siege[396]: this is the censorship on the largest possible scale, a censorship in the manner of the Convention, with this difference, that a military commission takes the place of the Revolutionary Tribunal. They are shooting, in June 1832, the men who achieved the victory in July 1830: that same Polytechnic School, that same artillery of the National Guard are being sacrificed; they conquered the power for those who are crushing, disowning and disbanding them. The Republicans are certainly wrong to have cried up measures of anarchy and disorder: but why did you not employ such noble arms on our frontiers? They would have delivered us from the ignominious yoke of the foreigner. Generous, if exalted heads would not have remained to ferment in Paris, to blaze up against the humiliation of our foreign policy and the bad faith of the new Royalty. You have been pitiless, you who, without sharing the dangers of the Three Days, have gathered their fruit. Go now with the mothers to identify the corpses of those knights of July from whom you hold places, riches and honours. Young men, you do not all obtain the same lot on the same shore! You have a tomb under the colonnade of the Louvre and a place in the Morgue: some for snatching, others for bestowing a crown. Your names, who knows them, you sacrifices and for-ever-unknown victims of a memorable revolution? Is the blood known that cements the monuments which men admire? The workmen who built the Great Pyramid for the corpse of an unglorious king[397], sleep forgotten in the sand near the needy root that served to feed them during their labours.

PARIS, RUE D'ENFER, _end of July_ 1832.

Madame la Duchesse de Berry[398] no sooner sanctioned the measure of the 12,000 francs than she took ship for her famous adventure. The rising of Marseilles failed; there remained but to try the West; but the Vendean glory is a thing apart: it will live in our annals; in any case, seven-eighths of France has chosen a different glory, the object of jealousy or antipathy; the Vendée is an Oriflamme venerated and admired in the treasure of Saint-Denis, under which youth and the future will henceforth gather no longer.

[Sidenote: Madame lands in France.]