Chapter XXVI: Book IV: 556 (2)

On Monday the 27th, in the morning, the "Opposition" came to tell me that I could not see the young Prince: M. de Damas had tired his pupil by dragging him from church to church to the Stations of the Jubilee. This weariness served as a pretext for a holiday and was made to justify a trip to the country: they wanted to hide the child from me. I spent the morning in visiting the town. At five o'clock, I went to dine at Count Chotek's.

The house belonging to Count Chotek was built by his father[595], who was also Grand Burgrave of Bohemia, and presents externally the form of a Gothic chapel: nothing is original nowadays, everything is copied. The drawing-room gives a view over the gardens; they slope down into a valley: the light is always dull, the soil greyish, as in those many-cornered recesses of the mountains of the North, where gaunt nature wears the hair-shirt.

The table was laid under the trees in the "pleasure-ground[596]." We dined without our hats: my head, which so many storms have insulted by carrying off my hair, was sensitive to the breath of the wind. While I strove to keep my mind on my dinner, I could not help watching the birds and clouds that flew over the banquet: passengers embarked on the breezes and having secret relations with my destinies; travellers, the objects of my envy, whose aerial course my eyes cannot follow without a sort of emotion. I was more at home with those parasites wandering in the sky than with the guests seated near me on the earth: happy those anchorites who had a raven for _dapifer!_

I cannot speak to you of Prague society, because I met it only at that dinner. There was a woman present who was very much in the fashion in Vienna and very witty, I was told; she seemed to me an acrimonious and foolish person, although she still had a certain youthfulness, like those trees which keep in summer the dried clusters of the flower which they have borne in spring.

[Sidenote: Society in Prague.]

I know, therefore, of the manners of this country only those of the sixteenth century, as told by Bassompierre[597]: he loved Anna Esther, eighteen years of age and six months a widow. He spent five days and six nights in disguise and hidden in a room with his mistress. He played tennis in Hradschin with Wallenstein. Being neither Wallenstein nor Bassompierre, I laid claim to neither empire nor love. The modern Esthers ask for Assueruses who are able, disguised though they be, to get rid of their dominoes at night: one does not lay aside the mask of the years.

PRAGUE, 27 _May_ 1833.

After the dinner was over, at seven o'clock, I waited on the King; I there met the same persons as before, excepting M. le Duc de Bordeaux, who was said to be ailing from his Stations on the Sunday. The King was half reclining on a sofa, and Mademoiselle sitting on a chair right up against the knees of Charles X., who was stroking his grand-daughter's arm and telling her stories. The young Princess listened attentively: when I appeared, she looked at me with the smile of a reasonable person who should say:

"I must do something to amuse my grand-papa."

"Chateaubriand," exclaimed the King, "I did not see you yesterday!"

"Sire, I was told too late that Your Majesty had done me the honour to name me for your dinner-party: also, it was Whit Sunday, a day on which I am not allowed to see Your Majesty."

"How is that?" asked the King.

"Sire, it was on Whit Sunday, nine years ago, that, when I came to pay my Court to you, they forbade me your door."

Charles X. seemed touched:

"They won't drive you away from the Castle of Prague."

"No, Sire, for I do not see those good servants here who showed me out on the day of prosperity."

The whist-playing began and the day came to an end. After the rubber, I returned the Duc de Blacas' visit:

"The King," he said, "has told me that we were to have a talk."

I replied that, as the King had not thought it expedient to summon his Council, before which I could have set forth my ideas regarding the future of France and the majority of the Duc de Bordeaux, I had nothing more to say.

"His Majesty has no council," rejoined the Duc de Blacas with a tremulous laugh and a self-satisfied look in his eyes; "he has no one but me, absolutely no one."

The Grand-master of the Wardrobe has the highest opinion of himself: a French complaint. To hear him speak, he does everything, he is equal to everything: he married the Duchesse de Berry; he does what he pleases with the Kings; he leads Metternich by the nose; he has Nesselrode[598] under his thumb; he reigns in Italy; he has carved his name on an obelisk in Rome; he has the keys of the conclaves in his pocket; the three last Popes owe their elevation to him; he knows public opinion so well, he measures his ambition so well by his strength that, when accompanying Madame la Duchesse de Berry, he had himself given a diploma appointing him Head of the Council of Regency, Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs! And that is how those poor people understand France and the times.

Nevertheless, M. de Blacas is the most intelligent and the most moderate of the band. In conversation he is reasonable; he always agrees with you:

"Is that what you think? It is just what I was saying yesterday. We have absolutely the same ideas!"

He bemoans his slavery; he is tired of business, he would like to live in an unknown corner of the earth, to die there in peace, far from the world. As to his influence with Charles X., don't speak of it to him; they think that he sways Charles X.: they are wrong! He can do nothing with the King! The King refuses a thing in the morning; at night he grants the same thing, and nobody knows why he has changed his mind, and so on. When M. de Blacas tells you these tales, he is telling the truth, because he never thwarts the King; but he is not sincere, because he inspires Charles X. only with those wishes which are in accordance with that Prince's inclinations.

[Sidenote: The Duc de Blacas.]

For the rest, M. de Blacas possesses courage and honour; he is not without generosity; he is devoted and faithful. By rubbing himself against the high aristocracy and acquiring wealth, he has caught the ways of both. He is very well-born; he comes of a poor, but ancient house, known in poetry and arms[599]. His stiff and formal manners, his assurance, his strictness in matters of etiquette preserve for his masters an air of nobility which one loses too easily in misfortune: at least, in the Museum in Prague, the inflexibility of a suit of armour holds erect a body which would fall without it M. de Blacas does not lack a certain energy; he dispatches ordinary affairs quickly; he is orderly and methodical. A fairly enlightened connoisseur in some branches of archaeology, a lover of the arts without imagination and an icy libertine, he does not grow excited even over his passions; his coolness would be a statesmanlike quality if his coolness were other than his confidence in his genius, and his genius betrays him: one feels in him the abortive great lord, even as one feels it in his fellow-countryman, La Valette, Duc d'Épernon[600].

Either there will or there will not be a restoration: if there is a restoration, M. de Blacas will come back with places and honours; if there is no restoration, the fortune of the Grand-master of the Wardrobe is almost all invested out of France; Charles X. and Louis XIX. will be dead; he, M. de Blacas, will be very old: his children will remain the companions of the exiled Prince, illustrious foreigners at foreign Courts. Praise God for all things!

Thus the Revolution, which exalted and ruined Bonaparte, will have enriched M. de Blacas: that makes amends. M. de Blacas, with his long, impassive, colourless face, is the Monarchy's undertaker-in-ordinary: he buried it at Hartwell, he buried it at Ghent, he buried it again in Edinburgh and he will bury it again in Prague or elsewhere, always attending to the remains of the high and mighty defunct, like those peasants on the coasts who pick up the wreckage which the sea casts up on its shores.

PRAGUE, 28 _and_ 29 _May_ 1833.

On Monday the 28th of May, as the history lesson at which I was to have been present at eleven o'clock did not take place, I found myself free to go through, or, rather, to revisit the town which I had already seen and seen again in coming and going. I do not know why I had imagined that Prague was nestled in a gap of mountains that threw their black shadow over a huddled kettleful of houses. Prague is a bright city, in which twenty-five or thirty graceful towers and steeples rise up to the sky; its architecture reminds one of a town of the Renascence. The long sway of the Emperors over the Cisalpine countries filled Germany with artists from those countries; the Austrian villages are villages of Lombardy, Tuscany or the Venetian main-land: one would think one's self under the roof of an Italian peasant, if, in the farm-houses, with their great bare rooms, a stove did not take the place of the sun.

The view enjoyed from the windows of the Castle is agreeable: on one side, you see the orchards of a cool valley, with green slopes, enclosed by the denticulated walls of the town, which run down to the Moldau, almost as the walls of Rome run from the Vatican down to the Tiber; on the other side, you perceive the city, cut in two by the river, which is beautified by an island set up stream and embraces another island down stream, after leaving the northern suburb. The Moldau flows into the Elbe. A boat might have taken me on board at the bridge of Prague and landed me at the Pont-Royal in Paris. I am not the work of the ages and kings; I have neither the weight nor the duration of the obelisk[601] which the Nile is now sending to the Seine; the girdle of the Vestal of the Tiber would be strong enough to tow my galley.

The Moldau Bridge, which was first built in wood, in 795, by Mnata, has been rebuilt, at different times, in stone. While I was taking the measure of this bridge, Charles X. was walking on the pavement; he carried an umbrella; his son accompanied him like a paid _cicerone._ I had said, in the _Conservateur_, that "men would go to the window to see the Monarchy pass:" I saw it pass on the bridge of Prague.

In the constructions of which Hradschin is composed one sees historic halls, museums hung with the restored portraits and the furbished arms of the Dukes and Kings of Bohemia. Not far from the shapeless masses, there stands detached against the sky a pretty building decked with one of the graceful porticoes of the Cinquecento: this architecture has the drawback of being out of harmony with the climate. If at least one could, during the Bohemian winter, put those Italian palaces in the hot-house, with the palm-trees? I was always preoccupied with the thought of the cold which they must feel at night.

[Sidenote: History of Prague.]

Prague, often besieged, taken and re-taken, is known to us, in a military respect, by the battle called after it and by the retreat in which Vauvenargues[602] took part. The bulwarks of the town are demolished. The moat of the Castle, on the side of the high plane, forms a deep and narrow groove, now planted with poplars. At the time of the Thirty Years' War, this moat was filled with water. The Protestants, having penetrated into the Castle, on the 23rd of May 1618, threw two Catholic lords, together with the Secretary of State, out of window: the three divers saved their lives. The Secretary, like a well-bred man, begged a thousand pardons of one of the lords for his rudeness in falling on his head. In this present month of May 1833, we are no longer so polite: I am not sure what I should say in a similar case, although I have been a secretary of State myself.

Tycho Brahe died in Prague[603]: would you, for all his knowledge, have a false nose in wax or silver as he did? Tycho consoled himself in Bohemia, like Charles X., by contemplating the heavens; the astronomer admired the work, the King adores the Workman. The star which appeared in 1572 (and died out in 1574) and which passed successively from dazzling white to the red yellow of Mars and the leaden white of Saturn presented to Tycho's observations the spectacle of the conflagration of a world. What is the revolution whose breath blew the brother of Louis XVI. to the tomb of the Danish Newton beside the destruction of a globe, accomplished in less than two years?

General Moreau came to Prague to concert with the Emperor of Russia a restoration which he, Moreau, did not live to see.

If Prague were by the sea-side, nothing would be more charming; and Shakespeare, striking Bohemia with his wand turns it into a shipping country:

"Thou art perfect then," says Antigonus to a Mariner in the _Winter's Tale_:

Thou art perfect then, our ship hath touch'd upon
The deserts of Bohemia?

Antigonus lands, charged to abandon a little girl, to whom he addresses these words:

Blossom, speed thee well!
. . . . . . . . .
. . The storm begins
. . . . . . . . .
. . . . Thou art like to have
A lullaby too rough[604].

Does not Shakespeare seem to have told in advance the story of the Princesse Louise, that young "blossom," that new Perdita transported to the deserts of Bohemia?

PRAGUE, 28 _and_ 29 _May_ 1833.

Confusion, blood, catastrophes compose the history of Bohemia; her dukes and kings, in the midst of civil wars and foreign wars, fight with their subjects or come to logger-heads with the Dukes and Kings of Silesia, Saxony, Poland, Moravia, Hungary, Austria and Bavaria.

During the reign of Wenceslaus VI.[605], who spitted his cook for roasting a hare badly, arose John Huss, who, having studied at Oxford, brought back the doctrine of Wyclif[606]. The Protestants, who were looking for ancestors everywhere without being able to find any, report that, from the top of his funeral pile, John sang and prophesied the coming of Luther:

"The world filled with acidity," says Bossuet, "gave birth to
Luther and Calvin, who canton Christendom."

From the Christian and pagan struggles, the precocious heresies of Bohemia, the importation of foreign interests and foreign manners, resulted a state of confusion favourable to lying. Bohemia passed as the native land of the sorcerers.

Some old poems, discovered, in 1817, by M. Hanka[607], the Librarian of the Prague Museum, in the archives of the church at Königinhof, have become famous. A young man whom I have pleasure in naming, the son of an illustrious scholar, M. Ampère, has made known the spirit of those lays. Czelakovsky[608] has spread popular songs in the Slav idiom.

The Poles think the Bohemian dialect effeminate: it is the quarrel of the Doric and Ionic. The Lower Breton of Vannes treats the Lower Breton of Tréguier as a barbarian. Slav as well as Magyar lends itself to the translation of all languages: my poor _Atala_ has been rigged out in a robe of Hungarian point-lace; she also wears an Armenian dolman and an Arab veil.

[Sidenote: Bohemian literature.]

There is another literature that has flourished in Bohemia: the modern Latin literature. The prince of this literature, Bohuslas Hassenstein, Baron Lobkowitz[609], born in 1462, took ship, in 1490, in Venice and visited Greece, Syria, Arabia and Egypt Lobkowitz preceded me in those celebrated places by three hundred and sixteen years and, like Lord Byron, sang his pilgrimage. With what a difference in mind, heart, thoughts, manners have we, at an interval of over three centuries, meditated on the same ruins and under the same sun: Lobkowitz, the Bohemian; Byron, the Englishman; and I, the child of France!

At the time of Lobkowitz' voyage, wonderful monuments, since overthrown, were standing. It must have been an astonishing spectacle, that of barbarism in all its strength, holding civilization on the ground under its feet, the janissaries of Mahomet II.[610] drunk with opium, victories and women, scimitar in hand, their foreheads girt with the blood-stained turban, drawn up in line for the assault on the rubbish of Egypt and Greece: and I have seen the same barbarism, among the same ruins, struggling under the feet of civilization.

As I surveyed the town and suburbs of Prague, the things which I have just told came to apply themselves on my memory like transfers on a canvas. But, in whatever corner I happened to be, I saw Hradschin and the King of France leaning on the windows of that castle, like a ghost over-towering all those shades.

PRAGUE, 29 _May_ 1833.

Having finished my review of Prague, I went, on the 29th of May, to dine at the Castle, at six o'clock. The King was in high spirits. When we left the table, sitting down on the sofa in the drawing-room, he said:

"Chateaubriand, do you know that the _National_ which arrived this morning declares that I had the right to issue my Ordinances?"

"Sire," I replied, "Your Majesty is making innuendoes against me."

The King, undecided, hesitated; then, taking his resolution:

"I have something on my mind: you dealt me devilish hard measure in the first part of your speech in the House of Peers." And at once the King, without giving me the time to answer, cried, "Oh, the end, the end!... The empty grave at Saint-Denis.... That was admirable! That was very fine, very fine! Do not let us talk of it any more. I did not want to keep that... it's done with, it's done with." And he excused himself for venturing to risk those few words. I kissed the royal hand with pious respect.

"Let me tell you," Charles X. resumed: "perhaps I was wrong not to defend myself at Rambouillet; I still had great resources... but I did not want blood to flow for me; I retired."

I did not combat this noble excuse; I replied:

"Sire, Bonaparte retired twice like Your Majesty, in order not to prolong the ills of France."

I thus put the weakness of my old King under the shelter of Napoleon's glory.

The children arrived and we went up to them. The King spoke of Mademoiselle's age:

"What, you little doll," he exclaimed, "are you fourteen already?"

"Oh, when I'm fifteen!" said Mademoiselle.

"Well, what will you do then?"

Mademoiselle stopped short.

Charles X. was telling something:

"I don't remember that," said the Duc de Bordeaux.

"I should think not," said the King; "it happened on the very day when you were born."

"Oh," replied Henry, "so it's very long ago!"

Mademoiselle, leaning her head a little on one shoulder, lifting her face towards her brother, while casting a glance aslant at me, said, with an ironical little look:

"Is it so very long, then, since you were born?"

The children retired; I took leave of the orphan: I was to start during the night I said good-bye to him in French, English and German. How many languages will Henry learn in which to tell his wandering miseries, to ask for bread and a shelter from the stranger?

When the rubber began, I took His Majesty's orders:

"You will see Madame la Dauphine at Carlsbad," said Charles X. "A good journey, my dear Chateaubriand. We shall read about you in the papers."

I went from door to door to pay my last respects to the inhabitants of the Castle. I saw the young Princess again at Madame de Gontaut's; she gave me a letter for her mother at the foot of which were a few lines from Henry.

[Sidenote: I take leave of my Kings.]

I was to have left at five o'clock, on the morning of the 30th; Count Chotek had had the goodness to order horses along the road: a jobbing transaction detained me till noon. I was the bearer of a letter of credit for 2000 francs payable in Prague; I had called upon a fat little monkey of a Jew who uttered cries of admiration when he saw me. He summoned his wife to his aid; she ran, or, rather, rolled up to my feet; she sat down opposite me, quite short, fat and black, with two arms like fins, staring at me with her round eyes: if the Messiah had come in by the window, this Rachel would not have appeared more delighted; I thought myself threatened with an "Hallelujah." The broker offered me his fortune, letters of credit for the whole extent of the Israelitish dispersion; he added that he would send me my 2000 francs to my hotel.

The money was not paid on the evening of the 29th; on the 30th, in the morning, when the horses were already put to, came a clerk with a parcel of bills, paper of different sources, which loses more or less on change and which is not current outside the Austrian States. My account was made out on a bill which said, in discharge, "good money." I was astounded:

"What good is this to me?" I asked the clerk. "How am I to pay the posting and my hotel-bills with this paper?"

The clerk ran off in search of explanations. Another clerk came and made me endless calculations. I sent back the second clerk; a third brought me cash in the form of Brabant crowns. I set out, thenceforth on my guard against the affection with which I might inspire the daughters of Jerusalem.

My calash was surrounded, under the gate-way, by the people of the hotel, among whom squeezed a pretty Saxon servant-girl, who used to run off to a piano every time she could snatch a moment between two rings at the bell: just ask Léonarde of Limousin, or Fanchon of Picardy to sing or play _Tanti palpiti_ to you on the piano, or _Moses' Prayer!_

PRAGUE AND ON THE ROAD, 29 _and_ 30 _May_ 1833.

I had come to Prague with the greatest apprehension. I had said to myself:

"To ruin us, it is often enough for God to place our own destinies in our hands; God works miracles in men's favour, but He leaves the conduct of these to them; but for which it would be He that would govern in person: now men make the fruits of those miracles abortive. Crime is not always punished in this world; mistakes always. Crime is part of the infinite and general nature of men; Heaven alone knows the depth of it and sometimes reserves its punishment to Itself. The mistakes of a limited and accidental nature come within the scope of the narrow justice of the earth: that is why it would be possible for the last mistakes of the Monarchy to be rigorously punished by men."

I had said to myself also:

"Royal families have been seen to fall into irreparable errors, by becoming infatuated with a false idea of their own nature: at one time they look upon themselves as divine and exceptional families, at another as mortal and private families; they set themselves above the common law or within that law, as the case may require. When they violate political constitutions, they cry that they have the right to do so, that they are the fount of the law, that they cannot be judged by ordinary rules. When they want to make a domestic mistake, to give a dangerous education, for instance, to the Heir to the Throne, they reply to the protests made:

"'A private person can act towards his children as he pleases, and we cannot!'"

[Sidenote: Reflections on the road.]

Well no, you cannot: you are neither a divine family, nor a private family; you are a public family; you belong to society. The mistakes made by royalty do not affect royalty alone; they are detrimental to the whole nation: a king trips and goes away; but does a nation go away? Does it suffer no hurt? Are not those victims of their honour who have remained attached to the absent Royalty interrupted in their careers, persecuted in the persons of their kin, trammelled in their liberty, threatened in their lives? Once more, the Royalty is not a private possession, it is a public property, held in joint tenancy, and third parties are involved in the fortune of the Throne. I feared that, in the confusion inseparable from misfortune, the Royalty had not perceived these truths and had done nothing to come back to them at the expedient time.

On the other hand, while recognising the immense advantages of the Salic Law, I did not conceal from myself the fact that the duration of a House has some serious draw-backs for both nations and kings: for the nations, because it blends their destiny too closely with that of the kings; for the kings, because permanent power intoxicates them; they lose earthly notions: all that is not a part of their altars, prostrate prayers, humble vows, profound abasement, is impiousness. Misfortune teaches them nothing: adversity is but a coarse plebeian who fails to show them respect, and catastrophes are, for them, but so many displays of insolence.

I had fortunately deceived myself: I did not find Charles X. in those high errors which take their rise at the pinnacle of society; I found him only in the common illusions of an unexpected accident, which are more easily explained. Everything serves to console the self-esteem of the brother of Louis XVIII.; he sees the political world falling into decay, and, with some justice, he attributes this decay to his epoch, not to himself: did not Louis XVI. perish? Did not the Republic fall? Was not Bonaparte compelled twice to forsake the scene of his glory and did he not go to die a captive on a rock? Are not the thrones of Europe threatened? What, then, could he, Charles X., do more than those overthrown powers? He wanted to defend himself against his enemies; he was warned of the danger by his police and by public symptoms: he took the initiative; he attacked so as not to be attacked. Did not the heroes of the three riots admit that they were conspiring, that they had been playing a part for fifteen years? Well then, Charles thought that it was his duty to make an effort; he tried to save the French Legitimacy and, with it, the European Legitimacy: he gave battle and lost; he sacrificed himself to save the monarchies; that is all: Napoleon had his Waterloo, Charles X. his Days of July.

This is the light in which things present themselves to the unfortunate Monarch; he remains immutable, leaning upon events which wedge in and fasten down his mind. By dint of his immovability, he achieves a certain greatness: a man of imagination, he listens to you, he does not get angry with your ideas, he appears to enter into them and does not enter into them at all. There are certain general axioms which a man puts in front of himself like gabions; taking up his position behind that shelter, he takes shots from there at intellects which march ahead.

The mistake of many is to persuade themselves, according to events repeated in history, that mankind is always in its primitive place; they confound passions and ideas: the first are the same in every century, the second change in successive ages. If the material effects of certain actions are alike at different periods, the causes which have produced them vary.

Charles X. looks upon himself as a principle and, in fact, there are men who, by dint of living with fixed ideas, alike from generation to generation, are no longer more than so many monuments. Certain individuals, through the lapse of time and their own preponderance, become "things transformed into persons;" those individuals perish when those things come to perish: Brutus and Cato were the Roman Republic incarnate; they could not survive it, any more than the heart can beat when the blood ceases to flow.

In former days, I drew this portrait of Charles X.:

"You have seen him for ten years, that loyal subject, that
respectful brother, that tender father, so greatly afflicted in one
of his sons, so greatly consoled by the other! You know him, this
Bourbon who was the first to come after our misfortunes, a worthy
herald of Old France, to throw himself between you and Europe, with
a branch of lilies in his hand! Your eyes are fixed with love and
gladness on this Prince who, in the fulness of age, has preserved
the charm and the noble elegance of youth and who now, adorned
with the diadem, is still 'but one Frenchman the more in the midst
of you!' You repeat with emotion so many happy phrases escaped from
this new Monarch, who derives from the loyalty of his heart the
grace of speaking well!

"Where is that one among us who would not trust him with his
life, his fortune, his honour? That man, whom we would all wish
to have as our friend, we have to-day as our King. Ah, let us try
to make him forget the sacrifices of his life! May the crown lie
light upon the whitened head of that Christian Knight! Pious as
Louis XII.[611], courteous as Francis I., frank as Henry IV., may
he be happy with all the happiness which he has lacked during so
many long years! May the throne, on which so many monarchs have
encountered storms, be to him a place of rest[612]!"

Elsewhere I have again celebrated the same Prince: the model has only grown older, but one recognises it in the youthful touches of the portrait; age withers us by taking from us a certain truth of poetry which gives colour and bloom to our faces and yet one loves, in spite of one's self, the face which has faded at the same time as our own features. I have sung hymns to the House of Henry IV.; I would begin them again with all my heart, while combating anew the mistakes of the Legitimacy and bringing down upon myself anew its disgraces, if it were destined to rise again. The reason of this is that the Constitutional Legitimate Royalty has always appeared to me the gentlest and safest road to entire liberty. I believed and I should still believe that I was playing the part of a good citizen even when exaggerating the advantages of that royalty, in order to give it, if so much should depend on me, the duration necessary for the accomplishment of the gradual transformation of society and manners.

[Sidenote: Memoires of Charles X.]

I am doing a service to the memory of Charles X. by opposing the pure and simple truth to what will be said of him in the future. The hostility of parties will represent him as a man faithless to his oaths and the violator of the public liberties: he is nothing of the sort. He acted in good faith in attacking the Charter; he did not, nor did he need to think himself forsworn; he had the firm intention of restoring the Charter after he had "saved" it, in his own way and as he understood it.

Charles X. is what I have described him to be: mild, although subject to anger, kind and affectionate to his intimates, lovable, easy-going, free from malice, having all the knightly qualities, devotion, nobleness, an elegant courtesy, mixed, however, with weakness, which does not exclude passive courage and the glory of a fine death; incapable of carrying out to the end a good or bad resolution; built up of the prejudices of his century and his rank; in ordinary times, a proper king; in extraordinary times, a man of perdition, not of misfortune.

As for the Duc de Bordeaux, they would like, at Hradschin, to make of him a King ever on horse-back, ever flourishing his sword. It is necessary, no doubt, that he should be brave; but it is a mistake to imagine that in these times the right of conquest will be recognised, that it would be enough to be Henry IV. to reascend the throne. Without courage, one cannot reign; but one no longer reigns with courage alone: Bonaparte has killed the authority of victory.

An extraordinary part might be conceived by Henry V.; I will suppose that, at the age of twenty, he feels his position and says to himself:

"I can no longer remain inactive; I have the duties of my Blood to fulfil towards the past; but am I then obliged to trouble France because of myself alone? Must I weigh upon centuries yet to come with all the weight of the centuries that are done with? Let us solve the question; let us inspire with regrets those who unjustly outlawed me in my childhood; let us show them what I could be. It but depends on me to devote myself to my country by consecrating anew, whatever be the issue of the contest, the principle of the hereditary monarchies."

Then the son of St. Louis would land in France with a double idea of glory and sacrifice; he would descend upon it with the firm resolve to remain there with a crown upon his head or a bullet in his heart: in the latter case, his inheritance would go to Philip. The triumphant life or the sublime death of Henry V. would restore the Legitimacy, stripped only of that which the century no longer understands and which no longer suits the times. For the rest, supposing the sacrifice of my young Prince made, he would not have made it for me: after the death of Henry V. without children, I should never recognise a monarch in France!

[Sidenote: Thoughts on the elder branch.]

I have abandoned myself to these dreams, but what I suppose in relation to the resolution to be taken by Henry is impossible: by arguing in this wise, I placed myself, in thought, in an order of things above us, an order which would be natural at a time of elevation and magnanimity, but which would to-day look like the exaltation of romance; it is as though I were to speak at the present time in favour of going back to the Crusades, whereas we have become common-place in the sad reality of a deteriorated human nature. Such is the disposition of men's souls that Henry V. would encounter invincible obstacles in the apathy of France within and in the royalties without. He will therefore have to submit, to consent to await events, unless indeed he decided on a part which men would not fail to brand as that of an adventurer. He will have to enter into the sequence of ordinary facts and see the difficulties which surround him, without, however, allowing them to overwhelm him.

The Bourbons held good after the Empire, because they were succeeding an arbitrary government: can one see Henry transported from Prague to the Louvre after men have grown used to the most complete liberty? The French nation does not, at bottom, love that liberty; but it adores equality: it admits absolutism only for and through itself and its vanity commands it to obey only what it imposes upon itself. The Charter made a vain attempt to cause two nations which had become foreign to one another to live under the same law: Ancient France and Modern France; how would you make the two Frances understand one another, now that prejudices have increased? You would never appease men's minds by placing incontestable truths under their eyes.

To listen to passion or ignorance, the Bourbons are the authors of all our misfortunes; to reinstate the Elder Branch would mean to restore the domination of the castles; the Bourbons are the abettors and accomplices of those oppressive treaties of which, with good reason, I never ceased to complain: and yet nothing could be more absurd than all those accusations, in which both dates are forgotten and facts grossly distorted. The Restoration exercised no influence in diplomatic acts except at the time of the first invasion. It is admitted that men did not want that Restoration, because they were treating with Bonaparte at Châtillon, and that, had he pleased, he could have remained Emperor of the French. When his genius proved obstinate, for want of anything better, they took the Bourbons, who were on the spot Monsieur, as Lieutenant-general of the Kingdom, then took a certain part in the transactions of the day; we have seen, in the life of Alexander, what the Treaty of Paris of 1814 left to us.

In 1815, there was no longer any question of the Bourbons; they had nothing to do with the predatory contracts of the second invasion: those contracts were the result of the escape from Elba. In Vienna, the Allies declared that they were only uniting against one man; that they did not intend to impose any sort of master nor any kind of government upon France. Alexander even suggested to the Congress another King than Louis XVIII. If the latter had not, by coming to seat himself in the Tuileries, hastened to snatch his throne, he would never have reigned. The treaties of 1815 were abominable for the very reason that men refused to hearken to the voice of the Legitimacy, and it was in order to destroy those same treaties that I wanted to rebuild our power in Spain.

The only moment at which we again find the spirit of the Restoration is at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle; the Allies had agreed to take from us our northern and eastern provinces: M. de Richelieu intervened. The Tsar, touched by our misfortune and influenced by his leanings towards fairness, handed to M. le Duc de Richelieu the map of France on which the fatal line had been drawn. I have, with my own eyes, seen that map of Styx in the hands of Madame de Montcalm, the sister of the noble negociator[613].

With France occupied as she was, our fortified towns garrisoned by foreign troops, could we have resisted? Once deprived of our military departments, how long should we have groaned under conquest? If we had had a sovereign of a new family, a prince at second-hand, he would never have been respected. Among the Allies, some bowed before the illusion of a great House, others thought that, under a worn-out authority, the Kingdom would lose its energy and cease to be an object of anxiety: Cobbett[614] himself agrees to this in his Letter. It is therefore a monstrous piece of ingratitude to refuse to see that, if we are still Old Gaul, we owe it to the blood which we have cursed most loudly. That blood which, since eight centuries, had flowed in the very veins of France, that blood which made her what she is saved her once more. Why persist in eternally denying the facts? They took advantage of victory against us, even as we had taken advantage of it against Europe. Our soldiers had gone to Russia; they brought after them, upon their footsteps, the soldiers who had fled before them. After action, reaction: that is the law. That makes no difference to the glory of Bonaparte, an isolated glory which remains complete; that makes no difference to our national glory, all covered as it is with the dust of Europe, whose towers have been swept by our flags. It was unnecessary, in a moment of but too justifiable spite, to go in search of any cause for our misfortunes other than the real cause. So far from their being that cause, had we not had the Bourbons in our reverses, we should have been portioned out.

Appreciate now the calumnies of which the Restoration has been made the object: examine the archives of the Foreign Office, and you shall be convinced of the independence of the language held to the Powers under the reigns of Louis XVIII. and Charles X. Our sovereigns had the sentiment of the national dignity; they were kings above all to the foreigner, who never frankly wanted the re-establishment and who witnessed the resurrection of the Elder Monarchy with regret. The diplomatic language of France at the time of which I am speaking is, it must be said, peculiar to the aristocracy; the democracy, full of broad and prolific virtues, is nevertheless arrogant when it governs: capable of incomparable munificence when there is a need for immense devotion, it splits on the rock of details; it is rarely elevated, especially in prolonged misfortunes. Part of the hatred of the Courts of England and Austria for the Legitimacy is due to the firmness of the Bourbon Cabinet.

Instead of throwing down that Legitimacy, it would have been better policy to shore up its ruins; sheltered inside it, one would have erected the new edifice, as one builds a ship that is to brave the deep under a covered dock hewn out of the rock: in this way English liberty took its form in the breast of the Norman law. It was wrong to repudiate the monarchic phantom: that centenarian of the middle-ages, like Dandolo[615], "had fine eyes in his head; and, if it could not see out of them," was an old man who could guide the young Crusaders and who, adorned with his white hair, still vigorously printed his ineffaceable footsteps in the snow.

It is conceivable that, in our prolonged fears, we should be blinded by prejudice and vain and ridiculous shame; but distant posterity will not fail to see that, historically speaking, the Restoration was one of the happiest phases of our revolutionary cycle. Parties whose heat is not extinguished may cry, "We were free under the Empire, slaves under the Monarchy of the Charter!" but future generations, going beyond this mock praise, which would be ludicrous if it were not a sophism, will say that the recalled Bourbons prevented the dismemberment of France, that they laid the foundations of representative government among us, that they brought prosperity to our finances, discharged debts which they had not contracted, and religiously paid the pension even of Robespierre's sister. Lastly, to make good our lost colonies, they left us, in Africa, one of the richest provinces of the Roman Empire.

Three things remain standing to the credit of the restored Legitimacy: it entered Cadiz; at Navarino it gave Greece her independence; it freed Christianity by seizing Algiers: enterprises in which Bonaparte, Russia, Charles V. and Europe had failed. Show me a Power of a few days (and a Power so much disputed) which has accomplished such things as these.

I believe, with my hand on my heart, that I have exaggerated nothing and set forth nothing but facts in what I have just said of the Legitimacy. It is certain that the Bourbons neither would nor could have restored a castle monarchy or cantoned themselves in a tribe of nobles and priests; it is certain that they were not brought back by the Allies; they were the accident, not the cause of our disasters: the cause is evidently due to Napoleon. But it is certain also that the return of the Third Dynasty unfortunately coincided with the success of the foreign arms. The Cossacks appeared in Paris at the moment when Louis XVIII. returned there: hence, for France humiliated, for private interests, for all excited passions, the Restoration and the invasion are two identical things; the Bourbons have become the victims of a confusion of facts, of a calumny changed, like so many others, into a truth-lie. Alas, it is difficult to escape those calamities produced by nature and the times: fight them as we may, right does not always carry victory with it. The Psylli, a nation of Ancient Africa, had taken up arms against the South wind; a whirlwind arose and swallowed up those brave men:

"The Nasamonians," says Herodotus, "seized upon their abandoned
country."

[Sidenote: The death of Henry IV.]

When speaking of the last calamity of the Bourbons, I am reminded of their commencement: an indescribable omen of their grave made itself heard in their cradle. Henry IV. no sooner saw himself master of Paris than he was seized with a fatal presentiment. The repeated attempts at assassination, without alarming his courage, had an influence on his natural gaiety. In the procession of the Holy Ghost, on the 5th of January, he appeared clad in black, wearing a plaister on his upper lip, on the wound which Jean Châtel[616] had given him when aiming at his heart. He wore a gloomy visage; Madame de Balagni asking him the reason:

"How," he said, "could I be pleased to see a people so ungrateful that, while I have done and am still doing daily what I can for it and for whose safety I would sacrifice a thousand lives, if God had given me so many, it daily prepares new attempts on me, for, since I am here, I hear speak of naught else?"

Meantime the people cried:

"Long live the King!"

"Sire," said one of the Court lords, "see how all your people rejoices to see you."

Henry, shaking his head:

"What a people it is. If my greatest enemy were here where I am and it saw him pass, it would do for him as much as for me and would shout still louder."

A Leaguer, seeing the King huddled at the back of his carriage, said:

"There he is already at the cart's tail."

Does it not seem to you as though that Leaguer were speaking of Louis XVI. going from the Temple to the scaffold?

On Friday the 14th of May 1610, returning from the Feuillants with Bassompierre and the Duc de Guise, the King said to them:

"You do not know me now, none of you, and when you have lost me, you will then know what I was worth and the difference between me and other men."

"My God, Sire," answered Bassompierre, "will you never have done troubling us by telling us that you will soon die?"

And then the marshal recounts to Henry his glory, his prosperity, his good health which was prolonging his youth.

"My friend," said the King, "I must leave all that."

Ravaillac was at the gate of the Louvre.

Bassompierre withdrew and did not see the King again except in his closet:

"He was stretched out," he says, "on his bed; and M. de Vic[617], sitting on the same bed as he, had laid his cross of the Order on his mouth and reminded him of God. M. le Grand on arriving knelt down between the bed and the wall and held one of his hands which he kissed, and I had flung myself at his feet which I held clasped, weeping bitterly."

That is Bassompierre's story.

Pursued by these sad memories, it seemed to me that, in the long halls of Hradschin, I had seen the last Bourbons pass "sad and melancholy," like the first Bourbon in the gallery of the Louvre; I had come to kiss the feet of the Royalty after its death. Whether it die for ever or be resuscitated, it will have my last oaths: the day after its final disappearance, the Republic will commence for me. In the case that the Fates, who are to edit my Memoirs, do not publish them forthwith, you will know, when they appear, when you have read all, weighed all, how far I was mistaken in my regrets and in my conjectures. Respecting misfortune, respecting that which I have served and will continue to serve at the cost of the repose of my last days, I am writing my words, true or deluded, on my falling hours, dry and light leaves which the breath of Eternity will soon have blown away.

Supposing the high dynasties to be nearing their limit, omitting, however, the possibilities of the future and the lively hopes that spring incessantly at the bottom of men's hearts, would it not be better that they should make an end worthy of their greatness and withdraw with the centuries into the night of the past? To prolong one's days beyond a dazzling illustriousness is good for nothing; the world tires of you and your fame; it is angry with you for being still there: Alexander, Cæsar, Napoleon have disappeared in accordance with the rules of fame. To die beautiful, one must die young; do not make the children of spring say:

"What, is that the genius, the person, the dynasty that the world applauded, for a hair of whose head, a smile, a glance one would have thrown away one's life!"

How sad it is see old Louis XIV. find no one near him, to talk to him of his century, except the old Duc de Villeroi! It was a last victory of the Great Condé to have met Bossuet by his grave-side: the orator revived the mute waters of Chantilly; out of the old man's childhood he kneaded again the young man's adolescence; he made brown again the hair on the forehead of the victor of Rocroi while bidding an undying farewell to his white hairs. You who love glory, look to your tomb; lie down comfortably in it; try to cut a good figure in it, for you will remain there.

[Sidenote: My journey to Carlsbad.]

The road from Prague to Carlsbad stretches out through the tedious plains which the Thirty Years' War stained with blood. As I cross those battle-fields at night, I humble myself before the God of Armies, who bears the sky on His arm like a buckler. One can see at some distance the wooded hillocks at whose foot the waters lie. The wits among the doctors at Carlsbad compare the road to Æsculapius' snake which came down the hill to drink of Hygieia's cup.

On the top of the tower of the town, the _Stadtthurm_, a tower mitred with a steeple, watchmen blow the horn, so soon as they perceive a traveller. I was greeted by the joyous sound like a dying man, and every one in the valley began to say with delight:

"Here's a gouty man, here's an hypochondriac, here's a myopic subject!"

Alas, I was better than all that: I was an incurable!

At seven o'clock, on the morning on the 31st, I was installed at the Golden Shield, an inn kept for the benefit of Count Bolzona, a very high-born ruined man. In the same hotel were staying the Comte and Madame la Comtesse de Cossé, who had gone before me, and my fellow-countryman General de Trogoff[618], formerly Governor of the Château de Saint-Cloud, born long ago at Landivisiau, within the rays of the moon of Landerneau, and, squat of figure though he be, a captain of Austrian Grenadiers in Prague during the Revolution. He had just been to see his banished lord, the successor of St. Clodoald[619], a monk in his time at Saint-Cloud. Trogoff, after his pilgrimage, was returning to Lower Brittany. He was taking with him an Hungarian nightingale and a Bohemian nightingale which prevented everybody in the hotel from sleeping, so loudly did they complain of Tereus' cruelty. Trogoff used to cram them with grated bullock's heart, without being able to get the better of their sorrow.

Et mœstis late loca questibus implet[620].

Trogoff and I embraced like two Bretons. The general, short and square like a Celt of Cornouailles, has a certain shrewdness under an air of candour and an amusing way of telling a story. Madame la Dauphine was inclined to like him and, as he knows German, she used to walk with him. On hearing of my arrival from Madame de Cossé, she sent to me to propose that I should go to see her at half-past nine or at twelve: I was with her at twelve.

[Sidenote: The Duchesse D'Angoulême.]