Chapter X: Book IX: 283 (1)

General politics of the moment--Louis-Philippe--M. Thiers--M. de La Fayette--Armand Carrel--Of some women: the lady from Louisiana--Madame Tastu--Madame Sand--M. de Talleyrand--Death of Charles X.

When, passing from the politics of the Legitimacy to general politics, I re-read what I wrote on those politics in the years 1831, 1832 and 1833, I find that my previsions were fairly correct

Louis-Philippe is a man of intelligence whose tongue is set in movement by a torrent of commonplaces. He pleases Europe, which reproaches us with not knowing his worth; England is glad to see that, like herself, we have dethroned a king; the other sovereigns forsake the Legitimacy, which they did not find obedient. Philip has lorded it over the men who have come closer to him; he has made game of his ministers; he has employed them, dismissed them, reemployed them, dismissed them afresh, after compromising them, if anything can compromise one nowadays.

Philip's superiority is real, but it is only relative; place him in a period when society still retains some life, and his mediocrity shall come to the surface. Two passions spoil his good qualities: his exclusive love for his children and his insatiable eagerness to increase his fortune; on those two points his eyes will always be dazzled.

Philip has not that feeling for the honour of France which the elder Bourbons had; he has no occasion for honour: he fears nothing except popular risings, even as the nearest relations of Louis XVI. feared it. He is sheltered by his father's crime; the hatred of what is good does not weigh heavy on him: he is an accomplice, not a victim.

Having realized the lassitude of the times and the vileness of men's souls, Philip has made himself at home. Laws of intimidation have come to suppress our liberties, as I foretold at the time of my farewell speech in the House of Peers, and not a thing has stirred; the Government has resorted to arbitrary measures; it has murdered people in the Rue Transnonain, shot them down in Lyons, instituted numerous newspaper prosecutions; it has arrested private citizens, has kept them for months and years in prison without trial, and has been applauded for doing so. The exhausted country, which no longer understands what is happening, has suffered all. There is hardly a man whom it is not possible to face with his own past. From year to year, from month to month, we have written, said and done the exact opposite of what we used to write, say and do. By dint of having cause for blushing, we have ceased to blush; our inconsistencies escape our memory, so numerous have they become. To have done with it, we adopt the course of declaring that we have never changed, or that we have changed only through the progressive transformation of our ideas and our enlightened apprehension of the times. Events so rapid have aged us so speedily that, when men remind us of our doings of a past period, it seems to us that they are talking of some other man than ourselves: and besides, to have changed is to have done what everybody does.

[Sidenote: Louis-Philippe.]

Philip did not think it necessary, as did the Restored Branch, to be the master in every village in order to reign; he considered that it was enough to hold sway in Paris: therefore, if ever he could turn the Capital into a warlike town, with an annual roll of sixty thousand pretorians, he would think himself safe. Europe would let him alone, because he would persuade the sovereigns that he was acting with a view to stifling the revolution in its old cradle, while leaving the liberties, independence and honour of France as a pledge in the hands of the foreigners. Philip is a policeman: Europe can spit in his face; he wipes himself, gives thanks and shows his patent as a king. Moreover, he is the only Prince whom the French would, at present, be capable of supporting. The degradation of the elected Head constitutes his strength; we momentarily find in his person enough to satisfy our monarchical habits and our democratic leanings; we obey a power which we believe ourselves to have the right to insult; that is all the liberty that we require: on our knees as a nation, we slap our master's face, re-establishing privilege at his feet, equality on his cheek. Crafty and guileful, a Louis XI. of the age of philosophy, the monarch of our choice dexterously steers his ship over a liquid mire. The Elder Branch of the Bourbons is dried up, save one bud alone; the Younger Branch is rotten. The Head inaugurated at the town-hall has never thought of any one but himself: he sacrifices Frenchmen to what he believes to be his security. When men argue about what would be fitting for the greatness of the country, they forget the nature of the Sovereign: he is persuaded that he would be undone by methods which would be the saving of France; according to him, that which would give life to the Royalty would be the death of the King. For the rest, none has the right to despise him, for every one is on the same contemptible level. But, whatever may be the prosperity that forms the object of his dreams, in the last result, either he or his children will fail to prosper, because he abandons the people, from whom he holds all. On the other hand, the legitimate kings, abandoning the legitimate kings, will fall: principles are not denied with impunity. Though the revolutions may, for a moment, have been diverted from their course, they will none the less come to swell the torrent which is under-mining the ancient edifice: none has played his part, none shall be saved.

Since no power among us is inviolable, since the hereditary sceptre has fallen four times within thirty-eight years, since the royal diadem fastened by victory has twice slipped from the head of Napoleon, since the Sovereignty of July has been incessantly attacked, we must conclude from this that it is not the Republic which is impossible, but the Monarchy.

France is under the dominion of an idea hostile to the throne: a diadem of which men at first recognised the authority, which they next trod under foot, then picked up, only to tread it under foot again, is merely a useless temptation and a symbol of disorder. A master is set over men who seem to call for him by their memories and who no longer support him by their manners; he is set over generations which, having lost the sense of moderation and social decency, know only how to insult the royal person or to replace respect by servility.

Philip has within him the wherewithal to delay the march of destiny, but not to stop it. The Democratic Party alone is progressing, because it is advancing towards the world of the future. Those who refuse to admit the general causes of destruction where monarchical principles are concerned in vain look to be delivered from the present yoke by a motion of the Chambers; the latter will never consent to reform, because reform would be their death. The Opposition, on its side, which has become an industrial Opposition, will never give the death-thrust to the King of its own making, as it gave it to Charles X.: it makes a disturbance in order to obtain places, it complains, it is peevish; but, when it finds itself face to face with Philip, it draws back; for, though it wishes to have the handling of affairs, it does not wish to overthrow that which it has created nor that by which it lives. Two fears stop it: the fear of the return of the Legitimacy, the fear of the reign of the people; it clings to Philip, whom it does not love, but whom it looks upon as a safeguard. Stuffed full of offices and money, abdicating its own will, the Opposition obeys what it knows to be fatal and goes to sleep in the mire, which is the down invented by the industry of the age: it is not so pleasant as the other, but it is cheaper.

[Sidenote: Philip's turpitude.]

All these things notwithstanding, a sovereignty of a few months, of a few years, even, if you wish, will not change the irrevocable future. There is hardly any one now but confesses the Legitimacy to have been preferable to the Usurpation, in so far as security, liberty, property were concerned, and also our relations with foreign Powers, for the principle of our present Sovereignty is hostile to that of the European sovereignties. Since he was pleased to receive the investiture of the Throne at the good pleasure and with the certain knowledge of the democracy, Philip missed his opportunity at the start: he ought to have leapt on horseback and galloped to the Rhine; or rather, he ought to have resisted a movement which was carrying him without conditions towards a crown: more durable and more suitable institutions would have arisen from that resistance.

It has been said that "M. le Duc d'Orléans could not have refused the crown without plunging us into dreadful troubles:" this is the argument of cowards, dupes and cheats. No doubt, conflicts would have ensued; but they would have been swiftly followed by a return to law and order. What has Philip done for the country after all? Would there have been more blood shed by his refusing the sceptre than flowed because of the acceptance of that same sceptre in Paris, Lyons, Antwerp, the Vendée, without reckoning those streams of blood spilt, as a consequence of our Elective Monarchy, in Poland, Italy, Portugal, Spain? Has Philip, in compensation for these misfortunes, given us liberty? Has he given us glory? He has spent his time in begging for his legitimation among the potentates, in degrading France by making her the handmaid of England, by giving her as a hostage; he has tried to make the age come to him, to make it old with his House, not wishing to become young himself with the age.

Why did he not marry his eldest son[284] to some fair commoner of his country? That would have meant wedding France: those nuptials of the people and the Royalty would have made the Kings repent; for those Kings, who have already taken advantage of Philip's submissiveness, will not be content with what they have obtained: the might of the populace which appears through our Municipal Monarchy terrifies them. The Potentate of the Barricades, to become completely agreeable to the absolute potentates, ought above all to destroy the liberty of the press and abolish our constitutional institutions. At the bottom of his soul, he detests them as much as they, but he has to keep within bounds. All this remissness offends the other sovereigns; the only way to make them have patience is to sacrifice everything to them abroad: in order to accustom us to becoming Philip's liegemen at home, we are commencing by making ourselves the vassals of Europe.

I have said a hundred times and I repeat again, the old society is dying. I am not easy-going enough, nor quack enough, nor sufficiently deceived by my hopes to take the smallest interest in that which exists. France, the ripest of the present nations, will probably be the first to go. It is likely that the Elder Bourbons, to whom I shall die attached, would not even to-day find a lasting shelter in the Old Monarchy. Never have the successors of an immolated monarch worn his torn mantle long after him: there is distrust on both sides; the prince dares not rely upon the nation, the nation refuses to believe that the reinstated family is capable of forgiving it. A scaffold raised between a people and a king prevents them from seeing each other: there are tombs that never close. Capet's head was so high that the little executioners were obliged to strike it off to take its crown, even as the Caribbees used to cut down the palm-tree in order to gather its fruit. The stem of the Bourbons had propagated itself in the different trunks which, bending down, took root and rose again as haughty shoots; that family, after being the pride of the other royal Houses, seems to have become their fatality.

[Sidenote: Prospects of the Usurpation.]

But would it be more reasonable to think that the descendants of Philip would have more chances of reigning than the young heir of Henry IV.? It is vain to contrive different combinations of political ideas: the moral verities remain unchangeable. There are inevitable reactions, instructive, magisterial, avenging. The Monarch who initiated us into liberty, Louis XVI., was made to expiate in his own person the despotism of Louis XIV. and the corruption of Louis XV.: and shall it be said that Louis-Philippe, he or his line, shall not pay the debt of the depravity, of the Regency? Was that debt not contracted anew by "Égalité" at the scaffold of Louis XVI., and did Philip his son not increase the paternal contract when, a faithless guardian, he dethroned his ward? "Égalité" redeemed nothing by losing his life; the tears shed with the last breath redeem nobody: they only wet the breast and do not fall upon the conscience. If the Orleans Branch were able to reign by the right of the vices and crimes of its ancestors, where, then, would Providence be? Never would a more terrible temptation have disquieted the good man. What deludes us is that we measure the designs of Eternity by the scale of our short life. We pass away so quickly that God's punishment cannot always fall within the short moment of our existence: the punishment descends when the time comes; it no longer finds the original culprit, but it finds his House, which leaves room for action.

Rising up in the universal order of things, this reign of Louis-Philippe's, however long it last, will never be anything but an anomaly, a momentary breach of the permanent laws of justice: those laws are violated in a restricted and relative sense; they are followed in an unlimited and general sense. From an enormity that has received the apparent consent of Heaven, we must draw a loftier conclusion: we must deduce from it the Christian proof of the abolition of the Royalty itself. It is this abolition, and not any individual chastisement, that will become the expiation of the death of Louis XVI.; none will be admitted to gird on the diadem, after that just man: as witness Napoleon the Great and Charles X. the Pious. To render the crown completely hateful, it will have been permitted to the son of the regicide to stretch himself for a moment, as a false king, in the blood-stained bed of the martyr.

For the rest, all these arguments, just though they be, will never shake my loyalty to my young King: were none but myself to remain in France, I shall always be proud to have been the last subject of him who was to be the last king.

The Revolution of July has found its King: has it found its representative? I have, at different times, described the men who, from 1789 to this day, have appeared upon the scene. Those men were more or less connected with the old race of mankind: we had a scale of proportion to measure them by. We have now come to generations that no longer belong to the past; studied under the microscope, they do not seem capable of life, and yet they combine with elements in which they move; they are able to breathe an air which we cannot breathe. The future will perhaps discover formulas to calculate the laws of existence of those beings; but the present has no means of appreciating them.

Without, therefore, being able to explain the changed species, we notice, here and there, a few individuals whom we are able to grasp, because of their peculiar failings or distinctive qualities which make them stand out from among the crowd. M. Thiers, for instance, is the only man that the Revolution of July has produced. He has founded the school that admires the Terror, a school to which he himself belongs. If the men of the Terror, those deniers and denied of God, were such great men, the authority of their judgment ought to carry weight; but those men, reviling one another, declare that the party whose throats they are cutting is a party of rascals. See what Madame Roland says of Condorcet, what Barbaroux[285], the principal actor of the 10th of August, thinks of Marat, what Camille Desmoulins writes against Saint-Just[286] Are we to appreciate Danton according to Robespierre's opinion, or Robespierre according to Danton's? When the Conventionals have so poor a notion of one another, how can we, without failing in the respect which we owe them, entertain an opinion different from theirs?

With its material mind, Jacobinism does not perceive that the Terror failed from not being capable of fulfilling the conditions of its continuance. It was unable to achieve its aim, because it was unable to cut off enough heads: it would have needed four or five hundred thousand more; now time was wanting for those long massacres; nothing remains but unfinished crimes whose fruit cannot be gathered, because the last sun of the storm did not ripen it sufficiently.

[Sidenote: The French revolutionaries.]

The secret of the inconsistencies of the men of the day lies in the privation of moral sense, the absence of any fixed principle and the worship of force: whoever goes to the wall is guilty and without merit, at least without that merit which assimilates with events. Behind the liberal phrases of the devotees of the Terror, you must see only what lies hidden there: the deification of success. Do not adore the Convention except in the manner in which one adores a tyrant. When the Convention is upset, go over with your baggage of liberties to the Directory, then to Bonaparte, and that without having a suspicion of your metamorphosis, without thinking that you have changed. Sworn dramatist that you are, while looking upon the Girondins as poor wretches because they have been "beaten," nevertheless draw a fantastic picture of their death: they are beautiful young men marching, crowned with flowers, to the sacrifice. The Girondins, a cowardly faction, who spoke in favour of Louis XVI. and voted for his execution, did wonderfully, it is true, on the scaffold; but who did not, in those days, run full butt at death? The women were distinguished for their heroism: the young girls of Verdun climbed the steps of the altar like Iphigenia; the artisans, about whom we are prudently silent, those plebeians of whom the Convention reaped so large a crop, braved the steel of the executioner as resolutely as our grenadiers braved the steel of the enemy. For one priest and one noble, the Convention offered up thousands of workmen taken from the lowest classes of the population[287]: this is what we always refuse to remember.

Does M. Thiers set store by his principles? Not in the least: he has cried up massacre and he would preach humanity in quite as edifying a manner; he gave himself out as a bigot for liberty, and he has oppressed Lyons, shot people down in the Rue Transnonain, and upheld the September Laws against all men: if he ever reads this, he will take it for a panegyric.

Since he became President of the Council and Minister for Foreign Affairs[288], M. Thiers is enraptured with the diplomatic intrigues of the Talleyrand School; he runs the risk of being taken for a buffoon-in-waiting, for lack of equilibrium, gravity and silence. One can turn up one's nose at earnestness and greatness of soul: but it does not do to say so, before one has brought the subjugated world to take its seat at the orgies of Grand-Vaux[289].

For the rest, M. Thiers combines with inferior manners an instinct for higher things; while the feudal survivors have become misers and turned themselves into stewards of their own land, he, M. Thiers, a great lord by second birth, travels like a new Atticus[290], purchases works of art on the roads and revives the prodigality of the old aristocracy: this is a distinction; but, if he sows as easily as he reaps, he ought to be more cautious of the intimacy of his old habits: consideration is one of the ingredients that go to make the public man.

[Sidenote: Adolphe Thiers.]

Stirred by his mercurial nature, M. Thiers has pretended that he was going to kill, in Madrid, the anarchy which I had overthrown there in 1823: a project all the bolder inasmuch as M. Thiers was struggling with the opinions of Louis-Philippe. He may suppose himself to be a Bonaparte; he may think that his pen-cutter is but an elongation of the Napoleonic sword; he may be persuaded that he is a great general, he may dream of the conquest of Europe, by reason that he has constituted himself its historian[291] and that he is very inconsiderately bringing back the ashes of Napoleon[292]. I acquiesce in all these pretensions; I will only say, as for Spain, that, when M. Thiers thought of invading her, he was deceived in his calculations; he would have ruined his King in 1836, and I saved mine in 1823. The essential thing, then, is to do in the nick of time what one wants to do; there are two forces, the force of men and the force of things: when these two are in opposition to one another, nothing is accomplished. At the present moment, Mirabeau would rouse nobody, even though his corruption would do him no harm; for, just now, none is cried down because of his vices: one is slandered only for his virtues. M. Thiers must make up his mind to one of three courses: to declare himself the representative of the republican future[293], or perch himself upon the counterfeit Monarchy of July like a monkey on a camel's back, or revive the imperial order of things. This last would be to M. Thiers's taste; but the Empire without an emperor: is that possible? It is more natural to believe that the author of the _Histoire de la Révolution_ will allow himself to be absorbed by a vulgar ambition: he will want to remain in power or return to it; in order to keep or recover his place, he will recant anything that the moment or his own interest will seem to him to require[294]; to strip one's self before the public, there is audacity: but is M. Thiers young enough for his beauty to serve him as a veil?

Putting Deutz[295] and Judas on one side, I recognise in M. Thiers a supple, prompt, shrewd and malleable mind, perhaps the heir to the future, capable of comprehending everything, except the greatness that comes from moral order. Free from jealousy, pettiness and prejudice, he stands out against the tame and obscure background of the mediocrities of the time. His excessive pride is not yet odious, because it does not consist in despising others. M. Thiers possesses resources, variety, fortunate gifts; he troubles little about differences of opinion, bears no malice, is not afraid of compromising himself, does justice to a man, not for his probity or for what he thinks, but for what he is worth: which would not prevent him from having us all strangled, in case of need. M. Thiers is not what he is able to be: years will modify him, unless the elation of self-love should place obstacles in the way. If his brain stands firm and he is not carried away by some headstrong act, public life will reveal unheeded superior qualities in him. He must soon rise or fall; the chances are that M. Thiers will either become a great minister or remain a marplot.

[Sidenote: Lost opportunities.]

M. Thiers has already been wanting in resolution at a time when he held the fate of the world in his hands: if he had given the order to attack the English Fleet, with the superior force that we had in the Mediterranean, our success was assured; the Turkish and Egyptian Fleets, lying together in the harbour of Alexandria, would have come to swell our fleet; a success obtained over England would have electrified France. We should have at once found 150,000 men to enter Bavaria and fling themselves upon some point in Italy, where nothing was prepared in prevision of an attack. The whole world might once more have changed its aspect. Would our aggression have been a just one? That is another affair; but we could have asked Europe whether it had acted loyally towards us in the treaties, or whether, abusing their victory, Russia and Germany had enlarged their territory beyond measure, while France had been reduced to her old clipped frontiers. Be this as it may, M. Thiers did not dare play his last card; looking upon his life, he did not think himself sufficiently supported, and yet it was because he was staking nothing that he might have played for all. We have fallen under the feet of Europe; such an opportunity to recover ourselves will perhaps not occur for long.

In the last result, M. Thiers, in order to save his system, has reduced France to a space of fifteen leagues which he has made to bristle with fortresses; we shall soon see if Europe is right in laughing at this piece of child's play on the part of the great thinker.

And this is how, allowing my pen to run away with me, I have devoted more pages to a man of uncertain future than I have given to persons whose memory is assured. It is a misfortune to live too long; I have come to a period of sterility in which France sees only lean generations run: _Lupa carca nella sua magrezza._[296] These Memoirs diminish in interest with the days that have supervened, diminish by what they were able to borrow from the greatness of events: they will end, I fear me, like the daughters of Achelous[297]. The Roman Empire, so magnificently proclaimed by Livy, contracts and goes out dimly in the accounts of Cassiodorus. You were more fortunate, O Thucydides and Plutarch, Sallust and Tacitus, when you told of the parties that divided Athens and Rome! You were certain, at least, of animating them, not only with your genius, but also with the splendour of the Greek and the gravity of the Latin language! What could we relate of our expiring society, we Welshmen, in our jargon confined to narrow and barbarous limits? If these later pages reproduced our parliamentary tautology, those eternal definitions of our rights, our ministerial prize-fights, would they, fifty years hence, be anything more than the unintelligible columns of an old newspaper? Of a thousand and one conjectures, would a single one prove to be true? Who would foresee the strange leaps and bounds of the inconstancy of the French spirit? Who could understand how its execrations and infatuations, its curses and blessings become transformed without apparent reason? Who would be able to guess and explain how, by turns, it adores and detests, how it springs from a political system, how, with liberty on its lips and bondage in its heart, it believes in one truth in the morning and is persuaded of a contrary truth at night? Throw us a few grains of dust: like Virgil's bees, we shall cease our conflict to fly away elsewhither[298].

If, by chance, anything great should still be stirring here below, our country will remain supine. The womb of a society that is becoming discomposed is barren; the very crimes which it begets are still-born crimes, smitten as they are with the barrenness of their origin. The period upon which we are entering is the tow-path along which fatally condemned generations will draw the old world towards a world unknown.

In this year 1834, M. de La Fayette has just died[299]. I think I must have been unjust in speaking of him in former days; I think I must have represented him as a sort of double-faced, double-famed ninny: a hero on the other side of the Atlantic, a Giles on this side[300]. It has needed more than forty years to recognise in M. de La Fayette qualities that had been persistently denied him. He expressed himself in the Tribune with ease and in the tone of a well-bred man. His life was unblemished; he was affable, obliging and generous. Under the Empire, he behaved nobly and lived a life apart; under the Restoration, he was less dignified: he stooped so far as to allow himself to be called the "grand old man" of the auction-rooms of Carbonarism and the ring-leader of petty conspiracies, glad as he was to escape from justice at Belfort[301], like a vulgar adventurer. In the early stages of the Revolution, he did not mix with the cut-throats; he fought them by force of arms and tried to save Louis XVI.; but, though abhorring the massacres, obliged though he were to fly from them, he found words of praise for scenes in which some heads were carried at the ends of pikes.

[Sidenote: La Fayette.]

M. de La Fayette became exalted because he lived: there is a reputation which bursts forth spontaneously from talent and of which death increases the splendour by arresting the talent in youth; there is another sort of reputation which is the offspring of age, the backward daughter of time: without being great of itself, it is great through the revolutions in whose midst chance has placed it. The bearer of that reputation, by the mere fact of his existence, is mixed up with everything; his name becomes the sign or the banner of everything: M. de La Fayette[302] will be the "National Guard" to the end of time. By an extraordinary effect, the result of his actions was often in contradiction with his thoughts: as a Royalist, he overthrew, in 1789, a Royalty eight centuries old; as a Republican, he created, in 1830, the Royalty of the Barricades: he went away giving Philip the crown which he had taken from Louis XVI. Moulded as he was with events, when the alluvium of our misfortunes shall have become consolidated, his image will be found encrusted in the revolutionary dough.

The ovation which he received in the United States enhanced his fame to a singular degree: a nation, rising to greet him, covered him with the effulgence of its gratitude. Everett[303] apostrophized him as follows in the peroration to the speech which he delivered in 1824:

"Welcome, friend of our fathers, to our shores!... Enjoy a triumph such as never conqueror or monarch enjoyed.... The friend of your youth, the more than friend of his country, rests in the bosom of the soil he redeemed. On the banks of his Potomac he lies in glory and peace. You will revisit the hospitable shades of Mount Vernon, but him whom you venerated as we did, you will not meet at its door.... But the grateful children of America will bid you welcome, in his name. Welcome, thrice welcome to our shores; and whithersoever throughout the limits of the continent your course shall take you, the ear that hears you shall bless you, the eye that sees you shall bear witness to you, and every tongue exclaim, with heartfelt joy:

"'Welcome, welcome, La Fayette[304]!'"

In the New World, M. de La Fayette contributed to the formation of a new society; in the Old World, to the destruction of an old society: liberty invokes him in Washington, anarchy in Paris.

M. de La Fayette had only one idea, and, unfortunately for him, it was that of his century; the fixity of that idea constituted his empire: it served him as a blinker, prevented him from looking to right or left of him; he walked with a firm step along a single line; he marched on without falling into precipices, not because he saw them, but because he did not see them; blindness stood him in the stead of genius: all that is fixed is fatal, and that which is fatal is powerful.

[Sidenote: La Fayette's funeral.]

I still see M. de La Fayette, at the head of the National Guard, passing along the boulevards, in 1790, on his way to the Faubourg Saint-Antoine; on the 22nd of May 1834, I saw him lying in his coffin, following the same boulevards. In the funeral procession one remarked a troop of Americans, each with a yellow flower in his button-hole. M. de La Fayette had sent to the United States for a quantity of earth sufficient to cover him in his grave; but his intentions were not carried out[305]: when the fatal moment came, forgetting both his political dreams and the romance of his life, he expressed the wish to lie at Picpus beside his virtuous wife[306]: death restores order to all things.

At Picpus are buried the victims of the Revolution[307] commenced by M. de La Fayette; there stands a chapel where perpetual prayers are said in honour of those victims. I accompanied M. le Duc Matthieu de Montmorency to Picpus[308]; he had been M. de La Fayette's colleague in the Constituent Assembly: on touching the bottom of the grave, the rope turned that Christian's coffin on one side, as though he had raised himself on his hip to say a last prayer.

I stood in the crowd, at the entrance to the Rue Grange-Batelière, when M. de La Fayette's funeral passed by: at the top of the ascent to the boulevard, the hearse stopped; I saw it, all gilded by a fleeting ray of the sun, gleam above the helmets and arms: then the shadow returned, and it disappeared from sight.

The multitude dispersed; sellers of "goodies" cried their _oublies_[309], vendors of trifles hawked about paper mills, which twirled round in the same wind whose breath had shaken the plumes of the funeral car.

In the sitting of the Chamber of Deputies of the 20th of May 1834, the President[310] spoke:

"General La Fayette's name," he said, "will remain famous in our history.... While expressing to you the sentiments of condolence of the Chamber, I join to these, sir and dear colleague[311], the private assurance of my attachment."

After these words, the reporter of the sitting adds, in brackets, the word, "(Laughter)."

That is what one of the most serious lives is reduced to. What remains of the death of the greatest men? A grey mantle and a straw cross, as on the corpse of the Duc de Guise, assassinated at Blois.

Within earshot of the public crier who was selling for a son, at the gate of the Tuileries Palace, the news of the death of Napoleon, I heard two quacks shouting the praises of their antidotes; and, in the _Moniteur_ of the 21st of January 1793, I read the following words below the account of the execution of Louis XVI.:

"Two hours after the execution, nothing remained to show that he
who had once been the head of the nation had just undergone the
punishment of criminals."

Following on those words came this notice:

"_Ambroise_, comic opera[312]."

The last actor in the drama played fifty years ago, M. de La Fayette remained upon the scene; the last chorus of the Greek tragedy delivers the moral of the play:

"Learn, O blind mortals, to turn your eyes upon the last day of life."

And I, a spectator seated in an empty play-house, amid deserted boxes and extinguished lights, remain alone, of my time, before the lowered curtain, alone with the silence and the night.

[Sidenote: Armand Carrel.]

Armand Carrel threatened Philip's future even as General La Fayette beset his past You know how I came to be acquainted with M. Carrel[313]; since 1832, I did not cease to keep up relations with him until the day when I followed him to the Cemetery of Saint-Mandé.

Armand Carrel was melancholy; he began to fear that the French were incapable of a rational feeling of liberty; he had a vague presentiment of the shortness of his life: as though it were a thing upon which he did not rely and to which he attached no value, he was always willing to risk it on a cast of the die. If he had fallen in his duel with young Laborie[314], about Henry V., his death would at least have had a great cause and a great stage; probably his funeral would have been honoured by a great display of bloodshed: he left us for a miserable quarrel which was not worth a hair of his head.

He was suffering from one of his native attacks of gloom, when he inserted an article on myself, in the _National_, to which I replied by the following note:

"PARIS, 5 _May_ 1834.

"Your article, monsieur, is full of that exquisite feeling for
situations and proprieties which places you above all the political
writers of the day. I say nothing to you of your exceptional
talent; you know that I did it ample justice before I had the
honour of knowing you. I do not thank you for your praises: I like
to owe them to what I look upon now as an old friendship. You are
rising very high, monsieur; you are beginning to stand alone, like
all men made for a great fame: gradually the crowd, unable to
follow them, leaves them, and we see them the better because they
hold themselves aloof.

"CHATEAUBRIAND."

I tried to console him by another letter, on the 31st of August, when he was condemned for a newspaper offense. I received the following reply from him; it shows forth the opinions of the man, his regrets and his hopes:

TO MONSIEUR LE VICOMTE DE CHATEAUBRIAND

"MONSIEUR,

"Your letter of the 31st of August was handed to me only on my
arrival in Paris. I would come to thank you for it, at once, if
I were not obliged to devote the short time which can still be
left to me by the police, who are informed of my return, to a
few preparations for entering prison. Yes, monsieur, here am I
condemned by the bench to six months' imprisonment for a fanciful
offense and by virtue of an equally fanciful piece of legislation;
for the jury wittingly let me go unpunished upon the best-founded
charge, and that in spite of a defense which, so far from
extenuating my crime of telling the truth to the person of King
Louis-Philippe, had aggravated that crime by setting it up as an
established right for the whole of the opposition press. I am glad
that the difficulties of so bold a thesis, as times go, appeared to
you to be almost surmounted by the defense which you read and in
which it was so great an advantage to me to be able to invoke the
authority of the book in which, eighteen years ago, you instructed
your own party in the principles of constitutional responsibility.

"I often ask myself with a heavy heart what purpose will have
been served by writings such as yours, monsieur, such as those
of the most eminent men of the opinion to which I myself belong,
if, from this agreement between the highest intellects of the
country for the constant defense of the rights of discussion, there
did not at last result, for the bulk of French minds, a resolve
thenceforth to insist upon, under every form of government, to
exact from all victorious systems, whatever they may be, liberty
of thought, speech and writing, as the first condition of all
lawfully exercised authority. Is it not true, monsieur, that when,
under the last government, you asked for the most complete liberty
of discussion, it was not for the momentary service which your
political friends might derive from it in opposition to adversaries
who had forced their way into power by intrigue? There were some
who made use of the press in this way, as they have since proved;
but you, monsieur, asked for liberty of discussion as essential
to the public welfare, as the weapon and general protection of
all ideas, young or old; that is what earned for you, monsieur,
the gratitude and respect of opinions to which the Revolution of
July has opened the lists again. That is why our work is incident
on yours, and, when we quote your writings, we do so less from
admiration of the incomparable talent which produced them than
as aspiring to continue the same task at a great distance, young
soldiers as we are of a cause of which you are the most glorious
veteran.

"What you have wished for thirty years, monsieur, what I would
wish, if I be permitted to mention myself after you, is to secure
to the interests that divide our beautiful France a law of combat
that shall be more humane, more civilized, more brotherly, more
conclusive than civil war. When shall we succeed in bringing
ideas face to face, instead of parties, and lawful and avowable
interests, instead of disguises, egoism and cupidity? When shall
we see speech and persuasion cause those inevitable transactions
which the contest of parties and the shedding of blood also bring
to pass by exhaustion, but too late for the dead in both camps
and, too often, without profit for the wounded and survivors? As
you so sorrowfully say, monsieur, it seems that many lessons have
been wasted and that men no longer know in France what it costs to
take refuge in a despotism that promises silence and repose. We
must none the less continue to speak, write and print; resources
most unforeseen sometimes issue from constancy. And so, of all the
splendid examples which you, monsieur, have set, that which I have
most constantly before my eyes is expressed in one word: Persevere.

"Accept, monsieur, the sentiments of unalterable affection with
which I am glad to call myself

"Your most devoted servant,

"A. CARREL.

"PUTEAUX, near NEUILLY, 4 _October_ 1834."

[Sidenote: Armand Carrel in prison.]

M. Carrel was locked up at Sainte-Pélagie; I used to go to see him two or three times a week: I found him standing behind his window-grating. He reminded me of his neighbour, a young African lion in the Jardin des Plantes: motionless at the bars of its cage, the son of the desert turned its vague and sad look upon the objects outside; one could see that he would not live. Then M. Carrel and I used to go down the stairs; the servant of Henry V. walked with the enemy of the Kings in a damp, dark, narrow yard, surrounded by high walls, like a well. There were other Republicans also taking exercise in this yard: those young and ardent Revolutionaries, with their mustachios, beards, long hairs, Greek or German caps, pale faces, fierce looks, threatening aspect, were like those pre-existent souls in Tartarus that had not yet reached the light; they were preparing to break into life. Their dress acted upon them as the uniform upon the soldier, as Nessus' blood-stained shirt upon Hercules: they were an avenging world, which lay hidden behind the society of the present and which made one shudder.

In the evening, they met in the room of their leader, Armand Carrel; they spoke of what would have to be accomplished when they came into power and of the necessity for bloodshed. Discussions arose on the "great citizens of the Terror:" some, who were partisans of Marat, were atheists and materialists; others, who admired Robespierre, adored that new Christ. Had not St. Robespierre said, in his speech on the Supreme Being, that belief in God "gives strength to defy misfortune" and that "innocence on the scaffold made the tyrant turn pale in his triumphal car?" The hocus-pocus of an executioner who talks meltingly of God, misfortune, tyranny, scaffolds, in order to persuade men that he kills only the guilty, and even then in consequence of virtue; the foresight of evil-doers who, feeling the punishment draw nigh, pose in advance as Socrates before the judge and try to frighten the blade by threatening it with their innocence!

The stay at Sainte-Pélagie did M. Carrel harm: shut up with hot-heads, he fought against their ideas, blamed them, defied them, nobly refusing to illuminate his room on the 21st of January; but, at the same time, he chafed at his sufferings, and his reason was disturbed by the murderous sophistry that resounded in his ears.

The mothers, sisters and wives of those young men came to look after them in the mornings and to do their rooms. One day, as I was passing along the dark corridor which led to M. Carrel's room, I heard a bewitching voice issue from a neighbouring den: a beautiful woman, hatless, with her hair hanging loose, was sitting on the edge of a pallet-bed, mending the tattered clothes of a kneeling prisoner, who seemed less the captive of Philip than of the woman at whose feet he was chained.

M. Carrel, delivered from his captivity, came, in his turn, to see me. A few days before his fatal hour had struck, he came to bring me the number of the _National_ in which he had taken the trouble to insert an article on my _Essais sur la littérature anglaise_, in which article he had, with too much praise, quoted the concluding pages of those Essays. After his death, they gave me that article written entirely in his own hand, and I keep it as a token of his friendship. "After his death:" what words I have just written without noticing it!

[Sidenote: Armand Carrel's duel.]

Though forming a necessary supplement to laws which take no cognizance of offenses against honour, the duel is a horrible thing, especially when it destroys a life full of hopes and robs society of one of those rare men who came only after the labour of a century, in the concatenation of certain ideas and certain events. Carrel fell in the wood that saw the Duc d'Enghien fall: the shade of the grandson of the Great Condé served as a witness to the illustrious plebeian and took him with it. That fatal wood has twice made me weep: at least I cannot reproach myself for having, in those two catastrophes, failed in what I owed to my sympathies and my grief.

M. Carrel, who, in his other meetings, had never dreamt of death, thought of it before this one: he employed the night in writing his last wishes, as though he had been warned of the result of the combat. At eight o'clock in the morning, on the 22nd of July 1836, he went with a quick, light step to those shadows where the roebuck gambols at that hour.

Placed at the distance measured out, he moved swiftly forwards, fired without turning sideways, as was his custom: it would seem as though there were never enough danger for him. Wounded to the death and supported in the arms of his friends, as he passed before his adversary[315], who was himself wounded, he said to him:

"Are you in great pain, sir?"

Armand Carrel was as gentle as he was fearless.

On the 22nd, I heard of the accident too late; on the morning of the 23rd, I went to Saint-Mandé: M. Carrel's friends were most exceedingly anxious. I wanted to go in, but the surgeon observed that my presence might over-excite the patient and dissipate the faint glimmer of hope that still remained. I went away in consternation. The next day, the 24th, when I was making ready to return to Saint-Mandé, Hyacinthe, whom I had sent ahead of me, came to tell me that the unfortunate young man had expired at half-past five, after suffering atrocious pain: life in all its force had waged a desperate fight with death.

The funeral took place on Tuesday the 26th. M. Carrel's father and brother had arrived from Rouen. I found them gathered in a little room with three or four of the most intimate companions of the man whose loss we were mourning. They embraced me and M. Carrel's father said to me:

"Armand would have been a Christian like his father, his mother, his brothers, his sisters; the hand of the clock had but a few hours to travel over in order to reach the same point on its face."

I shall eternally regret that I was not able to see Carrel on his death-bed: I should not have despaired, at the last moment, of making the hand "travel over" the space beyond which it would have stopped at the hour of the Christian.

Armand Carrel was not so irreligious as has been supposed; he had doubts: when from fixed incredulity a man passes to indecision, he is very near to arriving at certainty. A few days before his death, he said:

"I would give the whole of this life to believe in the other."

When reporting the suicide of M. Sautelet[316], he wrote this powerful passage:

"I have been able to carry my life, in thought, to that instant,
swift as lightning, in which the sight of objects, the power of
movement, speech and perception will escape me and the last forces
of my mind will gather to form the one idea, 'I am dying;' but of
the minute, the second that will immediately follow I have always
had an undefinable dread; my imagination has always refused to
guess at any part of it. The depths of hell are a thousand times
less terrible to measure than that universal uncertainty:

. . . . To die; to sleep;
To sleep! Perchance to dream[317]!

"I have seen in all men, whatever their strength of character
or belief, that same inability to go beyond their last earthly
impression. There we lose our heads, as though, on reaching that
boundary, we found ourselves suspended over a precipice of ten
thousand feet. We drive away that terrifying sight to go to fight
a duel, deliver an assault on a redoubt or face a stormy sea; we
even seem to sneer at life; we display a bold, contented, serene
countenance; but that is because our imagination reveals success
rather than death, because our minds are much less exercised upon
the dangers than upon the means of escaping them[318]."

[Sidenote: Armand Carrel's funeral.]

These words are remarkable in the mouth of a man fated to be killed in a duel.

In 1800, when I returned to France, I did not know that a friend was being born to me on the shore where I was landing[319]. In 1836, I saw that friend lowered into the grave without those consolations of religion of which I brought back the memory to my country in the first year of the century.

I followed the coffin from the residence of the deceased to the place of burial; I walked beside M. Carrel's father and gave my arm to M. Arago: M. Arago has measured the Heaven which I have sung. On reaching the gate of the little rural cemetery, the procession stopped; speeches were delivered. The absence of the cross informed me that the emblem of my affliction was to remain enclosed in the depths of my soul.

Six years before, during the Days of July, passing in front of the colonnade of the Louvre, near an open grave, I met young men who carried me back to the Luxembourg, when I was going to make my protest in favour of a Royalty which they had just overthrown[320]; after six years, I was returning, on the anniversaries of the July festivals, to associate myself with the regrets of those young Republicans, even as they had associated themselves with my fidelity. How strange is destiny! Armand Carrel breathed his last in the house of an officer of the Royal Guard[321] who did not take the oath to Philip; I, a Royalist and a Christian, have had the honour of bearing a corner of the pall which covered noble ashes, but which will not hide them.

Many kings, princes, ministers, men who thought themselves powerful, have gone off before me: I have not condescended to raise my hat to their coffin or devote a word to their memory. I have found more to study and depict in the intermediary ranks of society than in those which make men wear their livery; a gold-laced cloak is not worth the morsel of flannel which the bullet drove into Carrel's body.

Carrel, who remembers you? The mediocrities and poltroons whom your death delivered from your superiority and their fears and I, who was not of your views. Who thinks of you? Who remembers you? I congratulate you on having, at one step, finished a journey whose prolonged passage becomes so disgusting and so lonely, on having brought the end of your march within the range of a pistol, a distance which to you appeared still too great and which you hastened to reduce to a sword's length.

I envy those who have departed before me: like Cæsar's soldiers at Brundusium, from the top of the rocks on shore I cast my eyes upon the main sea and gaze towards Epirus to look if I can see the ships which have taken over the first legions come back to carry me across in my turn.