Chapter XX: Introduction (4)

[From the marble statue in the Louvre, by Guillaume Couston, a pupil
of Coysevox, who died at Paris in 1746. The King wears the royal
fleur-de-lys mantle, and on his knees offers his crown and sceptre to
the Virgin. The 15th of August, 1638, the day on which Louis XIV. was
born, was ordered to be celebrated by a solemn procession in
Nôtre-Dame; and throughout France, to this day it is kept in the
Cathedral, and called the ceremony of the Vow of Louis XIII. The
attitude chosen by the sculptor is thus explained. There are several
other examples of the same kind at Versailles; the statue of Louis
XIV. (No. 308) is one. At Versailles there is a similar statue by
Coysevox, and a bust by Warin.]

307.* ANNE OF AUSTRIA. _Queen of France._

[Born in Spain, 1602. Died in France, 1666. Aged 64.]

The daughter of Philip II. of Spain, and wife of Louis XIII. of France. She was neglected by the King, her husband, and had no influence in France during his lifetime. But upon his decease, the parliament annulled his will, which had restricted the Queen’s power, and gave her the unlimited Regency of the kingdom, and sole guardianship of her son, Louis XIV. She appointed Cardinal Mazarin her Prime Minister, and the alliance thus formed between a Spanish princess and an Italian priest, gave rise in France to the civil wars of “La Fronde.” In spite of the opposition which she encountered, she made over the sovereignty of France unimpaired to her son when he reached his majority. Of a mild and docile temper, religious and charitable. As a mother she was devoted to her children, and sought to imbue them with high moral and religious principles.

[Mask from the statue referred to in note No. 308.]

308. LOUIS XIV. _King of France._

[Born at St. Germain, 1638. Died 1715. Aged 77.]

The son of Louis XIII. and Anne of Austria. He ascended the throne at five years old--his mother being Regent during his minority--and reigned 72 years, longer than any other King of France. Until the death of Mazarin in 1661, Louis XIV. suffered the adroit Cardinal to rule. From that hour until his own death, no man governed but himself. This renowned monarch survived nearly the whole of his family, and when he died, the crown, as in his own case, came to the charge of a child--his great grandson--then in his fifth year. The reign of Louis Quatorze was singularly eventful within and without the realm. It embraced wars, marked now with splendid successes, and now with formidable reverses. He aimed at universal monarchy, and endangered his own. He sustained, in the War of the Succession, the defence of Spain and France against united Europe--a war in which the allies hoped to dismember France, that did not lose a province. Under this king, the soil of France was stained with the blood of her children in religious civil conflict; the most industrious and the best, slaughtered for their faith, or exiled. A magnificent Court surrounded his person--the centre to the politeness of Europe, its stately decorum veiling great moral corruption. Jealous of his prerogatives and of his supremacy amongst kings, Louis XIV. was still more jealous to be thought the best bred gentleman of his time. In this reign, the marine, the commerce, and the manufactures of France made a vast stride. Arts, letters, and science were royally encouraged. It is looked back upon as the Augustan age of French literature, when the writings of Corneille, Racine, Molière, and Boileau--of Masillon, Bossuet, Fénélon, seemed to have fixed the language. The age of Louis XIV. was the age of glory to the French monarchy; and splendidly dissolute, and, in many respects, hollow, as it may have been, we still revert to its records with a fascination that never palls, and an interest that becomes more acute the more it is gratified.

[This statue, representing Louis as a child, is from a bronze by
Guillain, which formed, with a statue of Anne of Austria, and one of
Louis XIII., a group of three, as a monument to commemorate the
building of the Pont-au-Change, begun by Louis XIII. in 1639, and
finished under Louis XIV., 1647, while Anne was Regent. The monument
was destroyed in 1787; but the statues are in the Louvre, as well as
the great bas-relief. The bust of Anne of Austria (No. 307*) is taken
from the statue.]

308A. LOUIS XIV. _King of France._

[From the marble, by Ch. Ant. Coysevox, in the Louvre and at
Versailles. The King, kneeling on a cushion where his crown is placed,
is dressed in the Royal mantle, with the Orders of the Holy Spirit and
St. Michel. There are numbered no fewer than twenty-two busts,
statues, and medallions of this favourite King at Versailles. Four are
equestrian statues in bronze; one by Martin Bogaert, called
Desjardins, and two by Louis Petitot, done in 1834. The statue in
bronze by Desjardins, which once stood in the Place des Victoires, was
destroyed in 1793. The four slaves which stood chained at the angles
of this statue were alone preserved, and are now at the Hotel des
Invalides, at Paris.]

309. LOUIS XV. _King of France._

[Born at Versailles, 1710. Died there, 1774. Aged 64.]

He succeeded his great grandfather, Louis XIV., in the fifth year of his age. He was styled “the well beloved.” In his 34th year, on the field of Fontenoy, he gave proof of courage. Up to the prime of manhood, he gave equally satisfactory evidence of many good qualities of heart and head. But indolence and vicious habits, subsequently contracted, rendered the latter half of Louis’s reign one of the most disgraceful and profligate that France had witnessed. The shameless proceedings which had stained the career of his guardian, the Regent Orleans, were re-enacted in his own vicious Court. The disasters of France abroad during this degraded time, the destruction of her navy, the financial crisis that followed that catastrophe, the corruptions that were eating into the very heart of the State, and the immorality that characterized the higher classes, were the natural forerunners of the frightful storm that burst over France in the following reign. Louis XV., once “the well beloved,” died execrated by his subjects, who insulted his wretched remains, as they were passing to their last home.

309A. LOUIS XV. _King of France._

[From the marble, in the Louvre, by Guillaume Couston the son, who
died at Paris, 1777. The costume, in accordance with the fancy of the
day, is that of a Roman general, as we see in the statue of King James
II., of England, (No. 491). The King holds in his right hand a sceptre
reversed, and with his left presents a baton of a Marshal of France.
At Versailles, are several authentic busts of the time of this
monarch, besides a copy of this statue, and an equestrian statue in
bronze, by Bouchardon. The date of this work is about 1728.]

310. MARIE ANTOINETTE JOSÉPHINE JEANNE. _Queen of France._

[Born at Vienna, 1755. Guillotined 1793. Aged 38.]

The unfortunate daughter of Francis I., Emperor of Germany, and the illustrious Maria Theresa of Austria. In 1770, before she was sixteen, married to Louis the Dauphin, who in 1774 became King of France, under the title of Louis XVI. At the breaking out of the French Revolution, every public disaster was laid to her charge by the maddened people, and after the execution of her husband, she was herself condemned to death. On her way to the scaffold, she was for two hours reviled by a ferocious mob; but resignation and sweetness of demeanour only could be traced on her countenance. Her hair had been turned silvery white by her many troubles, and a settled melancholy was stamped on her beautiful features. After her execution, her body was immediately consumed with quick lime. The murder of this unhappy lady was the most crimson spot in all the bloody time of the French Revolution. She was of a playful, happy, cheerful disposition, devoted to her family, benevolent to all. Her purity is beyond question, her heroism perfect. In mixing in public concerns, which she did not understand, she betrayed imprudence. In despising etiquette she laid herself open to the worst criticisms of her ungenerous foes; but her character shines unsullied after cruel persecution, horrible imprisonment, and ignominious death.

[From the marble in the Louvre by Lecomte.]

311. NAPOLEON BUONAPARTE. _Emperor of France._

[Born at Ajaccio, in Corsica, 1768. Died at St. Helena, 1821. Aged
53.]

A soldier of fortune at the outset of his career. Lieutenant of Artillery, 1785. First Consul of France, 1799. Emperor of France in 1804, when he was but 36 years of age. Discrowned exile, and prisoner, 1815. The military prodigy of his age. His story reads like a romance of eastern enchantment; for he made and unmade kings at his will, and confounding all the established conceptions and expectations of men, asserted and won his right to fix for a time the destinies of nations. His extreme hour of greatness was in 1813, after the fearful retreat from Russia, when in a few months he summoned a new army to his side from the fields of exhausted France, and alone defied, and almost overcame, the united strength of the rest of civilized Europe. The most ignoble period of his life is found on the barren rock of St. Helena, when, treacherous to his former grandeur, he was afflicted and absorbed by the worthless and passing annoyances of the moment. His career was that of a dazzling meteor, astonishing all men in its fiery passage, but creating little else than amazement, and admiration mingled with fear. Not naturally cruel, he enacted cruelties. Brave in the field, he lacked the true heroic element. He used all men for his own advancement, and counted human life valueless, when its sacrifice might add to his imagined glory. Superstitious, but not religious. Framed for intensest exertion, indefatigable, impatient, irritable, untruthful, theatrical, petty. Yet a grand lawgiver; cognisant of the wants of men, and capable of meeting them, had his lust of ambition suffered him to provide for the interests of his people as sedulously as for his own. His character, a singular conflict of great virtues with small vices, and of great vices with small virtues. The most splendid soldier since the days of Julius Cæsar, and the idol of his army. The uncle of Napoleon III., the present Emperor of France.

[From the marble in the Louvre by Houdon.]

311A. NAPOLEON BUONAPARTE. _Emperor of France._

[The colossal bust by Canova.]

311B. NAPOLEON BUONAPARTE. _Emperor of France._

[An ideal bust by Thorwaldsen, supported on the French eagle with palm
branches.]

311C. NAPOLEON BUONAPARTE. _Emperor of France._

312. LOUIS PHILIPPE. _King of the French._

[Born in Paris, 1773. Died at Claremont, in England, 1850. Aged 77.]

A monarch who ascended the throne of France on the neck of one Revolution, and was hurled from it by the heel of another. A king who had borne adversity bravely in his youth, yet was unequal to sustain prosperity in his age. The most remarkable example of the proverb that “a Bourbon learns nothing, and forgets nothing.” If any Bourbon could prove an exception to the rule, Louis Philippe must have been the man. He had great sagacity; he had mixed for many years with all ranks and conditions of men. He had acutely felt the want of the means of living. He had been forced to earn his own bread by humble day labour. He had travelled in America, resided in England, had read much, observed more. Yet in 1848, after a reign of 18 years, he conducted himself towards the French nation with a blind obstinacy and wilful disregard of consequences, worthy of a sovereign who had been suckled in the lap of despotism, and fed for ever afterwards upon obsequious flattery, and all the other dainty diet of a Court. Louis Philippe had many good qualities of heart. He was beloved by his wife and children, and was a true hero at the domestic hearth. He had also a shrewd, active, well-informed mind. Nor did he act without a principle in his dealing with his subjects. But unfortunately his love for his family led him into foolish schemes for their advancement, his shrewdness overreached itself, and his principle of action was based upon a fallacy. He imagined that he could satisfy his people with the very husk and rind of constitutional government, and flatter them with the conviction that they were chewing and enjoying the kernel. Corruption was hardly greater in the days of the Regency, than towards the untimely close of the reign of Louis Philippe, but the rottenness under the later Orleans was veiled beneath forms demanded by the spirit of the age, and conceded by the King in a spirit of mock complaisance and quiet irony. Few men have had greater opportunity than the King of the Barricades. None have so desperately disappointed hope and baffled expectation. The history of the House of Orleans is full of instruction for all who bear the name: but no chapter is so fraught with momentous interest to the living chief of the House as that which tells the extraordinary and calamitous history of Louis Philippe.

[From the Marble, by J. E. Jones, 1845.]

312*. LOUIS NAPOLEON. _Emperor of France._

[Born 1808. Still living.]

The third Emperor of the name, and not the least remarkable of his extraordinary race. The opinions formed of the present Emperor of France from his earlier history, have all been belied by his subsequent career. He has been an exile, a prisoner, a wanderer, an outcast. When he has ceased to be an object of suspicion, it was only to become a subject for ridicule. Of all pretenders to thrones in Europe, he has been held the least likely to obtain, by any change of circumstances or overthrow of dynasties, supreme dominion. When kings, in their fear, have reckoned over the names of those from whom danger might be expected, and have exhausted the entire list by including all possible representatives of peril, Louis Napoleon has not been in the number. He lived for years in London, and on the 10th of April, 1848, when special constables were enrolled for the preservation of menaced order, he sallied forth with his neighbours, and performed street duty with the humblest. He was so poor in England, that his goods were sold to pay his debts. Yet at this hour the diadem binds his brow, and his foot is firmly planted upon the summit of power in tranquillized France, and we all pray Heaven in the interests of humanity, civilization, and peace, to maintain it there. Since the accession of Napoleon III., all his exertions have been directed to the development of the material resources of his country, and to the upholding of that good understanding amongst nations which is essential to the continuance of social prosperity. Europe lies under great obligations to his sagacity, and England has cause to rejoice in his friendship. When he married, he called himself a “_parvenu_.” His wisdom, moderation, and good faith have attached him to the heart of public opinion more closely than though, upon an insincere brow, he had brought to his imperial throne the stamp of a hundred kings.

[From the marble by Barre, 1853.]

312A. LOUIS NAPOLEON. _Emperor of France._

[From the marble by J. E. Jones.]

312**. EUGÉNIE MARIE GUZMAN. _Empress of France._

[Born 1826. Still living.]

The wife of Napoleon III., before her marriage with whom she was Countess Montijo of Teba.

THE GERMAN PORTRAITS.