"I repeat my request, as I made a mistake in my first application, for 1208 francs 95 centimes. I beg you to discharge these payments by the 10th instant, to avoid the putting into execution of legal methods according to Article 52 of the Code pénal.
"I have the honour to remain
"GUILLEBERT, Registrar"
And M. Guillebert, who would have been as polite to any prisoner but would, undoubtedly, not have been so punctilious with him if he had not been a poet, had the complaisance to put that 52nd Article of the Code pénal, to which he alluded so delicately, in a postscript. This is the article which, I suppose, has remained unaltered under the government of King Louis-Philippe I., and under that of M. Bonaparte:—
Article 52
"Distraining for fines, restitutions, damages and interest, and for costs, can be enforced by means of imprisonment."
To this letter Barthélemy replied, on 9 May 1830, by an epistle entitled La Bourse ou la Prison. But in comparison with Fontan and Magallon, Barthélemy had nothing to complain of: he was lodged in a palace. The palace was rent free, but he gives us the tariff for the cost of furnishing it:—
francs
Ordinary bed, two mattresses, sheets, one blanket and
bolster 4 50
For every extra blanket 6 50
One pillow 9 50
One chair 6 50
One table 6 50
Total, 33 50
And it was by these actions that the Government was alienating itself from the people by the scandalous trials of Carbonneau, Pleignies and Tolleron successively; from the army by the executions of Bories, Raoul, Goubin and Pommier; from the high military aristocracy by the assassination of Brune, Ramel, Ney and Mouton-Duverney; from the middle classes by the dissolution of the National Guard; and was alienating a race far more dangerous still, namely poets, journalists and men of letters, by the sentences which struck successively such men as Paul-Louis Courier, Cauchois-Lemaire, Magallon, Béranger, Fontan and Barthélemy.
Now, a Government which has the people, the army, the middle classes and literature opposed to it is in a very bad way, and this Government was therefore in a very bad way on 31 July 1829, on which day it pronounced its sentence on Barthélemy; exactly a year later, to the day, it was defunct.
Finally, an anecdote I am just about to relate will prove that I partially foresaw the trend of coming events. My new position in the library of the Duc d'Orléans (a post which, as I have already pointed out to my readers, was more honorary than lucrative) possessed the great advantage to me of affording me an immense office, where I could carry on my literary and historical researches nearly as well as, and far more comfortably than, in the Bibliothèque royale. So I was more regular in my attendance than either of my two confrères, Vatout and Casimir Delavigne. Accordingly, one day, when the Duc d'Orléans came in, humming a tune from one of the masses—a habit of his when he was in a good temper, which, I must say, he nearly always was—he remarked:
"So! are you by yourself, M. Dumas?"