Madame la Duchesse d'Orléans had been present at the coronation, and wrote an account of it in her private diary in Italian. On her return to Paris, she desired to have it translated into French, and commissioned Oudard to do it. Oudard was much embarrassed, and handed the album over to me, giving me a couple of days' holiday to translate it for him. This album was the book in which the Duchesse d'Orléans wrote her most secret thoughts and related her private deeds. I was not forbidden to read it, so of course I read it. However, there was not a single word throughout the book that could have put an angel to the blush, though it contained the actions and reflections of the Duchesse d'Orléans for the last ten years, though she never intended it to leave her own hands, not even to pass into those of the Duc d'Orléans, since it was for the Duc d'Orléans that the translation was being made. One thing above all struck me as I read, and that was the profound gratitude of Madame la Duchesse d'Orléans for the favours that the new king, Charles X., had lavished on the prince her husband, and for the kindness displayed every day towards her and her family by Madame la Duchesse de Berry.
Alas and alas! how many times the remembrance of that album came into my mind when I saw King Charles X. at Gratz, and Madame la Duchesse de Berry at Blaye, and it made me shudder as I thought of how deeply the religious-hearted Marie-Amélie must have suffered, when, because of what princes term "political necessities," the honour of the one, and the crown of the other, were broken in her husband's hands.
Another page also riveted my attention and kept me for a long time enthralled, wherein Madame la Duchesse d'Orléans related how lovingly and tactfully her husband broke to her the news of the death of her father, Ferdinand I. Now, Ferdinand I. was the very king who had kept my father a prisoner in the dungeons of Naples for eighteen months; the very same man who had allowed people to try and poison him three times, and once to attempt his assassination; he, the shepherd who had devoured his own flock during those terrible years of 1798-99, had just been called to render an account of his stewardship to the Lord. It was a strange coincidence that I, the son of one of the king's victims, should hold this album in my hands and read the sorrowful outpourings of the daughter's grief at the death of her father! What a strange juxtaposition of destiny and fortunes! However, he was dead, even as just men have to die; he who had watched those whom he called his friends hung before his very eyes, burnt beneath his very windows, disembowelled and torn to pieces in his very presence; the people whom a treacherous capitulation had yielded into his hands; those who, under another reign, might have been the honour of their king and the glory of the country!
On 3 January 1825 he was quietly sleeping, at two in the morning. His attendants heard him cough several times; then, at eight o'clock, as he had not summoned them to him according to his usual custom, the officers of his chamber, followed by the Court doctors, entered his room, and found him dead from a stroke of apoplexy. Ferdinand I. had just reigned sixty-five years, when he died at the age of seventy-four.
Oudard got his translation, which he re-copied in his own writing, and handed to the Duchesse d'Orléans as his own. True, he faithfully retailed to me the compliments he had received for it, adding that for which I was far more grateful—two tickets for the first representation of Roman at the Théâtre-Français; it was a capital five-act comedy in verse, by de Laville de Miremont, already known because of Folliculaire, a piece more commendable for its action than for any other quality. I knew de Laville very well: an accusation by Lemercier worried him greatly. Lemercier had accused de Laville, who had occupied the post of Censor, of having suppressed his Charles VI. and of having afterwards used his plot and ideas. But, in the first place, de Laville plainly proved both by Folliculaire and by Roman that he did not need to borrow ideas from other people's plays; besides, he was utterly incapable of doing such an action. There was a charming creation in Roman: a father who was friendly to and almost a companion in the escapades of a son born to him when he was only twenty. Nothing could have been more natural than this situation, which de Laville was the first to employ in a play.
Owing to the kindness of Talma, I had several times seen the Cid d'Andalousie. Casimir Delavigne's example was infectious: Talma having taken part in comedy, Mademoiselle Mars asked why she might not play in tragedy; hence the new reunion of the two actors in the Cid d'Andalousie. But M. Pierre Lebrun, author of an Ulysse which had not been played, or what is far worse, which had only run one or two nights, was not Casimir Delavigne. There was nothing at the time to support him as there had been in 1820 when, in Maria Stuart, he had had the sturdy framework of Schiller to fall back upon. Reduced to drawing from Spanish romanceros, which only suggested simple scenes, he was lacking in everything—power, originality and style, and in spite of the unusual support of both Talma and Mademoiselle Mars, who had doubled the power of a strong creator and who could not conceal the weakness of a feeble writer, the Cid d'Andalousie fell flat at the first representation, managed to survive the second, upheld by hired applause, dragged on miserably for five or six nights, and then finally was taken out of the bill. This failure was the beginning of the fortune of M. Pierre Lebrun—Academician, peer of France and Manager of the Royal Printing-house.
O thou venerable deity, Mediocrity! Surely thou hast the secret of the precious essence given to Phaon by Venus to assure successfulness in this world of ours! Thou who for long rejected Hugo, Lamartine and Charles Nodier! Thou who left Soulié and Balzac to die without doing for them a third of what thou didst for M. Pierre Lebrun! Thou who ignored Alfred de Musset,—wisely, for all light of originality, all nervous strength, makes thy owl's eyes to blink! Thou whose leaden-based statue ought to be a hundred feet high, so that its shadow should fall on the Pont des Arts and the respectable monument to which it leads! O Mediocrity! sole divinity for whom France has not a 21 January, a 29 July or a 24 February! Thou whom I despise above everything else in the world, and would fain hate if I could ever hate anything! Look ever askance on me and be benign to my enemies, that is the sole favour I ask thee. And, on this condition, may thou remain in undisturbed possession of the future, as thou hast been of the past!
Now let us note well that the failure of the Cid d'Andalousie took place in 1825. One might therefore reasonably have hoped that by 1838, thirteen years later, the unlucky Cid would have been forgotten by everybody, even by its author. Nothing of the kind. At Compiègne, in his country house, the Duc d'Orléans entertained his comrades with sport in the forest by day, and at night he opened his drawing-rooms to those who preferred card-playing, dancing and conversation. One evening a fatal idea came into the unfortunate prince's head. Turning towards several poets who stood round, he said to them—
"Gentlemen, let us see which of you has some poetry to read to us."
Everybody kept silence, as will be readily understood, and moved a step or two backwards; except M. Pierre Lebrun, who stepped forward.