Whilst Oudard was looking for them, the duke tore a blank sheet from a sort of register which lay within his reach: it was a register in connection with the Chevaliers de l'Ordre. Then, according to his habit, to economise paper, he made the rough draft of his letter upon the sheet he tore out of the register. It was, no doubt, owing to this economy of his that we are able to give the public a copy of that highly important, extremely curious and authentic letter. When the Duc d'Orléans had written his letter, he crumpled up the rough copy in his hands, threw it away behind him, and it rolled into a corner by the fireplace, where it was picked up the next day. By whom, I cannot say. I can only state that I copied the letter you are about to read from that very rough draft itself. As for the fate of the final letter, M. de Mortemart folded it, placed it inside his white cravat, and went away to carry it to the king. It was this letter that Charles X. re-read with much bitterness, when he learnt that Louis-Philippe had accepted the crown. Here is the rough draft with his autograph and erasures; we have not altered one single letter from the original, but left it exactly as His Royal Highness wrote it.
"M. de —— will tell Your Majesty how they brought me here by force. I do not know to what point these people may go in the employment of force towards me; but (if it should happen) if in this fearful state of disorder it should happen that they were to impose upon me a title to which I have never aspired, Your Majesty may be (convinced) very well assured that I will receive no kind of power except temporarily, and in the sole interest of Our House.
"I hereby formally swear this to Your Majesty.
"My family share my feelings in this matter.
"(Your faithful subject)."
PALAIS-ROYAL,
July 31, 1830.
We will now invite our readers, those especially who like to form an exact impression of the character of the men who are chosen for leaders of humanity; we will, we say, invite them to compare this copy of the letter with the note sent from Neuilly during the night of the 29th of July.
Louis-Philippe as a private individual, Louis-Philippe as politician and Louis-Philippe as king, are all faithfully depicted by his own hand in that note and that rough draft of a letter. But the date of 31 July puzzles us, especially after the lapse of twenty-two years. Is it an error of the duke's, or was the note not signed until after midnight?—this would make the date of the 31st correct; or, again, as is just conceivably possible, was it signed only on the evening of the 31st? Our own opinion is that it was signed on the morning of the 31st, between one and two o'clock, after midnight. And we base our opinion on the fact that, at one o'clock in the morning M. Laffitte had not yet been informed of the arrival of the Duc d'Orléans. Besides, the salons of the illustrious banker, deserted little by little by those whom the silence and absence of the Duc d'Orléans rendered anxious, kept on thinning in a manner far from re-assuring. At two o'clock in the morning, indeed, no one was left in the salon but Laffitte and Benjamin Constant. Béranger had just retired, worn out with fatigue.
"Well!" Laffitte remarked with his accustomed imperturbability, "what do you think of the situation, Constant?"
"I?" the author of Adolphe laughingly replied. "Well, my dear Laffitte, it is a hundred chances to one that by to-morrow at this hour we shall be hung."
Laffitte made a gesture.
"Ah! I quite understand that. You are not madly in love with hanging; it would spoil your pretty pink face and your well-groomed hair and your perfectly adjusted cravat; while I, with my long yellow face, look as though I had been hanged already, and the cord would add little to my physiognomy."
With this compliment, the two men separated at half-past two in the morning. It was only at five that they waked M. Laffitte to warn him of the arrival of the Duc d'Orléans in Paris.
"Oh!" said he, "Benjamin Constant is distinctly wrong, and we shall not be hanged."