There were three noticeable points in this proclamation:
The duke, first of all, declares that he did not waver for one moment in coming to share the dangers of the Parisian people. A lie, since, on the contrary, he hid himself both at Neuilly and at Raincy during the time of danger, and only reached Paris when the danger was over on the night of the 30th. Next, he announces that the Chambers were about to assemble to confer concerning the best methods of bringing about the reign of law and the maintenance of order; which statement was a calumny against the people; for, if ever people respected law and maintained order it was the people of July 1830. Finally, M. le Duc d'Orléans said that a Charter would henceforth be a genuine fact. He should have said that, from the very next day, not a Charter but the Charter, a change imperceptible to the eye and almost to the ear, which brought with it, however, the grave consequence that France, instead of having a new charter, was simply to have the Charter of Louis XVIII., and this meant that the king of the barricades, by appropriating that old charter, not only did not take the trouble to draw up another, but, with a new form of government, only promised to give the people the same amount of liberty as that promised by the fallen Government. This was, indeed, a bold start on a career of kingship. Lying, calumny and chicanery: Louis XI. himself could not have gone farther.
I said that, at the close of this chapter, I would give some idea of the stinginess of the Duc d'Orléans. Perhaps this is not exactly the place for the fragments we are about to introduce to our readers' notice; but those who think they interrupt the course of the narrative, can carry their imaginations elsewhere.
Let us first of all explain how these fragments of information fell into our hands. To do this in one step we must skip over a period of eighteen years; and, instead of the young man who took active part in all we have just read, substitute the mature man who stood aside, and sadly watched the passing of the events of that long reign; we must suppose the Lieutenant-general, to whose proclamation we have just listened, to be a king, also grown old and unpopular and driven away in his turn; we must imagine ourselves to have left behind Sunday morning, August 1830, for three o'clock in the afternoon of 24 February 1848. Then, the king gone and the Tuileries seized and the Republic proclaimed, I returned alone, sad and anxious, more of a Republican than ever, but of the opinion that the Republic was ill-constituted, ill-matured and ill-promulgated; I returned, my heart depressed by the spectacle of a wife cruelly repulsed, two children separated from their mother, two princes put to flight, one hunted through the rostral columns of the Place de la Concorde, the other along the circular staircases of the Palace of the Deputies; I returned, wondering if all I had seen and heard could actually be true, or whether I was not rather under the influence of a strange nightmare, a mysterious vision; I returned and, metaphorically speaking, felt myself to see if I could really be alive—for it is sometimes as easy for us to doubt our own existence as to doubt the weirdly strange events that we see passing under our very eyes;—I returned, I say, by the Tuileries, with its windows all open and its doors broken in, as on that famous 29 July which I have described at, perhaps, too great length; but how could I help myself? There are some memories which fill such a space in our lives that we feel compelled to impress them upon the lives of others. I was possessed with the idea of looking over the château that I had entered once before and to begin in the same way, at the apartments of King Louis-Philippe, on 24 February 1848, as I had through the rooms that belonged to King Charles and on 29 July 1830.
The account of what I saw will be given elsewhere. I have only one thing to relate, and here it is. As I went through the king's cabinet, where all kinds of papers lay scattered over the floor, all soiled with mud, in the midst of these forgotten, useless papers, condemned to the fire and oblivion, I detected some pages covered with characters which made me tremble. It was the king's writing; that very writing which, twenty-five years before, had often passed under my eyes. A patriot of 1848, as ragged as a former patriot of 1830, kept guard over the king's broken-open desk.
"Comrade," I said to the man, "may I have some of these papers that litter the floor?"
"You can take them," he replied; "they are probably left because they are of no value."
So I took them.
At the first Revolution I had come into possession of a copy of Christine inscribed with the arms of the Duchesse de Berry. At the second, I obtained some old yellow papers that lay on the floor, which I was allowed to take because the sentinel thought they were valueless. It will be noticed that I am not one of the persons who grow rich out of revolutions. True, I do not come under the category of those who are submerged by them. I sail above them, like birds and clouds; then, when the revolutions are over, I direct my flight, not to the side where lie power and fortune, but to the 1 side of justice and faithfulness, even though I should have to follow justice into exile and loyalty through proscription.
But here is a copy of the papers: they themselves will speak better than any notes or commentaries could.