[CHAPTER II]
The drama of Saint-Leu—The bravery of the Duc d'Aumale—The arrest of MM. Peyronnet, Chantelauze, Guernon-Ranville and Polignac—Madame de Saint-Fargeau's servant—Thomas and M. de Polignac—The ex-ministers at Vincennes—The abolition of the death penalty in the Chamber—La Fayette—M. de Kératry—Salverte—Death to the ministers—Vive Odilon Barrot and Pétion!
But, before returning to these patchings up of damaged walls (which played an important part, as we shall see, in due season), let us finish with the dark tragedy of Saint-Leu, and with the last of the Condés, who was found one morning hanging, like an old rusty sword, from the catch of a window. I say let us finish with the dark tragedy of Saint-Leu, because, in the preceding chapter, I believe I alluded to the mysterious death of the Prince of Condé. Now that death was certainly very mysterious; but my reader must not interpret this epithet in any other sense than the one I give to it. One of my most intimate friends (the same who, on the morning of 17 August 1847, on coming out of the sleeping-chamber of Madame la Duchesse de Praslin, had breakfasted with me, after washing his hands a second time from the bloodstains of that unfortunate woman, and who that morning had said to me, "I swear to you that the Duc de Praslin killed his wife!")—this friend, the celebrated Surgeon Pasquier, as skilled as Dupuytren and as honest as Larrey, repeated many times to me the following sentence:—
"I took the body of the Prince of Condé down from the window; well, on my soul and conscience, I declare he hanged himself there!"
I questioned him the more insistently upon this subject, because I had known the poor prince at Villers-Cotterets, I had dined at the same table with him at M. Deviolaine's, and he had been kind to me, when I was quite a boy, and a stranger and totally unknown to him. Well, upon my word of honour, I, too, in my turn, believe implicitly what Pasquier told me many times; which he repeated again exactly in the same terms when, less than a couple of years ago, we both crossed the Channel together to pay our last respects to the dead king at Claremont (a respectful duty, which, from some unknown family susceptibility or other, I regret I was unable to pay personally). I believe that, if the king had not also died before his time, as many of my friends have died, as the one to whom these Memoirs are dedicated has died, I would invoke his testimony, which would be devoid of all affection towards that Royal Family of which he often had reason to complain to others, including myself; his testimony, I say, would not fail me. And I believe it is right to say and write and print this, and to swear to it by the dead man, as I should have done were he alive, when the rumour reached me in the retreat I had voluntarily chosen in a foreign land, that they were going to raise a doubt as to the question of its being suicide. However, it matters little. Had Madame de Feuchères been accused and convicted of the crime of which science and the law have declared her innocent; had Madame de Feuchères confessed this crime; had Madame de Feuchères been condemned to expiate it on the scaffold; had Madame de Feuchères, in a last confession, accused of moral or material complicity those whom vile hatred has tried to stain with this complicity; had Madame de Feuchères uttered this monstrous lie; had she published this dastardly slander; even then, for all noble minds, for all honest hearts, no shadow of suspicion could ever have attached to those whom she tried to reach—cursed be the parties which make use of such weapons for attacking their enemies! As in the case of the dauphin, when he tried to snatch the sword from the Duc de Raguse, they only wound and stain their own hands with blood! The author who writes history is bound to tell the truth, and I believe I have ever done so: it is cowardly for such as wield the pen, and write for the public, not to contradict calumnious statements. I therefore emphatically deny this one. It would certainly have been finer and nobler of the Duc d'Orléans, who was already rich in his own rights as a prince, and also drawing wealth, as king, from the civil list; it would have been a grand act, I repeat, if the duke had renounced the fatal succession, and handed over the vast legacy to a benevolent institution, a foundation in the cause of art, in aid of a national misfortune at that time or in the future. But those who have read these Memoirs know how miserly the king was, and if they may have blamed me for publishing the fact, they will understand what I now wish people to infer. Well, then, the prince's character being realised and his temperament admitted, we declare that it would have been altogether beyond the power of the man who could cover six pages with figures to discover a bonus of sixty-six centimes, to renounce a legacy of sixty-six millions at the moment when that long-wished-for and expected inheritance came, as it were, of its own accord into his hands.
But now let us pass quickly from this subject, as we said at the beginning of this chapter it was our intention to do, and let us be particularly careful not to fix the responsibility for this fortune, which was left him, on the young and noble hero of La Smala.
Alas! so many calumnies, so much indifference and forgetfulness follow exiles that it is, indeed, necessary that some voices should, from time to time, recall to the country that produced them the names of those beloved sons who were worthy of her love!
An officer who had received his first epaulettes from the Duc d'Aumale once replied to me, when I was praising the bravery of the poor exiled duke in his presence—