"Brave? Why, he was no braver than anybody else!"
No braver than anybody else! As to this, I heard Yousouf, whose own courage I hope nobody will dare to dispute, tell what I am sure he will be ready to repeat:—
"When we found ourselves with only our two hundred and fifty men face to face with the forty thousand souls that composed La Smala, I asked the prince, 'Monseigneur, what are we to do?' He replied, 'Go in, by Jove!' When he said it I thought I must have misunderstood him, so I repeated my question, and when he again said, 'Go in, I tell you!' I began to shudder. I took up my sword, of course, because I was a soldier, but I said to myself, 'Then that will be the last of us, for we shall all be lost!'"
No braver than anybody else! though Charras (whom nobody ever accused of Orléanist leanings or of knowing fear, being one of those rare natures who love danger for its own sake, un soldat de nuit, as connoisseurs term them)—Charras himself said to me, in speaking of that same taking of La Smala—
"To go as the Duc d'Aumale did, with two hundred and fifty men, into the midst of such a population as that, one must either be but twenty-two years of age with no knowledge of the meaning of danger, or else have the very devil inside one! The women had only to stretch the tent ropes in front of the horses, in order to throw them down, and to throw their slippers at the soldiers' heads, to exterminate them ally from the first to the last!"
No, indeed! the Due d'Aumale's courage was of a different order from the rest of the world's: he was braver even than the bravest of men.
In due course I will relate what he himself told me about it at this period, the first time I saw him after his return.
Now let us return to the re-plastering of the walls, from which we have been turned aside by this digression on the death of the Prince de Condé and the bravery of the Duc d'Aumale; I write, I repeat, as I feel, and, above all, from conviction; and I proclaim with an equally impartial voice the avarice and scheming of the father and the courage and loyalty of his children. Moreover, the discussion which arose as to whether the walls of Paris should remain in their mutilated condition or not; whether they should bear the immutable impression of the dates of 27, 28 and 29 July; or whether those dates should be effaced from the stones as it was hoped they would be effaced from people's hearts; this discussion, we say, had a far more significant meaning than the scrapers of houses and restorers of buildings were ready to acknowledge. It was really a question of the saving of the heads of the ex-king's ministers, which were violently imperilled by this public prosecution. Four of them had been arrested: these were, in the order of their arrest, MM. de Peyronnet, de Guernon-Ranville, de Chantelauze and de Polignac.
Let us give a few details concerning these different arrests; the papers of their day duly register the facts and they are talked of, discussed at the time and then gradually forgotten; only the cruel, stupid fact remains; then history steps in, which limits itself to stating the mere fact, robbed of all its details and of its picturesque side.