"Wars of extermination sprang up again; despotism counted her expenditure in men, as people reckon the revenue of an estate; generations were mowed down like grass; and men daily sold, bought, exchanged and given away like flocks of little value, often not even knowing whose property they were, to such an extent did a monstrous policy multiply these infamous transactions! Whole nations were put in circulation like pieces of money!"
To profess such principles was, of course, equivalent to looking towards the Restoration, that dawn without a sun. Moreover, it should not be forgotten that, in those days, all young men of letters were carried away with the same intoxication for monarchical memories. Poets are like women—I do not at all know who said that poets were women—they make much of a favourable misfortune. This enthusiasm for the person of the king was shared, in different degrees, even by men whose names, later, were connected with Liberalism. Heaven alone knows whether any king was ever less fitted than Louis XVIII. for calling forth tenderness and idolatry! But that did not hinder Casimir Delavigne from exclaiming—
"Henri, divin Henri, toi que fus grand et bon,
Qui chassas l'Espagnol, et finis nos misères,
Les partis sont d'accord en prononçant ton nom;
Henri, de les enfants fais un peuple de frères!
Ton image déjà semble nous protéger:
Tu renais! avec toi renaît l'indépendance!
Ô roi le plus Français dont s'honore la France,
Il est dans ton destin de voir fuir l'étranger!
Et toi, son digne fils, après vingt ans d'orage,
Règne sur des sujets par toi-même ennoblis;
Leurs droits sont consacrés dans ton plus bel ouvrage.
Oui, ce grand monument, affermi d'âge en âge,
Doit couvrir de son ombre et le peuple et les lys
Il est des opprimés l'asile impérissable,
La terreur du tyran, du ministre coupable,
Le temple de nos libertés!
Que la France prospère en tes mains magnanimes;
Que tes jours soient sereins, tes décrets respectés,
Toi qui proclames ces maximes:
'Ô rois, pour commander, obéissez aux lois!
Peuple, en obéissant, sois libre sous tes rois!'"
True, fifteen years later, the author of La Semaine de Paris sang, almost in the same lines of the accession to the throne of King Louis-Philippe. Rather read for yourself—
"Ô toi, roi citoyen, qu'il presse dans ses bras, Aux cris d'un peuple entier dont les transports sont justes. Tu fus mon bienfaiteur ... Je ne te loûrai pas: Les poètes des rois sont leurs actes augustes. Que ton règne te chante, et qu'on dise après nous: 'Monarque, il fut sacré par la raison publique; Sa force fut la loi; l'honneur, sa politique; Son droit divin, l'amour de tous!'"
Let us read again the lines we have just quoted—those which were addressed to Louis XVIII. we mean—and we shall see that Victor Hugo, Lamartine and Lamennais never expressed their delight at the return of the Bourbons in more endearing terms than did Casimir Delavigne. What, then, was the reason why the Liberals of that day and the Conservatives of to-day bitterly reproached the first three of the above-mentioned authors for these pledges of affection for the Elder Branch, whilst they always ignored or pretended to ignore the covert royalism of the author of Messéniennes? Ah! Heavens! It is because the former were sincere in their blind, young enthusiasm, whilst the latter—let us be allowed to say it—was not. The world forgives a political untruth, but it does not forgive a conscientious recantation of the foolish mistakes of a generously sympathetic heart. In the generous pity of these three authors for the Bourbon family there was room for the shedding of a tear for Marie-Antoinette and for Louis XVII.
M. de Lamennais hesitated, for a while, over his literary vocation, or at least, over the direction it should take. The solitude in which he had lived, by the sea, had filled his soul with floating dreams, like those beauteous clouds he had often watched with his outward eyes in the depths of the heavens. He was within an ace of writing novels and works of fiction; he did even get so far as to write some poetry, which, of course, he never published. Here are two lines, which entered, as far as I can remember, into a description of scholastic theology—
"Elle avait deux grands yeux stupidement ouverts,
Dont l'un ne voyait pas ou voyait de travers!"
M. de Lamennais then became a religious writer and a philosopher more from force of circumstances than from inclination. His taste, he assured us in his moments of expansion, upon which we look back with respect and pride, would have led him by preference towards that style of poetical prose-writing which Bernardin de Saint-Pierre had made fashionable in Paul et Virginie, and Chateaubriand in René. So he communed with himself and, with the unerring finger of the implacable genius of the born observer, he touched upon the wound of his century—indifference to religious matters. Surely the cry uttered by that gloomy storm-bird, "the gods are departing!" had good reason for startling the pious folk and statesmen of that period! Were not the churches filled with missions and the high roads crowded with missionaries? Was there not the cross of Migné, the miracles of the Prince of Hohenlohe, the apparitions and trances of Martin de Gallardon and others? What, then, could this man mean? M. de Lamennais took, as the motto for his book, these words from the Bible—
"Impius, cum in profundum venerit contemnit."