Perhaps our readers will be curious to know how, after the lapse of twenty-two years, the French press appreciated this event, which contained something both fatal and providential in it, and happened at the moment when a new king was trying to found a new dynasty on the soil of France, a country ever rebellious against dynasties. The news was only known in Paris on 1 August. We will open a newspaper which we had sent for for another purpose, and we there read the article we are about to place before our readers. The paper is the Constitutionnel; we do not know by whom the article is written, but it seems a good one.
"PARIS, 1 August
"The son of Napoleon is dead. This news, which had been long expected, has produced in Paris a sorrowful but calm sensation. So obscure an end to a life which gave promise of a splendid destiny, a pale, last ray of vast glory, such as that which has just died out, affords a melancholy subject for meditation! The people will mourn deeply and seriously, for it is in the people especially that the memories of Imperial glory have left enduring traces.
"The details of the last moments of Napoleon's son are still wanting to us; his death has been surrounded by mystery, as was his life. We are, however, assured that he saw the approach of death with a fortitude worthy of his father. When he realised that the fatal hour had come, he disposed of the few remaining worldly goods which he had left, in conformity with the wishes previously expressed by the Emperor of the French, in favour of young Louis-Napoleon, son of the ex-King of Holland, who fought in the ranks of the last defenders of Italian liberty. We understand that a letter written by the illustrious dying man to inform his cousin of the bequest contains evidence of the troubles which poisoned and, no doubt, shortened his existence.
"It must indeed have been a bitter one! Tom away from the cradle, from his country and his family, to be confined in a sumptuous prison; deprived of guidance at the age when his mind had much need of direction; submitted to tyrannical etiquette; a stranger in the midst of a Court, which beset him with doubtful loyalty, to whom could he confide if not in the watchful attendants commissioned to deceive him, perhaps to corrupt him? From whom could he obtain information of what he most wanted to know—of his fate, his future, his duties? His tutors, we are assured, left him for a long time in ignorance of his father's history! If the few friends he had been allowed to meet are to be believed, the young Napoleon had been endowed by nature with an upright mind and a generous heart; barren gifts, which only served to make his loneliness more crushing and death a welcome boon! His life has ended opportunely for the honour of the name he bore: he will not have dragged that great name through a long time of inaction; he will not have dishonoured it in the service of politics, of courts or of party intrigues; he will not have played the ridiculous and odious rôle of a pretender, and history will not have to reproach him with having been a scourge to his country.
"The young Napoleon has, in the hands of Austria, been both an object of terror to herself and a bugbear to the France of the Restoration. His name alone, uttered by M. de Metternich, would have made Louis XVIII. and Charles X. tremble, and been sufficient to repulse every attempt that was contrary to Austrian politics; and yet, prudence would never have let them realise the menace contained in such a name. Such menace would, perhaps, not have been without effect, even after the Revolution of 1830, on the statesmen who have controlled our politics, although it would not have been more serious now than at any other period.
"Austria, therefore, is delivered from her fears, and robbed of the instrument of trouble which she had at her disposal against us.
"Napoleon II. had, in France, at least, a number of partisans, if not exactly a party. It is a heritage factions will dispute over amongst themselves and with the government, a heritage which will remain to those who know best how to rally the popular masses to a sense of the true interests of the country."
The rest of the paper contained a manifesto from the English press, telegraphic despatches about Don Pedro's expedition and an analysis of Mademoiselle de Liron—a novel by M. E. J. Deléchuze.
[BOOK VI]
[CHAPTER I]
Lucerne—The lion of August 10—M. de Chateaubriand's fowls—Reichenau —A picture by Conder—Letter to M. le duc d'Orléans—A walk in the park of Arenenberg