"As the château d'Arenenberg is only a league's distance from Constance, I was seized by a great desire to pay my homage at the feet of fallen majesty and to see what remained of a queen in a woman when fate has torn the crown from her head, the sceptre from her hand and the robes from her shoulders; from that queen, moreover, who was the gracious daughter of Joséphine Beauharnais, sister of Eugène, and the diamond in Napoleon's crown.
"I had heard so much of her in my youth as a beauteous and good fairy, most gracious and charitable, from the daughters to whom she had given a dowry, the mothers whose children she had redeemed, and the prisoners for whom she had obtained pardon, that I worshipped her. Add to this, the remembrance of the romances which my sister sang about the queen, which were so impressed on my heart by memory that even now, although it is twenty years since I heard these lines and music, I could repeat both without forgetting a word, and I could jot down the music without transposing a note. These romances about a queen are sung by a queen; a combination which can only be seen in the Thousand and One Nights, and which has remained in my mind like a glad surprise."[1]
I had no letter of introduction to the Comtesse de Saint-Leu; but I hoped that my name was not entirely unknown to her; I had already written at that time Henri III., Christine, Antony, Richard Darlington, Charles III. and La Tour de Nesle.
When I reached Arenenberg, it was too early in the morning to present myself to the queen. I left my card with Madame Parquin, reader to the Comtesse de Saint-Leu, and sister of the noted barrister of that name, and I took advantage of a fine storm which had just risen to go for a sail on the lake. On my return, I found an invitation to dinner awaiting me at the hôtel; then a letter from France had found me out there, an act of cleverness which was a great achievement on the part of the Swiss post: it contained the manuscript ode by Victor Hugo on the death of the King of Rome. I went on foot to the queen's residence and read the letter as I went.
All the details of that gracious hospitality which the queen made me accept for three days can be seen in my Impressions de Voyage. I merely wish to reproduce here a conversation which revealed an odd profession of faith in the present—if it be borne in mind that the present of that time corresponded with September 1832—and a singular forecast of the future.
"A WALK IN THE PARK AT ARENENBERG
"The queen and I took about a hundred steps in silence. I was the first to interrupt it.
"'I believe you have something to tell me, Madame la Comtesse?' I asked.
"'True,' she said, looking at me; 'I wanted to talk to you of Paris. What news was there when you left it?'
"'Much bloodshed in the streets, many wounded in the hospitals, too few prisons and too many prisoners.'
"'You saw the 5th and 6th of June?'
"'Yes, madame.'
"'Pardon, I am perhaps going to be inquisitive; but, from some words which you said yesterday, I believe you are a Republican.'
"I smiled.
"'You are not mistaken, madame; and yet, thanks to the sense and to the colour which the papers representing the party to which I belong and am in sympathy with (though not with all its methods) have given to that word, before accepting the qualification which you give me, I will ask your permission to lay bare my principles before you. To any other woman such a profession would be absurd; but you, Madame la Comtesse, as queen, must have heard so many serious speeches, and, as woman, so many frivolous ones, that I shall not hesitate to tell you at what point I join myself to Republican Socialism and where I am at variance with revolutionary Republicanism.'
"'You are not, then, agreed among yourselves?'
"'We have the same hopes, madame, but the means by which each one of us wishes to act are different. Some talk of chopping off heads and dividing properties; these are ignorant and insane.... You are surprised that I do not employ a stronger term by which to designate them ... it is unnecessary: they are neither afraid nor to be feared; they think themselves strongly in advance and are totally behind the times; they date from 1793 and we are in 1832. Louis-Philippe's government makes a show of being in great fear of them, and would be much vexed if they did not exist; for their theories are the quiver from whence they derive their weapons. These are not Republicans, they are believers in a commonwealth. Others there are who forget that France is the oldest sister among the nations, who do not remember that her past is rich with traditions, and go searching about among the constitutions of Switzerland and England and America for that one which shall be most applicable to our country. They are dreamers and Utopians: wrapped up in their cabinet theories, they do not perceive in their imaginary applications that the constitution of a people can only last so long; that it is born but of its geographical situation, that it springs from its nationality and that it is in unison with its customs. The result is that as no two people under heaven have the same geographical position or have identical national characteristics and habits, the more perfect a constitution is, the more individual it is and the less, consequently, is it applicable to another locality than that which gave it birth. These people are not any longer Republicans but Republicists. Others there are who think that an opinion only means a light blue silk coat, a large lappelled waistcoat and a flowing tie and pointed hat: they are the parodists and the brayers. These excite riots, but take good care to keep out of them; they erect barricades and leave others to get killed behind them; they compromise their friends and hide themselves thoroughly as though they themselves were the compromised. These are not Republicans, they are Republiquets! But there are others, madame, to whom the honour of France is sacred, and not to be touched; to whom a promise is a sacred engagement which they will not suffer to be broken by either king or people; a noble and immense fraternity which extends to every country that is suffering, every nation that is waking up; these have shed their blood in Belgium, Italy and Poland, and returned to be killed or captured at the Cloître Saint-Merry: they, madame, are Puritans and martyrs. A day will come when not only will the captives be released from prisons but when the bodies of the dead will be looked for in order to raise tombstones above them. The only wrong they can be accused of is of having been in advance of their age, and been born thirty years too soon. These, madame, are the true Republicans.'
"'I have no need to ask you,' the queen said to me; 'you belong to that party.'
"'Alas! madame,' I replied, 'I cannot wholly boast of that honour.... Certainly, all my sympathies are with them; but, instead of letting myself be carried away by my feelings, I have appealed to my reason; I want to do for politics what Faust did for science: go down and touch the bottom. I was for a year plunged in the depths of the past; I entered it with instinctive opinion, I left it from reasoned-out conviction. I saw that the revolution of 1830 had brought us a step forward, it is true, but that it had simply led us from the aristocratic monarchy to the bourgeois monarchy, and this bourgeois monarchy was an era which must be exhausted before it could arrive at popular magistracy. Henceforth, madame, without doing anything to bring myself nearer to the government from which I had parted company, I have ceased to be an enemy to it; I watch it tranquilly running its period, and I shall probably see the end of it; I applaud what good it does, I protest against the evil; but, at the same time, without either enthusiasm or hatred. I neither accept nor reject it: I submit; I do not look on this as good fortune, but I believe it to be a necessity.'
"'But to hear you talk, there will be no chance for it to change.'
"'No, Madame ... not for long years at least.'
"'Suppose, however, the Duc de Reichstadt had not died, and that he had made an attempt.'
"'I believe he would have failed.'
"'True, I forgot that, with your Republican opinions, Napoleon must appear to you a tyrant.'
"'I beg your pardon, madame, I look at it from another point of view. In my opinion Napoleon was one of those men who were elected from the beginning of time, and have received a providential mission from God. One judges such men not according to their own will-power, which has made them act as they did, but according to the degree of divine wisdom which has inspired them; not according to the work they have done, but according to the result it has produced. When this mission is accomplished, God recalls them, and they believe they are dying, but they really go to render their account.'
"'And, according to you, what was the emperor's mission?'
"'One of liberty.'
"'Do you know that others quite different from me will ask you for proof of your statement?'
"'Even to you will I give it.'
"Proceed! you have no idea how deeply I am interested in all this!'
"'When Napoleon, or, rather, Bonaparte, appeared before our fathers, madame, France was emerging from a revolution, not from a Republic. In one of its fits of political fever it was flung so much in advance of other nations that it had disturbed the world's equilibrium. It needed an Alexander to deal with this Bucephalus, an Androcles with this lion! The 13 Vendémiaire brought them face to face: and the Revolution was beaten. The kings, who should have recognised a brother in the cannon of the rue Saint-Honoré, thought they had an enemy in the dictator of 18 Brumaire; they mistook the Consul of a Republic in him who was already the head of a monarchy, and, insane as they were, instead of keeping him prisoner in a general peace, they made European war upon him. Then Napoleon rallied round him all the youth, courage and intellect of France, and spread them abroad over the world. A reactionist, as far as we were concerned, wherever he passed among other nations he was in a state of advance, and flung the seeds of revolution broadcast: Italy, Prussia, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Belgium, Russia herself, turn by turn, called their sons to the sacred harvest; and he, like a tired labourer after his day's work, folded his arms and watched them gathering it in, from the top of his rock at St. Helena. Then it was that he had a revelation of his divine mission, and there dropped from his lips a prophecy of a future Republican Europe.'
"'Do you believe, then, that, if the Duc de Reichstadt had not died, he would have continued his father's work?'
"'In my opinion, madame, men like Napoleon have neither fathers nor sons: they are born like meteors in the twilight of the dawn, and light up the sky from one horizon to the other as they cross it before they are lost in the twilight of the night.'
"'What you are saying is not consoling to those of his family who preserve some hope.'
"'It is as I say, madame; for we have only given him a place in our heavens on condition that he did not leave any heir on the earth.'
"'But he bequeathed his sword to his son.'
"'The gift was fatal, madame, and God broke the bequest.'
"'You terrify me, for his son, in turn, bequeathed it to mine.'
"'It will be heavy for a simple officer of the Swiss Confederation to bear!'
"'Yes, you are right, for the sword is a sceptre.'
"'Take care lest you go astray, madame! I am, indeed, afraid that you only live in the deceptive and intoxicating atmosphere which exiles carry away with them; the times which continue to march for the rest of the world seem to stand still to outlaws: they still see men and things as they left them. Yet men's faces change and so do the aspect of things; the generation which saw Napoleon pass as he returned from the isle of Elba is dying out daily, madame, and that miraculous march is already more than a memory: it is a historical fact.'
"'So you think it is hopeless for the Napoleon family to return to France?'
"'If I were king, I would recall it to-morrow.'
"'That is not what I meant.'
"'Otherwise, there is very little chance.'
"'What advice would you give to a member of that family who should dream of the resurrection of the glory and power of the Napoleons?'
"'I would counsel him to wake up.'
"'If he persisted in spite of that first advice (which in my opinion is the best), and asked you for a second piece of advice?"
"'Then, madame, I would tell him to obtain the cancelling of his exile, to buy a plot of ground in France and to make use of the immense popularity of his name to get himself elected a deputy, to try by his talent to win over the majority of the Chamber, and to use it to depose Louis-Philippe and become elected king in his stead.'
"'You think,' said the Comtesse de Saint-Leu, with a melancholy smile, 'that all other methods would fail?'
"'I am convinced of it.'
"The comtesse sighed. At that moment the breakfast bell rang and we took our way back to the château, pensive and silent. The comtesse did not address a single word to me as we returned, but, when we reached the door, she stopped, and, looking at me with an indefinable expression of anguish, said—
"'Oh! I wish my son were here and could have heard what you have been saying!'"
[1] Do not let it be forgotten that these lines were written under Louis-Philippe, at the time when the Bonapartes were exiled.