Do I need to add, dear readers, that this new work is the most strictly historical of any that I have undertaken, and was conceived, composed and written in pursuance of a great object; that, namely, of obtaining the perusal of ten volumes of history under the guise of ten volumes of romance? The events related in "The Whites and the Blues" are the most important of our age; and it is essential that our people, who have played such a leading rôle for the last seventy years in the affairs of Europe, and who are called upon to play a still greater part, should know these grand pages of our annals as they deserve to be known.
Then when restorations follow revolutions, and revolutions follow restorations, when each party, at the moment of its elevation, raises statues to those who represent it—statues destined to be cast down by the opposite party, only to give place to others—feeble minds and short-sighted visions falter before all these great men of the moment, who become traitors, and whom their contemporaries find no more difficulty in dishonoring than they did in exalting. It is therefore well for a keener eye and a more impartial mind to say: "This is plaster and this is marble; this is lead and this gold."
There are statues which are thrown from their pedestals and which rise again of themselves. There are, on the contrary, those which fall of themselves and which are shattered in their fall. Mirabeau, after having been carried to the Pantheon with great pomp, has no statue to-day. Louis XVI., after being tossed into the common ditch, has his memorial chapel.
Perhaps posterity has been rather severe with Mirabeau, and equally lenient toward Louis XVI., but we must bow alike before its severity and its indulgence. And yet, without envying Louis XVI. his memorial chapel, we would like to see a statue erected to Mirabeau. The more guilty of the two, in our opinion, was not he who sold but he who bought.
[CHAPTER I]
SAINT-JEAN-D'ACRE
On the 7th of April, 1799, the promontory on which Saint-Jean-d'Acre is built, the ancient Ptolemais, seemed to be wrapped in as much thunder and lightning as was Mount Sinai on the day when the Lord appeared to Moses from the burning bush.