“I fear you will think I have suddenly grown servile to the gauds and shows of mere royalty. I ask myself if that be so—I think not. Surely it is a higher sense of greatness which has been impressed on me by the pageant of to-day I feel as if there were brought vividly before me the majesty of France, through the representation of the ruler she has crowned.
“I feel also as if there, in that hall, I found a refuge from all the warring contests in which no two seem to me in agreement as to the sort of government to be established in place of the present. The ‘Liberty’ clamoured for by one would cut the throat of the ‘Liberty’ worshipped by another.
“I see a thousand phantom forms of LIBERTY—but only one living symbol of ORDER—that which spoke from a throne to-day.”
Isaura left her letter uncompleted. On the following Monday she was present at a crowded soiree given by M. Louvier. Among the guests were some of the most eminent leaders of the Opposition, including that vivacious master of sharp sayings, M. P———-, whom Savarin entitled “the French Sheridan;” if laws could be framed in epigrams he would be also the French Solon.
There, too, was Victor de Mauleon, regarded by the Republican party with equal admiration and distrust. For the distrust, he himself pleasantly accounted in talk with Savarin.
“How can I expect to be trusted? I represent ‘Common Sense;’ every Parisian likes Common Sense in print, and cries ‘Je suis trahi’ when Common Sense is to be put into action.”
A group of admiring listeners had collected round one (perhaps the most brilliant) of those oratorical lawyers by whom, in France, the respect for all laws has been so often talked away: he was speaking of the Saturday’s ceremonial with eloquent indignation. It was a mockery to France to talk of her placing Liberty under the protection of the Empire.
There was a flagrant token of the military force under which civil freedom was held in the very dress of the Emperor and his insignificant son: the first in the uniform of a General of Division; the second, forsooth, in that of a sous-lieutenant. The other liberal chiefs chimed in: “The army,” said one, “was an absurd expense; it must be put down:” “The world was grown too civilised for war,” said another: “The Empress was priest-ridden,” said a third: “Churches might be tolerated; Voltaire built a church, but a church simply to the God of Nature, not of priestcraft,”—and so on.
Isaura, whom any sneer at religion pained and revolted, here turned away from the orators to whom she had before been listening with earnest attention, and her eyes fell on the countenance of De Mauleon, who was seated opposite.
The countenance startled her, its expression was so angrily scornful; that expression, however, vanished at once as De Mauleon’s eyes met her own, and drawing his chair near to her, he said, smiling: “Your look tells me that I almost frightened you by the ill-bred frankness with which my face must have betrayed my anger, at hearing such imbecile twaddle from men who aspire to govern our turbulent France. You remember that after Lisbon was destroyed by an earthquake a quack advertised ‘pills against earthquakes.’ These messieurs are not so cunning as the quack; he did not name the ingredients of his pills.”