‘On revient toujours.’”
“‘A ses premières amours,’”
said she, finishing; while with a smile, half playful, half sad, she turned toward the window, and I retired noiselessly, and without an adieu.
Heigho! how nervous and irritable I feel! The very sight of that handsome barouche that has driven from the hôtel, with its beautiful occupant lying listlessly back among the cushions, has set my heart a-beating far far too hurriedly. How is it that the laws that govern material nature are so inoperative in ours, and that a heart that never felt can make another feel? Heaven knows! It is not love; even my first passion, perhaps, little merited the name: but now, reading her as worldliness as taught roe to do-seeing how little relation exists between attractions and fascinations of the very highest order and any real sentiment, any true feeling—knowing how “Life” is her idol, how in that one idea is comprised all that vanity, self-love, false pride, and passion can form,—how is it that she, whom I recognise thus, that she can move me? There is nothing so like a battle as a sham fight in a review.
CHAPTER II.
I must leave Paris at once. The weather is intolerably hot; the leaves that were green ten days ago already are shewing symptoms of the sear and yellow. Is it in compliment to the august inhabitant of the palace that the garden is so empressé to turn its coat? Shame on my ingratitude to say so! for I find that his Majesty has sent me a card of invitation to dine on Friday next. Another reason for a hurried departure! Of all moderate endurances, I know of none to compare with a dinner at the Tuileries. “Stay!—halt!” cries Memory; “I’ll tell you of one worse again—a dinner at Neuilly!”
The former is sure to include a certain number of distinguished and remarkable men, who, even under the chill and restraint of a royal entertainment, venture now and then on some few words that supply the void where conversation should be. At Neuilly it is strictly a family party, where, whatever ease may be felt by the illustrious hosts, the guests have none of it. Juvenal quaintly asks, If that can be a battle where you strike and I am beaten? so one is tempted to inquire, If that can be called society where a royal personage talks rapidly for hours, and the listener must not even look dissent? The King of the French is unquestionably a great man, but not greater in any thing than in the complete mystification in which he has succeeded in enveloping his real character, mingling up together elements so strange, so incongruous, and seemingly inconsistent, that the actual direction or object of any political move he has ever made, will always bear a double appreciation. The haughty monarch is the citizen king; the wily and secret politician, the most free-spoken and candid of men: the most cautious in an intrigue, the very rashest in action. How is it possible to divine the meaning, or guess the wishes, of one whose nature seems so Protean?
His foreign policy is, however, the master-stroke of his genius,—the cunning game by which he has conciliated the party of popular institutions and beguiled the friends of absolutism, delighting Tom Buncombe and winning praise from Nicholas. Like all clever men who are vain of their cleverness, he has always been fond of employing agents of inferior capacity, but of unquestionable devotion to his interests. What small intelligences—to use a phrase more French than English—were the greater number of the French ministers and secretaries I have met accredited to foreign courts! I remember Talleyrand’s observation, on the remark being made, was, “His Majesty always keeps the trumps in his own hand.” Though, to be sure, he himself was an evidence to the contrary—a “trump” led boldly out, the first card played!
So well did that subtle politician comprehend the future turn events must take, that on hearing, at two o’clock in the morning, that his Royal Highness the Duc d’Orléans had consented to assume the crown, he exclaimed, “And I am now ambassador at St. James’s!” It must have been what the Londoners call “good fun” to have lived in the days of the Empire, when all manner of rapid elevations occurred on every hand. The commis of yesterday, the special envoy to-day; a week ago a corporal, and now gazetted an officer, with the cross of the Legion—on the grande route, to become a general. A General, why not a Marshal of France—ay, or a King?
We have seen something of this kind in Belgium within a few years back—on a small scale, it is true. What strange ingredients did the Revolution throw up to the surface! what a mass of noisy, turbulent, self-opinionated incapables, who, because they had led a rabble at the Porte de Flandre, thought they could conduct the march of an army! And the statesmen!—good lack! the miserable penny-a-liners of the “Indépendant” and the “Lion Beige,” that admirable symbol of the land, who carries his tail between his legs. The really able, and, I believe, honest men, were soon overwhelmed by the influence of the priest party—the vultures who watched the fight from afar, and at last descended to take all the spoils of the victory.