Indeed, if you knew all that happens to me, instead of blaming me for being too political, you would be very thankful for the care and pains I bestow in endeavouring to make a digest of all I hear for your advantage, containing as few contradictions as possible. And truly this is no easy matter, not only from the contradictory nature of the information I receive, but from some varying weaknesses in my own nature, which sometimes put me in the very disagreeable predicament of doubting if what is right be right, and if what is wrong be wrong.
When I came here, I was a thorough unequivocating legitimatist, and felt quite ready and willing to buckle on armour against any who should doubt that a man once a king was always a king—that once crowned according to law, he could not be uncrowned according to mob—or that a man's eldest son was his rightful heir.
But, oh! these doctrinaires! They have such a way of proving that if they are not quite right, at least everybody else is a great deal more wrong: and then they talk so prettily of England and our revolution, and our glorious constitution—and the miseries of anarchy—and the advantages of letting things remain quietly as they are, till, as I said before, I begin to doubt what is right and what is wrong.
There is one point, however, on which we agree wholly and heartily; and it is this perhaps that has been the means of softening my heart thus towards them. The doctrinaires shudder at the name of a republic. This is not because their own party is regal, but is evidently the result of the experience which they and their fathers have had from the tremendous experiment which has once already been made in the country.
"You will never know the full value of your constitution till you have lost it," said a doctrinaire to me the other evening, at the house of the beautiful Princess B——, formerly an energetic propagandiste, but now a very devoted doctrinaire,—"you will never know how beneficial is its influence on every hour of your lives, till your Mr. O'Connell has managed to arrange a republic for you: and when you have tasted that for about three months, you will make good and faithful subjects to the next king that Heaven shall bestow upon you. You know how devoted all France was to the Emperor, though the police was somewhat tight, and the conscriptions heavy: but he had saved us from a republic, and we adored him. For a few days, or rather hours, we were threatened again, five years ago, by the same terrible apparition: the result is, that four millions of armed men stand ready to protect the prince who chased it. Were it to appear a third time—which Heaven forbid!—you may depend upon it that the monarch who should next ascend the throne of France might play at le jeu de quilles with his subjects, and no one be found to complain."
LETTER XLI.
M. Dupré.—His Drawings in Greece.—L'Eglise des Carmes.—M. Vinchon's Picture of the National Convention.—Léopold Robert's Fishermen.—Reported cause of his Suicide.—Roman Catholic Religion.—Mr. Daniel O'Connell.
We went the other morning, with Miss C——, a very agreeable countrywoman, who has however passed the greater portion of her life in Paris, to visit the house and atelier of M. Dupré, a young artist who seems to have devoted himself to the study of Greece. Her princes, her peasants, her heavy-eyed beauties, and the bright sky that glows above them,—all the material of her domestic life, and all the picturesque accompaniments of her classic reminiscences, are brought home by this gentleman in a series of spirited and highly-finished drawings, which give decidedly the most lively idea of the country that I have seen produced. Engravings or lithographs from them are, I believe, intended to illustrate a splendid work on this interesting country which is about to be published.
In our way from M. Dupré's house, in which was this collection of Greek drawings, to his atelier—where he was kind enough to show us a large picture recently commenced—we entered that fatal "Eglise des Carmes," where the most hideous massacre of the first revolution took place. A large tree that stands beside it is pointed out as having been sought as a shelter—alas! how vainly!—by the unhappy priests, who were shot, sabred, and dragged from its branches by dozens. A thousand terrible recollections are suggested by the interior of the building, aided by the popular traditions attached to it, unequalled in atrocity even in the history of that time of horror.