Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 2

by H. Sutherland Edwards

PORTE AUX POMMES.

It might have been thought that after the death of the Count of Chambord, the Count of Paris, who now became the true heir to the French throne, would have been acknowledged not only by all his relatives, but by the Legitimist party, equally with the Orleanists. But the will by which the Count of Chambord left a large sum of money to two Italian representatives—Count Bardi and the Duke of Parma—without making any mention of the Count of Paris, was yet another indication of the little cordiality felt by the Bourbons of the elder branch for the grandson of Louis Philippe, the great-grandson of Philippe Égalité. The reasons which animated the Countess of Chambord in her opposition to the Count of Paris do not demand long consideration. Possibly she was vexed at the scanty assistance given by the Count of Paris to the head of the family in 1871, and again in 1873; and it is a fact, in any case, that the Count of Paris did not attend the Count of Chambord’s funeral. This abstention was due to the Countess of Chambord’s strange decision that her husband’s foreign relatives should be regarded as nearer to him than his French kinsman, who, moreover, by the Count of Chambord’s death would become the legitimate heir to the French throne. Don Carlos, as representative of the Spanish Bourbons, was, it is true, more nearly related to the Count of Chambord than the Count of Paris as representing the Orleans family, just as much, indeed, as sixth cousins are more nearly related than eighth cousins. But the Bourbon prince who, at the beginning of the last century, ascended the Spanish throne lost, in doing so, his character of Frenchman, just as the offshoots from the Spanish Bourbons, on becoming established in Naples and in Parma, lost their Spanish character. It is well, even in connection with such lofty subjects as the divine right to rule, not to lose sight of practical considerations; and one can imagine no possible combination of circumstances under which the French would consent to be ruled either by a Spaniard or by an Italian. To argue in the present day that a foreign prince who is descended from Louis XIV. has therefore a better title to reign in France than a French prince who can only boast of a collateral relationship with that sovereign, but who is himself the grandson of a French king, is to attach strange importance to a mere theory spun to suit the occasion. Such a theory may have harmonised with the Countess of Chambord’s private prejudices. But to state it is enough to show its weakness. If for one moment, and simply to conform to the arbitrary arrangements of a funeral pageant, the Count of Paris could have recognised it, he would by doing so have shown himself unworthy of all confidence. It is better for him to have broken altogether with the unrecognised claimants and[{306}] dispossessed occupiers of foreign thrones than to remain their ally at the cost of such sacrifices as were demanded from him. King Louis Philippe, in his last instructions to his grandson, laid no stress upon the principle of descent, but called upon him to be above all “of his own time and of France.” The shadowy potentates to whom the Count of Paris was invited to submit himself at Frohsdorf are as far removed from France by their nationality as from the present time by their ideas.

The fault, however, charged against the Count of Paris by the late Count of Chambord is as nothing compared to the offence of which his grandfather, Louis Philippe, is held to have been guilty; which, again, cannot be likened for atrocity to the crime committed by Louis Philippe’s father, Philippe Égalité.

When, in 1873, there was a prospect of a Royalist restoration, the Count of Paris, according to the Countess of Chambord, speaking as with the voice of her late husband, did not give the Count the support which he had a right to expect; and the Count of Chambord seems, in particular, to have complained to the Countess that the Count of Paris had refused to accept the white flag—“the flag of Ivry,” as the Count of Chambord called it, unmindful, it would seem, of the fact that Ivry was a victory gained by one French army over another, and by Protestants over Catholics. The important point, however, in the eyes of the Count of Chambord, was that the grandson of Louis Philippe, the great-grandson of Philippe Égalité, stuck to the Revolutionary tricolour, and declined to return to the flag of the ancient monarchy. The grandson of a usurper and great-grandson of a regicide could have no claim, then, either in the past or in the present, to represent a line of kings towards which the grandfather had played the part of a betrayer and the great-grandfather that of a murderer.

If the Count of Chambord’s widow, remembering her husband’s last instructions, disavows Louis Philippe’s grandson, his mother, the Duchess of Berry, disavowed Louis Philippe, and even organised against him an armed rebellion. Thus, while Louis Philippe was hated as an enemy both by the grandfather and by the mother of the Count of Chambord, his father was worse than the enemy of the Count of Chambord’s great-uncle, Louis XVI. The Count of Chambord must naturally have inherited something of the horror and hatred with which the Orleans family, in one or other of its members, was regarded successively by Louis XVI., Charles X., and the Count’s own mother, the Duchess of Berry.[{307}]

CHAPTER XLIII.
THE PARIS RIVER AND PARIS COMMERCE.

The Society of the Water-Merchants of Paris—The Navigation of the Seine—The Paris Slaughter-Houses—Records of Famine in France—The Lot of the French Peasant in the Last Century—The Paris Food Supply.

THE navigation of the Seine has had remarkable effects on the commerce, and even the municipal government, of the great city traversed by this stream. Turning to the annals of the middle ages, one finds that nearly all the powerful towns seated on rivers profited by their position to secure as much as possible exclusive rights of navigation. With this view, the citizens showed themselves as eager and as voracious as the nobility. Take, for instance, the towns of Cologne or of Mayence, which in mediæval times forced all the boats passing down the Rhine to stop for three days and allow the inhabitants to purchase from their cargo whatever merchandise seemed desirable.