The fourth and last procession, that of the 3d of May, was the most important of all. It was to close by an expiatory ceremony in honor of Louis XVI., by the laying and benediction of the corner-stone of the monument voted by the Chamber of 1815, and which still awaited its foundation. It is at the very place where the unfortunate sovereign had been executed that the monument was to be constructed. The cortege left Notre-Dame and directed its course first to the Church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois. The Chamber of Peers, the Chamber of Deputies, all the functionaries, all the authorities of the Department of the Seine, followed the King and Dauphin, who advanced, accompanied by the ministers, the marshals, the officers of their houses, cordons bleus, cordons rouges. Never since the end of the old regime had such a multitude of priests been seen defiling through the streets of Paris. The pupils of all the seminaries, the almoners of all the colleges, the priests of all the parishes and all the chapels, stretched out in an endless double line, at the end of which appeared the Nuncio of the Pope, Cardinals de Latil, de Croi, and de La Fare, the Archbishop of Paris, and a crowd of prelates. After the station of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, there was a second at Saint-Roch, then a third and last at the Assumption. When the special prayers of the close of the jubilee had been said at this last parish, the immense cortege resumed its march to the place where Louis XVI. had brought his head to the sacrilegious scaffold. The day chosen for the expiatory solemnity was the 3d of May, the anniversary of the return of Louis XVIII. to Paris in 1814, and then a political idea was connected with the religious ceremony. A vast pavilion surmounted by a cross hung with draperies in violet velvet, and enclosing an altar, which was reached on four sides by four stairways of ten steps each, occupied the very place where, the 10th of January, 1793, the scaffold of the Martyr-King had been erected, in the middle of the Place called successively the Place Louis XV. and the Place de La Concorde, and which was thenceforth to be called the Place Louis XVI.
The account in the MONITEUR says:—
"A first salvo of artillery announced the arrival of the procession. It presented as imposing a tableau as could be contemplated. This old French nation—the heir of its sixty kings at the head—marched, preceded by the gifts made by Charlemagne to the Church of Paris, and the religious trophies that Saint Louis brought from the holy places. The priests ascend to the altar. Three times in succession they raise to heaven the cry for pardon and pity. All the spectators fall upon their knees. A profound, absolute silence reigns about the altar and over all the Place; a common sorrow overwhelms the people; the King's eyes are filled with tears."
In this multitude the absence of the Dauphiness, the daughter of Louis XVI., is remarked. The Orphan of the Temple had made it a law for herself never to cross the place where her father had perished. She went to the expiatory chapel of the Rue d'Anjou-Saint-Honore, to pass in prayer the time of the ceremony.
M. de Vaulabelle makes this curious comparison:—
"Behind Charles X. there knelt his Grand Chamberlain, Prince Talleyrand, covered with gleaming embroideries, orders, and cordons. It was the ecclesiastical dignitary whom Paris had beheld celebrating the Mass of the Federation on the Champ-de-Mars, the wedded prelate who, as Minister of the Directory, had for some years observed as a national festival the anniversary of this same execution, now the subject of so many tears."
Religious people rejoiced at the ceremony that was celebrated; but the Voltairians and the enemies of royalty complained bitterly at the sight of the quays, the streets, the squares of the capital furrowed by long files of priests, chanting psalms and litanies, dragging devout in their suite the King, the two Chambers, the judiciary, the administration, and the army. Yet was it not just that Charles X. should cause an expiatory ceremony to be celebrated at the place where his unfortunate brother had been guillotined? Was not that for a pious sovereign the accomplishment of a sacred duty? It matters not; there were those who reproached him with this homage to the most memorable of misfortunes. They would have forbidden to Charles X. the memory of Louis XVI. Yet a king could hardly be asked to have the sentiments of a conventionnel, of a regicide. In their systematic and bitter opposition, the adversaries of the Restoration imputed to the royal family as a crime its very virtues and its piety.
Charles X. was not unaware of this half-expressed hostility. That evening he wrote to M. Villele, President of the Council of Ministers:—
"In general I have been content with the ceremony and the appearance of the people; but I wish to know the whole truth, and I charge you to see M. Delavau, and to know from him if the reality corresponds to appearances, if there was any talk against the government and the clergy. I wish to know all, and I trust to you to leave me in ignorance of nothing."
M. de Villele was not a flatterer. He responded discreetly, but without concealing the truth:—