XX
LOUIS NAPOLEON’S FLIGHT FROM PRISON
MY godmother Camille, of whom I was very fond, and whom I used to visit every Thursday at the glass manufactory at Saint-Gobain—not to amuse myself, but to talk with her, for she conversed with me on serious subjects—had left Chauny two years previously, but she came every two or three months to pass a week with us. She lived at Ham, where my godfather was the manager of a sugar-refinery. She was very intimate with Prince Louis Napoleon, and my grandfather joked with her frequently about the honour of having inspired a Napoleon—and, he doubted not, a future Emperor—with “a sentiment” for her, and he went, moreover, himself to assure the Pretender about his hope of seeing him an Emperor some day.
It annoyed my grandfather to hear that this Bonaparte was called a socialist. But he declared that it could not be—it was a calumny.
My godmother repeated to my grandfather something that the “Prince” had said to her before he wrote it, and which she thought admirable:
“With the name I bear, I must have either the gloom of a prison-cell, or the light of power.”
“We shall have him one day for Emperor,” said my grandfather. It was from his lips that I heard for the first time: “We shall have Napoleon,” which was so often repeated later.
“But the Republic is his ideal,” said my godmother, who knew by heart everything that Louis Napoleon wrote. “He does not know whether France is ‘republican or not, but he will aid the people, if he is called to power, to find a governmental form embodying the principles of the Revolution.’ Those are his exact words,” said my godmother. She added: “He formulates his ambition thus:
“‘I wish to group around my name the partisans of the People’s Sovereignty.’”
“You are crazy about your Prince, Camille,” answered my grandmother, “and you see him with the prestige of all you feel for his misfortunes—as a prisoner, coupled with the greatness of his name. But was there ever a more ridiculous pretender? Remember his rash attempt at Boulogne, with his three-cornered hat, the sword of Austerlitz, and the tamed eagle. He is grotesque.”
If my father came while Camille was with us he was much amused at my grandfather’s exasperation when he and Camille would declare that Louis Napoleon was more of a socialist than themselves, for had he not written: