France from Behind the Veil: Fifty Years of Social and Political Life

by Princess Catherine Radziwill

CHAPTER X
The Comte de Chambord and His Party

I had had the honour to be introduced to the Comte de Chambord in Vienna, long before the fall of the Empire had once more put him forward as a Pretender to the throne of France; I had even once or twice been invited to Frohsdorf. These visits always left me a sadder if not a wiser man. They were more like a pilgrimage to an historical monument, than a visit to a living man. Everything seemed dead in that small, unpretentious house, for it could hardly be called a castle, in which the last direct descendant of Louis XIV. was ending his uneventful existence. The walls themselves told you of something that was past and gone, and the inhabitants of this living grave flitted like ghosts of the great traditions that were embodied in them. Everything was dignified, solemn, and hushed. The rooms were small, but full of great things and mementoes, from the large equestrian portrait of Henri IV., to the stately picture of Louis XVI., and the smiling one of unfortunate Marie Antoinette. Lackeys in the blue livery of the House of France, met you at the door, and ushered you into an unpretentious study, where, sitting at a table littered with books and papers, the Comte de Chambord was awaiting his visitors.

He was a most charming man, with grand manners, and much stateliness, but one on whom the many deceptions of his life had left their impress, and aged before his time. He always questioned all those whom he was about France, Paris, and everything that was going on there, taking the liveliest interest in his country, but not understanding it at all, and not realising that the France of after the Revolution was no longer the France which the old Bourbon monarch had ruled. He had strong principles, earnest convictions, was in the full sense of the term a “chevalier sans peur et sans reproche,” but he harboured no illusions as to his possibilities of playing any part in the political life of his country. Had he had any children it is probable that he would have tried to reconcile the traditions of his family with the requirements of modern France, but in presence of the fact that with him the elder branch of the House of Bourbon was coming to an end, he must have had the feeling, though he never owned to it in public, that there was no necessity for him to abdicate any part of the inheritance of his ancestors, in order to benefit the Orleans dynasty who had sent his great-uncle to the scaffold, and had tried to dishonour his own mother. He was too much of a gentleman not to have received with politeness the overtures of his cousins when they made up their minds to come and pay their respects to him at Frohsdorf; but he could not, and would not, affect in regard to them a cordiality which he did not really feel.

The Comte de Chambord was essentially un homme d’autrefois; he never shirked what he considered to be his duty, but who would never give himself the appearance of liking what he did not, or of respecting what did not deserve respect. He had grand manners that savoured of hauteur, and left one in no doubt as to what he thought or believed. Life had been one long disappointment to him, which he had accepted with a true Christian spirit, devoid of the slightest shade of rebellion, and he had picked up his burden, and carried it nobly to the end. He died wrapped in the folds of the old flag which he had refused to renounce, even when a crown would have rewarded him for its abandonment.

At Frohsdorf he led the existence of a country gentleman; there was no semblance of a Pretender about him. As he once said to a visitor who very tactlessly had remarked upon it: “I am not a Pretender, and do not need give myself the appearance of one. I am a principal for those who see in me their King.”

And yet there was much that was kingly in that quiet Austrian domain, to which the Duchesse d’Angoulême had retired towards the end of her earthly career, and which she had bequeathed to her nephew. The big drawing-room where one assembled in the evenings after dinner had a vague appearance of a palace, though the master of it did his best to put his visitors at their ease; but the Comtesse de Chambord sitting in her big arm-chair by a round table, upon which her needlework was laid, or bending over the stitches of her tapestry, looked every inch a sovereign, in spite of the knitted scarf which she often tied round her head, or the extreme simplicity of her black silk dress, made quite high to the throat and finished by a plain white linen collar. The atmosphere of the room, too, was laden with a hush and solemnity that at once made one feel and understand that one was not in the dwelling of a common mortal. These evenings were anything but amusing, though the Comte did his best to keep the ball of conversation rolling; but somehow it was impossible to give it a frivolous turn, or to drive away an impression that everyone in the room was waiting for something. What, of course, was not known; but one was waiting, waiting like the son of the murdered Duc de Berry had been waiting ever since his birth, for the call of his country, which never came, or at least not in the way in which he would have cared to respond to it.

A great deal has been said concerning the attempt at a monarchical restoration that had taken place during the presidency of Marshal MacMahon, and the circumstances which had accompanied it have not been commented upon in a manner favourable to the Comte de Chambord. I was in Versailles at the time it occurred, and from what came to my knowledge I do not think that the real reasons which influenced Henri V., as his adherents called him, have ever been known in their entirety. One has spoken of the flag and of the reluctance of the Pretender to accept the tricolour, but what has never been revealed to this day is that a compromise had been suggested by a clever French politician who had been consulted. Gifted with a singular gift of observation, this politician was very well au courant of the feelings of the different parties which were represented in the National Assembly, and consequently he was in a position to give sound advice to those who had recourse to his experience.

His compromise was that the national flag should remain the tricolour, whilst the King would keep for his own personal emblem the white cravat of his ancestors, that alone would be borne before him on all State ceremonies which were not purely military ones. Strange to say, the Comte de Chambord had at first appeared willing to consent, understanding well, in spite of the prejudices of his earlier education, that he would be obliged to make some concessions to the times before he could hope to be accepted by France as its legitimate King. But, before giving his final adherence to this compromise, he wished to know the opinion of his cousin, the Comte de Paris, and to learn from him whether or not he would, when in due course he succeeded him, ratify this arrangement, and maintain its clauses. The Comte de Paris refused to assume the responsibility of saying yes, and replied evasively that his uncle the Duc d’Aumale ought to be consulted. The latter, however, declared that he could not advise his nephew, but that it would be difficult in his opinion for an Orleans prince to forget that the fate of his dynasty was bound up with that of the tricolour banner, and that to renounce it even in part, was to renounce the glorious principles of the Monarchy of July. This answer, when it became known to the Comte de Chambord, did away with his last hesitation. Urged by the strong dynastic feelings that swayed him, he might have made up his mind to sacrifice some part of his principles to the welfare of his race; but only if this sacrifice would have been of some use to it. Seeing that it would only be interpreted as a desire on his part to put on his head a crown he did not care for, and which in his inmost heart he did not think he had either the strength or the ability to carry or to defend, he gave up every idea of winning it by means of a compromise where, in the best of cases, some of his own personal dignity would have foundered; and after a short stay in France, he returned to his beloved Frohsdorf, to die there a few years later, the last of the Burgraves of his generation.

I had occasion to see him during the short stay which he made at Versailles under an incognito which was only discovered by a very few. We took a walk together in the park, and along the alleys of that garden of Trianon, where the young and frivolous Queen, so brutally murdered by the bloody Revolution which she had neither foreseen nor understood, had walked together with the lovely Lamballe and her train of gay courtiers. Everything looked sad, and deserted, and abandoned; it all spoke of a dead past, and of a departed glory. Suddenly the Comte de Chambord stopped in his walk, and turning to me said those memorable words which I have never forgotten: “What a pity that this place was not entirely destroyed in 1793!”

I looked at him with surprise.