When the campaign was over he remained on active service, until the proscription that fell on his brother had also an influence upon his fate, and obliged him to retire into private life. He had been a great favourite in Parisian society; men appreciated his wit, and women his chivalrous devotion to them. It is not an indiscretion to say that his love affairs with the Princesse de Sagan were at one time a general subject of conversation. He was always a welcome guest at a dinner table, and a conspicuous figure in the hunting field, and succeeded better than any of his uncles and cousins in winning for himself the sympathies even of Republicans, who secretly feared his popularity among the army and in his own regiment.
He was a born soldier, with all the intrepidity of the fighter who never shirks a battlefield. People liked him and respected him, because with all the sterling qualities of his elder brother, the Comte de Paris, he had none of the latter’s apathy. Perhaps, if he had not been a younger son, he might have made an effort to win back the throne for his race. But reared in principles of absolute submission to the head of his house, he never criticised anything his elders did, and though I have known him intimately and well, the only time when I have heard him talk politics was one afternoon at his little country home of St. Firmin on the borders of the Forest of Chantilly, when the conversation turned on the trial of Marshal Bazaine, over which the Duc d’Aumale had presided. The Duc de Chartres happened to be in a communicative mood, and expressed the opinion that he thought it had been a mistake on the part of his uncle to have accepted the task of judging the unfortunate commander-in-chief of the army of Metz. He said that a member of the house of Bourbon ought not to have consented to appear before the public as a kind of avenger of wrongs in which politics had had so great a part. And he added these significant words: “We Orleans, more than even members of other royal houses, ought to avoid showing ourselves as arbiters of another man’s fate. It is quite enough to have to carry into history the stigma that attaches to us ever since the trial of Louis XVI.”
I looked up to him rather in astonishment.
“Yes,” he said, “I understand what you mean, and that you are surprised to hear me talk in the way I do, but you must not think that I have not often given a thought to that fatal act of my ancestor, when he helped an ungrateful nation to murder its legitimate King. You see, I belong to another generation than the one which saw all those horrors, and I cannot consider them without deep regret and shame. I can understand a good many things—cruelty, ambition, ingratitude, wickedness even—I cannot admit crimes against nature, and the vote of the Duc d’Orleans belonged to that kind of crime. Beside it, the so-called—because I cannot look at it in that light since it was the result of the free choice of a great nation—the so-called usurpation of my grandfather was a small matter. It only offended and sinned against a principle, it did not offend the natural feelings that ought always to be sacred to every man, no matter what position he holds in life. And when I reflect on the trial of Marshal Bazaine, I cannot help thinking that my uncle would have been better advised if he had kept aloof, and left to others the task of asking from that victim of his ambition or of circumstances—which it was, it is not for me to say—an account of his actions and an explanation of his deeds.”
The Duc de Chartres had married his cousin, the daughter of the Prince de Joinville and of a Brazilian Princess. His wife was a very distinguished woman, who by her tact and her cleverness made herself universally liked. They had several children, and their eldest daughter, the Princess Marie, who was married to a Prince belonging to the Royal House of Denmark, played at one time rather an important part in European politics, thanks to the influence which she exercised over the mind of the Emperor Alexander III. of Russia. She died young, and the Duc did not survive her long. The Duchesse de Chartres, widowed and past middle age, now spends her time in her little home at St. Firmin, having sold the house in the Rue Jean Goujon, where she had lived with her husband, and which at one time was a centre of reunion for a certain portion of Paris society. The only members of the family of Orleans whom one can meet in the salons of the French aristocracy are the Duc and the Duchesse de Vendôme, who live at Neuilly, and go about a good deal. The Comtesse de Paris comes sometimes to the capital, but never stays there longer than for a few days, spending the rest of her time either in her palace of Villamanrique in Spain, or in her castle of Randan, near Vichy, where her life is entirely given up to practices of devotion and good deeds. All her daughters are married. Tragedy has broken the life of her eldest daughter, Queen Amélie of Portugal, but the Comtesse is placid by nature, possessing something of the fatalism that ruled the Comte de Paris, and that never disputes the decrees of a Providence it has learned to bless whether it sends good or evil to mankind.
The future of the Orleans family, that promised to become so important on returning to France after the fall of the Empire, proved to be quite insignificant in so far as the destiny of France was concerned. The Orleans had neither the courage nor the energy, nor especially the unselfishness, to try to win back for themselves the position which they had lost. They never had enough initiative, much less determination to brave public opinion, and eat humble pie before the Comte de Chambord. These things alone could have put them back on the height whence they had fallen. But the descendants of Louis Philippe never could make up their minds to any resolution, whether grave or frivolous. They always professed the fallacious opinion that the will of a nation ought to be respected, no matter how or in what way expressed. France was for them a master before whose decrees they never for one moment felt the temptation to rebel. They accepted those decrees so well that now no one dreams of looking upon them as pretenders to anything, be it a throne, or simply the wish to have their word considered at times when the vital interests of their country are at stake. They always talk, or rather allow their followers to talk, of their duties, of their fidelity to the principles that made their ancestors great, but in reality they have not the slightest wish to put forward their persons in order to secure to their race anything beyond the millions which they already possess. The Comte de Paris was a dreamer; the Duc de Nemours a saint; the Duc de Chartres a soldier, never looking beyond the field of a soldier’s activity; the Duc d’Orleans a man of the world; the Duc d’Aumale a scholar, immersed in his books and his artistic tastes. Among them all a man was wanted, and a King could not be found.
CHAPTER XII
The Duc d’Aumale and Chantilly
The Duc d’Aumale was certainly the one member of the Orleans family who made the most friends for himself, and had the greatest number of admirers. Whether this was due to his personal merits, or to the millions which he inherited from the last Prince of Condé, it is not for me to say. He had plenty to give to others; it is but natural that these others praised him in the hope he would give them a little more than he had intended. He courted popularity, made sacrifices of pride, principles, and sometimes personal affections, in order to win it; and he succeeded in a certain sense, at least from the point of view of those who measure praise and blame according to the social standing of the person to whom they deal it. He was more learned than clever, more clever than brilliant; his wit was inferior to his intelligence, but he had cunning, a singular way of at once finding his personal advantage out of an entangled situation. He put his own wellbeing beyond everything else, and cared in reality only for his comforts and being left alone to lead an easy, indolent existence among his books, his pictures, his flowers, his manuscripts, all the magnificences of the old home of the Condés. This he had restored with care and a singular artistic knowledge, and had succeeded in endowing it with some of its past glories.
He was a perfect host, even though, perhaps, a little dull; and one enjoyed a first visit to Chantilly more than a second, on account of the necessity it entailed to perform with its master what is called “le tour du propriétaire,” to admire what he admired, to look only upon what he showed you himself, and not to be allowed to roam at will in the avenues of the park, or in the vast halls full of lovely things, and of remembrances of the past. One would have liked to spend hours contemplating the wonders of art gathered under that roof, to examine the sword of the Great Condé, or to look through the quantity of interesting documents, historical and otherwise, that were kept in businesslike order in the great cupboards of the long library, whose windows opened on the meadows, where probably the lovely Madame de Longueville had roamed together with one or other of her numerous admirers.
This solitary place required silence rather than the casual remarks which echoed through its corridors as the motley crowd generally met at the Sunday breakfasts which the Duc liked to give. These breakfasts were quite a feature in the life of the master of this palace, and the queerest assemblage of people could be met at them—Academicians, colleagues of the Duc, military men, foreigners, scientists, diplomats, men of letters and men of the world, ladies of the highest rank and actresses. He made no distinctions, and never cared whether he brought together people who agreed with each other or not. There was no link between his guests, who forgot all about those who had been their companions of the afternoon at Chantilly after that afternoon was over; they never chatted together, and perhaps their host did not care for them to do so. He liked to concentrate around his own person the attention of those who had partaken of his hospitality; he would have felt offended had he caught them talking to each other, and not listening exclusively to himself. He was full of attention to those whom he guessed were admirers of his deeds or works, and took a deal of trouble to show to self-made people that he esteemed them more than those who were his equal in birth if not in rank. For instance, I remember one day when having at lunch the Duchesse de Noailles and Madame Cuvillier Fleury, the widow of his old tutor, he put the latter on his right and the Duchesse on his left. The fact was instantly noticed by a few Academicians, of what I would call the inferior ranks of the Academy, and instantly it was remarked what a kind, noble and attentive nature was Henri d’Orleans, Duc d’Aumale, who thus ignored the high standing of one of the noblest amongst the noble Duchesses of France in order to show gratitude to the relict of the man to whom he owed his moral training. This action of the Duke was just one of these things he was so fond of doing, in order to provoke admiration. He liked to forget the exclusive traditions of his race whenever he thought that it would ensure for him the sympathies of the mob; that mob which his family had ever courted, to which it owed in part its fame and its successes, and which despised it for the very facility with which it bowed down licking the very dust. Among all the opportunist Orleans the Duc d’Aumale was foremost.