THE COURT OF LOUIS PHILIPPE.[1]
The schoolboy, agape at the tinsel splendour and seeming miracles of a holiday pantomime, longs for a peep behind the pasteboard parapets that limit his view. When the falling curtain puts a period to Clown’s malicious buffoonery and to the blunders of persecuted and long suffering Pantaloon, he marvels as to the subsequent proceedings of the lithe and agile mimes who have so gloriously diverted him. He is tempted to believe that Harlequin sleeps in his motley skin, that Columbine perpetually retains her graceful rose-wreaths and diaphanous muslin. He can hardly realize the relapse of such glittering apparitions into the prosaic humdrum of every-day life, and would gladly penetrate the veil of baize that shrouds from his eager eyes the mirth-provoking crew. Better that he should not. Sadly would his bright illusions fade, sore be his disenchantment, could he recognise the brilliant Harlequin in yon shabby-genteel gentleman issuing from the stage door, and discern her of the twinkling feet rewarding herself with a measure of Barclay for the pirouettes and entrechats that lately ravished his youthful vision.
Not unlike the boy’s desire for a peep behind the scenes, is the popular hankering after glimpses of royal privacy. The concealed is ever the coveted, the forbidden the most desired. Keep an ape under triple lock, and fancy converts her into a sylph; it was the small key, the last of the bunch, that Bluebeard’s bride most longed to use. For the multitude, the Chronicles of Courts have ever a strong and peculiar attraction. With what avidity is swallowed each trivial detail concerning princes and their companions; how anxious are the humble many to obtain an inkling of the every-day life of the great and privileged few, to dive into the recesses of palaces, and contemplate in the relaxation of the domestic circle, those who in public are environed by an imposing barrier of ceremony, pomp, and dignity. In the absence of more precise and pungent particulars, even the bald and fulsome paragraphs of a court circular find eager readers, who learn with strange interest the direction and extent of a king’s afternoon ride, and the exact hour at which some infant principule was borne abroad for an airing. Less meagre and more satisfactory nourishment is afforded to popular inquisitiveness by the writings of those who have lived in the intimacy of courts. Seldom, however, do such appear during the lifetime both of the writer and of the personages to whom they chiefly refer, and when they do they are often valueless, further than as a sop to public curiosity. Truth is rarely told of kings by those who enjoy, seek, or hope aught from their favour. These split upon the reefs of flattery, as a disgraced courtier does upon those of spite and disappointed ambition. And again, history affords us examples of men, who, having, through misconduct or misfortune, lost the countenance of their sovereign, resorted, to regain his good graces, to shameless adulation and servile panegyric.
We do not include in any of the three categories just named, the author of the book before us. We should not be justified in attributing to interested motives his praises of his former patrons; but believe, on the contrary, that, although familiar with courts, he is no mere courtier. Had he been more of one, his fortunes might now be better. From a very early age, Monsieur Appert devoted himself to the prosecution of philanthropic plans and researches, having for their chief objects the amelioration of the condition of the lower classes, the reform of convicts, the education of the army, and that of children who, by the desertion or vices of their parents, are left destitute and unprotected. He has frequently been employed by the French government, and has occupied various important posts. When only one-and-twenty, he was appointed director of a model-school for the army. With reference to his humane schemes, he has published many volumes on the education of soldiers and orphans, on the prisons, schools, and other correctional and benevolent institutions of France. With these we have nothing to do. His present book is of a lighter and more generally interesting character. For ten years he held the office of almoner to the Queen of the French, and to her sister-in-law, Madame Adelaide. The charities of these royal ladies are, as we shall presently show, on a truly princely scale. To this almonership no salary was attached; M. Appert performed its arduous duties gratuitously, and esteemed himself well rewarded by the confidence and good opinion of the illustrious persons he served. His income from other sources was ample; his position honourable, and even distinguished; his friends, true or false, were reckoned by hundreds. But misfortune, swift of foot, overtook him in the zenith of his prosperity. Heavy pecuniary losses, chiefly resulting, as he implies rather than informs us, from ill-advised loans and generous assistance to unworthy persons, impaired his means. Concerning his disgrace at court, he is more explicit. He attributes it to the envy and intrigues of courtiers, against whom, as a class, he bitterly inveighs. That his office was one well calculated to make him enemies, if he conscientiously fulfilled its duties, is made evident by various passages in his book. During ten years that he was in the daily habit of seeing them, and of distributing the greater portion of their charities, the queen and Madame Adelaide, he tells us, never made him the slightest reproach; but, on the contrary, invariably approved his proposals and requests, none of which, he adds, tended to his personal advantage. The king, on various important occasions, showed great confidence in him, and a strong sympathy with his philanthropic labours. Nevertheless, the occult, but strong and persevering influence employed against M. Appert, at last prevailed, and he was removed from the court, laden with costly presents from the royal family, who assured him that they would never forget, but always acknowledge, his long and devoted services. After his disgrace, he sold a villa he possessed at Neuilly, and left Paris, with the intention of founding an experimental colony of released convicts, and of the children of criminals. Whether this experiment was carried out, and how far it succeeded, he does not inform us. He is now travelling in Germany, visiting the schools, prisons, and military institutions, and writing books concerning them. The King of Prussia has received him favourably, and given him every encouragement; the sovereigns of Belgium, Denmark, Bavaria, Saxony, and Wurtemberg, have written him flattering letters, and promised him all facilities and assistance during the stay he proposes making in their respective dominions.
It was at Berlin, in the spring of the present year, that M. Appert completed, after very brief labour, his three volumes of Memoirs. He confesses that they were written in haste, and whilst his mind was preoccupied with the objects of his German tour. This is to be regretted, for the result proves that the work was too quickly done to be well done. The motive of his precipitation is unexplained, and we are not told why it was necessary to complete, by the 15th of March, a book destined to appear but in late autumn. Did the snail-wagen pace of the German buchdruckerei need half a year for the printing of a thousand pages? Surely not; and surely M. Appert might have given himself a little more time,—have indulged us with more detail,—have produced, instead of a hasty outline, a finished picture. His materials were ample, his subject most interesting; he is no novice in the craft of authorship. Besides his opportunities of observation at court, he has enjoyed the acquaintance, in many cases the intimacy, of a vast number of notable persons, military, diplomatic, scientific, literary. Ministers and deputies, peers of France and nobles of the old regime, generals of the empire and distinguished foreigners, were reckoned upon his list of friends; many of them were regular partakers of his periodical dinners at his Paris hotel and his Neuilly villa. It was in his power, we are convinced, to have produced a first-rate book of its class, instead of these hasty and unsatisfactory sketches. Each night, he tells us, especially since the year 1826, when he was first attached to the Orleans family, he wrote down, before retiring to rest, the events of the day. And yet such is his haste to huddle over his work that he cannot wait to receive his voluminous memoranda and correspondence, but trusts entirely to his memory. As far as it goes, this serves him pretty well. “Whilst correcting the last page of these souvenirs, I have received the enormous mass of notes and autograph letters which ought to have been of great utility in the composition of the book; and, on referring to the various documents, I am surprised to find that my memory has served me faithfully upon every subject of interest, and that I have nothing to rectify in what I have written.” Nothing, perhaps, to rectify, but much, we should think, to add. Monsieur Appert’s notes, judging from one or two verbatim specimens, were both copious and minute, and must include very many interesting particulars and anecdotes of the remarkable persons with whom he came in contact during the varied phases of a busy and bustling life. Could he not, without indelicacy or breach of confidence, have given us more of such particulars? His memoirs would have gained in value had he deferred their publication some ten or fifteen years; for then many now living would have disappeared from the scene, and he might have spoken freely of things and persons concerning whom he now deems it prudent or proper to be silent. But personal recollections of the present French court, even when loosely and imperfectly set down, cannot fail to command attention and excite interest. And much that is novel and curious may be culled from M. Appert’s pages, although we regret, as we peruse them, that they should have suffered from too great haste and an overstrained discretion.
M. Appert opens his memoirs in the year 1807, in the prosperous days of Napoleon, whose ardent admirer he is. The earlier chapters of his book, relating to the Empire and the Restoration, have less to recommend them than the later ones, and we shall pass them rapidly over. At the age of fifteen he became a pupil of the imperial school of drawing. Here he carried off the first prizes, was made sub-professor, and hopes were held out to him that he should take a share in the education of the King of Rome. But this was in 1812; the decline of the empire had begun, Russia had given the first blow to Napoleon’s seemingly resistless power;—the hopes of the young professor were never realized. Upon the return of the Bourbons, after Waterloo, he lost his sub-professorship, on account of his well-known Bonapartism; and because, whilst giving a lesson in mathematics, he employed, to mark the curves and angles of a geometrical figure, letters which made up the words “vive l’Empereur!” Soon afterwards, however, he again obtained occupation, although of a far humbler description than that to which he had once aspired. He was employed in the organization of elementary and military schools, upon the plan of mutual instruction. In this he was most successful, and his reports to the Minister of war proved that, in three years, one hundred thousand men might be taught to read, write, and cipher, at the small expense of three hundred thousand francs, or half-a-crown per man. In 1820, although then only twenty-three years old, he was intrusted with the inspection of the regimental schools of the royal guard and first military division; and his connexion with the army brought him acquainted with many of the Bonapartist plots at that time rife. Although often confided in by the conspirators, who were aware of his attachment to the Emperor, he took share in none of their abortive schemes for placing Napoleon the Second on the throne of France; but, nevertheless, he was looked upon with suspicion by the government of the Bourbons. Still, however, he was permitted to become the director, without a salary, of a school established in the prison at Montaigu, appropriated to military criminals. To this prison, in the year 1822, were sent two non-commissioned officers, by name Mathieu and Conderc, implicated in the conspiracy for which General Berton lost his head. Yielding to his sympathies and to the prayers of these two young men, who were bent upon escape or suicide, M. Appert promised to assist their flight. He did so, successfully, and the consequence was his own imprisonment at La Force, where he was placed in the room subsequently occupied by the poet Beranger. Pending his trial, he had for servant a celebrated thief of the name of Doré, of whom Vidocq, the thief-taker, more than once makes mention in his curious books. This Doré, who, for a robber, was a very decent fellow, and who served M. Appert with the greatest punctuality and fidelity, once had the audacity, alone and unassisted, save by his own ingenuity, to stop a diligence full of passengers. With a skill that would have made him an invaluable confederate for a London or Paris kite-flyer, he constructed several excellent men of straw, the size of life, and quite as natural—at least in the dark. These he invested with the needful toggery—neither fresh nor fashionable, we presume, but serving the purpose. Finally, he fastened sticks, intended to represent muskets, to the shoulders of the figures, which he posted in a row against trees bordering the high road. Up came the diligence. “Halt!” shouted Doré, in the voice of a Stentor; “Halt! or my men fire!” The frightened driver pulled up short; conductor and passengers, seeing a row of figures with levelled fire-arms, thought they had fallen into the power of a whole army of banditti, and begged for mercy. Doré came forward in the character of a generous protector, sternly ordered his men to abstain from violence and remain where they were, and collected from the trembling and intimidated passengers their purses, watches, and jewels. “I forbid you to fire,” he shouted to his quaker gang, whilst pocketing the rich tribute; “they make no resistance; I will have no useless blood-shed.” The conductor, delighted to save a large sum of money secreted in a chest, quietly submitted: the passengers were too happy to get off with whole skins, and the women thanked the spoiler, called him a humane man, and almost kissed him, out of gratitude for him sparing their lives. The plunder collected, the driver received permission to continue his journey, which he did at full speed, lest the banditti should change their minds and forget their forbearance. Doré made his escape unmolested, leaving his straw regiment on picket by the road side, a scarecrow, till daybreak, to the passing traveller.
The few persons acquainted with M. Appert’s share in the escape of Mathieu and Conderc, proved stanch upon his trial: nothing could be proved against him, and he was acquitted. The affair gave rise to long and bitter controversy between the Liberal and Royalist newspapers. Of course M. Appert lost his place under government, and he now had full leisure to busy himself with his philanthropic investigations. To these he devoted his time; but the police looked upon him as a dangerous character, and, in May, 1823, orders were again issued for his arrest. Forewarned, he escaped by the garden-gate at the very moment that his pursuers knocked at the front door. The cause for which he was persecuted, that of Bonapartism and liberal opinions—the anti-Bourbon cause, in short—made him many friends, and he had no difficulty in concealing himself, although prudence compelled him frequently to change his hiding-place. One of his first retreats was the house of Lafayette, then looked upon as an arch conspirator, and closely watched by the police, but who, nevertheless, afforded a willing shelter to young Appert. A happy week was passed by the latter in the hotel and constant society of the venerable general.
“I had his coachman’s room, and a livery in readiness to put on, in case of an intrusion on the part of the police. I dined with him tête-a-tête, and we spent the evenings together; the porter telling all visiters, excepting relatives and intimate friends, that the general was at his country house of La Grange.
“Monsieur de Lafayette’s conversation was most interesting, his language well chosen, his narrative style simple and charming; his character was gay and amiable, his physiognomy respectable and good. His tone, and every thing about him, indicated good humour, kindness, and dignity, and the habit of the best society. He had the exquisitely polished manners of the old regime, blent with those of the highest classes of the present day. His vast information, the numerous anecdotes of his well-filled life, his immense acquaintance with almost all the celebrated persons in the world, his many and curious voyages, the great events in which he had borne a leading part, the historical details that he alone could give on events not yet written down in history, constituted an inexhaustible conversational treasure, and I look upon it as one of the happiest circumstances of my life to have passed a week in the intimacy of that excellent and noble general.”
All, however, that M. Appert thinks proper to record in print of these anecdotes, historical details, &c., consists of a short conversation with M. Lafayette, who predicted the final downfall of the Bourbons, and the advent of a more liberal order of things. In 1828, many besides Lafayette were ready with the same prophecy. M. Appert then asked the general whether, in the event of a revolution, the Duke of Orleans, who appeared sincerely liberal, who encouraged the progress of art and science, sent his sons to the public colleges, cultivated the opposition members, and was generally popular with the advocates of the progress, might not become King of France.