“Madame C. read the affecting words added by the queen; then, bursting into tears, she pressed the paper to her lips. ‘Sir,’ she exclaimed, ‘give me nothing, but leave me this holy relic. I will die of hunger with it upon my heart.’
“Madame C. proving in all respects worthy of the queen’s generosity, I left her the three hundred francs, but had much difficulty in prevailing on her to give up the petition, which I still preserve with respect and veneration. This trait of the Queen of the French is only one of ten thousand.”
Madame Adelaide d’Orleans vies in charity with her sister-in-law; and, although she has no separate establishment at Paris, but lives always with the king, her generosity and the expenses of frequent journeys, and of a certain retinue which she is compelled to maintain, have sometimes caused her temporary embarrassments. “Thus is it,” she one day said to M. Appert, with reference to a loan she had contracted, “that royalty enriches us. People ask what the king does with his money, and to satisfy them, it would be necessary to publish the names of honourable friends of liberty, who, in consequence of misfortunes, have solicited and obtained from him sums of twenty, thirty, forty, and even of three hundred thousand francs. They forget all the extraordinary expenses my brother has had to meet, all the demands he has to comply with. Out of his revenues he has finished the Palais Royal, improved the appanages of the house of Orleans, and yet, sooner or later, all that property will revert to the State. When we returned to France, our inheritance was so encumbered, that my brother was advised to decline administering to the estate; but to that neither he nor I would consent. For all these things, people make no allowance. Truly, M. Appert, we know not how to act to inspire the confidence which our opinions and our consciences tell us we fully deserve.”
This was spoken on the 23d January, 1832, and written down the same evening, by M. Appert. Madame Adelaide had then been too short a time a king’s sister, to have become acquainted with the bitters as well as the sweets of that elevated position,—to have experienced the thorns that lurk amongst the roses of a crown. Doubtless she has since learned, that calumny, misrepresentation, and unmerited censure, are inevitable penalties of royalty, their endurance forming part of the moral tax pitilessly levied upon the great ones of the earth.
So liberal an almsgiver as the Queen of the French, and one whose extreme kindness of heart is so universally known, is of course peculiarly liable to imposition; and the principal duty of M. Appert was to investigate the merits of the claimants on the royal bounty, and to prevent it, as far as possible, from passing into unworthy hands. For this office his acquaintance with the prisons and galleys, with the habits, tricks, and vices of the poor, peculiarly fitted him. He discovered innumerable deceits, whose authors had hoped, by their assistance, to extract an undeserved dole from the coffers of the queen. Literary men, assuming that designation on the strength of an obscure pamphlet or obscene volume, and who, when charity was refused them, often demanded a bribe to exclude a venomous attack on the royal family from the columns of some scurrilous journal; sham refugees from all countries; old officers, whose campaigns had never taken them out of Paris, and whose red ribbon, given to them by l’Autre, on the field of Wagram or Marengo, was put into their button-hole on entering the house, and hastily taken out on leaving it, lest the police should inquire what right they had to its wear: such were a few of the many classes of imposters detected by M. Appert. One insatiable lady sent, regularly every day, two or three petitions to various members of the royal family, considering them as so many lottery tickets, sure, sooner or later, to bring a prize. She frankly confessed to M. Appert the principle she went upon. “Petitions,” she said, “like advertisements in the newspapers, end by yielding a profit to those who patiently reiterate them. Persons who constantly see my name, and hear that I have eighteen children, come at last to pity and relieve my distress, which is real.” This woman was, as she said, in real difficulties, but nevertheless it was impossible to comply with all her demands. When, by M. Appert’s advice, the queen and Madame Adelaide refused to do so, this pertinacious petitioner got up a melodramatic effect, borrowed from the Porte St Martin, or some other Boulevard theatre. She wrote a letter, announcing that if she did not receive immediate assistance she had made every preparation to suffocate herself with charcoal that same evening. “Then this good queen would send for me, and say, ‘Mon Dieu! M. Appert, Madame R. is going to kill herself. It is a great crime, and we must prevent it. Be so good as to send her forty francs.’ And to prevent my raising objections to this too great goodness, her majesty would add immediately, ‘I know what you are about to say: that she deceives me, and will not kill herself; but if it did happen, God would not forgive us. It is better to be deceived than to risk such a misfortune.’”
There exist regular joint-stock companies, composed of swindlers leagued together for the plunder of the charitable. Some of the members feign misfortune and misery, and send petitions to the queen, and ministers, or to any one known as rich or benevolent; whilst others, well dressed and decorated, assume the character of protectors of the unfortunate, and answer for the respectability and deserts of the protégés. M. Appert describes a lodging rented by one of these companies. It might have furnished Eugene Sue with a chapter in his “Mysteries of Paris.” “It consisted of two rooms. In one were a wretched truckle-bed, two broken chairs, an old table; the other was well furnished with excellent chairs, a mahogany table, and clean curtains. The door connecting the rooms was carefully masked by a hanging of old paper, similar to that of the outer one; the bed was a dirty straw mattress. The impostor who occupied these lodgings received her visiters in the shabby room, and there she looked so miserable, that it was impossible to help relieving her. The charitable person or persons gone, she transferred herself to the inner apartment, and led a joyous life with her confederates and fellow-petitioners. There are in Paris as many as fifty of these immoral associations, which the police does not interfere with, because it finds most of their members serviceable as spies.” The suicide-dodge seems a favourite resource of male as well as female impostors. “Mr. B., formerly in the army, now a gambler, always carried two loaded pistols in his pocket, (the balls forgotten, very likely,) and when he came to ask me for assistance, which was at least a hundred times a-year, he invariably threatened to blow out his brains in my room; having left, he said, a letter to a newspaper for which he wrote, publishing to Europe the avarice of the royal family, and the baseness of those about them, beginning, of course, with myself. When I refused to yield to his threats, Mr. B. changed his mind, and consented to live, but with the sole object of injuring me in every possible way; and, according to promise, this worthy man of letters wrote against me in his newspaper, and sent anonymous letters to the Tuileries.”
Exiled Polish princes, Italian patriots, veterans of all possible armies and services, moustached to the eyes, their coats covered with crosses, their breasts, as they affirmed, with scars; aid-de-camps of half the kings and generals in the world; wounded and fever-stricken soldiers from Algeria;—these were a few of the false titles to charity impudently advanced by the mob of rogues and impostors, who daily crowded M. Appert’s anti-chamber, giving it the aspect of a guard-room or of the depôt of some house of correction, and displaying in their tales of wo astonishing address and ingenuity. And in spite of the immense army of gendarmes and police-spies, who are supposed to envelop France in the vast net of their vigilance—and who certainly succeed in rendering it as unlike a land of liberty as a free country well can be—in spite of the complicated passport system, having for one of its chief objects the check of crime and fraud, we find that these jail-birds “had always passports and certificates, and were often provided with letters of recommendation from persons of rank and wealth, who found it easier to sign their name than to draw their purse-strings. I possess more than fifteen hundred letters and notes, large and small, from peers of France, generals, ex-ministers, and others, recommending petitioners; and sometimes, when I met these complaisant patrons, they knew not even the name of those they had thus supported. The visits of these illustrious persons often lost me a great deal of time; and what astonished me beyond measure was, that the possession of a hundred or a hundred and fifty thousand francs a-year did not prevent these rich misers from tormenting me. They would lose two or three hours rather than pay down a penny. The son-in-law of one of the richest proprietors in France once wrote me a most humble and suppliant letter, begging me to obtain from the Queen a grant of thirty francs to one of his domestics, who, through old age, was compelled to leave his service.” And many an enemy did M. Appert make by noncompliance with the requests of the wealthy skin-flints, who sought to do a charitable act at another’s expense. The Queen and the Princess Adelaide often received petitions from ladies of the court, who expatiated on the interesting and deserving character of those they recommended. Nevertheless, M. Appert was always desired to inquire into the real merits of the case, and frequently found that it was not one deserving of succour. Then the queen or princess would say, when next they were importuned on the subject, “My dear countess, M. Appert has been to see your protégée, has made due inquiry, and finds that we have many upon our list in far greater need of assistance. I am sorry, therefore, to be unable to comply with your wishes.” Here, of course, was an enemy for poor M. Appert, who certainly needs the approbation of his own conscience as reward for having gratuitously held so thankless an office. His functions were no light ones, and took up nearly his whole time. His position relatively to the royal family compelled him to receive a vast number of persons of all ranks and classes, some of them of no very respectable description, but who were useful in procuring him information. Once or twice a month the Phrenological Society held its sittings at his house. During one of these meetings two heads were brought into the room in a basket, and placed with great care upon the table. “I thought they were in wax; the eyes were open, the faces placid. Upon approaching, I recognised the features of the assassins, Lacenaire and Avril, whom I had seen in their dungeons. ‘Do you find them like, M. Appert?’ said the man who had brought them. I replied in the affirmative. ‘No wonder,’ said he, ‘they are not more than four hours off their shoulders.’ They were the actual heads of the two murderers.” Not satisfied with having the heads, our philanthropical phrenologist had the headsman. We have already referred to the less scientific but more convivial meetings held at M. Appert’s house, in the shape of dinners, given each Saturday, and at which the guests were all, in some way or other, men of mark. Sometimes the notorious Vidocq, and Samson, the executioner of Paris—son of the man who decapitated Louis the Sixteenth, Marie Antoinette, and many other illustrious victims—took their places at M. Appert’s table. When this occurred, all his friends were anxious for an invitation. The only two who declined meeting the thief-taker and the headsman, were the archbishop of Malines, and M. Arnault, of the French Academy, brother-in-law of Regnaut de St. Jean d’Angely, who was so influential a person in the time of Napoleon. There were others, however, whom M. Arnault disliked to meet. He had a great prejudice against writers of the romantic school, and especially against Dumas, whom he called a washed-out negro. If M. Appert wanted an abrupt refusal, he merely had to say to him, “Dine with me on Saturday next. I shall have Balzac and Alexander Dumas.” Caustic in manner, but good and amiable, M. Arnault cherished the memory of Napoleon with a fidelity that did him honour. In the court of his house grew a willow, sprung from a slip of that at St. Helena. After 1830, misfortune overtook him, and M. Appert tried to interest the king and Madame Adelaide in his behalf. He was successful, and a librarian’s place was promised to his friend. But the promise was all that M. Arnault ever obtained. The ill-will or obstinacy of the minister, who had the power of nomination, is assigned by M. Appert as the cause of the disappointment, which he hesitates to attribute to lukewarmness on the part of his royal patrons. Louis Philippe is the last man, according to our notion of him, to suffer himself to be thwarted by a minister, whether in great or small things. Kings, whose position exposes them to so much solicitation, should be especially cautious in promising, strictly on their guard against the odious vice, too common in the world, of lightly pledging and easily breaking their word. They, above all men, should ever bear in mind that a broken promise is but a lie inverted.
We return to M. Appert’s dinners. To meet Samson and Vidocq, he had invited the late Lord Durham, Dr. Bowring, De Jouy the academician, Admiral Laplace, and several others. The executioner sat on his right, the policeman on his left, and both occasionally favoured him with a confidential a parte. Samson was grave and serious, rather out of his element amongst the grand seigneurs, as he called them; Vidocq, on the contrary, was gay, lively, and quite at his ease.
“‘Do you know,’ said he, with a laugh, to the headsman, ‘I have often sent you customers when I was chief of the brigade of safety?’
“‘I know you have, M. Vidocq,’ replied Samson. Then, in a low voice to me, ‘Any where but in your house, sir, I should hardly like to dine in company with that joker. He’s a queer one.’ Almost at the same moment, Vidocq whispered, ‘He’s a worthy man, that Monsieur Samson; but all the same, it seems odd to me to sit at the same table with him.’” Very good, the spy; not bad, the hangman. In the conversation that followed, Lord Durham and the accomplished Hermite de la Chaussée d’Antin took a share, and Samson gave some curious details concerning his terrible profession. He was on the scaffold when Louis XVI. was executed. “We all loved the king in our family,” said he, “and when my father was obliged, according to orders, to take up the head by the hair and show it to the people, the sight of that royal countenance, which preserved all its noble and gentle expression, so affected him that he nearly swooned away. Luckily I was there, and being tall, I masked him from the crowd, so that his tears and emotion, which in those days might have sufficed to bring us to the guillotine in our turn, passed unobserved.” Presently Vidocq ventured a joke, concerning the headsman’s office, which greatly offended him of the axe, who muttered his displeasure in M. Appert’s ear. “That man is as coarse as barley bread,” was his remark: “it is easy to see he is not used to good society; he does not behave himself as I do!” Poor Samson, who receives about five hundred a year for the performance of his melancholy duties, was, in reality, very well behaved. His appearance was so respectable, his black coat, gold chain, and frilled shirt, so irreproachable, that on his first visit to M. Appert, that gentleman’s secretary took him for some village mayor on his way to a wedding, or about to head a deputation to the king. Upon Lord Durham’s expressing a wish to see the guillotine, he obligingly offered to show it to him. M. Appert gives an account of the visit. “On the following Saturday, Lord Durham, accompanied by his nephew, heir, I believe, to his title and vast fortune, came in his carriage to fetch me. He had told so many English of our intended visit, that we were followed by a string of vehicles, like the procession to a funeral. On our way, Lord Durham asked me if it were not possible to buy a sheep to try the guillotine upon. On my telling him that to do so would give just grounds for severe criticisms, he did not press his wish. On reaching the Rue du Marais, I went alone into Samson’s house. He was in a full dress suit of black, waiting to receive us. He conducted our party, at least fifty in number, to the banks of the Canal St. Martin, where, in a coachmaker’s shed, the guillotine was kept. Here there was a fine opportunity for the display of a genuine English characteristic. Every body wished to touch every thing; to handle the hatchet and baskets, and get upon the plank which supports the body when the head is fitted into the fatal frame. Samson had had the guillotine repainted and put together, and bundles of straw served to show its terrible power.”