Mr Stahr inquired of the worthy coiffeur what had been the motive of his journey to Wiesbaden, which he seemed to look upon as a sort of North Pole expedition, and of whose fatigues and privations he drew a vivid picture. He wished to judge for himself, he said; to see whether the rightful heir to the throne was as ill-favoured as his enemies represented him to be. He found him, on the contrary, full of amiable qualities. He was a little lame, but his smile was irresistible. Warming with his subject, the enthusiastic Henriquinquist asked his customer's permission to relate all the particulars of his reception at Wiesbaden. This was just what Mr Stahr wished, and he duly encouraged his interlocutor.
"On our arrival," continued the hairdresser, "we presented ourselves to the aide-de-camp, as I have had the honour of informing you. He took down our names, and gave us each a number of rotation, according to which we were arranged in the afternoon at the general audience. We were formed in three ranks. The prince was informed beforehand of the name and trade of each number, so that he was able to address a few well-chosen words to everybody. When we were all drawn up in order, he came in, placed himself in the midst of us, at a few paces distance, and addressed us. 'Good day to you, my friends,' he said: 'believe me when I say that I am most sensible of the mark of sympathy you have so spontaneously given me, by quitting your families and occupations, and undertaking a journey into a foreign country to see and console me in my exile. Be sure that I will never forget what you have done for me.' Then he said, 'Come nearer, my friends!' We advanced a step. 'Nearer yet, my friends. You come from too far not to come nearer! I hope to see you all at eight o'clock to-night!'"
The hairdresser acted this scene as he related it, addressing himself and Mr Stahr alternately as the prince, by whose mandate to draw a step nearer he was evidently vastly flattered. The professor, immensely amused by the performance, still fancied he saw that the main cause of the fascination which Henry V. had exercised upon his devoted adherent was still undivulged. The sequel showed that he was not mistaken.
"In the evening," continued the coiffeur, "we returned to the Prince's residence; there we partook of refreshments, and the Prince had an amiable word for each and all of us. He talked about the state of affairs in France, and wished to know all our opinions of it. The next day some of us were received in private audience. I was of the number. But as we were numerous, and the Prince was very busy, I could not have much conversation with him. However, he gave me a silver medal, and—'Mr R.,' said he, 'have you a comfortable bed at your hotel?' 'Monseigneur,' I replied, 'since you deign to ask the question, I am accustomed to sleep between two sheets, and as I do not understand a word of German, I have been unable to make them understand this at my hotel. They put the sheet sometimes over and sometimes under the blanket, but never more than one.' Sir," continued the delighted barber, addressing himself to Mr Stahr, whilst his face beamed with triumph, "that night I had two sheets upon my bed. Could anything be more amiable? Ah, sir, I have seen them from very near, those republicans of the Mountain, those members of the Provisional Government!—what blockheads! what boors! They aspired to command, and in their whole lives scarcely one of them had had as much as a servant at his orders! Sir, it was pitiable to behold."
Mr Stahr observed to the loyal hair-curler that he had seen the persons in question only after they had attained power, and that there are few more amiable people in the world than a pretender, before he has gained his object. He thought it possible that, once at the Tuileries, Henry V. might show himself in a less agreeable light, and trouble himself less about his adherent's bedlinen. The barber's sensible reply did him honour. But barbers, from Don Quixote's day downwards, have been men of good counsel.
"Monsieur," said the coiffeur, "I am not a fool. Do you suppose I shall go and plague him, when he is king? He will have other matters to mind then. I have no pretensions to be made minister or prefect, when there are people who have studied those things all their lives. I am a hairdresser, and I shall remain one. But I want to dress a great deal of hair, and under the republic I dress none."
"But," remarked Mr Stahr, "you dress more under the President."
The barber, however, was no admirer of the President, whom he had also been to see, before his election, and upon the appearance of whose head he passed a most unfavourable opinion. He was sulky, he said, and not conversable. The affairs of France could never go on well under a man who knew not how to talk. Moreover, nothing could suit him but Henry V. He was neither Buonapartist nor Republican. But when things were at the worst, he said, his cry had always been "Vive la France!" "Stick to that!" said a customer who just then stepped in. "France has a tough existence, and will outlive your Henri Dieudonné and all his kin, and the President to boot. And now have the goodness to curl my hair."
Whether fact or invention, this sketch has one truthful point: it gives a sound enough notion of the manner of reasoning of the French shopkeeper and petit bourgeois—a numerous and weighty class, without whose concurrence no state of things can long be permanent in France. With them the whole question, since they first awoke from the shock and folly of the February revolution, has been one of two sheets on their bed and more hair to dress. They will support any government under which they can sleep in peace and drive a good trade. Some of our readers will not have forgotten the sufferings and fate of poor Monsieur Bonardin.[4] The disasters and commercial depression of 1848 were a severe but perhaps a wholesome and necessary lesson to many thousands of Frenchmen. Unfortunately, as illustrated in M. Bonardin's case, the lesson was given to many who neither required nor deserved it. Wandering near Versailles, in the pleasant valley of Jouy, Mr Stahr and his companions were invited by a friendly dame, whose acquaintance they had made in the omnibus, to walk into her house and taste her grapes. She perhaps thought the object of the foreigners' pedestrian stroll was to purchase one of the pleasant country houses, surrounded by vineyards and orchards, which there abound; for she took them all through her kitchen-garden and vineyard, and through the copse of chestnuts and hazel bushes, to the fish-pond, and to the pleasant grotto, fitted up as a chapel, and even to the vine-dresser's cottage, from whose windows a lovely view repaid the ascent of the numerous terraces. During this tour of inspection the good lady's tongue was not altogether idle, and a melancholy page out of a Paris citizen's life was laid open to the Germans' eyes. The pleasant little domain they were rambling over was the fruit of five-and-twenty years' toil. "Monsieur Cendrell, a skilful gilder, had bought it a few years before the last revolution, and had laid out considerable sums in building and embellishment. The revolution broke out just as he had given up his business to a friend and assistant. He suffered heavy losses, and was now compelled, in spite of the general depreciation of all landed property, to part with his little estate. It was to be had for only thirty thousand francs, as it stood—garden and vineyard, dwelling-house and garden-cottage, shady copse, and pond well stocked with carp, and right of shooting over I know not how many acres. And how neatly and comfortably arranged was the house, with its bath and billiard-rooms, and its library with portraits of Louis Philippe and the Count de Paris—how cleanly kept was every room from the kitchen to the attics, the gardener's house and the stable included! There was nothing wanting, but—thirty thousand francs to buy it with, and as much more to live there quietly till the end of one's days. We sat full half-an-hour in the cottage on the hill, refreshing ourselves with the sweet grapes that clustered round the windows of the rush-matted room, whilst the kindly Frenchwoman told us her story. It is that of thousands of her class in Paris since the February revolution. Truly it grieved us, both for her sake and our own, that we could not purchase the pleasant country house." This, it will be said, is a common-place incident. There is certainly nothing in it very striking or dramatic. Every day somebody or other suffers losses, and is compelled to reduce his establishment, or to put it down altogether; to sell his last acre of sunny meadow and vineyard, and toil in an obscure lodging for daily bread. But there will be found in the picture something deeply affecting, if we suffer the mind to dwell upon it for a moment, recalling, at the same time, the well-known fact referred to by Mr Stahr, that, since the dreary days of 1848, the fate of the frame-gilder of Jouy has been that of multitudes of others who, like him, had passed a laborious manhood in earning, for their old age, a competency and a right to repose. Thus we obtain a glimpse of a mass of misery, of domestic happiness broken up, if not destroyed, of hallowed associations rudely ruptured—by no fault of the victims, but as a melancholy effect of the obstinacy of a selfish king, and of the rashness and precipitancy of a section of his subjects. But these material evils, deplorable as they are, sink, in our opinion, into insignificance, contrasted with the moral results of the last most ill-omened French revolution. These strike Mr Stahr in a very different light. The early part of the month of October was passed by him at the pretty village of Loges, near Versailles, whither he went to enjoy the beautiful scenery and the mellow autumnal weather, and to escape for a few days from the whirl and rattle of Paris. In the course of his walks, he and his friends not unfrequently visited a little rural inn on the way to Jouy, kept by a corpulent but active dame, who usually favoured them with her society and conversation, whilst they consumed a glass of her country wine and a slice of her fromage de Brie. She read no newspapers—none were received in her modest tavern—and knew but little of the intricacies of her country's dissensions; but she had political notions of her own, and was a warm republican. "We French," said she to Mr Stahr, "soon get tired of governments. They have driven away all that have been chosen since Napoleon; and when they were driven away the consequence always was a terrible shock, affecting all kinds of property. Now, in a republic, there is no one person to drive away with so much clatter, and that is why, for my part, I desire neither a Napoleon nor a king." "Query," exclaims Mr Stahr, "whether the woman is so much in the wrong? For my part, from no French politician have I yet heard a more striking remark with respect to the present circumstances of France. That France has no longer any king, any family ruling her by right divine, that is the chief thing won by the February revolution. The dynastic and monarchical illusion is completely eradicated from the people's mind, never again to take firm root." This prospect, in which the German radical exults, we, as staunch upholders of the monarchical principle, should of course deplore, did we attach any value to his predictions. But, after what has passed, we think anything possible in France, and should be no more astonished at a Bourbon restoration, than at a consolidation of the republic; at Joinville's presidency, than at Louis Napoleon's re-election. It needs more temerity than judgment to hazard a prophecy concerning what will or will not take place in a country which, as far as politics go, has become, above all others, le pays de l'imprévu. The title used to belong to Spain; and in the years of Continental tranquillity that preceded 1848, it was amusement for unoccupied politicians to watch the unforeseen crises constantly occurring in the Peninsula. It is infinitely more exciting to wait upon the caprices of a great and powerful country, whose decisions, however unreasonable, may influence the state of all Europe. They can but be waited upon, they cannot be foretold. Since the memorable 10th of December 1848, this has been our conviction. Before that date there was at least a certain logical sequence in the conduct of the French nation. Although often impossible to approve, it had always been possible to account for it. But the common sense of Europe certainly stood aghast when Louis Napoleon Buonaparte was elected ruler of France, by a majority so great as to attach a sort of ridicule to the petty minorities obtained by men who, in ability and energy, and, as far as two of them were concerned, in respectability, were infinitely his superiors. At that period, Louis Napoleon had never given one proof of talent, or rendered the slightest service, civil or military, to the nation that thus elected him its head. Twice he had violated, by armed and unjustifiable aggression, resulting in bloodshed and disgrace, the laws of his country. Pardoned the first time, on a pledge of future good conduct, he took an early opportunity of forfeiting his word. Notwithstanding the stigma thus incurred, four districts, when universal suffrage became the law of France, elected him their representative to the National Assembly. This may not be worth dwelling upon. There were stranger elections to the Assembly than that, after the February revolution. But when, out of seven millions of voters, five and a half millions gave their voices to a man whose sole recommendation was a name,—then did wonder reach its perigee. And thenceforward bold indeed must be the politician who attempts to foreshadow the possible whims of the fickle people of France.