Charles R. was, as I had supposed, connected with the “press,” a socialist, a believer in the perfectability of men—of Frenchmen at least—and, in theory, an organizer of Labor. At that time the “press” had no great liberty in France; but it had to the full as much as it deserved, whatever the interested, or those who know nothing of the matter, may say to the contrary. The French “press,” when it has had its way, has done little else than to overturn a government, without the power or the knowledge to set up another in its place. It is not best that children, or the unskillful, should be entrusted with edge-tools; and a people is to be educated, through long centuries, to a fitness for the enjoyment of civil liberty, as man is educated, through long years, to a fitness for becoming his own master. Such has been the pupilage of our ancestry; but such has not been the pupilage of the ancestry of the French. In France liberty is anarchy; and so it is upon the Continent, in Germany, in Italy, and the Peninsula; and he who thinks it is to be made otherwise in a day, might as well pour the contents of a library at a fool’s feet, and bid him rise learned. But Charles R. and his friends, among whom was Louis Blanc—who looked like a boy, as a boy indeed he was, who had achieved something beyond his years—and Ledru Rollin—the future leader of the Mountain, which he had neither the ability to protect, nor the courage to fall with—and Proudhon—the plausible corrupter of youth, who endeavored to persuade France that “property is theft”—thought much and talked much of the liberty of the “press,” until in the end they got it, and made such use of it as we all know. A las la presse. I heard that cry once, and thought it the most conservative and the best for France.
Such was the atmosphere which Paqueta now breathed, and I sometimes thought that, for her soul’s health, it was no better than the servitude from which she had escaped. I saw her often during another month that I remained in Paris, and more than once with a deal of company at her rooms. She had grown to her husband’s intellect, conversed freely upon the lightest and gravest topics, and performed the duties of a hostess with an ease and propriety which flowed directly from her native good taste; it is so with French blood every where, and however small may be the proportion to the whole mass. Her husband was a brilliant feuilletonist; I had read something of his pen before seeing France; but he found more excellence in his wife than his imagination ever limned; and, as a proof of it, he himself told me that his friends said his articles had more heart in them since his marriage.
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CHAPTER III.
When Louis Philippe fled, Charles R. harangued the people. He would have thrown the red flag of the old republic to the breeze, and have followed it to the world’s end. The French have grown no wiser since Robespierre’s day; and in Robespierre’s day they sat around Plutarch’s Lives, and modeled government upon the anecdotal garrulity of an old gentleman who lived some two thousand years ago. But Charles found that his friends were in the Provisional Government—one of whom he hoped soon to see stealing all power from his associates—so he acquiesced in Lamartine’s well-turned sentences, and consented that the tricolor and a poet should be uppermost for a time. Charles entered the National Assembly, as a member from the department of the Seine, and took his seat with the Mountain; that great party, whose history is more terrible than that of any body of men, either of ancient or of modern days, which has come down to us.
“The Mountain!” exclaimed Charles R., at a conversazione which I attended at his rooms; “how often do my thoughts run back to its great leader. Extremely beautiful, extremely touching, too, are the chapters which Michelet devotes to the history of the Purcelle. She, who had been taught neither to read nor to write, but who had learned all her mother knew of sacred things, left her sewing, and her spinning, and went forth to give courage to men; to give a king to her country; to turn back the tide of conquest; to smite victorious armies with ceaseless rout and ruin, urged, sustained, by that certain knowledge of being called, which God gives to all the chiefest instruments of his dispensations—by the certain knowledge, too, of the quick coming of a martyr’s death. There was another, of a sterner sex, appointed unto times more trying, who equally saved France, when three-fifths of France were traitors unto France; who alone, of all the faithful, never for a moment despaired of the Republic; who assumed nothing, claimed nothing, asked for nothing for himself, but all for his country; whose will, of a wonderful energy, scattered the victorious arms, not of one nation, but of combined Europe; who, from afar off, retired, sitting in his narrow chamber over the cabinetmaker’s shop, blasted with the breath of his nostrils the well-concerted plans, the strength of despotism, and delivered over France, his great mother, into the hands of those who came after him, triumphant, uncontaminated by the tread of a single foreign foe. He, too, had the certain knowledge of being called and appointed to a purpose; and the certain knowledge of the quick coming of death; for he often spoke of it as a fit crowning of a great labor. Robespierre a coward! He who spoke daily, as of old the Athenian spoke, at the gage of life! Death was at all times treading hard upon his footsteps; and did he shun it in that last hour when he put aside the proclamation which was to give him the victory? Many have been the martyrs for opinion’s sake. To die by the axe, all are equal to; to die by fire, most are equal to; but to die misrepresented and misunderstood, cheated of fair fame, with another’s crime fastened upon us—to die taken in the toils of an enemy, who usurps our purposes, and gives to history a lie growing with each new teller of the story—this is terrible. Pardon me; I could not but say thus much. I judge men by their acts and words, and my opinion hangs not upon another’s conclusions. I believe I have read all that has been most ably written about the revolution; in all, the acts are the same, and the words are the same, but the arrangement of the acts, and the voice given to the words, change with each several narrator. Neither Thiers, nor Allison, nor Miguet, nor Lamartine, shall speak for me; the prejudices of the Englishman, and the prejudices of the Frenchman color their vision—I am answerable for my own. When will History listen to the defense which has not yet been heard!”
With such sentiments, it was not difficult to foresee what would be Charles’ policy in the Assembly. When news of the Revolution of February came, I thought at once of my friend, and expected to find him an actor amid the events then transpiring. I watched, and saw him step forth among the foremost. I listened—even at this distance—and was pleased to hear his voice among the ablest in debate.
“Who knows,” said I, “what Paqueta—who rolled at my feet, and wished to be my little barber forever—may become with a people who have been democratic in their belief, and monarchical in their sentiments, since eighty-nine? One has as much right to expect sudden promotion in France, as in the East; and a slave may yet sit upon the throne of the Capets.”
Paqueta was equal to either fortune; or to a better, as her true story—now drawing to its close—will tell you.
We all know the weak and vacillating policy of the Mountain during the earlier stages of the later Republic—if that may be said to have had any stage at all, which was born to die so soon. Violent—without strength; headstrong—without wisdom; it moved—under the leadership of Rollin—straight onward to an utter ruin. It had committed itself from the beginning, to all the impracticabilities of the modern French mind. The ouvrier Albert was the type of its philosophy. Ignorant, stolid: it thought that the poor were the only class in society to be cared for; and that true government consisted in setting on foot, and in keeping up an endless and inextinguishable warfare between the beggars and the rich. The organization of labor, forsooth! Labor organizes itself; and is best protected when the magistrate lets it alone. Charles might have done better had he but followed his own counsels; and I believe he would have done so, had he not entered upon his public life swayed by private friendships and predilections. Certainly, he who reads the history of his hero aright, will find no such half-measures, no such ideas of one side alone, in his speculations. But the Mountain walked upon ashes; and the fatal day came in that sweet month of June, which God made for love, and its fruition; but which a son of the Republic—stern and honest, yet weak as the rest, blind to the future, and driven by a necessity, much of his own making—has marked with blood in his country’s calendar. I was thinking of Paqueta, and what her part might be in her husband’s ambitions, when the reverberations of the fusilade of Paris, the cries of the massacred of the 25th, smote upon my ears, here, three thousand miles from the scene of that tragedy. Thus fell the Mountain: and with the Mountain, and through the Mountain fell the Republic; for the Republic died with the coming in of the Dictatorship, and the Mountain rested and must ever rest upon the shoulders of the poor.