“‘We are done with thrones long ago,’ shouted they in chorus, ‘and we’ll finish you also.’
“Ay, and they kept their word, too. They shot him that same evening, on very little other charge than his own name! If I have retained the old sound of my name, I have given it a more plebeian spelling, which is, perhaps, just as much of an alteration as any man need submit to for a period that will pass away so soon.”
“How so, Eugene? you fancy the republic will not endure in France. What, then, can replace it?”
“Any thing, every thing; for the future all is possible. We have annihilated legitimacy, it is true, just as the Indians destroy a forest, by burning the trees, but the roots remain, and if the soil is incapable of sending up the giant stems as before, it is equally unable to furnish a new and different culture. Monarchy is just as firmly rooted in a Frenchman’s heart, but he will have neither patience for its tedious growth, nor can he submit to restore what has cost him so dearly to destroy. The consequences will, therefore, be a long and continued struggle between parties, each imposing upon the nation the form of government that pleases it in turn. Meanwhile, you and I, and others like us, must serve whatever is uppermost—the cleverest fellow he who sees the coming change, and prepares to take advantage of it.”
“Then are you a royalist?” asked I.
“A royalist! what! stand by a monarch who deserted his aristocracy, and forgot his own order; defend a throne that he had reduced to the condition of a fauteuil de Bourgeois?”
“You are then for the republic?”
“For what robbed me of my inheritance—what degraded me from my rank, and reduced me to a state below that of my own vassals! Is this a cause to uphold?”
“You are satisfied with military glory, perhaps,” said I, scarcely knowing what form of faith to attribute to him.