In one day, or, rather, in one night, all this present and all this future crumbled. La Moricière, at the age of forty-five, falling from the most enviable position a French soldier could occupy, without its being possible to reproach him with the shadow of a crime or even of a fault, saw for ever closed to him all access to either of the two careers in which he had won so much glory, and in which he walked as the peer, or the superior, of all his contemporaries. His military and public life was closed. The most brilliant of our soldiers succumbed to a military revolution. The statesman and the tribune, so in love with popular sympathies, was swept away by a movement sanctioned by a popularity none could dispute. He was broken when the law was broken with the assent of the people; he was broken for having remained faithful to an opinion which had for it constitutional right and the inviolability of oaths; broken much less by the unmerciful demands of victory than by the forgetfulness and abandonment of France; broken for not having comprehended that France had wholly changed her gait and her tendencies, and no longer held anything which she had pretended to hold and to love ever since 1814. He must then, in his turn, undergo those prodigies of inconstancy and ingratitude with which the contemporary public delights to visit princes when they are liberal, and superior men when they are honest.
No cup of bitterness was spared him: I mean bitternesses of the mind and the heart, the most poignant and the most unbearable of all; and I speak not for him alone, but also for his valiant and unfortunate companions in glory and in exile. In the first years of his exile he met, outside of his family and his wife, little sympathy in that Belgium where Catholics especially were almost all under the fascination of the conqueror. At that period of life when we have the full consciousness of our strength and our resources, when the employment of the gifts received from God is a prime necessity, he saw himself condemned to forego not only the exercise of power and the management of great affairs to which he had become accustomed, but all public life, and, indeed, all active life. In vain he repeated the device of his generous rival and friend Changarnier, Happiness is gone, but honor remains; in vain he spoke and wrote with Count de Maistre after Tilsit, Europe is Bonaparte's, but my heart is mine; he was forced to experience a long while the mortal tediousness of the dead calm after the salutary and quickening excitements of the storm, and to sink into a wearisome idleness, the mother, as Fouquet says to Pignerol, of despair. He had to bear the laceration of impatience, that mortal despite, that sterility of walks and books for a man of his condition, that lassitude of a life deprived of all occupation, that fatigue of doing nothing of which the bare thought made Saint-Simon shudder, and held him fast in the ante-chamber of Louis XIV.
But there was for him a more cruel trial still, a thousand times more bitter, of which neither Fouquet nor Saint-Simon had the remotest conception.
France was on the point of making war, a great war; and these valiant guards, these great war-chiefs, are not to be there! From Africa are drawn the battalions they formed, which they commanded, and so often led to victory. These battalions are now to march under other chiefs to new victories. Themselves so long first and alone, on whom the eyes of France and of Europe were so long accustomed to be fixed—themselves all glowing with military ardor, full of vigor and patriotism—having never failed their country, honor, or justice, are now condemned to inaction, to forgetfulness, to nothingness; noted subalterns rise and seize the first rank in the eyes of the world!—who can tell, who can conceive, the anguish, the torture of these men, so illustrious, so intrepid, and, be it not forgotten, so innocent, so irreproachable before the country and the army?
The "Epoque" tells us to-day that a word, a single word, had sufficed to recall them to France, and to commands in the Crimea, the baton of the marshal, and all the augmented splendor and prosperity which victory brings in its train. Nothing is known of it. Always is it a fact that this word, whether it would have been listened to or not, was not spoken, and since it was not, it no doubt ought not to have been spoken.
What, moreover, was that marshal's baton so cruelly stolen from those who had so well earned it? Those grades, decorations, gildings, and salaries, the vulgar food of vulgar souls, were they what attracted, what inflamed, these heroic souls? No, a thousand times no. It was danger; it was devotedness, enthusiasm, action, the service of France, the love of country, the love of the noble flag which they had borne aloft for twenty years; the glorious brotherhood of arms with so many good soldiers and brave officers, their own offspring, so to speak; the burning desire, a thousand times legitimate, of adding new laurels to those already won; in a word, it was HONOR—and it was precisely honor that condemned them to silence, to inaction, to death—the real death and the only death they had ever dreaded.
Never did Calderon, the great Spanish poet, in those famous dramas of his which always turn on the imperious exigencies, the merciless refinements, the torturing delicacies of honor, imagine a situation more striking, a trial more acute, a narrower pass, or a yoke more crushing. The trial was submitted to, the pass was traversed, the yoke was borne to the end. All we cannot say, and what we do say is nothing by the side of the suffering we have seen, felt, known, and shared. Perhaps a day will come when these tortures of the soul will be comprehended and rewarded with the admiration which is their due. But who knows? To hope that, it is necessary to believe in the justice of history, and who knows if there will be again any history worthy of the name? We may well doubt it, when we mark what is passing around us in an age which for a long time boasts of having regenerated history, and when we see liberals make the panegyric of the 10th of August, Christians applaud the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and writers in high credit with their several parties undertake to rehabilitate the reign of terror, the Inquisition, and the Roman empire.
Nothing was wanting, we have said, to the evil fortune of our friend. After years of exile in Belgium, his only son fell ill in France. And while were debated with the desolate father the conditions of his return, the son, the only hope of his family, died. When at length he was permitted to return, it was too late; he received not the last sigh of his child. He was inconsolable. "They restore me my country," he said; "but who will restore me my child?" It was no longer his country, such as he had known it, that was restored to him—the country, above all, by which he had been so well known, so proudly boasted, and so admired. The real exile is not in being torn from our native country, but in remaining in it and finding no longer that which made it specially dear to us. La Moricière perceived it only too soon. But he comprehended the difference alike of time and men, and conformed with an intelligent and manly resignation, which held in nothing from his adhesion, and which took nothing from the energy of his convictions or the dignity of his attitude. For the rest, he had brought back with him from the land of his exile neither the illusions of the emigré, blind animosities, nor mean or noisy bitterness. And yet he was not at the end of his cross.
There remained to him a last human good, a last plank saved from shipwreck!—his old popularity among [{297}] his contemporaries, and the companions in that shipwreck, near his old political friends, in the bosom of the party which he had not only served and defended, but, above all, had honored and protected with his glory. That popularity he risked totally in the most abandoned, the most contested, and the most vilipended cause in the world. He risked all, and he lost! A priest whom he had known as a soldier in Africa, under the flag of France, before becoming his relation and his friend, offered him, in the name of Pius IX., an opportunity of braving new perils, with the certainty of being vanquished in the desperate struggle. He ran thither. Forthwith a long and loud howl of insult and derision rose from the bosom of the whole so-called European democracy. He was dragged to the gemoniae—both he and the young warriors that followed in his footsteps. A hideous clamor arose from the lowest depths of human baseness, from the Thames to the Arno, and pursued with invectives, railleries, and calumnies the devoted band and their heroic chief. The vapid calumniators of disinterested virtue spoke all at once, and spoke alone; France and Europe justified them. New Italy blushed in her turn to find herself approached by men bold enough to dare to fight and die under the colors of a pontiff and a father. She asked and obtained freedom to crush them. But she essayed to kill them with falsehood before attacking them with the sword, and by falsehoods such as the world had not heard since the imperial trap set at Bayonne in 1808. A Cialdini dares call, in an order of the day to his army, La Moricière and his companions "mercenaries thirsting for gold and pillage," and King Victor Emmanuel announces to the Emperor of the French that he "is marching his troops into the Marches and Umbria to re-establish order there in relation to the temporal authority of the Pope, and, if it should be necessary, to give battle to the revolution on the Neapolitan territory." [Footnote 46] Eight days after the troops of the king pounced, ten to one, on the little army of La Moricière. The obscure burgh of Castelfidardo is immortalized by that butchery. Pimodan perished there by a death worthy of his chief, who sought refuge in Ancona, and capitulate when his last gun was dismounted. This French general—and what a general!—gave up his sword to the Piedmontese! His young companions, prisoners like himself, passed over Italy in the midst of insults and outrages. La Moricière, himself released as soon as the work of spoliation was consummated, returned to France, where he met the scoffs and jeers of those who insulted his departure.