These three words and three lances have ever since been the armorial bearings of the Zamoyski family. Reflecting upon them, we find in them a singular appropriateness to that one of the line whom we have best known; that illustrious and wounded hero whom we have had so long before our eyes with the deadly steel in his heart, and on his lips a word of proud resignation or intrepid disdain.
Fortunate are those great races who, before they are submerged by the rising tide of equality and modern uniformity, can give forth one last flash of glory, and furnish to the historian some great heart enthusiastic for a good cause and a noble faith; some vigorous lover of right and duty, capable of signalizing himself by a generous death, like our own Duke de Luynes, or by an entire life of devotion and sacrifice, like Count Ladislas Zamoyski. For reason as we will, so long as men are men, they will be always and everywhere moved by a something—I know not what—a kind of realization of completeness, which nobility of birth imparts to great virtues or great misfortunes.
Ladislas Zamoyski, in his 28th year, was an officer of the lancers in the Polish army, and aide-de-camp to the Grand Duke Constantine; he was desirous above all things to serve his country as a soldier and a citizen, when the military insurrection of Warsaw broke out, at the end of November, 1830.
It was, as has often been repeated, the advance-guard of the Russian army, directed against the France of July, which turned back against the main body. Although the count had taken no part in the insurrection, the high rank of his family and the precocious maturity of his mind enabled him to profit by the particular position which he held near the prince, whose arbitrary and unwise acts had contributed more than anything else to provoke the revolt. He obtained from the brother of the emperor the order which separated the Polish troops from the Russian, and gave a sort of method to the military movement, which soon expanded into a national revolution. Believing himself freed now from all allegiance to the grand duke, the young count took part in all the exploits of the campaign of 1831—a campaign which has left imperishable recollections in the minds of all who were living at that time.
For ten months all Europe stood breathless, gazing with deep and varied emotions on those fearful turns of fortune. Every incident produced vehement agitations at the French tribune, in the streets of Paris, and even in the reviews held by the French king. There was something both of heroic and legendary interest in this conflict, so disproportioned yet so prolonged, between a handful of brave men on the one side, and the colossal resources of Russia on the other—a conflict where the veteran comrades of Dombrowski and Poniatowski were led on by youths inflamed with holy zeal for their country's liberty, where the first place was so long held by the Generalissimo Skrzynecki, true paladin of the middle ages, who always put in the orders of the day for his army prayers to the Holy Virgin as Queen of Poland, and who, brave in the field and devout at the altar, was so pre-eminently hero, Christian, and Catholic. I know not how upon this point the young Poles of our own day stand; but I know they would be faithless to the most noble examples of the heroes of 1831 if they should suffer themselves to be enervated by religious indifference, or, sadder still, should they ever trail through the depths of atheism and modern materialism that banner which their ancestors never separated from the cross of Jesus Christ.
When, finally, the countless masses which Russia threw upon Poland had dislodged the insurgents from all their positions; when the attempts at intervention made by the French government were rendered nugatory by the icy and cynical indifference of Lord Palmerston; [Footnote 190] when Europe resigned herself to be a tranquil spectator at the sacrifice of a nation, Ladislas Zamoyski, firm to the end, in the front rank of combatants, holding then the grade of colonel, laid down his arms with the last division of the Polish army, that of Ramorino, defeated in Gallicia. He crossed then the frontiers of that country which he was destined never more to see, and came, wounded and suffering, but not less resolute than in the first days of his manhood, to put himself at the disposal of his uncle, Prince Adam Czartoryski, the venerable chief of the Polish emigration, as he had been president of their national government.
[Footnote 190: See the correspondence between Prince Talleyrand and Lord Palmerston on the Polish question, July, 1831, in the documents submitted to the English parliament by order of the Queen, in 1861.]
It was then that we saw him for the first time among us. Young, tall, commanding, active, and untiring, he carried in his deportment and in those glorious wounds the credentials of his mission. Always occupied with the cause of his country, but with a serenity and stability far beyond his years, he attracted to himself all attention. A solitary and embarrassed wanderer in a world which was so soon to grow heartlessly indifferent to Poland, he entered calmly and resolutely upon that obscure, laborious, and uncongenial path which honor and duty had traced for him.