I must be permitted here a just homage to that first Polish emigration of 1831, which, preceded by the members of the national government, by the Count Platen and General Kniacewicz, and grouped about Prince Czartoryski, the Generals Dembinski, Dwernicki, Rybinski, and the former ministers, Malachowski and Morawski, have given us, for nearly forty years, such noble examples of fortitude and devotedness, of modest dignity and magnanimous resignation. How many of these yet remain to whom I can address this last testimony of an admiration which I shall always account among the most salutary and most lasting emotions of my life? I owe to them a great good—the power to know and to comprehend the grandeur and beauty of a vanquished cause!
Forced by circumstances to immolate everything in the worship of their assassinated country, not one hesitated before this stern requisition. Rich and poor, old and young, citizens and soldiers, all were called on for sacrifices painful and unexpected, and none shrank back; indeed, to many the privations they were obliged to endure formed a strange contrast to their previous habits of prodigality and almost oriental luxury. Ladislas Zamoyski was conspicuous in this career, so new to himself and his comrades. The subsidies which his friends forced him to accept were invariably reserved for some general object, or divided among his less fortunate companions, saying: "I learn every day to do without something." One thing only did he guard carefully—his beloved sword, as, with juvenile naïveté, he was accustomed to call it, in the warm hope and belief that it might yet serve his country.
The French refugees, whom the Edict of Nantes expelled from their homes, represented liberty of conscience odiously persecuted, and by this title they won the active sympathies of all the Protestant nations. The Irish emigrants, who, about the same time, were the victims of an intolerance as bitter and inconsistent in Protestant England, found in France and Spain places freely opened to them, and which they honorably filled. The French emigration of 1792 represented not only loyalty to a monarchy, but an entire social order, whose end no one believed so near—an order which still reigned in nearly the whole of Europe; to this they owed, at least during the first years of their exile, the aid and support of all the powers affected or threatened by the Revolution. It was quite otherwise with the Polish emigration of 1831, which, nevertheless, personified, at one and the same time, liberty both political and religious, and, more than all, a grand people, erased, by injustice, by a crime without a parallel, from the list of nations, and unanimous in protesting against that decree. They received from perplexed and divided Europe not one of those consolations and encouragements which it was their right to expect.
France and England had generous alms to solace needs purely material, but nothing more. Ruled by a double fear—that of the Muscovite preponderance from without, and that of dangers from demagogues within—no statesman, even the most liberal, was able or willing to espouse the Polish cause. It was a sadder thing still that a misapprehension prevented their receiving a sympathy which otherwise would have been first offered. Beyond the little circle of liberal, free-hearted Catholics—a circle then very limited—the Polish refugees, victims of the most bitter persecutor of the church in the nineteenth century, met no response from the religious world. It was a time when Catholic Europe, monarchical and aristocratic, was miserably prostrate before the Austria of Prince Metternich and the Russia of the Emperor Nicholas. Consequently, at Paris, and, above all, at Rome, there was to be caught not one glimpse of salvation. There existed among the defenders of the throne and the altar an animosity to the Poles truly revolting, unjustifiable traces of which even yet remain. It was the heaviest cross, for a multitude of Christian souls, which the Polish emigration hid in its bosom. I have the right to speak of it, for no one, perhaps, on this subject, has received more mournful confidences, and no one, I venture to believe, has done more to induce among Catholics a happy change—a change commencing with the good and fatherly Pope Gregory XVI., and precisely on occasion of Count Ladislas Zamoyski, whom he was pleased, at my request, to encourage to visit him in Rome. [Footnote 191]
[Footnote 191: Until 1837, no Pole was allowed to enter Rome, without a passport visé by Austria, Prussia, or Russia; consequently, this excluded the exiles of 1830.]
But how time and efforts must fail in making reparation for this strange misunderstanding! and how much it must have aggravated the sorrows inseparable from prolonged exile—those sorrows which every noble heart must comprehend, even without having experienced them, and which inspired, in a sad, gifted soul, the last ray of its genius!
"He passed, a wanderer on earth. May God guide the poor exile! I move among the crowd; they gaze at me, and I at them, yet each to each is unknown. The exile is alone everywhere," [Footnote 192]
[Footnote 192: Paroles d'un Croyant. 1833.]