This rose of the South than his own.
Charles X. At Holyrood.[93]
By The Comte Achille De Jouffroy
From Paris Ou Le Livre Des Cent-Et-Un.
Several friends of the exiled royal family, having been led by devotion to their cause to visit Scotland, have published detailed accounts of the residence at Holyrood. These narratives have left but little untold concerning the august proscribed personages, their situation, their mode of life, and their habits, the uniformity of which no important circumstance occurred to modify during the two years of their abode in the ancient palace of the Stuarts.
The reader, therefore, must not expect to meet in the following sketch with descriptions which have already been given by others with much minuteness, and which have been repeated in various works. Here will be found merely a small number of observations, impartially collected, which may serve to combat prejudices of a diverse nature that have been called forth, as well by the assertions of an unjust and bitter hatred, as by the injudicious efforts of a flattering servility.
Certainly, any enemy of the royal family, unless he were insane or wicked, had he been admitted into the privacy of Holyrood, must at least have ceased to regard them with dislike. Their most prejudiced adversary, no matter to what distinguished rank of society he might belong, could not have learned to know the domestic virtues displayed by these princes in adversity without wishing himself to have a father, a son, a wife, a sister, or children resembling them. On the other hand, those who, through attachment, duty, or interest (for there are political situations which a well-comprehended interest forces some to retain, even after the occurrence of disasters)—those, I say, who have made themselves the noisy apologists of this family have carried exaggeration so far as to attribute to them qualities and talents which would have been more than sufficient for ruling even in these difficult times; without reflecting that this blindness of zeal in regard to princes who met with so sudden a downfall while surrounded by a faithful army, and in the midst of devoted provinces, must diminish the confidence due to that portion of the eulogium which is really just. As private individuals, the Bourbons of the elder branch have never merited the smallest of the outrages which it has been their fate to endure; as sovereigns, it is well known they have been great chiefly in their fall, and have shown their courage and resolution less in their lives than in their deaths.
The writers of whom I speak, carried away by the feelings of their hearts, have poured them forth in eloquent descriptions. Identifying themselves, so to speak, with the [pg 420] misfortunes of which they have been witnesses, they have given us chiefly the recital of their own emotions. I shall not imitate them; the spectacle of an entire family, precipitated from the most brilliant of thrones into the miseries of exile, is of itself sufficiently touching; it has in it enough of sad sublimity to render it useless to overload the picture with the pretentious ornaments of the elegiac style. To put together sentimental phrases for the purpose of describing a misfortune like this is to place one's self, no matter what talents one may possess or exhibit, very much beneath the level of the subject.
I have considered this preamble needful in order to avoid being taxed with coldness. To speak with a suitable calmness of the Bourbons may perhaps be permitted to one who for fifteen years has defended their cause, and who has followed them into banishment; who has never obtained from them either favors or places, and who also has never betrayed them.