"What, monsieur le maréchal!" I asked. "Is it certain that we cannot return except on such harsh conditions?"
"Faith, monsieur le vicomte," replied the marshal, "I am not quite convinced of it."
The King stopped two hours at Gonesse. I left Madame de Chateaubriand in her carriage in the middle of the highroad, and went to the council at the mayor's offices. There a measure was brought under deliberation upon which depended the future fate of the monarchy. The discussion began: I, alone with M. Beugnot, maintained that in no case ought Louis XVIII. to admit M. Fouché to his counsels. The King listened: I saw that he would have liked to keep his word given at Roye; but he was absorbed by Monsieur and driven by the Duke of Wellington.
Fouché.
In a chapter of the Monarchie selon la Charte, I have recapitulated the reasons upon which I laid stress at Gonesse. I was excited; the spoken word has a strength which becomes weaker in the written word:
"Wherever an open tribune exists," I said, in this chapter, "no one liable to be exposed to reproaches of a certain kind can be placed at the head of the government There are certain speeches, certain phrases, which would oblige such a minister to resign on leaving the Chamber. This impossibility resulting from the free principle of representative government was not felt at a time when all illusions united to place a famous man in office, notwithstanding the too well-founded repugnance of the Crown. The rise of that man was bound to produce one of these two things: either the abolition of the Charter or the fall of the ministry at the opening of the session. Can one picture the minister to whom I refer listening in the Chamber of Deputies to the discussion concerning the 21st of January, liable every moment to be apostrophized by some deputy from Lyons, and always threatened with the terrible Tu es ille vir! Men of that kind cannot be employed ostensibly, except with the mutes of the seraglio of Bajazet or the mutes of the Legislative Body of Bonaparte. What will become of the minister if a deputy, ascending the tribune with a Moniteur in his hand, reads the report of the Convention of the 9th of August 1795; if he demands the expulsion of Fouché, as unworthy by virtue of that report which 'ejected him, Fouché'—I am quoting literally—'as a thief and a terrorist, whose atrocious and criminal conduct conferred dishonour and opprobrium upon any assembly whatever of which he became a member[347]?'"
Those are the things which have been forgotten!
After all, supposing they had had the misfortune to think that a man of that kind could ever be useful: they ought to have kept him behind the scenes, consulted his deplorable experience; but to do violence to the Crown and to public opinion, in a barefaced manner to summon such a minister as that to affairs, a man whom Bonaparte, at that very moment, treated as infamous: was that not to declare that they disclaimed liberty and virtue? Is a crown worth so great a sacrifice? It left them powerless to remove anybody: whom could they exclude, after accepting Fouché?
Parties acted without thinking of the form of government which they had adopted; every one spoke of the Constitution, of liberty, of equality, of the right of peoples, and no one wanted them; fashionable verbiage: one asked, without thinking, for news of the Charter, hoping all the time that it would soon die the death. Liberals and Royalists leant towards absolute government, modified by our habits: such is the temper and trend of France. Material interests prevailed: they did not want, they said, to disown what had been done during the Revolution; each was burdened with his own life and claimed the right to load his neighbour with it: evil, they asserted, had become an element in public life which must thenceforth combine with the governments and enter as a vital principle into society.
My crotchet, relative to a Charter set in motion by religious and moral action, was the cause of the ill-will which certain parties have borne me: for the Royalists, I was too much attached to liberty; for the Revolutionaries, I had too great a scorn for crimes. Had I not been there, to my great detriment, to make myself the school-master of constitutionalism, the Ultras and the Jacobins would from the earliest days have put the Charter into the pocket of their fleury dress-coats or their carmagnoles à la Cassius.