M. de Talleyrand had no liking for M. Fouché; M. Fouché detested and, strangest of all, despised M. de Talleyrand: it was difficult to achieve that success. M. de Talleyrand, who at first would have been pleased not to be coupled to M. Fouché, feeling that the latter was inevitable, consented to the proposal; he did not perceive that, with the Charter (especially when he was united with the man of the Lyons grape-shot), he was hardly more possible than Fouché.
Promptly what I had declared was verified: they obtained no profit from the admission of the Duc d'Otrante, they obtained nothing but opprobrium; the approaching shadow of the Chambers was enough to cause the disappearance of ministers too much exposed to the plain-speaking of the tribune.
My opposition was of no avail: according to the custom of weak characters, the King closed the sitting without deciding anything; the Order in Council was to be settled at the Château d'Arnouville.
No council, strictly speaking, was held at this last residence: only the intimates and those associated with the secret were assembled. M. de Talleyrand, having distanced us, entered into intelligence with his friends. The Duke of Wellington arrived: I saw him drive past in a calash; the plumes of his hat waved in the air; he had come to confer with M. Fouché and M. de Talleyrand upon France, as a twofold present which the Battle of Waterloo was making to our country. When it was represented to him that the regicide of M. le Duc d'Otrante was perhaps a drawback, he replied:
"That's a trifle!"
An Irish Protestant, an English general unacquainted with our manners and our history, a mind seeing in the French year 1793 only the English precedent of the year 1649 was charged to shape our destinies! Bonaparte's ambition had reduced us to this state of wretchedness.
I rambled by myself in the gardens which the Comptroller-general Machault[348] left, at the age of ninety-three years, to go and die at the Madelonnettes; for Death, in his great review, passed none over then. I was no longer sent for; the familiarities of a common misfortune had ceased between the Sovereign and the subject: the King was getting ready to return to his palace, I to my retreat. The vacuum forms anew round monarchs so soon as they recover their power. I have rarely passed, without making serious reflexions, through the silent and uninhabited rooms of the Tuileries which led me to the King's closet: for me, deserts of another kind, infinite solitudes in which the very worlds vanished before God, the only real Being.
Bread was scarce at Arnouville; but for an officer named Dubourg[349], who was hurrying away from Ghent like ourselves, we should have fasted. M. Dubourg went marauding; he brought us back half a sheep to the house of the mayor, who had run away. If the servant of the mayor, a Heroine of Beauvais left alone, had had any arms, she would have received us like Jeanne Hachette[350].
Saint-Denis.