What I said above of the warriors, with the object which I was proposing to attain, was true as regards the leaders; but I lied with respect to the soldiers. I have present in my memory, as though I saw it still, the spectacle which I witnessed when Louis XVIII., entering Paris on the 3rd of May, went to visit Notre-Dame: they had wished to spare the King the sight of the foreign troops; a regiment of the old foot-guards kept the line from the Pont-Neuf to Notre-Dame, along the Quai des Orfèvres. I do not believe that human faces ever wore so threatening and so terrible an expression. Those grenadiers, covered with wounds, the conquerors of Europe, who had seen so many thousands of cannon-balls pass over their heads, who smelt of fire and powder; those same men, robbed of their captain, were forced to salute an old king, disabled by time, not war, watched as they were by an army of Russians, Austrians and Prussians, in Napoleon's invaded capital. Some, moving the skin of their foreheads, brought down their great bear-skin busbies over their eyes, as though to keep them from seeing; others lowered the corners of their mouth in angry scorn; others again showed their teeth through their mustachios, like tigers. When they presented arms, it was with a furious movement, and the sound of those arms made one tremble. Never, we must admit, have men been put to so great a test and suffered so dire a torment. If, at that moment, they had been summoned to vengeance, it would have been necessary to exterminate them to the last, or they would have swallowed the earth.
At the end of the line was a young hussar, on horse-back; he held a drawn sword, and made it leap and as it were dance with a convulsive movement of anger. His face was pale; his eyes rolled in their sockets; he opened and shut his mouth by turns, clashing his teeth together, and stifling cries of which one heard only the first sound. He caught sight of a Russian officer: the look which he darted at him cannot be described. When the King's carriage passed before him, he made his horse spring, and certainly he had the temptation to fling himself upon the King.
The Restoration committed an irreparable mistake at its outset: it ought to have disbanded the army, while retaining the marshals, generals, military governors and officers in their pensions, honours and rank; the soldiers would afterwards have successively returned into the reconstituted army, as they have since done into the Royal Guard: the Legitimate Monarchy would not then have had against it, from the first, those soldiers of the Empire, organized, divided into brigades, denominated as they had been in the days of their victories, unceasingly talking together of the time that was past, nourishing regrets and feelings hostile to their new master.
The miserable resurrection of the Maison Rouge[195], that mixture of soldiers of the old Monarchy and fighting men of the new Empire, augmented the evil: to believe that veterans distinguished on a thousand battle-fields would not be offended at seeing young men, very brave no doubt, but for the most part new to the calling of arms, wearing symbols of high military rank without having earned them, was to betray a want of knowledge of human nature.
Declaration of Saint-Ouen.
Alexander had been to visit Louis XVIII. during the stay which the latter made at Compiègne. Louis XVIII. offended him by his haughtiness: this interview led to the Declaration of Saint-Ouen of the 2nd of May. The King said in this that he had resolved to give, as the basis of the Constitution which he proposed to award to his people, the following guarantees: representative government divided into two bodies, taxes freely granted, public and individual liberty, liberty of the press, liberty of public worship, sacred inviolability of property, irrevocability of the sale of national goods, irremovable judges and an independent judicial bench, every Frenchman admissible to every employment, etc., etc.
This declaration, although it was in keeping with Louis XVIII.'s intelligence, nevertheless pertained neither to him nor to his advisers; it was simply the time which was issuing from its rest: its wings had been folded, its soaring suspended since 1792; it was now resuming its flight, or its course. The excesses of the Terror, the despotism of Bonaparte had caused ideas to turn back again; but, so soon as the obstacles that had been opposed to them were destroyed, they flowed into the bed which they were at the at same time to follow and to dig. Matters were taken up at the point at which they had been stopped; all that had passed was as though it had not happened: the human race, thrust back to the commencement of the Revolution, had only lost forty years[196] of its life; well, what is forty years in the general life of society? That gap disappears when the cut fragments of time have been joined together.
The Treaty of Paris, between the Allies and France, was concluded on the 30th of May 1814. It was agreed that, within two months, all the Powers engaged on either side in the present war should send plenipotentiaries to Vienna to settle the final arrangements in a general congress.
On the 4th of June, Louis XVIII. appeared in royal session in a collective assembly of the Legislative Body and a fraction of the Senate. He delivered a noble speech: old, by-gone, worn-out, these wearisome details now serve only as an historic thread.
To the greater part of the nation, the Charter possessed the drawback of being "granted:" this most useless word stirred up the burning question of royal or popular sovereignty. Louis XVIII. also dated his boon from the nineteenth year of his reign, considering that of Bonaparte as null and void, in the same way as Charles II[197]. had taken a clean leap over Cromwell's head: it was a kind of insult to the sovereigns, who had all recognised Napoleon and who were at that very moment in Paris. That obsolete language and those pretensions of the ancient monarchies added nothing to the lawfulness of the right and were mere puerile anachronisms[198]. That apart, the Charter, replacing despotism, bringing us legal liberty, was calculated to satisfy conscientious men. Nevertheless, the Royalists, who gained so many advantages by it, who, issuing from their village, or their paltry fireside, or the obscure posts on which they had lived under the Empire, were called to a lofty and public existence, received the boon only in a grudging spirit; the Liberals, who had accommodated themselves whole-heartedly to the tyranny of Bonaparte, thought the Charter a regular slave-code. We have returned to the time of Babel, but we no longer work at a common monument of confusion: each builds his tower to his own height, according to his strength and stature. For the rest, if the Charter appeared defective, it was because the Revolution had not run its course; the principles of equality and democracy lay at the bottom of men's minds and worked in a contrary direction to the monarchical order.