The Allied Princes lost no time in leaving Paris. Alexander, when going away, had a religious sacrifice celebrated on the Place de la Concorde[199]. An altar was erected where the scaffold of Louis XVI. had stood. Seven Muscovite priests performed the service, and the foreign troops defiled before the altar. The Te Deum was sung to one of the beautiful airs of the old Greek music. The soldiers and the sovereigns bent their knee to the ground to receive the benediction. The thoughts of the French were carried back to 1793 and 1794, when the oxen refused to go over pavements which the smell of blood made hateful to them. What hand had led to the expiatory festival those men of all countries, those sons of the ancient barbarian invasions, those Tartars, some of whom dwelt in sheep-skin tents beneath the Great Wall of China? Those are spectacles which the feeble generations that will follow my century shall no longer see.
The first Restoration.
In the first year of the Restoration, I assisted at the third transformation of society: I had seen the old Monarchy turn into the Constitutional Monarchy, and the latter into the Republic; I had seen the Republic change into military despotism; I had seen military despotism turn back into a free Monarchy, the new ideas and the new generations return to the old principles and the old men. The marshals of the Empire become marshals of France; with the uniforms of Napoleon's Guard were mingled the uniforms of the bodyguards and the Maison Rouge, cut precisely after the old patterns; the old Duc d'Havré[200], with his powdered wig and his black cane, ambled along with shaking head, as Captain of the Body-guards, near Marshal Victor[201], limping in the Bonaparte style; the Duc de Mouchy[202], who had never seen a shot fired, went in to Mass near Marshal Oudinot[203], riddled with wounds; the Palace of the Tuileries, so proper and soldierly under Napoleon, became filled, instead of the smell of powder, with the odours of the breakfasts which ascended on every side: under messieurs the lords of the Bed-chamber, with messieurs the officers of the Mouth and the Wardrobe, everything resumed an air of domesticity. In the streets, one saw decrepit Emigrants wearing the airs and clothes of former days, most respectable men no doubt, but appearing as outlandish among the modern crowd as did the Republican captains among the soldiers of Napoleon. The ladies of the Imperial Court introduced the dowagers of the Faubourg Saint-Germain and taught them "their way about" the palace. There arrived deputations from Bordeaux, adorned with armlets; parish captains from the Vendée, wearing La Rochejacquelein hats. These different persons retained the expression of the feelings, thoughts, habits, manners familiar to them. Liberty, which lay at the root of that period, made things exist together which, at first sight, appeared as though they ought not to exist; but one had difficulty in recognising that liberty, because it wore the colours of the Ancient Monarchy and of the Imperial Despotism. Everyone, too, was badly acquainted with the language of the Constitution: the Royalists made glaring errors when talking Charter; the Imperialists were still less well-informed; the Conventionals, who had become, in turn, counts, barons, senators of Napoleon and peers of Louis XVIII., lapsed at one time into the Republican dialect which they had almost forgotten, at another into the Absolutist idiom which they had learned thoroughly. Lieutenant-generals had been promoted to game-keepers. Aides-de-camp of the last military tyrant were heard to prate of the inviolable liberty of the peoples, and regicides to sustain the sacred dogma of the Legitimacy.
These metamorphoses would be hateful, if they did not in part belong to the flexibility of the French genius. The people of Athens governed itself; orators appealed to its passions in the public places; the sovereign crowd was composed of sculptors, painters, artizans, "who are wont to be spectators of speeches and hearers of deeds[204]," as Thucydides says. But when, good or bad, the decree had been delivered, who issued to execute it from amid that incoherent and inexpert mass? Socrates, Phocion, Pericles, Alcibiades.
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Is it the Royalists who are "to blame for the Restoration," as is urged to-day? Not in the least: it was as though one should say that thirty millions of men had stood aghast, while a handful of Legitimists accomplished a detested restoration, against the wish of all, by waving a few handkerchiefs and putting a ribbon of their wives' in their hats! The vast majority of Frenchmen was, it is true, full of joy; but that majority was not a Legitimist one in the limited sense of the word, applicable only to the rigid partisans of the old Monarchy. The majority was a mass composed of every shade of opinion, happy at being delivered, and violently incensed against the man whom it accused of all its misfortunes: hence the success of my pamphlet. How many avowed aristocrats were numbered among those who proclaimed the King's name? Messieurs Mathieu and Adrien de Montmorency; the Messieurs de Polignac, escaped from their jail; M. Alexis de Noailles; M. Sosthène de La Rochefoucauld. Did those seven or eight men, whom the people neither recognised nor followed, lay down the law to a whole nation?
Madame de Montcalm had sent me a bag containing twelve hundred francs to distribute among the pure Legitimist race: I sent it back to her, not having succeeded in placing a crown-piece. An ignominious cord was fastened round the neck of the statue which surmounted the column in the Place Vendôme; there were so few Royalists to raise a hubbub around glory and to pull at the rope that the authorities themselves, Bonapartists all, had to lower their master's image with the aid of a scaffold; the colossus was forced to bow his head: he fell at the feet of the sovereigns of Europe, who had so often lain prostrate before him. It was the men of the Republic and of the Empire who enthusiastically greeted the Restoration. The conduct and ingratitude of the persons raised by the Revolution were abominable towards him whom they affect to-day to regret and admire.
Its supporters.
Imperialists and Liberals, it is you into whose hands the power fell, you who knelt down before the sons of Henry IV. It was quite natural that the Royalists should be happy to recover their Princes and to see the end of the reign of him whom they regarded as an usurper; but you, the creatures of that usurper, surpassed the feelings of the Royalists in exaggeration. The ministers, the high dignitaries vied with each other in taking the oath to the Legitimacy; all the civil and judicial authorities crowded on each other's heels to swear hatred against the proscribed new dynasty and love to the ancient race whom they had a hundred and a hundred times condemned. Who drew up those proclamations, those adulatory addresses, so insulting to Napoleon, with which France was flooded? The Royalists? No: the ministers, the generals, the authorities chosen and maintained in office by Bonaparte. Where was the jobbing of the Restoration done? At the Royalists'? No: at M. de Talleyrand's. With whom? With M. de Pradt, almoner to "the God Mars" and mitred mountebank. Where and with whom did the Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom dine on his arrival? At the Royalists' and with Royalists? No: at the Bishop of Autun's, with M. de Caulaincourt. Where were entertainments given to "the infamous foreign princes?" At the country-houses of the Royalists? No: at Malmaison, at the Empress Joséphine's. To whom did Napoleon's dearest friends, Berthier, for instance, carry their ardent devotion? To the Legitimacy. Who spent their existences with the Emperor Alexander, with that brutal Tartar? The classes of the Institute, the scholars, the men of letters, the philosophers, philanthropists, theophilanthropists and others; they returned enchanted, laden with praises and snuff-boxes. As for us poor devils of Legitimists, we were admitted nowhere; we went for nothing. Sometimes we were told, in the streets, to go home to bed; sometimes we were recommended not to shout "God Save the King!" too loud, others having undertaken that responsibility. So far from compelling anyone to be a Legitimist, those in power declared that nobody would be obliged to change his conduct or his language, that the Bishop of Autun would be no more compelled to say Mass under the Royalty than he had been compelled to attend it under the Empire. I saw no lady of the castle-keep, no Joan of Arc proclaim the rightful sovereign with falcon on wrist or lance in hand; but Madame de Talleyrand[205], whom Bonaparte had fastened to her husband like a sign-board, drove through the streets in a calash, singing hymns on the pious Family of the Bourbons. A few sheets fluttering from the windows of the familiars of the Imperial Court made the good Cossacks believe that there were as many lilies in the hearts of the converted Bonapartists as white rags at their casements. It is wonderful how far contagion will go in France, and a man would cry, "Off with my head!" if he heard his neighbour cry the same. The Imperialists went so far as to enter our houses and make us Bourbonists put out, by way of spotless flags, such white remnants as our presses contained. This happened at my house; but Madame de Chateaubriand would have none of it, and valiantly defended her muslins.
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