The fixed idea of the grandeur, the antiquity, the dignity, the majesty of his House gave Louis XVIII. a real empire. One felt its dominion: even Bonaparte's generals confessed it; they stood more intimidated before that impotent old man than before the terrible master who had commanded them in a hundred battles. In Paris, when Louis XVIII. accorded to the triumphing monarchs the honour of dining at his table, he passed without ceremony before those princes whose soldiers were camping in the court-yard of the Louvre; he treated them like vassals who had only done their duty in bringing men-at-arms to their liege-lord. In Europe there is but one monarchy, that of France; the destiny of the other monarchies is bound up in the fate of that one. All the Royal Houses are of yesterday beside the House of Hugh Capet[283], and almost all are its daughters. Our old royal power was the old royalty of the world: from the banishment of the Capets will date the era of the expulsion of the kings.
The more impolitic that haughtiness on the part of the descendant of St. Louis (it became fatal to his heirs), the more pleasing was it to the national pride: the French rejoiced at seeing sovereigns who, when conquered, had borne the chains of a man, bear, as conquerors, the yoke of a dynasty.
The unshaken faith of Louis XVIII. in his blood is the real might that restored his sceptre; it was that faith which twice let fall upon his head a crown for which Europe certainly did not believe, did not pretend that she was exhausting her populations and her treasures. The soldier-less exile was to be found at the issue of all the battles which he had not delivered. Louis XVIII. was the Legitimacy incarnate; it ceased to be visible when he disappeared.
*
At Ghent, I took walks by myself, as I do wherever I go. The barges gliding along narrow canals, obliged to cross ten or twelve leagues of pasture-land to reach the sea, appeared to be sailing over the grass; they reminded me of the canoes of the savages in the wild-oat marshes of Missouri. Standing at the edge of the water, while they were dipping lengths of brown holland, I let my eyes wander over the steeples of the town; its history appeared to me on the clouds in the sky: the citizens of Ghent revolting against Henri de Châtillon, the French governor; the wife[284] of Edward III.[285] bringing forth John of Gaunt[286], the stock of the House of Lancaster; the popular reign of van Artevelde[287]:
"Good people, who moves you? Why are you so incensed against me? In what can I have angered you?"
"You must die!" cried the people: it is what Time cries to all of us. Later, I saw the Dukes of Burgundy; the Spaniards came. Then the pacification, the sieges and the captures of Ghent.
When I had done musing among the centuries, the sound of a little bugle or a Scotch bagpipe would rouse me. I saw living soldiers hastening to join the buried battalions of Batavia: ever destructions, powers overthrown; and, at last, a few faded shadows and some names that had passed.
Sea-board Flanders was one of the first cantonments of the companions of Clodion[288] and Clovis. Ghent, Bruges and the surrounding country furnished nearly a tenth of the grenadiers of the Old Guard: that terrible army was in part drawn from the cradle of our fathers, and came in its turn to be exterminated beside that cradle. Did the Lys[289] give its flower to the arms of our Kings?