Letter from Benjamin Constant.
"I have delayed very long, monsieur, in thanking you for your admirable speech. An inflammation of the eyes, my work for the Chamber and, still more, the terrible scenes in that Chamber shall serve as my excuse. You know, besides, how my mind and soul participate in all that you say and sympathize with all the good that you are trying to do to our unhappy country. I am glad to add my feeble efforts to your powerful influence; and the frenzy of a ministry which plagues France and would like to degrade it, while disquieting me as to its approaching results, gives me the consoling assurance that such a state of things cannot last long. You will have powerfully contributed to put an end to it; and, if I deserve some day that my name be placed far after yours in the struggle which we must maintain against so much folly and crime, I shall consider myself amply rewarded.
"Accept, monsieur, the homage of a sincere admiration, of a profound esteem and of the highest regard.
"Benjamin Constant.
"Paris, 21 May 1827."
It was at the time of which I am speaking that I attained the highest pitch of my political importance. Through the Spanish War, I had swayed Europe; but a violent opposition was fighting against me in France. After my fall, I became, at home, the acknowledged ruler of public opinion. Those who had accused me of committing an irreparable fault in resuming my pen were obliged to recognise that I had formed for myself an empire mightier than the first. Young France had come over in its entirety to my side and has not left me since. In several of the industrial classes, the workmen were at my orders, and I could no longer take a step in the streets without being surrounded. Whence came this popularity? From the fact that I knew the real spirit of France. I had set out for the combat with one newspaper, and I had become the master of all the rest. My daring came to me from my indifference: as it would have been all one to me had I failed, I advanced towards success without troubling lest I fell on the way. All that remains to me is this satisfaction with myself; for what matters to anybody, to-day, a past popularity which has rightly been effaced from the memory of all?
The King's saint's-day[296] having arrived, I took occasion of it to blaze forth a loyalty which my Liberal opinions have never impaired. I published this article:
"Another royal truce!
"Peace to-day to the ministers!
"Glory, honour, long happiness and long life to Charles X.! It is St. Charles's Day!
"It is we above all, the old companions in exile of our Monarch, who should be asked to tell the history of Charles X.
"You others, Frenchmen who have not been forced to leave your country, you who received one Frenchman the more only to escape imperial despotism and the foreign yoke, inhabitants of the great and good town who have seen only the happy Prince: when you crowded round him, on the 12th of April 1814; when, weeping with emotion, you touched consecrated hands; when, on a brow ennobled by age and misfortune, you found again all the graces of youth, as one sees beauty through a veil, you perceived only virtue triumphant, and you led the son of kings to the royal couch of his fathers.
"But we, we have seen him sleep on the bare ground, like ourselves homeless, like ourselves outlawed and despoiled. Well, the goodness which charms you was the same; he wore misfortune as he wears the crown to-day, without finding the burden too heavy, with that Christian mildness which tempered the vividness of his misfortune as it softens the vividness of his prosperity.
"To the bounties of Charles X. must be added all the bounties with which his ancestors loaded us; the feast of a Most Christian King is for the French a feast of gratitude: let us therefore give way to the transports of grateful acknowledgment with which it should inspire us. Let us allow nothing to enter our souls that can for a moment render our joy less pure! Woe to the men...! We were about to violate the truce! God save the King[297]!"
Article in praise of Charles X.
*
My eyes have filled with tears while copying this page of my controversy, and I have not the courage to continue making extracts from it. O my King, you whom I had seen on foreign soil, I have seen you again on that same soil where you were about to die! When I was fighting for you so eagerly, to snatch you from hands which were beginning to undo you, judge, by the words which I have just transcribed, if I was your enemy or, rather, the fondest and sincerest of your servants! Alas, I speak to you, and you no longer hear me!
The Bill relating to the police of the press having been withdrawn, Paris was illuminated at night. I was struck by the public manifestation, an evil prognostication for the Monarchy: the opposition had passed into the people, and the people, by its character, transforms the opposition into a revolution.
The hatred of M. de Villèle went on increasing; the Royalists, as at the time of the Conservateur, had become Constitutionalists again, at the back of me. M. Michaud[298] wrote to me: