Paris, end of March 1831.

I was out of my reckoning when, after the Days of July were over, I thought that I was entering a region of peace. The fall of the three Sovereigns had obliged me to explain myself in the House of Peers. The proscription of those Kings forbade me to remain dumb. On the other hand, Philip's newspapers were asking me why I refused to serve a revolution which consecrated the principles which I had defended and diffused. I had needs to speak on behalf of the general truths and to explain my personal conduct. An extract from a little pamphlet which will be forgotten, De la Restauration et de la Monarchie élective[337], will continue the thread of my narrative and that of the history of my times:

*

"Despoiled of the present, possessing but an uncertain future beyond the tomb, I feel a need that my memory should not be injured by my silence. I must not hold my peace touching a Restoration in which I have taken so much part, which is being daily outraged and which is at length being proscribed before my eyes.... In the middle-ages, at times of calamity, men used to take a religious and lock him in a tower, where he fasted on bread and water for the salvation of the world. I am not unlike this twelfth-century monk: through the dormer-window of my expiatory jail, I have preached my last sermon to the passers-by..."

Here is the epitome of that sermon:

"As I predicted in my last speech in the tribune of the Peers, the Monarchy of July is in an absolute condition of glory or of laws of exception; it lives by the press, and the press is killing it; devoid of glory, it will be devoured by liberty; if it attack that liberty, it will perish. It would be a fine thing if, after driving out three Kings with barricades, on behalf of the liberty of the press, we were to be seen erecting new barricades against that liberty! And yet, what is to be done? Will the redoubled action of the tribunals and the laws suffice to restrain the writers? A new government is a child that can walk only in leading-strings. Are we to put back the nation into swaddling-clothes? Will that terrible nursling, which has sucked blood in the arms of victory at so many bivouacs, not burst its bandages? There was but one old stock, deeply rooted in the past, which could have withstood with impunity the gales blowing from the liberty of the press. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

"To listen to the declamations of the moment, it seems that the exiles of Edinburgh are the poorest fellows living and that they are nowhere missed. The present, to-day, lacks nothing but the past: a small thing! As though the centuries did not make use of each other as pedestals, and as though the last comer could support itself in mid-air!... It is useless for our vanity to take offense at memories, to erase the fleurs-de-lys, to proscribe names and persons: that family, the heir of a thousand years, has left an immense void by its withdrawal; one feels it everywhere. Those individuals, so paltry in our eyes, have shaken Europe in their fall. To however small a degree events produce their natural effects and bring about their rigorous consequences, Charles X., in abdicating, will have made all those Gothic kings, the grand vassals of the past under the suzerainty of the Capets, abdicate with him. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

"We are marching towards a general revolution. If the transformation which is being effected follows its inclination and meets with no obstacles, if popular reason continues its progressive development, if the education of the middle classes suffers no interruption, the nations will become levelled in a uniform liberty; if that transformation is stayed, the nations will become levelled in a uniform despotism. This despotism will not last long, because of the advanced age of intelligence, but it will be harsh, and a long social dissolution will follow it. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Extracts from my pamphlet.

"Preoccupied as I am with these ideas, it is clear why I was; bound, as an individual, to remain true to what seemed to me; the best safeguard of the public liberties, the least perilous road by which to attain the complement of those liberties.

"It is not that I have the pretension to be a tearful preacher of sentimental politics, an eternal repeater of white plumes and commonplaces à la Henry IV. Casting my eyes over the space that separates the tower of the Temple from the palace in Edinburgh, I should doubtless find as many calamities heaped up as there are centuries accumulated on a noble race. A woman of sorrow, above all, has been loaded with the heaviest burden, as being the strongest; there is not a heart but breaks at the thought of her: her sufferings have risen so high that they have become one of the grandeurs of the Revolution. But, when all is said and done, no one is obliged to be king: Providence sends particular afflictions to whom it pleases, always brief ones, because life is short; and those afflictions are not counted in the general destinies of the peoples. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

"Even if the proposition which for ever banishes the deposed Family from French territory be a corollary of the deposition of that Family, that corollary carries no conviction for me.... I should in vain seek my place in the several categories of persons who have become attached to the actual order of things. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

"There are men who, after taking the oath to the Republic One and Indivisible, to the Directory of five persons, to the Consulate of three, to the Empire of one alone, to the First Restoration, to the Additional Act to the Constitutions of the Empire, to the Second Restoration, have something left to swear to Louis-Philippe: I am not so rich.

"There are men who flung their word on the Place de Grève, in July, like those Roman goat-herds who play at odd or even among ruins. Those men... treat as a fool and simpleton whosoever does not reduce politics to a question of private interests: I am a fool and a simpleton.

"There are timorous people who would have much preferred not to swear, but who saw themselves being butchered, together with their grand-parents, their grandchildren, and all the landlords, if they had not trembled out their oaths: this is a physical effect which I have not yet experienced; I shall wait for the infirmity and, if it comes to me, I shall consider.

"There! are great lords of the Empire linked to their pensions by sacred and indissoluble bonds, whatever be the hand they fall from: a pension is in their eyes a sacrament; it stamps a character, like orders or marriage; no pensioned head can ever cease to be so: pensions being charged to the Treasury, they remain charged to the same Treasury. As for me, I have the habit of divorce from Fortune: I am too old for her and abandon her, lest she should leave me.

"There are high barons of the Throne and the Altar who have not betrayed the Ordinances: no! But the insufficiency of the means employed to carry out the Ordinances has excited their spleen: indignant to find shortcomings in despotism, they have gone to seek another antechamber. It is impossible for me to share their indignation and their abode.

"There are men of conscience who are perjurers only to be perjurers; who, while yielding to force, are none the less for the right: they weep over that poor Charles X., whom they first dragged to his ruin by their advice and then put to death by their oaths; but, if ever he or his House revive, they will be very thunder-bolts of legitimacy. As for me, I have always been devoted to death, and I am the funeral procession of the Old Monarchy, like the poor man's dog.

"Lastly, there are trusty knights who have dispensations from honour and permits of disloyalty in their pocket: I have none.

"I was the man of the possible Restoration, of the Restoration accompanied by every kind of liberty. That Restoration took me for an enemy; it is ruined: I must undergo its fate. Shall I go to attach the few years that remain to me to a new fortune, like the hems of dresses which women drag from court to court for all the world to tread upon? At the head of the young generations, I should be suspect; following them, is not my place. I am fully aware that none of my faculties has aged; I understand my century better than ever; I penetrate more boldly into the future than anybody; but necessity has pronounced its decree; to end his life opportunely is a necessary condition for the public man."

Lastly, the Études historiques[338] have just appeared; I will quote the Introduction, which is a real page of my Memoirs, and contains my history at the very moment at which I am writing:

The Études historiques.

Introduction

"Remember, so as not to lose sight of the pace of the world, that at that time[339]... there were citizens engaged, like myself, in ransacking the archives of the past amid the ruins of the present, in writing the annals of the old revolutions to the uproar of the new revolutions; they and I taking as our table, in the crumbling edifice, the stone that had fallen at our feet, while awaiting that which was to crush our heads" (Études historiques).

"I would not, for the sake of the days that remain for me to live, begin again the eighteen months that have just elapsed. None will ever have an idea of the violence which I have done on myself; I have been forced to abstract my mind, for ten, twelve and fifteen hours a day, from what was passing around me, in order childishly to abandon myself to the composition of a work of which no one will read a line. Who would peruse four stout volumes, when it is already so difficult to read the feuilleton of a newspaper? I was writing ancient history, and modern history was knocking at my door; in vain I cried, 'Wait, I am coming to you:' it passed on, to the sound of the cannon, carrying with it three generations of kings.

"And how marvellously the times agree with the very nature of these Études! Men are overthrowing the Cross and persecuting the priests, and the Cross and the priests occur on every page of my narrative; they are banishing the Capets, and I am publishing a history in which the Capets occupy eight centuries. The longest and the last work of my life, that which has cost me most research, care and years, that in which I have perhaps stirred up most ideas and facts, appears at a time when it can find no readers; it is as though I flung it into a pit, where it will sink down under the mass of the rubbish that will follow it. When a society is being composed and decomposed, when the existence of each and all is at stake, when one is not sure of a future of an hour's duration, who cares what his neighbour does, says, or thinks? Men have something else to trouble their heads about than Nero, Constantine, Julian, the Apostles, the Martyrs, the Fathers of the Church, the Goths, the Huns, the Vandals, the Franks, Clovis, Charlemagne, Hugh Capet and Henry IV.; they have something else to think of than the shipwreck of the old world at a time when we are all involved in the shipwreck of the new world! Does it not argue a sort of dotage, a kind of feeble-mindedness, to busy one's self with literature at such a time? That is true; but this dotage has nothing to do with my brain, it comes from the antecedents of my spiteful fortune. If I had not made so many sacrifices to the liberties of my country, I should not have been obliged to contract engagements which are now being fulfilled under circumstances doubly deplorable to myself. No author has ever been put to such a proof; thank God, it is nearly at an end: I have nothing left to do but to sit on ruins and despise that life which I scorned in my youth.

"After these very natural complaints, which have involuntarily escaped me, one thought comes to console me: I began my literary career with a work in which I considered Christianity in its poetic and moral aspects; I end it with a work in which I regard the same religion in its philosophical and historical aspects: I began my political career under the Restoration, I end it with the Restoration. It is not without a secret satisfaction that I observe this consistency with myself."

Paris, May 1831.

I have not abandoned the resolution which I conceived at the moment of the catastrophe of July. I have been considering the ways and means of living abroad: difficult ways and means, because I have nothing; the purchaser of my works has all but made me a bankrupt, and my debts prevent me from finding anyone willing to lend me money.

I leave for Geneva.

Be this as it may, I shall go to Geneva[340] with the sum that has accrued to me from the sale of my last pamphlet[341]. I am leaving a procuration to sell the house in which I write this page for the sake of the order of dates. If I find a customer for my bed, I can find another bed outside France. In these uncertainties and movements, it will be impossible for me, until I am settled somewhere, to resume the sequence of my Memoirs at the place where I interrupted them[342]. I shall continue, therefore, to write down the things of the actual moment of my life; I shall communicate these things by means of the letters which I may happen to write on the road or during my different stoppages; I shall afterwards join the intermediary facts by a "journal" which will fill up the intervals between the dates of those letters.

I leave for Geneva.