Shortly afterwards, the catastrophe came.
A Royalist conspiracy.
Do you know the Rue des Prouvaires[367], a narrow, dirty, populous street, near Saint-Eustache and the markets? It was there that the famous supper of the Third Restoration was held. The guests were armed with pistols, daggers and keys; after drinking, they were to make their way into the gallery of the Louvre and, passing at midnight through a double row of master-pieces, go to strike the usurping monster in the midst of a fête. The conception was a romantic one: the sixteenth century had returned; one might have believed one's self in the times of the Borgias, the Florentine Medicis and the Parisian Medicis: only the men were different.
On the 1st of February, at nine o'clock in the evening, I was going to bed, when a zealous man and the individual of the bills of exchange forced my door in the Rue d'Enfer to tell me that all was ready, that in two hours Louis-Philippe would have disappeared; they came to enquire if they might declare me the principal chief of the Provisional Government and if I would consent to take the reins of the Provisional Government, in the name of Henry V., with a council of Regency. They admitted that the thing was dangerous, but said that I should reap all the greater glory, and that, as I was acceptable to all parties, I was the only man in France in a position to play such a part.
This was pressing me very hard: two hours to decide upon my crown! Two hours in which to sharpen the big mameluke's sabre which I had bought in Cairo in 1806! However, I felt no embarrassment and I said to them:
"Gentlemen, you know that I have never approved of your enterprise, which seems to me a mad one. If I were disposed to meddle in it, I would have shared your dangers and would not have waited for your victory to accept the prize of your risks. You know that I have a serious love of liberty, and it is clear to me, to judge by the leaders of all this business, that they do not want liberty and that, if they remained masters of the field of battle, they would begin by establishing the reign of arbitrariness. They would have no one, they would have me least of all, to support them in these plans; their success would bring about complete anarchy, and other countries, profiting by our discords, would come to dismember France. I cannot therefore enter into all this. I admire your devotion, but mine is not of the same character. I am going to bed; I advise you to do the same; and I am very much afraid that I shall hear to-morrow morning of the misfortune of your friends."
The supper took place; the proprietor of the tavern, who had prepared it only with the authorization of the police, knew what he was about. The police-spies, at table, touched glasses to the health of Henry V. with the best of them; the officers arrived, seized the guests, and once more upset the cup of the Legitimate Royalty. The Renaud of the royalist adventurers was a cobbler in the Rue de Seine[368], a hero of July, who had fought valiantly during the Three Days and who seriously wounded one of Louis-Philippe's policemen, even as he had killed soldiers of the Guard to drive out Henry V. and the two old Kings.
During this business, I had received a note from Madame la Duchesse de Berry appointing me a "member of a secret government," which she was establishing in her quality as Regent of France. I took advantage of this occasion to write the following letter to the Princess[369]:
My letter.
"Madame,
"I have received with the deepest gratitude the mark of confidence and esteem with which you have consented to honour me; it lays upon my loyalty the duty of doubling my zeal, while not refraining from placing before the eyes of Your Royal Highness what appears to me to be the truth.
"I will speak first of the so-called conspiracies, the rumour of which will perhaps have reached Your Royal Highness. It is asserted that these have been concocted or provoked by the police. Leaving the fact on one side, and without insisting upon the intrinsically reprehensible nature of conspiracies, be they true or false, I will content myself with observing that our national character is at once too light and too frank to succeed in such tasks. And so, during the last forty years, this sort of guilty enterprise has invariably failed. Nothing is more common than to hear a Frenchman publicly boast of being in a plot: he tells the whole details of it, without forgetting the day, place and hour, to some spy whom he takes for a brother; he says aloud, or rather exclaims to the passers-by:
"'We have forty thousand men all told, we have sixty thousand cartridges, in such a street, number so-and-so, the corner-house.'
"And then our Cataline goes off to dance and laugh.
"Secret societies have a long range only because they proceed by revolutions and not by conspiracies; they aim at changing doctrines, ideas and manners, before changing men and things; their progress is slow, but their results certain. Publicity of thought will destroy the influence of secret societies; it is public opinion which will now effect in France that which occult congregations accomplish among unemancipated nations.
"The departments in the West and South, which they seem to wish to drive to extremities by means of arbitrary measures and violence, retain the spirit of loyalty for which our old manners were distinguished; but that half of France will never conspire, in the narrow sense of the word: it forms a sort of camp standing at ease under arms. Admirable as a reserve force of the Legitimacy, it would be insufficient as an advance-guard and would never assume the offensive successfully. Civilization has made too much progress to allow of the outburst of one of those intestine wars, leading to great results, which were the outlet and the scourge of centuries at once more Christian and less enlightened than our own.
"What exists in France is not a monarchy; it is a republic: one, truly, of the worst quality. This republic is plastroned with a royalty which receives the blows and prevents them from striking on the Government itself.
"Besides, if the Legitimacy is a considerable force, the right of election is also a preponderating power, even when it is only fictitious, especially in this country where men live only on vanity: the French passion for equality is flattered by the right of election.
"Louis-Philippe's Government abandons itself to a double excess of arbitrariness and obsequiousness which the Government of Charles X. had never dreamt of. This excess is endured; and why? Because the people more easily endure the tyranny of a government which they have created than the lawful strictness of the institutions which are not their work.
"Forty years of storms have shattered the strongest souls: apathy is great, egoism almost general; men shrivel up to escape danger, to keep what they possess, to make shift to live in peace. After a revolution, there remain also cankered men who communicate their contamination to everything even as, after a battle, there remain corpses which pollute the air. If, by a mere wish, Henry V. could be transported to the Tuileries without trouble, without a shock, without compromising the slightest interest, we should be very near a restoration; but, in order to effect it, if one had to spend as much as one sleepless night, the chances would decrease.
"The results of the Days of July have not turned to the profit of the people, nor to the honour of the army, nor to the advantage of literature, art, commerce or industry. The State has fallen a prey to the professional ministerialists and to the class which sees the country in its stew-pot, public affairs in its domestic economy. It is difficult, Madame, for you at your distance to know what is here called the juste-milieu: Your Royal Highness must imagine a complete absence of elevation of soul, of nobility of heart, of dignity of character; you must picture to yourself people swelled up with their importance, bewitched with their employs, doting on their money, determined to die for their pensions: nothing will part them from those; it is a question of life or death to them; they are wedded to them as were the Gauls to their swords, the knights to the Oriflamme, the Huguenots to the white plume of Henry IV., the soldiers of Napoleon to the tricolour; they will die only when they are exhausted of oaths to every form of government, after shedding the last drop of those oaths on their last place. These eunuchs of the sham Legitimacy dogmatize about independence while having the citizens bludgeoned in the streets and the writers crowded into prison; they strike up songs of triumph while evacuating Belgium at the bidding of an English minister and, soon after, Ancona by order of an Austrian corporal. Between the threshold of Sainte-Pélagie and the doors of the Cabinets of Europe, they strut all puffed out with liberty and soiled with glory.
To the Duchesse de Berry.
"What I have said concerning the temper of the French must not discourage Your Royal Highness; but I wish that the road that leads to the throne of Henry V. were better known.
"You know my way of thinking as regards the education of my young King: my opinions are expressed at the end of the pamphlet which I have laid at Your Royal Highness' feet; I could only repeat myself. Let Henry V. be brought up for his century, with and by the men of his century: my whole system is summed up in those two words. Let him, above all, be brought up not to be King. He may reign tomorrow, he may reign only in ten years, he may never reign: for, if the Legitimacy has the different chances of returning which I will presently set out, nevertheless the present edifice might crumble to pieces without the formers rising from its ruins. You have a firm enough soul, Madame, to be able, without allowing yourself to be cast down, to suppose a judgment of God which would thrust back your illustrious House into the popular sources, even as you have a large enough heart to cherish just hopes without allowing them to intoxicate you. I must now place this other side of the picture before you.
"Your Royal Highness can defy, can dare everything at your age; you have more years left to run than have elapsed since the commencement of the Revolution. Now, what have these latter years not seen? When the Republic, the Empire, the Legitimacy have passed, shall the amphibious thing known as the juste-milieu not pass? What! Was it to arrive at the wretchedness of the men and things of the present moment that we have gone through and expended so many crimes, so much misfortune, talent, liberty and glory? What! Europe overturned, thrones tumbling one over the other, generations hurled into the common ditch with the steel in their breasts, the world labouring for half a century, and all this to bring forth the sham Legitimacy? One could conceive a great republic emerging from this social cataclysm: it would at least be fitted to inherit the conquests of the Revolution, that is, political liberty, liberty and publicity of thought, the levelling of ranks, the admission to all offices, the equality of all before the law, popular election and sovereignty. But how can we suppose a troop of sordid mediocrities, saved from shipwreck, to be able to employ those principles? To what a proportion have they not already reduced them! They detest them, they hanker only after laws of exception; they would like to catch all those liberties in the crown which they have forged, as in a trap; after which they would fiddle-faddle sanctimoniously with canals, railways, a mish-mash of arts, literary arrangements: a world of machinery, loquacity and self-sufficiency denominated 'a model society.' Woe to any superiority, to any man of genius ambitious of preferment, of glory and pleasure, of sacrifice and renown, aspiring to the triumph of the tribune, the lyre or arms, who should rise up some day in that universe of boredom!
"There is but one chance, Madame, for the sham Legitimacy to continue to vegetate: that is, if the actual state of society were the natural state of that very society at the period in which we live. If the people, grown old, found itself in sympathy with its decrepit government; if there were a harmony of infirmity and weakness between the governors and the governed, then, Madame, all would be over for Your Royal Highness and for the rest of the French. But, if we have not come to the age of national dotage and if the immediate Republic be impossible, then the Legitimacy seems called to be born again. Live your youth, Madame, and you shall have the royal tatters of the poor thing known as the Monarchy of July. Say to your enemies what your ancestress, Queen Blanche[370], said to hers during the minority of St. Louis:
"'No matter; I can wait.'
"Life's beautiful hours have been given you in compensation for your sufferings, and the future will give you as many occasions of happiness as the present has robbed you of days.
"The first reason which militates in your favour, Madame, is the justice of your cause and the innocence of your son. All the eventualities are not against the good right."