"Go down on your knees to a priest and make an act of contrition, for we want your old head to put an end to your treacheries."
For the rest, the cholera still continues: the answer which I might address to a known or unknown adversary would perhaps reach him when he was lying on his threshold. If, on the contrary, he were destined to live, where would his reply find me? Perhaps in that resting-place of which no one can be frightened to-day, especially we men who have lengthened out our years between the Terror and the Plague, the first and last horizons of our lives. A truce: let the coffins pass.
Paris, Rue d'Enfer, 10 June 1832.
General Lamarque's[394] funeral has brought about two days of bloodshed and the victory of the sham Legitimacy over the Republican Party[395]. This incomplete and divided party has made an heroic resistance.
Paris in state of siege.
Paris has been declared in a state of siege[396]: this is the censorship on the largest possible scale, a censorship in the manner of the Convention, with this difference, that a military commission takes the place of the Revolutionary Tribunal. They are shooting, in June 1832, the men who achieved the victory in July 1830: that same Polytechnic School, that same artillery of the National Guard are being sacrificed; they conquered the power for those who are crushing, disowning and disbanding them. The Republicans are certainly wrong to have cried up measures of anarchy and disorder: but why did you not employ such noble arms on our frontiers? They would have delivered us from the ignominious yoke of the foreigner. Generous, if exalted heads would not have remained to ferment in Paris, to blaze up against the humiliation of our foreign policy and the bad faith of the new Royalty. You have been pitiless, you who, without sharing the dangers of the Three Days, have gathered their fruit. Go now with the mothers to identify the corpses of those knights of July from whom you hold places, riches and honours. Young men, you do not all obtain the same lot on the same shore! You have a tomb under the colonnade of the Louvre and a place in the Morgue: some for snatching, others for bestowing a crown. Your names, who knows them, you sacrifices and for-ever-unknown victims of a memorable revolution? Is the blood known that cements the monuments which men admire? The workmen who built the Great Pyramid for the corpse of an unglorious king[397], sleep forgotten in the sand near the needy root that served to feed them during their labours.
Paris, Rue d'Enfer, end of July 1832.
Madame la Duchesse de Berry[398] no sooner sanctioned the measure of the 12,000 francs than she took ship for her famous adventure. The rising of Marseilles failed; there remained but to try the West; but the Vendean glory is a thing apart: it will live in our annals; in any case, seven-eighths of France has chosen a different glory, the object of jealousy or antipathy; the Vendée is an Oriflamme venerated and admired in the treasure of Saint-Denis, under which youth and the future will henceforth gather no longer.
Madame lands in France.
Madame, when she landed, like Bonaparte, on the coast of Provence, did not see the White Flag fly from steeple to steeple: deceived in her expectation, she found herself almost alone on shore with M. de Bourmont. The marshal wanted to make her recross the frontier at once; she asked to have the night to think it over; she slept well among the rocks to the sound of the sea; in the morning, on waking, she found a noble dream in her thoughts: