The lesson over, the young page-King pulled up on horse-back in the middle of the riding-school, took off his cap, suddenly, to salute me in the gallery where I was standing with the Baron de Damas and some French people, and sprang from his horse as nimbly and gracefully as the Little Jehan de Saintré[566].
Henry is slender, agile, well-built; he is fair; he has blue eyes with a trait in the left eye which reminds one of his mother's look. His movements are sudden; he accosts you frankly; he is curious and asks questions; he has none of the pedantry which the newspapers ascribe to him; he is a genuine little boy, like any little boy of twelve. I complimented him on his good appearance on horse-back:
"You have seen nothing," he said; "you ought to see me on my black horse; he's as vicious as a demon: he kicks, he throws me; I get up again, we jump the gate. The other day, he hit himself; he's got a leg as thick as that. Isn't the last horse I was riding a pretty one? But I was not in form."
Henry at present detests the Baron de Damas, whose appearance, character and ideas are repellent to him. He frequently loses his temper with him. In consequence of these rages, the Prince must needs be punished; he is sometimes condemned to stay in bed: a stupid punishment. Next comes an Abbé Moligny, who confesses the rebel and tries to frighten him out of his wits. The obstinate one will not listen and refuses to eat Then Madame la Dauphine decides in favour of Henry, who eats and laughs at the baron. The education proceeds in this vicious circle.
What M. le Duc de Bordeaux ought to have is a light hand which would lead him without making him feel the bit, a governor who should be his friend rather than his master.
If the family of St. Louis were, like that of the Stuarts, a kind of private family expelled by a revolution, confined within an island, the destiny of the Bourbons would, in a short time, be foreign to the new generations. Our old royal power is more than that; it represents the Old Royalty: the political, moral and religious past of the people is born of that power and grouped around it. The fate of a House so closely intertwined with the social order that was, so nearly allied to the social order that is, can never be indifferent to mankind. But, destined though that House be to live, the condition of the individuals composing it, with whom a hostile fate had not made a truce, would be deplorable. In perpetual misfortune, those individuals would march forgotten on a parallel line along the glorious memory of their family.
There is nothing sadder than the existence of fallen kings; their days are no more than a tissue of realities and fictions; remaining sovereigns by their own fire-sides, among their people and their memories, they have no sooner crossed the threshold of their house than they find the ironical truth at their door: James II. or Edward VII.[567], Charles X. or Louis XIX. behind closed doors become, with opened doors, James or Edward, Charles or Louis, without numerals, like the labourers their neighbours; they suffer the two-fold drawbacks of Court life and private life: the flatterers, the favourites, the intrigues, the ambitions of the one; the affronts, the distress, the gossiping of the other: it is a continual masquerade of menials and ministers, changing clothes. The mood sours in this situation, hopes weaken, regrets increase; one recalls the past; one recriminates; one exchanges reproaches which are the more bitter inasmuch as the utterance ceases to be confined within the good taste of a high origin and the proprieties of a superior fortune: one becomes vulgar through vulgar sufferings; the cares of a lost throne degenerate into domestic worries: Popes Clement XIV.[568] and Pius VI.[569] were never able to restore peace in the Pretender's Household. Those discrowned aliens remain under supervision in the middle of the world, repelled by the princes as infected with adversity, suspected by the peoples as smitten with power.
*
Dinner at Hradschin.