This is the light in which things present themselves to the unfortunate Monarch; he remains immutable, leaning upon events which wedge in and fasten down his mind. By dint of his immovability, he achieves a certain greatness: a man of imagination, he listens to you, he does not get angry with your ideas, he appears to enter into them and does not enter into them at all. There are certain general axioms which a man puts in front of himself like gabions; taking up his position behind that shelter, he takes shots from there at intellects which march ahead.
The mistake of many is to persuade themselves, according to events repeated in history, that mankind is always in its primitive place; they confound passions and ideas: the first are the same in every century, the second change in successive ages. If the material effects of certain actions are alike at different periods, the causes which have produced them vary.
Charles X. looks upon himself as a principle and, in fact, there are men who, by dint of living with fixed ideas, alike from generation to generation, are no longer more than so many monuments. Certain individuals, through the lapse of time and their own preponderance, become "things transformed into persons;" those individuals perish when those things come to perish: Brutus and Cato were the Roman Republic incarnate; they could not survive it, any more than the heart can beat when the blood ceases to flow.
In former days, I drew this portrait of Charles X.:
"You have seen him for ten years, that loyal subject, that respectful brother, that tender father, so greatly afflicted in one of his sons, so greatly consoled by the other! You know him, this Bourbon who was the first to come after our misfortunes, a worthy herald of Old France, to throw himself between you and Europe, with a branch of lilies in his hand! Your eyes are fixed with love and gladness on this Prince who, in the fulness of age, has preserved the charm and the noble elegance of youth and who now, adorned with the diadem, is still 'but one Frenchman the more in the midst of you!' You repeat with emotion so many happy phrases escaped from this new Monarch, who derives from the loyalty of his heart the grace of speaking well!
"Where is that one among us who would not trust him with his life, his fortune, his honour? That man, whom we would all wish to have as our friend, we have to-day as our King. Ah, let us try to make him forget the sacrifices of his life! May the crown lie light upon the whitened head of that Christian Knight! Pious as Louis XII.[611], courteous as Francis I., frank as Henry IV., may he be happy with all the happiness which he has lacked during so many long years! May the throne, on which so many monarchs have encountered storms, be to him a place of rest[612]!"
Elsewhere I have again celebrated the same Prince: the model has only grown older, but one recognises it in the youthful touches of the portrait; age withers us by taking from us a certain truth of poetry which gives colour and bloom to our faces and yet one loves, in spite of one's self, the face which has faded at the same time as our own features. I have sung hymns to the House of Henry IV.; I would begin them again with all my heart, while combating anew the mistakes of the Legitimacy and bringing down upon myself anew its disgraces, if it were destined to rise again. The reason of this is that the Constitutional Legitimate Royalty has always appeared to me the gentlest and safest road to entire liberty. I believed and I should still believe that I was playing the part of a good citizen even when exaggerating the advantages of that royalty, in order to give it, if so much should depend on me, the duration necessary for the accomplishment of the gradual transformation of society and manners.
Memoires of Charles X.
I am doing a service to the memory of Charles X. by opposing the pure and simple truth to what will be said of him in the future. The hostility of parties will represent him as a man faithless to his oaths and the violator of the public liberties: he is nothing of the sort. He acted in good faith in attacking the Charter; he did not, nor did he need to think himself forsworn; he had the firm intention of restoring the Charter after he had "saved" it, in his own way and as he understood it.
Charles X. is what I have described him to be: mild, although subject to anger, kind and affectionate to his intimates, lovable, easy-going, free from malice, having all the knightly qualities, devotion, nobleness, an elegant courtesy, mixed, however, with weakness, which does not exclude passive courage and the glory of a fine death; incapable of carrying out to the end a good or bad resolution; built up of the prejudices of his century and his rank; in ordinary times, a proper king; in extraordinary times, a man of perdition, not of misfortune.
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