My letter to Madame la Duchesse de Berry described the general facts, but did not enter into details.
When I saw Madame de Gontaut, surrounded by half-packed trunks and open boxes, she threw herself on my neck and, sobbing:
"Save us!" she said. "Save us!"
"And what am I to save you from, madame? I have just arrived, I know nothing about anything."
Hradschin was deserted; one would have thought that we were in the midst of the Days of July and the flight from the Tuileries, as though revolutions had become attached to the footsteps of the outlawed House.
The young men from France.
Young men were coming to congratulate Henry on the day of his attaining his majority[258]; several were under penalty of death: some of them, who had been wounded in the Vendée[259], almost all of them poor, had been obliged to club together in order to enable them to go to Prague and give voice to their loyalty. Forthwith an order closed the frontiers of Bohemia to them. Those who succeeded in reaching Butschirad were received only after making great efforts; etiquette barred their way, even as Messieurs the lords of the Bed-chamber defended the door of Charles X.'s closet at Saint-Cloud, while the Revolution entered by the windows. The young men were told that the King was going away, that he would not be in Prague on the 29th. The horses were ordered, the Royal Family packed up bag and baggage. When the travellers at last obtained leave to pronounce some hurried compliments, they were listened to in fear and trembling. Not so much as a glass of water was offered to the faithful little band; they were not bidden to the table of the orphan whom they had come to seek from so far away; they were driven to drink to the health of Henry V. in a tap-house. Men fled before a handful of Vendeans, even as they scattered before five score heroes of July.
And what was the pretext for this stampede? They were going to meet the Duchesse de Berry, they were going to make an appointment with the Princess on the high-road in order stealthily to show her her daughter and her son. Was she not very guilty? She persisted in claiming an empty title for Henry. And, in order to extricate themselves from the simplest position, they displayed before the eyes of Austria and France (always presuming France to notice such pin-points) a spectacle which rendered the Legitimacy, already too much disparaged, the despair of its friends and an object of calumny to its enemies.
Madame la Dauphine realized the disadvantages of the education of Henry V., and her virtues ran over in tears, even as at night the skies fall in dew. The brief audience which she granted me did not give her time to speak of my letter of the 30th of June from Paris; she wore an air of concern when she looked at me.
A means of safety seemed to lie hidden in the very rigours of Providence: the orphan's expatriation separated him from that which threatened to ruin him at the Tuileries; in the school of adversity, he might have been brought up under the guidance of a few men of the new social order, qualified to instruct him in the new theories of kingship. Instead of adopting those masters of the moment, so far from bettering Henry V.'s education, they made it more fatal by the intimacy produced by the constricted family-life: during the winter evenings, old men, stirring up the centuries by the fireside, taught the child about days the light of which nothing will ever bring back; they transformed the Chronicles of Saint-Denis[260] into nursery-tales for his benefit: surely the two First Barons of the modern era, Liberty and Equality, would know how to force Henry "Lackland" to grant a Great Charter!