I still see M. de La Fayette, at the head of the National Guard, passing along the boulevards, in 1790, on his way to the Faubourg Saint-Antoine; on the 22nd of May 1834, I saw him lying in his coffin, following the same boulevards. In the funeral procession one remarked a troop of Americans, each with a yellow flower in his button-hole. M. de La Fayette had sent to the United States for a quantity of earth sufficient to cover him in his grave; but his intentions were not carried out[305]: when the fatal moment came, forgetting both his political dreams and the romance of his life, he expressed the wish to lie at Picpus beside his virtuous wife[306]: death restores order to all things.
At Picpus are buried the victims of the Revolution[307] commenced by M. de La Fayette; there stands a chapel where perpetual prayers are said in honour of those victims. I accompanied M. le Duc Matthieu de Montmorency to Picpus[308]; he had been M. de La Fayette's colleague in the Constituent Assembly: on touching the bottom of the grave, the rope turned that Christian's coffin on one side, as though he had raised himself on his hip to say a last prayer.
I stood in the crowd, at the entrance to the Rue Grange-Batelière, when M. de La Fayette's funeral passed by: at the top of the ascent to the boulevard, the hearse stopped; I saw it, all gilded by a fleeting ray of the sun, gleam above the helmets and arms: then the shadow returned, and it disappeared from sight.
The multitude dispersed; sellers of "goodies" cried their oublies[309], vendors of trifles hawked about paper mills, which twirled round in the same wind whose breath had shaken the plumes of the funeral car.
In the sitting of the Chamber of Deputies of the 20th of May 1834, the President[310] spoke:
"General La Fayette's name," he said, "will remain famous in our history.... While expressing to you the sentiments of condolence of the Chamber, I join to these, sir and dear colleague[311], the private assurance of my attachment."
After these words, the reporter of the sitting adds, in brackets, the word, "(Laughter)."
That is what one of the most serious lives is reduced to. What remains of the death of the greatest men? A grey mantle and a straw cross, as on the corpse of the Duc de Guise, assassinated at Blois.
Within earshot of the public crier who was selling for a son, at the gate of the Tuileries Palace, the news of the death of Napoleon, I heard two quacks shouting the praises of their antidotes; and, in the Moniteur of the 21st of January 1793, I read the following words below the account of the execution of Louis XVI.: