"Two hours after the execution, nothing remained to show that he who had once been the head of the nation had just undergone the punishment of criminals."
Following on those words came this notice:
"Ambroise, comic opera[312]."
The last actor in the drama played fifty years ago, M. de La Fayette remained upon the scene; the last chorus of the Greek tragedy delivers the moral of the play:
"Learn, O blind mortals, to turn your eyes upon the last day of life."
And I, a spectator seated in an empty play-house, amid deserted boxes and extinguished lights, remain alone, of my time, before the lowered curtain, alone with the silence and the night.
Armand Carrel.
Armand Carrel threatened Philip's future even as General La Fayette beset his past You know how I came to be acquainted with M. Carrel[313]; since 1832, I did not cease to keep up relations with him until the day when I followed him to the Cemetery of Saint-Mandé.
Armand Carrel was melancholy; he began to fear that the French were incapable of a rational feeling of liberty; he had a vague presentiment of the shortness of his life: as though it were a thing upon which he did not rely and to which he attached no value, he was always willing to risk it on a cast of the die. If he had fallen in his duel with young Laborie[314], about Henry V., his death would at least have had a great cause and a great stage; probably his funeral would have been honoured by a great display of bloodshed: he left us for a miserable quarrel which was not worth a hair of his head.