MY MEMOIRS
BY
ALEXANDRE DUMAS
TRANSLATED BY
E. M. WALLER
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
ANDREW LANG
IN SIX VOLUMES
VOL. V
1831 TO 1832
WITH A FRONTISPIECE
NEW YORK
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1908
[CONTENTS]
Organisation of the Parisian Artillery—Metamorphosis of my uniform of a Mounted National Guardsman—Bastide—Godefroy Cavaignac—Guinard—Thomas—Names of the batteries and of their principal servants—I am summoned to seize the Chamber—How many of us came to the rendez-vous [1]
Odilon Barrot, Préfet of the Seine—His soirées—His proclamation upon the subject of riots—Dupont (de l'Eure) and Louis-Philippe—Resignation of the ministry of Molé and Guizot—The affair of the forest of Breteuil—The Laffitte ministry—The prudent way in which registration was carried out [10]
Béranger as Patriot and Republican [20]
Béranger, as Republican [28]
Death of Benjamin Constant—Concerning his life—Funeral honours that were conferred upon him—His funeral—Law respecting national rewards—The trial of the ministers—Grouvelle and his sister—M. Mérilhou and the neophyte—Colonel Lavocat—The Court of Peers—Panic—Fieschi [38]
The artillerymen at the Louvre—Bonapartist plot to take our cannon from us—Distribution of cartridges by Godefroy Cavaignac—The concourse of people outside the Luxembourg when the ministers were sentenced—Departure of the condemned for Vincennes—Defeat of the judges—La Fayette and the riot—Bastide and Commandant Barré on guard with Prosper Mérimée [50]
We are surrounded in the Louvre courtyard—Our ammunition taken by surprise—Proclamation of the Écoles—Letter of Louis-Philippe to La Fayette—The Chamber vote of thanks to the Colleges—Protest of the École polytechnique—Discussion at the Chamber upon the General Commandership of the National Guard—Resignation of La Fayette—The king's reply—I am appointed second captain [59]
The Government member—Chodruc-Duclos—His portrait—His life at Bordeaux—His imprisonment at Vincennes—The Mayor of Orgon—Chodruc-Duclos converts himself into a Diogenes—M. Giraud-Savine—Why Nodier was growing old—Stibert—A lesson in shooting—Death of Chodruc-Duclos [68]
Alphonse Rabbe—Madame Cardinal—Rabbe and the Marseilles Academy—Les Massénaires—Rabbe in Spain—His return—The Old Dagger—The Journal Le Phocéen—Rabbe in prison—The writer of fables—Ma pipe [77]
Rabbe's friends—La Sœur grise—The historical résumés—M. Brézé's advice—An imaginative man—Berruyer's style—Rabbe with his hairdresser, his concierge and confectioner—La Sœur grise stolen—Le Centaure [88]
Adèle—Her devotion to Rabbe—Strong meat—Appel à Dieu—L'âme et la comédie humaine—La mort—Ultime lettere—Suicide—À Alphonse Rabbe, by Victor Hugo [99]
Chéron—His last compliments to Harel—Obituary of 1830—My official visit on New Year's Day—A striking costume—Read the Moniteur—Disbanding of the Artillery of the National Guard—First representation of Napoléon Bonaparte—Delaistre—Frédérick-Lemaître [109]
The Abbé Châtel—The programme of his church—The Curé of Lèves and M. Clausel de Montals—The Lévois embrace the religion of the primate of the Gauls—Mass in French—The Roman curé—A dead body to inter [117]
Fine example of religious toleration—The Abbé Dallier—The Circes of Lèves—Waterloo after Leipzig—The Abbé Dallier is kept as hostage—The barricades—The stones of Chartres—The outlook—Preparations for fighting [124]
Attack of the barricade—A sequel to Malplaquet—The Grenadier—The Chartrian philanthropists—Sack of the bishop's palace—A fancy dress—How order was restored—The culprits both small and great—Death of the Abbé Ledru—Scruples of conscience of the former schismatics—The Dies iræ of Kosciusko [130]
The Abbé de Lamennais—His prediction of the Revolution of 1830—Enters the Church—His views on the Empire—Casimir Delavigne, Royalist—His early days—Two pieces of poetry by M. de Lamennais—His literary vocation—Essay on Indifference in Religious Matters—Reception given to this book by the Church—The academy of the château de la Chesnaie [138]
The founding of l'Avenir—L'Abbé Lacordaire—M. Charles de Montalembert—His article on the sacking of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois—l'Avenir and the new literature—My first interview with M. de Lamennais—Lawsuit against l'Avenir—MM. de Montalembert and Lacordaire as schoolmasters—Their trial in the Cour des pairs—The capture of Warsaw—Answer of four poets to a word spoken by a statesman [148]
Suspension of l'Avenir—Its three principal editors present themselves at Rome—The Abbé de Lamennais as musician—The trouble it takes to obtain an audience of the Pope—The convent of Santo-Andrea della Valle—Interview of M. de Lamennais with Gregory XVI.—The statuette of Moses—The doctrines of l'Avenir are condemned by the Council of Cardinals—Ruin of M. de Lamennais—The Paroles d'un Croyant [160]
Who Gannot was—Mapah—His first miracle—The wedding at Cana—Gannot, phrenologist—Where his first ideas on phrenology came from—The unknown woman—The change wrought in Gannot's life—How he becomes Mapah [167]
The god and his sanctuary—He informs the Pope of his overthrow—His manifestoes—His portrait—-Doctrine of escape—Symbols of that religion—Chaudesaigues takes me to the Mapah—Iswara and Pracriti—Questions which are wanting in actuality—-War between the votaries of bidja and the followers of sakti—My last interview with the Mapah 176
Apocalypse of the being who was once called Caillaux[186]
The scapegoat of power—Legitimist hopes—The expiatory mass—The Abbé Olivier—The Curé of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois—Pachel—Where I begin to be wrong—General Jacqueminot—Pillage of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois—The sham Jesuit and the Préfet of Police—The Abbé Paravey's room [203]
The Préfet of Police at the Palais-Royal—The function of fire—Valérius, the truss-maker—Demolition of the archbishop's palace—The Chinese album—François Arago—The spectators of the riot—The erasure of the fleurs-de-lis—I give in my resignation a second time—MM. Chambolle and Casimir Périer [211]
My dramatic faith wavers—Bocage and Dorval reconcile me with myself—A political trial wherein I deserved to figure—Downfall of the Laffitte Ministry—Austria and the Duc de Modena—Maréchal Maison is Ambassador at Vienna—The story of one of his dispatches—Casimir Périer Prime Minister—His reception at the Palais-Royal—They make him the amende honorable [220]
Trial of the artillerymen—Procureur-général Miller—Pescheux d'Herbinville—Godefroy Cavaignac—Acquittal of the accused—The ovation they received—Commissioner Gourdin—The cross of July—The red and black ribbon—Final rehearsals of Antony [229]
The first representation of Antony—The play, the actors, the public—Antony at the Palais-Royal—Alterations of the dénoûment [238]
The inspiration under which I composed Antony—The Preface—Wherein lies the moral of the piece—Cuckoldom, Adultery and the Civil Code—Quem nuptiæ demonstrant—Why the Critics exclaimed that my Drama was immoral—Account given by the least malevolent among them—How prejudices against bastardy are overcome [249]
A word on criticism—Molière estimated by Bossuet, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and by Bourdaloue—An anonymous libel—Critics of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries—M. François de Salignac de la Motte de Fénelon—Origin of the word Tartuffe—M. Taschereau and M. Étienne [256]
Thermometer of Social Crises—Interview with M. Thiers—His intentions with regard to the Théâtre-Français—Our conventions—Antony comes back to the rue de Richelieu—The Constitutionnel—Its leader against Romanticism in general, and against my drama in particular—Morality of the ancient theatre—Parallel between the Théâtre-Français and that of the Porte-Saint-Martin—First suspension of Antony [265]
My discussion with M. Thiers—Why he had been compelled to suspend Antony—Letter of Madame Dorval to the Constitutionnel—M. Jay crowned with roses—My lawsuit with M. Jouslin de Lasalle—There are still judges in Berlin! [278]
Republican banquet at the Vendanges de Bourgogne—The toasts—To Louis-Philippe!—Gathering of those who were decorated in July—Formation of the board—Protests—Fifty yards of ribbon—A dissentient—Contradiction in the Moniteur—Trial of Évariste Gallois—His examination—His acquittal [289]
The incompatibility of literature with riotings—La Maréchale d'Ancre—My opinion concerning that piece—Farruck le Maure—The début of Henry Monnier at the Vaudeville—I leave Paris—Rouen—Havre—I meditate going to explore Trouville—What is Trouville?—The consumptive English lady—Honfleur—By land or by sea [299]
Appearance of Trouville—Mother Oseraie—How people are accommodated at Trouville when they are married—The price of painters and of the community of martyrs—Mother Oseraie's acquaintances—How she had saved the life of Huet, the landscape painter—My room and my neighbour's—A twenty-franc dinner for fifty sous—A walk by the sea-shore—Heroic resolution [308]
A reading at Nodier's—The hearers and the readers—Début—Les Marrons du feu—La Camargo and the Abbé Desiderio—Genealogy of a dramatic idea—Orestes and Hermione—Chimène and Don Sancho—Goetz von Berlichingen—Fragments—How I render to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's [317]
Poetry is the Spirit of God—The Conservatoire and l'École of Rome—Letter of counsel to my Son—Employment of my time at Trouville—Madame de la Garenne—The Vendéan Bonnechose—M. Beudin—I am pursued by a fish—What came of it [336]
Why M. Beudin came to Trouville—How I knew him under another name—Prologue of a drama—What remained to be done—Division into three parts—I finish Charles VII.—Departing from Trouville—In what manner I learn of the first performance of Marion Delorme [345]
Marion Delorme [356]
Collaboration [364]
The feudal edifice and the industrial—The workmen of Lyons—M. Bouvier-Dumolard—General Roguet—Discussion and signing of the tariff regulating the price of the workmanship of fabrics—The makers refuse to submit to it—Artificial prices for silk-workers—Insurrection of Lyons—Eighteen millions on the civil list—Timon's calculations—An unlucky saying of M. de Montalivet [376]
Death of Mirabeau—The accessories of Charles VII.—A shooting party—Montereau—A temptation I cannot resist—Critical position in which my shooting companions and I find ourselves—We introduce ourselves into an empty house by breaking into it at night—Inspection of the premises—Improvised supper—As one makes one's bed, so one lies on it—I go to see the dawn rise—Fowl and duck shooting—Preparations for breakfast—Mother Galop [388]
Who Mother Galop was—Why M. Dupont-Delporte was absent— How I quarrelled with Viardot—Rabelais's quarter of an hour—Providence No. I—The punishment of Tantalus—A waiter who had not read Socrates—Providence No. 2—A breakfast for four—Return to Paris [397]
Le Masque de fer—Georges' suppers—The garden of the Luxembourg by moonlight—M. Scribe and the Clerc de la Basoche—M. d'Épagny and Le Clerc et le Théologien—Classical performances at the Théâtre-Français—Les Guelfes, by M. Arnault—Parenthesis—Dedicatory epistle to the prompter [406]
M. Arnault's Pertinax—Pizarre, by M. Fulchiron—M. Fulchiron as a politician—M. Fulchiron as magic poet—A word about M. Viennet—My opposite neighbour at the performance of Pertinax—Splendid failure of the play—Quarrel with my vis-à-vis—The newspapers take it up—My reply in the Journal de Paris—Advice of M. Pillet [419]
Chateaubriand ceases to be a peer of France—He leaves the country—Béranger's song thereupon—Chateaubriand as versifier—First night of Charles VII.—Delafosse's vizor—Yaqoub and Frédérick-Lemaître—La Reine d'Espagne—M. Henri de Latouche—His works, talent and character—Interlude of La Reine d'Espagne—Preface of the play—Reports of the pit collected by the author [432]
Victor Escousse and Auguste Lebras [440]
First performance of Robert le Diable—Véron, manager of the Opéra—His opinion concerning Meyerbeer's music—My opinion concerning Véron's intellect—My relations with him—His articles and Memoirs—Rossini's judgment of Robert le Diable—Nourrit, the preacher—Meyerbeer—First performance of the Fuite de Law, by M. Mennechet—First performance of Richard Darlington—Frédérick—Lemaître—Delafosse—Mademoiselle Noblet [446]
Horace Vernet [456]
Paul Delaroche [463]
Eugène Delacroix [472]
Three portraits in one frame [483]
Collaboration—A whim of Bocage—Anicet Bourgeois—Teresa—Drama at the Opéra-Comique—Laferrière and the eruption of Vesuvius—Mélingue—Fancy-dress ball at the Tuileries—The place de Grève and the barrière Saint-Jacques—The death penalty [491]
The peregrinations of Casimir Delavigne—Jeanne Vaubernier—Rougemont—His translation of Cambronne's mot—First representation of Teresa—Long and short pieces—Cordelier Delanoue and his Mathieu Luc—Closing of the Taitbout Hall and arrest of the leaders of the Saint-Simonian cult [500]
Mély-Janin's Louis XI. [506]
Casimir Delavigne's Louis XI. [514]
THE MEMOIRS OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS
[BOOK I]
[CHAPTER I]
Organisation of the Parisian Artillery—Metamorphosis of my uniform of a Mounted National Guardsman—Bastide—Godefroy Cavaignac—Guinard—Thomas—Names of the batteries and of their principal servants—I am summoned to seize the Chamber—How many of us came to the rendez-vous
I am obliged to retrace my steps, as the putting out to nurse of Antony at the Porte-Sainte-Martin has carried me further than I intended.
Bixio had given me a definite answer with regard to my joining the artillery, and I was incorporated in the fourth battery under Captain Olivier.
Just a word or two upon the constitution of this artillery.
The order creating the Garde Nationale provided for a legion of artillery comprised of four batteries.
General La Fayette appointed Joubert provisional colonel of the legion, which consisted of four batteries. It was the same Joubert at whose house, in the Passage Dauphine, a quantity of powder had been distributed and many bullets cast in the July Days. La Fayette had also appointed four captains to enlist men. When the men were enlisted, these captains were replaced by picked officers.
Arnoux was appointed head captain of the first battery. I have already mentioned that the Duc d'Orléans was entered in this battery. Guinard was appointed first captain, and Godefroy Cavaignac second captain, of the second battery. Bastide was appointed senior captain, and Thomas junior captain, of the third battery. Finally, Olivier was first captain, and Saint-Évre second captain, of the fourth battery.
The first and second battery formed a squadron; the third and fourth a second squadron.
The first squadron was commanded by Thierry, who has since become a municipal councillor, and is now Medical Superintendent of Prisons, I believe. The second squadron was commanded by a man named Barré, whom I lost sight of after 1830, and I have forgotten what has become of him. Finally, the whole were commanded by Comte Pernetti, whom the king had appointed our colonel.
I had, therefore, reached the crown of my wishes: I was an artilleryman!
There only remained for me to exchange my uniform as a mounted national guardsman for an artillery uniform, and to make myself known to my commanding officers. My exchange of uniform was not a long job. My jacket and trousers were of the same style and colour as those of the artillery, so I only had to have a stripe of red cloth sewed on the trousers instead of the silver one; then, to exchange my epaulettes and my silver cross-belt at a military outfitter's for epaulettes and a red woollen foraging rope. The same with regard to my schako, where the silver braid and aigrette of cock's feathers had to be replaced by woollen braiding and a horse-hair busby. We did not need to trouble ourselves about carbines, for the Government lent us these; "lent them" is the exact truth, for twice they took them away from us! I lighted upon a very honest military outfitter, who gave me woollen braid, kept all my silver trimmings, and only asked me for twenty francs in return; though, it is true, I paid for my sword separately. The day after I had received my complete costume, at eight o'clock in the morning, I made my appearance at the Louvre to take my part in the manœuvres. We had there twenty-four pieces of eight, and twenty thousand rounds for firing.
The Governor of the Louvre was named Carrel, but he had nothing in common with Armand Carrel, and I do not think he was any relation to him.
The artillery was generally Republican in tone; the second and third battery, in particular, affected these views. The first and fourth were more reactionary; there would be quite fifty men among them who, in the moment of danger, would unite with the others.
As my opinions coincided with those of Bastide, Guinard, Cavaignac and Thomas, it is with them that I shall principally deal; as for Captains Arnoux and Olivier, I knew them but little then and have never had occasion to see them again. May I, therefore, be allowed to say a few words of these men, whose names, since 1830, are to be found in every conspiracy that arose? Their names have become historic; it is, therefore, fitting that the men who bore them, or who, perhaps, bear them still, should be made known in their true light.
Let us begin with Bastide, as he played the most considerable part, having been Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1848. Bastide was already at this time a man of thirty, with an expression of countenance that was both gentle and yet firm; his face was long and pale, and his black hair was close cut; he had a thick black moustache, and blue eyes, with an expression of deep and habitual melancholy. He was tall and thin, extremely deft-handed, although he looked rather awkward on account of the unusual length of his neck; in conclusion, he was an adept in the use of sword and pistol, especially the latter, and in what is called in duelling terms, la main malheureuse.[1]
So much for his physical characteristics. Morally, Bastide was a thorough Parisian, a thorough native of the rue Montmartre, wedded to his gutter, and, like Madame de Staël, he preferred it to the lake of Geneva; unable to do without Paris no matter how dirty it was, physically, morally, or politically; preferring imprisonment in Paris to exile in the most beautiful country in the universe. He had been exiled for several years, and spent two or three years in London. I have heard him say since, that, rather than return there even for two or three months, he would let himself get shot. He has a delightful country house in the neighbourhood of Paris, to which he never goes. Beneath an extremely unsophisticated manner, Bastide concealed real knowledge; but you had to discover it for yourself; and, when he took the trouble to be amusing, his conversation was full of witty sallies but, as he always spoke very low, only his near neighbour benefited by it. It must be admitted that this quite satisfied him, for I never saw a less ambitious man than he in this respect. He was a bundle of contradictions: he seemed to be nearly always idle, but was, in reality, nearly always busy, often over trifles, as Horace in the Roman forum, and, like Horace, he was completely absorbed in his trifling for the time being; more often still he was occupied over difficult and serious problems in mathematics or mechanics. He was brave without being conscious of the fact, so simple and natural a quality did bravery seem to his temperament and character. I shall have occasion later to record the miraculous feats of courage he performed, and the deliciously cool sayings he uttered while actually under fire, between the years 1830 to 1852. During deliberations Bastide usually kept silent; if his opinion were asked and he gave it, it was always to advise that the question in hand be put into execution as promptly and as openly, and even as brutally, as possible. For example, let us refer to the interview between the Republicans and the king on 30 July 1830; Bastide was among them, awaiting the arrival of the king, just as were the rest. This interval of waiting was put to good use by the representatives of Republican opinion. Little accustomed to the presence of crowned heads or of those on the eve of coronation, they discussed among themselves as to what they ought to do when the lieutenant-general should appear. Each person gave his opinion, and Bastide was asked for his. "What must we do?" he said. "Why, open the window and chuck him into the street."
If this advice had been as honestly that of the others as it was his own, he would have put it into execution. He had a facile, and even a graceful, pen. In the National it was he who had to write impossible articles; he succeeded, as Méry did, in the matter of bouts-rimés with an almost miraculous cleverness. When Minister of Foreign Affairs, he took upon himself the business of everybody else, and he a minister, not only did his own work, but that, also, of his secretaries. We must look to diplomatic Europe to pronounce upon the value of his work.
Godefroy Cavaignac, as he had recalled to the memory of the Duc d'Orléans, was the son of the member of the convention, Jean Baptiste Cavaignac; and, we will add, brother to Eugène Cavaignac, then an officer in the Engineers at Metz, and, later, a general in Algeria, finally dictator in France from June to December 1848; a noble and disinterested character, who will remain in history as a glittering contrast to those that were to succeed him. Godefroy Cavaignac was then a man of thirty-five, with fair hair, and a long red moustache; although his bearing was military, he stooped somewhat; smoked unceasingly, flinging out sarcastic clever sayings between the clouds of smoke; was very clear in discussion, always saying what he thought, and expressing himself in the best words; he seemed to be better educated than Bastide, although, in reality, he was less so; he took to writing from fancy, and then wrote a species of short poems, or novelettes, or slight dramas (I do not know what to call them) of great originality, and very uncommon strength. I will mention two of these opuscules: one that is known to everybody—Une Guerre de Cosaques, and another, which everybody overlooks, which I read once, and could never come across again: it was called Est-ce vous! One of his chansons was sung everywhere in 1832, entitled À la chie-en-lit! which was the funniest thing in the world. Like Bastide he was extremely brave, but perhaps less determined; there always seemed to me to be great depths of indifference and of Epicurean philosophy in his character. After being very intimate, we were ten years without seeing one another; then, suddenly, one day, without knowing it, we found ourselves seated side by side at the same table, and the whole dinner-time was spent in one long happy gossip over mutual recollections. We separated with hearty handshakes and promises not to let it be such a long time before seeing one another again. A month or two after, when I was talking of him, some one said, "But Godefroy Cavaignac is dead!" I knew nothing of his illness, death or burial.
Our passage through this world is, indeed, a strange matter, if it be not merely a preliminary to another life!
Guinard was notable for his warm-hearted, loyal characteristics; he would weep like a child when he heard of a fine deed or great misery. A man of marvellous despatch, you could have said of him, as Kléber did of Scheswardin. "Go there and get killed and so save the army!" I am not even sure he would have considered it necessary to answer: "Yes, general"; he would have said nothing, but he would have gone and got killed. His life, moreover, was one long sacrifice to his convictions; he gave up to them all he held most dear—liberty, his fortune and health.
From the single sentence we have quoted of Thomas, when he was accosted by M. Thiers on 30 July, my readers can judge of his mind and character. Bastide and he were in partnership, and possessed a woodyard. He was stout-hearted and upright, and had a clever head for business. Unaided, alone, and simply by his wonderful and honest industry, he kept the National afloat when it was on the verge of shipwreck after the death of Carrel, from the year 1836 until 1848, when the long struggle bore successful fruit for everybody except himself.
But now let us pass on from the artillerymen to the composition of their batteries.
Each battery was dubbed by a name derived from a special characteristic.
Thus the first was called The Aristocrat. Its ranks contained, as we already know, M. le Duc d'Orléans, then MM. de Tracy, Jal, Paravey (who was afterwards a councillor of state), Étienne Arago, Schoelcher, Loëve-Weymars, Alexandre Basset and Duvert.
The second was called The Republican. We are acquainted with its two captains, Guinard and Cavaignac; the principal artillerymen were—Guiaud, Gervais, Blaize, Darcet fils and Ferdinand Flocon.
The third was called La Puritaine, and it was thus named after its captain, Bastide. Bastide, who was on the staff of the National, was the champion of the religious questions, which this newspaper had a tendency to attack after the manner of the Constitutionnel. Thence originated the report of his absolute submission to the practices of religion. The Puritaine counted amongst its gunners—Carral, Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire, Grégoire, Séchan.
The fourth was called La Meurtrière, on account of the large number of doctors it contained. We have mentioned its captains; these are the names of the chief "murderers"—Bixio, medical student; Doctors Trélat, Laussedat, Jules Guyot, Montègre, Jourdan, Houet and Raspail, who was half a doctor. The others were Prosper Mérimée, Lacave-Laplagne, who has since become Minister of Finance; Ravoisié, Baltard, the architect; Desvaux, student, afterwards a lieutenant in the July revolution, and, later still, one of the bravest and most brilliant officers in the whole army; lastly, Bocage and myself. Of course, there were many others in these batteries, for the artillery, I believe, numbered eight hundred men, but we are here only mentioning those whose names survived.
The discipline was very strict: three times a week there was drill from six to ten in the morning, in the quadrangle of the Louvre, and twice a month shooting practice at Vincennes.
I had given a specimen of my strength in lifting—with either five, three, or one other, when the other servants were supposed to be either killed, or hors de combat,-—pieces of eight weighing from three to four hundred kilogrammes, when, one day, I received an invitation to be at the Palais-Bourbon at four o'clock in the afternoon, fully armed. The business in hand was the taking of the Chamber. We had taken a sort of oath, after the manner of Freemasons and Carbonari, by which we had engaged to obey the commands of our chiefs without questioning. This one appeared rather high-handed, I must admit; but my oath was taken! So, at half-past three, I put on my artillery dress, placed six cartridges in my pouch and one in my carbine, and made my way towards the pont de la Concorde. I noticed with as much surprise as pride, that I was the first arrival. I only strutted about the more proudly, searching along the quays and bridges and streets for the arrival of my seven hundred and ninety-nine comrades who, four o'clock having struck, seemed to me to be late in coming, when I saw a blue and red uniform coming towards me. It was worn by Bixio. Two of us then here alone to capture four hundred and forty-nine deputies! It was hardly enough; but patriotism attempts ambitious things!
Half-past four, five, half-past five and six o'clock struck.
The deputies came out and filed past us, little suspecting that these two fierce-eyed artillerymen who watched them pass, as they leant against the parapet of the bridge, had come to capture them. Behind the deputies appeared Cavaignac in civilian dress. We went up to him.
"It will not take place to-day," he said to us; "it is put off until next week."
"Good!" I replied; "next week, then!"
He shook hands and disappeared. I turned to Bixio.
"I hope this postponement till next week will not prevent us from dining as usual?" I said.
"Quite the reverse. I am as hungry as a wolf! Nothing makes one so empty as conspiring."
So we went off and dined with that careless appetite which is the prerogative of conspirators of twenty-eight years of age.
I have always suspected my new chiefs of wishing to, what they call in regimental parlance, test me; in which case Cavaignac can only have come just to make sure of my faithfulness in answering to his summons.
Was or was not Bixio in his confidence? I never could make out.
[1] TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.—Applied to a duellist who always kills or wounds his opponent.
[CHAPTER II]
Odilon Barrot, Préfet of the Seine—His soirées—His proclamation upon the subject of riots—Dupont (de l'Eure) and Louis-Philippe—Resignation of the ministry of Molé and Guizot—The affair of the forest of Breteuil—The Laffitte ministry—The prudent way in which registration was carried out
Now, the session of the Chamber had been an animated one that day, and if we had burst into the parliament hall we should have found the deputies in heated discussion over a proclamation issued by Odilon Barrot.
It was a singular position for a man, outwardly so upright and unbending as was Odilon Barrot, which was created by, on the one hand, his duties as Préfet of the Seine about the person of the king and, on the other, the good terms of friendship existing between him and most of us. He held soirées at his house, to which we flocked in large numbers; at which his wife, then still quite young, who seemed a more ardent Republican than her husband, did the honours with the correctness of a Cornelia that was not without a charm of its own. We of course discussed nothing but politics at these gatherings; and especially did we urge Odilon Barrot, in his official capacity as Préfet of the Seine, to hunt for the famous programme of the Hôtel de Ville, which had disappeared on 2 August, and had become more invisible even than the famous provisional government which was represented by a round table, empty bottles and a clerk who never stopped writing except when the pen was snatched out of his hands. That programme had never been discovered from that day to this! Our suggestion worried him much, for our insistence placed him in the following dilemma:—
"My dear Odilon" (we would say), "all the strength of the Government is vested in La Fayette and Dupont (de l'Eure) and yourself; if you, for instance, were to withdraw, we are persuaded that La Fayette and Dupont, the two blind men whom you, good dog, lead by the string, will also retire.... So we are going to compel you to retire."
"But how?"
"Oh, it is simple enough! We are going to raise a disturbance to carry off the king from the Palais-Royal.... Either you fire upon us, in which case you make yourself unpopular; or you abstain from firing on us, in which case we carry off the king, take him to Ham and proclaim the Republic."
Odilon was well aware that this dilemma was only a joke; but he also knew that there was a feverish spirit in us which any unlooked for spark might kindle into a blaze and lead to the maddest enterprises being attempted.
One day we drove him into a corner, and he promised that, on the first opportunity, he would make his views known both to the court and to us. This opportunity was the procession which, as I have mentioned, marched through Paris, and proceeded to the Palais-Royal, and to the château de Vincennes, shouting, "Death to the ministers!" It will be recollected that the king and Odilon Barrot had appeared upon the terrace, and that the men who led the procession had thereupon shouted, "Vive Odilon Barrot!" forgetting to shout "Vive le roi!" Whereat Louis-Philippe, as we know, had replied: "These are the sons of the men whom, in 1792, I heard shouting: 'Vive Pétion!'"
The allusion had annoyed Odilon Barrot considerably, and he decided to issue a proclamation of his own. He promised to give us this explicit proclamation.
It is a mania with every man who wants to be looked upon as a statesman to produce a proclamation, in fact he does not consider himself entitled to the name of statesman until he has. His proclamation is issued and received by the people, who read it and see in it the sanction of some power or other, which they either obey or disobey according to their individual views of politics. Unfortunately, this proclamation, upon which Odilon was counting greatly, demonstrated the fact that the Préfet of the Seine took a middle course, which offended at the same time both the Court party and the Republicans. We will reproduce it here in its entirety. Be it understood that our readers are free to read only the sentences in italics, or to pass it over altogether unread—
"Citizens, your magistrates are deeply distressed at the disorders which have recently been disturbing the public peace, at a time when commerce and industry, which are in much need of protection, are beginning to rise above a long crisis of depression.
"It is not vengeance that this people of Paris, who are the bravest and most generous in the world, are demanding, but justice! Justice, in fact, is a right, a necessity, to strong men; vengeance is but the delight of the weak and cowardly. The proposition of the Chamber is an INOPPORTUNE STEP calculated to make the people imagine that there is a concerted design to interfere with the ordinary course of justice with respect to the ex-ministers. Delays have arisen, which are merely the carrying out of those forms which surround justice with greater solemnity of character; and these delays but sanction and strengthen the opinion of which our ungovernable enemies, ever lying in wait to disunite us, persistently take advantage. Hence has arisen that popular agitation, which men of rectitude and good citizens regard as an actual mistake. I swear to you in all good faith, fellow-citizens, that the course of justice has neither been suspended, nor interrupted, nor will it be. The preparation of the accusation brought against the ex-ministers still continues: they have come under the law and the law alone shall decide their fate.
"No good citizen could wish or demand anything else; and yet cries of "death" are uttered in the streets and public places; but what are such instigations, such placards, but violent measures against justice? We merely desire to do as we would ourselves be done by, namely, be judged dispassionately and impartially. Well, there are certain misguided or malevolent persons who threaten the judges before the trial has begun. People of Paris, you will not stand by such violent conduct; the accused should be sacred in your eyes; they are placed under the protection of the law; to insult them, to hinder their defence, to anticipate the decrees of justice, is to violate the laws of every civilised society; it is to be wanting in the first principles of liberty; it is worse than a crime; it is cowardly! There is not a single citizen among this great and glorious people who cannot but feel that it is his honoured duty to prevent an outrage that will be a blot upon our Revolution. Let justice be done! But violence is not justice. And this is the cry of all well-meaning people, and will be the principle guiding the conduct of our magistrates. Under these grave circumstances they will count upon the concurrence and the assistance of all true patriots to uphold the measures that are taken to bring about public order."
This proclamation is, perhaps, a little too lengthy and diffuse and tedious; but we should remember that Odilon Barrot was a barrister before he became Préfet of the Seine. However, in the midst of this ocean of words, a flood of language by which the préfet had, perhaps, hoped that the king would be mystified, His Majesty noted this sentence—"The proposal of the Chamber was an inopportune step leading people to suppose it was a concerted thing...." And the Republicans caught hold of this one—"Our ungovernable enemies, ever on the watch to disunite us," etc.
The step that the Préfet of the Seine blamed was the king's own secret wish, interpreted by the address of the Chamber; so that, by finding fault with the address of the Chamber, the Préfet of the Seine allowed himself to blame the secret wish of the king.
From that moment, the fall of the Préfet of the Seine was decided upon. How could Louis-Philippe, with his plans for reigning and governing at the same time, keep a man in his service who dared to find fault with his own secret wishes? It was useless for M. Odilon Barrot to try to deceive himself; from that hour dates the king's dislike to him: it was that proclamation of 1830, which postponed his three hours' ministry to 1848. Then, on the other hand, he broke with the Republican party because he spoke of them as his ungovernable enemies.
The same night, or the day after the appearance of this proclamation, Godefroy Cavaignac cast Odilon Barrot's horoscope in these pregnant words—
"My dear friend, you are played out!"
This is what really passed at the Palais-Royal. The king was furious with the audacity of the pettifogging little lawyer. The little lawyer, however, was to take his revenge for this epithet two years later, by annulling the sentence on the young artist Geoffroy, who had been illegally condemned to death by the court-martial that had been instituted on account of the state of siege at the time. It was a splendid and noble method of being revenged, which won back for Odilon ten years popularity! So his fall was decided at the Palais-Royal. But it was not a matter that was very painful to the ministry which was in power in November 1830; this was composed only of M. Molé, a deserter from the Napoléonic camp; of M. de Broglie, a deserter from the Royalist camp; of M. Guizot, the man of the Moniteur de Gand; M. Casimir Périer, the banker whose bank closed at four o'clock, and who, up to the last, had struggled against the Revolution; M. Sébastiani, who, on the 30th, had announced that the white flag was his standard; and finally, General Gérard, the last minister of Charles X., who, to keep in power, had only had to get the Ordinance, which the flight of the Elder Branch left blank, signed by the Younger Branch. It will be understood that none of these men had the least personal attachment to Odilon Barrot. So, when the king proposed the dismissal of the Préfet of the Seine, they all unanimously exclaimed, "Just as you wish, seigneur!" Only one voice cried, "Veto!" that of Dupont (de l'Eure). Now, Dupont had this one grand fault in the eyes of politicians (and the king was the foremost politician of his day), he persisted in sticking both to his own opinions and to his friends.
"If Odilon Barrot goes, I also depart!" said the honest old man flatly.
This was a more serious matter, for if the withdrawal of Odilon Barrot involved that of Dupont (de l'Eure), the withdrawal of Dupont would also mean that of La Fayette with him. Now, La Fayette's resignation might very well, in the end, involve that of the king himself. It would, moreover, cause ill-feeling between the king and Laffitte, who was another staunch friend of Odilon Barrot. True, the king was not disinclined for a rupture with Laffitte: there are certain services so great that they can only be repaid by ingratitude; but the king only wished to quarrel with Laffitte in his own time and at his own convenience, when such a course would be expedient and not prejudicial. The grave question was referred to a consensus of opinion for solution.
M. Sébastiani won the honours of the sitting by his suggestion of himself making a personal application to M. Odilon Barrot to obtain his voluntary resignation. Of course, Dupont (de l'Eure) was not present at this secret confabulation. They settled to hold another council that night. The king was late, contrary to his custom. As he entered the cabinet, he did not perceive Dupont (de l'Eure) talking in a corner of the room with M. Bignon.
"Victory, messieurs!" he exclaimed, in an exulting voice; "the resignation of the Préfet of the Seine is settled, and General La Fayette, realising the necessity for the resignation, himself consented to it."
"What did you say, sire?" said Dupont (de l'Eure) hastily, coming out of the darkness into the circle of light which revealed his presence to the king.
"Oh! you are there, are you, Monsieur Dupont," said the king, rather embarrassed. "Well, I was saying that General La Fayette has ceased to oppose the resignation of M. Barrot."
"Sire," replied Dupont, "the statement your Majesty has done me the honour to make is quite impossible of belief."
"I had it from the general's own lips, monsieur," replied the king.
"Your majesty must permit me to believe he is labouring under a mistake," insisted Dupont, with a bow; "for the general told me the very reverse, and I cannot believe him capable of contradicting himself in this matter."
A flash of anger crossed the king's face; yet he restrained himself.
"However," continued Dupont, "I will speak for myself alone ... If M. Odilon Barrot retires, I renew my request to the king to be good enough to accept my resignation."
"But, monsieur," said the king hastily, "you promised me this very morning, that whatever happened, you would remain until after the trial of the ministers."
"Yes, true, sire, but only on condition that M. Barrot remained too."
"Without any conditions, monsieur."
It was now Dupont's turn to flush red.
"I must this time, sire," he said, "with the strength of conviction, positively assert that the king is in error."
"What! monsieur," exclaimed the king, "you give me the lie to my face? Oh! this is really too much! And everybody shall hear how you have been lacking in respect to me."
"Take care, sire," replied the chancellor coldly; "when the king says yes and Dupont (de l'Eure) says no, I am not sure which of the two France will believe."
Then, bowing to the king, he proceeded to the door of exit.
But on the threshold the unbending old man met the Duc d'Orléans, who was young and smiling and friendly; he took him by both hands and would not let him go further.
"Father," said the duke to the king, "there has surely been some misunderstanding ... M. Dupont is so strictly honourable that he could not possibly take any other course."
The king was well aware of the mistake he had just made, and held out his hand to his minister; the Duc d'Orléans pushed him into the king's open arms, and the king and his minister embraced. Probably nothing was forgotten on either side, but the compact was sealed.
Odilon Barrot was to remain Préfet of the Seine, and, consequently, Dupont (de l'Eure) was to remain chancellor, and La Fayette, consequently, would remain generalissimo of the National Guard throughout the kingdom.
But we shall see how these three faithful friends were politely dismissed when the king had no further need of them. It will, however, readily be understood that all this was but a temporary patching up, without any real stability underneath. M. Dupont (de l'Eure) consented to remain with MM. de Broglie, Guizot, Molé and Casimir Périer, but these gentlemen had no intention whatever of remaining in office with him. Consequently, they sent in their resignation, which involved those of MM. Dupin and Bignon, ministers who held no offices of state.
The king was placed in a most embarrassing quandary, and had recourse to M. Laffitte. M. Laffitte urged the harm that it would do his banking house, and the daily work he would be obliged to give to public affairs, if he accepted a position in the Government, and he confided to the king the worry which the consequences of the July Revolution had already caused him in his business affairs. The king offered him every kind of inducement. But, with extreme delicacy of feeling, M. Laffitte would not hear of accepting anything from the king, unless the latter felt inclined to buy the forest of Breteuil at a valuation. The only condition M. Laffitte made to this sale was that it should be by private deed and not publicly registered, as registration would naturally reveal the fact of the sale and the seller's difficulties. They exchanged mutual promises, and the forest of Breteuil was valued at, and sold for, eight millions, I believe, and the private deeds of sale and purchase were executed and signed upon this basis.
M. Laffitte's credit thus made secure, he consented to accept both the office of Minister for Finance and the Presidency of the Cabinet Council.
The Moniteur published, on 2 November, the list of newly elected ministers. They were—MM. Laffitte, for Finance and President of the Council; Dupont (de l'Eure), Minister of Justice; Gérard, for War; Sébastiani, at the Admiralty; Maison, for Foreign Affairs; Montalivet, at the Home Office; Mérilhou, for Education.
The king, therefore, had attained his end; the doctrinaires (as they were nicknamed, probably because they had no real political principles) had done him great service by their resignation, and given him the opportunity of forming a ministry entirely devoted to him. In the new coalition, Louis-Philippe ranked Laffitte as his friend, Sébastiani and Montalivet, as his devoted servants; Gérard and Maison, his subservient followers; while Mérilhou fell an easy prey to his influence. There was only Dupont (de l'Eure) left, and he took his cue from La Fayette.
Now, do not let us lose sight of the fact that this ministry might be called the Trial Ministry (ministère du procès), and that La Fayette, who had been proscribed by M. de Polignac, wanted to take a noble revenge upon him by saving his life. His speech in the Chamber did not leave the slightest doubt of his intentions.
On 4 October, the Chamber of Peers constituted itself a Court of Justice, ordered the removal of the ex-ministers to the prison of the petit Luxembourg and fixed 15 December for the opening of the trial. But between 4 October and 15 December (that is to say, between the constitution of the Court of Peers and the opening of the trial) M. Laffitte received the following curt note from Louis-Philippe:—
"MY DEAR MONSIEUR LAFFITTE,—After what has been told me by a mutual friend, of whom I need not say anything further, you know quite well why I have availed myself, at M. Jamet's[1] urgent instigation, to whom the secret of the purchase was entrusted by yourself and not by me, of taking the opportunity of having the private deed of sale registered, as secretly as possible.—Yours affectionately,
LOUIS-PHILIPPE."
M. Laffitte was stunned by the blow; he did not place any belief in the secrecy of the registration; and he was right. The sale became known, and M. Laffitte's downfall dated from that moment. But the deed of sale bore a special date! M. Laffitte took up his pen to send in his resignation, and this involved that of Dupont (de l'Eure), La Fayette and Odilon Barrot. He reflected that Louis-Philippe would be disarmed in face of a future political upheaval. But the revenge appeared too cruel a one to the famous banker, who now acted the part of king, while the real king played that of financier. Nevertheless, the wound rankled none the less deeply in his heart.
[1] M. Jamet was the king's private book-keeper.
[CHAPTER III]
Béranger as Patriot and Republican
When Laffitte became minister, he wanted to bear with him up to the political heights he was himself compelled to ascend, a man who, as we have said, had perhaps contributed more to the accession of Louis-Philippe even than had the celebrated banker himself. That man was Béranger. But Béranger, with his clear-sighted common sense, realised that, for him as well as for Laffitte, apparent promotion really meant ultimate downfall. He therefore let all his friends venture on that bridge of Mahomet, as narrow as a thread of flax, called power; but shook his head and took farewell of them in the following verses:—
"Non, mes amis, non, je ne veux rien être;
Semez ailleurs places, titres et croix.
Non, pour les cours Dieu ne m'a point fait naître:
Oiseau craintif, je fuis la glu des rois!
Que me faut-il? Maîtresse à fine taille,
Que me faut-il? Maîtresse à fine taille,
Petit repas et joyeux entretien!
De mon berceau près de bénir la paille,
En me créant, Dieu m'a dit: 'Ne sois rien!'
Un sort brillant serait chose importune
Pour moi rimeur, qui vis de temps perdu.
N'est-il tombé, des miettes de fortune,
Tout has, j'ai dit: 'Ce pain ne m'est pas dû.
Quel artisan, pauvre, hélas! quoi qu'il fasse,
N'a plus que moi droit à ce peu de bien?
Sans trop rougir, fouillons dans ma besace.
En me créant, Dieu m'a dit: 'Ne sois rien!'
Sachez pourtant, pilotes du royaume,
Combien j'admire un homme de vertu
Qui, désertant son hôtel ou son chaume,
Monte au vaisseau par tous les vents battu,
De loin, ma vois lui crie: 'Heureux voyage!'
Priant de cœur pour tout grand citoyen;
Mais, au soleil, je m'endors sur la plage
En me créant, Dieu m'a dit: 'Ne sois rien!'
Votre tombeau sera pompeux sans doute;
J'aurai, sous l'herbe, une fosse à l'écart.
Un peuple en deuil vous fait cortège en route;
Du pauvre, moi, j'attends le corbillard.
En vain l'on court ou votre étoile tombe;
Qu'importe alors votre gîte ou le mien?
La différence est toujours une tombe.
En me créant, Dieu m'a dit: 'Ne sois rien!'
De ce palais souffrez donc que je sorte,
À vos grandeurs je devais un salut;
Amis, adieu! j'ai, derrière la porte,
Laissé tantôt mes sabots et mon luth.
Sous ces lambris, près de vous accourue,
La Liberté s'offre à vous pour soutien ...
Je vais chanter ses bienfaits dans la rue.
En me créant, Dieu m'a dit: 'Ne sois rien!'"
So Béranger retired, leaving his friends more deeply entangled in the web of power than was La Fontaine's raven in the sheep's wool. Even when he is sentimental, Béranger finds it difficult not to insert a touch of mischief in his poetry, and, perhaps, while he is singing in the street the blessings of liberty, he is laughing in his sleeve; exemplifying that disheartening maxim of La Rochefoucauld, that there is always something even in the very misfortunes of our best friends which gives us pleasure. Yet how many times did the philosophic singer acclaim in his heart the Government he had founded. We say in his heart, for whether distrustful of the stability of human institutions, or whether he deemed it a good thing to set up kings, but a bad one to sing their praises in poetry, Béranger never, thank goodness! consecrated by a single line of praise in verse the sovereignty of July which he had lauded in his speech.
Now let us take stock of the length of time his admiration of, and sympathy with, the royal cause lasted. It was not for long! In six months all was over; and the poet had taken the measure of the king: the king was only fit to be put away with Villon's old moons. If my reader disputes this assertion let him listen to Béranger's own words. The man who, on 31 July, had flung a plank across the stream, as the petits Savoyards do, is the first to try to push it off into the water: it is through no fault of his if it do not fall in and drag the king with it.
"Oui, chanson, muse, ma fille,
J'ai déclaré net
Qu'avec Charle et sa famille,
On le détrônait;
Mais chaque loi qu'on nous donne
Te rappelle ici:
Chanson, reprends ta couronne!
—Messieurs, grand merci!
Je croyais qu'on allait faire
Du grand et du neuf,
Même étendre un peu la sphère
De quatre-vingt-neuf;
Mais point: on rebadigeonne
Un troûe noirci!
Chanson, reprends ta couronne!
—Messieurs, grand merci!
Depuis les jours de décembre,[1]
Vois, pour se grandir,
La chambre vanter la chambre,
La chambre applaudir!
À se prouver qu'elle est bonne,
Elle a réussi ...
Chanson, reprends ta couronne!
—Messieurs, grand merci!
Basse-cour des ministères
Qu'en France on honnit,
Nos chapons héréditaires,
Sauveront leur nid;
Les petits que Dieu leur donne
Y pondront aussi ...
Chanson, reprends ta couronne!
—Messieurs, grand merci!
La planète doctrinaire
Qui sur Gand brillait
Vent servir la luminaire
Aux gens de juillet:
Fi d'un froid soleil d'automne
De brume obscurci!
Chanson, reprends ta couronne!
—Messieurs, grand merci!
Nos ministres, qu'on peut mettre
Tous au même point,[2]
Voudraient que la baromètre
Ne variât point:
Pour peu que là-bas il tonne,
On se signe ici ...
Chanson, reprends ta couronne!
—Messieurs, grand merci!
Pour être en état de grâce
Que de grands peureux
Ont soin de laisser en place
Les hommes véreux!
Si l'on ne touche à personne,
C'est afin que si ...
Chanson, reprends ta couronne!
—Messieurs, grand merci!
Te voilà donc restaurée,
Chanson mes amours!
Tricolore et sans livrée,
Montre-toi toujours!
Ne crains plus qu'on l'emprisonne,
Du moins à Poissy ...
Chanson, reprends ta couronne!
—Messieurs, grand merci!
Mais, pourtant, laisse en jachère
Mon sol fatigué;
Mes jeunes rivaux, ma chère,
Ont un ciel si gai!
Chez eux la rose foisonne,
Chez moi le souci.
Chanson, reprends ta couronne!
—Messieurs, grand merci!"
These verses were nothing short of a declaration of war, but they escaped unnoticed, and those poets who talked of them seemed to talk of them as of something fallen from the moon, or some aerolite that nobody had picked up.
A song of Béranger? What was it but a song by him? The public had not read this particular one, though it was aware of the existence of a poet of that name who had written Le Dieu des bonnes gens, L'Ange Gardien, Le Cinq mai, Les Deux Cousins, Le Ventru, all songs that more or less attacked Louis XVIII. and Charles X.; but they did not recognise a poet of the name of Béranger who allowed himself to go so far as to attack Louis-Philippe. Why this ignorance of the new Béranger? Why this deafness as to his new song? We will explain.
There comes a reactionary period after every political change, during which material interests prevail over national, and shameful appetites over noble passions; during such a period,—as Louis-Philippe's reign, for example—that government is in favour which fosters these selfish interests and surfeits ignoble passions. The acts of such a government, no matter how outrageously illegal and tyrannical and immoral, are looked upon as saving graces! They praise and approve them, and make as much noise at the footstool of power, as the priests of Cybele, who clashed their cymbals round Jupiter's cradle. Throughout such a period as this, the only thing the masses fear, who, living by such a reaction, have every interest in upholding it, is, lest daylight break on the scene of Pandemonium, and light shine into the sink where speculators and moneymakers and coiners of crowns and paper money jostle, and crowd and hustle one another amid that jingling of money which denotes the work they are engaged in. Whether such a state of things lasts long or only briefly, we repeat that, while it endures until an honest, pure and elevated national spirit gets the upper hand, nothing can be done or said or hoped for; everything else is cried up and approved and extolled beforehand! It is as though that fine popular spirit which inspires nations from time to time to attempt great deeds has vanished, has gone up to the skies, or one knows not where. Weaker spirits despair of ever seeing it come back, and nobler minds alone, who share its essence, know that it ever lives, as they possess a spark of that divine soul, believed to be extinct, and they wait with smiling lips and calm brow. Then, gradually, they witness this political phenomenon. Without apparent cause, or deviation from the road it had taken, perhaps for the very reason that it is still pursuing it, such a type of government, which cannot lose the reputation it has never had, loses the factitious popularity it once possessed; its very supporters, who have made their fortunes out of it, whose co-operation it has rewarded, gradually fall away from it, and, without disowning it altogether, already begin to question its stability. From this very moment, such a government is condemned; and, just as they used to approve of its evil deeds, they criticise its good actions. Corruption is the very marrow of its bones and runs through it from beginning to end and dries up the deadly sap which had made it spread over a whole nation, branches like those of the upas tree, and shade like that of the manchineel. Into this atmosphere, which, for five, ten, fifteen, twenty years, has been full of an impure element that has been inhaled together with other elements of the air, there comes something antagonistic to it, something not immediately recognised. This is the returning spirit of social probity, entering the political conscience; it is the soul of the nation, in a word, that was thought to have fainted, risen to the sky, gone, no one knew where, which comes back to reanimate the vast democratic masses, which it had abandoned to a lethargy that surrounding nations, jealous and inimical, had been all too eager to proclaim as the sleep of death! At such a crisis the government, by the mere returning of the masses to honesty, seems like a ship that has lost its direction, which staggers and wavers and knows not where it is going! It has withstood fifteen years of tempests and storms and now it founders in a squall. It had become stronger by 5 and 6 June, on 13 and 14 April and 15 May, but falls before 24 February.
Such a government or rather governments show signs of their decline when men of heart and understanding refuse to rally to their help, or when those who had done so by mistake quit it from disgust. It does not follow that these desertions bring about an immediate fall—it may not be for years after, but it is a certain sign that they will fall some day, alone, or by their own act, and the public conscience, at this stage of their decline, needs but to give it a slight push to complete the ruin!
Now Béranger, with his fine instinct of right and wrong, of good and evil, knew all this; not in the self-saving spirit of the rat which leaves the ship where it has fattened, when it is about to sail. As we have seen, he would receive nothing at the hands of the Government or from the friends who formed its crew; but, like the swift, white sea-bird, which skims the crests of the rising waves, he warned the sailors of coming storms. From this very moment, Béranger decides that royalty in France is condemned, since this same royalty, which he has kneaded with his own hands, with the democratic element of a Jacobin prince in 1791, a commandant of the National Guard, a Republican in 1789 and a popular Government in 1830, is turning to a middle-class aristocracy, the last of the aristocracies, because it is the most selfish and the most narrow-minded,—and he dreams of a Republic!
But how was he to attack this popular king, this king of the bourgeois classes and of material interests, the king who had saved society? (Every form of government in France as it arose has made that claim!) The king was invulnerable; the Revolution of '89, which was looked upon as his mother, but was only his nurse, had dipped him in the furnace of the Three Days, as Thetis dipped her son Achilles in the river Styx; but he, too, had his weak spot like Homer's hero.
Is it the head? Is it the heel? Is it the heart? The poet, who will not lose his time in manufacturing gunpowder, which might easily be blown away, before it was used, will look for this weak spot, and, never fear, he will find it.
[1] We shall talk about these directly, but, desiring to dedicate a chapter or two now to Béranger, who, as poet and politician, took a great part in the Revolution of July, we are obliged to take a step in advance.
[2] What would have become of Béranger if he had followed the power of the ministers who could be put all on the same level? For notice that the ministers he speaks of here are his friends, who did not send in their resignation till 13 March.
[CHAPTER IV]
Béranger, as Republican
This vulnerable spot was the Republican feeling, ever alert in France, whether it be disguised under the names of Liberalism, Progress or Democracy. Béranger discovered it, for, just when he was going to bid farewell to poetry, he once more took up his song; like the warrior who, in despair, had flung down his arms, he resumed them; but he has changed his aim and will slay with principles rather than bullets, he will no longer try to pierce the velvet of an ancient throne, but he will set up a new statue of marble upon a brazen altar! That statue shall be the figure of the Republic. He who was of the advanced school under the Elder Branch, hangs back under the Younger. But what matters it! He will accomplish his task and, though it stand alone, it will be none the less powerful. Listen to him: behold him at his moulding: like Benvenuto Cellini, he flings the lead of his old cartridges into the smelting-pot: he will throw in his bronze and even the two silver dinner-services which he brings out of an old walnut chest on grand occasions when he dines with Lisette, and which he has once or twice lent to Frétillon to put in pawn. While he works, he discovers that those whom he fought in 1830 were in the right, and that it was he himself who was wrong; he had looked upon them as madmen, now he makes his frank apologies to them in this song—
"Vieux soldats de plomb que nous sommes,
Au cordeau nous alignant tous,
Si des rangs sortant quelques hommes,
Tous, nous crions: 'À bas les fous!'
On les persécute, on les tue,
Sauf, après un lent examen,
À leur dresser une statue
Pour la gloire du genre humain!
Combien de tempo une pensée.
Vierge obscure, attend son époux!
Les sots la traitent d'insensée,
Le sage lui dit: 'Cachez-vous!'
Mais, la rencontrant loin du monde,
Un fou qui croit au lendemain
L'épouse; elle devient féconde,
Pour le bonheur du genre humain!
J'ai vu Saint-Simon, le prophète,
Riche d'abord, puis endetté,
Qui, des fondements jusqu'au faite,
Refaisait la société.
Plein de son œuvre commencée,
Vieux, pour elle il tendais la main,
Sur qu'il embrassait la pensée
Qui doit sauver le genre humain!
Fourier nous dit: 'Sors de la fange,
Peuple en proie aux déceptions!
Travaille, groupé par phalange,
Dans un cercle d'attractions.
La terre, après tant de désastres,
Forme avec le ciel un hymen,
Et la loi qui régit les astres
Donne la paix au genre humain!'
Enfantin affranchit la femme,
L'appelle à partager nos droits.
'Fi! dites-vous, sous l'épigramme
Ces fous rêveurs tombent tous trois!'
Messieurs, lorsqu'en vain notre sphère
Du bonheur cherche le chemin,
Honneur au fou qui ferait faire
Un rêve heureux au genre humain!
Qui découvrit un nouveau monde?
Un fou qu'on raillait en tout lieu!
Sur la croix, que son sang inonde,
Un fou qui meurt nous lègue un Dieu!
Si, demain, oubliant d'élcore,
Le jour manquait, eh bien! demain,
Quelque fou trouverait encore
Un flambeau pour le genre humain!"
You have read this song. What wonderful sense and rhythm of thought and poetry these lines contain! You say you didn't know it? Really? and yet you knew all those which, under Charles X., attacked the throne or the altar. Le Sacre de Charles le Simple, and L'Ange Gardien. How is it that you never knew this one? Because Béranger, instead of being a tin soldier drawn up to defend public order, as stock-jobbers and the bourgeois and grocers understand things, was looked upon as one of those fanatics who leave the ranks in pursuit of mad ideas, which they take unto themselves in marriage and perforce therefrom bring forth offspring! Only, Béranger was no longer in sympathy with public thought; the people do not pick up the arrows he shoots, in order to hurl them back at the throne; his poems, which were published in 1825, and again in 1829, and then sold to the extent of thirty thousand copies, are, in 1833, only sold to some fifteen hundred. But what matters it to him, the bird of the desert, who sings for the love of singing, because the good God, who loves to hear him, who prefers his poetry to that of missionaries, Jesuits and of those jet-black-dwarfs whom he nourishes, and who hates the smoke of their censers, has said to him, "Sing, poor little bird, sing!" So he goes on singing at every opportunity.
When Escousse and Lebras died, he sang a melancholy song steeped in doubt and disillusionment; he could not see his way in the chaos of society. He only felt that the earth was moving like an ocean; that the outlook was stormy; that the world was in darkness, and that the vessel called France was drifting further and further towards destruction. Listen. Was there ever a more melancholy song than this? It is like the wild seas that break upon coasts bristling with rocks and covered with heather, like the bays of Morlaix and the cliffs of Douarnenez.
"Quoi! morts tous deux dans cette chambre close
Où du charbon pèse encor la vapeur!
Leur vie, hélas! était à peine éclose;
Suicide affreux! triste objet de stupeur!
Ils auront dit: 'Le monde fait naufrage;
Voyez pâlir pilote et matelots!
Vieux bâtiment usé par tous les flots,
Il s'engloutit, sauvons-nous à la nage!'
Et, vers le ciel se frayant un chemin,
Ils sont partis en se donnant la main!
. . . . . . . . . .
Pauvres enfants! quelle douleur amère
N'apaisent pas de saints devoirs remplis?
Dans la patrie on retrouve une mère,
Et son drapeau vous couvre de ses plis!
Ils répondaient: 'Ce drapeau, qu'on escorte,
Au toit du chef le protège endormi;
Mais le soldat, teint du sang ennemi,
Veille, et de faim meurt en gardant la porte!'
Et, vers le ciel se frayant un chemin,
Ils sont partis en se donnant la main!
. . . . . . . . . .
Dieu créateur, pardonne à leur démence!
Ils s'étaient fait les échos de leurs sous,
Ne sachant pas qu'en une chaîne immense,
Non pour nous seuls, mais pour tous nous naissons.
L'humanité manque de saints apôtres
Qui leur aient dit: 'Enfants, suivez ma loi!
Aimer, aimer, c'est être utile à soi!
Se faire aimer, c'est être utile aux autres!'
Et, vers le ciel se frayant un chemin,
Ils sont partis en se donnant la main!"
At what a moment,—consider it!—did Béranger prophesy that the world would suffer shipwreck to the terror of pilots and sailors? When, in February 1832, the Tuileries was feasting its courtiers; when the newspapers, which supported the Government, were glutted with praise; when the citizen-soldiers of the rues Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin were enthusiastic in taking their turn on guard; when officers were clamouring for crosses for themselves and invitations to court for their wives; when, out of the thirty-six millions of the French people, thirty millions were bellowing at the top of their voices, "Vive Louis-Philippe, the upholder of order and saviour of society!" when the Journal des Débats was shouting its HOSANNAHS! and the Constitutionnel its AMENS!
By the powers! One would have been out of one's mind to die at such a time; and only a poet would talk of the world going to wrack and ruin!
But wait! When Béranger perceived that no one listened to his words, that, like Horace, he sang to deaf ears, he still went on singing, and now still louder than before—
"Société, vieux et sombre édifice,
Ta chute, hélas! Menace nos abris:
Tu vas crouler! point de flambeau qui puisse
Guider la foule à travers tes débris:
Où courons-nous! Quel sage en proie au doute
N'a sur son front vingt fois passé la main?
C'est aux soleils d'être sûrs de leur route;
Dieu leur a dit: 'Voilà votre chemin!'"
Then comes the moment when this chaos is unravelled, and the night is lifted, and the dawn of a new day rises; the poet bursts into a song of joy as he sees it! What did he see? Oh! be not afraid, he will be only too ready to tell you—
"Toujours prophète, en mon saint ministère,
Sur l'avenir j'ose interroger Dieu.
Pour châtier les princes de la terre,
Dans l'ancien monde un déluge aura lieu.
Déjà près d'eux, l'Océan, sur les grèves,
Mugit, se gonfle, il vient.... 'Maîtres, voyez,
Voyez!' leur dis-je. Ils répondent: 'Tu rêves!'
Ces pauvres rois, ils seront tous noyés!
. . . . . . . . . .
Que vous ont fait, mon Dieu, ces bons monarques?
Il en est tant dont on bénit les lois!
De jougs trop lourds si nous portons les marques,
C'est qu'en oubli le peuple a mis ses droits.
Pourtant, les flots précipitent leur marche
Contre ces chefs jadis si bien choyés.
Faute d'esprit pour se construire une arche,
Ces pauvres rois, ils seront tous noyés!
'Un océan! quel est-il, ô prophète?'
Peuples, c'est nous, affranchis de la faim,
Nous, plus instruits, consommant la défaite
De tant de rois, inutiles, enfin!...
Dieu fait passer sur ces fils indociles
Nos flots mouvants, si longtemps fourvoyés;
Puis le ciel brille, et les flots sont tranquilles.
Ces pauvres rois, ils seront tous noyés!"
It will be observed that it was not as in les Deux Cousins, a simple change of fortune or of dynasty, but the overturning of every dynasty that the poet is predicting; not as in Les Dieu des bonnes gens, the changing of destinies and tides, but the revolution of both towards ultimate tranquillity. The ocean becomes a vast lake, without swell or storms, reflecting the azure heavens and of such transparent clearness that at the bottom can be seen the corpses of dead monarchies and the débris of wrecked thrones.
Then, what happens on the banks of this lake, in the capital of the civilised world, in the city par excellence, as the Romans called Rome? The poet is going to tell you, and you will not have long to wait to know if he speaks the truth: a hundred and sixty-six years, dating from 1833, the date at which the song appeared. What is a hundred and sixty-six years in the life of a people? For, note carefully, the prophecy is for the year 2000, and the date may yet be disputed!
"Nostradamus, qui vit naître Henri-Quatre,
Grand astrologue, a prédit, dans ses vers,
Qu'en l'an deux mil, date qu'on peut débattre,
De la médaille on verrait le revers:
Alors, dit-il, Paris, dans l'allégresse,
Au pied du Louvre ouïra cette voix:
'Heureux Français, soulagez ma détresse;
Faites l'aumône au dernier de vos rois!'
Or, cette voix sera celle d'un homme
Pauvre, à scrofule, en haillons, sans souliers,
Qui, né proscrit, vieux, arrivant de Rome,
Fera spectacle aux petits écoliers.
Un sénateur crira: 'L'homme à besace,
Les mendiants sont bannis par nos lois!
—Hélas! monsieur, je suis seul de ma race;
Faites l'aumône au dernier de vos rois!'
'Es-tu vraiment de la race royale?'
—Oui, répondra cet homme, fier encor;
J'ai vu dans Rome, alors ville papale,
À mon aïeul couronne et sceptre d'or;
Il les vendit pour nourrir le courage
De faux agents, d'écrivains maladroits!
Moi, j'ai pour sceptre un bâton de voyage....
Faites l'aumône au dernier de vos rois!
'Mon père, âgé, mort en prison pour dettes,
D'un bon métier n'osa point me pouvoir;
Je tends la main ... Riches, partout vous êtes
Bien durs au pauvre, et Dieu me l'a fait voir!
Je foule enfin cette plage féconde
Qui repoussa mes aïeux tant de fois!
Ah! par pitié pour les grandeurs du monde,
Faites l'aumône au dernier de vos rois!'
Le sénateur dira: 'Viens! je t'emmène
Dans mon palais; vis heureux parmi nous.
Contre les rois nous n'avons plus de haine;
Ce qu'il en reste embrasse nos genoux!
En attendant que le sénat décide
À ses bienfaits si ton sort a des droits,
Moi, qui suis né d'un vieux sang régicide,
Je fais l'aumône au dernier de nos rois!'
Nostradamus ajoute en son vieux style:
'La République au prince accordera
Cent louis de rente, et, citoyen utile,
Pour maire, un jour, Saint-Cloud le choisira.
Sur l'an deux mil, on dira dans l'histoire,
Qu'assise au trône et des arts et des lois,
La France, en paix, reposant sous sa gloire,
A fait l'aumône au dernier de ses rois!'"
It is quite clear this time, and the word Republic is pronounced; the Republic in the year 2000 will give alms to the last of its kings! There is no ambiguity in the prophecy. Now, how long will this Republic, strong enough to give alms to the last of its kings, have been established? It is a simple algebraic calculation which the most insignificant mathematician can arrive at, by proceeding according to rule, from the known to the unknown.
It is in the year 2000 that Paris will hear, at the foot of the Louvre, the voice of a man in tatters shouting, "Give alms to the last of your kings!"
This voice will belong to a man born an outlaw, old, arriving from Rome, which leads one to suppose he would be about sixty or seventy years of age. Let us take a mean course and say sixty-five @ 65
This man, a born outlaw, saw in Rome, then a papal city, the crown and golden sceptre of his grandfather. How long ago can that have been? Let us say fifty years @ 50
For how long had this grandfather been exiled? It cannot have been long, because he had his sceptre and gold crown still, and sold them to feed the courage of false agents and luckless writers. Let us reckon it at fifteen years and say no more about it @ 15
Let us add to that the twenty years that have rolled by since 1833 @ 20
And we shall have to take away a total from 166 of 150
Now he who from 166 pays back 150 keeps 16 as remainder,—and yet, and yet the poet said the year 2000 is open to doubt. Do not let us dispute the question, but let us even allow more time.
We return thee thanks, Béranger, thou poet and prophet!
What happened upon the appearance of these prophecies which were calculated to wound many very different interests? That the people who knew the old poems of Béranger by heart, because their ambition, their hopes and desires, had made weapons of them wherewith to destroy the old throne, did not even read his new songs, whilst those who did read them said to each other, "Have you read Béranger's new songs? No. Well, don't read them. Poor fellow, he is going off!" So they did not read them, or, if they had read them, the word was passed round to say, that the song-writer was going off. No, on the contrary, the poet was growing greater, not deteriorating! But just as from song-writer he had become poet, so, from poet, he was becoming a prophet. I mean that, to the masses, he was becoming more and more unintelligible. Antiquity has preserved us the songs of Anacreon, but has forgotten the prophecies of Cassandra.
And why? Homer tells us: the Greeks refused to put faith in the prophetic utterances of the daughter of Priam and Hecuba.
Alas! Béranger followed her in this and held his peace; and a whole world of masterpieces on the eve of bursting forth was arrested on his silent lips. He smiled with that arch smile of his, and said—
"Ah! I am declining, am I? Well, then, ask for songs of those who are rising!"
Rossini had said the same thing after Guillaume Tell, and what was the result? We had no more operas by him, and no more songs from Béranger.
Now it may be asked how it happens that Béranger, a Republican, resides peacefully in the avenue de Chateaubriand (No. 5), at Paris, whilst Victor Hugo is living in Marine Terrace, in the island of Jersey. It is simply a question of age and of temperament. Hugo is a fighter, and scarcely fifty: while Béranger, take him all in all, is an Epicurean and, moreover, seventy years of age;[1] an age at which a man begins to prepare his bed for his eternal sleep, and Béranger (God grant he may live many years yet, would he but accept some years of our lives!) wishes to die peacefully upon the bed of flowers and bay leaves that he has made for himself. He has earned the right to do so—he has struggled hard enough in the past, and, rest assured, his work will continue in the future!
Let us just say, in conclusion, that those who were then spoken of as the young school (they are now men of forty to fifty) were not fair to Béranger. After Benjamin Constant had exalted him to the rank of a great epic poet, they tried to reduce him to the level of a writer of doggerel verses. By this action, criticism innocently made itself the accomplice of the ruling powers; it only intended to be severe, but was, really, both unjust and ungrateful! It needs to be an exile and a poet living in a strange land, far from that communion of thought which is the food of intellectual life, to know how essentially French, philosophical and consolatory, the muse of the poet of Passy really was. In the case of Béranger, there was no question of exile, and each exile can, while he sings his songs, look for the realisation of that prophecy which Nostradamus has fixed for the year 2000.
But we are a very long way from the artillery, which we were discussing, and we must return to it again and to the riot in which it was called upon to play its part.
Let us, then, return to the riot and to the artillery. But, dear Béranger, dear poet, dear father, we do not bid you adieu, only au revoir. After the storm, the halcyon!—the halcyon, white as snow, which has passed through all the storms, its swan-like plumage as spotless as before.
[1] See [Note A], at end of the volume.
[CHAPTER V]
Death of Benjamin Constant—Concerning his life—Funeral honours that were conferred upon him—His funeral—Law respecting national rewards—The trial of the ministers—Grouvelle and his sister—M. Mérilhou and the neophyte—Colonel Lavocat—The Court of Peers—Panic—Fieschi
The month of December 1830 teemed with events. One of the gravest was the death of Benjamin Constant. On the 10th we received orders to be ready equipped and armed by the 12th, to attend the funeral procession of the famous deputy. He had died at seven in the evening of 8 December. His death created a great sensation throughout Paris. Benjamin Constant's popularity was a strange one, and it would be hard to say upon what it was founded. He was a Swiss Protestant, and had been brought up in England and Germany. He could speak English, German and French with equal ease; but he composed and wrote in French. He was young, good-looking, strong in body, but weak in character. From the time he set foot in France, Constant did nothing unless under the influence of women: they were his rulers in literature and his guides in politics. He was taken up by three of the most celebrated women of his time; by Madame Tallien, Madame de Beauharnais and Madame de Staël, and he was completely under their influence; the latter, especially, had an immense influence over his life. Adolphe was he himself, and the heroine in it was Madame de Staël. Besides, the life of Benjamin was not by any means the life of a man, but that of a woman, that is to say, a mixture of inconsistencies and weaknesses. Raised to the Tribunal after the overturning of the Directory, he opposed Bonaparte when he was First Consul, not, as historians state, because he had no belief in the durability of Napoléon's good fortune, but because Madame de Staël, with whom he was then on most intimate terms, detested the First Consul. He was expelled from the Tribunal in 1801, and exiled from France in 1802, and went to live near his mistress (or rather master) at Coppet. About the year 1806 or 1807 this life of slavery grew insufferable to him, and, weak though he was, he broke his chains. Read his novel Adolphe, and you will see how heavily the chain galled him! He settled at Hanover, where he married a German lady of high birth, a relative of the Prince of Hardenberg, and behold him an aristocrat, moving in the very highest aristocratic circles in Germany, never leaving the princes of the north, but living in the heart of the coalition which threatened France, directing foreign proclamations, writing his brochure, De l'esprit de conquête et d'usurpation, upon the table of the Emperor Alexander; and, finally, re-entering France with Auguste de Staël, in the carriage of King Charles-John. How can one escape being a Royalist in such company!
He was also admitted to the Journal des Débats, and became one of the most active editors of that periodical. When Bonaparte landed at the gulf of Juan and marched on Paris, Benjamin Constant's first impulse was to take himself off. He began by hiding himself at the house of Mr. Crawford, ex-ambassador to the United States; then he went to Nantes with an American who undertook to get him out of France. But, on the journey, he learned of the insurrection in the West and retraced his steps and returned to Paris after a week's absence. In five more days' time, he went to the Tuileries at the invitation of M. Perregaux, where the emperor was awaiting an audience with him in his private room. Benjamin Constant was to be bought by any power that took the trouble to flatter him; he was in politics, literature and morality what we will call a courtezan, only Thomas, of the National, used a less polite word for it. Two days later, the newspaper announced the appointment of Benjamin Constant as a member of the State Council. Here it was that he drew up the famous Acte additionnel in conjunction with M. Molé, a minister whom we had just thrown out of Louis-Philippe's Government. At the Second Restoration, it was expedient for Benjamin Constant to get himself exiled; and it regained him his popularity, so great was the public hatred against the Bourbons! He went to England and published Adolphe. In 1816, the portals of France were re-opened to him and he started the Minerve, and wrote in the Courrier and Constitutionnel and in the Temps. I met him at this time at the houses of Châtelain and M. de Seuven. He was a tall, well-built man, excessively nervous, pale and with long hair, which gave his face a strangely Puritanical expression; he was as irritable as a woman and a gambler to the pitch of infatuation! He had been a deputy since 1819, and each day he was one of the first arrivals at the Chamber, punctiliously clad in uniform, with its silver fleurs-de-lis, and always, summer and winter, carrying a cloak over his arm; his other hand was always full of books and printer's proofs; he limped and leant upon a sort of crutch, stumbling along frequently till he reached his seat. When seated, he began upon his correspondence and the correcting of his proofs, employing every usher in the place to execute his innumerable commissions. Ambitious in all directions, without ever succeeding in anything, nor even getting into the Academy, where he failed in his first attempt against Cousin, and in the second against M. Viennet! by turns irresolute and courageous, servile and independent, he spent his ten years as deputy under every kind of vacillation. The Monday of the Ordinances he was away in the country, where he had been undergoing a serious operation; he received a letter from Vatout, short and significant—
"MY DEAR FRIEND,—A terrible game is being played here with heads as stakes. Be the clever gambler you always are and come and bring your own head to our assistance."
The summons was tempting and he went. On the Thursday, he reached Montrouge, where the barricades compelled him to leave his carriage and to cross Paris upon the arm of his wife, who was terrified when she saw what men were guarding the Hôtel de Ville, and frightened her husband as well as herself.
"Let us start for Switzerland instantly!" exclaimed Benjamin Constant; "and find a corner of the earth where not even the cover of a newspaper can reach us!"
He was actually on the point of doing so when he was recognised, and some one called out "Vive Benjamin Constant!" lifted him in his arms and carried him in triumph. His name was placed last on the list of the protest of the deputies, and is to be found at the end of Act 30, conferring the Lieutenant-generalship upon the Duc d'Orléans; these two signatures, supported by his immense reputation and increasing popularity, once more took him into the State Council. Meanwhile, he was struggling against poverty, and Vatout induced the king to allow him two hundred thousand francs, which Constant accepted on condition, so he said to him who gave him this payment, that he was allowed the right of free speech. That's exactly how I understand it, said the king. At the end of four months, the two hundred thousand francs were all gambled away, and Constant was poorer than ever. A fortnight before his death, a friend went to his house, one morning at ten o'clock, and found him eating dry bread, soaked in a glass of water. That crust of bread was all he had had since the day before, and the glass of water he owed to the Auvergnat who had filled his cistern that morning. His death was announced to the Chamber of Deputies on 9 December.
"What did he die of?" several members asked.
And a melancholy accusing voice that none dared contradict replied—
"Of hunger!"
This was not quite the truth, but there was quite enough foundation for the statement to be allowed to pass unchallenged.
Then they set to work to arrange all kinds of funeral celebrations; they brought in a bill respecting the honours that should be bestowed upon great citizens by a grateful country, and, as this Act could not be passed by the following day, they bought provisionally a vault in the Cemetery de l'Est.
Oh! what a fine thing is the gratitude of a nation! True, it does not always secure one against death by starvation; but, at all events, it guarantees your being buried in style when you are dead—unless you die either in prison or in exile.
We had the privilege of contributing to the pomp of this cortège formed of a hundred thousand men; shadowed by flags draped in crêpe; and marching to the roll of muffled drums, and the dull twangings of the tam-tams. At one time, the whole boulevard was flooded by a howling sea like the rising tide, and, soon, the storm burst. As the funeral procession came out of the church, the students tried to get possession of the coffin, shouting, "To the Panthéon!" But Odilon Barrot came forward; the Panthéon was not in the programme, and he opposed their enthusiasm and, as a struggle began, he appealed to the law.
"The law must be enforced!" he cried. And he called to his aid that strength which people in power generally apply less to the maintenance of law than to the execution of their own desires; which, unfortunately, is not always the same thing.
Eighteen months later, these very same words, "The law must be enforced!" were pronounced over another coffin, but, in that instance, the law was not enforced until after two days of frightful butchery.
At the edge of Benjamin Constant's grave, La Fayette nearly fainted from grief and fatigue, and was obliged to be held up and pulled backward or he would have lain beside the dead before his time.
We shall relate how the same thing nearly happened to him at the grave of Lamarque, but, that time, he did not get up again.
Every one returned home at seven that evening, imbued with some of the stormy electricity with which the air during the whole of that day had been charged.
Next day, the Chamber enacted a law, which, in its turn, led to serious disturbances. It was the law relative to national pensions.
On 7 October, M. Guizot had ascended the tribune and said—
"GENTLEMEN,—The king was as anxious as you were to sanction by a legislative act the great debt of national gratitude, which our country owes to the victims of the Revolution.
"I have the honour to put before you a bill to that effect. Our three great days cost more than five hundred orphans the loss of fathers, five hundred widows their husbands, and over three hundred old people have lost the affection and support of children. Three hundred and eleven citizens have been mutilated and made incapable of carrying on their livelihood, and three thousand five hundred and sixty-four wounded people have had to endure temporary disablement."
A Commission had been appointed to draw up this bill and, on 13 December, the bill called the Act of National Recompense was carried. It fixed the amounts to be granted to the widows, fathers, mothers and sisters of the victims; and decreed that France should adopt the orphans made during the Three Days fighting; among other dispositions it contained the following—
"ARTICLE 8.—Resolved that those who particularly distinguished themselves during the July Days shall be made non-commissioned officers and sub-lieutenants in the army, if they are thought deserving of this honour after the report of the Commission, provided that in each regiment the number of sub-lieutenants does not exceed the number of two and that of non-commissioned officers, four.
"ARTICLE 10.—A special decoration shall be granted to every citizen who distinguished himself during the July Days; the list of those who are permitted to wear it shall be drawn up by the Commission, and submitted to the King's approval; this decoration will rank in the same degree as the Légion d'honneur."
This law appeared in the Moniteur on the 17th.
Just as the bill had been introduced the day after M. de Tracy's proposition with respect to the death penalty, this bill was adopted the day before the trial of the ex-ministers. It was as good as saying—"You dead, what more can you lay claim to? We have given your widows, fathers, mothers and sisters pensions! You, who live, what more can you want? We have made you non-commissioned officers and sub-lieutenants and given you the Cross! You would not have enjoyed such privileges if the ministers of Charles X. had not passed the Ordinances; therefore praise them instead of vilifying them!"
But the public was in no mood to praise Polignac and his accomplices; instead, it applauded the Belgian revolution and the Polish insurrection. All eyes were fixed upon the Luxembourg. If the ministers were acquitted or condemned to any other sentence than that of death, the Revolution of July would be abjured before all Europe, and by the king who won his crown by means of the barricades.
Mauguin, one of the examining judges, when questioned concerning the punishment that ought to be served to the prisoners, replied unhesitatingly—"Death!"
Such events as the violation of our territory by the Spanish army; the death of Benjamin Constant and refusal to allow his body to be taken to the Panthéon; the Belgian revolution and Polish insurrection; were so many side winds to swell the storm which was gathering above the Luxembourg.
On 15 December, two days after the vote upon the National Pensions Bill, and two days before its promulgation in the Moniteur, the prosecutions began. The trial lasted from the 15th to the 21st; for six days we never changed our uniform. We did not know what we were kept in waiting for; we were rallied together several times, either at Cavaignac's or Grouvelle's, to come to some decision, but nothing definite was proposed, beyond that our common centre should be the Louvre, where our arms and ammunition were stored, and that we should be guided by circumstances and act as the impulse of the moment directed.
I have already had occasion to mention Grouvelle; but let us dwell for a moment upon him and his sister. Both were admirable people, with hearts as devoted to the cause of Republicanism as any Spartan or Roman citizens. We shall meet them everywhere and in everything connected with politics until Grouvelle disappears from the arena, at the same time that his sister dies insane in the hospice de Montpellier. They were the son and daughter of the Grouvelle who made the first complete edition of the Lettres de Madame de Sévigné, and the same who, as secretary of the Convention, had read to Louis XVI. the sentence of death brought him by Garat. At the time I knew him, Grouvelle was thirty-two or three, and his sister twenty-five, years of age. There was nothing remarkable in his external appearance; he was very simply dressed, with a gentle face and scanty fair hair, and upon his scalp he wore a black band, no doubt to hide traces of trepanning. She, too, was fair and had most lovely hair, with blue eyes below white eyelashes, which gave an extremely sweet expression to her face, an expression, however, which assumed much firmness if you followed the upper lines to where they met round her mouth and chin. A charming portrait of herself hung in her house, painted by Madame Mérimée, the wife of the artist who painted the beautiful picture, l'innocence et le Serpent; the mother of Prosper Mérimée, author of Le Vase Étrusque, Colomba, Vénus d'Ile and of a score of novels which are all of high merit. The mother of Laure Grouvelle was a Darcet, sister, I believe, of Darcet the chemist, who had invented the famous joke about gelatine; consequently, she was cousin to the poor Darcet who died a horrible death, being burnt by some new chemical that he was trying to substitute for lamp-oil; cousin also to the beautiful Madame Pradier, who was then simply Mademoiselle Darcet or at most called madame. They both had a small fortune, sufficient for their needs, for Laure Grouvelle had none of the usual feminine coquetry about her, but was something akin to Charlotte Corday.
It was a noticeable fact that all the men of 1830 and the Carbonari of 1821 and 1822 were either wealthy or of independent means, either from private fortunes or industry or talent. Bastide and Thomas were wealthy; Cavaignac and Guinard lived on their incomes; Arago and Grouvelle had posts; Loëve-Weymars possessed talent and Carrel, genius. I could name all and it would be seen that none of them acted from selfish ends, or needed to bring about revolutions to enrich himself; on the contrary, all lost by the revolutions they took part in, some losing their fortunes, others their liberty, some their lives.
Mademoiselle Grouvelle had never married, but it was said that Étienne Arago had proposed to her when she was a young girl; that was a long while back, in 1821 or 1822. Étienne Arago was then, in 1821, a student in chemistry at the École polytechnique, and was about twenty years of age; he made the acquaintance of Grouvelle at Thénard's house. He was a fiery-hearted son of the South; his friends were anxious to make him a propagandist, and through his instrumentality principally, to introduce the secret society of the Charbonnerie into the École; Grouvelle, Thénard, Mérilhou and Barthe being its chief supporters.
These germs of Republicanism, sown by the young chemical student, and, even more, by the influence of Eugène Cavaignac, also a student at the École at that time, produced in after life such men as Vanneau, Charras, Lothon, Millotte, Caylus, Latrade, Servient and all that noble race of young men who, from 1830 to 1848, were to be found at the head of every political movement.
A year later, La Charbonnerie was recruited by Guinard, Bastide, Chevalon, Thomas, Gauja and many more, who were always first in the field when fighting began.
The question of how to introduce the principles of La Charbonnerie into Spain in the teeth of the cordon sanitaire was being debated, in order to establish relations between the patriots of the army and those who were taking refuge in the peninsula. Étienne Arago was thought of, but as he was too poor to undertake the journey, they went to Mérilhou. Mérilhou, as I have said, was one of the ringleaders of Charbonarism. He was then living in the rue des Moulins. Cavaignac and Grouvelle introduced Étienne, and Mérilhou gazed at the neophyte, who did not look more than eighteen.
"You are very young, my friend," said the cautious lawyer to him.
"That may be, monsieur," Étienne responded, "but young though I am, I have been a Charbonist for two years."
"Do you realise to what dangers you would expose yourself if you undertook this propagandist mission?"
"Certainly, I do; I expose myself to death on the scaffold."
Whereupon the future minister of Louis-Philippe and peer of France, and presiding judge at the Barbés' trial, laid his hand upon Étienne's shoulder, and said, in the theatrical manner barristers are wont to assume—
"Made animo, generose puer!" And gave him the necessary money.
We shall come across M. Mérilhou again at Barbés' trial, and the made animo will not be thrown away upon us.
For the moment, however, we must go back to the trial of the ministers.
La Fayette had declared his views positively; he had offered himself as guarantee to the High Court; he had sworn to the king to save the heads of the ministers, if they were acquitted. Thereupon ensued a strange revival of popularity in favour of the old general; fear made his greatest enemies sing his praises on all sides; the king and Madame Adélaïde showered favours upon him; he was indispensable; the monarchy could not survive without his support.... If Atlas failed this new Olympus, it would be overthrown!
La Fayette saw through it all and laughed to himself and shrugged his shoulders significantly. None of these flatteries and favours had induced him to act as he did, but simply the dictates of his own conscience.
"General," I said to him on 15 December, "you know you are staking your popularity to save the heads of these ministers?"
"My boy," he replied, "no one knows better than I the price to be put upon popularity; it is the richest and most inestimable of treasure, and the only one I have ever coveted; but, like all other treasures, in life, when the moment comes, one must strip oneself to the uttermost farthing in the interest of public welfare and national honour."
General La Fayette certainly acted nobly, much too nobly, indeed, for the deserts of those for whom he made the sacrifice, for they only attributed it to weakness instead of to devotion to duty.
The streets in the vicinity of the Luxembourg were dreadfully congested by the crowds waiting during the trial, so that the troops of the National Guard could scarcely circulate through them. Troops of the line and National Guards were, at the command of La Fayette, placed at his disposition with plenary power; he had the police of the Palais-Royal, of the Luxembourg and of the Chamber of Peers. He had made Colonel Lavocat second in command at the Luxembourg, with orders to watch over the safety of the peers; those same peers who had once condemned Lavocat to death. If he could but have evoked the shade of Ney, he would have placed him as sentinel at the gates of the palace!
Colonel Feisthamel was first in command. Lavocat was one of the oldest members of the Carbonari. Every kind of political party was represented in the crowd that besieged the gates of the Luxembourg, except Orléanist; we all rubbed against one another. Republicans, Carlists, Napoléonists, awaiting events in the hope of being able to further each his own interests, opinions and principles. We had tickets for reserved seats. I was present on the last day but one, and heard the pleading of M. de Martignac and also that of M. de Peyronnet, and I witnessed M. Sauzet's triumph and saw M. Crémieux fall ill.
Just at that second the sound of the beating of drums penetrated right into the Chamber of Peers. They were beating the rappel in a wild sort of frenzy.
I rushed from the hall; the sitting was almost suspended, half on account of the accident that had happened to M. Crémieux, half because of the terrible noise that made the accused men shiver on their benches and the judges in their seats. My uniform as artilleryman made way for me through the crowds, and I gained the courtyard; it was packed. A coach belonging to the king's printers had come into the principal court and the multitude had angrily rushed in after it. It was the sound of their angry growls combined with the drumming which had reached the hall. A moment of inexpressible panic and confusion succeeded among the peers, and it was quite useless for Colonel Lavocat to shout from the door—
"Have no fear! I will be answerable for everything. The National Guard is and will remain in possession of all the exits."
M. Pasquier could not hear him, and his little thin shrill voice could be heard saying—
"Messieurs les pairs, the sitting is dissolved. M. le Commandant de la Garde Nationale warns me that it will be unwise to hold a night sitting."
It was exactly the opposite of what Colonel Lavocat had said, but, as most of the peers were just as frightened as their illustrious president, they rose and left the hall hurriedly, and the sitting was deferred until the morrow.
As I went out I pushed against a man who seemed to be one of the most furious of the rioters; he was shouting in a foreign accent and his mouth was hideous and his eyes were wild.
"Death to the ministers!" he was yelling.
"Oh! by Jove!" I said to the chief editor of The Moniteur, a little white-haired man called Sauvo, who, like myself, was also watching him. "I bet twenty-five louis that that man is a spy!"
I don't know whether I was right at the time; but I do know that I found the very same man again five years later in the dock of the Court of Peers. He was the Corsican Fieschi.
[CHAPTER VI]
The artillerymen at the Louvre—Bonapartist plot to take our cannon from us—Distribution of cartridges by Godefroy Cavaignac—The concourse of people outside the Luxembourg when the ministers were sentenced—Departure of the condemned for Vincennes—Defeat of the judges—La Fayette and the riot—Bastide and Commandant Barré on guard with Prosper Mérimée
I returned to the Louvre to learn news and to impart it. It is quite impossible to depict the excitement which reigned in this headquarters of the artillery. Our chief colonel, Joubert, had been taken away from us, and, as the choice of a colonel was not in our hands, he had been replaced by Comte Pernetti.
Comte Pernetti was devoted to the court, and the court, with just cause, mistrusted us, and looked for a chance to disband us.
But we, on our side, every minute kept meeting men whom we had seen upon the barricades, who stopped us to ask—
"Do you recognise us? We were there with you...."
"Yes, I recognise you. What then?"
"Well, if it came to marching against the Palais-Royal as we did against the Tuileries, would you desert us?"
And then we clasped hands and looked at one another with excited eyes and parted, the artillerymen exclaiming—
"The people are rising!" While the populace repeated to one another, "The artillery is with us!"
All these rumours were floating in the air, and seemed to stop like mists at the highest buildings.
The Palais-Royal was only a hundred and fifty yards from the Louvre, in which were twenty-four pieces of artillery, twenty thousand rounds of ammunition, and out of eight hundred artillerymen six hundred were Republicans.
No scheme of conspiracy had been arranged; but it was plainly evident that, if the people rose, the artillery would support them. M. de Montalivet, brother of the minister, warned his brother, about one o'clock that afternoon, that there was a plot arranged for carrying off our guns from us. General La Fayette immediately warned Godefroy Cavaignac of the information that had been given him.
Now, we were quite willing to go with the people to manage our own guns, and incur the risks of a second revolution, as we had run the risks of the first; but the guns were, in a measure, our own property, and we felt responsible for their safe keeping, so we did not incline to have them taken out of our hands.
This rumour of a sudden attack upon the Louvre gained the readier credence as, for two or three days past, there had been much talk of a Bonapartist plot; and, although we were all ready to fight for La Fayette and the Republic, we had no intentions of risking a hair of our heads for Napoléon II. Consequently, Godefroy Cavaignac, being warned, had brought in a bale of two or three hundred cartridges, which he flung on one of the card-tables in the guardroom. Every man then proceeded to fill his pouch and pockets. When I reached the Louvre, the division had been made, but it did not matter, as my pouch had been full since the day I had been summoned to seize the Chamber.
As would be expected, we had no end of spies among us, and I could mention two in particular who received the Cross of the Légion d'honneur for having filled that honourable office in our ranks.
An hour after this distribution of cartridges they were warned at the Palais-Royal. A quarter of an hour after they had been warned there, I received a letter from Oudard, begging me, if I was at the Louvre, to go instantly to his office. I showed the letter to our comrades and asked them what I was to do.
"Go, of course," answered Cavaignac.
"But if they question me—?"
"Tell the truth. If the Bonapartists want to seize our guns we will fire our last cartridges to defend them; but, if the people rise against the Luxembourg, or even against any other palace, we will march with them."
"That suits me down to the ground. I like plain speaking."
So I went to the Palais-Royal. The offices were crowded with people; one could feel the excitement running through from the centre to the outlying extremities, and, judging from the state of agitation of the extremities, the centre must have been very much excited. Oudard questioned me; that was the only reason why he had sent for me. I repeated what Cavaignac had told me, word for word. As far as I can recollect, this happened on the evening of the 20th. On the 21st I resumed my post in the rue de Tournon. The crowd was denser than ever: the rue de Tournon, the rues de Seine, des Fossés-Monsieur-le-Prince, Voltaire, the places de l'Odéon, Saint-Michel and l'École-de-Médecine, were filled to overflowing with National Guards and troops of the line. The National Guard had been made to believe that there was a plot for plundering the shops; that the people of the July Revolution, when pulled up by the appointment of the Duc d'Orléans to the Lieutenant-generalship, had vowed to be revenged; now, the bourgeois, ever ready to believe rumours of this kind, had rushed up in masses and uttered terrible threats against pillagers, who had never pillaged either on the 27th, the 28th, or the 29th, but who would have pillaged on the 30th, if the creation of the Lieutenant-generalship had not restored order just in time.
It is but fair to mention that all those excellent fellows, who were waiting there, with rifles at rest, would not have put themselves out to wait unless they had really believed that the trial would end in a sentence of capital punishment.
About two o'clock it was announced that the counsels' speeches were finished and the debates closed, and that sentence was going to be pronounced. There was an intense silence, as though each person was afraid that any sound might prevent him from hearing the great voice, that, no doubt, like that of the angel of the day of judgment, should pronounce the supreme sentence of that High Court of Justice.
Suddenly, some men rushed out of the Luxembourg and dashed down the rue de Tournon crying—
"To death! They are sentenced to death!"
A stupendous uproar went up in response from every ray of that vast constellation of streets that centres in the Luxembourg.
Everybody struggled to make a way out to his own quarter and house to be the first to carry the bitter news. But they soon stayed their progress and the multitude seemed to be driven back again and to press towards the Luxembourg like a stream flowing backwards. Another rumour had got abroad; that the ministers, instead of being condemned to death, had only been sentenced to imprisonment for life; and that the report of the penalty of death had been purposely spread to give them a chance to escape.
The expression of people's faces changed and menacing shouts began to resound; the National Guards struck the pavements with the butt-end of their rifles. They had come to defend the peers but seemed quite ready when they heard the news of the acquittal (and any punishment short of death was acquittal) to attack the peers.
Meanwhile, this is what was happening inside. It was known beforehand, in the Palais-Royal, that the sentence was to be one of imprisonment for life. M. de Montalivet, Minister of the Interior, had received orders from the king to have the ex-ministers conducted safe and sound to Vincennes. The firing of a cannon when they had crossed the drawbridge of the château was to tell the king of their safety. M. de Montalivet had chosen General Falvier and Colonel Lavocat to share this dangerous honour with him. When he saw the four ministers appearing, who had been removed from the hall in order that, according to custom, sentence should be pronounced in their absence—
"Messieurs," said General Falvier to Colonel Lavocat, "take heed! we are going to make history; let us see to it that it redounds to the glory of France!"
A light carriage awaited the prisoners outside the wicket-gate of the petit Luxembourg. It was at this juncture that some men, set there by M. de Montalivet, rushed through the main gateway, shouting, as we have mentioned—
"Death.... They are sentenced to death!"
The prisoners could hear the tremendous shout of triumph that went up at that false report. But the carriage, surrounded by two hundred horsemen, had already set off, and was driving towards the outlying boulevards with the speed and noise of a hurricane.
MM. de Montalivet and Lavocat galloped at each side of the doors.
The judges assembled in the Rubens gallery to deliberate. From there, they could see, as far as eye could reach, the bristling of cannons and bayonets and the seething agitation of the crowds. Night was fast approaching, but the inmates of every house had put lamps in their windows and a bright illumination succeeded the waning daylight, adding a still more lurid character to the scene.
Suddenly, the peers heard an uproar; they saw, one might almost say they felt, the terrible agitation going on outside: each wave of that sea, that had broken or was just ready to break, rose higher than the last; and the tide that one thought was at the ebb, returned with greater and more threatening force than ever, beating against the powerfully built walls of the Médicis palace: but the judges were fully aware that no walls or barriers or ramparts could stand against the strength of the ocean; they each tried to find some pretext or other for slipping away: some did not even attempt any excuse for so doing. M. Pasquier, by comparison, was the bravest, and felt ashamed of their retreat.
"It is unseemly!" he exclaimed; "shut the doors!"
But La Layette was informed, at the same time, that the people were rushing upon the palace.
"Messieurs," he said, turning to the three or four persons who awaited his commands, "will you come with me to see what is going on?"
Thus, whilst M. Pasquier was returning to the audience chamber, which was nearly deserted, to pronounce, by the dismal light of a half-lighted chandelier, the sentence condemning the accused to imprisonment for life and punishing the Prince de Polignac to civil death, the man of 1789 and of 1830 was making his appearance in the streets, as calm on that 21 December, as he announced to the people the quasi-absolution of the ex-ministers, as he had been forty years before, when he announced, to the fathers of those who were listening to him then, the flight of the king to Varennes.
For a single instant it seemed as though the noble old man had presumed too much on the magnanimity of the crowd and on his popularity: for the waves of that ocean which, at first, made way respectfully before him, now gathered round him angrily. A threatening growl ran through the multitude, which knew its power and had but to make a move to grind everything to powder or smash everything like glass.
Cries of "Death to the ministers! Put them to death! Put them to death!" were uttered on all sides.
La Fayette tried to speak but loud imprecations drowned his voice.
At last he succeeded in being heard, and, "Citizens, I do not recognise among you the heroes of July!" he said to the people.
"No wonder!" replied a voice; "how could you, seeing you were not on their side!"