 Book 15, Part 2 of the Memoirs of Chateaubriand, Volume 5. The rumour spread on the evening of the second that Charles X refused to leave Rambouille before his grandson was recognised. A multitude gathered in the Champs Elysees on the morning of the third, shouting, To Rambouille, to Rambouille, not one of the Bourbons must escape from it. There were rich men mixed among these groups, but when the moment came they allowed the rabble to set out without them. General Pajol placed himself at their head, taking Colonel Jacques Minot as his chief of staff. The returning commissaries, meeting the scouts of this column, turned on their steps and were then admitted to Rambouille. The king questioned them on the strength of the insurgents, and then, withdrawing, sent for Maison, who owed him his fortune and his marshals' baton. Maison, I ask you on your honour as a soldier, is what the commissaries have told me the truth? The marshal replied, They have told you only half the truth. There remain at Rambouille on the 3rd of August, 3,500 men of the Infantry of the Guard, and four regiments of like cavalry, forming twenty squadrons and consisting of two thousand men. The military household, bodyguards, and so on, amounted horse and foot to thirteen hundred men. In all, eight thousand eight hundred men and seven batteries, consisting of forty-two pieces of artillery with their teams. At ten o'clock at night the signal was sounded to saddle. The whole camp started from Antenna, Charles X and his family marching in the midst of the funeral column, which was scarce lighted by the veiled moon. And before whom were they retreating? Before a band, almost unarmed, arriving in omnibuses, in camps, in traps from Versailles and St. Cloud. General Pudgeall thought that he was quite lost when he was obliged to place himself at the head of that multitude, which, after all, did not amount to more than fifteen thousand men, with the adjunction of the newly-arrived Ruanese. Half of this band remained on the roads. A few exalted, valiant, and generous young men mingled with this troop would have sacrificed themselves. The rest would probably have dispersed. In the fields for Rambouillet, in the flat open country, they would have had to face a fire of the line and of the artillery. By all appearances a victory would have been won. Between the people's victory in Paris and the King's victory at Rambouillet, negotiations would have been entered upon. But among so many officers was there not one with sufficient resolution to seize the command in the name of Henry V, for after all Charles X and the Dauphan were Kings no longer. If they did not wish to fight, why did they not retire to Chartres? There they would have been out of the reach of the Paris populace, or better still to tour, supported by the legitimate provinces. Had Charles X remained in France, the greater part of the army would have remained loyal. The camps at Boulogne and L'Univille were raised and were marching to his aid. My nephew, the Cont-Louis, was bringing his regiment the Fourth Light Infantry, which left the ranks only on hearing of the retreat from Rambouillet. Monsieur de Chateaubriand was reduced to escorting the monarch on a pony to his place of embarkation. If, repairing to some town, protected against a fair surprise, Charles X had convoked the two chambers, more than half of those chambers would have obeyed. Cassemille Perrier, General Sebastiani, and a hundred others had waited, had struggled against the Tricolour Coquade. They dreaded the dangers of a popular revolution. What am I saying? The Lieutenant General of the Kingdom, summoned by the King and not seen the Battle I, would have stolen away from his partisans and conformed to the royal injunction. The diplomatic body, which did not do its duty, would have done it then by placing itself around the sovereign. The Republic, installed in Paris, amidst all the disorders, would not have lasted a month in the face of a regular constitutional government, established elsewhere, never has the game been lost with so fine a hand, and when a game is lost in this way there is no revenge possible. Go talk of liberty to the citizens, and of honour to the soldiers, after the ordinances of July, and the retreat from St. Cloud. The time will perhaps come, when a new form of society will have taken the place of the present social order, when war will appear monstrous absurdity, when its very principle will no longer be understood. But we have not reached that stage yet. In armed quarrels there are philanthropists who distinguish between the species, and who are prepared to swoon away at the mere word of civil war, fellow countrymen killing one another, brothers, fathers, sons, face to face. All this is very sad, no doubt, and yet a nation has often been regenerated and acquired new vigour in interstine discords. None has ever perished by civil war. Many have disappeared in foreign wars. See what Italy was at the time of her divisions, and see what she is now. It is a deplorable thing to be obliged to lay waste to your neighbour's property, to see your own home blooded by that same neighbour. But frankly, is it much more humane to slay a family of German peasants whom you do not know, who have never had a discussion with you of any kind, whom you rob, whom you kill without remorse, whose wives and children you dishonour with a safe conscience because this is war? Whatever men may say, civil wars are less unjust, less revolting and more natural than foreign wars, except when the latter are undertaken to save the national independence. Civil wars are based at least upon individual outrages, upon admitted and recognised aversions. They are duels with seconds, in which the adversaries know why they are wielding their swords. If the passions do not justify their evil, they excuse it, they explain it, they give a reason for its existence. How is foreign war justified? Generally nations cut each other's throats because a king is bored, because an ambitious man wishes to rise, because a minister seeks to supplant a rival. The time has come to do justice on those old common places of sentimentalism, better suited to perts and historians. Thucydides, Caesar, Livy, are content to utter a word of sorrow and pass on. Civil war, in spite of its calamities, has only one real danger. If the contending factions have recourse to the foreigner, why have the foreigner profiting by the divisions of a people, attack it? Such a position might result in conquest. Great Britain, the Iberian Peninsula, Constantinopolitan Greece, in our own days Poland, offer examples which we must not forget. Nevertheless during the league the two parties calling Spaniards in English, Italians and Germans to their aid, the latter counterbalanced each other, and did not disturb the equilibrium which the French and arms maintained among themselves. Charles X was wrong to employ bayonets in support of his ordinances. His ministers have no justification to offer, whether they were acting in obedience or not, for having shed the blood of the people and the soldiers, whom no hatred divided, in the same way as the theoretical terrorists, would gladly reproduce the system of the terror, where no terror exists. But Charles X was also wrong not to accept war when, after he had yielded on every point, it was brought to his door. He had no right, after placing the diadem on the brow of his grandson, to say to that new Joas, I have made you ascend the throne, to drag you into exile, so that Richard and banished, you may bear the weight of my years, my prescription, and my scepter. He was not right at the same moment to give Henry the Fifth a crown, and to rob him of France. When they made him king, they had condemned him to die on the soil in which lie mingled the dust of St. Louis and that of Henry the Fourth. For the rest, after this evolution of my blood, I returned to my reason, and I seen these things no more than the accomplishment of the destinies of humanity. The court had it triumphed by force of arms, would have destroyed the public liberties. They would nonetheless have crushed it one day, but it would have retarded the development of society for some years. All that had taken a wide view of the monarchy would have been persecuted by the re-established congregation. In the last result, events have followed the trend of civilization. God makes men powerful according to his secret designs. He gives them faults which undo them when they must be undone, because he does not wish that qualities ill-applied by a false intelligence should oppose themselves to the decrees of his providence. The retirement of the royal family reduced my part to myself. I no longer thought of what I should be called upon to say in the House of Peers. To write was impossible. If the attack had come from the enemies of the Crown, if Charles X had been overthrown by a conspiracy from the outside, I should have taken up my pen, and if they had left me independence of thought. I should have undertaken to rally an immense party around the ruins of the throne. But the attack had come from the Crown itself. The ministers had violated both liberal principles. They had made the royalty commit perjury, not intentionally no doubt, but in fact, through this very act they had taken away my strength. What could I put forward in favour of the ordinances? How could I have continued to extol this sincerity, the candour and the chivalry of the legitimate monarchy? How could I have said that it was the strongest guarantee of our interests, our laws and our independence? The champion of the old royalty, I had been stripped of my arms by that royalty and left naked to my enemies. I was therefore quite astonished when reduced to this state of weakness. I saw myself sought out by the new royalty. Charles X has disdained my services. Philip made an effort to attach me to himself. Just an hour ago he spoke to me, in lofty and lively terms, on behalf of Madame Adelaide. Next the Counte Anna told her Montesquieu came one morning to Madame Récarmiès and met me there. He told me that Madame La Duchesse d'Oliens and Monsieur la Duc d'Oliens would be delighted to see me, if I would go to the Palais Royal. They were at that time engaged upon the declaration, which was to transform the lieutenant generalship of the kingdom into the royalty. Charles H.R.H. had thought it well to try to weaken my opposition, before I pronounced myself. He may also have thought that I looked upon myself as released by the flight of the three kings. These overtures of Monsieur de Montesquieu surprised me. However, I did not reject them, for without flattering myself with hopes of success, I thought that I might utter some useful truths. I went to the Palais Royal with the lord in waiting to the future queen. I was admitted by the entrance leading out of the Rue de Valois, and found Madame La Duchesse d'Oliens and Madame Adelaide in their private apartments. I had had the honour of being presented to them before. Madame La Duchesse d'Oliens made me sit down beside her and said to me, offhand, «Au Monsieur de Châtabreon, we are very unhappy. If all the parties would only unite together, perhaps we might yet be saved. What do you think of all this? Madame, I replied, nothing is easier. Charles X and Monsieur Le Dauphin have abdicated, Henry is now the king, Monsignor Le Doudollion is lieutenant-general of the kingdom, let him act as regent during the minority of Henry V, and all is settled. But Monsieur de Châtabreon, the people are very much excited. We shall fall into anarchy. Madame, may I venture to ask you what are the intentions of Monsignor Le Doudollion? Will he accept the crown, if it is offered to him? The two princesses hesitated to answer. Madame La Duchesse D'Oliens replied, after a momentary pause. Think, Monsieur de Châtabreon, of the misfortunes that may happen. All honest men must combine to save us from the Republic. In Rome you might render such great services. Monsieur de Châtabreon, or even here, if you do not care to leave France again. Madame is aware of my devotions to the young king and his mother. Ah, Monsieur de Châtabreon, they have treated you so well. Your royal highness would not have me give the lie to my whole life. Monsieur de Châtabreon, you do not know my niece. She is so frivolous, poor Caroline. I am going to send for Monsieur de Doudollion. He will persuade you better than I can. The princess gave instructions, and briefly arrived after a quarter of an hour. He was badly dressed and looked extremely tired. I rose, and the lieutenant general of the kingdom accosted me with, Madame La de Châtabreon must have told you how unhappy we are. And forthwith he spun me and Idyll on the happiness which he enjoyed in the country, on the peaceful life so much to his liking which he spent in the midst of his children. I seized the moment of applause between two strophes, to speak in my turn, and respectfully to repeat, in almost the same words, what I had said to the two princesses. Ah, he exclaimed, that is what I should like. How happy I should be to be the guardian and the upholder of that child. I think, just as you do, Monsieur de Châtabreon, to accept the due de Bordeaux would certainly be the best thing to do. I fear only that events will prove more than a match for us. More than a match for us, Monsignor, are you not invested with four powers? Let us go to join Henry V. Summon the chambers and the army to your side outside Paris. The mere noise of your departure will cause all this effervescence to subside, and memble secret shelter under your enlightened and protective power. While speaking, I watch Philip. My advice put him ill at ease. I read on his face his desire to be king. Monsieur de Châtabreon, he said, without looking at me, the thing is more difficult than you think. It won't go like that. You do not know the danger in which we stand. A furious band might indulge in the most violent excesses against the chambers, and we have no one to defend us. This phrase, which Monsieur de Châtabreon let fall pleased me, because it supplied me with a peremptory retort. I can conceive that difficulty, Monsignor, but there is a sure means of removing it. If you do not think that you can join Henry V, as I was suggesting, you can adopt another course. The session is about to open. Whatever proposal the deputies may make first, declare that the present chamber does not possess the necessary powers, which is the sheer truth, to dispose of the form of government. Say that France must be consulted, and a new assembly elected, with powers ad hoc, to decide so important a question. Your Royal Highness will then be placing yourself in the most popular position. The Republican Party, which at this moment constitutes your danger, will extol you to the skies. In the two months that will elapse before the meeting of the new legislature, you will organize the National Guard. All your friends and the friends of the young king will work for you in the provinces. Then let the deputies come, let the cause which I am defending be publicly pleaded in the Tribune. This cause, secretly favoured by yourself, will obtain an immense majority of votes. The moment of anarchy will have passed, and you will have nothing more to fear from the violence of the Republicans. I do not even see that you all have much difficulty in winning General Affayette and Monsieur Lafitte to your side. What a fine part for you to play, Monsignor. You can reign for fifteen years in the name of your ward. In fifteen years the Age of Rest will have set in for all of us. You will have had the glory, unique in history, of being able to ascend the throne, and of leaving it to the lawful heir. At the same time you will have brought up that child in the enlightenment of the century, and you will have made him capable of reigning over France. One of your daughters might one day wheel the sceptre with him. Philip Castis looks vaguely above his head. Excuse me, Monsieur de Châtabreon, he said. I left an important deputation to come to talk with you, and I must go back to it. Madame La Duchesse de Lyon will have told you how happy I should be to do what you might wish. But believe me, it is I alone who am holding back a threatening crowd. If the royalist party is not massacred, it owes its life to my efforts. Most certainly I replied to this statement, so unexpected and so far removed from the subject of our conversation. I have seen massacres, men who have gone through the revolution last seasoned. Old soldiers do not allow themselves to be frightened by objects that terrify conscripts. H.R.H. with Jew, and I went to join my friends. Well, they exclaimed. Well, he wants to be king. And Madame La Duchesse de Lyon? She wants to be queen. What did they say to you? One spoke to me of pastorals, the other of the dangers threatening France, and of poor Caroline's frivolity. Both were good enough to convey to me that I might be of use to them, and neither of them looked me in the face. Madame La Duchesse de Lyon wished to see me once more. Madame La Duchesse de Lyon did not come to take part in this conversation. Madame La Duchesse de Lyon explained herself more clearly on the favors with which Monsignor de Lyon proposed to honor me. She was good enough to remind me of what she called my power over public opinion, of the sacrifices which I had made, of the aversion which Charles X and his family had always shown me in spite of my services. She told me that if I wished to go back to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, H.R.H. would be most pleased to reinstate me in that office, but that perhaps I would prefer to return to Rome, and that she, Madame La Duchesse de Lyon, would see me take this last course with an extreme pleasure in the interests of our holy religion. Madame, I replied at once with a certain animation, I see that M. de Lyon's mind is made up, that he has weighed the consequences that he foresees the years of misery and of various dangers which he will have to pass. I have therefore no more to say. I have not come here to show any lack of respect to the blood of the Bourbons. I owe besides nothing but gratitude to Madame's kindness. Leaving on one side therefore the main objections, the reasons drawn from principles and events, I beseech your Royal Highness to consent to listen to what regards myself. You have been good enough to speak to me of what you call my power over public opinion. Well if this power is real, it is founded only on public esteem, and I should lose this esteem the moment I change my flag. M. de Lyon would think he was gaining support, whereas he would have in his service only a Richard Fraze-maker, a perderer to his voice none would harken, a renegade of whom everyone would have the right to fling mud, and to spit in his face. To the wavering words which he would stammer in favour of Louis Philippe, they would oppose whole volumes which he had published in favour of the fallen family. Was it not I, Madame, who wrote the pamphlet, de Bonaparte et des Bourbons? The articles on the arrivée de Louis XVIII à Compiègne, the rapport d'un conseil du Roi à Gant, the histoire de la vie et de la mort de M. de Berry, I doubt if I have written a single page in which the name of my ancient kings does not appear in some connection and which it is not surrounded with protestations of my love and fidelity, a matter which bears a character of individual attachment the more remarkable in as much as Madame knows that I do not believe in kings. At the mere thought of a desertion the blushes rise to my face. I would go the next day to throw myself into the scent. I entree Madame to excuse the animation of my words. I am penetrated with your kindness. I will keep it in profound and grateful remembrance, but you would not wish to dishonour me. Pity me, Madame. Pity me. I had remained standing and bowing, I withdrew. Amazal Dolion had not uttered a word. She rose, and as she left the room, said to me, I do not pity you, Monsieur de Chateaubriand. I do not pity you. I was astonished at these few words, and at the emphasis with which they were spoken. That was my last political temptation. I might have thought myself a just man according to St. Hillary, who declares that men are exposed to the attempts of the devil in proportion to their godliness. Victoria A. S. Mages, Exacta, De Sanctis. My refusals were those of a dupe. Where is the public that shall judge them? Could I not have taken my place among the men, virtuous sons of the land, who serve the country before all things? Unfortunately I am not a creature of the present, and I am not willing to capitulate with fortune. I have nothing in common with Cicero, but his frailty is no excuse. Posterity has declined to forgive one great man his moment of weakness for another great man. What would my poor life have been, losing its only possession, its integrity, for Louis Philippe Dolion? On the evening of the day on which I had this last conversation at the Palais Royal, I met Monsieur de Saint-Olière, and madame Recamiers. I did not amuse myself by asking him his secret, but he asked me mine. He had just arrived from the country, full of the events of which he had read. Ah! he cried! How glad I am to see you! Here is a fine business. I hope that all of us at the Luxembourg will do our duty. It would be a curious thing for the peers to dispose of the crown of Henry IV. I am quite sure that you will not leave me alone in the Tribune. As my mind was made up, I was very calm. My reply appeared cold to Monsieur de Saint-Olière's ardour. He went away, saw his friends, and left me alone in the Tribune. Long live your light-hearted and frivolous men of intelligence! The Republican Party was still struggling under the feet of the friends who had betrayed it. On the 6th of August a deputation of twenty members, appointed by the Central Committee of the Twelve Wards of Paris, appeared in the Chamber of Deputies, representing an address of which General Théâde and Monsieur Dury-de-Fren eased the well-meaning deputation. It was said in this address that the nation could not recognise as a constitutional power either an elective chamber appointed during the existence and under the influence of the royalty which it has overthrown, or an aristocratic chamber, the institution of which is in direct opposition to the principles that have caused the nation to take up arms. The Central Committee of the Twelve Wards, having granted, as a revolutionary necessity, only a de facto and very provisional power to the present Chamber of Deputies, to discuss any measure of urgency, now calls with all its wishes for the free and popular election of mandatorys, who shall really represent the needs of the people, that the primary assemblies alone can bring about that result. If it were otherwise, the nation would render null and void, all that might tend to impede it in the exercise of its rights. All this was pure reason, but the Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom was aspiring to the crown, and the fearful and ambitious were in a hurry to give it to him. The plebeians of today wanted a revolution, and did not know how to make it. The Jacobins whom they have taken for their models would have flung the men of the Palais Royale and the praetors of the two chambers into the water. Monsieur de Lafayette was reduced to impotent wishes. He was pleased at having caused the revival of the National Guard. He allowed himself to be tossed like an old swaddling-band by Philip, whose wetness he imagined himself to be. He grew torpid with this felicity. The old General was no more than liberty fallen asleep. As the Republic of 1793 was no more than a death-side. The truth is that a truncated chamber, with no special mandate, had no right whatever, to dispose of the crown. It was a convention expressly called together, formed of the House of Lords and a newly-elected House of Commons, that disposed of the throne of James II. It is also certain that that rump of the Chamber of Deputies, those two hundred and twenty-one, imbued under Charles X, with the traditions of the hereditary monarchy, brought no disposition fitted to the elective monarchy. They stopped it at its commencement, and forced it to go back to principles of quasi-legitimism. They who forged the sword of the new royalty, introduced into the blade a straw which soon or later will cause it to spring. The 7th of August is a memorable day for me. It is the day on which I had the happiness of ending my political career as I had begun it, a happiness rare enough to-day to give reason for rejoicing in it. The declaration of the Chamber of Deputies concerning the vacancy of the throne had been brought to the Chamber of Peers. I went to take my seat, which was in the highest row of arm-chairs, facing the President. The Peers seemed to me at once busy and depressed. If some bore nephorids the pride of their approaching disloyalty, others bore the shame of a remorse to which they liked the courage to listen. I said to myself as I watched this sad assembly, What? Are they who receive the favor of Charles X in his prosperity, going to desert him in his ill fortune? Are they who's special mission it was to defend the hereditary throne, those men of the court who lived in the King's intimacy? Will they betray him? They kept watch at his door at St. Cloud. They embraced him at Rambouille. He clasped their hands in a last farewell. Are they going to raise against him those hands, still warm with that last pressure? Is this Chamber, which for fifteen years has resounded with their protestations of devotion, about to hear their perjury? And yet it was for them that Charles X ruined himself. It was they who drove him towards the ordinances. They stamped for joy when these appeared, and when they thought that they had won, in that moment of silence, which precedes the fall of the thunder. These ideas rolled confusedly and sorrowfully through my mind. The peerage had become the triple receptacle of the corruptions of the old monarchy, the Republic and the Empire. As for the Republicans of 1793 now transformed into Cenesis and the generals of Bonaparte, I expected of them only what they have always done. They deposed the extraordinary man to whom they owed all. They were going to depose the king, who had confirmed them in the benefits and honours, with which their first master had loaded them. Let them in turn, and they will depose the usurper to whom they were preparing to throw the crown. When I ascended the tribune, no deep silence fell. The faces of the peers seemed embarrassed. They all turned sideways in their armchairs and looked down at the floor. With the exception of a few peers who had resolved to retire like myself, none dared to raise his eyes to the level of the tribune. I reproduced my speech because it sums up my life, and forms my principal title to the esteem of posterity. Gentlemen, the declaration which has been brought to this chamber is to me much less complicated than it appears to those of my noble colleagues who profess an opinion different from mine. There is one fact in this declaration which appears to me to govern all the others, or rather to destroy them. While we under a regular order of things, I should doubtless carefully examine the various changes which it is proposed to make in the charter. Many of these changes have been proposed by myself. I am surprised only that the reactionary measure regarding the peers created by Charles X should have been proposed to this chamber. I shall not be suspected of any fondness for the system by which these batches were created, and you know that when threatened with them I combated the very menace. But to make ourselves the judges of our colleagues, and to erase whom we please from the list of the peerage, whenever we find ourselves a stronger party, would seem to me to savor of prescription. Do they want to destroy the peerage, be it so? It better becomes us to surrender our existence than to beg for our lives. I reproach myself already for the few words I buttered on a point which important as it is becomes insignificant when merged in the great proposition before us. Francis without a guide, and I am now to consider what must be added to or cut away from the mass of a vessel which has lost its rudder. I lay aside then whatever is of a secondary interest in the declaration of the elective chamber, and fixing on the single enunciated fact of the vacancy of the throne, whether true or pretended, I advance directly to my object. But a previous question ought first to be attended to. If the throne be vacant we are free to choose the future form of our government, before offering the crown to any individual whatever. It is well to ascertain under what political system the social body is to be constituted. Are we to establish a republic or a new monarchy? Does the republic or new monarchy offer sufficient guarantees to France of strength, durability and repose? A republic would first of all have the recollections of the republic itself to contend with. Those recollections are far from being in faced. Time is not yet forgotten when death made his frightful progress among us, with liberty and equality for supporters. If you were plunged again into anarchy how would you reanimate the Hercules on his rock who alone was able to stifle the monster? In the course of a thousand years your posterity may see another Napoleon. As for you, you must not expect it. In the present state of our manners and of our relations with surrounding governments, the idea of a republic seems to me to be untenable. The first difficulty would be to bring the people of France to a unanimous vote on the subject. What right has the population of Paris to compel the population of Marseille or any other town to adopt the forms of a republic? Is there to be but one republic, or are we to have twenty or thirty? And are they to be federative or independent? Let us suppose these obstacles to be removed. Let us suppose that there is to be but one republic. Can you imagine for a moment, with the habitual familiarity of our manners, that a president, however grave, however talented, and however respectable he may be, could remain for a year the head of the government without being tempted to retire from it? Still protected by the laws and unsupported by previous recollections, insulted and vilified morning, noon and night by secret rivals and by the agents of faction, he would not inspire the confidence which property and commerce require. He would possess neither becoming dignity in treating with foreign governments, nor the power which is indispensable to the maintenance of internal tranquillity. If he resorted to revolutionary measures, the republic would become odious. All Europe would become disturbed and would avail itself of our divisions, first to ferment them and afterwards to interfere in the quarrel, and we should again be involved in an interminable struggle. A representative republic is, no doubt, to be the future condition of the world, but its time has not yet come. I proceed to the question of a monarchy. A king named by the chambers or elected by the people, whatever may be done, will always be a novelty. Now I take it for granted that liberty is soughtful, especially the liberty of the press, by which and for which the people have obtained so brilliant a triumph. Well, every new monarchy will soon or later be compelled to gag this liberty. Could Napoleon himself admit of it? The offspring of our misfortunes and the slave of our glory. The liberty of the press can exist in security, only under government whose roots are deeply seated. A monarchy, the illegitimate offspring of one bloody knight, must always have something to fear from the independent expression of public opinion. While this man proclaims for public an opinions, and that some other system, is it not to be fear that laws of exception must soon be resorted to, in spite of the anathema against the censorship which has been added to article eight of the Charter? What then, O friends of regulated liberty, have you gained by the change which is now proposed to you? You must think of necessity, either into a republic or into a system of legal slavery. The monarch will be surrounded and overwhelmed by factions, or the monarchy itself swept away by a torrent of democratical enactments. In the first intoxication of success, we suppose that everything is easy. We hope to satisfy every exigency, every interest, every humour. We flatter ourselves that everyone will lay aside his personal views and vanities. We believe that the superior intelligence and the wisdom of the government will sum out innumerable difficulties. But at the end of a few months we find that all our theories have been belied by practice. I present to you gentlemen only a few of the inconveniences attaching to the formation of a republic or of a new monarchy. If either have its perils, there remained a third cause, and one which well deserved a moment's consideration. The crown has been trampled on by horrible ministers who have supported by murder their violation of the law. They have trifled with oaths made to heaven and with laws sworn to on earth. Foreigners who have twice entered Paris without resistance learn the true cause of your success. You presented yourselves in the name of legal authority. If you were to fly today to the assistance of tyranny, do you think that the gates of the capital of the civilized world would open as readily before you? The French nation has grown since your departure under the influence of constitutional laws. Our children are fourteen, our giants. Our conscripts at Algiers, our schoolboys in Paris, have shown you that they are the sons of the conquerors of Austerlitz, Marengo and Jena. But sons strengthened by all that liberty adds to glory. People was a defence more just and more heroic than that of the people of Paris. They did not rise against the law. So long as the social compact was respected, the people remained peaceable. They bore insults, provocations and threats without complaining. Their property and their blood were the price they owed for the charter. Both have been lavished in abundance. But when after a system of falsehood pursued to the last moment, slavery was suddenly proclaimed. The conspiracy of folly and hypocrisy burst forth unawares, when the panic of the palace, organized by Unix, was prepared as a substitute for the terror of the Republic and the iron yoke of the Empire. Then it was that the people armed themselves with their courage and their intelligence. It was found that those shopkeepers could breathe freely amid the smoke of gunpowder, and that it required more than four soldiers and a corporal to subdue them. A century could not have ripened the destinies of a nation so completely as the three last sons that have shone over France. A great crime was committed. It produced the violent explosion of a powerful principle. Was it necessary on account of this crime and the moral and political triumph that resulted from it to overthrow the established order of things? Let us examine. Charles X and his son have forfeited or abdicated the throne. Understand it which way you will. For the throne is not vacant. After them came a child, whose innocence ought not to be condemned. What blood now rises against him? Will you venture to say that it is that of his father? This orphan, educated in the schools of his country, in the love of a constitutional government, and with the ideas of the age, would have become a king well suited to our future once. The guardian of his youth should have been made to swear to the declaration on which you are about to vote. On attaining his majority, the young monarch would have renewed his oath. In the meantime, the present king, the actual king, would have been Missoula du Dolyon, the regent of the kingdom. A prince was lived among the people, and who knows that a monarchy today can only exist by consent and reason. This natural arrangement, as it appears to me, would have united the means of reconciliation and would perhaps have saved France those agitations which are the consequence of all violent changes in a state. To say that this child, when separated from his masters, would not have had time to forget their very names before arriving at manhood, to say that he would remain infatuated with certain hereditary dogmas after a long course of popular education, after the terrible lesson which in two nights has held two kings from the throne is, at least, not very reasonable. It is not from a feeling of sentimental devotion nor from a nurselike affiction transmitted from the swaddling clothes of Henry IV to the cradle of the young Henry, that I plead a cause where everything would again turn against me anew if it triumphed. I am not aiming at romance or chivalry or martyrdom. I do not believe in the right divine of royalty, but I do believe in the power of facts and of revolutions. I do not even invoke the charter. I take my ideas from a higher source. I draw them from the sphere of philosophy of the period at which my life terminates. I propose the Duke of Bordeaux merely as a necessity of a purer kind than that which is now in question. I know that, by passing over this child, it is intended to establish the principle of the sovereignty of the people, an absurdity of the old school, which proves that our veteran Democrats have advanced no further impolitical knowledge than our superannuated royalists. There is no absolute sovereignty anywhere. Liberty does not flow from political right, as was supposed in the eighteenth century. It is derived from natural right, so that it exists under all forms of government, and a monarchy may be free nay much more free than a republic, but this is neither the time nor the place to deliver political lecture. I shall content myself with observing that when the people dispose of thrones, they often dispose also of their own liberty. I shall remark that the principle of an eruditary monarchy, however absurd it may at first appear, has been recognized in practice as preferable to that of an elective monarchy. The reasons for this are so obvious that I need not enlarge upon them. You choose one king today. Who shall hinder you from choosing another tomorrow? The law, you say. The law, and it is you who make it. There is still a simpler mode of treating the question. It is to say we repudiate the elder branch of the Bourbons. And why? Because we are victorious. We have triumphed in a just and holy cause. We use a double right of conquest. Very well. You proclaim the sovereignty of might. Then take good care of this might, for if in a few months it escapes from you, you will be in a bad position to complain. Such is human nature. The most enlightened and the purest minds do not always rise above success. Those minds were the first to invoke right in opposition to violence. They supported that right with all the superiority of their talent. And at the very moment when the truth of what they said has been demonstrated by the most abominable abuse of force and by its signal overthrow, the conquerors recur to those arms they have broken. They will find them to be dangerous weapons, which will wound their own hands without serving their cause. I have carried the war into my enemy's camp. I have not gone to Bivouac in the past under the old banner of the dead, a banner which has not been inglorious, but which droops by the flagstaff that supports it, because no breath of life is there to raise it. Where I to move the dust of thirty-five cappets, I should not draw from it an argument which should be as much as listened to. The idolatry of a name is abolished. Monarchy is no longer a tenet of religious belief. It is a political form, which is preferable at this moment to every other, because it has the greatest tendency to reconcile order with liberty. Useless Cassandra! How often have I wearied the throne in the country with my disregarded warnings? It only remained for me to sit down on the last fragment of the shipwreck which I have so often foretold. In misfortune I acknowledge every species of power except that of absolving me from my oaths of allegiance. It is also my duty to make my life uniform. After all that I have done, said and written for the Bourbons, I should be the meanest of wretches if I denied them at the moment when, for the third and last time, they are on the road to exile. Fear I leave to those generous royalists who have never sacrificed a coin or a place to their loyalty, to those champions of the altar and the throne who lately treated me as a renegade, an apostate and a revolutionary. Pious libeless, the renegade now calls upon you. Come then, and stem out a word, a single word, with him for the unfortunate master who loaded you with his gifts and whom you have ruined. Instigators of coup d'etat, preachers of constituent power, where are you? You hide yourselves in the mire from under which you gallantly raised your heads to culminate the faithful servants of the king. Your silence today is worthy of your language of yesterday. At all those doubting knights whose projected exploits have caused the descendants of Henry IV to be driven from their throne at the point of the pitchfork tremble now as they crouch under the three-coloured cockade. It is natural that they should do so. The noble colours which they display will protect their persons, but will not cover their cowardice. In thus frankly expressing my sentiments in this tribune, I have no idea that I am performing an act of heroism. Those times are past when opinions were expressed at personal hazard. If such were now the case, I should speak a hundred times louder. The best buckle is a breast that does not fear to show itself uncovered to the enemy. No gentleman, we need neither fear a people whose reason is equal to its courage, nor that generous rising generation which I admire, with which I sympathise with all the faculties of my soul, and to which as to my country I wish honour, glory, and liberty. Far from me, above all things, be the thought of sowing seeds of discord in France, and that has been my motive for excluding from my speech every accent of passion. If I could convince myself that a child should be left in the happy ranks of obscurity in order to procure the piece of thirty-three millions of men, I should have regarded every word as criminal which was not consistent with the needs of the time, but I am not so convinced. At either disposal of a crown I would willingly lay at the feet of Monsieur le Duc d'Orléans, but all that I see vacant is not a throne but a tomb at Saint Denis. Whatever destiny may await Monsieur, the lieutenant-general of the kingdom, I shall never be his enemy if he promotes my country's welfare. I only ask to attain my liberty of conscience and the right of going to die, where I shall find independence and repose. I vote against the declaration. I was fairly calm when I began my speech, but gradually I was overcome with emotion. When I came to this passage, useless Cassandra, how often have I weared the throne in the country with my disregarded warnings. My voice became troubled, and I was obliged to put my hand kitchen to my eyes to keep back tears of love and bitterness. Indignation restored my path speech in the paragraph that follows. Pious libelers, the renegade now calls upon you. Come then, and stammer out a word, a single word, with him for the unfortunate master who loaded you with his gifts in whom you have ruined. I turn my glances upon the benches to which I address those words. Several peers seem crushed. They sank down in the armchairs till I could no longer see them behind their colleagues seated motionless before them. This speech made some noise. All parties were hurt in it, but all remained silent, because by the side of great truths I had placed a great sacrifice. I came down from the tribune, I left the chamber, went to the cloakroom, took off my pier's coat, my sword, my feathered hat. I unfastened from the last the white cockade and placed it in the little pocket on the left-hand side of the black frockcoat, which I put on and buttoned across my heart. My servant carried away the cast-off clothes of the peerage, and I, shaking the dust from my feet, quitted that palace of treachery, which I shall never enter again in my life. On the 10th and 12th of August I completed my self-divestment, and sent in the different resignations I'd follow. Paris, 10th August, 1830. Monsieur le Président de la Chambre des Pères. Being unable to take the oath of allegiance to Louis-Philippe d'Orléans as king of the French, I find myself seized with a legal incapacity which prevents me from attending the sittings of the hereditary chamber. One mark of the kindness of King Louis XVIII, and of the royal munificence, remains to me, a peer's pension of 12,000 francs, which was given me to keep up, if not brilliantly, at least independently of immediate needs, the high position to which I was called. It would not be right that I should retain a favour attached to the exercise of functions which I am not able to fulfil. I therefore have the honour to resign into your hands, my pension has appeared. Paris, 12th August, 1830. Monsieur le ministre de Finance. It remains to me from the kindness of Louis XVIII, and the national munificence, a peer's pension of 12,000 francs, transformed into an annuity inscribed on the ledger of the public debt, and transmissible only to the first direct generation of the annuitant. Not being able to take the oath to Monsignor, le Duit d'Orléans as king of the French, it would not be right that I should continue to receive a pension attached to functions which I no longer exercise. I therefore write to resign it into your hands. It will have ceased to accrue to me on the day, 10th August, when I wrote to Monsieur the President of the Chamber of Peers, that it would be impossible for me to take the oath required. I have the honour to be with high regard, etc. Paris, 12th August, 1830. Monsieur le Grand Référendaire. I have the honour to send you a copy of the two letters which I have addressed, one to Monsieur the President of the Chamber of Peers, the other to Monsieur the Minister of Finance. You will there see that I renounce my peer's pension and that consequently my attorney will have to receive of this pension only the sum due to the 10th of August, the day on which I declared my refusal to take the oath. I have the honour to be with high regard, etc. Paris, 12th August, 1830. Monsieur le Ministre de la Justice. I have the honour to send you my resignation as Minister of State. I am with high regard Monsieur le Ministre de la Justice, the most humble and obedient servant. I remained as naked as a little St John, but I had long been accustomed to live on wild honey, and I did not fear that the daughter of Herodotus would have a longing for my grey head. My gold lace, tassels, bullion fringe, and appellettes, sold to a Jew and melted down by him, brought me in seven hundred francs, the net produce of all my granges. And now what had become of Charles the Tenth? He was travelling towards his exile, accompanied by his bodyguards, watched over by his three commissaries, passing through France without exciting even the curiosity of the peasants plowing their furrows beside the high road. In two or three small towns, hostile movements were made. In some others, townsmen and women showed signs of pity. It must be remembered that Bonaparte Rouse no more commision went going from Fontaine Blur to Toulon. That France grew no more excited, and that the win of so many battles narrowly escaped death at Orgonne. In this tired country the greatest events are no longer more than dramas played for a diversion. They interest the spectators so long as the curtain is raised, and when it falls, leave but a vain memory. Sometimes Charles the Tenth and his family stopped at Richard Carter's wrists, to take a meal at a corner of a dirty table where wagoners had dined before him. Henry V and his sister amused themselves in the yard by watching the chickens and pigeons of the inn. I had said it, the monarchy was going away, and people stood at their windows to see it pass. Heaven at that moment was pleased to insult both the victorious and the vanquished party. While it was being maintained that all France was indignant at the ordinances, King Philip was in frequent receipt of provincial addresses sent to King Charles to congratulate the latter on the salatory measures which he had taken and which were saving the monarchy. The Bay of Titeria, on his side, sent the following act of submission to the Dithero Monarch, who was at that time on the road to Sherbourg. In the name of God, et cetera, et cetera, I recognise as my lord an absolute sovereign, great Charles the Tenth, the victorious, I will pay him tribute, et cetera. It is not easy to imagine a more bitter mockery of both fortunes. Nowadays revolutions are manufactured by machinery. They are made so fast at a sovereign, while still king on the frontiers of his states is already no more than an exile in his capital. The indifference of the country for Charles the Tenth points to something more than lassitude. We are bound to behold in it the progress of democratic ideas and the assimilation of ranks. At an earlier period the fall of a king of France would have been an enormous event. Time has lowered the monarch from the height on which he was placed, has brought him nearer to us, has diminished the space which separated him from the class of the people. If men felt little surprise at meeting the son of St. Louis on the high road like everybody else, this was due not to a spirit of hatred or system, but quite simply to the sense of social levelling which has penetrated men's minds, and which has acted upon the masses without their knowing it. A curse Sherbourg upon thy ill omen precincts. It was near Sherbourg that the wind of anger threw Edward III to ravage our country. It was not far from Sherbourg that the wind of an enemy's victory shattered Turville's fleet. It was at Sherbourg that the wind of a deceptive prosperity drove Louis XVI toward his scaffold. It was at Sherbourg that the wind from I Know Not What Shore carried away our last princess. The coast of Great Britain, on which William the Conqueror landed, witnessed the disembarkation of Charles X without lance or penne. He went to Holyrood to find the memories of his youth hung upon the walls of the Stuart Palace, like old engravings made yellow by time. I have depicted the three days as they unroll themselves before my eyes. Hence a certain contemporary colour, true at the passing moment, false after the moment has passed, is diffused over my picture. There's no revolution so prodigious but described from minute to minute, will find itself reduced to the slightest proportions, events issued from the womb of things, even as men from the womb of their mothers, accompanied by the infirmities of nature. Misery and greatness are twin sisters. They are born together. But where the confinement is a vigorous one, misery at a certain period dies and greatness alone survives. To judge impartially of the truth that is to remain, we must therefore place ourselves at the point of view from which posterity will contemplate the accomplished fact. Getting away from the meannesses of character and action of which I'd been a witness, taking only what will remain of the days of July, I said with justice in my speech in the Chamber of Peers. The people having armed themselves with their courage and their intelligence, it was found that those shopkeepers could breathe freely amidst the smoke of gunpowder, and that it required rather more than four soldiers and a corporal to subdue them. A century could not arrive in the destinies of a nation so completely, as the three last sons that have shone over France. In fact the people properly so-called were brave and generous on the day of the twenty-eight. The guards had lost more than three hundred men killed and wounded. They did ample justice to the poor classes, who were alone fought on that day, and among whom were mingled men who were foul-minded, but who were unable to dishonour them. The pupils of the polytechnic school, who left their school too late on the twenty-eight to take part in the fighting, were placed by the people at their head on the twenty-ninth, with admirable simplicity and ingeniousness. The troops who had been absent from the strife sustained by the people came to join their ranks on the twenty-ninth, when the greatest danger was passed. Others, likewise Victus, first joined the conquering side on the thirtieth and thirty-first. On the side of the troops things were very much the same. Only the soldiers and officers were engaged. The staff, which had once deserted Bonaparte at Fontainebleau, kept to the heights of St. Cloud, watching from which side the wind blew the smoke of the powder. They pressed on each other's heels at Charles X's levee. Not a soul was present at his couche. The moderation of the plebeian classes equaled their courage. Order resulted suddenly from confusion. One must have seen the half-naked workmen posted on sentry at the gate of the public gardens, preventing other ragged workmen from passing, to form an idea of the power of duty which had seized upon the men who remained the masters. They could have paid themselves the price of their blood, and allowed themselves to be tempted by their rigidness. One did not, as on the tenth of August 1792, see the Swiss massacred in their flight. All opinions were respected. Never, with a few exceptions, was victory less abused. The Victus carried the wounded guards through the crowd, crying, Respect brave men! If a soldier came to die, they said, Peace to the dead! The fifteen years of the restoration under constitutional government had given rise among us to that spirit of humanity, lawfulness and justice, which twenty-five years of the revolutionary and warlike spirit had been unable to produce. The law of force introduced into our man has seemed to have become the common law. The consequences of the revolution of July will be memorable. This revolution has pronounced a decree against all thrones. Today kings will be able to reign only by force of arms, a sure means for a moment but incapable of enduring. The time of successive janissaries is ended. Neither Tacitus nor Thucydides could give us a good description of the events of the three days. It would need bossiery to explain to us the events in the order of Providence. A genius had saw all, but without overstepping the limits, set to its reason and its splendour, like the sun-rich moose between two dazzling boundaries, in which the Orientals call the slave of God. Let us not seek so near at hand the motive-pulse of a movement placed so far away. The mediocrity of mankind, mad terrors, inexplicable disagreements, hatreds, ambitions, the presumption of some, the prejudice of others, secret conspiracies, buying and selling, well or ill-advised measures, courage or the absence of courage. All these things are the accidents, not the causes of the event. When people say that they no longer wanted the Bourbons, that these had become hateful because they were supposed to have been forced upon France by the Foreigner, this lofty disgust explains nothing satisfactorily. The movement of July has not to do with politics properly so called. It has to do with the social revolution which is never idle. By the concatenation of this general revolution, the 28th of July 1830 is only the inevitable sequel of the 21st of January 1793. The work of our first deliberative assemblies had been suspended. It had not been finished. In the course of twenty years the French had accustomed themselves, like the English under Cromwell, to be governed by other masters than their old sovereigns. The fall of Charles X is the consequence of the decapitation of Louis XVI, even as the dethronement of James II is the consequence of the murder of Charles I. The revolution seemed to die away in the glory of Bonaparte and in the liberties of Louis XVIII, but its germ was not destroyed. Lodged at the bottom of our manors, it developed when the faults of the restoration gave it fresh heat, and soon it burst forth. The council's providence are revealed in the anti-monarchical changes that are taking place. That superficial mind should seem merely a scuffle in the revolution of the three days is quite simple, but reflective men know that an enormous step forward has been taken. The principle of the sovereignty of the people has been substituted for the principle of the royal sovereignty. The hereditary monarchy changed into an elective monarchy. The 21st of January taught that one could dispose of a king's head. The 29th of July has shown that one can dispose of a crown. Now any truth, good or bad, which manifests itself, remains the acquisition of the crown. A change ceases to be unheard of or extraordinary. It no longer presents itself to the mind or the conscious as empires, when it results from an idea that has become popular. The Franks used to exercise the sovereignty collectively. Next they delegated it to a few chiefs, then those chiefs confided it to one alone, then this sole chief usurped it for the benefit of his family. Now men are going back from the hereditary royalty to the elective royalty, and from the elective royalty they will glide into the republic, that is the history of society, these are the stages by which the government comes from the people, and returns to it. Let us then not believe that the work of July is a superfitation of a day. Let us not imagine that legitimacy is going to come incontinently to re-establish succession by right of primogenity. Let us neither try to persuade ourselves that July will suddenly die a natural death. No doubt the Orléans branch will not take root. It is not to produce that result that so much blood, calamity and genius has been expended during the last half-century. But July, if it do not bring about the final destruction of France with the ruin of all her liberties, will bear its natural fruit, that fruit is democracy. The fruit will perhaps be bitter and blood red, but the monarchy is an outlandish graft, which will not take on the republican stem. And so let us not confound the improvised king with the revolution from which he sprung by chance. The latter, as such as we see it, is acting in contradiction with its principles. It seems to have been born without the power to live, because it is punished with a throne. But let it only drag on a few years, this revolution, and what will have come and gone will change the data that remain to be known. Grown-up men die, or no longer see things as they used to see them. Adolescents attain the age of reason. New generations recruit corrupt generations. The linen soaked in the sores of a hospital, when met by a great stream soils only the water that flows below those corruptions. Downstream and upstream, the current keeps or resumes its limpidity. July, freeing its origin, produced only a fettered monarchy. But the time will come when rid of its crown. It will undergo the transformations which are the law of existences. Then it will live in an atmosphere befitting its nature. The heiress of the Republican Party, the illusions of the Legitimist Party, are both deplorable and go beyond democracy and royalty. The first things are violence as the only means of success. The second things are the past as the only harbour of safety. Now there is a moral law which rules society, a general legitimacy which dominates the particular legitimacy. This great law and this great legitimacy are the enjoyment of the natural rights of man, ruled by his duties, for it is the duty that creates the right and not the right that creates the duty. The passions and the vices relegate us to the class of slaves. The general legitimacy would have had no obstacle to overcome if it had kept us belonging to the same principle, the particular legitimacy. For the rest, one observation will suffice to make us understand the prodigious and majestic might of the family of our old sovereigns. I have already said it and cannot repeat it too often. All the royalties will die with the French royalty. In fact, the monarchical idea is wanting at the very moment when the monarch is wanting. We find nothing left around us but the democratic idea. My young king will carry away in his arms the monarchy of the world. It is a good ending. When I was writing all this on what the revolution of 1830 might be in the future, I had a difficulty in defending myself against an instinct which spoke to me in contradiction to my argument. I took this instinct for the impulse of my dislike of the troubles of 1830. I distrusted myself, and perhaps in my too-loyal impartiality, I exaggerated the future which the three days might bring forth. Well, ten years have passed since the fall of Charles X. As July sat down, we are now at the commencement of December 1840, to what a depth has France sunk. If I could find any pleasure in the humiliation of a government of French origin, I should experience a sort of pride in rereading in the Congress de Veyron, my correspondence with Mr. Canning. Certainly it differs from that which has just been communicated to the Chamber of Deputies. Whose is the fault? Is it that of the elected prince? Is it that of the incapacity of his ministers? Is it that of the nation itself, whose character and genius seem to be exhausted? Our ideas are progressive. What do our manners support them? It would not be surprising if a people which has existed fourteen centuries, and which has ended that long career with an explosion of miracles, should have come to an end. If you read these memoirs to their conclusion, you will see that, while doing justice to all that has seemed fine to me in the various epochs of our history, I am of opinion that in the last result, the old society is coming to an end. Here ends my political career. This career ought also to close my memoirs since nothing is left for me, but to sum up the experiences of my course. Three catastrophes have marked the three preceding parts of my life. I saw Louis XVI die during my career as a traveller and a soldier. At the end of my political career Bonaparte disappeared. Charles X in falling closed my political career. I have fixed a period of a revolution in literature and in the same way in politics. I have formulated the principles of representative government. My diplomatic correspondence is worth quite as much, I think, as my literary compositions. It is possible that both are worth nothing at all, but it is certain that they are of equal value. In France, in the Tribune of the House of Peers and in my writings, I exercised so great an influence that I first placed Monsieur de Villal in office, and that later he was forced to retire in the face of my opposition after he had made himself my enemy. All this is proved by what you have read. The great event of my political career is the Spanish War. It was for me in this career what the genie du Christianism had been in my literary career. My destiny picked me out to entrust me with the mighty venture which, under the restoration, might have set in regular order the world's progress towards the future. It took me out of my dreams and transformed me into a leader of facts. It sent me down to play at a table at which was seated as my adversaries the two First Ministers of the Day, Prince Metinic and Mr. Canning. I won the game against both of them. All the serious minds which the cabinets at that time numbered agreed that they had met a statesman in me. Bonaparte had foreseen it before them in spite of my books. I am entitled, therefore, without boasting to believe that the politician in me equal the writer, but I attach no value to political renown. That is why I have allowed myself to speak of it. If at the time of the peninsular enterprise I had not been flung aside by deluded men, the course of our destinies would have changed, France would have resumed her frontiers, the equilibrium of Europe would have been re-established, the restoration becoming glorious might have lived a long time yet, and my diplomatic work would also have marked a stage in our history. Between my two lives there is only a difference of result. My literary career, completely accomplished, has produced all that it had to produce, because it depended on myself alone. My political career was suddenly stopped in the midst of its successes, because it depended on others. Nevertheless I admit that my politics were applicable only to the restoration. When a transformation takes place in principles, societies and men, what was good yesterday becomes antiquated and lamps today. With regard to Spain the relations between the royal families having ceased, owing to the abolition of the Sainic law, there is no longer a question of creating impenetrable frontiers beyond the Pyrenees. We must accept the field of battle which Austria and England may one day open up to us there. We must take things at the point to which they have come and abandon, not without regret, a firm but reasonable line of conduct, the certain benefits of which were, it is true, long dated. I feel conscious of having served the legitimacy as it should be served. I saw the future as clearly as I see it now, only I wish to reach it by a less dangerous road, so that the legitimacy which was essential to our constitutional instruction might not stumble in a precipitous course. Today my plans are no longer realisable. Russia is going to turn elsewhere. If, as things now are, I were to enter the peninsula, whose spirit has had time to change, it would be with other thoughts. I should occupy myself only with the alliance of the nations, suspicious, jealous, passionate, uncertain and variable though it be, and should not dream of relations between the kings. I should say to France, you have left the beaten track for the path of precipices. Very well, explore its wonders and its perils. Come to us, innovations, enterprises, discoveries. Come and let arms of necessary favour you. Where is there anything new in the East? Let us march there. Where can we direct our courage and our intelligence? Let us hasten thither. Let us place ourselves at the head of the great rising of the human race. Let us not allow ourselves to be outstripped. Let the French name go before the others on this crusade, as of old it did to the tomb of Christ. Yes, if I were admitted to my country's councils, I would try to be of use to it in the dangerous principles which it has adopted. To restrain it at present would mean to condemn it to a base death. I should not be satisfied with speeches. Adding works to faith I should prepare soldiers and millions. I should build ships, like Noé, to make provision for the deluge. And if I were asked why, I should answer, because such is France's good pleasure. My dispatchers would warn the cabinets of Europe that nothing shall stay on the globe without our intervention. That if the world's shreds are to be distributed, the lion's share shall fall to us. We should cease humbly to ask our neighbours for leave to exist. The heart of France would beat freely. No hand would dare to lay itself upon that hand to count its throbbing. And since we are seeking new silence I should dart towards the esplender, and no longer await the natural rise of dawn. God grant that these industrial interests in which we are to find a prosperity of a new kind may deceive nobody, that they may prove as fruitful, as civilising, as the moral interests went still society-issued. Time will teach us whether they be not the barren dreams of those sterile intellects, which lack the faculty of rising above the material world. Although my part finishes with the legitimacy, all my wishes are for France, whatever be the powers which her improvident whim may lead her to obey. As for myself I ask for nothing more. I would wish only not too long to outlive the ruins, which lie crumbling at my feet. But once years are like the Alps. This guest has once amounted the first, before others rise before one. Alas! Those last and higher mountains are uninhabited, arid and topped with snow. End of Book 15, Part 3. Book 1, Part 1 of Part 4 of the memos of Chateaubriand, Volume 5. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Nicolle. Part 4 of the memos of Chateaubriand, Volume 5, by François-René de Chateaubriand, translated by Alexandre Tuxerre de Matos. Book 1, Part 1. Infe Marie de Marie-Thérèse, Paris, October 1830. Out of the turmoil of the three days, I'm quite surprised to find myself opening the fourth part of this work amid a profound calm. It seems to me that I have doubled the Cape of Storms and penetrated into a region of peace and silence. If I had died on the 7th of August of this year, the last words of my speech in the House of Peers would have been the last lines of my history. My catastrophe, being that of a past of twelve centuries, would have augmented my memory. My drama would have ended magnificently. But I did not fall under the blow. I was not struck to the ground. Pierre de L'Étoile wrote this page of his journal on the day following the assassination of Henry IV. And here I end with the life of my king, the second register of my melancholic pastimes, and my vain and curious researchers, both public and private, interrupted often since the past month by the watches of the sigh and irksome nights which I have suffered, similarly this last, for the death of my king. I had proposed to close my ephemerides with this register, but so many new and curious occurrences have presented themselves through this signal mutation that I pass to another which also will go before God pleases, and I doubt will not be very long. L'Étoile saw the death of the first Bourbon. I have just seen the fall of the last. Would I not to close here the register of my melancholic pastimes and of my vain and curious researchers? Perhaps, but so many new and curious researchers have presented themselves through this signal mutation that I pass to another register. Like L'Étoile, I lament the adversities of the dynasty of St. Louis. Nevertheless, I am obliged to admit there mingles with my sorrow a certain inward satisfaction. I reproach myself with it, but I cannot prevent it. This satisfaction is that of the slave delivered from his chains. When I abandoned the courier of a soldier and a traveller, I felt a certain sadness. Now I feel joy, freed convict that I am of the gallows of the world and the court. Faithful to my principles and my oaths, I have betrayed neither liberty nor the king. I carry away neither wealth nor honours. I go as poor as I came. Happy to end a courier which was hateful to me, I lovingly return to repose. Blessed be thou, O my native and dear independence, soul of my life. Come, bring me my memoirs, that alter ego whose confidant, idle, and muse you are. The hours of leisure are fit for storytelling. A shipwrecked mariner, I shall continue to relate my shipwreck to the fisherman on shore. Returning to my primitive instincts, I become a free man and a traveller once again. I end my course as I began it. The closing circle of my days brings me back to the starting point, on the road which I once took as a countless conscript. I am going to travel as an experienced veteran, with my furlough and my shaker, the stripes of time upon my arm, a knapsack full of years upon my back. Who knows? Perhaps I shall, stage by stage, recover the reveries of my youth. I shall call many dreams to my help, to defend me against that horde of truths which are begotten in old days, even as dragons hide themselves in ruins. It will depend but on myself to not together again the two ends of my existence, to blend far distant periods, to mingle illusions of different ages. Since the prince whom I met in exile, on leaving my paternal home, I now meet in banishment on my way to my last abode. I rapidly wrote the little introduction to this part of my memoirs in the month of October last year, but I was unable to continue this labour because I had another on my hands. This was the work which concluded the addition of my complete works. From this work again I was diverted, first by the trial of the ministers, and next by the Sycho Saint-Germain-Doix-Séroir. The trial of the ministers and the Florian parrots made no great impression on me, after the trial of Louis Sez, and the revolutionary insurrections, all is small in the matters of trials and insurrections. The ministers, when coming from Van Saint to the Luxembourg, when returning to Van Saint, while sentence was being passed, went through the read-en-faire. I could hear the veils of their carriage from the back of my retreat. How many events have passed before my door! The defenders of those men did not rise to the level of their task. None took a high enough view of the matter. The advocate predominated too greatly in the speeches. If my friend the prince de Polignac had chosen me for his second, with what an eye should I have looked upon those perjurers setting themselves up for judges of a perjurer. What I should have said to them? It is you who dare to be my client's judges. It is you who all sullied with your oaths dare to impute it as a crime to him that he ruined his master when he thought he was serving him. You, the instigators, you who urged him to issue the ordinances. Change places with him whom you claim the right to judge. He who was accused becomes the accuser. If we have deserved to be struck, it is not by you. If we are guilty, it is not towards you, but towards the people. They are waiting for us in the yard of your palace, and we shall take our heads to them. After the trial of the ministers came the scandal of Saint-Germain-Locce-Roy. The royalists full of excellent qualities, but sometimes stupid and often aggravating, never calculating the range of their measures, always thinking that they would restore the legitimacy by effecting a colour in the aquavats or a flower in their buttonholes, occasioned to deplorable scenes. It was evident that the revolutionary party would profit by the service-held incommemoration of the Duke de Berry to make a noise. Now the legitimists were not strong enough to oppose this, and the government was not settled enough to maintain order, and so the church was pillaged. A Voltairean and progressive apothecary triumph fearlessly over a steeple of the year 1300, and a cross already overthrown by other barbarians at the end of the ninth century. Consequently upon the exploits of these enlightened pharmaceutics come the devastation of the Archbishop's palace, the profanation of the sacred things, and the processions copied from those of Lyon. The execution and the victims were lacking, but there were plenty of buffoons, masks, and diverse carnival delights. The burlesque sacrilegious procession marched on one side of the Seine, while the National Guard, pretending to hasten in aid, defiled on the other. The river separated order and anarchy. It is stated that a man of talent was there as an onlooker, and that he said, on seeing the chastables and books floating on the Seine, what a pity they did not throw the Archbishop in. A profound utterance for indeed a drowned Archbishop must be a pleasant sight. That makes liberty and enlightenment take so great a step forward. We old witnesses of old deeds are obliged to tell you, that you see here but pale in Richard copies. You still possess the revolutionary instinct, but you no longer have its energy. You can be criminal only in imagination. You would like to do evil, but your heart lacks courage and your arm strength. You would like to see fresh massacres, but you would no longer set to work to commit them. If you want the revolution of July to be great and to remain great, do not let Monsieur Cudde de Gassicorby its real hero and Maillot its ideal personage. Paris end of March 1831. I was out of my reckoning when, after the days of July were over, I thought that I was entering a region of peace. The fall of the three sovereigns had obliged me to explain myself in the House of Peers. The prescription of those kings forbade me to remain dumb. On the other hand, Philip's newspapers were asking me why I refused to serve a revolution, which consecrated the principles which I defended and diffused. I had needs to speak on behalf of the general truths and to explain my personal conduct, and extract from a little pamphlet which will be forgotten, de la restauration et de la monarchie elective, will continue the thread of my narrative and that of the history of my times. It is spoiled of the present, possessing but an uncertain future beyond the tomb. I feel a need that my memory should not be injured by my silence. I must not hold my peace touching a restoration in which I have taken so much part, which has been daily outraged, and which is at length being prescribed before my eyes. In the Middle Ages, at times of calamity, men used to take a religious and lock a minotaur, where he fasted on bread and water for the salvation of the world. I am not unlike this twelfth-century monk. Through the dormer window of my expiatory jail, I have preached my last sermon to the pastor's by. Here is the epitome of that sermon. As I predicted in my last speech in The Tribune of the Peers, the monarchy of July is in an absolute condition of glory, or of laws of exception. It lives by the press, and the press is killing it. Devoid of glory, it will be devoured by liberty. If it attack that liberty, it will perish. It would be a fine thing if, after driving out three kings with barricades on behalf of the liberty of the press, we were to be seen erecting new barricades against that liberty. And yet what is to be done? Will the redouble action of the tribunals and the laws suffice to restrain the writers? A new government is a child that can walk only in leading strings. Are we to put back the nation into swaddling clothes? Will that terrible nursing which has sucked blood in the arms of victory add so many bivyics, not burst its bandages? There was by one old stock deeply rooted in the past, which could have withstood with impunity the gales blowing from the liberty of the press. To listen to the declarations of the moment, it seems that the exiles of Edinburgh are the poorest fellows living, and that they are nowhere missed. The present, today, lacks nothing but the past, a small thing, as though the centuries did not make use of each other's pedestals, and as though the last comer could support itself in mid-air. It is useless for Vanity to take offence at memories, to erase the floodily, to prescribe names and persons. That family, the heir of a thousand years, has left an immense void by its withdrawal. One feels it everywhere. Those individuals, so poultry in our eyes, have shaken Europe in their fall. To have a smaller degree event produce their natural effects, and bring about their rigorous consequences. Charles X in abdicating will have made all those gothic kings, the grand vassals of the past under the scissor-enty of the capants, abdicate with him. We are marching towards a general revolution. If the transformation which is being effected follows its inclination and meets with no obstacles, if popular reason continues its progressive development, if the education of the middle class suffers no interruption, the nations will become levelled in a uniform liberty. If our transformation is stayed, the nations will become levelled in a uniform despotism. This despotism will not last long, because of the advanced age of intelligence, but it will be harsh, and a long social dissolution will follow it. Preoccupied as I am with these ideas, it is clear why I was, bound as an individual to remain true to what seemed to me, the best safeguard of the public liberties, the least perilous road by which to attain the compliment of those liberties. It is not that I have the pretension to be a tearful preacher of sentimental politics, an eternal repeater of white plumes and common places, Allah, Henry IV. Casting my eyes over the space that separates the tar of the temple from the palace in Ennebra, I should doubtless find as many calamities heaped up as there are centuries accumulated on a noble race. A woman of sorrow, above all, has been loaded with the heaviest burden as being the strongest. There is not a heart but breaks at the thought of her. The sufferings have risen so high that they have become one of the grandeurs of the revolution. But when all is said and done, no one is obliged to be king. Providence sends particular afflictions to whom it pleases, always brief ones, because life is short, and those afflictions are not counted in the general destinies of the peoples. Even if the proposition which fervour banishes the depletes family from French territory be a corollary of the deposition of that family, that corollary carries no conviction for me. I should in vain seek my place in the several categories of persons who have become attached to the actual order of things. There are men who, after taking the oath to the republic one and indivisible, to the directory of five persons, to the consulate of three, to the empire of one alone, to the first restoration, to the additional act to the constitutions of the empire, to the second restoration, have something left to swear to Louis Philippe. I am not so rich. There are men who have flung their word on the plaster griff in July, like those roaming goat-herds who play at odd or even among ruins. Those men treat as a fool in Simpleton, who serve or does not reduce politics to a question of private interests. I am a fool, and a Simpleton. There are timorous people who would have much preferred not to swear, but who saw themselves being butchered, together with their grandparents, their grandchildren, and all the landlords, if they had not trembled out their oaths. This is a physical effect which I have not yet experienced. I shall wait for the infirmity, and if it comes to me, I shall consider. There are great lords of the empire linked to their pensions by sacred and indissoluble bonds, whatever be the hand they fall from. A pension is in their eyes a sacrament. It stamps a character like orders or marriage. No penchant head can ever cease to be so. Pensions being charged to the treasury, they remain charged to the same treasury. As for me, I have the habit of divorce from fortune. I am too old for her, and abandon her, lest she should leave me. There are high barons of the throne and the altar, who have not betrayed the ordinances, no. But the insufficiency of the means employed to carry out the ordinances has excited their spleen. Indignant to find shortcomings in despotism, they have gone to seek another anti-chamber. It is impossible for me to share their indignation and their abode. There are men of conscience who are perjurers only to be perjurers, who, while yielding to force, are nonetheless for the right. They beep over that poor child's attempt whom they first dragged to his ruin by their advice, and then put to death by their oaths. But if ever he or his house revive, they will be very thunderbolts of legitimacy. As for me, I have always been devoted to death, and I am the funeral procession of the old monarchy, like the poor man's dog. Lastly, there are trusty knights who have dispensations from honor and permits of disloyalty in their pocket. I have none. I was the man of the possible restoration, of the restoration accompanied by every kind of liberty. That restoration took me for an enemy, it is ruined. I must undergo its fate. Shall I go to attach the few years that remain to me to a new fortune, like the hems of dresses which women drag from court to court, for all the world to tread upon? At the head of the young generations I should be suspect. Following them is not my place. I am fully aware that none of my faculties has aged. I understand my sentry better than ever. I penetrate more boldly into the future than anybody. But necessity has pronounced its decree. To end his life opportunally is a necessary condition for the public man. Lastly the etude historique have just appeared. I will quote the introduction, which is a real page of my memoirs, and contains my history at the very moment at which I am writing. Introduction Remember, so as not to lose sight of the pace of the world, that at that time there were citizens engaged, like myself, in ransacking the archives of the past amid the ruins of the present, in writing the annals of the old revolutions to the uproar of the new revolutions. They and I, taking as our table, in the crumbling edifice, the stone that had fallen at our feet, while awaiting that which was to crush our heads. Etude historique I would not, for the sake of the days that remain for me to live, in again the eighteen months that have just elapsed. Now I will ever have an idea of the violence which I have done on myself. I have been forced to abstract my mind for ten, twelve, and fifteen hours a day, from what was passing around me, in order childishly to abandon myself to the composition of a work of which no one would read a line. Etude peruse forced out volumes, when it is already so difficult to read the fruiton of a newspaper. I was writing ancient history, and modern history was knocking at my door. In vain I cried, Wait, I am coming to you! It passed on to the sound of the cannon, carrying with it three generations of kings. And how marvellously the times agree with the very nature of these Etude. Men are overthrowing the cross and persecuting the priests, and the cross and the priests occur on every page of my narrative. They are banishing the cappets, and I am publishing a history in which the cappets occupy eight centuries, the longest and the last work of my life, that which has cost me most research, care, and years, that in which I have perhaps stirred up most ideas, and facts, appears at a time when it can find no readers. It is as though I flung it into a pit, where to sink down, under the mass of the rubbish that will follow it. When a society is being composed and decomposed, when the existence of each and all is at stake, when one is not sure of a future of an hour's duration. Who cares what his neighbour does, says, or thinks? Men have something else to trouble their heads about than Nero, Constantine, Julian the Apostles, the Martyrs, the Fathers of the Church, the Goths, the Huns, the Vandals, the Franks, Clovis, Charlemagne, Hugh Cuppet, and Henry the Fourth. They have something else to think of than the shipwreck of the old world, at a time when we are all involved in the shipwreck of the new world. Does it not argue a sort of dotage, a kind of feeble mindedness, to busy oneself with literature at such a time? That is true. But this dotage has nothing to do with my brain. It comes from the antecedents of my spiteful fortune. If I had not made so many sacrifices to the liberties of my country, I should not have been obliged to contract engagements, which are now being fulfilled under circumstances doubly deplorable to myself. No author has ever been put to such a proof. Thank God it is nearly at an end. I have nothing left to do but to sit on ruins, and despise that life which I scorned in my youth. After these very natural complaints, which have involuntarily escaped me, one thought comes to console me. I began my literary career with a work in which I considered Christianity in its poetic and moral aspects. I end it with a work in which I regard this same religion in its philosophical and historical aspects. I began my political career under the restoration. I end it with the restoration. It is not without a secret satisfaction that I observe this consistency with myself. Paris, May 1831. I have not abandoned the resolution which I conceived at the moment of the catastrophe of July. I have been considering the ways and means of living abroad. Difficult ways and means, because I have nothing. The purchase of my works has all but made me a bankrupt, and my debts prevent me from finding anyone willing to lend me money. Be this as it may. I shall go to Geneva with the sum that has accrued to me from the sale of my last pamphlet. I am leaving a procuration to sell the house in which I write this page for the sake of the order of dates. If I find a customer for my bed, I can find another bed outside France. In these uncertainties and movements it will be impossible for me, until I am settled somewhere, to resume the sequence of my memoirs at the place where I interrupted them. I shall continue, therefore, to write down the things of the actual moment of my life. I shall communicate these things by means of the letters which I may happen to write on the road, or during my different stoppages. I shall afterwards join the intermediary fax by a journal, which will fill up the intervals between the dates of those letters. To madame recamier. Lyon, Wednesday, 18th May, 1831. Here I am, too far away from you. I have never made so sad a journey. Wonderful weather, nature all arrayed, the nightingale singing, a starry night, and all this for whom. I shall indeed have to return to where you are, unless you be willing to come to my aid. To madame recamier. Lyon, Friday, 20th May. I spent the day yesterday in wandering beside the Rhône. I contemplated the town where you were born, the hill upon which raised the convent where you were chosen as the fairest, an expectation which you did not disappoint, and you are not here, and years have elapsed, and you have since been exiled to your birthplace, and madame understale is no more, and I am leaving France. One singular personage belonging to those old days has appeared before me. I send you his note, because of its unexpectedness and its surprise. This personage, whom I had never seen, is planting pines in the mountains of Lyonnais. It is a long cry from there to the Rife d'Eau, and the Maisonneur Vendre. What different parts men play on earth. Yes, aunt has told me of the regrets and the newspaper articles. I am not worth all that. You know that I sincerely think so, for twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four. The twenty-fourth is dedicated to vanity, which, however, is of slight duration and soon passes. I wanted to see nobody here. Monsieur Thiers, who was on his way to the south, forced my door, known enclosed in the above letter. A neighbour, your fellow countrymen, who has no other claim upon you, than a profound admiration for your glorious talent and your admirable character, would like to have the honour of seeing you and offering you the homage of his respect. This next door neighbour at your hotel, this fellow countrymen, is called Elvier. To Madame Ricamier, Lyon, Sunday, twenty-second May. We leave to-morrow for Geneva, when I shall find more memories of you. Shall I ever see France again, after I have once crossed the frontier? Yes, if you will, that is to say, if you remain there. I do not wish for the events which might offer me another chance of returning. I shall never allow the misfortunes of my country to enter among the number of my hopes. I shall write to you on Tuesday, the twenty-fourth, from Geneva. When shall I again see your little handwriting, the younger sister of mine? Geneva, Tuesday, twenty-fourth May. We arrived here yesterday and are looking at houses. We shall probably make shift to the little summer house on the edge of the lake. I cannot tell you how sad I feel as I busy myself with these arrangements. Again another future. Again to begin anew a life which I thought I had ended. I mean to write you a long letter when I am a little at rest. I dread that rest, for then I shall be contemplating without distraction those dim years upon which I am entering with a heart so much oppressed. Ninth June, eighteen-thirty-one. You know that a reformed sect has been established in the midst of the Protestants. One of the new pastors of the new church has been to see me, and has written me two letters worthy of the first apostles. He wants to convert me to his faith, and I want to turn him into a papist. We argue as though living in Calvin's day, but loving each other in Christian brotherhood and without burning one another. I do not despair of his salvation. He is quite shaken by my arguments in favor of the soaps. You cannot conceive the pitch of exaltation to which he has risen, and his candor is admirable. If you come to me, accompanied by my old friend Balange, we shall do wonders. In one of the Geneva newspapers, a Protestant controversial book is advertised, and the authors are urged to stand firm because the author of the Genie du Christenisme is close at hand. There is a certain consolation in finding a little free people, administered by the most distinguished men, among which religious ideas form the basis of liberty and the chief occupation of life. I lunched on Monsieur de Constance, beside Madame Necker, who is unfortunately deaf, but a woman of rare qualities and the greatest distinction. We spoke only of yourself. I had received your letter, and I told Monsieur de Cisse-Mondi the amiable things you had said for his benefit. You see, I am taking your lessons. Lastly, here are some verses. You are my star, and I am waiting for you to go to that enchanted island. Delphi Marit, home, uses. I have told you in my last letter why I could write neither on the peerage nor on the wall. I should be attacking a contemptible body to which I have belonged, and preaching honor to those who no longer possess it. It needs a sailor to read the verses and understand them. I put myself in Monsieur Le Normand's hands. Your intelligence will suffice for the last three stanzas, and the key to the riddle is at the foot. Geneva, 18th June, 1831. You have received all my letters. I am constantly expecting a few words from you. I can see that there will be nothing for me, but still I am always surprised when the post brings me only newspapers. Not a soul writes to me except yourself. Not a soul remembers me except yourself. And that is a great charm. I love your solitary letter, which does not arrive as it used to arrive, in the days of my magnificence, in the midst of packets of dispatches, and of all those letters of attachment, admiration, and meanness which vanish with fortune. After your little letters I shall see your fair self, if I do not go to join you. You shall be my testamentary executrix. You shall sell my poor retreat. Your price will enable you to travel towards the sun. At this moment the weather is admirable. As I write to you I can see Mont Blanc in its splendour. From the top of Mont Blanc, one sees the Apennines, it seems to me as though I have but three steps to take to arrive in Rome, where we shall go, for all will get settled in France. Our glorious country lacked but one thing in order to have passed through every form of wretchedness, to have a government of cowards. She has it now, and her youth is about to be swallowed up in doctrine, literature, and debauch, according to the particular character of the individual. The chapter of accidents remains, but when a man drags along life's road as I do, the most likely accident is the end of the journey. I do no work, I can do nothing more. I am bored. It is my nature, and I am like a fish in water. Nevertheless, if the water were a little less deep, perhaps I should be better pleased in it. Journaled from the 12th of July to the 1st of September, 1831, the Pachy near Geneva. I am settled at the Pachy with Madame Nechatebriand. I have made the acquaintance of Monsieur Rigo, chief syndic of Geneva, above his house by the edge of the lake, going up the Lausanne Road. You find the villa of two clerks of Monsieur de La Panneuse, who have spent a million five hundred thousand francs in building it, and laying out their gardens. When I pass on foot before their dwelling-house, I wonder at Providence, which has placed witnesses of the restoration at Geneva, in them and in me. What a fool I am! What a fool! The Seer de la Panneuse went through royalism and misery with me, see to what his clerks have risen for having favoured the conversion of the funds, which I had the simplicity to oppose, and by virtue of which I was turned out. Here are the gentlemen. They drive up in an elegant tilbury, hat on ear, and I am obliged to step into a ditch, lest the wheel should carry off a skirt of my old frock coat. And yet I have been a peer of France, a minister, an ambassador. And in a cardboard box I have all the principal orders of Christendom, including the Holy Ghost and the Golden Fleece. If the clerks of the Seer seize under la Panneuse, now millionaires, cared to buy my box of ribbons for their wives, they would do me a lively pleasure. Nevertheless, all is not roses for the messiahs be. They are not yet Genovese nobles, that is to say, they have not yet reached the second generation. Their mother still lives in the lower part of the town, and has not risen to the Saint-Pierre Quarter, the faux-bog Saint-Germain of Geneva. But with God's help, nobility will follow on money. It was in 1805 that I saw Geneva for the first time. If two thousand years had elapsed between the dates of my two journeys, would they be further separated from each other than they are? Geneva belonged to France. Bonaparte was shining in all his glory. Madame de Steyle, in all hers, there was no more question of the Bourbons than if they had never existed. And Bonaparte and Madame de Steyle and the Bourbons, what has become of them? And I, I am still there. Monsieur de Constant, a cousin of Benjamin Constant, and Mamazoldi Constant, an old maid full of wit, virtue, and talent, live in the accotage of Souterre, on the bank of the Rhône. They are overlooked by another country house, which was formerly Monsieur de Constant's. He sold it to the princess Belgejosso, a Milanese exile, whom I saw pass like a flower, through the fete which I gave in Rome for the grand Duchess Helen. During my boating excursion, an old oarsman tells me of the deeds of Lord Byron, whose house we see standing on the Savoyard's side of the lake. The noble pier would wait for a tempest to rise before setting sail. From the deck of his Filuca he leapt into the waves, and swam in the midst of the gale to land at the feudal prisons of Bonnevar. He was always the actor and the pert. I am not so eccentric. I also love the storms, but my loves with them are secret, and I do not confide them to the burntmen. I have discovered behind Thirney a narrow valley in which runs a tiny stream, some seven or eight inches deep. This rivulet waters the roots of a few willows, hides itself here and there under patches of water-cress, and shakes rushes on whose tips perch blue-wing dragon-flies. Did a man of trumpets oversee this refuge of silence, right up against his resounding house? No, without a doubt. Well, the water is there, it still flows. I do not know its name, perhaps it has none. Voltaire's days are spent. Only his fame still makes a little noise in a little corner of our little world, even as that streamlet can be heard at a dozen paces from its banks. Men differ from one another. I am charmed with this deserted water furrow. With insight of the Alps, the palm leaf of a fern which I gather delights me. The murmuring of a ripple over pebbles makes me quite happy. An imperceptible insect, seen only by myself, which plunges into the moss as into a vast solitude, occupies my gaze and makes me dream. These are intimate trifles, unknown to the fine genius who disguised as Orozman, played his tragedies, wrote to the princess of the earth, and forced Europe to come to admire him in the hamlet of Ferny. But we are not those trifles, too. The transitions of the world are not equal to the passing of those waters, and as for kings I prefer my aunt. One thing always astonishes me when I think of Voltaire, although gifted with a superior rational enlightened mind, he remained completely foreign to Christianity. He never saw what everyone sees, that the institution of the Gospel, to consider only the human aspect of it, is the greatest revolution that ever took place on earth. It is true to say that, in the age of Voltaire, this idea had come into the head of nobody. Theologians defended Christianity as an accomplished fact, as a verity based upon laws emanating from spiritual and temporal authority. The philosophers had hacked it as an abuse springing from priests and kings. They went no further. I have no doubt that, if one could suddenly have presented the other side of the question to Voltaire, his quick and lucid intelligence would have been struck with it. One blushes to think of the mean and limited manner in which he treated a subject which embraces nothing less than the transformation of peoples, the introduction of morality, a new principle of society, another law of nations, another order of ideas, the total change of humanity. Unfortunately, the great writer who ruins himself in spreading baleful ideas, drags many minds of lesser capacity with him in his fall. He is like those old eastern despots on whose tombs meant emulated slaves. There to Furny, which no one visits now, to that Furny around which I come to Rome alone, how many celebrated personages at one time hastened? They sleep, gathered together for all time, at the bottom of Voltaire's letters, their hypergean temple. The breath of one century grows weaker by degrees, and dies away in the eternal silence, as one begins to hear the respiration of a new century. The Pachy near Geneva, 15 September 1831. O gold, which I have so long despised, and which I cannot love whatever I may do, I am nevertheless forced to admit thy merit. The source of liberty thou arranges a thousand things in our existence, in which all is difficult without thee, excepting glory. What is there that thou canst not procure, with thee one is handsome, young, adored, one enjoys consideration, honors, qualities, virtues? You tell me that with gold one has but the appearance of all that. What matter, if I believe what is false to be true? Deceive me well, and I will release you from the rest. Is life other than a lie? When one has no money, one is dependent upon everything and everybody. Two creatures who do not suit one another could go each his own way. Well, for one type of few pistols, they must remain face to face, sulking, fuming, souring, bored to extinction, devouring each other's souls and the whites of their eyes, fearlessly sacrificing to one another their tastes, their inclinations, their natural methods of life. Poverty presses them close together. And in those beggars' bonds, instead of embracing, they bite each other, but not in the way in which floor are a bit pompy. With our money there is no means of escape. One cannot go in search of another son. And with a proud soul, one wears chains without ceasing. Oh, happy Jews! Dealous and crucifixes! Who today govern Christendom? Who decide peace or war? Who eat pig after selling old hats? Who are the favourites of kings and beauties, ugly and dirty though you be? Ah, if you would but change skins with me, if I could at least creep into your iron chests, to rob you of that which you have stolen from young men under age, I should be the happiest man in the world. True, I might have a means of existence. I could apply to the monarchs. As I have lost all for the sake of their crown, it would be only fair that they should feed me. But this idea, which ought to occur to them, does not. And to me it occurs still less. Rather than sit at the banquets of kings, I should even prefer once more to begin the regimen which I kept in the old days in London, with my poor friend Angle. However, the happy times of Gareth's are past. Not that I was not most comfortable there, but I should be ill at ease. I should take up too much room with the flances of my reputation. I should no longer be there with my one-shirt and the slender-figure of an unknown person who has not dined. My cousin, Delabue Tade, is there no more to play the violin on my truckle-bit in his red robes as a counsellor to the Parliament of Brittany, and to keep himself warm at night, covered with a chair by way of counter-pane. Peltier is there no more to give us dinner with King Christof's money, and above all the witch is there no more, youth, who with a smile changes penury into a treasure, who brings you her younger sister Hope for a mistress, the latter also as deceptive as her elder, though she still returns when the other has fled forever. I had forgotten the distress on my first emigration, and imagined that it was enough to leave France, in order peacefully to preserve one's honour in exile. The larks fall already roasted into the meadows only of those who reap the harvest, not of those who have sown it. If I alone were concerned, I should do marvellously well in an alms-house, but madame de Chateaubriand. And so I have no sooner become settled then, as I cast my eyes upon the future, anxiety sees a soul of me. They wrote to me from Paris that there was no means of selling my house in the Rue d'Enfayre, save at a price which was not sufficient, to pay off the mortgages with which that hermitage is loaded. That something might nevertheless be arranged if I were there. Acting on this communication, I have taken a useless journey to Paris, for I found neither goodwill nor a purchaser. But I saw the Abbey au Bois again, and a few of my new friends. On the eve of my return here, I dined at the café de Paris, with Messiers Aragot, Pouc Ville, Carrel, and Béranger, all more or less dissatisfied and deceived by the best of republics. The Pâquis near Geneva, 26 September 1831. My two-day story brought me into relations with Monsieur Carrel, even as they made me acquainted with Messiers T.A. and Minier. I had copied into the preface of those studies a fairly long passage from the Guerre de Catalon by Monsieur Carrel, and especially the following. Things in their continual and fatal transformations do not always carry every intelligence with them. They do not master every character with equal facility. They do not take the same care of all interests. This is what we must understand and make some allowance for the protest raised on behalf of the past. When a particular period is finished, the mould is shattered, and it is enough for providence that it cannot be made over again. But of the fragments left upon the ground, there are occasionally some that are beautiful to look upon. After these fine lines I myself added this summary. The man who is able to write those words has reasons for sympathy with those who have faith in providence, who respect the religion of the past, and who also have their eyes fixed upon fragments. Monsieur Carrel came to thank me. He represented both the courage and the talent of the national, on which he worked with Messiers T.A. and Minier. Monsieur Carrel belongs to a pious and royalist family of wrong, the blind legitimacy which rarely distinguish merit. Miss Judge Monsieur Carrel, proud and alive to his worth, he had resort to dangerous opinions, in which one finds a compensation for the sacrifices one lays upon oneself. There happened to him what happens to all characters fit for great movements, when unforeseen circumstances oblige them to restrict themselves within a narrow circle, they consume their superabundant faculties in efforts which go beyond the opinions and events of the day. Before revolutions, supermen die unknown, their public has not yet come. After revolutions, supermen die neglected, their public has disappeared. Monsieur Carrel is not happy. There is nothing more material than his ideas, nothing more romantic than his life. After being a republican volunteer in Spain in 1823, being captured on the battlefield, condemned to death by the French authorities, and escaping a thousand dangers, he finds love mingled with the pleasures of his private existence. He has to protect a passion which is the mainstay of his existence, and this large-hearted man, ever ready to face a sword-point by daylight, sets wicket-gates before him and the shades of night. He walks in the silent fields with a beloved woman, at that first dawn at which the revere used to call him to the attack of the enemy's tents. I leave Monsieur Armand Carrel in order to write a few words on our famous songwriter. You'll find my story too short, reader, but I have a claim on your indulgence. His name and his songs must be engraved on your memory. Monsieur de Berangers is not, like Monsieur Carrel, obliged to conceal his love affairs. After singing the praises of liberty and the popular virtues, while defying the jails of the kings, he puts his amours into a couplet, and behold, Lisette immortalised. Near the barrier des matières, below Montmartre, you see the Rue de la Tour d'Auverne, in this half-built, half-paved street, in a little house hiding behind a little garden, and calculated upon the modesty of present-day fortunes. You will find the illustrious songwriter, a bald head, a somewhat rustic, but keen, and voluptuous air, announced the poet. I love to rest my eyes on that plebeian countenance, after looking at so many royal faces. I compare those so greatly different types. On the monarchical brows one sees something of an exalted nature, but blighted, impotent, effaced. On the democratic brows appears a common physical nature, but one recognises a lofty, intellectual nature. The monarchical brow has lost a crown. The popular brow awaits one. One day I asked Béorgé, I beg him to forgive me for becoming as familiar as his fame. I asked him to show me some of his unknown works. Do you know, he said, that I began by being your disciple? I was mad on the genie du christianisme, and I wrote Christian idols, scenes in the life of a country priest. Pictures of religious worship in the villages, and in the midst of the harvest. Monsieur Augustin Thierry has told me that the battle of the Franks in the Martyrs suggested to him a new manner of writing history. Nothing has flattered me more than to find my memory occupying a place at the commencement of the talent of the historian Thierry, and the poet Béorgé. Our songwriter has the several qualities upon which Voltaire insists for the ballad. To succeed well in these little works says the author of so many graceful plans. One needs refinement and sentiment of intellect, to have harmony in one's head, not to lure oneself over much, and to know how not to be too long. Béorgé has many muses, all of them charming, and when those muses are women he loves them all. When they betray him he does not turn to elegiacs, and nevertheless there is a feeling of sadness at the bottom of his gaiety. His is a serious face that smiles. It is philosophy saying its prayers. My friendship for Béorgé earned me many expressions of astonishment on the part of what was called my party. An old knightess in Louis, personally unknown to me, wrote to me from his distant turret, rejoicer at being praised by one who has slapped the face of your king and your god. Well said, my garland nobleman, you are a pert too. At the end of the dinner, the café de Paris which I gave to messieurs de Béorgé and Armand-Caël before my departure for Switzerland, M. Béorgé sang us his admirable printed song. Chateaubriand, pourquoi fies ta patrie? Fies un amour entre ensemble et nos soins? Il n'est que des stanzas on the bourbons, et tu voudras t'attacher à la chute, quand il donc mieux le folle vanité, au rang des mots qu'au ciel même elle impute, le cœur en garde met ta fidélité. To this song, which belongs to the history of my time, I replied from Switzerland by a letter which is printed at the head of my pamphlet on the Brickville motion. I said to messieurs de Béorgé, from the place whence I wrote you, messieurs, I can see the country house where Lord Byron lived, and the roofs of Mme de Steyer's chateau, where is the barn of child Harold, where is the author of Corrine? My too long life is like those Roman roads bordered with funeral monuments. I returned to Geneva, I next took Mme de Chateaubriand to Paris, and brought back the manuscript directed against the Brickville motion for the banishment of the Bourbons, a motion which was taken into consideration in the sitting of the deputies of the 17th of September, of this year, 1831. Some attach their lives to success, others to misfortune. End of book one, part one.