YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

THE HISTORY

OP THE

RESTORATION

or

MONARCHY IN FRANCE.

BY

ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE,

Author of " The Histout of the Girondibtb.'1

VOLUME 111.

LONDON:
VTZETELLY AND COMPANY,
135 FLEET STREET.

1852.

CONTENTS OF YOLUME TIL

BOOK TWENTY-EIGHTH.
Tiie 24th of June— Fouche is appointed President of the Provisional Govern
ment — Formation ofthe new 'Ministry — Fouche's policy — Manuel — Sitting
of the Chamber of Representatives — It adopts Manuel's motion — Tlie
25th of June — Departure ofthe Emperor from Paris — He goes to Mal-
, maison — His farewell address to the Army — Five plenipotentiaries are
sent to ncgociate a peace — Interview between Fouche and M. de Vitrollcs
—Interview between Napoleon and Benjamin Constant — Advice of
Napoleons friends on the choice of his place of exile — He makes choice"
of America — He is watched by the Provisional Government — Temporary
opposition of the Government to the departure of Napoleon — His resi
dence at Malmaison — Solicitations of the Provisional Government to
Napoleon — It delivers him a passport — Refusal of Napoleon — Propo
sition of Excelmans to Napoleon — Arrival of the Allies at Compeigne —
Napoleon proposes to put himself at the head of the Army — Refusal of
the Provisional Government — Meeting of M. de Flahaut and Da v oust —
Napoleon and Maret — Critical situation of Napoleon — His departure
from Malmaison — His farewell — His journey — His halt at Rambouillet
— His hopes — Overtures of Excelmans to Daumesnil — Napoleon proceeds
through Chateaudun, Tours, and Poitiers — Mob at St. Maixent — He
arrives at Niort — Acclamations of the People — He arrives at Rochefort
on the 3rd of July — Napoleon renews bis proposal to the Provisional
Government — Various counsels for the flight of Napoleon — His hesita
tion — Reply of the Provisional Government to his proposal- — Napoleon
embarks on board La Saale frigate on the 8th of July — fie departs
from Rochefort — His visit to the Isle or" Aix — Interview between M. de
Las Cases and Captain Maitland, on board the Bellerophon — The captain
ofthe Medusa proposes to force a passage against the English cruizer —
Refusal of Napoleon — He disembarks at the Isle of Aix — His indecision
— He refuses the proposition of Captain Baudin — Some midshipmen offer
to conduct him to America — Napoleon accepts the offer, and departs —
He is kept back by his suite — Second interview of Las Cases, Rovigo,
and Lallemand with Captain Maitland — Deliberation on his departure —
Napoleon decides on going away by the Bellerophon — His letter to the
Prince Regent of England — His instructions to Gourgaud — Departure of
Gourgaud and Las Cases for England — Napoleon quits the I^le of Aix
— His farewell to Becker — He embarks on board the Bellerophon— He
receives a visit from Admiral Hotham — The Bellerophon anives at Tor-
bay — The Emperor is rejoined there by Gourgaud — Departure from
Torbay and arrival at Plymouth — Cabinet Council ofthe English Minis
ters on the fate of Napoleon — He is declared a prisoner of 'war by the
Allies — He is brought back to Torbay — He is required to deliver up his
sword — His farewtll — His grief on hearing of the Capitulation of Puns
— H e embarks on bo ard the Aof thumberland — H is Protest against
Kngland — Ilia departuie for bt Helt.ua  X

CONTESTS.

BOOK TWENTY-NINTH.
Wellington after the Battle of Waterloo— His despatch to the Duke de Berry
— His letter to Dumouriez — He enters France — His proclamation to the
French people — He writes to the Duke de Feltre and to M. de Talley
rand — Entrance of Louis XVIII. into Fiance — Conferences of Haguenau
— Wellington's reply to the French Plenipotentiaries — Dismissal of M de
Blacas — Louis XVIII. at Cateau-Cambresis — His proclamation to the
French — He arrives at Cambray — Second proclamation to the French —
Intrigues of Fouche with the Provisional Government in favour of the
Bourbons— Davoust appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Army — Efforts
r»f MM. de Vitrolles and Ouvrard amongst the Chiefs of the Army — The
Provisional Government orders M. de Vitrolles to be arrested — His Flight
— Address of several generals to the Chamber of Representatives — Con
ference in the Chamber of Peers — Plenipotentiaries sent to Wellington
and Blucher to negotiate an armistice — Conferences of the Plenipoten
tiaries with Wellington — Blucher crosses to the left bank of the Seine-
Situation of France — Strength of the Army — Excelmans attacks and
routs a corps of Prussian cavalry — Council of Government — Council of
War at La Villette — It authorises Davoust to capitulate — Application of
Davoust to Blucher — Bluchers reply— Fouche sends Colonel Macirone
to Wellington, and General Tr< melin to Blucher — Conferences at St.
Cloud — Capitulation ol Paris — Adoption ofthe Convention of St. Cloud
by the Chamber of Representatives — Agitation ofthe people — Opposition
ofthe Army — Entrance of the English and Prussians into Paris — The
Chamber of Representatives — Vote ofthe Constitution — Interview between
Wellington and Fouche at Neuiliy — Presentation of Fouche to the King,
Louis XVIII, by M. de Talleyrand — Conference — Nomination of
Fouche to the Ministry of Police — Composition of the Ministry —
Interview between Louis XVIII. and M. de Chateaubriand — Confer
ence of the Provisional Government— Occupation of the Tuileries, and
expulsion of the Commission by Blucher —Dispersion of the Chamber of
Peers — M. Decazes shuts up the Chamber of Representatives — Impo
tence of Lafayette — Interview between Carnot and Fouch£ ... .49
BOOK THIRTIETH.
R. v e\v of the Hundred Days — Entrance of Louis XVIII. into Paiis — Speech
of .M. deChabrol— Answer of Louis XVIIL— Louis XVIII. at Paris-
Acclamations ofthe Populace — Political Position of the King — Attitude
of Fouche — Ordinances for the re-organization of the Peerage, and for
the Convocation of the Chamber of Deputies- — The Army of the Loire 
Orders of the Day of Marshal Davoust — Submission of the Army to
Louis , XVIII — The Army adopts the While-flag — Blucher wishes to
blow up the Bridge of Jena — Devastation of the Museum and the Li
braries — Violence of the Prussians — Requisitions — Removal of the Pre
fects — War Imposts — Occupation of Paris and France by the Allied
Armies — Disbanding ofthe Army ofthe Loire— Marshal Davoust super
seded by Maishal Macdonald — Diplomatic Negociations at the residence
of Loid Castlereagh — Ultimatum of the Allied Powers — Aversion of
Louis XVIII. for M. de Talleyrand— Court of Louis XVIII.— His Family
— Favour of M. Decazes — M. Decazes — His Portrait— Retrospect of his
Life— His interview with the King — Fouche's Report — Proscriptions 
Weakness of the King .... , , .... 96
BOOK THIRTY-FIRST.
Murat — His flight from Naples — Arrival at the Isle of Ischia — His aide-
de-camp, the Duke of Rocca Romana — His departure for France 
He lands at Cannes— Offers his services to the Emperor — Refusal of
Napoleon — Terror in tlie South — Murat quits the neighbourhood of

CONTENTS, t
PAOB
Toulon and conceals himself — Asks an asylum from Louis XVIII. —
It is granted to him in Austria — Attempts at flight — He fails —
Adventures — His retreat — Dangers— He embarks for Corsica — Perils
of the passage — Incidents — He is picked up at sea — His arrival in
Corsica — He retires to the mountains — Political situation of Corsica
— Murat is summoned to surrender by the governor of the island
— His refusal — The governor sends a body of soldiers to arrest him —
Their failure— Projects of Murat— He departs on an expedition to
Naples — His march towards Ajaccio — Entry into the City — Arrival
of Macirone — He sends him the passport for Austria— Murat's letter
— His departure for Naples — Passage— Desertion of one of his vessels
— Incidents — He disembarks at the port of Pizzo — Endeavours to
raise the population — His arrest — Last moments — Condemnation —
Death — Review of his life  .  150
BOOK THIRTY-SECOND.
Character of the French nation — Causes of the spirit of the elections of
18J5 — Fall of Fouche — His exile in Germany — Review of his life
— Fall of M. de Talleyrand — Formation of M. de Richelieu's ministry
— Retrospective glance at M. de Richelieu — His life in Russia —
His character' — Negociations with the Allies — Their exactions —
Treaty ofthe 20th of November — Letter of M. de Richelieu — Treaty of
the Holy Alliance — Opening of the Chambers — The King's speech—
M. Laine, President of tlie Chamber of Deputies — His speech-
Addresses of the two chambers to the King — Policy of the Duke de
Richelieu — Spirit of the Council — Laws against seditious cries and
individual liberty — Law of the prevotal courts — Discussion and vote
in the two chambers — Proposition of the Duke de Fitzjames —
Speech of the Count d'Ai tois— Return of the Duke de Orleans — His
interview with Louis XVIII   209
BOOK THIRTY-THIRD.
The Reign of Terror of 1815— State of Paris —Situation of the South—
Mu&sacres at Marseilles — Assassination of Marshal Brune at Avignon
— Massacres at Nismes — The Verdets — Intervention of the Duke
d'Angouleme — Heroism of General Lagarde— Assassination of Gene
ral Ramel at Toulouse — The twins of L'1 Reole— Their trial — Their
death — Labedoyere — His journey to Paris — His arrest — His trial —
His death . ,  . , . . 256
BOOK THIRTY-FOURTH.
Trul of Lavalette — His condemnation and escape — Fury of the Chamber
at the news — Arrest of Marshal Ney — He is sent to Paris and brought
before a court-martial — Noble conduct of Marshal Monccy — The
Court declares itself incompetent — He is brought beft ~~he Chamber
of Peers— Implacability of the ministers — Debates ar"^ divers inci
dents—Evidence of Bourmont — M. Bellart's address to the Court for
the prosecution — Quibbles of the defence — Attitude of the Marshal
— His condemnation — Vindictive intrigues of the royalists — Magnani
mous intercession of Madame Hutchinson — Ney in his prison — His
last moments — His interview with his family — His execution — Re
action of public opinion in favour and against the Bourbons . . 287
BOOK THIRTY-FIFTH.
A nimosities of parties — 1 mpassioned reaction in the departments : pre
votal courts— Debates on the amnesty law : MM. Royer-Collard, De Labour-
donnaie, and Chateaubriand — Production of the will of Marie Antionctte
— Relaxation in the severity of public opinion — Dissolution of the Chamber

Vl CONTENTS. PAGS
— Agitation in the departments — Conspiracy of Grenoble — Didier: his
character, previous lile, his connection with the Orleans party — His
abortive attempt on Grenoble — Proclamations and dracolite vengeance —
Flight and noble death of Didier — Palace intrigues : formation of the
Doctrinaire paru — The Coup d'etat of the 5th September, ratified by the
elections — Fury of the ultra- royalists : tlieir private note to the congress of
Aix-la-Chapelle — Evacuation of France by the allies — Memoir by Louis
XVIII. on the ministerial crisis (December, 1818)  334
BOOK THIRTY-SIXTH.
1818-19— State of France— Struggle of parties— The Press— The Minerve ;
P. L. Courrier — The Conservateur ; Chateaubriand, Lamennais, de
Bonald — Opening of the Session — Vote of a national recompense to
M. de Richelieu — Bartheiemy's proposition on the Electoral Law —
Discussion on the recall of banished persons — M. de Series — In
creasing agitation of public opinion — Development of journalism :
the Courrier, the Constitutionel, the Cenceur, the Debats, the Quoti-
dienne, the Drapeau Blanc— Stormy debates on the massacres ofthe
South; parliamentary exposures — Various associations; the missions,
the secret societies of Brussels, and of Paris ; fermentation in Ger
many — Elections of 1819; nomination of Gregoire; General Foy —
General spirit of the elections, hostile to the crown — Ministerial
changes, opening of the session; exclusion Of Gregoire — Project
for modifying the Electoral Law ...  409
BOOK THIRTY-SEVENTH.
Portrait of the Duke de Berry — Louvel : his previous life, his monomania
of regicide — Fie determines to kill the Duke de Berry — Night of the
13th of February — Assassination of the Duke at the Opera: his
death-bed — Grief of the royal family — Consternation of the public —
Accusation against M. Decazes; M. Clausel de Coussergues charges
him with high treason — Violent debates, palace intrigues — Madame
dw Cayla; her origin: her favour — The Viscount de la Rochefoucauld
— Fall of M. Decazes : review of his political career .... . ,439
BOOK THIRTY-EIGHTH.
Opening of the debates on the Law of Election — M. Royer Collard, his
previous life and character — Speeches of MM. Laine\ Camille, Jordan,
und Foy — Passing ofthe bill— Trial and execution of Louvel— In
creasing hatred to the Bourbons : Secret Societies, Bonapartists,
Counter-Revolutionists — M. Madier Montjau denounces to the Chambers
ihe royalist conspiracies ofthe South — Birth ofthe Duke de Bordeaux —
Revival of the spirit of independence in Europe : error of those who have
ascribed thehonour of it to Napoleon — Its real causes * ideas of nationality
instilled by the European kings, the Napoleonic absorption — Revolution
in Spain — Retrospective glance : Decay of that monarchy : Palace in
trigues, Theocratical terrorism — The Prince of the Peace — Charles IV.
his abdication and captivity — Heroism of Spain, the Cortes, the constitu
tion of 1812— Return of Ferdinand VII. : reaction — O'Donnell  Revolu
tionary explosion : Riego, Mina — Italy — State of this country in 1820:
erroneous opinions concerning it — Carbonarism — Movement at Naples :
Guglielmo Pepe — Equivocal conduct of the Court— Intervention of the
Northern courts: Congress of Troppau, of Laybach: conclusion of the
revolution at Naples — Movement in Piedmont — Carbonarism in France
—Napoleon at St. Helena: his captivity— The memorial: unskilful
justification of his memory — Hudson Lowe — Illness of Napoleon : his
death: review of his reitti.  .jgjj

THE
HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION
OF
MONARCHY IN FRANCE.

BOOK TWENTY-EIGHTH.
The 24th June — Fouche is appointed President of the Provisional Govern
ment — Formation of the new Ministry — Fouchg's policy — Manuel
— Sitting of the Chamber of Representatives — It adopts Manuel's
motion — The 25th of June — Departure ofthe Emperor from Paris —
He goes to Malmaison — His farewell address to the Army — Five
plenipotentiaries are sent to negociate peace — Interview between
Fouche and M. de Vitrolles — Interview between Napoleon and Ben
jamin Constant — Advice of Napoleon's friends on the choice of his
place of exile — He makes choice of America — He is watched by the
Provisional Government — Temporary opposition ofthe Government to
the departure of Napoleon — His residence at Malmaison — Solicita
tions of the Provisional Government to Napoleon — It delivers him a
passport — Refusal of Napoleon — Proposition of Excelmans to
Napoleon — Arrival of the Allies at Compiegne — Napoleon proposes
to put himself at the head of the Army — Refusal of the Provisional
Government — Meeting of M. de Flahaut and Davoust — Napoleon
and Maret — Critical situation of Napoleon — His departure from Mal
maison — His farewell — His journey — His.halt at Rambouillet — His
hopes — Overtures of Excelmans to Daumesnil — Napoleon proceeds
through Chateaudun, Tours, and Poitiers — Mob at St. Maixent
— He arrives at Niort — Acclamations of the People — He arrives at
Rochefort on the 3rd of July — Napoleon renews his proposal to the
Provisional Government — Various counsels for the flight of Napoleon
— His hesitation — Reply of the Provisional Government to his pro
posal — Napoleon embarks on board La Saale frigate on the 8th of
July — He departs from Rochefort — His visit to the Isle of Aix —
Interview between M. de Las Cases and Captain Maitland, on board
the Bellerophon — The captain of the Medusa proposes to force a
3 A

HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 28.
Fouche is appointed President of the Provisional Government.

passage against the English cruizer — Refusal of Napoleon — He dis
embarks at the Isle of Aix — His indecision — He refuses the proposi
tion of Captain Baudin — Some midshipmen offer to conduct him to
America — Napoleon accepts the offer, and departs — He is kept back
by his suite — Second interview of Las Cases, Rovigo, and Lallen.and
with Captain Maitland — Deliberation on his departure — Napoleon
decides on going away by the Bellerophon — His letter to the Prince
Regent of England — His instructions to Gourgaud — Departure of
Gourgaud and Las Cases for England — Napoleon quits the Isle of Aix
— His farewell to Becker — He embarks on board the Bellerophon —
He receives a visit from Admiral Hotham — The Bellerophon arrives
at Torbay— The Emperor is re-joined there by Gourgaud — Departure
from Torbay and arrival at Plymouth — Cabinet Council of the Eng
lish Ministers on the fate of Napoleon — He is declared a prisoner
of war by the Allies — He is brought back to Torbay — He is required
to deliver up his sword — His farewell — His grief on hearing of the
Capitulation of Paris — He embarks on board the Northumberland —
His Protest against England — His departure for St. Helena.
I.
Henceforward emergencies were to reign alone, and Fouche to
govern by emergencies. He was that very night nominated
president of the provisional government by the votes of Carnot
and of Quinette, and by his own, which he gave in favour of
himself, to deprive Caulaincourt or Carnot of the ascendancy
conferred by the presidentship ; for he doubted their fidelity,
or their weakness, in favour of Napoleon. He appointed a
brother of Carnot minister of the interior, and M. Bignon, who
was rather a man of learning than a statesman, easily played
upon and cajoled by flattery, was made minister for foreign
affairs. Pelet de la Lozere, an honest man, patriotic and con
ciliating, a pledge of moderation for all the parties which it
was necessary to lull, obtained the ministry of police ; Boulay
de la Meurthe, a Bonapartist, whom it was necessary at once to
employ and to nullify, by functions of slight political import
ance, was appointed minister of justice; Massena, who had
evinced his independence in the Chamber of Peers, and whose
name was distinguished by unblemished military glory, was
appointed commander-in-chief of the National Guard.
The remainder of the night was employed by the provisional

1815 ] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 8
Policy of Fouche.
government and by the ministers in concerting the greatest
possible concentration of the fragments of the army around
Paris, in order to give time and a military basis to the nego
ciations about to be opened. These negociations, to a mind so
acute and so generalizing as that of Fouche, were, in reality,
only an appearance which he wished to preserve, and a satis
faction he wished to offer to the susceptibility of the nation.
He well knew that negociations can only exist between equal
forces. Where were these forces ? They had been annihilated
at one blow at Waterloo. The confidential agents of Fouche
already filled the court of Louis XVIII., and the head-quarters
of Wellington. To give the signal to the King that the hour
of his restoration was about to strike, to convince Wellington
that he alone could open the gates of Paris, witliout a fresh
effusion of blood, to the King and the allies ; to persuade
M. de Talleyrand, and through him the cabinet of the King,
that he alone could pacify France ; to lull the Chambers, to
fascinate, to deceive, or to subdue the provisional government ;
to dismiss the Emperor, and finally, to present with his own
hand, his regicidal hand, the people to the King, and the King
to the people : this constituted from the very first day the whole
secret and public policy of Fouche. Seldom did minister un
dertake one more complicated, or fraught with greater perils,
or succeed in it with greater boldness united to more consummate
ability. Fouche reckoned on the mediocrity of intellect, and the
pliability of character of those around him. He reckoned also on
the impatience of ambition to reign, which bent to his views the
wishes of all at Ghent. He did not presume too much on the
nullity of some, the servility of others, and the longing for the
throne of an exiled court. Every vice and every ambition con
tributed to effect his object, because he was experienced in their
ascendancy over the minds of men, and had the humiliating
courage of calculating upon them. II.
But he experienced one difficulty at the outset. The
Emperor obstinately holding out at the Elysee, on hearing in

4 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 28.
Influence of Manuel.
the morning that Grouchy was advancing with unbroken forces
on Paris, and that imposing bodies of troops were rallying
under Excelmans and other energetic generals, between Paris
and Wellington, was already regretting his too hasty abdication,
and fomenting, through his most faithful adherents, a new dis
cussion in the Chamber of Representatives, on the regency
question. Should this regency be proclaimed, he would again
assume power, in the name of his son ; if it were rejected, he
would resume the Empire in consideration of the broken con
dition on which, as he said, he had based his abdication.
The proposal to proclaim Napoleon II. was therefore to be
renewed, with better-concerted efforts, at the first sitting of the
Chamber. Begnault de Saint-Jean d'Angely, Boulay de la
Meurthe, Defermon, councillor of state, rivals of Fontanes and
of Cambaceres, were certain of winning over the irresolution of
their colleagues. Fouch6, informed of this attempt, which
might disconcert his plans, hesitated for a moment whether he
should oppose it openly, or baffle it by an apparent indifference.
It was necessary to choose between the danger of reinstalling
Napoleon himself on the throne, and at the head of the army,
should the Chamber refuse to proclaim his son, and the more
distant danger of breaking off the negociations with the allied
powers, and retarding the entrance of Louis XVIII., should
the Chamber vote the preliminary sovereignty of Napoleon II.
He held himself ready for one or other of these contingencies,
according as the undecided Chamber should appear to lean,
under the eloquence of the orators, for or against the dynasty
of Napoleon. Manuel, who possessed the confidence of Fouche, prepared
to assist, with his powerful, patriotic, and practised eloquence,
the political plans of the man who manoeuvred externally in
this conflict of opinions. Young, fresh, with a rising and
nure fame, great courage, cool resolution, a penetrating glance,
i patriotism almost republican, which freed him from the sus
picion of connivance with the Bourbons, Manuel was more than
an orator in the Chamber ; he was already the foreshadowing
of a statesman. His influence, though in its dawn, was great
with his colleagues, and still greater out of doors. Lafayette

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 5
Sitting of the Chamber of Representatives.
and Sebastiani cultivated his friendship. An enemy to Napo
leon by the instinct of a free and lofty soul, the desire of obtaining
either a republic, or a constitutional government from the ruins
of military despotism, had connected him with, though not en
slaved him to Fouche and the liberals who were weary of the
yoke. Such was the situation of the Assembly at midday on
the 25th of June. . EII
M. Dupin, eager to smooth the road for an accommoda
tion with the Bourbons, and to negociations with the allies,
which his keen perception of the circumstances indicated to
him as indispensable to the public safety, having insisted that
the new government should take the oath of fidelity to the na
tion alone, this motion became the signal of a struggle, the
issue of which, whatever it should be, might for a few days
restore to Napoleon the sceptre or the sword.
Defermon imperiously demanded who had authority to
receive such an oath, and if there was not an Emperor in
existence? "Yes," replied the Bonapartists; "we have an
Emperor — we will have Napoleon II. ! He is our sovereign by
the fundamental laws of the country. At this name alone the
army and the National Guard will rally round their country !
Yes, yes !" repeated the same voices, multiplied by that echo
with which patriotism always swells those motions which ap
pear to offer a bold defiance to the foreigner. This echo
continued and increased in volume, till at length the hall re
sounded with cries of " Vive I'Empereur !" Beranger trembled
lest au acclamation of national courage should be taken for a
matured proclamation of a new Empire. He demanded a
night for reflection. The Chamber, already cooling down, ap
plauded him. Boulay de la Meurthe was indignant at this
return to indifference : " France is lost !" he exclaimed, rebuk
ing the weakness of his colleagues, " if we only seem to doubt
the hereditary right to power of the son of the Emperor. We
are surrounded by numerous intriguers and many factionists
outside this hall," continued Napoleon's orator, alluding to

6 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 28.
Speech of Dupin.
Fouche, the royalists, the republicans, and Lafayette. " They
want to declare the throne vacant, in order to replace the
Bourbons upon it ! France would have the fate of Poland !
The foreigners would divide its fragments amongst them ! There
is an Orleans faction in existence ! " This excited murmurs of
incredulity. " Yes !" continued Boulay, " I know that this
faction exists ; I know that it keeps up a correspondence with
the republicans. If the Duke d'Orleans should accept the
throne it would bo to give it back to Louis XVIII. Prevent
these plots, break these intrigues, and proclaim Napoleon II.
Emperor of the French !" IV.
Boulay was applauded, and seconded by other speakers on
the same side. Mouton Duvernet, one of the generals most
compromised in the defection of the 20th March, ventured to
say that there was not a Frenchman who would not fly to arms
in the service of the young Emperor. This courtly assertion
roused the slumbering pride of the representatives. " Both
you and we, generals and Emperor," exclaimed Flaugergues,
indignant at the servility of this language, " are in the service
ofthe nation!" Begnault de Saint-Jean d'Angely repeated,
and Defermon tempered the expressions : he was succeeded by
Dupin. " If Napoleon himself," said he, with a blunt severity of
reasoning which left no scope for reply, " had thought he could
still be useful to the nation, would he by abdicating have left
to another the honour of saving it ? How can we hope from a
child that which a hero no longer hopes for us through him
self ?" -The faction of the Elysee wished to drown his voice.
" I ask," he resumed with imperturbable coolness, " if a cap
tive child can do that which his father, free and a sovereign,
acknowledges by his abdication to be beyond his own power?
We are asked who we shall have to oppose to the enemy ? I
reply, the nation ! It is that which exists before and which sur
vives its rulers !"
Dupin, whose thoughts were floating, it is said, towards the

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 7
Manuel's motion adopted.
Duke d'Orleans, had carried the Chamber too far to please
Fouche. That minister, who, a few weeks sooner, would have
been favourable to such an expedient, had the good sense to
acknowledge its impossibility after Waterloo. That battle had
unavoidably restored the sceptre to the prince and the prin
ciple of legitimacy. To offer the crown now to the Duke
d'Orleans would only be to create an additional obstacle to the
pacification of the country, to offer a powerless defiance to
Europe, and to insure a prolongation of the public calamities.
The empty proclamation of Napoleon II. would entail none of
these disadvantages. It would only have the value of an im
potent protest ; it would disarm for the moment the Bonapartists
and the army, and by the removal of the Emperor it would
enable the country to free itself from the alarms and menaces
created by his presence in Paris. Fouche, therefore, pressed
this issue forward with as much ardour as he would have evinced
the evening before to prevent it ; and with this object, Manuel,
his organ, ascended the tribune

V.

The speech he delivered was long, analytical, holding a just
balance between contending opinions, with that apparent can- .
dour which concedes the honour due to every party, to obtain
in return reason and attention. He analyzed without dis
couraging them ; above all, he set aside the Orleanist party,
whom Dupin had either made apparent or brought under sus
picion. "The danger to be most apprehended," he said, in
conclusion, " amongst all the opinions which divide us, is to
expose the country by our hesitation. Let us declare, then,
for Napoleon II." After this conclusion, which excited the
enthusiasm of the Bonapartists, the orator read a draught of a
declaration to this purport, but the ambiguity and indecision
of which seemed rather the postponement of the recognition of
another government than the proclamation of the government
of Napoleon II. Public assemblies can always happily evade
extreme measures, by one of those issues open to all parties.

8 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 28. ¦
Napoleon removes to Malmaison.
Manuel had simply saved the honour of the determined parti
sans of the Emperor, while in reality he completed their defeat.
Fouche, apparently vanquished, triumphed in reality. The
Emperor, compelled to appear satisfied, was constrained at
length to give up his position to the pretended government of
his son, and to quit the Elysee and Paris. Already the repre
sentative, Duchesne, demanded from the tribune that he
should be summoned to withdraw. Ominous information
reached him from all parts on the dangers he incurred by pro
longing his residence at that palace. Whether they arose from
secret manoeuvres of Fouche's police to intimidate him, or
from the jealous zeal of his adherents to preserve his life, he
was incessantly beset with warnings, in which abduction, the
dungeon, poison, and the poignard, were held in perspective. .
The state, in fact, could not, in presence of an enemy at
the gates, and of factions in the interior, brook two masters
with impunity. The Elysee had become a solitude ; one ve
teran alone stood sentry at the gate, and the slightest movement
of the parties might force it The Emperor at last felt the
necessity of quitting a capital kept in a state of inquietude by
his presence, and which, after having welcomed him, abandoned
him to solitude VI
He caused to be burnt in his presence, by his aides-de
camp and his secretaries, all the papers he had received since
the 20th of March, and which might serve as the groundwork
of accusations of complicity in his return. He only preserved
his family correspondence
At noon on the 25th he quitted the Elysee for his residence
at Malmaison, the scene of his most prosperous years of power,
of glory, and of happiness ; but now filled with mourning for
his great reverse, and with bitter recollections of his first wife,
the Empress Josephine Beauharnais, who died there. His
step-daughter, Hortense Beauharnais, whom he had loved
sufficiently to elevate her to the throne of Holland, aud to destine
the Empire for her son, had gone before and awaited him at

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 9
His feelings on the occasion.
Malmaison ; a faithful adherent whom he had protected as a
child, whom he had made a queen, but whose mother he had
divorced. After the first abdication she had solicited from
Louis XVIII. the title of Duchess of Saint-Leu, and permis
sion to remain in the country. She had eagerly desired the
return of Napoleon, kept alive the fanaticism of the Empire,
through feeling or ambition, in the hearts of the young officers
by whom she was surrounded ; but faithful to him in his fall,
she devoted herself to soothe the last hours of separation, and
assisted him to descend with less violence from the lofty
height to which he himself had elevated her. The mother had
smoothed his ascent to unlimited power, the daughter sweetened
for him the road to exile.

VII
On revisiting beloved localities the soul regains fresh vigour
from the recollections with which they are associated. The Em
peror, whose most complaisant biographers and most assiduous
confidants all describe as overwhelmed, since his defeat at
Waterloo, with a species of mental stupor, evincel by the lan
guor, the uncertainty, the irresolution, and the sudden starts he
exhibited from the battle-field up to the period of his departure
from the Elysee, appeared now to resume in the abode of his
youth the customary character of his soul, the resolution of
his mind, and the vigour of his body. " He had not sufficiently
learned," says his confidential secretary and domestic historian,
" to struggle at an early age against adversity." Prosperity had
accompanied him from the cradle to the summit of human
happiness. He had been only half-educated in the effects
which events produce upon great men, and had escaped the
deceptions and the chastisements of destiny.
At Malmaison he was once more within the walls of the
habitation of his time of glory, in the gardens of his recrea
tion, in the silence and solitude of his retreat, and soothed by
the tender solicitude of the child of his adoption. He allowed
his fortune to take its own course at Paris, under the inspiration
of Fouche and the march of events, without casting another

10 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 28.

His farewell address to the army.

look behind him. The first days were devoted to distant
memories and forgetfulness of the present. His soul unbent
itself, relieved from the weight of the world and his own destiny.
Such is the nature of man, happy to bear the burthen of power
and glory, happy to relinquish it when its weight becomes
oppressive. His confidants and Hortense found in him once
more the image they had always cherished.
VIII
But a whole day and night passed in this abode, abounding
also in military recollections of the Consulate, renewed his
feeling for that army of which he had been the hero. He
could not think of quitting the country without addressing for
the last time to his companions in arms a farewell, more sor
rowful and eternal than that of Fontainebleau. The echo of
his voice in the camp was pleasing to him even after having
quitted the command and the Empire. He shut himself up
in his cabinet and wrote an address to the army of Paris. But
this address still breathed too strongly the accent of the Em
peror and the habitual tone of sovereignty, not to appear to his
confidants a withdrawal of his abdication and a menace to the
government and the Chambers. This they observed to him,
and he was obliged to concede the point. The act in itself was
somewhat bold in a man who was-now no more than a citizen
without a title, and a general without command. It might be
tolerated out of consideration for the novelty of private life to
a man who had never for twenty years been the equal of an
other ; but it was injudicious to aggravate it by that magisterial
tone which no longer became a deposed sovereign. He there
fore patiently modified the language of this address, and sent
it thus to the Parisian journals : —
" Soldiers ! While obeying the necessity which removes
me from the brave French army, I carry with me the happy
conviction that it will justify by the eminent services which
the country expects from it, the praises which our enemies
themselves cannot withhold.

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. H
It is not allowed to be published.
" Soldiers ! Though absent, I shall follow your steps. I
know all the corps, and not one of them will ever gain a signal
advantage over the enemy, without receiving ample credit from
me for the courage it may have displayed. "You and I have
been calumniated. Men very unfit to appreciate your labours,
have seen, in the marks of attachment which you have given
me, a zeal, of which I was the sole object. Let your future
successes convince them that in obeying me it was the country
above all things which you served ; and that if I had any share
in your affection I owe it to my ardent love for France — our
common mother.
Soldiers ! A few more efforts and the coalition will be dis
solved ; Napoleon will recognise you by the blows which you are
about to strike.
" Save the honour, the independence of France ; be unto
the last the same men which I have known you for these twenty
years, and you will be invincible. " Napoleon
" De la Malmaison, 25th June, 1815."
IX.
This proclamation clashed too strongly with the circum
stances of the time to produce much excitement amongst the
troops. It was the accent of victory in the mouth of a van
quished and humbled chief. To promise the dissolution of the
coalition as the price of some final efforts, to a people whose
army without a chief was itself in a state of dissolution, and
whose Emperor had just thrown away his sword and delivered
up his sceptre to his enemies, was a derision which could only
be borne from a man deprived of his genius by the excess of
his adversity. The government, to which this address was
transmitted from the Elysee, received it with disdain and did
not suffer it to be published.
On the following day the Emperor having repeatedly in
quired as to the effect produced on the army by his. address,
and having learned from his aides-de-camp the contempt with
which it had been received by Fouche and his colleagues, was

22 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 23.

Plenipotentiaries sent to treat for peace.

obliged to devour the insult in silence. This was the first
time that the voice which had shaken the world found no echo
in Paris to repeat it. X.
The Emperor had scarcely departed for Malmaison when
Fouche and the members of the commission, in obedience to
public opinion and the wishes of the Chambers, appointed
plenipotentiaries to go and negociate for a suspension of hos
tilities, or for peace, at the head-quarters of Wellington and
Blucher. These envoys were adroitly chosen from amongst the
important members of both Chambers, who, since his reverses,
had shown themselves most hostile to Napoleon and his family;
and who, by their previous careers and patriotic opinions, had
given the most apparent pledges for the independence of the
country. These were, Sebastiani, both a soldier and a diplo
matist, who had long been devoted to the Emperor, but was
now detached from him, embittered, allied to the high Bour
bon aristocracy, through the house of Coigny, into which he had
married, and too intelligent not to know that between Louis
XVIII. and Napoleon there was nothing but chimeras and
impossibilities. D'Argenson, a man of probity and patriotism, without re
pugnance to the Bourbons, of whom his high birth had made
him a natural adherent, but sufficiently independent in character
to sacrifice, if necessary, even his birth to his almost radical
opinions ; in other respects, a man easily deceived even through
his virtues.Pontecoulant, possessed of an honest heart, cool judgment, a
soul devoid of fanaticism and prejudice, formerly a courtier,
and subsequently a moderate revolutionist, some time attached
to the Empire, but always to honour, which was the guiding
star of his life. He was more capable than any one of saving the
dignity of his country while yielding to the necessity of the
times, and accepting a liberal restoration which was not repug
nant either to his name or his recollections.
Laforet an old ambassador of the republic and of Napoleon,

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 13
instructions given to them.
convinced of the necessity of peace, and capable of negotiating
it, if there had been grounds for negociation.
Finally, Lafayette, one of the most violent opponents of
Napoleon when down, to prevent him from rising again ; de
ceived after his fall, by the vague hope of raising a republic
upon his ruins, postponing his own part to another opportunity,
always patient, always deceived, always on the watch for his
time, and accepting in this delusive negociation the shadow of
a part that was not repugnant to the importance of his name.
Benjamin Constant, the friend of Lafayette and of Sebas
tian!, embarrassed at once between the liberal opposition which
he had betrayed, and the imperial favour which had crumbled
under his feet, was appointed secretary to this congress of ne-
gociators. This was, for a man of so many faces, an adroit
means of appearing to serve at the same time a remnant of the
Napoleon cause in the cause of the country and of peace. In
terposed, in the eyes of the patriots, between France and the
foreign powers, he thus issued again from the ruins of the 20th
March and of Waterloo, by the outlet of a capitulation in which
he would appear at least to have stipulated for liberty. He
was too clear-sighted to see anything else in this phantom of a
negociation XJ
The instructions given by the provisional government to
these negociators were to the effect that the basis of their ne
gociation should be the integrity of the French territory, the
exclusion of the Bourbons, and the recognition of Napoleon II
In case these three bases should not be accepted by the allies,
the negociators were to combine all their efforts to obtain an
armistice. The first part of these instructions was evidently
nothing more than a dead letter, intended solely to lull for a
few days longer the little that remained of Bonapartist enthu
siasm in the Chambers and amongst the people. The armis
tice was the only serious part. This armistice, if not granted,
would evince at least in the eyes of the Chambers the efforts
of Fouche and his colleagues to have a negociation in favour of
the son of N?poleon; but if obtained, it would give to France

14 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 28.

Intrigues of Fouche,

a foretaste of peace, which it desired too passionately to wish
for a renewal of the war" at the expiration of the suspen
sion of arms, and it would give time for the seeds of imperialism
to die in Paris, and for those of restoration to spring forth,
ripen, and fructify.
Fouche, by this feigned hope of success, which in reality he
did not entertain in an impossible negociation, did not deceive
himself, though he deceived all parties alike, imperialist, re
publican, liberal, and Orleanist. Everything indicates that, with
the exception of the minister of foreign affairs, Bignon, and of
D'Argenson, a man whose own candour laid him open to decep
tion, all the other negociators had their cue from Fouche, and
that in reality they had but one object — the armistice. Every
thing that has been written, then and since, about the pretended
hopes of this negociation, is a deception which those diploma
tists wished to prolong beyond the event, on the Bonapartist
or Orleanist parties in France. The decision of history lies in
the will of the allied powers and the wishes of Fouche. Neither
the allies, as conquerors, nor Fouchi., sold through the interest
of his ambition to Louis XVIII., wished for anything else than
the restoration of the house of Bourbon.
XII.
Fouche was conducting at one and the same time a triple
negociation : official with the allies, through the negociators
whose mission we have just narrated ; confidential with the
Duke of Wellington, whom he solicited to interest himself
with the court of Ghent to obtain the most liberal declarations
for France ; finally, of an intimate character with Louis XVIII.
to whom he wished to send M. de Vitrolles to urge him to
throw himself between his people and the foreign invaders.
M. de Vitrolles, whose officious and volunteer negociation in
1814, between the royalists of Paris and the Count d'Artois
we have already seen, had acquired a certain importance by
his activity and his intermeddling between all the parties in
the court ofthe Count d'Artois. Commissioned by the King
a short time before the 20th March, to go and raise Toulouse

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 15
His interview with M. de Vitrolles.
against the Emperor, he had succeeded there for a few days!
but being soon arrested by General Chartran, and conducted to
Paris to be tried there, he had been imprisoned at Vincennes.
His connection with Caulaincourt and with Fouche procured
him his liberty, on the solicitation of his wife, immediately
after the abdication of the Emperor. Fouche commissioned
him, the very day he had appointed negociators to the allied
powers, to exclude the Bourbons, to go and invite Louis XVIII.
to hasten his return to France.
" You see," he said to him, " the extreme embarrassment
of my position. For the last three months I have risked my
head every day for the cause of France, of peace, and of the
King. The Chamber has proclaimed Napoleon II. , which is a
preliminary step towards the Bourbons. It was an indirect
measure, but this impossible name reassures simple and syste
matic men who imagine, like my colleague Carnot, that the
safety of France and of liberty exists in this chimera of a
liberal Empire under a child who is the prisoner of Europe.
They must be allowed to indulge in this delusion for a few days;
it will last long enough to enable us to get rid of Napoleon.
Carnot and his friends feed themselves with vain words, pro
vided those words recall liberty and patriotism. After this
period of superannuated partisans of Napoleon II. , that of the
partisans of the Duke d'Orleans will have its turn. This
prince,'' added Fouche, intentionally magnifying the importance
of this faction in the eyes of M. de Vitrolles, " can boast here of
numerous partisans."
This faction, however, was then very limited, and possessed
no other consequence than in some coteries of diplomatists and
imperialists, eager to reconcile their defection from the Empire
with their repugnance to the Bourbons. They gave no serious
disquietude to Fouche ; but, on the contrary, assisted to enhance
the price of his services with the King, by exaggerating the
obstacles that he wished to assume the honour of vanquishing
in his cause.
M. de Vitrolles, alarmed at this false confidence of Fouche,
declined going to Ghent, that he might remain at Paris to
watch there, in the interest of Louis XVIII., and the Count

If) HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION LBOOK 28.
Interview of Napoleon and Benjamin Constant,
d'Artois, the pretended plots of the Orleans faction. This was
all that FouchS wished ; for he had at Ghent confidential agents
enough between himself and the princes, and he well knew that
M. de Vitrolles would not fail, in his correspondence with the
Count d'Artois, to enhance the dangers to be apprehended from
the Orleanist party and the merit of Fouche. M. de Vitrolles
merely requested the minister to answer to him for his liberty
and his head, should he remain in Paris.
" Your head ! " replied Fouche, with a smile ; " how can I
guarantee that to you when I am not sure of my own ? All I
can do is to promise you that they shall both fall together ! "
M. de Vitrolles, a man eminently calculated for double confi
dences and secret diplomacies, received from Fouche numerous
passports for Ghent, to be used by his agents, and an invitation
to visit the minister every day to discuss with him the interests
of the King. XIII
Before he departed for the head-quarters of the allied
sovereigns, Benjamin Constant went to take leave of the Emperor.
This negociator having asked him in what part of the globe he
meant to choose an asylum to finish his days removed from
the throne, " I have not yet decided," replied the Emperor, in
a tone of indifference to his own fate. " Flight I disdain ; and,
moreover, why should I not remain where I am ? What can
the allied powers do to a disarmed man? I shall live in
this retreat with a few friends who will continue attached not
to my power but to my person."
He amused himself with anticipating the nature of this
private life, so peaceable and free from care, as if past grandeur
was unheeded, and he could descend at a single step from
the throne to a private station.
'' If they do not choose to leave me here," he said, "where
would they like me to go? To England? But there my
residence would be either ridiculous or disquieting. No one
would believe that I could be tranquil there. Every mist
would be suspected of bringing me to your coast; I should

1S15. ] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 17
Napoleon's opinion of the Chambers.
be put out of the pale of the law; I should compromise all
my friends ; and by dint of saying, ' There he is come at
last,' I should at length be tempted to come in earnest.
America would be more suitable. I could live there with
dignity ; but, after all, what have I to apprehend in staying
where I am? What sovereign could persecute me without
dishonouring himself ? To one of them I have returned the
half of his conquered states, and how many times - has the
other pressed my hand, felicitating himself on being the friend
of a great man ! I shall see, however. I do not wish to
struggle against open force. I arrived at Paris to combine
our last resources — I have been abandoned with the same
facility that I was received ! Well, let them efface, if possible,
this double stain of weakness and frivolity ! They should at
least cover it with some struggle, some glory! Let them
do for their country what they will no longer do for me! But
I do not hope it," he added, with an incredulous accent.
"They give me up to-day," they say, " to save France, but
to-morrow they will give up France to save their own heads ! "
XIV
Another of his visitors having congratulated him on the
departure of the plenipotentiaries commissioned to present
to the allied powers the recognition of his dynasty as the
ultimatum of France : " No," he replied, " the allies are
too much interested in imposing the Bourbons upon you to
give my son the crown ! The names of the plenipotentiaries
belie their instructions. Lafayette, Pontecoulant, and Sebas-
tiani are my enemies ; they have conspired against me ; the
enemies of the father cannot be the friends of the son !
Moreover, the Chambers obey the wishes of Fouche. If they
had given to me what they have lavished upon him I should
have saved France. My presence alone at the head of the
army would have done more than all your negociations ! " He
forgot that he had himself quitted that army, where, by his
presence, he might, in fact, still have fought or negotiated.
" I alone,'' he incessantly repeated, " could retrieve all ; bufc
3b

IS H1ST0BY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 28.
Caulaincourt advises his escape to America.
your plotters would rather bury themselves in the gulf than
save themselves with me."
These plotters, however, were all men who had issued
from the 20th March as his ministers, his marshals, his
generals, his partisans, who had sacrificed with him and for
him the last army of France. But ambition never deems
itself sufficiently served unless the country itself is offered
up as its victim !
The affectation he displayed in considering himself at
perfect liberty to prolong his residence at Malmaison had
evidently for its object to await still some vicissitude of events
in his favour. In the secret outpouring of his thoughts to
his most intimate confidants, Caulaincourt and Maret, he
already spoke of retiring to England, and demanding there
the hospitality of a free soil. Maret dissuaded him from
this step. Caulaincourt advised him if he meant to adopt it
not to lose a moment to assure its success ; to embark on board
a smuggling vessel, to land on the English coast, to appear
before the first magistrate at the place of his landing, and
to invoke from him the protection which England affords to
every stranger who touches its soil. He began again to
deliberate with himself, and seemed inclined to go to America
He demanded of the naval minister a list of the American
vessels at anchor in the French ports, and it was sent to him.
" Remark above all, Sire," said the minister to him, in
the letter containing this information, " an American vessel
stationed at Havre ; its captain is now in my antechamber ;
his vehicle is waiting at my door ; he is ready to start ; I
answer for him, he awaits your orders, and to-morrow, if you
wish, you will be on the high seas, under a private flag, and
sheltered from every attempt of your enemies ! "
Caulaincourt, in his double capacity, as a member of the
government, interested in freeing France from the dangerous
presence of its master, and as the friend of Napoleon re
sponsible for his safety to his own honour, anxiously entreated
the Emperor to profit by this providential opportunity to
escape. " I know well," said Napoleon to him with unjust
bitterness, " that my departure is already longed for by some.

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE.
General Becker appointed to command his guard.

to rid themselves of my presence at any price, and to deliver
me up a prisoner to my enemies ! " Caulaincourt replied by
a gesture of indignation and reproach, but the Emperor assured
him that the remark was not intended to apply to him.
"After all," he repeated to his old minister, "what have I
to apprehend ? It is the duty of France to protect me ! "
XV
Meanwhile the Chambers were urging the government to
remove, in him, the obstacle to the negociations, the exciting
cause of the agitation of Paris, and the still dangerous tribune
of the army. The Emperor replied to the applications of the
government on this subject, that he was ready to embark for the
United States, with his family, if he was furnished with two
frigates. The minister of marine instantly ordered these
two frigates to be equipped, and M. Bignon, minister of
foreign affairs, demanded a safe-conduct for him from the
Duke of Wellington.
But the government and the Chambers, informed of the
vacillations of Napoleon, and fearing . from the multiplied
indications which they received from Malmaison, that these
vacillations and tardy proceedings were nothing more on his
part than manoeuvres to gain time, and to find an opportunity of
having himself carried off by a body of his army, or to place
himself of his own accord at the head of a military insurrection,
which would relume the conflagration, and overturn the Cham
bers, decided on having him watched by a military comman
dant of his household, merely half disguising his captivity
under the honours due to his former rank. General Becker,
brother-in-law to General Desaix, who was killed at Marengo
while deciding Napoleon's first victory, received orders to
repair to Malmaison, to assume there the command of the
Emperor's guard, under the semblance of a guard of honour,
charged with the safety of the deposed prince. But he was,
at the same time, charged with the duty of preventing any
one from making use of the name or the person of the Em
peror to excite disturbance

20 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 28.
Becker's interview with Napoleon.
Davoust, minister of war, and invested with the command
in chief of the army since the abdication, intimated to General
Becker the orders, at once respectful and severe, wliich suited
such a mission. Becker, who was attached to Napoleon, but
more attached to his country and to his duty as a soldier,
received these orders with grief, and executed them with
decorum. But their meaning could not escape Napoleon.
He saw in them the first menace of the extremities to which
his obstinacy or his indecision might impel the Chambers, his
enemies, and even the friends he had in the government.
He was at first indignant as at Fontainebleau and at the
Elysee ; he then yielded with an appearance of indifference,
and even of grace, as if he wished to conceal his abasement
from himself, and to seem still to command at the moment
he was compelled to obey. His adherents anticipated some
sinister order, and arrest and imprisonment were spoken of.
Gourgaud, an enthusiastic young man, in whose breast, as
with all noble natures, adversity augmented devotion, vowed
to immolate the first who should dare to lay a hand on his
master. Tears were flowing in the apartment of Queen
Hortense. XVI.
Becker affected at sight of the Emperor, ashamed of his
rigorous mission, and but ill-concealing the emotion which the
sight of this downfall excited in his sensitive heart, accosted
Napoleon with a respectful compassion. He seemed to ask
pardon of him for the severities and reverses of fortune.
Napoleon drew him into the garden, and asked him, with
the indifference of familiarity, what was passing at Paris.
Becker replied to him with that considerate adulation which
compassion authorises towards irretrievable adversity. He
could not, however, conceal from his former general that if
he had not abandoned his army after Waterloo, he might
have, if not conquered, at least intimidated at the same time
both Paris and the foreign powers, at the head of his troops,
or behind the ramparts of Strasbourg; and thus, by giving

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 21
Perplexity of the Provisional Government.
time for negotiation, have secured the inheritance for his son
and conditions for France. " I expected better things from
the Chambers and from France," said the Emperor in his
own exoneration ; " but I soon discovered that all were ex
hausted and demoralised ! " Becker assumed the command of
the Emperor's residence.
On the following day he conversed again with Napoleon,
whose thoughts had undergone a change in the night, and
who now spoke of nothing but his departure. He sent
Savary to the government to hasten the preparation of the
two frigates. Fouche told him they were ready, but that he
would not allow them to sail until the safe-conducts had
arrived ; not wishing, he said, to dishonour his memory by an
act of imprudence, which would be called a snare and a treason
should the frigates be taken with Napoleon on board, when
leaving port. Carnot himself became impatient at these
alternate solicitations and refusals of the Emperor. " Nobody
wishes," he said with ill-humour to Savary, " to throw any
obstacle in the way of his departure On the contrary, we
wish to take measures never to see him here again ! "
Caulaincourt, on his side, entreated Savary to persuade the
Emperor to depart without further delay. " Tell him," he
added, " that I supplicate him to do so, and that he cannot
go too soon." XVII
On the evening of the 27th, Fouche and his colleagues,
overwhelmed by the double responsibility occasioned by the
presence of Napoleon, fatal to the country if he escaped,
and equally fatal to their fame if made prisoner by the enemy,
ordered the minister of marine to go to Malmaison and to
declare to the Emperor that the frigates placed at his disposal
were ready, and that they begged him to embark even before
the arrival of the safe-conducts. One hour later, this order:
of the government to the minister of marine was revoked.
In consequence of the progress of the allies around Paris
and Malmaison, and the presence of English cruisers on the

22 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 2a
Napoleon's remaining adherents.

coasts, Fouche ordered the minister of war, Davoust, to send
troops and gendarmes to General Becker to guard the approaches
of Napoleon's residence, and to prevent his flight. In con
sequence of these new orders which rendered the captivity
of the Emperor closer, Becker was authorised alone to escort
him, without losing sight of him, to the Isle of Aix, where
he was either to embark, or to remain under surveillance
until the sea was open for him, or that the sureties demanded
of England for his departure should be granted. Fouche,
Davoust, and the government at the same time recalled
from Malmaison, under various pretexts of civil or military
service, the officers of the Emperor's household who might
assist him in his designs of resisting his exile, and foment in
his breast, or amongst the neighbouring troops, ideas of revolt
against the abdication.
His court thus decimated, as much by the measures of
government as by that natural void which creates itself around
hopeless misfortune, no longer consisted of any but men
irremediably compromised in his return from the Isle of
Elba : Maret, Lavalette, Flahaut, Gourgaud, Bertrand, Mon
tholon, Savary, and Las Cases. The last of these, an old emi
grant of aristocratical family, was only a simple chamberlain,
admitted into the superior household of the palace, and
subsequently into the council of state after his return from
emigration. He had no complicity in the new attempt at
empire. More inclined from his birth and connexions to
the Bourbons than to the new reign, he was a volunteer in
the imperial downfall. A man of study, and familiar with
history, he knew that even the most obscure fidelity receives
from the great men to whom it attaches itself under great
calamities, a reflex of greatness and immortality. He medi
tated being one day the historian of that exile upon whom
the eyes of the world and of posterity were to be for ever
fixed. With this idea he sued for a place in the adversity of
Napoleon, as others, and he himself, would have sued for one
in his prosperity A noble flatterer who had caressed the
Empire through ambition, and who was going to flatter exile
through the vanity nf devoted attachment! He was only

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 23

His unwillingness to depart.

acquainted with the Emperor by sight, and the Emperor only
knew him by name. XVIII
General Becker acknowledged to the Emperor the rigorous
orders he had received. But being repugnant to the office
of gaoler which these orders inflicted upon him, he went to
Paris to receive an explanation, or a modification of them from
the members of government He again received an order
to accelerate the departure of Napoleon, and to accompany
him to the Isle of Aix in the roadstead of Rochefort. He re
ceived a passport in which Napoleon was designated as secretary
to this general ; for they apprehended some commotions of
the troops or the people, either for or against him, on the route
It is not known whether Becker was furnished with private
instructions in such an event ; but in the accomplishment of
duties so delicate and complicated this officer displayed a
fidelity and propriety which happily combined the character
of a soldier obeying the orders of his country, and that of
a man of feeling respecting alike his own dignity and the
dignity of misfortune. On his return to Malmaison he com
municated the order for departure, and the passport, to the
Emperor. "Behold me then your secretary!" said the pri
soner, in a tone of resignation. " Yes, Sire," replied Becker
with emotion, " but to me you are ever my sovereign! "
XIX
Preparations were now ostensibly made for departure, but
everything around Napoleon still indicated that these prepara
tions and this resignation were only a feint, and that a pretext
was still looked for to revolt against necessity. The Emperor
had been willing to relax as far as Malmaison the links which
attached him to the Empire, but he could not resolve on sever
ing them altogether by a departure. He waited for chances,
he hoped impossibilities. The first corps of Grouchy's army
were approaching nearer and nearer to him, driven back by the
Prussians and the English. A brave and enterprising general

24 HISTORY OF T3E RESTORATION [BOOK 28.
Proposition of General Excelmans.
of cavalry, who only recognised the camp as his country, and
the Emperor as its government, meditated the abduction of his
former general, to replace him at the head of his squadrons, to
eollect around him the 80,000 scattered men, the remnants of
the campaign, and to confide once more to his genius, behind
the Loire, the death-struggle with the foreign invaders. This
was Excelmans, whose breach of discipline, arrest by Soult,
and popular disgrace, we have seen under the first restoration.
Excelmans sent one of his colonels, named Sender, to Mal
maison, to tempt Napoleon to this noble act of despair. " The
army of the north," said the colonel in the name of his general,
'• is unbroken, and full of enthusiasm still for you. It is easy
to rally round this nucleus of troops everything that remains
of patriotism and military spirit in France. Nothing is to be
despaired of with such troops under such a chief." The Em
peror reflected, and, as had been constantly the case for the last
four months, he scarcely saw the prospect of realizing his hopes
when he abandoned them for others, and eventually fell back
upon obstacles and resignation. "Thank your general for me,"
he said to Excelmans' envoy, " but tell him I cannot accept his
proposition. I should require the whole support of France ;
but everything is unsettled, and nobody cares any more about
the matter ! What could I do alone with a handful of soldiers
against all Europe ? " Thus he confessed with tne sincerity of
the soldier what he incessantly denied in the official language
of the politician, in the face of the government, the Chambers,
and the people. To these he affirmed that be alone could
save all, and restore all ; to Excelmans he acknowledged that
he could do nothing more for the country, for the army, or for
himself. He had already adopted two modes of expression ;
one confidential, the other for the public. He wished to
appear the victim of general desertion, when he was only the
sport of necessity. He deceived history, but no longer deceived
himself.
XX.
Meanwhile the enemy was surrounding him, and was already
encamped at Compiegne, from which a detachment of cavalry

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 25
Napoleon sends Becker to Paris.
might cross the Seine and carry him off. He could hear the
cannon from the midst of his gardens. This noise appeared
to reanimate him ; he called for his horses and his arms, as if
the resolution of dying with those who were dying in his cause
so near him had at length conquered in his breast the lethargy
in which he had languished for so many days. He summoned
General Becker into his cabinet, and, excited by the fever which
the sound of the cannon produces in the soldier's breast, he
exclaimed in an accent of despair, " The enemy is at Compiegne,
at Senlis ! To-morrow he will be at the gates of Paris ! I
cannot understand the blindness of the government. He must
be either f> lunatic or a traitor to his country who doubts for a
moment the bad faith of the foreigner. Those persons," he
added, speaking of the Chambers and of the government, " know
nothing of their business."
He expected some sign of approval from General Becker,
who held his tongue, however, neither wishing to accuse the
Emperor of these disasters, nor to encourage him in thoughts
which might still further aggravate them. The Emperor affect
ing to take this silence for an acquiescence in his ideas, " Every
thing is lost— is it not? " said he to Becker. " Well, then, in
this case, let them make me general : I will command the army :
I will apply for the command." Then taking the first step ,as
it were, and suddenly assuming that tone of command which
forbids objection by the authority of the tone : " General,"
said he, " you shall take my letter to the government. Depart
at once— a carriage awaits you. Explain to them that my inten
tion is not to repossess myself of power ; that I only wish to
fight the enemy, to crush him, to force him by a victory to grant
better conditions ; and that when this result is obtained, 1 shall
pursue my route. Go, general ; I reckon upon you " Then,
as if desirous of holding out a lure to the infidelity of Becker
by the perspective of high favour, the reward of his complais
ance, he added, as he dismissed him, " You shall not quit me
any more."

26 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 2S.

Fouche's reception of Becker.

XXL
Becker, uncertain of his position, but influenced by the
ascendancy of that voice which he was accustomed to obey, did
not venture to oppose him to his face, and set off to accomplish
a mission of wliich no one felt the absurdity more than him
self. On arriving at the Tuileries he timidly presented to the
assembled government the message of his prisoner, which was
couched in the following terms : —
- " In abdicating power I have not renounced the noblest
right of the citizen — the right of defending my country. The
enemy's approach to the capital no longer leaves the least doubt
as to their intentions or their bad faith. In these grave cir
cumstances I offer my services as general, still looking upon
myself as the first soldier of the country."
This letter, derisive in its purport,' though noble in its Ian
guage, sufficiently betrayed the popularity-seeking intention
with which it had been written. Who could have doubted that
the enemy, assaulted on a foreign soil by Napoleon himself,
would follow up their victory by repelling the aggressor upon
the French soil? What bad faith could be attributed to Wel
lington and to Blucher, as conquerors, having agreed to no
armistice, in advancing upon Paris ? And finally, how could
Napoleon, as a general, have had more ascendancy over fortune
at the head of the fragments of the army abandoned by himself
some days before, than he had possessed as emperor and general
at the head of unbroken armies, warlike and united under
his hand ?
Fouche, as president, received the letter from the timid
hands of Becker, read it aloud to the council, with the accent
and gesture of one wearied with lunacy ; then throwing it on
the table, " Is this man amusing himself at our expense '?
said he. " Doubtless," he added, looking at Becker with
the penetrating glance of suspicion, " this letter is nothing
more than a deferential formality towards the Chambers, while
at the very moment that we have received it he has already
escaped from Malmaison, and is reviewing his soldiers, and

1818.] OF MONARCH? IN FRANCE. 27

Booker'* return ; Mission of M, do Flahuut.
liuranguing them against us." Becker vowed that the Emperor
was waiting his return and their reply.
They deliberated for a few momenta. Carnot alone at first
appeared to accept the antique idea of replacing for a moment
tho Emperor at the head of tho army. Fouche demonstrated
that Napoleon was the sole cause of the war, and that his pre
sence at the head of the army would bo dclianco personified
anew to Europe, and an invincible obstacle to all accommoda
tion both for tho army and the country. He added, that the
character of Napoleon forbade all belief in any durable disin
terestednoss of power in such a mind ; and that if he obtained
sufficient success to roascend tho throne for the third time, he
would drag down in his last and inovitable fall tlie army, tho
capital, the soil, and ovon tho integrity of tiie country.
Carnot, Caulaincourt, Davoust, and all the members of the
government did not hesitate in acknowledging the solid con
siderations urged by Fouche: against this instance of weakness
and caprice. Carnot took upon himself, in order to soften the
refusal, and to convince Napoleon by the word and tho heart of
a man whom ho did not doubt, to forward considerations less
severe, but quite as peremptory, to Malmaison.
XXII
During the short absence of Becker, the Emperor, either
believing, or feigning to believe, in the consent of the govern
ment, had dressed himself, assembled his aides-de-camp, bade
farewell to Hortense, and had his chargers bridled and saddled,
aud kept in readiness at the palace gate.
Booker, on arriving, gave him the roply of the government,
which he road and threw away with disdain. " I knew it
before hand," he said. " Those people have no energy ! Well,
general," he added, addressing Becker ns if he had made sure
of him, " since that is the case, lot us go ! Come on ! "
Becker, more and more embarrassed, was silent and motion
less. The Emperor then called M. de Flahaut, a younger man,
more decided in yielding everything to the Emperor, or bend
ing everything to his will Napoleon ordered him to hasten

28 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 28.
M. de Flahaut's interview with Davoust.
to Paris, and to arrange with the government for his positive
departure for the army. M. de Flahaut obeyed. On entering
the Tuileries he stumbled on Marshal Davoust, minister of war,
a military man, faithful up to that point when fidelity became
treason to his country. Davoust, firm in resolution, and rough
in language, energetically repulsed the mission of Flahaut to
the government. " Your Bonaparte," he said to him, with an
accent of impatience and disgust, "does not wish to go away!
But he must decide on it, for his presence disturbs and com
plicates everything. We can neither fight nor negotiate with
him ! If he flatters himself that we shall take him again for
our master and our chief tell him he deceives himself ! Let
him depart immediately, or we shall be compelled to arrest him.
If necessary, to save the country and the army, I will arrest
him myself! "
The Emperor's aide-de-camp replied that he had too much
respect for himself, and also for Marshal Davoust, to deliver
to the Emperor such menaces, on the part of one of his generals,
who, only a week before, received his orders, and lavished upon
him his zeal. Davoust answered him with all the authority of a
minister of war over a subordinate officer, and directed him to
. proceed to Fontainebleau, and await there his orders. " I shall
not go there," said M. de Flahaut : "I shall not abandon the
Emperor, but will preserve for him to the last moment the
fidelity which others have sworn to bim." " I shall punish
you for this," cried Davoust. " I deprive you of the right to
do so," replied the young man. " I resign my commission,
and henceforth I have only to obey my honour "
XXIII
On the return of his aide-de-camp the Emperor perceived
on his features the traces of sorrow, and desired to know all ;
the aide-de-camp told him every tiling that had passed. "Let
him come," cried Napoleon; " I am ready, if necessary, to lay
my head on the block ! " He dismissed his equerries, sent his
horses back to the stables, and again resumed his complaints,
in the privacv of his garden and the circle of his attached

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 29
Napoleon and Maret.

courtiers. " Those men," he said to Maret, " are intoxicated
with the kingly part they are playing. They feel that if they
replaced me at the head of the army they would be nothing
more than my shadow ! In their pride and self-consequence
they can scarcely bear me. They will ruin everything!" As
if everything had not been already lost.
From time to time he regained, or affected to regain, his
energy after a depression of spirit, like Tiberius negotiating
with the Senate, sometimes with resignation, sometimes with
insolence. " But why should I allow them to reign? " he ex
claimed with a sudden excitement of mind and body. " I have
abdicated for my son ; but if this name is to, be lost, I would
rather lose it on the field of battle than motionless here ! " I
can do nothing better for my son or myself than to throw myself
into the arms of my soldiers ! My appearance will electrify
the army and confound the enemy ! "
He no longer recollected that only the evening before he
had on reflection rejected this step, offered to him by the heroic
temerity of Excelmans. He resumed : " The enemy, knowing
that I have only returned to the field to crush them or to die,
will grant you, to get rid of me, everything you demand
If, on the contrary, you leave me here rusting my sword, they
will despise you, and you will be compelled humbly to receive
Louis XVIII. It must have an end ! If your five emperors,"
alluding thus to the five members of the government, " will
not have me to save France, I shall dispense with their consent !
It will be sufficient to show myself : Paris and the army will
receive me a second time as a liberator ! " "I believe it, Sire,"
replied Maret, accustomed to believe everything from the un
limited power of his master ; "but if the Chamber should out
law you — if fortune should desert your arms — what would be
come of your Majesty ? "
" Well, well ! " replied the Emperor, yielding in appearance
to the counsels of friendship, with the same facility that he
would rebel anew against destiny, "I see that I must yield !
You are right ; I ought not to take upon myself the responsi
bility of so great a resolution. I ought to wait till the voice of
the people, of the Chambers, and of the army recalls me ; "

80 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 28.
Critical situation of Napoleon.
then, as if he expected every instant to hear this imaginary cry
of public opinion : " But how is it that Paris has not already re
called me ? " he exclaimed. " They do not perceive then that
the enemy makes no account of my abdication. That infamous
Fouche ! he continued; " he deceives you !" The provisional
government, itself deceived, consents to be conducted by him
alone. Some day or other it will have to undergo great re
proaches ! There is nobody there but Caulaincourt and Carnot
who are worth anything ; but they have bad associates. What
can these two devoted men do against a traitor ? — two imbeciles,
and two Chambers fluctuating with every breeze ! You all be
lieve, like dupes, in the promises and generosity ofthe foreigners
You think they are going to give you a prince such as you
desire. You deceive yourselves. Alexander will obey the
English, and Austria will obey Alexander ! "
XXIV.
Some generals, most compromised in the events bf March,
and most threatened by the return of the Bourbons, now be
sieged him with demands for money to save their lives. He
distributed to them some trifling aid by the hand of Hortense,
who trembled, from their constant importunity, for the safety
of her step-father
One of his confidential secretaries, whom he had sent in
search of news, informed him that the enemy's troops were
touching the walls of Paris on three sides, and that it was
time to think of his personal safety. " I shall fear nothing
from them to-morrow," he replied ; " I have taken measures to
depart this night; I am weary of myself, of Paris, and ot
France. Prepare yourself to follow me ! " The secretary ex
cused himself on account of the age and infirmities of his
mother. Napoleon pretended to be satisfied with these excuses,
which multiplied around him from hour to hour. " I want no
thing more now than a good wind and good fortune," he said,
with an accent of resolution resigned to fate. " I shall go to
America, where they will give me some land, or else I shall
purchase it, and we shall cultivate it. I shall finish where

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 31
Blucher's feeling towards him.
man has commenced ; I shall live on the produce of my land
and of my flocks ! " To some objections offered by his confi
dant, touching the proximity of Europe and the United States :
" Well then," he continued, " I shall go to Mexico, and put
myself at the head of the Independents ! I shall go, in
short, from shore to shore, and from sea to sea, until I shall
find an asylum against the resentment and the persecution of
men. In reality, what would you have me do ? Would you
have me allow myself to be taken like a child by Wellington,
to adorn his triumph in London ? I have only one course to
adopt — that of retiring from the scene. Destiny will do the
rest ! Certainly I could die ! I could say, like Hannibal,
' Let me deliver them from the terror with which I inspire
them ! ' But suicide must be left to weak heads, and souls
badly tempered ! As to me, whatever may be my destiny, I shall
never hasten my natural end by a single moment ! " He thus
refuted the drama of suicide which his sycophants had arranged
for him at Fontainebleau.

XXV
Savary, whom he had ill-treated on his return from the
Isle of Elba, and who redeemed the devotion of his unscrupu
lous services by the disinterested obstinacy of his fidelity, also
advised him, not to terminate his life with his own hand, but
to seek for death under the cannon which was now destroying
France. Malmaison was already outflanked by the light troops of
Blucher. "If I can take him prisoner," said the latter to
Wellington, " I shall have him hanged at the head of my
columns ! " This general, possessed of a savage energy,
burned to avenge the Queen of Prussia, killed by the implac
able acts of Napoleon, and the annihilation of her country.
Wellington, on the contrary, was indignant at these shameful
reprisals ; he respected while he combatted his enemy. The
Emperor, on finding danger so close to him, sent to ascertain
if the bridges of Bezons and of Pecq, which covered Malmai
son, had been cut; but as this had not been done, the officers

32 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 28.
Remarks on Napoleon's hesitation.
of his household, and the troops commanded by Becker, made
defensive arrangements round his residence to resist any sudden
attempt. The night was passed in these agitations.
At three o'clock in the morning the friends he had still left
in the Chamber of Deputies and in the government came to in
form him that the allies had refused the safe-conducts and
passports which had been asked for by Fouche, and that he
had scarcely time left to escape captivity by flight. He still
asked for some hours' delay, and promised to depart in the
course of the day
General Becker had received orders not to allow him to
return when once he had departed, and the naval commandant
at Rochefort received instructions not to permit him to land
again on the soil of France when he should have embarked for
the Isle of Aix. Historians have represented this order of the
government, and the whole of the circumstances which pre
ceded the departure of Napoleon from Malmaison, as so many
snares concerted by the members of the commission and by
Fouche" to ruin him. But these accusations are belied, by the
facts. We have seen that the government never ceased for an
instant to desire and to hasten the departure of the man who
embarrassed at once the peace, the war, and the free move
ments of the country, from his arrival at the Elysde till the
29th June ; and that these ten days lost by Napoleon in feeble
longings for the dictatorship, in abdicating, in resuming his
thoughts of empire, in calculated delays, in irresolution, in
contests with necessity, with the government, and with himself,
would have given him time and means enough for security in
his flight. We have also seen that when once engaged in ne
gociations with the victorious enemy, the government could not,
while it was treating, or perhaps after having treated, permit
Napoleon, the sole cause of the war, to return to the territory
which he had freely quitted, and to renew the contest after a
capitulation, the very first condition of which was his removal.
It was not the fault of the Chambers that Napoleon fluctuate*- ¦
for ten days between the different parties ; allowing the power
to escape him in Paris, the enemy to approach the capital in
masses and by forced marches, and the light troops of Welling

1R15.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 33

Justification of the Provisional Government.

ton and Blucher to occupy Compiegne and Senlis, and to turn
the flank of Malmaison.
A triple responsibility weighed upon the members of the
government : to relieve the negociations from the person and the
presence of the Emperor ; to prevent, on his part, after the ab
dication, an attempt at a military dictatorship, which would
place everything in jeopardy, even the existence of Paris,
and the integrity of the national soil; finally, to prevent,
should the Emperor be taken at Malmaison by the enemy, an
appearance of his being delivered up by France, and thus
tarnishing the peace itself with dishonour. In the state of
perplexity in which the obstinacy of Napoleon placed the govern
ment on the 29th June, under the enemy's cannon, there evi
dently remained no other course to pursue than that of shel
tering the person of Napoleon at the Isle of Aix, within reach
of the frigates which had been prepared for him, or of the
means of escaping by sea which were offered to him, and to
prohibit bim, until his embarkation, from returning to the soil
of France. It was not the perfidy of the government which
had so much retarded his departure from Malmaison, waited
for such extremities, and increased the difficulties of 'his flight, —
it was his own will. We shall further see that it was entirely
by his own will that flight became impossible. History ought
not to make itself the complaisant and lying echo of the odious
accusations of the family or the household of Napoleon; neither
should it dishonour the nation to exonerate a great man from
his mental irresolutions. In. all these final circumstances of
his departure, Napoleon was only betrayed by himself He
still clung to the shore, — it eluded his grasp.

^

XXVI.

He again consumed the whole of the 29th in vague hopes,
in desperate expectations, in fruitless glances cast towards
Paris, and towards every point of the horizon, in walking in
his garden, in conversing with his confidants, and in lengthened
farewells to his family and his friends. At five o'clock in the
evening he was informed that the two carriages which General
3 c

34 HISTORV OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 28.
Napoleon's departure from Malmaison.
Becker had ordered awaited him in the park. He embraced
Queen Hortense, who was overcome with grief, made a melan
choly sign of farewell to the officers and soldiers of his guard,
and plunging into the park alley, at the extremity of which the
carriages were stationed, he turned round several times to con
template that dear abode of his youth, of his happiness, and of
his glory ; and at length entered a plain summer calash with
General Becker, his grand marshal of the palace, Bertrand,
and Savary.
Two other carriages, which were to proceed to Rochefort by
another road, were filled with his suite, consisting of Gourgaud,
the wife and children of General Bertrand, M. and Madame tie
Montholon, M. de Las Cases and his son, young Emmanuel, be
sides several servants. Napoleon, Becker, Bertrand, and
Savary had laid aside their uniforms, and assumed travelling
dresses, to escape observation and avoid mobs on the route.
Gourgaud alone travelled in full uniform, in a gilded carriage
of the Emperor, in order that the people's attention, deceived by
this luxury and display, might attract to this carriage alone the
snares and dangers of the road, if the perfidy of the Emperor's
enemies had prepared any, or if by the spontaneous commotions
of the populace he might incur them.
The districts which Napoleon would have to pass through
were scarcely pacified after the royalist insurrections against
him. Becker was desirous of travelling fast, the sooner to
insure the security of the deposit confided to his charge, and to
relieve himself, as early as possible, from a responsibility which
lay heavy on his heart. But on arriving at Rambouillet, Na
poleon wished to pass the night there. He even maintained
upon his road to exile, the illusion he had nourished for the
last ten days. He could not believe that France would allow
her hero to depart without recalling him. The long sleepless
night he passed at Rambouillet was only occupied with waking
dreams of recall by the people, by the army, or by the
Chambers, in whose breasts he imagined the news of his de
parture would have excited remorse and anxiety to retain him.
He passed the night listening to every noise in the town, and
he sent General Gourgaud several times upon the road to Mal-

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 35
Incidents on his journey.
maison, to listen, amidst silence and darkness, for the noise of
approaching couriers, which he incessantly expected from that
direction. Excelmans had in fact arrived at, Vincennes on the evening o
of the 29th with two divisions of dragoons, still influenced by
the same idea which he had communicated to the Emperor
through his aide-de-camp, Colonel Sender. He had not been
discouraged by Napoleon's first refusal, and thought of doing
violence to his indecision. He communicated his project to
General Daumesnil, commandant of Vincennes ; but the latter
acquainted him with the departure of Napoleon, and Excelmans
no longer thought of anything but distinguishing himself by
some bold stroke against the Prussians.
XXVII.
Although the night had brought no news from Paris, the
Emperor would not consent to tear himself away from Ram
bouillet till the middle of the next day, the 30th. It might be
said that he was desirous of enjoying to the last moment the
recollections of grandeur and of empire recalled by this impe
rial residence. At noon he departed for Chateaudun, where
it was reported that Napoleon had been killed in a rencounter
with the Prussians. On changing hor? es he was recognised by
the postmistress, who wept in silence on beholding him. He
passed through Tours and Poitiers without stopping. At St.
Maixent a threatening mob gathered round his carriage.
General Becker opened a passage through the town by means
of an officer of gendarmerie, who had been attracted by the
tumult, and at night they arrived at Niort.
Napoleon, relying on his safety in a town where he had
concentrated some troops of observation against La Vendee,
was desirous of remaining there for a day. He slept at the
post-house, and opening his window in the morning he took a
pleasure in allowing himself to be recognised by some hussars
who were grooming their horses in the square. Their cry of
" Vive I'Empereur !" that watchword of the soldiers, everywhere
roused the town, and attracted the inhabitants under his win

36 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 28.

His arrival at. Rochefort.

dows. The prefect immediately hastened to offer him the
hospitality of his house, and during the day the prefecture was
surrounded by the troops and the populace, who saluted him
with acclamations. They feared nothing more from his ambi
tion, and only recollected his glory. During the whole day he
gave audience to the officers, the functionaries, and the inhabi
tants, who thronged to salute in him the disarmed hero. Some
of these officers conjured him to put himself at their head and
renew the war. He seemed to derive a pleasure from these
entreaties, and to wish that the feelings of these soldiers should
be disseminated amongst the people. He ordered General
Becker to send a courier to the government to acquaint them
with the enthusiasm excited amongst the troops by his presence,
to make them apprehensive of an open, forcible resistance to his
departure, and finally, to acquaint them, that news received
from Rochefort announced that all egress from the roadstead
for the frigates was stopped by the English cruisers. " The
government," he ince'ssantly repeated, " is ignorant of the feel
ing of the country ; it was too hasty in sending me away from
Paris. If it had accepted my last proposition things would
have had a different aspect. I might still exercise a great in
fluence on political affairs ; my name would have served as a
rallying point." He also ordered General Becker to write to
the government, that he again offered his services as general of
an army for the defence of Paris.
Becker obeyed, as a final act of complaisance, and to soothe
to the last the sorrows and the bitterness of his prisoner.
XXVIII.
Having at lengthy arrived at Rochefort on the morning of
the 3rd July, he stopped at the hotel of the maritime prefec
ture. " His attitude during the whole journey," says General
Becker, " had been calm and dignified. He preserved unbroken
silence in the carriage, where nothing was heard but the respi
ration of the four persons who occupied it. He seemed de
pressed, bent down within himself, still dwelling upon the
chances of a return of fortune, and lost in thoughts which were

IS15.] ' OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 37
Various propositions for his escape.
only revealed from time to time by a few words that escaped
from his reveries."
The population of Rochefort, informed of his arrival by
Gourgaud, who had preceded him, surrounded his residence in
respectful silence, interrupted by generous acclamations, a con
solation for his misfortunes. The two frigates which awaited
him were at anchor in the roads, under the cannon of the Isle
of Aix. The wind was unfavourable ; and the English were
cruising off the two channels of the roadstead. The naval
commandants and the officers of the frigates were holding
council at the prefecture, to deliberate on the possibility and
the dangers of embarking and leaving the port. The chances,
without being altogether desperate, seemed, however, great
against it. Other expedients were considered — that of attempt
ing on board a light vessel to evade the pursuit of the English
squadron, or else to embark on board a Danish vessel, the cap
tain of which offered the protection of his flag and the rapidity
of his sailing. Finally, it was proposed to the Emperor to
travel by land to Bordeaux, where the intrepid Captain Baudin
proposed to receive him on board his frigate, Bayadere, and
pledged his honour and his nautical skill to carry him to the
United States.
Being himself present at these consultations, the Emperor
adopted all the resolutions, made arrangements in consequence,
then abandoned them for others, and suffered days to elapse,
and decisions to fluctuate, according to the instability of his mind.
Was this irresolution or calculation ? Did he expect one last
summons from Paris, or did he hesitate in putting the ocean
between himself and his past glory ? The impression on the
mind of those who witnessed these last days, equally lost to
his safety and his power, is, that he hoped against all hope, and
that he expected to gain everything by procrastination.
XXIX
The government had replied to General Becker's despatch,
written under the dictation of the Emperor : " Napoleon must
Embark without' delay. If he had done this immediately on

38 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 28.
Becker's orders from the government.
arriving, the maritime prefect of Rochefort writes us that his
departure would not have been impossible. We therefore place
his person under your responsibility. You must employ all
forcible means that may be necessary, while maintaining the
respect due to him. Cause him to embark immediately. As
to the services he offers, our duty towards France, and our en
gagements with the foreign powers, do not permit us to accept
them, and you must not again apply to us on the subject.''
The stern impatience of the language of this despatch,
signed by Caulaincourt and by Carnot, whose attachment to the
Emperor was not to be doubted, sufficiently proves to what an
excess of weariness his vacillation had reduced even his best
friends. Friendship itself revolted against this blind importu
nity of hope. Davoust had written by the same courier to the
general commanding the troops of the department, to assist
Becker in forcing Napoleon to embark. The capitulation of
Paris, concluded with the enemy on the same day, left the
government no further power of temporising with the fallen
Emperor. Becker faithfully communicated these orders to the Em
peror himself. " Well, then," said Napoleon to him, " what
do you think of the matter?" " I am not in a position to
give advice," replied the afflicted general. " The only counsel
I -can venture to give is to come to a prompt resolution, and to
execute it without losing a moment. The destiny of France
may be accomplished every instant, and the new government
may send persons to execute new orders with respect to you ;
from that moment the powers which I hold from the provisional
government will cease, and you may be threatened with unknown
dangers." " But," replied Napoleon, with an inquiring glance
at Becker, " in any case you would be incapable of delivering
me up ?' " You know," replied the general, " that I would
give my life to ensure the safety of your flight ; but the com
mandants ofthe frigates will be under the orders of Louis XVIII.
and will not recognise mine." " Well, then," said the Em
peror, " order the boats necessary for conveyance to the
Isle of Aix."
The boats were accordingly hailed, and approached the

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 39

Napoleon lands on the Isle of Aix.

quay. The Emperor embarked in that of the frigate La Saale.
A long farewell cry from the shore responded to the strokes of
the oars which bore him from the main land. Both the wind
and the sea were rough in the roads, and the passage from
Rochefort to the Isle of Aix was long and wearisome. The
Emperor, instead of lauding on the island, went on board the
Saale frigate, and fixed himself there for the night, with Ber
trand, Becker, .Savary, and Gourgaud.
It was eight o'clock in the evening, the hour at which
Louis XVIII., who had been driven out by him on the 20th
March, after having traversed Paris, amidst the acclamations of
the people, who in him hailed the wished-for peace, installed
himself once more in the palace of the Tuileries.
XXX.
At daybreak on the 9th, Napoleon landed at the Isle of
Aix. The people and the regiment of marines in garrison
hastened to the shore in crowds, eager to see him, and rending
the air with their acclamations. His exile resembled a
triumph, amidst this population of ships, coasts, and camps.
The Emperor reviewed the regiment, and after going through
the island, and tasting the last pleasures of command, he
returned to his frigate. The maritime prefect waited on him
there with final orders from the government for his em
barkation. The act of disembarking him again upon the
French territory was declared high treason. The Emperor
still rejecting the adventurous offers of safety which were made
to him by Captain Baudin, by the Danish captain, and by the
young naval officers, who engaged to take him through the
cruisers in a vessel fast-sailing but hazardous, resolved to go
on board the Bellerophon, commanded by Captain Maitland, at
anchor off the Isle of Oleron, with a brig, which composed tlie
English cruising squadron there. He despatched M. de Las
Cases on board to negotiate with Captain Maitland, and to ask a
pledge of safety should the Emperor take refuge on board his
vessel. '' I can enter into no engagement," said Captain Maitland.

40 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 28.
Result of Las Cases' interview with Captain Maitland.
" I shall make a report of our interview to Admiral Hotham,
my superior officer, who is at anchor with the whole of the
squadron in the neighbouring bay of Quiberon ; and I will
transmit you his answer." M. de Las Cases having demanded
of Captain Maitland if he would allow the frigates to pass, or a
neutral vessel having the Emperor Napoleon on board, the
captain replied that he would attack the frigates if they were
enemies ; that he would take Napoleon prisoner, and that in
the event of Napoleon being found in a neutral vessel, he would
detain that vessel, and submit the fate of Napoleon to the
decision of his government. He seemed to dread the idea of
Napoleon's passage to the United States, and to throw out a
hint to Las Cases of seeking an asylum in England; but in
that case he presumed nothing as to the intentions of his
government with respect to the freedom or the captivity of
Napoleon.
XXXI.
Las Cases returned, and gave an account of this conversa
tion to the Emperor, whom it appeared to discourage. The
Bellerophon and the English brig approached immediately after
the departure of Las Cases, and each took post at one of the
two channels ofthe roads, to prevent the nocturnal flight ofthe
frigates. The captain of the Medusa, one of the frigates, ex
cited by the gravity of the circumstances, and by the greatness
of the deposit confided to him, proposed forcing the passage
during the night ; in which case he would devote himself to the
Bellerophon, and perish under its guns to prevent it from man
oeuvring, while the Saale, fighting and crushing the brig,
should carry the Emperor off to sea. Napoleon declined an act
of devotion which would sacrifice a whole crew to his flight, and
passed the night in a state of prolonged indecision. He could
not be ignorant that this indecision would result in the un
avoidable capitulation of his person, since the entire squadron
of Admiral Hotham, being warned by Captain Maitland, would
profit by this very night to blockade the roads. He resumed,
or pretended to resume, the idea of accepting the offer to cross
the ocean in the Bayadere, and sent General Lallemand to

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 41
Napoleon is still undecided.
concert measures with Captain Baudin. At the same time he
listened again to the proposition, of the Danish captain. Some
hours later he had his luggage and equipage put on board tra
ding schooners to send them on board the English vessel, where
he decided on going himself. On the evening of the same day
he retraced his steps once more, and landed on the Isle of Aix,
where he installed himself in the hotel of the director of
engineers. Days were passing quicker than his thoughts. Lallemand
returned from the Bayadere, bringing a repetition of Captain
Baudin's assurances and entreaties ; but he was on shore and
the shore held him back. He declined the offers of the captain of
the Bayadere, which he had solicited a second time. He then ap
peared to accept the devotion of some young midshipmen, who
asked him to equip two luggers, fishermen's vessels anchored in
the roads, to bring them under shelter of the land, out of sight
of the English cruisers, and take himself with them across the
ocean. He purchased the two barks, appointed their crews,
transhipped his baggage, and prepared apparently to embark in
the night. At midnight, accordingly, Becker announced to the
Emperor that all was ready: "I am ready to go,'' said the Em
peror. He appeared in reality desirous of proceeding to the
shore, but the tears and lamentations of the members of his
suite, dispersed and separated as they -tfould be from him in
these little vessels, withheld him. Everybody exclaimed,
" England !" " If such be your wish," said Napoleon, "well,
then! we'll go to England!" A grain of sand made him
stumble and change his resolution.
He gave one more night to the vague hope which had lulled
him since his departure from Malmaison, but it brought him
nothing more than a view of the white flag of the Bourbons,
which was flying at Rochefort and on all the headlands of the
coast. He sent Las Cases again, with Savary and Lallemand,
to the Bellerophon. The captain told them that he was
authorised by his government to receive Napoleon and his suite
on board his ship ; but that he could not guarantee either a safe
conduct or a passport to go from England to the United States
" I see no guarantee fn that," said Napoleon to his friends, on

42 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 28
His letter to the Prince Regent.
the return of Lallemand. The Danish captain then entreatec
to have the preference. Napoleon took the opinions of all
With the exception of Lallemand all implored him to confid<
himself to British honour rather than incur the perils of th(
sea and of unknown and perhaps inhospitable shores, on whicl
the waves might cast him far away from his friends. He
yielded to persuasions evidently too conformable to his own re
solutions, and shutting himself up in his chamber he wrote tc
the Prince Regent of England the following letter, wherein wil]
be found, in the accents of Marius at Minturnse, the appeal of a
great soul struggling with the extremities of fate •
" Your Royal Highness, — A victim to the factions which
distract my country, and to the enmity of the great powers of
Europe, I have terminated my political career ; and I come,
like Themistocles, to throw myself upon the hospitality of the
British people. I put myself under the protection of their
laws, which I claim from your Royal Highness, as the most
powerful, the most constant, and the most generous of my
enemies. " Rochefort, July 13, 1815." " Napoleon.
Conceived as it was between the country which refused
him a throne, and the ocean which refused him flight, this
letter, the epitaph of his political life, was worthy of being in
scribed on the last page of his downfall. It summed up with
a calm and sorrowful majesty what he had been, and what he
consented to become. The master of Europe, imploring the
hospitality of the island which the ocean alone had preserved
from his domination ; it made an appeal to the honour and
generosity of an enemy, which ought to have been listened to,
if England had more highly appreciated the moral grandeur of
its hospitality than the political safety of the world. England
alone might have committed this generous imprudence; but
she formed a part of the European crusade against the' man
who had subdued and reduced the continent to servitude.
Greatness of soul may be expected from a court, never from a
coalition. Collective acts are more implacable than individual

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 43
Gourgaud and Las Cases sent to England.
ones, because no one in particular bears the responsibility in
the eyes of mankind. A statesman is sometimes guided by the
dictates of his heart, a congress of kings or of nations solely by
those of policy. Vengeance counselled reprisals, policy autho
rised the sovereigns and the nations to rely no more on the
faith of a man who had violated his word by tearing the treaty
of Fontainebleau, and returned, sword in hand, upon the soil and
to the throne which he had renounced by that treaty.
It cannot be sufficiently deplored, for the dignity and the
morality of history, that England did not magnanimously re
spond to the letter of Napoleon by granting him an asylum.
True greatness is sovereign wisdom. We are never deceived
by our virtues. XXXII.
Gourgaud was commissioned to bear this letter to London.
His instructions were to use every effort to obtain an audience
ofthe Prince Regent, a personage of an indolent but honourable
mind, of whom he was to ask for Napoleon a country residence
at a short distance from London, promising, on the part ot
Napoleon, that he would engage to live there as a private
individual ; that he would take the name of Muiron, or of
Duroc, two of his military companions whom he had loved
and lost, and whose names he adopted with a fond remem
brance, the proof of an honourable tenderness of soul. Further,
that lie would accept the superintendence of a commissioned
officer stationed about him.
A second letter, addressed in the name of the Emperor
to Captain Maitland by the marshal of the palace, Bertrand,
acquainted this officer that Napoleon would go at four o'clock
the next morning on board the Bellerophon. Gourgaud and
Las Cases, the bearers of these letters, departed in the evening
to deliver them to Captain Maitland. They were immediately
put on board a light vessel which conveyed them towards the
English coast, there to execute their mission.
The night of the 1 5 th July was again full of irresolutions
on the part of Napoleon, of anxieties, of doubts, and of
solicitations to change his mind from his devoted mariners,

44 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 28.
Napoleon embarks on board the Bellerophon.
who vowed to withdraw him secretly from the faithless asylum
which he was demanding from his enemies. He was still in
a state of hesitation when General Becker acquainted him
with the arrival at Rochefort of M. de Rigny, captain of a
frigate, and nephew of the Abbe Louis, direct from Ghent,
whither he had followed the King, and now commissioned, it
was said, to arrest Napoleon, if he prolonged any further
his residence on a French island where he was an outlaw.
Napoleon dressed himself as if for one of the grand
ceremonials of his life, and embarked with General Becker
and his officers in a boat which immediately put him on board
a French brig, prepared for his conveyance to the English
squadron. Becker went on board the brig with him, and
asked permission to accompany him to the very last step
he should take on a French deck. " Do nothing of the kind,
general," said the Emperor, with a delicacy of sentiment
which attested the solicitude of a man of honour for the fame
of his guardian. " Do nothing of the kind ; we must be rnind-
. ful of France. If you accompanied me to the Bellerophon, it
might be thought that you had delivered me up to the Eng
lish. It is entirely of my own free will that I go on board
the English cruiser ; I do not wish France to lie under the
suspicion and appearance of such an act of treachery." Then,
holding out his hand to Becker: "Embrace me, general," he
said to him. " I thank you for all the care you have tajken of
me. I regret that I have not known you sooner. Farewell !"
Becker, moved even to tears, embraced the Emperor, and wished
him greater happiness than he left behind him.
XXXIII
The brig was speedily wafted towards the Bellerophon,
where Napoleon was received by Captain Maitland, his officers
and crew, with all the respect and etiquette due to his title,
to his name, and to his misfortunes. The brig then departed,
casting over the waves one last cry of "Vive I'Empereur!"
The white flag was hoisted on all the ships in the roads, and
the second Empire was at an end. Napoleon, from the poop

1815.1 OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 45
Reception of his letter to the Prince Regent.
of an English man of war, witnessed the disappearance, with
his colours, of the last trace of his sovereignty, uncertain if
the deck upon which he stood was an asylum or a prison.
Admiral Hotham, an officer of the most dignified mind
and manners, a true type of the naval aristocracy of England
both in features and sentiments, arrived a few moments after
on board the Bellerophon. He requested permission of the
Emperor, who had already retired to his cabin, to pay his
respects to him, and conversed respectfully with him. On
the following day he received Napoleon on board his flag
ship, with the honours due to a sovereign visiting his fleet.
After this reception the Emperor returned to the Bellsrophon,
which immediately made sail for Torbay. He was there re
joined by Gourgaud, who had not been permitted to land for
the purpose of accomplishing his mission to the Prince Regent.
The Bellerophon anchored in Plymouth Sound, where the port
Admiral Keith received the Emperor with the same respectful
consideration which had been evinced for him in the squadron
of Admiral Hotham. The curiosity of the English people to
contemplate on board the vessel which bore the fugitive Em
peror of the French, the monument of so great a vicissitude
of fate, drew crowds of boats and craft around the Bellerophon,
day and night. Their eagerness took the aspect of enthu
siasm ; for men are disposed to admire greatness when they
cease to fear it. Napoleon was the spoil of England, and
they were never weary of looking at him. The spectacle alone
of such a marvel of fortune constitutes an era in life.
' Napoleon's letter to the Prince Regent had been transmitted
to London to the council of ministers. They did not recognise
to themselves the right of deliberating alone on the fate of an
enemy who had fallen into the power of Great Britain inconse
quence of the events of a war waged in common with their allies.
They looked upon Napoleon as the captive ofthe coalition, merely
thrown as a deposit into their hands ; they therefore declined
the responsibility of deciding between a state of captivity and
an exercise of British hospitality. Necessity alone had thrown
Napoleon, conquered, and without a footing on terra-firma,
upon the deck of one of their vessels. Had he surrendered on

46 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 28.

Napoleon in Plymouth Sound.

the field of battle to a Russian, a Prussian, or an Austrian
officer, would they themselves have recognised in the King of
Prussia, the Emperor of Russia, or the Emperor of Austria,
the right of disposing alone of the common enemy ? Evidently
not ; they therefore referred the matter to their allies, who
made the following declaration on the subject :
" Article I. Napoleon Bonaparte is regarded by the powers
who signed the treaty of the 5 th of March last, as their
prisoner. " Article II. He is specially confided to the guardianship
of the British government.
"Article III. The allied powers will appoint commissioners,
who will reside on the spot which may be assigned by the
British government for the residence of Napoleon Bonaparte."
England, in thus accomplishing the duty of not disposing of
a collective prisoner, undertook, nevertheless, three odious
parts, with which its history will remain tainted in future times :
that of delivering up to Europe a refugee, not taken on the
field of battle, but a voluntary suppliant of its hospitality ; that
of keeping watch alone over his chains ; and finally, that of
assigning him his prison. England, the champion of the
world, became its gaoler. She took upon herself the severity,
the distance, and the maledictions of the captivity. Her glory
is tarnished by it. A more generous hospitality might have
been less honourable towards the allied powers, might have
afforded less security for the present, but would have exhibited
more humanity and more majesty in the page of history.
XXXIV.
Napoleon consumed the six days passed in Plymouth
Sound in conjectures on his own fate, in gazing on the English
coast, and in receiving impressions of his popularity so powerful
in the minds of his enemies, shown by the avidity with which
they sought a glance at his profile as he paced backwards and
forwards on the poop of the Bellerophon. He measured his
own greatness by their curiosity, and derived a sad enjoy

1S15.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 47
His protest on being destined to St. Helena.
ment from this spectacle of himself. His mind resumed its
serenity in this state of repose. He had reached the extremity
of his ruin, but this ruin was still glorious.
On the 7th of August the Bellerophon brought him back to
Torbay, where Admiral Cockburn awaited him on board the
Northumberland. Here his sword was taken from him as from
a prisoner of war. He became indignant, and blushed more for
his enemies than for himself. The admirals blushed them
selves, and respected this susceptibility of the warrior. Ber
trand, Savary, Lallemand, and Gourgaud, his military com
panions and followers, were likewise disarmed. Before quitting
the vessel, which had hitherto borne him and his friends, to go
on board the Northumberland, Napoleon was obliged to part
with some of his followers. Even Savary was taken from him,
and he was only left Bertrand, Madame Bertrand, and their
children ; Las Cases and his son, M. and Madame Montholon,
Gourgaud, and his most attached servants. He bade adieu to
all the others, and receiving in that moment of emotion the
tidings of the capitulation of Paris, shut himself up alone in his
cabin, where he was heard to weep. The man, who had not
shed a tear over the bodies of 400,000 men, strewing the
snows of Russia with a continuous line of dead, over the disas
trous battle of Leipsic, over the lost empire at Fontainebleau,
or over Waterloo, the tomb of his last army, wept with shame
on reading the details of the second occupation of Paris, and on
tearing from his heart the small number of friends, companions
of his exile, grudged him by the harshness of his enemies. He
was already apprised that St. Helena was the place appointed
for his future residence.
Having concealed his tears for a moment, though unable to
stifle the noise of his sobs, he resumed the majesty of his mis
fortune, and went on board the Northumberland. There he
gave utterance to the following protest, the first reprisal of his
ill fortune, against the English government. It was his appeal
to history, which is bound to record it.
" I hereby solemnly protest," he said, reading this act ad
dressed to futurity — " I protest in the face of heaven and

48 RESTORATION OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE [BOOK 28.
Departure of the Northumberland.
mankind, against the violation of my most sacred rights, in
forcibly disposing of my person and liberty. I came voluntarily
on board the Bellerophon; I am not the prisoner, I am the
guest of England.
" When once on board the Bellerophon I was entitled to the
hospitality of the British people. If the government, in giving
the captain of the Bellerophon orders to receive me and my
followers, only wished to lay a snare, it has forfeited its honour,
and disgraced its flag.
" If this act be consummated it will be in vain for the
English henceforth, to talk of their sincerity, their laws, and
liberties. British faith will have been lost in the hospitality of
the Bellerophon.
" I appeal to history. It will say, that an enemy, who for
twenty years made war against the English people, came spon
taneously in the hour of misfortune to seek an asylum under their
laws. What more striking proof could he give of his esteem
and confidence ? But how did England reply to such an act of
magnanimity ? It pretended to hold out a -hospitable hand to
this enemy ; and on giving himself up with confidence he was
immolated! (Signed) Napoleon.
" Bellerophon, (at sea,) Friday, August 4, 1815 "
On the evening of the 8th August the Northumberland got
under weigh and made sail for St. Helena. At daybreak the
next morning the coast of France was still in sight. Napoleon
gazed on it for a long time, and when at length it melted away
in the distance, he exclaimed : " Farewell ! land of the brave !"
He then assumed the idle and careless life of a passenger on
board ship during a voyage, which suspends all action, and lulls
the thoughts to rest.
We shall now leave him progressing towards his island and
towards the memory of his deeds, and resume the recital of
events from which his great destiny has drawn us, with tho
unlimited power of human affairs, which never palpitate more
effectually than in the heart of a great man vanquished and
outliving his destiny.

BOOK TWENTY-NINTH.
Wellington after the Battle of Waterloo— His despatch to the Duke de
Berry — His letter to Dumouriez — He enters France — His proclama
tion to the French people — He writes to the Duke de Feltre and to
M. de Talleyrand— Entrance of Louis XVIII. into France — Con
ferences of Haguenau — Wellington's reply to the French Plenipoten
tiaries — Dismissal of M. de Blacas — Louis XVIII. at Cateau-
Cambresds — His proclamation to the French — He arrives at Cam-
bray — Second proclamation to the French — Intrigues of Fouche with
the Provisional Government in favour of the Bourbons — Davoust
appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Army — Efforts of Messrs.
de Vitrolles and Ouvrard amongst the Chiefs of the Army — The
Provisional Government orders M. de Vitrolles to be arrested — His
Flight — Address of several generals to the Chamber of Representa
tives — Conference of the Chamber of Peers — Plenipotentiaries sent to
Wellington and Blucher to negociate an armistice— Conferences of
the Plenipotentiaries with Wellington — Blucher crosses to the left
bank of the Seine — Situation of France — Sirength of the Army—
Excelmans attacks and routs a corps of Prussian cavalry — Council of
Government — Council of War at La Villette — It authorises Davoust
to capitulate — Application of Davoust to Blucher — Blucher's reply —
Fouche sends Colonel Macirone to Wellington, and General Tromelin
to Blucher — Conferences at St. Cloud — Capitulation of Paris —
Adoption of the Convention of St. Cloud by the Chamber of
Representatives — Agitation of the people — Opposition ofthe Army —
Entrance of the English and Prussians into Paris — The Chamber of
Representatives — Vote of the Constitution — Interview between Wel
lington and Fouche at Neuilly — Presentation of Fouche to the King,
Louis XVIII., by M. de Talleyrand — Conference — Nomination of
FouchS to the Ministry of Police — Composition of the Ministry-
Interview between Louis XVIII. and M. de Chateaubriand — Con
ferences of the Provisional Government — Occupation of the Tuileries,
and expulsion of the Commission by Blucher — Dispersion of tr
Chamber of Peers — M. Decazes shuts up the Chamber of Represen
tatives — Impotence of Lafayette — Interview between Carnot and
FouchS. I.
The evening before the battle of Waterloo, the Duke of
Wellington, anticipating that a more successful result would
3 D

50 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 29.
Wellington's letters and proclamation.
attend Napoleon's attack upon the forest of Soighies, and
already preparing an eventual retreat of his own army, which
would have laid open Brussels and Ghent, had written to the
Duke de Berry, to induce Louis XVIII. to quit Ghent at the first
signal. At that residence of the King all was distrust and un
certainty ; for they had been so much accustomed to the triumphs
of Napoleon that neither the still unknown genius of Welling
ton, nor the fiery bravery of Blucher could restore confidence to
the fugitive court. The King prepared himself with resigna
tion to carry still farther, and perhaps beyond the seas, his tent
and his government. The noise ofthe cannon had resounded the
whole day of the 18th June even upon the heights in the vicinity
of Ghent. Sinister tidings spread at Brussels by the fugitive
English camp followers, which reached with customary exagge
rations the ears of the King and the princes, had made of this day,
which restored to them both country and throne, a day of
anguish, of panic, and despair. Their fate was deciding at a
distance sufficiently near for them to experience all its atten
dant emotions, but too remote to become acquainted with its
vicissitudes. Wellington, however, hastened during the night
which followed the battle to reassure them. He wrote with
his own hand to the Duke de Berry, commander-in-chief of the
little army of the King at Alost, announcing the victory. "As
I expect to pass the frontier to-morrow," wrote the victorious
general, " I beg of your Royal Highness to advance and join
us. I write also to the King to request him to put himself in
motion by the same route."
On the same night he wrote to General Dumouriez, that old
French deserter, who closely watched the war against his
country, and to whom Wellington gave an account of his
successes, as a scholar to a master in the art of war. " You
will learn what I have done," he said, " and I hope you will be
satisfied. I have never witnessed such a battle, nor gained
6uch a victory, and I hope we have done with Bonaparte! We
are going to pursue him while he lives."
The following day be addressed a proclamation to the
French people on crossing the frontier, to announce to them
that he was entering at the head of a victorious army, not as an

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 51
His letter to M. de Talleyrand.
enemy but a liberator, and to assist them in throwing off the
yoke of the enemy of the human race, with whom no one could
have either truce or peace. He recommended the most
scrupulous discipline to his army.
The Duke also wrote to the Duke de Feltre, minister of
war to Louis XVIII. at Ghent, to urge the King, whose pre
sence was very necessary, to follow his steps, and to present
himself to the French people, who were imploring his return
and his mediation. " We already find," he said, " the white
flag flying. in the towns and villages. The defeat of Napo
leon's army is more decisive than was at first imagined. The
soldiers are going in bodies to their homes, the cavalry and
artillery are selling their horses in the country they pass
through, the infantry are throwing away their arms and dispers
ing to return to their dwellings. There are more than 2,000
muskets to be picked up in the forest of Mormal."
He summoned the officers commanding garrisons, and the
general who occupied Cambray, to surrender their arms to the
King of France. Finally, preoccupied himself, as much as the
ministers of Louis XVIII., with the apprehension of a differ
ence of opinion amongst the allied powers as to restoring the
throne to the King, he wrote to M. de Talleyrand from Cateau-
Cambresis, where that prince had arrived immediately after
him :
" The King has arrived, and has been received by the in
habitants with the transports of joy that I expected. I am
sorry you have not accompanied the King here : it is I who
have anxiously entreated his Majesty to enter France with us,
because I was desirous, by his presence, of giving to the battle
of Waterloo all the results it ought to have ; and because, fore
seeing that his Majesty would encounter a serious crisis in the
recovery of his throne, above all, when we should approach
Paris, I wished the King to be as near as possible to the scene
which was to decide his fate. I do not doubt that if you had
known the considerations which have directed me in this matter,
you would, instead of advising the King at Mons not to enter
France have given his Majesty a different counsel."
In another letter, the Duke of Wellington more clearly

52 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 29.
Conferences at Haguenau,

expressed his apprehension, if Louis XVIII. did nipt hasten
to resume his rights as a sovereign, taking the crovyn by his
own will and that of his people, that Austria, Prussia, and
Russia might abandon the cause of the legitimate sovereign,
and transfer his right to some other prince of the house of
Bourbon, or of the family of Napoleon.
The King, deaf to the counsels of M. de Talleyrand, and
heeding only those of the Duke of Wellington, advanced with
his little court and army towards Cambray. He was received
everywhere as the natural mediator between the people and
the foreign powers. Independent of the Royalist sentiments,
more developed in the north and west than in the centre of
France, and which urged the people forward to receive him,
the instinct of public safety predominated over the negociations
of all parties, and evidently invited this prince a second time to
pacify and preserve the soil from the reprisals of Europe.
Nothing could resist this general current of opinion and good
sense in France. The tangled web of the 20th of March un
ravelled itself everywhere on the approach of the King. At
Paris only, the centre of all intrigues and all factions, Na
poleonist, Orleanist, military, or parliamentary, there were
still some difficulties to be solved. II
Lafayette, Sebastiani, and Laforet, the plenipotentiaries
appointed by Fouche to go to the head-quarters of the allied
powers to pursue the shadow of a negociation, the meaning of
which we have before explained, obtained nothing but evasive
respect and procrastination. At Haguenau, the temporary
residence of the two emperors and the King of Prussia, these
sovereigns had eluded the audiences demanded by the envoys.
M. de Lafayette, who reckoned on his name, and on some
personal intercourse which he had had the year before with
the Emperor Alexander, at the house of Madame de Steel
attempted in vam to renew it, with the view of drawing him
into some ill-defined plan of modified empire, or of royalty
impaired by the illegitimacy of the crown. Alexander refused

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 53
Wellington's reply to the French negociators.
to see him. Tho sovereigns contented themselves with
naming commissioners, before whom the French plenipoten
tiaries were to be admitted to produce the bases of their nego
ciations. These conferences, which were only a diversion for
Fouche, were also nothing more on the part of the allied
powers than an act of aimless complaisance. They were con
sumed in idle conversations, in which they spoke of the throne
of France for Napoleon II. , for the Duke d'Orleans, for the
Prince of Orange, or for the King of Saxony. These chimeras
of the Bonapartist party, who only sought to avoid a total con
tradiction of the revolution of the 20th of March, did not even
obtain the honour of a serious refutation. If it was humiliat
ing to the Bonaparte faction, or the enemies of the Bourbons,
again to receive Louis XVIII., imposed upon them by neces
sity and by victory, but accepted by the opinions of a ma
jority of the people, it was a thousand times more shameful to
solicit from the complaisance of the sovereigns who had con
quered Bonaparte, a foreign prince unknown to the country.
M. de Lafayette, and M. de Laforet, exhibited in these con
ferences as little political good sense as of real national spirit.
Sebastiani appeared better to appreciate the force and propriety
of circumstances. " The French people," he said, " are still
free in their choice ; they have pronounced for nothing ; they
only ask for peace, and the re-establishment of friendly rela
tions with the rest of Europe." The conferences, after these
short ramblings of mere words, were put an end to by the
English commissioner, who, in concert with his colleagues,
declared that he had no power to stipulate anything.
III.
The Duke of Wellington replied with more politeness, but
also with more frankness, to such of the plenipotentiaries as
had been directed to his head quarters, and to that of Blucher.
He did not dissemble from them, that in his opinion the first
condition of any armistice, or of any negotiation, was the re
cognition of the rights of Louis XVIII., expelled from the
throne by a conquered faction, and re-entering with full rights

54 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 29.
Dismissal of M. de Blacas.
into his power on the ruins of that faction. Nevertheless,
already agreeing in everything with M. de Talleyrand and with
Fouch6, who corresponded every day with him, and who were
desirous of obtaining from the King the dismissal of M. de
Blacas, and the appointment of a ministry more national
and more in the interest of their party, the Duke readily
acknowledged to the plenipotentiaries that the King had com
mitted some errors in 1814, that he had not surrounded him
self with statesmen sufficiently characterised by their constitu
tional spirit ; he assured them also that on returning to Paris
this prince would freely give all the pledges compatible with
the dignity of the throne. With respect to the insinuation of
the partisans of the Duke d'Orleans, the Duke of Wel
lington replied, that to place this prince upon the throne would
be to give the lie to every principle of hereditary right which
regulated all the monarchies in Europe ; and that in the eyes
of England he would be nothing but another Napoleon without
his glory, and an usurper possessed of royal blood.
IV
During these vain attempts at negociation, the King ad
vanced slowly in rear of the armies of Wellington and Blucher.
Before he placed his foot upon the French soil he had at
length separated from M. de Blacas, that devoted but dreaded
favourite, whose unpopularity would have excited between
France and the King an ill-timed antipathy. It was with dif
ficulty, however, that M. de Chateaubriand and his friends,
M. de Talleyrand, Fouche, and their agents, even the Duke of
Wellington himself, could obtain from the King this sacrifice
;o necessity. The separation, which was painful to the King,
vas smoothed to the favourite by titles and largesses to the
imount of seven or eight millions of francs. M. de Blacas'
Droved himself worthy of these benefactions of his master, by
aying his fortune, the gift of the royal hand, at the feet of
Jharles X., dethroned and poor during his last exile. Louis
CVI1I. was scarcely delivered from the dangerous presence of
VL. de Blacas in his council when he published at Cateau-

1815.) OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 55

First proclamation of Louis XVIII.

Cambresis the royal proclamation which summoned his people
once more around him.
" From the period," said the King, " when the most criminal
of enterprises, seconded by the most inconceivable defection,
constrained us for awhile to quit our kingdom, we have apprised
you of the dangers which threatened you if you did not hasten
to break the yoke of the tyrant usurper.
" We have felt no desire to unite our arms or those of our
family with the instruments chosen by Providence to punish
the treason. But now that the powerful efforts of our allies
have scattered the satellites of the tyrant, we hasten to ,return
to our kingdom, to re-establish therein the constitution that we
have given to France, to repair, by all the means that are in
our power, the evils caused by the revolt, and by the war which
was the necessary consequence of it ; to recompense the good,
and to execute the existing laws against the guilty : finally, to
recall around our paternal throne the vast majority of the
French people, whose fidelity, courage, and devotion have
brought such sweet consolation to our heart.
"Given at Cateau-Cambresis, the 25th June, 1815, and
the twenty-first year of our reign. (Signed) "Louis."
The spirit of M. de Blacas was still visible in this impru
dent proclamation, drawn up by the King and by his chancellor
M. Dambray. The resentment couched in the words might
urge the Chambers, the army, and the numerous accomplices
of the 20th March into despair, by the prospect of punishment
with which the prince impohtically threatened them. Amnesty
is the first condition of reconciliations between a king and his
people. A conqueror would scarcely have had the right to
sfleak in such terms. Louis XVIII. was only a vanquished
man brought back by a foreign victory. His part was, there
fore, to present himself as the intercessor and not the execu
tioner of Europe. This ill-advised proclamation slackened
the movement which was drawing all around him.

56 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 29.

Second and more conciliatory.

V.
The King arrived at Cambray, the gates of which were
opened to him by the people, in spite of the resistance of the
garrison. He entered it by the triumphal breach which the
love of the people, and the frenzy of the women and children
had made for him, and which young maidens strewed with
flowers. He found there his whole ministry, who freed him
from all recollection of the policy of M. de Blacas, and who
induced him to issue a proclamation to the French people,
more able and more paternal than the last.
" The gates of my kingdom," said the King, " fly open
before me. I hasten to place myself a second time between
the French people and the allied armies, in the hope that the
feelings of consideration of which I may be the object will tend
to the preservation of my subjects. This is the only way in
which I have wished to take part in the war. I have not
suffered any prince of my family to appear in foreign ranks,
and I have restrained the courage of those of my servants who
had been able to range themselves around me.
" Returned to my native country, I feel a peculiar pleasure in
speaking confidence to my people. When I re-appeared amidst
them before, I found men's minds heated and carried away
by conflicting passions. My views encountered difficulties and
obstacles on every side. My government, therefore, was liable
to commit errors ; perhaps it did commit them. There are
times when the purest intentions are insufficient to direct, and
sometimes they even mislead. Experience alone can teach; it
shall not be thrown away ; all that can save France is my wish.
" My subjects have learned, by cruel experience, that the
principle of the legitimacy of sovereigns is one of the fundf-
mental bases of social order; the only one upon which, amidst
a great nation, a wise and rational liberty can be established.
This doctrine has just been proclaimed as that of all Europe.
I had previously consecrated it by my charter, and I will add
to that charter every guarantee which nan secure its benefits.

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE.
Proclamation issued by the King.

" The unity of the ministry is the strongest that I can
offer. I design that it should exist, and that the frank and
firm march of my council should guarantee all interests, and
calm all troubles.
" Some persons have spoken of the re-establishment of
tithes and feudal rights. This fable, invented by the common
enemy, needs no refutation. It will not be expected that the
King of France should stoop to repel calumnies and lies.
The success of the treason has too clearly indicated their
source. If the purchasers of national property have felt alarm,
the charter should suffice to re-assure them. Did I not, myself,
propose to the Chambers, and cause to be executed, sales of
such property ? This proof of my sincerity is incontrovertible.
"In these latter times my subjects of all classes have given
me unequivocal proofs of their love and fidelity. I wish them
to know how sensibly I feel them, and that it is from among
all Frenchmen I shall delight to choose those who are to
approach my person and my family.
" I wish to exclude from my presence none but those whose
celebrity is matter of grief to France, and of horror to Europe.
In the plot which they contrived I perceive several of my sub
jects to have been misled, and some guilty.
" I promise — I who never promised in vain, as all Europe
can witness — to pardon misled Frenchmen all that has trans
pired from the day I quitted Lille amidst so many tears, up to the
day when I re-entered Cambray amidst so many acclamations.
" But the blood of my people has flowed in consequence of
a treason unprecedented in the annals of the world. That
treason has summoned foreigners into the heart of France.
Every day reveals to me a fresh disaster. I owe it, therefore,
to the dignity of my crown, to the interest of my people, and
to the repose of Europe, to exempt from pardon the authors
and instigators of this horrible plot. They shall be delivered
over to the vengeance of the laws by the two Chambers which
I propose forthwith to assemble.
" Frenchmen ! such are the sentiments which he brings
among you whom time has not been able to change, nor
calamities, fatigues, nor injustice made to stoop.

58 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 29.
Intrigues of Fouche in favour of the Bourbons.
" The King, whose fathers have reigned for ages over yours,
returns to devote the remainder of his days to your defence and
consolation. " Given at Cambray the 28th day of the month of June,
the year of grace 1815, and of our reign the twenty-first.
(Signed) " Louis."
VI
This manifesto displayed the insinuating spirit of M. de
Talleyrand, the royalist magnanimity of M. de Chateaubriand,
and the majestic style of the King himself. Having been
concerted also with Fouche, whose emissaries succeeded each
other under various disguises around the prince, it produced an
immense impression on the public mind in favour of the King.
His promises rendered all averse to resistance, except three or
four great culprits of the 20th March, for whom the irritated
nation did not feel disposed to sacrifice its existence, or to
postpone its pacification.
The marshals and generals who had continued faithful to
the King's cause during the second reign of Napoleon, hastened
to meet him. Macdonald, Oudinot, and Gouvion St. Cyr were
already at Cambray. The remains of the army which had
fallen back upon Paris, and the Chambers within the walls of
the capital, were alone opposed to the complete restoration of
the Bourbons. Fouche still pretending to negotiate with the
enemy, in reality negociated with the Chambers. But embar
rassed by his colleagues in the government, he reckoned on the
pressure of the public danger to assist him to triumph over
the obstacles which surrounded him, and to urge that royalist
cry which was still restrained by a dread of the army in Paris.
If, on the one hand, this minister, thrown into the midst of so
many perils, was impatiently wishing to have done with the
wrecks of Napoleon, on the other he was not sorrv that the
prolongation and complication of these difficulties, increased
even by the nature of things under the footsteps of Louis
XVIII. added more importance and more value to the services

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 59
Davoust appointed commander of the army.
he wished to render to him, in order to redeem his unpardon
able regicide in the heart of the King, and to secure a large
portion of power, after his second accession.
VII.
He sounded the government several times on the subject of
proclaiming the Bourbons These hints being unfavourably
received by the majority of his colleagues, and above all, by
Carnot, who wished to have some pledges of freedom in ex
change for the throne restored to the King, Fouche was com
pelled to await a more critical moment. The first condition
of liberty for Paris was the removal of the army, which was
filled with the creatures of Napoleon, and which, by fraternising
with the Chambers, the federes, and the faubourgs, might bury
Paris beneath its own ruins. Fouche, certain of the firmness,
the discretion, and the prudence of Marshal Davoust, caused
him to be appointed generalissimo of the protecting army.
Davoust was too much of a soldier to excite the suspicion of
the army, and too patriotic to sacrifice that army and the ca
pital to a paroxysm of rage against the Bourbons, and to a
posthumous devotion to Napoleon.
He established his head-quarters at La Villette, where
Grouchy, with all the chiefs, and all the corps of the army of
the north, collected around him; but with the enemy increasing
in front, Paris distracted and fluctuating behind them, this
was a situation that demanded negociation rather than a battle.
Fouche was constantly insinuating this, more or less obscurely,
to the marshal, who was sufficiently inclined to it himself, as
well as the generals and subordinate officers. The most diffi
cult to convince in appearance, evidently sought only to make
the best conditions. The numerous vicissitudes of their mili
tary lives had made them so pliable to events that their
honour being safe, not one of them would expose himself m -a
desperate opposition to fortune. They were only restrained
by that silent sense of shame which, in imperious, but grievous
circumstances, prevents everyone from taking the initiative
and responsibility of a resolution secretly desired by all. ine

GO HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 29.
Carnot's suspicions of Fouche.
head-quarters of the marshal were besieged by semi-official
counsellors, secret agents, negociators avowed or disavowed by
the King, by M. de Talleyrand, by Fouche, who mingled in
the conversations of the generals, and used every effort to
incline them to capitulation. Amongst these was M. de
Vitrolles, a man very adroit in introducing himself everywhere,
and who knew how far he might venture to go with characters
moved by self-interest ; M. Ouvrard also, one of the most
adventurous seekers of fortune under the Directory, who knew
the influence of public affairs upon money, and of money upon
public affairs. All these men, some through interest, others
through opinion, urged the generals to bend to circum
stances. The majority of good citizens spoke the same Ian
guage to the army. What end could it answer to persist in
a military antipathy against the Bourbons, when Napoleon was
vanquished, dethroned, and a fugitive, already perhaps on his
way to the new world ; and when the capital and the country
had nothing more to give than their ashes to feed the fanati
cism for his name ? VIII.
Carnot suspected Fouche of prompting the country, through
the mouths of these men, with the name of Louis XVIII., and
thus losing the concessions which he still hoped to draw from
the monarchy. Provoked by some Bonapartist representatives
in the Assembly who wished to dispute the entrance of the
King into Paris, and who, in an undertone, accused Fouche of
treason, Carnot at length broke out in the council against the
manoeuvres of which the head-quarters of the army were the
focus, and against the intervention of M. de Vitrolles, the avowed
agent of the royalists, the insurrectionist of Toulouse, who
had been imprisoned for that act, but was now free, and cor
rupting the generals with impunity when he ought to be shut
up in the dungeons of Vincennes. "Yes," he exclaimed,
" this man is conspiring for Louis XVIII., and he is, perhaps,
not the only one," he added, casting into the eyes of his col
league one of those glances which terminate a sentence. " Do

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE.

Military address to the Chambers.

you mean to say that I conspire with him?'' demanded Fouche,
affecting an assurance which Carnot's summons had for a
moment disturbed. " If so, speak out, and accuse me before
the Chamber ! There is nothing to prevent you, but I shall
defend myself. " Carnot, as prompt, in disavowing his suspi
cion as he had been bold in uttering it, said that he did not
accuse his colleague of a guilty complicity with this royalist
agent; but that this man corrupted even the generalissimo
himself, and he was very desirous of sending him to prison
again. " What ! " exclaimed Fouche, derisively ; " you also
suspect even Marshal Davoust himself! Him, at least, it will
be difficult to arrest; go and seize him, if you dare, in the
midst of his army ! "
Fouche opposed the arrest of M. de Vitrolles. Caulain
court, having some personal connections with this agent of
Louis XVIII., declined voting; the majority, however, decided
on the arrest, but Fouche having apprised his agent, the latter,
by that means, escaped a few days' imprisonment. Carnot,
careless and silent, appeared to content himself with this
puerile satisfaction afforded to his suspicions, and yielded once
more, though with a murmur, under the ascendancy of Fouche
and the progress of events. IX.
A small number of excited generals alone, of all the army,
were indignant at the visible appearance of the negociations
which were concocting between Davoust, Grouchy, and the
foreign armies. Generals Dejean, Freissinet, and some of the
colonels and officers of the army, signed an address to the
Chambers, to protest against the return of the Bourbons.
This address, communicated to Davoust, and sent to the Cham
ber of Representatives, was read there by Dupont (de I'Eure).
Generals Pajol, Freissinet, d'Erlon, Roguet, Harlet, Pelet,
Christian, Brunet, Chasteau, Vandamme, and Ambert had
signed it. Davoust himself, not to break with his generals,
had consented to put his name to it. " The Bourbons offer
no guarantee to France ; we are ready to die against them,"

(12 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 29.
Consultation in the Chamber of Peers.
said this address, which was a sort of renewed oath of the
20th of March.
It received some vain applause from the Bonapartist or
military parties of the Assembly ; but it changed nothing in
the necessities of the moment, before which words were no
longer availing. The march of events left the Chambers be
hind them. Marshal Davoust himself had only signed this
protest that he might not lose his influence with his comrades,
Grouchy, by his orders and those of Fouche, negotiated for an
armistice ; everybody negociated but nobody wished to have the
appearance of doing so. People closed their eyes to the par
leying that was going on between the two armies and the two
causes. Marshal Ney, .Marshal Grouchy, and Marshal Mortier
being consulted by the Chamber of Peers on the possibility of
prolonging the defence of Paris, after the taking of the village
of Aubervilliers by the troops of Blucher, replied that a capi
tulation was indispensably called for by the laws of civilized
warfare, if it was not wished to give up the capital to the
assault and ravage of an irresistible enemy. The Chamber
convinced, but still restrained by the protests of some generals,
less sincere, or more desperate in their cause, awaited, never
theless, the result of another negociation opened by M.
Bignon. This minister, who carried the illusions of diplomacy
into the realities of war, had sent plenipotentiaries to the
Duke of Wellington and to Blucher, to ask them for an armis
tice after the failure of Lafayette and of Sebastiani. These
diplomatic plenipotentiaries, Andreossy, Valence, Boissy
d'Anglas, Flaugergues, and Labesnardiere, were instructed to
propose, as an insurpassable limit for both armies, a line dis
tant twenty leagues from the capital. This line of demarcation,
arbitrarily traced upon the map by the minister in his cabinet,
was only defended by the finger of the diplomatist. Blucher
crossed it with contempt, and refused to listen to plenipoten
tiaries who had nothing but words to oppose to 200,000 men,
conquerors, and in a state of exasperation. He would scarcely
permit them, save out of consideration for his En°iish allies,
to pass through his advanced posts, and a portion of his army,
to go to the head quarters of his colleague Wellington.

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN KRANCE. G3
Wellington's report to his government.

x
Wellington reported to his government the following ac
count of his conference with them : " I have received the five
commissioners sent from Paris to ask me for a suspension of
hostilities. I told them that I could not in the present state
of affairs, look upon any attempt to negotiate with us but as a
snare ; and that to suspend my operations would be to betray
our allies. They told me they had every reason to believe
that Napoleon had definitively quitted Paris, and that in case
he should persist in remaining at Malmaison there were many
ways of getting rid of him, either by sending him to England,
or confiding him to the Emperor of Austria, his father-in-law.
I replied that I had no power to decide between these several
parties ; but that, if he was sent to England, I did not doubt
that the Prince Regent would consider it his duty to place him
at the disposal of his allies.
" They then told me they thought he was already at Roche
fort, or embarked for America, and asked if, in case this
departure should be accomplished, I would consent to suspend
my march upon Paris. 1 replied that, independent of the
presence of Napoleon, there were the adherents of his cause
who had declared war against the allies, and that before 1
could suspend a single operation prudence required that 1
should first see established in France the outline at least of a
government, which should give some pledges of security for
the peace of Europe. They requested me to indicate to them
the wishes of the allies on this subject, to which I replied that
I had no title whatever to speak on this matter, either in the
name of England or of the allies ; but that my private and
personal opinion was, that there would be no security^ for
Europe, or for France, but in the restoration of the King;
that any other system would inevitably give birth to fresh
causes of war ; that there was even more true dignity for^ the
French in recalling without conditions their fugitive King,
than to impose clogs upon him which would retard the peace,
and embarrass his constitutional intentions. They all pro-

64 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOB 29.'
Wellington's advice to the French negociators.
fessed before me their individual convictions that the recall of
the King could alone obviate the present calamitous circum
stances. They assured me that the re- establishment of Louis
XVIII. was at bottom the wish of the provisional government
itself; and that this government and the Chambers had only
proclaimed for the moment Napoleon II. to lull and conciliate
the soldiers who had taken refuge in Paris in such great num
bers after the battle of Waterloo, because a sedition amongst
them, causing a civil war, was apprehended. They also asked
me whether a regency conducting the affairs of the govern
ment in the name of Napoleon II. was likely to satisfy the
allies. I energetically replied I did not think it would.
Finally, they asked me what would be the case if any other
prince of a royal house were called to the throne of France ?
I declined discussing these hypotheses, and referred them to
what I had already said on the subject.
"They further followed me to my head-quarters at Louvres,
where they renewed their questions as to offering the throne
to any other prince than their King. I replied more catego
rically, that I saw no pledge of peace for France, or for the
security of Europe, but in Louis XVIII. The commissioners
replied that they perfectly understood me ; and some of them
added, in allusion to the opinion I had expressed, ' You are
perfectly right.'
" Finally, on the third day, having acquainted me with the
departure of Napoleon for the United States, and interrogated
•ne on what should be done as a preliminary to peace, I in
formed them that the principal obstacle to an armistice bein"
removed, the most fitting step to be taken, in my opinion,
would be to withdraw the French army behind the Loire, and
to confide Paris to the National Guard. I added, that if they
agreed to these terms, I would intercede with my colleague
Blucher, to induce him to suspend his march and further hos
tilities. They made objections to the retreat of the army
behind the Loire, although they had told me two evenings
before that the presence of the army at Paris had been the
only motive which had induced the government and the Cham
bers to proclaim Napoleon II. I replied that, as long as a

1815.J OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 65

Real strength of the French army.

single soldier remained in Paris I would not suspend my ope
rations; and, in fact, if they consented to restore Louis XVIII.
to his throne, this prince, surrounded in Paris by the army
and the Chambers, would be at the mercy of Napoleon's crea
tures, and the instrument of their designs."
XI
M. Bignon's plenipotentiaries re-entered Paris at the mo
ment that Blucher had turned the capital and crossed to the
left bank of the Seine. The city, but weakly fortified on both
banks, had nothing to defend it but the wrecks of Waterloo ;
reduced by desertion and discouragement to about 20,000 men
of all arms, the army of Grouchy reduced to 30,000 combat
ants, some depots of troops which had not yet been in the
field, some handfuls of volunteers and federes, fit only to fight
behind entrenchments, many pieces of cannon, and but few
artillery men, generals at variance in interests and opinions,
and distrusting one another, marshals, some of whom were
hastening to join the King, and others wishing in their hearts
to treat, while affecting, however, an inclination still to
fight, to satisfy their soldiers ; the most distinguished of them
loudly confessing in their conversation, and in their reports to
the Chambers, that the struggle, henceforth without object by
the abdication of the Emperor, would only result in the
conflagration of Paris, the massacre of the last remain
ing battalions, the fruitless and hopeless sacrifice of the
capital and of the country, to a shadow of empire that was
flying fast, and of which victory even could not recover
possession. The historians of the 20th of March, who have since enu
merated with great complacency the imposing forces rallied
under tho walls of Paris, estimating them at 110,000 men, have
taken figures for men in the military statements which they
have consulted. The army no longer existed, save in a nucleus
of 50,000 or 60,000 combatants around Paris, to protect the
government and the Chambers in the city, to defend the walls,
and hold possession of the country against 300,000 men,
3 E

CO HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 29.
Blucher sends a corps of cavalry to Versailles.
already covering both banks of the Seine, and against 450,000
more daily arriving from the Alps and the Rhine, through
Champagne and Burgundy.
The south was rising everywhere in insurrection for the
Bourbons, who were idolised by the population in those pro
vinces. The west was flying to arms, and organising itself
under royalist chiefs, to combat at the same time the troops of
Bonaparte, and to oppose the entrance of foreigners into their
country. The north was opening all its fortified places to the
King himself, and Paris awaited him with impatience. What,
therefore, could some thousands of men, even if they were
conquerors, do against three-fourths of all France, and against
the whole of Europe under the walls of Paris ? — Exasperate
the final victors, and pour to the shade of Napoleon one more
libation of blood. Such historians write to console a party, not
to bear witness to facts. For the interest of the country the
army was bound to preserve itself for France and for the King,
by sheltering itself behind the Loire, and by ceasing to deny
peace to the nation and the throne to Louis XVIII. The
most heroic warriors, the most experienced, and the most
compromised in the events of that epoch, Soult, Davoust,
Grouchy, Oudinot, Massena, and Ney himself; were unani
mously of this opinion. By what right do those party writers
accuse such masters in the art of war of inexperience, and
such brave men of cowardice? In their fanaticism for the
Emperor they even sacrifice his most intrepid generals
XII
Davoust was resolved on treating ; but, desirous of honour
ing the negociation by a feat of arms, to keep the Prussians
in check a few days longer, availed himself of a temerity
of Blucher, who had ventured one of his corps of cavalry as far
as Versailles, by crossing the Seine at St, Germain. He ac
cordingly ordered General Excelmans, who longed for exploits,
even after the annihilation of his hopes, to attack with 1,500
cavalry the corps of Blucher at Versailles, and drive it back
upon the Seine, and into that river This little exploit swept.

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 07

It is overthrown .by Excelmans.

the left bank of the river for a few days longer, giving more
time for the negociations, and teaching some respect to the
enemy. Excelmans was a man admirably chosen for
its execution. He was the Murat of the army of Paris.
Brought up in the school of the King of Naples, his friend
Excelmans had his rapidity and his chivalry in heart and
hand. Davoust had promised to support him with two corps
of infantry, which he ordered to recross the Seine for this
expedition. Excelmans having divided his cavalry into two
columns, advanced upon Versailles at the head of the first.
The second, commanded by General Vichery, diverged upon
Roquencourt, in order to take the Prussians in flank when
Excelmans should have attacked them in front. The Prussians,
who had already quitted Versailles, to spread themselves over
the plains of Paris on the left of the Seine, were encountered
by the column of Excelmans in the hollow roads of the forest
of Verrieres. The attack of the general was terrible ; his re
giments, animated by a chief who fought himself at the head
of his squadrons, sabred the Prussians into the very streets of
Versailles, and throwing them back upon Roquencourt, where
the column of Vichery awaited them, destroyed them to the
very last man. Being then free in his movements, and think
ing he formed the advance-guard of the two corps of infantry
promised by Davoust, Excelmans, with his two columns, re
united and victorious, galloped towards St. Germain to push
the remainder of Blucher's corps into the Seine. But at
Marly he came alone into collision with Blucher's masses of
infantry, which occupied the surrounding hills. The corps
of infantry which had been pushed forward in the morning by
Davoust had been countermanded. Fouche, being informed
of these hostile operations against the armies with which he
was in negociation, had energetically blamed this rashness, which
was useless for defence and fatal to peace. Davoust, being
convinced, had yielded. The heroism of Excelmans only
adorned with closing bloodshed, and a final lustre, the un
avoidable capitulation

08

HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 29.
United council of war and of government.

XIII.
Carnot, the most military member of the government, made
an inspection himself of the fortifications and the troops. He
declared before the council of war, assembled and united with
the government council, that it was certainly possible to sweep
for a moment the left bank of the river of the Prussians, who
were beginning to overspread it ; but that this success would
be momentary, and that when joined by the English army they
would soon recross the river in irresistible force and numbers.
The inferences drawn from his report were discouraging,
though bitter against the military chiefs. Fouche, being inter
rogated by Dupont de I'Eure on the state of the negociations,
declared that the allies were for imposing Louis XVIII. on
them, and that Europe was determined to have the Bourbons
at all hazards ; that to refuse them would be to authorise the
iron yoke which these princes, supported by Europe against
the powerless army, wished to impose upon the country ; that
to receive them, under national and constitutional conditions,
would be to save at once the capital, the nation, and their free
dom ; that stipulations would be made with them for the army,
for the Chambers, and for the men compromised in the 20th
of March, who would thus be shielded by an amnesty in a
capitulation. These words, supported by Massena and by Soult
who unanimously affirmed that the defence of Paris was
beyond all human power, gave a motive to the conviction of
the ministers, the representatives, and the military men pre
sent at this deliberation.
One alone, Marshal Lefevre, an old soldier, expressed an
opinion as to the possibility of defending, at least for a few
days longer, the left bank of the river. Fouche, pretendino- to
yield to the marshal's scruples of honour, ordered a council of
war to assemble at La Villette, in the quarters of the
generalissimo, to decide finally on the defensive situation of
Paris.

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 69

Davoust authorised to treat for a capitulation.

XIV.
This council of war, composed of all the marshals pre
sent at Paris, assembled in the night at the head-quarters of
La Villette. Soult maintained that the political situation of
the country was paramount to the military question ; that to
prolong the defence of Paris for a few days more or less would
only be time given to a more extensive irruption of the foreign
armies upon the soil of France, and around the capital. He
recognised frankly and resolutely the necessity of rallying
around Louis XVIII., if it were not wished that the fall of
Napoleon should occasion the ruin and dismemberment of the
country. Davoust, Grouchy, and even Vandamme, supported
with a sorrowful but stern conviction the prudent and politic
opinions of Marshal Soult. " Sound sense," they all exclaimed
in turn, " prompts us, and prompts all France, that there is no
safety but in the King, whose wisdom and moderation con
stitute the best treaty." Some young generals, amongst those
who earnestly longed for Napoleon II., in their fanaticism for his
father, and not to belie their recent enthusiasm, opposed some
vague objections. Military men in France are heroic soldiers
in causes still on foot — rarely martyrs to those that are fallen.
The council replied, that there was no hope in a battle, and
no guarantee for Paris in case of a prolonged defence under
its walls. Fouche, Carnot, Grenier, Caulaincourt, and Quinette,
armed with this deliberation of the chiefs of the army, which
covered their responsibility to the Chamber, authorised Davoust
the same night to conclude a capitulation. It was in vain that
the orators of the Napoleon party in the Chamber murmured
some imprecations against the necessity of the case, and some
insinuations of treason against Fouche ; the latter, shielded by
the revolutionary and military authority of Carnot and the
marshals, braved their murmurs.
Davoust sent a flag of truce to the army of Blucher, who
replied with the brutality of a barbarian, that he would listen
to no proposal of peace until the array had laid down its arms.

70 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 29,
Capitulation of Paris.
He insulted Davoust in his replies, by gross and calumnious
insinuations respecting depredations unjustly attributed to
this officer at Hamburg, while executing the orders of Napo
leon, against the navy and commerce of the Hanseatic Towns.
XV
Fouche, who corresponded with the English general by the
intervention of his confidant, Colonel Macirone, an Italian,
formerly aide-de-camp of Murat, requested Wellington to inter
cede with Blucher and incline him to negotiate. Wellington
wrote to the Prussian general that it would be rash in them
alone to invest Paris on all sides ; and that an armistice was
their best military measure, to give time to the Russian and
Austrian armies to come up to their assistance. Blucher,
influenced by his colleague, and by another negotiator of
Fouche, General Tromelin, agreed to a suspension of arms,
on condition that the French army should retire to a distance
of forty leagues from Paris. Wellington crossed over to the
left bank of the Seine, at Argenteuil, to strengthen Blucher
during these negociations. The chateau of St. Cloud, Napo
leon's palace of repose after his triumphs, was appointed by
the two generals for the place of conference. M. Bignon,
minister of foreign affairs, M. Bondy, prefect of Paris, and
General Guilleminot, major-general of the army under Davoust,
met Wellington and Blucher there, at four o'clock on the even
ing of the 3rd July.
This was precisely the hour when Napoleon had at length
quitted Malmaison, and stept unknown into a common carriage,
to proceed to the shore of the ocean. The evacuation of
Paris by the French army, and its retreat behind the Loire,
constituted the first article of the convention. The second
stipulated that the English and Prussian armies should pro
tect the actual authorities in Paris, as long as they should exist.
The artillery and ammunition were delivered to the allies.
It was in fact a real capitulation, vainly adorned, to save
the national honour, with the title of a convention ; but every
thing had unfortunately been sacrificed at Waterloo.

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 7]
Assented to by the Chamber of Representatives.

xvi.
Paris, in a state of consternation, presented in its boule
vards and its squares the same spectacle as in 1814: a migratory
mass of farmers, driven from their villages by the advance
of the foreign armies, encamped with their wives, their old
men, their children, their flocks, and their carts laden with
their furniture, in the streets and in the promenades of the
capital. Fouche, master of all the springs of the police, em
ployed them in spreading panic and mutual distrust in the
public mind, to disconcert any idea of military sedition in the
army, or of posthumous energy in the Chambers. He governed
the crisis in the street, as he had governed it in the council of
the Emperor, and in the council of government. The con
vention, thus adroitly prepared for, in the minds of the
humbled people, was promulgated without provoking a mur
mur : it was received with an official resignation, and with a
secret satisfaction by the Chamber The old minister of the
republic, Garat, ascended the tribune, and loudly acknow
ledged that honour was satisfied. He demanded solely that
they should avail themselves of this interregnum to proclaim,
in imitation of the English, a fundamental theory of the
rights of man, to be for ever acknowledged by the govern
ments which France should accept. This was opposed by
Manuel, who demanded that the Chamber should resume the
discussion of a constitution comprising one hundred articles, of
which he was reporter. It was, perhaps, to serve, and certainly
to gratify Fouche, thus to open a long and useless deliberation on
principles in an assembly which had the enemy at their gates,
and whose energy it was necessary to moderate and prevent
from exploding G eneral Solignac demanded that thanks should
be voted to the army. This vote was carried, and communi
cated in an address to the troops. XVII.
Meanwhile the convention was in course of execution,
without impediment, since the evening before, and St. Denis,

72 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 29.
Opposition of the army.

occupied by the allies, had displayed the white flag A pass
ing commotion agitated the faubourgs and the last battalions
of the army, at the moment when the Prussians arrived to
occupy the posts in the vicinity of the city, and abandoned by
the troops of the line. Some of the lower classes of the
people, and some disbanded soldiers, uttering a cry to arms,
mingled with imprecations against the traitors, fired their
muskets in the air, upon the ramparts, as if in defiance of the
foreigners, and to arouse the patriotism of the city; then
spread themselves in threatening groups towards the Tuileries,
where Fouche was sitting. Massena put himself at the head
of the National Guard, which he had called out to protect the
government and preserve order. The tumult subsided before
the old warrior and the bayonets of the citizens armed to pro
tect their city.
Outside the walls some battalions, desperate for a struggle,
received with threatening vociferations the order to quit the
capital. They shouted " Treason," and swore to the people who
were retaining them, to defend Paris in spite of their chiefs.
Some of them broke their arms and refused to march towards
the Loire ; while in the camp they talked of deposing from his
command the stern Davoust, and of proclaiming Vandamme
general and tribune of the troops. The Bonapartist generals
secretly fomented these revolts amongst the soldiers. Van
damme, a popular, but disciplined soldier, near to the legitimate
attainment of the highest dignities of the army, refused to
ascend to them by means of sedition. He had himself voted
in the council of defence, for an unavoidable retreat and for
the Bourbons, now the only guarantees of independence and
peace. General Drouot, who had commanded the Imperial
Guard at Waterloo, presented himself to the troops, and con
vinced them by his counsel and his example. The army then
contented itself with demanding its pay, after the example of
the Roman cohorts of the Lower Empire, as if it wished to
force a sale of its obedience upon that country, already over
whelmed by its war, and delivered up to the enemy by its
defeat. The government, trembling at these demands, emptied
the public coffers to satisfy them, and even borrowed from the

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 73

Entrance of the allied troops.

principal bankers of Paris the large sums necessary to appease
the chiefs and soldiers. M. Lafitte, a popular and liberal
banker, signalised himself by the generous co-operation which
he offered on that day to the government. He lent it his gold
and his credit, to preserve the city from the extremities to which
the sedition of the army might expose the citizens. Amidst
the sad necessities which the return of Napoleon had imposed
upon France, M. Lafitte, and all the new men in the higher
ranks of citizens, thought there was more patriotism in
a peace made honourable by liberal conditions with the Bour
bons, than in the prolonged disasters of the country, through
the obstinacy of Napoleon.
Such was at this moment the feeling of all France, as
proved by its attitude for the last three months. Dismayed
but immovable, it saw Napoleon fall, as it had seen him return
from the Isle of Elba. For a long time past, the nation had
a cause distinct from the army This separation of the army
and the people, which, dated from the 18th Brumaire, alone
explains what the historians of the military party have since
attributed to the treason of the marshals, and the moral debase
ment of the nation. This is false : nothing can be explained
by supposing cowardice in a people who had conquered the
world, arid who yet allowed themselves to be twice conquered
without rising at the destruction of its armies and the invasion
of its capital. The nation, humbled and afflicted, protested
by its apathy against a cause which was decided on its own
soil, but which was no longer its own, since the military sedi
tion of the 1 8th Brumaire, and the imperial sedition of the
20th March, had made it the cause of a man and of a party.
The city and the camp constituted two countries

XVIII.

The troops of Blucher and Wellington had entered Paris,
and the Chamber of Representatives affected to be still de
liberating ou the constitution— a puerile imitation of the
Roman senators awaiting the Gauls on their curule chairs.
When those senators offered their necks to the soldiers of

74 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 29.
Vote of the Chamber of Representatives.
Brennus, it was after they had fought to the gates of Rome's
last stronghold. The Chamber of Representatives had nei
ther fought nor furnished arms to the combatants. They
had sat and debated, undecided between tyranny and liberty,
until the moment when fate had pronounced against the man
whom they had neither dared to overturn nor to support. They
were neither the Chamber of the country, nor the Chamber
of Napoleon ; a confused and discordant mixture of all the
half parties, they were nominated only by a small number of
electors to observe passing events rather than to govern them.
They had neither the nation nor the army at their back ; and
the part they were playing was puerile in face of the foreign
conquerors. They had made no appearance in the negocia
tions at St. Cloud, which were altogether military. The public
opinion of France had withdrawn from them. Fouche, who had
made use of them for some days to keep down the dictatorial
longings of the Emperor, was now embarrassed by them. He
felt that, after having dismissed the Empire, it was now neces
sary promptly to dismiss before the new masters this idle
phantom of a representation. XIX
The Chamber discussed for some hours, and voted with
enthusiasm a declaration of rights, and a declaration of princi
pies, which the smoke of Blucher's cannon was to obliterate
an hour after. They arose in a body before an enemy absent
and inattentive, as if to bid defiance to vacancy, and swore
they were ready to die for independence while only a few paces
from the English and Prussians encamped in their public
promenades, and within hearing of their own soldiers giving
up their walls to the enemy. Blucher and Wellington were
only delaying their entrance until a more imposing force should
join them, that they might by their numbers more decidedly
strike the imagination of Paris.
On the eve of their entrance Fouche, by the authority of
his colleagues, repaired to the head-quarters of Wellington
at Neuilly. He described in the most sombre colours to the

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 75

Interview between Wellington and Fouche.

English commander-in-chief the situation of Paris and of
France : he intentionally exaggerated the strength of the Na
poleon and Republican parties, and he underrated that of the
Royalists : he depicted the nation as a smouldering volcano,
ready to explode under the throne of the Bourbons, and even
under the armies of Europe ; and to engulph all, if a popu
Iar hand, experienced in revolutions, did not know at once
how to restrain it, or to dissipate its fury at the critical
moment. He thus sufficiently indicated himself to the Duke
of Wellington as the man of the emergency, and as the genius
of the compromise between the revolutionary spirit and a
second Restoration.
The Duke of Wellington, already fascinated by the agents
of Fouche, and favourably impressed towards him by M. de
Talleyrand himself, who loudly pretended to declare the neces
sity for having Fouche, was more convinced than ever by this
conversation, that the King ought to confide, in every res
-pect, as well for his re-entrance into Paris as for his govern
ment after, in the sovereign ability of a mau who had managed
the most complicated events with so great a superiority of
intrigue and audacity He saw in this man the subduer of the
revolution, prepared for the part by the revolution itself
Fouche, delighted with the impression which he had produced
upon the most influential man of the coalition, and through
him upon the British cabinet (the real patron of Louis XVIII.
in this war), begged of the Duke of Wellington to obtain from
the King, who had already arrived at the chateau of Arnouville,
under the walls of St. Denis, the most liberal declarations of
amnesty and pacification. He showed him the danger of
leaving Paris any longer at the mercy of chance, of the vicis
situdes of opinion, of popular or military commotions, and of
discussions of the Assembly; and conjured him to cut short
all these uncertainties, by boldly entering Paris the following
day. Wellington promised he would do so.
On leaving Neuilly, Fouche felt himself minister of the
King, and arbiter of the Restoration. A confidential message
from Talleyrand informed him that the King had consented to
receive him privately the next day (the 6th July), at the

76 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 29.
Fouche repairs to Louis XVIII.
chateau of Arnouville, the head-quarters of Louis XVIII. and
his family. Fouche, to keep himself always on good terms
with both parties, obtained the authority of his colleagues in
the Government to attend this interview in his quality of Pre
sident of the Provisional Government, under the pretext of
convincing the King of the necessity of national institutions,
and to exact from him the most satisfactory guarantees for
persons and principles. He had no difficulty in convincing men
already convinced by necessity, and who were interested in
having a negociator so personally compromised, between them
selves and the prince who was soon to be their master. Car
not had himself seen the King in 1814, and Caulaincourt
had solicited permission to appear at his court. Fouche ac
cordingly went to Arnouville on the 6th July
XX.
Everything was already pre-disposed in the mind of the
King, in his council, and in his court, to prepare for Fouche the
reception which a grateful prince owed to a man who restores to
him his people, and smooths tho way for his return to the
throne. The Royalists, who had remained in Paris during the
hundred days of Bonaparte's domination, had been crowding
the road to Arnouville fir the last two nights. Impatient to
secure the return of the King, and to hasten back the reign
wliich they had thought lost for ever, they had kept down all
the antipathies of their birth, of their opinions, and even of
their exile, against the pro-consul of the Reign of Terror, the
regicide of Louis XVI., and the conspirator of tho 20th of
March. Parties who pardon nothing to those who have served
them, pardon everything to those who are going to serve them.
Usefulness, in their opinion, is an amnesty for all crimes.
The Royalists of Charles the Second's time made a hero of
Monk, the Royalists of Louis XVIII. made a Monk of Fouche,
the ruler at once of the revolution, of the people, and of Na
poleon. "Parties," they exclaimed, " only obey their accom
plices." To serve, it had been necessary to betray ! But did
not treason in so holy a cause become the most mysterious

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 7?

Numerous supporters of Fouche.

virtue? They were moved, they were excited into the very
mysticism of admiration in speaking of so marvellous a tilter
at revolutions. The court journal, the Debats, edited by
writers the most confidentially acquainted with the thoughts
of the aristocracy and of the court, humbled itself before the
genius of this man, and saw in Fouche the supreme director
of the vicissitudes of empires. " He had said to the King's
friends " (said they), " in taking leave of them on the 20th of
March, ' Save the King, I undertake to save the monarchy.'
He has done more than he promised— he has saved the
monarchy and brought back the King." " Everything," wrote
M. de Chateaubriand himself, " took part in his praise : religion
as well as impiety, virtue as well as vice, the Royalist and the
Revolutionist, the foreigner and trie Frenchman. From every
side they exclaimed, that unless Fouche was the King's
minister, there was neither safety for the King, nor salvation
for France ; that he alone had prevented a great battle, and
that he alone could finish his work." He guaranteed pardon
to the Bonapartists, concessions to the revolutionists, the
peaceable occupation of Paris to the foreigners, to the Royalists
the throne, and his life to the King himself. Gratitude still
warm, complicity, interest, ambition, fear., — every passion of
the human heart, generous, mercenary, or base, conspired at
this moment in favour of Fouche. Even the intrigues of his
rivals in ambition helped him without his knowledge. M. de
Talleyrand, Prime Minister of Louis XVIII., the man of the
Congress, the confidant and counsellor of the allied powers,
was never tired of praising to the King, to the generals, and
to the allied sovereigns, the genius of Fouche ; and of ac
knowledging, with the appearance of superiority which recog
nises an equal, the necessity for having this man in the coun
cils of the King. " I can do nothing without him," said he ;
" Fouche is at this moment the man of emergencies. Not to
acknowledge this would be to reject the evidence of facts. He
has France in his hand : we must take it from him or leave
it."

78 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 29.

Motives which actuated Talieyrand.

XXI.
Thus spoke M. de Talleyrand. Why spoke he thus? Did
he really believe what he said ? No ; he had never looked
upon Fouche but as a subaltern Talleyrand, a revolutionist
sprung from the dregs of factions, stained with blood, and
bearing the stamp of the regicide which for ever disqualified
him from negotiating with courts, or of commanding, in the
name of a monarchy, the respect due to kings from their sub
jects. He did not honour his low and vulgar intriguing with
the name of policy ; he looked upon him from the eminence
of his own birth as an upstart, he disdained him as an equal,
he hated him as his rival, he merely deigned to accept him as
his instrument.
M. de Talleyrand, in his capacity of a great revolutionary
lord, a renegade courtier long in the suite of Bonaparte, and a
priest who had repudiated both his priesthood and his faith,
had appeared a scandalous gift of fortune at the court, and at the
head of the councils of Louis XVIII. in 1814. He had been im
posed upon them by events rather than accepted by the King,
by the princes, the princesses, the courtiers, and by Europe
itself. Penetrating, though impassive, the embarrassment of
his position weighed upon and made him doubtful of the con
tinuance of his ascendancy. He was too intelligent to think
Fouche indispensable to the crown after Waterloo, with Paris
evacuated by the French troops, and surrounded by five armies,
comprising altogether a million of men. But by affecting to
believe in the necessity for Fouche, and by daily declaring to
the King that he could answer for nothing without this col
league, he adroitly avenged himself on the monarch, the
princes, the princesses, the courtiers, and the emigrants. He
forced them to raise up with their own hands, and in their own
court, a scandal, before which the impropriety of his own ele
vation must disappear. What was, in fact, M. de Talleyrand, 
a bishop absolved from his vows by the sovereign pontiff, a
moderate constitutionalist and the friend of Mirabeau in 1790 •
an emigrant to America in 1793 ; of pure blood, high birth)
famous for talents and negociations during the Empire, 

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 79
Conflicting feelings of Louis XVIII.
by the side of Fouche, pro-consul and regicide ; a murderer of
the brother and the father of the princes and princesses who
were about to admit him to their court and to their hearts ?
After such a sacrifice, voluntarily made to the utility of such a
man, what would the Bourbons and their friends have to com
plain of in seeing M. de Talleyrand preside in their councils?
By tainting themselves, he deprived them of all right to be
astonished at his presence, or to stigmatize him for the future :
he made Louis XVIII. a thousand times more than himself
an accomplice in the revolution ; he debased him lower than
Fouche ; and when once the public voice should be raised
against the scandal of this unnatural minister, and that Fouche
should be dismissed, the King and his court would have
nothing further to oppose to his own domination in the govern
ment. Their contact with Fouchd would have deprived them
of all right to the affectation of shame on any other point
XXII.
Such were, without any doubt, the real thoughts of M. de
Talleyrand when he opened his arms to Fouche at Arnouville,
to conduct his rival in intrigue and ambition to the feet of the
vanquished King. The struggle of Louis XVIII. must have
been long before he bent under this opprobrium of destiny.
To languish for twenty years an exile from the palace of his
forefathers, was only a misfortune common to many kings ;
to fall from a throne but ill-established, before the irresistible
prestige of a conqueror, and under the desertion of his own
army, was only an inevitable reverse in a still tottering restora
tion ; but, in reascending this throne, to take the hand stained
with the blood of a king and a brother, to belie those royal
imprecations, and those European lamentations with which
this prince had filled every court of Europe ! to inflict upon
his beloved niece, the daughter of Louis XVI., the sight and
the horror of the man who had sacrificed her father and her
mother during the revolution ! This was the worst of all his
calamities, for it was the downfall of his honour, the dis
avowal of his rank, the lie given to his own blood. By

80 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 29.
Final decision of the King.
declaring himself grateful, he became to all appearance
in the eyes of history the accomplice. To pardon the regi
cide was only to execute the dying testament of his brother
Louis XVI. ; but to elevate him to the rank of one of his mi
nisters, and to place him at the head of his councils, was to ac
knowledge himself the vassal of what he had all his life
denominated crime. The throne itself, if such a degradation ,
of royal character had been necessary to ascend it, was too dear at
this price. The impatience to reign dishonoured the reign itself.
The King felt all these considerations, if not in his heart,
at least in his kingly pride ; but he thought that if he did not
hasten to regain his crown, the manoeuvres of Fouch6, of La
fayette, and of Sebastiani, the contempt of Prussia, the hank
ering of the Emperor Alexander after the revolutionary
popularity of some Parisian saloons, and the selfish and lurking
interest of Austria, would succeed in transferring it to some
other. The Duke of Wellington, M. de Talleyrand, the
numerous adherents of Fouche about the court, perhaps M. de
Vitrolles (the insinuating go-between from the royalists to
Arnouville, and from Arnouville to the private cabinet of
Fouche), had persuaded the King that the coalition, with the
exception of England, was ready to abandon him to his for
tune, and to crown another branch of his house. It may bo
supposed that the Count d'Artois himself, influenced by M.
de Vitrolles, and his private court of gentlemen and of bishops,
eager to return on any conditions, felt no less inclined in secret
towards this weakness of the court, covered by the name of
necessity ; and that they were not sorry to see the King stoop,
on his own responsibility, to an act of baseness which they
reserved for future reprobation. The King himself, who aspired
to the title of a statesman, was, no doubt, afflicted at this moral
constraint which placed him in the hands of a regicide ; but
educated in the school of Machiavelli, and pretendino- to des
pise, in pursuing the interest of his house, his throne, and
his people, the scruples of the vulgar, he braved, with a cer
tain satisfaction of pride, his own sensibility. He thus seemed
to say to M. de Talleyrand and the statesmen, whose admira
tion he coveted, "lam your equal in indifference as to the

ISIS."! OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 81
Repugnance of the Duchess d'Angoul£me towards Fouche.
means ;" — and to the timorous men of his court, " I am above
your timid susceptibilities ; there is a philosophy of the throne
which you do not understand." He forgot that if a sovereign
must elevate himself above personal repugnances to save his
people, no one can with impunity elevate himself above nature
Nature forbade him to allow himself to be presented to France,
and borne to the throne by the hand of Fouche There was
blood between the minister and the King.
The Duchess d'Angouleme felt this bitterly She re
peatedly threw herself at her uncle's feet to conjure him to
spare her this shame and affliction. She declared that no
human consideration, not even obedience to the King, should
compel her to meet in the palace one of the murderers of her
father. She bathed with her tears the hand of the King, who
was affectionate, moved, caressing, but inflexible. " My
child," he said, " policy and nature have different laws ; it
becomes you to weep, but it is my duty to save my people,
and transmit you my throne : it is not the King of France
who forgets himself, it is the regicide that humbles himself
before the right of the crown, and it is the King who pardons
great crimes redeemed by great services." The princess was
obliged to devour in silence her humiliation and her grief, but
she remained at her uncle's court. It would have been more
filial and more dignified on her part to protest by her absence
against a constraint which no ambition of reigning ought to
impose upon the heart of a daughter
XXIII
Fouche arrived at Arnouville with M. de Talleyrand. The
King expected him. Nevertheless when the Prince de Poix
(of the house of Noailles and a captain in his body guard),
announced to him that the minister was waitbg at the door of
his cabinet for the promised audience, his Majesty turned pale
and was uneasy. The shade of his brother appeared for a
moment in his thoughts, between the judge of Louis XVI. and
himself. He resumed, however, his calmness and majesty,
dismissed the Prince de Poix, and admitted only the two
3 F

H2 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 23'
Fouche's interview with Louis XVIII.
statesmen into his cabinet. The private interview, and .the
conference between these three heads, which represented three
such different epochs ; the old regime, the empire, and the
revolution, and whom a triple ambition brought together to re
concile them, had no other witnesses of this scene than the
three actors themselves. Louis XVIII communicative in old
age, has since confided its details to one of his court.
M. de Talleyrand having introduced Fouche, the King and
the regicide looked at each other a long time without speaking ;
the King affecting the majesty and authority of the glance of
a superior who condescends to be served ; Fouche the timidity
and embarrassment of a culprit who consents to be pardoned,
but who feels that his services command rather than implore
that pardon. M. de Talleyrand concealed under his immov
able physiognomy the secret joy of humbling his master, and
of patronizing his rival. At this moment he towered over
them both.
He came to the assistance of the two interlocutors, abridg
ing the ceremonial, and cutting short all souvenirs and expla
nations. He told the King that in Fouche he brought to his
feet a devoted and essential man, who had best seconded the
events to which France was indebted for her lung, and who
alone could, under such difficult circumstances, enlighten the
councils of the crown, and baffle the plots of its enemies.
Fouche either feeling or feigning an emotion which, before
royalty, deprived him of all presence of mind and self-com
mand, could only bow and stammer forth some embarrassed
words of gratitude and devotion to the prince and the mon
¦ archy, now once more become the only salvation of France, and
the sole desire of all Frenchmen.
"I appreciate, Sir," said Louis XVIII. with the majesty of
rank bowing before merit, " I appreciate very highly the
services that you have rendered latterly to me and my cause,
and those that you can render to me now more than ever in the
ministry of police which you occupy. I had beforehand de
signed you in my thoughts for this post, one of the most
important of my government. Give me your ideas as to the
best means of pacifying my people, consolidating my throne,

l8'5-I OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. S3

His advice to the King.

and bringing back all erring spirits to legitimate monarchy,
the only guarantee for the safety, the independence, and the
freedom of my subjects."
Fouche, still embarrassed, bowed in token of gratitude and
acceptance of the King's confidence, and drawing a sad but
exaggerated picture of the animosities of factions, the resources
of Bonapartism, the agitations ill-appeased of the revolutionary
spirit, spoke to him of the part of Henry IV., who had only
conquered his people by yielding to the dominant ideas of his
epoch, and by making himself less the king of his friends than
the king of his enemies. He insisted on the absolute neces
sity of obliterating the past between France and the Bourbons,
by an amnesty so complete and so real that it should resemble
less an act of pardon than an act of oblivion.
" It is necessary," he said, " that all persons should remain,
under the dominion of the King, not only at ease with respect
to their conduct during the different revolutions which have
filled up the interregnum of your house, with respect to their
acquisition of national property, and the rank, functions, digni
ties, and titles they possess, but also as to the preservation of
these honours and these functions, so that each may believe
that the services he has rendered to the successive governments
of France have been rendered to the King. In a word, your
Majesty must adopt France, if you wish that France should
irrevocably adopt your house. The sovereign wisdom of your
house," he added, " has at all times raised it above the pre
judices, the weaknesses, and the resentments of its own party
Europe and the nation know that it is less a king than a great
statesman that Providence has now restored to the throne in
your person, and all the world will see in your Majesty the
genius of the reconciliation of interests, and of the restoration
of thrones. Your Majesty must impart your wisdom to those
who are around you, and who would again forfeit the crown if it
were left at the mercy of their narrow intellects and their
paltry passions. The times require concessions, and Paris will
never be quiet but at this price. It is easy to enter into this
course, but difficult to remain in it. This is the moment to
make those concessions ; at a later period they will, perhaps,

84 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 29.
M. de Talleyrand submits the names of a new ministry to the Xing.
appear to be forced by the impatience and agitation of public
opinion : to-day France will be grateful, to-morrow importunate
and thankless. Facts must be admitted as rights, and care
must be taken not to contest with the Chambers, or with pub
lic opinion, the guarantees of safety and of dignity which they
set forth in their declaration, as conditions of their honourable
capitulation, and causes of their submission "
XXIV.
M. de Talleyrand, by his silence and by his gestures, ap
peared to acquiesce in all the counsels of Fouche. The King
only declared himself with moderation and reserve. Proud of
the high opinion that even the revolution, in the person of
Fouche, had of his moderation and wisdom, he listened to him,
however, with distrust, dissembled beneath an appearance of
confidence. He was willing to reassure Bonapartism. still in
possession of the ministry, of the government, and of the
Chambers, but he did not wish to compound with it. To
grant everything to the general interests of the revolution, and
to the new opinions which had the majority in the country,
entered with force and reason into his ideas ; but to place him
self in the hands of the army of Napoleon's functionaries, of
the conspirators of the 20th March, and of the two Chambers
nominated by Napoleon, or under his influence, was, in the
eyes of the King, to abdicate.
He did not dissemble to his new minister that he never
would confound the real requirements of national opinion with
the ambitions and importunities of the Bonapartist party ; and
that it was necessary to disembarrass the position of the govern
ment from the army and the Chambers of the 20th March.
Fouche undertook to do this : he had gone too far now ever to
recede ; and after what he had done for the King he might
still advise, but he could no longer refuse anything.
M. de Talleyrand submitted to the King, in presence of
the new minister of police, with great deference to his opinion,
the names of the new ministry which the dismissal of M. de
Blacas, and the transition from exile to the throne, made it

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 85
Distiibution of the various departments.
necessary to reconstruct. M. de Talleyrand kept for himself
the office of foreign affairs, the management of Europe, and
the traditions of the Congress of Vienna ; Fouche, with the
ministry of police, kept under his hand all the springs of pub
lic opinion, and the high policy of the interior. Baron Louis
took the finance department ; and M. de Jaucourt, also devoted
to M. de Talleyrand, took the marine.
M. Pasquier, an old member of the parliament of Paris,
and formerly prefect of the police under the Empire, but
untarnished by treason and defection in the return of the
Emperor, was minister of justice.
Marshal Gouvion St. Cyr, one of the most consummate
of Napoleon's generals, who had, like Macdonald, remained
faithful in his allegiance to the King, was minister of war.
The King and M. de Talleyrand agreed with Fouche\ to
reserve the government of the King's household for M. de
Richelieu, aide-de-camp and friend of the Emperor of Russia,
in order to give a pledge to that court.
M. Mole, who had gone over from the Empire to the Bour
bons, from the Bourbons to the Empire, and who consented to
pass again from the Empire to the Bourbons, was presented by
Fouche for a department. The King, in consideration of his
monarchical name, of his youth full of promise, and of his
talents, calculated to serve and adorn all governments, appointed
him to the direction of public works.
Another aide-de-camp of the Emperor of Russia, M. Pozzo
di Borgo, a man of universal comprehension, management,
and eloquence, calculated for a constitutional government where
eloquence is necessary, was privately chosen for minister of
the interior. M. Pozzo di Borgo had not quitted the King
during his exile at Ghent, where he was the representative of
Alexander's friendship Decided on returning to the service
of France, his country, through a post so confidential and im
portant, he was desirous, however, of waiting the arrival of his
sovereign, the Emperor of Russia, to obtain his authority for
accepting the confidence of Louis XVIII.
M. Pasquier, calculated for all departments, by his de
meanour, as well as by his flexibility to all circumstances, was

86 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 29
Fouche's reception by the courtiers of Louis XVIII.

appointed to direct the home department during the indecision
of M. Pozzo di Borgo.
A young man, M. Decazes, until then unknown, and whose
high fortune dates from this lucky chance, was appointed pre
fect of police ; recommended to the King and the council for
this prominent post by the courage and resolution, in act and
language, which he had displayed at Paris and at Bordeaux
against Napoleon during the hundred days after the example of
M. Laine. He was accepted by Fouche, whose authority no
other person of importance amongst the Royalists would sub
mit to by filling this subordinate branch of his department.
It was settled that this ministry should assemble privately
at Paris that same evening, and prepare everything for the un
expected entrance of the King into that capital on the follow
ing day
XXV.
After this conference, which lasted two whole hours, in the
King's cabinet, and after these ministerial arrangements were
settled, Fouche, still under the guidance of M. de Talleyrand,
passed through the apartments of the Chateau of Arnouville,
which were filled with the old and new courtiers of Louis
XVIII. He was received there with repugnance by some,
with assiduity by others, and with astonishment by. all. He
had by this time regained his serenity and assurance. '
" Duke of Otranto," said M. de Talleyrand to him, with a
smile, in the presence of some of the great officers of the
crown, " you know not the spell that attends a legitimate mon
arch, and, above all, a monarch whose understanding places him
on a level with his throne. Confess that you have been some
what abashed in his presence." Fouche felt too much the
necessity of flattering the prince and his court by admitting
his confusion, not to acquiesce in the observation of Talleyrand.
He carried off the prize of so many stratagems and so much
audacity, in the possession of a power which was to impose at
once upon the friends and the enemies of the Bourbons. He
saw, without quitting the post of minister and arbiter of all
parties, three monarchies enter, pass away, and return, under

1S15-] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 87
II. de Chateaubriand.
his guardianship. He had dismissed a restoration, he had
directed and played with an empire : he had recalled a second
restoration, and he was now going to dismiss his colleagues as
his subalterns, and the Chambers as exhausted instruments.
He had quelled by his tactics, and by the equilibrium of parties,
the genius and the distrust of Napoleon. He had compelled
the King of the old regime to place his fate in the hands of
a pro-consul of the convention and a minister of Bonaparte
Fie played with three or four destinies, superior to all by the
contempt he entertained for them. He only estimated these
positions by the difficulties he had experienced in attacking
and winning them. Doubtless he felt the secret baseness of
his procedure ; but in this baseness he saw so much audacity,
and so much superiority over the vulgar, that he applauded
himself for the means in attaining the end, and esteemed him
self greater than men and parties, from the facility with which
he deceived both one aud the other.
The shades of night concealed his return to Paris
XXVI.
There was, however, one man connected with the exile of
Louis XVIII., and included in the councils, already dismissed,
of Arnouville, who foresaw in this presence, and in the com
plicity of the King with Fouche, the coming degradation of
royalty : this was M. de Chateaubriand. By his poetic spirit,
¦ — that nobility of intellect and feeling — he had, almost alone,
the revelation of honour; by his genius he divined, from afar,
the judgment of posterity on this indignity of the crown.
He had scarcely learned that Fouche had appeared in the
presence of Louis XVIII. presented by M. de Talleyrand, and
that he had carried away with him his confidential nomination
to the ministry of police, when he presented himself at the
door of the King's cabinet, and earnestly begged to be admitted
to an audience. The King, who did not like this writer, and
who dreaded his presence, lest he should have to blush before
him for the appointment he had just made, refused for a long
time to receive him. The obstinate importunity, however, of

88 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 29.
M. de Chateaubriand's interview with the King.
M. de Chateaubriand, his title of member of the prince's
council, his fidelity, his voluntary exile, and his services at
Ghent, claiming especial consideration from the King, he at
length admitted this illustrious servant to his presence.
M. de Chateaubriand, with every mark of respectful at
tachment to his house and person, stated to his Majesty what
he had just heard, but refused to believe. He supplicated him
by the memory of his brother, by the honour of his house, and
by respect for his own name, to spare the history of his
reign from a concession which his enemies would style an
ignominy. He represented to him the consternation of the
royalists, on learning that the judge who had condemned Louis
XVI. to the scaffold, was to sit in the presence of the King,
the brother of that Louis XVI., in his councils, and even in
the palace of his victim. He depicted to his view the heart of
the Duchess d'Angouleme, to draw from it those cries of
grief and indignation, which respect would doubtless keep
smothered before him, but which would break forth before the
shade of her father, and before her God ! He obtained, how
ever, nothing but impassible silence, and signs of fixed resolu-
lution in the features and gestures of the King.
" It is essential, Sir," his Majesty sternly replied. " No
good Frenchman can have any pretension to feel the necessity,
and the grief conquered by duty towards his people, more
strongly than the King.'' "Ah!" cried Chateaubriand, "if
the throne itself was in reality the price of such a sacrifice, it
would become, above all, a prince so enlightened and so noble
as your Majesty to sacrifice that throne to virtue!" He was
proceeding still further, but the King, impelled by impatience
at his importunity, and equally embarrassed to refuse as to
reply, pointed to the door and exclaimed, "Begone, Sir!"
Chateaubriand bowed sorrowfully, and retired, bearing a
murmur in his heart which was never appeased
XXVII
Fouche, on his return to Paris, concerted in the evening,
with his new colleagues, the private measures to be taken

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 89
Position of the Provisional Government.
during the night for the entrance of the King on the following
day. All Paris was thrown into a state of feverish excitement,
as on the approach of a catastrophe which is to decide the fate
of all. The faubourgs were crowded with groups who insulted
the Royalists going to Arnouville, and who threatened to close
the capital against a king brought back by the troops who had
fought against their brothers. They displayed, they trampled
on, and otherwise insulted the white flag, while bands paraded
through the streets, demanding the heads of the traitors
The National Guard, patient, but few in number, with diffi
culty restrained these commotions.
The Chambers swore to die at their post if the royal pro
clamations did not contain the guarantees promised every day
by Fouche to lull them. The provisional government, feeling
the impossibility of resisting, and the shame of yielding, pre
tended to sympathise with these requirements of the military
population, and of the Chambers, and left to Fouche all the
dangers, all the responsibilities, and all the reproaches of
the event. These he accepted with an intrepidity, a duplicity,
and an assurance worthy of a better cause, and of a more
elevated character He allowed them to lament and murmur,
to save appearances, for he knew that they wished to appear
deceived, and to be compelled by the force of events into an ab
dication which would appear less humiliating to them if they
could attribute it to treason and force of arms. He treated
them as they wished to be treated.
The part performed by Carnot and his colleagues was ter
minated, from the day they had attached their cause to that
of Napoleon. Vanquished with him at Waterloo, vanquished
a second time by his forced abdication at Paris, they were
nothing more than flags of truce between two revolutions,
which were about to be determined without their concurrence.
They pretended to have confidence in Fouche for making con
ditions for freedom, or to guarantee safety and amnesty for the
Empire ; but in reality they hoped for nothing more than to
be relieved at any price from the burden which weighed heavy
upon them. They might with more resolution have followed
the army of the Loire, or tried the fate of battle at Paris, but

90 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 29.

Resignation of the Provisional Government.

they had done neither one nor the other. The weakness ol
the army had deterred them from war with the allies, while
patriotism and public opinion had equally deterred them from
civil war: they could, therefore, only expire amidst all parties,
under the hand of a colleague more perverse, but more able
and resolute than they were XXVIII.
Fouche, eager to dismiss them, that he might deliver the
palace of the Tuileries to the King, assembled them on the
morning of the 9th of July. He narrated to them his con
ferences with the Duke cf Wellington, and with Louis XVIII
He assured them that he had received from the former all the
concessions and all the guarantees for which the Government
and the Chambers had outwardly shown so much solicitude
By these he meant the amnesty and liberal institutions, for
already everybody had ceased to think about Napoleon. A
new prince carries off his posterity with him — old dynasties
alone leave roots and offshoots after their fall.
While Fouche was speaking with this freedom of mind,
and apparent security to his colleagues, as if to induce them
to disengage themselves at length from public afiairs, and to
retire, General Blucher, in conformity with an arrangement
made by him the evening before with Wellington and Fouche,
occupied with his troops the gardens and palace of the
Tuileries, without resistance. The members of the govern
ment protested in vain against this violation of the article of
the capitulation, which confided the interior of the city, the
palaces, and the public buildings -to the National Guard. The
Prussian general replied, that he only recognised the orders of
his chief. "Well, then," said Fouche. with anger, ' real or
assumed, " we will retire ; but after having recorded, in a
final message to the Chambers, the violence which has been
offered to us ;" and he accordingly wrote as follows :—
" Monsieur le President,— Until now we have been led
to believe that the allied sovereigns were not unanimous in

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. fll

Its character reviewed.

their choice of the prince who is to reign over France. Our
plenipotentiaries gave us the same assurance on their return.
Nevertheless, the ministers and generals of the allied powers
declared yesterday, in the conferences they had with me, that
all the sovereigns had pledged themselves to replace Louis
XVIII. upon the throne, and that he is to make his entrance
into the capital either this evening or to-morrow.
" The foreign troops have just occupied the Tuileries,
where the government is sitting.
" In this state of affairs we can do no more than offer up
our vows for the country ; and our deliberations being no
longer free, we think it our duty to separate.
(Signed) " Fouche,Cabnot,
Caulaincourt, Quinette,
" Paris, July 7, 1815 Geeniee."
XIXX
Thus retired, without a murmur, before an appearance of
violence which they could neither prevent, fly from, nor
repulse, and under the injunction of one of their colleagues,
already at that moment the minister of a new government,
these men who had been forced to accept the part of dupes,
although they perfectly well knew the manoeuvres of Fouchfe
to remove from their heads the suspicion of cowardice or
treason. No government of France had ever until then so
shamefully terminated its career. It was not, however, either
personal courage, or patriotism, or honour, in which these men
were deficient; but, with the exception of Quinette and
Grenier, chosen from amongst the men who were strangers to
the 20th of March, the situation of the three others was so
false in a government created to dismiss and replace Napoleon,
that they were of necessity as deficient in dignity and con
formity with their own acts, as they were in their resignation

92 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 29,
Inconsistencies of the Provisional Government.
of power. Caulaincourt, the creature and negotiator of Na
poleon, and Carnot, who, by an inconsistency of patriotism,
explained by his friends, but inexplicable to history, had ac
cepted from him a ministerial department, and a ridiculous
court title in addition to his Republican name, had come direct
from the confidential councils of Napoleon at the Elysee, to
undertake, in the name of the Chambers, to watch him, to
counteract him, and to proscribe him. This unnatural part,
once accepted, they could no longer be anything but the play
things of events, and of the vain official names behind which
Fouche masked his real policy,
Too enlightened not to see as well as he did the absolute
impossibility of resisting in Paris, with a handful of men, the
armies of all Europe — too honourable, however, themselves to
betray the remains of the Bonapartist party, which they repre
sented in the government — they allowed it to be betrayed, and
they assisted in the treason. This treason being accomplished,
they signed with their own hands their deception and their
humiliation in this act. There was an end of them for the
Republicans, for the faithful adherents of Napoleon, for the
partisans of Napoleon II. , for the Constitutionalists, whose
guarantees they gave up, — in short, for every party. They
had now only to disappear from every stage. The last resem
bled a scene of comedy representing the catastrophe of one of
the great tragedies of history : the triumvirs of the Republic,
of the Empire, and of Napoleon IL, dissolved and dismissed
by Figaro. History has some pages in which Tacitus should
relinquish the pen to Terence, to Moliere, or to Beaumarchais
XXX
Cambaceres, a personage of high comedy also — a Bonapart
ist in spite of himself during the hundred days —a favourite
frightened at his favour, and wishing for obscurity, as another ,
would wish for a great part, in which to shelter his timidity and
his fortune— was President of the Chamber of Peers when
the message of the government was delivered to him. He
read it with resignation to his colleagues It was received

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 93
M. Decazes undertakes to dismiss the Chamber of Representatives.
with silence, and the Chamber was speedily evacuated by those
senators, accustomed to follow the obsequies of so many
governments, and the first to turn towards the rising sun of all
favours and all servilities.
In the Chamber of Representatives, the Bonapartists, the
Republicans, and those who affected, under the inspiration of
Fouche, the attitude of expectation and hope, protested by
some murmurs and empty exclamations against the violence
done to their functions. Manuel interrupted the speculative
discussion of the constitution to assure the Chamber that the
foreign armies themselves, intimidated by the sacredness of
the national representation, would allow their deliberations to
continue with due solemnity amidst the noise of arms ; and
that in case violence should dare to meddle with their func
tions, they would exclaim, as Mirabeau did in the Constituent
Assembly: " We are here by the will of the people, and we
shall not quit but by the force of bayonets !"
But a meeting of ministers took place in the evening at
the residence of M. de Talleyrand ; when Fouche, having ex
pressed the embarassment he felt in dismissing the Chamber
of Representatives — whose presence had the appearance of op
posing government to government, without employing foreign
bayonets, and enacting one of those scenes stained with blood
and vindictive language, which resound and loudly protest
against a government in the page of history — M. Decazes, urged
hy his Royalist principles and ambition to do some service,
approached Fouche, and said to him, with an air of confidence :
" I undertake to rid you of the Assembly, if such be your
pleasure. You have only to give me the order, and I will
answer for the rest." Fouche delighted, wrote the order in
stantly at M. de Talleyrand's table, and gave it to M Decazes,
congratulating him on his assurance.
The young prefect immediately retired, and calling together
at his house a few trustworthy National Guards, whose Royalist
principles were known to him, directed them to assemble
during the night the National Guards of their respective
legions on whom they could depend, and to" take possession
before daybreak of the Chamber of Representatives, the doors

94 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK ?9.
Protest of Lafayette.
of which they should close against the deputies in the name
of the King's government.
This order was executed with the zeal which public opinion
and the coming triumph of a new-born government always
impart to its partisans in France. The deputies, on arriving
at daybreak the next morning at the gates of their palace,
found them closed against them, and all entrance forbidden.
They retired murmuring, some to save appearances, others
from honourable feeling, and a few for the cause of freedom.
The people, who no longer recognised in them either Napoleon,
or the Republic, or the country, but a few orators, mad for
aimless discussion upon ruins, only responded to their murmurs
by the most perfect indifference. XXXI
Lafayette owed to his name and his past career a more
personal and striking protest. This he endeavoured to make
by extending his arms and haranguing the people in front cf
the railing. The people, who knew him no longer, were as
deaf to his voice as the gates. Everything was shut against
him during this short aspiration for a great part which he had
attempted to resume. After having detested Napoleon, been
oue of the first to welcome the return of the Bourbons in
1814, and to salute the Count d'Artois at the Tuileries, he had
abandoned those princes on the 20th of March, and been a
candidate for election to the Chamber of Representatives.
Suspicious of Napoleon, though he had allowed him to take
the sceptre and the sword after the 20 th of March, he had
exasperated the Chamber against the dictator, and watched for
the moment of his weakness to assist in dragging him down.
Waterloo afforded him this opportunity, and he had seized"
upon it with a bitterness of hatred which did not sufficiently
respect misfortune. Disappointed since the abdication in his
hope of directing the new government, and of being the
arbiter between a restoration and liberty, he had been equally
disappointed in his attempt at negociation in the name of the
Chamber with the allied sovereigns. On returning to Paris

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 95
Fouche and Carnot.
he asserted that Sebastiani and himself had obtained from the
allies the free choice of a monarch who should be agreeable to
France. He had a longing, it is said, for the Duke of Orleans,
as an additional deviation from the monarchical principle, and
as an additional degradation of royalty, which he had all his
life endeavoured to weaken, without having the frankness and
the energy to suppress it. The allies gave the lie effectually
to this pretended negociation by sweeping away the Chamber,
and unanimously installing the Bourbons in the Tuileries.
Lafayette finding no echo amongst the people, silently mingled
with the crowd, and witnessed in the evening, obscure and un-
perceived, the expulsion of a representative body which he had
agitated, and the ruin of a cause which he had disarmed in
disarming Napoleon.
Fouche alone triumphed of all those men who had disap
peared, some amidst their conspiracies, others in their fanati
cism — the latter in their ambition, the former in their incon
sistency, but all in their incapacity. Nothing remained to
them but murmurs, which Fouche braved ; for, having no con
science, he had no remorse.
Carnot, on hearing that Fouche was minister of police to
Louis XVIII., and that he was directed to draw up with his
own hand lists of exile against his accomplices and colleagues,
presented himself at his audience. He bestowed on him a
look in which was fully expressed the contempt of a sincere
heart for the success of political knavery, and making use of
that rough old revolutionary familiar style of which these two
Republicans had contracted the habit in the convention,
"Where am I to go to, traitor?" he demanded of him.
"Where thou wilt, fool J" replied Fouche. He probably
respected Carnot sufficiently, or despised him too much, to
include him in the list of proscriptions.
This little dialogue, true or false, is at least historical. It
admirably qualified a government composed of an able and
cunning man, and one simple and deceived. Fouche was
tarnished — Carnot was judged

BOOK THIETIETH.
Review of the Hundred Days — Entrance of Louis XVIII. into Paris-
Speech of M. de Chabrol — Answer of Louis XVIII. — Louis XVIII.
at Paris — Acclamations of the populace — Political position of the
King — Attitude of Fouchd — Ordinances for the re-organization of
the Peerage, and for the convocation of the Chamber of Deputies —
The Army of the Loire — Orders of the day of Marshal Davoust —
Submission of the Army to Louis XVIII. — The Army adopts tha
White-flag — Blucher wishes to blow up the Bridge of Jena — Devas
tation of the Museum and the Libraries — Violence of the Prussians
— Requisitions — Removal of the Prefects — War Imposts — Occu
pation of Paris and France by the Allied Armies — Disbanding of
the Army of the Loire — Marshal Davoust superseded by Marshal
Macdonald — Diplomatic Negociations at the residence of Lord
Castlereagh — Ultimatum of the Allied Powers — Aversion of Louis
XVIII. for M. de Talleyrand— Court of Louis XVIII.— His family
— Favour of M. Decazes — M. Decazes — His portrait — Retrospect
of his life — His interview with the King — Fouche's report —
Proscriptions — Weakness of the King.

t.
Thus finished the hundred days of Bonaparte's second
Empire, commenced by an armed descent, in profound peace,
upon the shores of his country ; triumphing by the seduction
and by the sedition of the army ; tarnished by the treason
of some chiefs; prosecuted through the humiliating submission
of the nation to the army; weakened by the indifference,
the disaffection, or the indignation of all good citizens ; ruined
by the defeat of Waterloo, and the annihilation of that heroic
but culpable army; finished by the indecision of Napoleon,
and by his abdication, yielded too soon, or too late to the
eagerness of the Chambers ; made use of and sold to the
Bourbons, without conditions for liberty, by the ambition of
Fouche, and the inaction of his colleagues ; finally dishonoured

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 97

Review of the Hundred Days.

by a second invasion of Europe, and by the temporary sub
jection of the soil of the country by foreign powers.
Such was this second Empire, a short and deplorable
parody on the first. Such for France was the result of this
attempt of its ancient chief against its repose, its indepen
dence, and its safety. In undertaking it, Napoleon showed
but little solicitude for his country, which had only to risk
itself for his cause, little care for his fame, which could only
suffer, and little acquaintance with history, which never begins
again. His landing at Cannes was a crime against his country ;
his march upon Paris was a heroism and a triumph, but it
was the heroism of selfishness, and the triumph of sedition.
The preparations for war were indolent, undecided, and em
barrassed by that hesitation between the part of a dictator
and that of a constitutional prince, the restorer of the people's
sovereignty. The campaign was a bold one, the battle des
perate but successive, piecemeal, without unity, and devoid
of the light of genius. By not risking all, as Ney and the
aspect of the battle urged him to do, he lost all. Defeat
dethroned him at once at the frontier and in his capital. The
menaces in the Assembly of Representatives were rash ; his
concessions forced ; his resignation of the Empire humiliating ;
his retreat to Malmaison inexplicable in a man who knew what
fortune was ; his offers of service puerile ; his flight to the sea-
coast tardy ; his embarkation, suspended to await impossibilities
with one foot on the ocean, was chimerical. His surrender on
board an enemy's vessel, without having made conditions, was
madness ; his captivity, written beforehand. Every thing with
him, during this period of his life, is marked with symptoms
of decay and blindness, except his march on Paris, the most
intrepid and the most personal of all his campaigns. He
rushed forward, without looking before or behind him, towards
the throne. But from the moment he had attained it he
staggered at the difficulties he had dared, and he precipitated
himself in order to descend from them. This caprice of ennui,
of heroism, and of ambition on the part of Napoleon, cost
France more than two thousand millions of francs, in arma
ment.s, tributes, and war indemnities to Europe ; the insur-
3 G

98 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 30.
The consequence to France of Napoleon's attempt.
rection — first and fatal example of her army against the laws,
the honour .of her generals and of her marshals — forgetting
their oaths to their country in their reluctant concession to
the military popularity of one man, the last veteran army
which remained to her from the invasion of 1814, her fame
as a nation invincible on the field of battle — the spell of her glory,
her frontiers restricted by the sword of the conquerors, her soil
invaded, her cities at the mercy of foreigners, her capital pro
faned, her monuments despoiled by reprisals, her provinces and
strongholds occupied for three years until the liquidation of
her ransom, and finally, the disarming and disbanding of the
remains of Waterloo ! It cost, in addition, the government
of the Bourbons which had the succession of these disasters,
the independence, the freedom, and the popularity of the
throne, which has been unjustly accused of the consequences
of the crime of this second invasion. The King must have
had great courage, or a, great thirst of dominion, to accept
a throne and a people buried under so many ruins.
There never was, perhaps, an epoch in the history of
France more desperate, more humiliating, and more grievous
for the country, than these hundred days, and the period
that immediately followed them. Country, monarchy, liberty,
honour of the army, patriotism of the people, character of the
Chambers, public finances, and glory of arms — all suffered,
even to the national honour. A terrible lesson to the soldiery
who dare all, and still more terrible to the people who allow
every thing to be dared against them by these tribunes of
glory. France had not made herself respected by her army
on the 20th March, and both France and the army paid for
their fault ; the one by the loss of its blood, and of its do
mination, the other by the loss of its dignity, and of its inde
pendence. II.
It was under these melancholy circumstances that the King
again entered Paris. Therefore, whether out of shame for
his people, or the apprehension of his ministers of exciting a
desperate commotion and of subjecting the King to personal

1815.1 OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 99
Entry of the King into Paris.
dangers from the balls or the poignards of some desperate
fanatic of the Empire, his entrance into the capital was not
announced by the cannon of the forts and of the foreign
troops, until the moment he was passing through the faubourgs
and the boulevards to enter his palace. M. Decazes, dreading
the faubourg St. Denis, which had been, with the faubourg St.
Antoine, one of the most tumultuous strongholds of the federes,
had counselled the King to enter by Clichy towards the close
of the day.
" No," replied Louis XVIII., alluding to the nocturnal
entry of Napoleon on the 20th of March; " I wish to pass
through Paris in open day, and in the midst of my country.
When they see their King in France, there are no more
leaguers !" III.
The King accordingly entered in the middle of the day
In spite of all the government precautions to misdirect the
multitude, it was immense on his passage. All catastrophes
are a solace for the people. The party of Napoleon, composed
almost exclusively of men of the court and men of the camp,
had disappeared four days before, having either followed the army
of the Loire, or shut themselves up in their hotels, awaiting ¦
the inevitable event, and negociating with Fouche for their
amnesties, their dignities, and their fortunes. The people, who
had at first been enthusiastic at the miraculous return of their
Emperor, and by their acclamations accomplices of the military
sedition of the 20th of March, had no longer recognised either
the army in its defeat, or the Emperor in his indecision, in his
flight upon Paris, in his immobility at the Elysee, in his abdi
cation, and in his careless retreat at Malmaison. His popu
larity was exhausted, and there only remained amongst the
masses resentment for so many deceptions, and grief for the
country and the capital, delivered by a single battle into the
hands of foreigners. The nobles and the citizens in mass,
the first through love for the Bourbons, and as a retaliation
for their defeat of the 20th of March, the latter through a
love for peace, for their business, and for their security,

]00 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 30.
The King's reception.
had only one heart to recall, to look upon, and to cheer
Louis XVIII.
In his short reign, so unhappily interrupted, this prince
had not had time to render his government unpopular. His
reign had been cut short by the violence of the Bonapartists
at the commencement of its hopes. Those hopes revived
with his return. An imprecation, almost unanimous, was
uttered against Napoleon alone, his family, his courtiers, and
his soldiers, for the calamities of the country. This impreca
tion, which as yet no one dared to vent in reprisals against the
civil or military conspirators of the hundred days, was poured
out in acclamations and emotions for the Bourbons. The
white flag, which had been hoisted since morning as a signal of
peace on the pavilion of the Tuileries, had set flying in an
instant a million of flags of the royal colour from all the win
dows of the faubourgs, and of the streets and squares which
the cortege was to pass through. All Paris seemed spontane*
ously to decorate itself with the banner of the lilies. This
time, at least, the impulse was not given by some itinerant
groups of Royalists, nor favoured by Fouche : this minister,
on the contrary, wished to cool down the royal reception, to
exaggerate in the eyes of the Bourbons the repugnance and
irritations of Paris. But the enthusiasm for peace swept
away these vain precautions of cunning. Qhe King returned
on this occasion, still more than in 1814, as a reparation for
some, as a repentance for others, as a salvation for allN
* The National Guard, which had been placed under. *he
command of General Dessolles, formerly one of MoreWs
generals, who was beloved by the army, and agreeable to the
Bourbons, by the antipathy which the men of this party bore
to the Empire, lined with their neutral and pacific bayonets
the streets through which the King was to pass. Innumer
able columns of unarmed citizens, of royalist youths, and of
artisans, succeeded each other in the faubourg St. Denis,
rushing spontaneously forward to meet Louis XVIII., with

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 101
Demeanour of the people.
cries of " Vive le Roi !" and with the popular song of " Vive
Henri IV. !" These people, by their concurrence, their masses,
and their demonstrations, seemed as if they wished to hide
from their prince, and to hide from themselves, the aspect of
foreign armies, whose appearance ljumbled and saddened his
return. They wished to prove that between the King and
Paris there had only been one man and his satellites ; and
that when once this man had disappeared, and his army had
withdrawn, the people and their King would embrace, by the
national impulse of a father towards his children, and of chil
dren towards their parent. The population of Paris, so cold,
so silent, and so absent on the 20th of March, revenged them
selves now for that day, and protested, though too late, against
the oppression which the army had made them suffer.
V.
At three o'clock the King appeared at the barrier St.
Denis. He was accompanied by the Count d'Artois on horse
back at one door of his carriage, and the Duke de Berry, his
nephew, at the other, and surrounded by Marshals Marmont,
Oudinot, Victor, Macdonald, Gouvion St. Cyr, the Duke
de Feltre, and Generals Maison, Villatte, and Dessolles, some
of them companions of his short exile at Ghent, the others
having remained faithful to their duty and their oaths during
the interregnum. The military household of the King and
the princes, the royal guards, the musketeers, and the light
dragoons of the guard, the royal volunteers, and the grena
diers of La Rochejaquelin, which formed the little army of the
prince at Alost, and which was increased and re-formed on the
King's route, since his return to France, marched in his rear,
saluting the National Guard, composed of their friends, their
fathers, and their brothers, and saluted by them in return, as
guests impatiently expected at the national hearth. This
escort, entirely French, imparted to this return at least a
national aspect. It was neither the foreigner nor the civil
war which triumphed in this embracing of Paris and th
Bourbons. This time they were voluntary exiles, who had not

102 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 30.
M. de Chabrol's address to the King.
drawn their swords against their country, but who, removed
from it for a moment by their fidelity, received its recompense
in the free and cordial recaption of the people, freed from the
^compression of the army. | The reception of the King in 1814
had been more full of ciiriosity, but this was replete with
emotion and sensibility. fTears rolled down many faces ; they
had been so unfortunate* on both sides, that they were now
eager to repair and to forget the common disaster. The King
^concealed the foreigner, and all took refuge in him, once more
' to find in him their country.

VI.

Fouch<_ had recalled to the prefecture of Paris M. de
Chabrol, a man of solid popularity, the same who had presented
to Louis XVIII. the keys of Paris in 1814, and presided over
the city during the first restoration. M de Chabrol, although
a magistrate of the Empire, had had sufficient respect for
himself and for his country to retire with the Bourbons on the
return of the Emperor. Fouche was desirous that M. de
Chabrol should insinuate conditions to Louis XVIII., in the
speech he was to deliver in the name of the city of Paris, and
that he should give advice and warning to the monarch ; but
M. de Chabrol declined so ungracious a task, at such a moment.
Were not the defection, the flight, the exile, the blood shed
at Waterloo, the return into the invaded provinces, and the
capital occupied by four foreign armies, warnings sufficiently
eloquent of themselves ? and was it becoming to sadden still
more this reconciliation of the King and the people by sinister
recollections and forebodings? Was it necessary, moreover,
thus to invert the parts, and to give to the King alone the
appearance of doing all the wrong, when the people and the
army were, at least, equally reproachable ? Was it for those,
who had allowed the capital and the throne to be invaded by
Napoleon, to demand reparation from Louis XVIII., whom
they had themselves abandoned, dethroned, and proscribed?
M. de Chabrol, on the contrary, confined himself to enumerat
ing the calamities which the hundred days of Bonaparte's

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. J03
The King's reply.
presence, and of the absence of the legitimate government,
had cost the country, and to soliciting for all errors the pardon
contained in the breast of a king and of a father, and for all mis
fortunes the forgiveness and consolation necessary to repair all.
Louis XVIII., with a propriety which was the gift of his
nature, and the inspiration of his policy, replied without
making any allusion of reproach or of vengeance to the mouth
piece of the city of Paris : "I did not leave my capital but
with the most lively grief, I return to it with emotion. I had
but too well foreseen the evils with which it was threatened,
and I am come back to prevent and to repair them."
These words comprised the whole situation. There was a
reproach in them, but softened by sorrow ; a promise to inter
vene between France and the enemy, to temper victory if
possible ; an augury of good government.
But if Louis XVIII. wished to soften the expression of
the bitterness and humiliations that such a return in the midst '
of foreign armies inflicted on the nation, he would not too com-
plaisantly dissemble from the people the heavy grief and
patriotic resentment which he experienced in passing through
his capital invaded, and his provinces conquered, by the sedition
of some, and the weakness of all. He quickly closed the
window of his carriage, which he had only opened to listen to
the prefect of Paris, and his features, for the remainder of the
route, assumed a majestic and impassible expression, in which
great dignity was mingled with a tinge of anger. rELe wished
the people to understand that he had returned witrout hatred,
but not without a recollection of the injury that had been done
to him. He effaced the tear from his eyes, the smile from
his lips, and all appearance of royal condscension from his
gestures. It was plain to be seen that he did not wish to
implore a reception, or to beg for the throne ; but to resume,
with a full right and a r\eid authority, a reign which had
been interrupted by factions/V This sentiment, depicted on his
visage, was understood by the people, who love pride even
against themselves. The more reserve the King maintained
in his demonstrations, the more those of the crowd were mul
tiplied and affecting It appeared as if the population of

104 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 30

The King enters the Tuileries.

Paris wished to pluck from his heart the grief which closed it
and the pardon which ought to spring from it.
VII.
On approaching the palace by the Carrousel, the triumphal
entry of the King was still further saddened by the presence
of th6 Prussian troops, who were encamped in the courts and
in the garden. This palace of a people resembled the prison
of Europe. The National Guard and the military household of
the King, hastened to take possession of the doors, the stair
cases, and the armories, to conceal from France, and from its
monarch, the mortification of seeing a royal residence in the
heart of the capital, guarded by soldiers of the north. The
King alighted from his carriage on the same steps from which
he had taken his departure one hundred days before, by the
light of the torches which had illumined his flight ; and from
which Napoleon had been lifted the day after, and borne to the
throne in the arms of his grenadiers. He was received there
by his servants, who threw themselves at his feet, and bedewed
with tears of joy the skirt of his coat. Conducted by them
to the balcony of the hall of the marshals, which looks on the
garden of the Tuileries, he received there, in the unanimous
and impassioned cries of an innumerable multitude, the wel
come due to his return, and a touching reparation for his exile.
These acclamations, renewed at every gesture he made, con
tinued as long as the daylight retained the King and the
Princes at the windows of the palace.
The delirium of this select crowd, principally composed of the
noble, rich, and citizen population of the aristocratical quarter
adjacent to the palace, rose to the forgetfulness of all propriety
and national dignity. The rejoicings, like the excesses, of a
people are often characterized by extravagance. The songs,
the cries, the tears, the gestures of this multitude no longer
sufficing to express their fanaticism, they imitated the example
of savage hordes ; men and women of the most elevated rank,
and bearing the most historical names of France, were seen
forming, like the Israelites before the ark of the covenant,,

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. ]Q5

Extravagance of loyal demonstrations.

circles and Bacchanahan groups, and dancing, hand in hand, by
the light of torches, before the King and his court. Every
time that the prince, who, though pleased, was yet weary
of these demonstrations, retired from the balcony to confer
with his ministers and officers, he was recalled by fanatical
vociferations, to witness some new freaks of madness indicative
of the public joy. The King himself, carried away by the
energy of these appeals, and by the thousands of hands raised
towards him, was forced to descend to the steps of the
palace, and to satisfy by a closer view this insatiable thirst
of royalty. This joy was saddening. Reflecting minds did not recognise
in these indecent exhibitions of loyal affection of the elegant
and aristocratic society of Paris, the decorum of a people whose
right of sovereignty had perished on the 20th March, their
glory at Waterloo, and their national independence the day
before in Paris. A sad resignation, a welcome, tender and
reparative, but silent and reserved, had been more worthy of
France in the presence of her King, and of all Europe in arms.
But there was a retaliation in this delirium ; and the King,
who witnessed it, ought to have reflected that the parties who
indulged in such joys might very soon brood over opposite
scenes of vengeance, and demand of him gratifications of
hatred which he might have some difficulty in refusing them.
VIL
His first night was disturbed until daybreak by the tumults
of these frantic manifestations. He was more a king than
ever, for he was king of the hearts of the people. This people,
however, was no longer its own master, but delivered a second
time to the invasion and the vengeance of armed Europe. It
was necessary at once to appease, to disarm, and to dismiss
Europe, and to govern this nation, in whose bosom the
hundred days had sown the seeds of division, which would
make of the second restoration no longer a reign, but only a
party and a combat.

106 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 30.

Difficulties of the King's position.

The King deeply felt these difficulties, but he felt also,
with a most penetrating intelligence, the advantages which his
second position held over his first.
On his first accession, a year before, he was unknown to
France. He had presented himself as a candidate for the throne,
under foreign patronage. He represented in the imagination
of France a regime repudiated and superannuated, irrecon
cilable, perhaps, with the ideas and interests which had
sprung up since his emigration. He succeeded a hero who
had intoxicated France with the glory and the pride of his
conquests, and who had stumbled, for the first time, from
victory and the throne. The army of this conqueror, deprived
of its chief, but unbroken and imposing still, was an empire
within the empire, a pretorian people, with whom it was indis
pensable to compound, or to retire. Its chiefs, dignitaries,
marshals, generals, officers, senators, and even its courtiers,
were on foot, united and combined. They had made their con
ditions with the Restoration, and could command or constrain
it, if they did not possess it altogether. The old party or the
party of the King, was only received in their suite as a mark
of jealous grace and hospitality by the surviving party of the
empire. These two parties contended for the ascendancy in
the palace, for favours, public employments, and posts in the
army. To give a supremacy to the royalists was to alienate
the ambitions of the court, the camps, and the administrations
of Bonaparte ; to give a pre-eminence to the Bonapartists,
?was to estrange the friends of ancient royalty, and to excite
a cry of ingratitude amongst the high nobility, the church,
the emigrants, and throughout all Europe. In this position
of the King in 1814 there were snares and abysses which it
was almost impossible to shun. In some respects he only held
a power of attorney from the empire : he was a sort of viceroy
of the revolution, a tolerated arbiter between the parties; he
was, of himself, only a conciliator, a landlord of the country .,
he was not master, he was not king.

OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. J 07
Its advantages.

IX.
The\ thunderbolt o), the 20th March had struck his throne,
it was tA^but it had, at the same time, thrown a light upon
the position. It had distinctly separated, by a bold and irre«
concilable aggression, the Royalist and Napoleon elements.
It had done more : it had thrown back upon the King's side,
through reprobation of the attempt of the 20th March, and
through resentment for the national calamities, — the conse
quences of that attempt, — the ^pinion of the masses, until
then indifferent and undecided. tThe King who had only been
tolerated, or accepted in 1814,' was implored for now, and
received with acclamations by the almost unanimous voice of
the nation! He alone could now effectually throw himself
between France vanquished, and Europe provoked. The ser
vices which he alone could render consecrated him in the eyes
of the nation. He was innocent of its misfortunes ; he had
not called back Bonaparte, he had not called in the foreigners.
Europe had armed of her own accord, for her own safety, and
not for the cause of this king, to whose fate it was indifferent.
He had not excited civil war in France ; he had hot retired
into Vendee, raising after him one half of his kingdom against
the other. He had taken shelter in Belgium, where he re
mained at the disposal of events and of his people, an afflicted
and powerless, but disarmed spectator of the struggle of
Bonaparte with Europe. Bonaparte had fallen again, under
the weight of his own fault, and of his own impotence. A
national cry of distress had recalled Louis XVIII. to Paris,
to repair the ruins accumulated by his antagonist. The army
had refused to defend the nation, which its defection had given
over to the foreigner ; the Chambers closed, no longer repre
sented anything but a faction vanquished and discredited by '
its defeat ; the country, of its own full and free will, gave itself
to the King. It was less a reign than a dictatorship of public
safety which this situation of affairs conferred upon the monarch. ;l
He found in it the right of withdrawing his confidence from
the men who had deceived him in so barefaced and treacherous

108 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 30.
Exigencies of the Royalist party.
a manner. He could be the friend of his friends, the King of
his enemies, the absolute arbiter of parties, and no longer the
embarrassed negociator between two causes. In one word, he
had compounded in 1814, while in 1815 he was going to reign.
Three months of grief and exile had given him the substance
•of power, of which hitherto he had only had the shadow.

Two dangers alone, still however, menaced him ; the exigen
cies, divested of all shame, of victorious Europe, which shelter
ing its rigours and its spoliations .under the name of the King,
would thus associate this name in the mind of the country
with the resentment of a conquered nation against the foreigner ;
and the requirements, devoid of all discretion, of the Royalist
party, impolitic and retrograding, of the emigration, re
presented in his court by the Count d'Artois, his brother,
and in the Chamber and the provinces by the nobility
and the clergy, whose exclusive influence was dreaded by
the country. But he hoped to relieve himself from the
first of these difficulties through the patronage of England,
through the friendship — cooled but easily regained — of the Em
peror Alexander, and through the consummate ability of M.
de Talleyrand ; and he hoped to prevent the second by the re
moval of M. de Blacas, by the confidence bestowed upon
Fouche — a sacrifice of which the nation was his witness — and
finally, by that personal diplomacy, and by that proverbial wis
dom with which his years had gifted him. He had a strong
belief in his own ability; he had the instinct of govern
ing in difficult times, as he had the ambition natural to his
high rank. A spectator and a victim of revolutions, by which
he had been long tried and tossed about; a witness of the
/ faults and the ruin of his brother Louis XVI., profoundly con-
I vinced of the political incapacity of his other brother, the
| Count d'Artois, governing his two nephews and his niece by
rthe ascendancy of understanding, of age, and of the throne,
Ihe thought himself certain of making all parties feel his in
flexible superiority, of restraining some and intimidating others.

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 109
Altered position of the dynasty of the old regime.
Richelieu and Mazarin in one man, but Richelieu without
cruelty, Mazarin without baseness, and both in a king.
Such was the opinion which Louis XVIII. had of others and
of himself; and this opinion was not without excuse in his
nature, and in his intelligence. He had the foremost quality
of a king : he affected to believe in the divinity of his right,
and he had the most perfect belief in himself.
XI.
But although the second fall of Napoleon, and the second
abasement of France had wonderfully smoothed for the King
the difficulties of reigning ; and although France, to raise her
self again from the 20th March, had only to choose between
the Bourbons and destruction, something betrayed, even in
their recall, the incompatibility which existed since 1789 be
tween renovated France and the dynasty of the old regime.
Louis XVIII. returned to the palace of his fathers, but he
returned to it supported on one side by a secularised bishop,
married, a deserter from his church, a negociator of the revo
lution in '92, a minister, a favourite, and it may be, even an
accomplice, of Napoleon ; and supported on the other side by
a regicide, just revolted from the Emperor, and who only
opened the doors of his palace to the King on the condition
of chasing from it the friends of his youth, and making the
revolution still reign there under his name.
M. de Blacas being removed, Talleyrand and Fouche, con
sidered necessary by the King to present the guarantees of the
revolution in his council, sufficiently told which was the con
queror, which the conquered, of the old or of the modern spirit,
even upon a soil occupied and governed by a million of ene
mies. These two men placed by destiny, as a living derision
on either side of the legitimate prince, humbled his triumph.
They resembled the ancient insulters placed behind the Roman
ovations to remind the conqueror that he was a man, and the
King that he was amnestied. Louis XVIII. had intelligence
enough to comprehend this symbol, pride enough to resent it,
ambition enough to endure it, and wisdom enough to interpret

110 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK SO.
Position of Fouche and Talleyrand.
it in his new reign. His council opened in his presence the
following day. XII.
Three men were already conspiring against one another
in this council of the royal government, associating together
for a moment through a necessity which counterfeited the con
cord of ideas : M. de Talleyrand against Fouche, Fouche
against Talleyrand, and the King against them both. M. de
Talleyrand had too much natural penetration not to understand
that by introducing Fouche into the King's council he had taken
this minister in the snare of his ambition, and that the scandal
attached to his position must engulf him before long. He
therefore left it to time to rid him of his rival.
Fouch6, in fact, in forcing himself into the King's ministry
after his return, had shown a giddiness of ambition which
betokened in him more of the mania of importance than of the
true genius of circumstances. His part, in whatever view it
may be regarded, ought to have finished as soon as he should
have replaced the King upon the throne. As a great personage,
secluded from public affairs, and decorated with some vain
title without functions, or a distinguished embassy in a distant
court, he might have fittingly terminated his career. His
recompense lay in the gratification of self-love, which his supe
riority in boldness and intrigue had given him in three epochs:
pro-consul under the convention, minister under the destroyer of
the Republic, arbiter of two reigns, and master of two revolu
tions under the second empire, the evil genius of Napoleon, the
moderator of the crisis of the 20th March, the restorer of those
Bourbons whom he had disdained and proscribed, necessary to
the King after having been redoubtable- to 'him, a man retired
from the scene where nothing more remained to play but history.
But, to astonish history by an additional boldness of incon
sistency, he wished to become the minister of the Bourbons,
without a transition of epoch and of circumstances; the Fouche
of to-day insolently rejecting his revolutionary costume, and
turning himself round in his court finery to outface the
Fouche of yesterday. Not only did this indecent versatility

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. Ill
Difficulties of Fouche's policy.
degrade the man, and left no other alternative in looking
at him than laughter or indignation, but the situation he
aspired to fill was impracticable to the genius even of insolence
and intrigue. It was destined in a few days to crumble
under him.
If he made himself agreeable to the Bourbons in minister
ing to their resentments, and making himself the instrument
of their policy, he became the proscriber of his own accomplices,
and thus lost all popularity and all importance in the revo
lutionary party. On the other hand, if he spared the revolution,
the Empire, and his accomplices of 1793, and ofthe 20th March,
he fell instantly under the suspicion of the King and his
party. In either of these hypotheses he was lost. He
doubtless flattered himself that he could preserve an equi
librium between the two factions which were going to contend
for France ; to govern the court party by the intimidation
of that of the army, and to domineer over the army party
by frightening it with the party of the court: showing to
the one side the revolution ready to break forth again, to
the other the vengeance of the Royalists ready to annihilate
them, and assuming thus the appearance of constraining all
by his own dexterity. This part would have been possible
for a statesman in 1814, when the foreign armies had retired,
and left the King alone and unknown in the presence of his
people; but it was no longer so in 1815, when the allied
powers, present and in arms around the throne, and occupy
ing every position in the country, answered to the King for
the submission of his people, and the immobility of the
revolution. These powers did not allow the royalists to
dread the movements of public opinion, or revolutionary de
monstrations, while encamped for several years upon the
soil ; and they thus broke the pretended lever of Fouche in
his hands. The King had evidently taken him as a flag
of truce for the moment between himself and the remains of
the Bonapartist insurrection, resolved to dismiss him im
mediately after he should have entered his capital, disbanded
the army proscribed the guilty, and consolidated his throne
beneath his feet.

112 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 30.

Fouche's opinion of the Bourbons.

By what blindness of understanding could a man so in
telligent of instinct, and so experienced in reactions as Fouche
believe in the gratitude of courts, in his own importance,
and in the durability of the power of a judge of Louis XVI.
in the palace even of that King, and in the midst of his
brothers, of his nephews, and of his avengers? This cannot
be explained by any reasoning of a sound mind : it can only
be explained by that giddiness which, at certain moments,
seizes upon ambitious men as upon kings, which conceals
from their eyes what all the world, by their side, sees clearly,
which catches them in their own snares, and punishes them
by their own success. Great vices have no more the privilege
of infallibility than great virtues. Men, even when they are
perverse, are still men; they stumble in their intrigues,
deceived by their cupidity, as the best stumble in their can
dour, deceived sometimes by their virtues. Every thing
finishes for all by a decline or by a fall. Such is the law ol
human affairs : only that posterity elevates some in its esteem,
and leaves others illustrious still, but illustrious in its contempt.
Such was Fouche. XIII.
He was intoxicated by the pride of his triumph, and
continued to speak of the King with a lightness and disdain
which this prince could not be ignorant of, as if he took a
pleasure in humbling his master. " All that the Bourbons
have hitherto done," he would say, " has only been in opposi
tion to the interests and glory of France. They wished to
place the counter-revolution upon the throne; they still wish
it, but I am present ! I shall oppose it with all my power.
There was some talk of substituting a foreign prince for
them ! Well ! that is true. A foreign prince, an Orleans, a
regency — there is nothing which the constitutional party would
not rather have accepted from the allied powers than them.
In that case, at least, it would have been required that the
rights of the people should be recognised. They speak of
civil war! If it broke out the Bourbons would onlv have

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 113
The convocation of the Chambers resolved upon,
in sixty departments a handful of royalists to oppose to the
mass of the people. Draw from my words whatever in
ference you please," he added, defying the indiscretion of
his interlocutors ; " that is quite indifferent to me ! "
He thought himself sure of finding again in a new
Chamber a majority, if not revolutionary, at least constitu
tional, which would serve him as a bulwark against the
court: a Chamber which he would govern by his intrigues
and by his creatures, as he had done the Chamber of the
hundred days, and which would aid him in intimidating
the royalists and governing the King and the court.
M. de Talleyrand, who had occasion for the same sort
of bulwark against more distant, but certain misfortunes,
with which he felt himself menaced by the spirit of the
court, without having any counterpoise in public opinion,
had the same hopes in a representation of the country.
These two ministers, agreeing in this common interest, im
mediately agitated in the King's council the question of the
prompt convocation of the Chambers. The King himself
was anxious to place a National Assembly face to face with
the exigencies of the foreigners, that he might not alone bear
the responsibility and unpopularity of the sacrifices, and the
ransoms of the country XIV,
To preserve the existing Chambers would be to capitulate
with the revolution and with the empire. To recal the
Chambers existing in 1814, and expelled by the 20th March,
would be still to recognise the authority of the empire, from
which they emanated, and to find, amongst the deputies and the
peers, many partisans of Napoleon re-elected after the 20th
March, and who had participated in the act of proscription
against the Bourbons. The King could not consent to replace
with his own hand his enemies in the legislative body, and
in the Chamber of Peers, altogether military and imperialist.
In the absence of the prescriptions of the charter, orders in
council ruled every thing ; with the condition, however, that
3 H

114 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 3a

Constitution of the Chambers of Peers and Deputies.
they should be recognised and constituted laws of the
state by the Chambers themselves, immediately on their being
assembled. The Chamber of Peers of 1814, was maintained for all
those of its members who had not sat in Napoleon's Chamber
of Peers during the hundred days. The Chamber of Deputies
of 1814, and the Chamber of Representatives of 1815, were
dissolved. The peerage for the future wm, in spite of the
King's opposition, declared hereditary. A vain institution of
feudal and aristocratic England, among a people who had
made a revolution for the suppression of castes, and who thus
re-established privileges in a legislature by right of birth,
and not by right of royal and popular election, and of personal
capacity !
Fouche and M. de Talleyrand saw nothing in this dis
position but a means of tying up the hands of the King
beforehand, and of preventing future ministers, sold to the
court, from ruling the Chamber of Peers, by the bait of
transmitting the peerage, at the will of the King, from father
to son. Above all, they saw in it the advantage of themselves
nominating the new peers, of choosing them from the men
of the revolution, or of the empire, and of thus securing
for themselves powerful adherents in the most elevated po
litical body after the King. The King, who trembled without
cause before the shade of the revolution and of the civil
war, with which Fouche and M. de Talleyrand frightened
him, during the first days of his reign, which was still con
tested, yielded every thing. He thus beforehand alienated
a part of his prerogative and of his liberty
The mode of electing the deputies was determined by
other orders in council The electors were divided into
committees of departments, and committees of districts. The
district committees presented the candidates to the depart
mental committees, who chose amongst them one half of the
deputies. This graduated election was intended to ensure
a representation at once more local and more general. It
was a pledge of notoriety, and of presumed capacity required
ly the law from the representatives of the country. Property

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 115
Withdrawal of the French troops behind the Loire.
and taxation always constituted the title to the right of
electing and being elected. Taxation to the amount of
300 francs, was the qualification for the departmental
electors. The ministers, to flatter the army, and to intro
duce a new element, presumed to be liberal in the elections,
had admitted in the departmental committees the men who
were decorated with the order of the Legion of Honour, the
civil and military militia of the Emperor The Chambers
were convoked for the 24th September.
XV
The French troops under the command of Davoust, retired
into cantonments behind the Loire, murmuring but peaceable ;
sowing in all the departments they passed through and
occupied, the remorse of patriotism and of Bonapartism, van
quished and proscribed in them. The populations more dis
tant from the theatre of war, and more indifferent to the
dangers which had threatened Paris, attributed to the King
and to the royalists, the reverses and the rigours of which they
were innocent.
On seeing these fine regiments still unbroken, and whose
numbers, horses, and artillery had the aspect of an uncon
querable force, but sad and condemned to inaction by treachery,
the inhabitants of the towns and country could not understand
that those thousands of soldiers, intrepid phalanxes, still
fervent in their enthusiasm for the Emperor, could have fled
of their own accord before the armies of the coalition, though
ten times superior, and thus delivered up the capital, the
throne, and the soil to the enemy. They believed, or affected
to believe, that this capitulation which had banished the army
into their provinces, was a cowardly understanding between
the Bourbons and the foreigners, and an expiation for the
glory of France, imposed by those who wished to debase it,
to make little of and disarm it, in order to possess it.
Symptoms of military insurrection and civil agitation broke
out under the footsteps of this army in twenty departments.
It seemed every instant ready to draw on the populations or

116 HISTORY OF THE RESTOR\TION [BOOK 30.
Disposition of the army and its chiefs.
to allow itself to be drawn on by them, to a renewal of the
war. The generals were in correspondence with Paris.
Davoust, though resolved to submit to necessity, with
difficulty kept his generals within the limits of their duty.
His head quarters were a sort of military government nego
tiating with the civil government. Privately encouraged in
his demands by the insinuations of Fouche and his friends,
he made his own conditions and those of the army. He
addressed to the King's government demands, through the
intervention of three negociators left by him in Paris on
his retirement, to discuss the interests of the army, as he
would have discussed the separate interests of a province, or
of an empire within the empire.
These three generals were Gerard, Kellermann, and Haxo,
all three famous for their talents and their patriotism. They
transmitted to the government the wishes and the opinions
of the army, and to the army the desires, rather than the
orders, of the government. They mutually watched and feared
each other, obedience was negotiated for, instead of being
enforced. Marshal Davoust resembled one of those Roman gene
rals at the head of undecided legions, obedient only to the
order which they themselves had imposed upon the senate.
In reality, however, Davoust submitted to play this part
rather than solicited it. Moved by the misfortunes of his
country, and convinced that a renewal of the war, though
favourable to his popularity and his fame, would only be' a
prolongation of the agony of France, he occupied himself,
while saving appearances, but with sincere self-denial, in paci
fying the spirit of the army, and calming' its anger by con
cessions. XVI.
His orders of the day from Orleans and Tours, testified
these efforts to soothe the excitement of the chiefs and the
soldiers. "The commissioners," he said to the troops, " assure
us that a reaction is not to be apprehended ; that passions will
be kept down, men respected, and principles preserved ; that
there will be no arbitrary dismissals in the army, and that

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 117
Address of the army to the King.
its honour will be shielded. As a pledge of this," he added,
" we have the nomination of Marshal St. Cyr to the ministry of
war ; and that of Fouche to the ministry of police. These
conditions are acceptable. The national mterest ought frankly
to unite the army with the King. This interest requires
some sacrifices ; let us make them with a modest energy. The
army unbroken and united will become, if necessary, the
rallying point of the French, and even of the royalists !
Let us unite; let us press together; let us never separate;
let us be French ! This has been, as you know, the first
wish of my heart, and it will never quit me but with my
last sigh ! "
These noble words were appreciated by the mass of the
army, which began to feel its fault, and to afflict itself for
the calamities it had brought upon the country. It responded
to them by a great act of repentance and submission, trans
mitted to the commissioners, by the generals commanding
divisions and by the commissioners to the marshal, to be
forwarded by him to the King.
" Sire ! " said this patriotic manifesto of the army to
the throne : " full of confidence in your generosity, resolved
to prevent civil war by rallying around you, and of recalling
by its example those of your subjects whom circumstances
may have alienated from you, the army flatters itself that
you will receive its submission with benevolence, and that,
casting a veil over the past, you will not close your heart
to any of your children."
This act did honour to the army, and moved the King
and all France. The following day Marshal Davoust, ven
turing still further, imposed upon the army the spontaneous
change of its colours.
"Soldiers," said he, "it remams to complete the act
of submission that you have just made, by an act of obedience,
painful but necessary ! Hoist the white flag ! I know that
in this I ask of you a great sacrifice ! For five-and-twenty
years we have all stood by these colours which we have
borne ; but this sacrifice is demanded of us by the interest
of our country. 1 am incapable, soldiers, of giving you an

118 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 30.

Reprisals of the allied powers.

order that would be at variance with honour. Preserve to our
country a numerous and a gallant army !"
XVII.
The last words of the generalissimo were understood before
he had uttered them. The King was already oppressed, and
even insulted in Paris by the insolent reprisals of Blucher. The
bridge of Jena, in front of the Champ-de-Mars, denounced by this
barbarian to his soldiers, mined, and charged with powder, to
bury in the ruins of this monument the name of the battle
which had annihilated Prussia, had only been saved by the
supplication of the King to the Emperor Alexander, and by the
threat, more theatrical than rational, which he held out, of
placing himself upon the bridge at the moment of the ex
plosion, to perish with a monument of his kingdom, shielded
by his majesty and his life.
The monuments of the arts, bronzes, marbles, pictures,
statues, antique cars, the spoils of the nations, of the capitals,
the palaces, the museums, and the libraries of Europe, accumu
lated in the Louvre, and in the public squares, by victory, were
reclaimed and taken back in open day, by the armed soldiers of
the nations and of the princes from whom they had been
conquered. Conquest was taking away what had been taken
away by conquest. These trophies went back from Paris to
Rome, to. Florence, to Vienna, to Berlin, to Turin, and to
Madrid. They were not regarded as property; they were the
spoils of war. The vicissitude of fate constituted all the right
of the possessors. Impartial equity could not legitimately
accuse the former proprietors of these chefs d'ceuvre for seizing
them again, and carrying back to their capitals and countries
the treasures which had been ravished from them. The sword
had been the only title ; and in turn it produced, not a re
taliation — for French property and national monuments were
respected — but the violent restitution of the spoils. Conscience
admitted this ; but national pride murmured even to the appre
hension of a desperate insurrection in Paris.
The artistic as well as military genius of France was

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 119
Rigour of the Prussians.
attached to these pictures, these marbles, and these bronzes
with more passion, and with a passion more noble, than was
felt for treasures and for territories. It was less bitter, and it
seemed less humiliating, to give up provinces and kingdoms
than pictures and statues. The people thought their hearths
and altars were violated, and that their national chattels, sold
by auction amongst barbarian soldiers, would testify for ever to
Europe their defeat and humiliation. The sculptors and
painters were indignant. Poetry wept in the elegies, at once
sad and avenging, of Casimir Delavigne, entitled Masseniennes,
at the devastation of the Louvre, and the emigration of the
marble gods and goddesses.
M. de Talleyrand had too just an appreciation of the situation
of affairs, and too much the habit of discussing questions of public
right, to contest with the allies this restitution which they were
making with their own hands. He would have had nothing
but sophistry to oppose to reason ; he therefore shut his eyes
to the abduction of these spoils. He despised the murmurs of
the people ; and as if he had disdained being moved by such a
trifle, he affected to reply to those who came to acquaint him
with the excitement of the capital, and to beg of him to interfere
in the name of France and of the King • " It is no business of
mine!" He was right. To resist was impossible, to supplicate
would be base, to lament humiliating. There was nothing for
it but to be silent and turn away the eyes.
XVIII.
But the allies, when once occupying Paris en masse, and
successively covering all the provinces with their armies,
imposed subsidies, oppressed the towns and the country with
requisitions of every description, emptied the public coffers forthe
payment of their troops, domineered, exhausted, and devastated
the dwellings of the rich and the poor. The Prussians, above
all, whether they had more to avenge for the dismemberment
and spoliation of their own country, or whether that people,
more warlike than the other Germanic races, have in their
nature more of this bitterness of oppression and exaction that

120 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 30.
Brutalities of Blucher.
are contracted in camps, signalised themselves, as in 1814, by
cruelties and brutaUties, which made their occupation the more
dreaded, and their name the more odious in France. They
had imposed 100,000,000 of francs on the city of Paris, the day
they entered it. The prefects appointed by the King, the
mayors of the towns and villages, could not shield their depart
ments, their towns, and their villages, against these insatiable
requirements and depredations. The Prussians treated France,
although reconciled by the convention of St. Cloud, and by
the presence of the King, as a conquered country. They did
not recognise in it the kingdom of a king, their ally, but the
spoil of Napoleon their enemy. They laid their hands on
several prefects, who, with a courageous independence, had dared
to resist, made them prisoners, and removed them from their
provinces. A unanimous cry of grief, distress, and indignation arose to
the King from all the provinces occupied by them and by the
Austrians, who were not so harsh, to implore protection, or to
threaten an insurrection of despair
The Duke of Wellington, more modest in victory, and more
guarded in his occupation, preserved the English outside Paris
in a strictness of discipline, which respected the dwellings oi
the citizens and the authority of the King, whom, while re
establishing, he wished to make popular. He acted like an
ally with Louis XVIII. after having acted like a conqueror
with Napoleon. He did not offend, but frequently consulted
with the government of the King, which he sustained against
the brutalities of Blucher. In spite of his observations, the
Prussian general threatened to seize upon the treasury, and to
carry off the public coffers, if the city of Paris did not pay him
the 100,000,000 which he had imposed upon it on his entrance.
The presence of his King and of the Emperor of Russia, who
at length arrived in Paris, restrained the reprisals of the
Prussian general.
The war impost of Prussia on Paris was reduced by
10,000,000. But Blucher had pillaged the manufactories
of arms at Versailles, and some private houses of this royal
residence had been ransacked by his soldiers.

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 121
Advance of foreign troops on the French territory.

xix.
During this concentration of sovereigns and commanders-
in-chief in Paris, Europe, which the 20th March had placed
entirely under arms and set in motion, continued to advance
from all the frontiers upon the French territory. The pro
vinces could scarcely contain this flowing tide of nations, eager
to come, even after the termination of the struggle, to avenge
themselves for the terror with which the landing of Napoleon
had inspired the world. The allies divided the whole space
of the country amongst them. The English, the Belgians, the
Dutch, and the Hanoverians were distributed amongst all the
cities and all the provinces which extend from Paris to the
Belgian frontier. The Prussians encamped en masse in Paris,
and spread from thence between the Loire and the ocean. The
Austrians, the Bavarians, and the Wirtemburghers were can
toned in Burgundy, the Nivernese, the Lyonnese, and Dauphiny.
The Austrian and Piedmontese army of Italy were quartered
in Provence and in Languedoc. The Russians covered with
their numerous corps d'armee Lorraine and Champagne ; the
Saxons and Badenese occupied Alsatia ; the Hungarians the
borders of the Mediterranean ; the Spaniards the flanks of the
French Pyrenees, Navarre and Roussillon.
Never since the great invasion of the Barbarians, who had
driven away the primitive populations, and supplied their place
on the soil, had such an inundation of armed nations over
whelmed the French territory. The maledictions of the people
arose on every side against the man whose impatience to re
conquer the throne had opened the floodgates of this torrent of
people, and given to the world a pretext for this universal
inundation.
XX.
The King — with a territory thus invaded under his feet, and
with a people divided in opinion, exhausted of money and of
blood, disarmed, expelled from their fortresses, occupied in its
capital and in all its great centres of energy, as Lyons, Stras-

122 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 30.
Perplexities of the King's position.

burg, and Lille — in insurrection for his cause in the west and
south — quivering in the east and behind the Loire for the
cause of his enemy — could only lament and submit.
An act of desperate energy, it has been said, could have
thrown him into the bosom of the army of the Loire, which, re
cruited by the Vendeans, and mingling the two flags in one
common patriotism, might have imposed respect and modera
tion upon the allies. But this plan, dreamt of by some generals
of the army of the Loire, and by some Vendean chiefs, eager to
bear their share of patriotism in the calamities of France, was
but a chimera which vanished in the first moment of reflection
To abandon Paris was to abandon the throne ; for, after giving
up three-fourths of the French provinces and the capital, it
would be necessary to re-conquer them from more than a
million of foreigners, masters of the fortified places, of the
arms, of the treasury, and of the taxes. With what force could
the King attempt such an enterprise? With forty or fifty
thousand men, the wrecks of Napoleon's army, and with some
thousands of peasants of Brittany for auxiliaries ; and supposing
an impossible success, in what state would the King find his
kingdom? Ravaged and torn to pieces by this million of
enemies ! The whole of France would have been changed into
one vast battle-field after the struggle. It was proposing to
him the conflagration of his kingdom by his own hand.
Nothing was possible for the King, after Waterloo and the
submission of Paris, except to retire from the throne to avoid
witnessing the oppression of his kingdom, or to treat in his
own name, and in the name of his people, with the allies, to
reduce the ransom, and soften the rigours inseparable from
occupation : a painful but essential part, the necessity for
which the nation felt, excused its rigours, and thanked from
their hearts their unfortunate King.

XXI.
But the presence of this army of Napoleon, though now
submissive to the King, assembled on one single point of the

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FBANCE. 123
Disbanding of the French army.
kingdom, behind a great river, backed by warlike provinces,
such as Brittany and Auvergne, still, however, alarmed the
allied powers. The council of sovereigns therefore required
the King to disband it.
" The treaty of alliance concluded at Vienna between the
great powers," wrote the Russian plenipotentiary — M. de Nes-
selrode to M. de Talleyrand, " was concluded against Bonaparte
and his adherents, and above all, against the French army,
whose disorderly ambition, and insatiable thirst of conquest,
have frequently disturbed all Europe. Urged by the neces
sity of universal peace, the Emperor of Russia and his allies
make the disbanding of this arnry an imperative condition, as
well for the interest of the King of France as for that of the
peace of nations."
The King, who could only see in the army of Bonaparte a
remnant of pretorians who would perpetuate the fanaticism of
his competitor to the throne, and the opposition to his race and to
his reign, must himself have anxiously wished for the dis
banding of this army, and its transformation into a territorial
and royalist body. He therefore hastened to yield to the
injunction of the allied powers, which was in all respects con
formable to his own interests.
The disbanding of the army of the Loire was accordingly
declared. The regiments were organised in eighty-six depart
mental legions of three battalions each, and in fifty-two regi
ments of cavalry and artillery. To destroy the esprit de corps,
that inextinguishable tradition of troops which survives the
men, and still lives on in the colours and the name of armed
bodies, each of the legions was to be composed of soldiers born
in the department of which it bore the name — an excellent
method of stifling Bonapartism in these corps, and to substitute
for it the spirit of the country to which each belonged. It was
an adroit method of creating royalist legions, at least in the
west and south, but a certain element likewise of civil war, in case
of a conflict of opinions between the different parts of France ; a
fatal institution also on another account, because it was in its
essence more federative than national, and because, by creating
a provincial spirit in the members of the army, it tended to

124 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 30
Opening of diplomatic conferences.
weaken the spirit of national unity, which constitutes its strength
against factions and foreign enemies.
Marshal Macdonald was charged with the disbanding and
the reorganising of the army. XXII.
It was essential, before anything else, to fix in a definitive
treaty of peace the situation of France and of its monarch, with
reference to the allied powers. Until this treaty was discussed
and signed France only existed as a conquered country, its
King as an officious commissioner between his people and
Europe. M. de Talleyrand, happy to escape the difficulties of
the home government, which were left to Fouche, became
entirely absorbed in this negociation, which was the principal
occupation also of the King. The Congress of Vienna, in
terrupted by the 20th March, and aggravated by Waterloo, was
therefore resumed at Paris.
The diplomatic conferences between M. de Talleyrand and
the European plenipotentiaries were opened at the residence
of Lord Castlereagh, prime minister of England, to which the
deference of the sovereigns for the conqueror of Waterloo left
the paramount direction of the negociations. M. de Talley
rand, the Duke of Wellington, Lord Castlereagh, M. de Metter
nich, M. de Weissemberg, M. de Hardenberg, M. de Humboldt,
Prince Rasoumowski, M. de Nesselrode, M. Capo d'Istria, M.
de Gentz, a German publicist, M. Pozzo di Borgo, and some
of the generals most versed in the secret policy of their re
spective cabinets, assembled there for several hours each day.
They began by regulating according to conventions the
requisitions, which until then had been arbitrary, and also the
departments assigned to the different corps d'armee in the
territory of France. They afterwards deliberated on the fate
of Napoleon, who was then still in a state of indecision on the
British coast. He was declared the prisoner of war of Europe,
his custody confided to England, and his residence fixed at the
island of St. Helena. Peace between France and England
was on the instant re-established ; Great Britain having declared

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 125
Their progress.
war against Napoleon alone, the cause of it was removed m his
person. M. de Talleyrand, by way of fostering a noble feeling of
humanity, of which England had taken the initiative, under
the religious inspiration of Wilberforce and its philosophers,
admitted, in the name of France, the principle of the abolition
of the infamous slave-trade.

XXIII.
It was then asked if the allies had made war for the
purpose of conquest, or for the re-establishment, pure and
simple, of European order, disturbed by Napoleon. The great
powers, more generous, consented to admit the latter principle.
The little ones, more envious and ambitious, contested it. The
Netherlands demanded the restitution of Alsatia, of Lorraine,
of Flanders, and of Artois, to their ancient possessors. " Con
quest," they said, " has the right to retrieve conquest."
Prussia supported the Netherlands by its organ, M. de
Humboldt ; and she demanded the cession of Montmedy,
Metz, Sarrelouis, and Thionville.
M. de Metternich demanded, in the name of Austria, a
territorial indemnity, a guarantee for permanent security, a
form of government reconcilable with the neighbouring govern
ments, and immediate measures of military police to repress the
attempts of the army.
The King of Sardinia reclaimed Savoy, which had been
left to France by the treaty of 1814. England and Russia
asked for nothing.
These demands, on their amicable representation, were
reduced to the demolition of Huningen, an indemnity of
600,000,000 of francs for the expenses of the war, of
200,000000 to construct new fortified places against any future
aggressions of France, an occupation during seven years of a
portion of French territory, by 150,000 troops ofthe coalition,
maintained at the expense of France, and commanded by
general conjointly named by the allies ; finally, an important
dismemberment of the north of France, in behalf of the Ne-

126 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 30.
The ultimatum of the allied powers.
therlands, by the cession of Conde, Philippeville, Givet, and
Maubeuger. XXIV.
M. de Talleyrand confided in the impartial friendliness
of the Duke of Welhngton, to combat the injurious and
iniquitous enormity of these conditions. The King himself
took an active personal part in the private conferences with
the Emperor of Austria, the King of Prussia, and above all,
with the Emperor Alexander, the most generous and the
most influential prince of the coalition. He brought to bear
also upon the heart of this prince, the mystic influence of
Madame de Krudener, that Christian sibyl, who replaced in
the soul of the Emperor of Russia all human ambition by
religious aspirations for the foundation in Europe of an order
moral and intellectual.
The Duke of Wellington and the Emperor Alexander
nobly interceded with Europe, not to abuse victory too rigidly
against a prince innocent of the attempt of Napoleon, and
against a nation subdued by its own army, and which had
suffered rather than conspired for this attempt. The ulti
matum of the allied powers, to which Russia and England
thought it their duty to adhere, out of regard for their allies
more than from hostility to France, was concocted amongst
them, and concealed for more than a month from M de
Talleyrand and the King.
It came out at length, at the beginning of September, and
threw the King into a state of consternation. It comprised
the conditions, scarcely alleviated, enumerated above: a par
tial dismemberment, an indemnity of 1000,000,000 of francs,
an occupation of seven years, France redeemed from par
tition by disarmament, ruin, and shame ; and the redemp
tion signed by a king who, in redeeming his country, seemed
thus to preserve his throne at the expense of his people.
Louis XVIII. shed bitter tears in secret, and but ill
concealed his despair from his familiar adherents. "Mv
place," he often exclaimed, " should be at Hartwell, or with
the army pf the Loire. My allies ruin, in affecting to save

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 127

Feelings of the King towards M. de Talleyrand.
me." Had this prince listened to this noble despair of his
heart, and had he given up to the allies a throne too dear
at the price they demanded, he would have lost this throne
for a few daj's, perhaps; but Europe embarrassed, and France
excited, would have restored to him his kingdom on more
worthy conditions. The inspirations of honour are the only
certain ones in similar extremities. To declare themselves the
prisoners of Europe would have been better for Louis XVIII.
and for his family than to appear its accomplice in the de
basement and spoliation of his country
XXV
Instead of being irritated against himself, the King con
ceived a profound resentment at the impotence, or the inability
of M. de Talleyrand. Want of success readily becomes a
crime in statesmen, as well as warriors. Moreover M. de
Talleyrand was a secret burthen upon the self-love and the
dignity of Louis XVIII This statesman was a necessity,
but an onerous and importunate one ; for his superiority was
too ill disguised in the council, not to overshadow somewhat
the superiority of the King.
M. de Talleyrand was of high birth, and the great lord
appeared in the minister, as well as the condescending one in
his services. He recollected, and he made the King recollect,
that it was by the aid of his hand he had mounted his throne,
and that it was by the hand of M. de Blacas that he had des
cended from it. The advice he gave in the council was brief
and imperious; he did not discuss, he prescribed. More
experienced in modern men and things than Louis XVIII.,
more influential with the allied sovereigns and their ministers
than the King, he exercised, by his obtruded ascendancy
rather a patronage than a ministry. The power lay in his
name, more than in his title of president of the council.
The King, obliged to conciliate him, in consequence of his
presumed capacity in public affairs, was not sorry to find that
capacity at fault, that he might ascribe, in the eyes of the
multitude, the misfortunes of the negociation to the negotiator,

128 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION LBOOK 30.
Character of M. de Talleyrand.
and appear compelled by the interest of the state to dismiss
a minister who resembled too much a mayor of the palace.
XXVI.
It must be acknowledged, moreover, that M. de Talleyrand,
so useful at the Congress of Vienna as a negotiator, had
not evinced, either in 1814, or since the second return of
the King in 1815, as minister, any of those high qualities
which constitute the statesman in constitutional countries.
He had neither the initiative, nor activity, nor eloquence,
those three essentials of parliamentary governments. The
laisser-faire, the superb indolence, and the intelligent silence
formed his nature, his ability, and his tactics. Now, these three
virtues of an indolent mind, which are excellent in times
when the vessel of the state sails in its right course of itself,
were insufficient at this tempestuous period, when it was
often necessary to seek out a passage and work the ship
amidst rocks and contrary winds. There are moments when
it is requisite to grasp time as it flies, and to seize on opinions
as it were by main force. M. de Talleyrand loved to slumber,
and counted greatly upon that secret progress of events, which
does much it is true, but not all. The advantage of time,
indolently waited for, and adroitly gathered in, constituted at
least one half of his fame for ability.
No man was ever more indebted for his fame to providence.
When time operated for him under the active hand of Napo
leon, all went well ; but since the spirit of the court in the
palace, and the spirit of faction in parties, had decomposed
the national spirit under the eyes and under the hand of a
drowsy government, it was quite the contrary. The minister
was a looker-on of the decline of the throne, and of the
people; and by not impressing upon the government any
decisive course of action, he allowed it inevitably to sink by
intestine vices which corrupted every thing, and by extreme
difficulties which continually increased. Nature, moreover,
had not given bim the necessary courage to make a figure
in the tribune, or the gift of eloquence in the presence of

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 129
Contemplated retirement of M . de Talleyrand.

public assemblies. He always required to have some one in
advance of him, and was more a prompter than an actor in
the great political dramas he had witnessed. Witliout fire
in his heart, without passion, or warmth of eloquence, how
could he have warmed, excited, and impassioned any assembly
of men? Impartiality is never eloquent, because eloquence
is only the result of conviction : the tribune would there
fore have only placed his inferiority in a stronger light in
the presence of an opposition, or of contending parties. Now
the hour of oratory was about to strike ; the elections were
preparing, the factions were forming, France was about
to recover her voice. The King felt that M. de Talley
rand would be mute before the questions which would not
fail to be showered upon him. M. de Talleyrand himself
must have been intimidated at the new part which the Cham
bers were about to impose upon him. This part he never
had been able to attempt even in the vigour of his youth
and of his ambition in the Constituent Assembly, where he
concealed himself behind Mirabeau. How then could he
attempt it now ? To what a fall from his high prestige was
he not about to expose himself? He preferred rather to
fall opportunely by the discontent of the King, than a few
days later by his own insufficiency.
Such were the motives which made the King wish for the
retirement of his prime minister, a step which was as much
desired by M. de Talleyrand himself. There was another
reason still imperceptible to the court, but already powerful
in the heart of the King. This was the sudden, lively, and
profound inclination which he had conceived some days back
for a new favourite ; for no other name can be given to the
feeling which attracted him towards a young man he had scarcely
seen, and who was already become necessary to him ; this wag
M. Decazes. XXVII.
Louis XVIII., like princes in general who are born near
the throne, brought up in leading-strings, in the effeminacy of
oducation, and in the etiquette of courts, which separates a man
3 i

130 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 30.
The King in his friendship.
from the rude contact of ordinary hfe, had something effeminate
in his character. His mind wanted that manly tenderness of
which infirmity had deprived his body. He had not enough
of it for love, that powerful luxury of great natures, but he had
enough for friendship. His friendships, by their concentration
and by their fidelity, readily grew to passion and favouritism,
aud he honoured them by his constancy.
In his youth he had cultivated the society of some ladies,
rather than been in love with them ; amongst others, the
Marquise de Balby, whose wit was more dazzling even than
her beauty. After these, M. d'Avaray and M. de Blacas had
been the objects of this obstinacy in his friendships. M.
d'Avaray, who merited this sentiment by his gentleness and
grace, and M. de Blacas, who merited it by his fidelity, had
been snatched away from him, the one by death, the other
by unpopularity, to which it had been necessary to sacrifice
him, or else to renounce the throne.
Madame de Balby was still alive, but she had grown old,
and private feelings of resentment which sprung up during
the emigration, seemed to have removed her for ever from the
court and heart of the King. He had therefore no domestic
friendship in the palace where he had formerly opened his
mind and his heart to cherished confidants on the subjects of
his mental troubles, his political ambitions, and his literary
labours. He could no longer find in the family by which he
was surrounded, the same friendship, secure confidence, and
outpourings of affection. He deemed himself, and was, in
fact, very superior in intellect and faculties to the other
members of his house.
He was very fond of his niece, the Duchess d'Angouleme ;
but she was cold, reserved, restrained, ajid lofty in her horror 
very natural in the daughter of such dear victims— of those
compacts and compromises with the revolution, and the men of
the revolution, which the King was compelled to justify throuoh
policy, and to submit to. Her presence was often a silent
reproach to him, especially since he had admitted M. de
Talleyrand and Fouche into his councils That which is
dreaded is not long beloved.

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 13 J
Character of the members of the royal family.
His nephew, the Duke d'Angouleme, was more agreeable
to him, by the modest gravity, the attitude of respectful
deference for the wisdom on the throne, and the gentleness
and obedience of his character. He was, the King said, his
Germanicus. But the intellect of the Duke d'Angouleme,
less elevated than his soul, was too inferior to that of his uncle
to admit of a communion of mind between him and the King.
The Duke de Berry, his other nephew, was brave and in
telligent ; but frivolous, rough, and addicted to pleasure, from
the passions of his age and the idleness of his life. The King
left him to the enjoyment of his military tastes and the
caprices of his heart ; he made him the Alcibiades of his
dynasty, and gave him up to the admiration and malice of
youth. The princes of the house of Conde, either superannuated or
mere ciphers, were consigned with some old men and women
of their posthumous court, to their huntings and banquets at
Chantilly. The Duke d'Orleans would have had more conformity of
views, more equality of mind with the King, and more allure
ment for his opinions ; but he was to the royal house a living
souvenir of his father, so fatal to the family of Louis XVI.;
and, moreover, it was suspected that he indulged the hope of
a personal usurpation. Nobody loves a rival, or confides in a
competitor. The Duke d'Orleans was pardoned, loaded with
honours, endowed with possessions, favours, and riches ; but he
was kept at a distance, as well with a view to his own popu
larity, as by the politic prudence of the King.
XXVIII.
There remained the Count d'Artois, the brother and
eventual successor of the King upon the throne. The King
loved him, in spite of his inferior intellect, aud perhaps for
that very reason, as it prevented his fearing him. There was
friendship in this relationship. Sure of the heart of this
brother, who had shared his exile and misfortunes, he saw in
him a witness of his early splendour, a survivor of the old

132 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 30.

The Count d'Artois and his court.

court, a companion of the same adversities ; but with the
Count d'Artois he had only these ties of blood, of affection,
of recollections, of community, and of fortune. Political opinions
separated the two brothers, if the term opinion may be applied
to the habits of thinking of the Count d'Artois, imbibed ready-
made from his birth, nurtured by the prejudices and thought
lessness of his early youth, preserved in mature age by his
exclusive association with the exiled nobility and priesthood,
the most irreconcilable with the new spirit of the age ; and
brought back from exile to the palace to be made use of by all
the flatterers of decayed old times, and all the fabricators of
intrigue. XXIX.
Since his return from Ghent, although he had not mur
mured too loudly at Arnouville against the prostration of Louis
XVIII., and against the necessity for Fouche, this prince had
resumed, immediately after the King's return to the Tuileries,
his customary circle of royalist ringleaders, and his habits of
underhand opposition to the government of his brother, which
constituted him the consolation of the old court, the hope of
the aspirations of the aristocracy and the church, and the
involuntary instrument of men to whom these two causes were
indifferent, but who flattered them to aggrandize themselves.
The right wing of the palace of the Tuileries, called the
Pavilion Marsan. was the residence of the Count d'Artois. and
the focus of this little emigrant court in the midst of a revolu
tionized country. The political man of this intestine faction of
the palace was once more M. de Vitrolles. This personage
had served in 1814, as a confidential messenger between M.
de Talleyrand and the Count d'Artois. He had opened, with
more zeal than real utility, some channels of communication
between the disaffected Bonapartists, the foreign diplomatists,
and the prince, for a restoration, which did not depend upon the
success of his petty schemes, but on the defeat, or the victory
of Napoleon. After Waterloo, he had again insinuated himself
into the confidence of Fouche, and he had been the official, or
officious negotiator of the overtures of this minister to the

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 183
Iheir intrigues.
king and the princes. This last service had seemed to give
him a further claim to the confidence and the gratitude of the
Count d'Artois. M. de Vitrolles had evidently no other
political ability than his insinuating spirit and his royalist
zeal ; for he had been the first to mix up the cause of pure
monarchy with the intrigue, abounding in constitutional con
cessions, of M. de Talleyrand's party, of which he was the
voluntary agent in 1814; whilst in 1815, he mixed up the
cause of pure monarchy with the intrigue, full of revolutionary
concessions and of compromises with the cabinet of Fouche,
the secrets of which he had equally received and carried back
wards and forwards.
But M. de Vitrolles had, over all those men of the old
school who surrounded the Count d'Artois at the Pavilion
Marsan, the advantage which a young and active man, who has
remained in France and mingled in everything, must have over
expatriated men who know not on what to depend in a country
of unknown politics. The prince thought he had occasion for
him, to serve him with eyes, with tongue, and with hand, amidst
the clouds of the revolutionary world through which he pre
tended he could penetrate. M. de Talleyrand and Fouche
had scarcely begun to reign without rivals in the cabinet
formed by the King at Arnouville, when the circle of the Count
d'Artois, consigned to the inactivity and discontent of their
political extinction, conspired against the ministry, and began
to hatch political plans and ministries, by which this party of
superannuated men, or of new men, ardent in intrigues, would
save, as they said, the monarchy in spite of the King.
XXX.
The principal men of this budding opposition of the palace,
of which M. de Vitrolles was the soul and the moving power,
reckoned amongst them M. d'Ambray, a retired chancellor of
1814, and M. Ferrand, a man of factitious reputation, created
by the royalist party that it might boast a publicist of its own,
although Bonaparte had also taken into his service, and into his
pay, the superstitious principles of despotism of M. Ferrand.

134 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 30.
The men of the opposition.
M. de Fontanes, more enlightened, but burning to obtain
the pardon of his partiality for the Emperor, by the purity and
the ardour of his royalist principles.
The Duke de Levis, a man of the old court, with an upright
mind, delicate, studious, and literary, but with a constitution
too feeble to bear the weight of politics.
M. Bourrienne, a clever renegade from the cabinet of the
Emperor into that of the princes, his enemies, possessing all
the desperate zeal of renegades.
M. Alexis de Noailles, a young man of great name, of
generous courage, and of an activity which equalled his zeal ;
who had signalised himself by the boldness of his faith against
the Emperor's persecutions of the church and its pontiff; and
who was one of the first to throw himself, sword in hand, in 1814,
before the Count d'Artois and the monarchy of his fathers.
Finally, M. de Chateaubriand, who had returned dis
contented from Ghent, feeling himself by his genius equal to
great political parts, not disdaining fortune in the midst of
ambition, excluded from public affairs by the horror he had
dared to evince against Fouche, by the indifference of M. de
Talleyrand, who did not sufficiently appreciate him, and by the
instinctive repulsion of Louis XVIII., who did not like him.
Princes, great by convention, are unwittingly jealous of genius,
great by nature. No other motive can be found for this aversion
of Louis XVIII. to M. de Chateaubriand, who had devoted
himself to this prince, even to calumny against Bonaparte, and
who only asked to rivet himself to him by all his devotion,
and by every ambition of fame and of power.
XXXI.
In this opposition camp were found other men of inferior
note, such as M. Laborie, the friend and colleague of Messrs.
Bertin in the Journal des Debats, a man famous for scenting
an intrigue, and drawing closer the strings which tie the
knot of it.
M. de La Maisoufort, of a trivial but sparkling genius, who
could assume gravity on occasion, suspected by Louis XVIII. of

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 135
M. Decazes.

intriguing, during the emigration, with _B auche-Borel, and
other officious agents of supposed negociations, to give them
selves importance. M. de La Maisonfort had attached himself
to the Count d'Artois, more credulous than his brother, and
more surrounded by intermeddlers. He had written in 1814
a royalist pamphlet, which had contested with that of M.
de Chateaubriand the enthusiasm of the friends of the
Bourbons. Having returned to France with the princes, and
being unknown to the new men, he was looked upon as a
political oracle, when he was only a playful wit, a courtier of the
court of Charles II.
Messrs. de Polignac, brought up in the court of the Count
d'Artois, living souvenirs of his youth, men of honour and of
fanatical zeal, still too young to allow people to judge of their
political importance ; M. de Juigne, M. de Bruges, and M. de
Boisgelin. None of the men of this court, and of these opinions,
were calculated to offer to Louis XVIII. the favourite in whom
he could repose at once his policy, his intellect, and his heart.
Chance, however, presented him with one.
XXXII.
We have said that the day before the King's entry into
Paris the council of ministers, looking for a prefect of police,
bold, intelligent, and sure, to dissolve the Chambers, to appease
the murmurs of the people, and to smoothe and secure the
route of Louis XVIII. from Arnouville to the Tuileries, had
appointed M. Decazes to fill these functions. We have seen
with what ardour to serve, and with what resolution of head
and heart, this young man had solicited from Fouche, his
superior in the police department, the honour and the respon
sibility of this task. Since that day M. Decazes had redoubled
his zeal, enlightened the government, baffled the remnants of
the factions, deserved well of the ministry, and better still of
the King and the royalists.
The prefect of police, from the subordinate though im
portant nature of his functions, was not in the habit of seeing
the King. He reported his labours to the minister of police,

13b' HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 30.
Origin of M. Decazes' favour with the King.
who imparted them to the King in council. But an imaginary
attempt to poison the Emperor Alexander having alarmed for
a moment the aides-de-camp of this prince at the Elysee, and
M. Decazes having, in his quality of director of the police, to
probe this affair and demonstrate its puerility, the King, uneasy
at the rumours to which this event gave rise in Paris, and
wishing to evince to the Emperor Alexander all the solicitude
he felt for the safety of so august a guest, summoned M.
Decazes, to receive from his own mouth the details of this event.
The countenance of the young prefect of police, his attitude,
at once timid and assiduously attentive, his elocution, clear and
refined, the sound of his voice, wliich evinced feeling and
respect, struck the King at once. He was pleased to prolong
the audience, in order to prolong the pleasure of the conference,
and to study the man. In short, Decazes pleased him ; and
to please a King is speedily to govern under his name. This
sudden impression was justified by many gifts of nature and of
character. XXXIII.
M. Decazes was the son of a magistrate of Libourne, in
the department of the Gironde, a part of France which more
than any other produces those unexpected pieces of good fortune
and rapid elevation— the fruits of a bold ambition, of southern
aptitude, and of that insinuating suppleness of character peculiar
to those people who drink the waters of the Pyrenees. He
possessed the graces, the felicitous disposition, and the natural
abilities of this race, who are found everywhere in our history,
in our camps, in our courts, in our ministries, and in our public
assemblies, from Henri IV. down to Murat or Barrere; faithful
to success, versatile as fortune, floating on the surface, like all
light things, in every shipwreck of governments, institutions,
and dynasties — the adventurous race of France. The Gironde,
the Garonne, and the Lot seem to communicate to it something
of the volubility and inconsistency of their waves. These rivers
impart an intoxication of eloquence and ambition to all who live
upon their banks.
Destined by his father for an humble provincial magistracy.

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 137
His antecedents.
M. Decazes visited Paris during the last years of the Empire ,
he studied the law there, and succeeded, through some influence,
in getting a clerkship in the office of the minister of justice.
Some years after, M. Muraire, first president of the Court of
Cassation,* gave him the hand of his daughter, who was smitten
with the young legist. This marriage opened the door to further
favours, and he was nominated a judge of one of the inferior
tribunals of Paris. He then became secretary to the Emperor's
mother, in the avenues of the imperial court, from which he
progressed, with the same title, into the court — more initiated
in public affairs and intrigues — of the palace of the King of
Holland, and of the Queen Hortense, his wife ; remarked by the
men, and agreeable to the women, a welcome guest wherever he
was introduced. A premature death deprived him of his first
wife. He evinced such profound grief, and so impassioned a
fidelity, both to her memory and to her family, that he became
in the political world a celebrity of conjugal devotion. For
some years after he continued, under the auspices of his father-
in-law, his double career in the magistracy and the court. In
1814 his fortune did not follow that of his protectors, but
turning completely round, with his province in the south,
warmly entered the cause of the new princes. He presented
to Louis XVIII. the deputations from his department, he
harangued him in the name of his native town, and received
as a reward of his zeal a decoration from the hand of the
King. But, confounded at that period with the crowd of
fugitive presentations which besieged the palace, he was re
compensed without being remarked. XXXIV.
The return of Napoleon from the Isle of Elba did not
deceive either his conscience or his precocious judgment ; he
only saw in it a crime and a folly. He took arms like a brave
citizen, at the head of the young students of the schools of
Paris, and proposed to the government a levy en masse of
* Court of Appeal.

138 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 30.
Portrait of M. Decazes.
volunteer youths, to oppose the children of the country to the
pretorians of the Isle of Elba. After Bonaparte's entry into
Paris, he alone opposed, in the assembly of his colleagues of
the tribunal, the proposition made by the president, to lay the
homage of their body and the oath of fidelity at the feet of the
conqueror. " I have never learned from my masters," he said,
"nor from myself, that the legitimacy of power was the reward
of the race." This expression exposed him to the anger of.
the Emperor, who banished him to a distance of forty leagues
from Paris. The young exile did not obey the mandate, but
hastened to Bordeaux, associated himself with the intrepid pro
testations of M. Laine, and with this citizen, of a truly antique
virtue, relumed in every heart, during the hundred days, the
fire of independence and of fidelity to the legitimate King in
this portion of the south. His civic courage, rare at the time,
and his disinterested fidelity, served him better than versatility
and ambition would have done. On the return of Louis XVIII.
when new and devoted men were sought after, his name and
actions were remembered. We have seen how the hand of
M. de Talleyrand and that of Fouche accidentally fell upon him.
XXXV
M. Decazes was at this time thirty-five years of age, but
appeared ten years younger than his contemporaries. His
figure, slender and supple, the elegance of his gait, the proud
carriage of his head, and the natural nobility of his attitude,
indicated less the magistrate than the diplomatist or the mili
tary man. His lofty forehead, his flaxen hair, his eyes of a
lively and limpid blue, his mouth, in which the severity of the
lips was unbent by the grace of his smile, the oval somewhat
lengthened of his visage, the slightly feminine tint of the man
of study, relieved in colour by the blood of the south ; a phy
siognomy generally of all those traits and tints which could
not be looked on without impression and attraction, constituted
M. Decazes, at this period of his life the living portrait of the
favourite predestined by nature for the infatuation of a court ;
a Cinq- Mars, or a Leicester, according as he should happen to

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 139
His mind and character.
enchain the heart of a queen, or to fascinate the mind of a
monarch. His heart and his understanding responded to these exter
nal symptoms, by which nature rarely deceives the eye. He
was loving, devoted, and faithful, capable of attachment and
generosity of soul, and incapable of treachery or baseness;
given to flattery, without doubt, but less through interest than
enthusiasm ; pleasing himself with illusions on the genius or
the virtues of his protectors, to justify his adoration. A cour
tier by nature, and not through servility ; so much the more
qualified to please as he was more easily and more sincerely
pleased himself.
His intellect, without rising to a genius for public affairs,
possessed a precision which is the instinct of situations, and
the high road of statesmen. He felt rather than invented a
policy. A new man, desirous of serving an ancient cause, he
judged France by the disposition of his own mind. To make
the King acceptable to new France, and new France to the
King, comprised the whole restoration, according to good sense
and M. Decazes : counter-revolution if the King did not accept
France, revolution if France did not accept the King. Two
abysses traced the route, and there was no occasion for any
great superiority to see it, or for any high initiative of idea to
follow it. Prudence and moderation were sufficient : good will
was all the genius necessary for such a work, and at such a
moment. It further required a personal, exclusive, and inflexible
attachment to the King, who alone of all his palace under
stood this policy. Finally, it required an aptitude in the
management of men, to be able to repulse the fanatics of old
France, without alienating them too much from the King, and
to attract the capacities of new France, without too much giving
up to them the restoration, which they did not love sufficiently
that it might be confided entirely to them with safety for the
King. M. Decazes was capable of these three government
diplomacies. He did not pin his faith in any respect on the
past. All his fortune might lie in the heart of the prince who
could win his attachment. He had no fanaticism of revolution,

140 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 30

Capabilities of M. Decazes.

or of counter-revolution, calculated to embarrass his mind, and
to prevent him from bending to the sinuosities of the great
routine of governments. He had frankness enough to impart
confidence to the men of both parties, finesse enough to divine
their ambitions under their principles, intelligence enough to
seduce them, and sufficient firmness of character to retain them
after their seduction.
No one perhaps was more capable by his qualities, as well
as by his weaknesses, to form, from all these wrecks of parties
with which France was covered, a personal party for the King,
at once against his family, his enemies, and his friends. He
spoke without much eloquence, but to the purpose ; he compre
hended better, and he acted constantly. Indefatigable in work,
in political intrigue, in society, in pleasure, provided society and
pleasure still offered means of government ; he had connexions
with all camps which might recruit that of the King. Too
new, or too subordinate to excite the suspicion of the great
aspirants of the court ; too much mixed up with the events of
the empire aud of the revolution to be an object of suspicion
to the Bonapartists, or to the constitutionalists converted to
the restoration ; he joined to all these gifts of nature, of birth,
and of circumstances, a taste for literature, and a universality
of conversation, which corresponded with the sedentary and
literary tastes of the King. Finally, he was young, and this
prince wished less for a minister than a scholar in his friend.
Chance, therefore, better served the prince and the future
favourite, than choice in this first meeting, which gave rise to
their reciprocal attachment. Thus it may be seen that the
heart exercises its influence and destiny over politics, even in
the interior of palaces and in the privacy of courts.

XXXVI.

The King, after having encouraged a long conversation with
the young man on the circumstances of the times, at length
said to him, " I am quite pleased to have a prefect of police so
intelligent and so safe ; you will come in future and make me
a personal report in my cabinet of all the important affairs of

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 141

Interview of M. Decazes with the King.

my capital." M. Decazes appeared modestly to decline this
unusual favour, to induce the King to pronounce it more de
cidedly. He represented to his Majesty that he had received
from M. de Vitrolles, in the name of the King and of the
Count d'Artois, an order to transmit the police reports in
writing to the court, which at first he addressed to Fouche,
and that this communication, founded upon the suspicions
which the character of Fouche excited at court, might be suffi
cient for the King. " No," hastily replied the prince, who
distrusted the interference of his brother as much as that of
Fouche : — " No, I repeat, no intermediate person hereafter
between you and me. When you have any affair of conse
quence, you will acquaint me with it, and I will receive you."
Then still retaining him, after the business was terminated,
he made inquiries with a friendly curiosity as to his name, his
country, his family, and his preceding life. He appeared to be
interested with everything that concerned the prefect, and
employed all his fascination to inspire confidence. He displayed
his wit, he exerted his memory, he insinuated his policy, and
unveiled his heart, for he was in want of a friend. " Have I
ever seen you before to-day ?" he asked of M. Decazes. " I do
not think I have, for your voice and countenance would have
struck me." "Yes, Sire," replied the prefect of police, "I
had the honour to present to you in 1814 the delegates of my
department, and even to address your Majesty in their name.'
" It is astonishing," said the King ; " but the fact is, I saw sc
many people at that time, that I could fix nothing in my
memory. Come again, come often ; I am pleased with you.'
The prince had longed for a substitute for M. d'Avaray in his
heart, and his policy was in conformity with his inclination ;
an intimate friend was indispensable to him.
XXXVII.
Fouch6 was alarmed, and seemed awkwardly enough to
take a pleasure in alarming the King more and more every
day, by exaggerated or sinister reports read in the council,
which he delivered to the King, and then unfairly allowed

142 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 30.
Fouche's manoeuvres to alarm the King.
to transpire in public, by pretended indiscretions, as if to make
an appeal and a signal to public opinion out of doors, to support
him by a pressure of popularity within ; a knavish and cowardly
manoeuvre, renewed from the letter of the minister Rowland
to Louis XVI., in 1792.
" The moment is approaching," said he; " the national spirit
is already taking this frightful direction. A fusion is taking
place between the most opposite parties. La Vendue itself is
joining its colours to those of the army. In this excess of
calamity, what other part will remain for your Majesty to take
but that of withdrawing. The magistrates will quit their
functions of their own accord, and the armies of the allied
sovereigns will then come into collision with individuals libe
rated from all social ties. A nation of thirty millions of inha
bitants may disappear from the earth, but in this war of man
to man, more than one tomb will enclose, by the side of each
other, the oppressors and the oppressed !
" The calamities of France are complete ; ruin, devastation,
and destruction are taking place, as if for us there was neither
peace nor compromise to be hoped for. The inhabitants are
flying before the undisciplined soldiers ; the forests are crowded
with unhappy creatures, who flock thither in search of a last
asylum. The harvests will perish in the fields. Despair will
soon listen to no voice of authority ; and this war, undertaken
to secure the triumph of justice, will rival the barbarity of
those deplorable and too celebrated invasions, of which history
recalls the memory with horror." XXXVIII.
While Fouche was thus agitating public opinion, and
threatening at the same time the authority of the Kino-, and
the King himself with the revolution, M de Talleyrand was
unpopular and tottering in the ministry, the Count d'Artois
was murmuring, while the South, the provinces Of the West,
and even the foreigners, were calling for vengeance against the
Bonapartists, the authors of these calamities. The people,'
trodden down by 700,000 soldiers, bewailed, without being

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 143

Result of die elections.

able to accuse any others than themselves, of the consequences
of their weakness in yielding to the usurpation of Napoleon.
The old army was dwindling away behind the Loire; the
officers dismissed on half pay to their provinces, bore with
them, on returning to their homes, imprecations against the
conquerors, resentment for their fallen consequence, the bitter
ness of their present mediocrity in rural families, compared
with their martial omnipotence under the Empire, which
gave them promotion for their prey, and France and Europe
for donations. They united themselves, by a coalition against
nature — but made necessary by circumstances — with the con
stitutionalists, and the friends of the revolution and liberty,
again become hostile to the Bourbons.
The foreign powers were imposing conditions which were
unacceptable to the crown; the popular reactions of the royalists
and the catholics in the south were shamefully avenging, in the
blood of the Bonapartists and protestants, the insults and
injuries they had themselves suffered, some months before,
from these inimical factions or creeds, — an increasing clamour,
which soon became fanatical, issuing from the mouths of the
royalists, and from the pen of M. de Chateaubriand himself
blamed the forbearance of the King, who refused an expiation
of the attempt of the 20th March.
The elections which took place during this despair of the
nation, and this angry retribution against the authors of the
recent calamities of the country resulted in the discomfiture
everywhere of the moderate men and the triumph of all the
men of extreme opinions ; as if in public calamities passion
and fury constituted the desperate genius of nations. These
elections threatened the King in the independence of his
policy, and promised to make of him the King of a party
instead of the pacifying monarch of France. He hoped to
find in the Emperor Alexander, offended by M. de Talleyrand
at the congress of Vienna, by his secret treaty with England
and Austria, a supporter against the exigencies of the allied
powers. He hoped to find in the Duke of Richelieu, the friend
of this sovereign, a substitute for M. de Talleyrand, of more
influence than this minister Finally, he anticipated in M.

144 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 30.
The King decides on dismissing Talleyrand and Fouche.

Decazes a successor to Fouche, who would take the ministry of
police from this suspected man, and another Blacas equally
agreeable to his heart but less unpopular.
He silently meditated the renewal of the ministry. " Until
now," he repeated, in an under tone, to his most confidential
friends, " M. de Talleyrand has had over me the advantage
which events have given him, and which I have adroitly un
derstood and suffered. His unskilfulness and indolence now
give me the advantage. I keep my revenge for him and I am
going to govern in my turn." XXXIX.
But before he dismissed these two outlaws, Fouche and M.
de Talleyrand, he wished to throw upon their hands the odium
of the first reprisals, which the public cry of his court and his
own policy imposed upon him. Public opinion, in its irritated
state, had designated, right or wrong, some men as principal
authors or abettors of Bonaparte's return, of the expulsion of
the Bourbons, and of the disasters which afflicted at the same
time the throne and the country. The spontaneous risings of
Marseilles, of Nismes, and of several other cities of the South,
— the assassinations which had forestalled the judgments,
which had taken the victims by chance, and substituted san
guinary personal vengeance for legal justice, — the frenzy of
the royalist journals, calling for vengeance as if for honour
and safety — the repeated complaints of the little court of the
Count d'Artois, rendered more imperative by the authority of
the family, all seemed to enjoin the King not to wait for the
assembling of the Chambers, to give satisfaction to the anger
of some, and to the prudence of others, to arm himself for state
reasons with an apparent rigour, and to remove some men by
an arbitrary proscription — temporary but not sanguinary —
that he might not have to give them up at a later period to
the sword of justice, or the passions ofthe royalist party.
"Are there no bounds to clemency?" wrote the publicists
in France and elsewhere, who were mad for an expiation.
" Do crimes not exist which the interest of France and of

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 145
Lists of proscriptions are drawn up by Fouche.
Europe cannot suffer to go unpunished ? Are loyalty and
fidelity alone to suffer the consequences of the disasters pro
voked by traitors ? Are firmness and severity crimes ? The
judge condemns himself in acquitting the guilty. How much
blood and treasure has not a magnanimity ill-repaid already
cost to Europe ?
A twofold proscription was resolved on in the council ; one
directed against the men most notoriously culpable, who were
to be arrested and brought before councils of war; the other
levelled at the men who were reputed dangerous, and which
would condemn them to exile. Fouche was charged, in his
quality of minister of police, to draw up these lists of pro
scription, and to submit them to the council and to the King ;
who would add to, or erase from them, such names as
might be selected by the anger or the favour of the court.
He had now a natural and worthy opportunity of retiring,
and of at least retrieving his own name by refusing to
proscribe those whom he had instigated or foUowed in the
complicity of the hundred days, and to whom he had so often
promised amnesty. He did not do so. Ambition, which had
made him accept as glory the appearance of treason, made him
accept as necessity the part of proscriber of his accomplices.
He felt already that there was no possible retreat behind him,
and no asylum but in power. His past actions surrounded
him everywhere, and condemned him to refuse nothing more
to the royalists : a proscriber for them, or proscribed by them.
He therefore acquiesced.
XL
The following day, Fouche brought to the council a list of
one hundred and ten names, one part chosen by the public
clamour, the other by chance, and from amongst men whose
insignificance, or the obscurity of whose crimes, protected them
from the honour of proscription. In this first choice, however,
he had not evinced any personal weakness ; all his accomplices
of the hundred days, — Bonapartists, Orleanists, ministers,
colleagues, representatives of his party, equals or subordinates
3 j

146 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [book 30.

Fouche's warning and assistance to the proscribed

generals, marshals, agents of his police, and executors of his
orders, — were comprised in it ; Lanjuinais, Diesbach, Flauger-
gues, Carnot, and Caulincourt, closed the list. He had
sacrificed himself liberally; there only wanted his own
name. The King and his ministers had only to soften down the
rigours of Fouche, and to strike out names which innocence,
indulgence, or favour recommended to pardon. Louis XVIII.
erased with his own hand that of Benjamin Constant, and the
Emperor Alexander that of Caulaincourt. The list thus limited
to the names most notoriously compromised, was at first re
duced to eighty, and afterwards to thirty-seven. During this
ballotting, which continued for several days, Fouche, author
ised by the King and by his own repugnance, to seize those
whom he had marked out, sent them warning, saw personally a
great number of them, and distributed to, or offered them dis
guises, passports, the means of escaping, and even the sums
necessary for their residence abroad. Five or six hundred
thousand francs, from the treasury of the police, were distri
buted by him to those whom he rather wished to save than
proscribe. The most obstinate, or the most foolhardy,
alone fell subsequently into the hands of the executors of
these orders.
The word proscription had been written for state reasons
alone by the King and the minister. The real object of the
council was the removal of the proscribed persons, to give satis
faction not to vengeance, but to public clamour. The King
did not wish for victims, Europe did not ask for blood
XLI.
The act of proscription ran as follows : —
" Desirous, by the punishment of an attempt without
example, but graduating the penalty, and limiting the number
of the guilty— of conciliating the interest of our subjects, the
dignity of our crown, and the tranquillity of Europe, with
what we owe to justice and to the full security of all other citizens,

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 147
The act of proscription.
without distinction, we have declared, and do declare, have
ordered, and do order as follows :
"Art. I. The generals and officers who have betrayed
the King before the 23rd of March, or who have attacked
France and the government by force of arms, and those who
by violence have possessed themselves of power, shall be
seized and brought before the competent courts- martial in
their respective divisions ; viz. Ney, Labedoyere, Lallemand
senior, Lallemand junior, Drouet d'Erlon, Lefebvre, Desnou-
ettes, Ameil, Brayer, Gilly, Mouton-Duvernet, Grouchy, Clau-
sel, Laborde, Debelle, Bertrand, Drouot, Cambronne, Lava-
lette, and Rovigo.
"Art. II. The individuals whose names here follow: viz.
Soult, Alix, Excelmans, Bassano, Marbot, Felix Lepelletier,
Boulay de la Meurthe, Mehee, Freissinet, Thibeaudeau,
Carnot, Vandamme, General Lamarque, Lobau, Harel, Pire,
Barrere, Arnault, Pommereul, Regnault de St. Jean d'Angely,
Arrighi de Padoue, Dejean jun., Garrau, Real, Bouvier,
Dumolard, Merlin (de Douai), Durback, Dirat, Defermon,
Bory de St- Vincent, Felix Desportes, Garnier (de Saintes),
Hullin, Mellinet, Cluys, Courtin, Forbin-Janson jun., Le-
lorgne d'Ideville, — shall quit Paris in three days, and shall
retire to the interior of France, to the places which will
be indicated by our minister of general police, and where
they shall remain under his superintendence, until the Cham
bers shall declare which of them are to quit the kingdom, or
to be sent for trial before the tribunals.
"Art. III. Those individuals who shall be condemned to
quit the kingdom shall have the power of selling their estates
and property, within the term of one year; to dispose of
and transport the produce out of France, and to receive
during this period the revenue thereof in foreign countries,
on condition, however, of furnishing the proof of their obedience
to the present ordinance.
" Art. IV. The lists of all the individuals to whom Articles
I and II may be applicable, are and shall remain closed by
the names designated in these articles, and can never be
extended to others for any cause or pretext whatsoever, other

148 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOR 30.
Causes of the proscription.
wise than in the forms and according to the constitutional
laws ; from which deviation is only made for this special case.
(Signed) Louis.
" By the King.
The Minister Secretary of State for the police de
partment (Signed) Duke of Oteanto."
XLII.
Thus was begun in France, in spite of the King, and in
spite of the minister, but under the presentiment of the
Chamber which was about to assemble full of vengeance,
the era of proscription of 1815; fatal concessions, not of the
heart but of the weakness of the monarch, who, with the
spirit and the will of clemency, gave himself the appearance
of rigour. Louis XVIII., did not sufficiently feel, under the
circumstances, his power against the foreign princes, against
his own party, and against his brother, as he had not suffi
ciently felt it at Arnouville when prostituting the royal
authority to Fouche. He was the man essential to Europe,
to France, and to the royalists themselves. He ought to
have known this ; and, to demonstrate it to all, he had merely
to refuse concessions which lowered him as a man, without
strengthening him as a King.
In conceding the nomination of Fouche, that he might
enter Paris in favour with the revolution, he had lessened
his personal dignity in the eyes of the royalists ; in conceding
this beginning of a proscription, against his will, to his party
and to the allied powers at the commencement of his reign,
he lessened his popularity as a royal peace-maker and me
diator, in the eyes of the revolution. His character yielded
to both sides in the course of a few weeks. He had furnished
both parties with the secret of his weakness. The royalists
and the liberals were going to draw him on successively farther
than he wished to go He had not. marked with sufficient

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 149
Their impolicy.
resolution the fixed points at which it became him to maintain
his character and his reign, the dignity of his race, the im
partiality of his mind, the sovereign umpirage of his heart
between the parties. A restoration can never be anything
but an amnesty. Pardon is not its virtue only, it is its
law.

BOOK THIETY-FIEST.
Murat — His flight from Naples — Arrival at the Isle of Ischia — His aide-
de-camp, the Duke of Rocca Romana — His departure for France —
He lands at Cannes — Offers his services to the Emperor — Refusal of
Napoleon — Terror in the South — Murat quits the neighbourhood of
Toulon and conceals himself — Asks an asylum from Louis XVIII. —
It is granted to him in Austria — Attempts at flight — He fails —
Adventures — His retreat — Dangers — He embarks for Corsica — Perils
of the passage — Incidents — He is picked up at sea — His arrival in
Corsica — He retires to the mountains — Political situation of Corsica
— Murat is summoned to surrender hy the governor of the island —
His reiusal — The governor sends a body of soldiers to arrest him —
Their failure — Projects of Murat — He departs on an expedition to
Naples — His march towards Ajaccio — Entry into the City — Arrival
of Macirone — He sends him the passport for Austria — Mural's letter
— His departure for Naples — Pa&sage — Desertion of one of his vessels
— Incidents — He disembarks at the port of Pizzo — Endeavours to
raise the population — His arrest — Last moments — Condemnation —
Death — Review of his life.

I.
But before we enter upon a narrative of those proscriptions,
of those assassinations, of those trials, and those executions,
which were to strike with dismay the second return of the
King— sinister pages which the friends of the restoration
would wish to tear from its history — let us first return to
one of fts most illustrious outlaws, whom the events of the
hundred days led on to his ruin; and whose flight, last
attempt, and death, commenced this period of vicissitudes,
of vengeance, and of blood, We speak of Murat, whose
life, like that of Napoleon, was not terminated by his first
fall from the throne, and by the surrender of his kingdom
to the Bourbons of Naples. It seemed to be the destiny of
this satellite of Napoleon to rise with him, to fall with him,

1815.] RESTORATION OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 151

Murat' s flight from Naples.

to rise again with him, and to enact after him the heroic
parody of a second re'ign, but also to fall again like him, no
longer into banishment but the tomb.
II.
We left him, in the preceding volume of this history,
vanquished, cast down, tearing himself in the night from the
embraces of his wife, the sister of Napoleon, and of his
children, who were going to fly on board an English vessel ;
himself stealing from his palace, with two faithful companions
in misfortune, in borrowed clothes, looking for a fisherman's
boat on the shore of his own kingdom, already invaded;
embarking, under favour of night, at Cape Miseno, and
rowing towards the little Isle of Ischia, where his authority
still nominally existed, but where his flag was already lowered
On arriving there, he cut off his long hair, by which he was
distinguished amongst other men of his camp and his kingdom
He did not make known there who he was, apprehensive that
the islanders might deliver him up to the Austrians who had
already entered Naples, or to the Bourbons who were
approaching, that they might, by giving up his head to his
enemies, earn the reward of treason. Some of his officers,
commanding the forts of the island, were alone acquainted with
his residence there. He hoped chance would give him an
opportunity of flying to France.
The next morning, when walking with his two companions
in misfortune on the solitary shore of the island, between the
town of Ischia and the garden walls of one of his old pleasure
palaces, he saw a felucca, which was tacking undecidedly
between the harbour and the beach on which he was walking ;
and which seemed by its manoeuvres to have no other object
than to be observed, and to wait for passengers at an appointed
rendezvous. Murat surmised that this vessel, freighted by
some unknown friends, might perhaps be an unexpected aid
sent to him by fortune. He made signals therefore, which
were instantly replied to by the officers on board. The vessel
approached the beach, and sent her boat on shore Murat

152 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 31.
Murat departs from Ischia for France.
immediately jumped into it with his two friends, and in a few
moments found himself on the deck of the felucca, and in the
arms of his aide-de-camp, the Duke of Rocca- Romana.
This officer who was called the Bayard of the Neapolitan
army, had, beneath the aspect and outward form of a paladin,
that antique and determined stamp of friendship in his character,
which is now but rarely found in Italy, enervated by long servi
tude, but which, in those hearts where it is to be found, noble
or plebeian, equals all that antiquity or chivalry can boast of an
heroic and superhuman cast. Such was Rocca-Romana, worthy
by his rank of the court of the Bourbons, worthy by his bravery
of fighting by the side of Murat, and worthy by his fidelity to
the fallen fortunes of his old general, of the esteem of both
parties. His image, as we thus depict it, is still in our eyes
and our memory. Ill
The Duke of Rocca-Romana, on learning from his military
and court friends, that Murat had taken the direction of Cape
Miseno, conjectured that the King had taken refuge at Ischia.
He hastened, therefore, in concert with the Duchess of Cone-
gliano, Murat's niece, to embark on board a Calabrian felucca,
belonging to a farmer on his estate, which was at the moment
in the port of Naples ; and he made sail towards the island, to
seek for his master as chance might direct, to take him on
board, and save him. Murat, Rocca-Romana, the Neapolitan
Colonel Bonafoux, the Marquis Giuliano, and some other ser
vants of the King, made sail for Toulon. The King hoped that
Napoleon, who was then still at Paris, would grant him his
pardon, and permit him to return to Paris, to fight as a chief, or
as a volunteer in his cavalry, when he might redeem his
ambitious infidelity with his blood. In this vague hope, but
without daring to anticipate in Paris the pardon which he was
preparing to solicit, he disembarked on the same coast where
Napoleon himself had landed, at Cannes, the 28th May, as if
he had wished to follow exactly the footsteps of his brother in
law He took refuge in a sort of half mystery, while waiting,

1815.J OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. Ifi3
He offers his services to the Emperor, and is refused.
in a country villa, belonging to Admiral Lallemand, called
Plaisance, in the vicinity of Toulon.
He wrote from thence to Fouche, minister of police, who
had been his guest a long time at Naples, and the confidant of
all his family and political quarrels with the Emperor. He
could not have made choice of a more powerful negociator.
Fouche lent himself with his natural complaisance to this part
of mediator and conciliator between the two brothers-in-law.
He loved Murat, and thought him necessary to the success of
the army. But at the first word he uttered on the subject to
the Emperor, the latter became gloomy, and cast a glance at
Fouche, which seemed to imply that the residence of Murat at
Toulon, of which he wished to appear ignorant, was a suffici
ently great indulgence. "What treaty of peace, of which I
am ignorant," said he to Fouche, " has been concluded between
the King of Naples and France ?" Fouche did not venture to
persist against a resentment, which might soon change to a
threat. He acquainted Murat with the unfavourable dis
positions of his brother-in-law, and counselled him to wait in
obscurity until victory should recall Napoleon's generosity, or
till reverses should restore friendship to his heart. Murat
obeyed, trembling with impatience, his heart corroding with
grief and remorse, in the solitude and idleness of his retreat.
IV
He was only aroused from this lethargy by the rumour of
the catastrophe of Waterloo, the abdication ancj. flight of the
Emperor, and of the return of the Bourbons — his enemies at
Paris, through the recollection, very unjust with respect to
him, of the execution of the Duke d'Enghien ; and his enemies
at Naples, from a community of interest and of blood. The
royalist risings at Marseilles — the murder of General Ramel
at Toulouse — of General Lagarde at Nismes — of Marshal Brune,
at Avignon — the reign of terror, which only changed its colours
in the south, and which was raging even in Toulon, against all
who adhered either by blood, by functions, or by opinions to
Bonaparte — compelled him to quit the house of Admiral Lalle-

154 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 31.

Murat asks an asylum from Louis XVIII.

mand, where the police of the Marquis de Riviere, the King's
commissioner in the south, knew that he resided.
He took shelter in a retreat unknown to all, except to some
naval officers, devoted to his misfortunes, and faithful to his
secret. From thence he turned his thoughts towards the
generosity of the Bourbons, who had returned to Paris, to ask
them for safety and an asylum in France. He wrote a digni
fied and touching letter to the King, and another to Fouche,
the only one who remained in power after the ruin of the im
perialists. This letter from the pen of Murat was dated : "From
the depths of my gloomy retreat, the 22nd of August 1815."
The unfortunate King of Naples was, in fact, deprived of
the light of day in his retreat ; and it was only during the night
that he could breathe the fresh air, and get a glimpse of the
heavens. In his letter to Fouche he informed him that not
daring to travel through the south, which was stained with the
blood of Brune, to go and throw himself at the feet of the
King, he was going to embark for Havre on board a trading
vessel, freighted by his friends in Toulon, and that from Havre
he could go to Paris with less danger to his life. At the same
time he commissioned one of his aides-de-camps, Colonel
Macirone, the confidant and secret agent of Fouche in Paris, to
negotiate with the allied powers for a safe conduct for him, as-
igning him an asylum and a place of residence in one of the
continental states.
During this correspondence, which was slow and impeded
by the state of ignorance in which Murat wished to keep
Fouche, and even Macirone, of the place of his retreat, events
hurried on rapidly, and his retreat being in danger of discovery
by the spies of the Terror at Toulon, he was compelled to form
and reject other resolutions.

Meanwhile Fouche, M de Talleyrand, the Duke of Wel
lington and Prince Metternich, yielding without difficulty to
the solicitations of Murat, and to the wishes expressed by his
aide-de-camp Macirone. and the Marquis Giuliano, another of

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 155
His retreats and their dangers.
the companions of his flight, who had been sent by Murat to
Paris, furnished Macirone with letters and passports from M.
de Metternich, the Austrian plenipotentiary at Paris, authorising
the ex-king of Naples to rejoin his wife and children at Trieste,
and to reside in safety in the states of the Emperor of Austria.
But the destiny and intentions of Murat had been already
changed by one of those fatal chances which frustrate the best
laid plans, and which threw the outlaws back into a state of
anxiety worse than before their attempts at evasion.
Murat ought to have been able to reckon on the indulgence
and the private feelings of the Marquis de Riviere, the governor
of Toulon. At the period when this gentleman, then an
outlaw himself, had returned clandestinely to France, to
hatch plots there against Napoleon, had been tried and con
demned to death as an accomplice of the conspiracies of
Polignac, of Pichegru, and of Moreau, he had been indebted
for his pardon and his life, to the generous intercessions of
Murat with the First Consul. This was for M. de Riviere a
rare and sacred occasion of returning generosity for generosity,
safety for safety, to a fugitive cast in turn on his mercy by the
vicissitudes of fate. The Marquis de Riviere, who was expe
rienced in proscriptions, was worthy, it is said, by his heart, to
take upon himself the protection of his old intercessor and the
anger of the royalists. But whether his understanding was not
equal to his feelings, whether the prudence of Murat did not
give him the means of communicating to him in his retreat
the good intentions of the governor of the south, or that the
zeal and researches of the secondary or volunteer agents of the
royalist police overstepped the orders of M. de Riviere, the
alarm caused to Murat and his friends by the snares that were
laid for them, obliged them frequently to change their place of
concealment. Weary of this continual terror, which besieged
his retreats, and which left him no hope of safety in any part
of France, Murat renounced the idea of going to Havre and
to Paris, and resolved to repair to Corsica, an island full of the
relations, the partisans, and the dependants of the Bonaparte
family, still badly disposed towards the new government of the
Bourbons, unfurnished with French troops, left in a sort of

1 56 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 31.
Preparations for departure for Corsica.
expectation and neutrality between events, and where the
numerous creeks, the impracticable roads, the forests, the
mountains, the sacred hospitality of the inhabitants presented
a thousand means of flight, of inaccessible retreats, or of
temporary security for an outlaw. By the care of the Marquis
Giuliano, of Macirone, of the Count of Mosbourg, and of a
lady in Paris, whom he had loved before he was a King, and
who preserved for him that remembrance of love which is the
tenderest and most courageous of friendships, he had received
from Paris, clothes, linen, jewels, arms, and a sum of 200,000
francs, to assist him in his plans of flight. He commissioned
the Duke of Rocca-Romana, Colonel Bonafoux, and the Marquis
Guiliano, his aides-de-camp, less disturbed and less suspected
at Toulon from being strangers to the civil discords of the
country, to freight a light vessel for him, to make the passage
from the French coast to the island of Corsica. These faith
ful friends, assisted by the officers of the French navy of whom
we have already spoken, succeeded without much difficulty,
in a few days, to arrange their preparations with the greatest
secrecy. The treasure, the equipments, the arms, the servants,
and even the clothing of the King were embarked on board the
hired vessel, which now only awaited Murat himself.
VI.
The vigilance of the police at the gates of Toulon, or in the
port of the city, and the sanguinary menaces of which he was
the object as a presumed accomplice of the 20th March, did
not permit him to embark in the harbour at the same time as
his officers and his servants, for the hand of a hired assassin or
a commotion of the people might seize and strike him at his
last step on the shore of his country. It was therefore agreed
that the vessel should put to sea without him, that it should
stand off and on in the roads, at a certain distance from Toulon,
and that, approaching the land towards a point agreed on,
where the King would be during the night, the captain should
send a boat ashore, and embark the fugitive monarch under
cover of the darkness and the solitude.

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 157
Murat misses the vessel.
On the day fixed for their departure, the 2nd of August,
all was accomplished which concerned the vessel that had
been engaged The Duke of Rocca-Romana, Colonel Bona
foux, two domestics, and the King's equipage, sailed out of
the harbour without exciting suspicion, and the vessel which
bore them, cruised slowly till the close of day in the roads.
The boat was then lowered, approached the shore towards the
point agreed on, and the sailors who rowed it searched a long
time for Murat and the Marquis Guiliano, amongst the rocks
and olive trees that skirted the shore.
But they sought for and awaited him in vain. A body of
soldiers and police agents prowling through the country around
the lung's retreat, had prevented him from leaving it at the
hour of rendezvous which he had assigned to his friends The
boat therefore returned to the vessel. The friends and ser
vants of Murat, in a state of consternation, deliberated amongst
themselves in a mortal fright, what was best to be done to
parry this fatal mischance ; some thinking that their unfortunate
master had mistaken the place of rendezvous, and was waiting
for them in some creek nearer to, or farther from Toulon ;
others that he had mistaken the hour of the day, and that he
would make his appearance on the shore after the departure of
the vessel.
The latter proposed landing and passing the night in
attempting to discover him, calling upon him from rock to
rock ; the former proposed cruising within reach of the shore,
aud at the risk of being seized by the coast-guard, until the
King should make his appearance, and the boat might be
sent again for him to the shore. They decided on this last
measure, the most prudent of all, and tacked about opposite
the coast. But these suspicious manoeuvres having attracted
the attention of the same royalist patrol which had scoured the
country around the King's retreat, these men hailed the vessel,
went on board sword in hand, uttering sanguinary imprecations
against the Bonapartists and against the King of Naples,
declaring that if they had found him on board they would have
avenged his crimes without trial, and cast his body into the
sea ; they ordered the captain, under threat of seizing his vessel,

158 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 31.
Suspicions of the royalist patrol.
to quit the coast immediately and proceed to sea, to avoid the
suspicion of endeavouring to save some of the outlaws. The
Duke of Rocca-Romana, and Colonel Bonafoux, with the
servants and equipments of the King, concealed during this
visit in the bottom of the hold, behind bales of merchandise
destined apparently for Corsica, had fortunately escaped the
notice of the assassins. VII.
The captain of the vessel, compelled to obey under pain of
exciting suspicions, and calling out patrols inevitably fatal to
the King, pretended to put to sea after their departure, but
slackening sail again to give Murat time and opportunity still
to rejoin them, he kept on under easy sail within reach of the
coast during the night. Rocca-Romana, in despair would have
died rather than thus escape alone, instead of the friend,
whom he had come to save ; but the armed vessels that guarded
the coast, and which observed the ship, prevented it from
making the shore again, or even from approaching it too near,
During these events at sea, the gangs who were watching
the approaches to Murat's retreat having retired, the King
came out about midnight, and reached, without being perceived,
the point of the coast where the vessel was to have waited and
taken him on board. He did not doubt the punctuality of his
companions in arms being there, nor their patience in waiting
for him. He enjoyed already in imagination, that feeling of
anticipated safety which at length he was going to enjoy in
Corsica, after the long oppression of sorrow and terror under
which he had existed for the last three months.
Vain illusion of the outlaw, by turns the sport of fortune
in hopes and fears! The shore was deserted, and the sea
vacant. The King thought he had come too late or too early.
He still continued to hope that the vessel would appear with
every wave that rustled at his feet. More disturbed, how
ever, as the night wore away, and new stars were rising or
setting behind the mountains of the coast, he ascended from
rock to rock, to obtain, from a greater elevation, a more extended

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 1,59
The vessel puts to sea without Murat.
view of the sea. He thought he saw a sail in the white crest
of every wave, and still clung to hope with the obstinacy of
a man who must cease to live if deprived of that consolation.
At length the first glimpses of the morning twilight spread
a broader gleam than that of the moon upon the waves. He
saw and recognised his vessel by the description which had
been given to him, and by the signals which had been agreed
upon between himself and his friends at Toulon. But he saw
her only to feel at the same time the absolute impossibility of
reaching her. There was no boat on the shore that he could
avail himself of, and the vessel, watched by the coast-guard
boats, was under full sail for the open sea.
His last hopes and his last friends were vanishing together
with this sail. He fell for a moment thunderstruck upon a
rock, calling for death, or for his friends
VIII.
But he was one of those men who do not long bend under
the weight of calamities, even the most desperate. Fortified
by the perils encountered in his youth, by playing with destiny,
and by the dangers, braved or avoided, of the field of battle,
against all extremities of fortune, he, like all men of courage,
did not submit to them until he had exhausted all the resources
of his presence of mind, and all the vigour of his character in
endeavours to surmount them. Conquerable only by death,
the energy and flexibility of his soul subdued, even in the most
sinister assaults of fate, all outward symptoms of weakness, and
his countenance still displayed the smile and the serenity of
his courage.He arose after waiting some moments in vain for the
return of his vessel, now more and more impossible, which
was disappearing under the waves of the horizon, and he
plunged amidst the fields and olive groves which line the coast,
not knowing whither to direct his steps, but still unable to re
main in a state of inaction.
Daylight would now soon discover him to those who had
been in search of him during the night The conviction that

100 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION JBOOK 31.
Murat wanders about the coast for three days and four nights.
his asylum of the preceding evening was suspected and
surrounded, did not permit him to return to it, unless at the
risk of falling into the hands of his executioners. . Under every
roof which he saw in the country he was apprehensive of meet
ing with an informer or an enemy. He went on as chance
directed, avoiding the vicinity of the forts and villages, reced
ing from the sea coast, following no other paths than those
which his instinct pointed out to him as the most hidden and
deserted, frequently tempted to knock at the doors of some
isolated houses, but as often withheld by the dread of finding
some traitor within.
He wandered thus for three days and four nights, without
any other nourishment than some grains of Indian corn which
he ground between his teeth to support nature, and having no
other covering from the cold night air while he slept, than the
leaves of the olive trees. He did not, however, retire too far
from the borders of the sea ; and approached the shore every
evening, in the vague hope that his friends, when once freed
from the observation of the vessels of war, would land in the
neighbourhood of the spot they had fixed upon, and that they
would succeed in discovering him, and take him on board.
IX
But none of these hopes were realised. About noon on
the fourth day, compelled by hunger and the weakness of his
limbs, he decided on knocking, at all risks, at the door of the
first cottage which should present itself, and to seek for
hospitality or death from the generosity or treachery of its in
habitants. He flattered himself even that he would not be recog
nised, and that he might sound the feelings and opinions of his
hosts, before he should reveal himself, or steal away again from
their threshold.
His fortune conducted him towards a poor and rustic cottage
isolated from the other houses scattered about these hills, and
belonging to an old military man retired from the service, who
cultivated there the little inheritance of his fathers. An aged
female servant, who kept house for the owner, was the sole

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 101
He takes shelter in a cottage.
compainon of her master, who was absent at the moment of
Murat's arrival. The King gave a timid knock, and the door
was opened by the old woman, who, seeing a man of mild and
noble countenance, whose dress was half civil and half mili
tary, but decent and even rich, thought he was some friend or
companion in arms of her master, and invited him with confi
dence to enter. The King told her that he was an officer of
the garrison of Toulon, a stranger in the country ; that having
gone astray in the course of a long walk across the fields,
he felt himself pressed by fatigue and hunger, and that he
thought the inhabitants of this house would be hospitable
enough to permit him to take some rest and nourishment in it.
The grace and nobleness of the King's countenance ; the
politeness of his manners, and the honest frankness of his
accent convinced and touched the worthy housekeeper.
She invited the King to sit down on the bench at the
kitchen-table, and occupied herself in lighting the fire, and
looking for some eggs to prepare him a dinner. While thus
employed in her household affairs, she conversed with the
stranger with that domestic familiarity of the south, which places
less distance, than in the interior of France, between servants
and their master. She begged him to pardon the homely fare
she had to offer him, and told him that if her master had ex
pected him he would certainly have received him at a better
provided table. As she pronounced the word master the King
started ; but concealing his anxiety under a feigned indifference,
he asked her carelessly who her master was, and if he was to
be long absent from home. She replied that he had only just
gone out to look at his olive trees, and that he would soon
return. The King was about to renew his inquiries, when the
master himself returned from his walk, and seeing a stranger
of noble appearance in his house, already seated and eating
at his table, he cordially greeted him, and sitting down opposite
to him, said he was hungry himself, and ordered his housekeeper
to prepare him another dish of eggs, and to bring him another
bottle of wine. The King, in fact, half famished by his long fast
in the woods, had already devoured the food which had been
placed beforo him, before the arrival of the master of the house.
3 K

162 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 31.
The King is discovered by his host.

X.
The guest and his host were scarcely seated opposite each
other at the same table, when the latter, looking more closely
and with a better light at the person who was before him, re
cognised the King of Naples, by his perfect resemblance to his
effigy on the coin of the Grand Duchy of Berg and of the king
dom of the two Sicilies. With a start of surprise and con
fusion, he arose from his seat, and evincing in his looks, his
gesture, and his attitude, all the respect and emotion he felt in
the presence of such fallen greatness, begged pardon of him
for the involuntary familiarity he had assumed towards so
august and so unexpected a guest. He hastened to assure him
of his discretion, and vowed he would risk his life a thousand
times rather than betray him ; his house, his fortune, and his
person, he said, were without any reserve at his service.
At this sudden exclamation of her master, and the warm
demonstrations of respect and devotion he evinced towards the
stranger, the old housekeeper, who was occupied with her
cookery, turned round with astonishment, found that the guest
she had entertained was a king, and in the midst of her
emotion letting fall amongst the ashes the dish she was pre
paring for her master, threw herself all trembling at the feet
of Murat, and lost all presence of mind in her excuses and deep
emotion in so august a presence XI
The King returned his thanks to providence which had
directed him better than if he had made a deliberate choice of
an asylum. He passed some tranquil days, happy and unknown,
beneath this hospitable roof. But the master of the house being
one of those military men, at that time suspected of imperialist
sympathies and predilections, one upon whom the Toulon police
had their eyes especially fixed, Murat did not think it prudent
to prolong his residence there beyond the time necessary to find
another retreat more certain for himself. By the assiduity of

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 163
He takes refuge in the vicinity of Toulon.
his host and the naval officers his friends, whom he had
acquainted with his adventure, he took refuge in another house
in the vicinity of Toulon, belonging to a captain of a vessel, and
just then uninhabited.
One woman alone, faithful, vigilant, and sure, was entrusted
with the secret, and entrusted to the service of the King, in
this house which was thought to be abandoned. The two
naval officers of Toulon, the only confidants of his secret,
watched over his safety at a distance, and brought him from
time to time, during the night, such articles as he stood in need
of, and hopes of better fortune.
But a rumour was spread about, amongst the executioners
of popular vengeance in the south, of the presence of the
King of Naples concealed in the neighbourhood of Toulon, and
of imaginary treasures and jewels, the envied spoils of those
who should discover him, which redoubled the ardour of the in
vestigators around him. The woman who served him had not
one hour of safety, she watched all night while the King slept,
to listen to the footsteps and the noises of the nocturnal patrols
in the country, and to warn the King to fly if armed visitors
should approach the house. XII.
In spite of these precautions and this discretion of the
friends of Murat, silence and mystery themselves seemed to
reveal the outlaw. During the night of the 13th August, a band
of sixty royalist volunteers, guided and commanded by one of the
chiefs most eagerly bent on discovering the King, surrounded
the country house where he had taken shelter. From the
windows of the house, which was situated on an eminence, might
be perceived during the day everything that approached, and
he would then have time to conceal himself from all research ;
but under favour of the shades of night, and of the silence en
joined to the troops, the proscribers might surround and surprise
their victim without giving him either a hint of their approach,
or the time to conceal himself. But a lantern carried in a
hollow road by one of the guides of the armed party to light

164 HISTORY OF THE RESTOUATION [BOOK 31.
His retreat is surrounded and invaded by royalist troops.
them in their march, having revealed to Murat's guardian, who
was watching near a window, the approach of a distant patrol
ascending the road towards the house, she suddenly awoke the
King who slept in his clothes with his arms by his side, and
warned him of the coming danger.
He sprang from his bed, threw his cloak about him, seized
his poniard and his pistols, and going out without noise by a
back door, he plunged amongst the tall vines about sixty paces
from the house, and covered himself with some faggots of dry
vine-branches, left by the vine-growers in their fields. The
old woman carefully closed the door of the house after the King,
removed every trace which might reveal the presence of a
stranger in any of the rooms, and pretending to awake and to
dress herself slowly at the knocking of the visitors at the door,
she did not open it to them until she had given the King the
time necessary to fly and conceal1 himself.
While the volunteers were inspecting, with all the bitterness
of disappointed rage, the apartments, the cellars, the garrets,
and the most secret places of the house, others prowled about
the court yards, in the garden, and even amongst the vineyards
near the house. They passed several times, with their lanterns
in hand and their sabres drawn, within a few paces of the
bundles of vine-branches which concealed the fugitive, and the
King heard them break out in curses against him, and in hopes
of discovering him, that they might immolate him to their fury,
and divide his spoils amongst them. During these observations
of his persecutors who left only a few steps between himself and
death, Murat kept his hand on his poignard and his pistols,
decided, as he has since related, to kill the first that he could
strike, and to reserve his last pistol for himself, that he might
give up nothing but a dead body to the ferocity of his
executioners. This mysterious search thus baffled in the house he inha
bited, made it more sure to him, and he sought no more to
change his place of residence. But a price was set upon his
head at Marseilles. A thousand Louis d'or were promised to
any one who should deliver him up dead or alive to the in
quisitors of the Bourbon party. As the soil of France must,

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 165
He embarks on 1 oard a fishing-boat for Corsica.
therefore, sooner or later open beneath his footsteps, he re
sumed his idea of taking refuge in Corsica.
XIII.
The three young naval officers, who had never ceased to
devote themselves secretly to his escape, and who were ready
to share his dangers, Messrs. Donnadieu, Blancard, and Lang
lade prepared for him a new plan of escape. A fishing boat,
without deck or cabin, in which these young men embarked
themselves, awaited the King during a dark night, and a rough
sea, on another point of the coast. This time he succeeded in
getting aboard, favoured by the fancied security of the coast
guard, who thought the shore sufficiently guarded, in such a night
by the tempest ; and he gave himself up to the winds and waves,
less cruel perhaps, and less relentless than political parties.
The boat which was only large enough to hold four per
sons, managed by intrepid hands, quitted the roadstead and was
sailing at day-break on the open sea, in the direction of the
island of Corsica. But the storm which drove more mighty
waves against the frail bark in the open sea, than in the sheltered
roadstead of Toulon, the wind which had torn the sail and
broken the yard, the water which the boat shipped at every
squall, threatened to open for the King and his friends a tomb
amidst every wave. Perceiving a decked vessel going before
the wind towards the French coast, they endeavoured to reach
it, to beg the crew to take them on board and carry them to
Corsica, offering the captain as a reward for this service, a part
of the money which the King had about him. But the captain
and crew, deaf to their entreaties, kept on their way without
pity, at the risk of swamping the boat under their bows, and
left Murat to struggle with the raging elements. The night
was falling, the wind was howling, and the boat took in water
and trembled at every shock of the sea, when another sail
showed itself over the waves, by the glimmering twilight,
sailing towards Corsica, in the same direction as Murat, and
on the point of passing him.
This was the mail-boat from Toulon to Corsica, commanded

166 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 31.
He is picked up at sea, and proceeds to Corsica.
by Captain Michaello Bonelli, of Bastia, which was conveying
despatches and passengers to the island. At the signals of dis
tress, the gestures and cries of Murat and his companions, the
generous captain, though himself threatened by the tempest,
did not hesitate to back his sails, and wait for the boat. He
pretended to be ignorant who the persons were in such immi
nent peril that he received on board ; but the captain of the
frigate Olessa, who had embarked in the mail boat at Toulon,
had been confidentially informed before he left of the King's
departure. He took it for granted that the winds and the
waves would not intimidate this gallant prince, and that he
should fall in with him at sea, struggling with the tempest ; he
had therefore, secretly hinted to the commandant of the mail-
boat, to scan the horizon, and to pick up the unfortunate King
of Naples. Murat was accordingly received on the deck of the
vessel more like a King than a shipwrecked wanderer.
He had scarcely got on board, when his boat, dismasted
and shattered by the waves, foundered in sight of the passengers.
XIV.
Besides the captain of the navy who was devoted to him,
Murat found on board the mail-boat, some partisans of his
cause, and some men who were flying, if not from proscription,
at least from disgrace. Amongst these were senators, Corsican
generals of high rank, of the family, of the court, or high in
the favour of Napoleon ; the Bacciocchis, the Casabiancas, the
Rossis, the Galvanis. They received Murat with all the marks
of respectful consideration and deference compatible with the
reserve called for by the circumstances of the times. It was
agreed amongst all on board, that on their arrival in port, they
should affect to be ignorant of the name and title of the King. '
He had taken the name of Campo Meli, one of the fiefs of his
former kingdom.
XV.
The King, who landed under this name at Bastia, was soon
recognised, and silently received with that mute popularity

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 167
He take, up his residence at Viscovato
which attached to his person, to his exploits, and to his mis*
fortunes, which, in the ignorance of the islanders, were identified
with the reverses of Napoleon. Fearing, however, that the
agents and partisans of the Bourbons in the city, the centre of
the government, might take umbrage at his residing there, and
execute some order of severity against him, either received from
Paris, or inspired by their own zeal, he passed only one night
in the city, and the day after his arrival he went with some
friends to Viscovato, a village situated in the centre of some
lofty mountains, at twelve leagues distance from Bastia.
The principle family of Viscovato was that of Colonna, of
ancient race and consideration in these mountains, where the
people, as in the East, recognise natural and hereditary masters,
in the chiefs of the old tribes of the country. Murat had been
prompted to throw himself into Viscovato, by his recollections
of the name of this family of Colonna, into which one of his
most confidential generals, Franceschetti, had married. He
thought that the gratitude and affection which this general,
who had been loaded with his favours at Naples, had communi
cated to his relations, would be a pledge of hospitality and
fidelity. He was not deceived. The ties of nature and of the
heart, are more sacred in Corsica than those of politics or
opinion, as amongst all primitive people, where man is above
the subject or the citizen. The mayor of Viscovato, Colonna
Cecaldi, father-in-law of General Franceschetti, was the chief
of this family. He was a royalist, an enemy to Bonaparte,
and devoted to the Bourbons ; but, above all, devoted to family
feeling, to the duties of hospitality towards those who invoke
it, and to the ancient manners of his country.
XVI.
Murat on arriving, like a chieftain of the mountain bands
of Scotland, or of Lebanon, in the square of Viscovato, alighted
from his horse before the threshold of a house which had the
most imposing appearance of any in the village ; this was the
residence of Colonna Cecaldi. The master of the house, and
the chief of the country, Colonna, came out at the noise of the

168 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 31.

Dispositions of the Corsicans.

horses of the King's suite. Murat mentioned his name,
acquainted him with the motives of his landing on the island,
and asked him for an asylum and protection amongst his
people, with the sole intention of awaiting in safety amidst
these mountains what the King of France and the allied
sovereigns should decide respecting him. The venerable chief
of the Colonnas replied to the King by an assurance of the
most inviolable hospitality. He told him that there did not
exist, to his knowledge, any order of the King of France, or
any reason of conscience or honour, for a faithful partisan of
the Bourbons, which could authorise any person in Corsica to
treat the deposed King of Naples as a fugitive and an enemy.
The King lived for some days in security and peace in
the house of Colonna Cecaldi, where it was not long before
he was rejoined by the Neapolitan general Franceschetti, the
son-in-law of his host. XVII.
Corsica, as we have before said, was then fluctuating in a
sort of interregnum favourable to the anarchy of the three
principal parties which divided it, — the Bonapartists, the
partisans of England, and the friends of the house of Bour
bon; and still more favourable to the personal enterprises
wliich an illustrious chief, stirring and popular like the King
of Naples might wish to attempt there, whether to govern the
island, or to recruit there adherents and instruments of ad
ventures and expeditions elsewhere. The feeble garrisons
of Calvi, of Bastia, and of Ajaccio, did not consist of more
than a few hundred men, an insufficient number to impose
obedience, or even peace, on the three existing parties, rooted
in the island, masters of the mountains, and always in arms
and in observation to avail themselves of the chances which
events might offer them. The white flag was flying in the
port, and on the belfries of the island, the only sign of the
submission of the country to the government of Louis XVIII.
The military command of the island was exercised provisionally,
and almost officiously, by the Colonel of Gendarmerie Verriere.

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 109
The military commandant summons Murat to surrender himself.

XVIII.
As soon as this military commandant of Bastia, who was
informed of the arrival of the King of Naples in Corsica,
had learned that Murat was at Viscovato, urged by his
own zeal, and by the zeal of the royalists of his party, to
act against the fugitive of Toulon, he sent him by an official
messenger, a summons to put himself into his hands, until
the King of France should have decided on his fate. Murat,
already sheltered at Viscovato by the inviolable hospitality
of the Colonnas, and being soon surrounded by peasants, by
shepherds, and by old soldiers armed for his protection, refused
to obey ; alleging as a motive for his refusal the absence of
all legal and sovereign authority in the island. On receipt
of this answer Colonel Verriere published a proclamation
which declared Murat, King of Naples, an enemy to the
King of France, and a disturber of the public peace. A
detachment of 400 men, supported by a corps of gendarmes,
marched to Viscovato, to execute the orders of government,
and to. seize on the person of Murat.
But Murat was already an impregnable power in the very
heart of the lofty and warlike mountains in which he was
cantoned. With some, hereditary devotion to the Colonna
family, under whose roof he resided — with others, the sacred
rights of hospitality, which no political sentiments would
make them forget or betray, — with one class the adventurous
popularity of the King of Naples, — with another the memory
of the old wars in which they had served under his orders,
— with the most ambitious, the hope of sharing his dangers
and the spoils of an expedition of this old sovereign to
reconquer his kingdom, — with the mercenary, the pay which
Murat distributed out of the sums he had brought with him,
or which he drew from Paris, — all these considerations had
collected at Viscovato, around the King of Naples some
thousand of defenders, armed and ready for any thing to
save, to follow, or to avenge this popular outlaw. The detach
ment sent from Bastia, intimidated by the number and re-

.170 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 31.
Murat's projects.
solution of his partisans, and by the natural strength of his
position, returned without its prey to Bastia.
XIX.
Murat was earnestly pressed by his little army, and by
the attachment of the mountaineers, to raise the standard
of insular independence in his own name, and to seize upon
Bastia. This, however, he declined, still affirming that he
did not wish to undertake anything against the King of
France, and that he limited himself to providing for his
own safety and dignity, under the guardianship of his warlike
hosts. But his partisans around him were already doing
violence to his reserve, whether pretended or sincere, and
boldly recruited men, arms, munition, and subsidies for his
cause. He shut his eyes to all this, and seemed himself to
fluctuate undecided between an insurrection in the island in
his favour, and an expedition to the shores of his ancient
kingdom. The certainty of failing against Europe, after a
momentary success in the island of Corsica, and the me
diocrity of the conquest proportioned to its danger, turned
him from the first idea, and precipitated him into the second.
Despair above all, and the ambition of imitating and sur
passing Napoleon, by returning to Naples and maintaining
himself there, drove him blindfold into this fatal step of
his life. His pecuniary resources becoming exhausted, he
could not support the weight of idleness, nor the humiliation
of a private and obscure life, after a life of tumult in camps,
and of splendour on a throne. Domestic troubles also added
their secret bitterness and incitement to his political reverses.
He adored his wife, young, beautiful, ambitious, and greedy
of power and splendor. He was jealous of the supposed
mental favour she evinced towards some young generals of
his court, whose counsels she had sometimes seemed to prefer
to his own policy. He felt humbled at having deprived her
of a throne to which she had elevated him by her union
with him. He was impatient to replace her upon it by the
boldness of his genius, and by the bravery of his heart ; and

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 171
He decides on going to Naples.
he was indignant at the vulgar rank in which he would have
to leave his children, whom he adored like their mother.
His heart disturbed his head. He was seized with the
vertigo of pride, of love, and of the throne. During his
three week's residence amongst the mountains, he indulged
in the delirium or the illusions which he needed as a justi
fication of his madness.

XX.
" I am adored at Naples," he said to his confidents, " and
how could it be otherwise ? I have done nothing but good
to the Neapolitans, whom I governed with my heart, and
whose military name I raised in the field, by covering it
with my own exploits. I gave freedom to the people.
I elevated the nobility, I gave courage to the soldiers, I
loved the peasantry, I civilized, I administered, I enriched
the kingdom. I still hear from this place the acclamations
of the multitude on my route, every time I returned in triumph
to my capital, from our campaigns with the grand army.
Great heaven? what memories do these applauses of a nation
awaken in my soul ! Naples and my people beset me by their
continual presence ! " Then melting into tears at these pic
tures : " It is too mnch," he exclaimed, " I can no longer live
or die but for my people. We shall see Naples, we shall see
Naples, let us hasten our departure ! "
XXI.
It was in vain that some general officers, more calm and
more faithful to his interests than to his illusions,, represented
to him the dangers of the enterprise ; Europe in arms, Austria
and her armies on his frontiers, the Bourbons of Sicily but just
restored to their kingdom, and not having yet had time to
exhaust the enthusiasm and popularity of their restoration, the
army vanquished and broken up, its officers again attached to the
Bourbons by family souvenirs, by duty, by oath, and by interest;
the rapid oblivion which follows the calamities of fate and

172 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 31.
Arrival of Macirone.
absence, a vigilant police and numerous Sbirri * from Sicily,
spying out the sentiments and feelings of the people, the
difficulty of disembarking, the paucity of resources, of arms, of
soldiers and of munitions, the absence of all pretext or reason
for raising the people, and a certain captivity or tragical death
on the soil of a kingdom which could not brook two kings.
Nothing however could shake his resolution, for he had
the regal monomania. He was determined to consider men and
things only in the light which smiled upon his wishes, and which
reflected back the false colouring of his warm and lively imagi
nation. Intelligent, but unreflecting, like all the men of the
south, Murat had all his life had occasion for a head to think
for him. Wherever he had gone alone, he had gone astray.
His mind, though full of fire, had but little light. It served
more to dazzle than to guide him on his way.
XXII.
It was in the midst of these perplexities, but when his
heart, decided before his understanding, was already entirely
bent on a landing at Naples, that his old aide-decamp, corres
pondent, and negociator at Paris, Colonel Macirone, arrived in
the island with the sanction of government, and demanded to
be conducted to Viscovato, to bear to the King the intentions
and safe-conduct of the allied powers. It was too late. The
King was constantly repeating this axiom, which served as the
heroic excuse for his resolution : " For a King who has lost his
crown nothing remains but, the death of a soldier." He was
moreover convinced, and repeated incessantly to his con
fidents, that if he gave himself up to the apparent generosity
of Europe, his tomb would speedily be built by the side of his
prison. Macirone, before he appeared in the presence of his old
master, confided to the commandant of Bastia, and to the
English and Neapolitan agents, who were sent thither to turn
Murat from his enterprise and dissuade his adherents, the
* Satellites of Justice.

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 173
Murat's march to Ajaccio.
mission with which he was charged for him. Amongst others
he saw the two brothers Carabelli, Corsicans by birth, who had
formerly served in the British army, and who had been con
fidentially sent from Naples by Medici, the minister of police ;
not to instigate, as it has been thought, but to turn away Murat
from his enterprise. The court of Naples had already its sus
picions. It was alarmed, and kept watch, but it had no occa
sion to lay a deadly snare for a man who so madly threw himself
into it of his own accord. Macirone and the two Carabellis,
the former anxious for the King and for the success of his ne
gociation, the others in the interest of Naples, and of the
minister Medici, who employed them, saw each other at
Bastia, conferred with the military government of that city, and
having learned that Murat was going to Ajaccio by one road,
they went thither by another, to stop him by their counsels at
the last step. XXIII
But nothing could any longer restrain him. On the 17th
September, he mounted his horse at Viscovato, surrounded by
a little army of Corsican volunteers, and of all the dependants
of the Colonna family. He marched to Ajaccio, the second
capital of the island, amidst cries of " Long live the King of
Naples !" and the good wishes of the whole population, whom
he had captivated during his long residence with the Colonnas
by his grace, his familiarity, his martial eloquence, and his
fame. This army was principally composed of Generals Fran
ceschetti and Natali, who had rejoined him in Corsica, <»,
unemployed sub-officers and soldiers, residing in the island,
who had hastened at the sound of his name around their ancient
general, of a selection of the m'ost warlike of those Condottieri,
whom the perpetual and reciprocal vengeance of families, at
variance with each other had driven into the forests, and
accustomed daily to the bivouac and petty warfare with the
troops ; and finally, of those shepherds from the lofty pasture
grounds of the island, and of those young villagers, who tend
their flocks or labour with gun-in-hand, and to whom the use of
arms is familiar from infancy. Murat, in his half military,

174 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 31.
Appearance of the country.
half regal costume, with which he affected to fascinate the eyes
of the French soldiers, followed by the principal chiefs of the
family which had shown him hospitality, and by his generals in
uniform, behind the guides of his advance-guard of mountain
eers, marched at the head of this column, an escort in the eyes
of some, an army in the eyes of others, according as the gates
of Ajaccio, where he had established some communication,
should open or shut at his name. He rode one of those long
haired little Corsican stallions, whose sure footing, eye of fire,
bold heart, and ear accustomed to musketry, constitute the
battle-steed of these mountain warfares. The rocks, the
ravines, the skirts of the forests were covered with women and
children, grouped upon the route to witness the passage of a
hero and a King.
The wild magnificence of the landscape scenery he was
passing through added something still farther of picturesque
and oriental grandeur to the spectacle. The abrupt pathways
by which he had to cross the granite heart of the island to go
to Ajaccio, mounted upwards, plunged down, and meandered by
turns through the mountains, the ravines, the abysses, and the
venerable forests of firs, of oaks, and of chestnuts, whose eleva
tion renders them inaccessible to the axe of man. Southern
Alps, framed in by a vast sea, where the deep splendour of the
sky, the solitude, the rudeness, and the silent majesty of
nature, impress upon the heart of man the energy, the
loftiness, and the profundity which they themselves display.
XXIV.
All the villages which Murat had to pass through, apprised
of his coming, proud of showing him hospitality, and already
rendered zealous in his cause by his emissaries, went to meet
him, with their chiefs, their magistrates, and their priests.
He slept the first night at Cotone, in the house of the curate
Galvani, whose brother, a commissary general of Napoleon's
wars, went with the King as one of his staff. He remained
there on the 18th, to recruit some new soldiers. On the
19th he breakfasted at the hamlet of Peselli-Danisani, in the

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 175
Dispositions of the Emperor's family.
house of the principal inhabitant, Manuelli. Then, with his
followers, who increased in numbers at every cabin on his
route, passing over the lofty gorges of La Serra, he encamped
that evening at St. Pierre-de-Venaco. The curate of Vivaro,
Pantalacci, afforded him hospitality on the 20th, and escorted
him with his villagers, for the remainder of the day through
the primitive forests of Vizzavona. When descending Bococ-
nano, he met Lieutenant-Colonel Bonelli, who had come to
meet him with all his village. He there awaited the remainder
of his little army, which had marched slower than himself, and he
sent General Franceschetti to Ajaccio, to announce his approach
and his intentions, commissioned also to treat with the prin
cipal people of the city, and with the royal authorities. He
awaited at Bococnano to await the result of his conferences.

XXV.
Franceschetti applied first to the Arrighis, a family loaded
with gifts, with titles, and with honours by Bonaparte. He
tound assembled there all the principal members of the Em
peror's family, resident or refugees in the island. The resent
ment of these relations of Napoleon against Murat, whom they
accused of having contributed to his ruin, and the prudence
natural to islanders, which made them more than any others
dread the appearance of mixing themselves up with plots
against the Bourbons, to whom their name had already made
them greater objects of suspicion, inspired this family council
with an inflexible aversion to this compromising temerity of the
King of Naples. They addressed to his general the most bitter
and insulting reproaches against a king who, after having been
crowned by the hand of their family, and after having fought
against it with the coalition, had come again to persecute it
with his ambition, and to ruin it, even in the island where it
was hiding its misfortunes. They sternly conjured Franceschetti
to deter his master from entering Ajaccio, and thereby to impart
to a peaceable and submissive town the appearance of a place in
open insurrection against the King of France. Franceschetti
returned to report to the King the evil disposition of his rela-

170 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 31.
He enters Ajaccio.
fives ; but Murat, now surrounded by his whole army, and
urged on by the less reflecting enthusiasm of the people, and of
the soldiers of the garrison of Ajaccio, would listen to nothing,
and remounting his horse he advanced towards the city.
XXVI
His entry was a triumph. The people overwhelmed their
authorities. The civil magistrates and the military command
ant restrained with difficulty the five hundred French soldiers
of the garrison in the fortress, the gates of which they kept
shut solely to prevent them from mingling with the people and
with the army of the King. They were seen leaning unarmed
on the parapets of the fortifications, gazing on the triumphal
entry of the old brother-in-arms of their Emperor, applaud
ing the demonstrations of the multitude, and mingling their
cries of "Long live the King of Naples!" with the acclama
tions of the army, the city, and the port. Murat would not
accept the public palace, which the multitude pressed him to
enter in token of sovereignty. He made them conduct him to
an ordinary inn in the square ; and before he dismounted he
harangued the people, who had crowded closely round him
He told them that he had only come to Ajaccio to ask for
simple and inoffensive hospitality ; and that if his presence
was made a cause of sedition, or disturbance in the city, he
would immediately quit it again. He sent his officers to bear
the same assurance to the authorities, satisfied with having
braved them, not wishing to push his victory beyond the object
he had in view, happy only in being favoured in his designs
against it by the ascendant of his popularity, and by the
kingly part which he was enjoying for the last time in the
island of his benefactor and of his enemy.
XXVII.
" His Majesty the King of Naples seeks an asylum," thus
the chief of his staff wrote by his orders to the mayor of
Ajaccio. " He has given a preference to the place where his

18l5.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 177
Enthusiasm ofthe people of Ajaccio.
family reside ; believing himself to be in the midst of his own
relatives when amongst the inhabitants of this city. He will
live there as a private individual, and only asks the authorities
for the protection due to honour and misfortune.
The naval officer, Blancard, who performed the duties of
his private secretary, wrote from the King's dictation to Colonel
Verriere, commanding the military division, a long despatch,
intended for publication, and which contained the following :
" The King has read with indignation your proclamation against
him to the inhabitants and soldiers of the island ; this proclama
tion is false and indecent ; for it denounces to the dagger of the
assassin, the King and the persons who have given an asylum
to an unfortunate prince, to a captain whose services, rank,
and reverses render him sacred in the eyes of all civilised
nations." Murat enjoyed to intoxication the empire he exercised over
the people of Ajaccio. He contemplated their demonstrations
every moment under his windows, and made his friends observe
them ; he saw in them an augury of the enthusiasm which he
hoped soon to find again on the soil of his kingdom. He
hastened the preparations for his expedition, which was
freighting and arming at full liberty in the port, under the
eyes of the powerless authorities, and of the soldiers of the
garrison, accomplices at least in their hearts and good wishes.
He placed his jewels in pledge to obtain the necessary funds
for the equipment of his little squadron.
XXVIII.
Meanwhile Macirone had arrived with the two brothers
Carabelli. The former having requested an audience with his
old master, it was granted immediately. The inn in which the
King resided was only designated by the flag of the two Sicilies
displayed over the door, and by the sentinels and the armed
mountaineers who guarded the entrance. Macirone, who was re
ceived with tenderness, but with embarrassment, by the King,
reported to him the success of his negociation ; and delivered to
him a note from Prince Metternich, containing the conditions
3 L

178 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 31.
His evasive reply to the offer of Austria.
on which the King of Naples would be admitted to the hospi
tality of Austria. These were :
1. That the King should assume the name of a private
individual. % That he should choose his residence, either in town or
country, in Bohemia or Upper Austria.
3. That he should pledge his word not to quit the Austrian
States without the consent of the Emperor, and that he should
submit himself there to the laws of the country.
To these conditions were added a passport for Trieste, if
the King wished to make use of it. He took the pasport and
reserved the discussion of the conditions until he should be re
united to his family. This evasive reply recalled the am
biguity of his attitude between Napoleon and the allies in
1814. Furnished with this passport if destiny was adverse to
him in the expedition he was about to attempt, free from the
conditions which he would not accept if he succeeded, he
refused, under the pretext of the omission of his regal title
in the despatches, the written offer made to him by the cap
tain of an English frigate, which was placed at his disposal
by the British government to conduct him to Trieste. The
two brothers Carabelli were afterwards admitted to an audience,
and exerted themselves to point out to him the dangers of his
enterprise, but failed in convincing him.
He invited them to his table with Macirone. Generals
Natali and Franceschetti, six colonels, and his principal offi
cers, also formed part of the company. The conversation
turned upon Waterloo — '¦ Ah !" exclaimed the King, " if I had
been there, I feel assured that the fate of the world would have
been changed. The French cavalry was madly engaged, it
was sacrificed in detail, when its charge en masse at the decisive
moment would have surmounted everything!" His thoughts
flowed freely, and the conversation was varied and turned on
indifferent subjects. After dinner he took Macirone into his
cabinet, and said to him that the first ambiguous answer which
he had given him in the morning to the offers of Austria, had
a double meaning, little suited to his honour and his rank, that

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 179
His letter to Colonel Macirone.
he reproached himself with it, and that he would give him
another more frank and sincere as to his real intentions. Then
sitting down before his writing-table, he indited a letter with
his own hand, which contained his thoughts and complaints
without reserve.
" I appreciate my liberty," he said in this letter, " above '
every other possession of this world. Captivity or death is the
same to me. What treatment can I expect from those who
hired assassins against me at Marseilles ? . I saved the life of
the Marquis de Riviere, who had been condemned to die on
the scaffold; I obtained his pardon from the Emperor. Detes
table truth, notwithstanding, he has excited wretches against me,
and set a price upon my head ! Wandering in the woods and
mountains, I have confided my life to the generous fidelity of
three French officers, who brought me to Corsica at the peril
of their own lives. Some wretches have said that I have
brought treasures with me from Naples ! I expended there,
on the contrary, in improving my kingdom, all the wealth I
had brought from my principality of Berg. I cannot accept
the conditions that you have brought me, Monsieur Macirone !
They constitute my abdication, I am only permitted to live.
Is this the respect due to an unfortunate sovereign, recognised
by the whole of Europe, and who at a critical moment decided
the campaign of 1815, in favour of these same powers who
now pursue him with their hatred and ingratitude ? I have
not abdicated ! I have a right to recover my crown, if God will
give me strength and means to do it ! My presence in Naples
can no longer injure any one; I cannot correspond with
Napoleon, a captive at St. Helena ! When you receive this
letter I shall be already at sea, advancing to meet my destiny.
I shall either succeed or terminate my life with my enterprise.
I have dared death a thousand times in fighting for my country,
and shall I not be allowed to dare it once in my own cause ?
I have only one anxiety, the fate of my family!"
After having given these lines to a secretary to be copied,
he signed them, and dismissed his former aide-de-camp with
an embrace.

180 HISTOilY OF THE EESTORATION [BOOK 31.

Sailing of Ml unit's expedition.

XXIX.
The report of a cannon at one o'clock in the morning,
amidst the silence that prevailed, awoke Macirone with a start,
and informed him that the signal for embarkation was given
by the King to his fellow adventurers in the hazards of the
war. He had, in fact, embarked with them. This cannon-
shot was, some minutes after, followed by several others from
the battlements of the fort of Ajaccio. This was a vain pre
tence of opposition to the expedition of the King of Naples,
procured with difficulty and supplication from the soldiers by
the officers of the garrison. The artillerymen secretly favour
ing th^ adventurous cause of Murat, and restrained by discipline
alone within an apparent neutrality, had loaded the guns as if
to fire on the squadron, but they designedly took aim over the
vacant sea. These discharges lost in the waves, were more a
salute than an act of hostility. The King and his army were
already sailing at liberty towards the coast of Italy.
Six light vessels with decks, feluccas or bomb-ketches,
composed the whole flotilla of Murat. The vessel which bore
the King was commanded by Baron Barbara, captain of a
frigate in the Neapolitan service ; Courand commanded the
second, having under him Captain Pernice and Lieutenant
Maltedo ; Ettore the third, Mattei the fourth, and Semidei the
fifth. The sixth vessel, a better sailer and more manageable
than the others, served as an advice boat, and was commanded
by a simple pilot named Ceconi. The officers, and the two
hundred and fifty sub-officers and soldiers, which formed the
whole army of the King's expedition, were distributed amongst
these frail vessels, in proportion to their respective sizes. The
flotilla was under sail in view of Corsica at daybreak on the
28th of September. On the 29th they made little way for
want of wind. On the 30th a squall threw them on the coast
of Sardinia, where they narrowly escaped shipwreck. The
overloaded vessels took shelter for a whole day in a creek of
the uninhabited island of Tavolora, a vast rock in the form of
an ancient altar, detached from Sardinia.

1815,] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 18]
Murat enters San Lucido.
On the 2nd of October they put to sea again, struggling
with difficulty against the waves, for five days and four nights,
and only reached at night-fall, on the 6th, the coast of Calabria,
in sight of the mountains of Paolo. The land lay about three
leagues distance from the vessels, which were then altogether.
XXX.
The commander of the fleet, Barbara, ordered all fires
above and below decks to be extinguished, to avoid revealing
the presence of unknown ships upon the coast. It was agreed
that the vessels keeping company together should make signals
to each other only by the sparks produced by the collision of
flint and steel, in order that the look-out men on the shore
might mistake these fugitive lights for the phosphorescent
appearances on the sea during the summer nights. The wind
blew from the mountains of Calabria, as if providence was
desirous of repelling the King from destruction. The vessels
obliged to beat up with difficulty in a hollow sea, to make the
land in the roadstead of Paolo, were separated in the darkness
from each other by a sudden squall, blowing, after the moon
had risen, from the stormy gorges of Lower Calabria. Driven
from his original intention by the wind and sea, the King
entered, at day-break, the secluded roadstead of San Lucido,
with only two of his vessels, to await there the remainder of
his scattered flotilla.
XXXI
The anchor was cast at some distance from the beach,
and the King ordered the chef de bataillon, Ottaviani, to land
with one seaman, sound the opinions of the peasants, and
acquaint him with the result of his enquiries. Ottaviani and
the seaman did not return, having been arrested a few steps
from the beach by the inhabitants. This bad symptom dis
turbed the companions of Murat, amongst whom, since the
preceding evening, a gloomy silence and a timid hesitation of
evil augury had been observable. It appeared as if the sight

J 82 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 31.

Hesitation and discouragement of the crew.

of the coast had suddenly presented to their eyes the danger
of the enterprise they were about to brave, and which had
hitherto been imperceptible amidst the illusions created by
distance. The Italian shore however, made them susceptible
of all these forebodings.
These men had neither personal cause, nor cause of duty,
of country, or of honour, in this expedition ; none of those
motives, in short, which animate true heroism and support
fortitude. Adventurers, in search of the easy fortune and
capricious glory of an enterprise in which they had no real
interest, the slightest doubt of success could dishearten them,
and the least obstacle check them. They began to have a
glimpse of their temerity, and without daring to confess it to
themselves, to look behind them.
XXXII
The day was drawing to a close, and the King did not see
his vessels re-appear. The pilot Ceconi, commanding the
advice boat, and which alone was anchored beside that of the
King, in the roadstead of San Lucido, was sent by Murat at the
close of day, to discover at sea or behind the neighbouring capes,
the other vessels, and to rally them around him. Ceconi
discovered the vessel commanded by Courand, and brought her
in. Being interrogated by the King as to the fate of the other
vessels, he replied that he had lost sight of them during the
squall the preceding evening. Two officers of the land troops
on board the vessel of this captain, confided to Murat their
suspicions as to the intentions of Courand, whom they believed
to be plotting with his crew, the desertion at sea, and abaadon-
ment of the King. Murat summoned Courand on board his
vessel, reminded him of the benefits with which he had loaded
him at Naples, and pretended to have greater confidence in him,
to induce him to abandon the idea of deceiving him.
The King, however, prudently ordered Captain Barbara,
commandant of the flotilla, to take Courand's vessel in tow, to
deprive him of all pretext of separating from, the squadron,
This vessel had on board fifty chosen men, sub-officers,

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 183
Desertion oi Courand with his crew.
and soldiers, the bravest and most warlike of the whole ex
pedition. At midnight the three vessels of the King weighed anchor
in silence, and the flotilla made sail towards another creek
on the coast, hoping to fall in with the other vessels at sea.
But before daylight could reveal his flight Captain Courand,
having sent the soldiers down between decks, to conceal them
as he said, from the look-out men on the shore, cut, while they
were asleep, the hawser which attached his vessel to the poop
of the King's, and concealed by the fog made sail for Corsica,
telling the soldiers when they awoke that the King had
abandoned the enterprise, and had ordered him to go before
him to Trieste. XXXIII.
At the first dawn of day the King was dismayed at the
desertion of Courand, who had served seven years in his
guard, and who thus betrayed his master at the critical moment.
Having no more with him now than his own crew, and the
handful of men embarked in the advice boat of the pilot
Ceconi, he wavered in his resolution, and directed the com
mandant of his flotilla, Barbara, to steer for Trieste. Bar
bara affirmed that his crews were not in a condition to undergo
so long a voyage in the Adriatic, with their present paucity
of sailors and provisions ; but he offered the King to go ashore
in the neighbouring little port of Pizzo, to hire there a stronger
vessel, to get a crew and provisions, and to return and join the
King who was to stand out to sea in the advice boat. But
to effect this it was necessary that Murat should confide to
Barbara his Austrian passports for Trieste, the only documents
which could warrant the landing, and protect the person and
transactions of Barbara on shore. The King refused to part
with his safe-conduct, which he reserved doubtless as a last
resource of flight in case of disaster. Barbara persisted in
not landing without this indispensible guarantee of his safety,
and an angry altercation took place between him and the King.
" You hear him," exclaimed Murat indignantly, addressing

184 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 31"

The expidition lands at Pizzo.

his officers. "He refuses to obey me! Well, then, I shall
go on shore myself ! My memory is fresh in the hearts of the
Neapolitans ; they will recognise me ! "
He then ordered all his officers to put on their uniforms.
General Natali, alone, not having any uniform, the King
murmured loudly at this negligence or prudence of the general.
"It was not when following me to danger," said he, "that
you should have forgotten your military dress ! "
During these altercations, these murmurs, and reproaches on
board, the fresh breeze was rapidly impelling the two vessels,
on a brilliant sea and under a glowing sun, towards the
Calabrian coast, where rose half-way up the hill the white
castle and houses of the little port of Pizzo. It was eleven
o'clock in the morning on the 8th October. The sun was
smiling as if to lure them to destruction.
XXXIV.
At the moment when the two vessels cast anchor, at a
cable's length from a deserted beach, a short distance from
the port of Pizzo, the generals and officers wished to land
first. The King kept them back by a gesture, and
making them stand behind him on the deck : " It is my
duty," said he, "to be the first to land on this field of
glory, or this field of death. Mine is the precedence, as the
responsibility is mine," and he stepped boldly upon the beach.
The two generals, Franceschetti and Natali, accompanied by
twenty five officers, sub-officers, soldiers, or personal servants,
landed after him ; and collecting in a body behind the King,
followed his footsteps, his movements, and his gestures.
The presence of these unknown vessels in the solitary
roadstead, the number and costume of the passeno-ers, the
anchor cast without waiting for a visit from the coast-guard,
the tumult, the rapidity, and the noise of the landing, had
roused the attention of the sailors of the port, and the idlers
of the shipping. The beach where the King had landed
was covered with groups, few in number, astonished, undecided,
and keeping at a certain distance from the party formed by

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FKANCE. 185
Mnrat's reception by the people.
the King and his suite. A guard of Marine Artillery, fifteen
in number, issuing from an isolated tower, which served them
as a guard-house, advanced at the noise, but irresolutely,
towards the King. They still wore the uniform of his army.
" There are my soldiers," cried Murat walking towards them.
" My children recognise your King ! " Raising his hat at
these words, and proudly elevating before the soldiers bis
handsome head, lit up by the sun, shaking the long locks
that waved on his shoulders, to impress strongly upon their
eyes that martial figure which had been so often engraved in
their memories at reviews or camps. " Yes, it is I, your
King Joachim ; say if you recognise me, and if you will
follow and serve me still ; me the friend of the soldiers, the
brother of the Neapolitans ! "
Murat's companions supported these words and gestures
of their chief, by raising their hats in the air, and crying
out : " Long live King Joachim ! " holding out their hands
to the soldiers and Calabrese, who were attracted by this
spectacle around them. The soldiers, without a chief, petri
fied by this sudden apparition of a beloved king, whose
image was preserved in the imaginations of these poetical
people as that of their hero, saluted him with their arms.
Some of them mechanically repeated the cry, "Long live
King Joachim!" like an excitable people who echo every accla
mation. Some others retired in silence to await the event.
Five or six replied that they were ready to follow and to
fight under him, to reconquer his throne, and to deliver the
kingdom from the tyranny of the Austrians.
XXXV.
During these colloquies the inhabitants of Pizzo, informed
by public rumour of the landing of some armed men pro
claiming King Joachim and having this proscribed prince at
their head, hastened, incredulous at first, to the shore, where
they were harangued by Murat. Then, seeing the small
number of his adherents, the two dismantled vessels near
the shore, this handful of sub-officers and soldiers, Sardinians,

186 HISTORY ,OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 31.
Impolicy of landing in Calabria.
Corsicans, Genoese, sunburnt and sallow after their rough
passage, their clothing soiled with foam and sand, more like
a band of pirates than the escort of a King, they passed
from incredulity to astonishment, from astonishment to con
tempt, and from contempt to indignation and anger. Some
surrounded the King at a distance, which indicated repulsion
rather than respect ; while others, already determined on out
rage, returned murmuring to the town for their guns, to
fight, in the name of their legitimate King, the usurper and
outlaw who came to tempt their fidelity.
Calabria was the most unfortunate point of landing that
could be chosen by Murat to effect a rising of the people
in the name of French popularity. The population of these
provinces, the most fanatic and warlike of the kingdom, close
to Sicily, whence the old court always inspired them with
hatred of French dominion, excited to insurrection in 1799
by Cardinal Ruffo, whom they had proclaimed at once their
general and their pontiff, had since then been incessantly
agitated by Bourbon conspiracies. Finally, kept down by
terror, pacified but oppressed, decimated, shot at the first
symptom of agitation by the French general Marches, they
had been raised again in insurrection on the news of the first
disasters of the French in Lower Italy.
To present to these provinces, so recently returned under
tlie government of their antient royal family and their priests,
the flag of French domination, was to offer them what they
regarded as the flag of tyrrany, of usurpation, of irreligion,
and of treason. Calabria was for Murat what a landing in La
Vendee would have been for Napoleon, his model, three months
after the Vendean res'toration of the princes of the house of
Bourbon. Nearer to Naples and to the central provinces of the king
dom, Murat, perhaps, would have had more chances and more
popular opinions in his favour.
The people were already assembling, interrogating, and
encouraging one another to fidelity, and were arming at the
call of the prmcipal inhabitants of the town, on the public
place of Pizzo. Murat lost some moments in waiting for a

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 187
Excitement of the people against Murat.
movement in his favour which never took place. The shore
became deserted, vacancy appeared around him ; fatal indica
tion ! Where fortune is, men flock around her banner.

XXXVI.
The relationship between the royal houses of Naples and
of Spain, and the double domination of two kingdoms by one
and the same dynasty, have left in the provinces of Sicily, or
of Naples, immense fiefs belonging to the great families of
Spain. The Duke de lTnfantado possessed considerable terri
tory around Pizzo ; and his agent exercised that influence and
authority over the population of the town which a generous
chieftainship acquires over a vassal tenantry. This agent, who
was popular at Pizzo, having heard of the landing of Murat,
was faithful to the house of Bourbon, whose cause was heroi
cally supported by his master in Spain. He made his appear
ance on the public place, mingled with the people, who canvassed
his thoughts ; demonstrating to them the crime and the mad
ness of an insurrection against the legitimate King, and the
honour and reward of a courageous fidelity, he won over with
out difficulty the hearts of allr predisposed already against any
complicity with Murat. The people responded to the agent
of the Duke de 1' Infantado "by a cry of " To arms 1" and by
imprecations and threats of death against Murat. To march
against him they only waited for an accession of numbers and
arms better suited to the occasion. XXXVII.
Two young men of Monteleone, a neighbouring city, the
capital of Calabria, who witnessed this fermentation of the
people, and who appeared to take an interest in the new comers,
hastened to the beach, approached the King, reported to him
what was passing in the town, apprised him of the danger he
was running in remaining on the coast, and advised him to
throw himself boldly upon the route to Monteleone, where
public opinion being more favourable, and the garrison more

188 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 31.

Murat takes the route to Monteleone.

easily seduced, would open to him the gates of his kingdom.
They offered to guide him thither; and Murat, without having
time for reflection, and ashamed to re-embark while he could
yet do anything, took their advice for inspiration. He accepted
the guidance of the two Calabrians, made a sign to his com
panions to rise, and ordered the artillerymen to follow him.
Some of these soldiers did follow him ; in fact, more from a
habit of obedience than from any interest they took in his
cause, so much are soldiers imposed upon by the uniform and
the word of command. XXXVIII.
The feeble column, composed in all of forty or fifty per
sons, several of whom were idlers seeking to gratify their
curiosity, and some were enemies, followed the steps of the
guides and of Murat up the steep road which scaled the hills.
This road leads towards Monteleone, leaving Pizzo on the right,
and having the sea at its feet. The uniforms and the muskets of
the King's escort shone brilliantly in the sun, amongst the
stems of the olive trees, towards the summit of the ascent,
near the upland where the road slopes gently ; whilst a more
numerous column, more confused and sombre in appearance.
armed with long carabines, and wearing the high conical shaped
hats of the Calabrese, began to form at the gate of the town
on the shore. It could not be discerned from the vessels at
anchor if this column was forming to follow or to fight that of
the King.
Murat did not well know this himself; for, like all men
who attempt impossibilities, he had a taste and a necessity for
illusions. In spite of the warning of his guides and the cold
ness exhibited on his landing, he flattered himself that the
popularity of his name, the certainty of his presence, and the
boldness of his march, were drawing these undecided people on
to follow him. Harassed with fatigue and heat by the steep
ascent he had been climbing, his legs unaccustomed to motion
during the eight days he had passed at sea, on board a vessel whose
size forbade the exercise of his limbs, he sat down at the sum-

1815. j OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 189
His meeting with Trenta Capelli
mit of the acclivity on the root of an olive tree, to wipe the
perspiration from his brow, to breathe a moment, and to reflect
on his position.
He seemed to expect with impatience the column of people
he beheld from this height upon the shore, without asking
himself what their intentions might be. He asked the group
of artillerymen who had followed him, where their comrades
were. They pointed them out to him, mingled with the peo
ple and beginning to ascend the hill. To see them the better,
Murat got up, quitted the high road, and ascended to a grove
of olive trees, whence the eye took in, as from a promontory,
the town, the sea, the shore, and the windings of the declivity.
He there persisted, in spite of the entreaties of his guides, in
waiting for the second detachment of artillerymen and the
crowd who surrounded them.

XXXIX.
At this moment a colonel of the royal gendarmerie, mounted,
and in uniform, appeared upon the road, on a level with the
hillock where the King was reposing and observing the move
ments on the shore. This was a chief of Calabrian bands,
famous in the partisan wars of these provinces against the
French, an agent of Queen Caroline and of Cardinal Ruffo,
for a long time a mountain adventurer, and who had become com
mandant of the regular Sbirri of Monteleone since the restoration
of King Ferdinand. His name was Trenta Capelli. The
colonel stopped in the midst of the group of officers and soldiers
who remained on the road waiting for the King.
Murat called him and summoned him to join his enterprise ;
but the blood of three brothers of Trenta Capelli, shed on the
scaffold by the French during the Oalabrian insurrections, for-
bmle him to join the murderers of his family. He' did not
evince, however, too lively a repugnance to the invitation uf
the King ; and contented himself with saying to him, as he
pointed to the flag of the two Sicilies on the castle of Pizzo,
"My king is he whose colours fly over the kingdom !" Murat,

190 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 31.
Hostilities of the people.
instead of detaining him by force, conversed with him, and
allowed him to continue his route to the town.

XL.
Trenta Capelli had scarcely accosted the people and the
artillerymen ascending towards the King, when he returned
with them, advanced a few paces in front of his troops, called
upon Murat, and respectfully requested him to follow him to
Pizzo. Murat still deceived, or feigning to be so, as to the
intentions of the armed crowd who were advancing towards his
followers, went down the road with Trenta Capelli, surrounded
by Generals Franceschetti and Natali, and by his officers, who
conjured him in vain to get away from these people, and march
upon Monteleone.
" My children," he said to the crowd, " do not fire upon
your old King ! I have not landed in Calabria to fight with
you, but to go to Monteleone, and to ask there the assistance
of the authorities in order to pursue my passage to Trieste,
where I am to join my wife and children. If you had listened
to me on the beach at Pizzo, you would have seen that I have
a safe conduct for the Austrian states, which your King Ferdi
nand himself must recognise and respect."
The crowd replying only by their shouts, with their mus
kets presented, and their advance accelerated at the words
thrown away by Murat, he fell back rapidly into the midst of
his twenty-eight soldiers, who had remained a few paces in
rear to intimidate the multitude by the front they showed. A
confused discharge from the crowd and tho artillerymen was
poured in upon the King's group, which killed Captain Maltedo
at his feet, and wounded Lieutenant Pernice and several of his
soldiers. Murat only replied by raising his hat, saluting the
people, and conjuring them to listen to him. A second dis
charge still further thinned his ranks ; while the armed multi
tude increased upon the road, and extended on the flanks to
prevent the King from returning towards the sea.
He has now no other asylum in this land, which he
came to conquer, than the vessels which had brought him

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 191
Attempted flight of Murat.
thither. He flies, therefore, followed by Franceschetti, Natali,
and eight or ten sub-officers, across the fields towards the
shore. He receives, without being struck, the fire of some
carabines, and succeeds in gaining the beach, amidst the fire
of the intimidated sharp-shooters. From the top of a rock
which juts into the sea, he calls out with all the strength of
his lungs, " Barbara ! Barbara ! " conjuring this commander
of his vessel to send him a boat, and to draw nigh the shore
But the vessel having weighed anchor, when the firing re
sounded over the waves, is already in full sail for the open sea,
carrying off, with the proclamations, the arms, the treasure, the
munitions of the King — his last refuge and his life !
XLI.
Murat, and the four or five companions of his flight, had
only been pursued across the vine and olive grounds in their
way to the shore by some unarmed men, whom the fear of
seeing the fugitives turn upon them kept at a distance.
Colonel Trenta Capelli, the artillerymen, and the armed men
of Pizzo, were occupied at the summit of the hill in firing on
the twenty-four soldiers of Murat, disarming them, making
them prisoners, and dragging them towards the town, bathed
in their blood. The King and his friends had therefore time
to escape captivity or death, if, Barbara and Ceconi had tacked
about at their cries, and sent a boat ashore ; but Murat saw
the soldiers and volunteers of Trenta Capelli coming down
towards him, and his last resource flying from him at the same
time. In this perplexity, the King, seeing some fishermen's boats
moored at some distance from him on the sands, threw himself
into the water to seize upon one of them, to put the sea
between himself and his enemies. But the boat being
stranded, and having no water under its keel, resisted the
efforts of the King and his followers to get it afloat. During
these useless attempts, the crowd, who saw what he was about,
called by gestures the Sbirri of Trenta Capelli, and surrounded
the King still closer, without however daring, whether from

192 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 31.

Murat is taken prisoner.

respect, from pity, or from fear, to fire upon him, or lay their
hands upon his person.
Murat, unable to remove the large boat, threw himself
alone, at some paces distance, into a small fishing boat, which
was floating at anchor in deeper water. He had hardly got on
board when he endeavoured to pull in the hawser, at the end of
which was tied a large stone that served as an anchor to this
frail bark. He was near succeeding when the poor fisherman
who owned the boat, trembling at seeing the King carrying
away his only means of existence, rushed into the water to
save his all from the fugitive. The King knocked him down
with the stroke of an oar, and continued drawing in the hawser
and raising the stone ; but a crowd of sailors and fishermen
running up at the cries of their fallen comrade., rushed into the
water, held back the hawser with their united strength, jumped
into the boat, overthrew the king, took away his oar, tore his
clothes, bruised his features, and dragging him, vanquished
and bleeding, upon the beach, gave him into the custody of
Trenta Capelli's men, overwhelmed with insults and outrage.
These guards disputed with each other the possession of the
prisoner, struck him in the face with the butt ends of their
carabines, collared him, tore from him the rich orders which he
wore in his hat and on his breast, and dragged him with the
dead bodies of Pernice, of Giovanni, and seven others of his
officers or servants, wounded and bathed in their blood, through
the mob that always insult the fallen. They then threw
them pellmell into the casemates of the little ruinous castle of
Pizzo. XLII.
Twice during his passage from the shore to the prison the
King was menaced by the fury of the people, and the axe was
raised above his head. Trenta Capelli. and the agent of the
Duke de l'lnfantado, satisfied with so .illustrious a prize, and
unwilling to tarnish their success with a crime, protected him
against the poniards of the populace, made the assasins blush
at their baseness, and placed volunteers and soldiers on guard
at the castle to preserve the victims.

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 103
His intended proclamation.
The King was thrown upon a heap of straw, in the same
vaulted room where his dead and wounded companions were
staining with their blood the stones of the dungeon. Trenta
Capelli ordered his clothes to be searched. They seized his
passports, his diamonds, his money, a letter of credit for a
million and a half of francs, which he had on a Neapolitan
banker and the printed proclamation which he had drawn
up at Viscovato, and which he intended to distribute throughout
the kingdom.
This proclamation, which was long, diffuse, and full of
sophisms but little understood by the people, indicated more
the diplomatist than the soldier. It was rather a justification
of his enterprise before Europe than a sympathetic appeal to
the Neapolitans. It only exhibited the feelings of the human
heart in some phrases alluding to the vicissitudes of his destiny.
"I lived lonely," said he, " in one of tliose humble asylums
which are more frequently found in virtuous poverty ; there I
braved the poniards of the assassins of the south, those cannibals,
who, in all the epochs of the French revolution, have bathed
in the blood of their fellow countrymen. I had decided on
waiting in my retreat the end of that counter-revolutionary
fever which is devouring France, to come and seek in your
hearts an asylum against my misfortunes, and against the most
unheard of and unjust persecutions, when I was compelled to with
draw !" This proclamation finished with the promise of a
peaceful reign and a constitution, the ordinary and tardy peni
tence of all princes who have harassed the world with war or
with tyranny. XLIII.
Insults and menaces still resounded in the courts of the
castle and in the dungeon of the prisoners, from the mouths of
some fanatical lovers of blood and vengeance ; but the greater
number of the soldiers and volunteers felt for the unfortunate
after the victory, and evinced for the King all the respect and
consideration compatable with captivity.
Murat had. not excited any personal hatred against himself
during his reign, for he was equally humane in peace, as brave
3 M

19 i HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 31.
Arrival of Captain Stratti.
and generous in war ; and had never shed blood but in action.
To be admired and beloved constituted the whole ambition of his
life. When once disarmed, nobody could hate him. The
agent of the Infantados, Alcalas, sent to the castle a dinner for
the King, assistance for the wounded, mattrasses, linen, clothes,
refreshments, and comforts of every description. He honoured
his masters, and the Spanish nation, by the generosity of
his consideration towards a captive monarch.
XLIV.
Meanwhile, on the rumour of the landing and defeat of a
band of factious persons, who had came to incite the kingdom
to insurrection, the Neapolitan general, Nunziante, who com
manded in Calabria, hastened to send to Pizzo Captain Stratti,
a Greek by birth, and a stranger to the latter years of Neapo
litan history, with a detachment to guard the prisoners, to
ascertain their names and quality, and to prevent at the same
time the escape and the massacre of the captives. They were
still ignorant at Monteleone of the presence of King Joachim
amongst this handful of adventurers. Stratti, on arriving at
the castle, without passing through the town, and ¦without
attending much to the vague rumours of the arrest of the King,
caused the captives to be immediately brought before him in
the court yard, to interrogate them and draw up his report. A
Corsican sergeant and soldier were the first who appeared and
replied to his questions. " Who are you ?" said Stratti to the
third. " Joachim Murat, King of Naples," replied the King
with dignity. Stratti confused at this presence of a King^ in
which he could scarcely yet believe, and seized with reifect
and compassion before his prisoner, cast down his eyes, and
for the last time giving to the King the title of Majesty, as if
by a bitter irony of fate, he had him conducted, with the kind
ness and consideration of a soldier who respects a hero, into a
chamber more apart and more decent, where the King could
at least collect his scattered thoughts without having con
stantly before his eyes the ruin, the blood, and the corpses of
his friends

1815.] OV MONARCHY IN FRANCE. ]95
Arrival of General Niinziante.

XLV.
On receiving the report of Stratti, who confirmed the rumours
spread at Monteleone, General Nunziante hastened thither him
self before night. He sent couriers to Naples to acquaint the
court and the ministers with this prodigious event, which had
in the course of one hour, threatened and saved the crown of
Ferdinand and the peace of the kingdom. He then presented
himself before Murat.
General Nunziante was not one of those satellites of the
camp who pass from one service to another, as tlieir sword passes
from hand to hand, and who preserve in their new cause,
neither respect for themselves nor for those they have previously
served ; a description of men as common in the camp as in the
court, who are moulded to adulation, baseness, and cruelty, by
discipline and a thirst for promotion. He was a man of feeling
and understanding, faithful to his king and country, but faithful
also to gratitude and glory, towards him who had been his
sovereign ; a military man who knew how to reconcile in his own
conduct the duties of nature with those of his position. He
honoured Murat, and accosted him as a king fallen from his
throne, but not from the respect and affection of his old sub
ordinates. He pitied him, and reprobated the indignities
and outrages he had suffered from the populace of Pizzo. He
apologised for the necessity he was under of still leaving him
in such a ruinous and unworthy abode, through anxiety for
his safety, which required soldiers and stone walls to shelter
him frpm insult. Surgeons were brought from Monteleone to
assist the wounded. The night passed amidst the groans of
the dying, and the silent reflections of the King on his fate.
The following day, General Nunziante conducted him into
an apartment of the castle distinct from the prisons, and more
suitably prepared for his reception. The countenance of the
general betrayed more anxiety than that of his captive, for he
began secretly to anticipate sinister orders from Naples. He
dined at the King's table with the two Generals Franceschetti
and Natali, the voluntary companions of their master in his

196 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION r BOOK 31.
Murat's illusions as to his fate.
new prison. The conversation turned on the past wars, on the
state of the kingdom and of Europe, and on the probable reso
lutions which King Ferdinand would take with respect to his
competitor and captive. The King affected confidence in the
generosity of his enemy, and in the inviolability of his own life,
henceforth without danger for the kingdom. Nunziante did
not venture to reveal to him all his apprehensions ; but was
careful, however, not to leave him in so full a security that the
fall from it would be too sudden and too cruel. He spoke to
him with uneasiness of a first telegraphic message, interrupted
by the fog and by the night, which he had received in the
morning. This despatch began : " A despatch informs me 
You will confine him  "

XLVI.
The day passed in expectation of a despatch, or a courier to
complete the interrupted order of the preceding evening. The
King received a visit from the captain of an English frigate,
who proposed to Nunziante to take his prisoner to Tropea, a
small town on the coast, where he would be better lodged, and
more strictly guarded against popular commotions than at Pizzo.
Nunziante did not dare to confide the captive, for whom he was
answerable, without an authority from his court, to an English
vessel and the accidents of the sea. In the evening, when at
dinner with the King, he evinced further uneasiness as to the
sense of the suspended despatch. " I hope, however," said he
to the King, " that the meaning was to deliver your majesty to
the English fleet, to be taken to Messina, there to await the
decision of the allied powers."
" But, general," said Murat with a smile which seemed to
anticipate the reply; "if, however, a telegraphic despatch
ordered you to bring me before a military commission, would
you do it ?"
Nunziante replied that he would not obey such an order
unless he received it from King Ferdinand himself, by a
courier bearing his written wishes ; but that such an order
was not to be apprehended from the goodness of heart and

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 197
Feelings of the court of Naples on learning the landing of Murat.
generosity of Ferdinand. Murat, reassured and calm, arose
from the table, went to bed with tranquillity, and before he
slept made Natali read to him a tragedy of Metastasio, the
catastrophe of which had some analogy to his own position ;
after which he fell into a profound sleep.
On awaking the following morning, and at table, he con
versed gaily with his guardians, and with Nunziante, on tlie
facility of an amicable arrangement between Ferdinand and
himself, by which he would cede Sicily to the Bourbons, and
the Bourbons would recognise him as sovereign of Naples.
The illusions of grandeur did not quit him any more than the
illusions of life. The delay in the instructions from Naples
made him believe that deliberations were taking place, which
would result in a milder decision.

XLVII.
Meanwhile the court of Naples had received, at first by
the telegraph from Monteleone, and afterwards by a courier
sent by Nunziante, the news of the landing and the arrest of
Joachim at Pizzo. The shadow even of Murat, the echo only
of his name, still popular in the army, fascinating in the
capital, and inciting in the provinces and all Italy, had thrown
the court and the government into a confusion, which foreboded
cowardly and sinister resolutions. In courts and political parties,
as amongst the people, fear gives rise to ferocity. The souls of
kings, of ministers, and of the great, are formed like those of
the populace ; panic drives them into blood.
The heart of Ferdinand was not cruel. A sovereign
swaddled from his infancy in the indolence, the voluptuousness,
and the popular superstitions of the thrones of the south ;
familiar even to vulgarity with the lazzaroni of the shore of
Naples; passionately fond of fishing, of hunting, and of women;
governed until then by a vindictive and imperious queen, who
was just dead ; given up to mistresses ; intimidated by tho
priesthood ; served by ministers more kings than himself ; a
man of understanding, however, but of that trivial and inactive
understanding which makes a play of busiuesss, and laughs at

J 98 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 31.
Character of Ferdinand.
its own idleness — he had occupied the throne for sixty years,
despised and beloved at the same time by his subjects. His
misfortunes, his long exile in Sicily, his age, and his good
intentions made him dear at thia moment to the Neapolitans.
Great cruelties had signalised his reign in 1799; but the
blood shed at that period, and which is attributed to his wife,
to Cardinal Ruffo, to Admiral Nelson, and to Lady Hamilton,
the favourite of the queen, and the mistress of that great
officer, does not lie at the king's door. Nothing sinister could
emanate from his heart, which was equally devoid of impulse
for crime, as of constancy for virtue.
XLVIII.
But he was more susceptible of fear than of virtue. His
court trembled around him. His ministers — and above all
Medici, young, enlightened, and philosophic — leaned at first
towards magnanimity, the only true prudence against defeated
factions. But to humour the fears of the court upon which
they were dependent, they themselves exhibited a degree of
apprehension beyond the occasion. They feared, or affected to
believe in the existence of ramifications of a plot in the capital
and in the provinces. The guards of the palace were doubled,
the streets encumbered with patrols, a division of the army
was marched upon Naples, and another upon Calabria. The
imagination of the King and of his confidants was overcast, as
if threatened with some dreadful calamity. They would not
see that an attempt of this nature, failing at the very threshold,
against the fidelity of the people and the good sense of the
public, was the best guarantee of safety for the kingdom, and,
for the king, the noblest opportunity for greatness of soul, and
of defiance to usurpation without peril.
Councils succeeded councils, and resolutions followed reso
lutions. When the court trembled, nobody dared to show any
confidence. The useless and ferocious order to immolate a
prisoner without accomplices and without defence issued from
the palace of the King on the night of the 9th of October,
twenty four hours after the dethroned king, thrown almost in

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 199
He issues an order for Murat's trial.
spite of himself on the coast by the boisterous sea, had placed
his foot on the soil of the kingdom, and was vanquished, in
sulted, and imprisoned by the people he came to incite to
insurrection. This was a gratuitous shame for the court of
Naples and its counsellors. By shedding a drop of the
blood which chance had thrown into their power, the council
dishonoured two thrones — unnecessarily stained with blood
the hand of Ferdinand — made the natural return of the old
dynasty into its kingdom a matter of contest — gave to the old
monarchical right, which defends itself by its paternal love,
the appearance of revolutionary force — killed a disarmed hero,
and shed upon his tomb the interest of their own dastardly
fears. It would almost appear in this enlightened age as if
the King had sworn to dethrone himself, sometimes by weak
ness, sometimes by folly, and sometimes by vengeance.
However this may be the order was sent, and the 'prince of
Canosa, the implacable instrument of conspiracies, of police,
of reactions, and of the emigrants of the Sicilian court, set out
at the same time ; commissioned to watch, to purify, or to
fanaticise Calabria, where he maintained a correspondence with
the partisans of the counter-revolution. The order was as
follows : —
" General Murat shall be brought before a military com
mission, the members of which shall be nominated by our
Minister of War.
" There shall be granted to the condemned only one half-
hour, to receive the consolations of religion.
(Signed), " Ferdinand."
Thus the order for the trial did not admit even the suppo
sition of an acquittal. The conditions of the execution pre
ceded the sentence ! The trial of Pizzo recalled that of
Vincennes against the Duke d'Enghien.
It was a consolation for Murat at this supreme hour, that he
did not recognise a retaliation of Providence in this mode oi
proceeding of Ferdinand, and that he had protested against the
assasination of the son of the Condes, as unfortunate as
himself, and more innocent.

200 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 31,
Nunziante communicates the decree to Murat.

XLIX.
Nunziante, who had received this decree on the night of
the 1 2th, would not curtail from the hours which still remained
to the King, the sleep whieh at least abridged his agony. He
entered, sat down at the foot of his prisoner's bed, wept in
silence over him, and waited till Murat should awake himself.
The sun had already been shining a long time on the slumber
ing head of the prisoner. At length, on opening his eyes he
beheld the countenance of the general bathed in tears. He
understood all before a word was spoken. Nunziante, however,
after having tenderly pressed his hand, told him in a low voice
the nature of the order of the court, which had arrived during
the night,' that the King might have time to prepare the heart
of a man, and the countenance of a king, for the stroke he was
going to receive in public. " Well then," said Murat, a mo
ment after, resigning himself to a sentence which he had been
far from considering as inevitable, "since it is so, I am lost!
The order for my trial is that of my death ! " A few tears
stole into his eyes. The bravest men have their moments cf
weakness. Life itself utters a cry at extinction in the heart
of a hero.
Nunziante left the King to his reflections, and retired
silently. His two generals, and his valet-de-chambre, Armand,
who would ' follow his master even in his temerity, were then
sent out of the apartment.
Captain Stratti soon after entered, followed by seven officers
of the army, into the chamber where Murat awaited them
standing. Stratti, as compassionate as Nunziante, held down
his head, and did not venture to look at the victim. He
ranged to the right and left, a little in his rear, his colleagues
of all ranks, facing the King. These seven military judges,
appointed according to the order of the court, by the general
commanding in Calabria, were all officers who had long been
subjects, and companions in the campaigns of their Kino-,
Murat, and promoted by himself to their respective ranks in
the army. Not one of them had the courage to refuse a mis-

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 201

Murat refuses to appear before the court-martial.

sion of murder. The courage of these men of the camp is in
the arm rather than in the heart. They were going to try
and condemn their old general and benefactor, as five months
before they would have tried and condemned his enemies
Human machines bereft of heart by constant subordination,
and docile to the hands of all who reign.
Far from complaining they thanked King Ferdinand for a
mark of confidence which did them honour, they said, and
which put to the proof their recent fidelity to their new king
L.
Stratti at length read, stammering, to his prisoner the
order by which he was to be brought before a military commis
sion. He added that this commission was going to assemble
immediately in an adjoining chamber, that the military law
allowed a defender to the accused, and that General Nunzi
ante had proposed to him for this last office the Sicilian
captain Starace, a man of honour, equally devoted to humanity
and his duty.
"Tell the tribunal," replied Murat, proudly raising his
head, " that I refuse to appear before it. Men like myself
are only accountable for their actions to God ! Let the tri
bunal decide my fate, I shall submit to it, but I shall recognise
no judges ! "
Stratti and his colleagues retired to go and prepare the
formalities of the court-martial. General Nunziante took pen,
ink, and paper to the prisoner, himself, that he might express
his last wishes, or write his last farewell to his family. Murat
being left to himself wrote, as he bathed the paper with his
tears, that sublime letter, in which his soul and his fate, his
love as a husband, his passion as a father, his conscience as a
king, and his courage as a soldier, were summoned up in a few
lines, dictated by the final thrillings of his heart. He ad
dressed them to his young wife, the love and glory of his
youth, the delight, the pride, and sometimes the torment of
his life, but always the perpetual anxiety of his soul.

202 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 31,
Murat's letter to his wife and children.
'' Pizzo, October 13, 1815,
' My dear Caroline, — My last hour is arrived ! In a few
moments I shall have ceased to live ; in a few moments you
will no longer have a husband. Never forget me ! I die
innocent. My life has not been stained by any injustice !
Farewell my Achille ! Farewell my Ltetitia ! Farewell
my Lucien ! Farewell my Louise ! " (the names of his
children to whom he wished to give this nominal embrace,
that it might be felt more personally in the heart of each,
accompanied with tlieir names of domestic familiarity), " show
yourselves worthy of me to the world ! I leave you without a
a kingdom and without fortune, in the midst of my numerous
enemies. Be constantly united ! Show yourselves superior to
misfortune ; think of what you are, and of what you have been,
and God will bless you ! Do not execrate my memory ! Know
that my greatest sorrow in the last moments of my life is to
die far away from ray children. Receive my paternal blessing!
Receive my embraces and my tears ! Always preserve the
memory of your unfortunate father _ '
LI.
This letter solely dictated by nature, on the point of eternal
separation, within three paces of the tribunal about to pass
sentence, and of the soldiers who were loading their muskets
to shatter that breast, and to stop for ever the palpitations
of that heart, betokened still more than a whole life could do,
the genius of Murat's soul — good-heartedness ! He knew how
to fight and he knew how to love. He was better than a king,
he was more than a hero, he was a man. This last cry of his
testified, imknown to him, more for his memory than all the
declamation and all the posthumous manifestos of his model at
St. Helena could subsequently effect for that of Napoleon.
The one addressed his adieux to the world, the other to his
wife and children; the one died upon the stage, the other
amidst his family. The death of Murat was superior to that of
Napoleon, as nature is superior to pride; Murat's farewell letter

181 5. J OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 203

His interview with Staracc.

will draw tears trom the remotest posterity. If in him we do not
recognise the victim and the martyr, at least we feel the lover,
the father, and the hero. He died a faithful witness of him
self. Volatile and fiery, he had experienced the intoxication
of fortune, and the errors of policy ; but he never had the
perversity of ambition, nor the cruelty of supreme power. His
reign had been generous and gentle as his heart.
After having bedewed this paper with his tears, and pressed
it with his lips as often as he had kisses to send thus to his wife
and his four children, he asked for a pair of scissors, cut off
one of the ringlets of his long hair, kissed it also, that his
family might find upon it the impression of his lips, and enclos
ing the humid hair in the letter, he gave it, with the most
earnest recommendations to Nunziante. LII.
Captain Starace, who had been recommended to him for
his official defender, entered his room, disguising badly an
emotion which revealed itself in his tears. He conjured Murat
to be allowed to defend him before the military commission ;
but Murat, resuming the martial attitude and language of his
kingly character, " No ! " he said to Starace, " these are my
subjects, and not my judges. Kings are not amenable to their
subjects, not even to other kings, for thrones make all kings
equal with each other ! Would they try me by any other title?
As a marshal of France? The court must then be formed of
marshals. As a general? The court must be composed of
generals. Before they compel me to recognise a tribunal such
as that they would impose upon me, many pages must be torn
from the history of Europe ! You cannot save my life ! They
who are going to pronounce upon my fate are not my judges,
but my executioners. The honour of royalty shall at least be
preserved in me." Starace was compelled to yield to the
inflexible will of his client.
The Judge-advocate having entered to interrogate the
accused; "You shall have but one reply from me," said he:
" I am Joachim Napoleon, King of the Two Sicilies ! Begone !"

204 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 31.

His review of his career.

Delivered from the cares of his defence, and from the
presence of his judges, who were deliberating on the other side
of the wall, and drawing out his sentence, he conversed, with
an unshaken freedom of mind, with the officers appointed to
guard him, who were standing at the door of his chamber.
" I should have thought," he said disdainfully, " King Ferdi
nand a greater man. If fate had put him in my place, and me
in his, and if he had landed in my provinces, I should not
have abused the fate of arms by sacrificing him !" Then re
tracing in thought the course of his career, he spoke with satis
faction of the gentleness and prosperity of his reign at Naples,
of the pardons be had granted, of the blood he had spared, of
the improvements of every description with which he had
exerted himself to endow the kingdom ; of the army, of the
glory he had shed upon it, by associating it with the glory of
the French army ; of the personal sacrifices which he had
made of the treasure he had brought from Germany, for the
embellishment of his capital, and of the absolute destitution of
fortune in which he was leaving his family after him.
"This is my glory, this is my consolation in my last mo
ments," said he : " I swear that I have done all the good that
was in my power to the country, and never did evil except to
the wicked. At Pizzo, however, they hate me, and rejoice at
my misfortune! What have I done to be hated?" Then
looking back still farther to seek for the cause of the people's
dislike of him, and recollecting the murder of the Duke
d'Enghien, of which he had been so unjustly accused of being
the accomplice. " Is it the tragedy of the Duke d'Enghien,"
he said, as if with a sudden impulse, "which Ferdinand is now
avenging upon me by a similar, tragedy? I here swear by
that God in whose presence I shall stand in another moment,
that I took no part whatever in that murder."
He finally requested to be left alone for some moments to
resign himself and to fortify his soul, for his language to his
guardians, as well as his letter to his children, proves that the
thoughts of God were present to his mind at his departure
from the earth.
A priest of Pizzo who had been offered to him, and whom

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 205
His last moments.
he had accepted to console and sanctify his death, was shut up
with him in his chamber. "Sire," said the priest, addressing
him with respect and pity, " this is not the first time that I
have appeared before your majesty. When you came about
five years ago to Pizzo, while visiting your provinces, I implored
some assistance from your majesty for the necessities of this
church, and you gave me a generous donation. My voice which
had then sufficient power over your heart to inspire you with
an act of benevolence shall now be for you a souvenir of mercy.
May this souvenir of happy augury induce you this day to
accept those prayers which have no other object than the
eternal repose of your soul ! "
Murat performed the service for the dying, and, at the re
quest of the priest, gave him, to ensure his interment in conse
crated ground, these words written and signed with his own
hand, " I declare that I die a good christian." He charged
the priest to give his watch, which had now no more hours to
mark for him here below, to his faithful servant, Armand. He
desired to say farewell to Generals Natali and Franceschetti,
and to the poor soldiers who had been drawn into his mis
fortunes. This, however, was refused, not from cruelty, but
from commiseration, to spare his heart from another bitter
trial. LIII

During these rapid preparations for the closing scene, the
tribunal which was sitting at his door condemned him to death,
as the instigator of an insurection against the kingdom, in
virtue of a law which he had promulgated himself ten years
before, to intimidate the revolted Calabrians; but which he
had never executed by capital punishment, from the indulgent
mercy of his disposition. His sentence was read to him with due
solemnity. He listened to it as he would have listened to the
cannon of another battle during his military life, equally without
emotion or bravado. He neither asked for pardon, for delay, or
for appeal. He thanked General Nunziante, the officers, and
the priest for the consideration and sensibility for his fate which

206 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 31.
His death.
they had evinced towards him during his short captivity within
those walls.
He advanced of his own accord towards the door, as if to
accelerate the catastrophe. This door opened on a narrow
esplanade lying between the towers of the castle and the outer
walls, very much resembling the castle of Vincennes. But
one last and splendid sun, at least, beamed upon the last step
and the last look of the hero. Twelve soldiers with loaded
muskets awaited him there. The narrow space did not permit
them to stand at a sufficient distance to deprive death of a
part of its horror. Murat, on stepping over the threshold of
his chamber, found himself face to face with them. He refused
to let his eyes be bandaged, and looking at the soldiers with a
firm and benevolent smile ; "My friends," said he, "do not
make me suffer by taking a bad aim. The narrow space
naturally compels you almost to rest the muzzles of your
muskets on my breast, do not tremble, do not strike me in the
face, aim at the heart, here it is."
As he spoke thus he placed his right hand upon his coat,
to indicate the position of the heart. In his left hand he held
a small medallion which contained, in one focus of love, the
image of his wife and of his four children, as if he thus
wished to make them witnesses of his last hour, or to have
their image in his last look, as in his last thought. He fixed
his eyes on this portrait, and received the death blow without
feeling it, absorbed in the contemplation of all he loved upon
earth! His body, pierced at so short a distance by twelve
bails, fell with the arms open and the face to the earth, as if
still embracing the kingdom which he had once possessed, and
which he had come to reconquer for his tomb. They threw
his cloak upon the body, which was buried in the cathedral of
Pizzo, where he had previously purchased by his donations the
hospitality of a final resting place.
His companions in misfortune were pardoned, released, and
restored to their country. The people who had insulted him
alive, wept at his death. No one could hate him but in battle.
He had felt pity, and it was shed freely on his tomb.

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 207
Review of his life.

LIV.
Thus ended the most chivalrous soldier of the Imperial
epoch ; not the greatest but the most heroic figure amongst the
companions of the new Alexander. Sprung from the Pyrenese
mountains, a soldier in search of adventures, distinguished in
the army by his bravery, offered to the notice of the First Consul
by chance, become dear and useful to him by zeal and friendship,
elevated to the hand of Bonaparte's sister by her beauty and
his love, raised to great commands by the favour, and to the
throne by the interest of the family, driven to infidelity by the
ambition of his wife and by a father's weakness for his children,
dethroned by the reaction on the fall of the empire, disgraced
at the same time by Napoleon and by his enemies, unfitted for
obscurity and mediocrity after so much splendour and so much
fortune, throwing himself in despair upon impossibilities and
by imprudence upon death, but falling, while still young, with
all his fame, carrying with him if not the entire esteem, at least
all the interest and all the compassion of his contemporaries,
leaving to posterity one of those,names which will eternally dazzle
future ages, in which some shades may doubtless be discovered,
but no crimes ! Such was Murat ! Two countries will lay
claim to him, France which he served, and Italy which he
governed. But he belongs above all to the world of imagi
nation and poetry ; a man of romance from his adventures, a
man of chivalry from his character, a man of history from his
epoch. He merited more than any other of the martial and
political men of his period, the epitaph rarely merited by those
who serve, or govern courts — a man qf heart, in all the grandeur,
and in all the sensibility of the word. Thus history which will
have its enthusiasm and its reproaches, will have, above all,
tears for Murat. LV.
If his death was not a crime it was at least, a baseness of
heart in his murderers. They had the right in ap extreme

208 RESTORATION OF ..orfAECHY IN FRANCE. [BOOK 31.

Judgment on his murderers

point of view, to kill him, but they had not the necessity.
Being masters of his person, having no longer to fear from a
captive enemy any of those enterprises and competitions which
disturb an empire or make a dynasty tremble, there was more
vengeance than prudence in his death. This execution tar
nished the reign of Ferdinand, without securing it. Greatness
of soul, that justice of victory, was wanting to the Sicilian
court, where the tragical traditions of Conradin, of Queen Joan,
of Machiavelli's Italy had left sinister examples of deadly
struggles and scaffolds amongst pretenders to the throne. In
sacrificing a hero, who had no ancestors before him, nor dynasty
after him, to claim not a right, but an adventure for his throne,
the court of Sicily did not elevate its glory, but degraded its
character. This execution of a disarmed competitor looked
like fear. Envy also appeared to inspire it. It was not so
much the rivalship of rights, as the superiority of fame, which
obscured in Murat the house of Naples. His competition was
less feared than the popularity of his exploits. In beating down
the hero they wished to beat down his memory. They only
succeeded in imparting to the drama of his life the pathos and
the pity which attach themselves to the sanguinary catastrophes
of great men. His death recalled that of Pompey. The house
of Naples only conquered by that death an additional stain of
blood upon its annals, and a mutilated corpse upon its shore.
Woe to cowards ! Cruelty never exists but where there is
lack of courage.

BOOK TH1ETY-SECOND.
Character of the French nation — Causes ofthe spirit ofthe elections of
1815 — Fall of Fouch£ — His exile in Germany — Review of his life
— Fall of M. de Talleyrand — Formation of M. de Richelieu's ministry
— Retrospective glance at M. de Richelieu, — His life in Russia —
His character — Negociations with the Allies — Their exactions —
Treaty of the 20th November — Letter of M. de Richelieu — Treaty of
the Holy Alliance — Opening ofthe chambers — The King's speech —
M. Laine, President of the Chamber of Deputies — His speech —
Addresses of the two chambers to the King — Policy of the Duke de
Richelieu — Spirit of the Council — Laws against seditious cries and
individual liberty — Law of the prevotal courts* — Discussion and vote
in the two chambers — Proposition of the Duke de Fitz-James —
Speech of the Count d'Artois — Return of the Duke d'Orleans — His
interview with Louis XVIII.

I.
Nations are like men ; they have the same passions, vicissi
tudes, exaggerations, indecisions, and uncertainties. That which
is called public opinion in free governments is only the moveable
needle of the dial plate which marks by turns the variations in
this atmosphere of human affairs. This instability is still more
sudden and prodigious in France than in the other nations of
the world, if we except the ancient Athenian race. It has
become the proverb of Europe.
The French historian ought to acknowledge this vice of the
nation, whose vicissitudes he recounts, as he ought to point out
its virtues. Even this instability belongs to a quality of the
great French race — imagination ; it forms part of its destiny
In its wars it is called impulse ; in its arts, genius ; in its
reverses, despondency ; in its despondency, inconsistency ; and
in its patriotism, enthusiasm. It is the modern nation which
* Cours prevotales. The name given to criminal tribunals established
temporarily and judging without appeal. — TRANSLATOR.
3i

210 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION BOOK 32.
Character of the French nation.
has the most fire in its soul ; and this fire is fanned by the
wind of its mobility. We cannot explain, except by this
character of the French race, those frenzies — which simulta
neously seem to seize upon the whole nation after the lapse of
some months — for principles, for men, and for governments the
most opposed to each other
We are on the eve of one of those astonishing inconstan
cies of public opinion in France. Let us explain its causes.
II.
The gleam of those philosophical principles, the whole of
which constitute what is called the revolution had nowhere, so
much as in France, dazzled and warmed the souls of the people,
at the end of the last century. At the voice of her writers, her
orators, her tribunes, and her warriors, France took the initia
tive in the work of reformation, without considering what it
would cost in fatigues, treasure, and blood, to renew her
institutions, vitiated by the rust of ages, in religion, legisla
tion, civilization, and government. An immense popularity
attached itself at the commencement to the men who had
courageously sapped the old edifice of her church, her throne, and
her laws. Her King himself, imbued through his court, even
upon his throne, with this unanimous spirit of renovation, had
generously declared himself the first innovator of his kingdom
He had begun the reformation by that of his court, and the
sacrifices by those of his authority. The nobility had been
equally generous in renouncing its caste, feudalities, titles,
and monopolies to mingle itself with the nation. The
church aloae, a state within the state, a principle calling
itself immutable even in temporalities, in the midst of an im
provable civilization, had shut itself up in the inflexibility of
bodies without hereditary right, without family, and consequenly
without responsibility in the nation. It had conceded none of
its temporal privileges but those which had been wrested from
it. Civil war had broken out at its voice in the provinces, over
which it maintained the greatest ascendancy. It had excom
municated modern reason, liberty, and equality. It had agitated

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 21 1
Retrospect of France under the Revolution.
those consciences rashly attacked by the constituent assembly
in the civil constitution of the clergy, a constitution which should
only touch the temporal establishment, and not the free hier
archy of the priesthood. It had fanaticised the peasantry, and
the peasantry had led away their nobles, in spite of themselves,
in those extremities of the kingdom. III.
The remainder of the nation, little enlightened, had made
the King, the clergy, and the nobility, responsible for those
seditions of the past against the present. The anger and the
suspicions of the people had risen to their culminating point;
persecution had urged to emigration, emigration to fury, to the
spoliation of families, and to the national war against Europe.
The throne had crumbled amidst the tumult, pulled down like
a counter-revolutionary flag raised in the midst of the revolu
tion. Ungovernable demagogues had thrown to the people the
heads of the King, of the queen, of her family, of the nobility,
and of the citizens, to feed their popularity with blood ; and
they had in turn perished themselves by the hands of their
rivals. France inundated with the blood of her citizens
during eighteen months, had been the dread of the world and
of itself. Ideas were confounded with each other ; the conflict
of events, of foreign wars, of civil wars, of men, and of affairs
in general, had so intermingled all flags, that no one could any
longer recognise either his friends or his enemies. The revo
lution was drowned in the anarchy.
The country, however, was beginning to know itself, to
purify itself, to constitute itself into a tolerant democracy under
the republican government of the directory, when Bonaparte,
personifying at once in himself the usurpation of the army over
the laws and the counter-revolution, violently interrupted on
the 18th Brumaire, the silent work of the new civilization,
which was elaborating and culling out the elements of the new
order of things. To divert the nation's thoughts from its re
volution he launched it and led it on to the conquest of Europe.
He exhausted it of its blood and population, to prevent it from

212 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 32.
Public opinion after the discomfiture of Napoleon.
thinking and agitating under him. He had made it apostacize
by his publicists, by his silent system, and by his police, from
all the principles of its regeneration of 1789. While he was
hurling Kings from their thrones, he declared himself the
avenger and restorer of priesthoods and royalties.
IV.
France had begun to breathe after his first fall in 1814.
The charter had resumed the work of Louis XVI., and pro
mulgated the principles of the constituent assembly. The re
volution had gone back to its first glorious days. It had no
longer to apprehend either the intoxication of illusions, or the
resistance of the church, of the court, of the nobility, or the
crimes of the demagogues.
The second return of Bonaparte, thanks to the complicity
of the army, had a second time interrupted this era of renova
tion, of peace, and of hope. This violence to the nation and to
Europe had been punished by a second invasion, which humbled,
ruined, and decimated France ; and even threatened to parti
tion it into fragments. Bonaparte in quitting his army after his
defeat at Waterloo, and in abdicating, had carried away 'with
him the responsibility of this disaster ; but he had left behind
him the resentment of the nation against the army, against his
party, his accomplices, and against his name. This great
calamity must necessarily fall upon something ; and it fell
accordingly, like an imprecation, almost unanimous, on Bona-
partism. Koyalists — liberals — landed proprietors — merchants
— farmers — artisans — remnants of the assemblies of '89 —
remains of the nobility and clergy— royalists of La Vendee, of
the south, and of the north— constitutionalists or republicans
of the east and the centre of France — the citizens of towns,
whose 20,000 families had each a son, a nephew, or a brother
in the military household of the King — sea-ports, whose vessels,
shipping, and products had been imprisoned for twenty years
by the continental war — rural families, who each deplored the
loss of one, two, and sometimes three children sacrificed ; in
Spain or in Kussia, to the ambition of a conqueror — towns and

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 213
Causes of the spirit of the elections of 1815,
villages occupied by the Eussians, the Prussians, or the
English, ruined by requisitions , and imposts— everybody in
short had a grievance, a resentment, a mourning, or a ruin to
avenge upon this name of one man. The paroxysm of anger
compressed by the presence of the army, by dread of the im
perial police, and by the hope of a repetition of that glory with
which he had for a moment fascinated France before Waterloo,
burst forth from every heart, except those of his soldiers,
immediately after his fall,
Public opinion threw itself, without reflection, without
foresight, and without discretion into the opposite party in
the elections. Neither the caution recommended by M. de
Talleyrand to the King's commissioners appointed to preside
over and direct the electoral colleges, nor the partiality of
Fouche's agents, in favouring, as much as possible, the re
publican candidates, to intimidate the court and the King,
and to preserve an equilibrium, were availing. Public opinion
in France, when irritated, listens neither to middle courses,
nor to intrigues, nor to prudence; it goes direct from one
side to the other, like the ocean in its ebb and flow. This
is the whole explanation of the elections of 1815, which
sent up to the crown a Chamber more counter-revolutionary
than all Europe, and more royalist than the King.
It astonished this prince himself by the unanimity and
excess of its anger against the revolution, by its animosity
against the Empire, and by its enthusiasm for the Bourbons.
He felt that he would have more difficulty in restraining than
in exciting such a passion for his family. He even feared that
this enthusiasm would consider him too lukewarm in his own
cause, and that it would reproach him for the humiliating con
cession he had made in placing M. de Talleyrand, but above all
a regicide, in his council, and that it might make the Count
d'Artois, his brother, the ruler and perhaps the master of
his reign. He resolved, therefore, to forestal those exactions
which the names comprised in such a representation led him
to anticipate, and to dismiss his minister himself, before the
opening of the Chambers.

214 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 32.
The King decides on dismissing Fouche.

He experienced, however, a secret embarrassment in dis
missing M. de Talleyrand, who had held out such a protecting
hand to him in 1814, and whose ascendancy over the peerage,
and understanding with the foreign courts, appeared to him
to call for some caution and prudence. It was with secret
joy, though mixed with some bitterness for himself, that he
saw him become unpopular in Paris by his carelessness, and
his failing in the negociation of the conditions of peace, by
the inflexibility of Austria and Prussia. He felt a pleasure
in being able to attribute to the inability of this great diplo
matist the humiliating ultimatum of the allied powers, which
M. de Talleyrand was pliant enough to accept, and which
he, the King, was partriot enough to reject. He wished first
to avail himself further of the hand of M. de Talleyrand, to
dismiss Fouche from his councils. The league of the simul
taneous discontents of these two statesmen seemed to him
dangerous to his safety. It was necessary therefore to divide
before he got rid of them. He thought he should still have
occasion for M. de Talleyrand for a short time ; but he could
at once dispence with Fouche. The zeal and activity of his
new favourite, M. Decazes, who daily advanced farther in his
confidence, reassured him against the conspiracies of the
Bonapartists. M. Decazes profiting by the indolence of
Fouche — who was inexpert in detail — and by his private
audiences with the King, had possessed himself insensibly
of all the springs of the police. He left to Fouche only the
name of minister, and the high intrigues in which he took
a pleasure in playing the part of a man essential to all parties.
Already the King said, in speaking of his young confidant,
" I shall raise him so high that he will excite the envy of the
greatest houses of France ! " Pride and friendship mingle
together in the hearts of Kings

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 215
Fouche's manoeuvres with the King.

VI

The King, at a glance, saw through these transparent in
trigues of Fouche, who had continued since his majesty's
return the double part he had played during the hundred
days. He alarmed the King and the Council of Ministers
with imaginary plots and exaggerated perils. He spread
about, himself under the form of official notices, sinister
rumours, in order to propagate agitation by the very means
he pretended he was taking to allay it.
He wrote several reports to the King, similar to those
which he had drawn up for the Emperor after the 20th
March ; these he secretly delivered to his agents, and had
them circulated underhand amongst the people, as documents
purloined from the indiscreet confidence of his cabinet.
" Sire," said the cunning minister, " the energetic men
who have overturned Bonaparte have only sought to put a
period to tyranny. An opposition of the same nature agitates
and divides all classes. It has its focus in the most ardent
passions, and in the dread of seeing the old opinions triumph
We must not look at Paris, for there factitious opinions
assume the aspect of the real."
He wished thus to efface from the mind of the King
the evidences of adoration and of joy, scenes of which were
incessantly before his eyes, in the gardens of the Tuileries
and on the boulevards, an intoxication of loyalty throughout.
" The towns," he added, " are opposed to the country,
even in the west, where you are flattered with the hope
of finding soldiers. The purchasers of national domains will
there resist whoever may attempt to dispossess them. The
loyalty of the south finds vent in illegal proceedings. Armed
bands scour the country, and penetrate into the towns.
Pillage and assassination daily multiply. In the east the
horror of the invasion, and the faults of preceding ministers,
have alienated the population. In the majority of the de
partments a few handfuls of royalists would only be found

.16 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 32.

Fouche's reports to the King,

to oppose the mass of the people. Kepose will be difficult
to the army ; unlimited ambition has made it adventurous.
•' There are two great factions in the state ; the one
defends principles, the other marches to a counter-revolution.
On one side the clergy, the nobility, the old possessors of
national domains now sold, the members of the old parlia
ments, obstinate men who cannot believe that their antiquated
ideas are at fault, and who cannot pardon a revolution they have
cursed, and others, who being weary of agitation look for
repose in the old regime, with some impassioned writers,
flatterers of triumphant opinions. On the opposite side,
nearly the whole of France, the constitutionalists, the re
publicans, the army, the people, every class of the discon
tented, a multitude of Frenchmen even attached to the King,
but who are convinced that an attempt at, or even a tendency
towards the old regime, would be the signal for an explosion
similar to that of 1789." VII
Manuel, that orator of the last assembly, who was now
more closely than ever allied to Fouche, and seeking to attach
himself to the minister, drew up these reports with him, in
which some truths were mingled with intentional exagge
rations, Manuel and Fouche, while writing these threatening
statistics to the King, forgot, or pretended to forget, those
innumerable masses, who fluctuate between matured opinions,
and who rush to the side where they behold fortune, peace, and
security. They were all at this moment for the King; this
was sufficiently attested by the elections. But Fouche wished
to alarm, that he might afterwards reassure, in answering for
all by his personal ability.
The King and his council began to be offended with these
sinister pictures, and above all with the culpable publicity
given to them by the minister of police. This publicity was
too like treachery to be tolerated without umbrage by the King.
" Does the minister of police then," said M. de Talleyrand at
length one day, before his colleague, and in the presence of

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 217

His unpopularity at court.

the King, "pretend to rule us by his popularity?" Fouche
excused himself by some pretended involuntary revelations of
his manuscripts to the public ; but they were accustomed to
disbelieve his assertions, and the irritation against him in
creased. The Duke and Duchess of Angouleme, on returning
from the southern provinces, whither they had gone to enjoy
the royalist enthusiasm, and who returned to the Tuileries with
the conviction of an impassioned popularity for their cause,
declared again to the King that they never would meet in his
palace the judge of Louis XVI. Every time that Fouche
appeared in the apartments of the palace, they became deserted
immediately. The moderate men did not dissemble their
repugnance, nor the royalists their antipathy. He alone,
blinded by the prodigious success of his boldness and his
stratagems during the late events, and sure of the support of
the Duke of Wellington, thought himself still certain of ruling
all. He thought he could intimidate the assembly by the King,
the King by the revolutionists and Bonapartists, the allied powers
by the irritated patriotism of the country, and the country by
the allied power^. He was confident as success could make him.
He himself forgot his past life, believing that he could thus
make others forget it. The man of the convention, and the man
ofthe court of Louis XVIII., were, in his opinion, two indivi
duals who had no longer anything in common, not even the name.
His title of Duke of Otranto, covered the memory of the old
Fouche. He repudiated the revolution as an importunate
souvenir of his youth. " When we are young," he said care
lessly to his confidants, " we are pleased with revolutions ; they
move and agitate us ; they are a spectacle which we like to
witness, and to mingle in ; but at my age they have fewer
charms, and then we like repose, order, stability, and to enjoy
ourselves." Power seemed to him one of those enjoyments
necessary to his mature age, as agitation had been necessary to
his youth VIII.
Nothing was wanting to the external dignity of his life but
a family to inherit his immense fortune and titles, and an

218 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION r__00K 32.
Fouche's worldly position and marriage.
alliance with one of the families of the high French aristocracy,
to legitimate his new nobility by the ancient nobility of the
court and of Paris. He was still thought to be so powerful, so
inviolable from disgrace ; his riches, his influence on the late
events, his decisive intervention in the fall of Bonaparte, and
in the re-establishment of the Bourbons, exercised such a spell
upon that nobility accustomed to grant everything to the favour
of courts, that he was almost certain, in spite of his name and
his blemishes, to engraft himself upon the stock of some
illustrious family by a union. That heart agitated, but not
filled by ambition and the satiety of fortune, had not been
insensible to the seductions of youth and beauty. He had
known at Aix, during his mission to the south at the termination
of the empire, Mademoiselle de Castellane, the young daughter
of a distinguished house of Provence, endowed with charms
calculated to captivate the heart and the eyes. He had pre
served for her a tender recollection and a serious admiration.
This young lady herself, in spite of the disproportion of name,
age, and manner of life, had been touched by the respectful
homage of a powerful, clever, and celebrated man, whose titles,
advancement, and services rendered to the royal cause had
blotted out the past. Fouche demanded her in marriage, and
obtained her from her family. He was then so high in public
favour, and in the apparent confidence of the King, that the
aristocracy of Paris dared hardly murmur against the com
plaisance of a great race which consented to mingle its name
with that of the old proconsul of the reign of terror. He gave
immense splendour to his marriage fete, as if to bid defiance
to all murmurs. He thought he had opened to himself for
ever the doors of that nobility of which he only possessed the
title and riches. This was the zenith of his happiness It
was not long before he was precipitated from it.
IX
A few days after the elections, the significance of which
though still obscure, struck the ministry however with inquie
tude ; M. de Talleyrand, who wished to merit the favour of

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE 219

M. de Talleyrand broaches the dismissal of Fouche in the council.

the court by delivering it from a humiliation, insinuated indi
rectly to Fouche, at the council of ministers, the propriety or
the necessity of a retirement. He spoke carelessly of America,
where he had himself passed the sweetest years of his exile
during the reign of terror. He boasted the freedom and safety
of a residence which by separating a man from a stormy con
tinent, such as that of Europe, separated him from his enemies
and his dangers. He said that no existence upon earth had
ever appeared to him superior to that of an Ambassador, the
representative of France, in a country which owed everything
to France. Then turning affectedly towards Fouche, as if he
had wished to draw from the mouth of his colleague an acqui
escence in such a degree of happiness, which he might have
taken for a wish to enjoy it; "this existence," he added, " I
can offer at this moment, the post of King's minister to the
United States being vacant. Would you not be tempted by
the dignity and the security of this asylum ?" Fouche who
who had been prevented by astonishment from understanding
him at first, at length comprehended the matter fully, became
confused, and demanded, without however, receiving any answer,
if his services were disagreeable to the King, and if his Majesty
wished to get rid of him ?"
After this the court might explain itself farther, and
dismiss him without danger. The elections threatened him
from hatred to his name, the royalists blushed for having made
use of him for a day. The King felt humbled, the court was
ungrateful, the ministers were jealous, M. de Talleyrand happy
at casting an old rival upon the waves, the republicans in
different, the Bonapartists implacable. The soil itself seemed
at last to crumble under bim. The man who had proscribed
to please others, was proscribed himself a few days after, by
those to whom he had sacrificed his accomplices. He was
about to meet them as a hving remorse upon a foreign soil.
X.
This proscription was however adorned with the appearance
of a foreign mission. Fouche who had refused the embassy to

220 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 32

Fouche's dismissal arid exile to Austria.

the United States, not to place too great a distance between his
exile and a return to greatness, which he did not cease to hope
for, accepted the title of minister at the little court of Saxony.
The King thus gave a colouring to his ingratitude, Fouche to
his impotence. His fortune opened the whole world to him,
and he could retire independent anywhere. But this exile
required the shadow of a court, of importance, and of public
affairs. He was so completely abandoned and so threatened
in France, the day after he had ceased to be all-powerful there,
that he made his preparations for departure in silence, and
travelled through France under a false name, and in disguise,
to evade the insults of some, the vengeance of others, the
disdain of all.
A few months after his arrival at Dresden he was recalled,
and interdicted from returning to France. He was exiled to
Austria, and lived at Lintz, consoled by the tenderness and
virtues of his young wife. He frequently solicited from M.
Decazes, and from Prince Metternich an exile somewhat nearer
to France, or a residence in a capital, such as Vienna. We
have before us his correspondence during these years of dis
tant solitude ; they sometimes breathe resignation, and some
times indignation against fate and the insults of his enemies.
" We are in a rich and beautiful country, and in a hand
some town," said he, "but without resources of society and
information. Throughout the Austrian dominions Vienna alone
possesses any intelligence, but that is the residence of the son
of Napoleon. Would it be inconvenient to place me in
Bavaria, in Belgium, or in England ? It is very certain that
I should give no assistance to the parties which divide you.
In approaching France I should sometimes have the advantage
of seeing my friends. I have signed the ordinance of proscrip
tion ; it was— and it was considered at that time to be— the only
means of saving the party which accuses me now. It removed
it from the fury of the royalists, and sheltered it in exile. I
do not wish that parties should be crushed in France ; but I
form ardent wishes that they may be restrained. Let the
revolutionalists be reduced to a reasonable opposition ; let not
the King be separated from the nation, by making it look upon

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 221
Fouche's death, and review of his character.
him as an adversary. You are too much on your guard
against the ultra royalists, but not enough against the other
party. Read the history of Poland again ; you are threatened
with the same fate, if you do not master your passions. I am
reading a history of the campaign of 1815, by General Gour
gaud. I am not astonished at the language his master makes
use of with reference to me : it is convenient for Napoleon to
excuse all his follies by maintaining that he has been betrayed.
No, there were no traitors but his flatterers."
Fouche died during his exile, insulted, or forgotten by all
parties, incapable of repose, exhausted by idleness and in
activity, not satiated with enacting a part, seeking to repel the
echo, sometimes true, sometimes calumnious, of his life, which
pursued him in his retreat : a man of storms, who, like the
bird of the sea, could not live on a peaceful shore.
XI.
He left behind him an ambiguous memory, but great as
the varied part he had played in the events of his country
Possessing the genius more of au embroiler than an evil-doer,
but still the genius of intrigue, pursuing his course through
such varied revolutions ; a terrorist in attitude and language,
more than in heart and hand, under the convention ; suspected
by Robespierre, threatened some days before the triumph of
moderation, one of the first to disown the revolution when it
was declining, and offering himself to Bonaparte as a neces
sary negotiator between him and Jacobinism ; availing himself
of his power under the empire to make friends by indulgence
both of royalists and republicans, seeking to moderate the
despotism of Napoleon, to prolong it for his own profit, aban
doning him when he declined to obtain pardon from the Bour
bons, dismissing them with one hand, and bringing them back
with the other, after the return from the Isle of Elba, with a
boldness and a duplicity which perhaps were never equalled ;
not betraying Napoleon, but allowing him to be betrayed by
his genius and by events ; preparing himself to dismiss him
from the scene and to prevent him from a third time setting

222 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 32.
Causes ofthe King's dislike to M. de Talleyrand.
France in a flame, ruling at that moment by his intervention
one of the boldest and most complicated transitions in history ;
saving his country from great calamities, Europe from rivers
of blood, and perhaps France from dismemberment ; triumph
ing for two days, and forcing the court of the Bourbons to
implore the assisting hand of a regicide ; a dupe subsequently
to his own cleverness, and engulfed in his triumph by the rage
of the royalists whom he had served. Such was Fouche. If
something sinister had not attached itself to his name, with
the votes of the blood of the convention, his would be one cf
the great parts, by turns serious and comic, which the states
man would study with the greatest satisfaction, if he had for
his object success and not principles. A consummate actor
under the two aspects of the man of boldness and the man of
stratagem ; he wanted nothing in ability, little in good sense,
everything in virtue. This is his definition, but it is also his
sentence. He will be always looked upon, sometimes admired,
never esteemed. XII
We will now return to the day after his fall The King
was only half delivered by Fouche's disgrace. M. de Talley
rand, and the rest of the ministry, still remained, and persisted
in facing the Chamber, thinking it would be appeased by the
sacrifice of the minister of police. But M de Talleyrand
weighed perhaps more heavily upon the King than Fouche
himself. The King in Fouche only hated the revolutionist,
but in M. de Talleyrand he hated the patron. The pride of
the man of high birth, and the superiority of the man of under
standing, consummate in public affairs, were apparent in the
tone and attitude of M. de Talleyrand before the King.
Though pliant with the powerful, this minister had too lively a
recollection of his name, of his dignities of the Empire, of his
favour with the allied sovereigns, and of his reputation as a
statesman, in the King's presence. He looked upon this
prince as a foreign guest of the nation, new to affairs of the state,
passive in his own Council, whom he had led by the hand into
the palace, to whom he was doing the honours of France, and

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 223
The King resclves on changing his ministry.
who could not without him make himself acquainted with the
manners, the affairs and the men of the new age.
Louis XVIII. had submitted for some time to this politi
cal subordination in affairs, from the necessity which had im
posed M. de Talleyrand upon him ; but his dignity and under
standing felt itself wounded. He had confided to M. Decazes
the discontent he felt with his ministry, the wish he had to
substitute another, and the preliminary and confidential nego
ciations, the necessary preludes to this change of administra
tion. His conferences with M. Laine, and with other members
of the Chamber who had arrived in Paris, the slow and unsuc
cessful nature of the negociations with the allied powers for a
general peace, the murmurs of the court of the Count d'Artois
against this ministry, which it called at once idle, proud, and
unfortunate, had secretly decided the King. But an oppor
tunity and a pretext were wanting to break with becoming
decency the connection with the ministry of M. de Talleyrand,
which had been formed from necessity. M. de Talleyrand
intoxicated by two years of importance, and thinking himself
inviolable, had the imprudence to offer to the King himself the
hour and the manner of his own disgrace.

XIII.
The royalist journals, and the saloons of the aristocracy, in
cited by the impassioned movement of public opinion which had
been evinced in the elections, were incessantly threatening the
minister with the anger of the chambers for the cowardly, or
culpable lenity he was showing to the revolution and the revo
lutionists. These rumours, the prelude of sharp struggles with
the chambers, alarmed M. de Talleyrand. He did not feel
himself strong enough to quell an assembly by his eloquence ;
he wished therefore, to intimidate it by the authority ofthe King.
It was necessary for this purpose to compromise the King in
the cause of the ministers, and to establish between them and
him an apparent joint responsibility, capable of imposing upon
the royalists.
M. de Talleyrand imparted this plan to his colleagues, and

224 HISTORY OF THE EESTORATION [BOOK 32.
M, de Talleyrand's proposal lo the King.

easily drew these weak and frivolous men into this giddy act of
audacity. He called upon the King in full council, to give the
lie to the rumours which were afloat of his estrangement from
his ministry, by granting to himself and his colleagues some
striking proof to the contrary, which would discourage the
budding opposition in the chambers, and impose silence upon
the cabal of the Count d'Artois in the palace. He even went
so far, it is said, as to hint to the King the retirement of the
Count d'Artois from Paris, as a government necessity, which
would remove a centre and a support from the opposers of his
policy. He added that if the King did not exhibit for his
ministry, the firmest and most personal adhesion, the ministers,
weakened in public opinion, would not consider themselves in a
position to meet the chambers, and that they would consequently
be obliged to retire. XIV
In speaking thus boldly, M. de Talleyrand did not doubt
that the King, constrained by the necessity of continuing his
confidence to the man who was at that moment treating for his
kingdom with the allied powers, and for his popularity with the
revolutionary party, would yield to his demand, and give
renewed vigour to royal authority in his hands But like
Fouche, M. de Talleyrand could no longer read the hearts of
Kings, or of nations ; he still assumed the position of an essen
tial man, though he had no longer any foundation either in
events, or in public opinion. The King whom he had ruled,
now ruled him in turn, with all the loftiness of the throne above
the revolution.
The King felt his strength, and he looked upon the cir
cumstance as a relief to his embarrassment in dismissing his
ministers. After having listened with an appearance of im
passibility while ruminating on the language, so respectfully
insolent, of M. de Talleyrand :
" It is their resignation, then," he said, with the accent of
an offended man, "that my ministers have given me ! Very
well ! I shall nominate others." Then with a motion of the

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 225
His dismissal and review of his career.
head, without waiting for replies, penitence, or explanation, he
dismissed them. " You may remain in France," said the King
to M. de Talleyrand, as if desirous of reminding his minister
of the exile imposed upon Fouche, and of the banishments far
from the court to which the ancient monarchy condemned its
too powerful ministers. " I hope," replied M. de Talleyrand,
with a degree of hardy bitterness, which he would not have
ventured, under similar circumstances, before Napoleon when
irritated, " I hope I have occasion for nothing more than the
justice of the King, to live without apprehension in my country."
He then retired.
" The King has made fools of us," he said to his colleagues
on going out of the royal cabinet, astonished at his baffled
stratagem. He had seen, in the eagerness of his majesty to
take him at his word, a foregone conclusion, and he had re
cognised in his words, the accent of the master and not of the
protege. Subduing his anger, however, to his interest, and
wishing to keep open for the future the doors of a palace, the in
constancies of which he well knew, he solicited, at first as a repa
ration, and afterwards as a favour, the place of grand chamber
lain, with a salary of 100,000 francs; a favour which was
granted more to the circumstances than to the man; for though
the court still tolerated, it no longer feared him.
XV.
The ministry of M. de Talleyrand, of 1815 had been
passive, powerless, and unfortunate. This statesman, whose
principal talent was to let everything be done by the natural
course of human affairs, taking to himself the merit when this
occult power had served him well, had been badly served on
this occasion by circumstances, and he had been unable either to
correct or to combat them. A nullity at home, and played with
by Russia and Prussia abroad, not able to treat on acceptable
conditions with the allied powers, to direct the elections which
had passed like a returning tide over his head, to rule the
court, to face the deputies, or to shield from the indignation
of the country, the remains of the revolutionary party com
3 o

226 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 39.
The King offers the Duke of Richelieu the presidency of the Council.
promised in the hundred days, he disappeared without leaving
a trace, unregretted by all parties. He had only obtained one
success, and that was a scandal. In persuading the King to
take Fouche into his council, he had dishonoured the monarchy
which he pretended to serve. From this day his political life
declined, in spite of all the manoeuvres which he did not cease
to employ, to regain a popularity which he had .himself justly
diminished by his incapacity in these great conjunctures. Nor
did he regain it in 1830, and he only raised his name then by
unworthily disavowing the principle of the hereditary right of
thrones, which in 1814 he had made the dogma of the monar
chists ; and by becoming the accomplice of the overthrow of
that principle with the house of Orleans, the last refuge of all
his projects of ambition. XVI.
The King, who had conversed with M. Decazes about the
Duke of Richelieu, directed his favourite to see him, and to offer
him the presidency of the council of ministers. Independent
of the general and merited esteem which directed the King's
thoughts towards this nobleman, and the prestige of his name
itself, which seemed to connect his cabinet with the memory of
one of those statesmen to whom the Bourbon family owed the
terror and boundless power of the monarchy, the King had a
very just and a very able instinct in placing his government
under the auspices of so great a name. The Emperor of
Russia had been alieneated from M. de Talleyrand at the Con
gress of Vienna, the year before, by the ill-concealed manoeuvres
of that diplomatist, who had concluded a secret alliance with
Austria, to the exclusion and against the interests of Russia.
In thus acting, M. de Talleyrand had followed the mean and
cowardly policy of Cardinal Bernis, under Louis XV. In
forming this alliance, France only restrained herself. By the
secret resentment which the Emperor of Russia had conceived
at this duplicity and ingratitude of the cabinet of the Tuileries,
which owed everything, even the throne, to him, he was less
disposed to have towards a ministry directed by M. de Talley-

lrifl.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 227
Character of the Duke of Richelieu.
rand than towards any other, that complaisance and generosity
which the King had solicited from him to soften the conditions
of the conquerors. The exactions against France might be the
personal vengeance of that sovereign against M. de Talleyrand ;
but a minister who should guarantee to Russia the fidelity and
friendship ofthe government of the Bourbons, would, perhaps,
obtain from the Emperor Alexander, the arbiter of Europe, an
alleviation of the rigours of fate. M. de Richelieu seemed to
be destined by his life for this appeal to the heart of Alexander
He was one of those men predestined by birth, by name, by
nature, and even by the chances of their existence, to throw
themselves as mediators between conflicting events, and to save
their country when everything seems to conspire for its
destruction. XVII
Armand, Duke of Richelieu, grand-nephew, by the female
line, of the cardinal, was the grandson of Marshal Richelieu,
the French Alcibiades. We must omit from this illustrious
genealogy the Duke de Fronsac, his father, the eclipse of one
generation in a great race. The genius of government, the
genius of war, and the genius of the court seem thus to have
been concentrated in this name.
The Duke of Richelieu was at this time forty-nine years of
age. ^ When young and impatient for glory, like Lafayette,
before 1 789, he had gone to seek in the struggle between the
Turks and Russians at that period opportunities and lessons in
war under the enterprising General Suwarrow. He had been
remarked by that hero at the famous assault of Ismail, the
Saragossa of Turkey. He had hastened from the frontiers of
the Ottoman empire to the army of Conde, to offer his arm
and his blood in defence of the Bourbons and of the throne,
those two-fold duties of his race. After the dissolution of this
brave army, which was repudiated at once by France and by
the foreign powers, he had followed his cause in England,
where it still had hopes and defenders. He had there com
manded, up to 1 791, one of those emigrant corps which England
held in pay as auxiliaries in civil war, when the continent should

228 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [HOOK 32
Career of the Duke of Richelieu.

be open to the inactive princes of the house of Bourbon. This
inglorious idleness weighed upon the active and noble soul of
the Duke of Richelieu. Civil war was repugnant to his patri
otism : he had therefore returned to Russia to offer his services
to the emperor Paul I. Well received at first, and subse
quently disgraced by one of the caprices of this prince, who
had a generous heart but a suspicious mind, he had been
recalled by the emperor Alexander, immediately on his ac
cession to the throne. Conformity of age and character had
connected the young emperor and the illustrious refugee in a
friendship more intimate and more solid than the ordinary
favour of courts. But Russia being at peace, a wish to see his
country again, and the solicitations of Napoleon, who was
seeking out illustrious names, to surround himself with every
fascination, had recalled the Duke of Richelieu for a moment
to Paris. Though respectful towards the First Consul, he did
not condescend to disavow, in order to attach himself to hi?
fortune, the traditions of his house, and the attachments of his
youth. An explosion of these sentiments in his language
having occasioned his exile, his remembrances recalled him to
Russia, where the friendship of the Czar awaited him. Alex
ander, who was then employed in peopling, civilizing, building
upon, and arming that fine portion of his vast empire which is
bathed by the Black Sea, had made him governor general 01
the whole of New Russia. He had created, constructed, and
aggrandized Odessa, the territorial and maritime capital of the
Crimea. He had planned, in ten years of wise and prosperous
administration, an empire between the Dneister and the
Caucasus. He had nothing to do but to scatter benefits
around, and to second the spontaneous growth of people, com
merce, and navigation. He had understood nature, and nature
assisted him. His name, like that of an ancient founder of a
colony, a disseminator of races, magnified by distance, and
favoured by circumstances, was consecrated in the East, and
renowned in the West. The continental war had brouo-ht him
back into the camp, into the councils, and into the intimacy of
Alexander. We have seen him in 1814, and during the hundred days,

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 229
His personal appearance.
following or representing his sovereign and his friend in Paris,
at Vienna, and at Ghent. The subject at once of two princes,
Louis XVIII. and Alexander, he was the link that sought to
connect them together, for the advantage of both. His cha
racter and reputation inspired the King and the French princes
with a serious respect for him. The armies and foreign diplo
matists considered him as one of those men without reproach, who
shine less by their splendour than their purity. The French
nobility cited him with pride, the army and the people with
esteem. A stranger, from his long absence from France, to all
the enmity, all the faults, and all the ambition of parties, he
.presented to all that aspect of neutrality in passions, and im
partiality in thoughts, which is the happy condition of men
who have been long absent from their native country, and who
return to it as arbitrators, beyond the reproaches and weariness
engendered by revolutionary times.
This moral character of the Duke of Richelieu was still
further enhanced by all that external grace and nobility which
combine the lofty virtues with the highest popularity in a man
of conspicuous station. His countenance bespoke his name.
His forehead was high, his eyes limpid, his nose aquiline, his
lips disclosed. The Grecian oval of his features recalled the
beauty of his grandfather in his youth ; but his expression had
neither the same volatility, boldness, or vanity. It was per
ceptible that a sad and serious revolution had passed over the
natural splendour of the race, and impressed upon it reflection,
maturity, and the virtues of long adversity. The prevailing
character of his countenance, as of his soul, was modesty. He
was a man whom it was always necessary to convince of his
own sufficiency, and who could not be induced to accept an
honour except by proving to him that it was also a duty.
He was adored by his family. Two sisters whom he had
left in France, and who resided in Paris, lived only in his
memory and his affection. These were the Countess of
Jumilhac, and the Marchioness of Montcalm. The latter,
connected by feeling and intellect with the literary, aristocratic,
and political elite of Paris, had a saloon open to all the talent
and celebrities of the day. A graceful and eminent woman,

230 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 32.
The Duke of Richelieu accepts the presidency of the Council.
whose mind and countenance recalled her brother, who could
only be won by virtues, and who herself only captivated by
dignity of mind and nobleness of heart. Her house formed
the circle of the Duke of Richelieu's friends ; and it comprised
the court, the parliament, the army, the city, and the diplo
macy of Europe. There was no intriguing there ; but all
nourished, in friendly intercourse, the loftiest thoughts for the
reconciliation of parties, and the independence and dignity of
France. M. Lame was its modest and patriotic oracle. A
conformity of nature and love of good, had instinctively at
tracted together these two men, who only knew each other
by name : M. Laine represented the virtue of citizenship,
M. de Richelieu the patriotism of the nobility. Their union
combined them both XVIII.
Great efforts were necessary to vanquish the modesty of the
Duke of Richelieu, and to induce him to accept, under such
desperate circumstances, a government which had eluded the
most consummate hands. M. Decazes, M. Laine, the King,
the Emperor Alexander himself had much difficulty in triumph
ing over his timidity. Patriotism alone subdued him. It was
demonstrated to him that he alone could prevent the dismem
berment of France, by obtaining from the friendship of the
Emperor Alexander that which no one but himself could hope
to accomplish after the failure of M. de Talleyrand. The tears
and supplications of his sisters at length softened his resistance.
He consented to quit the high and tranquil favour of a sove
reign, his friend, to throw himself into the difficulties, the disas
ters, the intrigues, and the storms of opinion of those internal
and external parties who were contending for his country.
The ministry was thus composed: — the Duke of Richelieu,
minister of foreign affairs, and president of the council ;
M. Corvetto, an able Genoese financier, as bold as Law, but
more prudent, was the finance minister ; M. de Vaublanc, new
to public affairs, though an old member of the revolutionary
assemblies, was minister of the interior — this was the pledge

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 231
Constitution of the ministry.
given in the administration to the Count d'Artois, whose confi
dence he had won at Ghent; Clarke, Duke de Feltres, minister
of war; Barbe-Marbois, a man of mixed politics, whose years
corresponded with the events of both centuries, minister of
justice ; M. Dubouchage, an old naval officer, a gentleman of
ancient race from Dauphiny, minister of marine. The King
had reserved for his negociator and personal confidant M. De
cazes, the ministry which appeared to him at such a moment
to constitute the entire government, the ministry of police, the
study and the government of public opinion.
XIX
The ministry was scarcely constituted when the Duke of
Richelieu, acting upon the Emperor Alexander, not any longer
by diplomatic notes, but by his heart and his generosity,
obtained from that sovereign the decisive intervention which
he solicited to reduce to silence the obstinate exactions of
secondary and hostile powers. England, which had been well
disposed by the Duke of Wellington, whose good sense saw no
repose but in the Bourbons, and no monarchy of the Bourbons
possible but with the integrity and independence of their king
dom, seconded the Emperor Alexander in the conferences.
The conditions of the treaty, unfortunately agreed to beyond
the necessity of the case, by the pliancy of M. de Talleyrand,
and the impatience of the court for the throne at any price,
were, however, modified within limits which a statesman might,
without being satisfied, submit to. M. de Richelieu, in des
pair at not being able to obtain more advantageous conditions,
still considered them too unfavourable, and obstinately refused
to sign them. The King who saw the Chambers, then about
to open, disposed to call him to account for his sterile interven
tion for the pacification of the country, and who saw on the
other side Austria, Prussia, Holland, and the powers of the
Rhine, crushing his people under the devastations of 800,000
men, sent for the Duke of Richelieu, one night, by M. Decazes,
and bedewing the hand of his prime-minister with tears, im
plored him for tho sacrifice which is dearest to a man of honour

232 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 32.

Negociations with the Allied Powers.

that of his name. The Duke of Richelieu went away, moved
and vanquished by this conference with his unhappy master,
and signed the treaty. We find in a few lines written by him
a moment after to his sister, Madame de Montcalm, to be
communicated to M. Laine and his friends, the cry of sorrow
that bursts from the heart of an honest man when forced to
humble his country through a spirit of patriotism.
" All is finished ! I have put my name, more dead than
alive, to this fatal treaty. 1 had sworn not to do it, I said so
to the King; but this unhappy prince with tears conjured me
not to abandon him. I could, therefore, no longer hesitate.
I have a conviction, however, that nobody could have obtained
so much. Expiring under the presence of calamities which
overwhelm her, France imperatively demanded a prompt
deliverance ! "
The opinion of the Duke of Richelieu was correct. The
King was wasting with grief and shame ; France was calling at
any price for a relief from the invasion which war had brought
upon its territory ; and if not a cessation, at least some regu
larity in the mode of retaliation. Europe would not have
granted to any one but the Duke of Richelieu what it had
refused to Louis XVIII. ; he was at this moment the inter-
ceder for his country. We have seen the map whereon the
borders of France were cut up, to assign their fragments to the
respective powers who partitioned them amongst each other.
" Preserve this map, which I re-establish for you alone,"
said the emperor of Russia to his friend : "it will be in future
times the proof of your services and of my friendship for
France, and the finest title of nobility for your house." His
descendants, in fact, still preserve it.

XX.

This treaty left France in possession of its frontiers of
1790, with the exception of some unimportant portions of ter
ritory enclosed within other states, and of Savoy, a conquest of
the revolution which had been respected by the treaty of 1814.
It imposed an imdemnity to Europe of 700,000,000 of francs

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 233
Their exactions.
for the last war commenced by Napoleon, an armed occupation
for five years of 150,000 men, the generalissimo of which was
to be nominated by the allied powers, and the fortesses to be
delivered up to this garrison of security. This occupation
might terminate in three years, if Europe considered France
sufficiently pacified to offer it moral guarantees of tranquillity.
The prisoners of war were to be given up, and the liquidation of
the 700,000,000 indemnity, was to be effected day by day.
Besides this war indemnity, France recognised the principle of the
indemnities to be assigned afterits liquidation to each power for the
ravages, the requisitions, or the confiscations that each of these
states had sustained, during the last wars, by the occupation of
the French armies. France was further burthened with the
pay and subsistence of the 150,000 men of the army of occu
pation, left by the allied powers upon its territory. The
national penalty incurred by France for Napoleon's return
from Elba was, in money, about 1,500,000,000 of francs ; in
national strength, its fortresses; in blood shed in the field, 60,000
men ; and in honour, the disbanding of its army, and a foreign
garrison to keep a close watch over an empire in chains. This
is what the last aspiration of Bonaparte to the throne and to
glory cost his country. Eleven hundred and forty thousand
foreign soldiers were at that moment trampling under foot the
soil of France XXI
The allied powers, however, at the moment they were thus
imposing chains upon France, were also chaining the King to
the constitutional system which they had imposed upon him
by their counsels in 1814, and which they judged to be a salu
tary necessity for the popularity of the throne in France. A
strange spectacle, well calculated to make the statesman ob
serve the gradual triumph of the principle of liberty in
Europe Here was the counter-revolution, armed and victori
ous, itself imposing conditions of popular government on the
old regime !
" The allied cabinets," said one of the stipulations of the
treaty, " find their guarantee in the enlightened principles,

234 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 32.
Stipulations of the Allied Powers for constitutional government.
magnanimous sentiments, and personal virtues of the King.
His majesty has acknowledged that, in a kingdom torn for a
quarter of a-century by revolutions, it is not force alone which
can restore peace to the mind, confidence to the heart, and
equilibrium to the social body. Far from thinking that the
King will lend an ear to imprudent or impassioned counsels,
calculated to renew alarm, and to reanimate hatred or divi
sions in the country, the allied powers feel reassured by the
declarations of his majesty in 1814, and especially since his
return. They know that the King will oppose to the enemies
of the public weal his attachment to the constitutional laws
promulgated under his auspices, and his strongly-declared
intention not to preserve any portion of the past, except the
good which Providence has produced even from the public
calamities. It is only thus that the wishes formed by the
allied cabinets for the preservation of the constitutional au
thority of the King can be crowned with complete success, and
that France, re-established on its antient basis, can resume
that eminent position which belongs to it in the European
system." XXII
On the same day that assembled Europe signed this com
pact with France, and with the modern spirit of intervention
of nations in their own government, the Emperor Alexander,
inspired by Madame de Krudener, who had followed him to
Paris, signed the treaty of the Holy Alliance, the dream of his
pious soul, and a sort of social contract of kings. This com
pact made the great fraternal principles of Christianity tho
code of a new right of nations between princes, in anticipation
that those same principles subsequently promulgated by
France, and by the revolution of 1848, should become the
code of nations towards each other. It was the new European
right of nations of which a mystical female had communi
cated the inspiration to the most powerful monarch of the
coalition, and of which Alexander was desirous of being the
crowned apostle. The allied powers signed it from complai
sance and flattery towards the chief of the European league.

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 235

The treaty of the Holy Alliance.

England alone refused, out of respect for the freedom of creeds,
Christian or non-Christian, which constitutes the basis of its
civil legislation. This treaty, which the prejudices and sup
positions of the liberal party have long looked upon as a mutual
pledge amongst kings for the slavery of the people, was in
principle only an act of faith in Providence, promulgated by a
grateful prince after the deliverance of the continent, and an
act which was to substitute in the transactions of empires
morality and equity for despotism and brute force. We pro
duce it here, in memory of Alexander. XXIII.
" Tn the name of the most Holy and Invisible Trinity.
"Their majesties the Emperor of Austria, the King of
Prussia — and the Emperor of Russia, in pursuance of the great
events which have signalised in Europe the course of the last
three years, and principally of the benefits which it has pleased
divine Providence, to shed upon those states, the governments
of which have placed their confidence in it alone — having
acquired a thorough conviction that it is necessary to establish
the proceedings to be adopted by the allied powers, in their
mutual relations, upon the sublime truths which are taught by
the eternal religion of God the Saviour, —
" Solemnly declare that the present act has solely for its
object to manifest in the face of the universe their unshaken
determination to take for tlieir rule of conduct, whether in the
administration of their respective states, or in their political
relations with any other government, only the precepts of this
holy religion, — precepts of justice, of charity and peace, which,
far from being solely applicable to private life, ought, on the
contary to have a direct influence on the resolutions of princes,
and to guide all their proceedings, as being the sole means of
consolidating human institutions, and helping to bring them to
perfection. " In consequence whereof, their Majesties have agreed
upon the following articles : —
"1. In conformity with the words of scripture which order

236 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 32.
The treaty of the Holy Alliance.
ali men to regard each other as brethren, the three contract
ing monarchs will continue united by the ties of a true and
indissoluble fraternity ; considering themselves as fellow
countrymen, they will lend to each other on all occasions,
and in all places, assistance, aid, and succour ; lookiug upon
themselves, with reference to their subjects and armies, as
fathers of families, they will conduct them in the same spirit
of fraternity with which they are animated to protect religion
peace and justice.
" 2. Consequently, the only principle of action, whether
between the said, governments, or between their subjects, shall
be that of reciprocally rendering each other assistance ; of
evincing to each other, by an unalterable benevolence the
mutual affection with which they ought to be animated ; of
only considering themselves as members of one and the same
christian nation ; the three allied princes only regarding
themselves as delegates of Providence, to govern three branches
of the same family, viz. Austria, Prussia, and Russia, thus
acknowledging that the Christian nation, of which they and
their people form a part, has really no other sovereign than
Him to whom alone belongs the rightful power, because in
Him alone are found all the treasures of love, of knowledge
and of wisdom infinite, that is to say God, our divine Saviour
Jesus Christ, the Word of the Most High, the Word of life.
Their Majesties consequently recommend, with the most tender
solicitude, to their people, as the only means of enjoying that
peace which springs from a good conscience, and which alone
is durable, to fortify themselves more and more every day in
the principles and exercise of the duties which the divine
Saviour has taught mankind.
"3. All those powers who will solemnly avow the sacred
principles which have dictated the present act, and will
acknowledge how important it is to the happiness of nations,
too long agitated, that these truths should henceforth exercise
upon human destinies all the influence which belongs to them,
will be received with as much eagerness as affection into this
holy alliance."

1815.] OF MONAKCHY IN FRANCE. 237

Opening of the Chambers.

XXIV.
The King only awaited the signature of the treaty of
pacification to open the session of the Chambers. He re
appeared on the 30th November before them, being received
on his passage, and in the assembly, with frantic acclamations,
which augured less of love for his person than hatred against
his enemies. It was revenge for the military acclamations
which had expelled him on the 20th March, from his throne
and from his palace. The assembly, almost entirely composed
of men of the court, of emigrants, of writers, or journalists of
the old regime, of nobles of the provinces, of royalists of the
departments, deputed by public wrath to avenge France on the
Revolution and the Empire, presented the spectacle of another
France exhumed from the ashes of the invasion.
The ladies of the court, of the high aristocracy, and of the
city, always more impassioned than the men, filled the gal
leries, clapped their hands, shed tears, waved their white
handkerchiefs, and spread around this scene, melancholy in
itself, the agitation of sinister joy, which at this moment
called for acclamations, but shortly perhaps would call for
blood. In the elevated ranks of society, as in the obscure
ranks of the people, weak and timid females are easily excited
to cruelty. They must have idols for their love, and victims
for their hatred. In the accent of this enthusiasm of the
females of the aristocratic world in the galleries, might be
foreseen the coming exigencies of their royalism. The eyes
were delighted with it, but the heart dismayed. The King,
in the expression of his countenance, at once happy, overcast,
and melancholy, seemed to dread this excess of love at the
very moment he was enjoying it.
His brother was beaming with confidence, and encouraged
these demonstrations with his looks. He felt himself, for the
first time in his life, in the element of his counter-revolu
tionary opinions. The Chamber belonged to him, heart and
soul. He saw in it his party, and he thought that party was
France.

238 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 32.
Attitudes of the Dukes de Berry and d'Angouleme.
The Duke de Berry exhibited the loyalty and carelessness
of a soldier. The Duke d'Angouleme, who took the King, his
uncle, for his model, and who had witnessed the fury of the
south, appeared sad, restrained, and reserved. This prince,
whose exterior was unfavourable, concealed under his modesty
and his timidity, more political sense and moderation than any
of his family. The court looked on him with disdain, because
he did not participate in its passions ; the people with respect,
because through the homeliness of his features they discerned
in him the intuitions of a Germanicus, The King loved him
as. a pupil, into whose mind he poured his sorrows and his
lessons. He supported himself with unreserved confidence
upon his arm.
XXV.
When silence had at length calmed down the murmurs
and curiosities of this scene, in which the King, proscribed by
the military sedition, was about to open his soul to the free
and impassioned representation of his people, he spoke as
follows :
" When for the first time I convoked the Chambers last
year, I congratulated myself on having, by an honourable treaty,
restored peace to France.
" She had begun to taste its fruits ; all the sources of pub
lic prosperity were re-opened.
" A criminal enterprise, seconded by the most inconceivable
defection, intervened to arrest its course.
" The evils which this ephemeral usurpation has entailed
upon our country, profoundly afflict me ; I must here however
declare that if it were possible they could only reach myself, I
should bless Providence.
" The marks of love which my people have given me, even
in the most critical moments, have solaced me in my personal
troubles ; but those of my subjects, of my children, weigh upon
my heart. " It is to put a period to this state of uncertainty, more
overwhelming than war itself, that I have deemed it necessary

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 239
The King's speech.
to conclude with the allied powers, — who after having over
thrown the usurper, occupy at present a great part of our
territory, — a convention which regulates our relations, present
and future, with them.
" It shall be communicated to you, without any reserve, as
soon as it shall have received its final form.
" You will recognise, and all France will acknowledge the
profound grief I must have felt, but the salvation even of my
kingdom rendered this great determination necessary and
when I took it, I felt the duties it imposed upon me.
" I have ordered that this year there should be transferred
from the treasury of my civil list into that of the state, a con
siderable portion of my revenue. My family, as soon as they
were made acquainted with my resolution, have offered me a
proportionate donation.
" I have ordered similar diminutions to be made in the
salaries and expenses of all my servants without exception. I
shall at all times be ready to bear a portion of the sacrifices which
grievous circumstances may impose upon my people.
" The accounts will be laid before you, and you will recog
nise the importance of the economy that I have ordered in the
departments of my ministers, and in all parts of the admi
nistration. " Happy would it be if these measures could suffice for the
expenses of the state ! In all circumstances I reckon on the
devotion of the nation, and the zeal of both the Chambers.
" But other cares more pleasing and not less important as
semble them to-day. It is to give more weight to your delibera
tions, and to derive more instruction from them myself, that I
have created some new peers, and that the number of deputies
of the departments has been augmented.
" I hope I have been successful in my choice ; and the
zeal of the deputies in difficult conjunctures is also a proof
that they are animated with a sincere affection for my person,
and an ardent love for their country.
" It is, therefore, with a lively joy and the fullest confidence
that I see you assembled around me, being certain that you
will never lose sight of the fundamental basis of the happiness

240 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 32.
Impression created by the speech.
of the state : a frank and faithful union of the Chambers with
the King, and respect for the constitutional charter.
" This charter which I carefully studied before I gave it to
the country, to which reflection attaches me more and more
every day, which 1 have sworn to maintain, and to which all of
you, beginning with my own family, are going to swear obedience,
is doubtless like all human institutions susceptible of improve
ment ; but none of us should forget that the danger of innova
tion is close beside the advantage of improvement.
"Many more objects of importance demand your attention.
" To make religion flourish again, to purify manners, to
establish liberty on respect for the laws, and to make them
more and more analogous to these great views, to give stability
to public credit, to reorganise the army, to heal the wounds
which have only too deeply torn the bosom of our country,,
finally to ensure internal tranquillity, and thus to make France
respected abroad, these are the objects to which all our efforts
should tend.
" I do not flatter myself that so much good can be the
work of one session ; but if at the close of the present legis
lature we perceive that we have made an approach towards it,
we ought to be satisfied with ourselves. I shall spare no efforts
to contribute to so desirable a result ; and in order to succeed
I reckon, gentlemen, on your most active co-operation."
XXVI.
Sorrow, consternation, hope, resignation, love, and anger
had by turns overcast, depressed, melted, or irritated the faces
and attitudes of the assembly and the galleries, at the different
paragraphs of the King's speech. Tears filled the eyes of the
deputies of the towns and departments which were to be cut
off from the French territory. The country, even amidst its
calamities, wished to retain all its children. The public were
still ignorant of the amount of the sacrifices imposed upon the
heart of France, and trembled to learn them. The engage
ments renewed by the King and his family to the charter
excited, if not murmurs, at least whisperings in the galleries.

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 241
Its effect upon the ultra royalists.
Everything that limited royalty lessened their enthusiasm, and
recalled a compact with the revolution. The King's reign,
according to the saloons of that period, ought to be one con
tinued triumph over the men and things which filled them
with hateful recollections.
The past, they thought, should be renewed with the King,
without mixing with, or making conditions for the future.
Concessions appeared to them to be weaknesses, prudence
cowardice. There is nothing so impatient to reign without
moderation as parties without strength, who have failed from
impotence. They fancy they can hide their humiliation by
their insolence.
Such was at that time the irritated aristocratical party re
turned from that Mount Aventine of the nobility called the
Faubourg St. Germain. Anger and hope inspired it with de
lirium. The genius of emigration avenged itself in words upon
France. After having been proscribed, it wished to proscribe
in its turn ; and it sought, in the King, not a moderator but an
instrument. They lavished upon the Count d'Artois, and the
numerous deputies of his party, acclamations, smiles, and
signs of understanding, which seemed to say " Reign before
hand, our hearts are with you!"
XXVII.
The King, as solicitous of his fame as a literary prince, as of
that of a legislative King, had drawn up and written this
speech with his own hand, with the most perfect fitness to the
situation and events of the time. He possessed a tact for
state ceremonies, and a perception of public opinion. Before
he pronounced it he had read it to his Council of ministers and
to his family ; and he had required of the Count d'Artois, the
Prince of Conde, the Duke d'Angouleme, and the Duke de
Berry, all the princes of his house, to renew with him, on
their return from their second exile, the oath to observe the
charter, which they had pronounced on the 18th March. This
engagement renewed at such a moment, in full freedom, and
under the protection of 1200,000 bayonets, which kept the
3 p

212 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 32.
The royal family take the oath to the charter.
pressure from without in proper bounds, appeared to the King
an act of high moral dignity and generous policy. He had,
moreover, the ambition, the only one permitted to his years
and his nature, to bequeath to history the fame of a monarch
the founder of institutions. He wished his heirs to take, in
the face of the nation and of Europe, the engagement to res
pect its institutions.
The Count d'Artois had hesitated for a moment. Some
inveterate royalists and ecclesiastics by whom he was sur
rounded, advised him not to swear to a charter that
admitted human limits to that divine authority which flows
with the blood of Kings in their veins, and with the oil of
consecration upon their head. ¦ That portion of the clergy who
rebelled against the concordat, and who wished to restore with
the unity of power the unity of worship, inspired him with
scruples against a charter in which dissenting doctrines were
tolerated. The Prince of Conde, enfeebled by age, and who
had never recognised the revolution upon the field of battle
except to fight against it, equally refused to sanction this re
volution with his oath. The old courtiers and the ladies by
whom he was surrounded advised him to assign his infirmities
as the cause of his absence.
These princes at length yielded, less to the entreaties of the
King than to the injunctions of Europe. They raised their
hands to confirm the promises of their chief, speaking in the
name of his dynasty. These scruples and murmurs of their
conscience, however, were betrayed by their friends in the two
chambers, at the moment when the Duke of Richelieu pro
nounced before the King the names of the peers and deputies,
to require them to take the oath. The Count Jules de
Polignac, a young courtier who enjoyed the greatest intimacy,
and the most paternal favour, with the Count d'Artois, refused
to swear. M. de Labourdonnaie, Cardinal de Perigord, and
Marshal de Viomenil only replied by their silence on the calling
of their names. A deputy of Montauban, named Domingon°
arose and demanded to be heard in explanation of his refusal.
The Duke of Richelieu equally embarrassed in imposing silence
on the conscience of a deputy, and in allowing the Kin" to

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 243
M. Laine is voted President of the Assembly.
hear an objection which might be offensive, looked at his
majesty and, interpreting his gesture, replied that the im
memorial customs ofthe monarchy itnerdicted subjects from
speaking in the King's presence without his authority.
These signs of the internal repugnance to the spirit of the
charter were sufficient for the Count d'Artois and his court.
They contained a tacit protest, or reservations which time
might brood upon uuder the ruin of these liberties. The
King saw in the smallness of their number a ratification of his
wisdom by the almost unanimous voice of the nation. His
return to the Tuileries was a popular triumph, which suffici
ently repaid him for the coldness and the murmurs of his own
court. A part of the aristocracy and the church had protested
but the mass of the nation agreed and applauded. This
prince, more firm in his designs than he was at that time
thought to be, was already escaping with persevering energy
from the besetting of family, of caste, and of the priesthood, to
seek for his support in public reason, and for his popularity in
the future. His family was embittered against him, the emi
grants rebellious, the church discontented, his people submissive
and grateful. XXVIII.
The chamber presented according to parliamentary usage
three candidates, one of whom the King himself was to choose
as president of the assembly. M. Lainfi, full of that civic
courage which he had twice exhibited, in the course of fifteen
months, even in defiance of death, was the greatest citizen of
the nation. The assembly still just, at that period because it
was new, gave a unanimous vote for M. Laine. The King felt
happy in choosing the champion of freedom against tyranny, and
of constitutional right against insurrection. M. Laine was the
personification of a liberal charter. No one could better repre
sent the people before the King, or the liberal King before the
free people. He comprised the citizen in the faithful subject
the faithful subject in the citizen, the man of both periods.
This choice was applauded by all ; it was better than a declara
tion, it was a symbol.

244 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 32,
M. Laine's speech.

XXIX.
" Gentlemen," said M. Laine, on taking possession of the
president's chair, " the ruling sentiment of the French, that
which absorbs all hearts, that of our country's calamities, keeps
gratitude silent in my own breast. Who could, in fact, in the
midst of our common misfortunes, form any other wishes, or
have any other thoughts than to soften the evils which for
eight months past have overwhelmed France and the King?
One great hope is, however, given to us. The solemn oathjust
taken within these walls permits us to believe that debates on
party politics will cease at length before a charter which rallies
all opinions and secures all interests. Let us show that a
common calamity elevates the character ! Let us leave it to
God who afflicts this people to judge kings, but let us sur
round our own with all the strength for which he has occa
sion, to extinguish passions, stifle discords, make France re
spected, and its liberty protected."
The chamber unworthy to hear these words, and incapable
of comprehending them, replied to the King's speech with an
accent of painful resignation to clemency ; thus indicating from
the very outset that it would obtrude its resentments and its
reprisals upon the crown, and that it would only respect its
government on condition of ruling it.
" In the midst of our vows of concord," said the chamber,
"it is our duty to solicit your justice against those who have
endangered the throne. Your clemency has been without
bounds, we are not going to beg of you to retract it, but we
supplicate you, in the name of the people themselves, victims of
the calamities under which they are crushed, to let justice at
length proceed from where clemency has stopped, that those
who even now, encouraged by impunity, are not afraid of
exhibiting their rebellion, may be given up to the just severity
of the tribunals. The chamber will zealously concur in fra
ming the laws necessary for the accomplishment of this desire.
Only confide your authority to hands that are pure !"'
In this first demand was felt an impatience to act with

1815,] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE 245
Dispositions of the Chambers.
rigour, in the second an impatience to seize upon the royal
authority. These pure hands, an allusion to Fouche and
Talleyrand, constituted an offence to the King himself, under
the form of counsel, and he resented it from the bottom of his
heart. He began to fear his friends more than his enemies.
The Chamber of Peers, into which M. de Talleyrand had
introduced men more moderate, more experienced in revolu
tions, but also more servile, had neither the courage to contra
dict nor to ratify the language of the Chamber of Deputies.
They looked how the wind blew, that they might follow it.
They stammered forth a repetition of the King's speech in an
obscure address, in which the forms of the paraphrase covered
the paucity of ideas.
XXX.
The inclinations of the Chamber of Deputies, which were
all in accordance with the opinions and enmities of the Count
d'Artois, and of the government in expectancy which surrounded
that prince, soon mastered the actual government, and forced it
to give by severe laws satisfaction to the passions of the chiefs
pf the royalist party.
The Duke of Richelieu, absorbed in the conferences and
negotiations with the allied powers, for the liberation of the
territory, could not refuse to the foreign cabinets those rigours
which were called acts of prudence. He left to his colleagues,
the ministers of war, of the interior, of justice, and of the police,
the initiative of measures and of laws, and the direction of the
chambers. To restore the independence of France ; to main
tain harmony amongst the different members of the royal
family, by concessions of influence in the cabinet, calculated to
prevent factions in the palace ; to organise an army attached to
the King, which would release him at a later period from the
pretorians of Napoleon ; to moderate the imprudent and already
cruel zeal of royalism, repressing at the same time the spirit
of sedition in the revolutionary party ; to re-establish in the
disturbed south the empire of the laws, in place of the sangui
nary turbulence of factions ; to preserve harmony between the

24 G HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 32.
Difficulties of the Duke of Richelieu's position.
government and the chambers, so long as this harmony should
cost the government neither baseness nor crime ; to caress the
emigrants while he restrained them, to pacify the people, to
restore the finances, ruined by the war and by the price it was
necessary to pay for peace ; to raise public credit, and call upon
it for the ransom of the country, by throwing upon the future a
portion of the weight that lay too heavy on the present ; and
for all the rest, to leave much to the King, to his brother, to
time, to events, to the free play of opinions in the chambers, to
the gradual subsiding of the passions, and to that lassitude
which in human affairs follows great popular convulsions ; such
were the ruling thoughts of the Duke of Richelieu.
His nature, his faculties, and his habits did not fit him
either for the details of administration, the manoeuvres of
intrigue, the adulations of the court, or for the struggles of
eloquence with parties in the tribune. His was a mind more
penetrating than exercised in political contest, more general
ising than active. He had occasion in the council for hands to
serve him, and for voices to explain him. He gave himself up
to these hands, and these voices, and above all to M. Decazes.
XXXI.
The council, though unanimously royalist, was divided into
two distinct shades of opinion. M. de Vaublanc, the Duke of
Feltre, and M. Dubouchage, belonged by their excessive zeal,
to the party of the Count d'Artois ; they aided the violence of
this party in all their circulars, and in all their operations. M.
de Richelieu, M, Decazes, M. de Barbe Marbois, and M.
Corvetto were of the King's party. But these two opinions
mingled together at the council board in one common zeal for
the consolidation of the throne.
The King himself, though more enlightened than his
brother, and more moderate than his own party, brought back
from his second exile a species of regret for his want of firmness
in 1814, and a certain bitterness of governing, natural to a man
who had suffered under so much treachery and outrage. The
foreign powers, the nation, his own family, demanded sureties

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 247
Laws of rigour proposed by the government,
of him against the return of calamities which weighed heavily
upon all. He was loudly accused of weakness. He therefore
endeavoured to prove his vigour. A rivalship of royalism reigned
at this moment between himself and his court. He did not wish
to be too much behind his partisans, lest they should seek in
his brother a personification of the throne, which might be
elevated against him in his own court. He appeared therefore
to yield with complaisance to the instigations and the rigours
which his tribunes, the journals, the saloons, and the meetings
of royalist deputies incessantly addressed to his ministers.
Three bills with this import were concocted by the govern
ment, and presented to the Chamber. A law against seditious
cries, a law which suspended the guarantees of the individual
liberty of the citizens, and finally, a law constituting the ancient
prevotal courts, a sort of revolutionary tribunal of the monarchy.

XXXII.
The first of these laws inflicted long imprisonments on the
authors of seditious clamours. The preamble insulted with
the bitterest expressions, the parties hostile to the restoration.
The Chamber received it coldly, as a tame effigy of its resent
ments. The second, which breathed hatred and menace
against the revolution, drew plaudits from the parliamentary
parties, whose requirements it satisfied. This was the temporary
dictatorship of the police over the liberty of the citizens. The
government itself thought it too absolute ; but the private acts
of violence which were causing so much bloodshed in the south,
imposed at this moment a necessity upon ministers to arm the
hands of government with despotic power, to snatch it from
individuals. There was humanity even disguised under this
appearance of rigour, which, by throwing victims into prison.
saved them from assassination. The discussion which was
timid on the part of the opposition, was implacable on the side
of the over-zealous royalists. M. d'Argenson having had the
courage to speak of the blood of the protestants which was
flowing in the south, was vociferously called to order, as if the

248 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 32.
Excessive zeal of the royalists in the Chamber.
denunciation of crime was itself a crime to ears that wished
to hear nothing.
" Do you think you are still here at the Champ de Mai?''
was loudly demanded of him M. de Vaublanc combated the
observations of M. d'Argenson, not with the calm authority of
the minister, but with the impassioned declamation of the court
neophyte. " We require an extraordinary power," he said,
" to watch over the safety of the State. An immense majority
of the French demand their King !" Acclamations of " Vive
le Roi !" responded to him from all the monarchical benches.
The discussion was no longer by speeches, but by cries and
gestures. The bill was carried ; hardly fifty voices protesting
against the excess of its precautions. The liberty of the
citizens was at the mercy of the police.
XXXIII.
On the discussion of the law, the royalists finding the
penalty of transportation too merciful, loudly demanded that it
should be changed to death. " Death against the wretches
who dared to struggle against the legitimate government," voted
M. Humbert de Sesmaisons. " Death against all who shall
display any other flag than the white flag," voted M. Piet.
''Perpetual hard labour," continued M. Josse de Beauvoir,
" since the King's return, crime has been caressed instead of
scourged!" " No, no, death! death!" exclaimed M. de Ses
maisons. "The penalty of parricides!" added M. Bouin.
These furious exclamations rose one above another, as a rival
ship of pledges given to royalty. Each seemed desirous of
flinging his name to history with his vote, as a defiance to
humanity. No one concealed his rage, but all made a title of
it to the favour of futurity, a glory beyond their party. Fu
turity has, indeed, preserved these titles, and now appreciates
their value. XXXIV.
Ou the 17th of November, a discussion took place, on the
prevotal courts, a jurisdiction witliout guarantee, like despotism';

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 249
Discussion cf the laws of rigour.
witliout appeal, like passion ; without mercy, like death. Each
department was to have one of these tribunals, composed of the
prevot, or principal judge, and four assessors They tried all
political crimes, plots, agitations, and insulting cries against
the King or his family. The penalties were as numerous as
those of the code, from fines to death. The chief of the tri
bunal sought out and denounced the crime ; within four and
twenty hours the examination took place, the court gave judg
ment without adjourning, and sentence was executed without
appeal. Suspicion, as in 1793, was converted into criminality.
The propensity to blood was so enticing, and the public rage
so httle anticipated the remorse which is subsequently excited
by such laws in the national mind, that two men who have
since become renowned by their genius, and the moderation and
elevation of their characters, M. Cuvier, illustrious in science
to all ages, and M. Royer Collard, tlie type of philosophy in
public affairs, supported this law as a necessity of the times.
One member, even, carried away by the vehemence of his
royalism, which did not allow him to recognise justice in any
cause but his own, demanded that a portion of the other
tribunals should be suppressed, and that the irremovability of
the judges should be suspended for one year, that the appre
hension of dismissal might have a corresponding effect on their
judgments. This was carrying the reign of terror into the very hearts
of fhe judges, in which wisdom elsewhere protects impartiality
by independence of action. A number of propositions of this
nature crowded upon each other in the assembly, to enhance,
as it were, the price of passion.

XXXV
In the discussion of these laws, the Chamber of Peers
gave utterance to murmurs of conscience and protests, by the
mouths of the same men who had braved, under the conven
tion, the sword of the other parties. The heroism of revolu
tions is not found in men of excess, but in men of moderation,

250 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 32
Dispositions of the Chamber of Peers.
Lanjuinais proved himself in the Chamber of Peers the same as
he had been during the reign of terror.
" Your law," he said, " is unjust, because it makes a crime
of suspicion, and because it sends the accused before judges
who are dependent upon the accuser ! It is the law of 1793,
but still better calculated to intimidate all imaginations, and
to enslave all consciences ! Rome and England even in public
emergencies had no such laws." The peers, by turns victims
and instruments of the tyranny they were required to enact,
were irritated at the voice of Lanjuinais as passion is irritated
when disconcerted by a truth.
Boissy-d'Anglas, Marmont, and Lenoir Laroche, without
denying the necessity of rigorous law, endeavoured to modify
the despotism and irresponsibility of these tribunals. Fon
tanes, a man of a gentle and cultivated mind, but a lover of
despotism under all titles, defended them by that eternal
motive which justifies all dictatorships ; that the first necessity
of societies is order, and not liberty ; a true axiom for times
and men who make a distinction between order and right,
which are inseparable in a perfect and moral state of civilisa
tion. The Duke de Brissac, brought up in the same school
of the Empire, found them indulgent. The most bitter
opinions during the restoration were almost always those
given by men pliant to the tyranny, and accomplices of im
perial despotism under Napoleon.
The law was passed by this assembly with the undisguised
regret of not having to pass one more absolute and efficacious.
It was evident that the Chamber of Peers would oppose
neither modification nor obstacle to the violence of the Cham
ber of Deputies. M. de Talleyrand and Fouche when in
troducing into the senate the living remains of all the courts
and all the revolutionary governments, had not introduced into
it either civic courage, independence, or dignity of character.
The Chamber of Deputies had the passions of the times, the
Chamber of Peers had its servilities. It was the depot of
thirty years of revolutions, wherein the courtiers of Hartwell,
the myrmidons of Napoleon, the revolutionists of '89, the
legislators of the Empire, and the worn-out military men,

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 251
The Count d'Artois declines a vote of thanks proposed to his son.

only met each other in one common lassitude, and in a gene
ral complaisance for all powers protecting their titles, their
fortunes, their dignities, and their repose. Some rare ex
ceptions offered a contrast there, rather than an opposition
to the general spirit of pliancy and adulation. The national
aristocracy no longer existed. Cardinal Richelieu had killed
it ; and it could only be replaced in a French senate by a
court aristocracy, made to serve, not to resist.
XXXVI.
The Duke of Fitzjames, a descendant of the Stuarts, attached
to the Count d'Artois, a man of a giddy head, a warm heart,
and a noble soul, naturally eloquent, better calculated than
any of the prince's friends to take a decided part in the
parliament, and to recall the voice of the doctrines of Cazales,
tried to make the Duke of Angoul&me popular, by proposing
a vote of thanks to this young prince for having preserved the
south from an invasion of the Spaniards. The prince merited
this tribute, which the Count d'Artois set aside with a paternal
decorum and modesty which excited the sympathy of the
nation. " You will pardon," he said, ascending the tribune
for the first time in his life, " the emotion of a father who
listens to the eulogium of a son worthy of all his love and
that of France. He is absent, and it is my duty to be his
interpreter. If he had been happy enough to display against
the external enemies of France the courage that you wish to
honour in him, such a recompense would crown his glory
and my satisfaction. But as a Frenchman, a French prince,
can my son forget that it was against deluded Frenchmen he
was compelled to fight? Permit me to decline for my son the
thanks acquired by such a title."
The assembly acceded to this scruple of the heir to the
throne ; and the Duke of Fitzjames, in withdrawing his pro
position, conferred upon his master the honour of this refusal.
This homage to the national sorrow, inclined many hearts to
the Count d'Artois.
The King could not, without umbrage, see the princes of

252 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 32.
The Duke of Orleans.
his house ascend the tribune, in the Chamber of Peers.
Opposition would have been fatal ; popularity even was danger
ous in a rank so near the throne. When congratulating his
brother on his oratorical success, his Majesty could not forget
the Duke of Orleans, whose parliamentary character, if imita
ted by this prince, might agitate the Empire, and even
menace the throne itself.

XXXVII.
The Duke of Orleans, whose conduct we have seen at once
irreproachable and ambiguous since 1814, his caresses to the
army during his residence at Lille, his flattering reminiscences
of the tri-coloured flag, his departure for England, his resi
dence in London during the hundred days, and his adroit
affectation of separating his cause from that of Ghent, had
just returned to France. His suspicious attitude in England,
where the most liberal members of the opposition sought him
out, and held him up as a contrast to the unpopularity of his
race ; the rumours which had been current in France, during
the hundred days, of an Orleanist plot, to which he was not
an accomplice, but of wliich he served as the banner ; the
interrupted march upon Paris of the Generals Lallemand and
their corps d'armee, an enigma of which he was, unknown to
himself, the true explanation ; his obsequious character in the
court ; his opinions, transparent in all his acts, though veiled
by his language in public; his rank which commanded respect,
while his independence gave room for popularity ; his talents,
very distinguished, although of that secondary class which
attracts consideration without exciting envy ; the souvenirs
of the revolution which surrounded him with a twofold interest ;
a man of 1792 for the patriots, an emigrant for the royalists,
an accomplice for one side, a victim for the other, a citizen for
the former, a prince for the latter, considerable for all; all
this constituted the Duke of Orleans at once a strength and
a menace for the monarchy. The King was justly offended
at the affected isolation in which this prince had kept himself
from him and the other princes of his house, during the in-

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 253

His reconciliation with the King,

terregnum of Ghent. The Duke of Orleans, after the defeit
of Waterloo, had allowed a report to circulate, to justify
himself, that it was by the express order of the King, he
had abstained from taking arms against his country. The
King who knew the contrary, did not readily pardon him for
a duplicity of character and language by which this prince
profited. He had not, however, opposed his return to France
after the re-establishment of his throne.
The Duchess of Orleans, the mother of this prince, daugh
ter of the Duke of Penthievre, and widow of Philippe Egalite,
had been requested by her son to negociate with the King for
his return, his reconciliation, the restitution of those immense
domains the appanages of his house, and all the titles and
royal favours which were the object of his ambition. This
princess, a victim of the revolution, the virtuous wife of a cor
rupt husband, an irreproachable widow, and a tender mother,
devoted by her name, by her misfortunes, by her exile, and by
her sentiments, to the royal house, was a natural and venerated
intercessor with the court. • She had become answerable for
her son, and easily obtained from Louis XVIII. a forgetfulness
of the past, and all the favours calculated to attach the Duke
of Orleans, through gratitude, to the royal family. The King
had spoken to him with the lofty sincerity of the chief of a
race, who fears nothing for himself, and who combats suspected
ambition by well-understood interest.
" You are my cousin," he said to the prince ; " you are the
nearest prince of the blood to the throne, after the Duke of
Berry. You have a fairer prospect of the crown by right than
by usurpation. I have also as much confidence in your good
understanding as in your good heart. I feel quite at ease, for
you are in one of those happy situations in which virtue leads
more directly to greatness than ambition."
The King had confirmed these words by a legal and irre
vocable title to the rich domains of his appanage, which until
then the Duke of Orleans possessed only in virtue of the re
vocable word of the king. The prince made a vow of inno
cence, of gratitude, and of unalterable fidelity. He had been
summoned to take his place with the princes of the royal

234 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 32.
Speeches and votes on the laws of rigour in the Chamber of Peers.
family in the Chamber of Peers. But though he was silent
in public, and reverential to the court, his coquetting with
public opinion, his caresses of the budding opposition, his
court, almost exclusively formed of the wrecks of the empire
and the army, tacitly contradicted out of doors the attitude he
assumed within the palace. The generosity of Louis XVIII.
was not deceived, but it was justly vigilant. He gave the
princes of his house to understand that their presence at the
sittings of the Chamber of Peers would be disagreeable to him.
He gave a colouring to this injunction by urging the impro
priety there would be in any member of his family opposing,
by word or vote, the acts of his ministers ; and the still greater
impropriety in the voting of princes so near the throne in the
great political proceedings which were to be tried in the Cham
ber of Peers, about to be changed into a tribunal of state.
The princes acceded to his wish.
XXXVIII.
The speeches and the votes upon the three laws of rigour
proposed by the ministry were no less sinister in the Chamber
of Peers than in the Chamber of Deputies. The same spirit
animated both bodies, and even the best were subject to
its influence. M. de Rouge demanded the penalty of death
against all who should display any other than the white flag.
" Was it not a flag displayed at Grenoble," said he, " which
has been the cause of our late misfortunes?" M. de Chateau
briand was indignant at that article of the bill which declared
a penalty against those who should threaten the legality of the
possession of national estates.
" A barbarious enactment," said he, " which will reach the
unhappy despoiled emigrant whom a purchaser, jealous of his
property, may surprise shedding some tears and breathing some
regrets upon the tomb of his father ! How are we to impose a
silence which in case of need the very stones themselves would
break that serve as a boundary to those inheritances which it
is proposed to secure to their present psssessors ?"
"For what crime will you reserve death?" said M. de

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 255
Prevalence of sanguinary feeling.
Frondeville. " Have we islands to which we can banish such
monsters ? One of the calamities of our age is that cold
philosophy which places the mildest penalties by the side of
the most atrocious horrors. Let us threaten parricide with
death, and we shall prevent parricide !"
Thus the penalty which kills was substituted for that which
corrects ; and humanity itself became a crime in the eyes of
those avengers of humanity who were themselves returning
from exile, and the blood of whose relatives had been shed
upon every scaffold of the revolution. The defender of Louis
XVI., De Seze himself, who had with so much glory endea
voured to save an august head from the political axe, now called
for the penalty of death. All breathed the retaliation of the
counter-revolution, and blood could therefore net be slow in
flowing. It was already shed by the hands of the people,
in the impassioned provinces of France. The laws were now
going to snatch the sword from tho hands of those people, not
to disarm, but to imitate them.

BOOK THIETY-1HIRD.
The Reign of Terror of 1815— State of Paris— Situation of the South-
Massacres at Marseilles — Assassination of Marshal Brune at Avignon
—Massacres at Nismes— The Verdets— Intervention of the Duke
d'Angouleme— Heroism of General Lagarde — Assassination of Gene-
ral Ramel at Toulouse — The twins of La Reole — Their trial— Their
death — LabSdoyere — His journey to Paris — His arrest — His trial —
His death.

Political opinions, hostile, but temperate as the climate and
manners of the people, had not stained the capital with blood
during the numerous political changes which we have narrated.
The spectacle of the reign of terror, during the eighteen
months' immolation by the convention, had inspired Paris with
a satiety and horror of blood. The lively manners of the
people — the events daily occurring under the eye, and becoming
a necessary spectacle and food to public curiosity — the habit of
seeing the rise, the fall, and the rising again of parties and of
men — the numerous distractions in which the affections of
nations, as well as their enmities evaporate — the presence of a
foreign army, and of a civic force, controlling the multitude on '
the spot and at the instant — and above all the magnitude of a
city, the inhabitants of which unknown to each other do not
cherish those local antipathies of parish feuds, of religion, and
party politics, and those personal animosities which are only
extinguished by death — had preserved Paris from crimes.
II.
But the south was bubbling and boiling ever since 1814.
The south is the focus of French imagination, and imagination
is the boundary of popular impressions. It is through this

1815.] RESTORATION OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 257
Situation of the south.
organ that the more indolent or more active sensibility receives
aud throws back again with more or less passiveness or force
the reaction of events which humble or exalt a people. The
southern populations of France constitute this movement, and
sometimes this vertigo of the country. Aix had given birth to
Mirabeau in '89 — Marseilles had sent her children to provoke
the 10th August in '92 — Avignon had equalled in 1793 the
crimes of Rome under her proscribers — Toulon had given itself
to the English — Nismes to the Protestants — Lyons had armed
and committed itself to the flames, to oppose the tyranny of
the revolution, of which that plebeian city had been one of the
most enthusiastic foci — the Cevennes, still bleeding with the
executions of Louis XIV., kept alive in the hereditary opposi
tion of the two creeds, by turns persecuted and persecutors, a
leaven of hatred which fomented the political animosities.
The Restoration had made the protestants tremble for the
preservation of freedom of conscience ; they had dreaded the
inevitable alliance between the descendants of Louis XIV.
and the successors of Bossuet, and though professing repub
lican opinions, they had hailed as a salvation the return of
Napoleon. Their joy had exasperated the catholics and the
royalists, who were burning to avenge in turn the insults they
had suffered, and the momentary triumph of their antagonists.
Religion in their eyes consecrated their hatred. The news of
the defeat of Waterloo, and of the abdication of Napoleon,
broke the seal which still kept them within bounds. The
people of the south were burning with anger and impatience
against the military accomplices in the usurpation of their
country. Marseilles, the foremost city in the movement, could not
restrain the cry of Five le Roi! in the face of General Verdier's
troops, who still cried Vive I'Empereur ! General Verdier who
was an old soldier of the Egyptian and Spanish wars, but
inexpert in the management of seditions, vainly harangued the
groups of people, who mistook his moderation for fear. An
explosion took place, the tocsin sounded; the royalists, who con
stituted the immense majority of the country, hastened at the
sound of the bells to assist the insurgents in the city.
3 Q

258 HISTORY OF THE RESTORVTION [BOOK 33.
Massacres at Marseilles.
General Verdier had force sufficient to subdue everything;
but knowing the intelligence of the Emperor's disaster, and not
wishing to cause a vain effusion of blood, he retired upon Tou
lon, abandoning Marseilles and a part of Provence to the
enthusiasm of their royalism. This humanity of the general
was fatal to the imperialists, who were marked out by their
employments or their opinions to the irrepressible fury of the
people. The massacre commenced with the innocent remains
of these Mamelukes whom Napoleon had formerly brought
from Egypt, and who were peacably concluding their lives in
a quarter of Marseilles where the sea and the sun reminded
them of the East. Their innocent blood discoloured the waters
of the port. Neither their wives nor children were spared.
Furious ruffians, imitating the assassins of September, threw
themselves madly upon these old companions of Napo
leon, fancying that while they mutilated them they rent
asunder that odious glory of which they were the living
witnesses. The people added to their dead bodies, which were
thrown into the sea, those of some inhabitants of Marseilles,
known for their attachment to the Emperor. Assassination
was succeeded by pillage, till the alarmed citizens at length
took arms and quelled a commotion which, though gratifying to
their feelings, threatened their families, their fortunes, and their
dwellings. Ill
Marshal Brune, who commanded the army of the south,
learned at Toulon the massacres of Marseilles. His soldiers
wished to avenge them, but he restrained their ardour, and
resigned his command to the Marquis de Riviere, the commis
sioner sent by the King to govern and pacify the south. Brune
had only evinced, during his mission to Toulon, the firm neu
trality of attitude of a general, who, while defending his
country against foreigners, is desirous at the same time of
restraining the passions of the interior. The royalists had
nothing to reproach him with but his too easy obedience to the
orders of Napoleon. He had hastened to yield to destiny,

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 259
Attack on Marshal Brune at Avignon.
and to make his army recognise Louis XVIII. a second time,
in order to avoid a civil war.
Flaving accomplished this duty he quitted Toulon, and took
the road to Paris. He was advised, but in vain, to go by sea,
that he might travel with less danger to the capital ; he was
told of the rashness of a journey by land, amidst an excited
population, for his name represented a detested cause, and
might become the incentive to a crime. Brune, however, con
fided in his innocence and his courage.
He quitted Toulon on the night of the 31st July. In
changing horses at Aix he was recognised, and the fury of the
mob around him with difficulty allowed his carriage to depart.
Having arrived on the morning of the 2nd August at Avignon,
he stopped at an hotel in that city near the Rhone. The
news of his arrival was instantaneously spread amongst that
idle population who crowd the quays, the streets, and the
squares, in a climate where people live out of doors. Amongst
this stirring and unsettled people the slightest murmur creates
an excitement. The name of Marshal Brune, the victim of an
odious calumny, had remained synonymous with a great crime in
the imagination of the south. A report had circulated that
thi3 marshal, then an artisan and a fierce revolutionist, had
participated in the masacres of September 1792 in the prisons
of Paris, and that he had carried through the streets the bleed
ing head of the beautiful and innocent Princess de Lamballe.
This sinister report, which was in vain belied by the whole
course of his military life, and even by his absence from Paris
at the moment the crime was committed, circulated amongst
the crowd. It was further added that this myrmidon of Bona
parte was going, not to the King in Paris, but to the army of
the Loire, to assume its command and return to chastise the
south These rumours being fomented by persons of some
credit with the people, the hotel at which the marshal had put
up was attacked by an immense crowd. It was in vain that
the doors were closed and barricaded, and that M. de Saint-
Chamont, the prefect of Avignon, who was accidently in the
same hotel, made himself known, and for a time dispersed the
mob ; it collected again in front of the town house. M. Puy,

2i.O HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 33.

Murder of Marshal Brune.

M. de Saint-Chamont, and M. de Balzac hastened with a
handful of brave and generous citizens to tear their victim from
these madmen ; they succeeded a second time, by the force of
supplications and energy, in rescuing the marshal. His car
riage was proceeding towards the Rhone, but was again stopped
in this short passage ; and being assailed with clamours, pelted
with stones, and threatened with knives, he was brought back
a third time into the court yard of the hotel,
The prefect, the mayor, the officers, the aides-de-camp,
Major Lambot, commanding the department, M. de Mon-
tagnat, chief of the national guard, M. Hughes, a lieutenant-
colonel, on leave at Avignon, ranged themselves before
the gate, opposed their bodies against the irruption, and
swore to the people that they must pass over their dead bodies
before they stained the city with the blood of a marshal of
France, immolated without defence, without a crime, and without
a trial. The cries of the people then rose against these magis
trates and citizens, some of whom were compelled to retire
that they might not increase the exasperation by their presence;
others were thrown down, trampled on by the multitude,
and dragged in the dust. Major Lambot got up, and with
Hughes charged the assailants sword in hand : the latter fled,
the door of the hotel was cleared, and Brune was again about
to escape. M. de Balzac, the sous-prefect of the town, was
repelling the most furious of the last groups of the mob, and
the marshal's defenders were beginning to breathe, when at
the moment peace was thought to be re-established, a discharge
of fire-arms resounded from within the hotel, and the smoke of
several shots issued from the window of the apartment where
the marshal was awaiting his fate. One of the assassins, with
his discharged gun in his hand, showed himself at the balcony,
and announced to the people their dastardly triumph and
vengeance — Brune was stretched dead upon the floor ! A few
villains, abandoning the attempt to enter by the door, had
scaled the roofs of the neighbouring houses without being
perceived, and creeping from thence to the garret window of
the hotel, they soon found their way to the apartment in which
Brune was congratulating himself on his deliverance. He was

1815,] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 261
Atrocities of the people on his dead body.
reading, at the moment, to strengthen and console himself
under so much hatred, an affectionate and tender letter from
his wife. Standing erect before his assassins, he never
changed colour, or stooped to make supplications. " What do
you want with me ?" he asked them with a calm voice. He
was replied to by a pistol shot ; but with a motion of his hand
he turned aside the muzzle, and the ball missed its object. A
second ball from a carabine, however, struck him in the head,
and laid him dead at the feet of his murderers, while the crime
was hailed with shouts of joy by the multitude outside.
A vain attempt was made by the magistrates to relieve
their city from the shame of this atrocity, by false attestations
that the marshal, frightened at the rage of the people, had
killed himself ; but the people contradicted this official false
hood by fresh horrors. They pursued the unhappy marshal
even after death ; they tore his body from the coffin, dragged
it by the legs upon the pavement, and flung it from the bridge
into the waters of the Rhone ; and, as if such a death had not
been sufficient, they fired repeatedly at the body, and pursued
it with execrations, as it floated down the current. Fre
quently pushed from the shore by the fury of the inhabit
ants, the river at length carried it into a retired creek between
Aries and Tarascon, where the birds of prey, attracted by the
sight of a dead body on the sand, alighted in flocks amongst
the reeds.
The appearance of these birds attracted the attention of a
poor fisherman, and led to his discovery of the body of the mar
shal, whose name and tragical death he had heard of. He buried
it, unassisted, in the night-time, being fearful that even this
pious act might be imputed to him as a crime ; and it was not
till two years after that he revealed the particulars of this mys
terious sepulture. These funereal rites recall those of Pompey
on the Egyptian sea-beach, where the hands of an old Roman
6oldier lighted the funeral pyre of his general.
This crime cannot be ascribed to the government, but it
was the crime of the fanatical royalist opinions in the south.
It was the signal for other popular crimes, which dismayed
and dishonoured those provinces, and stained them with blood

262 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 33.
Massacres at Nismes.
for many months. At Nismes, a city which has preserved
something of the majesty of Rome in its monuments, and of
the Trasteverini* fierceness of character in its manners, the
civil rage redoubled by the fury of religion, equalled the bar
barities of 1793 at Avignon and Paris. The Verdets, bands of
cut-throats, organised under the profaned banner of religion
and of royalty, overran the country, the villages, and the
towns. Under the pretext of avenging upon the protestants
their complicity with the Bonapartists, they assassinated whole
families designated to their vengeance. After plundering and
burning the chateau of Vaquerville, and consuming alive the
inhabitants in the flames, around which they danced to the
cries of their victims, they tore from its tomb the body of a
young girl fifteen years of age, and trampling it under foot,
abandoned themselves to the most brutal profanations of the
body. Thousands of protestants, flying from their ruined
homes, wandered about the woods and mountains. Terror or
death chased them from asylum to asylum.
Thus hunted about they could not appear at the elections,
to claim their rights as citizens, and to implore the patrons of
their persecuted sect to defend them with the government.
IV
The King lamented the crimes committed in the name of
the zeal of his partizans in the provinces. He dared not act
rigorously against his friends, while he blushed to tolerate
murderers. He sent General Count de Lagarde to Nismes
— an old aide-de-camp and friend of the Duke of Riche
lieu, a man of sense, of virtue, and of feeling ; a sufficiently
good diplomatist also to reconcile with ability the royalist
sentiments which animated himself, with the impartial re-
establishment of order, and the protection of the victims who
were the objects of his mission.
The Count de Lagarde, though feeble in body, possessed a
* J Trasteverini. The supposed descendants ofthe ancient Romans, who
dwell on the right bank of the Tiber, whence their name.— Translator.

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 2C3
Intervention of the Duke d'Angouleme.
manly courage. He did not dissemble from himself the dan
gers of his mission. Though he had only a handful of troops
he did not hesitate, on arriving at Nismes, to arrest the chief
of the agitators and assassins, Trestaillon. On this act of
generous boldness, the fury of the Catholics and royalists broke
out in threats and risings. The Verdets and the fanaticised
volunteers assembled under the orders of Servan and Tru-
phemy, worthy avengers of their accomplice Trestaillon.
The troops were unequal in number to these confederates in
crime. The prefect, M. Darbaud de Jouque, a moderate but a firm
man, selected by M. Decazes to bridle the passions on these
banks of the Rhone, foresaw the insufficiency of the military
power of repression. He conjured the Duke d'Angouleme,
who was making a tour through the south, to visit Nismes,
that by his presence he might at once satisfy and intimidate
the delirium of the population. The Duke d'Angouleme, filled
with the wisdom of the King, and who never hesitated in the
performance of a duty, threw himself between the victims and
their executioners. He granted the prayers of the protestants,
and he pacified the catholics. He resisted with unshaken
firmness the entreaties of the clergy, of the women, and of the
influential protectors of Trestaillon, who dared to ask him for
the release of this criminal. " No," he replied, " I shall never
shield from the law assassins and incendiaries." He directed
the opening of the protestant churches, which had been closed
by the Reign of Terror, and departed, leaving to General
Lagarde the task of completing his work, and pacifying the
country. V.
But the prince had scarcely gone when the royalists re
sumed their audacity. The catholics exciting the populace in
the name of God and the King, surrounded the principal
protestant churches of Nismes during the performance of
divine worship. The doors were broken opeu, the faithful
dispersed, the minister dragged upon the pavement of the
anctuary, tho men knocked down, and the women disgraced

264 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 33,
Renewal of the popular fury at Nismes.
with ignominious punishment. General Lagarde hastened to
the spot at the head of a regiment, dashed alone on horseback
into the midst of the furious mob, attempting to rescue their
victims from them, and to bring them back by persuasion to
humanity and tolerance. Without consideration or pity for
this magnanimity of an unarmed officer, who risked his own
life to save the blood of the contending parties, the verdets and
the volunteers surrounded Lagarde, and assailed him with
hootings, insults, and stones. A national guard named Boivin,
seized with one hand the bridle of the general's horse, and
with the other presenting a pistol close to his breast,. fired and
wounded his chest with the bullet. Though hurt, almost mor
tally, Lagarde, by his mental energy kept his seat in the
saddle, and though threatened by an hundred weapons, he
yet, with a voice weakened by the blood that was pouring from
his wound, ordered the regiment to charge his assassins. The
soldiers dashed upon the mob and dispersed it, and the dying
general was borne off upon a Utter.
The Duke d'Angouleme when acquainted with these mas
sacres, returned to Nismes, and sent Trestaillon and his
accomplices before the tribunal. But justice, partial or in
timidated, failed in its duty; the magistracy of Nismes absolved
the culprits. The people, always enthusiastic in favour of
those who minister to its fury, carried Trestaillon in triumph.
Boivin, the general's assassin, who confessed and gloried in his
crime, was acquitted by the jury, under the pretence that he
only fired to defend himself. Royalism, religion, and justice
were all at the same time dishonoured by such judgments.

VI.

Toulouse imitated the agitations and the frenzy of Nismes,
but the civil furies were only prompted there by political
opinions. Religion in Languedoc did not so much add the
conflict of consciences to that of dynasties ; but the impetuosity
of the southern character equally impassioned there all the
political movements.

1816.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 265
General Ramel is appointed to.the command of Toulouse.
The King had conferred the command of Toulouse on
General Ramel, an old volunteer of 1792, who had risen from
rank to rank by his courage and his services. He had com
manded the guard of the council in 1797, was transported
after the 18th Fructidor with Pichegru and Carnot, of whom
he had been unjustly said to be an accomplice; he had escaped
from Guyana in a ship's long boat, and returned to France
during the last years of the Empire. He had been employed
by Napoleon in Spain, but was always suspected of an inclina
tion for the Bourbons. Since his exile with Pichegru, Ramel,
being a soldier of fortune, had refused to serve during the
hundred days. This reserve, so rare in an army so incon
stant, had won for Ramel the confidence of the royalists. He
exerted himself to restrain, on the banks of the Garonne, the
sanguinary animosity of the people against the fugitive remains
of Napoleon's army, disbanded and wandering about these
provinces. Some of these proscribed officers, obliged to con
ceal themselves from the resentment of the people, had met
with a generous asylum even in the house of the general.
This pity was imputed to him as a crime by the royalists ; the
name of treason was given to the magnanimity of the soldier.
The royalist volunteers, thirsting for the blood of the outlaws,
openly insulted Ramel, on which he announced his resolution
to brave and to disperse them.
On hearing this they assembled in groups in the public
squares, and openly concerted the death of the general. They
summoned the chiefs and bands of the country, to come to
them in the city; they formed sinister processions in the
streets, singing cynical songs, and vociferating sanguinary
cries against the man who alone restrained them. Amongst
these cries was that of " Long live the King," to cover sedition
with a pretence of fidelity.
On the evening of the 15 th August while these frantic
columns were dancing to these ferocious songs on the Place
des Carmes, a detachment chosen, instructed, and armed
beforehand for the purpose, separated itself suddenly from the
circle of the populace, of which it formed a part, sprang forward
with a bound towards the hotel of the general, surprised and

266 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 33.
Massacre of General Ramel.
disarmed the guard, crossed the threshold, mounted the stair
case, and was soon face to face with Ramel.
" What do you want ? " he asked them with a threatening
voice and unshaken visage. " To kill thee, and in thee to kill
an enemy of the King," replied one of the assassins taking aim
at Ramel's breast. A sentinel rushed forward and turned the
shot aside. Ramel drew his sword, determined to die as a
brave man, and not as a victim. But during this movement
which made the assassins draw back, another shot was fired
which lodged a ball in the general's body ; he sank upon the
landing-place of the staircase, beside the corpse of the sentinel
murdered in attempting to save him. His aides-de-camp and
officers rushed out of their rooms, sword in hand, and striding
over the two dying men, attacked the volunteers, and drove
them out upon the square. Ramel was carried to his bed, a
surgeon hastened to attend him, probed his wound, and found
it mortal. He announced this dismal news from the window
to the excited crowd who were roaring like wild beasts, hoping
thus to calm their rage by glutting it. " So much the better! "
replied their implacable voices ; " but we are going to finish
him : that will be more sure."
At these words the crowd demolished a triumphal arch, which
had been erected in the square for the recent reception of the
Duke d'Angouleme, and then made use of the beams and cross
bars as battering rams, to break down the iron railing of the
hotel. The doors gave way, the soldiers who guarded the
vestibule were sacrificed. The assassins ascended to the
chamber of the dying general. The surgeon who was dressing
his wound threw himself at their feet, and supplicated them to
spare his last moments, while his aides-de-camp covered his
bed with their bodies and their naked swords. Ramel, on the
contrary, stretched out his arms to his murderers, and entreated
them to finish their work, to shorten the agony that was tearing
his entrails. One of the assassins, adding derision to the
the crime, and sarcasm to the blow, struck him in the face with
a sabre cut. " 'Tis to obey the general," said the villain
smiling. The others imitated him successively, plunging their
bayonets into the body of Ramel, as they repeated the sangui-

1815] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 267
Indignities perpetrated upon the body.
nary raillery, until he was no longer anything but a shapeless
mass. The assassins disputed with each other the honour of
dyeing their arms in the blood of the general, as they defiled
with songs of triumph round his ensanguined couch.
The night alone, and the intoxication of the populace, put
an end to this scene, worthy of Saint Bartholomew and of the
days of September. The troops sent by Marshal Perignon,
governor of the province, only arrived in time to bury the
victim. Justice, as at Nismes, refused to avenge him. It
allowed public indignation against the murderers to evaporate
by its tardy proceedings; it acquitted the chiefs, and only
condemned the executioners to trifling penalties, under the
pretext that they had only struck a dead body !
VII.
Such was, for many months, the vengeance of the south
against parties suspected either of complicity with the soldiers
of the Emperor, or lukewarmness for the Bourbons, or of
dissent from the fanatical faith of the people. It will be seen
that vengeance was the passion of all parties in this climate
bordering on Spain and Italy, the lands of the passions and of
vengeance. The royalists of Paris, ashamed of, and embarrassed with
these criminal proceedings, tried rather to deny, than to excuse
or chastise them. One man of courage in the cause of hu
manity, M. d'Argenson, dared alone to re-echo the cries of so
many victims, from the tribune of the Chamber of Deputies.
On the word massacres being pronounced by the orator, the
Chamber, feigning a conventional incredulity, arose with fury
against him, and shut his mouth as to a calumniator ; no one was
permitted to say what every one knew. To denounce crime
was the greatest of all crimes. The impassioned party of the
Bourbons pushed their zeal for their cause, not to approbation,
but to silence, that tacit amnesty for the most odious crimes.

208 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 33
The twins of La Reole.

VIII.
Bordeaux was fermenting with the same passions as Mar
seilles, Nismes, Avignon, and Toulouse.
Two twin brothers, Caesar and Constantine Faucher, residing
in the little town of La Reole, had followed together the career
of arms until they had attained the rank of general. Guilty
of having hailed the return of Napoleon, as a souvenir of their
military lives, and of having exercised during the hundred
days, civil and military functions in the Gironde, they were
accused of maintaining a focus of Bonapartism in their country.
Surrounded for three days in their house by a detachment of
volunteers of Bordeaux and of Spanish soldiers, they had
refused to open their doors to the illegal summons of this
troop. This attitude redoubled against them the animosity of
the royalist party. Having been arrested and conducted to
Fort Ha, they were thrown into the dungeon allotted to the
most abject villains. The advocates of the Bordeaux bar, and
M. Ravez himself, being indifferent, or intimidated, refused to
defend them ; they therefore, defended one another, lending
to each other by turns before the court-martial the fraternal
assistance of their unskilful, but pathetic eloquence. They
were condemned to die.
A young niece, who comprised the whole of their family,
went through the city in vain, bedewing with pious tears the
thresholds of their accusers, of their enemies, and of their
judges. In vain did each of the twins attempt to separate his
cause from that of his fellow prisoner, to take upon himself the
whole of the crime, and dispute the scaffold with his brother.
Objects alike of the same hatred, they were equally involved in
the same sentence. They marched for a whole hour in the
midst of the multitude, half pitying, half insulting, and holding
each other by the hand, to La Chartreuse, their place of
execution. »As they stood erect before the firing party, they were
determined to receive, arm in arm, the stroke of their deliver
ance, united thus in death as they had been in life. Caesar

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 269'
Their death.
gave the word to fire, and tho two brothers fell together, struck
but not killed by the discharge. Constantine crawling upon his
mutilated hands and knees dragged himself towards his expiring
brother, to embrace him once more. He reclined his head on
his brother's breast, as on a dying pillow of peace and love, and
in that position received the second discharge in his forehead,
which at once released both souls from their misery.
We shall be silent on the names of their accusers and
judges, and have only mentioned those of the victims ; since
the latter have pity and history for an inheritance, the former
only remorse and contempt. IX.
Whilst private revenge and judicial vengeance were thus
staining with blood the south of France, the government was
disgusted with these political acts of justice and executions,
which must impart a sinister aspect to a reign of penitence and
of peace, and which were equally repugnant to the indulgent
character of Louis XVIII., the lofty soul of the Duke of
Richelieu, and to the naturally generous youth, of the favourite
— M. Decazes. But political passions seek to make govern
ments their accomplices, and when these governments will not
consent to be their instruments, they speedily make them
tlieir victims.
Great amnesties are the most necessary acts, and at the
same time the most difficult, to make acceptable to those parties
who have felt themselves oppressed. The pardon magnani
mously given by power, and energetically imposed upon the
conquerors, is the heroism of restorations. Louis XVIII., the
Duke of Richelieu, and M. Decazes wanted not this conviction,
but the necessary firmness against the thirst of reprisals which
was consuming the King's friends. The court, the saloons,
the journals, the tribune, and even the sacred churches and
pulpits resounded with accusations and imprecations against
the impunity afforded to the real or supposed conspirators of
the 20th of March. To the excessive indulgence of Louis
XVIII., and to his confidence in the men of the Empire, were

270 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 33.
Labedoyere.
attributed the fall of the throne, the exile of the Bourbons,
and the devastation and occupation of the country by the
foreign armies. Some demanded vengeance, others implored
for pledges ; but these pledges and this vengeance were equally
comprised in blood. Louis XVIII. wished to spare its effusion,
but he did not think he could succeed in moderating the resent
ment of his party, otherwise than by granting them a little.
He limited in his thoughts, to some illustrious culprits, the
small number of victims it was unavoidably necessary to sacrifice
to political justice. Not being desirous, however, of seizing
these culprits, he had given them time to fly or to conceal
themselves. But the unintelligent zeal of his partisans, and
the bitterness of party hatred, served him beyond his wishes.
Two of these great victims were brought to him against his
will, and their actual presence in the dungeons of Paris left
him no other choice between a clemency which would be an
accusation of weakness and treason against himself, and a
severity which would tarnish his reign in the cold and impartial
judgment of posterity.
These two men were Labedoyere and Marshal Ney.

X.

After the occupation of Paris, Labedoyere had followed the
army beyond the Loire. Nobody stood more in peril than he
did, for no one before him had given the signal and the ex
ample of a premeditated defection under arms. By drawino-
over his regiment he had drawn over the whole army. Napo
leon received from him his second throne, the Bourbons were
indebted to him for their second exile, and France owed him its
ruin. An assiduous attendant on Queen Hortense, and admitted
to the Emperor's table at Malmaison to the very last day. his
affectionate attachment to his family, and to a country which
could no longer offer him anything but a tomb, had prevented
him from following Napoleon to Rochefort and to St. Helena,
Instead of availing himself of a passport which Queen Hortense
had procured for him from Fouche, to fly from this burning

18I5.J OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 271
His journey to Paris.
soil, Labedoyere saw the Emperor depart for his exile, and then
joined the French army behind the Loire.
His friends, Generals Excelmans and Flahaut, whom he
rejoined at Riom, appointed him chief of the staff of the corps
d 'armee cantoned in that town. He had learned at Riom the
proscription of all the leading chiefs of public opinion during
the hundred-days. No one more than he should have put
faith in these warnings, but he neglected them. The giddiness
which leads a troubled conscience on to ruin had seized upon
him. His heart was in Paris, and the attractiou of that city
veiled from his eyes the danger of re-appearing there. We can
no otherwise explain the fatality which urged him thither.
Generals Excelmans and Flahaut combated in vain this aber
ration of mind. Labedoyere was but twenty-nine years old
an age at which dangers disappear before desires. He would
not listen to his friends ; but procuring a passport under a
borrowed name, and evading the friendly watchfulness of
Excelmans, he took his place in the public diligence from
Riom to Paris. XI.
The roads leading from the capital to the army were
narrowly watched at that period by the spies of the royal
government and of the allied powers. The slightest movement
of these troops might compromise the peace, and rend the
country in two. The relations of the generals with the centres
of public opinion in Paris, were of too important a nature not to
keep a strict eye upon them. Labedoyere, met in the car
riage one of those agents of government superintendence, who was
there either by accident or design, and who concealed, under the
apparent indifference of a traveller full of business, the mission
of observation with which he was charged. The martial, melan
choly, proud, and pensive features of the young general, indi
cated too much anxiety and mystery to escape the scruti
nising glance of a man whose profession it was to read the
index of the human countenance. The more we seek to veil
the features, the more they betray the secrets of the soul, and

272 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 33.
He falls in with -,, spy.
tempt curiosity to divine them. Even the closed lips and
silence of Labedoyere but the more attracted the attention of
his fellow traveller. He seemed to let out in spite of himself,
some involuntary expressions against the Bourbons and their
ministers, and some tears for the conquered country and the
proscribed army ; then, as if he had been seized with dread and
repentance at having thus betrayed himself, he entreated Labe
doyere to forget what he had heard, and feigned a hypocritical
royalism, leaving very transparent the dissimulation of this
second profession of faith. Labedoyere, however, continued
silent. The spy, then taking another course, related to his tra
velling companion the arrest of Lavalette, which was not yet
known in the army. Lavalette was dear to the heart, and an
accomplice in the cause of Labedoyere. The general could
not, therefore, dissemble his emotion or his paleness in listening
to the details of his friend's arrest. These symptoms betrayed
him, and he allowed the adroit spy to draw from him even his
name. This person, after some slight reproaches on the teme
rity which made Labedoyere brave the dangers of a return to
Paris, offered him his friendly services, and insinuated himself
so much into his confidence, that the general, on his arrival,
allowed his obliging protector to accompany him even to the
door of the asylum where he was going to take shelter. This
was the house of a person attached to Labedoyere, in one of
the faubourgs of the East-end. It was scarcely daybreak, and
the fugitive was to remain in his retreat until night, before
venturing into streets. Guarded by the vigilance of friendship,
concealed and barricaded in an upper room of an unsuspected
house, he threw himself upon his bed and fell asleep, with
anticipations of a happy meeting with his wife and child.
XII.
Meanwhile the spy, sure of his prey, had gone to offer him
to M. Decazes, then prefect of police. The Prussians, appri
sed by M. Decazes, surrounded the house with a battalion of
their troops. Labedoyere taken by surprise made no defence. He

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 273
He is arrested.
surrendered to the police agents, who conducted him to M>
Decazes. This magistrate put a hundred questions to him, the
answer to every one of which could only be an acknowledgment
of his guilt. Fouche who was still minister of police at that
period, seemed to lament the imprudence of this victim, who had
not been sought for by the government, and who thus came
himself to force into an act of rigour. The minister of war,
Gouvion St. Cyr, ordered a court martial. The vengeance of the
royalists, the favour of the Bonapartists, the recrimination of
the foreign masters of Paris, with the passions or the curiosity
of all, impressed upon this political and military trial the
solemnity of justice, the bitterness of anger, and the interest of
a drama. The journals and the saloons forestalled the sentence
by imprecations which called for blood, and which dishonoured
justice. Some females of the highest rank were implacable in
their remarks It would seem as if generosity is the com
panion of strength, and that the weaker the sex the more devoid it
is ofpity. Historyis bound to notice this, in order to stigmatise it.
High birth, great fortune, and literary education did not, in this
case, and in many others, preserve the females of the aristo
cracy of Paris, and of the court, from that thirst of vengeance
and that sanguinary joy which women of the most abject
condition exhibited under the reign of terror, at the doors of
the revolutionary tribunals. Elevation of rank by such base
ebullitions of feeling only renders more remarkable the vicious-
ness of the heart. There appeared in the language, in the
gestures, and in the eyes of some females of the elegant society
of Paris, as fiery a degree of anger, and as eager a thirst for
vengeance, as in the female auditors of the convention. The
political writers, as it always happens, favoured and fed these
vile passions by their diatribes ; hired flatterers of all opinions
sufficiently rich to pay for this complaisance of hatred and of
blood. XIII
The trial commenced on the 14th August. The room in
which it was held, filled from an early hour in the morning
by ladies of the court, and by foreign princes and generals, con-
3 R

274 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 33.
Labedoyere's trial.
querors whom the decency of victory should have kept away
from such a scene, resembled an amphitheatre prepared for a
combat of the circus. The appearance of Labedoyere was
awaited by some with that cruel impatience which longs for the
humiliation of an enemy, and rejoices beforehand in the hope
of being avenged ; by others with that curiosity which begins
with indifference, and ends in the presence of the victim by an
involuntary sensibility. There was in the accused sufficient
to excite at once this twofold feeling.
He was the most culpable and the most interesting of the
men of the hundred days. Born of an antient family, sur
rounded from his cradle with monarchical bigotry and fidelity-
deriving from his ancestors, from his paternal family, from the
family of his wife, and from that young wife herself, nothing
but counsels and pleas of fidelity to the Bourbons — compelled .
to struggle against his own nature and his conjugal love to
support his new opinions against the inclinations, the habits,
and the domestic relations of his former self — a criminal in
his own eyes, and in the eyes of all, but a criminal pardonable
from his youth, from his enthusiasm, and from his fanatical
love of glory, seduction, country, and even of ambition, a vice
ennobled in the soldier by the sacrifice of his hfe, — he could
not defend himself against his broken oath, his violated disci
pline, and the ruins of his country, displayed under his eyes,
and which spoke more trumpet-tongued than his accusers
themselves. But he was created lo create indulgence, excite
pardon, and draw forth tears. At length he appeared
XIV.
His costume, consisting of a green frockcoat, without epau
lettes or decoration, but which displayed the cut of a uniform,
indicated that he had done justice upon himself before he in
voked the indulgence of his country, in having laid aside the
insignia of his rank and the rewards of his valour. His form
set off by this simple prisoner's dress, was lofty, noble and
firm, like that of a soldier accustomed to stand erect under
fire. His features, though handsome and firm, displayed the

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 275
His examination.
gravity of suffering thought, and the pallidness occasioned by
sleepless nights and prison reflections. This personal grace
had contributed to his crime, by exposing him to the seduc
tions of the imperial court ladies, who had exhibited glory to
him under the features of defection. Their hero had become
their victim. In contemplating his martial beauty, it was felt
that he had been the hero of that conspiracy of aides-de-camp
and of females, who set up the popularity of their saloons, and
the intoxication of their enthusiasm at the price of defection
from the Bourbons.
The Court, more impartial than the auditory, was moved at
the aspect of the young warrior they were going to try accord
ing to law, but whom they could not help pitying from the
fellowship of camps. He was asked his name, his age, his
rank, and if he had received this rank from Louis XVIII.
He replied with a modest countenance, and a frankness
which accused itself, that he had, in fact, received from the
King the command of his regiment; that he had marched
from Chambery to Grenoble by the orders of General Marchand,
commandant of that place ; that he had drawn over his soldiers
with the cry of " Vive I'Empereur! " in the presence of Napo
leon ; that he had resisted the reproaches and reprehension
of General de Villier, his immediate chief, when trying to
recall him to duty and discipline; that he thought he had
seen at that moment the superior interest of the country
effacing the duty of the soldier; that he had no other vindi
cation to offer than the testimony of those who had witnessed
this fatal moment of his life, that the tribunal might judge not
the fault alone, but the seduction of the emotions and circum
stances which had preceded and accompanied that fault
These witnesses were accordingly called ; and their evidence,
in conformity with that of history, did not excuse, but it did
not aggravate the defection. The accent of these witnesses,
the chiefs, or companions in arms of the prisoner, evinced the
sorrow of men who lament the necessity of accusing, but who
cannot absolve. It was too true that the young colonel had
premeditated at Chambery the part of a deserter ; that he had
sounded the opinions of his officers, harangued his soldiers,

2~6 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 33.

Evidence of the witnesses.

substituted for the white flag the eagles displayed on the branch
of a willow tree, distributed the tri-coloured cockades which
had been found in a drum, or prepared for a moment of ex
plosion; that he had rejected the voice, the order, and the
supplications of his general, had marched to meet the Em
peror, embraced and brought back in triumph the man he was
sent to fight against, tempted from the foot of the ramparts
the regiments of Grenoble to insurrection, broke open with
his battalions the gates of the city, and had been the first to
give a fortified place, an army, a people, and a route to Paris,
to Napoleon.
XV.
His accusers had no occasion for further proof of a crime
thus avowed and attested. They confined themselves to de
manding, as an example to those armies which have the
privilege of arms, the double duty of patriotism and discipline,
and which, from the confidence of governments, carry the fate
of nations in their swords, that Labedoyere should suffer the
military condemnation already awarded to him by the public
conscience. They did not conceal either their grief or their
pity; they did not insult the man while accusing the soldier.
Labedoyere, after listening with resignation to these words
from the organ of the court-martial, arose and pronounced his
defence. His voice bore the accent of his conscience, a sad
conviction of his fault, a martial firmness in the face of those
consequences he was about to suffer, a patriotic and christian
reparation, voluntarily offered to the King, to his country, and
to his family, in expiation of the calamities, of the blood, and
of the tears which he had cost them. It was felt that his
hereditary traditions had resumed in these last moments their
empire over his opinions, that his young wife had insinuated
into his prison her adjurations to repentance, her hopes of
pardon, of life redeemed, and of long happiness still upon the
oarth ; and that the piety of his mother introduced into his
solitude had called upon him, in the name of death, for the
confession of his error, which conjugal tenderness had insinuated
to him in the name of love.

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 277
Labedoyere's defence.
He did not plead his innocence but his honour. " If my
life only was in question," said he, "I should not detain you;
to know how to die is my profession. But a wife the model of
every virtue, and a son in the cradle, might one day or other
accuse me for my silence. The name I leave them is their
inheritance, I ought to leave it to them unfortunate, it is true,
but free from stain. I may have been deceived as to the real
interests of France ; led astray by the souvenirs or honourable
illusions of camps, I may have mistaken chimeras for the
accents of my country. But the greatness of the sacrifices
which I made in tearing asunder the dearest ties of rank and
family prove, at least, that my conduct was not influenced by
any vile motive of personal interest. I deny nothing, but I
know that I have not conspired. When I received the com
mand of my regiment, I did not believe that the Emperor
could ever return to France : — gloomy presentiments, however,
weighed upon me at the moment I departed for Chambery.
This vague feeling of sadness arose from the impression which
public opinion had made upon me." Here he drew a political
picture of the first fall of Napoleon, of the general unpopularity
which drove him from France, of the enthusiasm justified by
the virtues of Louis XVIII. which smoothed the way for the
Bourbons to the throne ; he showed this happy commencement
of their reign being overcast by little and little, under the
faults of the King's government, and preparing the way
for an approaching return of the Emperor. He was
doubtless going to explain how this disaffection of the people
for the Bourbons had made him despair of the country, and
had turned his thoughts towards another public salvation in
the reign of Napoleon, abdicating despotism to become the
protecting genius of the nation and of liberty. He was inter
rupted, however, in this exposure of faults which in his mouth
might take the character of an accusation, instead of the
accent of an apology. This was not his intention ; he did not,
therefore, persist, but resumed his defence. "Yes," he said,
" I ought to confine myself to the confession of an error. I
confess with sorrow, in looking at my country, that my error
has been in mistaking the intentions of the King, but his re-

278 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 33.

Effect of Labedoyere's defence.

turn has entirely opened my eyes ! All the acts that have
emanated from his royal authority bear the stamp of excellence,
of wisdom, and of moderation. I see all promises fulfilled,
all guarantees consecrated, the constitution perfected, and
foreigners I hope will see a great nation of Frenchmen united
around their King Perhaps I am not destined to enjoy this
spectacle, but I have shed my blood for my country; and I
wish to persuade myself that my death, preceded by the
abjuration of my errors, may be useful to France, that my
memory will not be detested, and that when my son shall be
of an age to serve his country, no one will reproach him with
bearing my name."
The manly but evident emotion of his countenance, his
gesture, and his voice, completed the pathos of these words.
The most indifferent shed tears, and even his enemies could
not harden their hearts, though the passions of the day had
closed them to mercy.
XVI.
The historians of the Napoleon party have thought it neces
sary to misrepresent facts, to glorify the accomplices of the hun
dred-days. In the character they have drawn of Labedoyere they
imparted to it a colouring of Roman stoicism and implacable
defiance to the Bourbons, in order to present to the people in
him not a natural man, but a hero and a martyr of opposition.
They have passed over in silence these touching words of the
dying man ; but we restore them. Doubtless, it does not become
the accused to flatter his judge ; and even justice in the mouth
of a guilty prisoner becomes suspicious, when the eulogium is
addressed to a sovereign who holds in his breast both death
and pardon. In this point of view, Labedoyere, even if repen
tant, would perhaps have done better to keep silence on the
virtues and the magnanimity of the King. But if reflection
had, in fact, recalled his sensitive mind to a more equitable
appreciation of the character of Louis XVIII., and the part
he had to fill on returning from a second exile to restore a
monarchical and constitutional liberty; if the minister of

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 279
He is condemned to death.
religion introduced into the prison by the cares of the prisoner's
family, had inspired him, with a true feeling of his fault, the
avowal which might redeem it before God; if patriotism had
really convinced Labedoyere that the rallying of all French
men around a throne of necessity was the only safe-guard of
the country from the foreigners ; or, finally, if the tears of his
wife and the smiles of his child had drawn from him the pro
mise not to repel a pardon which they were soliciting for him,
and which might preserve for them a husband and a father,
should we reproach this young man for a conscientious peni
tence, for an act of religion or a sensibility of heart, and
travesty under a savage obstinacy what in him was nothing but
remorse, piety, or love ? No, history ought not to be a false
witness, arranging or disguising, according to the ends of
party, the last words of the dying. It should delineate the
man as he really was, and faithfully repeat to posterity that
which it heard. It is thus at once more touching and more
instructive ; it is also more sublime, because nature, in whatever
she says, has accents which the spirit of system will never
attain. XVII.
The words of Labedoyere, though fruitless for his acquittal,
were not lost upon the minds of the spectators. Whilst the
tribunal was deliberating they remained immovable, silent and
affected, riveted by anxious expectation to their places.
The accused was condemned to suffer the pain of death.
He had four-and-twenty hours to apply to a court of appeal.
This time was granted to the entreaties of his family, to enable
them to solicit the King's pardon, rather than from any sup
posed benefit to be derived from this proceeding, for he had con
fessed everything. A young orator of the Paris bar, then
already celebrated as a pohtical advocate, and still more cele
brated since in the tribune, M. Mauguin, defended this des
perate cause before the court of appeal. He moved pubhc
opinion, he touched the judges, but he could not convince them.
A second sentence of death confirmed the first. Labedoyere
still uncertain if the influence of his noble family might not

280 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 33.
Efforts of Labedoyere's family to save him.
obtain from the court perpetual imprisonment in place of a
tomb, fortified his soul in his cell with the resolution of the
soldier, the resignation of the christian, and the prayers ot
the dying : ready for life or for death, according as the heart,
forgiving or implacable, of the King should decide at this
moment on his fate. His mother and his wife besieged the
portals of the palace; but, trembling lest reasons of state
should prevail in the Council of the King against the natural
disposition and magnanimity of the princes of the royal house,
they collected 100,000 francs in gold, to bribe the gaoler of the
prison for the escape of the condemned. This offer which was
suspected by the government, was refused by the keeper of the
Abbaye. Nothing more than a desperate supplication remained
for the mother and wife of the prisoner. The most rigid orders
interdicted the guards of the palace from granting an entrance
to these suppliants, to spare the court from the embarrassment
of an implacable severity. These guards, however, were less
pitiless than the courtiers, they relaxed their stern vigilance
before these two weeping ladies. At the moment when Louis
XVIII., leaning upon the arms of his attendants, was descend
ing the grand staircase and crossing the vestibule where he
was to get into his carriage for his daily drive, the young wife
of the condemned, only nineteen years of age, her infant in
her arms, in deep mourning, with hair dishevelled, and eyes
streaming with tears of anguish, threw herself between the
prince and the steps of the carriage, and exclaimed in a voice
stifled with sobs : "Pardon! Pardon!" The King drew back,
at once moved and discontented ; but the fear of refusing a
satisfaction to his party, and of incurring those reproaches of
weakness with which he was besieged even in his own palace,
prevailed over the spectacle of this suppliant who asked him
for so many lives in one. He fortified himself with his im
passibility of countenance, and bowing with an apparent good
nature which contrasted with his rigour to the young -wife :
" Madam," said he, " I know your sentiments and those of
your family for my house, it is painful to me to refuse a pardon
to such faithful servants. If your husband had only offended
me, his pardon would be granted beforehand ; but I owe satis-

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 281
Final efforts of his mother.
faction to France, upon which he has drawn all the evils of
sedition and of war. My duty as a king ties up my hands.
I can do nothing more than pray for the soul of him whom
justice has condemned, and to offer my protection to you and
to his child." After these words the King was borne into his
carriage and the windows were closed.
The hapless wife fainted upon the track of the wheels.

XVIII.
Meanwhile Labedoyere, suspended between the despair of
leaving his wife a widow, his child an orphan, and his mother
inconsolable upon the earth, and the last glimmering of hope
which the relations of his family with the court allowed to
penetrate into his dungeon, employed his last hours in pouring
out his soul in letters to his mother, to his wife, and to the
King. He did not implore or beg for his life ; he acknowledged
his faults to disburden his conscience, that he might not carry
before the great judge of all, either the sophistry or the obsti
nacy of the man of party. He would not leave, through pride,
an example fatal to the loyalty of the soldier and the discipline
of his companions in arms. His fault had never been without
remorse and agitation. Misfortune had restored to him moral
light and peace. He had received with the piety of his family
the exhortations of a minister of the religion of his mother.
He sanctified his agony and his tears by prayer and by the
acceptance of his punishment. Every minute that passed
diminished the short space of time left for pardon. This was
the last day, and the evening was coming on without any noise
at the door of his prison announcing to him a message of mercy.
After the fainting of his young wife under the carriage
wheels of the King, his mother, stronger in her age and her
piety, had persisted in suplicating without hope. In deep
mourning, and covered with a thick veil, concealed, by the dis
obedient indulgence of some courtiers and some officers related to
her family, in the shadow of the vestibule, she waited in mortal
anxiety the return of the King, resolved to embrace his knees

282 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 33.
Labedoyere is taken to the place of execution.
when he should alight from the coach and to let herself be
trampled under his feet rather than give up, without a final
effort, the life of her son. But the King who anticipated
another heartrending scene, and wished to avoid it, had ordered
that every suppliant should be kept at a distance from him. A
rampart of valets, of guards, and of courtiers accordingly
surrounded him the moment he touched the threshold of his
palace, and kept the poor mother at a distance from him. Her
cries and sobs alone reached the ears of the King ; but he
stifled their echo in his heart, for fear of being deficient in
policy while yielding to nature.
Cruel and ill-understood duty of Kings, who struggle
against the instinct of feeling, that infallible voice of God him
self, and who think that the effect of vengeance upon men is
more efficacious than magnanimity ! Madame de Labedoyere
was carried back to the bosom of her decimated family, and
overwhelmed with inconsolable grief by those very princes
whose return they had longed and sighed for all their lives !
The triumph of their opinions became thus, by a cruel mockery
of fate, the anguish of their hearts and the mourning of
their house. XIX.
It was six o'clock in the evening : at the same moment, a
carriage, escorted by gendarmes, was bearing Labedoyere to
the place of execution, under a garden wall on that same plain
of Grenelle which a few days before he had contested with the
enemy. He was accompanied by a priest who recited to him
in a low voice the prayers in the pangs of death. On alight
ing from the coach he perceived amidst a little group of curious
persons attracted to the spot by the rumour of the execution, a
faithful friend, Csesar de Nervaux, whose visits had often con
soled him in the solitude of his prison. The presence of this
witness, a friend at an hour when all else upon earth are
enemies, and the consolation of dying in the presence of one
at least who would shed an honest tear to his memory, threw a
gleam of saddening joy over the countenance of Labedoyere.

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 283
His last moments,
He advanced towards M. de Nerveaux, and the two companions
in arms embraced each other affectionately. They exchanged
some rapid and interrupted words in a low voice. Historians
assert that M. de Nerveaux promised his dying friend to avenge
him : but vengeance, a sentiment altogether human, existed
no longer in the soul of Labedoyere, which was full of religious
hope and divine forgiveness. M. de Nervaux only promised
his friend to avenge him on oblivion, hy the fidelity and ten
derness of his recollection.
Labedoyere approaching the soldiers ordered for his exe
cution, and walking from the wall towards them, appeared
slowly to measure the number of steps which ought to separate
him from his executioners. He stopped a moment on the spot
which he seemed to have chosen for his death. Then, as if a
sudden thought had struck him, which called him back to life
to repair a lapse of memory, he returned hastily towards the
priest, whispered something in his ear, and embraced him ; after
which resumed his chosen place in front of the firing party,
awaiting the final blow. The officer who commanded the ve
terans approached, him in order to bandage his eyes, to spare
him, with the customary consideration at executions, the sen
sation of looking on the arms directed against him. But with
a gesture he declined this last act of kindness, needless to
those who like him have been familiar with death on so many
fields of battle. He threw his hat upon the ground, and
untying his cravat, begged one of the soldiers to accept it as a
present from a dying man, and keep it in memory of him-
The soldier, though moved, declined the gift as at variance
with the laws of military discipline. Labedoyere, however,
insisted, and the soldier at length replied : " Well, then, I will
take the handkerchief, but it shall be respectfully to cover
your face after death.''
XX.
Satisfied with this pious resolution of the soldier, Labedoyere
handed him the handkerchief, and advanced a few paces closer
to the firing party, until the muzzles of their muskets almost

284 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 33.
Labedoyere's death.
touched his breast. The emotion, not of fear, but of bidding
farewell, had deprived his features of their natural colour, but
not of their firm expression or intrepid look. He instinctively
turned his head towards the side where M. de Nervaux was
praying for him, as if to bestow his last look on friendly eyes.
Then baring his breast, he said with a firm voice to the
veterans, " Fire, my friends ! " The volley replied to his
voice, he staggered and fell, pierced with a number of balls.
The smoke of the discharge covered for a moment the soldiers
and the body. When this was dispelled by the breeze, the
priest who had attended the execution, approached the body
extended on the border of a ditch, knelt down, and steeping a
handkerchief in the warm blood flowing from the breast of the
deceased, which he had promised to take as a relic to Madame
Labedoyere, he retired.
Such was the end of this third martyr of the hundred-
days ; the first act of justice of the law, after the horrors ofthe
assassinations of the people. It was impossible to pardon him,
and still more impossible not to pity his fate. Neither interest
nor ambition had caused or debased his crime ; he had yielded to
that martial popularity, to that seduction, to that attraction of
youth towards the emperor. These feelings had shown him the
patriotism but not the defection, the glory but not the breach
of discipline of which he was guilty. The fanaticism of great
innovations had fascinated and incriminated his mind ; but the
fault had scarcely been committed when it began to goad him.
Before he had expiated it with his life, he had made an expia
tion of honour. God and men were satisfied, and could the
royal house of Bourbon require more ? No. The cruel joy it
thus afforded to its partisans was a concession to the enmity of
the royalists. Concessions of this nature do not appease
parties, they only heighten their thirst for more ; they sadden
a whole reign, they cramp the mind of a nation, they hght up
resentments which are never more extinguished.
Louis XVIII., by this inflexibility so contrary to his cha
racter, thought he took rank amongst statesmen. He sacri
ficed his heart to a vain policy. A disarmed King, conciliatory
and pacific, his strength and greatness consisted in clemency

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 285
Reviews ofthe policy ofthe Bourbons.
Napoleon had left him no other superiority to distinguish him
than magnanimity ; and that at least he ought to have made
his own. It was not by executions that he could outrival
battles ; in his soul alone he should have sought his genius.
The royalists in his court, and the foreigners in his capital,
imperiously demanded of him to avenge them and himself.
This is true. The blood of Labedoyere was offered up in
satisfaction to the King's party, and in reparation to Europe.
But if he made this sacrifice to his court, Louis XVIII was no
longer King ; and if he made it to the foreign powers, he was
no longer a Frenchman. In the first case, an instrument of
the animosity of some ; and in the second, an instrument of
the passion of others ; he lowered himself both at home and
abroad. He failed, moreover, in the part which he had wisely
marked out for himself in the solitude and meditation of his
long exile, as tt sovereign pacificator; for to pacify is to pardon.
When the object is to conciliate a people, it is not blood that
should be thrown amongst the parties, but indulgence and
mercy. The execution of Labedoyere was the first stain on
this reign, destined soon after to be tarnished and saddened by
others. The horizon so serene in 1814 began to be overcast.
Nothing was heard in the court and in the chambers but cries
of vengeance. Chance, at this time, also delivered into the
hands of the Bourbons the most illustrious of these victims..
Marshal Ney. It was the evil genius of the Restoration that
made them this fatal gift. In presenting them with culprits, it
tempted them with their blood. This blood, justly or unjustly
shed, must recoil upon their memory, and deprive them of the
noblest prestige which their race had derived from the revolu
tion, that of pardoned martyrdom, of proscribed innocence
restored, and of a magnanimous return to their native land.
Until this day they had been the visible Providence of
their country, arriving in the midst of its distresses, aver
ting its dismemberment, shielding it with their legitimacy
against Europe, reconciling it with all nations and with itself.
But from this day they descended from this sublime rank, to
the rank of princes enslaved to the passions of the moment,

286 RESTORATION OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. [BOOK 33.
Impolicy of rigour.
obedient to the resentments of their party, instead of mingling
all parties, even the guilty ones, in the impartiality of their
pardon, and forgetting that after intestine struggles, especially
when they are complicated by patriotic struggles against foreign
powers, and when errors are excused by illustrious exploits and
great glory, there is but one justice — amnesty.

BOOK THIRTY-FOURTH.
Trial of Lavalette — His condemnation and escape — Fury ofthe Chamber
at the news — Arrest of Marshal Ney — He is sent to Paris and brought
before a court martial — Noble conduct of Marshal Moncey — The
Court declares itself incompetent — He is brought before the Chamber
of Peers— Implacability of the ministers— Debates and divers inci
dents — Evidence of Bourmont — M. Bellart's address to the court for
the prosecution — Quibbles of the defence — Attitude of the Marshal —
His condemnation — Vindictive intrigues of the royalists — Magnani
mous intercession of Madame Hutchinson — Ney in his prison — His
last moments. His interview with his family — His execution — Re
action of public opinion in his favour and against the Bourbons.

There are times and seasons of a cruel tendency, even when
men are disposed to clemency. Vengeance is a vice so natural to
the human species that the triumphant opinions of the moment
seem spontaneously bent on avenging themselves at the very
time that governments are inclined to pardon. Those govern
ments which resist this base passion of the human heart, and
refuse this gratification to the anger of the times, merit well at
the hands of public morality and of posterity. Those, on the
contrary, which yield up victims to the pressure of circum
stances, tarnish themselves for ever by this severity, or this
complaisance ; and for the short and wretched popularity of the
moment they renounce that which alone is durable — the popu
larity of the human heart. They are accountable to history not
only for the blood they themselves demand, but also for that
which they grant to the resentment of their party. At this
day when opinions which were burning in 1815 have cooled
down — through the remoteness of the events which had inflamed
them — when the conquerors and the conquered. Louis XVIII.,
Charles X.. the Dauphin, the Duchess of Angouleme, the Duke

288 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 33.
Trial of Lavalette.
de Berry, the Richelieus, the Laines, the Talleyrands, the
Fouches, the Neys, the Labedoyeres, the Lavalettes, the most
insatiable members in their rage for justice of the Chambers
and the Senates of 1815, sleep together in the same dust, what
politician of that period would now arise with the same hatreds
and the same fanaticism which inflamed him then? What
friend of the Bourbons still living that would not redeem at
the price of his blood, the stains and reproaches of which these
executions have left the impress on the name, and on the
cause of the second restoration ? Those executions were not
merely rigours, they were faults ; and these faults not only re
tarded the reconciliation of the country with itself, its divisions
being envenomed and perpetuated by political punishments, but
they made of the Bourbons the interested executioners of the
national anger, instead of making them the arbitrators and
peacemakers of all parties. They did more, they clouded the
futurity of a reign whose destiny was to be accepted as an
asylum even by those who had struggled against it. They
mixed up with the griefs and the resentments of the relations,
the friends, and the partisans of the victims, the name of the
King and of his family, who could only recover and perpetuate
their legitimacy in the benedictions of the nation. All govern
ments fall ; but none are more sure of recovering themselves
than those which fall in their innocence, or in their mag
nanimity. II.
The trial of M. Lavalette immediately followed the execution
of Labedoyere. M. de Lavalette was an old aide-de-camp of Bonaparte in
Italy and Egypt, who had quitted the army for a civil govern
ment employ. Under the Empire he was director of the post-
office, a confidential place, during a reign when the most secret
transactions of the citizens were spied into, as symptoms of
public opinions and elements of government. It will be re
membered that on the morning of the 20th March, during
the interregnum at Paris, M. de Lavalette had gone to
take possession of the administration of the post-office, and

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 289
Attempts to save Lavalette.
had sent couriers to the Emperor, and to the departments,
announcing the retreat of the King, and the pretended
enthusiasm of the capital. After the abdication of Napo
leon and the dispersion of his partisans, M. de Lavalette
had been arrested. Though indirectly warned beforehand, by
a voluntary indiscretion of the numerous friends he had in the
King's cabinet, he had not availed himself of the information.
The police were obliged, though with reluctance, to obey the
court. M. Pasquier, then minister of justice, with the inten
tion of giving time to the prisoner, and to soften by this delay
the irritation against him, had withdrawn Lavalette from trial
by court martial, and left him, intentionally forgotten, in his
prison, to await the assembly of the civil jury, a tribunal still
more harsh and arbitrary. They would have gladly forgotten
him altogether, but the chamber had scarcely re-assembled
when the name of M. de Lavalette excited the enthusiastic
members of this body so fervent in their zeal, who loudly de
manded those deeds of vengeance which they called acts of
justice. After two months suspense, Lavalette was condemned
to death. Being a man much liked and inoffensive, he inspired with a
generous interest those even who had not shared in his fault.
The Princess de Vaudemont, a lady of influence over the court
and political parties, by her connections with both sides — M
de Vitrolles, a man of ardent zeal, but of a merciful disposition
to the vanquished — M. de Talleyrand — Fouche — M. Decazes,
himself, a rigorous minister but an indulgent man — were desi
rous of saving the condemned from the execution of a sentence
which had not even the excuse of an important victim. M.
Pasquier, who was no longer minister at the time of trial, had
done himself honour by a courageous deposition in favour of
the accused. The Duke de Richelieu, by the simple impulse
of Ms nature, revolted against this execution for the crime, not
of treason, but of the fidelity of an old friend to his general.
He solicited from Louis XVIII. the pardon of Lavalette ; but
though the King was desirous of indulgence he did not dare to
grant it. Urged on between the raging anger of the assembly
and the underhand vengeance of his court, " Lavalette is

200 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 34.
Marmont's attempts to save Lavalette.
guilty,'' he replied to M. de Richelieu, " the Chamber de
mands examples ; I incline to pardon, and I shall not refuse
you the life of Lavalette ; but rest assured that the day following
that on which they hear you have obtained this act from me,
you will be defeated by the majority, and I shall be compelled
to sacrifice yourself." M. Decazes, who had more influence
with the King, interceded also for pardon : " Find some means
of appeasing the Assembly, and stopping the voiciferations of
its ringleaders,'' replied the King, " and you shall have the
pardon." " I can only see one," said M. Decazes, " which is
that the Duchess d'Angouleme, so influential with the royalists
of the Assembly, should herself intercede with your majesty,
and thus prevent the murmurs of her own party,"
The Duchess d'Angouleme being solicited to this inter
cession by the Duke de Richelieu, was moved and shed tears
She promised to intercede ; she remembered the Temph
Madame de Lavalette was informed of this favourable dis
position of the princess. Marshal Marmont, who commanded
the palace-guard, always eager to redeem his faults towards the
Emperor by services to his old companions-inarms, undertook
to conduct the wife of Lavalette into the palace, in violation of
all the orders which would yield before his rank. But while
this generous plot was concocting between the King, the
ministers, Marmont, and the princess herself, some evil coun
sellers got round the Duchess d'Angouleme, induced her to
repent of her virtuous intentions, and closed her heart against
all magnanimity, in the name of those reasons of state which
are the ordinary sophisms of the irritated passions. When
Marmont appeared, with the weeping young wife of the con
demned victim leaning on his arm, the Duchess turned away
her eyes from the suppliant, and casting an angry look on the
marshal disappeared, like the last deceitful hope of the dying.
There now remained only one resource, the escape of the
prisoner. The Princess de Vaudemont superintended all the
preparations for the enterprise, andit may fairly be supposed that
the ministers, disposed as they themselves were to clemency,
and also being friends of the princess, closed their eyes at least
to a plot which so well answered their own wishes

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 291
Escape of Lavalette.
However this may be, Madame de Lavalette, accompanied by
her children, was admitted into the prison the evening before
the day fixed for the execution, as if to receive the last farewell
of her husband. She dressed him up in her own clothes, and
at the hour of shutting up the cells for the night, after the cus
tomary visits to the prisoners, Lavalette, thus disguised, and his
features hidden by a thick veil, under which he affected to be
sobbing bitterly, passed unrecognised through the ranks of the
jailors, whose vigilance was lulled by their pity. He was
received by some friends at the door, who conducted him
to the office of foreign affairs, where the Duke de Richelieu
had prepared an asylum for him with one of the principal
officers of his department. Lavalette thus protected by those
very persons who were directing a search to be made for him,
awaited in safety till the commotion excited by his escape should
have subsided. He was finally dressed in the English uniform
by some young English officers, — Mr. Churchill, heir to one of
the most historical names of his country, and Sir Robert Wilson,
who personally conducted him to the frontier.
Exclamations of rage broke from the Chamber of Deputies
at the news of Lavalette's escape. We recall them here as a
reproach to the spirit of party, but for the honour of human
nature we shall not name those who uttered them. It might
have been supposed that the safety of the monarchy depended
on the head of this prisoner, and the widowhood of his wife.
The resentment of disappointed anger growled from that day
forward against the ministers, and even against the King him
self. It was no longer ministers the assembly wanted, but
lictors. These murmurs threw a damp on the indulgence of
the King's heart, and on the moderation of the Council of
Ministers. They seemed to think that a great sacrifice was
necessary to appease the irritations of the Chamber. A vic
tim was now only required. Unlucky chance threw one into
their hands, This was Marshal Ney.
III.
After the abdication of the Emperor, Marshal Ney had
quitted Paris under an assumed name, and had proceeded

292 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 34.

Marshal Ney's exile.

towards Switzerland. Still more oppressed by anxiety of mind
than by the enmity of the Bourbons, he had exhibited as much
indecision in his flight as in his fault. The evil genius which
had taken possession of him at Lons-le-Saulnier, which had
since followed him to Lille, to Waterloo, and to the Chamber
of Peers, still beset him from asylum to asylum. It was not
death he feared to meet wherever he went but the reprobation
of his weakness The army which had retired behind the Loire
still offered him an honourable and safe retreat ; but the army
was Bonapartist, and he had execrated Bonaparte in replying
to Labedoyere in the discussions of the Chamber of Peers-
Thus pursued by the dislike of the army, by the enmity of the
foreign powers, and by the vengeance of the royalists, he had
now no refuge but in death ; and while he fled from it he
seemed to seek it.
Having arrived at Lyons, and about to cross the Alps, he
was apprehensive, though furnished with a passport from
Count de Bubna, general of the Austrian army, of falling into
the hands of his enemies on entering Switzerland. He re
turned, therefore, towards the interior, and passed some days>
without being recognised at the baths of St. Amand, in the
department of the Loire. On learning at this place that his
name appeared at the head of the proscription list, he changed
it a second time, and took refuge in the mountains of Auvergne,
at the chateau of Bessonis, the residence of a family related to
his wife. The solitude of this place, the discretion of his
hosts, and the name of a noble family of Auvergne under
which he concealed his own from the curiosity of the servants,
together with the vicinity of the army of the Loire which pre
served the country from the prying of the police, all con
tributed to his concealment. Several weeks passed over in
this asylum, when one of those acts of imprudence which are
the snares of security, excited a suspicion in the neighbouring
town of Aurillac that some illustrious outlaw had taken shelter
in the chateau of Bessonis.

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 293
His arrest.

IV.
The Marshal had formerly received, as a present from
Napoleon, a Turkish sabre, one of the Egyptian spoils, the
peculiar form and rich decoration of which attracted every eye.
This weapon always accompanied him as a souvenir and a wit
ness of his glory. Having one day exhibited it to the admira
tion of his hosts, he forgot to take it back to his chamber, and
left it carelessly in the drawing-room. A country neighbour
on paying a visit at the chateau perceived the weapon, and was
struck by its magnificence. Without any idea of doing mis
chief he spoke of the Turkish sabre he had seen a few days
after in the town of Aurillac, and described it minutely. One
of the idlers who listened to him, and who had a taste for, and
a knowledge of handsome arms, exclaimed that there were
only two such sabres in the world, those of Murat and of
Marshal Ney. This conversation awoke conjectures in some
who were present, which at length reached the ears of the
prefect. This functionary being acquainted with the relation
ship between the family of Bessonis and that of Ney, no
longer entertained any doubt that the unknown guest of the
chateau was the marshal himself. He therefore sent a detach
ment of gendarmes, under the command of an officer, to
surprise the chateau at day-break, and to bring away the sus
pected stranger. Governments, whatever may be their charac
ter, always find men ready to yield them up their prey.
Hatred is the feeling that most zealously serves both princes
and parties. If the prefect of Aurillac had had more zeal for
the honour of the King than for the anger of the royalists, he
would have given the outlaw time to escape his search. What,
in fact, could Ney do against the Bourbons ? He was ruined
with all parties. His flight connived at by M. Locard, the
prefect would but save a man; his arrest embarrassed and tar
nished a whole reign : but these reflections did not occur to
the prefect of Aurillac. At break of day the gendarmes sur
rounded the chateau ; the officer commanding the detachment
and eighteen men of his brigade entered the court-yard. Tha

294 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 34.

Ney is brought before a court-martial.

tramping of the horses, the noise of arms, and the alarm of
the people of the house awoke the marshal. He could still
however fly, by stealing into the woods through the gardens,
but he was weary of opposing his destiny : he appeared at the
window, and addressing the commandant of the gendarmes he
loudly declared who he was, ordered the doors to be opened,
and stepping from his chamber said to the gendarmes : "lam
Michael Ney," and accompanied them without resistance to
Aurillac. V.
He was there treated with respect by the prefect. His
guards were withdrawn, he was only required to give his word
not to escape, and he was sent to Paris under the superinten
dence of two officers. In passing through the cantonments of
the army of the Loire, he might have allowed himself to be
carried off by his soldiers. General Excelmans offered to de
liver him, but he refused, that he might not forfeit his word.
He arrived at Paris at the very moment when his companion
in arms and defection, Labedoyere, was falling under the balls
of his executioners.
After a long examination by M. Decazes, he was brought
to a court-martial, composed of the marshals and generals who
had been witnesses of his valour but were free from his faults.
These were Massena, Moncey, Augereau, and Mortier. Moncey
refused to sit in judgment on his old companion in glory. His
letter to the King was in style and diction a model of civic
courage, of respectful firmness, and loftiness of soul : " I do
not know, I do not wish to know," said Moncey to the King,
" if Ney is innocent or guilty ; your justice and the equity of
his judges will answer for it to posterity, which weighs in the
same balance both kings and subjects. Ah ! Sire, if your
councillors were only desirous of good they would tell you
that the scaffold never made friends for a cause. Is it the
allies who require that France should immolate her most illustri
ous citizens ? What, I ! I pronounce upon the fate of Mar
shal Ney! Where then were his accusers while he was sig
nalising himself on so many fields of battle ? If Russia and

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 295
Moncey refuses to sit in judgment on Ney.
the Coalition cannot pardon the Prince of Moskowa, can
France ever forget the hero of the Beresina ? And should I
condemn to death him to whom so many Frenchmen owe their
lives, so many families their sons, tlieir husbands, their fathers ?
No, Sire, if I am not permitted to save my country, or my life,
I shall at least preserve my honour ! Who amongst us will
not be compelled to regret that we could not find death at
Waterloo ? Your Majesty will excuse the frankness of an old
soldier, who, remote from intrigue, has never known anything
but his profession and his country ; and who ventures to think
that the same voice which blamed the wars of Spain and of
Russia might also speak the language of truth to the best of
kings. I am not unconscious that with any other monarch my
proceeding would be dangerous, but in descending to the tomb
I may exclaim with one of your illustrious ancestors : ' All is
lost except honour!' and then I shall die content!"
VI.
Whilst an old marshal was thus giving vent to accents of
independence and delicacy of feeling, so rare amongst those
whose profession forbids them to tamper with obedience, a man
who had but lately been a tribune of liberty, and who had
subsequently compounded with tyrrany on the 20th of March,
— Benjamin Constant, wrote confidential letters to M. Decazes,
with a view of inspiring the Councils of the King with a
spirit of indulgence. But public opinion was at that moment
so implacable against Marshal Ney, that when invoking an
amnesty for all the guilty, Benjamin Constant himself seemed
to abandon the most illustrious, and the most culpable of all,
the hero of the Beresina. It is true that at the period when
these letters were written to save the life of Labedoyere, Mar
shal Ney was not yet arrested, or at least his arrest was not
known. In giving up this victim to vengeance, Benjamin
Constant thought he was only giving up a name ; his letters,
however, too well express the agitation and debasement of jus
tice which prevailed at the moment not to constitute a memorial
of history.

296 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 34.
Benjamin Constant's letter to M. Decazes.
"M. de Labedoyere," said Benjamin Constant in these
letters, " is very guilty ; buthe has been brought to this by
the party which for the last fifteen months has defeated all the
intentions of the King, and keeps the country in a state of
perpetual crisis.

" When the King returned last year all hearts were with
him. The army itself would have been easily gained, and this
the King would have accomplished ; but projects of subversion
circulated around him. These were taken for the secret inten
tions of the King ; and when a man has offered himself, a
shelter has been seen against persecution, and a guarantee for
interests.

" I affirm that this severity is not the means of safety that
circumstances require ; that if severity be desirable one head
alone should fall, and that M. de Labedoyere, how guilty so
ever he may be, is not the victim to strike, if one be absolutely
necessary. I should never forgive myself, I who have not that
fatal mission, were I to designate a victim, and I feel that I
cannot even write the words which might indicate him ; but
M. de Labedoyere might allege hastiness, non-premeditation,
frankness, youth — I stay my pen, for my hand trembles while
I think that this insinuation is already too clear, and that I
ought not, while pleading for the life of one, recommend the
death of another. I return to M. de Labedoyere.
" The fact is inexcusable. M. de Labedoyere cannot but
be condemned. He will be condemned ; I will even say that
he ought to be. He has spoken to me of his defence.
" Legally no defence can avail him.
******
"I think that this plain of Grenelle, not having been
stained with the blood of any one during the three months of
Bonaparte's return, it would be fortunate that neither should
it be under the King. Finally, I am of opinion that if a vic
tim be necessary this is not the proper one "

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 297
Ney's prison.
The author of these letters was destined bitterly to bewail
these concessions, which were only verbal at the moment they
were written, but which became so many excuses for rigour
when the marshal had fallen into the hands of his enemies.
Even to preserve the life of one, a statesman should never give
up that of another to the cruel rage of party.
VII.
The courage of Marshal Moncey was punished as a serious
crime against discipline. He was exiled by the government to
the castle of Ham, He entered it sadly for disobeying, but
left it happy at having disobeyed.
Meanwhile Ney was languishing in the dungeons of the
Conciergerie, which had witnessed the agonies of the Royalists,
of the Girondists, and of Queen Marie-Antoinette, during the
proscriptions of the reign of terror. His wife and children,
whom he had embraced for a moment at some leagues distance
from Paris, on coming to his last abode, could no longer gain
admittance to him. He was put into one of those vaulted
cells, gloomy and damp, which are constructed in the founda
tions of the building, and which only receive light and air
through little windows half-opening on a narrow yard. This
light, which was insufficient to enable him to read, seemed a
preparation for that eternal night of which he felt the approach.
He had no other occupation than his thoughts, and no other
amusement than his flute. From this he drew forth airs some
times sad as his soul, sometimes gay as the memory of his
childhood, and which by their pastoral and serene accent con
trasted with the gloom of his dungeon and the anguish of his
actual sufferings.
One of his companions in captivity, separated from him by
the thickness of the walls, Lavalette, listened, without being
able to reply, to the melancholy flute of the hero. Lavalette
has related that after his escape, and after the execution of the
marshal, he accidentally heard one day, in his exile beyond the
Rhine, one of the airs which the prisoner played in his dun
geon, and that these notes resounded in a rural fete in Ger-

298 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 34.
The court-martial declares itself incompetent

many, bringing to his recollection the same air formerly
modulated by the unfortunatp captive in his gloomy cell, op
pressed his heart and. melted him to tears. If man would
measure the suffering of his fellow being by what he himself
has suffered, he might treat with rigour, but he would not tor
ture : he is cruel only because he does not sufficiently reflect.
The assembling of the court-martial, and the collecting in
Paris of the witnesses necessary for the trial, made the pri
soner languish for three whole months in the Conciergerie.
At length he was brought before the tribunal of his peers.
Some timid considerations of legal advisers had led him to the
resolution of declining this trial of a military man by military
men, and demanding a political trial before the Chamber of
Peers. The only benefit he could expect from this refusal of a
trial by his companions in arms was delay ; but this delay ac
corded to his demand was at the expense of his glory without
securing his life. The marshals and the generals might recol
lect his exploits ; the peers only knew his crime. His destiny,
from the day that he had rejected the counsel of honour at
Lons-le-Saulnier, was to vacillate between all the most fatal
suggestions, from remorse to relapse, and from imprudence to
weakness. To give up his life nobly was the only way to
honour, or even to save it. The chicanery of lawyers is un
worthy of the soldier. VIII.
The court-martial, happy to relieve itself from the re
sponsibility of his life or death, declared itself incompetent.
The Marshal and his counsel triumphed, the people and the
army were astonished, the court and the government were irri
tated. The ministers to hasten the catastrophe, did not wait
a single day; they transferred the trial to the Chamber of
Peers. The clamours of the royalists, who reproached the
King for every hour of life spared to the Marshal, as a weak
ness and a complicity of treason, excited even the soul of M. de
Richelieu. He assumed, in speaking before the Chamber of
Peers, the tone of an impatient accuser, instead of the accent

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 299
The trial is transferred to the Chamber of Peers.
of the afflicted but impassable minister. It was no longer the
man but the enemy who spoke. This was his only fault^-the
fault of the time rather than of his character. He seemed to
demand not justice but condemnation, and to require it not
only in the name of the country but in that of the foreigner.
" It is not in the name of the King alone," said M. de
Richelieu, " that we perform this duty ; it is in the name of
France for a long time indignant, and now stupified with aston
ishment ; it is in the name of Europe that we conjure, and at
the same time require you to try Marshal Ney. We venture to
say that the Chamber of Peers owes to the world a striking re
paration — it must be a prompt one, for it is of consequence to
allay the indignation which is rising on every side. You will
not suffer too long an impunity to engender fresh disasters.
The King's ministers are compelled to inform you that this de
cision of the court-martial has become a triumph for the
factious ; it is of consequence that their joy should be short
lived that it may not be fatal.
The whole ministry had signed these written words of the
Duke de Richelieu, in order that the parliamentary act should
have the character of a diplomatic act, and of a declaration of
the government. The sole exculpation, if there be any for such
language, was in this excitement of public opinion to which the
minister alluded. But this excitement of royalist opinion was
only the anger and the misfortune of the moment. Was it the
duty of a government to become its interpreter and executioner ?
IX.
The Chamber of Peers obeyed the impulse of the ministers.
with the celerity of a body which apprehends that it may be
robbed of the gratification of its resentment. In three days it
constituted itself into a judicial court, or rather a state tribunal,
which at the same time makes and awards its own penalties.
The trial commenced on the 21st November. The galleries
were filled with spectators, nearly all enemies, and several
foreigners, amongst whom were remarked with pain, Prince
Metternich and the members of the diplomatic body, invidious

300 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 34.
Ney's appearance before his Judges.
observers of a course to which they were parties. The Duke of
Wellington from a sense of propriety absented himself. The
battle field is the tribunal of warriors. The trial had been de
cided between Marshal Ney and the English general at Water
loo. Wellington would have tarnished his character and dis
honoured his victory in looking on the pangs of an adversary
about to be executed by his own country. It was nine o'clock
in the morning.
The evening before the accused had been transferred from
the Conciergerie to the Luxembourg, with an escort and a pre
cipitation which evinced the uneasiness of the government with
respect to a rescue, or a rising of the people. A corps d'armee
was stationed around the palace, which was changed into a
citadel. A lower room transformed into a prison, and furnished
with iron window bars, bolts, and wicket, served as a dungeon
for the prisoner. Fie could contemplate from the window, the
gardens of this palace of the Senate and the Peerage, where
but a short time before he had raised his voice in self-accusation
by acknowledging the disasters of Napoleon.
At eleven o'clock he was summoned to appear before his
judges. He had laid aside his uniform and put on a blue coat
without embroidery, a sign of mourning, or of modesty, be
coming an accused before his country. Four grenadier dragoons
of the royal guard marched by his side. A murmur of emotion,
of curiosity, and of pity, ran through the hall and the galleries
on his appearance. His attitude was in melancholy keeping
with his situation. His countenance, pale after four months
abode in the gloom of a prison, was calm and sad, and evinced
some emotion. His lofty forehead indicated the remorse and
presentiments revolving in his mind. His eyes looked proudly
on his destiny. His closed lips restrained the impression of
his soul. Nothing in his appearance either supplicated or defied
his judges; it was felt that he was going to plead rather in ex
cuse than justification of his conduct, and that he gave himself
up rather to the good feeling than the conscience of his old
colleagues. He cast a glance round the benches occupied by
his judges, seeking amongst those well-known countenances
some trace of friendship, of sorrow, or of hope. But all eyes

1815 ] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 301
Ney's defence.
were cast down not to encounter his. He bowed to the assembly,
and holding out his hand familiarly to tho most eloquent of his
defenders, M. Dupin, he sat down amongst his legal advisers.
The act of accusation was read in the name of the ministers.
This was a history of the indecision, the weakness, and the de
fection of the Marshal, such as we have recounted in the course
of this work. There was no occasion to distort or to colour the
facts to prove the military crime. Ney listened to it without
protesting by word or gesture When the reading was termi
nated, the Chancellor Dambray addressed some sad but en
couraging words to the accused. "It is not here," he said,
" that you need apprehend meeting with any prejudice, male
volence, or partiality. We have rather to be on our guard
against old recollections, and the interest inspired by a warrior
so long the glory of his country, and whom we were happy to
reckon in the number of our colleagues. You may speak without
fear." The accused, yielding a second time to the counsels of his
advocates permitted them to contest in a paltry spirit the forms
of procedure, and to demand time by pleading the necessity of
a preliminary law in a court where he should have only invoked
equity and conscience. The Chamber of Peers rejected these
demands, equally unworthy of the cause and the man. The
dignity of the warrior suffered by the pertinacity of his counsel ;
the interest even which his position excited was lowered by it.
In such conjunctures admiration of the accused forms part of
the commiseration with which he inspires his judges and public
opinion. X.
The sitting, which closed after these discussions, was ad
journed to the 23rd November, when the spectacle of the first
was renewed. The counsel of the accused accumulated other
formal objections against immediate judgment. M. Dupin him
self, a consummate orator of the bar, did not seem to recollect
that he was defending the character even more than the Ufe of
his client. He attached and lowered himself to these legal
sophisms, which embarrass the mind witliout moving the soul ;

302 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 34.

Nature of Ney's defence.

while the attorney general Bellart, a man accustomed by his pro
fession to see a victim in every accused, replied more as a plea
der than a magistrate ; the one desirous of absolving from all,
the other of incriminating everything in the man whom they
respectively defended, or prosecuted. A fatal struggle in all
state trials, in which the accuser's object should be the life, and
the defender's the memory of the accused.
The Chamber of Peers, weary of this litigation, only granted
a few days to the Marshal's counsel to prepare his defence.
The trial was continued on the 4th December ; but on the
opening of this sitting the Marshal, as ill advised as he had been
in the preceding ones, attempted to screen himself from the ac
cusation by the capitulation of Paris, and the treaty of the 20th
November, which had been the result of it. This desperate
plea, which might have been urged before a tribuual of the
Coalition, was devoid of force, or application in a national
court. The capitulation of Paris, a purely military convention
between the allied generals and the chiefs of the army of Paris,
evidently only bound the allies, and only protected the partisans
of Bonaparte against reprisals by the foreign armies. It left
to the actual, and every future government of France, all the
rights, just or unjust, of prosecution or clemency, which belong
to the governments of an independent country. The inter
jection of such a plea, therefore, was equally injudicious in point
of ability, as inadmissable in point of right. It seemed to con
vey a challenge of independence to the national government,
and to place the accused as if in an ancient asylum under
guarantee, not of his peers and his countrymen, but of foreign
ers. The asylum was not worthy of one of the first soldiers
of France. The court was not stopped by these objections, but
proceeded to interrogate the accused.
His answers were more noble than his defence ; for his soul
spoke through his own mouth, and not by the subterfuges of
his lawyers. He confessed, with an accent of remorse, that he
had seen the King, and that he spoke of the enterprise of Napoleon
as being so mad that he deserved, if taken, to be brought back in
an iron cage ; but he swore that he had not spoken of bringing
him back himself in that instrument of punishment. That he

1S15.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 303
Witnesses agaiust Ney.
had left Paris with loyal intentions of serving the King ; that
on arriving at Besangon, and seeing the excitement of the
troops, he had been assured that Napoleon's enterprise was con
certed with Austria and England ; that he had then dreaded
being the instigator of a civil war ; that he had pressed in good
faith the King's hand in his own, on taking leave of his majesty ;
that the sentiments of respect manifested by him at that
moment, had sprung from his heart, that he had not dissembled
in the least ; that he had perhaps been misled, but had never
acted with perfidy.
The accent of truth, and regret for outraged loyalty, shone
forth in his answers. When the defection at Lons-le-Saul-
nier came to be investigated his emotion redoubled, and he
unbosomed himself with still greater frankness. " I was con
fused," he said, " I wanted good advice and I found none. I
summoned Generals Lecourbe and Bourmont to aid me with
their counsel and support, but got nothing from them. One
colonel alone evinced a noble resistance to my orders, this was
M. Dubalen ; I owe him this praise, he alone gave in his
resignation." He concluded amidst general emotion, and the witnesses
appeared. The Duke de Duras and the Prince de Poix, who
had witnessed the Marshal's interview with the King, both
attested that he had promised to bring back Bonaparte in an
iron cage. The accused feebly denied this circumstance, which
appeared to weigh most heavily on his mind : " I think," he
said, " my remark was that Bonaparte deserved to be im
prisoned in an iron cage. It may be, however, that this threat
may have escaped me, in the confusion these events and the
presence of the King threw me into. I have no reason to
throw any doubt on the assertion of the Duke de Duras." He
triumphantly refuted the accusation of having received at
Besangon a pecuniary bribe for his treachery to the King.
Another witness, M. de Faverney, without making any
charge against the accused, uttered an eulogium on the fidelity
of General Lecourbe which contrasted with the conduct of the
Marshal. Lecourbe had died since the 20th March.
At last General Bourmont appeared. He who had been

304 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 34.
General Bourmont.
the most intimate with the prisoner was his bitterest accuser.
Having commanded under the Marshal at Lons-le-Saulnier,
Bourmont had alone witnessed all the mental anguish and
temptations of his chief ; and was, so to speak, a personifica
tion of the Marshal's conscience before his judges. But was
the conscience of this accuser himself free from reproach, im
partial and uninfluenced by ambition? Did he not accuse
another to exonerate himself ? This is the question the spec
tators of the scene put to themselves. It was about to be
answered by the subsequent proceedings.
Bourmont, a young and gallant combatant in the wars of La
Vendee, had given early proofs of his bravery and talents against
the armies of the republic. As a soldier of the civil war he
had passed after the pacification of La Vendee into the ranks of
Napoleon's army. The Emperor had rapidly promoted him
from rank to rank, as if to show the royalist armies that military
merit constituted as wide afield to brave soldiers in the camps
of the nation as in the forests of the Bocage. The Bourbons,
on their return, had found Bourmont in the army list of Napo
leon. His royalist opinions and his military services in the
new army had constituted for him a double title to the favour
of these princes. His ambition had everything to expect either
from their gratitude as a Vendean, or from their justice as a
soldier of France.

XI.
Such was the position of Bourmont when the debarkation
of Napoleon, the taking of Grenoble, the occupation of Lyons,
the visible commotion in the army of Ney, the perplexity of
the marshal, the imminence of a fresh catastrophe for the
Bourbons, and of a new usurpation of Napoleon, caused a
struggle in the heart of the general between his ancient and
his recent fidelity, his old and new fortune. Since the events
at Lons-le-Saulnier, of which he had given testimony before
the judges, the conduct of Bourmont had borne the impression
of this struggle of his thoughts in his soul. It had been per
plexed, hesitating, contradictory, according to the oscillation of

1S15.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 305
Bourmont's evidence.
events ; resisting the conqueror on the first impulse, giving him
self up to him after the victory, then retracting at the last mo
ment by desertion before the enemy, as if to impart to his return
to the royal cause more value, and more premeditation to his
desertion of Napoleon. He had followed Ney up to the hour
and act of the defection in the square of Lons-le-Saulnier. He
had immediately after quitted the army to offer his sword to
the King, at Paris. Being outstripped by the Emperor at the
Tuileries he had again solicited service in his cause, through
the mediation of his old companions in arms, who had rashly
answered for him to Napoleon. Having obtained a command
in the army of the north, he had passed over to the enemy to
rejoin the King at Ghent. It would have been more appro
priate for such a man to call for witnesses in his own cause
than to act as a disinterested witness in the cause of his old
general. When justifying himself in his examination, and
before the court-martial, Ney had thrown a portion of his
weakness upon Bourmont. The latter, thus inculpated in the
presence of his new masters, was irritated at these charges of
the marshal, which lay heavy upon his past honour and his
future ambition. His situation was delicate with respect to
the marshal, equivocal with the royalists, reproachful with the
partisans of Napoleon. If he was silent he was open to suspi
cion, if he accused he was ungrateful, and if he did not accuse
he was lost. The knotty point of this drama lay in confronting
these two men, who had both compromised themselves, and
neither of whom could exonerate himself except by mutual
accusations. All eyes endeavoured to explore their hearts
in the expression of their countenances. They themselves
avoided looking at each other. XII
" I have already been interrogated at Lille upon these
events,' said Bourmont " I abstained from making a charge
against the accused, being restrained by the commiseration
that is duo to great misfortunes. But now that he attacks me,
now that he accuses mo of having approved his proclamation
3 i

308 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 34.
Bourmont's evidence.
and his conduct, and of having insinuated to him that he would
do well in quitting the King's party for that of Bonaparte, I
shall speak out, and if I make him appear still more criminal
he must take the blame upon himself."
Bourmont then deposed that the marshal, who at first was
afflicted at Besangon at the progress of Napoleon, had subse
quently said at Lons-le-Saulnier to Lecourbe and himself,
his two generals, that everything had been arranged for three
months for the Emperor's return, and for the seduction of the
army ; that the King had already left Paris ; that no personal
injury was intended towards him ; that it was only desired he
should embark for England ; that they should afterwards
rejoin the Emperor, by whom they would be well treated ; that
Lecourbe had replied to these words : " I have received only
injustice from Bonaparte, and benefits from the Bourbons;
moreover, I am a man of honour, and do not wish to forfeit my
oath." " And I also am a man of honour," replied Ney to
Lecourbe, according to Bourmont's deposition, " and that is
the reason I wish to rejoin the Emperor. I no longer wish to
see my wife return weeping in the evening for all the humilia
tions she suffered during the day." These humiliations of his
wife had reference to a certain haughtiness, condescending, but
not offensive, on the part of the Duchess d'Angouleme. This
princess in speaking of Madame Ney before her private court
remembered, it is said, that this lady, at that time handsome,
stately, and of illustrious rank, was descended from a family
attached to the household service of Maria- Antoinette.
XIII.
Bourmont continued : " General Lecourbe," he said,
" wished to retire to his estate in the Jura ; but the marshal
insisted on retaining him. He read to us the proclamation
he was going to address to the soldiers. Lecourbe and I cen
sured it; but we thought that if we offered any resistance
measures had been taken to counteract us, and that the influ
ence of the marshal was irresistible over the troops. We went
to the square to judge of the effect which the reading of the

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 307
Ney's indignation at Bourmont's deposition.
proclamation might produce. We were melancholy and cast
down ; the officers pressed our hands and said to us, ' If we
had known that we would not have come ! ' "
At these words the marshal could no longer restrain his
recrimination. "It appears,'' he said, " that M. Bourmont
has laid down his plan for a long time, and that for eight
months he has been preparing his accusations at Lille. He
had flattered himself, perhaps, that we should never see one-
another again ; he thought that I should be treated here as
Labedoyere was. It is unfortunate that General Lecourbe is
not alive ; but I invoke him in another place. I summon him
against these depositions in a more elevated tribunal. Here
M. Bourmont overwhelms me, but there we shall be judged
both one and the other.
" However, I summoned these two officers to my residence;
I called upon them in the name of honour to let me know
their thoughts. M. Bourmont said to me, ' I agree with the
opinions expressed in the proclamation.' Lecourbe said to me,
' Has that been sent to you ? ' I made no reply, but insisted
on having their advice, and received no answer. Did anyone
say to me, ' Where are you going ? You are about to risk your
honour and your reputation for a fatal cause ! ' 1 have only
found men who have pushed me over the precipice.
"I invited them to remain with me, but they withdrew.
It was General Bourmont who called out the troops : he had
two hours to reflect. If he had thought my conduct criminal,
could he not have me arrested ? I was alone, I had not a man
with me, nor a saddle-horse to escape with. He went away
and took refuge with the Marquis de Vaulchier ; forming toge
ther coteries to be prepared for1 events, and to open, under all
circumstances, a door to escape by. Finally,' all the officers
came in a body to take me with them, and conducted me to
the public square, into the very midst of the troops."
XIV
After these words, which the accent, the solemnity of the
occasion, and the approach of death, must make us look upon

308 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 34.
Cross examination of Bourmont.
as sincere, and which the dying man did not retract before
God while marching to execution, the dialogue between the
accused, the accuser, the president, and the assembly, became
more direct, more pressing, and more overwhelming. As
sertions aud contradictions broke forth in questions and
reproaches. "Who gave the order to assemble the troops?" demanded
the president. "I did," acknowledged Bourmont, "but by
order of the marshal." '' He assembled them," said the
accused, " after I had communicated my proclamation to him."
" How did it happen ?" said the president, interpreting the
sentiments of the judges, and addressing the witness, "that
after you had disapproved of your chief's proceedings, you still
followed him to the square ?" " I wished to see," replied the
witness, " if any opposition should manifest itself amongst the
\roops. As to neutralising the ascendant of the marshal over
them, there was only one means, and that was to kill him."
" You have said," cried the accused, " that I wore at Lons-le-
Saulnier the decoration with the effigy of Napoleon ; that is false-
Do you then look upon me as a wretch ? I must in that case
have come from Paris with the intention of betraying the
King ! I regret that a man of understanding should employ
such false and paltry arts. It is really infamous to swear to
such fabrications. M. de Bourmont contributed to urge me on
to defection." Bourmont seemed embarrassed in explaining some orders
of detail given to the army by the marshal or by himself.
" Permit me to ask,'' said one of the defenders with accusing
pertinacity; " M. de Bourmont states that he was conducted to
the square by a sentiment of pure curiosity. Will' he say that
it was curiosity also which took him to the banquet given to
the staff by the marshal after the proclamation?" " It was
necessary," replied Bourmont, " to remove suspicion, and to
avoid being arrested. The marshal was uneasy about me, and
frequently sent officers to ascertain the side I was going to
take." " I arrested no one," interrupted the marshal. I left
everyone free to choose. You made no objection; nobody,
with the exception of one colonel who gave in his resignation,

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 309
His evidence rebutted by Ney.
made any. You had an extensive command ; you could have
had me arrested, and you would have done well," he added
with that accent of regret, or remorse, which sometimes breaks
from the labouring breast. " Yes, if you had killed me you
would have done me a great service, and perhaps it was your
duty to do so !"
This reproach from a faithless chief to a subordinate for
having spared him before the fault was committed, made the
spectators shudder. The whole agony of tortured honour in
the soul of the marshal was revealed in that exclamation ; and
all that he had suffered was felt on hearing that longing for
death burst from him. " Is it you," he continued, apostrophi
sing his accuser, " who could have resisted the enthusiasm of
the troops ? I do not believe you have firmness or talent
enough for that ! We cannot stop the ocean with our hand,"
he had already said in his examination.
M. Dupin, another of the marshal's counsel, embarrassed
M. de Bourmont again with an interrogatory which every reply
of the witness rendered criminating to himself. " What effect
did the letter and the proclamation of the marshal produce
upon the army?" demanded M. Berryer, father of the cele
brated orator of that name. " The soldiers cried ' Vive I'Em
pereur ! ' " replied Bourmont ; " the officers were stupified."
"Let the witness state,'' resumed M. Berryer, with a double
meaning which was obvious to all, " if he himself then cried
' Vive le Roi ! ' "
The Assembly understood this question, as justifying the
marshal and accusing the witness. Some . murmured at the
boldness of the advocate, others rejoiced at the embarrassment
of Bourmont. A movement took place, then a silence.
Bourmont retired, leaving in every breast the painful im
pression of a man who could extenuate when speaking against
himself, and aggravate in his own justification.
The prefect of the Jura, M. de Vaulchier, a zealous, but a
conscientious man, incapable of raising himself on the condem
nation of an enemy, was then heard. In communication at all
hours with the marshal, concerting measures for his province,
he at first depicted the active fidelity of Ney, then his doubts

310 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 34.
Depositions of other witnesses.
as to the success of the struggle with which the court had
charged him, then the successive, involuntary, and rapid
diminution of that fidelity in proportion as the aspect of
events changed, and the troops yielded to the current of popu
larity swelled by the approach of Napoleon. Another witness,
M Cappelle, drew the same picture of the mental condition of
the accused. Having been brought before the marshal after
his defection in the square, he was asked by Ney to join
Napoleon. " Nothing can induce me to do so," replied
M. Cappelle; " I have sworn fidelity to the King." "And I
also," said Ney, " would have wished to remain faithful to the
Bourbons ; but unfortunately, events will not permit me.
However, no injury shall be done to those princes ; they will
retire to an appanage which will be allotted to them. Woe
to him who shall dare to violate the respect that is due to
them ! "
The Count de Grivel, Inspector of the National Guards of
the Jura, who had alone responded to the proclamation by the
cry of " Vive le Roi ! " in the square, and broke his sword
before the troops of the line, had been protected by the
marshal against their sedition. Being a man of feeling and of
courage, he gave his evidence without aggravating.
" Why," demanded the president of the marshal, " did you
not take some measure or other to prevent the seduction of
your soldiers ? How did your resolutions, which were so loyal
in the evening, become so guilty the following, morning ?"
"After the tempest has passed," replied the accused sadly,
" it is easy to reason on its fury. I repeat that I was circum
vented, drawn away as if by enchantment. I was persuaded
that everything had been concerted with the allies ; the idea
of a civil war in the country horrified me, and I could no
longer resist."
The Duke de Maille nobly confirmed these assertions of
the accused by a deposition altogether exculpatory, and in
which he exonerated the marshal from all premeditation of
treason. This deposition of a good-hearted man, whose devo
tion to the Bourbons was hereditary, soothed the mind of the
prisoner, and rekindled hope in the breasts' of his friends.

1815.J OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 31]
Summing up of the prosecutor.
General Phillip de S6gur, who has since borne immortal wit
ness to the glory of Ney in his " History of the Russian War,"
spoke with the same delicacy of mind, and asserted the same
loyalty of intention on the part of the marshal at the time of
his departure to assume his command.
After these discussions between the accuse'd and the wit
nesses, which the observations of some of the peers shamefully
endeavoured to exasperate, Marshal Davoust' was heard in
explanation of the Convention of Paris, which, according to
Ney's defenders, shielded his life and liberty against all inquiry
into his acts. Davoust stated that he had understood this
convention in the sense of a complete amnesty for all the acts of
the interregnum ; and that if this convention had not had that
signification in his mind, he would have still fought and might
have conquered. " Yes," exclaimed the prisoner, who had
so rashly placed his hope in this capitulation, '• it is on the
faith of this convention that I have reposed ; without that can
it be believed that I should have hesitated to perish sword in
hand, rather than appear here on the bench of criminals."
XV
This last controversy being exhausted, M. Bellart began,
as prosecutor, to sum up and aggravate the crime. His first
words degraded the accused from his glory, before he degraded
him from his innocence and his life. They displayed that
antique declamation which thinks of the echo, and which
forgets the rebound of the accusation in the heart of the ac
cused. Implacable part which has to be played by those
magistrates who call for penal punishment in the name of state
policy, but who ought, at least, to ask nothing more than life.
M. Bellart was one of those men who are not crael by nature,
but rendered implacable by profession. His heart was melting
while his words were embittered by what he called a sense of
duty. It is said that when consulted some months before by
the family of the accused, he had given, with sincere commis-
seration, advice the best calculated to save him. His part now,
however, was to strike him with his eloquence, and he did so.

312 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 34.
Speech for the prosecution.
"Noble peers, when in the midst of deserts formerly
covered with populous cities, the philosophical traveller, who
is conducted thither by that insatiable curiosity, the character
istic attribute of our species, perceives the melancholy remains
of those celebrated monuments raised in remote ages, in the
vain hope of braving the hand of time, but which are now
nothing more than dust and shapeless ruins, he cannot avoid
feeling a profound melancholy when he thinks of the fate of
human pride and human works. But how still more cruel for
him who loves his species is the spectacle of the ruins of glory,
fallen to decay by its own misdeeds, and tarnishing itself those
honours it had so nobly won !¦
" When this calamity occurs, there is something within us
which struggles against conscience for that routine of respect
so long attached to the illustrious fallen. Our instinct is ex
asperated at the caprice of fortune, and we feel desirous, by
a thoughtless contradiction, still to honour what beamed with
so bright a splendour, at the same time that we despise and
detest the author of such frightful calamities to the state.
" Such, noble peers, is the double and contradictory im
pression which the commissioners of the King unavoidably
experience on the occasion of this deplorahle trial. Would to
heaven that two men existed in the illustrious accused whom
by a rigorous duty we are compelled to prosecute ; but there is
only one. He who so long covered himself with military
glory, is the same who has become the most culpable of
citizens. " Of what avail is his former glory to the nation ? He has
totally extinguished it by a fatal treason, productive to our
unhappy country of a catastrophe upon which we dare scarcely
venture to rest our attention. What matters it that he has
served the state, if it be him who has powerfully contributed
to its ruin ? There is nothing that such a crime can efface.
There is no sentiment which must not yield to horror inspired
by so great a treason.
" Brutus forgot he was a father, that he might see nothing
but his country. That which a father did at the price even of
a revolt of nature, the ministry, protector of the public safety, is

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 313
Its exaggerated character.
still more called upon to do, in spite of the murmurs of previous
admiration, which has mistaken its object ; it will fulfil this
duty with rectitude and simplicity. We may, at least, spare
the accused from galling declamations. Where is the necessity
for them in presence of a conviction drawn from the most in-
contestible evidence? I shall, therefore, spare them to him,
as the last homage I can offer. He still, doubtless, preserves
sufficient pride of soul to appreciate its value, to judge himself,
and to distinguish in those who are charged with the grievous
mission of his prosecution, the truly painful mixture of those
regrets which belong to the man, and those imperious obliga
tions which are imposed by office."
After this oratorical display of circumspection, better calcu
lated to relieve the judges of their scruples of admiration and
pity, than to do honour to the victim, Bellart exaggerated the
accusation to that degree as to maintain that a fault of weakness
was a crime of premeditation ! Everything in the character,
and even in the faults of the marshal, protested against a pre
conceived treason. But in the habits of legal men every accu
sation appears insufficient if they do not exaggerate it even to
calumny. It is thus that justice itself loses its sanctity and
its respect amongst men.
After the speech of M. Berryer, an incident of a tragic
nature, the real cause and character of which had not been pre
viously known, caused an emotion amongst auditors and judges,
who would have been a thousand times more excited if they
had then been acquainted with what we are going to recount.
XVI.
From the commencement of the trial the defenders of the
accused, as careful of his honour in future estimation as of his
justification at the time being, had consulted with each other as
to the character they should give to his defence. Were they
to think more of justifying the accused than of surrounding the
event with becoming splendour in the eyes of posterity ? Should
they sacrifice something to a desire for life, or sacrifice all to
the dignity of the soldier, and the majesty of the name. It

314 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 34.
Concert between Ney and his legal advisers.
was not, however, for them to solve a question so personal to
him they were going to defend. They thought it their duty,
therefore, to discuss the matter with the marshal. M. Dupin
asked him if he was desirous of living or of dying at any price ?
If he should conduct the defence with the sole view of preser
ving his life, or if he should make this a secondary considera
tion to the grandeur and the glory of his death. The first step
in coming to so delicate a determination being to know from the
marshal himself if he was anxious to live, his defenders with a
discreet reserve propounded to him this terrible problem, on
which his own feelings alone could properly pronounce.
" I confess to you," replied their client, equally devoid of
weakness and of boasting, " that I do not fear death : I have
beheld it a thousand times under every aspect in the field of
battle, and amidst the snows of Russia ; and I think I have
surrounded my name with fame enough to blot out one day of
error, and to find again, through indulgence, the glory of my
name in the memory of my country. However," he added,
with an impartial compassion for himself, and like a man who
weighs the reasons for dying and the excuses for living, " I am
forty-two years old — forty two years!" he repeated, appearing
to count in his own mind the numerous days which his strong
and active constitution still reserved for him in the natural
course of events. " Forty-two years ! And who knows if,
after a retirement and an expiation of some years, the course of
events, my country, the King himself, revolutions, or war, may
not recall me to the assistance of France, and give me an
opportunity of one of those acts of devotion, and for one of
those victories which redeem in the life of a soldier, as in that
of Turenne and of Conde, faults and errors, which are blottted
out for ever by the immensity of the service ? To live still to
find again one of those opportunities of redeeming my life,
would be to live twice. Aud besides, I must open to you my
affections in their most hidden recesses of nature, or of weak
ness, according as they may be interpreted ! I have a young
and handsome wife whom I love with all the tenderness of our
first happy days ; I have children, scarcely out of the cradle,
to bring up, to protect, and to love for yet a length of time.

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 315
They agree upon the nature of the defence.
All these things attach, and still bind me to existence, more
than I myself desire it ; all these affections are ties which bind
the heart much stronger than reason approves of, and indepen
dently of our own will ; for I live in these dear beings, they live
in me, and it is thus their existence which cries out and tortures
itself prematurely with mine ! I confess to you, therefore,
without shame and without weakness, that although resigned
to death I am desirous of living ! Defend my life, therefore, if
you think you can defend it, and by every legal means by which
you can protect it from my enemies !"
" But," he resumed, with the gesture of a man of honour
who rejects all baseness, " do not defend it at every price !
No, not life itself at every price ; neither for my own sake, nor
that of my name, nor for my wife, nor for my children, shall
my life be purchased by the slightest dishonour ! You now,"
he added, " know all my thoughts ; life, if it can be preserved
with honour, but death rather than a life which might here
after tarnish with a second stain my character and my memory !
It is therefore for you, more calm and more experienced than I
am in the study of law-courts, to read the thoughts of my
judges in the expression of their features ; and if, after having
tried all proper means of saving my life, you see at the last
moment that my cause is desperate, and that my condemnation
is determined on in their minds, apprise me of it that I may
fall nobly before them and before posterity ! I confide to you
my name and my memory ! Watch over them for me, and like
considerate doctors who are not afraid of acquainting their dying
patient with his danger, that he may prepare his soul for death,
apprise me unhesitatingly at the proper moment, of what I
ought to do, and what I ought to say, that I may take a
becoming leave of hope and life C
His defenders promised him to do so, and now the fatal
moment foreseen by the marshal had arrived. They had ex
hausted every means of delay, and every appeal to feeling, which
such a cause would naturally suggest, but all had failed in con
vincing or softening the resolution of the judges. Their coun
tenances, their looks, their murmurs, or their silence evidently
signified a condemnation already come to in their hearts. M. .

31 G HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 34.
Final effects of the defence.
Dupin, the marshal's defender, leaning towards his client, said
to him in a low voice : " This is the moment ! Every hope is
lost ! You have now only to render your death illustrious, and
to save your memory by falling nobly and patriotically before
your country ! " " I understand you," replied the marshal : then
feigning a desire to breathe a little fresh air and to take some
repose, he went out accompanied by his two defenders, to con
cert with them his demeanour and language. They confirmed
to him with a painful but necessary frankness, the inflexibility
of the peers, and the certainty of the sentence. " But we have
reserved for you," said M. Dupin, " a means of intervening
yourself, by some last and noble words, in the catastrophe of
your trial and your life. We shall return to the court, and I
shall ask to defend you in my turn. I shall begin by pleading
your privilege as a foreigner to France, wliich removes you
from its judgment, by your birth at Sarrelouis, a city now dis
joined from our territory. At my first words indicating an in
tention of shielding you thus, in your quality of a foreigner, you
will rise, and interrupt me with a burst of indignation, and an
impulse of patriotism, which you have no occasion to feign; and
you will interdict me from seeking to save your life, at the price
of abdicating your glorious nationality !"
The marshal thanked his defenders, and concerted with
them the few words he had to utter, on interrupting M. Dupin,
and reclaiming his country. He wrote them on a sheet of
paper, that the interest of the drama might not blot them from
his memory, and he rolled it between his fingers like one of
those notes which orators hastily scribble to remind them of
an idea. They then returned into court, and the prisoner's counsel
rose to speak. M. Berryer, sen., in his speech exonerated his
client, not from his faults, but from premeditated treason. His
speech strengthened by all the evidence which had been heard
in the preceding sittings, left no doubts with any who were not
influenced by hatred or prejudice. M. Dupin then rising after
his colleague, affected an intention of snatching the marshal
from the vengeance of France, by maintaining that he was no
longer a Frenchman, since he was born at Sarrelouis, and that

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 317
Their rejection by Ney.
the treaties of 1815 had taken away that city from the French
territory. The marshal then, as if impelled by noble shame at
hearing this sophism pleaded, which to save him from the
scaffold would rob him of his country, started suddenly up
to claim his birth-right and to protest against this too zealous
defence. " No, Sir, I am a Frenchman," he cried, placing his
hand on his breast; " and I know how to die like a French
man. I thank my generous defenders for what they have done,
and what they would wish to do, but I beg of them to cease to
defend me rather than to do it imperfectly. I rather wish not
to be defended at all than to have only the shadow of a defence.
I am tried contrary to the faith of treaties, and I am not per
mitted to invoke them ! Like Moreau, I appeal from this to
Europe and posterity !"
The emotion caused bythispremediated scene was immense
The suddenness, the accent, the gesture, and the look of the
accused increased it beyond anything that had been foreseen in
its preparation. Nature, as usual, surpassed all anticipation.
These words closed the pleadings. The accused was justly
relieved from the refuge so unworthy of him which he had con
sented to seek in the capitulation of Paris, and under the
auspices of the foreigner. His accuser moved that he should
be declared guilty of high treasen. The peers re-assembled
with closed doors, to discuss amongst themselves the questions
of conviction, of the nature of the crime, and the penalty
attached to it. They numbered 161 voters. Some had
absented themselves, others retired to avoid being impli
cated in an act for which they might now or hereafter be
reproached, according to the passions of the moment, or of
futurity. The young Duke de Broglie claimed the right of
sitting from which he was dispensed by his youth, in order to
protest by his vote against a political immolation as contrary
to the gratitude and the honour of his country. Faithful in that
to the noble sentiments of Madame de Stael, whose daughter
he married, and who sanctified the genius of letters by the
genius of pity.
The peers being divided on the charge of premeditation,
and almost unanimous on the crime, and its qualification as to

318 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 34.
Condemnation of Marshal Ney.
the crime of high treason, deliberated individually, and aloud,
on the penalty. The tribunal not being military, but political
it could appreciate all the circumstances, estimate the man, re
call his services, foretell the odium of state ingratitude, arbi
trate on reparation, graduate the punishment, and spare blood.
Under the inspiration of humanity, and to ratify the policy and
well-understood interest of the Bourbons, exile would have been
the most appropriate penalty for a crime occasioned by sudden
impulse ; but to throw at the army, as it were, the head of its
most gallant and popular chief, was a defiance to all reconcilia
tion, an implacable grievance planted in the hearts of brave
men, almost all of them more or less accomplices in his crime.
The guilty man himself confessed his fault, honoured the King,
and raised no other standard than that of repentance and
sorrow, in opposition to the standard of the Restoration. He
was no longer dangerous but in an ensanguined tomb. His
phantom alone was thenceforward to be dreaded ; everything
demanded that he should be reproved, but saved. Seventeen
peers only, in this select body of the statesmen and courtiers of
France, had the courage to refuse this victim to the fury of the
times, and to vote for his exile. We here record their names,
that public esteem may also have its tablets, in which history
will find and award its meed of praise to those hearts which are
inflexible to the passions or the calculations of parties. They
were : The Duke de Broglie, the Duke de Montmorency, Ber-
tho!et,Chasseloup-Laubat,Chollet, Collaud, Fontanes, Gouvion-
Saint-Cyr, Herwyn, Klein, Lanjuinais, Lemercier, Lenoir
Laroche, Malleville, Richebourg, Curial, Lally-Tollendal.
Five peers, Messrs. de Choiseul, de Saint Suzanne, de
Brigode, Daligre, and de Nicolai, either less convinced or less
courageous, abstained from voting. A humane, but timid neu
trality which neither strikes nor saves, but which should never
be permitted to stand between the sword and the victim.
As for those who voted in a mass for death, some from a
conscientious conviction ofthe proportion of the penalty to the
crime, others from a short sighted feeling of the necessity of the
example ; many from devotion to a cause to which thev could
refuse nothing— not even the head of a hero -and "several

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 319
Efforts to save his life.
through zealous emulation, and as a pledge of their suspected and
recent royalism ; the cruel through vengeance, the cowardly
through weakness, the flatterers from adulation, the ambitious
through anticipation of the benefits to be derived from this sacri
fice to servility ; we conceal their names from respect to their me
mories and consideration to their families. Posterity should have
its amnesties as well as policy ; the annals of nations are not a
perpetual index of resentments and divisions between the chil
dren of those parents who were either culpable or unfortunate.
To pardon the victims and to pardon even the judges, is the law
of true justice for beings so fallible as we are. To pardon is to
forget. Let us forget! XVII.
It must be said, in extenuation of these hundred and thirty
peers who pronounced sentence of death, that, in the opinions
of many, death was but a nominal satisfaction given to the
rigour of their conviction, but that they voted it under the tacit
condition of a commutation of the penalty by the government.
" The sentence," says M. de Vaulabelle, the most exact histo
rian and the most severe against this vote, " was scarcely pro
nounced, when the Duke de Richelieu, who attended this
nocturnal sitting, was surrounded by a great number of the
voters, who conjured him to solicit from the King exile to
America for the condemned, instead of the scaffold."
The Duke de Richelieu's heart was great enough to com
prise at once both justice and clemency. Whilst the judges,
still shut up in the Luxembourg, were communicating to each
other in an under tone those observations which result from
great acts accomplished by public assemblies, some expecting
inflexibility, and others a softening of the anger of the court,
the prime minister had hastened to the Tuileries to implore the
man after having served the prince. The King was mild by
nature, and magnanimous by calculation. • His long study of
human vicissitudes in history, which teaches the inutility of ex
ecutions as much as the deceptions of benefits, had imbued the
mind of this prince with a philosophy which resembled in-

320 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 34.
Efforts of Madame Hutchinson to save Ney.
difference. He did not hate because he loved but little ; but
he governed generally with a view to posterity. He cited
Henri IV. and aspired to imitate him : he wished not at any price
to leave a sinister memory to futurity. If he had been solely and
truly King he would certaifily have pardoned ; but although he
affected independence in his government, and a disdainful supe
riority over his family in his palace, he felt himself accountable
to his allies, and he yielded to the opinions of those around
him. The representatives of the great powers, and above all,
the Duke of Wellington, might have encouraged his inward dis
position to clemency, but influenced unknown to themselves, by
the ulra-royalist portion of the society of Paris by which they
were surrounded, they were involuntarily implicated in its
passions. XVIII.
The English nation was not an accomplice on this occasion,
either in this apathy, or this tacit approbation of a military
execution, which soldiers might look upon as just, but generous
hearts found cruel. Madame Hutchinson, the wife of a mem
ber of parliament, and a relation of the Duke of Wellington,
who was then in Paris, and whose house was the hospitable
rendezvous of the most liberal-minded officers of the English
army, interceded in the most earnest manner with His Grace
to obtain from him a decisive intervention for the salvation of
Marshal Ney. She conjured him, by his own glory and the
glory of his country, to avert, by such a step, the reproach
which would rest on his memory if this odious sacrifice were
accomplished under his eyes, and apparently with his moral
participation. It is even said that, in her ardent and eloquent
appeal to the magnanimity of the English general, Madame
Hutchinson threw herself at the feet of the Duke, to draw
from him by her prayers what she could not obtain by higher
considerations. Evidently wavering between his wish to yield
to so touching a solicitation, and the impossibility in which he
felt himself of pressing upon the free decision of the King,
and thus perhaps violating preliminary engagements of neu
trality between this prince and his subjects, contracted in

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 321
Intercession oi' Madame Hutchinson.
correspondence or private interviews during the campaign, the
Duke replied that his hands were tied by imperative consider
ations, and that whatever might be his personal sentiments of
interest and commiseration for an unfortunate adversary, his
duty was to be silent, to despise the false judgment of the
times on his character, and to leave all to the more enlightened
and impartial verdict of posterity.
Madame Hutchinson retired in tears, without being able to
move either the statesman or the soldier. Meanwhile, the
government being informed of her endeavours to snatch the
prey from the vengeance of the law, and of the bitter re
proaches she had uttered in her private circle against the
implacability of the judges, removed her from Paris, under the
charge of also having pitied the fate of Lavalette, and of having
contrived in her house the generous plot for his escape.
Affected by the efforts of this lady to save a husband and a
father for his afflicted family, Marshal Ney's widow presented
to Madame Hutchinson, as an offering of the heart, the sabre
worn by the Marshal at Waterloo, having had engraved upon the
blade a record of the generous act and the gratitude it inspired.
Twenty years after these sad events, a son of the victim
when travelling in Italy, to look for some traces of his father
in that country, on arriving at Leghorn stopped at a villa inha
bited by Madame Brennier, the wife of the French consul in
Tuscany ; where the conversation having fallen on the death
of the marshal, the young man was astonished to see tears
rolling down the cheeks of a strange lady at the recital of his
family misfortunes. The stranger was Madame Hutchinson,
the mother of Madame Brennier. Pity and gratitude had
thus met together without knowing each other. If cruelty has
its expiations and its remorse, generosity has its chances and
its turns of good fortune ; as if Providence reserved them for
fitting occasions, that noble hearts may not be discouraged.
XIX.
The passions of the court at this moment in Paris were
implacable To spare the life of the hero of the Beresina
3 TJ

322 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 34.
Vindictive feeling of the royalists.
seemed a larceny committed on the right of reprisals., In the
saloons of the aristocracy the King's ministers were actually
mobbed and entreated to give his blood as a personal favour to
the applicants. Ladies of the highest rank, young, beautiful,
rich, loaded with gifts, favours, titles, and court dignities,
forgot their families, their ease, and their amours, quitted their
houses at daybreak, ran about all day, and intrigued all night, to
gain over a voice amongst the judges from the side of indul
gence, and to win one to the side of punishment ; to imprecate
and accuse beforehand those whose cowardice or perfidy might
withhold this condemnation from their wishes. We have our
selves seen with astonishment and sorrow the supplications,
the clasping of hands, the smiles of these ladies, begging
those concessions, which they implored for the satisfaction
of their hatred. We stiU blush at the recollection. Who
can be astonished at the brutal ferocity of the multitude,
when rank, fortune, and even courts, display such thoughtless
inhumanity, such paroxysms of anger, such horrid thirst of
blood in their days of vengeance ?
XX.
All these vindictive proceedings of the royalist society had
their counterparts amongst the inhabitants of the Tuileries
Those around the princes thought they flattered them in
hardening their hearts by this bitterness of hatred against the
common enemy ; while the princes promised beforehand to be
inexorable, and to correspond with this devotion of their friends
by the sacrifice of every human weakness in their own hearts.
These promises being made, the blood demanded could not be
refused. Such were the dispositions of the court and of the princes,
when the Duke de Richelieu, infringing the regulations, and
entering the King's chamber at one o'clock in the morning,
acquainted him with the judgment of the Chamber of Peers,
aud pleaded for mercy. " My family would never forgive me
for this pardon," replied the King sadly ; " and the Chamber,
without which I cannot reign, would dissolve my government

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 323
Impolicy ofthe rigour of the Bourbons,
to-morrow. The allies themselves would accuse me of again
compromising the security of Europe by an indulgence, of
which I should have the honour and they the danger. There
are circumstances in which kings can only do what their parti
sans permit them. Our feelings even are subservient to our
duties of state. I pity Ney, I have no hatred against him :
I would gladly preserve a father to his children, a hero to
France ; but I am a constitutional king ; I cannot, without
compromising my union with the Chambers, suspend, or turn
aside the justice which my people require as a pledge of their
security." The Duke de Richelieu, who knew the dispositions,
and the requirements of the court, of the Chamber, and of the
followers of the princes and the princesses, had no further
hope from this source. The Duchess d'Angouleme could alone
have taken upon her the anger of the royalist party, and
cast her tears into the balance against the blood of the hero
The King, her uncle, could refuse nothing to such a suppliant.
Perhaps he anxiously wished that she should come and offer
this pretext for his clemency, this family authority for his
weakness. But she came not ; fatal counsels of severity pre
vailed around her, over the natural part which Providence
seemed to have assigned to her. A woman's heart at the
Tuileries interposed against all these reprisals, and the asylum
of all the vanquished, was the only popularity which the
Bourbons wanted to conquer all parties. She allowed this
heart to be closed by the hand of her fatal counsellors : that of
France closed in its turn. She thus deprived her family, her
cause, and herself of the most irresistible of policies, the policy
of feeling. It was more than a harshness, it was an error
which condemned her dynasty to a short existence. For,
restorations by their nature have only one of these parts to
play, magnanimity or vengeance. From the day they cease to
pardon, they are condemned to avenge. To avenge themselves
on a nation is to forfeit its affection without crushing it. With
the blood which they thus shed at the Restoration, was written
beforehand the second divorce of France and the Bourbons.

324 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 84.

Ney in his prison.

XXI.
Whilst death or pardon were thus on the balance within the
shadow of the palace, and the prime minister was leaving it in
consternation without bearing with him the slightest hope, the
condemned marshal had returned to his prison in the Luxem
bourg, whence he could hear in low murmurs the conversation
of the judges, themselves awaiting the decision of the King.
Uncertain, and almost indifferent, from weariness and grief, as
to his fate, the marshal had taken a little nourishment, and had
lain down in his clothes, as a soldier who expects to be aroused
by death. The excess of fatigue and agitation of mind since
the commencement of this long trial, had at length closed his
eyes as soon as his honour and his life had been placed in the
hands of his judges. The sleep which is disturbed by hope is
the companion of despair. He slept on the confines of destiny.
The considerate and compassionate guards who watched in his
chamber, restrained their words, and even their respiration, for
fear of interrupting this last repose. These were not, as it has
been said, myrmidons disguised as gendarmes, and chosen for
the ferocity and the rudeness of their enmity, from amongst
the King's guard, to torture the soul of the prisoner, and to
kill him in the event of any attempt to escape. They were,
on the contrary, brave young gentlemen, the Mite of their
companies, incorruptible in their honour, and incapable of any
outrage on an unarmed man, and especially on a captive, whose
fate they deplored, as they admired his glory. Although they
were officers they wore the uniform of simple grenadier dra
goons of the Royal Guard. Under this costume, though
mixed up with the gendarmes, and other attendants of
the prisoner, it was they alone who watched him in his
chamber, and who were most accustomed to converse with
him, not to aggravate, but to amuse and console his soli
tude. They encouraged him with hope, and they themselves
anticipated that the marshal, condemned and pardoned by the
King, would recognise them in happier times as the consolers

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 325
His sentence is communicated to him.
of his evil days"; It was from their own mouths that we re
ceived at the time this confidential account of their mission.

XXII.
At three o'clock in the morning the secretary of the
Chamber of Peers appeared at the door of the prisoner's cell,
to read his sentence to him officially. The guards, regretting
the necessity of interrupting that peaceful sleep, which death,
as if jealous of the short repose, was about to disturb so rudely,
hesitated for a long time to awake him. They at length,
however, obeyed, and touching the marshal's hand called him
with a low voice. Though in a profound sleep he sat up
quickly, and perceived the officials of the Chamber, and the
secretary, M. Cauchy, whose features, which were known to
him, indicated the sorrow and pity that disturbed his mind.
The marshal immediately got out of bed, advanced towards
M Cauchy, and prepared to listen to a sentence too well fore
seen. Before he read the paper he held in his hand, the
secretary begged the prisoner to separate his official duty from
the personal sentiments of respect and admiration with which
he was penetrated, and to pity him for having to perform a
duty which was repugnant to his heart. "I am grateful Sir,"
replied the marshal, " and touched by the sentiments you
express, which I fully comprehend. But we all have our
duties in this world ; fulfil yours, I shall perform mine."
Then pointing to the paper he held in his hand " Read, Sir,"
he said with a resigned and gentle accent. The secretary
accordingly began, in a voice which seemed to ask pardon for
the words ; and as he read conscientiously, word for word,
the long enumeration of the names, titles, rank, and dignities
by which the sentence designated the condemned : " To the
fact, to the fact," said the marshal, with an accent of impa
tience, and an expression of disdain for these baubles of a life
on the point of extinction : " say simply Michael Ney and soon
a little dust ! "
The reading having terminated, the secretary of the Cham
ber informed the condemned that the curate of St. Sulpice had

326 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 34.

Interview between Marshal Ney and his family.

come to offer him the consolations which religion gives to the
dying, and that he was authorized by the regulations to receive
him. " I want no one to teach me how to die," replied the
marshal. "At what hour to-morrow?" he added, with an
interrogative expression of countenance which finished the
suspended sense of the question. '• At nine o'clock," rephed
M. Cauchy, bowing, as if ashamed of the brevity of the time
doled out to him for his preparation. " And my wife and
children?" said the condemned; "can I, at least, embrace
them for the last time ?'' This, M. Cauchy was authorized to
promise him. " Well, then," said Ney, " let my wife come at
five in the morning ; but keep her ignorant, above all things,
of my condemnation : let her learn it only from myself who
alone can soften its horrors to her." He was promised that
this precaution should be taken with his family ; and he then
begged to be left alone for the remainder of the night. He '
lay down again on his bed, wrapped his cloak around his head,
and fell asleep, as if on the bivouac and ready for action.
Nature, more merciful than his judges, veiled from him his
agony in sleep.
At five o'clock Madame Ney, accompanied by her sister
and her four sons, was introduced into his prison. The period
fixed for this interview sufficiently indicated that it was one of
final separation. The marshal who adored this young and
charming companion of his happy days, received her fainting
in his arms, and with difficulty restored her with his tears and
kisses. Then taking his four young sons upon his knees, and
pressing them to his heart, he uttered to them in a low voice
those last sad words by which a father transfuses the purest
portion of his soul into the memory of his children. His
sister-in-law anxiously endeavoured to console by turns the
father, the mother and the children, and prayed aloud, amidst
the sobbing of these hapless groups. The marshal who had
solaced his heart with the sight and farewell endearments of
all that he loved upon earth, maintained sufficient coolness to
deceive his wife and withdraw her from the agony of his last
moments, by imparting a hope to her which he did not feel
himself. He flattered her with the idea that the heart of the

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 327
Final efforts of Madame Ney.
King might still be overcome by the sight of her grief and
the energy of her prayers. He thus succeeded in withdrawing
himself from her arms ; and the suppliants were conducted
amidst the darkness to the gates of the palace where the King
and the Duchess of Angoul^me were still sleeping.
By the favour ofthe Duke de Duras, first gentleman of the
King, the family were admitted into the anti-rooms of the
royal apartments, where Madame Ney, uneasy, but still con
fiding, awaited the monarch's rising. She did not doubt that
even the permission to weep so near their hearts was a tacit
promise of mercy. The first light and noises of day, penetra
ting into the palace impressed her with mingled feelings of hope
and terror. Her mother had been in friendly intercourse with
the mother of the Duchess of Angouleme. Would the daugh
ter of Maria Antoinette allow the widowed daughter, and the
little orphan boys, to leave that palace where she was more
than queen. This hapless group waited in the anti-chamber
in vain until the irreparable hour had elapsed. The princess
had known or heard nothing of it. What an hour lost for
nature and the Monarchy ! XXIII.
The marshal had not lain down again after the last em
braces of his wife, and sobbing of his children. He had dried
up his own tears, that he might no longer think of anything
but ^he dignity of his death. He wrote his will ; then rising
from his chair he walked about his chamber, exchanging with
great composure a few words with his guardians. One of these
royal body-guards, disguised as grenadiers, of whom we have
spoken, had conceived for the hero that involuntary tenderness
of admiration and pity which the familiarity of a prison, mis
fortune, and approaching death create in noble hearts. This
was a royalist gentleman of Dauphiny, named M. de V  .
His handsome countenance, his martial character, his accent of
free but respectful frankness had deceived the prisoner him
self, who thought he saw in M. de V  one of the old sub-
officers of his great campaigns. He gladly conversed with

328 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 34.
Ney's last moments in prison.
this guard during the long hours of his weary captivity.
"This is the last sun I shall ever see, comrade," said he,
approaching M. de V  . " This world is at an end for
me. This evening I shall lie in another bivouac. I am no
woman, but I believe in God and in another life, and I feel
that I have an immortal soul : they spoke to me of prepara
tion for death, of the consolations of religion, of conferring
with a pious priest. Is that the death of a soldier ? Let me
hear what you would do in my place. " Monsieur le Marechal,"
replied M. de V  , " we still hope that the King will be
worthy of Henri IV., and that he will not suffer France to be
deprived of one of her most glorious servants, for one day of
forgetfulness : but death is death for all mankind, and he who
has seen it so near on so many battle-fields is not afraid to hear
it spoken of in a dungeon. The voice of a last friend has
never been painful to a soldier in the hospital waggon. Were
I in your place I should allow the curate of St. Sulpice to
enter, and I should prepare my soul for every event." " I he-
lieve you are right," replied the marshal with a friendly smile
" Well then, let the priest come in." The curat^fcfi^St. Sul
pice who was patiently waiting the favourable momtenf in a
room of the Luxembourg, was introduced, and conferred piously
with the marshal in a corner of the chamber. TheJriour which
brought no pardon at length sounded for theeSmition. - The
prisoner who had read in the features, and heard in the mur
murs of the Chamber of Peers, the inexorable vengeance of
party spirit, had expected nothing from the tears of his wife
and children. It was for her sake and theirs that he had'
affected to hope. He dressed himself, therefore, to appear
with propriety before the last fire he was ever to face. He
wore a military frock coat on the occasion. The noise of ihe
troops, who were stationed from the gate of the Luxembourg
to the railing of the avenue of the Observatory, and the roll
ing of a carriage in the court-yard apprised him of the hour of
departure and the route. He thought he was to be conducted
to the plain of Grenelle, to the spot marked by the blood ot
Labedoyere, the ordinary place of execution. His door opened ;
he understood the sign He descended with a firm step, a

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 329
He proceeds to execution,
serene brow, and a lofty look, his lips almost wearing a smile,
but without any theatrical affectation, through the double ranks
of the troops drawn up on the steps of the staircase, and in
the vestibule of the palace, like a man happy once more to see
the uniform, the arms and the troops — his old family. On
arriving at the bottom of the flight of steps where the car
riage awaited him with the door open, he stopped instead of
. mounting, through politeness to the priest who accompanied
him, and who was yielding him the precedence. Taking the
curate by the arm, " No, no," said he, with a manner at once
playful and sad, in melancholy allusion to the object of his
journey, "Go in first, Mr. Curate; I shall still arrive above
there before you ;" indicating with a look the haven of his
rest. XXIV
The carriage proceeded at a foot pace through the broad
alleys of the Luxembourg, and between the silent ranks of the
soldiers. An icy fog crept along the ground, yielding only
glimpses of the leafless branches of the lofty trees in the royal
garden. The priest murmured by the side of the soldier
spiritual consolation and resignation to death. The marshal
istened to him with manly attention, and expected to listen
still longer, when the carriage suddenly stopped, midway
between the railing of the Luxembourg and the Observatory,
in front of a long wall of a black and fetid enclosure, that
bordered an alley leading out of the avenue. The government,
ill-advised even in the choice of a place of execution, seemed
desirous of rendering it more abject and contemptuous, by
striking down this illustrious enemy like some unclean animal,
on a cross road, and at a few paces from a palace, the name of
which will for ever be stained by the memory of so foul a deed.
Ney was astonished, and looked around for the cause of
this halt half-way, as he supposed, when the carriage door
opened, and he was requested to alight. He felt that he was
never to return, and gave to the priest who accompanied him
the few articles he had about him, with his last remembrances
to his family. He emptied his pockets also of some pieces of

330 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 34.
Ney's execution.
gold for the poor of the parish ; he then embraced the priest,
the last friend who supplies the place of all absent friends at
this final hour, and marched to the wall towards the place
indicated by a platoon of veterans. The officer commanding
the party advanced towards him, and requested permission to
bandage his eyes. " Do you not know," replied the soldier,
" that for twenty-five years I have been accustomed to look
balls and bullets in the face ?" The officer disturbed, hesi
tating, undecided, expecting perhaps a cry of pardon, or fearing
to commit a sacrilege of glory by firing on his general, stood
mute between the hero and his platoon. The Marshal availed
himself of this hesitation, and of the immobility of the soldiers
to cast a final reproach upon his destiny " I protest before
God and my country," he exclaimed, " against the sentence
which has condemned me. I appeal from it to man, to pos
terity, to God!"
These words and the countenance, enshrined in their
memory, of the hero of the camp, shook the steadiness of the
soldiers. "Do your duty," cried the commandant of Paris to-
the officer who was more confused than the victim. The
officer stumbling resumed his place beside bis party. Ney
advanced a few paces, raised his hat with his left hand, as he
was accustomed to elevate it in desperate charges to animate
his troops. He placed his right hand on his breast to mark
well the seat of life to his murderers. "Soldiers!" said he,
"aim right at the heart!" The party absolved by his voice
and commanded by his gesture, fired, as one man. A single
report was heard : Ney fell as if stmck with a thunder-bolt,
without a convulsion, and without a sigh Thirteen balls had
pierced the bust, and shattered the heart of the hero, and
mutilated the right arm which had so often waved the sword
of France. The soldiers, the officers, and the spectators,
turned away their eyes from the body, as from the evidence
of a crime During the quarter of an hour which the military
regulations required that the corpse should lie exposed upon
the place of execution, no spectators, except a few passers-by
and some women from the neighbouring houses, looked upon
the body, or mingled their tears with its blood. Some groups

1815.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 331
Public opinion on Ney's execution.
demanded with a low voice, who the criminal was, thus aban
doned on the public highway, and shot to death by soldiers of the
grand army. None had the courage to reply that it was
the body of the "bravest of the brave," the hero of the
Beresina. After the legal period of exposure, the hospitable
sisters of a neighbouring convent claimed the body to bestow
funeral honours upon it in private, had it carried to their
chapel, and watched and prayed alternately around the forlorn
coffin.
XXV.
When the Parisians awoke and found that Ney had been
executed, bitter shame seized upon every soul. The court
party stupidly rejoiced at being revenged. But for one heroic
enemy, disarmed and repentant, whom they had immolated,
they made thousands of new enemies amongst those who looked
for an act of clemency called for by so many services rendered
to the country, and so much fame acquired for France. A
feeling more dangerous than anger, because it is more durable,
smouldered in the hearts of impartial youth, of an outraged
army, and of a grateful people. This was disgust for the
pusillanimity of that court which had never fought, and which
allowed to be shed in its cause such popular and glorious blood,
as a libation to the foreigner, on a soil still trampled under the
feet of our enemies
We must, however, say, in the defence of the King, of the
ministers, and of the immense mass of the royalists, that they
were repugnant from moderation, from honour, and from sen
sibility, to this useless, cruel, and shameful sacrifice. In their
eyes, and in those ofthe impartial portion of the world, Ney was
a great culprit; but his was a glorious life. His fault was
amongst those which are condemned but pardoned : he had
stumbled in his weakness, not through premeditation. He
tried and condemned himself. He had redeemed beforehand
his military crime, by exploits which will be an eternal theme
in the camps of France. As a political chief he was no longer
to be dreaded. To save him would not be to save a factious
man but a soldier The amnesty which it was indispensable

332 RESTORATION OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. [BOOK 34.
Impolicy of Ney's execution.
to throw over the army could not find a nobler opportunity than
this. Henri IV. would have embraced him who was slaugh
tered by his descendants. How often since have they not
lamented this fatal yielding to the vindictive passions of their
Court and their Chamber, which ordered them to do this mur
der ! What a power of popularity would they not have derived
against the opposition, in the critical days of their dynasty,
from this plebeian blood spared and reserved for the country ;
this arm regained by magnanimity to their cause ! Though
insulted for a few days in the privacy of their palace by the
cowardly counsellors of abject fear, they would have been
avenged and adopted by the people, who only recognise the
greatness of royal races by their greatness of soul. They
would have fallen perhaps at the destined hour, but history
would not have this reproach to cast upon their memory, and
instead of a stain of blood upon their reign there would have
been, in conjunction with the name of Ney a tear of admi
ration. Instead of commanding as kings they obeyed as slaves.
The court was cruel, the King weak, the ministers complaisant,
the Chamber of Deputies implacable, Europe goading, the
Chamber of Peers cowardly as a senate in the fallen days of
Rome. Let each of these bear a part in the murder of the
hero, France disclaims the deed.

BOOK THIETY-F1ETH.
Animosities of parties — Impassioned reaction in the departments : pre-
votal courts — Debates on the amnesty law : Messrs. Royer-Collard
de Labourdonnaie, Chateaubriand — Production of the will of Maria
Antoinette — Relaxation in the severity of public opinion — Dissolu
tion of the Chamber — Agitation in the departments — Conspiracy of
Grenoble — Didier: his character, previous life, his connection with
the Orleans party — His abortive attempt on Grenoble — Proclamations
and vengeance — Flight and courageous death of Didier — Palace
intrigues: formation ofthe Doctrinaire party — The Coup d'etat of
the 5th of September, ratified by the elections — Fury of the ultra-
royalists: their private note to the congress of Aix-la-Chapelle —
Evacuation of France by the allies — Memoir by Louis XVIII. on
the ministerial crisis (December, 1818).
I.
The execution of Marshal Ney, instead of closing, as the King
and the ministers had hoped, the era of proscriptions and re
prisals, and satisfying the thirst for recriminations of the Court
and Chambers only excited it still further. All France, en
couraged to retaliation by the compliance of the government
in yielding to its passions, instead of occupying itself with its
deliverance, and its reconstruction, only appeared to occupy
itself with its vengeance. The zeal for the Bourbons was
commensurate with the wrath against, and the denmiciations of
their enemies. The prevotal courts, like a star chamber against
acts and opinions, outvied each other in severity in the depart
ments. The country was nothing but a vast military tribunal,
judging, condemning, and too often immolating the pretended
accomplices of the Bonapartist conspiracy. The most sinister
motions were daily made in the Chamber of Deputies and the
Chamber of Peers. The seduction was so irresistible and so gene
ral, tjiat on the bitterest propositions scarcely two or three voices

334 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 35.

Animosities of parties.

protested against these exaggerations of prudence, and against
the madness of party zeal. The King felt that the reins of
royalist opinion were eluding his grasp to pass into the hands
of his brother, the Count d'Artois, and of his most violent
counsellors, in more intimate connection than himself with the
passions of the Chamber. For fear of losing all, he conceded
a great deal, and then became himself alarmed at the con
cessions he had made. Accused in secret of having thrown
his dynasty into exile by compounding before the 20th of
March with the requirements of revolutionary opinion and
with the army of Bonaparte, he had to redeem in. the eyes of
his family, of the emigrants, and of the clergy, his pretended
complaisance for the revolution, As a party chief suspected
even by his own party, secretly undermined in his own palace
by the violent and ambitious partizans of his brother, obliged
to please them even while he restrained them, convinced at the
same time that he could not secure his reign but by moderating
his friends, and gaining over his enemies, by adopting the
glory, and by founding the constitutional liberty of the nation,
his situation in the midst of this tempest of conflicting passions,
was that of a pilot who struggles at the same time with his
own crew and with the raging elements. He deviated for a
moment from his proper course under the influence of too
strong a gale, intending to resume it as soon as the fury of
public opinion might allow the voice of sound policy to be
heard. II.
In the meantime, he allowed the royalist committees of
the departments to dictate and revoke the choice of his agents,
to purify the ministry and the army, to draw up lists of those
unworthy of serving in the army, to publish proclamations for
mutual defence in the provinces of the south and west, to
cause the assembling of armed parties, and to dismiss the
civil judges from their irremovable functions, the guarantee of
their independence. Imperative addresses, under the sem
blance of devotion to the King, called upon him, in the name
of the two Chambers, for efficacious measures of foresight and

1815-18.] OF MONARCHY- IN FRANCE. 335
Reaction in the Departments.
severity. His ministers obeyed these impuises. Ihe Duke de
Feltre dismissed a great number of those officers who had
served during the hundred days. Barbe-Marbois, minister of
Justice, promulgated a code prohibiting seditious manifesta
tions ; M. Decazes, Minister of Police, proclaimed a suspension
of individual liberty, which gave the government arbitrary
power over the citizens. The ministers, in supporting these
measures in the two chambers, had only to defend them against
excessive punishment, and against the penalty of death, which
the orators of the vengeance party invoked on every occasion
M. Pasquier, for a long time administrator of the police of the
capital under Bonaparte, was now in the tribune the most
devoted adherent of the Bourbons. M. de Chateaubriand
carried his enthusiasm even to the insulting of the vanquished
and the glorification of the conqueror. One of those men
who constitute themselves the dominant voices in the chorus of
political passions, M. de Labourdonnaye drew up, under the
false name of amnesty, a graduated table of proscription,
which included the names of 1,200 persons condemned to
exile or to capital accusations. Other lists, more or less vin
dictive, were drawn up by other deputies of the same faction.
Proscriptions were no longer made out with reference to the
men or the crime, but according to the category and the situa
tion. The Chamber applauded these initiatory measures ; it
named committees of deputies to draw them up in proper form,
and to enlarge and extend their powers. The government,
which was tacitly accused by these motions of tardiness, hesi
tation, or complicity with the public perils, trembled to see
itself out-done and abandoned by the Chambers, if it did not
itself yield to this impetus, in order that it might still retain
the power of moderating and directing it.
III.
It was thus that the Duke de Richelieu brought before the
Chambers an amnesty bill. This law had a double object in
the mind of the King : to quiet the alarms of the vanquished
party, which might be driven to revolt by despair, and to

836 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [book 85.
The Amnesty law.
satisfy the requirements of the party of the Chamber and of
the Court, by depriving it of the pretence of impunity accorded
to the opposite party. Louis XVIII. in this amnesty bill
proscribed only the members of the Bonaparte family ; he
generously kept the promise of pardon to the regicides which
his brother Louis XVI. had made them in his will. This
magnanimity of the dying monarch, to which death itself
imparted a religious character, made the advocates of retalia
tion in the two Chambers tremble with anger, but prevented
them from murmuring aloud. In rebelling against the cle
mency of the King they were afraid of impugning the sanctity
of the victim. The Chamber of Deputies nevertheless referred
the proposition of the ministers to the same committee that
was drawing up M. de Labourdonnaye's law of proscription.
This was to prejudge the enlargement ,of the government bill,
and to evince a contempt for the royal will. M de Corbiere
and M. de Vilelle, two men whose various talents, intimate
alhance, and common loyalty, had already given them a pre
dominance in the assembly, governed the opinions of this com
mittee ; M. de Villele, more experienced and flexible ; M. de
Corbiere, more collected and undaunted. The latter was
charged to bear to the tribune the resolutions of the commit
tee; "Henri IV., it is true," said he, "had granted an
amnesty to his enemies, but five years of exile and condemna
tion had preceded the royal clemency." He then read the
code of purification, banishment, and confiscation, under pain
of death, which the committee had substituted for the amnesty
of the King. The discussion alone of this counter-project
was a defiance to government under the mask of zeal. The
royalist orators aggravated this defiance by the bitterness of
their speeches. " Do not listen to these sophisms of impor
tunate philanthropy, so ingenious in the mouths of your
enemies. To hesitate to punish is weakness," said one
speaker " Divine Providence," said M. de Labourdonnaye,
" has at length delivered into our hands the murderers of your
kings, the assassins of your families, as if supreme justice
had preserved them, amidst all our disasters, to show the
vanity of human prudence and the perfidy of remorseless

1815—18.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 337
Discussions thereupon in the Chamber of Deputies.
hearts ! These men, now vanquished and disarmed, invoke a
generosity which they have themselves never practised ; as if
crimes should enjoy an eternal impunity. And you pusillanimous
magistrates, legislators without foresight ! you would witness
the plots of these men, fhe opprobium of the nation, and you
would not punish them !" M. de Bouville, a man of the same
disposition and the same creed, accused the committee itself of
timidity and weakness. " I should like to know," said he,
" what excuse can obliterate the crime of those administrators,
and of those generals, who, holding their functions from the
hands of the King, have turned them against him and placed
them at the service of the usurper!" These furious expres
sions were applauded as maxims of statesmen in the Chambers,
in the tribunes, in the journals, in the saloons, and even in
the palace. A few men of elevated views, cool judgment, and
incorruptible by the contagion of party rancour, — at the head of
whom ventured to show themselves M. Royer-Collard, a politi
cal philosopher; M. Laine, whose soul was calm in its great
ness; M. de Serre, an orator destined to acquire a distinguished
reputation, — combated this excess of zeal, these souvenirs of the
most evil days. " The confiscations you demand, under the
name of indemnity from the guilty," said M. Royer Collard,
" are the soul and the nerve of revolution ; after having con
fiscated, because you have condemned, you condemn in order
to confiscate. Ferocity may be satiated, but cupidity never
Confiscations are so odious, that they excited even the blushes
of the revolution, which never blushed for anything. More
over, the great culprits (Ney and Labedoyere), have already
suffered capital punishment : will you make an ex post facto
law to act against them ? bring them from their tombs, that
they may hear from the mouths of their judges this new act
of condemnation, which had not before been pronounced upon
them." Murmurs, groans of anger, of impatience for expiation and
for ruin, responded from amidst the majority to these words of
humanity and peace. M. de Corbiere passionately contradicted
these eternal truths. The Assembly, deaf to the voices of the
ministers, was about to reject the government measure, and to
3 v

338 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 35
Proscription is voted against the regicides.
pass its own. The ministers, seeing the imminence of the
danger, hastened to the palace in order to prevent it, and to
obtain from the King a compromise between his clemency and
the rigour of the Chamber. They returned an hour afterwards
with an amnesty less comprehensive, but which still included
the regicides. " It is not upon the earth," said the Duke de
Richelieu, " that you must seek the motives which prevent the
King from expelling them for ever from the kingdom, it is in
heaven, it is in the wish of the martyred King, who will be
consoled in his tomb by the pardon which you accord in his
name !" These affecting words imposed silence, but not con
viction. Political passions divested themselves even of all
sense of propriety. M. de Trinquelague demanded that the
laws and the penalties might not apply to the royalist bands
which were overwhelming the south with confusion and blood
shed. The classification of culprits by M. de Labourdonnaie,
became law. M. de Clausel de Coussergues justified the con
fiscations by the example of St. Louis and Henri IV. " Let
the treasury be poor, but honest ! " cried M. de Serres. M de
Bethisy insisted, in spite of the pious repugnance of the King,
upon the proscription of all the regicides. " Let us do violence
to his clemency," said he in a speech coldly read in the tribune,
but burning with zeal for the expulsion ; " if inflexible honour
compels us to disobey his wishes, if he turns away from us for
a moment his look of goodness, let us say like the noble
soldiers of the altar and throne, in the west, ' Vive le Roi
quand m^me ! ' "
This harangue, evidently concerted with the immense ma
jority of the Chamber, and which veiled obstinacy under an
appearance of respect, was received with unanimous applause.
The ministers themselves yielded the point to public animosity,
and held their peace. The proscription was voted.
M. de Chateaubriand, in the Chamber of Peers, demanded
a funereal expiation for Louis XVII., the young king slowly
tortured to death in soul and body by his executioners. The
political theatre was felt even upon the tomb of this poor
orphan. " Behold," cried M. de Chateaubriand, addressing in
Lis turn his imprecation against the proscribed, "these are

1815—18.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 339
Production of the will of Maria-Antoinette.
crimes which men can never sufficiently expiate ! Maledictions
on the villains who compel us to so many vain reparations.
France, at length, casts them off. Justice has resumed her
sway ; crime has ceased to be inviolable ! "
IV.
At this period, the will of the Queen, Maria-Antoinette, till
then unknown, issued from the obscurity in which it had been
buried. A moderate member of the convention, named
Courtois, charged, after the death of Robespierre, with the
examination of his papers, had found this will in the portfolio
of the Dictator, and had buried it in the ground, with the pious
motive of one day restoring it to history and her family.
Courtois, now banished as a regicide, had allowed his secret to
transpire. The will, which was brought to Louis XVIII. by
M. Decazes, was a monument too opportune, and of too
affecting a nature, that this prince should not make of it an
era- in his restoration, and an explosion of sentiment for his
cause. Before the catastrophe of the monarchy, and the ca
lamities of Maria-Antoinette, Louis XVIII,, then Count of
Provence, had but little political consideration for his sister-in-
law, who was accused, and with too much reason, of inclining
the virtuous Louis XVI. at times to too much resistance, at
others to too many concessions ; like a true woman, influenced
one day by boldness, and another by dejection. But the fire
of martyrdom had purified everything in the victim. Her
devotion in calamity, her union with her husband even in
death, her anguish for her children, the captivity she suffered,
her piety divided, her adieus received, her courage elevated in
the presence of her executioners, her judgment accepted, her
blood offered to heaven and earth in expiation of some errors
of government, had deified her memory in the mind of the
King. He wished also to deify it politically in the eyes of
renovated France, in order to surround his race with a crown
of sacred recollections, inviolable to revolutionary sarcasms.
He directed M. Decazes to communicate this royal relic to the
Chamber of Deputies. He hoped that the enthusiasm and the

340 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 35.
M. Decazes reads Maria-Antoinette's will to the Chamber of Deputies,
tears of his young minister in reading this letter, dated, as it
were, from another world, would soften the rising anger of the
royalists against his favourite, and would re-establish harmony
between the Assembly and his Council. M. Decazes, who
himself was anxious to acquire that consideration amongst the
royalists which his youth had not yet given him, hastened to
the Chamber with this letter of the queen in his hand, like a
man who could not retain a mystery, and read it, powerfully
affected himself, amidst the deep emotion of the auditory.

V.

The queen's letter, written to her sister, Madame Elizabeth,
and dated from her dungeon in the Conciergerie, at four o'clock
in the morning of the day of which she was destined never to
see the close, was worthy of the victim, of the hour of execution,
of posterity, and of heaven. Death inspires better than hfe,
because it transforms before it strikes.
" It is to you, my sister," said the queen, " that I write for
the last time. I have been condemned, not to a shameful
death, which is only for criminals, but to go and join your
brother. " As innocent as he was, I hope to show an equal firmness
as he did in his last moments. I am as calm as those are
whose conscience does not reproach them. I feel a deep regret
at leaving my poor children ; you know that I lived only in
them, and in my good and tender sister : you, who through
friendship, have sacrificed everything to be with us — in what a
position do I leave you ! I have learned from the pleadings
even of the trial that my daughter was separated from you.
Alas ! poor child ! I dare not write to her ; she would not
receive my letter : I do not even know if this will reach you.
''Receive here my benediction for them both. I hope
some day when they will be grown up, they will be reunited
with you, and enjoy the whole of your tender care. Let them
both think on what I have never ceased to instil into them :
that the principles and exact execution of their duties are the

1815—18.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 311
Maria-Antoinette's last letter.
first foundation of life, and that their mutual confidence and
friendship will constitute its happiness
" Let my daughter feel that at her age she ought always to
assist her brother by the counsels which her friendship and
experience, so much greater than his, may inspire her with.
Let my son, in turn, render to his sister all the cares and all
the services that friendship can inspire. Let them both, in
short, understand that in whatever situation they may be they
will never be truly happy but in their union. Let them see
by our example how many consolations our friendship has
given us amidst our calamities, and that we enjoy happiness
doubly when we can share it with a friend. And where can we
find dearer and more tender than in one's own family ?
" Let my son never forget the last words of his father,
which I expressly repeat to him : let him never attempt to
avenge our deaths.
" I must now speak to you of a matter very painful to my
heart. I know how much sorrow this child must have caused
you. Pardon him, my dear sister. Recollect at his age how
easy it is to make a child say what he should not, and even
what he does not comprehend.
" A day, I hope, will come, when he will only feel the better
all the value of your goodness and tenderness for them both.
" It now only remains to confide to you my last thoughts
I should have wished to write them from the commencement
of the trial ; but, in addition to my not being permitted to
write, the progress of it was so rapid that I have really not
had time. I die in the Roman Catholic and apostolic religion,
in that of my fathers, in which I have been brought up, and
which I have always professed, having no spiritual consolation
to expect, not knowing if there still exist any priests of this
religion ; and even the place in which I am would expose
them too much if they were once to enter it.
" I sincerely ask pardon of God for all the faults that I
may have committed during my life-time. I hope that in His
goodness He will deign to receive my last prayers, as well as
those I have made for a long time past, that He will receive
my soul in His goodness and mercy.

342 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 35.
Effect produced upon the Chamber by the reading of the letter.
" I ask pardon of all those that I know, and of you, my
sister, in particular, for all the trouble which, unwittingly, I
may have caused you. I pardon all my enemies the evil they
have done me.
" I now say farewell to my aunts, and to all my brothers and
sisters. I had some friends ; the idea of being separated from
them for ever, and of their sorrow, forms one of the greatest
regrets I have in dying. Let them know, at least, that I have
thought of them to my last moment.
"Farewell, my good and tender sister; may this letter
reach you. Always think of me. I embrace you with all my
heart, as well as my poor and dear children. My God ! how
frightful it is to quit them for ever !
" Farewell ! Farewell ! I do not wish to think of anything
more but my spiritual duties. As I am not free in my actions,
a priest will, perhaps, be brought to me ; but I here protest
that I shall not speak a word to him, and that I shall treat
him as a stranger." VI
The mother's benediction contained in this letter rebounded
from the scaffold upon her daughter and upon her race ; the
tears of the Assembly and of the people extinguished for a
moment the fire that smouldered in the resentment of the roy
alists. M. de Marcellus, an enthusiastic orator, made an
appeal to concord, to chivalrous self-devotion, and to antique
faith. Expiatory monuments to the royal victims of the revo
lution were raised at his suggestion. Some saw in these
monuments and anniversaries, reproaches against the nation,
others considered them inoffensive proofs of national sorrow
which remove in peaceful times the responsibility of times of
irritation. The murder of a King, crushed like Louis XVI.
beneath the irresistible crumbling of a system which he could
not maintain, was to all, even to his judges, a day of lamenta
tion. A nation that would blush to weep for deaths, especially
those of the kings of its forefathers, and fallen by its own
hand, would not perform an act of greatness of soul but of

1815—18.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 343
The electoral law.
insensibility. Liberty does not inculcate indifference to human
sorrow; it does not pluck out the hearts of the people : it ele
vates and enlarges them. To reproach Louis XVI II., the
Count d'Artois, the brothers, or the daughter of Louis XVI.,
with the institution of funeral honours to their brother, to their
father, and to their mother, would be to brand as a crime the
piety and remembrance of the Bourbons. Wisdom only
demanded the interdiction of funeral orations over their tombs,
to prevent zeal for the dead from kindling controversy amongst
the living. M. de Marcellus had felt this in his own heart,
and had addressed the invocation to religion and peace. The
jealous passions of the enemies of the Bourbons did not pardon
him for this homage paid to the ashes of royalty and to the
ruins of the old religion. They satirized even his candour,
and devoted his name to ridicule and sarcasm in the pamphlets
of the day. VII.
A law of elections, the basis of all representative govern
ments, was still wanting to the institutions. The fate of the
future government was in this law. Several were sketched
but none were finished. The triumphant aristocracy, and roy
alty trembling at the excessive zeal of its friends, equally
feared to deceive themselves by restraining too much, or too
much enlarging the rights of election. M. Laine, president of
the Assembly, expressed a wish to relinquish his functions,
owing to an unpunished insult from one of the most vehement
of the deputies, and conceiving this impunity to be an indication
of personal dislike towards him on the part of the majority.
Too moderate for those times of party rage, and too jealous of
his dignity as chief of a sovereign assembly to submit to an
outrage, M. Laine deeply lamented the excesses of which he
was a witness. The King's entreaty retained him a short time
longer in the presidency. Louis XVIII., M. de Richelieu,
and M. Decazes felt the value of such a man in the president's
chair. They made a distant proposition to him to remove from
the Home Department into the Council of Ministers, M. de

344 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 35.
Progress of the reaction.
Vaublanc, whose encouragement of the violent majority pre
saged his downfall.
During this long fermentation of the royalist party in the
two Chambers, a party of the church, at first mixed up with
the government party, afterwards separated from it, made a
trial of its strength by speeches and motions for a temporal
establishment for the dominant religion and a restoration of
the church property. The state salaries to ministers of wor
ship appeared an outrage to the partisans of an exclusive
church. It was in vain that the government proposed to in
crease this salary, and to appropriate considerable funds for
the payment of ecclesiastical pensions. The Chamber voted,
in its munificence, the restitution of all the church property
not yet alienated. The Constituent Assembly, when it abo
lished feudalism, had annihilated the nobility, and created the
nation ; in reforming the church as a proprietary body, the
revolution of '89 had suppressed the temporal possessions ot
an established religion, and founded religious liberty. The
tendency of the new and the religious party in the Chambers
in restoring its still unsold possessions to the church as a civil
body, was an evident return to a state religion. The King
proscribed and restored, the natural ally of a proscribed and
plundered church, neither dared to encourage or to repress
these tendencies. The orators of the court and those of the
clergy, M. de Chateaubriand, M. de Bonald, and M. de Mar
cellus, perpetually associated in their aspirations the throne
and the altar. Already, on the motion of M. de Bonald, an
able and venerated publicist, they had voted the abrogation of
the law of divorce. The government had consented to remove
it from the civil code, because it had been condemned by the
church. Public education which, since the revolution, had
been principally placed in the hands of an educational body
called the University, was reclaimed exclusively for the church.
They also loudly demanded that the registry of births aud
deaths should be confided to them, to the prejudice of the
municipal authority, in order that the births and deaths, being
legally made over to them, the people should look upon the
priesthood as civil and religious magistrates, a double tie which

1815—18.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 345
Closing of the Chambers and modification of the ministry.
would subject them to its power both in soul and body. They
went so far as to demand the re-establishment of the infamous
punishment of the gallows, and the odious judgment of here
ditary opprobrium in the families of the executed. " Happy
the people," cried a deputy from Brittany, " in whose families
the stigma of crime descends from father to son ! " Such was
the delirium of a return to old times amongst men whose
fathers had caused the revolution, or had perished upon its
scaffolds. They were, in general, neither fanatical nor im
placable ; but counter-revolutions have their deliriums as well
as revolutions. The memory of the excesses, the anarchy, and
the immolations of the reign of terror, the disgust for a long
despotism, the despair of the nation delivered up, ravaged, and
plundered at this moment by foreigners, threw them back with
fury upon old times, and made them seek in the demolition of
old systems, remedies for, and guarantees against the present-
evils. The counter-current, which weak and unreflecting
minds take for the real current of human affairs, carried every
thing before it in public opinion and in the Chambers, and
threatened even to absorb the government.
The King trembled and resolved to give the nation time to
think. He closed the Chambers and modified the ministry.
VIII.
M. de Vaublanc, a man wholly devoted to the Count
d'Artois, was replaced by M. Laine in the home department.
M, Laine, a friend and councillor of the Duke de Richelieu,
came to strengthen the personal policy of the King. His
conviction, heroically demonstrated, to base the restoration of
the monarchy, on public liberty, the esteem in which he was
held by the assembly, and his impassioned but rational eloquence,
imparted to the government an authority soon to be required
over an assembly so full of intrigues, impatience, and political
passion. M. Barbe Marbois, minister of justice, whose prin
cipal merit was, that he had been a victim to the Directory,
and transported to Cayenne, was sacrificed to the Count
d'Artois and the court, which he disturbed, without, however,

346 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 35.
Agitation in the departments.
serving efficiently the moderate policy of the King. The
Chancellor Dambray, more agreeable to the court, and more
docile to the instructions of Louis XVIII., replaced for the
present M. Barbe Marbois. M. Guizot, Secretary-General of
Justice, a young man whom the friendship of the Ab*b6 de
Montesquiou and his presence at the court of Ghent had
brought into credit amongst the royalists, fell, but to rise again
shortly, with his minister. He began, at an early age, a pubhc
career — precocious, long, and diversified — which was to carry
him from reign to reign, from party to party, from elevation -to
downfall, to a celebrity of political fortune and talent which
still endures, and which his vicissitudes forbid us to form a
judgment of at present. IX.
The Chambers were scarcely closed when the counter-action
of their proceedings and laws, on the opinions of the liberals
and Bonapartists, began to evince itself by secret agitation in
the departments. They felt themselves menaced, and they
wished to anticipate. The terror inspired by the acts of the
Chamber was serious enough to excite, but not sufficiently
apprehensive to restrain. The presence of the disbanded
officers and soldiers in their native places — their grievances
against the government — their complaints of the ungrateful
remunerations for their blood in their half-pay — the popularity
of their military stories in the public places of the towns, and
in the cabins of the country — the contempt and hatred which
they excited against this government of emigrants, of refugees,
of old men, of women, and of priests — the rumours of confis
cation of the national estates, for the benefit of the nobility
which they spread amongst the new proprietors, and amongst
the peasants — the journals and pamphlets abusive of the
Bourbons hawked about the villages — the humiliation of defeat,
the hatred of foreign occupation, the bitter ransoms, the heavy
taxes, the onerous loans, the perspective of glory closed with
the impossibility of war, — everywhere clouded the spirit of
the people, and predisposed them to plots and seditions

1815—18.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 347
Conspiracy of Grenoble.
There was not a hamlet on the whole surface of the territory
which had not in its disbanded officers, sub-officers, and
soldiers, a permanent cabal, and active agents of opposition
and insurrection. The presence of the foreign armies alone
restrained in the provinces of the east, the north, and the
centre, the spirit of disturbance and outbreak which was fer
menting in all hearts. The King was liked, was pitied, or, at
least, was pardoned ; but the Chambers were detested, as were
the nobility and the clergy, who were accused of usurping the
power of the throne to reconquer, oppress, and humble the
nation. X.
Such was the popular disposition during the summer of
1816. Men of importance at Paris, especially amongst those
who had tampered with, or failed in the 20th of March, ob
served these symptoms with heart and eye, fomented them
indirectly, and multiplied alarms in order to multiply discon
tent. A strange and enigmatical man suddenly caused an
explosion, at the extremity of the frontiers at the foot of the
Alps, of this concealed fire, which was smouldering amidst the
silence of the people. XI.
This man, whom we knew at that period of his life, was bor
dering on old age. There was nothing in him which bespoke
either great virtues, or great crimes. He was of lofty but slen
der stature, and walked with his body bent by the weight of years,
and by the sedentary habits of a legal man who has passed his
life in poring over bundles of briefs. His countenance was
vulgar, though shrewd and impassioned ; it was encircled by
long locks of white hair, matted and flowing upon his neck and
his coat, in the manner of barristers whose hair unfolded roUs
down upon their legal gowns ; his grey eyes, animated with a
dull fire, had the unsettled and penetrating look of the ferreter
who seeks and hides. His undecided physiognomy gave an
appropriate expression to the rapidity of his mind. Every-

348 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 35.
Didier. — his character.
thing in his appearance was more nimble than profound. He
was in perpetual motion upon his seat, rising, and sitting
down to rise again ; mingling with all the groups in a saloon,
and passing from one to another like a breath of air, to fan the
embers of conversation. He talked a great deal, with a loud
voice, without reserve or consideration; with warmth, though
without eloquence. He gesticulated with a rapid motion of his
hands, corresponding with the volubility of his tongue. People
asked each other who this stranger was, and what familiarity,
ancient or recent, had introduced him thus into intimate ac
quaintance with grave persons, amongst whom he was seen
mingling all at once, in the ranks of secret malcontents, and
especially amongst the still cautious partisans of the Orleans
faction. This figure altogether might equally well have per
sonified indiscretion, mystery, or intrigue, in a theatre at
Athens or Paris. His name was Didier ; and when this was
known, nobody was a bit the wiser as to his past or present
life, and inquiry still went on. XII.
The different parts he had played from his youth upwards
had always been active, but subordinate. Born amongst the
mountains in the neighbourhood of Grenoble, a country of
intelligence, agitation, and flexible genius, brought up for the
church, called to the bar, pleading in the capital and in the
provinces until the revolution broke out, he had signalised
himself like his countrymen, in the enthusiasm and disturbance
of the first reforms. Carried away by turns, afterwards, from
one side to the other, by the flux and reflux of opinions,
he had joined the royalists since 1792, and had solicited, with
many others, the honour of defending Louis XVI. before the
Convention. On his return to Lyons, where he had animated
the spirit of resistance to the republic, a price had been set
upon his head after the siege of that city. The Rhone then
bore him off into the midst of the royalist conspirators of the
south ; his correspondence with the emigrants had from thence
given credit to his name in the wandering cabals of the princes.

1815—18.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 319
His previous life.
When this fire was extinguished he emigrated himself. He
then presented himself to the Count de Provence, as an agent
devoted to his misfortunes and his restoration, and he had
contracted a certain familiarity of exile with the court of this
pretender. Having returned to France after the reign of
terror, he had acquired there, amongst the nobility of his pro
vince, that degree of credit which is attached to misfortunes
suffered in the same cause. He became the agent and solicitor
for these families, to obtain from the more favourable govern
ment a restitution of their confiscated estates. These lucrative
services had enriched him, and had placed him in communi
cation with the public authorities at the period of the Directory
Expert in following, or anticipating the symptoms of wavering
opinion, he had published, in favour of the re-establishment of
legitimate royalty, one of those fiery, turbulent, declamatory
pamphlets, more calculated to mark the fidelity and zeal of the
writer than to serve the cause of the prince. He carried roy
alism in it to a ridiculous excess, but the sensation it caused
was forgotten like its anonymous author. On the accession of
the First Consul, Didier attracted attention to his name by a
panegyric on Bonaparte, entitled " The Return of Religion."
It was an invocation to force, to reconstitute the temporal
power of the church. In whatever direction blew the popular
breeze Didier was carried by his fickleness, and flew to court
good fortune. The empire remunerated his adulation of Napo
leon by the situation of professor of legislation at the law
school of Grenoble. He only distinguished himself in this office
by the servile exaggeration of his enthusiasm for Napoleon.
More attentive to his fortune than to the study of his pro
fession, he conceived chimerical plans, that swallowed up con
siderable sums wliich he had gained in liquidating the estates
of the emigrants. The first return of the Bourbons in 1814,
brought Didier to Paris, either feeling, or feigning a revival of
enthusiasm for their cause ; renewing with their court the
connection which had been interrupted by twelve years of
forgetfulness, and hoping to find in the heart of the King the
recollection and recompense of a zeal formerly displayed in
emigration. At the moment of Napoleon's debarkation at

350 HISTORY OF THE RESTOBATION [BOOK 35.
Didier's connection with the Orleans party.
Cannes, no one declaimed with more indignation and energy
against the European crime of the great proscribed.
XIII.
Whether Louis XVIII. had not thought proper to recom
pense soon enough in Didier the monarchical zeal so long
devoted to another cause, or that the second fall of this prince
and the second accession of Napoleon had converted his fickle
mind to another fortune, Didier, after the King's return in
1815, showed himself as much exasperated against this prince,
and as ardent in his enmity to him as he had shown himself
enthusiastic and fanatic for the restoration six months before.
Too intelligent not to know that Napoleon, vanquished by
Europe, abandoned by France, and a prisoner on the rock
of St. Helena, had not a third reign in his destiny, Didier
assiduously paid court to the most important adherents of the
House of Orleans. It was amongst them that he was heard,
a few days before his enterprise, pouring out with a loud voice,
allusions and sarcasms against the court, the princes, and the
King himself; and professing, amidst the friendly smiles and
approbation of his auditory, hatred and contempt the secret of
which was not long in revealing itself. Was there an under
standing between Didier and these men devoted to the private
intimacy of the Duke of Orleans ? We do not believe it;
Their character repels the suspicion ; and the Duke of Orleans
himself would not have incited, or listened to from the mouths
of his servants, plans of conspiracy against his own race. But
there was in these conversations an understanding, at least,
of opposition and bitterness against the royal house ; and
Didier, in exciting himself to rashness before these men,
evidently thought he was flattering, if not actually seducing
them.* XIV.
However this may be, it was known a few days after that
* Chance, made us witnesses at the time of these conversations, the
relation of which we borrow solely from our own recollections.

1815—18.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 351
His attempt on Grenoble.
Didier had quitted Paris, that he had passed through the de
partments in the neighbourhood of Lyons, under pretence of
private affairs, that at Lyons he had had communications,
known to the police, with the members of an association of
national independence, who were arrested soon after as con
spirators, comprising men devoted in their hearts to the
Bonapartist cause ; that he had returned to Paris as the con
triver of a plot who comes to inspect, or complete his plans, and
that he had again departed without leaving a trace of his route.
He was already in the neighbourhood of Grenoble. There
the ground was already as well known to him as the people.
The peasants of these mountains, a patriotic, soldier-like, and
excitable race, were the same who had been worked upon by
the emissaries of Bonaparte before the 20th March, and who
had escorted his army after his junction with Labedoyere.
Since Grenoble by its defection had decided the fate of France,
these peasants thought they would re-conquer the country in
re-conquering the ramparts of this city. Numerous officers and
sub-officers, thrown back into these villages by the disbanding
of the army, kept up the fanaticism there for the name of the
Emperor. Didier knew that this name alone had sufficient
posthumous popularity amongst the populace to excite them to
revolt. Once roused to insurrection by such a talisman, and
the Bourbons expelled from the throne, political men would
easily change the standard upon which ignorance and prejudice
might have inscribed Napoleon II. , a captive at Vienna, and
give to the victorious insurrection the only dynastic signification
it could have — the Duke of Orleans. This was a repetition of
the abortive plot of the generals Lallemand in 1815, making
their soldiers march in the name of the Emperor, and marching
themselves with a different object. The flag was of very little
consequence to Didier provided it collected together the soldiers
and the people, and expelled from the throne the Bourbons who
now occupied it.
XV
Concealed from the government superintendents under tho
name of .Any. \ Didier had been hospii.ibly received at the

352 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 35.
Didier's proclamations.
mountain village of Quaix, in the house of an old officer of the
Egyptian army, nicknamed the Dromedary, in allusion to the
rapidity of his j ourneys in the desert when he commanded the
guides of Napoleon there. This officer, famous for his attach
ment to his old chief, and rendered popular in the mountains
by these oriental legends, possessed a great ascendancy over
his military companions at Grenoble, and in the neighbouring
villages. He assembled in his house the officers, sub-officers, *
and peasants most to be depended on, and presented them to
his guest Didier as the man intrusted with the secret of destiny,
come to confer upon their country the design, the first signal,
and the honour of the nation's deliverance. Didier, whose
name and person were already known to the majority of them,
harangued and read to them a proclamation artfully drawn up
in the name alone of the national independence. This procla
mation ascribed to the English all the calamities and humilia
tions of France, and summoned the people to arms agains,* ,_de '
foreigners, without explaining the nature of the gorernment
which was to represent this national movement. Thelpeasants,
who only know popular names, were mystified, Didier'^ host ex
claimed against a concealment which kept back the- ham b of, the
Emperor from the enthusiasm of his old soldiers. 'Didier upon
this consented to give satisfaction to all minds by turns, some
times speaking of Napoleon II. to the lowest of the conspirators,
at other times of the Duke d'Orleans to the 'elite, and of
a national independence movement to the multitude. Thus he
traversed the mountains and valleys of Grenoble, Chambery,
Eybens, les Adrets, Pontcharra and Tencin, everywhere secretly
enrolling subaltern agents in his cause, animating the hearts of
his partisans with the fire of his hatred, and alternately putting
forth in his proclamations and nocturnal banquets, either the
name of Napoleon II., or the mysterious name of another
prince. Joly, Briellet, chef de bataillon, Captain Pelissier,
Cousseaux, ex-forest ranger, and Joannini, a Piedmontese
officer, nearly all of whom had formed part of the second
batallion which had flocked round the Emperor at Grenoble,
and escorted him to Paris, became the active movers and future
chiefs of the insurrection. They prepared by hints of myste-

1815—18.1 OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 353
Preparations for the plot.
rious events three hundred officers or sub-officers of the city and
suburbs. They worked upon the citizens, the people, and the
schools, but with less success. .In the mean time, at Vizille, a
hussar named Charlet, Dussert, formerly mayorand a guide to the
army from the Alps to AUemont, Durif, formerly mayor of Vau
jany, Drevet an old soldier of the guard, Buisson, Genevois, Du-
fresne, Guillot, Dumoulin of La Mure, Bremet, a notary, Milliet,
a landed proprietor at Goncelin, Santon, post-master at Lumbin,
Adine, custom-house inspector at Pontcharra, Julien, a lieu
tenant of the customs, Turbet, a captain in the same body, Joly,
a disbanded lieutenant of Pencin, and all those whom hatred of
the Bourbons, antipathy to the foreigners, the recollections of
the republic, the fanatacism for Napoleon, disappointed ambi
tion, ruined fortunes, suspended promotion and irksome idle
ness, could induce to the desperate attempt in order to regain
their former position in society, received the watch- word, the
hints, private insinuations, deceitful promises, the assurance of
the concurrence of Paris and co-operation of Austria, and the
sign and initiation into the conspiracy. The republicans of
Grenoble, members of other secret societies equally hostile to
the Bourbons, were acquainted with the plot, but distrusted and
refused to meddle with it. This party, more united and more
consistent at that time in its proceedings, did not wish to devote
its energies to the exchanging of a monarchy which oppressed
it for a tyranny which had already, under the name of Bona
parte, betrayed its cause and ruined its hopes. The brutal and
military yoke of a second empire humbled it beforehand more
than the light and easily shaken yoke of a pacific and constitu
tional king. They allowed Didier, his imperialist soldiers, and
his unreflecting peasants, to plunge into sedition, ruin, or success,
content with not betraying them, and aiding them only by their
silence and inertness. XVI
The winter passed in these preparations, which a thousand
mysterious rumours might have discovered to a vigilant police
In the early days of spring, Didier went to Savoy, and as far

354 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 35.
Breaking out of the conspiracy.
as Turin, to connect together, at the foot of and beyond the
Alps, the ramifications of his conspiracy. Having returned
towards the end of April to the centre of his machinations,
he appointed the night of the 4th of May for the outbreak.
On receipt of this order, transmitted from village to village by
the officers and inhabitants enrolled in the conspiracy, the con
spirators armed themselves, rising at the cry of " Vive
I'Empereur!" formed themselves into small columns under
the command of the old military men of their districts, directed
their march upon the central village of Eybens where Didier
had established his head quarters, and immediately proceeded
towards the city, where nothing as yet had led to a suspicion
of the rising. The secret had been kept as if by a single
mind. Three or four thousand organised and armed men had
arrived within a few paces of Grenoble, while the general, the
prefect, and colonels assembled at a convivial meeting, were
conversing in full security It is the character of popular con
spiracies to break out unexpectedly. When the same thought
is in the minds of all, there is no occasion to talk about it ,
mystery concerts and silence speaks.
Didier proceeded on horseback at the head of these united
columns, viewing from the summits of the last of the hills,
the gates and disarmed ramparts of the city, congratulating
himself on the certain triumph of his cause, meditating a
march the following day upon Lyons with the park of artillery,
followed and preceded by the irresistible insurrection of those
provinces, and raising Paris and the whole of France under
the very feet of the astonished foreigners and the crumbling
throne XVII
M de Montlivault, prefect of Grenoble, General Donna
dieu, commanding the department, Colonel Vautre, and some
other superior officers of the garrison were conversing together,
when a man in breathless haste, his clothes in disorder, and
his feet covered with dust after a long run, rushed into the
saloon and demanded to be instantly heard by the general and
the prefect. It was the deputy-mayor of La Mure, a small

1815 -18.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE 355
Resistance of the authorities.
town the most important and the most distant from the opera
tions of Didier, celebrated for the meeting of Napoleon and
Labedoyere, and into wliich these two great conspirators
seemed to have infused their spirit. Being informed of the
conspiracy at the moment that the conspirators of La Mure
flew to arms, this magistrate, M. Chuzin, faithful to the King,
and foreseeing the public calamities, had saddled his horse,
and, escaping from La Mure through bye-rOads, he had gal
loped towards the city to apprise the royal authorities, and to
prevent a mortal conflict between the two parties. Intercepted
in his route by other columns descending from the mountains
across the country towards EybeDS, he had quitted his horse
for fear of being betrayed by the noise of its shoes upon the
rocks, and continued to run on foot to give the signal of danger
and of resistance. " The whole country was marching upon
Grenoble : their signal fires already blazed upon the mountain
peaks which over-looked the town, and they could hear from
the top of the ramparts the dull sound and the military tread
of the armed multitude by which they were about to be as
sailed!" On these words some doubted and some smiled at the ex
aggerations and chimeras of the imagination inflamed by fear,
while others became alarmed and went to seek for cooler
information. Fresh news came from the vicinity of Grenoble
confirming, from time to time, the first intelligence. General
Donnadieu, a man of prompt courage and cool resolution,
quitted the prefecture to arm himself, and call out the troops.
He still doubted, however, the reality and the imminence of
the danger. The night was dark, and he was walking silently
through the streets, when he suddenly met a young man, who
drew back on recognising the general, hesitated, and tried to
escape on the opposite side of the way Donnadieu seized the
fugitive, dragged him into the light of a lamp, identified in
him a half-pay officer of the city, saw the hilt of a sword and
the barrels of a pair of pistols shining under his cloak, and,
imagining that in him he had got hold of an armed accomplice
of the plot, he conducted him with his powerful arm to the
neighbouring guard-houBe, disarmed and gave him into the

356 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION BOOK 35.
 —  -—< 
Rout aud flight of Didier.
custody of the guard. The legion of the Isere, the legion of
the Herault, the dragoons of Paris, and the national guard of
Grenoble flew to arms ; a detachment marched upon Eybens
by a circuitous route, in order to reconnoitre, to stop, or to
separate the column of Didier. This detachment, either too
slow or too weak, came in contact at a few paces from the city
with the insurgents, animated by the numerous officers who
formed their advance-guard. It was driven back and dispersed
with cries of " Vive I'Empereur ! " Scarcely sixty paces sepa
rated the head of Didier's column from the open gates of* the
city. The rout of the detachment and the shouts arising from
the plain apprised Donnadieu of the extremity of the danger.
He pushed forward Colonel Vautre., in double-quick time, at
the head of the legion of the Isere to rally the fugitives and
charge the enemy. Vautre charged Didier's advanced guard
at the point of the bayonet, and was received by a volley from
the enemy. A nocturnal struggle, desperate and sanguinary,
took place between the legionists and the peasants. Being
old soldiers on both sides, they disputed the ground with equal
intrepidity. The drawbridge of Grenoble was strewn with the
dead and wounded. But Vautre, supported by the re-inforce-
ments which arrived from the barracks near the gates, inspired
the soldiers with his own courage, and breaking at length the
head of the insurgents' column, he rushed forward to meet
the mass of the peasants, fired upon, and drove them back.
Didier, dismayed at this first check, galloped towards Eybens,
to rally his peasants there ; he harangued and encouraged
them, and endeavoured to bring them back to the assault of
the gates. But there is no rallying for a defeated insurrection.
Courage flies with hope ; the clattering of the horses' feet of
the dragoons of the Seine made these broken bands fly on all
sides. Didier's horse was killed under him by a chance shot,
and he had scarcely time to rise and escape across the woods
which overlook Eybens. At the break of day Vautre, after
having scoured the plain, entered this deserted village, the
head-quarters of the insurgents. He found upon the public
place the carcass of Didier's horse, and the body of Captain
Joannini, stretched by the side of his own horse, which was

1815—18.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 357
Boastings of the military authorities.
smelling his master. Joannini was still biting a half-torn
piece of paper, upon which were inscribed the names of the
insurgent chiefs, whom he wished, even though dying, to
screen from the vengeance of the conquerors. Vautre followed
up his victory as far as La Mure, disarmed that town and the
suspected villages, and re entered Grenoble with the spoils of
the insurrection — waggons loaded with arms and prisoners.
On arriving near the gate of Grenoble, one of the prisoners,
the notary Guillot, passed over the road that was saturated
with the blood of his son, who was killed the evening before at
the assault of that gate. Six dead bodies and numerous
wounded, scattered about the avenues of Eybens, and at
Grenoble, were the only traces left of the insurrection

XVIII
Thus ended the sanguinary, but trivial and inconsistent
plot of Didier's conspiracy. Had it been successful it would
have produced no result, being unsuccessful it left no other
vestiges than executions. The civil and military authorities of
Grenoble affected to exaggerate its importance, in order to
enhance the"value of their services These men did not in
stigate or provoke it, as the spirit of rivalry and recrimination
amongst the conquerors themselves had insinuated, but they
allowed it to make noise beyond its actual importance, and
they thus involuntarily authorised government to conceive
alarms disproportionate to the peril, and to inflict punishments
beyond the crime.
The morning after this disastrous night, General Donnadieu,
eager to prove his recent devotion to the Bourbons by the 'eclat
of an immense service rendered to their cause, wrote to the
generals of the neighbouring departments in terms which had
neither discretion, modesty, nor truth. "Vive le Roi!" said
he in his despatch to his colleagues, " Vive le Roi ! for three
hours blood has not ceased to flow ! Vive le Roi ! the dead bo
dies of his enemies cover all the roads which lead to the city.
From midnight till five o'clock firing did not cease in the

35S HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 35.
Execution of several of the ringleaders.

space of a league all round the city. Even at this moment the
legion of the Isere, which covered itself with glory, is in pursuit
of them ; prisoners are brought in by hundreds. The prevotal
court will execute prompt and rigid justice upon them."
Such were the unbecoming expressions of a military chief
after a duty easily accomplished, by which the victorious
general announced to France and to the government the out
break and suppression of this conspiracy.' They explain the
exaggerated emotions and the promptitude of suppression of
the government itself. A victory over the internal factions
was for it a striking consolidation in the eyes of France and
of the foreign powers. It was but too natural that it should,
like its general, endeavour to exaggerate the danger in order
to increase the triumph. But should it have uselessly coloured
these exaggerations with blood hastily shed ?
The prefect of Grenoble published a proclamation to the
city, couched in more mod erate terms, but declaring that the
prevotal court was about to call for capital punishment upon
the guilty, without delay as without indulgence. The prisons
were encumbered with upwards of four hundred prisoners.
The tribunal, which assembled on the 6th of May, condemned
to death Drevet, Buisson, and David, who had been taken
with arms in the nocturnal action two days before. The next
day they were taken out for execution. They marched to the
place singing patriotic songs, and their last cry, " Vive I'Em
pereur!" was the same upon the scaffold as it had been upon
the field of battle.
The authorities seemed desirous of refusing time for re
flection, and of preventing, by the promptitude of irremediable
punishment all explanations, repentance, or excuse, and the
clemency which might result from cool examination. The
government, rendered giddy itself by. the nature of the
Grenoble despatches, lent itself but too readily to this precipi
tancy. By the rapidity of its measures and the number of its
victims, it obtained credit for its danger and its strength.
Harassed in Paris by the reproaches of weakness which be
sieged it in the Chamber, in the journals, and in the court of
the Count d'Artois, it seized upon this occasion for belying

1815—18.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 359
Proclamation against Didier and others.
these suspicions of the royalists, by showing itself as angry
and as implacable as themselves.
A circular of the minister of police, M. Decazes placed
fourteen departments under martial law, recompensed the
informers, provoked further arrests, excited zeal, summoned to
arms the military powers, and placed all suspected citizens at
the discretion of the civil authorities.
" Let all bad citizens tremble !" replied the prefect and
Genera] Donnadieu. " The authorities have a discretionary
power; as to the rebels, the sword of the law is about to strike
them." An order of the day by the same general, which re
sembled the Roman proscriptions, constituted e\en involuntary
hospitality a capital crime. This order of the day stated that
" the inhabitants of the house in which Didier should be found
would be brought before a court-martial, and shot." And push
ing his contempt of honour to the extent of offering a premium
for treachery and murder, this order of the day added : " It is
decreed that he who shall deliver up Didier, dead or alive,
shall receive the sum of 3,000 francs." Two days after, the
prefect ratified these terrible decrees, by extending the crime
of hospitality and pity to all those who should have knowingly
granted an asylum to any individuals who had formed part of
the seditious bands, " They shall be arrested," said the
prefect, " and their houses shall be razed to the ground !"
In his proconsulate at Lyons in 1793, Couthon held exactly
the same language, All parties accuse and resemble each
other, when they do not place above their anger, conscience,
law, and humanity.
The prevotal court being too slow was superseded by a
court-martial, an armed tribunal, where Colonel Vautre, after
fighting the night before, adjudged the prisoners the day
following. XIX.
Twenty-one men condemned to death, of whom five only
were recommended to the clemency of the King, and two to
be reprieved, delivered on the 10th of May fourteen fresh in-

360 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 35.
Rigours of the government towards the respited convicts.
surgents to the fire of the soldiers. The majority of these
were peasants drawn in by the torrent of sedition, whose use
less blood consolidated no cause. They fell under the balls in
a mass, leaving nothing but dead bodies almost unknown to
this butchery of justice.
Meanwhile the prayers for pardon and respite, which had
emanated from the court-martial itself, and were recommended
by the general and the prefect, had arrived at Paris onthe 12th
of May. No one doubted at Grenoble but that the govern
ment, satisfied with these two hecatombs, would ratify the
scruples of its own tribunal. There were amongst the seven
convicts whose fate had been adjourned, men worthy of pity,
and even children, drawn into sedition by their own fathers.
What political considerations weighed upon the Council of the
King, and on the hand of the minister of police ? They
may be partly surmised, but we have no right to state them.
The pressure of the royalist3, concession of blood to their
terror, zealous emulation, thirst for examples, dread of being
accused themselves while excusing the culprits. Whatever
may have been the motive, the interest, or the difficulty which
dictated the answer of the minister, it went forth implacable, un
expected, and inauspicious ; it was despatched by the telegraph,
an serial and imperfect instrument of communication, in which
a syllable omitted, or truncated, might bear life or death to
seven men. The only example of an execution ordered, as in
the east, by a sign ! This reply dismayed the judges and the
executioners themselves :
" I announce to you by the King's order," said the despatch,
" that you must not grant pardon to any but those who have
revealed something important.
" The twenty-one condemned must be executed, as well as
David " The decree of the ninth relative to those who have
sheltered malefactors cannot be executed to the letter.
" Twenty thousand francs shall be given to those who shall
deliver up Didier "

1815—18.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 361
Their execution.

xx.
The sky itself seemed willing, by veiling its brightness in
a fog. to intercept, or suspend this despatch of death, and to
give ministers time to revoke it : but no counter-order flew to
recall it. The general and the prefect received it on the 15th.
On the same day, at four o'clock in the afternoon, the seven
victims, whose agony the scruples of the court-martial had
only prolonged, marched to the place of immolation, and kneel
ing down on the borders of the ditch of the esplanade, still
red witli the blood of their brethren, received the discharge in
their breasts. A child of sixteen years old, Maurice Miard, in
whom no civilized code would recognise the age of discern
ment and of crime, had marched with the others by the side
of an old man, who was encouraging him to die boldly. He
was only slightly wounded by the balls, whether from his
boyish size, or from the pity of the firing party whose muskets
had all turned aside from so young a victim ; but having fallen
with the rest at the discharge, and struggling under the heap
of dead, he raised his head, stretched out his arms, and implored
his murderers either to save his life or to kill him entirely A
fresh discharge of three muskets granted one part of his re
quest, and he fell motionless upon the bodies of his slaughtered
companions. Remorse for this early murder followed from that day to
their tomb, as a fatality of their lives, all those men to whom
zeal, emulation of service to their cause, or unnatural policy
had given a part to act in this tragedy, and a participation in
this blood of innocence
Donnadieu himself, in reporting the execution to the
ministers, acquainted them also with the excitement it had
caused in the public mind. XXI
Thus perished the instruments of the sedition, while the
chiefs either escaped, or were spared the penalty Didier

362 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 35.
Wanderings of Didier and his accomplices.
himself, accompanied by Dussert, Durif, and Cousseaux, his
principal accomplices, had succeeded in crossing the frontiers
of Savoy. Overwhelmed by the ruin of his plans, wounded
in the leg by the falling of his horse upon him at Eybens,
reduced by walking, hunger, and want of sleep, he had in addi
tion to bear the reproaches of his accomplices, and speedily,
perhaps, their treachery. "You have deceived us," said the
three companions of his flight, in the solitary valley of the
Alps, where they sat down for the first time by the fire-side of
a shepherd : " You have deceived us ; Marie Louise was not at
Eybens, andnot a soul responded to the cry of ' Vive I'Empereur!'
within the walls of Grenoble I" "Well then," replied the
chief, " learn at length that if we had succeeded it is to the
Duke d'Orleans that France would have given the crown ! "
" The Duke d'Orleans ! " exclaimed Dussert, " Bourbon for
Bourbon, I like Louis XVIII. quite aswell." " If France
had rejected him," said Didier, "all was provided for, and we
should have proclaimed the republic !" Cousseaux indignantly
abandoned him ; but Dussert and Durif pursued their route
with him across the mountains. The Piedmontese gendarmerie,
warned by the French government, were already upon his
track. He proceeded painfully towards St. Jean-de-Maurienne,
a valley which it was necessary to pass through, to reach the
asylum which he had doubtless prepared for himself in Italy
or Switzerland, during his excursions the preceding spring.
On arriving at Saint-Sorlin-d'Arve, a village a short distance •
from St. Jean-de-Maurienne, he threw himself, overcome by
fatigue, on a truckle bed in the tavern, and slept soundly while
waiting for the food that was preparing for him. His com
panions Dussert and Durif abandoned him while he slept.
His host, named Balmain, followed them, and either from the
indiscretion of Durif and Dussert, or from suspicion, he ran
to inform the gendarmerie of St. Jean-de-Maurienne, and to
sell a guest on whose head he knew that a price was fixed.
Didier, on awaking, was astonished to see neither his
friends nor his host any longer sitting by the fire. His mind
became uneasy ; the innkeeper's wife, blushing at the pre
meditated treachery of her husband, fell at the old man's feet,

1815— 18.J OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 363
Didier is betrayed and arrested.
acquainted him with his danger, gave him some food, dressed
the sores of his feet, which were bruised and swollen from
walking, and showed him a wood of fir trees where he might
hide himself from his persecutors. Didier dragged himself up
to the summit of the mountain, through the fogs, not knowing
whether there was more danger for him in France than amidst
the Alps. He fell, from weakness and despair, upon the cold
earth, which was saturated with snow, and fainted. On reco
vering from his insensibility he descended again, entered a
cottage at a distance from the village, where he was assisted
by a woman, but repulsed, though not betrayed, by her hus
band. They sent a child to guide him into a deserted and
solitary barn in the openings of the woods, where the moun
taineers kept grass for their cattle ; there he sheltered himself
and lay down upon the straw.
Meanwhile his first host, the traitor Balmain, had returned,
accompanied by the gendarmes of Maurienne, expecting to give
them up his sleeping guest. His wife, however, confessed
that she wished to avoid that shame to his family, and to spare
her children from wealth ill-gotten by the sale of blood. The
avaricious landlord abused his wife and children, guided the
gendarmes, questioned the shepherds of the mountain, and
learned from one of them that he had seen a weary old man
dragging himself through the fir trees towards the deserted
barn. Balmain hastened thither with the carabineers, sur
rounded the building, broke in the door, discovered Didier
stretched upon the straw, 'gave him up to the gendarmes, and
claimed the informer's recompense. Didier, who was at first
conducted to Turin, was delivered to France and conducted to
Grenoble, the theatre of his crime. General Donnadieu re
ceived him, interrogated him, and pretended to have received
confessions from him which would give importance and myste
rious ramifications to his conspiracy. But Donnadieu was too
#much interested to give an impartial interpretation to these
pretended disclosures. Didier's vanity was itself gratified in
magnifying the importance of the plot, of which he had been
the ringleader. " From what dangers have we escaped ! " ex
claimed the general, addressing Colonel Vautre, after his pri-

364 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 35.
Didier's demeanour in prison.
vate conversation with Didier ; " even if the King were to
make me marshal of France and you lieutenant general, he
would still have ill-requited the service we have rendered
him ! " Words which divulged half the secret of the plot.
Frivolity on one side, ambition on the other, credulity here,
exaggeration there, mystery everywhere.

XXII
Didier was scarcely deprived of hope when he began to
evince sincerity, and neither endeavoured any longer to deceive
others or himself, as to the nature of the act which he alone
had conceived, perpetrated, and accomplished. His frivolous
and excitable mind recovered self-possession and calmness on
the brink of the grave. He turned towards his God and
accepted, in expiation of his madness, that death which he
could not escape. He consoled his last hours with reading
the "Imitation of Jesus Christ," that manual of Christian
resignation and penitence. A faithful and attached wife and
pious children gained admission to his dungeon, and interposed
between him and public vengeance. He did not seek to
aggravate or to palliate his crime. He allowed it to be partly
seen that the glory of the conspirator, in altering by boldness
and mystery the face of his country, was the principal motive
of his conspiracy, He made an observation of the contra
diction, and appeared himself to deplore it, which existed
between his former life, consecrated to the cause, the love, and
the service of the Bourbons, and his death, merited by a crimi
nal attempt against their family. " Alas ! " said he, " I have
been walking backwards towards the scaffold ! " He then
became absorbed in a religious resignation to his destiny. The
sentence of death passed upon him did not appear either to
astonish or to depress him. When taken back to his cell, he .
there passed his last hours consoled by the blessings of religion *
and the affection of his wife, who buried herself, as it were,
beforehand in the coffin of her condemned husband. Never
did conjugal love partake more completely of the punishment,

1815—18.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 305
His execution.
in order to withdraw half the weight of it from the dying
man. General Donnadieu, still pursuing that political secret,
which he hoped to extort from Didier, even upon the brink
of the scaffold, entered the cell of the convict a few moments
before the hour of execution. " What can I confess to you ?"
demanded Didier, annoyed with the perseverance of the
general; "an hour hence I shall be no more." And as
Donnadieu still persisted, he added : " Well then, tell the
King that the only proof I can give him of my gratitude for
the benefits I have received from him, is to advise him to
remove from his presence, from the throne, and from France,
the Duke d'Orleans and M. de Talleyrand." " These were,"
wrote the general, " the last words of a man about to plunge
into eternity " XXIII
A few moments after he was delivered up to the execu
tioners ; they tied his hands, and cut off his white hair, which
was gathered up and bedewed with the tears of his wife. This
woman, grown old in sorrow, and firm in the presence of death,
prepared to accompany him even to the scaffold, that
she might there receive both his blood and his body. They
were obliged to employ a friendly violence to tear her husbane
from her arms. Didier walked to the scaffold with his head
bare, a cloak thrown over his shoulders, in a cold rain, through
the deserted streets, in the midst of a death-like silence. His
step was firm, his look was directed towards the houses — to
the windows, and to the faces which he had known in his native
city. The moment he arrived at the place of execution, a win
dow opened and closed suddenly, and a cry of distress rent the
air, and affected all hearts. Final adieu of a wife or daughter,
escaped for a moment from the vigilance of the family, to offer
one more testimony of affection to the dying man.
Didier turned round and became pale at that cry, to which
the only reply he could make would be the silence of death.
Then resuming his mental prayer, he ascended with firmness
the steps of the scaffold, pushed aside the executioner, who was

866 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 85,
Review of the conspiracy.
needlessly going to adjust his head under the knife, placed it
there himself, and received like a martyr the blow which
he had dared as a conspirator

XXIV
With Didier died a conspiracy which he had entirely carried
in his own head. In spite of the efforts of General Donnadieu,
and of the men who had inflated the conspiracy of Grenoble
into the importance of a revolution, in order to cast the crime
sometimes upon M. Decazes, sometimes upon M. de Talleyrand,
and sometimes upon the Duke d'Orlea.ns himself ; no indication
has appeared for thirty years to justify these suspicions. Even
the words of the dying Didier, vague, extorted, heard by a
single interested witness, and interpreted by him with a view
to his own importance and his private hatred, were rather a
warning than an accusation. It is true that after his accession
to the throne the Duke d'Orleans appeared to make the cause
of Didier his own, by raising his family to public employments,
by rewarding his accomplices, and indemnifying his victims.
But it is well known that revolutions when accomplished always
bear the inheritance of unsuccessful revolutions, though they
may have been unconnected with those abortive attempts.
The successor of the Bourbons felt compelled to accept, as shed
for himself, every drop of blood which was spilt against them
during their reign. That which was shed at Grenoble had
produced too sinister a cry to admit of its being buried in
oblivion. It is certain that Didier, had he succeeded, would
have inevitably brought about a change of dynasty, not in
favour of an infant prisoner at Vienna, but of a prince of
mature age, able, popular, and actually present in France.
The conspirator, in raising the standard of Grenoble against
the King, thought he should flatter, serve unknown to them,
and draw into his triumph, perhaps, in spite of themselves, the
overzealous partisans of the house of Orleans. This prince
did not conspire, or authorise others to conspire for him, this
we know; but the court murmurs, the bitter language, the

1815—18.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 367
Alleged complicity ofthe Duke d'Orleans.
party accusations, and the secret family enmity broke forth too
near him, among his intimate friends and adherents, to ex
onerate him from inferences which an officious conspirator
might draw from these appearances. The Duke d'Orleans
who was innocent of any act or show of inclination during the
course of the Restoration, was still open to suspicion in con
sequence of his situation, his attitude, and his silence. Didier
was guilty of vain glory sought for in blood; Donnadieu of
boasting ; M. Decazes of promptitude in anticipating the
reproaches of the court and chamber, by .telegraphing the
sentence of death to the executioners of Grenoble ; the King
of complaisance to his party and hopeless implacability towards
the vanquished. This tragic intrigue, terminated by the dead
bodies of so many victims, left a stain upon these names and
upon this reign, which posterity will not efface. Blood shed
in vengeance, like that of Ney, cries to heaven ; but blood which
is spilt for ambition cries doubly ; for vengeance is a delirium,
ambition a calculation. Calculation is less excusable than
passion. The price for Didier's head, paid to his host Balmain,
and to his denouncer Sert, did not reward their treachery
Sert, after having received the promised 20,000 francs, and
an employment in a distant department, was pursued there
by the infamous reputation of having trafficked in blood, iso
lated in the multitude, insulted through his children, obliged
to sell his patrimony at a wretched price, excluded from all
commerce with men and even with God, whose temples were
closed against him.
The house of Balmain, the treacherous and venal host,
was marked with a sign of reprobation, and deserted by
travellers. His wife died of the shame of bearing: his name,
o
his children abandoned the village ; he himself after having
begged at Paris the price of Didier's blood, lost his reason in
returning to his native mountains, but without losing the re
collection of his treachery. The wages of the informer yield no
profit to those who receive them, or those who pay them This
is a law of God which men take upon themselves to execute

368 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 3&
Organization of secret societies.

xxv
The conspiracies of Grenoble and of Lyons had scarcely
exploded, when secret societies, incited to more bitter resent
ment by the implacable vengeance of the royalists, attempted
to get up insurrections in other parts. A leather-cutter named
Plaignier, a public writer named Carbonneau, and a sculptor
named Tolleron, formed the imaginary nucleus of a society of
conspirators under the name of " Patriots of 1816." Watched
by the police, which had introduced one of its spies into their
assemblies, this agent encouraged them to attempt the assault
of the Tuileries, by breaching it through the explosion of a mine
introduced through a drain which runs from the palace into the
river. They allowed this erection of puerilities, of perversity,
and impossibilities, to be raised to the elevation of a state
crime. A jury, impassioned and implacable, like all tribunals
of opinion in times of party, condemned the three first founders
of the society to the penalty of parricides, and seventeen in
ferior accomplices, and even some women, to other ignominious
punishments. The police withdrew its agents from the cause,
and left nothing to it but the dupes recruited by itself.
Plaignier, Carbonneau, and Tolleron walked to execution, their
faces covered with a black veil, as if they had attempted the
lives of their fathers. Their hands were cut off before they
were beheaded. The horror of these executions for crimes so
doubtful or so undecided, begot hatred in the people, and in
repressing it, made it more perverse. Secret societies com
municated with each other by signs from one extremity of the
kingdom to the other. The odium of the condemnations
against the generals accused of complicity with Bonaparte
during the hundred days, accumulutated tragedies upon tra
gedies. Admiral Linois, General Debelle, and General Travot,
were condemned to death. Drouot and Cambronne only escaped
the same penalty by a narrow majority. General Chartron
was shot in the citadel of Lille ; General Bonnaire was trans
ported, his aide-de-camp Mietton executed ; General Meuton
Duvernet immolated at Lyons; Generals Lefebvre-Desnouettes,

1815—18.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 369
Unpopularity of M. Decazes with the ultra-royaiists.
Rigaud, Gilly, Grayer, Radet, Drouet-d'Erlon, the two Lalle-
mands, Clausel, Brayer, and Ameilh, some of them impri
soned, and others fugitives, expiated in person or in effigy,
the punishment almost always capital, of their defection.
Trials of the press, and trials for seditious language, everywhere
followed these military condemnations or executions. The
correctional tribunals rivalled in rigour the criminal juries and
the courts-martial. The party of the Court and the Chambers,
insatiable in its severities, accused through the pens of its
writers, the slackness of repression, and the forbearance of the
King and his ministers. There is no tyrant more implacable
than public passion. Louis XVIII groaned under without
having the power of restraining it. He thought he should
redeem, by these sacrifices to vengeance or to the safety of his
throne, the confidence and the mildness which he had pre
scribed to his family, and for which he had been punished by
the Bonapartists in his first reign. The Duke de Richelieu,
exclusively attending to the liberation of the territory, the
great work of his department, thought he was hastening the
evacuation of the soil by showing to the foreign powers the
actual reign everywhere avenged, dreaded, or obeyed.

XXVI.
M. Decazes, in spite of his concessions to the clamours of
the court of the Count d'Artois did not hide from himself that
the ministry was diverging from its proper line, and was
driving amongst the rocks of party governments. The first
fragment which was to be carried off by this reaction was
himself. As a young man he was opposed to this court of emi
gration, embittered by the solitude of a long exile, and out of
its element in its own country ; while as a new man he was
displeasing to that ancient aristocracy, by whom the habit of
surrounding the monarch made power be looked upon as the
property of its rank ; as the favourite of the King he disquieted
the royal family by the concessions of principles and authority
with which he inspired that prince. M. Decazes was, in the
3 x

370 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 35.
Manoeuvres of the ultra-royalist faction.
eyes of the court of the Count d'Artois, a new-born Neckar, re
commencing after the revolutionary catastrophes those connivan
ces with public opinion which had cast them down. The dismissal
of M. de Vaublanc, the avowed minister ofthe faction of the Count
d'Artois, and his second in the council, had already rendered
these antipathies against M. Decazes almost irreconcilable,
This underhand but turbulent faction affected, from regard
for its position, the most excessive devotion to Louis XVIII. ;
but it carried on its secret manoeuvres in the palace, it had its
party in the Chamber, its committees in the provinces, its con
gregations under the cloak of religion in the church, its rami
fications in the councils of foreign sovereigns, its organs,
avowed or disavowed, in the press. The increasing irritation
of the Royalist press, of the majority of the Chamber and of
the peerage, led this intestine faction to hope that on the
approaching return of the deputies to Paris it would succeed
in governing alone the Council, to the exclusion of new men,
replacing them with its most fanatical agents, and to lead on
the King to the most violent ruptures with the new spirit of
the times. The necessity, however, in every form of con
stitutional government, of seducing public opinion prior to
quelling it, and deriving from a certain degree of popularity the
power to subjugate the people, compelled the ablest men of this
party to pretend forthe representative constitution a zeal, real
with some and false with others, which gave to the ultra-royalists
an appearance of jealous liberalism. M. de Chateaubriand
signalized himself by his talent in this new party. In a little
code of royalism entitled " The Monarchy according to the
Charter," this great writer endeavoured, with as much clever
ness as brilliancy, to conciliate monarchy and liberty. He
constituted himself, in this book and in literary impromptus
scattered amongst the journals of the court, the eloquent pub
licist of royalty in three branches, after the model of the
British constitution and of Mirabeau's ideas in 1 789. The
revived spirit of the constituent assembly appeared to re-exist
in him and in his friends. People imagined they were reading
again in these pages the speeches of the Clermont-Tonnerres,
of the Mouniers, of the Cazales, and of the Maurys in that

1815—18.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 371
Position of M. de Chateaubriand.
assembly. The three powers, weighed in imagination one
against the other, formed a mutual balance at the breath of
M. de Chateaubriand, in an equilibrium the elements of which,
though real in England, had disappeared in France. There
was no longer in that country, any other than a royalty of habit
and an immense democracy of fact. Thus the idea of M.
de Chateaubriand tended to reconstruct impossibilities, that is
to say, a power constitutional, aristocratical, and hereditary
in a nobility, which an equal division of property and the sup
pression of feudal rights would no longer admit. There lay
the error of M. de Chateaubriand and his school. The organic
repugnance of the nation to the re-establishment of a privileged
class rendered the advances of this writer suspected by the
liberal party ; but when they consented to overlook this radical
impracticability in his system, they listened to and repeated
with complaisance the noble sentiments of generosity and of
liberty which gave such life to his writings. His birth which
allied him to the high aristocracy ; his christian elegies, which
for twelve years past had made him the Jeremiah of the
church ; his style which made him popular with all lively
and sensitive imaginations ; his hatred of Napoleon and his
despotism, of which he had made himself the Tacitus ; his
adoration of the Bourbons, the pledge of security to the
royalists ; and his ambition, so much the more active now that
it had been impatiently adjourned during the last reign, ren
dered M. de Chateaubriand the man the most necessary, and at
the same time the most dangerous, to the new monarchy. Dis
contented with the King, who did not sufficiently appreciate
his services ; devoted to, but suspected by the Count d'Artois,
who wanted m'ore docile adherents ; he flattered and disquieted
by turns the two powers which divided the palace. A con
stitutionalist with the King, aud an ultra-royalist with his bro
ther, not breaking yet entirely with one or the other, appa
rently respecting M. de Richelieu and M. Laine, but already
pursuing in M. Decazes the favourite of whom he meditated
the overthrow.

872 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 35.

Birth of the Doctrinaire party.

XXVII.
The King and M. Decazes were too clear-sighted not to
see in the excited and retrograde party of the Court and the
Chamber, symptoms of the storm which was brewing against
them. They sought, therefore, a natural counterpoise in men
who were attached in heart or ambition to the monarchy, but
whose previous life made them incompatible with the renewal
of the old regime. The majority of these, men of govern
ment rather than men of principles, belonging by their names
to the old royalty, attached to the empire during its prosperity,
and the first to fall off from it on its fall, having recovered in
1814 their ancient devotion for the family of the Bourbons,
removed from public affairs, or undecided in 1815, approach
ing the throne again since its re-establishment, seeking the
notice of M. Decazes from similarity of antecedents, since
this young man possessed the heart of the monarch, and
sheltering themselves under his influence, to re-ascend the
broken ladder of their political fortunes : M. Pasquier, M.
Mole, M. de Barante, M. Mounier, M. Villemain, M. Guizot,
and M. Angles, some already broken into the vicissitudes of
governments, and moderate men from lassitude, the others
still young, and moderate from their strength of mind ; these
men, almost all remarkable through their talents or their ex
pectations, formed the nucleus of an intermediate party des
tined to extend and enlarge itself greatly, because it took a
position in which the King had placed himself, and where the
crowd flocks after revolutions, between all parties, offering
security to some, satisfaction to others, and pledges to all. A
man superior to them in years and authority, M. Royer-Collard,
at once a philosopher and a politician, covered them with the
mystery of his conceptions, the dignity of his life, and the
spell of his aphorisms. He was the concentrated and silent
Sieyes of this budding party. An oracle is essential to all
religions ; M. Royer-Collard was the oracle, still undecided,
of this active and equivocal sect, which was afterwards to be
called les Doctrinaires.

1815—18.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 373
Dissolution ofthe Chamber of Deputies.

XXVIII.
M. Decazes, who had occasion to make a personal party for
the King, lent an ear to the counsels of these men, and col
lected them around him to strengthen his own position. It
was from his conversations with these counsellors that he drew
the idea, and the boldness, of the coup d'ftat to which he
wished to lead the King.
Four ministers, M. de Richelieu, M. Laine, M. Decazes,
and M. Corvetto, convinced that the reins of government
would be wrested from the hands of the King if they did not
prevent the re-assembling of the Chamber, formed the bold
resolution of dissolving it before it had enacted an electoral
law and to appeal to the country from the exaggeration and
the violence of its representatives. The King, whom it was
necessary before all things to draw into this bold resolution,
hesitated some days, and then entered himself into this con
spiracy against his exclusive friends. The secret of this coup
d'etat, faithfully kept by several men, exploded on the night
of the 5th September, before the colleagues of the ministers,
or even the King's brother himself, could anticipate the blow
that was about to strike them. On the following morning the
public journals contained the royal ordinance, which, confirming
more and more the King's intention of reigning by the charter,
pronounced the dissolution of the Chamber of 1815, and con
voked the electors for the 4th October.
The King, who wished to avoid the reproaches of his
brother on a secret and an act so aggressive against him, had
charged the Duke de Richelieu to go and communicate the
ordinance to him before the hour at which it was to be pub
lished. The Count d'Artois received this communication as
he would have received the death blow of the monarchy. He
predicted the ruin of the throne thus deprived of its real sup
ports. He saw in Louis XVIII. another Louis XVI., opening
the breach, and tracing out himself the route to his enemies.
The palace resounded with his anger and his lamentations.
His friends dared loudly to accuse M. Decazes of treason.

374 HISTORY- OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 35.
Public opinion on the coup (Ce'lat.
The Duchess d'Angouleme refused to receive the ministers of
her uncle. The Duke d'Angouleme more rational than his
father, and more moderate than his wife, confided without
repugnance, and without murmuring in the wisdom of the
King. The Duke de Berry, whose youth and military taste
had surrounded him with the young officers of the empire,
and who affected amongst his intimate friends a contempt for
the antiquated superstitions of the old regime, exclaimed that
the King had done well in freeing himself from the intolerable
yoke of a Chamber at once servile and rebellious. The court
party boiled and bubbled to the verge of madness. The im
mense mass of public opinion, already weary of the agitations
and fury of the representatives it had named the preceding
year, responded to the coup d'etat of the 5th September by a
unanimous acclamation of joy. With the exception of the
exclusive partisans of the throne, all France became royalist in
a single day. The country seemed to have re-conquered its
King, the King his country.
The triumphant ministry was violently attacked by M. de
Chateaubriand in a phrase added to one of his pamphlets.
The King deprived him of his title of Minister of State, but
left him his pensions. The struggle then commenced between
the government and the royalists. M. de Richelieu who
wished to liberate the King from hi* friends, without giving
him over to his enemies, recommended to the agents of the
ministry to exclude as candidates for the Chamber only those
men who rebelled against the sage inspirations of the King,
but to repel with energy all revolutionists and Bonapartists.
M. Laine used the same language in his instructions. The
King himself spoke like a father to the presidents of the
electoral colleges, who came to receive orders from him pre
vious to their departure for the provinces. " Tell the French
people that it is an old man who begs of them to render his
last days peaceful by the reconciliation and happiness of his
children." The elections inspired by this spirit, ratified by a
majority, the coup d'etat of the 5th of September, by excluding
the violent deputies of the retrograde party, and increasing in
strength the party of the King and of moderation. M. de

1815—18.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 375
The new elections.
Vitrolles himself, the soul of the Count d'Artois' council, was
repudiated by the electors. They treated in the same manner
M. Laborie, an agitating satellite of M. de Chateaubriand, as
well as M. de Sesmaisons, M. de Bethisy, and M. de Polignac.
Nearly all those men who had compromised themselves with
public opinion during the last session, either by motions of
vengeance, by their wishes for the re-establishment of the old
regime, or by secret intrigues amongst the friends of the
royal house, were reproved for their zeal, for their systems, or
for their manoeuvres. The nation declared for itself and for
the King, against the excesses of royalism, and against the
revolutionary agitations. Orators famous in the minds of the
people for their moderation and their talents during the phases
of the imperial regime, • such as Camille Jordan, Ravez, the
friend of M. Lain6, Courvoisier, Mortier, Duke of Treviso,
Chabrol, Jacquinot de Pampelune, came to recruit by their
numbers, eloquence and consideration, that centre of the new
representation, in which the King, M. de Richelieu, M. Laine
and M. Decazes, wished to place themselves with the ma
jority of the country. Men experienced in public affairs, such
as M. Pasquier, M. Simeon, M. Roy, and M. Beugnot, ali
fluent orators, prepared to second them.
M. de Villele and M. de Corbiere, collected around them
the remains of the Chamber of 1815, at the same time mode
rating them. A party of parliamentary observation, rather
than of opposition, they seemed to await the acts of govern
ment before deciding either to support or to combat them.
A few men more imbued with the recollections of 1789,
such as Camille Jordan and his friends, professed the com
patibility of reforming principles and constitutional royalty.
Two persons almost isolated, M. Laffitte and M. d'Argen
son, sigualised themselves by a tendency more republican than
imperialist : M. Laffitte, a. popular banker, enjoyed a degree of
credit founded upon a fortune nobly spent, and upon a mind
ambitious of distinction ; M. d'Argenson, a great, lord, a phi
losopher, and a benevolent man, whom the inapplicable in
flexibility of his popular systems rendered irreconcilable with
all oppositions and all governments.

376 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 35.
Opening of the Session
In opening the session the King spoke with feeling of the
sufferings which the scarcity of corn was causing among the
people ; of his negociations with the Pope for a Concordat
which should maintain liberty of conscience, increasing at
the same time the state salaries of the clergy, and finally of
his firm resolution to maintain the charter, a treaty of peace
still more important between the past and the present. He
adduced asa proof of his energetic intention his coup d'ttatofthe
5th September. The first act of the assembly demonstrated
to the ultra-royalists the decrease of their influence in the votes.
The two members, who received the greatest number of suffrages
as candidates for the presidency were M. Pasquier and M. de
Serres ; M. Pasquier, a confidential adviser of the dissolution
of the chamber of 1815, M. de Serres, an old emigrant
having laid down his arms twelve years before to return to
his country, passed from the royal army into the magistracy,
a man whose universal talents, greatness of soul, and splendid
eloquence, placed him above the partialities and the intrigues,
of his time. The King gave the presidency to M. Pasquier,
This was a mistake of the ministry. The previous career of
this statesman, the functions he had long exercised as prefect
of police under Bonaparte, and under Savary, the weak manner
in which he allowed himself to be surprised and made prisoner
by three conspirators, without any other strength than their
own boldness, at the period of Mallet's plot, were calculated
to point out M. Pasquier to the suspicion, to the resentment
and the sarcasms of the royalist party in the Chamber. M. de
Serres would have attracted, M. Pasquier repelled. In re
commending him, M. Decazes was more influenced by his
personal gratitude, than by consideration for the King's agree
ment with the assembly. In the mean time the two Chambers,
in reply to the King's speech, confined themselves to a mere
respectful paraphrase of the wishes of the crown. The
royalists disavowed by public opinion took refuge in secret
intrigues, the focus of which was in the King's palace.

1815—18.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 377
The new electoral laws.

XXIX. '
An electoral law, the first reparation which the King owed
to the Chambers, offended by the electoral coup d'etat of the
5th September, was presented by the ministry. It conferred
the electoral rights upon every individual who paid three
hundred francs of direct taxes. It was expected that at this
limit of property, would be found the central point where the
aristocracy and the democracy met sufficiently to express at
once the national will, and the responsibility by a material
pledge of every citizen in the destiny of the state. The
royalists through the medium of M. de Villele, demanded the
election by two classes, which being more popular at the base,
became more aristocratic at its summit. M. Royer Collard
defended the ministry and the elections by one class. He
instanced the tumultuous assemblies of the people united in
primary assemblies as the cause of the bloodshed during the
first revolution. M. de Labourdonnaie, a bitter and insulting
orator of ultra-royalists principles in the Assembly, described
the ministry under the title of Directory, modified by the
introduction of M. Laine into the council of the King, hoping
thus to humble the crown, and to exhibit to the royalists a
King degraded by a council more sovereign than himself.
Two young writers who were not in the Chamber but who
served the minister with their pens, M. Guizot and M. de
Barante, wrote from his dictation against the election by
several classes. The law was rather forced than obtained from
the Chamber of Deputies.
In the Chamber of Peers the party of the Count d'Artois, M.
de Chateaubriand, M. de Fontanes, M. de Polignac, and M.
de Fitzjames, combated this measure in vain, in concert with
MM. de Villele, De Corbiere and De Labourdonnaie. The
King himself canvassed his own court for votes for his minis
ters ; and he triumphed more through deference than con
viction. The law was passed. It constituted an electoral
body in France of a hundred thousand large and moderate pro
prietors. It called them together to elect their representatives

378 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 35',
Conspiracy of Lyons.
in the principal towns of the departments. It abolished
private consideration to substitute for it the reputation which
was known to all. It excluded the people, and constituted
political cabal. Two errors which must speedily produce their
consequences, increasing opposition in the masses, and ambitious
agitation in the assemblies.
XXX.
Bitter discussions on the press and on individual liberty
still suspended, and the discussion of the budget occupied the
remainder of the session. In spite of the efforts of M. de
Chateaubriand and M. de Fitz-James in the Chamber of Peers,
the ministry triumphed there on all questions, as it had tri-
unphed over M. de Villele and M. de Labourdonnaie in the
Chamber of Deputies. France, although still partially agitated
by seditions arising from the scarcity, longed for peace. The
last convulsions of Bonapartism expired everywhere in conspi
racies without spirit or result. The ultra- royalists alone agitated,
not the country but the court and the journals.
This calm was for a moment interrupted by the outbreak of
a conspiracy at Lyons, to which the zeal and jealousy of the
royalist authorities of the department gave more importance
and substance than it had in reality. General Canuel, an old
colleague of General Rossignol in the republican wars against the
Vendeans, since converted to royalism, eager for renown in his
new cause, commanded the department. This general was
urged by a disquietude of mind and an emulation of fidelity, to
denounce to the government and to the commissary general of
police at Lyons, M. de Sainneville, imaginary dangers, invented
or magnified by the military spies, or the officious informers
amongst his staff. M. de Sainneville after having acted with
occasional rigour against the men declared suspicious by the
general, believing tranquillity to be restored, had gone to Paris,
leaving the city for a few days to the military police. Some
half-pay officers of the villages round Lyons, being enrolled in
a conspiracy by a captain of the legion of the Yonne, named
Ledoux, concerted a rising of their districts, and an advance

A 4

1815—18.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 379
Its abortive end.
upon Lyons on the 8th of June. Ledoux promised them the
junction of a portion of the troops, and of the people, at the
head of whom he was to join them. Some of the conspirators
did in fact wait for Ledoux. Astonished at his delay and at
the solitude of the streets, they went to seek him at his resi
dence. He was no longer there. They watched for his return.
The day passed thus ; at its close they saw Captain Ledoux
enter the city, they followed him unperceived. Ledoux entered
the general's house as if about to make a secret report to him ;
the moment he came out, his accomplices, who suspected him
of having betrayed them, shot him dead. At the same hour the
tocsin was rung in eleven populous villages on the banks of the
Saone and of the Rhone ; a small number of the conspirators,
old military men, and masses of peasants, confused and aston
ished, assembled at the noise of the tocsin, some believing in
the rumours of a revolution accomplished at Lyons, others
thinking it an alarm of fire. Some gendarmes and a weak
detachment of troops sufficed to disperse them without resis
tance. The puerile or imaginary conspiracy vanished with
the day. , Seven or eight disbanded officers and sub-officers,
and a few peasants, accomplices of this military plot, were
guilty of madness rather than of sedition. But General
Canuel, the prefect, and the mayor of Lyons, the one from
boasting the other from credulity or panic, made the agitation
of these villagers resound through the whole of France as the
explosion of a revolution. The minister believed, or affected
to believe in it, in order to conciliate his enemies, who already
accused him of indulgence or complicity. M. de Sainneville
was sent back to Lyons. In vain he cast doubts on the
reality of the asserted dangers. The prefect and the mayor
attested them. Two or three hundred suspected persons were
thrown into prison. The prevotal court assembled, divided
the causes, and separately judged the accused of the city and of
each village, as if to aggravate the importance of the crime by
the numerous ramifications of the conspiracy. Ten heads were
struck off in the city and eleven in the villages ; one hundred
and ten of the accused escaped capital punishment by being
condemned either to transportation or to the galleys. Moveable

380 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 35.
Real nature of the conspiracy at Lyons.
columns of troops and gendarmes dispatched into the country,
spread everywhere terror and accusations, while perfidious
agents provoked fresh insurrections in order to be called on for
other services.
In the mean time, the commissary general of police, M. de
Sainneville, a witness of these excesses, returned to Paris and
denounced them to the ministers. A sinister doubt arose on
his information, in the mind of the Duke de Richelieu, M.
Laine, M. Decazes, and the King. They sought the truth in
that labyrinth of real and supposed crimes and of incessant
punishments. They dispatched to Lyons Marshal Marmont,
invested with the title of king's lieutenant in those provinces.
Colonel Fabvier, chief of his staff, accompanied the marshal.
Their presence in Lyons at length threw a real light upon that
enigma of false zeal, confused plots, mutual panics, police,
terrors, and iniquities. The accusers accused themselves, the
witnesses were self-contradicted, the double-faced agents betrayed
themselves, the phantom of pretended dangers, and the impor
tance of exaggerated services vanished. Marshal Marmont
suspended, in the name of the King, the proceedings still
pending, and individual pardons softened or anulled the pun
ishments. The prefect and the general were recalled. Mar
mont and Fabvier returned to Paris, and left bitter resentments
against them in the minds of the humbled royalists. The con
spiracy of Lyons trafficked in by the two parties, and become
for many years a text for mutual accusations, remains one of
those mysteries of agitated times, for ever enveloped in doubt
and conjecture.
XXXI.
In the mean time the ministry separated from all alliance
with the party opposed to the coup d'etat of the 5th Sep
tember, had successfully admitted into the council, M. Pasquier
at the head of the department of justice, M. Mole at the head
of the admiralty, and Marshal Gouvion-Saint-Cyr at the head
of the war-office. These men, of various but eminent
capacities, strengthened the council of the King. They

1815—18.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 381
Infusion of new blood into the ministry.
evinced on the part of the young minister who had recommended
them to his master, a zeal exempt from jealousy for his service.
M. Decazes at this moment evidently sought more to serve
than to command, for he gave himself in these new collea
gues, as he had in M. Laine, rivals and even superiors in
public affairs. M. de Serres was president of the chamber ;
M. Guizot, M. de Barante, the Duke de Broglie and M. Ville-
main, men of promise, formed, under different titles around
the favorite minister, not only a friendly circle but a political
party. All of them well versed in the study of the constitu
tional history of England, all having felt at an early age, the
humiliating weight of the despotism of Napoleon upon thought
and upon the. dignity of the mind, all strangers either by their
birth, or their youth, to the superstitions of the court of the old
regime, they laid themselves out with good faith to reconcile
young France and the old monarchy, by maturing the one
and renovating the other. Gifted with minds more erudite than
creative, they had perspicacity enough to comprehend the analo
gies between the revolution of 1688 and that of 1789, but not
genius enough to comprehend the differences between them.
Their doctrines were nothing but imitations : they wished to
establish in France, without having the elements for it, a parlia
mentary party between the King, the nobility, and the people,
seizing upon the government in right of superior intelligence or
ambition, pitting the people against the -King and the King
against the people, the plebeian mind against the nobility ; thus
founding a government caste independent of all social forms,
subsisting and maintaining itself by talent, the management
of affairs, the pen, and the tribune, like those foreign, but domi
nating races, which impose and maintain themselves in the east
between the people and the sovereign. All those men of the
old revolutionist or imperialist parties, who were exhausted but
yet unwearied, all those young men who felt conscious ot some
superiority of mind, of eloquence, of character, or even of ambi
tion, radied round them. Self esteem and contempt for the
vulgar herd were the leading characteristics of their school.
Insinuating as an intrigue, intolerant as a dogma, they
already bore a distant resemblance to those religious sects which

•382 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 35.
Review of the Doctrinaire party.
flattered the world to enslave it. A few superior minds such
as M. de Serres and M. Royer-Collard, accepted the patronage
which these young sectarians conferred upon them to impart to
them the splendour of their own reputation. The King and M.
Decazes recompensed and encouraged their zeal, in order to inti
midate through them the court party, and to govern that of the
revolution. A moveable weight, which the minister of police,
young like themselves, could apply by turns to any point of
public opinion, so as to constitute that government of balances
which he wished to create for the benefit of the King. These
men, without any connecting link or solid foundation in the
country, were eminently calculated for the part ; their principal
doctrine was their own importance, and they could refuse nothing
to the ministerial despotism of M. Decazes, provided that he
did not refuse them anything in the way of influence and ascen
daucy. M. de Richelieu did not comprehend this new party,
Accustomed to the Greek servility of the absolute courts of the
north, he only saw in these ambitious young men clever and de
voted servants of the court. M. Laine, a republican by cha
racter and a royalist from principle, saw by instinct the spirit
of intrigue by which this young party was corrupted. He
accepted so much zeal with a secret repugnance. M. Pasquier
caressed it as an instrument of government. M . M0I6 as a useful
element of the principle of. royal authority, whoever might be
the prince ; M. Decazes allowed himself to be entirely over
reached by it though not adhering to it either by conviction or
nature ; he reserved his heart for the King, and his political
opinions for circumstances. The King, proud and flattered at
growing young again in this party, originating in his reign and
destined to carry out his personal opinions, rewarded with
smiles, with confidence, and favours, the friends of his favourite
minister. M. Decazes acquired more and more this title, so contra
dictory to the nature of a constitutional government, in which
the personal friendship of the King goes for nothing, in his
council. But constitutional monarchy was still so recent and
so undecided in France, at this epoch of 1817, that no one
except court rivals thought of refusing to the King, the right

1815—18.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 383
Royal favour to the family of M. Decazes.
of cultivating friendships, and everybody bent before the royal
favour. This favour which had had sufficient power to induce
the King to break with the past by the coup d'etat against his
exaggerated friends, was become at this moment a sort of uni
versal power, which held in its hands the fate of all ideas. M.
Decazes was the arbiter of the royalists and the liberals. The
former flattered him as the confidant of the crown, the latter
served him as the moderator of the monarchy and the guardian
of the charter. The King loved him even in his family, and
surrounded himself with everything which could remind him of
his minister. A young and handsome sister of M. Decazes,
who was married at Bordeaux, had been summoned to Paris to
participate in the high fortunes of her brother, and to temper
by female grace, those official receptions which are in France
an unavoidable decoration of power. The King had expressed a
wish to see her. The countenance, the candour, the respectful
astonishment of this sister of his favourite had pleased hkn.
He had admitted her as if by compulsion to a sort of familiarity
of conversing with him. This unbending of the mind of an
infirm prince in the intimacy of a lady without ambition and
without intrigue, imparted to the jealousy of the palace, odious
interpretations. These, however subsided before the modesty
and disinterestedness of this new favourite of the King. The
sister of the minister did not even improve her own fortune by
this chance intimacy with the sovereign. She entered the
palace pure from all dishonour, and left it equally so after the
fall of her brother.
The King who wished to give to the fortune of his favourite
minister, a foundation more permanent than his friendship, oc
cupied himself to get him admitted into one of those families
whose adoption naturalises new men in ancient races. M. de
Saint Aulaire, whose first wife had been a daughter of the
Prince of Nassau Saarbriick, and who had married, after her
death, a young and handsome woman, with gracefulness and
wit that gave her a distinguished position in the aristocratic
and literary saloons of Paris, had a daughter by his first mar
riage. This young lady was heiress to her father's name, to
the princely fortune of a branch of the Nassau family, and to

384 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 35,
Proceedings of the ultra-royalists.
the empire which her mother-in-law had exercised over the
literary and political world of the Parisian saloons. The King
wrote, with his own hand, to M. de St. Aulaire, to ask him to
give his daughter in marriage, to his minister. M. de St.
Aulaire, who was too much of a courtier to resist the wishes of
the King, and who was also a political friend of his proposed
son-in-law, and the habitual host of the new party, of which
his house and that of M. de Broglie constituted the focus,
acceded to the King's demand. M. Decazes, a plebeian who
was repudiated by the royalists, became a member of the aristo
cracy through court favour. This good fortune of the minister
irritated the nobility without subduing it, M. Decazes was
accused of vanity, M. de St. Aulaire of fawning, and the King
of a profanation of the aristocracy. The hatred against the
favourite increased with his elevation.

XXXII.
The elections of the deputies, and the tranquillity enjoyed
by the country permitting the absence of the Duke de Richelieu,
he proposed going to the congress of Aix-la-Chapelle, where
the ministers of the great powers were about to assemble on
the summons of the Emperor Alexander, and the suggestion
of the King, to deliberate on the anticipated evacuation of
France by the army of occupation. But the desperate party
which had been dethroned by the ordinance of the 5th of
September, saw with terror the hand of Europe withdrawing
from the affairs of France, and the country about to be delivered
over to the sole domination of the King and the policy of his
minister. The Duke de Richelieu, the Russian Ambassador,
Pozzo di Borgo, and the Duke of Wellington, yielding to the
anxious wishes of the King, acted in concert to abridge the
humiliation of France, and to induce the coalition to restore its
nationality and independence ; but some men who were fonder
of servitude even than their enemies themselves, who were
not desirous of a longer oppression, got Up at Paris, in the
cabals of the retrograde faction, an apocryphal intrigue to beg
for the continued intervention of the foreign powers in the

1815— 18.J OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 385

The note secrete.

affairs of the kingdom. This intrigue, more worthy the name
of plot, which continued in a part of the palace the machina
tions of the emigrants, broke out suddenly by the publication
of a memorial secretly addressed to the foreign powers, and
which received from this mystery the name of note secrete. As
an underhand explosion of the rage of the retrograde party,
emanating from the pretended terrors of the adherents of the
Count d'Artois, and a summing up of the grievances of some
men whom the King's sagacity had thrown into the shade, this
note of obscure diplomacy and double meaning, was still more
culpable in spirit than diction. It did not openly call upon
Europe to continue and increase its armed superintendence of
France, it even displayed patriotism in its language. But in
depicting to the eyes of strangers France in a state of social
dissolution, the government qf which could not maintain itself
except by the presence qf foreign armies, and concluding by
praying for a more decisive compulsion of the King to effect a
change in his system and ministry, the note secrete represented
in a peremptory manner to the foreign courts the necessity,
under pain of universal conflagration, of still maintaining the
occupation of the country. This was the first authentic revo
lution of that government, or rather of that secret counter-
government, composed of men sincerely but blindly convinced
of the ruin of the monarchy in the hands of the King, and of
other men interested in agitating the court, and eager to take
advantage of the reign of the prince whom they led astray, for
the gratification of their restless ambition.
M. de Chateaubriand was suspected of being the writer oi
this denunciation of France to the world, because it set forth
some of his doctrines, and breathed his enmity to the ministers.
He had then in reality connections with the men of intrigue of
tlie court of the King's brother. But such a denunciation of his
country to Europe was an outrage on the patriotism of that
great writer. He flung the imputation from him as an insult.
He was incapable of borrowing foreign arms to combat even
the internal faotions which he detested. The author of the
note secrete was, it is said, M de Vitrolles. He had drawn it
up at the instigation of the Count d'Artois, or at least had
3 it

3S6 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 35.
Opening of the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle.
communicated it to that prince before he despatched it to the
ministers of the foreign powers. The Duke de Richelieu,
being informed of this strange document by his diplomatic
agents in Germany, was dismayed. He lamented so many
efforts and so many sacrifices for the emancipation of his
country, thrown away or defeated by so anti-national a con
spiracy He wrote to the Emperor of Russia who began to be
influenced by these manoeuvres to bring him back to his former
confidence in him, and to his unvarying generosity to France.
Pozzo di Borgo and the Duke of Wellington, although
foreigners, indignant at this intrigue against the government
of a good monarch, and at this perversity of faction, powerfully
assisted the Duke de Richelieu to efface from the minds of the
allied sovereigns the artful distrust excited by this underhand
diplomacy. The congress opened under the most favourable
auspices on the 20th of September. Prince Metternich,
followed by that cortige of generals and publicists of the court
of Vienna, who were animated by his superior intellect which at
that time governed all Germany; M. de Nesselrode and M
Capo d'lstrias, political confidants of the Emperor Alexander ;
the Duke of Wellington, the European generalissimo ; Lord
Castlereagh and Mr. Canning, English statesmen ; and finally
M. de Richelieu removed the unpleasant feelings created in
the minds of the allied sovereigns. M. de Richelieu brought
with him to these conferences two young, personal, and politi
cal friends of his, to assist him with their advice and eloquence
in the transactions of the treaty One was M. de Rayneval,
brought up from his infancy in the traditions of French diplo
macy, which his father had directed during three reigns ; the
other was M Mounier, son of the president of the National
Assembly in 1789, afterwards private secretary to Napoleon
during the Empire, and subsequently attached, after its fall
to that constitutional monarchy which had been imagined by
his father both men ; whose moderate opinions indicated a
solid judgment, and to whose management might be confided
the most important affairs of Europe, without any apprehen
sion of an excess of zeal or indiscretion, or a deviation from
probity. The serious gracefulness of M. de Rayneval, the

1815—18.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 387
It proclaims the evacuation of France.
natural air of authority of M. Mounier, and the rapid and
superior intelligence of both were eminently calculated to see
everything, to simplify everything, and to decide upon every
thing, under the direction of a prime minister, who was also
their friend. The choice of these persons, approved of by M
Laine, was a happy preliminary to success.
XXXIII.
The presence of the Emperor of Russia, and his friendship
for the Duke de Richelieu, secured the acquiescence of the
other powers in the wishes of the King of France. " Your
nation is brave and honourable," said Alexander to the French
plenipotentiaries. " It bears its misfortunes with courageous
resignation; will you be answerable for it to me? Do you
believe it is prepared for evacuation ? Do you think its
government is firmly consolidated ? Speak frankly, I am a
friend and admirer of your nation ; I only require your word
I do not fear," he added, " the development of liberal principles
in France, I am a liberal myself; I could even wish that your
sovereign by some striking act, would attach the new interests
still more strongly to his throne. I fear the Jacobins (the
revolutionary name of demagogues) ; I hate them ; take . care
not to throw yourselves into their arms; Europe will not
suffer any more Jacobinism. Nothmg but a holy alliance
founded upon religion and morality can save social order. In
the name of heaven, M. de Richelieu, let us save social order !"
In these words in which was expressed so divine a thought,
the reverse of vvhich, and its triumphs, had so deeply affected
the young sovereign of so many millions of men, was recog
nised the deliverer of the continent, and now the moderator of
the world. Such sentiments infused into, or enforced upon all
around him by the Emperor of Russia, promptly scattered the
secondary difficulties which the Duke de Richelieu must have
encountered in the pretensions and ambition of other courts.
The evacuation of France was proclaimed, and the definitive
amount of indemnity for the war, was fixed at 265,000,000 of
francs by the French and foreign commissioners History ought

388 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION fBOOK 35.

Confidential narrative of Louis XVIII.

to state to the honour of the characters of the liquidators of so
large a debt that the Duke de Richelieu on quitting the ministry,
was rewarded, in consequence of his limited fortune, with a
personal grant from his country; that M. de Rayneval died in
straitened circumstances, leaving only his name as an inheri
tance ; and that after the death of M. Mounter, his wife and
son lived upon the most moderate state salary in a public
employment, at the extremity of the kingdom.
France, thus reconciled with Europe, entered ¦ by secret
articles into the confederacy of the Kings, and into the spirit of
the holy alliance. The Emperor Alexander after the signature
of this treaty, wished himself, to bear to the King, at Paris, the
expression of his respect for his age, and his concurrence with
his opinions. He was desirous of enjoying for the last time, the
popularity he had acquired in France. Louis XVIII in a con
fidential narrative, written by his own hand, and hitherto un
published, thus relates the impression that he received from
this visit, and from this emancipation of his people brought
about by his wisdom, and the services of the Duke de Richelieu.
Such a document, springing from the heart, is an evidence too
rare and too precious of events not to be received with eagerness.
They who have mingled in great scenes are always their best
historians. The real nature of events is best known to the
actors in them " December, 1818.
" Qui vidit, testimonium perhibuit, et verum est testimonium ejus —
St. John xv."
" One of the happiest moments of my life was. that which
followed the visit of the Emperor of Russia. Without speaking
of the extreme kindness he displayed in coming for the sole
purpose of seeing me, and thus calling to mind, but in a nobler
manner, that which the basest flattery induced the Duke de la
Feuillade to do with respect to Louis XIV., it was difficult
not to be gratified with his conversation. Not only did he enter
into all my ideas, but he even expressed them to me before I
had time to give thetti utterance myself. He highly approved
of the system of government, and the conduct that I had

1815—18.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 389
Confidential narrative of Louis XVIII.
followed, since I determined to issue the ordinance of the 5th
September 1816, (I cannot help remarking that this was the
period of the Paris elections, and that the Emperor went away
fully persuaded that Benjamin Constant would be elected.)
Finally this prince passed an eulogium on my ministers, and
particularly on Count Decazes, for whom I am not afraid of
avowing a friendship founded upon qualities at once the most
solid and the most amiable, and upon an attachment of which
one must be the object to appreciate all its value. I saw in the
certain evacuation of France, on moderate conditions, external
tranquillity assured for a long time, and nothing appeared to
me to threaten internal peace.
" Some of the elections displeased me, such as those of the
departments of La Sarthe, La Vendee, and of Finistere ; but
these are annoyances incident to a constitution like ours, and
the bulk of them was good. I remarked with pain in the Duke
of Richelieu's letter that he was more affected at them than I
was, but I flattered myself that on his return here, it would be
in drawing closer and closer to his colleagues that he would seek
a remedy for the mischief produced by the Minerve, and I may
incidentally add, aggravated by the Conservateur.
" I was mistaken, he had, unknown to me, searched for and
thought he could find other remedies. The words unknown to
me may surprise those who read them. In writing them I am
aware of the ideas which they may give rise to with respect to
myself; but the truth must be known, and I must, therefore,
tell it. But to return to what I was saying
" For a long time past every one has been persuaded that,
if the ultra-royalists, convinced of the impossibility of making
their exaggerated system succeed, would silence their personal
hatred and frankly embrace the system of moderation, the
ultra-liberals would not dare to raise -their heads. The minis
ters had, as everybody knows, laboured to effect this reconcili
ation, but it is equally known how little success they met with
in the negociation. It is known that the ultra-royalists de
manded concessions of principles, and personal guarantees
which it was impossible to accede to : it is also known that,
far from meeting the advances of the ministry, whom they did

390 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION (BOOK 35.
Confidential narrative of Louis XVIII.
not cense to insult by their writings, their chiefs had, during
the session of 1815, fought in the ranks of the ultra-liberals.
More is known but nothing has been judicially proved. My
ministers and myself did not the less feel the necessity of a
reconciliation ; this was also the opinion of the most enlight
ened foreigners. The Duke of Wellington spoke of it to me
on his return from Aix-la-Chapelle. 'The ultra royalists,' he
said, ' must return to the ministry ; but,' he added, ' uncondi
tionally.' " The aspect of the session about to open had nothing of a
threatening character ; this ministry, which the ultra partisans
of both sides sought so much to cry down, had, however, re-esta
blished everywhere order and confidence. France was respected
abroad : credit alone had been shaken, but this was only the
credit of the bank ; for, while the five per cents fell, the trea
sury bonds maintained their prices. I have already said that
the mass of the elections was good ; so that, although very
lively debates might be expected, it was very probable that, in
the Chamber of Deputies, the majority in favour ofthe ministry
would be at least what it had been in the last session ; that of
the Chamber of Peers was much smaller ; but, at least, there
was one. Such, in my eyes, was the state of affairs on the
return of the Duke de Richelieu on the 28th of November.
" Before I go any farther, I must revert to the position in
which the Count Decazes was placed. His department, so
important while the law of the 29th of October was in force,
had very much declined after the cessation of that law ; he was
about to lose the sole and feeble weapon which remained to
him, the censorship of the press. The enemies of Count
Decazes, after having, in attacking him, verified the fable of
the serpent and the file, had changed their ground of attack.
It was no longer the minister they attacked, but the depart
ment, by depicting it as unconstitutional, arbitrary, and as a
superfluous expense. With such arguments one is always
sure of obtaining the suffrages of the multitude. Accordingly,
they completely succeeded, and things had come to such an
extremity that it was by no means certain that in the forth
coming session, the budget of the general police would pass.

1815—18.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 391
Confidential narrative of Louis XVIII.
But even should it do so, what is a minister witnout power,
or authority, and yet loaded with the same responsibility as
when he had both ? Count Decazes felt this so strongly that
he proposed the suppression of his department and his conse
quent retirement from the council. All his colleagues ex
claimed against this proposition, some because they felt how
much his judgment, his coolness in the most critical circum
stances, and his capacity for public affairs rendered him neces
sary to the state ; others, perhaps, because they thought my
friendship for him made him a useful medium of communication
between myself and the ministry. The Duke de Richelieu,
who was incontestibly one of the former, sought for the means
of keeping him by proposing to M. Laine to give him the
home department, and to take instead of it that of justice. I
offered to facilitate this arrangement, to which M. Pasquier
unconditionally agreed, by making the latter minister of my
household, with a seat in the council. M. Laine refused to
make the exchange, and tendered his resignation, which I was
far from accepting, more especially as the Duke de Richelieu
had declared he would not remain without him. M. Decazes
consented to bear till the end of the session the weight without
alleviation of his expiring department, and the council remained
as it was.
" Let it be remembered what I have before said, that the
Duke de Richelieu had, unknown to me, searched for and ex
pected to find a remedy for the mischief that he apprehended
In retracing this fact, however recent it may be, and in record
ing it here, I fancy myself in a painful dream rather than
recalling to mind an actual truth. Posterity will never believe
that a minister, however great he might be, could conceive,
much less carry into execution a plan, the inevitable effect of
which would be to change the whole system of government,
without saying a word of the matter to the King. It will be
still less believed when it is known that this minister was
the Duke de Richelieu, the most loyal man that has ever
existed, and this lung, Louis XVIII- accused of weakness but
not of indiscretion, and consequently one would believe that it
was easy, without betraying the secret of the plan, to endeavour

392 niSTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 35.

Confidential narrative of Louis XVIII.

at least to effect a change in his opinion. Well then, in spite
of its improbability, the thing is an actual fact ; and it is the
more important to me that it should be known, inasmuch as
those who will think otherwise may, I feel assured, accuse me
of having pursued during this astonishing month of December,
1818, a very tortuous course. In thus defending myself I
have the appearance of accusing the Duke de Richelieu. 1
cannot, it is true, exculpate him from the mystery he has made
use of with respect to me ; but I am persuaded— and it will be
seen further on if I am wrong — that he was ignorant of what
his policy would lead him to. He wished to rally the ultra-
royalists around the ministry, by changing the law of elections,
and he did not perceive that he was thereby placing the min
istry at the discretion of the ultra-royalists. Who had con
ceived this plan, or who had crowned it with success I know
not ; and I do not wish to state here any but facts within my
full and entire knowledge, taking the freedom, however, of
adding my reflections when they seem to me plausible.
" However this may be, endeavours had been made to
detach from the centre, which, until then, had constituted the
strength of the ministry in the two Chambers, a sufficient
number of members to insure a majority to the ultra-royalists
The intrigue had been conducted with a secrecy which I should
praise in another cause ; it had escaped even the vigilant eyes
of M. Decazes. Its success had been complete in the Cham
ber of Peers, but was more doubtful in that of the Deputies.
The first intimation I had of it was from the chancellor, who,
a few days before the opening of the session, came to acquaint
me with the names of those whom the meeting of ministerial
members proposed for the secretaryship of the Chamber of
Peers ; adding, that he was not very sure that they would pass,
as there had been a counter-meeting which had proposed others.
As he did not explain himself any farther I thought he was
speaking of a meeting of ultra-royalists, a thing which had
always existed, and I did not trouble myself about it. But I
was soon further informed by M. de Breze, who came to tell
me that in fact there had been formed, on a suggestion of the
Duke de Doudeauville, a meeting of ministerial members, to

JP15--18.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 393
Confidential narrative of Louis XVIII.
effect a junction with the right side. He showed me a list, at
the same time, drawn up by this meeting, as well for the
bureau as for the commission on the address in reply to- my
speech. The first list bore the names of Doudeauville, of
M. de Verac, of the Duke de Bellune, and of M. Dubouchage.
I had nothing to say against the two first, and I was going to
make some observations on the two others, when, casting my
eyes on the second list I saw at the head of it the names of
the Marquis de Talaru, and the Viscount de Montmorency,
both of them bitter ultra-royalists, and the reputed authors of
the Conservateur. At this I broke out : I reproached M. de
Breze with belonging to a society which made such a choice,
and I quoted to him this verse from Athalie : —
'Rompez, rompez, tout pacte avec l'impigtfeV*
" I know not what further 1 said to him, I was so excited
He defended himself by naming to me persons of upright
principles, but somewhat weak, who formed part of the meeting.
Finally, he informed me that it was held at the residence of
Cardinal de Beausset. Had a thunderbolt fallen at my feet it
would have startled me less than this name. Until then, like
the people who formerly when oppressed cried out in their
misery, ' Oh, if our good King only knew it ! ' I said to my
self, " Ah, when the Duke de Richelieu shall come to know
it ! ' It was not that he had kept me in ignorance of a confer
ence that he was to have had with M. de Villele ; but as he
had not spoken of its result to any of his colleagues, or to my
self, I thought it had come to nothing like the preceding
conferences. But the name of Cardinal de Beausset dissipated
my error ; he has too much mind, and he is too much con
nected with the Duke de Richelieu to have taken so great a
step without his approbation. I became cool immediately,
dismissed M. de Breze, and gave myself up to my reflections.
"It may well be believed that they were sad ; 1 saw myself
reduced to the unpleasant alternative of approving, without
knowing its nature, a proceeding which could scarcely be
otherwise than opposed to that which I had followed for two
• ' Break, oh ! break every compact with impiety.'

394 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 36.
Confidential narrative of Louis XVIII.
years past, and which I believed to be the only good one, or
break with the Duke de Richelieu. The first of these was
rather inglorious, and even dangerous; the second had a
thousand inconveniences still more serious. Doubtless the
step taken by the Duke de Richelieu unknown to me was an
error for which it would be difficult to find a name : I do not
wish to justify it, I do not even comprehend it ; but what
everybody may comprehend is the existence of the culpable
person, called to the ministry under the most terrible circum
stances in which a nation was ever placed ; he did not hesitate
to undertake it, he did much more : he signed the conven
tion of the 20th November, 1815. Yes, I say it boldly, it
was the act for which he will be most applauded by posterity,
Let us consider the position in which France was at the time.
One million one hundred thousand foreigners come, I willingly
believe with good intentions, but inflated by victory, amongst
whom the love of pillage daily increased, covered one-half of
our soil. The sovereigns assembled in Paris treated me, it is
true, with great respect; but generosity is always shown to
grey hairs, and the rod of power was not the less felt for it.
Two prefects, those of the Sarthe and the Loiret, had been
torn from their functions, and dragged into captivity. M. De
cazes, then prefect of police had nearly experienced the same
fate. The master-pieces of art, the possession of which was
guaranteed to France by the treaty of May 30, 1814, had been
carried away by main force, under my eyes and from my resi
dence In the south of France, were it not for the heroic
conduct of the Duke d'Angouleme, who, without means or
arms had daunted General Castanos, the Spaniards would also
have come, without having shared in the victory, to share, at
least in the booty. But the danger was only suspended. What
were our resources? None, it must be acknowledged. The
army of the Loire which, I believe, would have been a very
feeble one, was disbanded, and if any energy remained in
France it only evinced itself by fermentations of civil war.
We could not even hope for the melancholy glory which ho
noured the last moments of Carthage. The foreigners im
posed, it is true, very hard conditions, but we were not in a

1815—18.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 395

Confidential narrative of Louis XVIII.

condition to refuse them ; and, independent of the devastation
caused by them, their presence alone cost France more than
a million of francs per day to no purpose. Under such cir
cumstances the virtuous man and friend of his country disdains
vain clamours and goes straight forward to his object. This is
what the Duke de Richelieu did, and the applause of posterity
will avenge him for the false shame which it has been attempted
to cast upon him on this occasion. From that moment his
extreme probity had not only acquired for him with the foreign
powers a degree of consideration such as few ministers have
enjoyed, but even at home it had reduced the most decided ad ver
saries of our system to traduce his talents, not daring to attack
his person. Finally, he signed those famous acts of Aix-ia-
Chapelle, which liberated France, and replaced her in her
proper rank. To these considerations were joined others of
great importance ; all my ministers would have quitted me,
above all the Count Decazes, who had often declared to me —
and in this I fully agreed with him — that if on his" return from
Aix-la-Chapelle, the Duke of Richelieu persevered in his pro
ject of retirement, he would follow his example. Now, if they
had resolved on a voluntary retreat, what would they have
done had they been forced to it ? In short, where should I
myself have found the necessary strength for an act of vigour,
I who, in spite of the inconceivable silence of the Duke de
Richelieu, in spite of other still more painful recollections, still
regret that I have no longer near me a man whom evil counsel
may lead astray, and even plunge into measures altogether at
variance with his character, but whose natural probity would
soon bring him back into the right course, with so much the
greater facility that his heart was never guilty. I resolved,
therefore, to appear ignorant of what was not communicated to
me, and to continue faithful to my line of conduct, which was
the more easy to me from the Duke de Richelieu assuring me —
and I am certain with sincerity — that he had made no change
of system. Moreover, there was no appearance of disunion in
the ministry. My opening speech was discussed, and unani
mously adopted, with the exception of a few phrases, which, at
the moment I was about to pronounce it, the Duke de Richelieu

3% HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 35.
Confidential nan-alive of Louis XVIII.
proposed that I should add, and the idea of which belonged to
M. Decazes, this amongst others : ' the prince has recovered
his independence, without which there is neither king nor
nation.' " This apparent union did not continue long. The opening
of the session took place on the 10th, and on the 12th ministers
deliberated oi: tlie line of policy to adopt under the actual cir
cumstances The keeper of the seals, who spoke first, described
their serious aspect very well, but without coming to any defi
nite conclusion. M. Roy did the same. Marshal Gouvion,
Saint Cyr, and M. Decazes were of opinion to continue
steadily in the course hitherto pursued. MM. Mole, Laine, and
the Duke de Richelieu counselled an approximation to the
right side, and consequently to propose an alteration in the
law of election. There was not, therefore, any decided ma
jority, and the deliberation was adjourned to the 14th, when
it was resumed, without, however, producing any further result ;
but the subject was thought to be sufficiently discussed to be
submitted to me at the next council.
" Many things happened in the interval. The Chamber
of Peers appointed its bureau, the same names that M. Breze
had communicated to me, except that M. Pastoret was substituted
for M. Dubouchage, and that, said the leaders, through consi
deration for me, because M. Dubouchage having been my
minister it might not be agreeable to me to see him often.
They forgot that the preceding year the ultra-royalists, pro
fiting by a disagreement amongst the ministerialists, had
appointed to the secretaryship the Duke de Feltre, who had
quitted the ministry after M. Dubouchage ; or rather they
wished to make a parade of a pretended respect for me, more
insulting than a direct affront. When, in the commission on
the address, they had done the Duke de Richelieu the honour
to ask him whom he wished to be nominated ; at this question,
yielding to a natural impulse, he had replied, ' Ministerialists.'
But they soon showed him that it was a mere affected act of
politeness, and told him plainly that it was impossible. I can
never conceive how, at these words, his eyes were not opened,
and that he could not see he was the slave of the party that ho

1815—18.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 397
Confidential narrative of Louis XVIII.
had imprudently favoured, and which only intended to make
him one of those idols of the Gentiles, which have eyes but see
not ; how, in short, he did not make a generous effort to try
at least to break his chain. Nothing of the kind, however,
took place, and he confined himself to replying pettishly :
'Well then, nominate rational people!' These rational people
were MM. de Talaru, Viscount de Montmorency, De Pastoret,
and De Rosambo, no less ultra-royalists than the two first
mentioned. I was, it may be imagined, still more hurt at this
nomination than at that of the bureau ; but, persuaded that a
king cannot commit a greater fault than to exhibit rage which
he cannot gratify, I contented myself by mentally exclaiming
with some bitterness : —
"'Attale, 6tait-ce ainsi que regnaient tes ancetres?'"*
" But the pain I then experienced was much lighter in
comparison with that of which I am about to speak. The
Duke de Richelieu, who, at all times, had so highly and nobly
shown himself the friend of M. Decazes, and who, a few days
before he left Aix-la-Chapelle, sent him a message on the sub
ject of an affair which interested him personally, and which
had succeeded badly, ' that he was in despair at the idea of
failing in the only negociation which really affected him.' The
Duke de Richelieu, I say, seemed to be embroiled with him ;
he would see him no more, and would not even reply to his
letters. Prepared as I had long been for the retirement of
M. Decazes, with whom I saw very clearly that the ministry
could not subsist, my friendship for him made me hope that
he would, at least, quit his position with the honours of war,
and I was too well aware of the advantage it would give his
enemies if his retirement took place immediately after a rup
ture with the Duke de Richelieu. Moreover, and independent
of what related to M. Decazes, nothing could be more preca
rious than the position of the ministry. M. Laine had an
nounced his unshaken resolution to retire. The Duke de
Richelieu declared that he would not remain a second after
• "Attala, was it thus thy forefathers reigned?"

398 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOR 35.

Confidential narrative of Louis XVIII.

him, and the very pressing applications to the former had
only a very equivocal success.
"May I be permitted here to speak of the state of my
health, not with a view to excite pity, but to serve as an excuse
for the faults that I may have committed in such difficult con
junctures. On the 12th I had an attack of gout : it was so
slight for. three days that I thought it would have passed
away; but on the evening of the 15th the pain became very
violent, and on the 16th it came on with a degree of severity
which I will describe in a few words : great suffering, little
sleep, no appetite, fever, and prostration of strength mental
and physical. Such was my condition for more than eight
days. " Meanwhile the political horizon seemed to clear up for a
moment. The ministers who were members of the Chamber
of Deputies being obliged to be present on Wednesday, 1 6th,
the day of election of candidates for the presidency, the council
was adjourned to Thursday. On Wednesday evening the Duke
de Richelieu unexpectedly appeared at the assembly of the
Count Decazes, was very polite to him there, and the following
day paid him a visit. An explanation took place between them,
at the conclusion of which they became reconciled, and it was
agreed that at the council the great question should be rather
casually alluded to than profoundly discussed.
"The council assembled on the 17th. The keeper of the
seals spoke there the first, as he had done at the Duke de
Richelieu's, that is to say, very fluently, but without coming to
any conclusion. Marshal Gouvion was of opinion that nothing
should be changed, and no attempt even made to alter the law
of elections. M. Mole declared that he did not think it possi
ble to continue in the same course which had been followed up
to that moment ; he was of opinion that they should lean
towards the ultra-royalists, without concealing the fact, that
this would be to give themselves masters, but that between
two evils they must choose the least. M. Laine thought that
they should plant the ministerial standard, and hold out a
hand to the right and the left side. M. Roy spoke nearly to
the same purport. M. Decazes developed the danger which

1815—18.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 399
Confidential narrative of Louis XVIII.
he saw in trying to change, or rather to destroy the law of
election, which he described as popular in the highest degree,
and he concluded to remain firm in our course. The Duke de
Richelieu spoke last. It was easy to see that he inclined
towards the opinion of M. Mole ; but he decided no more than
did the keeper of the seals and M. Roy At length I spoke,
and seizing the idea of M. Laine, ' Let us plant,' said I, ' our
standard npon the ordinance of the 5th of September, 1816.
Let us continue to follow the course which has united us up to
the present. Let us extend a hand to the right and to the
left, saying with Caesar, ' He who is not against me is with
me.' Thus terminated this council, and I was simple enough
to think that all discussions in the ministry were about to
cease ; it will be seen how mistaken I was.
" On the 16th M. Ravez had obtained the necessary num
ber of votes to constitute him a candidate for the presidency :
M de Serres had almost as many ; nevertheless it was impos
sible for me to avoid nominating M Ravez. I was wrong to
be in too great a hurry to say so, or the Duke de Richelieu in
announcing it to M. Ravez before the affair had been decided
upon in the council. This double imprudence gave a triumph
to the ultra-royalists, who, seeing the selections made by the
Chamber of Peers as well as this, (for I must say that
M. Ravez was one of those who had allowed themselves to be
led away), no longer doubted their victory. Their joy was of
short duration. Among the vice-presidents one alone, M. Blan-
quart de Bailleul, whose case was the same as that of M. Ravez,
could give them any hope. But the choice of secretaries, and
especially that of M. de Saint-Aulaire, father-in-law to Count
Decazes, sufficiently proved that the old ministerialists were
not yet vanquished. I confess that I could not help a feeling
of joy, but it did not continue long, for the Duke de Richelieu
was so much offended at it, that for the first time in his life,
the following Sunday, (the elections took place on Friday and
Saturday), he spoke to me with bitterness of M. Decazes,
almost accusing him of having been the instigator of these
selections. I then felt that the breach could not be healed.
I lamented it deeply; but, for the reasons before stated, I

400 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 35.

Confidential narrative of Louis XVIII.

determined, at whatever sacrifice, to offer up everything to the
advantage of keeping the Duke de Richelieu in the ministry.
This was the state of affairs when, on Monday evening and on
Tuesday morning, I received the following letters from the
the Duke de Richelieu,1' M. Mole,"' M. Laine,'"' M. Pasquier,"'
and M. Decazes,T' : — I.
It is with extreme regret, but with an irrevocable determination that
I supplicate your majesty to accept the resignation of the post which I
occupy, and which I lay at yonr feet. My firm conviction that I can no
longer be of any use in your service, sire, or of advantage to the country,
has determined me to take this step. I hope your majesty will be pleased
to inform me to whom I am to deliver the portfolio of foreign Affairs.
The circumstances under which I accepted it, and all that has passed for
the last three years, must prove to your majesty that if I now entreat of
you to grant me permission to retire, it is not for want of devotion or of
courage. "(Signed) Richelieu."
II.
" The situation of the ministry leaving me no hopes of being useful to
your majesty, and of justifying your confidence by continuing to serve you,
I pray your majesty to accept my resignation, and to inform me to whom
it is your pleasure that I should hand over the portfolio of Naval Affairs.
"(Signed) Molk."
III.
"I entreat your majesty to accept my resignation and to inform me
into whose hands I am to deliver the portfolio of the Home Department-
Allow me, sire, to request the favour of your majesty's permission to retire
altogether into private life. As a deputy I shall endeavour to serve my
king and my country with the utmost devotion. "(Signed) Laine."
IV.
"I am informed that the Duke de Richelieu has sent in his resignation
ta the King. If your majesty decides on accepting it, I beg to solicit the
iuvour of being also allowed to place my own at your majesty's feet 1

1815—18.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 401
Confidential narrative of Louis XVIII.
" Of all these letters, I replied only to that of the Duke de
Richelieu, to whom I wrote that, in the difficulty into which his
unexpected proceeding had thrown me, I found it impossible to
give a definite answer, and that I wished to see him before he
came to a final resolution. He came accordingly on Tuesday
afternoon. I did not hide from him any portion of the pain I
felt, and I begged him to consider, that, besides my regret in
parting with him, I felt myself reduced to the disagreeable
necessity of having recourse to  . He listened to me
know too well that under such circumstances my presence in the ministry
would be more injurious than useful to your majesty's service. Your
majesty knows my unlimited devotion. If I lose the happiness of serving
your majesty as a minister, I shall still have the consolation of manifesting
on all occasions as a deputy the sentiments and principles which I shall
never cease to retain in my heart. "(Signed) Pasquier."

"A letter from Count Mole to Baron Pasquier informs me that the
Duke de Richelieu has prayed your majesty to accept his resignation.
This determination, should it be irrevocable and have the consent of the
King, will oblige me to lay at his feet the portfolio which he has had the
goodness to confide to me for.the last three years. Nothing in the world
could induce me to remain an instant in the ministry after the Duke de
Richelieu. Your Majesty who knows my resolution on this subject, has
often approved it. I am the more bound to this course in as much as the
differences of opinion upon some points, or rather upon one point, between
the ministers, and particularly between the Duke de Richelieu and myself,
can alone have led to this determination. At the moment this difference
began to appear, I intimated to your majesty and to the Duke de Richelieu
my intention to retire. This resolution I must now carry into effect that
I may not deprive your majesty of the duke's services, certain as I am that
your majesty and the Duke de Richelieu are oonvinced that both will at all
times find me ready, out of the ministry as well as in it, to do everything
which may be useful to the service of your majesty and to the suocess of
your government, to which I shall always belong, both in wishes and in
tentions, as I shall belong in heart and soul to your majesty as long as I
shall have a drop of blood in my veins.
" I am now going to the Duke de Richelieu to give him the last proof
ofthe self-denial which I shall always evince in vour majesty's service.
"(Signed) Decazes."
3 z

402 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 35.
Confidential narrative of Louis XVIII.
with an air of affliction as deep as my own. We separated
without coming to any conclusion, and the next morning I
received the following letter from him :
" Your Majesty may very well conceive the painful situation
in which our conversation of yesterday, has left me, and all I
have suffered in witnessing the sorrow I caused your majesty.
I know too well my insufficiency in such difficult circumstances,
and in a description of affairs for the nature of which it is im
possible for any one to be less fitted than I am, not to repeat
to your majesty what I had the honour of saying to you yester
day. My mission terminated when the great state affairs with
the foreign powers were brought to a conclusion. Those of the
interior as well as the management of the Chambers are
altogether foreign to my capacity, and for their management I
have neither aptitude nor ability. It is my duty to inform
your majesty, with all the sincerity of my heart, that in re
taining me, you do the greatest injury to your affairs and those
of the country, and that the sentiment which your majesty had
the goodness yesterday to call modesty, is only the result of a
thorough knowledge of myself. To think otherwise would be
nothing but an inexcusable presumption on my part.
" After having made this profession of faith to your majesty,
on which I beg of you to reflect most seriously, I ought to in
form you, that if your majesty persists in retaining me, in spite
of the powerful reasons I have given, I cannot, and ought not to
refuse ; but that my services may not be rendered useless from
the outset it will be necessary to establish in the ministry a
unity of opinions which no longer exists. Your Majesty knows
that I like and esteem M. Decazes. My sentiments are,
and always will be, the same. But on the one hand, in
sulted without cause by a party whose imprudences have caused
so many evils, it is impossible for him to act with it ; on the
other hand, driven towards a party whose doctrines threaten us
still more, so long as he shall not be employed out of France in
important functions, all those men opposed to the ministry will
consider him as the object of their hopes, and he will doubtless
become, in spite of himself, an obstacle to the progress of
government It is with pain that I am obliged to hold this

181,5—18.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 403
Confidential narrative of Louis XVIII.
language to the King. Intrigue, ambition, and the means that
they ordinarily employ are certainly foreign to my nature ; but,
I owe the truth to your majesty, such at least as I believe it to
be. I feel how painful the sacrifice of which I speak will be to
the King, to M. Decazes, and if I may say so, to myself ; but
I think it indispensable if I am to remain in the management
of affairs. The embassy to Naples, or to St. Petersburgh, and
his departure, announced to take place in a week ; such are,
in my opinion, the necessary preliminaries, I do not say to
success, but to the progress of the administration. Your
Majesty knows how ill it would become me to impose such
conditions. The unpleasant situation in which I placed the
King yesterday, and the despair to which he reduced me, have
alone compelled me to confide them to his breast. Your
Majesty will make such use of them as you may think proper.
" In the event of your majesty imperatively calling upon me to
remain, I would venture to beg of you to use every effort in your
majesty's power to retain M. Laine, without whom I absolutely
cannot continue in the ministry, and M. Roy ; if your majesty
will but employ that seductive manner which no one can resist,
I think it will not be difficult to conquer their opposition
Having thus expressed my thoughts to you, suffer me, sire, to
throw myself at your majesty's feet, to ask you with the most
earnest entreaties to grant me my liberty ; I repeat that I have
neither the capacity nor the talents necessary to unravel the
labyrinth of the government of the Chambers. Nothing has
ever prepared me for this sort of life, and most certainly I shall
not succeed in it. Your Majesty is warned beforehand : do
not subject yourself to the pain of soon witnessing the fulfilment
of these. predictions."
" I was, I repeat, resigned to see M. Decazes go out of the
ministry ; but such a removal was, it may well be believed, much
more painful. I wrote to him instantly, but I had not, I con
fess, the courage to make him acquainted in extenso with the
letter I have just transcribed, I merely communicated to him
the essential point. He flattered himself that his removal
from Paris would be sufficient, and in his reply he offered to
depart instantly to go and pass three months at Libourne with

404 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 35.,

Confidential narrative of Louis XVIII.

his family. Though this offer was so perfectly reasonable, and
I will even say so perfectly generous, I did not much flatter
myself that it would be accepted. I resolved, however, to try
it ; the Duke de Richelieu having come to me a little before the
meeting of the council, I opened the matter to him, accom
panying it with everything I thought capable of lulling the
storm. But this seductive manner which no one can resist
failed of its effect. The Duke de Richelieu influenced by some
foreign impulsion was altogether out of his natural character.
He was insensible to the situation of Madame Decazes, who
was only sixteen years of age, in delicate health, and at the
time four months advanced in her pregnancy. He persisted
in making a journey to Russia, the sine qua non of his continu
ance in the ministry, and required that after the council I should
demand of Count Decazes his final resolution. Resolved as I
was to sacrifice everything to retain the Duke de Richelieu, I
undertook the commission, and I fulfilled it; but I confess that
in pronouncing to my friend a sentence so cruel for him, and
so painful to myself, my firmness abandoned me, and I broke
into tears. My victim only thought to assuage my grief, and
only spoke to me of his resignation. A moment after, however,
the thought of the fatigues and even the dangers which she
whom he loved, and with so much reason, was about to incur,
came to his recollection, and exclaiming : ' Oh ! my poor little
wife !' he also burst into tears. He speedily recovered his
firmness however, and left me to write to the Duke de Richelieu
that he agreed to everything.
" On the same day, abt'ut three hours after this most dis
tressing scene, I received the addresses of the two Chambers,
in reply to my opening speech, on which occasion I was, obliged
to exhibit a countenance, calm, serene, and even satisfied, for
after all the addresses were good ; and yet we are envied !
"The following day, the 24th, the Duke de Richelieu, re
suming his proper character, either of his own accord, or by the
counsel of M. Laine, who, it is said, forcibly represented to him
the harshness of his requirements, was content to accept the jour
ney to Libourne. But other embarrassments were soon brought
upon him He had calculated that with the exception of M.

1815—18.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 405
Confidential narrative of Louis XVIII.
Decazes, and perhaps of Marshal Gouvion, the council would
remain as it was ; but M. Laine, though he wished for a change
in the law of election, formally declared that he never would
present one to supersede that which was his own work, and
which he had so successfully defended. M. Roy declared
that he would not remain without M. Decazes, and the
others also refused. On the 25th, the Duke de Richelieu
and M. Laine, having met M. Decazes with me, after
mass, proposed that he himself should form a ministry,
and on his absolute refusal, they came and begged of me to in
duce him to do it. Although I approved of his resolution, I
replied that I would speak to him, but that I was quite certain
beforehand that I should not have any more success than them
selves Accordingly I sent for him, and his answer was just as
I had anticipated. The Duke de Richelieu then resolved to
form a new ministry altogether, and the following is the dis
tribution of the departments he proposed to adopt : — justice, M.
Simeon; war, General Lauriston; naval affairs, M. de Vilelle;
home department, M. Cuvier ; finance, M. Mollien ; general
direction of the police, under the authority of the president of
the council, M. de Tournon, prefect of the Gironde. One alone
of all these names displeased me ; but I had resolved to make
no difficulties whatever, and moreover, after having made the
greatest of all sacrifices, could I suffer myself to be stopped by
a secondary one ? On the evening of the 25th, the Duke de
Richelieu thought himself sure of success, but insurmountable
difficulties soon offered themselves. M. Cuvier made the same
objection as M. Laine ; M. Mollien, who had entered, it is said,
into other engagements, absolutely declined ; M. Lauriston alone
accepted. I was indirectly informed of this on the 26th, and
in the evening I received the following letter from the Duke de
Richelieu." " I have again made fruitless efforts for the formation of a
ministry which might offer to your majesty and to France
some guarantees in the crisis which now besets us. M. Roy,
whom I thought indispensable in the finance department, has
declined all my solicitations ; my other colleagues could not
agree upon the measures to be pursued, and I find myself again

400 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 35.
Confidential narrative of Louis XVIII.
under the necessity of supplicating your majesty to relieve me
from a task which it is impossible for me to accomplish with
success. I have evinced, sire, the most absolute devotion in
twice attempting to re-form a ministry, and your majesty will
recollect what I had the honour of saying to you on my depar
ture for Aix-la-Chapelle, and what I have taken the liberty of
repeating to you, verbally and in writing, since my return, that
I was not fitted for the management of internal affairs, and
that my mission was properly at an end at the moment of con
cluding the negociations with the foreign powers. But why
does your majesty consider it indispensable to send for 
to succeed me ? Is there no one in the kingdom then but
him and me that can be placed at the head of the Council ?
And if we both failed must the state necessarily perish ? I
cannot believe it. There are both marshals and peers of France
who could certainly replace us. Without naming others, could
not Marshals Macdonald and Marmont be selected? They
know both the country and the army ; they would inspire no
distrust to the foreign powers. I repeat to your majesty that
I can no longer charge myself with a task which I am incapa
ble of fulfilling after such fruitless efforts. It is, therefore,
with pain, but with decided resolution, that I supplicate your
majesty to accept my resignation, and to accept at the' same
time the homage, &c."
"This letter was too decided, and the resolution of the
Duke de Richelieu too loudly called for by circumstances to
render it possible for me to seek any longer to retain him. I
therefore, with the most sincere regret, accepted his resignation
His letter had imparted to me a ray of light by enabling me
to see the possibility of doing without  . But 1 was
not, therefore the less embarrassed ; for neither one nor the
other of the marshals of whom the Duke de Richelieu spoke
was, in my opinion, in a condition to succeed him. The keeper
of the seals came to me at the moment I had sent off my
answer to the Duke de Richelieu : I opened my mind to him
on the position of affairs. He went immediately to find the
Count Decazes, and the latter conceived the idea of confiding
the helm to General Dessolles. I approved of this idea, and

1815—18.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 407
Confidential narrative of Louis XVIII.

commissioned him to carry it into effect, at the same time
naming to him MM. de Jaucourt and De Serres. On the
following morning (Sunday the 27th) he saw the general, and
made the proposition to him, which was accepted. The
Count Decazes was in ecstacy, and did not anticipate the
difficulties which were about to arise. The Marquis Dessolles
wishing, reasonably enough, to form his own ministry himself,
proposed at first M de Serres for justice, and Baron Louis
for finance. He spoke to them on the subject, and all three
agreed to accept the nomination, but with this condition,
as a sine qua non, that Count Decazes should form a part
of the ministry. When they made the proposition to him
he rejected it with energy, and even with tears ; till at
length the Marquis Dessolles came to beg of me to vanquish
his resistance.
" If I had only consulted my own feelings I could have
wished that M. Decazes, uniting, as he always had the inten
tion of doing, his fate with that of the Duke de Richelieu,
should leave the ministry with him. But, in the first place,
if the Duke de Richelieu went out it was not because he pre
ferred repose to office, but because his ministerial capability
was exhausted : secondly, he had separated his fate from that
of the Count Decazes, by requiring his retirement, whilst he
retained all his other colleagues ; and thirdly, Count Decazes
found himself in some respect in the same position as when I
had proposed to him the Russian embassy : in both cases, the
existence of the ministry depended on his acceptance, and if he
had before sacrificed his happiness to it, should he not now
also yield to it scruples henceforward vain ? These considera
tions determined my judgment. The Count Decazes ac
quiesced, and the ministry was formed. I must add that this
ministry had the entire approbation of the Duke de Richelieu,
who told me so the first time I saw him again ; and who,
having come to himself, has not ceased personally when in
Paris, and since by his letters, to evince to Count Decazes
that friendship which had always united them.
" Should this little work find some readers, even the most
decided opponent will doubtless see in it some singular events,

RESTORATION OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. [BOOK 35.
  i 
Confidential narrative of Louis XVIII. [
but I venture to believe that he will also see in it that all the
intrigues that were said to have accompanied them have never
existed, and are nothing but the pure invention of party spirit,
so fertile in such calumnies.''

BOOK THIRTY-SIXTH.
1818-19 — State of France — Struggle of parties — The Press — The Minerve ;
P. L. Courrier — The Conservateur ; Chateaubriand, Lamennais, De
Bonald — Opening of the Session — Vote of a national recompense to
M. de Richelieu — Barthelemy's proposition on the Electoral law —
Discussion on the recall of banished persons — M. de Serres — In
creasing agitation of public opinion — Development of journalism :
the Courrier, the Constitutionnel, the Censeur, the Debats, the Quoti-
dienne, the Drapeau Blanc — Stormy debates on the massacres of the
South : parliamentary exposures— Various associations ; the missions,
the secret societies of Brussels, and of Paris ; fermentation in Ger
many — Elections of 1819 j nomination of Gregoire; General Foy —
General spirit of the elections, hostile to the crown — Ministerial
changes, opening of the session ; exclusion of Gregoire — Project
for modifying the electoral law.

I.
We have seen, by this confidential revelation of the King to
posterity, even to the very bottom of his soul : his passion for
the liberation of the territory, his sincere desire to found a
representative government under the authority of the crown,
moderated by the Chambers, and inspired by public opinion ;
his secret troubles in a palace where his contested will found
political opposition so near to his heart ; his considerate esteem
for the Duke de Richelieu ; and finally his almost paternal
solicitude for M. Decazes, the instrument of his thoughts, and
the attachment of his heart. The visit of Alexander, and the
moral approbation which this prince had so decidedly evinced
at Paris of the wisdom and ministry of the King, the more
strongly confirmed him in his resolution of consolidating and
developing the charter. The triumph he had obtained over
the retrograde and reactionary royalists in the elections of
September, by removing at the same time the Bonapartists

4 10 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 36.

The Press.

and the ultras, made him hope for a similar result in the elec
tions of 1818, by which one-fifth of the Chamber was to be
renewed. But already the parties, separated for a moment by the
ordinance of the 5th of September, began to evince an inten
tion of enthralling the King and struggling with each other, and
both against him in the assembly. The free press afforded them
courage, a field of battle, and weapons to wield. Infuriated jour
nals and pamphlets, which all made use of the King's name to
win over, or to calumniate him, fanned the flame of opposition to
the government in all the electoral colleges. The Minerve
and the Conservateur, two periodical papers, constituted the
manual of the passions. The Minerve was conducted by writers
who had served the cause of despotism under the Empire, and
who could not bear the idea of perishing with it. They trans.
formed themselves into puritans of the charter ; and under
took to blend in one adulterate alloy, patriotism, military spirit,
the glory of conquest, the doctrines of the revolution of ] 789.
the souvenirs of the republic, the national pride, constitutional
royalty, despotism and liberty, with such a fumble of ideas,
and such perfidious artifice that every passion hostile to the
Bourbons found at once in their pages some cause of joy, some
souvenir, some hope, some aliment. The principal editors of
this paper were Benjamin Constant, Etienne, Jouy, Pages,
Aignan, Courrier, Beranger, writers, publicists, pamphleteers,
poets, men of various talents : some affecting moderation ;
others embittering invective ; one party mingling with adula
tion of the King deadly insinuations against his family; another,
publishing correspondence in which they debated, as tribunes
of the people, questions of constitutional law ; some indulging
in moving apotheoses of exiles of the convention, and soldier-
labourers weeping the loss of their country in the forests of
America ; others, as Courrier, provoking the bitter laugh of
irony in pamphlets whose wit was sharpened by hatred ; others,
finally, like Beranger, nationalising contempt for the Bour
bons in immortal songs, which created for the people a religion
of glory, consoling to honour, but fatal to liberty. These men
called themselves Independents, dissembling thus, their oppose

1818—19.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 411
The Conservaieur and its writers.
tion. A cloud of journals, periodicals, pamphlets, and tracts
of similar genius received from them the inspiration and the
direction, sowing everywhere the seeds of disdain, repugnance,
and anger amongst the people. II.
The Conservateur, established by M. de Chateaubriand and
his friends, with the triple object of counterbalancing the
Bonapartist journals, of defending, the monarchy of the
Bourbons, and of enslaving the King to the royalists, was
written by MM. de Chateaubriand, De Lamennais, and De
Bonald, wits or geniuses of powerful stamp and lofty fame.
Their literary greatness was reflected in their works ; their
pages were enlightened by their names, and became events for
Europe. Fievee, an old prefect under Bonaparte, lent them
his administrative experience, and that sophistical theory, so
dear to all aristocracies, of provincial federalism, in opposition
to the concentration and unity of ministerial power. M. de
Suleau, a young writer divided between politics and literature —
M. de Frenilly, a traditional poet — M. de Fitzjames, a courtier
with an independent heart, whose royalism was expressed in
the accents of liberty — M. de Castelbajac — M. de Salaberry —
and all the men of the aristocracy, illustrious for personal
talent, struck their blow and signalised their name in this
ultra-royalist cry of alarm. The agreement of doctrines more
or less absolute, more or less constitutional, mattered but little
to these leaders of public opinion, the mass constituted strength,
the genius made the splendour. No periodical writing ever had
more. Never was a government hardly re-establisbed more
violently assailed, and more bitterly insulted by the jealousy
and the ambition of its pretended exclusive friends. M.
Decazes was held up in it sometimes to the suspicions, some
times to the derision, of the royalists, and the King himself
was scarcely spared. The court, the private circle of the
Count d'Artois, and the provincial aristocracy were intoxicated
with these names, these doctrines, and these invectives, which
seemed to them to shed a lustre on their cause, and to raise

412 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 30.
Removal of the Count d'Artois from the command of the National Guards
their obscurity to the elevation of genius. M. de Chateaubriand
with an artifice somewhat illogical, but sincere in his soul, and
readily accepted by the parties, associated in the Conservateur
the theories of the old dominant church, and the old feudal
monarchy, with the roughness of a manly royalist opposition
to the King. He taught the anti-royalist opposition all that
they might soon venture to dare in bitter criticism of the
government. No liberal paper ever struck so high, or wounded
so cruelly, as this discontented soldier of royalty. This fury
of Chateaubriand and the party of the Count d'Artois against
the opinions and the adherents of the King, decided M. Lain6
on a bold and constitutional act against a court faction
which threatened the crown with so much audacity. He
deprived this faction of its chief, by removing the Count
d'Artois from his most important functions, as commandant-
general of the National Guard of the kingdom. The King
after some resistance of feeling to the severity of his duty as
a monarch, granted to his ministers this measure of just re
prisal, which became one of the most bitter grievances of the
royalists against him. The palace was split into two factions
animated more and more against each other.
Public opinion in the provinces, exeited in two opposing
currents, by this rage of the royalist party, by these pamphlets
of the liberal party, and by these intestine divisions of the
royal family, diverted the elections of this year from the centre
where M. Laine and the King wished to maintain them
The liberal party was strengthened by twenty-two deputies
hostile to the monarchy of the Bourbons. M. de Lafayette,
the undecided symbol if not of a republic, at least of revolu
tion, was elected as a living challenge to royalty ; Manuel, the
promoter of Napoleon in 1815, as an imperial protest against
the Bourbons. The elections of that year, while they were
satisfactory to the King by the removal of some ultra-royalists,
which weakened the cabal of his brother in the Chamber,
alarmed him by the accession of men too significant amongst
the avowed enemies of his house. M. Laine was disquieted
The Duke de Richelieu, who had promised the Emperor
Alexander to snatch the helm alike from revolutionists and

1818—19.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 413
Position of M. Decazes,
counter-revolutionists, anxiously communed with himself. " I
see with alarm," he said, " the advent of men of the hundred
days. They have already ruined our position in Europe. We
must guard against revolutions ; they would consume our
national strength, and furnish Europe with grievances against
us !" From this day forward he inclined towards a junction
with the royalists. M. Decazes, on the contrary, threatened
by them more and more, had no other asylum than in the
liberal party ; and became, in spite of himself, more a party
leader than a minister. His colleagues became alarmed at a
line of conduct which threatened to remove the centre of the
monarchy from its equilibrium, to place it on the brink of a
precipice in the midst of its national enemies. They con
ferred with each other, unknown to M. Decazes, on these
tendencies and these dangers. The Duke de Richelieu was
the personal friend of M. Decazes, he had no distrust of him,
but of his position ; he felt the propriety of leaving a friend to
the King, and to the ministry a medium of communication, at
once safe and all powerful, between the heart of this prince
and his ministers. He endeavoured to conciliate what he
wished to grant to monarchical opinion, and to yield to the
King himself, by suppressing the police department occupied
by M. Decazes, an occult ministry which gave umbrage to the
royalists, and by leaving to him the purely administrative
government of the interior. M. Decazes, foreseeing and
anticipating this proposition, himself adroitly offered his resig
nation to his colleagues, to leave them full liberty for their
new combination. But this resignation, an apparent sacrifice
to concord which the young minister made of his own accord,
could no longer be accepted. Having taken root in the heart
of the King, whose friendship assumed the character of fatality,
popular with the liberal party, which could agitate France even
to the endangering of the throne, and which was then only
calmed by his voice, master of the Doctrinaire party which
excited public opinion through the press, and which negociated
with all the other parties by intrigue, M. Decazes was an em
barrassing but an indispensable man to his colleagues. With
one foot in the King's cabinet, and the other in popular favour,

414 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 36.
Meeting of the Chambers.
he could only quit the government to become a formidable
leader of opposition in the Chambers, or a source of regret,
still present and still menacing to his colleagues, in the con
fidence of the King. They, therefore, declined the resignation
of M. Decazes, and confined themselves to accepting that of
M. Corvetto, the ministerial restorer of our credit and our
finances, exhausted with labour and disappointment. He was
succeeded by M. Roy, a man of immense fortune, gained by
intelligent industry applied to the acquirement of wealth. A
financier by profession, conservative through interest, a mode
rate in principle, M. Roy, suited all parties without giving
umbrage to any. III.
The ministry, thus itself in a state of suspense, met the
Chambers on the I Oth of December. The King in his speech
congratulated himself on the liberation of the territory, and
gave an indirect warning to those revolutionary passions which
had signalised their revival in the last elections. The inten
tion of modifying the electoral law, already entertained by
the King, by M. de Richelieu, M. Laine, and M. Mole, revealed
itself in this speech. The chiefs of the royalist party in the
Chamber required this measure, as the condition of their sup
porting government. The Chamber, however, worked upon by
the leaders of the party of M. Decazes, showed an unexpected
sign of repulsion to this plan of modification, by nominating
to its committees the deputies most determined on maintaining
the law as it stood. At the same time the Chamber of Peers,
excited by the Count d'Artois, by M. de Chateaubriand, and
by some bishops, nominated to all its parliamentary functions
the most decidedly retrograde royalists. M. de Richelieu and
his colleagues, seeing in this irreconcilable tendency on one
side the presumed manoeuvres of M. Decazes in the Chamber
of Deputies, and on the other the triumphant manoeuvres of
the Count d'Artois and the royalists of his court in the Cham
ber of Peers, retired in mass before this contradictory position
of the two Chambers. M. Decazes himself, whether he had
really conspired against his colleagues, or whether he had

1818—19.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 415

Change of ministry.

been merely served improperly or beyond his wishes, by his
friends the Doctrinaires, placed his resignation in the hands of
the King. In the confidential memoir we have just produced
may be seen all the phases of this ministerial crisis.
The Chamber in its reply to the King's speech, declared
in a phrase conceived like a menace, that it would reject every
law which might be at variance with the spirit of the charter.
This was protesting beforehand against any ministry which
should touch the electoral law. The Duke de Richelieu, after
some fruitless attempts to patch up his ministry with the addi
tion of M. Villele, leader of the moderate royalists in the
Chamber, felt his physical powers give way under his mental
agitation. M. Decazes, the natural heir of his indecision,
wished for by the King, the hope of the liberals, accepted by
the Chamber, re-formed the government. He took the home
department : he gave the department of foreign affairs, and
the presidency of the cabinet to General Dessolles, a dis
graced military man under Napoleon, and a confidant of the
manoeuvres of M. de Talleyrand in 1814 for the recall of the
Bourbons to the throne ; the department of justice to M. de
Serres, an orator as eloquent in speech and as elevated in
mind as M. Laine j the finance department to M. Roy ; that of
war to Marshal Gouvion-Saint-Cyr, to whom the military forces
of France owed their recruiting and their re-organisation. His
youth, and a proper estimate of his position, alone prevented M.
Decazes from taking the title of President of the Council of
Ministers : but he was more — he was the creator and the
necessity of the government. His triumph exalted the liberals
and confounded the royalists. Their anger against him was
irritated by all that envy which attaches itself to new men.
The two Chambers, appreciating the services which the
Duke de Richelieu had rendered the country in his negocia
tions at Aix-la-Chapelle, voted him, in spite of his refusal, a
donation of 50,000 francs annual income. The Duke, though
deprived of fortune proportioned to the splendour of his name,
not daring to reject this national munificence, accepted it to
transfer it immediately to the hospitals of Bordeaux. Two
thousand millions of francs had passed through his hands

416 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOR 38.
M. Barthelemy.
almost without control, during his ministry and his transactions
with the European powers ; and his country was bound to
think of him more than he did of himself.
IV
Meanwhile the result of the last election had been no less
a warning to impartial statesmen than a cause of alarm to the
ultra-royalists. The dangers of the monarchy were the con
versation of all the coteries of the two Chambers. The
Chamber of Peers, less changeable in thought than the elective
chamber, corresponded more by its nature with the pre-occupa-
tions of the monarchical mind. The dominant party in this
chamber were too openly connected with the court of the
Count d'Artois not to make it evident that a motion made by it in
appearance, emanated in reality from the prince himself. It was
necessary, therefore, to find an independent organ, free from
the suspicion of familiarity and complaisance to the court, to
give a colouring of wisdom and public safety to the first attack
on the electoral law. One was found in M. Barthelemy.
This gentleman, nephew to the celebrated writer of the
same name, had all the requisites of apparent neutrality
between the parties. Heir to his uncle's f ime, and a diplo
matist at the time of the revolution, the different phases of
the republic had left him abroad, serving his country, without
participating in the excesses, the passions, and the resentments
of the different parties which contended for its possession.
His fortunate negociations had been repaid by the general
and impartial esteem of the nation. Placed at the summit
of affairs at the epoch of the Directory, driven thence into
proscription under suspicion of royalism, M. Barthelemy was
amongst those senators who had only to follow the dictates
of their hearts, to welcome back with the Bourbons in 1814
the souvenirs and attachments of their early years. Those
members of the Chamber of Peers who constituted the Cardi-
nalist party, after its leader, Cardinal de Beausset, other
members of this chamber, amongst the most temperate in
opinion, such as M. de Fontaines, M. de Pastoret, M. de

1818—19.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 417
His proposition to amend the electoral law.
Verac, and finally M. de Talleyrand himself, weary of his inacti
vity, and desirous of seeking importance even by the side of ultra
royalists, came to an understanding with the courtiers of the
Count d'Artois, and easily induced M. Barthelemy by appeal
ing to his foresight, to propose a vague and indefinite modifi
cation of the electoral law. M. de Lally-Tollendal, a verbose
and declamatory orator, who loved to flatter the most prevalent
opinions and to serve the ministry, opposed this proposition.
M. Decazes called it the most fatal which could issue from an
assembly attached to the monarchy, and calculated to alarm
the country on the irrevocable nature of the King's promises.
M. de Pastoret pressed the motion with the authority of an
avowed moderation, and a long experience of revolutions. An
immense majority of the Chamber defeated the objections of
ministers and the motion was carried. The humiliation of the
ministry was profound, and the triumph of the friends of the
Count d'Artois complete. The King himself wavered in his
conviction, on hearing so many members of the Chamber, ex
perienced and impartial, call upon him to save his crown, and
to accept with courage the unpopularity of such a measure to
prevent the outbreak of revolution in the committees. M.
Decazes found it necessary to strengthen the resolution of
the prince, and to supplicate him to defer all change, at least
until the test of a third renewal of the fifth part of the
elective chamber. Liberal opinion, not content with this
victory obtained for it in the council of the King by M.
Decazes, wished to consecrate it by an energetic reply of the
deputies to the rash demand of the peers. M. Laffitte opposed
the proposition, which was considered violent and irritating by
the ministerial centre of the Chamber, and rejected without
a division. V.
The discussion of M. Barthelemy's proposition in the
Chamber of Peers, brought out every thing of a couhter-
revolutionary tendency in one party, and of the terror of being
unseated in the other : M. de Fontanes cited Napoleon sup
porting himself on the aristocracy of fortune, and claiming
3 A A

418 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 36
Creation of new peers.
the great landed proprietors as the only props of his throne.
" Their interest is mine ; those who possess the soil do not
wish that it should be shaken." Lanjuinais saw in the pro
position the first act of the counter-revolution against the
charter. He denounced the ultra-royalist committees in the
departments. "They have," he said, " their secret assemblies,
their secret armies, their private rallying signs, their pay, and
their arms!" General Dessolles, president of the council of
ministers, deplored this manifestation of the imprudent friends
of royalty, and depicted public agitation flying from province
to province at the noise of this fatal discussion. M. Decazes,
driven into the extreme parties by the extremity of the peril
into which the peerage was throwing the government, proposed
to the King to recall to the Chamber of Peers all the members
of this assembly struck off by M. de Talleyrand after the
hundred days. This would be more than pardoning, it would
be legalizing the interregnum of the 20th March, and making
the King the ally of his enemies. The president of the council,
more calm and politic, limited himself to asking the King to
restore harmony between the two deliberative bodies, by crea
ting sixty- three new peers, devoted to the personal policy of
his ministers. This was repeating, after a short interval,
under the inspiration of the favourite, and in his favour, the
coup d'etat of the 5th September. The new peers, marshals,
generals, functionaries of the Empire, or friends of the minis
ter, were all chosen by him, for the support of his dominating
influence at the Luxembourg. The King felt this so thoroughly,
that before he signed the list he included in it one or two
court names, "in order," he said with gentle irony to M.
Decazes, " that there may, at least, be some one belonging
to me amongst those belonging to you."
VI
This was an abuse of favour, and a defiance of public
opinion. The royalists responded to it by a menace of exposure
and an accusation of high treason. Moderate opinion saw
in it the independent equilibrium of the powers arbitrarily

1818—19.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 419
Debates upon the press.
broken by the ministers, the prerogative of the King exhausted
by one stroke of the pen, by the introduction of a mass of
new men into a senate wherein the wisdom of the monarch
ought to economise his favours and his influence, by rare and
partial nominations ; the peerage entirely delivered over to
a single party, not too safe or too well affected to the crown,
and to serve only one occasion; finally, the royal patronage
become that of M. Decazes by this profuse bestowal of the
peerage on his personal friends. The King's enemies alone
rejoiced at this excess of boldness which saved a minister by
compromising royalty. The Barthelemy proposition which had
been carried in the Chamber of Peers prior to this new
increase of the peerage was discussed, according to the con
stitution, in the Chamber of Deputies. Opposed by M.
de Labourdonnaie, M. de Villele, M. de Corbiere, and by M.
Laine himself, who wished to defend the constitution by con
stitutional measures and not by violent acts of prerogative, it
was defeated in this Chamber. But in order to throw it out,
the minister had been compelled to avail himself of the elo
quence and the votes of the enemies of royalty. His triumph
was also that of the radical opposition. Desperate coalitions
of this nature furnish governments with victories more ruinous
than defeats. M. Decazes, in spite of himself, was drawing
the King towards the revolutionists, instead of attracting the
revolutionists towards the Kins.

VII.
The stormy debate upon the regulated liberty of journalism,
and on the recall of banished persons, called forth the lofty
eloquence of M. de Serres, a man whose parliamentary fame
was daily on the increase.
This gentleman seemed destined by greatness of mind and
talent, to accomplish, after an exhausted revolution, what
Mirabeau had attempted too soon, or too late in the ascend
ing and convulsive period of that revolution, — the treaty of
peace between representative liberty and hereditary monarchy.
Royalist from birth, religious from instinct, liberal from reason,

420 HTSTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 36.

Speech of M. de Serres.

constitutional from theory, impassioned in his eloquence, mo
derate in his character, grand in accent, attractive in warmth,
and rich in imagination, M. de Serres constituted the fidelity, the
strength, and the splendour of the ministry. He had leaned,
at the commencement of the session, towards the liberal side,
because the royalist party seemed to him bent on violence and
oppression. He had in his acts and speeches given pledges
to loyal democracy, and had been as often applauded by the
left of the Assembly as by the right and centre. It was felt
that his eloquence soared above the passing interest of his
ministerial position, and flowed from his mind with all the
freedom of the philosopher, the statesman, and the citizen.
No one had evinced more confidence than he had, in the
government of opinion by opinion, or conceded more to the
spirit of the times all the liberty compatible with social order
and representative monarchy. His was the genius of 1789,
purified by experience, heedful of the rocks, and expressed in
the most splendid eloquence, the echoes of which have ever
excited an assembly. The Restoration had found its fitting
organs in M. Laine and M. de Serres.
But when the liberal party, encouraged by the temerity of
M. Decazes, passed the bounds which M. de Serres had fixed
to his concessions, became aggressive, and wished to force
from the King humiliating disavowals of his first act of 1815
M. de Serres, repulsed by these requirements of the liberals,
began to distrust both them and M. Decazes, and to fall back,
by little and little, upon the moderate royalists of the part}
of M. Laine and of M. de Villele. The discussion on the
recall of banished persons rent still further the recent amity
between M. de Serres and the liberals. Assailed by voices
from the left, loudly demanding the return of the regicides :
" When that deplorable day, the 20th March," replied M. de
Serres, " appeared amidst the general consternation, and the
joy of a small number of seditious persons — when Europe was
shaken from the confines of Asia to the shores of the ocean —
when France sawherself invaded by millions of foreign soldiers 
when she was despoiled of her wealth and her monuments, and
when her territory was dismembered— every one felt that the

1818—19.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 421
Its effects.
first necessity of the state was to defend its monarchy by
severe and preservative measures from new calamities : then
arose the question whether the individuals who had concurred
by their votes in the death of Louis XVI. should be removed
from the French territory. Every one knows with what
generous persistance the royal will struggled against the mo
tion for their banishment. Men, known for their unbounded
devotion to the royal cause and to constitutional principles,
supported the proposition of entire amnesty made by the
King. But when it was otherwise decided, when the sentence
had been pronounced, that sentence was irrevocable. The ex
treme generosity of the King might have defended the voters ;
but the law having passed, it ought to be felt that it was im
possible, without violating the most powerful moral sentiment,
without impairing the royal dignity in the eyes of France and
of Europe, ever to exact from the King a formal act, which
should restore their country to the assassins of his brother, of
his predecessor, of the just man crowned. We must therefore
draw a distinction between the individuals affected by Article
XI. of the law of 1816, and those who voted for the death of
Louis XVI. As to the first we must have full confidence in
the clemency of the King ; as to the regicides, never ! "
This Draco-like word, so contrary to the wish of Louis XVI
expressed in his last testament, and to the sentiments mani
fested on his return by the King himself, opened an abyss
between the left side of the Assembly and the minister. In
pronouncing it M. de Serres yielded himself up to the animo
sity of the revolutionary party. His services to the cause of
moderation and of freedom were forgotten. It was not an
arbiter but an instrument that the party of the revolution
wanted in M. de Serres, and the moment he refused to lend
himself to the requirements of that party he was abandoned by
the left. The right rejoiced at the rupture, but it still only
accepted with distrust the powerful auxiliary that presented
itself in him.

422 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 36.
Development of journalism.

VIII.
This conflict of opinions, antipathies, dissertations, sar
casms, hatreds, provocations, and invectives, which excited and
disgraced the tribune, was prolonged from without in the jour
nals, which the freedom conferred upon the press multiplied in
number and increased in bitterness. All the literary talents
of the time assumed, for the advancement of their cause, an
incessant system of polemics which changed all conversation
into controversy. The public mind, so long repressed by arms
and despotism, gushed forth in a thousand voices. Every
breast was filled with the enthusiasm of a new era. The
whole of France was fermenting with ideas, ardour, zeal, and
passions, which the Revolution, the Empire, and the Restora
tion brought face to face, and to which the elections, the assem
blies, aud the journals offered an arena whereon to combat or
conciliate. Each camp of public opinion had its writers, paid
in popularity or favour according to the cause to which they
devoted themselves. M. Decazes was defended in the Moniteur,
in the Journal des Maires, and in the Journal de Paris, by
M. Villemain and M. Linguay. Louis XVIII., himself a
literary sovereign, wrote some articles by stealth, in which he
was gratified to see that his hand was suspected. M. Royer
Collard, M. Keratry, and M. Guizot wrote in the Courrier.
This journal of the first Doctrinaires, already partook of the
dogmatical gravity, the haughtiness and the disdain, which
were the characteristics of this school. M. Etienne, M. Pao-es,
and M. Aignan, wrote in the Constitutionnel, a subordinate and
irritating journal, which excited in the minds of the mass not
elevated ideas, but vulgar discontent. This was the journal
of public murmurs, not assuming any precise form of opposition,
but collecting, colouring, and aggravating all it could in satire
of the court, in the excesses of the ultras, the pretensions of
the clergy, and the ridicule of the old regime, in disaffecting
the nation to the Bourbons, and seducing it to Bonapartism, or
Orleanism. M. Comte and M. Dunoyer, two young and im
partial writers, through their elevation of mind as well as their

1818—19.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 423
The various organs.
youth, inclined towards the republic, without confessing it even
to themselves. They incited the young to think in a periodical
publication entitled the Censeur, a happy but austere imitation
of the celebrated pamphlets of England at the period when she
established her liberty.
The Journal des Debats, but recently the privileged journal
of the Empire, was directed by the Messieurs Bertin, who
wero more statesmen than public writers; adroit in maintaining
an equilibrium of opinions, by making them naturally lean
towards the side of authority, the Bertins had given up their
paper to M. de Chateaubriand and his friends. Its articles,
which were always sensible and sometimes brilliant, were only
addressed to Europe, to the court, and to the aristocracy of
letters and of the saloons. Professedly royalist, constitutional
in language, and learned in diplomacy, the Journal des Debats
never broke with the King, however it might immolate his
ministers. There was always a ministerial appointment behind
its opposition ; it was the store-room of royalty.
The superannuated, ultra, narrow, and violent opinions of
the court, of the returned clergy, and of the obsolete nobility,
were embittered, consoled, and flattered by the Quotidienne
and the Drapeau-Blanc, journals at once lively, aggressive, and
courageous in their impotent struggle against the spirit of the
age. These papers were supported by the rancour of the emi
grants, protestations against the revolutionary spirit, horror of
constitutional concessions, and antipathy to all new men and
fresh innovations. They were astonished at still being van
quished after the triumph of the Bourbons. They turned
royalism against the King ; papers ill-timed and fatal in their
friendship, which incessantly revealed to the revolution the
secret thoughts and ultimate intentions of the counter-revo
lution. IX.
Violent provocations frequently indicated in the Chamber
the anger smouldering amongst the parties excited by these
journals. M. d'Argenson was silenced for having made a sim
ple allusion to the Protestant assassinations in the South.

424 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 3C.
Debates on the massacres in the South.
M. Trinuqelague extenuated these crimes, and almost exone
rated their perpetrators. He was replied to by M. de Saint
Aulaire, who testified that he had seen the dead bodies of
thirteen electors, slaughtered under his own eyes, at Nismes,
and. had witnessed the flight of their fellow Protestants to the
mountains to escape a similar death. M. de Villele, turning
the indignation of the liberals against the ministry, said that
if these murders had been really committed they ought to be
punished, and he demanded why the government had not done
justice. This appeal roused M. de Serres. He justly threw
back the reproach upon the royalists, the tardy accusers of
crimes committed while they were in power, and which these
same royalists seemed now desirous of shifting upon others.
" Learn," said he, " to know the real parties. General Lagarde,
commanding the department of the Gard, protected public
order and the citizens with his sword and his person. He
received a ball in the breast from the very muzzle of a musket.
The author of the crime is seized, and the fact being proved
and avowed, the judges put this question : ' Was the homicide
committed in self-defence?' The jury ventured to reply in
the affirmative, and the murderer was acquitted.
" Another general, commanding at Toulouse, was in the act
of quelling a disturbance when he was mortally wounded ; he
was carried into his residence, and the assassins rushed in and
completed their butchery with a thousand wounds. They were
brought to trial, when it was alleged in their favour that they
could not kill a man who was already mortally wounded, and
they were condemned to simple imprisonment !
" A man whose horrible name it is painful even to pro
nounce, Trestaillons, was prosecuted with his accomplices as
the author of many assassinations. They were conveyed to
Riom, where more independent justice was expected, but not
one of the witnesses would give evidence against them ; the
reign of terror had frozen their courage. The witnesses in
their favour, on the contrary, presented themselves in crowds,
and these men were set at liberty ! "
The honest indignation of M. de Serres at the impunity
bestowed upon these crimes, completely silenced the royalists,

1818—19] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 425
Stormy scene in the Chamber.
and renewed for a moment his popularity amongst the liberals.
The homage he rendered, a few days after, to the spirit of the
revolution irritated almost to frenzy the counter-revolutionary
party. M. de Serres had said that majorities were almost
always either sound or well-intentioned. M. de Labourdonnaie,
the fiery organ of the right, called upon the minister to
declare if he extended this eulogium to the majority of the
Convention ?
"Yes, Sir," boldly replied the orator, " even to the Con
vention ! "
M. de Serres had scarcely fallen into the snare that was
hidden in this question, when he was covered with applause
from the left and from the galleries, and from the right with
murmurs and insulting expressions. The Chamber, in a
tumult, was obliged to suspend its sitting and to clear the
galleries. One imprudent or hasty word had been enough to
defeat a life of fidelity and honour. The parties defied each
other in their looks, and displayed mortal hatred in their
gestures ; their words insulted, though they did not kill.
M. Dupont (de I'Eure), the most humane of men, was com
pared to Marat, by M. de Puymaurin. M. de Courvoisier de
nounced the existence of a directing committee, charged by the
revolutionary party to communicate from Paris impulse and
unity of movement to the factions. The royalist party con
nected with the ambitious party of the church, responded to
these secret societies by societies, open and encouraged, which
covered all France with missionaries, at once religious and po
litical ; instruments of piety to some, of agitation to others,
and frequently of scandal and sedition. Received in some
places, repulsed in others, edifying in the churches, out ot
their element in the public places, applauded and insulted by
turns, protected by the magistrates, defended by the military,
these priests, wandering over the surface of the land, as through
a conquered country, revealed in the motive which sent them
forth less of zeal than of faction. The King and his ministers,
who witnessed with repugnance these excesses of proselytism
inspired by their secret enemies, did not, however, dare to
repress them, lest they should be accused of indifference or

426 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 38.
Secret plots at Paris and other parts of the continent
irreligion by the allies of the church. Education being con
fined to the ecclesiastics gave offence to the partisans of liberty
of conscience, and excited tumults amongst the students in the
capital and the provinces. These being convoked to sign
petitions to the Chambers, were dispersed at the point of the
bayonet. The opposition, thus repulsed in open day, took
refuge and concentrated itself in secret societies. The spirit of
conspiracy insinuated itself there under the semblance of liber
alism. Public societies were organised to defend, by all legal
means, the liberty of thought, of the press, and of public
opinion. M.M. de Lafayette, d'Argenson, Laffitte, Benjamin
Constant, Gevaudan, Mechin, Gassicourt, Merilhou, De Thiard,
and De Broglie, imparted to them the influence of their names
with the public. M. de Lafayette assembled at his residence
more secret and more resolute committees. Every weapon of
defence given to liberty by the public institutions became one
of aggression in the hands of the conspirators. Some harsh
correspondence took place between the refugees of the Conven
tion who had found shelter at Brussels, and the malcontents
of Paris. It was therein openly proposed to change the
dynasty in France, and to give the crown to a Protestant sove
reign. The King of the Netherlands smiled, it is said, upon
these ideas, which intoxicated his ambition with the hope of a
chimerical reign for his son, on the ruins of the house of
Bourbon. The Prince of Orange courted the refugees, and
negociations were attempted between him, the refugees, and
Lafayette. With these secret plots of Paris and of Brussels, already
corresponded plots of a similar nature in Germany, Spain,
Piedmont, and Naples. The spirit of liberty which had ex
cited the nations against Napoleon, and triumphed through
national independence, now felt itself menaced in France ; and
prepared to defend itself everywhere. Carbonarism was orga
nised in Italy, antimonachal liberalism at Cadiz, universal
union in the learned cities of Germany. One of the young
members of this sect, the student Sand, murdered Kotzebue in
cold blood ; a writer who was formerly popular, and who, it
was supposed, was now sold to Russia. Sand killed himself

1S18-19.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 427
Fermentation of Germany.
also with the poignard he had used in killing the traitor,
mingling suicide with assassination, returning thanks to God
for his madness, and calling these two crimes virtue. His
fanaticism excited the feverish imaginations of young men, and
of women. The sovereigns, alive to these symptoms of fer
mentation, directed their ministers to assemble at Carlsbad to
organise a collective repression against this outburst of popular
opinion, and to intimidate Germany by the police and by exe
cutions. France, both liberal and revolutionary, replied by
invectives and menaces to these precautions of the northern
courts. Every day war was more frankly declared between
the people and the sovereigns. The elections of 1819 were
influenced by this general agitation of ideas, and they became
more and more remarkable in the selection of names, the most
hostile to the Bourbons, and to kings in general, to indicate to
them both animosity and menace. This animosity was carried
to delirium, and even to suicide in the liberal party. Its real
interest was to come to the assistance of the ministry and the
King, who had raised it out of nothing, and who made for it a
rampart of the government against the triumph of the ultra-
royalists. To pull down M. Decazes was to pull themselves
down ; to insult the King was to throw this prince into a forced
alliance with the retrograde party. The liberals listened to
none of these inspirations of good sense, and of gratitude
They were determined to offend the crown, and to deceive the
minister, by selecting and supporting, in all places where they
had a preponderance, ultra-radical candidates, of evil augury
for the monarchy. The most striking of all was the election of
Gregoire, at Grenoble. X.
Gregoire, who was a philosophical priest before the revo
lution, faithful to Christianity, but rebellious to the pontifical
supremacy of Rome, had been advanced to a bishopric by the
civil constitution of the clergy. Under this title, which he had
never since repudiated, his name had the signification of a
6chism. Beinp a member of the national convention, on a

428 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 36'.
Election of Gregoire.
mission at the period of the King's trial, he had not voted
for the death of Louis XVI., but he had ratified the sentence
by an act subsequent to the execution ; being thus innocent of
the fact, and perhaps of the intention, but an accomplice from
weakness or ambiguity in the judgment. His invectives against
kings had become proverbs in revolutionary language. An
apostle nevertheless of the doctrines of equality and of the
gentleness of the gospel and of philosophy, Gregoire had, how
ever, revolted against blood, and preached after the victory,
justice and moderation to the conquerors. An obscure senator
under the Empire, a silent enemy of despotism, he had not
committed the inconsistency of hailing again on the 20th of
March that military tyranny, the first fall of which he had
witnessed with joy. This abstinence from all complicity with
the 20th of March had shielded him from the law of banish
ment applied to the regicides in 1815. He lived in retirement
and in silence since the second return of the Bourbons. The
liberal committees of Paris could not find throughout all
France a name more decidedly ill-omened to the King.
They chose him for the repulsion which this name must
excite in the family of Louis XVI. The ministry and the
moderate men opposed him in vain. Grenoble elected him as
a retaliation for the executions effected within its walls in the
name of the Bourbons. This nomination fell like a thunder
bolt upon M. Decazes and upon the court. It was an impeach
ment of the ministry ; it was a blow levelled at the face of
majesty itself. A cry, almost unanimous, of astonishment and
reprobation, arose from all opinions and all consciences which
were not desirous of a rupture between liberty and the throne.
The-ultra royalists rejoiced in secret under their apparent
indignation. The election of Gregoire was to them the felony
of the charter and the condemnation of the favourite. Names
less notorious, but nearly as hostile, issued from the electoral
urns amongst the departments summoned to replace their
deputies : Lambrechtz, Lecarlier, Labbey de Pompieres, Se-
bastiani, and Mechin. General Foy, soon to be called by
talent and character to so much parliamentary distinction,
appeared for the first time in the representation of his country.

1818—19.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 429
General Foy.
Dear to the army, chosen by the liberals, accepted by the
constitutionalists, formidable but not implacable to the Bour
bons, at once the leader and moderator of a legal opposition in
the Chamber, his accession to the assembly was about to offer
to liberty a figure unknown to the revolution, that of a military
tribune in a warrior statesman. General Foy combined this
double character in his person. His countenance was as open
as his thoughts, honest as his heart, and inspired as his elo
quence. Nature had made him a chief of party, at a time
when the only patriotic party was the moderation of hearts and
the conciliation of ideas. In him we remembered the soldier,
we recognised the honest man, we foresaw the great citizen.
XI.
Genera] Foy was one of the youngest soldiers of the revo
lution. He was born at Ham in the middle class of society,
and was educated for the army. Like Bonaparte he was an
officer of artillery, and served under Dumouriez, Pichegru,
and Dampierre, in those first campaigns of the north when
patriotism defended the soil without meddling with intestine
factions. Indignant at the crimes of 1793, he was imprisoned
by the proconsul Lebon for his murmurs, saved from the
scaffold by his youth and his eloquence, and being released
from prison by Moreau, he fought under him in Germany.
He was a friend of Desaix, and being wounded by his side by
a cannon ball, he employed the leisure of a tedious cure at
Strasburg in the studies of a publicist and a statesman ; led by
mental analogy to the facts and eloquence of antiquity, he
drew from those examples the love for, and the accents of
liberty. He soon after obtained promotion and served under
Massena in Switzerland. Seeing in the fame of Bonaparte the
dawning of a tyranny for Europe, he refused to sign the servile
addresses which the flatterers of budding power hawked about
the army in favour of the Empire, and was banished to Portu
gal and Spain in subordinate commands for this disinclination
to servitude. He obeyed, without reluctance, the summons to
the Bourbons and the charter in 1814, and flew to Waterloo,

430 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 36.
General spirit of the elections.
as to the Thermopylae of his country, but without being impli
cated in the defection of the hundred days, bedewing with his
blood the redoubts of Quatre-Bras, he was borne in a dying
state to his family after the ruin of his country. Having been
disbanded in 1815, he wrote, to console himself for the public
reverses, the history of his Spanish campaigns. Recommended
by his patriotism to the patriots, by talent to the electoral com
mittees, and by esteem to all, his department elected him by
acclamation to reanimate the country, to defend the charter,
to strengthen the constitutional throne, and to respect the
King. He was soon to surpass these promises, and to accom
plish all these mandates. Such was General Foy when he was
called to the Chamber. XII.
The King trembled at the advantage which the nomination
of so great a number of his enemies, and especially that of
Lambrechtz and of Gregoire, two shadows of the convention,
would give to his brother's policy over his own. His con
cessions were only rewarded with insults. The election of
Grenoble was a flash of light that opened his eyes. Afflicted,
but not obstinate, he did not close them against any such
symptom. The coolness which existed between him and his
brother, since the latter had been deprived of the command of
the Parisian National Guard, disappeared before this common
family misfortune. " Well, brother !" said the Count d'Artois
to the King, with an accent of consternation as he sat down
at his table: "you see at length whither they are leading you."
" I know it, brother," replied the King, softening his voice, and
withholding a thought that was already on his lips : " I know it,
and I shall guard against it." A long and cordial conversation
appeared at length to reconcile the two branches of the family
It was admitted that a law of election which sent, in return
for so many concessions, such challenges and threats to royalty,
was a hint to change its course ; the rock was too visible to be
overlooked. In the evening M. Decazes received from the
King an order to prepare the outlines of an electoral svstem

1818—19.] OF MONARCHY FN FRANCE. 431
Mortification ofthe ministry.
which should preserve the crown from such manifestations of
public opinion. M. Decazes, whose youth, whose interest and
whose real attachment to the King, precluded an obstinate
resistance to wishes which had so painful a motive, instantly
resolved to satisfy the royal family. M. de Serres, who was
suddenly thrown, by that impulse which constitutes the orator,
from one extremity of opinion to the other, and M. Portal,
minister of marine, did not hesitate in recognising the necessity
of a law which should disarm their enemies. Baron Louis,
minister of finance, Gouvion-Saint-Cyr, and General Dessolles
persisted in defending the old law. The abuse of liberty, the
misleading of public opinion were not sufficient in their ideas
to condemn a whole system. >• The decision was adjourned.
The liberals, fearful of seeing the instrument of their victory
broken through the impatience of M. Decazes, overwhelmed
this minister with attentions and adulation ; they even went so
far as to promise to obtain from Gregoire a voluntary retire
ment, which would leave to the crown its dignity, and to the
constitutional party its law. The minister resisted all these
advances, submitted the question again to his colleagues, and,
supported energetically by the King himself, overcame all
resistance, but received at the same time the resignations of
M.M. Louis, Dessolles, and Gouvion-Saint-Cyr.
M. Decazes, the sole spring henceforward of the intestine
movements of the King's council, formed a new ministry, of
which he himself was the head as president of the council, and
minister of the home department. M. Pasquier, who had felt
more strongly than any other of the political men, the insult
offered to the crown V^y the elections, and who had addressed to
the King a secret intimation of his dangers, was called to the
foreign department; being a man of flexible intellect and fluent
eloquence, which gave him a great aptitude for all phases of
public life, he offered to M. Decazes, a useful auxiliary both
in the council and the assembly, and he was, moreover, a secret
link between the court and the royalists. The statesman of
the Chamber who was beginning to discipline his powera under
M. de Villele, M. de Latour-Maubourg, a military man, cele
brated for his bravery and his fidelity, obtained the war-office.

432 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 36.
Position of M. Decazes.
M. Roy, who had been already minister of finance, and super
seded for a moment by the Abbe Louis, returned to that de
partment ; M. Portal took the naval affairs. ; M. de Serres
nominally the department of justice, but ia reality every de
partment where the universality of his genius, the ardour of his
zeal, and the force and promptitude of his eloquence might call
him to shield from threatened danger the King, the ministry,
and the constitution.

XIII.
This ministry would have been equally powerful against the
radicals and the royalists, if M. Decazes had consented to go
out and give his place to M. Laine. He wanted neither
strength, nor allurement, nor support amongst the new men
who directed public opinion through the press, and the parties
in the Chambers. But in making himself the executioner of
the very law of election which had won him his popularity the
year before, and which he had defended as a portion of the
charter at the beginning of this, he was guilty of such an
abjuration of his own principles as is generally fatal to political
meu. Ambition rather than conviction would be supposed to
have influenced him on this occasion, whereas the real motive
of his conduct was his devotion to the wishes of the King. But
his increasing favouritism wounded rivalship, irritated envy, and
showed in this uncontrolled direction of the government, per
tinaciously left to a man who had risen from nothing so high
and so suddenly, more boldness in the pursuit of fortune than
prudence in waiting for and weighing its importance.
At the King's suggestion, however, he made advances to the
Count d'Artois, and expressed with deference to this prince a
desire to act in concert with the royalists, his friends in both
Chambers. He also flattered the young adepts of the Doc
trinaire party : MM. de Broglie, Guizot, de Barante, and de
Stael ; the political circle at that time of M. Royer-Collard and of
M. de Serres, with the prospect of creating influential situations
for them in the government. None of these negociations were
concluded, and the King opened the session on the 29th

1818—19.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 433

Opening of the session.

November. His speech, maturely weighed by M. Pasquier,
began by hinting at great resolutions of public safety, without,
however, touching the sacredness of the charter. " The laws,"
said the monarch, " have been executed everywhere ; but
amidst these elements of public prosperity, I cannot conceal
from myself that just motives of apprehension mingle with our
hopes, and claim henceforward our most serious attention. A
vague but a positive disquietude pre-occupies all minds. Every
one demands of the present pledges of its stability. The nation
but imperfectly enjoys the fruits of peace and good order ; every
one fears to see them snatched away by the violence of the fac
tions ; the too obvious expression of their designs is alarming.
The moment is come to relieve the Chamber of Deputies from
the annual agitation of parties, by assuring to it a duration more
in conformity with the interests of public order, and of the in
ternal consideration of the state."
These words boldly placed the question of the dignity of
the crown in opposition to the name of the regicide by which it
had been insulted. They brought forward at the same time the
still more irritating question of the electoral law, by means of
which the opposition was in hopes of increasing its strength.
Royalty had been insulted ; it did not insult but it offered
combat in its turn. The Assembly understood the challenge
and was thrown into a state of fermentation.
XIV.
The majority of the Assembly, however, did not refuse a
legitimate satisfaction to the susceptibility of feeling and of
majesty, in the sacrifice of Gregoire. M. Becquey, a worthy
and pacific man, when expressing in the tribune the sentiments
of the bureaux of the Chamber, did not attack the individual,
but pretended to find some material causes of nullity in the
election of the deputy for Grenoble. The friend of M. Royer-
Collard, and an old agent of the King's in Paris during the
exile of the Bourbons, M. Becquey was desirous, as well as
the King, of sparing the Chamber those questions, which were
calculated to cause an explosion of anger in hearts that were
3 EB

434 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 36.

Discussion in the election of Gregoire.

boiling with party rage. But no hand, however prudent it
might be, could close up this crater of the Assembly. •' No 1
no! let us have no temporizing, no weakness!" cried several
voices on the right and in the centre. " No regicides in this
Chamber!" added M. de Marcellus. The murmurs increased
on the left ; some groups disconnected with both parties seemed
to waver between the insult offered by the election of a judge
of Louis XVI. as a defiance to his brother, and the excess of
parliamentary power displayed in unseating a deputy of the
country legally elected. It required an imposing, and until
then an impartial voice, to constitute itself the arbiter between
the majesty of the King, the feelings of the royal family, and
the inviolability of the electors. M. Laine slowly ascended the
tribune. His countenance always grave and ascetic, wore at
this moment even a sorrowful expression. He seemed to invest
the mourning of offended royalty with the civil wars and scaffolds
evoked by such fatal discussion. The features of this great
orator were as eloquent as his language. The muscles of his
thin and nervous lips palpitated with the struggling words before
they could force an utterance. He was moving because he was
himself moved. He possessed the eloquence of the eyes. M.
Laine, though he did- not utter a syllable would have affected
and convinced even by his silence.
XV
" Gentlemen," said he, after a long and painful pause which
betrayed his agitation, " by a clemency almost divine, or, if you
will, for the necessity or the appeasing of society, it was pro
mised that no one should be called to account for his votes ;
oblivion was enjoined upon all citizens. Who, in fact, remem
bered the fourth deputy of the Isere ? Who ever called him
to account for his votes and opinions ? Has oblivion then been
imposed only upon the victims ? And have those only who
most require to be forgotten preserved the sorrowful privilege of
being exclusively remembered?" This crushing style of argu
ment which fell upon the directing committees, the authors of
this premeditated insult, cut short the question, as great ora-

1818—19.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 435
His rejection.
tors frequently settle points, by a single expression The effect
was immense in the Assembly, which was enthusiastic in
applause on the right and in the centre, but silent and dismayed
in the other parts. Benjamin Constant alone, one of those cold
sophists who without sharing in party passions invest them with
language of most malignant popular meaning, harassed M.
Laine with some ambiguous phrases; in which he contrasted
Gregoire, who, in his opinion, was exonerated from all partici
pation in the death of Louis XVI., sitting in the council
of the nation, with Fouche himself an avowed regicide,
sitting in the council of the King. This cruel, though merited
allusion might degrade the crown, but it could not raise the
regicide, or justify the insult to royalty. Benjamin Constant
soothed the hatred of the radicals but he did not convince the
Chamber. Gregoire was unnanimously rejected. Some ex
cluded him on account of the indignity, others in consequence
of some irregularity in the form of election. Members were
excused from assigning their motives, in order that the votes
might be the more numerous, and the reparation to the crown
the more unanimous.
M. Ravez, a friend of M. Laine, and emulous of his fame,
was nominated by a majority of the Chamber, and chosen by
the King as its president. He distinguished himself in its
thankless but important functions, which change an orator into
a judge, an arbiter, and a moderator of an assembly. The
party of the ultra-royalists, united with that of the moderate
royalists in rival ship with the ministry, had given seventy-five
votes to M. Villele ; and the radical opposition party, sixty-five
to M. Laffitte. These figures comprised the strength of the
respective parties. The increasing opposition threatened soon
to overpower the ministerial, or central party, which had only
given 105 votes to M. Ravez. This balance of parties made
the reply of the Assembly to the King appear weak and timid.
They were sufficiently afraid of each other to adjourn the de
cisive struggles ; that in the Chamber of Peers, which bad
been inspired by the energy of the Count d'Artois, declared
open war against the factions.

430 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 36.
Petitions got up by the liberal party.

xvi.
In the same manner as the liberals, the royalists were
already divided into two camps, one ultra, the other moderate.
A man who was increasing in importance as in wisdom, M. de
Villele, governed the latter. M. de Labourdonnaie, an elo
quent man, but who was incapable of becoming wiser, animated
the other. Numerous petitions, got up in the provinces by
the liberal party, and conceived in terms threatening to the
crown, brought on a discussion. M. Mestadier, in the name
of the royalist majority, and of the centre of which he was
the organ, demanded that these petitions should be treated
with contempt. Dupont (de I'Eure), whose moral authority
with the liberals was founded on character as well as eloquence,
exposed the contradiction between M. Decazes, asserting, a
few months before, the perpetuity of the electoral law, and
the same M. Decazes now rejecting the petitions which
demanded its duration. General Foy made his maiden
speech on this occasion. He palliated, without approving
of, the exaggerated and insulting terms of the petitions.
" Liberty,'' said he, " is the youth of nations. There
is too much life in the government of liberty not to excite
movements sometimes to the extent of agitation." In these
first words might be perceived the accents of a mind that
was both free and honest. General Foy took his position on
the left, as M. de Villele did on the right, like a man who
wishes to conquer, but not to degrade, the government of his
country. There was in these two men a promise of two
ministries for the crown; the one if the demands of the
royalists drew him to the right, the other if the requirements
of public opinion should precipitate him to the left. The
ministry, wavering between these two groups, obtained a
majority of only three votes for the rejection of the petitions.
These three votes were those of the ministers themselves.
They trembled for the fate of the measure which they had
promised the King to carry through the Chamber. They at
tached themselves to all influential parties in the palace, or in

1818—19.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 437
The new electoral law.
public opinion, to obtain their support. An electoral bill, pro
jected by M. de Serres, under the supervision of the Duke
de Richelieu, and drawn up by M.M. Villemain, Monnier,
Barante, Guizot, and Decazes, a young party more full of zeal
than conviction, was at length to be submitted to the delibera
tion of the Chambers. This law, devoid of importance, and
without the confidence of the country, divided it into two
electoral nations ; the plebeian nation nominated half the
deputies in the chief towns of the respective districts, and the
nation of the aristocracy of wealth, composed of proprietors
paying taxes to the amount of 1,000 francs, nominated the
other half in the capitals of the departments. A foolish law,
with all its pretended prudence, which gave to the accident of
fortune, instead of the accident of birth, a title to the right of
citizenship — a title of wealth still more absurd than that of
nobility, for family may impart sentiments and virtues, while
fortune only bestows means and comfort. This law had an ad
ditional danger ; it brought face to face, in the same assembly,
men issuing from two different elections, an aristocracy of
department, and a democracy of district, elements of anti
pathy, of classification, and of civil war, which would rend the
country and the government in contending against each other as
representatives. Fear had badly inspired the royalists ; zeal for
his master had badly inspired the favourite ; systems had badly
inspired the Doctrinaires, fawned upon by all parties, which
sought to conciliate them for their own advantage ; ignorance
of the country had badly counselled M. de Richelieu ; the
love of monarchy M. de Serre. This law bore in itself the
germs of a struggle between classes, and the ruin of royalty.
It was a constitution of defiance; in a constitution, all defiance
is a provocation. M. Decazes was proceeding blindfold to the
ruin of the throne which he wished to consolidate. He had
made a coup d'etat on the 5th September against the royalists ;
he was about to be compelled by the opposition of the Chamber
to make a second against the liberals. But the coup d'itat
against the royalists only dethroned a party; that against the
liberals dethroned a public opinion which had become a popular
passion in the national masses. He was ruining himself, and

438 RESTORATION OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. [BOOK 36.
Impolicy of the new electoral law.
be was ruining his master, when one of those events in which
fatality intervenes by the hand of crime, occurred to pull dawn
the minister, to destroy a prince, and to disentangle, by the
stroke of a poniard, a crisis of which nobody could foresee the
catastrophe.

BOOK THIETT-SEVENTH.
The Duke de Berry — Louvel; his previous life, his monomania of
regicide — He determines to kill the Duke de Berry — Night of the
13th of February — Assassination of fhe Duke at the Opera; his
death-bed — Grief of the royal family — Consternation ofthe public —
Accusation against M. Decazes ; M. Clausel de Coussergues charges
him with high treason — Violent debates ; palace intrigues — Madame
du Cayla ; her origin ; her favour — The Viscount dela Rochefoucauld
¦ — Fall of M. Decazes ; review of his political career.

I.
The Duke de Berry was the second son of the Count d'Artois,
the favourite child of the royal family, and the only hope of
the direct succession of his race to the throne, from the unpro
ductive union of the Duchess of Angouleme. His worth lay
more in his heart than in his appearance ; for he was small in
stature, with broad shoulders, awkward in his motions, a bony
countenance, low forehead, shaggy eye-brows, a tumed-up nose,
thick lips, and a wild expression ; his countenance revealed his
goodness and intelligence only when lit up with a smile : then,
in the frank and cordial penetration of his look, in the delicate
contraction of his eye-lids, in the muscles of the mouth, in the
easy freedom of gesture which gave, as it were, his heart with
his hand, and in the brief and sincere quality of his voice, the
prince was visible, the mind was understood, the soldier was
apparent, and the heart was felt. The old sentiment of honour
constituted the virtue of this prince ; he had been fostered in
it by that wandering and chivalrous nobility which had followed
his father in his exile, and which bore with it, throughout all
Europe, the frivolities, the prejudices, and the amiable vices,
but also the fidelity and the self-devotion of former times.
The precocious spirit, the unexpected sallies, the youthful fire

440 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 37.
The Duke de Berry.

of the Duke de Berry, contrasted with the modest gravity and
the sickly timidity of his elder brother, the Duke d'Angou
leme, had proved at an early period the delight and amuse
ment of the exiled court. He had those defects wliich are the
luxuriance of rich natures and the augury of great qualities.
They had been too readily pardoned in his family and his pri
vate circle not to become a sort of boast with himself; and his
cultivated faults had thus become confirmed habits. He was
one of those young men in whom everything is pardoned, and
who at length think, even their follies are admired from that
very cause. He was, however, constant in love, firm in friend
ship, eager for action, and ambitious of glory, which if he did
not acquire upon the field of battle, it was not his fault, but
that of his destiny, which condemned him to a life of inaction.
After having rivalled the ardour of the Duke d'Enghien in the
army of Conde, the disarming of Germany had thrown him
back upon London. He lived there in obscurity, and in the
mystery of a durable attachment for a foreign lady whom, it is
said, he had irregularly married. Two daughters were the
fruit of this private but faithful union, and he loved them
openly with the tenderness of a father. Surrounded by these
ties of affection and by some gentlemen, his comrades in the
old court and army of Conde, he occupied his leisure hours in
manly and mental arts, for which he entertained the noble
passion of Francis I. He went to Hartwell, the residence,
in England, of the exiled King, only on those rare occasions
when this prince summoned his family around him, to concert
some political negociations with Europe.
The fall of the empire had opened a field of action to
the Duke de Berry. He was chosen by Louis XVIII., and
by the Count d'Artois his father, for those martial enterprises
to which his youth, his bravery, his natural soldier-like rough
ness, his activity, and his fire seemed to have destined him.
They wished to present in him to France, and to the army,
some living shadow of Henri IV. ; but, however, the young
prince might inherit the blood and the heart, and was, alas !
to suffer the same death, he had neither the grace nor the
captivating qualities of his ancestor. He mistook the proper

1820,] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 441
His unpopularity with the army.
tone in addressing himself to the army, by assuming the accents
of the master and the brother in arms of those conquerors of
the world, the companions of a hero, consecrated by the fire of so
many battles, and embittered by their defeat, which only ren
dered the more susceptible how humbled and unfortunate they
had been. This gave rise to unpleasant military scenes between
the prince and the old soldiers of Bonaparte, and to a degree
of unpopularity amongst them which had prejudiced the mind
of the Duke de Berry, and thrown him into dissipation through
disgust for a military life. He absented himself from the
court ; he held liberal opinions ; and he endeavoured, in order
to make himself agreeable to the nation and to reconcile him
self with the army, to separate himself from the superannuated
etiquette of his family, to despise the antiquated lumber of
the old regime, and to breathe a new and a fresher air. Fie
surrounded himself with the most popular artists, he frequented
the fetes of the people, he sought for pleasure, and affected to
cover a passing attachment for an actress with a veil through
which appeared the frivolity of youth. He was anxious to
please the French even through their vices.
II
The King had married him in 1816 to the Princess Caro
line, daughter of the Prince Royal of Naples, in order to con^
solidate the house of Bourbon upon the three thrones it occu
pied in Italy, in Spain, and at Paris, and to give to France
heirs of the royal race, who were no longer hoped for from the
Duchess de Angouleme. Two daughters, one of whom had
died soon after its birth, proved the fecundity of this union.
The young couple lived happy in their mutual affection, and
France looked forward to the birth of princes, pledges of per
petuity for the monarchy. The duke and duchess forgot the
world, and were forgotten by it, in domestic felicity full of
tenderness and confidence.
But crime did not forget them.
There was at that time in Paris a man lost amongst the
crowd, and but little known to his fellow beings, a common

442 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 3f.
Louvel : his previous life.
workman in one of those subordinate trades which minister
to the wants of the public, and who live on wages earned from
town to town. His name was Louvel ; he was born at
Versailles where his family were retailers of old clothes.
He lost his parents at an early age ; but a sister whom
he loved, and who had been as a mother to him, still
lived with and watched over him at Versailles. This was
the only being with whom Louvel had any tie of tenderness
upon the earth. He was at this period thirty-two years old ;
a little slender man, wasted with internal consumption, of a
bilious complexion, pallid and wan, in a constant state of
excitement, hard favoured, thin lipped, stiff in manner, with a
close and suspicious countenance, an image of fanaticism, re
volving in a contracted brain some idea ill understood, and
suffering mentally until his deadly hand should have relieved
him by a crime from its weight and its martyrdom
Louvel was born four years before the republic, and had
received that sort of Roman education which was then given
in common by the convention and the directory to the children
of the people, in the midst of popular ceremonies and philo
sophical fetes, the spectacles, the speeches, and the hymns of
which seduced the youthful hearts from the ancient faith, and
inflamed them with enthusiasm for reason, for country, and for
freedom. Of this he retained a firm and vivid impression;
and from a longing for some system of faith, inherent in his
reflective mind, he had subsequently followed the worship of
the Theophilanthropists, a sort of popular deism reduced to a
moral system and to outward form by the director Lareveillere-
Lepaux. The origin of his ideas seems to have resulted from
these two impressions of his childhood : a fanatical devotion
to the revolution, and a blind zeal for his country. Other
ideas equally ardent, such as national vanity, enthusiasm for
conquest, and for Napoleon,— that god of armies and military
glory, the religion of the camp and the barrack, — seem to have
added to his first revolutionary impressions other confused and
incoherent elements. The reverses of the armies, the fall of
its chief, the return of the Bourbons, horror of the counter
revolution, and the humiliation of the country under the feet

1820.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 443
His monomania of regicide.
of the foreigners, aroused those feelings of anger and despair
which fermented into a paroxysm of rage and madness in the
solitary soul of this enthusiast. Ill
Louvel wandered from city to city, from Italy to France,
from France to the Isle of Elba, during the exile of his hero,
constantly revolving in his mind the presentiment of a crime.
He did not, however, reveal this to any one, not even to those
whom he expected some day or other to serve by accomplishing
it. Always laborious, and always taciturn with his fellow
workmen, shunning all society, and avoiding all those dissipa
tions which are at once a recreation and a snare to persons of
his condition in their hours of leisure, he buried himself in
his own thoughts, reading and ruminating on books, journals,
and popular songs, in which the public writers of the revolu
tion, the liberal pamphleteers, and the Napoleon poets associated
themselves in a heterogeneous league, to exalt at once the
republic, the empire, national freedom, and to turn against
the Bourbons all the hearts, all the minds, all the hatred, and
all the contempt of the public. He was anxious to manifest
his rancour, but he did not know whom to strike.
So far back as 1814, when Louis XVIII. and his family
were about to land from the vessel which had brought them
back to France, Louvel had hurried from Rochelle to Calais,
with the intention of killing the King, or the first prince that
might fall in his way. Thus a stroke of a dagger awaited,
unknown to him, the first step of Louis XVIII. upon the soil
of his forefathers ; but chance, or hesitation, on the part of
Louvel, had saved him. Astonished at the popular enthusiasm
which manifested itself at sight of the royal family, Louvel
returned to Paris, to relieve his mind, as he said, from the
murderous thoughts which oppressed it. The more we con
sider the criminal, the more we are convinced that the crime
was owing to a mental malady. " I sometimes hesitated,"
said Louvel himself, analysing his own perversity : " I asked
myself if I was not wrong ; but I could not bear the entrance

444 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 37.
He determines to kill the Duke de Berry.
of the foreigners. I wished to travel to relieve my mind. I
went to Chambery ; but I left that place when I heard of the
arrival of Bonaparte at Grenoble, for I wished to know the
truth of it. If the Count d'Artois has been at Lyons I should
have killed him. I returned to Paris with the baggage-waggons
of the army. After the Emperor's departure I was seized
with the same thoughts again. 1 went to Rochelle and pur
chased a poniard there. I then returned to Versailles, where I
was employed in the court stables : from that moment I did
not cease to occupy myself with the means of accomplishing
my purpose at Versailles, St. Germains, St. Cloud, or Fontain-
bleau. I went to the hunting parties without saying a word to
my sister. To obtain time for this I did my work on the other
days, I always carried a poniard about me when I thought I
was likely to meet with a Bourbon ; but I was determined to
commence with the Duke de Berry, because he was the stock
of the family. After him I intended to kill the Duke d'Angou
leme, then the Count d'Artois, then the King, and after him
all the rest of them ! Perhaps, however, I might have stopped
with the King. The only culprits are those princes in par
ticular who have borne arms against their country. It was
not merely to the hunting parties that I followed these princes.
For three years I lurked almost every evening about those
theatres where I thought the Duke de Berry was likely to be.
To ascertain this I read all the play-bills, for I conjectured
where he would go by the nature of the performances. When,
after watching at the opera, I found he had not arrived at eight
o'clock, I went away. I followed him even to the churches,
in the hope of getting near enough to strike him, but the
crowd and his guards always kept me at a distance."
IV.
Such was the life of this man, in whom were embodied in
one living hatred, without relaxation, remorse, or pity, all those
scattered and contradictory hatreds wliich the republic, the
Empire, pretorian fanaticism, liberty, national resentment,
prejudice, animosity, and the perfidy of parties, journals, and

1820.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 445
Night of the 13th February.
pamphlets, had spread around like a popular miasma against
the Bourbons. This miasma respired by all, was to inflict
madness upon one alone — this was Louvel.

In the mean time the Duke and Duchess de Berry, solely
occupied with their happiness, and strangers to all political
factions, gave themselves up, with all the eagerness of their
youth and natural dispositions, to the pleasures and fetes
which the carnival multiplied, during the last days of the
theatrical season at Paris. Beloved and popular amongst
that world of art, of music and the dance which prolongs
the opera nights till day, they delighted in the enjoyment
of this popularity. On the 13 th February they purposed
going to the Royal Theatre, where they had not been for
some days before. Being both eager and curious in pursuit
of amusements, it might be supposed that they would not
allow this festive season to pass without making their ap
pearance there. While they were enjoying the prospect of
the evening's pleasure ; and were occupied with their toilette
and with the costumes for the night, the assassin who watched
their door, and almost read their very thoughts, conjectured
on his part that the attraction of pleasures was about to
deliver his prey into his hands VI
He had already for two evenings before been watching the
doors of the Opera-house. On Sunday he rose earlier than
usual with all the eager preparation of a man who looks for
ward to the commission of a crime with as much joy as others
feel at the approach of pleasure. He breakfasted deliberately
at his accustomed place in the street where he lived, and chat
ted freely with his usual table companions ; he then returned
to his chamber, and taking the smallest and the sharpest of
his two daggers, the better to hide it under his coat, he went
out to look at the masks, and the procession of the bceuf gras,

446 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 37.
Louvel's preparation for the crime.
the favourite spectacle of idle people during those days of
merry-making. Then, avoiding the crowd, he went to wander
about till night, on the road to the Bois de Boulogne, thus
passing, and repassing twice under the garden walls of the
Elys6e, the residence of the Duke de Berry. Towards the
close of the day he returned to his landlord's, seated himself
at table, and took his meal, chatting all the time on indifferent
matters with one of the persons employed in the King's stables.
After his dinner he went back to his room, and armed himself
with a second poniard, that he might have a weapon ready in
each hand for all emergencies. Convinced that the prince
would not fail to be present on this last day of gaiety, he
walked about with an air of indifference under the windows of
the theatre which were already lit up, near a small door
through which the members of the Royal family entered and
came out to avoid the bustle and tumult of the crowd. At
eight o'clock the clattering of horses' feet, and the gleaming
of torches born by the outriders, announced the coming of the
royal carriages. Louvel rushed towards the door, saw the
Duke alight first and offer his hand to the Duchess. He
might have struck the blow at that moment, but he felt him
self restrained by some hidden power ; whether it was a failure
of courage which he had often, he said, experienced at the
moment when his intention was about to be realised by an
irrevocable act, or, that the sight of the Duchess, young,
smiling, and happy, and pity for these two victims he was
about to immolate with the same blow, had involuntarily
softened him, he let the opportunity slip, and waited for
another. VII.
Ashamed of himself, however, and indignantly reproaching
his own weakness, he retired slowly, almost renouncing his
project for that night, and passed through the Palais-Royal
to return to his lodging which was close by ; but again beset
by evil thoughts he suddenly slackened his pace. He re
flected that in a few days his duties would 'recall him to Ver
sailles, where opportunities for murder would not occur again

1820.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 447
The Duke and Duchess de Berry at the opera.
until the still distant hunting season. He then placed before
himself this terrible and false dilemma : "am I right? or am
I wrong ? If I am right," he replied, " why does my courage
fail me ? If I am wrong, why do these ideas leave me no
repose?" Determined to conquer his cowardice if he was a
coward, and convinced that his ideas were correct because they
were obstinate, he suddenly turned round, retraced his steps
with ferocious resolution, from the garden of the Palais-Royal
to the entrance of the opera-house, ascertained that his victim
had not left it during his indecision, then walked backwards
and forwards between the garden and the theatre to pass the
time, watching at a distance the movements of the carriages
which would announce the departure of the prince. At twenty
minutes past eleven the royal carriages arrived, and drew up
at some distance from the entrance appropriated to the princes.
He slipped in after the carriages, entered the small deserted
street called the Rue de Louvois, and placing himself at the head
of a cab-horse, like a servant waiting for his master, he patiently
remained in this attitude till he heard the order issued for
drawing up the royal carriages. The shadow of the opera-
house wall concealed this unknown countenance from the ser
vants of the Duke de Berry, and his immoveable attitude
removed all suspicion from the sentinels.
VIII.
Meanwhile the prince and princess, only separated by a
wall from the man who was numbering the minutes of their
existence, were enjoying in their box, without any presenti
ment of evil, the pleasures of the performance, and of con
versation between the acts. The Duke and Duchess of Orleans
were present that evening in a neighbouring box, with their
children. The two families, who were very intimate owing
to the relationship of the two duchesses, saluted each other
with smiles of recognition. During an interval between the
performances the Duke and Duchess de Berry paid their
cousins a visit in their box. The duke embraced the children,
and played with the little Duke de Chartres, who was also

448 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 37.
Louvel stabs the Duke de Berry.
doomed to a tragical death in the flower of his age. On
passing through the lobby to return to their own box the
duchess was struck in the breast by a box door, which was
violently thrown open at the moment she was passing. She
was then enceinte a few weeks, and fearful that the blow, the
fright, and fatigue might endanger the fruit of her womb,
she expressed a wish to retire before the end of the opera,
and the bal masqut which was to follow it. The duke arose
to conduct her himself to the carriage, intending to return to
his box to enjoy the remaining pleasures of the night.
On the summons of the prince's attendants the royal
carriage drove up to the door. The young duchess supported
on one side by her husband's hand, and on the other by
that of her equerry Count de Mesnard, entered the carriage ;
the Countess de Bethisy, her lady in waiting, following her.
"Adieu!" said her husband smiling to her, "we shall soon
meet again." The footmen folded up the steps of the carriage,
and the prince turned round to enter the vestibule from the
street. At this moment Louvel, who had approached like an
inoffensive spectator, or a servant who was waiting for his
master, sprung, with all the vigour of his resolution, between
the sentinel who was presenting arms, and the footman who
was closing the carriage door, and seizing the left shoulder of
the Duke de Berry with his left hand, as if to secure his
victim under the knife, he struck him with the poniard in the
right side, and left the weapon in the wound. The rapidity of
the act, the confusion of the bystanders, the uncertain light
afforded by the torches, and the staggering of the prince under
the blow, prevented the Count de Choiseul and the Count de
Mesnard at the moment from discerning the murderous act and
gesture of the unknown. He fled unpursued towards the Rue
de Richelieu, and having turned the corner of the street, he
walked with a careless pace towards the Boulevard.
IX.
The Duke de Berry, struck by an invisible hand, and
thrown by the force of the blow against the Count de Mesnard,

1820.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 449
Arrest of Louvel.
had only, as it always happens, felt the shock and not the
wound. On recovering himself he put his hand on the place
where he had been struck, and it there fell upon the hilt of
a dagger. A horrible light broke in upon him. "I am assassi
nated ; I am a dead man ! " he cried. " I feel the dagger ;
that man has killed me ! " At this exclamation the Duchess
de Berry, whose carriage had not yet departed uttered a
piercing scream, which rent the heavens and drowned the
tumult. " Open the door ! open the door ! " she cried to
the footman, who still had his hand upon it : without waiting
for the step to be lowered, she sprang out and threw her arms
round her husband, who had just extracted the poniard, which
covered her dress with his blood. They seated the fainting
prince upon a bench in the outer hall, where the servants wait
for their masters. They tore open his dress, and the blood
flowing from the wound indicated the spot where the blow had
been struck, upon the right breast. " I am killed," he re
peated on recovering his senses ; " send for a priest ; come
here, my dear wife, that I may die in your arms ! "
During this momentary pause in the vestibule, the sentinel,
the footmen, and three gendarmes, horror struck at the deed,
ran in pursuit of the assassin. He had already passed the
facade of the opera-house, in the Rue-de-Richelieu and had
concealed himself in the shadow of an arcade which runs from
this street under the broad arches of the Bibliotheque. A
waiter of a Cafe, named Paulnier, there seized him round the
body, struggled with him, and assisted by the sentinel and the
gendarmes, brought him back to the place where he had com
mitted the murder. He had nearly fallen a victim to the fury
of the spectators, who collared and dragged him towards the
vestibule ; but the officers of the prince, trembling lest they
should destroy with the criminal the secret or the | lot of the
crime, saved him, and had him conducted to the opera guard
house. M. de Clermont-Lodeve followed him there to witness
his first examination. They found upon him the second dagger
and the sheath of the one which he had left in the bosom of the
prince. M. de Clermont returned with this weapon, and these
evidences of the crime to the vestibule.
3 c c

450 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 37.
Condition of the Duke de Berry.

x.
The Duke de Berry was no longer there. He had recovered
his senses, and had been removed in the arms of his servants to a
small saloon behind his box, where he was surrounded by medical
men, who were probing his wound. " Alas !" said he, on learn
ing the apprehension and name of the criminal, " what a cruel
fate, that I should die hy the hand of a Frenchman !" A ray
of hope for a moment inspired the princess and the medical men ;
he did not, however, partake of it, nor wished he to flatter
his wife with an illusion which must only redouble her affliction.
" No," said he, with a cool, firm, and incredulous tone ; " I will
not delude myself ; the poniard entered up to the very hilt, I
can assure you." His sight was now becoming dim from failing
strength, occasioned by loss of blood, and he felt about for his
wife, stretching his arms in all directions. " Are you there,
Caroline," he demanded. " Yes," the princess tenderly re
plied ; "lam here, and I shall never quit you !" The surgeon
of his household, the companion of his exile, shocked at the
rumour of the crime, had hastened to the side of the dying
prince ; and the blood having ceased to flow, he sucked the
wound. " What are you doing, Bougon ?" eagerly demanded
the dying prince, " perhaps the poniard was poisoned !"
XI.
His first word had been to ask not for a doctor but a priest.
Struck in the very noontide of youth and of pleasure, there had
been in his mind no transition between the thoughts of time and
the thoughts of eternity. He had passed in one second from the
spectacle of a f£te to the contemplation of his end, like those
men, who by a sudden immersion in cold water are snatched
from the burning delirium of intoxication. He had shown in
this revival, instantaneous and without weakness of his thoughts,
the deliberate courage of a soldier. He now evinced the faith
of a Christian, and the uneasy impatience of a man who fears
not to die, but to die before he had confessed his faults, and re-

1820.] OF MONARCHY -IN FRANCE. 451
Consternation of the royal family.
ceived the pledge of second life. His education drawn from a
family which was not less incorporated with the church than
with the throne, was found at the bottom of his soul, in pro
portion as the gushing out of life kept pace with the flowing of
his blood. He never ceased to inquire in a low voice if the
priest had not arrived. XII.
At length the priest came. It was the Bishop of Char
tres, his confessor, for whom the Count de Clermont Lodeve
had gone to the Tuileries. The bishop and the dying man
conferred a few moments in a low voice, and the agitation of
the prince appeared to subside. He resumed all his presence
of mind, and gave vent to the tender effusions of his heart- to
his brother, the Duke d'Angouleme, his sister-in-law, the
duchess, and his father the Count d'Artois, who hastened in
succession to the scene in all the confusion of a sudden alarm,
according to the hour they were informed, and the rapidity of
their horses. The Duke de Bourbon, his fellow soldier in the
army of his father, the Duke of Orleans, his wife and sister,
who were present on the first rumour of the crime, and who had
not quitted the theatre, stood around the bed of death which
had been prepared in one of the saloons of this festive place.
Apprehensive of the tumult, which might cause numerous acci
dents by accumulating frightened crowds at the doors, it was
thought advisable not to apprise the public of the murder, or to
interrupt the performance and the dances of the night ; so that
dying agonies and boundless merriment, songs aud sobbing, the
tinkling of music and the lamentations of grief, the priest
and the mask, God and the orgie, were only separated by
some wooden partitions, the echoes of both rising, unknown
to each other, in the tumultuous edifice, and increasing by the
frightful contrast the grief and horror of this bed of death !
XIII.
The Duke d'Angouleme and the Duke de Berry loved each
other, not onlv as two brothers, but like two orphans and two

452 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 37.
The Duke de Berry's interview with his relatives.
exiles, inseparable companions in the same fortunes. They
embraced each other with a warmth of affection that was broken
by sobs, body to body, tears and blood mingling together on the
hands and clothes of both.
When he beheld at hig bed-side all those faces, and all
those affections of family and friendship, the Duke de Berry
desired to see, and to bless his young daughter by the duchess,
born the year before. She was brought to him asleep. He
stretched out his arms to her, and blessing her with his tremb
ling hand ; " Poor child," he said, " may you be less unhappy
than the rest of your family !"
The most eminent doctors and surgeons in their respective
departments had been summoned in succession from the
various and distant quarters in which they resided. They con
sulted in 'a lowvoice, in one cornerof the apartment. Dupuytren,
their chief, resolved to try one final means of salvation, by
opening and enlarging the wound to occasion the blood, which
was effusing internally, to flow outwards, and thus to relieve the
respiration. The Duchess de Berry during this useless opera
tion, pressed her lips upon the cold hand of her husband, which
still retained its grasp of hers. " Spare me this suffering," he
said, "since I must die!" He then put his fingers on his
wife's head, as if to exhibit one last act of tenderness by ca
ressing her beautiful hair. •' Caroline," he said to her, " take
care of yourself, for the sake of the child you bear." This was
the first revelation of the birth of a son who escaped the crime
but not the misfortune of his race. He recommended his ser
vants with tears to his father ; and he expressed a wish to see
his assassin, to demand of him the cause of his hatred, reproach
him for his injustice, and pardon him for his death. " Who is
this man ?" he murmured, " what have I done to him? It is
perhaps some person that I have unknowingly offended." The
Count d'Artois assured him that the assassin had no personal
animosity against him. " It must be some maniac then," said
the Duke. " Ah ! that I would live until the King arrives,
that he may grant me the pardon of this man ! Promise me,
father, promise me brother, promise me all of you to ask the
King to spare this man's life !"

1820.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 453
His last moments.
They all promised him this, to calm the ardour of gene
rosity and pardon which preyed upon his mind. His natural
goodness displayed itself at the price of his own blood.
After some private signs and hints that passed between
him and the duchess, two young girls were brought to his
bed-side ; these were his daughters, born in London, of his
clandestine marriage with the faithful companion of his exile,
and whom he brought up with paternal care in Paris. The
two poor children, awoke out of their sleep to embrace in the
midst of a court, in tears, him whom they had formerly
regarded as their father alone, were brought in trembling, and
knelt down, their faces buried in the bed-clothes that were
stained with the prince's blood. He spoke to them softly in
English, and desired them to remember him, and to love their
mother. He raised them up, kissed them, and wept over
them; then presenting them to the duchess: "I know you
well enough, Caroline," he said to her in a tone of confidence
" to beg of you to take care of these orphans when I am
dead." The children threw themselves into the open arms
of their second mother, and the duchess with that instinct
wliich is the genius of the heart, resolved to adopt them in
the presence of her husband, as it were, by a single gesture,
and a single word. She beckoned the Duchess of Gontaut,
who held her own child in her arms, to the bedside, and
taking the daughters of the foreign lady by the hand, she said
to them : " Embrace your sister !"
XIV.
He confessed, in the middle of the night, to the Bishop of
Chartres, and seemed consoled by the prayers and the bene
dictions of religion. He asked pardon aloud for the weaknesses
of his soul and the errors of his life. " My God ! " he repeatedly
exclaimed, " pardon me, and pardon him also, as myself, who
has deprived me of life !"
The Duke d'Angouleme, a prince, pious from his youth
upwards, and who had with his brother the sacred authority of
a life always exemplary, was praying on his knees at the foot

454 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 37.
Arrival of the King.

of the bed. " Brother," said the wounded man timidly to him,
"do you think that God will pardon me?-' " Oh, my dear
brother," replied the Duke d'Angouleme, with celestial con
fidence in look, voice, and gesture ; "What farther pledge of
mercy do you require. He has made you a martyr!"
The night advanced and life was ebbing, but his soul was
free from the lethargy of death, and attentive to all its attach
ments. The venerable Count de Nantouillet, his first guide in
the camp, and his faithful companion in exile, hastened to
receive the last farewell of his pupil. " Come my old friend,"
said the duke to him, as he extended his arms, " let me embrace
you once more." He was informed that the marshals had
arrived to evince their interest and sorrow at the event.
" Ah!" he exclaimed, " I once hoped to shed my blood more
usefully amongst them, for France !"
XV.
The King who had been kept all night at the Tuileries by
the prudence of his ministers, who doubtless apprehended the
effect of the dismal sight upon him, or some ambush for the
commission of a second crime outside the palace, at length
arrived at daybreak. The clattering of the horses of the escort
on the pavement of the street made the dying prince start with
joy. "Uncle," he exclaimed as soon as he saw the King,
" give me your hand that I may kiss it for the last time !"
Louis XVIII. held out his hand and grasped tha't of his nephew.
" Uncle," resumed the prince anxiously. " I beg of you, as
my dying . prayer, to spare the life of my assassin!" "My
dear nephew," replied the King, "you are not in such danger
as you imagine, we will speak of it another time!" "Ah!
you do not consent," replied the duke, with an accent of doubt
and sorrow. " Oh ! say yes, say yes, that I may die in peace.
Pardon, pardon for the man !" As the King, however, was
silent, or endeavoured to divert his nephew's thoughts to other
subjects : " Ah ! the pardon of this man," murmured the duke,
with an expression of bitterness upon his lips, " would at least
have consoled me in my last moments ! If," he persisted, " I

1820.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 455
Death of the Duke de Berry.
could only have the gratification of knowing that this man's
blood would not be shed for me after my death !"
A few moments after he expired, still articulating in his
delirium the ungratified wish of his heart. He died in the
act of pardoning ; a great soul obscured in life, shining forth
in death ; a hero of clemency, having at the first effort accom
plished the most difficult and the most meritorious act of
humanity — that of dying well !
The deep sobs which had hitherto been repressed, gushed
forth at his last sigh. His wife, in a state of delirium, cut off
her hair, as a last token of affection and laid it upon his body,
then wildly cursing the country in which her husband had been
murdered, she demanded of the king in angry accents, permission
to retire for ever to Sicily. The King knelt down beside the
bed, and closed with his own hand, the lips and eyelids of the
last living hope of his race. XVI.
The noise of his death spread through all Paris at day
break, and thence throughout all France, exciting everywhere
not only the emotion of public horror, but the consternation of
a presage. Blows which are struck by crime, and above all by
political crime, are a thousand times more startling than those
which result from natural causes, for fright is mingled with
pity. The murder committed by Louvel broke forth as a
collective crime, revealing some immense and implacable con
spiracy, smouldering under the feet of all, threatening every
heart, and thirsting, drop by drop, for the last blood of the
Bourbons. The imagination of the people, shaken by the
commotion of the night, indulged in the most odious suspicions,
and fresh crimes were supposed to hurtle in the air. The
assassin was invested with the name of a party. The royalists
in the first paroxysm of their dismay, talked of nothing but
snares, ambushes, plots, and treason around the royal family.
They accosted each other with the question if this ill-omened
event would not at length open the eyes of the King to the
abyss which the ministers had dug under his dynasty ; and if,

456 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 37.
Consternation of the public.
amidst the tears shed upon the dead body of this prince, their
last hope, they should accuse, or be grateful to Providence,
which by the blood of one dear victim, might perhaps yet save
the monarchy ? The liberals, still more depressed and dis
mayed, because the crime would be imputed in all its horror to
them, protested with sincerity their execration of a murderer
who had cast a foul stain on their cause, and thrown suspicion
upon freedom itself. They felt that public opinion, in its
present excitement, would abandon them from horror of the
crime of a villain, who would be looked upon as their accom
plice ; that they must undergo a long and cruel expiation for a
murder of which they were innocent, and that the minister
upon whom they calculated for moderating their enemies, and
for stretching forth a hand to them from amidst the government,
would be torn from the King by the supplications of his family,
and inevitably sacrificed to the fury of the times.
Obscure murmurs were already beginning to rise against
the inefficiency of the police, which could not answer for the life
of a prince, the hope of the throne, against the hand of an
isolated individual, watching for three whole hours for his
victim in the open street. Already suppositions even still
more revolting and more perverse, insinuated that the favourite
minister had allowed the party of his enemies to be struck, in
the sole pledge of hereditary succession, that the crown might
slip away to the head of a collateral. Nothing was dreamt
of anywhere but accomplices, even amongst those who were
the first to be injured by the crime, in their favour, their
power, or their ambition. Those who did not believe in
these calumnies, affected to do so, in order to criminate the
system through the individual. The name of M. Decazes was
in the mouths of all the crafty or frightened royalists. The
favourite was the sacrifice demanded by them in expiation of
the victim.
An accidental circumstance which attested in M. Decazes
disquietude of mind, heartfelt zeal, and disdain of all suspicions,
at a moment when his duty required him to forget himself,
had given some apparent consistency to this odious shadow of
complicity, cast by credulity or perfidy upon his innocence.

1820.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 457
Accusation against M. Decazes.
A few moments after the apprehension of Louvel, and
while the Duke de Berry was still in existence, M. Decazes,
M. Angles, prefect of police, the attorney-general, M. Pasquier,
and M. Simeon, the last two being also ministers, had hastened
to the opera on the rumour of the crime. They entered the
lower hall where the murderer was in custody in order to
undergo a first examination. The surgeons had not yet
declared the wound to be mortal, and they were fluctuating
between hopes and fears. A sudden thought struck M. Decazes
at sight of the criminal ; he imagined that by a refinement of
villany, the dagger with which the assassin had struck the
prince might have been poisoned ; that a knowledge of this
fact and of the nature of the poison might save the victim, and
that the murderer, in the hope of saving himself, would perhaps
consent to reveal this in confidence to those who had the dis
posal of his life. Impelled by this hope, M. Decazes hurried
towards the assassin, and whispering in his ear. " Wretch,"
said he, in a low voice, " perhaps you can still make a con
fession to save the life of your victim, and to extenuate your
crime in the eyes of God. Tell me, sincerely, tell me alone,
is the dagger poisoned ?" "It is not," replied the assassin
coldly, but with apparent truth. M. Decazes breathed more
freely, and thought for a moment the prince was safe. He
hastened to apprize the surgeons of this, and interrogated
Louvel aloud. They then learned his name, his trade as a
journeyman in the employment of the king's saddler, his
residence at the Petites-Ecuries, his motive of political hatred
against the royal family, and the isolated nature of his crime,
without any other complicity than the fanaticism of ideas
imbibed by him from the public discontents.
But this eagerness of M. Decazes, and the few words he
had whispered in the ear of the assassin, to draw his secret
from him before his official examination, misinterpreted by the
perfidy and the malignity of some assistants into recommen
dations of silence from the minister to an accomplice, were
circulating already from mouth to mouth, In the private confer
ences of the courtiers raging for the ruin of the favourite, and
served as a text and an indication to the most infamous calumnies.

458 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 37.
Grief of the King.

XVII
The King struck by this calamity in his nephew, in the
heart of his house, in the succession of his family, in his
political system, and his affection for his minister, had returned
to the Tuileries bathed in tears, and dismayed by presentiments
of evil. M. Decazes had followed his master thither to concert
such measures with him — for the mourning, for public safety,
and how to meet the Chambers — as were called for under present
circumstances. With great self-denial he offered his resigna
tion to the King, feeling that the despair of the royalists, the
grief of the Count d'Artois, the consternation of the royal
family, palace rivalships, parliamentary questioning, and the
public rage and sorrow, would accumulate against him, over
the body of the Duke de Berry, a mass of accusations and sus
picions which would sweep away his- favour and his fortune.
" Alas !" said the King to his friend, " I must not delude
myself ; the ultra-royalist party, which besets and hates me as
much as yourself, will make an instrument of my grief, and
accuse me of insensibility and blindness, if I support you
against it. But no matter, policy and friendship forbid me to
give up France to those who would ruin it in a very short time.
I do not owe the sacrifice of my country to my personal grief :
I shall resist, and we shall not separate !"
M. Decazes then prepared the measure which a few hours
after he was to present to the Chambers : the suspension of
individual liberty and of the freedom of the press, two laws of
public peril and temporary dictatorship, and the formation of
the Chamber of Peers into a state tribunal, for the trial of the
criminal and his accomplices. XVIII.
The royalists, excited by their grief and their hatred, pre
pared, on their side, to overturn in the public commotion the
obstacle opposed to their domination by the minister, to sum
mon the King, in the name of his nephew's dead body by his

JS20.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 459
Scene in the Chamber of Deputies.
brother's tears, and to strike the heart of the monarch through
that of his favourite. Never, perhaps, did political enmity
observe less decency in the regret for so sudden and so
calamitous a tragedy, or make more haste to turn to the profit of
its party the blood wliich was, as it were, still flowing. The
Chamber of Deputies convoked at day-break, concentrated in a
threatening silence its sorrow, its mourning, its ferocious joy,
and the crime of parties impatient to cast upon each other a
still greater crime. Immense crowds of people besieged the
doors and avenues, in that silent but feverish immobility which
characterises the vague emotion of a multitude torn by two
conflicting sentiments : the horror of a crime execrated by all,
and disquietude on its own destiny.
After a long delay which was filled up with conversations
in an under tone, and by the circulation of intelligence from
without, the president and secretaries entered the hall of
assembly indicating in dress and features their grief for
the event of the night. They had scarcely taken their seats
when a deputy of the extreme right, M. Clausel de Cousser-
gues demanded to be heard.
This was one of those men such as are always to be found
in excited assemblies, who are credulous from hatred, and cruel
from thoughtlessness, who condense within themselves, like
hollow clouds, the electricity of the atmosphere, and who,
through excessive zeal, are eager to give a responsible voice to
the vague and anonymous rumours of party spirit. Some
ultra-members of the right maliciously rejoiced on seeing him
appear in the tribune ; the centre regretted it, the ministers
lamented, while the left and the liberal party were irritated
before hand, certain of having to put up with an insult, or to
refute a calumny. "Gentlemen!" he exclaimed, with the
expression of an orator who pours out the full inspiration of
his soul ; " there is no law extant to regulate the impeachment
of ministers, but the nature of such a proceeding demands
that it should be made in a public sitting and in the face of
France. I propose to the Chamber, therefore, an act of accusa
tion against M. Decazes, minister of the interior, as an accom
plice of this assassination !"

400 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 37.
Indignation of the Chamber at M. ClaUsel de Coussergues' motion.
At these words the voice of M. Clausel de Coussergues
was drowned in the indignant exclamations of the centre and
the left. The excess and wickedness of the act disgusted even
the least moderate. He quitted the tribune after having
obstinately demanded to carry out his accusation. M. de
Villele reproached him in a low voice, and he returned into
the ranks of his friends. M. de Labourdonnaie, with more
discretion, contented himself with demanding that the Chamber
should address the King, and offer him its energetic co-opera
tion in all measures tending to repress those perverse doctrines
which sap the foundations of all thrones alike. General Foy,
in the name of the liberal party, agreed to an address of con
dolence, which should be entirely devoted to the expression of
their sorrow, and should not allow party dissensions to inter
rupt the unanimity of the public grief. " If such an event,"
he said with propriety and truth, " be deplorable for all, it is
especially so for the friends of liberty, for they cannot doubt
that their adversaries will avail themselves of this execrable
crime to try and rob the country of those liberties which the
King has conferred upon it, and is desirous of maintaining !"
This integrity of moderation of General Foy won him golden
opinions. A committee was nominated to draw up the address,
and the Chamber separated in silent expectation. The people
dispersed in melancholy and good order.
On the following day M. Clausel de Coussergues renewed
his motion in a modified form. He suppressed the phrase
" complicity in the murder" whieh inculpated the individual,
and Substituted for it the word treason which inculpated the
system. M. Courvoisier moved that the authentic report of
the previous day's sitting should specify the indignation of the
assembly on hearing the proposition of M. Clausel de Cous
sergues ; M. Benoit, an old administrator under the empire,
who had joined the royalists with ardour since the return of
the Bourbons, opposed the motion of M. Courvoisier, and
defended the right of deputies to impute faults to a minister.
But M. Clausel de Coussergues had imputed a crime to M.
Decazes. M. de Saint-Aulaire, father-in-law of the insulted
minister, rushed to the tribune to avenge his relative, but his

1820. J OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 461

Violent debates.

position was more eloquent than his speech. The loftiness
and energy of his attitude raised him beyond truth and nature.
" Since M. Clausel de Coussergues," he said, " persists in re
producing his proposition, since he perseveres in this accusa
tion — a monument of his madness, I feel myself compelled to
speak, but I shall only reply by a single word, and shall content
myself with saying to him : You are a calumniator ! "
The accusation characterised by this single word fell under
the reprobation of all serious men. M. Decazes, crushed under
the weight of responsibility, under the exclamations of resent
ment which arose against him from the tomb of the prince,
under his personal sorrow, and under the tears of the King,
had the firmness, however, to appear before his enemies, to
shield his master, and to brave with disdain the insults of hatred.
But the effort he made was evinced in the paleness and melan
choly of his features, and the dejection of his voice. Few men
have ever had in their public lives a more terrible and more
complicated situation to contend against. He was in appear
ance the minister, but in reality he was already the victim
ascending the rostrum to gratify more effectually the looks and
the ferocious joy of his triumphant enemies. He confined
himself to reading the electoral law bill which displaced the
parliamentary influence in the country, and restored, as spolia
opima deposited upon the tomb, the power and the ascendancy
to the ultra-royalists. The latter accepted the offering, but in
their hopes they had already demolished the hands that pre
sented it. Two harsh laws, suspensive of personal freedom
and the liberty of the press, were offered by the minister, in
expiation of the blood that was shed by a fanatic, and as a
ransom for the ministry. Advances thrown away ! The palace,
the court, the Chamber of Peers, the Chamber of Deputies,
the saloons, the streets, the public journals, resounded with the
most fiery invectives against the moral accomplice of the
assassination. " His feet have slipped in the blood," wrote
M. de Chateaubriand in the Conservateur, thus making of
death an image to serve hatred, and of this image a calumny
against a political adversary, broken-hearted and beat down in
his misfortunes. In this great writer was recognised the man

462 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK ST.
Royalist wrath against M. Decazes.
in whom political passions had stifled the magnanimity of
genius. Every weapon was acceptable to him and to his friends,
provided it struck their victim. These insinuations and invec
tives increased hourly against M. Decazes. It cannot be dis
puted that if he had been more devoted at that time to his
ambition than to his master, M. Decazes would have found an
asylum against this persecution, as Necker did in 1789, in the
revolutionary and Bonapartist party hostile to the Bourbons.
This party half overthrown by the effects of Louvel's poniard,
offered the young minister alliance, support, popularity, and
deference, which would have made him a dangerous chief of
faction if he had consented to accept them. The King's
heart was in his hand : it was still in his power at this mo
ment to make this prince break every compact of weakness
with his family, and to lead him by a second 5th of September
to such a distance from his brother that all return to the
royalists would have been impossible. To remove the Count
d'Artois from his little agitating court at Paris, to unmask the
intrigues constantly hatching by his partisans, to declare him
incapable of reigning, by obstinately wishing to reign in antici
pation, and through a faction, instead of the will of the nation ;
to declare the crown to devolve on the Duke d'Angouleme,
or, on his refusal, on the Duke of Orleans, after the King ; to
change the electoral law, and to summon the masses to the
committees ; these were the measures which the friends of the
Count d'Artois, the calumniators of the press, and the under
hand conspirators ofthe an ti- chambers of the King's brother, in
cessantly accused M. Decazes of counselling and premeditating.
An obscure intrigue, partially disclosed some months before,
and which had been called the "conspiracy of the terrace on
the river side," had half revealed intentions in its authors of
dethroning Louis XVIII. in favour of his brother, which
might give cause for retaliation in an opposite sense. Such
retaliation would have been carried higher and farther than the
criminals, for the Count d'Artois, an honourable and religious
prince, formed no sinister plots against his brother : he was
only guilty in the intriguing, mercenary, and ambitious circle
with wliich he allowed himself to be surrounded. But this

1820.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 463
Palace intrigues.
circle composed of some bishops of the exclusive church, im
placable against liberty of conscience, of great lords of the
old court, irreconcilable with revolutionary equality, and of
some bold and agitating men, who kept those old passions in a
state of fermentation to establish their own importance on
secret services, was so odious to the country that the blow
which might fall upon it from the hand of the King, or his
minister would appear excusable either from danger or hatred.
To be just towards the fallen favourite himself, we must acknow
ledge that it indicates self-denial and greatness of soul in him
not to have stayed himself in his fall by such culpable ex
pedients of government, and not to have pulled down the King
and the monarchy with him in the ruin of his fortunes.
XTX
M. de Vitrolles, who was the first person admitted into
the privacy of the Count d'Artois, after the first moments
left by grief and propriety to the sincere tears of the prince,
hinted to him that it would be equally suitable to his des
pair and dignity to quit the palace of the Tuileries imme
diately, in order to proclaim a more irreconcilable schism with
the favourite, and to retire with his court to the palace of
the Elysee. He farther represented to the prince that the
uncertainty of the sex of the child which the widow of the
Duke de Berry then bore in her womb, leaving the crown
without any certain heir after himself and the Duke d'Angou
leme, it would be his policy to do violence to his grief, and to
marry again. It is even said that he proposed to him to marrj
the widow of the King of Etruria, daughter of Charles IV.,
King of Spain, whose, son he might adopt, a Bourbon of the
Spanish branch, and to whom he could devolve the crown in
removing, by a coup d'etat, the odious and suspected branch of
Orleans. The silence of the prince was his only answer to the un
seasonable insinuations of M. de Vitrolles, supported on the
following day in the papers, by the pathetic appeals of M. de
Chateaubriand and the other writers of his party. From all

464 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 37.
The Countess du Cayla.
sides they excited the indignation of the King's brother, of the
Duchess d'Angouleme, and of her husband, against the tardi
ness of the King in purging his councils and his court of the
obnoxious man. They resolved, at the instigation of M. de
Vitrolles, to make a decisive application to the King. For
this they had the authority of their blood, and the authority of
their grief. They had farther, in the heart of Louis XVIII.,
a secret understanding which began to take root, and of which
M. Decazes himself was ignorant.
The mysteries of politics are often in the deep shades of
palaces, and in the most secret feelings of the hearts of kings.
The hand of an invisible female sometimes, unknown to the
world, moves those springs which occasion the ruin or the sal
vation of empires. We are about, for the first time, to unveil
that hand, which at this period was still concealed, and which
afterwards, so long and so openly managed the mind of the
King.
XX.
There was a lady at that time in Paris, young, handsome,
and naturally eloquent, equally formed to seduce the heart and
the eyes of a prince who loved women without profaning them,
and who, at all times, had sought in their society the pleasures
of attention and friendship, rather than the voluptuousness of
love. The age and infirmities of Louis XVIII. had still far
ther purified in him the inclinations of nature. He wished
for relaxation and confidence, not for the gratification of pas
sion ; he might have a friend, but not a favourite. His predi
lection never exposed the object of his preference to scandal or
suspicion. This lady was called the Countess du Cayla. She was the
daughter of M. Talon, an ancient magisterial name. His
father, a man of high intrigue during the struggles between
the court and the revolution from 1789 to 1792, had been
connected with Mirabeau, with the Count de Lamarck, and
even with the chiefs of the demagogues. He had played
between the parties, to the advancement of his ambition and
his fortune, one of those double-faced and ambiguous parts

1820.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 465
Her origin and causes of her favour.
which render those who accept them necessary though not
estimable. He aspired to the ministry through every channel,
serving or defeating the chiefs of the most opposite parties, in
proportion as they made him hope or despair of attaining the
object of his ambition. He had also been mixed up with the
intrigue of the Count de Provence, now Louis XVIII., in
1791. At the moment when the unfortunate Favras was
iudicially executed for the crime of high treason and seduction
for the benefit of the Count de Provence, without revealing
anything of his connection, real or supposed, with the brother
of Louis XVI., M. Talon had received, it is said, the compro
mising confidence of the dying man, and a deposit of papers
criminatory against the Count de Provence. These documents,
preserved by M. Talon, constituted a menace or a hope, always
suspended over the honour of the King. As an emigrant con
tinuing to intrigue in London, M. Talon returned to France
under the Empire, was afterwards banished from Paris as an
agitating and dangerous man under every system of govern
ment, and died in exile before the Restoration. He bad left
to his daughter the precious deposit of the papers of Favras,
the pledge of future gratitude and favour in the event of a
return of the monarchy. Such was the public rumour, which
has never been confirmed or denied, but to which subsequent
events have imparted some credit in the opinion of the court.
Such an origin and such a lineage were calculated to give this
young lady, in spite of her youth and her candour, some tradi
tions of the paternal genius, of the management of parties, and
of the seductions of the court.
XXI.
She had been brought up at a school of feminine diplomacy,
in the Imperial seminary of Ecouen, conducted by Madame
Campan, a lady well trained in court artifices. She had there
formed a friendship of childhood with the daughter of the
Empress Josephine, then Hortense Beauharnais, since become
Queen of Holland, and subsequently Duchess of Saint-Leu.
Though belonging to another caste, she had, during the Ern-
3 D D

466 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 37.
Viscount de la Rochefoucauld.
pire, and even during the hundred-days, cultivated this friend
ship, always agreeable, and eventually useful, with the cherished
daughter-in-law of Napoleon. She had married a gentleman
of high birth, attached to the court of the Prince of Conde,
but domestic unhappiness, not aggravated by any criminality,
had separated her from her husband. Being thus virtually a
widow, in the flower of her youth and beauty, burthened alone
and without fortune with the care and future prospects of her
children, still in the cradle, she lived retired and free from
reproach in the house of the Prince of Conde, and in familiar
intercourse with the Countess de Rully, her friend, the natural
daughter of the prince. Her wit, her grace, her seductive
manners, were only known to a limited but pious and elegant
circle. She possessed the modesty, the reserve, and, as it
were, the presentiment of the destiny of Madame de Main
tenon, not laying herself out for admiration, but allowing her
self to be sought for in the shade by that of Louis XVIII
Such was the woman whom chance, or the premeditation of
the two parties of royalists and the church, was about to intro
duce into the cabinet of an old man, to promote their designs
XXII.
At the same period a young man of illustrious birth, of a
chivalrous figure, of external levity, but profound ambition,
although noble, independent, and disinterested, was attracting
the notice of the court and the capital by the elegance of his
manners and the flutter of his life. He was of the great and
princely house of La Rochefoucauld, made illustrious in war, in
literature, and even in the factions of the Fronde by the great
La Rochefoucauld; a house which, from the time of Louis XIV.,
seemed to be a portion of royalty itself. This family was divided
into several branches, some of which had served the revolution,
others the Empire, while that of La Rochefoucauld de Dou
deauville had maintained for the old faith and the old dynasty
a fidelity proof against the interregnums and the exiles of
legitimate royalty. The Viscount de la Rochefoucauld belonged
to this unbending branch of the family, and was the only son

1820.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 467
His favour with the Ring and princes.
of the Duke de Doudeauville, to whom the vicissitudes of the
revolution had left a princely fortune, great influence, and
personal consideration, merited by much beneficence and rigid
virtue. The Viscount de la Rochefoucauld, in all the ardour
of youth, of bravery, and of public spirit, at the moment of
Napoleon's fall, in 1814, had signalised himself, at the head
of the young nobility of Paris, eager to seize the opportunity
to raise up the throne of his fathers, and to precipitate the
downfall of Napoleon. On horseback, with the white colours
fluttering on his arm, he was seen riding through the capital,
exciting its wavering inhabitants with the acclamations of a
new reign, on the day the allies entered Paris. He was
erroneously accused of wishing to mutilate the monuments of
French victory, by attaching a rope to the statue of Napoleon,
and harnessing himself to it with the mob to drag it in the
mud. His presence on the place Vendome at the moment
of this impudent profanation, instigated, in fact, by a man
reprobated by all parties, had given some credit to this error.
Ardent in ro3ralism, but upright in heart, and guiltless of
insulting the vanquished, this young man was designated by
his name, by his political opinions, and by his zeal, to the
favour of the King and the princes. He occupied in their
service one of those high functions of honour reserved for
the ancient names of the monarchy. The Count d'Artois
loaded him with familiar favours, and the King himself showed
him much consideration. He was married to a daughter of
the Duke Mathieu de Montmorency, one of the most amiable
characters that history can have to describe in the vicissitudes
of the revolutionary times ; a popular reformer from generosity
of mind at the commencement, a victim during their excesses,
constant after reverses, generous after triumphs, and always
moderate and indulgent. XXIII,
The Viscount de la Rochefoucauld by his family, by his
alliance, and by his education— which was confided to the
Abbe Duval, an ecclesiastic, eloquent, and influential amongst

468 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 37.
The Jesuits.
the priesthood — by his connections in society, and his inti
macies at court, lived in an atmosphere of royalism and religion,
of the church and the palace, of bishops, princes, and courtiers,
which was overshadowed by the favour, impatiently submitted
to, of M. Decazes. Though a stranger to that hidden and
mischievous government which endeavoured to constitute itself
round the Count d'Artois into an ambitious opposition, consist
ing of some ecclesiastics, emigrants, and intriguers, he shared
in the animadversions and terrors which the concessions of
M. Decazes and of the King to the ideas, and especially to the
men of the revolution, instilled into the royalists of the Cham
ber, of the aristocracy, and of the clergy. Some Jesuits,
those religious diplomatists of the church with the people,
scarcely perceptible at that time in the conflict of opinions,
began, however to exercise a certain influence over the policy of
the ancient families. Permitted, under the Empire, to parti
cipate with the university in the education of the higher
classes, the Jesuits had displayed in the art of appropriating,
attaching, and affiliating youth, a talent, a zeal, and virtues which
had elevated their name and influence amongst the aristocracy
They prompted, unknown to them, those houses whose sons
they had instructed. Attached to the Bourbons after the fall
of the Empire, they were disposed, even by the spirit of their
institution, to connect this new reign of the Bourbons with the
church, in order to increase the religious faith of the people by
the ascendancy of the royal power, and to smooth the road to
power to none but religious people. They would naturally
incline those opinions wliich were subjected to them through
the medium of conscience, rather towards the clerical policy of
the Count d'Artois, than the profane and philosophical policy
of the King. The reign of a sovereign royalty agreed better
with their nature than that of a deliberative constitution, be
cause it is easier to enthral a court than a people, and to
govern a king than public opinion. This was the first germ of
what was called some years after the congregation, an associated
power partly sacred, partly profane, partly religious, partly
ambitious, which, in reality, exercised at a later period so for
midable and so fatal an influence on the destiny of the Bour-

1820.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 469
Their policy.
bons. This congregation without a body, invisible to the eye,
scarcely known to itself in these first years of the reign, already
exercised a moral government over the public opinions of a
certain number of the greatly devout and the grandly ambitious
in the upper classes of Paris and the provinces. Like the air,
they gave an inclination to things without appearing to touch
them. Many of those who sought that influence bent before
it ; some, through sincere conversion of the mind which led
them, from a disgust of the present, to seek repose from their
doubts in the traditional and consolatory worship of the past ;
others, through servile and interested adulation of opinions,
which promised favour and fortune to their votaries.
All the men and women who professed these opinions
aspired to the overthrow of the favourite. As a new man,
M. Decazes threw high birth into the shade; as a constitu
tional minister, he disquieted the consciences of the absolutists ;
as an adviser of the 5th of September, and the revolutionary
promotions which had changed the majority in the Chamber
of Peers, he alarmed even the impartial royalists as to the fate
of the monarchy.
This was some months before the assassination of the Duke
de Berry, when the death of this prince had not yet given a
motive and a pretext for the general clamour which was to tear
him from the heart of the king. It was necessary to insinuate
themselves into that heart to uproot from it the power of the
minister, and to replace it with another ascendant. An instru
ment was wanting for this vague design ; this instrument could
only be a woman, and nature had created her in Madame du
Cayla. She was sought for ; and friendship discovered her to
M. de la Rochefoucauld. XXIV.
He had been connected for some years past by a platonic
attachment, pure as esteem, and ardent as adoration, with this
lady, the friend of his wife ; and whose beauty, misfortunes, and
irresistible attractions he had thus learned to appreciate in the
intimacy of his own family. A daily correspondence fostered
between them a community of sentiments and ideas which

470 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 37.
Attempts of the royalists to gain over the King.
was characterised in their letters by the tender titles of brother
and sister. The letters of Madame du Cayla, at once pious
and tender, like female confidences, evinced, however, by
luminous ideas on the affairs of the times, a power of reflection
and a clearness of judgment which would not have astonished,
either in a Sevigne or a princess, des Ursins. These letters,
numbers of which have since been published, doubtless gave
to M. de la Rochefoucauld, or to his circle, the first idea of the
plan of seduction which it was desirable to attempt on the
eyes, the mind, and the heart of the King. " An Esther," as
Madame du Cayla herself playfully said, in allusion to the
part they wished her to perform, " was necessary for this
Ahasuerus." However this might be, whether the thought of the com
bination originated solely with the young friend of this seduc
tive woman, or arose in her own mind unknown to herself, in
concert with the views and opinions which were fluctuating
around her, the Viscount de la Rochefoucauld resolved to make
an Esther of the woman he most admired in the world, and to
possess himself, through her means, of the heart of Louis
XVIII., for the advantage of his political opinions, of the
monarchy, and of religion. Having conceived this plan, it
was necessary to obtain the consent and concurrence of her
who was to be its instrument or its victim ; for the part of
favourite, even if not criminal, had at least its dangers in the
court, and its evil interpretation in public opinion.
XXV.
In virtue of the familiarity established between them, the
Viscount de la Rochefoucauld met Madame du Cayla one
evening the preceding autumn, in the saloon of the old Prince
of Conde, in the Palais Bourbon, and leading her into one of
the retired alleys of the gardens of this palace, which then
bordered on the Seine, he assumed the mysterious air of one
about to confide a secret, and begged her serious attention to
the overture he was going to make to her. The lady listened
without interrupting him. " Religion and the monarchy,

1820.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 471
Interview of Viscount de la Rochefoucauld with Madame du Cayla.
which you love with all the attachment of your family," he
said, " are tottering, and ready to crumble in a new revolution.
The prime minister, whether through blindness, love of popu
larity, or ambition, is pushing royalty to fatal concessions,
which will place it disarmed at the mercy of its enemies.
The royalists are proclaimed public enemies under a king
whom they defend in spite of himself. While the improvi
dence or presumption of a man too dear to the heart of the
monarch agitates external parties, his overbearing fortune sows
disunion, suspicion, distrust, and even conspiracy, within the
palace. The royal family, in a divided state, weakens itself
by these divisions before the common enemy. We are drawing
towards a precipice ; no hand can tear from the King the
bandage that blinds him but the hand of a woman, gentle
enough not to give umbrage to his self-love while she unseals
his eyes. This prince must love those whom he suffers to
advise him : his heart constitutes one half of his policy.
Madame de Balbi, M. Davaray, M. de Blacas formerly, and
M. Decazes at present, are the still living proofs of this dispo
sition of his nature. It is necessary to please in order to
acquire a right to direct him. Women, illustrious through
their influence, useful or fatal, over the hearts and minds
of kings, have by turns ruined or saved royalty, both in
France and in Spain ; and it is even now from a woman alone
that we can look for the salvation of religion and the monarchy.
Nature, birth, education, misfortune itself, seem to have desig
nated you for this port. Will you be the saviour of the
princes, the friend of the King, the Esther of the royalists,
the Maintenon, firm and irreproachable, of a court which is oh
the way to ruin, and which a woman alone can reconcile and
save? Solicit an audience of the King, under pretence of
imploring his protection, which you are in want of for yourself
and your children ; exhibit to him, as if in a casual way, those
treasures of gracefulness, wit, and good sense which nature
has lavished on you, not for the gloom of retirement in which
you bury them, but for the full blaze of familiar intercourse
with a king, an enthusiastic admirer of the gifts of mind ;
charm him in a first interview ; quit him so that he may feel

472 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 37.
Madame du Cayla repeats the overtures made to her.
a regret at losing you, and a desire to see you again ; return
when he recalls you ; create, as if for the necessity of your
affairs, occasions for fresh interviews ; listen to his confidential
communications ; let some timid counsels escape you ; insinuate
yourself by affection into his heart, and by good sense into his
mind ; make yourself essential to the relaxation of this suffer
ing soul, overwhelmed with the cares of government ; and when
your imperceptible empire shall be confirmed by habit in his
attachment, make use of this influence, by little and little, to
uproot from his confidence the favourite by whom he is fas
cinated, to reconcile the King with his brother, and with the
princes, and to make them concur in adopting, in the person of
M. de Villele and his friends, a ministry at once royalist and
constitutional, which shall replace the equilibrium of the
throne on the monarchical basis, and prevent the impending
catastrophe with which France is threatened."
XXVI.
Such were the words of the young negotiator of the party
which was already forming in the Chamber, between the ultra-
royalists and the daring royalists of the Count d'Artois' anti-
chamber, against the liberals of the party of M. Decazes.
But this attempt on the self-love and ambition of a woman,
then timid and modest, and almost offended at so strange a
proposition, was foile'd at once by her modesty and the delicate
nature of the enterprise. "What!" she exclaimed to her
friend, with an accent of astonishment and reproach, " are
you then so little acquainted with me as to try to dazzle me
with a prospect of empire and domination at the court ? Have
I ever given you a right to confound me, — humble and retired
as I am in my gloom and my misfortune, hating as I do the
manoeuvres, the intrigues, and the glare of courts, — with those
bold, ambitious, or hypocritical women, who avail themselves
of their vices, or even of their virtues, to seduce or govern the
hearts of kings ? Believe me that such a part is equally op
posed to my nature and to my position ; and if you wish that
we should continue friends, never again speak to me on the

1820.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 473
Position of Madame du Cayla.
subject. I shall even forget that you have so little understood
me as to have spoken of it at all."
There was so fixed an intention, and such irrevocable deter
mination of mind in the accent with which these words were
pronounced, that the negotiator did not press the matter any
farther, but thought of seeking some other method of accom
plishing the successful combination of his party.
XXVII
The dangers and misfortunes of Madame du Cayla, resulting
from her rupture with her husband, who contested her fortune
with her, and insisted on having his children, were so imminent,
that her friends, and necessity itself, counselled her to throw
herself on the protection of the King. The Viscount de La
Rochefoucauld, who seemed to have forgotten his chimerical
projects which had been rejected with such energetic repugnance,
resumed with his friend his feeling of interest, the most true
and the most natural, for her unhappy situation. He encouraged
her to solicit an audience of the King, and to throw herself at
his feet, to demand an asylum in his justice ; quite certain that
the tears, the eloquence, and the understanding of the suppliant
would operate, in spite of herself, on the eyes and mind of the
monarch, and that in granting her the favour she asked, he
would feel her attractions. Whether reflection had modified the
first repugnance with which the idea suddenly presented to her
imagination had inspired the lady, and that the fancy recurring
to her mind had assumed a less repulsive form ; or, whether the
horror of being bereft of her children, had conquered her
timidity and reserve ; or, that the secret papers which, it was
said, she had received from her father appeared to her a certain
pledge of gratitude and favour to offer to Louis XVIII., she
decided on soliciting an audience, and presented herself before
the King.
She appeared in his presence armed with what most em
bellishes a woman in the eyes of a prince, — timidity, supplication,
and tears The King was more than dazzled, he was touched
He raised the young suppliant, made her sit down, conversed

474 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 37.
Madame du Cayla's interview with the King.
with her about her father, about her children, and about her mis
fortunes. He enjoyed the charms of her conversation as much
as the beauty of her face, and after having granted her more
than she had dared to ask, he gave her permission to retire, as
late as possible, desiring her himself to return to see him on
stated days, and telling her that his cabinet would be always
open to her whenever she had a wish to express to him.
The plan of seduction conceived by policy had, at the first
look, been accomplished by nature. We are never deceived in
reckoning on the all-conquering power of beauty, and the in
toxication of the eyes of a King. The sentiment of Louis
XVIII. for this seductive woman bore from the first day the
character of love, which hid from itself, under the name of
friendship, what the age ofthe monarch and the modesty ofthe
lady did not suffer to be avowed ; he felt a degree of affection
which he said was paternal, and called her his daughter ; not
daring, either from respect for himself, or respect for her, to give
her any other name. The royal family informed by the happy
negociator of the success of his plan, of the inspirations im
parted by Madame du Cayla in the intimacy of their interviews,
of her increasing ascendancy over the prince, of her wish to re
concile the monarch with his family, saw with pleasure these
interviews of the King and the lady, which were concealed
as much as possible from the knowledge of the minister.
M. de Villele and his friends were acquainted with it by M. de
La Rochefoucauld, and future plans of ministry were already
founded upon this friendship. XXV1I1.
The King derived greater pleasure every day from this
sweet feminine familiarity. It reminded him of his friendship
at an earlier age for the Countess de Balbi, the mental delight
of his youthful days. It taught him also that his heart could
do without M. Decazes ; and that there was, in the friendship
of a young woman with a man of his age, as much propriety
and more pleasantness than in the ascendancy of a favourite.
He began himself to interrogate those around him, as if to

1820.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 47 5
The King's disposition towards her.
sound them respecting the two objects of his favour, and to
make them applaud his new sentiments.
One evening he called for M. de La Rochefoucauld, and
asked him for his opinion of M. Decazes : " M. Decazes," re
plied the young courtier, with the instinct of courts, " is the
most attractive of men, and the most sincerely attached to the
person ofthe King." " Ah !" so I say every day," interrupted
the prince, " and I am happy to hear him thus spoken of by
yourself." "Yes, your majesty," resumed M. de La Rochefou
cauld, " M. Decazes has all the qualities of an agreeable man,
and a useful minister ; but the exclusive and jealous royalists
have committed irremediable faults towards him, they have
harrassed him with injustice and bitterness, and by their im
placable hostility they have thrown him into the camp of the
enemies of the monarchy : he has not had the stoicism to resist
these iniquities on the one side, or this interested popularity n
the other ; and by the violent and inconsiderate introduction of
sixty-four revolutionary names into the Chamber of Peers he has
broken the main spring of the government, instead of strength
ening it, and he has placed the throne at the mercy of your
enemies." The King listened without refuting him.
"And what is your opinion," added the King, " of Madame
Du Cayla ?" The sincere courtier had no occasion to recur to
adulation, or complaisance, to utter to the King the most ardent
encomiums on the private favourite of his heart. The King
listened, and even enhanced the eulogium. M. de La Rochefou
cauld learned from this that M. Decazes still subjugated, but
that his fair friend had already intoxicated the mind of the
monarch. He acquainted his friends with this conversation ;
and it was felt that time was secretly undermining the minister,
but that they must still wait to overturn him.
XXIX
Such was the disposition of the King, and the progress of
this attempt upon his heart on the evening of the Duke de
Berry's assassination. We have seen that M. de Vitrolles, on

476 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 37.
The royal family with the King.
his side, anxious to break every tie between the Count d'Artois and
his brother, and to effect the triumph of ultra-royalism by the
outburst and violence of this schism in the royal family, con
jured his prince to marry again. The following day he conjured
him to demand openly from the King the immediate dismissal
of M. Decazes, and to tell his brother that he must choose
between his family and his minister. The Count d'Artois,
whose mind was troubled at the same time by his paternal grief
and his political alarm, and by the ambitious promptings of his
counsellors, assembled around him what the poniard had still
left him of his family, his son the Duke d'Angouleme, and his
daughter-in-law, a living reproach to the revolution. The royal
family thus decimated repaired to the King's apartment, and
were announced to him. Louis XVIII. expected this melan
choly visit, and felt himself too weak to resist it. What could
he say to a father, a brother, a daughter, and a niece, mourning
for a son, a brother, and a cousin, murdered the evening before,
the silent accusers of a system to which they attributed their
catastrophe, and coming to present themselves as victims
marked out beforehand for similar attempts The King, the
princes, and the princess, continued a long time silently looking
at each other through their tears, without daring to say what
was sufficiently indicated by their countenances and their pro
ceeding : the King feeling that they wanted to deprive him of
his minister, and the princes understanding that in imploring
they came to command.
The Duchess d'Angouleme, bolder as being a woman, and
because the demand in her mouth preserved the appearance and
the pathos of a prayer, at length broke the silence : " Sire,"
she said, in an accent which seemed to comprise all the tears
and all the blood of her family, " we are proceeding towards
another revolution. Stop it while yet there is time ! Your
throne has occasion for every support. M. Decazes has too
deeply injured the royalists to admit of his joining them ; let
him retire, and all will unite in bringing aid to your govern
ment." "M. Decazes," replied the King to his niece with a stern
aspect, " has defended my authority against men who may

1820.] OF MONARCHY TN FRANCE. 477
Scene between the King and the Count d'Artois.
have done me real service, bnt who yield with a bad grace to
the restraint of the laws, and who openly league themselves
with a party that would do violence to my prudence, in order
to lead me into a course of which I disapprove. This was the
duty of a faithful minister."
Then raising his voice, and looking round with mingled
pride and anger ; "M. Decazes," he added, " has done nothing
but in conformity with my sentiments, my principles, and my
will. When a distinction is made in the tribune of the Cham
bers, between my royal will and the acts of my ministers, I can
understand it ; but that here, even in the bosom of my own
family, this puerile distinction should be drawn, is a thing that
I can only look upon as an intentional offence."
" Then, Sire," said the Count d'Artois, recalling to mind
the violent counsels of M. de Vitrolles, " it is impossible for me
to continue at the Tuileries, if M. Decazes, publicly accused of
complicity in the death of my son, by M. Clausel de Coussergues,
appears again, as minister in this palace !"
In repeating, without qualifying it, the odious imputation
of men of his party, the prince adopted it in his own mind,
and gave consistency, in the excess of his grief, to a shameful
calumny. The King was indignant at hearing from the hps
of his brother an accusation which by impeaching his minister
incriminated even himself, and reproached him with the blood
of a nephew. " What, my brother,'' he exclaimed, " is it when
a faithful and unfortunate minister is persecuted by a calumny,
the extravagance of which is equal to its atrocity, that you
would urge me to dismiss a man who is devoted to me ? The
deputies themselves, his enemies, have repelled this accusation
with horror, and should I appear to believe it when, on the
contrary, it is repugnant to every sentiment of my breast ! I
declare to you that I have never known a more sincere and
more sensitive heart than that of M. Decazes ; I am convinced
he would have given his life to save that of my nephew, as
he would give it up for me. I respect the errors of your grief ;
mine is not, less cruel, but it shall not, however, force me to be
unjust ! "
The Count d'Artois, thunderstruck by the energetic look

478 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 37.
Interview of the King with M. Decazes.
and accent of his brother, made no reply. He felt that though
the dignity and justice of the King might repel injunction and
menace, his heart perhaps, would not resist a prayer. He
accordingly, with his son and the Duchess of Angouleme, ap
proached the King's chair, and all three kneeling before their
uncle and their brother, " Sire," said the daughter of Louis
XVI., recalling by her attitude and dejection the disheartened
victim, the daughter and sister, niece and aunt of cherished
¦victims, " Our family has been sorely tried by calamity! let it,
however, he consoled by union ! do not refuse it the favour it
prays for on its kness ! "
" This favour," added the Count d'Artois sobbing, " I
beg for, as a sacrifice to the manes of my unfortunate son ! "
The King had softened from indignation to compassion for
his family : his mind resisted, but his heart was bent. " You
will have it so," he sorrowfully exclaimed ; " well then, you
shall be satisfied! " The princes retired, and the report of
the successful attempt they had been counselled to make, gra
tified the hatred and ambition of their adherents. The King
sent for M. Decazes, with whom he had a long and moving
interview, refusing with generous obstinacy the resignation
which the minister begged him to accept, to simplify the
transaction, and to offer himself as a sacrifice to the concord
of the family. "Ah! my child," exclaimed the King, more
vanquished by a sense of propriety than by conviction in his
struggle with his brother, "it is not you they would injure,
but me ! " M. Decazes did not endeavour, like so many other
ministers dismissed under so many reigns, to increase the
embarrassment of the crown by pushing his master into an
opposite extreme, in order to make himself necessary by making
the government difficult or impossible after him. He coun
selled the King to have recourse to the Duke de Richelieu,
a man who could not be attacked by the royalists, and who
was acceptable to the monarchical liberals; and he himself
undertook to convince and conciliate his successor. More a
friend than a disgraced minister in this circumstance, the
favourite showed himself superior to the weakness of resent
ment. He justified in his fall the King who had exalted him.

1820.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 479
Retirement of M. Decazes.
The Duke de Richelieu, convinced by experience of the difficulty
of pleasing a family divided among itself, and instructed by
the note secrete oi the snares laid by the adherents of the Count
d'Artois, would not consent to accept the ministry until he had
had a conference with this prince. The Count d'Artois gave
his word as a gentleman, that he would support the ministry
with all the power of public opinion which he commanded in
the palace, in the royalist journals, in the peerage, and in the
Chamber of Deputies. The Duke de Richelieu thought he
had thus made sure of the prince, but he soon perceived he
had not made sure of the party.
The ministry was formed on the 21st February. The
Duke de Richelieu presided over the Council of Ministers
without a department, M. de Serres was appointed in his
absence to the home department, and his place was provisio
nally supplied by M. Simeon, an old and consumate tactician in
public affairs and in the assemblies, whose previous life offered
guarantees to the liberals, and whose loyalty gave security to
royalism. The Count d'Artois, that he might have an adhe
rent in the ministry, introduced into it M. Capelle, who had
been appointed, no one knew whence, to the prefecture of
Florence under the Empire. He was a cherished protege,
it was said, of Eliza, sister to Napoleon and grand Duchess of
Tuscany; disgraced after 1814, for having too easily yielded
to the forces of the allies, he followed the Count d'Artois to
Ghent during the hundred-days, was useful to this prince by
his administrative experience, and devoted himself to his for
tunes with a zeal which never after belied itself. M. Mounier,
to whom the Duke de Richelieu offered a department, declined
it with a modesty that enhanced the value of his talents.
Wishing rather to serve than to ascend, he contented himself
with the direction general of police, reassuring both parties
by his vigilance and his moderation. M. Portalis, whose
name figures under every regime, as one of those servants
of the state, who attach themselves more to the functions
than the principles of government, and who make a sort of
appanage of high employments, replaced M. Sime'on in the
sub-direction of justice. M. Pasquier kept the department

480 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 37.
The new ministry.
of foreign affairs, passing from one ministry to another, with
a pliability of mind and zeal which made him acceptable to all.
M. Portal kept the marine, M. Roy the finances, M. de Latour-
Maubourg, the war-office. With a few exceptions, it was still
the ministry of M. Decazes, he himself being left out. His
spirit survived his fall : the King had only sacrificed his
name. After this sacrifice the King loaded his ex-minister with
tokens of attachment, which testified the continuance of his
personal confidence in the favourite whom political necessity
had wrested from his heart. He conferred upon him the title
of Duke, appointed him ambassador to London, with a salary
which placed the fortune of his minister on a level with the
fortunes of the British aristocracy; to which he added mu
nificent gifts, and tears more honorable to the minister than
donations. M. Decazes departed for England with the entire
affection of his master, the hatred of the royalists, the' ingratitude
of the liberals, and the regret of the ambitious and deposed Doctri
naires who had shared in his fall, but who saw in his removal
a passing eclipse of favour, and a certain pledge of a secret
ascendancy and a second fortune.
XXX.
Thus disappeared, for ever, this young minister, the acci
dental creation of circumstances, of the favour of a king, and of
the unpractised struggle of parties. The indecision and be
wilderment of a Restoration forgotten in a long exile, on re
placing its foot amidst darkness, on a soil which it had not
yet sounded, gave at this first moment a large scope to fa
vouritism. Government was no longer conducted by absolute
authority, it was not as yet conducted by authority in the
Chambers ; the government, in fact, was nothing but an
alternation of coups d'etat, sometimes for, and at other times
against the charter, victory being given in turn by the King's
hand to the two parties which royalty endeavoured to balance.
M. Decazes, marked out by chance, and remarkable for his
zeal, won his political fortune by his courage, confirmed it by

.820.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 481

Review of M. Decazes.

his urbanity, merited it by the sagacity of his views, shook it
by excessive compliances, some of them deplorable, first to
the court party, then to the opposition, and lost it finally by a
catastrophe of which he was innocent, and of which the ma
lignity of the times wished to make him an accomplice while
he was only its victim. His fidelity to his master and his
benefactor was complete, his conduct was variable, and his
system, which was only the system of the King, was that of
a statesman. It consisted in energetically interposing royalty,
the moderator of the new ideas, between the royalists eager
for reaction, and the liberals impatient for liberty. There
was none other practicable to make the country acceptable to
royalty, and royalty to the country. It was the policy of the
King matured by reflection in solitude. To carry it into
execution the King required a new man, young and without
other prospect than his personal favour ; that, being indepen
dent of the royalist and revolutionary parties, he should have
no signification but in himself, and no future prospect but in
the charter. The King had found this man in M. Decazes,
and had attached himself to him with an obstinacy which
partook at least as much of policy as of friendship. M. De
cazes was not only the favourite of a king, but the favourite
of a system, and in falling he dragged down the system with
him. When the royalists attained power they were compelled
to restore this fallen system and to practice it after him. M.
de Villele was the Decazes of the royalist majority, as M.
Decazes had been the Villele of the King. For this reason
his name will appear in history above the names of the common
race of favourites, who only represent the caprice of kings ; M.
Decazes is the representative of a just idea, the reconcilement
of a revolution and a royalty. He was the statesman of con
cord, of impartiality and of the charter ; and if he was not
strong enough to separate parties ferociously bent on destroying
each other, he had the glory of falling between them with the
only truth which could perpetuate the throne of his master.
His greatest error was not in his fall, but in reappearing
upon the scene after he had honourably quitted it. His proper
asylum was retirement, his dignity inaction, his greatness the
3 E E

482 RESTORATION OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. [BOOK 37
Impolicy of the re-appearance of M. Decazes after his retirement.
future. When a man has approached so closely to the heart
of a king, and personified with him one of those epochs which
constitute eras in the annals of a nation, he should disappear
with the events in which he has embodied his name. The
name of M. Decazes should disappear with Louis XVIII.
History recognises such names in obscurity, but never again
in the crowd. Fallen from the summit of power, the states
man rises no more until time has embalmed his memory .
isolation is the majesty of disgrace.

BOOK THTKTY-EIGHTH.
Opening of the debates on the law of election — M. Royer Collard, his
previous life and character — Speeches of M.M. Laine, Camille Jordan,
and Foy — Passing of the bill — Trial and execution of Louvel — In
creasing hatred to the Bourbons : Secret Societies, Bonapartists,
Counter-Revolutionists — M. Madier — Montjau denounces to the
Chambers, the royalist conspiracies ofthe South — Birth of the Duke
de Bordeaux — Revival of the spirit of independence in Europe :
error of those who have ascribed the honour of it to Napoleon — Its
real causes : ideas of nationality instilled by the European kings, to
resist the Napoleonic absorption — Revolution in Spain — Retrospective
glance : Decay of that monarchy : Palace intrigues : Theocratical
terrorism — The Prince of the Peace — Charles IV., his abdication
and captivity — Heroism of Spain, the Cortes, the constitution of
1812 — Return of Ferdinand VII. , reaction:— O'Donnell— Revolu
tionary explosion : Riego, Mina — Italy — State of this country in
1820: erroneous opinions concerning it — Carbonarism — Movement
at Naples : Guglielmo Pepe — Equivocal conduct of the court —
Intervention ofthe Northern courts: congress of Troppau, of Lay-
bach: conclusion of the revolution at Naples — Movement in Pied
mont — Carbonarism in France — Napoleon at St. Helena: his cap
tivity — The " memorial" : unskilful justification of his memory —
Hudson Lowe — Illness of N apoleon : his death : review of his reign

The serious and prolonged emotion produced by the death of
the Duke de Berry, the expectation of his posthumous issue,
the fall of the favourite, the satisfaction given to the royal
family, and the character, at once monarchical and moderate
of the ministry, seemed to soothe for a moment the irritation
of the royalist party, and the alarms of the liberals. But this
calm was only the funeral truce. The laws for the censorship
of the press, for the suppression of individual liberty, and the
electoral law, prepared by M. Decazes, and laid before the

484 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 38.
Opening of the debates on the law of election.
Chambers, with some modifications, by the new ministry, caused
an explosion of rage which was envenomed by the blood of the
prince, and which could no longer be restrained in the hearts of
the people. M. Pasquier frankly avowed to the Chamber that in
these laws the government really demanded a dictatorship.
" It is a dictatorship given to a party thirsting for vengeance,"
responded Manuel. Benjamin Constant emboldened by the
election which had absolved his double defection of 1814 and
1815, attacked the characters of ministers with a bitterness of in
vective as though it had no retaliation to dread ; M. de Lafayette
spoke in the tone of a master experienced in revolutions, pre
dicting in their apparent slumber their approaching triumph ;
General Foy, as a loyal citizen, who participates in the grief
of kings, but who refuses to offer up hecatombs of freedom at
their mourning. Irritated by the insulting apostrophes of the
deputies of the right, he designated as a handful of wretches the
men who had hailed the triumph of the foreigners over their
country. At these words an emigrant, a relative of Charlotte
Corday, the deliverer of her country by a crime resembling
that of Judith, arose and hurled at the general, one of those
insulting reprisals which the Romans despised and the French
wash out with blood. The two adversaries exchanged shots on
the following day without any fatal results ; after which the
general ascended the tribune, and satisfied the honour of the
emigrant, who on his part rendered homage to the courage of
the patriots. The right applauded this mutual reparation ; the
left astonished at the condescension of the general, murmured
and seemed to reject all justiee and all peace. The implacable
animosity of the one side, excited party excesses on the other.
The revolution and the counter-revolution personified, looked
each other in the face during the long debates on all the
questions involved in the proposed laws. M. Benoist exclaimed
that the counter-revolution was accomplished, and that the
charter was nothing but its reign. A deputy of the South, a
conscientious echo of the clergy, to whom all controversy
tolerated in matters of faith, was an impiety of thought, de
clared that liberty was the greatest plague that could be
inflicted upon nations. Manuel denounced to the country, the

1820.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 485
Agitation ofthe capital.
new alliance between the government and the men of 1815,
deposed by the 5th of September, and these men he called the
factious. The capital, excited every evening by the noise of
these combats of the day in the Chambers, took fire at these
flashes of the orators. Mobs were formed in the public
places, the students, the disbanded officers, the conspirators of
secret societies, as yet masked under an appearance of respect
for the charter, those who were discontented without cause and
seditious without party, the men who float with every breeze
on the surface of great populations, began to boil and bubble
at stated hours, at the silent signal of the assemblages. The
police watched them, harassed them, and only increased their
numbers by attempting to disperse them. Paris presented
every night the aspect and the presage of revolutions. In
the midst of this fermentation the ministry brought forward
the electoral law, which was to disarm the nation, and decree
with the double vote a political privilege to the aristocratical
classes in the departments. II.
On the 6th of May the discussion, preceded by so many
storms, opened amongst 120 speakers, ranged on both sides of
public opinion, to attack, or to defend the cause which the
government threw in as a fire-brand of desperate struggle
between the revolution and the crown. General Foy demon
strated in every page of our annals for several ages past, the
increasing equality of rights amongst the national classes, and
that the new order of things could be fixed and unshaken solely
upon the basis of this civic equality. This is the doctrine of the
rights of man, the theoretic code of the revolution, elucidated by
sound reason and a moderate conscience. " To support the
throne upon an aristocracy in such a country," concluded the
orator, " is to support it upon an abyss ! " M. de Labourdonnaie,
the boldest and most eloquent of the leaders of the right, and
the most popular in the saloons of the aristocracy, loudly
advocated privilege as a necessity of the monarchy. '¦ It can no
longer be saved but by those most interested in it, and the

486 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 38.
The Doctrinaire party.
most interested are the most wealthy. Let royalty choose,
therefore, it is for it a question of life or death ! The revo
lution advances, and the oriflamme is about to disappear before
the tri-coloured flag !"
The assembly split into two parties without any inter
mediate power, was fluctuating backwards and forwards without
any counterpoise. Two men attempted to form one ; these
were the chiefs of the Doctrinaire party, who had fallen from
power with M. Decazes, imperceptible in number, powerful in
talent, incapable of long bearing disgrace or inaction, Bona
partist before 1814, royalist in 1815, liberal underM. Decazes,
discontented after him, lending themselves to everything with
out committing themselves to any, and offering themselves to
both parties with a skilful reserve to govern them, the one by the
other, and to magnify themselves by their divisions. Messieurs
Guizot, De Stael, De Broglie, De Barante, De Saint-Aulaire,
and many young men who felt in them the stimulus of their
capacity and their future ambition, comprised the nucleus of
this third party. M. Laine, and M. de Serres, the two greatest
characters, and the two most pathetic orators of the Restora
tion, had been for a moment caressed by them, and seduced by
that lofty neutrality between the factions, which is the tendency
of elevated minds. But their disinterested ambition, which
only aspired to virtue, and which totally overlooked itself in
the interests of their country, had already detached them from
this little group, too much resembling a sect, and too narrow
to contain their lofty souls. Two other orators celebrated for
their services to royalty, consecrated by the proscriptions,
invested with the authority of age and the probity of their lives,
collected around them at that time these young neophytes
without a master. These were M. Royer Collard, and M
Camille Jordan

III.
M. Royer Collard was already bordering on old age, but it
was that green old age which is merely the maturity of thought.
He was in body and mind an antique figure, unshaken in the

1820.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 467
M. Royer-Collard.
midst of this modern and excitable world. His stature was
lofty and powerful, his countenance stern, his look penetrating
and austere, his mien majestic, his attitude sedate, his mouth
generally closed, and never more than half unbending his brow
by a smile full of reserve, and sometimes of disdain. He
appeared amidst these assemblies, at the summit of which he
sat apart, formed of colder and less material clay than those
by whom he was surrounded. He did not break forth in great
splendour, for no great work of action, of literature, or of elo
quence had ever illustrated his name, but he broke forth, so to
speak, in mystery. It was felt that his shadows concealed
great lights ; people believed in him, and waited upon his
accents, they hoped and they feared great things from this
man. He was that sort of oracle from whom long speeches
are not expected, but whose single word is sufficient to cause
-silence and long thought amongst the superstitious faithful.
Everything was mysterious in the life and physiognomy of
this old man.
Born of a rural family of much consideration in Champagne,
the least excitable province of all France — though it did give
birth to Danton — he had been, it was said, secretary of the re
volutionary commune of Paris under Pethion ; naturally averse
to the crimes and excesses of the multitude, he had passed
through the revolution in the loneliness and grief of a man who
escapes from the crowd by obscurity. He afterwards took refuge
in speculative philosophy, for which his reasoning and contro
versial genius had more aptitude than for politics, the science
of instinct and impulse. He had kept a school and formed a
sect in this vague and systematic teaching of philosophy. His
lessons and his books had revealed his name to a small number
of those who agitate their minds for or against systems in an
age of action. But that celebrity which has no judges is the
most fascinating and the least contested of all, because the in
dolence of public opinion is better pleased to form a judgment
upon hearsay than upon words.
Though buried to appearance in these speculations of phi
losophy, M. Royer-Collard connected with M. Becquet, a man
of equal virtue but of more activity, had been pointed out to

488 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 38.
Previous life and character of M. Royer-Collard.
the King, Louis XVIII., at Hartwell, as one of the leaders of
public opinion at Paris, the most hostile to the despotism of
Napoleon, and to his destruction of nationalities and liberties
under the name of conquests. M. Royer-Collard aspired from
that time to a government in which the monarchical right, mo
derate because it is inviolable, might be reconciled with the
freedom of thinking and voting in a liberal constitution. He
had accepted the dangerous title of correspondent of Louis
XVIII. at Paris ; he had formed a part of that secret council, of
which M. Becquetand the Abbe de Montesquiou were members,
not to conspire against Napoleon, but to guide from afar the
mind of the exiled King through all the obscurities of public
opinion in France. Napoleon was aware of the existence of
this secret council, but did not punish it even with disgrace.
He rather preferred, as better policy, that the pretender should
receive intelligence from prudent and temporising men. than
the turbulent excitement of dangerous conspirators against his
government and his life. IV.
On the return of the Bourbons, M. Royer-Collard, thus
accredited beforehand with the King by his services, and by
the testimonials of M. de Montesquiou and of M. Becquet, had,
from the first day, the ear of the sovereign, the favour of the
princes, authority in the council, and popularity amongst the
electors. He had not abused these advantages to further his
ambition. This ambition, lofty as his thoughts, cold as his
character, was disinterested as to fortune and honours. He
liked to advise more than to govern. The irresponsible part of
an oracle suited him and pleased him. To be listened to, was
for him to reign. He had accepted, and even with difficulty,
the modest direction of public instruction during these five
years. Rehgious, but imbued with the stern dogmas of Jan
senism, that Christian stoicism, he had watched rigidly that
public instruction confided to the university should not glide,
as an instrument of power, into the hands of a priesthood
equally hostile to philosophy aud Jansenism. At the moment

1820.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 489
M Royer-Collard as an orator.
when M. Decazes, on the point of falling, had turned towards
the royalists, and had allied himself with them instead
of maintaining his compact with the Doctrinaires, M. Royer-
Collard, irritated at this defection, had retired from his public
functions. He was going for the first time, to take a great part
in the deliberations of the Assembly. His eloquence was a
phenomenon in the Chamber. His speeches were not only
written beforehand, but erased and altered with incessant
labour, to arrive by force of meditation and study, at that logical
concatenation in which not a single link is wanting to the
continuous chain of thought. The nature of his eloquence in
clined farther to that force and perfection of speech and of
phrase, which concentrates, abridges, and illumines every word
by the reflection or by the contrast of the proceeding or follow
ing, and which constitutes eloquence no longer the expression
but even the algebra of politics. It was an eloquence more
adapted to the pulpits of the church, or the chair of the peda
gogue, than to the tribune of political assemblies. To give it
full value it should be uttered amidst profound silence and be
studied by the audience as it had been by the orator.
M. Royer-Collard had gained over this auditory beforehand
by the majesty of his mind, and by that popularity disdainful in
appearance, but very solicitous at bottom of success, which
skilfully courts the favour of the masses even by the indif
ference that is manifested for their applause. There was
much pride in the disdain of M. Royer-Collard, but there was
also much secret fawning on popularity in this pride ; he fre
quently gave offence, but he did not offend every one at the same
time ; when he wounded his own party he caressed the other.
His character was eminently calculated to constitute him an
orator of all oppositions, because he was essentially critical,
because he saw impropriety everywhere, because he took the
initiative and the responsibility in nothing ; and thus serving
all discontents and all negociations, he himself escaped criticism
by the sovereign indecision of his own mind. An honest, but
a great sophist, he threw by turns the weight of his doubts into
every balance, incapable of coming to a conclusion unless by a
censure, and still more incapable of acting, for action is the

490 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 38.

Debates on the dictatorial laws.

conclusion of a will. He half read his speeches, open before
him on the marble of the tribune, but committed beforehand
to memory. His voice had the weight and gravity of his
thoughts ; it fell with the authority of his life, which was pure
and retired within itself, which gave no scope to calumny, and
but little to envy, and which seemed to be animated by only
three passions superior to those of the crowd— logic, morals,
and virtue.
Camille Jordan, whose previous career we have already
sketched entered after M. Royer-Collard into public life, with a
fame matured in long obscurity, and consecrated by proscrip
tion. Integrity was the principal character of his talent.
Having combated and suffered much for royalty, in the time of
its adversity, he had a right to advise it in its power. The
royalists could not disavow him without ingratitude, and the
moderates were proud of attracting to them an orator who could
not be accused of faction.

These two voices gave great strength to the opposition in
the debates on the dictatorial laws, and especially on the law
of election. Royer-Collard, in a memorable speech, established
the fact that the French soil had devoured privilege for ever,
and conquered equality. " A law to re-establish them," he ex
claimed in conclusion, " will not stand ! Force alone will
govern !" M. de Villele, an organ more than ever in favour
with the royalist majority, defended the measures of the min
ister, having already come to a private understanding with him
and his friends, through the cabinet of the Count d'Artois, and
the new favourite, Madame du Cayla. M. Laine, a man of
quick and heroic impressions, convinced by his sensibility, by
the crime of Louvel, and by the conspiracies of the Bonapartists,
turned round, with a sincere abnegation of self-love, against the
law which he himself had promulgated two years before, and
recognised the urgency of a law preservative of the monarchy ;
a fault of constancy, but excusable from that passion for the
public weal which filled his breast, and which made him know-

1820.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 491
Speeches of Camille Jordan, M. Pasquier, and General Foy.
ingly sacrifice his popularity to what he considered the integ
rity of a repentance. Camille Jordan, then in a dying state,
caused himself to be borne to the tribune to refute M. Laine,
his friend, and to predict to the royalists in his last words, the
destiny that awaited them. " I withdraw myself with grief,"
he said, " from the ministers, who were my friends, and I do
not hesitate to declare this bill to be the most fatal that has
ever issued from the council of Kings, since those councils of
fatal memory which beset and ruined the unfortunate race of
the Stuarts ! It is the divorce between the nation and the
family that governs us." Such auguries from such a mouth
powerfully shook the convictions of many, whose votes they
held in suspense. M. Pasquier, the sole and indefatigable
organ of the ministry, raised himself to an elevation of
eloquence and courage which he had never before attained. He
refuted with circumstantial sophistry the most skilful and the
most habitual of the two oppositions, that of the Doctrinaires
by arguments, and that of the liberals by defiance. He boldly
sustained the cause of an aristocracy of property, as the basis
of political power, and a necessary counterpoise to the instabi
lity of the multitude. " The aristocracy," replied General Foy,
" has lost nothing during the last struggles of the country
against the coalition of 1815. Not a hair of its head has been
touched ; nevertheless, it has since theu extended between the
throne and the people, its hand armed with a foreign sword !
It has stained with blood the sceptre of our Kings ! Woe to
those who recognise in my words a picture of themselves !
It has overthrown the nation, and planted mourning in the
bosom of families. It never checks its career, it conspires for
ever. Do you wish for a proof?" He unfolded a paper of the
day, in which M. de Chateaubriand soothed the impatience of
the royalists, and drew up a programme of a government after
their own hearts. 'Listen," said he, "and judge!" The
general read, amidst a silence, which was broken by the in
dignation of the left, and by ironical cheers from the right, the
programme of the government of the illustrious writer, the
organ at that time of the discontented aristocracy. This pro
gramme, founded upon the anti-popular paradoxes of the Count

492 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 38.
Disturbances in the capital.
de Maistre, of M. Bonald, and of the bishops of the restored
church, called for a monarchy of the nobility — the suppression of
the law of recruiting and promotion, which gave rank in the army
to the blood that was shed for the country, and not to heredi
tary rights — the re-establishment of religious intolerance — the
monarchical re-constitution of the provinces, and corporations — .
the resurrection of an aristocracy — the feudal entail of in
alienable estates in favour of the peerage— unnamed measures
against that division of property which, according to M.
Chateaubriand, was to throw France under an agrarian law
and turn it into a fatal democracy, by the suppression of
the right of primogeniture understood in that measure —
finally, a pecuniary reparation to those families that had lost
their estates in the revolution !
The reading of this counter-revolutionary manifesto un
sealed the eyes of some wavering members, and delighted the
hearts of the royalists. The tumult of conflicting opinions in
the Chamber reverberated outside. The people and the stu
dents awaited the liberal orators upon the bridges to offer them
an ovation, and to load them with encouragement and acclama
tion. The troops, in repressing these triumphs, only gave more
courage to the popular sedition ; the mob increased, the sol
diers charged, and a student was killed in the affray. His
blood cried for vengeance ; Camille Jordan, Laffitte, Benjamin
Constant, Manuel, and Girardin denounced these murders to
the Assembly, and related the dangers and insults they them
selves had suffered in passing through the myrmidons of the
police. On the retirement of the deputies the mob collected
in mass, amidst cries of " Vive la Charte ! " and formed a
column of five or six thousand men, under the direction of
disbanded officers and liberal journalists. They advanced
along the Boulevards, recruiting on their route all those lovers
of mischief and sedition who are to be found in the cafes and
public places of a capital in a state of ebullition ; they marched
to the faubourgs, to summon to their assistance the dregs of
the populace, the standing army of revolutions. Thirtv or
forty thousand workmen responded to their call and marched
upon the Hotel de Ville, to muster there, as in 1792, prepara-

1820.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 493
Discussions thereon in the Chamber of Deputies.
tory to an attack upon the Tuileries. The cavalry and the
royal guard charged and dispersed them even under the porti
cos of the churches. The night brewed fresh disturbances for
the following day. The minister being attacked in the Cham
ber for the defensive force he had displayed, was covered by
M. de Serres, who had resumed his place in the tribune and in
the council. Instead of defending himself, however, he at
tacked the factions even in the Assembly, with a desperate
boldness which called to memory the Roman orator against
Cataline. Casimir Perier declared, " that the deputies could
not deliberate under oppression." Words like these circulating
a few moments after amongst the mob outside, inflamed the
people with fresh animosity. Every evening the troops and
the multitude bivouacked on the public places, insulting and
charging eath other by turns upon the quays, and at the Porte
Saint-Denis ; — blood was shed every day. Paris resembled a
camp in which two nations stood face to face, the one to im
pose, the other not to submit to the ministerial law. The
King, surrounded by numerous military forces, apprehended
nothing for himself; but he lamented in secret the sacrifice of
his minister which had been exacted from him, and he was
alarmed on account of his family for the consquences of this
open war between the people and the aristocracy. M. Decazes
was wanting to his attachment, as well as to his policy. These
agitations constituted a silent reproach which both his eye and
his heart addressed to his brother, for those exactions which
had bereft him of his friend. VI
The watchwords of this agitation were renewed at every
sitting, in the speeches of the opposition members. " For the
last eight days," cried M. Laffitte, " blood has not ceased to
flow in Paris. One hundred thousand of the peaceable inha
bitants of the capital were charged upon, sabred, and trodden
under the feet of the horses yesterday by the cuirassiers ! "
" Here is the blade of a sabre broken by the blow ! " said
M. de Corcelles, exhibiting the fragment of steel with a thea-

494 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 38.
Trial and execution of Louvel.
trical gesture. " The indignation of the capital is at its
height," resumed Laffitte ; " agitation has reached the
people. Tremble for to-morrow ! " " Blood is flowing, and
you refuse to hear us," again exclaimed M. de Corcelles. " It
is infamous ! " At these outcries, the Chamber rising like two
opposing waves which threatened to burst in upon each other,
the president was compelled to separate the parties by putting
on his hat. Benjamin Constant stirred up the flame again
when it was subsiding, with the breath of his bitter and pro
voking words. Prudent men, alarmed at this constant ebulli
tion of a people kept in continuous agitation for five-and-twenty
days, now, by the murder of the Duke de Berry, and sometimes
by the blood mutually shed by the people and the soldiers,
endeavoured to stifle these germs of revolution by one of those
compromises which offer a pretext for the appeasing of assem
blies. Courvoisier, a liberal emigrant, had proffered one, but
M. de Serres had refused it in the name of the government, as
a weakness which would appear to place the factious in the
right. Courvoisier having withdrawn his proposition, another
member of the centre, M. Bouin, reproduced it in his own
name ; it reduced in appearance the offensive privilege of the
double vote conferred upon the rich, and it was carried. The
entire law triumphed, to the misfortune of royalty, after stormy
debates, which recalled the scenes of the National Convention.
The people being kept down in the public places retired in
anger, and secret conspiracies began to be hatched, in the
absence of public tumults.
During these commotions, Louvel, the assassin of the Duke
de Berry, was tried by the Chamber of Peers. He denied
nothing, he recognised the poniard, he himself called the act a
horrible crime; he was affected at the magnanimity of his
victim, who had implored the King for his pardon while dying
by his hand. The only sentiment he expressed was brutal
hatred, stronger than his reason, against a family to which, in
his ignorance, he attributed the invasion and the calamities of
the country. He walked to the scaffold with the stoical indif
ference of a man who regrets nothing in this world, and hopes
for nothing in the next ; a brutal image of that fatahty which

1820.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 495
Increasing hatred to the Bourbons.
kills for the sake of killing, without glory, repentance, or
remorse for the blow it has struck.

VII.
His blood, very far from extinguishing the reviving hatred
to the Bourbons, seemed to reanimate and embitter it the
more. M. de Lafayette declared to his friends that open force
was henceforth the only efficacious weapon to overthrow a
government which had declared war against the equality of
classes. Emissaries were despatched from this centre to sound
the disposition of the troops and departments. The parlia
mentary opposition of M.M. Laffitte and Casimir Perier was
unwittingly associated with the tendencies and manifestations
common to the irreconcileable conspirators collected round
Lafayette, d'Argenson, Manuel, Corcelles, Rey, Tarrayre, and
Merilhou. This conspiracy found innumerable accomplices,
without the trouble of seducing them, in the schools, in the
disbanded military — remnants of the army of Napoleon — in the
sub-officers of the new army, in the small number of the re
publicans, in the Bonapartists as numerous as the discontented,
and finally in the purchasers of emigrants' estates, trembling
more and more at the presence and menaces of the old propri
etors, despoiled of their inheritance, and now protected by the
power of the government.
A captain of the legion of La Meurthe in garrison at Paris,
named Nantil, a half-pay colonel named Sauzet, a disbanded
colonel of the Imperial Guard named Maziau, Dumoulin, an
old orderly officer of Napoleon, Rey, a member of the directing
committee of all these plots, Berard, chef de bataillon of the
legion of the Cotes du Nord, allotted to different posts by
Nantil, resolved to give the signal and the rallying point to all
these scattered forces of the conspiracy, by surprising the for
tress of Vincennes, corrupting the regiments in Paris, raising
the faubourgs, and assaulting the Tuileries. A great number of
the generals of the Empire, unemployed or in disgrace in
Paris, as generals Pajol, Bachelu, Merlin, Maransin, Laffitte,
and officers of rank, as Ordener, Fabvier, Caron, Deuteel, and

496 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 38.
Plots and secret societies.
Brice, entered into the plans of the conspirators : the overthrow
of the government being their known and avowed object.
Lafayette wished to replace it by a republic, or a constitutional
prince, responsible to the revolution, and tied up in the
trammels of a representative democracy. The great mass pro
posed the dethronement of the Bourbons and the reign of
Napoleon II., the fascination of the soldiers and the people.
Impatience of overturning, at any risk, hurried Lafayette, as
usual, into a complicity from which he would not reap the fruit
for his ideas. But his violent hostility to a Restoration which
he had hailed with pleasure five years before, but which had
not realised his hopes, entirely obscured his foresight. All
were agreed upon destroying, without any explanation as to
what they should reconstruct upon the ruins. There was but
little good faith in this coalition of hatred, the Bonapartists bein«
certain of turning the triumph to the advantage of their mili
tary cause by the army they would corrupt, and the liberals
certain of seeing the confusion of the republic effected by a
victory of the pretorians, to which they lent all their energies,
thus deceiving their party without being able to deceive them
selves. Perhaps Lafayette was in hopes that in the impossi
bility of obtaining Napoleon II. from the court of Vienna, the
army would decree him a dictatorship, which he had had in
1790, had dreamt of in 1815, but which a Bonapartist revolu
tion might give him from 1820 to 1826, and which he again
allowed to escape him in 1830. However this might be, a
great harmony of feeling was effected through all the regiments
in Paris and in the great garrison towns. The night was fixed
for the surprise of the castle of Vincennes. Captain Nantil
and Captain Capes were to move off their legion and direct
the attack. M. de Lafayette had gone to his chateau of La
Grange, in order to second the movement of Vincennes by a
rising of his deparment. M. d'Argenson had hastened to
Alsace, where his popularity and benevolence had won for him
the hearts of all the workmen in his forges. M. de St. Aignan
had gone to Nantes. M. de Corcelles, the relation and friend
of Lafayette, a man whose fiery temperament urged him on to
tumultuous clamours in the public assemblies, and to extreme

1820.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 497
Explosion of the conspiracy.
resolutions in the secret cabals, had been charged to raise the
immense and formidable manufacturing classes of Lyons, al
ways ready armed for civil commotions, and whose example
would give a second capital to the revolution once begun at
Paris. An accidental explosion of powder having taken place in
the fortress of Vincennes on the eve of the day fixed by the
conspirators, the civil and military police were on the alert in
this principal focus of the revolution. The conspirators hesi
tated and put off their attempt, and informers acquainted the
government with it. Nantil fled, the suspected officers were
arrested, the legions which had been tampered with by the
chiefs removed from Paris, and the conspiracy, badly consoli
dated and half extinct, was brought before the tribunal of the
Chamber of Peers. But whether from insufficient evidence,
or apprehension on the part of the government of discovering
too many and too powerful accomplices, or from the secret
connivance of a part of the Chamber of Peers, composed of
Napoleon's generals, culpable in their hearts of the same re
pugnance as the conspirators, all the chiefs were acquitted, and
some of the secondary instruments only condemned to slight
punishments. The conspiracy, rather interrupted than de
feated, was everywhere renewed by the same hands which had
concocted the first plot. VIII
While the revolution was thus conspiring with impunity,
the counter-revolution was, on its side, conspiring in the shade.
A young magistrate of Nismes, M. Madier de Montjau, the
son and nephew of royalists, who had been signalised during
the reign of terror for their courageous fidelity to the throne of
Louis XVI., an ardent young man eager for service, had been
a witness, during the recent massacres in the South, of the
favour with which the ultras of the Catholic party were treated
in the correspondence emanating from the circle of the Count
d'Artois. At the moment when the Duke d'Angouleme, who
had been summoned from Toulouse to Nismes, was stanching
3 FF

498 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 38.
M. Madier de Montjau.
the blood and pacifying this turbulent city, this young magis
trate had imparted his alarms to the prince. He had begged
him to make overtures of conciliation and protection to the
persecuted and fugitive protestants, advice whioh was too con
sonant with the benevolence of the Duke d'Angouleme to be
displeasing to him. The young prince, indignant at the
slaughter of the protestants, and at the assassination of
General Lagarde under the eyes and by the hands of men
armed for the defence of the throne and laws, had assembled
the guilty National Guard of Nismes, and having reproached
it, face to face, in heroic terms worthy of the Chancellor de
l'Hopital, with its cowardly connivance in these excesses, he
declared his intention of asking the King, his uncle, for its
dissolution and disarmament. But these generous words had
been scarcely pronounced when orders emanating from the
Count d'Artois, commandant general of the National Guards
of the kingdom, neutralised the act of the prince, and
kept up at Nismes the agitation and tyranny of the ultra
party. M. Madier de Montjau, connected at the same time by his
family with the royalists, and by his opinions with the Doctri
naires of the party of M. Decazes, the then all-powerful
favourite of the King, had read at Nismes one of those anony
mous circulars which the hidden factions distributed amongst
their adherents, to acquaint them with the wishes and inten
tions of the superior committees. This circular, written from
Paris in the name of a semi-official royalist committee, the day
after the assassination of the Duke de Berry, said to their
brethren of Nismes : " Be neither alarmed nor surprised if the
crime of the 1 3th of February has not yet effected the fall of
the favourite. Act as if he was already overthrown ; we shall
drag him from his post if his banishment be not conceded;
meanwhile organise yourselves, information and money shall
not fail you!" Audacity like this attested to the eyes of
M. Madier de Montjau the great power of those who displayed
it. He had conjectnred from it the existence of a secret govern
ment, acting under the inspiration and supreme direction of the
King's brother ; but, after all, this pretended government was,

1820.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE 499
He denounces the machinations of the ultra-royalists to the Chamber,
perhaps, nothing but the ambition and turbulent encroachment
of mischievous men who assumed his name and favour

IX.
However this may be, the young magistrate eager to sig
nalise his name, to render some service to the moderate side of
politics, and to be its martyr, or to merit well at the hands of
the partisans of M. Decazes and of the King himself, had gone
to Paris during the great debates of the Chamber, resolved to
denounce this hidden government to the vengeance of the
liberals. Restrained for a long time by the counsels of pru
dent men averse to disturbance, and encouraged by others, he
had been secretly confirmed in his conviction of the existence
of a mysterious government, by a written declaration of M
de Lally-Tollendal, an old man with all the giddiness of youth,
and who was devoted to M. Decazes. Supported by this
authority, M. Madier de Montjau addressed a denunciatory
petition to the Chambers, a firebrand of discord in a furnace
already in combustion. The discussion of this petition which
was, by rending every veil, to discover the mysteries of ambi
tion and of a premature reign in the palace, produced nothing
but parliamentary storms. M. de St. Aulaire, father-in law of
M. Decazes, insinuated that family ascendancy was trying to
usurp the functions of actual royalty. General Sebastiani
reminded the Chamber of the note secrete to the foreign powers,
emanating, doubtless, from the same centre, and conspiring
against the independence of the King's power and of the
nation. The petition being rejected by the ministers was sent
to the Duke of Richelieu, and by him to the tribunals. The
denunciator had the only triumph he could expect, the noise,
the agitation, and the certain and merited part of victims who
denounce, that which it is impossible to prove, and still more
impossible to destroy X
While these conspiracies of all descriptions were thus
plotting the ruin of the Restoration, either by its crazy friends

500 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 38.

Birth of the Duke de Bordeaux.

or its implacable enemies, providence brought into the world,
in the Duke de Bordeaux, another heir, or another victim, of
the destinies of this monarchy. The Duchess de Berry, a
princess for whom the murder of her husband, and the infant
she bore in her womb at the time, had created a touching
sympathy in France and Europe generally, felt the pangs of
child-birth on the night of the 20th of September, 1820.
This fruitfulness so seasonable for the monarchy, revealed for
the first time on the bed of death, and which dated the period
of gestation some weeks before the murder of the father, had
served as a text for the incredulity and irony of the intestine
or public enemies of the royal house. It was of consequence
that an authentic publicity, in conformity with the usages of
the monarchy, should remove all ground for these rumours,
and this malignant hatred. Marshal Suchet, and several
officers of the guard of the Tuileries, were present at the
birth, as irrefragable witnesses of the real maternity of the
duchess. The King being apprised of it, hastened, and re
ceived the infant in his arms, as a compensation for his sorrows,
and a miraculous guarantee for his race. He lifted it up, in
the presence of the witnesses, and in conformity with the
classical traditions that were dear to his mind, he bathed the
lips of the new born child with some drops of the wine which
had fortified it was said, before the milk, the heart of
Henri IV.
A protest, which is thought to be apocryphical, had been
published in the London journals, against the possible birth of
a supposed prince. It was attributed to the most interested
person, the Duke of Orleans, or to his zealous partisans.
This prince disavowed it before Louis XVIII., and the King
reproved him. The Duke of Orleans, however, interrogated
Marshal Suchet on the reality of the birth, before he would
congratulate his niece. The marshal energetically attested the
legitimacy of the child ; and the duke being satisfied by so
undeniable a witness, offered his congratulations at the palace.
All France felt emotions of sympathy, of security, and of re
joicing on the birth of this infant. Pity for its father increased
the general satisfaction. The people rejoiced that Providence

1820.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 501
Rejoicings of the public on this event.
had thus avenged the crime, and dried up the tears of the
sufferers. The poets called him the child of miracle ; the
ambassadors called him the child of Europe. Some saw a
prodigy, others a principle in his cradle ; none could foresee at
such a distance the destiny of the Stuarts. Royal munificence,
amnesties, and favours of every description fell from the hands
of the King, at the solicitation of the young mother. This
cradle, exhibited to the world, was for some time a pledge of
reconciliation, of hope, and of peace for the nation. The mira
cle of the birth made the most incredulous superstitious. It
was a gift of nature which became in the eyes of France a
political power. This child, it was said, brought up under the
inspiration of the King, to perpetuate his constitutional work,
would escape by his age and his education, the resentments,
merited or unmerited, which the jealous revolution nourished
against his race ; that from him would date the treaty of peace
between the conflicting ideas ; the edict of Nantes of political
opinions incarnate in a young king ! This family event be
came in the eyes of all an intervention of Providence in the
destiny of the nation. No one imagined that heaven had
intervened by so unhoped for a birth to deceive the world and
to withdraw its pledges of security and future peace. Such
was the spirit of the speeches, the thoughts, and the sentiments
which at that time multiplied round the royal cradle. Sinister
»mens, however, appeared nearly at the same time on two sides
of the horizon, in Spain and at Naples.
XI.
It has been said that Napoleon was an armed missionary
of liberty and of revolution in Europe, and that in traversing
the continent to subdue it, he had willingly sown there the
germs of fruitful liberty. This is a sophism invented for the
use of the Sejanuses of his reign, whereby they were desirous,
after his fall, of creating for him a double popularity in the
imagination of the people, in order to accumulate around his
name all the elements of the opposition which they purposed
offering to the Bourbons or to the republic. Napoleon, in all

502 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 38.
Revival of the spirit of independence in Europe erroneously attributed to Napoleon
his victories over nationalities, sowed nothing but the terror of
his name and resentment against the French. France owes to
him its greatest military glory : this is an immense fascination
for which the nation must be grateful to his memory; but
neither France nor the continent owes to him the love of
liberty, unless we call by this name the lassitude of despotism
with which he had worn out the nations. By a similar
claim it may be equally contended that night produces day,
because darkness makes us long for light, and that servi
tude creates liberty, because it foments revolt in the souls of
the oppressed, and excites them against the oppressor. That
which is true, and is attested by all the revelations of his
thoughts, and by all his political acts from the 18th of Bru
maire to the renewed concordat of Charlemagne, to his feuda
tories and his nobility, and to the silence imposed by him upon
thought, under the name of ideology, is, that he turned back
the current of the whole French revolution ; that he pursued
the gleams, in order to extinguish them, of the principles of
this revolution wherever his sword could attain them in his
own country and on the continent ; that he employed the force,
with which God had endowed him, not to destroy but to revive
the absolute authority of theocracies, of aristocracies, and of
thrones ; that he was at all times the Julian of civil liberty and
of liberty of conscience, the great antagonist of the philosophy
of the eighteenth century through all the universe. A hero
certainly, but no apostle, or else an untimely apostle of con
quest, of glory, and of material force.
XII.
But what may for a moment have deceived nations as to
this pretended apostleship of liberty by the armies of Napoleon,
and what may have produced, in his footsteps, or after his fall,
symptoms of liberalism here and there upon the continent, is,
in the first place that the national feeling of subdued and en
slaved people having been invoked by their kings to resist or
conquer him, these nations called forth by their own sovereigns
to assist themselves, took a part for the first time in their own.

1820.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 503

Its real causes.

affairs, and insensibly claimed from their governments for their
internal liberty the privileges of thought, of speech, and of
national will, which these governments had allowed them to
exercise in defence of their external independence. They
made use of, for their own protection and the administration of
their own affairs, the immunities they had won in shedding
their blood and squandering their treasures for their kings.
They assumed in the national wars the attitude and the pride
of free institutions. Moreover, the fall of Napoleon having
broken the seal which for ten years had shut up the spirit of
liberty in France, and given respiration to thought, to speech,
to printing, and the tribune to the human mind, this accumu
lated explosion of liberty, which burst forth in France, produced
an echo throughout all Europe, and this reflux of ideas, so long
kept back, swept at once from Naples to Amsterdam, and from
Moscow to Madrid. Ideas find their level in the moral world
by a law analogous to that which governs the level of water,
or of air, in the material. Invisible and interwoven roots con
nect together, by a certain real communion of thought and
feeling, all altars, all thrones, all institutions, civil or religious,
of nations apparently most unconnected by distance or man
ners ; so that the Ml, the concussion, or the modification of
any of these things in any part of the globe, overturns, shocks,
or modifies them inevitably everywhere. This is especially
true with respect to France, a nation not superior to others,
but more prompt, more active, and more sympathetic, which is
first in thought and quickest in movement, and which the
modern world loves to contemplate and imitate when it does
not seek to humble or to conquer. XIII.
Such were, in our estimation, the real causes of the intes
tine movements of emancipation, of liberty, and of imitation
of constitutional governments, which agitated the continent,
since the liberal institutions, the tribune, and the press of
Paris began to excite the public mind, or to foment the secret
factions of France. Napoleon and his armies had not accele-

504 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 38.

The Spanish Revolution.

rated this movement of the minds of nations towards us, and
this tendency to imitate us ; they had, on the contrary, retarded
it. The fear and hatred which conquest had excited against us
throughout the world, were not attractions for its inhabitants ;
but the nations have turned towards us from the time when
we ceased to be objects of their fear or hatred. They liked
our ideas and our laws, but they could not bear our yoke.
In no part of the world had this yoke been more iniquitous,
more odious, more offensive, and more heroically shaken off
than in Spain. The laudable pride of independence had
revived this slumbering nation under the stratagems and the
violence of Napoleon. Spain was the Maccabeus of nations.
Its history is known, and we shall not here recapitulate more
of it than is indispensably necessary to connect the events of
1812 with those of 182.1. XIV.
The house of Bourbon had reigned over Spain and its
American possessions from the time of Louis XIV., or rather
it had permitted the reign of its manners and customs, its
monks and its inquisition, that permanent terror, which the
fanaticism of a nation at that time ignorant, superstitious, and
cruel, had suffered its priests to place by the side of and above
its government. Amongst no people of the earth, since the
time of the ancient Egyptians, or the Druidical Gauls, has the
sacerdotal theocracy ever governed a nation so directly and so
implacably. The perpetual purifying of the faith, and con
trolling the conscience by fire and sword, had multiplied its
human sacrifices. Thirty-eight thousand victims of this tri
bunal, without appeal, had been publicly burned there during
the last three centuries The execution of heretics was annually
presented there, as an edifying spectacle, or a fearful warning
to the faithful. More than three hundred thousand others
condemned, or merely suspected, and put to the torture, had
expiated in the dungeons, the galleys, or other non-capital
punishments, the crime of being only suspected of liberty of
thought on sacred things The mildness of the house of Bour-

1820.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 505
Retrospective glance at Spain.
bon had softened by degrees the ferocity of Philip II. The
inquisition obtained no more, or at least few victims under the
last reign. But the immense and inviolable wealth of the
church, the multiplication, the idleness, and the mendicancy
of the monks, an institution which suppresses labour by pre
cluding family, continued to embarrass the government and to
beggar the country. It subsisted upon its pastoral productions
and its distant colonies, like some idle proprietor who becomes
weakened by sloth while his slaves cultivate for him the neg
lected soil. When the French revolution broke out in 1789,
nothing remained to Spain but the chivalrous traditions of its
nobility, the heroic blood of its people, kingdoms governed
by viceroys in South America, an hereditary love of monarchy,
and a superstition by turns timorous and fanatical for its priest
hood ; remnants of the virtues and vices of a nation in a state
of decomposition, and which must become extinct unless re
generated by adversity
XV.
Charles IV. reigned at this period, or rather allowed Godoy,
his wife's minion, to reign in his name. Emanuel Godoy, a private
in the King's guard, whose handsome person had captivated the
young queen, and whose cleverness had relieved the King of
the weight of the crown, exercised equally over both one of
those mysterious and superhuman ascendancies, which can only
be explained by the unbounded love of the wife, and the mental
subjection of the husband. The King and the Queen seemed
to possess only one heart to adore and aggrandise the common
favourite; an expiation of despotism which subjects a nation
to the will of one man, that man to a faithless woman, and
that woman to an obscure courtier.
Godoy, who was subsequently Prince of the Peace, was
neither incapable, ungrateful, nor a traitor. He had an apt
capacity for public affairs, rational good sense for the necessary
amelioration of the kingdom, and a gratitude and fidelity for
his patrons, which partook of the superstition of the Spaniard,
the assiduity of the lover, and the obedience of the son.

506 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 38.

Emanuel Godoy.

Love and confidence had placed the kingdom in his hands,
and he laboured to preserve it intact, prosperous, and faithful
for his protectors. The clergy, whose domination over a
monkish court he did not counteract, witnessed his favour
without impatience, being apprehensive of a philosophical
ministry chosen from the great Spanish lords, who began to
disquiet their orthodoxy, and to breathe from beyond the
Pyrenees the liberty of thought and of conscience. The no
bility suffered him, by the habit of respecting in royal favour
ites, whether courtiers or cardinals, the caprices of majesty.
The court, composed by him and the army of which he was
commander-in-chief, were the servants of his will and his am
bition. The heir of the crown alone, the young Ferdinand,
married almost in his boyhood to a princess of Naples, hated in
the Prince of the Peace, his mother's lover, his father's tyrant,
the master and the rival of his own dignity, the humiliation of
his family, and the natural enemy of the son of the royal
house. The Princess of the Asturias, his wife, secluded, per
secuted, and finally thrown into a decline and death by the
cruel treatment of the Queen, together with some friends, the
confidants of her misery, nourished an instinctive hatred of
the favourite. Such was this court, in which religious cere
monies, surly etiquette, hunting, and music, kept up eternal
ignorance and idle monotony XVI.
The commotions in France, from 1789 to 1792, had been
scarcely perceptible in Spain, where the inquisition, the police,
the popular ignorance, the court indifference, and the broad
barrier of the Pyrenees, intercepted everything. After a
feeble declaration of war against the French Republic, through
a decent resentment for shedding the blood of Louis XVI.,
the court of Spain had concluded a humiliating peace.
It witnessed, trembling and motionless, the victories ot
Napoleon in Italy and Germany, and the dethronement of
the house of Parma and the house of Naples, its relations ;
trusting to its fawning for its own preservation, lending its

1821.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 507
His compliance to Napoleon.
fleet to the Emperor against England at Trafalgar, thus herself
assisting in the subjugation of the sea and the continent, and
lending a corps d'armee to Napoleon to coerce Denmark under
his sway. This was not enough ; the Prince of the Peace,
the better to bind Napoleon by the tie of gratitude, concluded
a secret treaty with him, by which he gave a free passage to
the French troops to march to the subjugation of Portugal,
and as a provision against the death of Charles IV., and his
own loss of power, he had stipulated to obtain for himself, as
a recompense for his complicity, the kingdom of the Algarves,
a dismemberment of Portugal between him and Napoleon.
But no submission could satisfy Napoleon. He wanted
another throne for one of his brothers, and from the centre of
Germany had his eyes fixed upon Madrid. Secret negocia
tions, in which both sides were caressing, the better to deceive
each other, existed in Paris between the private agents of the
Emperor and the Prince of the Peace. It is not known what
plots were hatching there to envelope Spain and win the favour
of Napoleon, when a palace tragedy, resembling those of
Byzantium under the Greek Empire, broke out unexpectedly
at Aranjuez, the summer residence of the Spanish court, and
furnished Napoleon with a pretext for the intervention, the
craft, and the violence which he had been premeditating for
some months past. XVII.
The Prince of the Asturias, presumptive heir to the throne,
who had recently lost his wife, worried to death by palace an
noyances and the rigorous conduct of his mother, could no
longer bear with patience the insolence and oppression of the
favourite, whom he accused of ruining Spain, and conspiring
against himself. In the paroxysm of his grief and terror, he
had yielded to the instigations of his preceptor, a canon
named Escoiquiz, and of two lords of his court, the Duke de
San-Carlo and the Duke del Infantado, his confidants, who
indicated to him, as his only support, the protecting and all-
powerful intervention of Napoleon. The prince, driven to

508 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 38.
Palace intrigues.
despair by the extremity of his danger and the excess of his
hatred, wrote a letter to Napoleon, criminal in its object, and
more criminal in its mystery, in which he supplicated the
Emperor to adopt him as his son, and to give him the hand
of a princess of the family of Bonaparte, or of Beauhar
nais. Whether from intentional indiscretion on the part of Na
poleon to render the breach between father and son irrecon
cilable, or whether through discovery of the minister's corres
pondence, the agent of the Prince of the Peace at Paris,
Izquierdo became acquainted with the letter and denounced it
to Godoy. Being communicated by the latter to the King and
Queen, and interpreted into a state crime and conspiracy against
the reign and the lives of his parents, this letter had raised to
a pitch of delirium the grief, the pride, and the anger of the
unfortunate Charles IV. The Queen, who hated her son in
proportion to the passion she entertained for the favourite, had
herself exaggerated the matter, and transformed an act of im
propriety into a criminal attempt. The Prince of the Asturias,
arrested in the palace of his father, conducted to the feet of
the King and Queen, convicted of criminal correspondence with
a foreign power, by criminatory documents found in his apart
ment, denounced to Spain and to the world as a rebellious prince,
and an almost parricidal son, trembled under the reproaches and
menaces of Godoy, and of the King and Queen. As cowardly
in his repentance as he had been thoughtless in the crime,
he humbled himself to tears, and debased himself in his exami
nation to the extent of accusing his advisers. These advisers
alone had suffered the vengeance of the laws, while the re
pentant son, degraded and pardoned, escaped the tragic fate of
Don Carlos, and recovered in his fathers court the liberty, the
rank, and the subordination of a presumptive heir, removed
from the Council board, and annulled by his humiliation.
Europe had resounded with this drama without a catastrophe
in the palace of Charles IV. Spain, indignant at the debase
ment of its prince and the triumph of the favourite, became
rife with murmurs and factions, which set the father against
the son, the son against the mother, the Prince of the Peace

1821.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 509
The French troops enter and occupy Madrid.
against the royal house, and the blood of its kings against the
detested blood of the upstart of Badajos.
XVIII
This was the moment when Napoleon, under the ambiguous
pretext of the affairs of Portugal, and an ill-defined co-operation
of his army, lent to Spain in virtue of the secret treaty of
Fontainebleau with Godoy, marched 100,000 of his best troops
over the Pyrenees, commanded by Murat, possessed himself
by violence or stratagem of the fortified places, and advanced
upon Madrid, without either the terrified Spanish government,
or himself, being able to give the Spanish patriots even a
specious explanation of a military occupation of the kingdom ;
which placed, one after another, the provinces, the arsenals,
the ports, the fortified towns, and speedily, perhaps, the capital
itself, under the yoke and at the mercy of a foreign power.
Charles IV., the Queen, and the favourite, their eyes being at
length opened, but too late, to the projects of a conqueror who
had concealed his ambition under the mask of friendship,
determined to quit Madrid, to retire to Cadiz, and to transport
themselves and the throne of Spain to America. The Spanish
troops were already stationed on the route to Cadiz to protect
the flight of the King and his family ; but the prince of the
Asturias secretly opposed this departure, which gave the
monarchy to the French. This resistance of the heir pre
sumptive transpired, and made him the idol of the humbled
and betrayed nation. The court intimidated by the resolution
of the people to oppose the flight of their sovereign, counter
manded the intended departure, and retired with the favourite
to Aranjuez, surrounded by the troops drawn together for their
protection. During this indecision of the two parties of the
court, and these still respectful movements of the people,
Murat entered Madrid with the French army, occupied all the
routes, and all the passages of the river which command the
capital, and preserving an enigmatical silence, more alarming
and more perfidious than a declaration of war, assumed the
position of arbiter of the destiny of both king and people

5]0 HISTORY OF THE KESTOEATION [BOOK 38.
Popular exasperation against Godoy.

xix.
The Prince of the Peace, undeceived at length as to the
pretended friendship of Napoleon, learned from his agent
Izquierdo, who had suddenly arrived from Paris, that the
usurpation of the throne and the nation was the secret of the
mysterious manoeuvres of Napoleon, and that there was no
other salvation for himself pjnd the royal family than a national
insurrection, or flight. But this thoughtless favourite, accus
tomed to miracles of fortune, and intoxicated with the dreams
which the crafty diplomacy of Napoleon had so long kept float
ing in his mind, was still slumbering at Aranjuez in the illu
sions and voluptuousness of boundless enjoyment. A clap of
thunder awoke him on the night of the 17th of March 1808.
A multitude of people issued furiously from Madrid at the
moment Murat was entering it and profaning the capital wjth
foreign arms, proceeded to the royal residence of Aranjuez,
amidst cries of treason and of vengeance against the favourite,
who, as they said, had sold and given up the country. This
mob, increased on the route by the population of the villages
and by the people of Aranjuez, rushed to the gates of Godoy's
palace, gained over the troops, proclaimed the cherished name
of the Prince of the Asturias, and burst into the chamber of the
favourite, armed with daggers, to obliterate with his blood the
Queen's passion, the King's weakness, and the ruin of the mo
narchy. Godoy had only time to escape by a lobby from the
multitude who filled and destroyed his mansion, to ascend by a
private staircase to the false roof of the palace, and to roll
himself up, like one of the pretorian emperors of Rome, in a
bundle of Indian cane mats, forsaken by his servants in the
obscurity of an attic.
The crowd thinking he had escaped, plunged their thirsty
weapons into his bed, ransacked his house, and ht their
torches to burn it to ashes ; then proceeding to the King's
palace, they did not pass the threshold, but loading the Queen
with invectives, and Charles IV. with expressions of pity, they
loudly demanded to have Ferdinand their son for king, and

1821.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 51]
His concealment and discovery.
for the saviour of the Empire. Insensible to their danger and
their personal insults, the Queen and her husband, more
faithful to love and friendship than to their crown, had no
alarm, no supplication, and no terrors but for Godoy. With
clasped hands they conjured their son, now their master, to
search for and save him, giving him up the Empire with
pleasure, if he would only give them their friend.
XX.
The night, however, and a great part of the following day
passed with the unfortunate Godoy in the slow agony of a con
demned wretch who hears from his retreat the maledictions,
the fury, the preparations for his destruction, and who cannot
escape one description of death without throwing himself into
another. Dying with thirst, destroyed with heat, burning with
fever, trembling lest his palace should be set on fire, and he him
self burned alive in the funeral pile of straw amidst which he
was buried, he counted as ages the moments of his lengthened
martyrdom. At length, no longer hearing the shouts of the
multitude ringing through his dwelling, and thinking that the
people, weary of seeking or waiting for him, had gone away to
search elsewhere, he ventured to descend from his retreat
silently down the backstairs that led to his garret, to slake his
thirst ; vainly looking for a drop of water in the courts and
fountains of the palace, which only a few hours before had
lavished upon him every delight. This silence in the apparently
abandoned building was a snare ; mute sentinels with naked
feet, that they might not betray their watch, were posted ir
the vestibules. One of these perceived and seized him, re
jected the offers of fortune with which the fugitive attempted
to soften him, and gave him up to the guard, who vainly tried
to save him from the fury, the mud, the stones, and the daggers,
scarcely warded off, of the people. The news of his appre
hension, flew like a cry of joy to the King's palace ; the King
and Queen responded by an exclamation of despair. They
supplicated their son to show his magnanimity and rescue his
enemy from death " Ferdinand," said his mother to him,

512 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 38,

Abdication of Charles IV.

" you wish for our crown, well then it is yours ; save our friend,
and your father will abdicate!" "Yes, yes," added the old
monarch, " save Emanuel and you are King !" At these words
Ferdinand rushed forward to the assistance of his persecutor,
snatched him from the multitude, and put him under the pro
tection of the troops. " Learn," he exclaimed as his only act
of vengeance, " learn that I am now your King !" " Are the
King my master and the Queen still alive?" was the only
consolation demanded by the favourite, more attentive to the
destiny of his benefactors than to his own wounds and humili
ations. Being satisfied of their existence, he was thrown,
covered with blood and dirt, into a carriage, and conducted to
the castle of Villa Viciosa, to await another death. The sport
of favour, of fortune, of disgrace, and of death, which all con
tended for their victim in one night, and had not yet done with
him.
XXI.
Charles IV. abdicated on the same day in favour of Ferdi
nand, both waiting till the act should be ratified by Napoleon,
master of the territory by means of his army, and by his policy
arbiter of the crown. His interpreter, Murat, refused to
explain himself, impressing with hope and fear, by turns, both
father and son. Napoleon, preceded and followed by invincible
forces, arrived at Bayonne, the last French city on the Spanish
frontier, and summoned this great cause before him upon the
French soil, as if to hold the competitors, both of whom he
intended to dethrone, at the mercy of his ambition and sepa-
ted from their subjects. Charles IV., his wife, his son, and
the favourite, allowed themselves to be drawn thither one after
the other, partly by seduction and partly by force. The
stratagems which brought these two monarchs to Bayonne, rather
recalled the Italian policy of Machiavel, than the Roman policy
of Cassar. Napoleon having dragged these princes to his feet,
resolved to dishonour them by means of one another, by
offering to the world the spectacle of their quarrels and their
debasement. Both father and mother overwhelmed the son,
in the presence of Napoleon, with maledictions as a parricide.

1821.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 5!3
Heroic struggle of the Spanish people.
Napoleon seemed to take the father's part against the son.
He summoned Ferdinand to abdicate a kingdom acquired by
rebellion, against the rights of blood. When the son accord
ingly abdicated and restored the throne, Napoleon made the
father abdicate in his own favour a crown which he could no
longer refuse in the perfidious captivity of Bayonne. He
gave the Spanish throne to his brother Joseph, and sent
Charles IV., his wife, and their favourite, to languish and die
in exile, without any other consolation than the friendship
which united all three, and with a royal subsidy badly paid in
exchange for two Empires. He gave to Ferdinand and his
brother as a prison, the Chateau of Valencay, surrounded by
troops and police, to prevent in these young princes the con
sequences of a sense of shame and a return of courage. He
pushed his armies into Spain, excited to insurrection by so
many criminal attempts upon its feelings and its independence
Victory and defeat were equally fruitless in the conquest of
this nation ; the hearts of the people combated in each of their
children, and the war became a struggle body to body, the
struggle a massacre. The English landed there to assist the
Spaniards and enlarged the field of battle. Each province,
deprived of its king, formed itself into a permanent insur
rectional junta. These juntas wore out the armies of Napoleon
one after another. This struggle of six years made Europe
the echo and the accomplice of this first insurgent nationality
against the conquest of the world. Cadiz was the centre of
this armed representation of Spain. The nation reigned for
its kings during the interregnum of its royalty, and Europe
learned from Spain that armies are mortal, but that nations
are invincible. Napoleon being driven back towards his own
frontiers by the north, in a state of insurrection and coalesced
against him, restored the Pope to the Romans, and Ferdinand
VII. to the Spaniards.
But this young prince, a slave in the cradle, soured in his
youth, a rebel against his father in the palace, and servile in
captivity, was ungraceful on his return. The Cortes, the
national representation of Spain which had fought for him,
were desirous of putting a price on their victory, and demanded
3 GG

514 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 38.
Return ol Ferdinand VII.
of him to swear to the constitution which they had promulgated
in 1812, in order to reconcile liberty with the throne. Ferdi-
nand_ being received with the delirium of enthusiasm by his
people, advanced slowly in the provinces without explaining
himself. At the gates of the capital, he had already forgotten
those who had opened them for him, abolished the constitution,
and repossessed himself of the absolute monarchy of his fathers.
His reign since that period had been nothing but a continuous
vengeance against the members of the Cortes who had tried to
affix a condition to his return and legal limits to his authority.
The moderate royalists, the patriots, the nobles, the orators,
the ministers, and the generals of the war of independence
were languishing in dungeons, crowding the galleys, and taking
refuge in exile. A domestic court called the Camarilla reigned
and persecuted in the King's name. Attempts at military in
surrection, not against the King, but against the royalist faction,
had offered as victims Porlier and Lacy, young generals of the
war of independence. Porlier when dying had bequeathed his
memory to the patriots in an epitaph which he 'had prepared
for his tomb. "Here lie the ashes of L. Diaz Porlier, general
in the Spanish army. He was successful in all his enterprises
against the foreign enemies of his country, and died a victim
to civil discord. Ye who are sensible to glory, respect the
remains of an unfortunate patriot." Lacy after having con
certed a constitutional movement with a great number of gene
rals and other officers of the war of independence, failed in the
enterprise through treachery, and took refuge in a shepherd's
cottage in the Pyrenees. He was discovered there by those
who were in pursuit of him, and condemned to death at
Barcelona. Ferdinand, unable to find executioners for a
general who was adored in Catalonia, sent him off to Majorca,
where the unfortunate Lacy met his death upon the shore,
instead of the exile which he had been promised. All the
provinces of Spain had their secret societies, their military
plots, their traitors, their informers, and their hangmen
Terror reigned at once over the court, which felt the soil
tremble under its despotism, and over the liberals, who felt
the hand of the court and the inquisition ready open to grasp

1821.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 515

Kcaclion ; O'Dnnnell.

them. Everything announced one of those fearful crises in
which nations and governments, incompatible with each other,
and animated by two irreconcilable spirits, cannot escape
either tyranny or insurrection. The priesthood and Spanish
monks, who had admirably served the cause of independence,
now ranged themselves on the side of absolute monarchy ; the
natural allies of a throne which they had always governed, and
the enemies of liberty which had put down the inquisition, and
which in its very first act had granted freedom of conscience.
The dungeons of the inquisition refused to give up their vic
tims to the civil tribunals. Bishops even, who were suspected
of tolerance and of liberal sentiments, groaned under the bolts
and bars of the holy office. The King himself dared not
refuse to its suspicions or its vengeance those even of whom
he knew the innocence and their attachment to his person.
Russia, through her jealousy of England, secretly favoured
by her counsel this system of terror of King Ferdinand. She
had encouraged this prince to raise to favour and credit a man
sprung from the very lowest rank of the court domestics, of a
faithful disposition, but limited nnderstanding ; whose servile
zeal, unenlightened attachment, and agitating skill relieved
the King from the burthen of government. The difficulty of
filling the royal treasury, in a country without agriculture or
commerce, and exhausted by a desperate war of ten years, led
Ferdinand and his favourite to project a decisive expedition,
the object of which was to reconquer and pacify by force of
arms his American possessions, then contested between Ferdi
nand's viceroys and the independent governments which these
distant colonies had established during the usurpation and
distractions of the mother country. Ugarte, the personal and
intimate minister of the King, had the chief management of
everything which concerned the preparations for this expedi
tion. The naval and military forces of the kingdom were
concentrated at Cadiz, the port from which the expedition was
to sail to bear to America the irresistible will of Spain
General O'Donnell, Count de Labisbal, of one of those Irish
Catholic families which made Spain their adopted country, and
whose three brothers, generals also in the service, were in

0 1 fi HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 38.

Perfidy of O'Donnell.

command of other provinces, was nominated by Ferdinand
commander-in-chief of the expeditionary army assembled at
Cadiz and in the neighbouring towns. O'Donnell had been
initiated a short time before this epoch into the secret societies
of the army ; but when, on the point of being discovered, he
had affected a horror of them, and made discoveries which had
appeared to the court and the clergy au irrefragable pledge of
fidelity XXII.
But O'Donnell, fluctuated, like most adventurers without
country, with the vicissitudes of events and parties, undecided
in opinion between the absolutists and liberals, giving security
to one side and hopes to the other, being decided only on pro
nouncing in favour of those who should elevate him highest.
He had scarcely arrived at Cadiz, when he was entrusted with
the confidence of the chiefs of the army enrolled in the secret
societies ; he affected to listen to them with favour. He thus
regained with the liberals the confidence he had lost by his
first defection ; and encouraged by his silence and toleration
the corruption and seduction of the army General Saarsfield,
second in command to O'Donnell, and a friend of the unfortu
nate Lacy, was entrusted with the same secrets, and swore to
avenge his friend, by reconquering that constitution for which
Porlier and Lacy had suffered death. He and O'Donnell
appeared to agree to bring about, on a fixed day, an insurrection
of their corps d'armee in favour of the common cause. But
whether the connivance of O'Donnell and Saarsfield with the
officers conspirators of their armies was merely a base stratagem
to learn the opinions of their subordinates, and to betray them,
or whether these two generals, thinking the moment unfavour
able and the movement premature, wished to let it half explode
the better to delay, or finally extinguish it, O'Donnell pre
tended to allow the Constitution to be proclaimed under his
eyes by some of the regiments, and then joining Saarsfield in
turning against the guilty, he arrested, in the very act, all the
colonels and officers compromised, or suspected, who had had
the imprudence to declare themselves, and sent them as prison

1821.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 517
Revolutionary explosion.
ers to the fortresses. The court, reassured by this explosion,
and by this perfidy of O'Donnell, received him as the saviour
of the throne, and retained him at Madrid. The army, for a
while dislocated and withdrawn from Cadiz by the precaution
of the government, which would no longer entrust a fortified
place to the chances of revolt, was cantoned, under the orders
of General Calderon, in the Isle of Leon.
XXIII.
The treachery of O'Donnell, however, and the arrest of the
superior officers, chiefs of the conspiracy, had only animated
the ardour of the numerous conspirators. They concerted
secretly together, and they nominated as their general Colonel
Quiroga, the accomplice of Porlier and Lacy, and at that time
a prisoner at Alcala in the Isle of Leon. Arco Aguero, impri
soned for the same cause in the castle of St. Sebastian, at
Cadiz, was appointed by them chief of the staff. The chef de
bataillon Riego, a friend of these conspirators, and himself
burning for the freedom of his country, was the hand and heart
of the new conspiracy. Spain is the country of bold and long-
maturing plots between thousands of conspirators. The inqui
sition has moulded the characters there to mystery and blood,
and nature to daring and to vengeance, — these two guardians of
secret oaths. The great majority of officers and sub-officers of
the army knew the day when the insurrection was to break
out, but none revealed the secret.
It exploded on the 1st of January, 1820, on the signal
given by Riego and the officers of his battalion at Las Cabezas,
the cantonment of the regiment of Asturias. The people
responded to it by cries of joy and deliverance. On the same
day Riego marched upon Arcos, the head-quarters of the army,
arrested there, with his own hand, the commander-in-chief
Calderon, and his staff, and gained over some battalions who
joined him and proclaimed him their general. Quiroga having
escaped from his prison, also marched, at the head of some
insurgent battalions, against Cadiz. Riego raised Xeres, and
Saarsfield fled'before him, threatened with the fate of traitors.

518 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 38.
Critical position ofthe insurrecliim Ms.
The whole army, speedily gained over by the current of tri
umphant opinion, nominated its chiefs, and drew up a respect
ful, but imperative address, imposing upon the King the
constitution of 1812. Cadiz alone shut its gates against the
conspirators. General Freyre, appointed by the King in the
place of Calderon, assembled a royal army to surround the Isle
of Leon, and to stifle the revolt in the bud. Riego quitted
the island with an expeditionary column to raise the neigh
bouring provinces. Received in some places with enthusiasm,
and with resistance in others, he escaped with difficulty the
still faithful detachments which pursued him, advanced boldly
upon Malaga, raised that city, fought an action there with
Joseph O'Donnell, brother of Count Labisbal, fell back in dis
order, losing his soldiers by desertion, marched through
Cordova at the head of 300 disheartened men, the only troops
he had remaining, received some supplies and a great many
acclamations ; but, harassed by superior forces, and only able
to draw his vain, decimated column into his own ruin, he dis
banded his officers and soldiers, and appointed Corunna as a
rallying point.
The insurrection, altogether military up to that period,
was extinguished and not strengthened by this expedition.
The Isle of Leon, fortified by Quiroga, defended itself with
difficulty against the troops of Cadiz. Everything was in a
state of suspense in thought and action. The insurrection,
blockaded by still increasing forces, seemed stifled in its birth,
when the city of Corunna, upon which Riego had directed his
disbanded troops, broke into insurrection at their call, and
proclaimed the revolution within its walls. Gallicia, the
Asturias, and Aragon, followed the movement of Corunna, and
the constitution was proclaimed everywhere, and even in
Cadiz. An accidental collision between the excited people
and the troops irritated by tlieir defeat, deluged this city with
blood. The excitement caused by these commotions all around,
shook, even in Madrid, the fidelity of the troops, and of the
Royal Guard itself. Ferdinand, yielding to necessity more
than to conviction, resolved to compound with his subjects, by

1821.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 5 ' 9
Triumph ofthe revolution.
promising them representative institutions. But promises
were no longer sufficient for the impatience of an army and a
nation determined to reconquer their rights. An insurrection
of the people of Madrid, under the windows of the King's pa
lace, was not appeased until the prince, humbled and coerced,
proclaimed with his own mouth the constitution of 1812, and
the convocation of the Cortes. This constitution, altogether
republican, as it emanated from the revolutionary organisation
of a nation without a chief, during the war of independence,
preserved nothing more of royalty than the name and the here
ditary principle, at the head of institutions entirely elective.
But Ferdinand did not deliberate as to the place assigned to
him in the constitution, he submitted to it. The Cortes as
sembled, the constitution brought into power all those men
whom the vengeance of Ferdinand had banished, and the
Inquisition still retained in its dungeons. Vengeance entered
the ( palace under the name of freedom, and proscription was
launched in turn against those who had proscribed the day
before. Quiroga, Riego, and their confederates, superseded in
the ministry, at the head of the army, and in the provincial
governments, the ministers, the generals, and the governors
faithful to royalty ; Ferdinand, in his own palace, surrounded
by official respect, was only the captive and hostage of the
revolution. Riots and disturbances were the daily coups d'etat
of the multitude ; and the reign of demagogues prevailed
under the name of debased royalty. The King, like all mon
archs who try to reign over, and by means of, their revolted
subjects, did not feel that after a virtual deposition the tomb
or proscription is the only asylum for their dignity. Ee gave
the compelled sanction of his name to the acts of his enemies,
pitied by some, odious to others, and suspected by all. Europe,
with the exception of France and England, protested in stern
diplomatic notes against these concessions of feebleness to
force, and presaged the impracticability and disasters that were
springing from this constitution. The army of Cadiz refused
to break up at the voice of the Cortes themselves, and of
Quiroga, who had become moderate after victory. Riego,
continuing to act the part of a military tribune, assumed the

520 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 88.
Progress of the revolution.
revolutionary command of it, resolved to superintend under
arms the acts of the Cortes, and to substitute the dictatorship
of the camp for the civil law. Being dismissed by the Cortes
and claimed by the clubs, he repaired to Madrid, to triumph
over the insulted laws, and to serve as a rallying point to the
demagogues. Being energetically opposed by the ministers,
he was compelled to yield before the constitution which he had
violated after having set it up. Banished from the capital he
carried into his province complaints, conspiracies, and the re
venge of checked sedition. This defeat of the principal tribune
was but a gleam of peace and order in the constitutional reign
of Ferdinand ; speedily tossed about between -the revolutionary
ministers and those suspected of royalism by the revolution, he
suffered fresh insults from his ministry, and fresh violence from
his subjects. He passed through all the vicissitudes of Louis
XVI. except the scaffold. Having retired for a short time to
the Escurial, a palace too near the royalist insurrections which
were now organising in his name in the faithful provinces, he
was constrained to return to Madrid, drawn thither by his
ministers to suffer there, like the royal family at Versailles,
on the 6th of October, the invasion and injunctions of the
clubs. All his friends, and even his confessor, were driven
away, to fetter his sentiments and his conscience. Proscription
banished them to towns where assassination waited them. His
guards, beset by the people, were partly immolated at the
gates of his palace, in defending it ; the rest were afterwards
proscribed for defending it in vain. During these intermittent
convulsions of the capital, the royalists and the priests raised
the Pyrenees and Catalonia in insurrection, for absolute power
and an exclusive religion ; the republicans, at the instigation
of some French emissaries, were plotting for the republic at
Saragossa. Riego hastened thither to resume the part of
agitator-in-chief of his country ; the people indignantly shut
their gates against him, and arrested the factious strangers.
The leaders of the Cortes, themselves, experienced in their
turn, the inconstancy and changes of popularity in Madrid,
The Count de Torreno, a celebrated orator, and Martinez de la
Rosa, poet, orator, and patriot, both victims of absolute nower,

1821.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 521
Counter-revolutionary plots.
and snatched from Ferdinand's dungeons to become, by their
talents, members and leaders in the Cortes, being now sus
pected of moderation and discretion in the cause of liberty,
escaped with difficulty from the poniards of the populace, when
flying from their houses, pillaged and burnt to the ground.
The blood of ultras and moderates was flowing in all the
towns, while bands of The Faith were traversing Navarre and
Aragon under chiefs chosen by the popular voice : the curate
Merino, the trappist, and General Quesada. A nomadic roy
alist and insurrectional government was formed at Urgel, under
the name of the Supreme Regency of Spain, by the Marquis de
Mataflorida and the Baron d'E relies. Mina, who had been
proscribed by Ferdinand, returned to his country, like Corio-
lanus, from his exile in France, and combatted, in his own
name, the royalist insurrections, by insurrections of liberals
He levied troops, imposed taxes, plundered the arsenals of
Barcelona, and drove into France the armies of The Faith.
Three civil wars ravaged and consumed the provinces. An
impotent assembly, factious and insulted ministers, a captive
king, a turbulent capital, a country torn by factions, a popula
tion fluctuating at every breath of priests or demagogues,
armed in turn with the hammer of the assassin and the dagger
of the brigand, or struck with the stupor of victims, such was
the state of Spain at the moment when the liberal conspiracy at
Paris — the prelude to, or consequence of the agitations of the
Peninsula — concocted at Paris, at Nantes, and in Alsace, the
popular and military plots which responded from the Directing
Committee to the compressive laws of the ministry. The
riotous mobs of the capital, the secret societies, the hidden
assemblies, the speeches of agitators, the bitter pamphlets, the
sinister allusions, and the public journals, masking their incen
diary excitement under the form of a legal opposition, were in
France so many reverberations concerted with the republicans
of Saragossa and the ultras of Madrid. The revolution felt its
own movements through the Alps and the Pyrenees.
An unexpected event occurred to redouble its strength, and
to give to the hopes of some, and the terrors of others, one of
those concussions which shake the whole continent. Italy,

522 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK ,18,
Italy, review ol' her past career

slumbering in appearance under the domination of its ancient
dynasty, and the armed guardianship of Austria, burst forth
in both its extremities at the same time. Naples and Turin
responded to each other, after a few weeks interval, by two
military insurrections and one sole cry of constitution
XXIV
Italy has been for ages the great reproach of the modern world.
It might be said that the nations of the north are avenging them
selves for the yoke which Italy formerly imposed upon them, and
for the horror excited by the many atrocities they have committed
upon her, by affected contempt for her character ; and that
by dishonouring her, they wish to deprive her even of self-
esteem. This affected contempt is cowardly, ignorant, and
unjust. Italy is still the privileged land of nature and human
ity ; and the manly pith of its great ages is neither degenerated
nor dried up. Involved, by the irresistible fall of the old
world, in the decay of the universal empire she had founded,
no nation upon earth has withstood so long a deposition without
debasement and dissolution. Her glory, her religion, her
genius, her name, her language, her monuments, and her arts,
have continued to reign after the fall of her fortune. She
alone has not had an age of civil darkness, after her age of
military dominion. She has subjected the barbarians who
conquered her, to her worship, her laws, and her civilization.
While profaning, they submitted to her : though conquerors,
they humbly besought her for laws, manners, and religion.
Nearly the whole continent is nothing but an intellectual,
moral, and religious colony of this mother country of Europe,
Asia, and Africa. The middle ages parcelled her out without
dissolving her : her fragments cut up into little principalities,
or small republics, still preserved the palpitations, the vigour,
the movement, and the energy of great nationalities. She had
anarchies, convulsions, virtues, crimes, and heroisms mighty
as her ruins. Her regeneration under the popes, under the
Medici, under her house of Ferrara, under her Venetian
aristocracies, under her democracies of Genoa, under her

1821 ] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 523
Erroneous opinions upon that country.
theocracies of Rome, under her commercial principality of
Florence, and under her paladins of Naples and Sicily, was
the regeneration of Europe. In rekindling herself she lit
up the whole world. War, policy, literature, commerce, arts,
navigation, manufactures, diplomacy, all emanated from Italy.
Her names resemble those eternal dynasties on which the
supremacy, in every region of the human mind, has been
devolved by nature, and of which such men as Sixtus V.,
Leo X., Cosmo, Tasso, Dante, Machiavel, Michael Angelo,
Raphael, Petrarch, Galileo, Doria, and Christopher Columbus,
transmit to each other, even at this day, the sceptre that no
other nation could snatch from their privileged race. Subject
in the latter ages to Austria, anxious to enervate, in order to
subdue her, to the house of the Spanish Bourbons : voluptuous
and superstitious dynasties, vice-royalties of Spain or of Ger
many ; to popes who bartered her powers, to conciliate their
favour ; to vicious aristocracies rich enough to corrupt her, but
too feeble to make her warlike ; and to a priesthood who com
pounded with slavery for her riches ; — Italy, rich, populous,
happy in the enjoyment of the senses, but humbled in mind.
was hushed and still, but not resigned to her fate.
The new spirit of the times penetrated, during her slumber,
through every pore. In no part of Europe, except in France,
had the ideas of tolerance, of civil and religious liberty,
of the equality of classes, of representative institutions, of
the intellectual government of nations, and of the evocation of
thought through the tribune or the press, — to co-operate with the
increasing progress of humanity — more advocates than in Italy,
especially amongst the heads of the country, in the councils
of princes, in the courts, in the priesthood, in the schools,
in the studios of artists, amongst the writers, the poets, and
even in the temples. In her sacerdotal pomp, Italy was
philosophical ; under her despotism she was liberal ; amidst
her dismemberment she was patriotic, and inclined by all
her instincts to that national or federal unity, the only possible
resurrection of her strength and greatness. Rome, by her
geographical position and her theocratical institution, which
condemns her to be the political vassal of foreign sovereigns,

524 HISTORY OF THE RESTOTATIOM' [BOOK 38.
Reception of the French revolution in Italy.
when she cannot have them for vassals, was the eternal obstacle
to this unity. The spiritual domination of the church, which
formerly constituted the power of the Italians, now consti
tuted their slavery. The compulsory neutrality of Rome
dissolves all armed and energetic nationality in Italy.
The French revolution had surprised Italy in this progress
of the national and philosophical spirit, which made her hail the
regeneration of France. The horror of Austria, a tyranny
more hateful because more oppressive, and the fear of having
the French yoke substituted for the German, kept her in
stincts in a state of indecision. Her sympathy, however,
had overcome her fears. The invasion of Savoy by M. de
Montesquiou, under the Convention, the descent of the re
publican armies upon Piedmont, had been hailed by the Italian
patriots and philosophers as omens of emancipation from the
theocratical yoke, and independence of the yoke of Austria.
The nobility, the literary, artistic, and industrial classes, had
smiled on the liberating radiance of France, from Nice to
Milan, from Chambery to Rome and Naples. Even the
ravages of that soil, become the battle-field of the armies of
the north and of France, had not discouraged the Italians.
They knew that an enslaved people do not purchase their
freedom and their dignity but at the price of some sacrifices.
The victories of Bonaparte which conquered the country for
France, appeared to the Italians triumphs which vanquished
them for themselves. These Poles of the south flattered
themselves that the conqueror of Austria would constitute
them a nation, united or federative, after having emancipated
them. The selfish and conquering policy of Bonaparte, over
powered there, as in Poland, the magnanimous and disin
terested policy, which by regenerating Italy would have given
new life to a great people, the grateful and dependent ally of
France, instead of giving it humbled and murmuring subjects.
Napoleon gratified his brother in-law Murat with a feeble and
powerless kingdom at Naples ; his adopted son, Eugene Beau
harnais, with a precarious vice-royalty at Milan; his sister,
Eliza Baciochi, with a principality in Tuscany; his other
sister, Pauline Borghese, with a government-general in Pied-

1821.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 525
* Napoleon's policy in that country.
mont ; Genoa, Venice, and Rome herself, had become spoils
torn from Italy, and imperial cities ; Milan the head quarters
of a French army ; Savoy a French department ; the Pope
like the Doges, superseded in the Vatican, not by a Roman
government but a French proconsul, and carried off from the
capital of the catholic world, was wandering from city to city
in a sort of honourable captivity, scarcely disguised. The
treasures of Italy, and the master-pieces of her museums,
served to enrich or to decorate the treasury and the palaces of
the Emperor. Her children recruited the French armies, and
shed their blood in the north for a cause which was neither
that of their independence, nor of their liberty. The am
bition of one man, and the pride of his universal military
monarchy, were fatally interposed between the genius of Italy
and the genius of France of 1789, which only aspired to a
mutual union to strengthen each other — but a union of freedom,
and not of bondage. The reflux of Europe against the uni
versal usurpation of Napoleon had therefore appeared a de
liverance of Italy. Tyrant for tyrant, she preferred the most
ancient and the weakest. The treaty of Vienna had given
her back her pontiff and her princes Austria, mistress of
the Milanese, usurper of Venice, and protectress of Tuscany,
took as much pains at the congress to parcel out the peninsula
afresh as Napoleon did to conquer it ; not one of these restored
powers, the house of Naples, the Popedom, the house of Tus
cany, or the house of Sardinia, was of sufficient weight to give
to Italy the signal of independence, and to inspire Austria
with a serious dread of a voluntary emancipation from her
authority.
XXV.
But the national and philosophical ideas, kept down and
discouraged by France in Italy during the reign of Napoleon,
were not dead. They began to palpitate afresh at the contact
of the liberty of speech and of the press in France, since the
representative government, reimported into France by Louis
XVIII., had found an echo and an emulation at Rome, at
Naples, at Genoa, and at Turin The revolutionary explosion

526 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 38.
Carbonarism.
of Spain to free herself from the monkish system, and from
the despotism of the court, had given a shock to Italy. The
political yoke of the priesthood appeared more intolerable
there to the minds of the people since it had been broken,
and that an impatience was felt to break it again. The
French administration, superior in mechanism to the admi
nistrations, at once feeble and mischievous, of the restored
governments, had left there examples and regrets. Finally,
the military youth of Italy, inured to war in the campaigns
of Napoleon, had formed a great number of brave and ex
perienced generals, officers, and soldiers, who were disgusted
with their present idleness, and who felt themselves capable
of making their country free and warlike. To all these
fermentations of public and national spirit in Italy, was
added the invisible but increasing influence of secret societies.
The most numerous and the most formidable of these were
the Carbonari, a hidden army of the public mind. When
ideas cannot be displayed to the light of day, they organise
themselves in the shade. Mystery is the strength of the
oppressed.
XXVI
Carbonarism, the origin of which is lost in the darkness of
the middle ages, like free-masonry, of which it was by turns
the ally and the enemy, was a sort of Italian Jacobinism. It
had its initiated, its doctrines, its secret meetings, its corres-
condence from province to province, its watch-words, its hidden
administration,— a government of darkness within the official
government. A philosophical Christianity, an ultra- patriotism,
and a republicanism antique, fanatic, sometimes declamatory,
—like that of the Girondists in France, or the friends of freedom
in Germany— comprised its soul, its formula, and its ceremonies.
It gave no preference to rank, profession, or class ; it initiated
rich and poor, aristocrats and plebeians, the military, the
priesthood, and the people. It was the equality of the human
mind. Its initiations excited no suspicions in the governments
themselves, a great number of whose agents belonged to it.
Nothing could be more irreproachable than its dogmas, more

1821.] Of MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 527

Its nature and influence.

puerile than its ceremonies, or more loyal than its oaths.
Its only apparent danger was in its mechanism, in its orga
nisation, in its numbers, in the simultaneous and irresponsible
dii ection which some men, concealed behind the veil of its
supreme hierarchy, could impart by a single word to its
acts and tendencies. However innocent to-day, it might be
guilty and irresistible to-morrow : such is the danger of these
numerous associations favoured by weak governments, who
think they acquire by supporting them the power of overturning
them also. More than a million of men, in the Calabrias, in the
provinces, and in the army of Naples were enrolled in Car
bonarism. King Ferdinand himself, his sons, Queen Caroline
of Naples, his wife, were initiated in this sect during their
long exile in Sicily. They held its strings in their hands,
and it was by this secret and popular society that they had
fermented the permanent insurrection of Calabria against
Murat and the French, intruded into their kiugdom strangers
to their country, and usurpers of their throne. On his return
to Naples, after the fall of Napoleon, the old King Ferdinand
brought into military organisation, as a local militia, the
Carbonari of the Calabrias ; thus arming with public power
those whom the pre existing organisation of their sect, had
already armed with the hidden power of their association.
The liberal spirit which breathed from France, from England,
from Sicily, and from Spain, upon the coast of Italy, speedily
imbued them with its influence The generals and officers
of the disbanded army of Murat, animated them with the
flame of their resentment. The abuses of the government,
the vices of the court, the restless oppression of the clergy,
the debasement of Italy under princes, either weak or the
accomplices of foreigners, became the texts of their speeches : —
the redress of these grievances, the resurrection of Italian
patriotism, and the establishment of a constitution the avowed
object of their assemblings. The army, partly commanded by
the old generals of Murat, associated itself with these plots
by its murmurs against the court, which had returned to
Naples with the emigrants and the counsellors of the royal
terror of 1799. The King had grown old in exile, a passive

528 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 38.
Tlie King of Naples.
instrument of the passions of Queen Caroline, his wife. He
was loved by the people, the laughing-stock of the great, and
despised by the soldiers. He was devoted to women and priests,
incapable of strong resolutions, but with a capacity for cun
ning and stratagems, — a true prince of the degenerate house
of Spain, in whom nature had been stifled by a superstitious
education and servile flattery. Hunting in the woods of the
Caserte, the Escurial of the Neapolitan dynasty, fishing in his
beautiful bay with the lazzaroni, — the frivolous and happy
plebeians of his capital, — love, and the ceremonies of religious
worship, occupied his leisure hours. Austria, the ally of his
crown and the ruler of his kingdom, had paramount influence
in his councils. The Chevalier de Medicis, a man of vast
erudition, but of timid will and feeble courage, calculated for
peaceable times, but unsuited to moments of resolution,
directed his government.
This minister, incredulous as to the dangers of Carbonarism,
had committed the same fault as the minister of the King of
Spain at Cadiz, the year before. He had formed a camp of
observation at Cessa, thus heaping up together all the elements
of military insurrection upon a single point of the kingdom, as
if to facilitate to the conspirators the means of communication, of
concerting together, and of comparing their forces. The
different corps d 'armee, on quitting the camp, had borne with
them, into their respective cantonments, the conviction of their
number, of their unanimous feeling, and the certainty of being
followed at the hour when a favourable opportunity should offer
to give expression to the public mind. Naples was looking for
its Riego. XXVII.
A sub-lieutenant of cavalry, named Morelli, cantoned at
Nola, in the province of Avellino, situated between Naples and
the Calabrias, gave the first signal to the army. He mounted
his horse at daybreak on the 2nd July 1820, gained over about
100 soldiers of his regiment, who had been initiated in Carbo
narism by a canon of Nola, named Menichini, and followed by
this priest, and a handful of the Carbonari, he advanced towards

1821.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 529

Movement in Nanles.

the town of Avellino, occupied by other corps, shouting " Vive
Dieu!" "Vive le Roi!" "yive la Constitution!" Colonel
de Conciliis, a man of high birth and great fortune in this
province, who was himself initiated in Carbonarism, but still
undecided as to the hour and opportunity for a movement,
commanded the troops in Avellino. Uneasy and perhaps
discontented with the premature insurrection of Morelli, he
considered and hesitated under arms. The insurrection, thus
checked, fluctuated for a while. The King who was in the bay,
going to meet his son, the Duke of Calabria, then returning
from Sicily, learned on board his vessel the bold proceeding
and first success of Morelli. He knew the danger of the first
spark in a kingdom so undermined with plots ; he was afraid to
land, but some encouraging news, and the resistance of Con
ciliis, decided him on doing so. He returned with his son and
his court to the palace. The council was assembled, and
General Guglielmo Pepe, a popular officer of Murat's army, and
commander-in-chief of the province, received orders to proceed
to Avellino. These orders had scarcely been issued when they
were cancelled, and General Caroscosa was sent in his place.
Pepe was indignant at a distrust which deprived him of the
opportunity of being an arbiter, like Lafayette, between the
throne, the army, and the country. He departed privately in
spite of the court took off a regiment of cavalry at the gates of
Naples, amidst cries of " Vive la Constitution !" spreading fear
in the palace, agitation in the capital, and joy in the hearts of
the conspirators. Caroscosa, faithful to the King, but popular
amongst the liberals, endeavoured to reconcile his duty with his
popularity, and lost some hours at Naples in reflecting on his
mission. During this temporising, time, which is the element
of revolutions or repression, was consumed. Morelli with his
detachment, raised the towns and country all round ; and at
night he concerted measures in a private interview with Con
ciliis, the commandant of Avellino. This officer having joined
the conspiracy resolved to gain over his province also. He
summoned the troops and the militia, under pretence of shutting
the gates of the town against the insurgents, but in reality to
6upport them. The whole province and the troops commanded
3 H H

530 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 38.
Triumphs ofthe revolution.
by Conciliis, declared open insurrection against the absolute
government. Morelli and Conciliis formed a constitutional
camp upon the heights of Avellino. General Pepe arrived
there from Naples, not to combat them but to direct and authorise
the movement by his presence. The noise of this defection of the
general spread abroad, and gained over the towns, the garrisons,
and the neighbouring provinces. The Carbonari rose with the
militia, like beings hitherto invisible in the midst of an aston
ished population. Pepe, respectful in his language, but deter
mined in his acts, formed them into columns, and announced
his march upon the capital. Naples, which only awaited a chief
and a signal, was agitated and emboldened by the approach of
the conspirators. A deputation of the Carbonari, the nobility,
and the people entered the palace, and called on the King to
promulgate the constitution. He granted the institutions im
,posed upon him, and only demanded time to discuss them with
his ministers. One of the ringleaders pointing with his finger
to the dial plate of the clock, gave the court two hours only to
change the institutions of the nation. The King thus coerced
dismissed his ministers, appointed others that were agreeable
to the multitude, published a declaration which guaranteed a
constitution in eight days, and placed the government pro
visionally in the hands of his son, the Duke of Calabria. This
prince, brought up from infancy in court intrigues, at the
palace of Palermo, between the English, the liberals, and his
mother, was better calculated than any one else to teach a
conquered power to bend cunningly before a revolution, but
who meditated freeing himself from its thraldom by force and
stratagem. Removed from public affairs, enlightened, studious,
eloquent, and skilful in flattering parties and lulling them into
false security, his reputation of liberalism made him agreeable
to the people and the army ; but respectful in reality tp his
father, and more anxious to save his crown than to purloin it
prematurely for himself, the Duke of Calabria was the natural
negotiator between the throne and the constitutionalists. The
more speedily to calm the tumultuous impatience of the people
around the palace, he promulgated the constitution of the
Spanish Cortes, vociferously demanded by the . multitude for

1821.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 531
General Pepe.
want of a better. The people being satisfied accepted the
promise without knowing what was comprised in the text of this
constitution, and only knowing that it signified at Madrid a
triumph over the court, the debasement of the King, and the
victory of popular liberty over monarchical and priestly despo
tism. XXVIII.
Meanwhile, the popular General Pepe advanced upon Naples,
at the head of the militia and the Carbonari of the insurgent
provinces. The revolution had made him its chief. This
chief created by chance, rather than conspiracy, was a fortunate
one for the throne and the revolution at the same time. He
was the all-powerful Riego, but the Riego involuntary and
moderate of Italy. Born in Calabria, of a military race in that
province, the most agricultural and warlike of the kingdom,
the twentieth child of a rich and popular family in those moun
tains, brought up in the simplicity and discipline of those rural
manners which make labourers and soldiers, inured to war
from his childhood by those intestine party struggles which
had existed in the Calabrias since the revolution of 1794, he
entered the service with several of his brothers, signalised him
self by his bravery, was promoted from one step to another by
Murat, on the battle-fields of France, to the rank of general of
division, was faithful to that prince to the day of his abdi
cation, when his services were accepted by Ferdinand, who
made him governor of a province, and commandant of a corps
d 'armee since the Restoration. He was still young, with a
countenance pleasing to the multitude, and a name dear to
the soldiery, his political opinions being liberal and tempered
by honour, gave pledges at the same time to freedom and to
the crown, and being employed by an insurrection, of which he
became the chief without having been its accomplice, General
Pepe resembled Lafayette, balancing, in 1790, the republic and
the monarchy in his hands, the armed arbiter between the King
and the nation. But although he was the first to take the part
of arbiter between the army, the throne, and the people, General
Pepe was more ambitious of fame than eager for domination over

532 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION LBOOK 38.

Entrance of the Carbonari into Naples.

his sovereign. He had neither won popularity by fawning upon
anarchy, nor torn the King from his palace to imprison him in his
capital, nor pursued the fugitive royal family to bring it back to
its jailors. Conditional fidelity to his king, progressive institu
tions to his country, the signal of Italian independence given as
an emulation and example to the peninsula, and a dictatorship,
short and promptly abdicated, to the prince and the laws, such
were the character and instinct of the Neapolitan dictator.
He entered Naples on the 7th of July at the head of the army
and the militia, after having made private arrangements with the
Duke of Calabria. His innumerable escort resembled a discip
lined sedition as much as a military triumph ; after the revolted
regiments commanded by Morelli and De Conciliis, — Neapolitans
and military tribunes, hailed as the liberators of the capital, —
marched in good order thousands of the militia and Carbonari of
the provinces. Their brown woollen jackets, their shepherd's san
dals, their conical hats, decorated with the Carbonarist colours,
their Calabrian carabines, glittering in the sun, their dusty feet,
their sunburnt faces, their sombre and warlike looks, excited at
once the astonishment and terror of the crowd that flocked out
upon the long strand of Naples to witness this invasion of a sect
issuing from its Ventes, its caves, its rocks, and its forests, to tri
umph over the temples and the palaces of a capital. The priest
Menichini, riding upon one of his mountain mules covered with
the emblems of Carbonarism, advanced in the midst of the rural
militia, with a carabine in his hand. All eyes were fixed upon,
all hands applauded this wild-looking priest, the prime mover
of the Nola insurrection. An army of peasants, of monks, shep
herds, sailors, and Calabrian brigands, marched in all their
variety of costumes around the chiefs of the Ventes of their
provinces. The whole city displayed, as they passed, the colours
of the sect, some from imitation, others throgh terror. A
unanimous cry of " Vive le Roi !" and " Vive la constitution !"
arose from the army, from the sea, and from the city, to the
balconies adorned with flags of the royal palace.
After having passed in review this double army, Pepe,
Morelli, De Conciliis, Menichini, and the Neapolitan general,
went to the palace to offer to the King and the Duke of Caia-

1821.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 533
Interview of the generals with the Duke of Calabria and the King.
bria the homage and the tacit injunction of the revolution
which they represented. The Duke of Calabria received them,
decorated himself, as well as his court, with the insignia of the
triumphant cause. " When I arrived at the camp of the con
stitutionalists," said Pepe, •' the revolution was accomplished;
I then only considered how I should direct it to the double
interest of the throne and the nation. The armed men who
have passed before your eyes, the thousands of others who have
remained in their provinces, or who have returned to their
country, are not rebels, but subjects ; their arms do not
threaten the throne, but serve for its support. As to myself,
I supplicate your Royal Highness and the King to shorten a
state of affairs that is equally painful to all, by convoking, as
speedily as possible, a national representation ; when I swear
to resign the high functions with which I am invested, with
more solicitude than I this day aceepted them."
The Duke of Calabria vowed on his side, with an accent
to which the dissimulation of the Italian courts gave an ap
pearance of sincerity, that he wished, as much as the people
and the army, for constitutional institutions " You, General
Pepe," he said in conclusion, " calm the uneasiness produced
by this generous feeling ! boldly exercise your military su
premacy ; the generals, your competitors, have themselves
applauded your elevation. Your actions have outstripped the
slow course of years ! I swear to defend the constitution of
the Cortes at the price of my blood ! " Being thence con
ducted to an interview with the old King, either ill, or affecting
illness to relieve himself from the burthen of affairs, Pepe
found Ferdinand in a retired chamber of the palace, lying
upon his bed ; the Princess Partanna, a beautiful Sicilian
whom he had long loved, and whom he married, like another
Maintenon, after the death of the Queen, was sitting by his
bedside. The general respectfully kissed the hand which the
King held out to him, according to the etiquette of the Spanish
courts. " Now, at length," said Pepe to him, " your majesty
reigns over the hearts of all ! " "I hope," replied the King
with some anxiety, " that you will conduct yourself like a man
of honour." The Duke of Calabria wished to excuse the con-

534 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 38.
Agitation of Italy.
stitutional general to his father, by explaining to him that
Pepe had joined the insurgents of Avellino only from the
rumour that the ministers intended to have had him
arrested. This excuse, however, Pepe proudly declined; he
avowed to the King that the idea of obtaining representative
institutions had long been entertained by him, that he had
meditated on the most loyal and proper means of inducing the
King to adopt them, in concert with his people ; that the out
break at Avellino had been unexpected and precipitate, without
doubt, but that the constitution called for by the nation and
the army would not have been the less proclaimed by him, in
a more regular and imposing form. Harmony, though some
what constrained, appeared to be established between the
general and the court. Public enthusiasm being kept by the
army and its chiefs within the limits of respect for the crown,
produced neither anarchy nor excess at Naples. The elections
sent a majority to the Neapolitan parliament of liberal but
prudent deputies, such as Ricciardi, Poerio, and Borelli, publi
cists, eminent political orators, representatives moderate — but
firm, of public opinion in Italy. This people, endowed by
nature with universal aptitude, raised its parliamentary elo
quence to a level with that of France and England, from the
first day of its discussions. The triumphant Carbonari alone
embarrased the new administration by their clamours and re
quirements. The King solemnly swore in the cathedral to
maintain the conquered institutions, and he voluntarily in
voked the vengeance of God upon his white hairs if he ever
violated his oath. Pepe resigned his dictatorship, and he
occupied himself exclusively in re-organising the army which
-Murat had inured to war upon the battle fields of Europe.
Sicily, always ready to proclaim its independence on every
shock given to the power of Naples and Austria, uneasy at the
signal which Naples had given to the independence of Italy,
rendered doubly necessary a display of armed force dispropor-
tioned to the extent and to the character of the kingdom.
Rome was the first to be excited, by the vicinity of this first
focus of revolution ; Tuscany, liberally and patriotically
governed by young Leopold, the then-adored disciple of the

1821.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 535

Intervention of the Northen powers.

first Leopold, waited without impatience, the development of
events ; Piedmont, always the ready echo of France, and the
ambitious adversary of Austria in lower Italy, was excited by
the result of the Neapolitan revolution, became initiated in
Carbonarism even to the King's palace, and meditated, amongst
the army and aristocracy, more than the people, a second ex
plosion at the other extremity of Italy.
XXIX.
Meanwhile the northern courts, attentive to the progress
of the liberal spirit, which they called the spirit of revolution,
moved by the humiliation of royalty at Madrid, dismayed by
the murder of a prince in France, uneasy about the contagion
which had displayed itself at Naples and Turin, and dreading
that this contagion which had crossed the Pyrenees and the
Alps, would soon pass the Tyrol and the Rhine, combined
together to stifle this threatening liberty in the triple outlet it
had opened for itself. Russia, Prussia, and Austria recalled
their ambassadors, closed their frontiers against those of
Naples and Spain, sternly interrogating these new governments
on the legitimacy of their origin and the sincerity of the kings
by whom they had been constituted. They armed with obvious
intentions, and marched towards the Italian frontier some
corps d'armee, which only awaited the authority of a congress
to intervene in the name of the Holy Alliance against the
independence of the nations in revolution. The British go
vernment, obliged to account for its political acts by the press
aud the parliamentary opposition, which enforced, at least, an
apparent respect for the national will, could not ostensibly
enter into this offensive league of kings. But her ambassadors,
secretly furthering the avowed intentions of the ministry,
still animated by the spirit of her great statesman, William
Pitt, everywhere betrayed their antipathy to the revolutionary
emancipation of the two peninsulas ; and endeavoured, if not
to combat, at least to render it abortive. They also appre
hended that the analogy of the institutions, and the joint
feeling of neighbourhood, might give France too great an

536 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 38.
The policy of France towards Italy.
ascendancy in Italy. France, on her side, was thrown hy these
external events into a contradictory position between her
national interests and those of her reigning dynasty, which
gave a fatal ambiguity to her acts and intentions. As a con
stitutional power she could not with propriety attack the con
stitutional principle by an hostile intervention in neighbouring
states, desirous of having the same freedom as herself; but as
a counter-revolutionary dynasty, she could not see without
alarm the revolution sapping her three family thrones at
Madrid, Naples, and Turin ; finally, as a representative mon
archy since the inauguration of the charter, she could not
demand of a representative chamber the necessary supplies for
a war against the principle of popular representation. Hence,
her diplomacy at Naples and Madrid necessarily assumed a
double, and contradictory direction, which made her govern
ment by turns the hope of the people and the ally of the
courts. This inconsistency was nowhere more flagrant than
at Naples and in Italy. The Duke of Narbonne, ambassador
of Louis XVIII., at the court of the Two Sicilies, a man who
concealed under a very modest exterior, great good sense and
an elevated mind, was imbued, though he had been an emigrant
in England, with the liberal spirit of the King, and with the ne
cessity of regenerating the house of Bourbon, by a sincere alliance
with the new interests in France and in Europe. He was recalled
from Naples precipitately, that the negotiations might be left in
the hands of M. de Fontenoy, a younger man, of less elevated
rank, and more easily disavowed if necessary. M. de Fontenoy,
though devoted in heart and mind to the Restoration, which
had appreciated and brought forward his talents, was one of
those men devoid of prejudice, and of superior judgment, who
take office not to flatter, but to serve. Nobody understood
better, or made them understand better at the Tuileries than
he did, in his despatches, the necessity for constitutional France
to make herself popular in Italy, by becoming, not the auxiliary
of revolutions, but the powerful and influential arbiter between
revolutions and thrones, and especially the antagonist of Austria.
It was only at this price, in the opinion of M. de Fontenoy,
that France could counterbalance Austria beyond the Alps, and

1821. J OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 537
Its contradictory nature.

England beyond the Pyrenees. He, therefore, recommended
moderation to the constitutionalists of Naples, and compliance
to King Ferdinand ; to the French ministry he recommended
resistance to the injunctions of the north, and arbitration
boldly aimed at by France, under the double title of a consti
tutional power and the Bourbon dynasty, between Italy and
Austria. He enjoyed great consideration in Upper Italy, with
the courts and liberals at the same time. To rectify the in
complete constitution of the Cortes, and then to take the inde
pendence of Italy under the protection of France, such was
the diplomacy of M. de Fontenoy and his legation.*
XXX.
M. Pasquier was at that time minister of foreign affairs ; a
man equal to the circumstances of the time, capable of applying
great penetration of mind to all affairs, and having no other
vice than forgetting, too often, when serving one side that he
had also served the other. This minister inspired our policy
in Italy and Spain with the same ideas as M. de Fontenoy ;
but while M. Pasquier transmitted to Naples the most prudent
and most intelligent instructions, in conformity with these
ideas of moderation and French arbitration, the Duke de
Blacas, ambassador at Rome, being invested with a general
authority over negociators of less elevated rank than his own,
forwarded to Naples contrary instructions and opposite di
rections to those of the official minister. M. de Blacas could
see no salvation for the monarchy of his master than in open
war against all liberal spirit of emancipation in the courts of
Italy, and in a frank and immediate alliance with Austria
against all independence and freedom in the peninsula ; being
willing to abandon these powers to Austria, provided Austria
would keep down their revolutions.
This same intestine struggle between the two principles
which contended for mastery in the government, existed at
Paris, and broke out from day to day, with greater animosity,
• The author of this history was at that time attached to the legation
of IL de Fontenoy, at Naples, and shared in the ideas of this diplomatist.

538 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 38.
The congress of Troppau and Laybach.
in the Chambers and in the press. The meeting of the north
ern sovereigns at Troppau, a city on the borders of Poland, to
discuss their affairs in common, and deliberate upon an act of
the Holy Alliance, so dear to Alexander, served as a text for
the recriminations of both parties. At the moment when
Austria, by the organ of M. de Metternich, was endeavouring
to convince the Emperor of Russia of the necessity, which he
still doubted, of an armed intervention in the two peninsulas,
a military revolt of one of the regiments of the garrison of St.
Petersburgh astonished Alexander, and convinced him of the
danger of the kings, by that which he had himself incurred
The three sovereigns agreed to act in common, and with
energy, against the progress of revolution in Italy as well as in
Spain. They separated for some weeks, to assemble again in
general congress at Laybach, where they summoned the old
King of Naples to appear, that his freedom or captivity might
be proved by his presence or his absence. After long agitations
amongst the people, and violent discussions in the Neapolitan
parliament, Ferdinand, by dint of repeated oaths to his people,
obtained permission to go, as a sovereign negociator, to the
congress of the allied powers. He embarked on board a vessel
of war, which was driven back the following day by a tempest,
and took a final departure with fresh oaths upon his lips, and
fresh recantations in his heart.

XXXI.
The liberal party of the French Chamber made indignant
speeches at this barefaced conspiracy of the absolute sovereigns
in their meetings at Troppau, and in their congress of
Laybach, against the independence of nations ; and complained
that France, either as a dupe or an accomplice, was lending a
hand to her own annihilation. The public mind, always more
sensitive in a warlike nation to external humiliation than to
domestic oppression, became embittered against the court and
the ministers. The ultra-royalists, on their side, lost all pa
tience, and reproached the ministers, Richelieu and Pasquier,
for temporising and compounding with revolutions. Interme-

1821.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 539

Failure of the Neapolitan revolution.

diate men, who were most in the confidence of this party, and
who had been admitted, without departments, into the council,
as guarantees for a royalist administration, such as M.M. de
Villele, De Corbiere, and Laine, were already objects of re
proach and bitter accusations in the tribune. General Don
nadieu, M. de Labourdonnaie, and M. de Lalot gave the
signal for a schism between the ultras and the moderates,
which threatened M. de Richelieu with an approaching fall
between the irritated liberals, and the unmanageable royalists.
These two parties exchanged, over the heads of the ministers,
insults and defiance which seemed the prelude of a civil war
Spain and Italy were the text of these mutual provocations.
General Foy, Lafayette, Benjamin Constant, Casimir Perier,
De Lameth, Manuel, Laffitte, and Girardin, rivalled in anger
and eloquence M.M. de Serres, De Vaublanc, De Labourdonnaie,
and Donnadieu. M. Pasquier, skilful in appeasing these
debates by speeches which gave the victory to neither side,
but made neither party desperate, secretly satisfied the court,
however, by sending to the congress of Laybach, negociators
agreeable to the Holy Alliance, such as M. de Blacas, M. de
Caraman, and M. de La Ferronays. In this congress, France,
fluctuating between England and Russia, declared herself
neutral ; but in thus keeping out of the action she, in reality,
gave up Italy to Austria. Sixty thousand men, commanded
by General Fremont, were already marching upon Rome and
Naples, through Tuscany. The old King Ferdinand advanced
with them, to reclaim his crown. What could a nation, dis
heartened by the desertion of all its natural allies, do against
the whole of Europe ? It was in vain that General Pepe led
the Neapolitan army to the defiles of Introdocco, to save, at
least, the national honour by a desperate but glorious struggle.
The Neapolitan revolution fell without a battle ; Pepe, aban
doned by his troops at the first cannon shot, could not rally a
single regiment up to Naples, He left his country for a long
exile, which was to be distinguised by the heroic defence of
Venice in his old age ; a soldier worthy of a better fortune,
betrayed by his countrymen and the necessity of the times.

540 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 38.
Movement in Piedmont.

XXXII.
By an ill-calculated co-operation, or by some chance equally
fatal to the Italian cause, Turin proclaimed the Spanish constitu
tion at the moment that Europe declared it to be incompatible with
the existence of monarchies, and that Austria was triumphing at
Naples. The King of Sardinia, Victor-Emanuel, a prince worthy
to reign, because he placed honour above the throne, refused to
ratify a revolution of the barrack and the palace, which required
him to violate his engagements with other powers, as well as his
own convictions. He abdicated, in favour of his absent brother
The young Prince de Carignan, presumptive heir to the crown,
who had fomented this revolution with the youthful nobility of his
court, and who was destined to perish a victim to ambition
more vast than his empire, assumed the regency, and excited the
revolution which took him for its chief; but as variable in its
manage ment, as he had been rash in its plot, he himself, a few
days after, disconcerted all resistance to the Austrian forces,
by abandoning the capital in the night, at the head of the
guards, and going to place himself, with one half the army,
under the orders of the Austrian general. An inconsiderate
boy in the palace as well as in the revolt, mischievous to
both parties by his inconsistency ; the instrument of a con
spiracy against the throne, and then of the throne against the
conspiracy ; giving up his friends after he had given up his
dynasty, and leaving it difficult to say if he had been more
a child than a conspirator, and more an accomplice of the
crown than of the revolution. His defection ruined the hopes
but not the courage of his friends ; Santa Rosa, Collegno,
St. Marsan, and other young chiefs of the military and
patriotic nobility of Turin, attempted an attack at Novara
upon the Austrians ; but the presence of the Prince de
Carignan in the ranks of their enemies, and the masses of
Bubna's forces, which had hastened from Milan, baffled their
heroism. They could only seal with their blood the cause
of the constitution, and of their country. The King of Sar
dinia returned to Turin, the constitutional chiefs, imprisoned

1821.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 541

His reception in the South.

or proscribed, expiated their temerity in fortress dungeons,
or in exile. The Prince de Carignan, but half pardoned by
the King his uncle, made a tour to the foreign courts, and
served with the French troops in Spain, to obliterate the
ambiguity of his conduct, and redeemed by noisy repentance
the right of succeeding to the throne

XXXIII
The equivocal neutrality which the French ministry had
preserved until then between the two parties of the assembly
in the negociations, — the irritation of the liberal party increased
by the fall of Naples and Turin, — the apostrophes of the right,
reproaching the ministers, — the manoeuvres of the secret council
of the Count d'Artois, — become more importunate in propor
tion to the concessions which had been made to it; finally
the certainty of having, through Madame du Cayla, the
favourite more than ever dear to the King, a party in the
heart of this prince, decided M. de Villele on retiring from
the council. He bore the responsibility without having the
direction of it. This secondary and thankless part of per
petual negotiator between the royalist party and the govern
ment, appeared to him, and with reason, disproportioned to
his political importance. He drew with him in his retirement
M. de Corbiere, a difficult but a faithful satellite of his policy
The ministry, thus abandoned to itself, tottered. The Duke
de Richelieu, informed of the court plots which began to be
framed against him in the familiar circle of the King's
brother, demanded an audience of him, and reminded him
respectfully, but with bitterness, that he had given his word
of honour as a gentleman, that he would not allow the
minister to be harassed by his friends, and had forgotten
that promise. The prince excused himself by the difficulties
he experienced in restraining the discontented royalists. The
civil and military conspiracies, badly extinguished in the blood
of the principal conspirators in the last plot, inspired the
court and the royalists of the two Chambers with inquietude;

542 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 38.
French Carbonarism.
which made them more importunate. They felt the ground
was mined beneath the throne.
The Italian Carbonarism produced, even on this side of
the Alps, explosions which were imputed to the ministers.
These plots, since avowed as a claim to distinction by the
chiefs who had then repudiated them as calumnies, had their
centre in Paris, and their ramifications in the military pro
vinces. The twentieth of March, Naples, Spain, and Pied
mont, had taught conspirators that to corrupt the fidelity of
the army was the most prompt and certain overthrow of
power. It was therefore, in the vicinity of great assemblages
of troops, and of the great military schools, that it was essential
to the French Carbonari to concentrate their secret societies,
and prepare their insurrections. Ventes, corresponding with
the grand central Vente of Paris, were organized at Nantes
and at Saumur. The grand Vente of Paris, composed nearly
of the same men as the directing committee already glanced
at in the preceding conspiracies, reckoned amongst its princi
pal members Corcelles, Kcechlin, De Schonen, Merilhou,
Buchez, Bazard, and Arnold Scheffer.
La Fayette was president. His name pronounced in a
whisper from Vente to Vente, in the regiments, the schools
and the workshops, authorised, accredited, and illustrated these
plots. Irtrepid and indefatigable, he devoted his person, his
family and even his life, to serve the revolution, provided it
would secure his memory. He established a connection with
Befort and with Saumur, preparing himself to resume, if
necessary, at the head of the army, the part he had formerly
played at the head of the national guard ; a constancy which
thirty years of disappointments and captivity could not weary.
The French Carbonarism as well as that of the Calabrias,
was principally manifested in its common hatred of the Bour
bons. The old military men hoped to obtain from the re
volution a third reign of Napoleon, recalled from St. Helena ;
the young ones hoped for Napoleon II. , rescued from Schcen
brunn ; some for the Duke of Orleans, others for the republic ;
La Fayette only looked for glory, and the decisive arbitration
between ail these parties

1821.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 543
Tidings of Napoleon's death reach France.

XXXIV,
Intelligence of immense interest temporarily interrupted
these plots and suspended, as it were, the respiration of
France. Napoleon was no more. We must pause for a while,
to recount this event, as Europe seemed to stop at the time
to listen to its recital. The political life of Napoleon had
ceased on the day he entered a British vessel to be conveyed
to St, Helena; but his moral life had survived in him, as
if to allow the actor to descend from the stage at the conclu
sion of the drama, as a spectacle to history and commencing
with himself. Providence had granted him, to crown all its
favours, the last favour it can bestow upon a great man, that
of having an interval of peace between his life and his death ;
to meditate with satisfaction, or repentance, on the acts of
his great career ; and to enjoy from that distance which gives
their true perspective to human events, the gaze, the admi
ration and the pity of posterity. Neither Caesar nor Alexander
obtained from their fortune this supreme gift of the gods.
The one died amidst the fever of youth and the delirium of
prosperity ; the other fell under twenty-seven dagger wounds.
having scarcely had time to recognise the hands of his murderers.
Napoleon saw at leisure, and from afar, the two aspects of his
destiny ; he heard prolonged to satiety the echo of his name ;
he descended step by step, seeing his shadow increase behind
him, the western declivity of his life. Trivial men have made
it a subject of regret that he did not vanish like Romulus in
a tempest, in the apogee of his glory and his power ; they
have designated as ill-fortune and downfall, his captivity and
removal far from the scene which he had filled with his
fame ; we call it his final happiness. He had, like Diocletian
in the garden of Salona, or like Charles V. in the monastery
of St. Just, those years of twilight, that allow the mind which
is disturbed by action, to divest itself of the clay of life before
it glides away into eternity, and which prepare the soul,
by the judgment it passes upon itself, for the judgment of
luturity and the judgment of God He had in addition

544 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 38;

Review of Napoleon's career.

those striking adversities, and those bitter expiations which
gratify envy, and soften through pity, the sentence of pos
terity. Let the unwise complain of such a fate ; pious men
of all religions, and men whose minds possess the instinct
of true glory in every age, will recognise in it a favour of
heaven.
XXXV
It must, however, be deplored, for the sake of his
memory- and for the dignity of misfortune, that Napoleon
profited but little by this favour of the pre-destined races
Having been accustomed from too early an age to a constant
and marvellous tide of posperity, he bore his misfortune
with more parade than real greatness of soul. He con
tended with adversity as if it had been a human offence,
instead of recognising, and being resigned to it, as the
merciful sovereignty of God. He had neither the volun
tary and philosophical indifference of Diocletian, nor the
pious and solitary self-denial of Charles V. Vanquished,
but, never submissive, contending with fate for its last
sordid remnant, rarely a man, always an emperor, even
after the empire had eluded his grasp, he too decidedly forgot
that which is greatest in a great man is not empire but nature.
He has thus given philosophy the right to think that if he
had not been master of the world by the concurrence of cir
cumstances with the force of his genius, he might have been
an ordinary soul in some private condition of life. He per
petually identified himself with the part he had to play.
This monologue of six years which he addressed to the
world from the summit of his rock, and the most trivial words
of which were registered by his courtiers to be transmitted to
his myrmidons as a gospel of party, was nothing more than a
long diplomatic note devoid of good faith, addressed to bis
partisans, and speaking in turns the language of all the fac
tions that he wished to nourish with his memory, instead of
being the disinterested, sincere, and religious effusion of a soul
which bequeaths with its greatness, its failings, its truth, and;

1821.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 515
The Memorial de Saintc Helene.
its repentance to the world. The book which contains this
monologue, the MSmorial de Sainte HeUne, is merely the pro
tocol of a fallen politician, anxious to justify himself by sophis
try, and the martyrology of ambition still raging for etiquette
and titles when it can no longer retain the universe. This
book which excited Europe for awhile, whether dictated by
Napoleon, or inspired by an unskilful desire to render his cause
popular after him, was a misfortune for the great man whom it
diminishes, while it seeks to exaggerate his greatness. Sin
cerity would have been more sublime, even silence would have
been more grand. When we wish to bequeath a colossal great
ness to the admiration of posterity, it is not enough to be a
colossus ; it is also necessary that the hand which transmits it
to the world should have sufficient compass to measure it
None of those faithful servants who made their names illustri
ous by their voluntary exile with their fallen master, had this
compass : a Quintus Curtius was wanting to this Alexander.
Napoleon alone couid record Napoleon. He tried to do so in
some pages, which are bronze and granite like his monuments :
a hero in style as he was in action. The pages of Las Casas
are those of a chamberlain, with the servility of a domestic,
and the blindness of a devotee, to be honoured solely for his
heart, for in him it was disinterested devotion to misfortune,
and the pious blindness of enthusiasm
XXXVI
During the long passage of the Northumberland, which
conveyed him to the Island of Saint Helena, Napoleon had won
the admiration of the English crew, by the ascendancy of his
name, by the contrast between his power of yesterday and his
present captivity, as well as by the calm freedom of his atti
tude. The soldiers love the soldier even in an enemy : gaolers
themselves are accessible to the radiance of glory and gran
deur that beams from the captive. A great name is a universal
majesty. The vanquished reigned over his conquerors. He
passed his time upon the ocean in1 a state of repose which
seemed to relieve him from himself, and which resembled
3 i i

546 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION, [BOOK 3S.
Napoleon lands at Saint Helena.
indifference rather than dejection. His long sleeps, his read
ing without object, his repasts with the admiral and his officers,
his games of reflection and calculation, his walks upon the
deck, his conversations with the officers and sailors, his con
templation of the sea and sky, his anticipations of the place and
occupations of his exile, some rapid retrospective glances upon the
last vicissitudes of Europe, which already seemed at a philosophi
cal distance from him, by the distant waves which every day in
creased the separation, filled up his two months' passage. He
did not yet feel the void left in his mind by the loss of the
world • it required time to dive into that void and find therein
his own nothingness. During the first days it was still filled
with the shadow of what it had so long possessed. Reality is
never any more than an image of the morrow. Napoleon did
not seem to feel this until he saw appear on the horizon the
arid, mountainous, and black-looking island, rising out of the
desert ocean before him. He landed, however, with the con
vulsive eagerness and precipitation of a mau impatient to see
the prison that has been prepared for him, and to conjecture
the fate in store for him in his exile. He had scarcely
put his foot on the shore when he mounted his horse, galloped
over the roads which led to the summit of the island, that he
might take it in with a single glance, and choose a residence
there to suit' his wishes and his taste. The aspect of this
mass of volcanic rocks, interspersed with hollow dells, pastoral
slopes, and rustic villas, where the passion of the English for
nature had forced the verdure of some budding plantations,
together with naked pinnacles and lofty summits covered with
heath and cork trees, a small commercial town, and a fort
animated by the arrival of vessels on their passage from India
to Europe ; this island, in short, so lost in an immense and
dazzling sea, often dotted with sails, under an ardent sky, but
in a climate tempered by the elevation and the clouds of the
mountains, did not make that sinister impression upon him
which weariness, acrimony, illness, and the complainings of
his companions in solitude subsequently changed into impreca
tions against this Corsica of another ocean. He had such a
longing for the air of the mountains, for the isolation of

1821.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 547

His life there

nature, for estrangement from places inhabited by crowds,
for solitude, and for liberty of thought and action, that he
refused to descend again to the town, even for a single night,
but established himself in the country cottage of an English
family of the island, named Balcombe, whither he had his bed
and books brought to him. A tent gave shelter to his servants.
He lived there for two months in a degree of leisure that
seemed to refresh his soul, occupying his time in reading,
working, riding and walking to different situations in the
island, and in agreeable intercourse with the family of his host.
During his encampment at this country residence and under
these tents, the English government had a much larger and
better house built for him at Longwood, — an old farm, on a
prominent but naked site, which he had himself chosen. He
made no delay in establishing himself there, with the numerous
suite of generals, friends, and servants, their wives and children,
by whom he was surrounded. The marshal of the palace,
Bertrand, his wife and son, M. and Madame de Montholon,
General Gourgaud, Doctor O'Meara, his first ralet de chambre
Marchand, his majordomo Cypriani, his butler Pierron, his
ordinary valets, Saint Denys and Noverras, his gentleman
usher Santini, his treasurer Rousseau, his equerries, his hunts
men, his cooks, his footmen, and the servants of his companions,
formed his household. The sum of 300,000 francs per annum.
frequently increased by supplementary grants, was appropriated
by the English government for the subsistence of this little
exiled court. A library, saddle horses, gardens, a wood,
rural labours, free and regular communication at all hours
amongst the exiles, a limited correspondence with Europe,
receptions, and audiences granted to curious travellers who
touched at the port, and who asked permission to be admitted,
such were the daily recreations at Longwood. Military posts,
commanded by a superior officer guarded the circuit of the
buildings and gardens A camp was established at a certain
distance, and out of sight of the house, to avoid giving
umbrage. Napoleon and the generals could go out on foot, or
on horseback, from sunrise till night, and traverse the summit
and even the whole island, accompanied at a distance by an

548 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 38.
Discontent of Napoleon with his exile.
English officer, charged solely to prevent any attempt to
escape. Such at the beginning was the respectful captivity,
which the complaints of Napoleon, and the companions of his
solitude, characterised as the dungeon and the martyrdom of
St. Helena. He appeared to find it tolerable at first. It was
soothed by the attentions of the admiral and governor of the
island, aud by the admiration of visitors. The day began with
conversation between the Emperor and his friends, in reading
the public journals received from Europe, in the dictations of
Napoleon to Bertrand and to Montholon on his campaigns,
epic notes on the poem of his life, comparable to those of
Caesar in ample recital, to Tacitus by the certainty and depth
of political sagacity. In these notes the historian is equal to
tne poet, the poet to the politician, the politician to the general.
The historian, the poet, the politician, and the general, are
therein comprised in one man, and that man is Napoleon !
The unoccupied hours of the remainder of the day were spent
under a tent pitched in the garden, in riding amidst the wood
of cork trees, in familiar chat round the evening lamp, in
reminiscences of the past and of their country, and in hopes
and conjectures about the future.
XXXVII.
The active mind sooner tires of repose than of labour. The
monotony of this life without any other events than his own
thoughts furnished, soon wearied Napoleon. The divisions, the
rivalships, the discontents, and the murmurs of some of his ser
vants, saddened and embittered his own mind. He suffered in
seeing others suffer impatiently for him and around him. There
was gossiping at Longwood as there had been in the palace of
the Tuileries. Too close an intimacy produced antipathies and
grievances. Wounded spirits are all the more susceptible, and
overwrought sensibility makes us unjust Napoleon's temper,
spoiled by this domestic uneasiness, excited him against a
captivity which made even his friends seem importunate to him.
He turned to poison the tolerance and freedom of his residence.
He persisted, with an affectation, which his flatterers consider

1S21 1 OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 519

Sir Hudson I.uwe.

heroic, but which history will judge as puerile, because it is
a misconception of his fortune, in exacting the titles of Emperor
and Majesty, which England, never having acknowledged the
Empire, was not officially bound to give him. He appealed to
heaven and earth against this breach of etiquette. He dictated'
notes on this trifle, as he would have done on the conquest or
the loss of Europe. The child of his own works, he preferred
his dignities to them. The islander issuing from Corsica to
distribute thrones amongst his family, forgot that he was greater
as a man than as the founder of dynasties already crumbled to
nothing, and that the only majesty of which he could not be
un-crowned was his name. After having debated, without ex
hausting it, this text of altercation for several years with the
authorities of the island, he declined the recreation and respect
which the visitors from both worlds bore to him in his solitude,
if they did not conform to this protocol. He soon after refused
to himself his rides to the different parts of the island, that he
might not suffer, as he said, by the presence even at a distance
of the officers of the governor, the appearance and humiliation
of captivity ; as if the island under his feet, the ocean before
his eyes, and even the sky above his head, were not walls and
witnesses of his banishment. He thus restricted with his own
hands the circuit of his residence, and changed by little and
little, his country residence into a prison. His health, which
required motion and horse exercise, as his mind did an exten
sive prospect, suffered from this change of temper. He pursued
slowly and obstinately the suicide of his captivity The arrival
at St. Helena of a new governor, Sir Hudson Lowe, rivetted
more narrowly his voluntary chains. This governor,— whom the
myrmidons of Napoleon, and Napoleon himself, persecuted with
gratuitous and violent accusations, such as the hallucinations o_
captivity only could inspire, treated by them as a sbirro* and
an assassin, — was neither criminal in thought against his cap
tive, nor cruel in his heart to misfortune. But overwhelmed
with the responsibility which weighed upon him, should the
agitator escape whom Europe had entrusted to his charge, o.

* Bailiff or Constable.

550 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 38.

Character of Sir Hudson Lowe.

contracted ideas, suspicious mind, jealous of forms, awkward hi
manner, and odious from his functions to his captives, he
annoyed Napoleon with restrictions, superintendence, orders,
visits, and even with attentions. He imparted too much to the
•duties of the governor of an island, and the guardian of an
European hostage, the appearance and harshness of a gaoler.
He may, therefore, be accused of impropriety, but not of cruelty.
He was the occasion rather than the cause of the sad end of
Napoleon. On reading attentively the correspondence and
notes exchanged under every pretext, between the adherents of
Napoleon and Sir Hudson Lowe, we are astonished at the
insults, the provocations and the invectives with which the
captive and his friends outraged the governor at every turn.
Napoleon, at this period endeavoured by cries of grief to excite
the pity of the British parliament, and to furnish a grievance to
the opposition against the ministry, with a view of effecting a
removal nearer to Europe. The desire of provoking insults by
insults, then to represent these insults as crimes to the indig
nation of the continent, and to make of Sir Hudson Lowe the
Pilate of this Napoleonic Calvary, is evident in all these notes.
It is also evident that the governor often irritated, sometimes
inquisitorial, always unskilful, felt himself the victim of his re
sponsibility. England which had claimed the odious part of
chaining up this European Prometheus, had to endure the re
probation of his cries and maledictions.
XXXVIII
The greater portion of the period of this captivity was con
sumed in these interminable quarrels between the captive and
his guardian, the rest in occasional conversations with the com
panions of his exile, which were evidently intended to produce
effect beyond his private circle and beyond the ocean, to palliate
his memory, revive his posthumous popularity, tarnish his
enemies, and inflame his partisans. These verbose and in
coherent commentaries on his life, edited by partial hands, have
neither the freedom nor the sincerity of the effusions of a heart
indifferent to the empire and to posterity. They are conn-

1821.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 551
Napoleon's conversation with his companions in exile.
dences of parade, in which the dissembled intention assumes
the guise of frankness. They throw no real light upon a mind
which transforms and diversifies itself under so many contra
dictory aspects, that it is impossible to discern truth from
sophistry, and nature from affectation. In religion, a philoso-
pherwith philosophers, an atheist with atheists, adeistwith deists,
a Christian with Christians, superstitious with the superstitious,
indifferent with the indifferent ; in politics, a republican with the
republicans, a democrat with the democrats, a royalist with the
royalists, a constitutionalist with the liberals, a despot with the
despots, prophesying by turns the triumph of kings, the triumph
of subjects, European domination by England, universal yoke
by Russia, the irresistible democracy of France, the explosion of
ideas and the reign ofthe sword, and offeringhimself to all systems
as the only balancer ofthe world, capable of doing all, accom
plishing all, and preserving all. In these conversations Napoleon
put forth as an oracle, enigmas or axioms of triple meaning, on
the past, the present, and the future, so that destiny cannot belie
the one without justifying the other. The tribune of the world,
of whom this rock is the tripod, and who seeks from thence not
to enlighten but to agitate Europe, he throws an echo to every
wind, the repetition of which is Napoleon. Always an actor
after the drama, he still performs a part when the curtain of
the world is drawn upon him, forgetting that the only eternal
part for man to act is man, and that the only immutable great
ness is truth. Therefore these conversations of St. Helena
fanaticise but do not touch. They afford no evidence for
history, but little interest for the human mind, and no emotion
for the heart. Except for his idolaters, this man who has
spoken for six years on the brink of his tomb, has spoken in
vain!
XXXIX
His friends and servants wearied, not with duty, but oi
patience, tired of separation from their families, of the climate,
of sickness, and of inquisition, quitted him, or tried to quit
him, under pretence of being torn from him by the persecution

552

HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 38.

Napoleon's last moments.

of the governor, or of rendering him more useful services in
Europe. Physical debility broke in upon him with despair.
He felt increasing attacks of the malady which had shortened
his father's life. " I sometimes have a desire to quit you," he
said to his last companions, Montholon and Bertrand. " That
is not difficult. I should escape from you the more easily by
suicide, since my religious principles do not at all trouble me.
I am one of those who believe that the punishments of the
other world have only been imagined as an addition to the
insufficient attractions we are promised there. After all, what
harm is it to return a little sooner to God ?" He suffered from
pain, from debility, from want of sleep, and from failing
strength, which made the light of day as disagreeable to him
as darkness. His mind alone was never enfeebled. He wit
nessed his slow destruction firm and impassible. His thoughts
always dwelt upon himself and he prepared to die gracefully
" I vegetate, I no longer live," he said to his servants. Nature,
however, prevailed at the last moment over the cold philosophy
of his approaching end, in the numerous testaments and codicils
he dictated to bequeath legacies to men and women who had
left traces of affection, of service, or of gratitude in his life.
His mother who still lived at Rome, his brothers, his sisters,
the companions, and servants of his exile, his generals, their
sons and daughters, those who had protected him in childhood,
his college friends, his first military companions, and his favou
rites when in power, received sums of money from him, out of
the millions he had left on quitting Paris in the coffers of M.
Laffitte, his banker, and the statues, the pictures, the arms, the
furniture, the manuscripts, the vases, the articles of domestic
furniture, consecrated by the use he had made of them, a dis
tribution from his heart, wherein the most distant reminiscences
were sought for with tenderness at the bottom of his memory.
Even his wife, who had forsaken him, was neither accused
nor execrated. He recollected that she was the daughter of
the Caesars, and that the protection of Austria would be with
drawn from a son whose mother he might have insulted. This
son, a prisoner like himself in the palace of Vienna, was the
only great sentiment through which he survived himself upon

1821.] OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE. 553
His death.
earth, his pride, his love, his dynasty, his name, his posterity.
He never shed a tear but for him.

LX.
Whether it was a return of the dying man to those early
impressions which revive towards the close of life, and bring
us back to the practice of our boyhood's worship ; or, whether a
political precaution of the founder of a dynasty, affecting to die
in official communion with the national faith, of which he had
been the restorer, Napoleon, who never spoke of religion but
as a political institution, the indifferent instrument of all
governments, was desirous of dying as a Christian, and attested
an authentic and, so to speak, an imperial faith, by the cere
monial of his death. The image of Christ dying on the cross,
pressed close to his mouth, closed the lips of this martyr to
ambition At the moment when the soul separated from the
body he exhibited no weakness unworthy of him. He awaited
his death as an exhibition, and composed his attitude even to
his last breath before the mirror of his fame. He demanded
to be buried with his arms and in his military costume, under
two willow trees near a spring, the shade and freshness of
which had been grateful to him during his last days. He
expired at length without pain and in silence, during a convul
sion of the elements, on the night of the 5th of May, 1821
The last words he stammered out were Anny and France, but
it could not be ascertained whether it was dream, delirium,
or adieu It was apprehended that the transmission of his body to
Europe might shake the continent, and he was buried, with
military honours, under the willow trees indicated by himself.
The intelligence of his death changed the immense terror
which had beset Europe during his life, into immense pity.
When people ceased to fear him, they ceased to hate. Impar
tial minds began to do him justice. Genius and glory were
not denied to him ; but it was deplored that so much genius
and so much glory had only been consecrated to the personal
greatness of one man, instead of being devoted to the amelio

554 HISTORY OF THE RESTORATION [BOOK 38.
Review of Napoleon.
ration of the world. This is where he failed to his destiny, to
God, to humanity, to France, and to himself. The fine part
of his character was not equalled by the good. He was the
greatest man of modern times, but he was also the most sterile
in results for the human race. He wasted France and Europe
for fourteen years, without imparting to them an idea, a li
berty, or a virtue. He shook the world without displacing it.
France, however, which owes him a severe judgment, owes
him also impartial gratitude. He made her illustrious, he
made her resound with the splendour of his own name, during
the early part of a century, through the universe. It is a
service to aggrandise the name of one's country, for the name
of a people is a spell in time and history, and a certain claim
to immortality.

END OF THE THIRD VOLUME.