CHAPTER VII

The Duc d'Orléans is given the title of _Royal Highness_--The coronation of Charles X.--Account of the ceremony by Madame la Duchesse d'Orléans--Death of Ferdinand of Naples--De Laville de Miremont--_Le Cid d'Andalousie_--M. Pierre Lebrun--A reading at the camp at Compiègne--M. Taylor appointed a royal commissioner to the Théâtre-Français--The curé Bergeron--M. Viennet--Two of his letters--Pichat and his _Léonidas_

My mother never knew anything of the story of my duel; she would have died of grief had she had the faintest suspicion of it. As we did not return to the office until nearly one o'clock, we had to tell Oudard everything; and he appeared quite content, after hearing Betz and Tallancourt's account, with the way his employé had conducted himself. Besides, the Palais-Royal had been in a constant state of fête since the accession of His Majesty Charles X. to the throne. The duc d'Orléans had just been granted the title of Royal Highness from the new king--a favour he had begged in vain from Louis XVIII. As we have already mentioned, Louis XVIII. persistently refused everybody who asked him to grant M. le Duc d'Orléans this privilege.

"He will always be sufficiently close to the throne," he would reply.

And in other ways, Charles X. made himself most popular.

As a pendant to his phrase, "Nothing is changed in France, there is simply one more Frenchman in it," he added another dictum, simpler still, and quite as much appreciated--

"My friends, let there be wider criticism!"

And in the midst of the general merrymaking the preparations for his coronation went on in sumptuous style.

The last few coronations had brought ill-fortune in their train. It will be remembered that, at Reims, Louis XVI. had quickly removed the crown from his head.

"What is the matter, sire?" asked the archbishop.

"That crown hurts me," replied Louis XVI. And, twenty years later, he died upon the scaffold.

Napoleon wished to be crowned by a higher official than an archbishop; he wished to have a pope, and had sent for Pius VII. to come from the Vatican at Rome to Notre-Dame at Paris.

"Il fallut presqu'un Dieu pour consacrer cet homme! Le prêtre, monarque de Rome, Vint sacrer son front menaçant, Car sans doute, en secret effrayé de lui-même, Il voulut recevoir son sanglant diadème Des mains d'où le pardon descend!"

Fifteen years later, Napoleon died at St. Helena! And now it was the turn of Charles X.

Every sovereign in Christendom had been informed of the solemn celebration, and sent their ambassadors extraordinary. Austria was represented by Prince Esterhazy; Spain by the Duke of Villa-Hermosa; Great Britain by the Duke of Northumberland; Prussia by General de Zastrow; and Russia by Prince Volkonski.

The king and the dauphin left the Tuileries at half-past eleven on the morning of 24 May, and set out for Compiègne. All went well as far as Fismes; but an accident augured ill to the king, whose reign was only to last six years, and to end in his exile. As they descended at Fismes, the batteries of the Royal Guard, which were mounted in a dingle to the left of the road, fired a salute to greet the king. The detonation and its echo were terrible, and at the noise of the firing the horses attached to the carriage containing the Ducs d'Aumont and de Damas, and the Counts de Cossé and Curial, ran away; the carriage was overturned and smashed to bits on the causeway. Two out of the four occupants of the carriage were seriously injured--MM. the Duc de Damas and Count Curial; the latter's case was worst, he had his collar-bone broken. Had it not been for the coachman's strength and presence of mind, the king himself would not have escaped a similar accident. His horses bolted; but the coachman had the sense not to try to stop them, and used all his efforts to keep them in the centre of the roadway; and after ten minutes' unrestrained career they calmed down.

At the village of Tinqueux the king found the Duc d'Orléans and the Duc de Bourbon awaiting him. The rain, which had never stopped pouring all morning, ceased, and the sun, which had not hitherto shown itself, now shone forth brilliantly. The king, M. le Dauphin, M. le Duc d'Orléans and M. le Duc de Bourbon entered the coronation coach, and in the language of the _Report of the Coronation_, "the whole of the way to Reims was one _arc de triomphe_."

After the coronation service, Charles X. signed the amnesty granted to men who had deserted from the navy and to political offenders. It was this amnesty that brought Carrel back to France. Thirteen years later, Charles X. died at Goritz.

Madame la Duchesse d'Orléans had been present at the coronation, and wrote an account of it in her private diary in Italian. On her return to Paris, she desired to have it translated into French, and commissioned Oudard to do it. Oudard was much embarrassed, and handed the album over to me, giving me a couple of days' holiday to translate it for him. This album was the book in which the Duchesse d'Orléans wrote her most secret thoughts and related her private deeds. I was not forbidden to read it, so of course I read it. However, there was not a single word throughout the book that could have put an angel to the blush, though it contained the actions and reflections of the Duchesse d'Orléans for the last ten years, though she never intended it to leave her own hands, not even to pass into those of the Duc d'Orléans, since it was for the Duc d'Orléans that the translation was being made. One thing above all struck me as I read, and that was the profound gratitude of Madame la Duchesse d'Orléans for the favours that the new king, Charles X., had lavished on the prince her husband, and for the kindness displayed every day towards her and her family by Madame la Duchesse de Berry.

Alas and alas! how many times the remembrance of that album came into my mind when I saw King Charles X. at Gratz, and Madame la Duchesse de Berry at Blaye, and it made me shudder as I thought of how deeply the religious-hearted Marie-Amélie must have suffered, when, because of what princes term "political necessities," the honour of the one, and the crown of the other, were broken in her husband's hands.

Another page also riveted my attention and kept me for a long time enthralled, wherein Madame la Duchesse d'Orléans related how lovingly and tactfully her husband broke to her the news of the death of her father, Ferdinand I. Now, Ferdinand I. was the very king who had kept my father a prisoner in the dungeons of Naples for eighteen months; the very same man who had allowed people to try and poison him three times, and once to attempt his assassination; he, the shepherd who had devoured his own flock during those terrible years of 1798-99, had just been called to render an account of his stewardship to the Lord. It was a strange coincidence that I, the son of one of the king's victims, should hold this album in my hands and read the sorrowful outpourings of the daughter's grief at the death of her father! What a strange juxtaposition of destiny and fortunes! However, he was dead, even as just men have to die; he who had watched those whom he called his friends hung before his very eyes, burnt beneath his very windows, disembowelled and torn to pieces in his very presence; the people whom a treacherous capitulation had yielded into his hands; those who, under another reign, might have been the honour of their king and the glory of the country!

On 3 January 1825 he was quietly sleeping, at two in the morning. His attendants heard him cough several times; then, at eight o'clock, as he had not summoned them to him according to his usual custom, the officers of his chamber, followed by the Court doctors, entered his room, and found him dead from a stroke of apoplexy. Ferdinand I. had just reigned sixty-five years, when he died at the age of seventy-four.

Oudard got his translation, which he re-copied in his own writing, and handed to the Duchesse d'Orléans as his own. True, he faithfully retailed to me the compliments he had received for it, adding that for which I was far more grateful--two tickets for the first representation of _Roman_ at the Théâtre-Français; it was a capital five-act comedy in verse, by de Laville de Miremont, already known because of _Folliculaire_, a piece more commendable for its action than for any other quality. I knew de Laville very well: an accusation by Lemercier worried him greatly. Lemercier had accused de Laville, who had occupied the post of Censor, of having suppressed his _Charles VI._ and of having afterwards used his plot and ideas. But, in the first place, de Laville plainly proved both by _Folliculaire_ and by _Roman_ that he did not need to borrow ideas from other people's plays; besides, he was utterly incapable of doing such an action. There was a charming creation in _Roman_: a father who was friendly to and almost a companion in the escapades of a son born to him when he was only twenty. Nothing could have been more natural than this situation, which de Laville was the first to employ in a play.

Owing to the kindness of Talma, I had several times seen the _Cid d'Andalousie._ Casimir Delavigne's example was infectious: Talma having taken part in comedy, Mademoiselle Mars asked why she might not play in tragedy; hence the new reunion of the two actors in the _Cid d'Andalousie_. But M. Pierre Lebrun, author of an _Ulysse_ which had not been played, or what is far worse, which had only run one or two nights, was not Casimir Delavigne. There was nothing at the time to support him as there had been in 1820 when, in _Maria Stuart_, he had had the sturdy framework of Schiller to fall back upon. Reduced to drawing from Spanish romanceros, which only suggested simple scenes, he was lacking in everything--power, originality and style, and in spite of the unusual support of both Talma and Mademoiselle Mars, who had doubled the power of a strong creator and who could not conceal the weakness of a feeble writer, the _Cid d'Andalousie_ fell flat at the first representation, managed to survive the second, upheld by hired applause, dragged on miserably for five or six nights, and then finally was taken out of the bill. This failure was the beginning of the fortune of M. Pierre Lebrun--Academician, peer of France and Manager of the Royal Printing-house.

O thou venerable deity, Mediocrity! Surely thou hast the secret of the precious essence given to Phaon by Venus to assure successfulness in this world of ours! Thou who for long rejected Hugo, Lamartine and Charles Nodier! Thou who left Soulié and Balzac to die without doing for them a third of what thou didst for M. Pierre Lebrun! Thou who ignored Alfred de Musset,--wisely, for all light of originality, all nervous strength, makes thy owl's eyes to blink! Thou whose leaden-based statue ought to be a hundred feet high, so that its shadow should fall on the Pont des Arts and the respectable monument to which it leads! O Mediocrity! sole divinity for whom France has not a 21 January, a 29 July or a 24 February! Thou whom I despise above everything else in the world, and would fain hate if I could ever hate anything! Look ever askance on me and be benign to my enemies, that is the sole favour I ask thee. And, on this condition, may thou remain in undisturbed possession of the future, as thou hast been of the past!

Now let us note well that the failure of the _Cid d'Andalousie_ took place in 1825. One might therefore reasonably have hoped that by 1838, thirteen years later, the unlucky _Cid_ would have been forgotten by everybody, even by its author. Nothing of the kind. At Compiègne, in his country house, the Duc d'Orléans entertained his comrades with sport in the forest by day, and at night he opened his drawing-rooms to those who preferred card-playing, dancing and conversation. One evening a fatal idea came into the unfortunate prince's head. Turning towards several poets who stood round, he said to them--

"Gentlemen, let us see which of you has some poetry to read to us."

Everybody kept silence, as will be readily understood, and moved a step or two backwards; except M. Pierre Lebrun, who stepped forward.

"I will, monseigneur," he said; and he sat down and drew a manuscript out of his pocket--think of it! a whole manuscript!--and, in the midst of the general silence, he read the title--

"Gentlemen, the _Cid d'Andalousie._"

They all stared at him; but there was no way out of it, they were trapped, and M. le Duc d'Orléans most of all. Upon my word, it was a great success. When the reading was over and compliments had been paid, the Duc d'Orléans said to me--

"Dumas, can you tell me what was the reason of the noise I heard by the side of the window, which interrupted M. Lebrun, towards the beginning of the third act?"

"Monseigneur," I replied, "it was A--, who squatted behind the curtains, where he could sleep more comfortably; but it would seem he had a nightmare: he gave a cuff to a small stand, and has smashed a table full of Sèvres china, for which he is excessively sorry."

"He need not be unhappy about it," said the Duc d'Orléans; "tell him he did quite right, and I will bear the cost of the china."

The poor duke was as wise a prince as Solomon, and as good as St. Louis!

In other respects, too, the Théâtre-Français was not very fortunate at this time. After playing the _Cid d'Andalousie_ of M. Lebrun, it put on M. de Comberousse's _Judith_ and _Bélisaire_, by M. de Jouy. An important change had taken place at the theatre in the rue de Richelieu. Baron Taylor had been appointed royal commissioner in place of M. Choron, upon the recommendation of MM. Lemercier, Viennet and Alexandre Duval.

When Charles X. returned to Paris after the coronation, and the Bishop of Orléans issued orders for prayers to be offered up in thanksgiving for the safe accomplishment of the ceremony just concluded, M. Bergeron, curé of the commune of Saint-Sulpice, canton of Blois, after delivering from his reading-desk the bishop's mandate, added these simple words:--

"My dearly beloved brethren, as Charles X. is not a Christian, as he desires to keep the Charter, which is an Act contrary to religion, we ought not to pray for him, any more than for Louis XVIII., who was the founder of that Charter; they are both damned. Those who agree with me, please rise."

And three hundred listeners out of four hundred rose, and by that act declared that they were entirely of the same opinion as their priest.

Alas! If the Academy could have known what kind of man Baron Taylor was, whom the order of Charles X. had introduced into the sanctuary of the Comédie-Française! If it could only have guessed that he was to open its doors to MM. Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo and de Vigny,[1] it would have followed the curé Bergeron's example and excommunicated King Charles x. But it knew nothing at all about it.

The first bad turn the new commissioner of the king did to his patrons was to have M. Viennet's _Sigismond de Bourgogne_ played, and M. Lemercier's _Camille._ I need hardly mention that both these plays fell flat. This did not discourage M. Lemercier: he decided to change his style of play, and began a melodrama called the _Masque de poix._ This elated M. Viennet, who, instead of changing his method, like his honoured confrère, made up his mind, on the contrary, to force his method into acceptance, and began by reading his _Achille_ in the salons, a play which had been written twenty years before, and which had been accepted ten years ago.

"Do you not think my Achille is very heroic?" he said to M. Arnault, after one of these readings.

"Yes," replied M. Arnault, "as fierce as a turkey-cock!"

But very few men could be more brilliant at repartee than M. Viennet. It was like watching a tilting bout in the lists to hear him, save that he never retorted when his adversary missed fire. He certainly offered a favourable target for such attacks, and people were not slow to avail themselves of their opportunities. Once, at Nodier's house, he went up to Michaud.

"Tell me, Michaud," he began, in a manner that was peculiarly his own,--"tell me what you think, I have just finished a poem of thirty thousand lines."

"It will need fifteen thousand men to read them," replied Michaud.

On another occasion, at a dinner party, M. Viennet made an attack upon Lamartine.

"He is a puppy," he said, "who thinks himself the greatest politician of his age, and who is not even the first poet!"

"At all events," Madame Sophie Gay retorted from the other end of the table, "he is not the last--that place is already occupied."

Besides everything M. Viennet wrote in verse--fables, comedies, tragedies, epistles and epic poems--he wrote a couple of letters in prose which are perfect models. We will quote them in toto and verbatim; extracts would not give a proper idea of their style. One was in reference to the nomination of Hugo as an officer of the Légion d'honneur; the other was in connection with his own nomination to the peerage. For M. Viennet was both a deputy and a peer of France, besides also being a Commander of the Légion d'honneur and a member of the Academy.

Here is M. Viennet's first letter:--

"MONSIEUR,--Je n'ai pas dit que je ne voulais plus porter la croix d'officier de la Légion d'honneur, depuis qu'on l'avait donnée au chef de l'école romantique.

"En ôtant mon ruban de la boutonnière où l'empereur l'avait placé, j'ai suivi seulement l'exemple de la plupart des généraux de la vieille armée, qui trouvaient plus facile de se faire remarquer en paraissant dans les rues sans décoration. Il ne s'agissait ici ni de romantiques ni de classiques.

"Il est tout naturel qu'un ministre romantique décore ses amis; il serait cependant plus juste de donner la croix de chevalier à ceux qui auraient eu le courage de lire jusqu'au bout les vers ou la prose de ces messieurs, et la croix d'officier à ceux qui les auraient compris. Je désire, en outre, qu'on n'en donne que douze par an aux écrivains qui font des libelles contre les grands pouvoirs de l'État, les ministres et les députés: il faut de la mesure dans les encouragements.--Agréez, etc., VIENNET"

And this is M. Viennet's letter about his nomination to the peerage of France:--

"MONSIEUR,--Sur la foi d'un journal judiciaire que je ne connais pas, vous publiez, que, des vendredi dernier, je me suis empressé d'écrire à M. Vedel, pour mettre opposition à la représentation des _Serments_, et vous accompagnez cette annonce d'une fort jolie épigramme contre cette comédie. L'épigramme me touche fort peu, elle sort peut-être de la même plume qui avait loué l'ouvrage quand l'auteur avait cessé d'être un homme politique. Je ne prétends pas l'empêcher de continuer, mais le fait n'est pas vrai et je me récrie. Il n'y a eu de ma part ni possibilité ni volonté de faire ce qu'on m'impute. Je suis parti vendredi de la campagne, et je suis arrivé chez moi, à Paris, vers les sept heures, sans me douter de ce que _le Moniteur_ avait publié, le matin, d'honorable pour moi. C'est mon portier qui m'a salué du titre de pair, attendu qu'il avait expédié, le matin même, pour mon village, une lettre officielle qui portait ce titre, et comme cette lettre ne m'est pas encore revenue, j'ignore à quel ministre je suis redevable de ce premier avis. Quant à ma volonté, elle n'existe point, elle n'existera jamais! c'est m'insulter que de me croire capable d'abjurer les travaux et les honneurs littéraires, pour un honneur politique. La Charte n'a pas établi d'incompatibilité entre le poète dramatique et le pair de France; si elle l'eût fait, j'aurais refusé la pairie. Les lettres et les succès de théâtre honorent ceux qui cultivent les unes et qui obtiennent les autres sans intrigue et sans bassesse. Au lieu d'y renoncer, je sollicite, au contraire, avec plus d'instance la représentation des _Serments_, la mise en scène d'une de mes tragédies et la lecture d'une comédie en cinq actes. Si vous avez quelque crédit auprès de M. le directeur du Théâtre-Français, veuillez l'employer en ma faveur. Les épigrammes dont on m'a poursuivi comme député sont bien usées; vous devez désirer qu'on en renouvelle la matière, et une nouvelle comédie, une nouvelle tragédie de moi, seraient de merveilleux aliments pour la verve satirique de mes adversaires. Rendons-nous mutuellement ce service; je vous en serai très-reconnaissant pour mon compte, et je vous prie d'agréer d'avance les remercîments de votre très-humble serviteur, VIENNET"

We will now return to Baron Taylor and the changes he brought about at the Théâtre-Français. At the Panorama-Dramatique he had produced _Ismaël et Maryam_ alone; _Bertram_ in collaboration with Nodier; and _Ali-Pacha_ with Pichat's assistance.

Pichat was a young man of twenty-eight at that time: a play of his, _Léonidas_, had been received two or three years before at the Théâtre-Français. Taylor extracted _Léonidas_ from the pandemonium he found himself in, and had it put in rehearsal. Talma was cast for the rôle of Léonidas:--not that his supreme intellect was mistaken about the part, which, dramatically speaking, was nothing at all; but in the matter of "business" it contained something fresh to do, and poor Talma, to the day of his death, was ever seeking new worlds, and, less fortunate than Vasco de Gama, he never succeeded in finding them. Besides, it was a very appropriate moment for the playing of _Léonidas_; all Europe was looking towards the successors of the three hundred Spartans. And the new piece, so it was announced in advance, was to be staged with unusual sumptuousness and unheard-of effects. I well remember the first performance of the tragedy of _Léonidas_, wherein one felt the dawn of new ideas, wherein every historic saying which immortalised the famous defence of the Thermopælians was felicitously adapted, and admirably rendered by Talma. One hemistich of the young Agis was Substituted for the written line. Agis wounded, fell, exclaiming--

"Ils sont tous morts ... Je meurs!..."

The play met with a most enthusiastic reception, on account of the circumstances under which it was played. It was a splendid success for Talma: he looked like an antique statue descended from its column. After the performance, when the curtain had fallen, I saw a noisy group of rejoicing people rush along the corridor and the foyer, anxious to convey their friendly congratulation. A fine-looking young man, with a face as radiant as a conquering Apollo, formed the centre and was the hero of the group. He was the author of _Léonidas._ Alas! he died only two years later--died before he had hardly lifted the intoxicating cup of success to his lips. But Taylor had at least the happiness of holding out to him the nectar which sweetened his last moments. Without Taylor, Pichat would have died in obscurity, and even though he were but an ephemeral meteor, many people, myself among the number, recollect the brilliant light he gave during his short career!

[Footnote 1: It will, of course, be understood that I place my own name and those of my honoured confrères according to the chronological order of the representations of _Henri III_, _Marion Delorme_ and _Othello._]