BOOK IV

Napoleon at Elba--Commencement of the Hundred Days--The return from Elba--Torpor of the Legitimacy--Article by Benjamin Constant--Order of the day of Marshal Soult--A royal session--Petition of the School of Law to the Chamber of Deputies--Plan for the defense of Paris--Flight of the King--I leave with Madame de Chateaubriand--Confusion on the road--The Duc d'Orléans and the Prince de Condé--Tournai--Brussels--Memories--The Duc de Richelieu--The King summons me to join him at Ghent--The Hundred Days at Ghent--Continuation of the Hundred Days at Ghent--Affairs in Vienna.

Bonaparte had refused to embark in a French ship, setting value at that time only on the English Navy, because it was victorious; he had forgotten his hatred, the calumnies, the outrages with which he had overwhelmed perfidious Albion; he saw none now worthy of his admiration save the triumphant party, and it was the _Undaunted_ that conveyed him to the harbour of his first exile. He was not without anxiety as to the manner in which he would be received. Would the French garrison hand over to him the territory which it was guarding? Of the Italian islanders, some wished to call in the English, others to remain free of all masters; the Tricolour and the White Flag waved on near headlands. All was arranged nevertheless. When it became known that Bonaparte was bringing millions with him, opinions generously decided to receive "the august victim." The civil and religious authorities were brought round to the same conviction. Joseph Philip Arrighi, the Vicar-General, issued a charge:

"Divine Providence," said the pious injunction, "has decreed that in future we shall be the subjects of Napoleon the Great. The island of Elba, raised to so sublime an honour, receives the Lord's Anointed in its bosom. We order that a solemn _Te Deum_ be sung by way of thanksgiving," etc.

[Sidenote: Napoleon in Elba.]

The Emperor had written to General Dalesme[231], commanding the French garrison, that he must make known to the people of Elba that "he had selected" their island for his residence in consideration of the gentleness of their manners and of their climate. He set foot on land at Porto-Ferrajo[232], amid the dual salute of the English frigate which had brought him and the batteries on shore. Thence he was taken under the parish canopy to the church, where the _Te Deum_ was sung. The beadle, the master of ceremonies, was a short, fat man, who was unable to join his hands across his person. Napoleon was next conducted to the mayor's, where his lodging was prepared. They unfurled the new Imperial Standard, a white ground intersected by a red stripe strewn with three gold bees. Three violins and two basses followed him with scrapings of delight The throne, hastily erected in the public ball-room, was decorated with gilt paper and pieces of scarlet cloth. The actor's side of the prisoner's nature accommodated itself to these displays: Napoleon made a serious business of trifles, even as he used to amuse his Court with little old-time games inside his palace at the Tuileries, going out afterwards to kill men by way of pastime. He formed his Household: it consisted of four chamberlains, three orderly-officers, and two harbingers of the palace. He stated that he would receive the ladies twice a-week, at eight o'clock in the evening. He gave a ball. He took possession, for his own residence, of the pavilion intended for the engineers. Bonaparte was constantly meeting in his life the two sources from which it had issued: democracy and the royal power; his strength was derived from the citizen masses, his rank from his genius; and therefore you see him pass without effort from the market-square to the throne, from the kings and queens who crowded round him at Erfurt[233] to the bakers and oilmen who danced in his barn at Porto-Ferrajo. He had something of the people among princes, and of the prince among the people. At five o'clock in the morning, in silk stockings and buckled shoes, he presided over his masons in the island of Elba.

Established in his Empire, inexhaustible in iron since the days of Virgil,

Insula inexhaustis Chalybum generosa metallis[234],

Bonaparte had not forgotten the outrages to which he had lately been subjected; he had not renounced his intention of tearing off his winding-sheet; but it suited him to seem buried, only to make some appearance of a phantom around his monument. That is why he was eager, as though thinking of nothing else, to go down into his quarries of specular iron and adamant; one would have taken him for the ex-inspector of Mines of his former States. He repented of having once appropriated the revenue of the forges of "Ilva" to the Legion of Honour: 500,000 francs now seemed to him worth more than a blood-bathed cross on the breast of his grenadiers.

"What was I thinking of?" he said. "But I have issued many stupid decrees of that nature."

He made a commercial treaty with Leghorn and proposed to make another with Genoa. At all hazards, he began to make five or six furlongs of high-road and designed the sites of four large towns, just as Dido laid out the boundaries of Carthage. A philosopher who had seen too much of human greatness, he declared that he intended thenceforth to live like a justice of the peace in an English county: and notwithstanding, on climbing a height which overlooks Porto-Ferrajo, these words escaped him at the sight of the sea which flowed up on every side at the foot of the cliffs:

"The devil! It must be owned that my island is very small!"

He had visited his domain within a few hours; he wished to join to it a rock called Pianosa.

"Europe will accuse me," he said, laughing, "of already having made a conquest."

The Allied Powers made merry over the fact that they had in derision left him four hundred soldiers: he needed no more to bring them all back to the flag.

Napoleon's presence on the coast of Italy, which had witnessed the commencement of his glory and which retains his memory, agitated everybody. Murat was his neighbour; his friends, strangers secretly or publicly landed at his retreat; his mother and his sister, the Princess Pauline, visited him; they expected soon to see Marie-Louise and her son arriving. A woman[235] did in fact appear, with a child[236]; she was received with great mystery, and went to live in a secluded villa in the most remote corner of the island: on the shores of Ogygia, Calypso spoke of her love to Ulysses, who, instead of listening to her, thought of how to defend himself against the suitors. After a two days' repose, the Swan of the North put out to sea again, to land among the myrtles of Baja, carrying away her little one in her white yawl.

[Sidenote: Madame Walewska.]

If we had been less trustful, it would have been easy for us to perceive an approaching catastrophe. Bonaparte was too near his cradle and his conquests: his funeral island should have been more distant and surrounded by more waves. It is inexplicable how the Allies had come to think of banishing Napoleon to the rocks where he was to serve his apprenticeship in exile: was it possible to believe that at the sight of the Apennines, that when smelling the powder of the fields of Montenotte, Areola and Marengo, that on discovering Venice, Rome and Naples, his three fair slaves, his heart would not be seized with irresistible temptations? Had they forgotten that he had stirred up the earth and that he had admirers and debtors everywhere, all of whom were his accomplices? His ambition was deceived, not extinguished; misfortune and revenge rekindled its flames: when the Prince of Darkness from the verge of the created universe looked upon man and the world, he resolved to destroy them.

Before bursting forth, the terrible captive restrained himself for some weeks. In the huge public bank at faro which he was holding, his genius negociated a fortune or a kingdom. The Fouchés, the Guzmans d'Alfarache swarmed. The great actor had long made his police the home of melodrama and had reserved the upper stage for himself; he amused himself with the vulgar victims who disappeared through the trap-doors of his theatre.

Bonapartism, in the first year of the Restoration, passed on from simple desire to action in the measure as its hopes increased and as it became better acquainted with the weak character of the Bourbons. When the intrigue had been hatched without, it was hatched within, and the conspiracy became flagrant. Under the able administration of M. Ferrand[237], M. de Lavallette[238] undertook the correspondence: the mails of the Monarchy carried the despatches of the Empire. Concealment was abandoned; the caricatures foretold a desired return: one saw eagles entering by the windows of the Palace of the Tuileries, through the doors of which issued a flock of turkeys; the _Nain jaune_[239] or _vert_ spoke of "_plumes de cane._" Warnings came from every side, and were disbelieved. The Swiss Government had gone out of its way to no purpose to inform His Majesty's Government of the intrigues of Joseph Bonaparte, who had retreated to the Pays de Vaud. A woman arriving from Elba gave the most circumstantial details of what was happening at Porto-Ferrajo, and the police sent her to prison. People held for certain that Napoleon would not venture any attempt before the dissolution of the Congress and that, in any case, his views would turn upon Italy. Others, still better advised, prayed that the "Little Corporal," the "Ogre," the "Prisoner," might land on the French coast; that would be too great a stroke of luck; they would settle him at one blow! M. Pozzo di Borgo[240] declared at Vienna that the delinquent would be strung up to the nearest tree. Were it possible to have certain papers, one would there find the proof that, as early as 1814, a military conspiracy was contrived and went side by side with the political conspiracy which the Prince de Talleyrand was conducting at Vienna, at Fouché's instigation. Napoleon's friends wrote to him that, if he did not hasten his return, he would find his place taken at the Tuileries by the Duc d'Orléans[241]: they imagine that this revelation served to hurry the Emperor's return. I am convinced of the existence of these plottings, but I also believe that the determinative cause which decided Bonaparte was simply the nature of his genius.

[Sidenote: Bonapartist intrigues.]

The conspiracy of Drouet d'Erlon[242] and Lefebvre-Desnoëttes had broken out. A few days before those generals rose in arms, I was dining with M. le Maréchal Soult, who had been appointed Minister of War on the 3rd of December 1814: a simpleton was describing Louis XVIII.'s time of exile at Hartwell; the marshal listened; to each detail he answered with the words:

"That's historical."

They used to bring His Majesty's slippers:

"That's historical!"

On days of abstinence the King used to take three new-laid eggs before commencing his dinner:

"That's historical!"

This reply struck me. When a government is not solidly established, every man whose conscience goes for nothing becomes, according to the greater or lesser amount of energy in his character, a quarter, or a half, or three-quarters of a conspirator; he awaits the decision of fortune: more traitors are made by events than by opinions.

Suddenly the telegraph announced to Napoleon's braves and to the doubters that the man had landed[243]: Monsieur[244] hurried to Lyons, with the Duc d'Orléans and Marshal Macdonald, and returned forthwith. Marshal Soult, denounced in the Chamber of Deputies, gave up his office on the 11th of March to the Duc de Feltre[245]. Bonaparte found facing him, as Minister of War of Louis XVIII. in 1815, the general who had been his last Minister of War in 1814.

The boldness of the enterprise was unprecedented. From the political point of view, this enterprise might be regarded as the irremissible crime and capital fault of Napoleon. He knew that the Princes still assembled at the Congress, that Europe still under arms would not suffer him to be reinstated; his judgment must have warned him that a success, if he obtained one, would be only for a day: he was offering up to his passion for reappearing on the scene the repose of a people which had lavished its blood and its treasures upon him; he was laying open to dismemberment the country from which he derived all that he had been in the past and all that he will be in the future. In this fantastic conception lay a ferocious egoism and a terrible absence of gratitude and generosity towards France.

All this is true according to practical reason, for a man with a heart rather than brains; but, for beings of Napoleon's nature, there exists a reason of another sort; those creatures of lofty renown have ways of their own: comets describe curves which evade calculation; they belong to nothing, they seem good for nothing; if a globe finds itself on their passage, they shatter it and return into the abysses of the sky; their laws are known to God alone. Extraordinary individuals are monuments of human intelligence; they are not its rule.

Bonaparte, therefore, was persuaded to his enterprise less by the false reports of his friends than by the needs of his genius: he took up the cross by virtue of the faith that was in him. To a great man, to be born is not everything: he must die. Was Elba an end for Napoleon? Could he accept the sovereignty of a vegetable-patch, like Diocletian[246] at Salona? If he had waited till later, would he have had more chances of success, at a time when his memory would have aroused less emotion, when his old soldiers would have left the army, when new social positions would have been adopted?

Well, then, he committed a fool-hardy act against the world: at the commencement he must have believed that he had not deceived himself as to the spell of his power.

[Sidenote: The return from Elba.]

One night, that of the 25th of February, at the end of a ball of which the Princess Borghese was doing the honours, he made his escape with victory, long his comrade and accomplice; he crossed a sea covered with our fleets, met two frigates, a ship of 74 guns and the man-of-war brig _Zéphyr_, which spoke and questioned him; he himself replied to the captain's questions; the sea and the waves saluted him, and he pursued his course. The deck of the _Inconstant_, his little ship, served him as a room for exercise and as a writing-closet; he dictated amid the winds and had copies made, on that shifting table, of three proclamations to the army and to France; some feluccas, carrying his companions in adventure, flew the white flag strewn with stars around his admiral bark. On the 1st of March, at three o'clock in the morning, he struck the coast of France between Cannes and Antibes, in the Golfe Jouan; he landed, strolled along the _riviera_, gathered violets, and bivouacked in a plantation of olive-trees. The dumfoundered population retired. He avoided Antibes and threw himself into the mountains of Grasse, passing through Sernon, Barrème, Digne and Gap. At Sisteron, twenty men could have stopped him, and he found nobody. He went on, meeting no obstacle among those inhabitants who, a few months earlier, had wished to cut his throat. Whenever a few soldiers entered the void which formed around his gigantic shadow, they were invincibly drawn on by the attraction of his eagles. His fascinated enemies sought him and did not see him; he hid himself in his glory, as the lion of the Sahara hides himself in the rays of the sun to avoid the sight of the dazzled hunters. Enveloped in a fiery cyclone, the bloody phantoms of Areola, Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, Friedland, Eylau, the Moskowa, Lützen, Bautzen formed his retinue with a million of dead. From the midst of this column of fire and smoke, there issued, at the entrance to the towns, a few trumpet-blasts mingled with the signals of the tricoloured _labarum_: and the gates of the town fell. When Napoleon crossed the Niemen, at the head of four-hundred thousand foot and a hundred thousand horse, to blow up the palace of the Tsars in Moscow, he was less astonished than when, breaking his ban and flinging his irons in the faces of the kings, he came alone, from Cannes to Paris, to sleep peacefully at the Tuileries.

Beside the prodigy of the invasion of one man must be placed another which was the consequence of the first: the Legitimacy was seized with a fainting-fit; the failure of the heart of the State attacked the members and rendered France motionless. For twenty days, Bonaparte marched on by stages; his eagles flew from steeple to steeple and, along a road of two hundred leagues the Government, masters of everything, disposing of money and men, found neither the time nor the means to cut a bridge, to throw down a tree, so as to delay, at least by an hour, the progress of a man to whom the populations offered no opposition, but whom also they did not follow.

This torpor on the part of the Government seemed the more deplorable inasmuch as public opinion in Paris was greatly excited; it would have countenanced anything, despite the defection of Marshal Ney. Benjamin Constant wrote in the newspapers:

"After visiting our country with every plague, he left the soil of France. Who would not have thought that he was leaving it for ever? Suddenly he appears, and again promises Frenchmen liberty, victory and peace. The author of the most tyrannical Constitution that ever ruled France, he speaks to-day of liberty! But it was he who, during fourteen years, undermined and destroyed liberty. He had not the excuse of memory, the habit of power; he was not born in the purple. It was his fellow-citizens whom he enslaved, his equals whom he loaded with chains. He had not inherited power; he desired and meditated tyranny: what liberty is he able to promise? Are we not a thousand times more free than under his empire? He promises victory, and three times he forsook his troops, in Egypt, in Spain and in Russia, abandoning his companions in arms to the triple agony of cold, destitution and despair. He brought upon France the humiliation of invasion; he lost the conquests which we had made before him. He promises peace, and his name alone is a signal for war. The nation unhappy enough to serve him would again become the object of European hatred; his triumph would be the commencement of a combat to the death against the civilized world.... He has therefore nothing to claim, nor to offer. Whom could he convince, or whom seduce? War at home, war abroad: those are the gifts which he brings us."

[Sidenote: Soult's order of the day.]

Marshal Soult's Order of the Day, dated 8 March 1815, repeats very nearly the ideas of Benjamin Constant, with an effusion of loyalty:

"SOLDIERS,

"The man who lately, before the eyes of Europe, abdicated the power which he had usurped, and which he had so fatally abused, has landed on French soil, which he was never to see again.

"What does he want? Civil war. What does he seek? Traitors. Where will he find them? Shall it be among those soldiers whom he has so often deceived and sacrificed by misleading their valour? Shall it be in the heart of those families which the mere sound of his name still fills with terror?

"Bonaparte despises us enough to believe us capable of abandoning a lawful and dearly-beloved Sovereign to share the fate of a man who is no longer more than an adventurer. He believes this, the madman, and his last act of insanity reveals him to us as he is!

"Soldiers, the French Army is the bravest army in Europe; it will also be the most faithful.

"Let us rally round the banner of the lilies, at the voice of the father of the people, the worthy heir of the virtues of Henry the Great. He himself has traced for you the duties which you have to fulfil. He places at your head that Prince, the model of French knighthood, who, by his happy return to our country, has already once driven out the usurper, and who to-day, by his presence among us, will destroy his sole and last hope."

Louis XVIII. appeared on the 16th of March in the Chamber of Deputies; the destinies of France and of the world were at stake. When His Majesty entered, the deputies and the strangers in the galleries uncovered and rose; cheers shook the walls of the house. Louis XVIII. slowly mounted the steps of his throne; the Princes, the marshals and the captains of the guards ranged themselves on either side of the King. The cheers ceased; none spoke: in that interval of silence, one seemed to hear the distant footsteps of Napoleon. His Majesty, seated, cast his eyes over the assembly, and in a firm voice delivered this speech:

[Sidenote: The King's speech.]

"GENTLEMEN,

"At this critical moment, when the public enemy has penetrated into a part of my kingdom and threatens the liberty of all the remainder, I come into your midst to knit yet more closely the ties which, uniting you to myself, constitute the strength of the State; I come, by addressing you, to make manifest my feelings and my wishes to the whole of France.

"I have seen my country again; I have reconciled it with foreign Powers, who will, you may be sure, be faithful to the treaties which have restored peace to us; I have laboured for the good of my people; I have received, I continue daily to receive the most touching marks of its love; could I, at sixty years of age, better end my career than by dying in its defense?

"I fear nothing, therefore, for myself; but I fear for France: he who comes to kindle among us the torches of civil war brings with him also the scourge of foreign war; he comes to put back our country under his iron yoke; he comes, lastly, to destroy the Constitutional Charter which I have given you, that Charter which will be my proudest title in the eyes of posterity, that Charter which all Frenchmen cherish and which I here swear to maintain: let us then rally round it."

The King was still speaking, when a fog spread darkness through the house; eyes were turned towards the ceiling to ascertain the cause of that sudden gloom. When the King-Lawgiver ceased to speak, the cries of "Long live the King!" were renewed, amid tears.

"The assembly," the _Moniteur_ truly says, "electrified by the King's sublime words, stood up, its hands stretched towards the throne. One heard only the words: 'Long live the King! We will die for the King! The King in life and death!' repeated with an enthusiasm which will be shared by every French heart"

It was, in fact, a pathetic sight: an old, infirm King who, in reward for the murder of his family and twenty-three years of exile, had brought France peace, liberty, forgiveness of all outrages and all misfortunes; this patriarch of sovereigns coming to declare to the deputies of the nation that, at his age, after seeing his country again, he could not better end his career than by dying in defense of his people! The Princes swore fidelity to the Charter; those tardy oaths were closed with that of the Prince de Condé and with the adhesion of the father of the Duc d'Enghien. This heroic race on the verge of extinction, this race of the patrician sword seeking behind liberty a shield against a younger, longer and more cruel plebeian sword offered, by reason of a multitude of memories, a spectacle that was extremely sad.

When Louis XVIII.'s speech became known outside, it aroused unspeakable enthusiasm. Paris was wholly Royalist, and remained so during the Hundred Days. The women in particular were Bourbonists.

The youth of to-day worships the memory of Bonaparte, because it is humiliated by the part which the present Government makes France play in Europe; the youth of 1814 hailed the Restoration, because the latter had thrown down despotism and set up liberty. In the ranks of the Royal Volunteers were included M. Odilon Barrot[247], a large number of pupils of the School of Medicine and the whole of the School of Law[248]; the last, on the 13th of March, addressed this petition to the Chamber of Deputies:

"GENTLEMEN,

"We offer our services to our King and country; the whole School of Law asks to go to the front. We will abandon neither our King nor our Constitution. Faithful to French honour, we ask you for arms. The feeling of love which we bear to Louis XVIII. is answerable to you for the constancy of our devotion. We want no more irons, we want liberty. We have it, and they come to snatch it from us. We will defend it to the death. Long live the King! Long live the Constitution!"

In this energetic, natural and sincere language, one feels the generosity of youth and the love of liberty. They who come to tell us to-day that the Restoration was received by France with dislike and sorrow are ambitious men who are playing a game, or new-comers who have never known Bonaparte's oppression, or old imperialized revolutionary liars who, after applauding the return of the Bourbons with the rest, now, according to their habit, insult the fallen and return to their instincts of murder, police and servitude.

*

The King's Speech had filled me with hope. Conferences were held at the house of the President of the Chamber of Deputies, M. Lainé. I there met M. de La Fayette: I had never seen him except at a distance, at another period, under the Constituent Assembly. The proposals were various and for the most part weak, as happens in peril: some wished the King to leave Paris and fall back upon the Havre; others spoke of moving him to the Vendée; one stammered out unfinished sentences; another said that we must wait and see what was coming: what was coming was very visible, for all that. I expressed a very different opinion: oddly enough, M. de La Fayette supported it, and warmly[249]. M. Lainé and Marshal Marmont were also of my opinion. I said:

[Sidenote: My advice to the government.]

"Let the King keep his word; let him stay in his capital. The National Guard is on our side. Let us make sure of Vincennes. We have the arms and the money; with the money we shall overcome weakness and cupidity. If the King leaves Paris, Paris will admit Bonaparte; Bonaparte master of Paris is master of France. The army has not gone over to the enemy as a whole; several regiments, many generals and officers have not yet betrayed their oaths: if we hold firm, they will remain faithful. Let us disperse the Royal Family, let us keep only the King. Let Monsieur go to the Havre, the Duc de Berry[250] to Lille, the Duc de Bourbon to the Vendée, the Duc d'Orléans to Metz; Madame la Duchesse and M. le Duc d'Angoulême[251] are already in the South. Our different points of resistance will prevent Bonaparte from concentrating his forces. Let us barricade ourselves in Paris. Already the national guards of the neighbouring departments are coming to our aid. Amid this movement, our old Monarch, protected by the will of Louis XVI., will remain peacefully seated on his throne at the Tuileries, with the Charter in his hand; the diplomatic body will range itself round him; the two Chambers will meet in the two wings of the Palace; the King's Household will encamp in the Carrousel and in the Tuileries Gardens. We shall line the quays and the water-terrace with guns: let Bonaparte attack us in this position; let him carry our barricades one by one; let him bombard Paris, if he please and if he have mortars; let him make himself odious to the whole population, and we shall see the result of his enterprise! Let us resist for but three days, and victory is ours. The King, defending himself in his palace, will arouse universal enthusiasm. Lastly, if he must die, let him die worthy of his rank; let Napoleon's last exploit be to cut an old man's throat. Louis XVIII., in sacrificing his life, will win the only battle he will have fought; he will win it for the benefit of the freedom of the human race."

Thus I spoke: one is never entitled to say that all is lost so long as one has attempted nothing. What could have been finer than an old son of St. Louis overthrowing, with Frenchmen, in a few moments, a man whom all the confederate kings of Europe had taken so many years to lay low?

This resolution, desperate in appearance, was very reasonable at bottom and offered not the smallest danger. I shall always remain convinced that, had Bonaparte found Paris hostile and the King present, he would not have tried to force them. Without artillery, provisions, or money, he had with him only troops collected at random, still wavering, astonished at their sudden change of cockade, at their oaths taken headlong on the roads: they would promptly have become divided. A few hours' delay and Napoleon was lost; it but needed a little heart. Already, even, we could rely on a portion of the army; the two Swiss regiments were keeping their faith: did not Marshal Gouvion Saint-Cyr make the Orleans garrison resume the white cockade two days after Bonaparte's entry into Paris? From Marseilles to Bordeaux, all recognised the King's authority during the whole month of March: at Bordeaux, the troops were hesitating; they would have remained with Madame la Duchesse d'Angoulême, if the news had come that the King was at the Tuileries and that Paris was being defended. The provincial towns would have imitated Paris. The loth Regiment of the line fought very well under the Duc d'Angoulême; Masséna was proving himself crafty and uncertain; at Lille, the garrison responded to Marshal Mortier's stirring proclamation. If all those proofs of a possible fidelity took place in spite of a flight, what would they not have been in the case of a resistance?

Had my plan been adopted, the foreigners would not have ravaged France afresh; our Princes would not have returned with the hostile armies; the Legitimacy would have been saved through itself. One thing alone would have to be feared after success: the too great confidence of the Royalty in its strength, and, consequently, attempts upon the rights of the nation.

Why did I arrive at a period in which I was so ill-placed? Why have I been a Royalist against my instinct, at a time when a miserable race of courtiers was unable either to hear or to understand me? Why was I flung into that troop of mediocrities, who took me for a raver when I spoke of courage, for a revolutionary when I spoke of liberty?

A fine question of defense, indeed! The King had no fear, and my plan rather pleased him through a certain "Louis-Quatorzian" grandeur; but other faces had lengthened. They packed up the Crown diamonds (formerly purchased out of the privy-purse of the Sovereigns), leaving thirty-three million crowns in the treasury and forty-two millions in securities. Those sixty-five millions were the produce of taxation: why was it not returned to the people, rather than left to tyranny!

A dual procession passed up and down the stair-cases of the Pavillon de Flore; people were asking what they were to do: no answer. They applied to the captain of the guards; they questioned the chaplains, the precentors, the almoners: nothing. Vain talk, vain retailing of news. I saw young men weep with rage when uselessly asking for orders and arms; I saw women faint with anger and contempt. Access to the King was impossible; etiquette closed the door.

[Sidenote: A Royal order: "Hunt him down."]

The great measure decreed against Bonaparte was an order to "hunt him down[252]:" Louis XVIII., with no legs, "hunting down" the conqueror who bestrode the earth! This form of the ancient laws, renewed for the occasion, is enough to show the compass of mind of the statesmen of that period. "To hunt down" in 1815! "Hunt down!" And "hunt" whom? "Hunt" a wolf? "Hunt" a brigand chieftain? "Hunt" a felon lord? No: "hunt" Napoleon, who had "hunted down" kings, who had seized and branded them for all time on the shoulder with his indelible "N"!

From this order, when considered more closely, sprang a political truth which no one saw: the Legitimate House, estranged from the nation for three-and-twenty years, had remained at the day and place at which the Revolution had caught it, whereas the nation had progressed in point of time and space. Hence the impossibility of understanding and meeting one another; religion, ideas, interests, language, earth and heaven, all were different for the people and for the King, because they were separated by a quarter of a century equivalent to centuries.

But if the order "to hunt down" appears strange, owing to the preservation of the old idiom of the law, had Bonaparte originally the intention of acting better, although employing a newer language? Papers of M. d'Hauterive[253], catalogued by M. Artaud[254], prove that it cost great difficulty to prevent Napoleon from having the Duc d'Angoulême shot, in spite of the official document in the _Moniteur_, a show document which remains to us: he thought it wrong of the Prince to have defended himself. And yet the fugitive from Elba, when leaving Fontainebleau, had recommended the soldiers to be "faithful to the monarch" whom France had chosen. Bonaparte's family had been respected; Queen Hortense had accepted from Louis XVIII. the title of Duchesse de Saint-Leu; Murat, who still reigned in Naples, saw his kingdom sold by M. de Talleyrand only during the Congress of Vienna.

This period, in which all are lacking in frankness, oppresses the heart: every one threw out a profession of faith as it were a foot-bridge to cross the difficulty of the day, free to change his direction, the difficulty once passed; youth alone was sincere, because it was near its cradle. Bonaparte solemnly declared that he renounced the crown; he departed, and returned after nine months. Benjamin Constant printed his vehement protest against the tyrant, and he changed in twenty-four hours. It will be seen later, in another book of these Memoirs, who inspired him with the noble impulse to which the fickleness of his nature did not permit him to remain faithful. Marshal Soult excited the troops against their old leader; a few days later he was roaring with laughter at his own proclamation in Napoleon's closet at the Tuileries, and became Major-general of the army at Waterloo; Marshal Ney kissed the King's hands, swore to bring him Bonaparte locked up in an iron cage, and handed over to the latter all the corps under his command. And the King of France, alas? He declared that, at the age of sixty years, he could not better end his career than by dying in defense of his people ... and fled to Ghent! At sight of this incapacity for truth in men's feelings, at the want of harmony between their words and their deeds, one feels seized with disgust for the human kind.

Louis XVIII., on the 16th of March, was declaring his intention of dying in the midst of France; had he kept his word, the Legitimacy might have lasted another century; nature herself seemed to have taken from the old King the power of retreating by chaining him about with wholesome infirmities; but the future destinies of the human race would have been trammelled by the accomplishment of the resolution of the author of the Charter. Bonaparte hastened to the assistance of the future; that Christ of the power for evil took the new man sick of the palsy by the hand, and said to him:

"Arise, take up thy bed, and walk[255]."

*

It was evident that a scamper was being contemplated: for fear of being detained, they did not even warn those who, like myself, would have been shot within an hour after Napoleon's entry into Paris. I met the Duc de Richelieu in the Champs-Élysées:

"They are deceiving us," he said; "I am keeping watch here, for I do not propose to await the Emperor at the Tuileries all by myself."

[Sidenote: Flight of Louis XVIII.]

On the evening of the 19th, Madame de Chateaubriand had sent a servant to the Carrousel, with instructions not to return until he had the certainty of the flight of the King. At midnight, as the man had not come in, I went to my room. I had just gone to bed, when M. Clausel de Coussergues entered. He told us that His Majesty had left and had gone in the direction of Lille. He brought me this news on the part of the Chancellor, who, knowing me to be in danger, was violating secrecy on my behalf and sent me twelve thousand francs recoverable on my salary as Minister to Sweden. I was obstinately bent on remaining, not wishing to leave Paris until I should be physically certain of the royal removal. The servant who had been sent to reconnoitre returned: he had seen the Court carriages go by. Madame de Chateaubriand pushed me into her carriage, at four o'clock in the morning on the 20th of March. I was in such a fit of fury that I knew neither where I was going nor what I was doing.

We passed out through the Barrière Saint-Martin. At dawn, I saw crows coming down peacefully from the elms on the high-road where they had spent the night, to take their first meal in the fields, without troubling their heads about Louis XVIII. and Napoleon: they were not obliged to leave their country and, thanks to their wings, they were able to laugh at the bad road along which I was being jolted. Old friends of Combourg, we were more alike in the old days when, at break of day, we used to breakfast on mulberries from the brambles in the thickets of Brittany!

The roadway was broken up, the weather rainy, Madame de Chateaubriand poorly: she looked every moment through the little window at the back of the carnage to see if we were not being pursued. We slept at Amiens, where Du Cange[256] was born; next at Arras, the birth-place of Robespierre[257]: there I was recognised. When we sent for horses, on the morning of the 22nd, the postmaster said that they had been engaged for a general who was taking to Lille the news of "the triumphal entry of the Emperor-King into Paris;" Madame de Chateaubriand was dying of fright, not for herself, but for me. I ran to the post-office and removed the difficulty with money.

On arriving under the ramparts of Lille, at two in the morning of the 23rd, we found the gates closed; the orders were not to open them to any one whomsoever. They could not, or would not, tell us if the King had entered the town. I induced the postillion for a few louis to make for the other side of the place, outside the glacis, and to drive us to Tournay; in 1792, I had covered the same road on foot, during the night, with my brother. On arriving at Tournay, I learnt that Louis XVIII. had certainly entered Lille with Marshal Mortier, and that he meant to defend himself there. I despatched a courier to M. de Blacas, asking him to send me a permit to be received into the place. My courier returned with a permit from the commandant, but not a word from M. de Blacas. Leaving Madame de Chateaubriand at Tournay, I was getting into the carriage again to go to Lille, when the Prince de Condé arrived. We learnt through him that the King had gone and that Marshal Mortier had had him accompanied to the frontier. From these explanations it became clear that Louis XVIII. was no longer at Lille when my letter arrived there.

The Duc d'Orléans followed close after the Prince de Condé. Under an apparent dissatisfaction, he was glad, at bottom, to find himself out of the hurly-burly; the ambiguousness of his declaration and of his behaviour bore the stamp of his character. As to the old Prince de Condé, the Emigration was his household god. He had no fear of Monsieur de Bonaparte, not he; he fought if they liked or went away if they liked: things were a little muddled in his brain; he was none too clear as to whether he should stop at Rocroi to give battle there or go to dine at the White Hart. He struck his tents a few hours before us, telling me to recommend the coffee at the inn to the members of his Household whom he had left behind him. He did not know that I had sent in my resignation on the death of his grandson; he was not very sure that he had had a grandson; he only felt a certain increase of glory in his name, which might come from some Condé whom he had forgotten.

Do you remember my first passing through Tournay with my brother, at the time of my first emigration? Do you remember, in that connection, the man transformed into a donkey, the girl from whose ears grew corn-spikes, the rain of ravens that set everything on fire[258]? In 1815, indeed, we ourselves were a rain of ravens; but we set nothing on fire. Alas, I was no longer with my unfortunate brother! Between 1792 and 1815, the Republic and the Empire had passed: what revolutions had also been accomplished in my life! Time had ravaged me like the rest. And you, the young generations of the moment, let twenty-three years come, and then tell me in my tomb what has become of your loves and your illusions of to-day.

The two brothers Bertin had arrived at Tournay: M. Bertin de Vaux[259] returned from there to Paris; the other Bertin, Bertin the Elder, was my friend. You know through these Memoirs what it was that attached me to him.

[Sidenote: I follow the King to Ghent.]

From Tournay we went to Brussels: there I found no Baron de Breteuil, nor Rivarol, nor all those young aides-de-camp who had become dead or old, which is the same thing. No news of the barber who had given me shelter. I did not take up the musket, but the pen; from a soldier I had become a paper-stainer. I was looking for Louis XVIII.; he was at Ghent, where he had been taken by Messieurs de Blacas and de Duras[260]: their first intention had been to ship the King to England. If the King had consented to this plan, he would never have reascended the throne.

Having gone into a lodging-house to look at an apartment, I perceived the Duc de Richelieu smoking, half-outstretched on a sofa, at the back of a dark room. He spoke to me of the Princes in the most brutal manner, declaring that he was going to Russia and that he would not hear another word about those people. Madame la Duchesse de Duras, on arriving in Brussels, had the sorrow to lose her niece there.

I loathe the Brabant capital; it has never served me except as a passage to my exiles; it has always brought sorrow upon myself or my friends.

An order of the King summoned me to Ghent. The Royal Volunteers and the Duc de Berry's little army had been disbanded at Béthune, in the middle of the mud and of the accidents of a military breaking-up: touching farewells had been exchanged. Two hundred men of the King's Household remained and were quartered at Alost; my two nephews, Louis and Christian de Chateaubriand, formed part of that corps.

I had been given a billet of which I did not avail myself; a baroness whose name I have forgotten came to see Madame de Chateaubriand at the inn and offered us an apartment in her house: she implored us with so good a grace!

"You must pay no attention," she said, "to anything my husband says: his head is a little... you understand? My daughter also is a trifle eccentric; she has terrible moments, poor child! But the rest of the time she is as gentle as a lamb. Alas, it is not she who causes me the greatest trouble, but my son Louis, the youngest of my children: without God's help, he will be worse than his father!"

Madame de Chateaubriand politely refused to go and live with such rational people.

The King, well-lodged, having his service and his guards, formed his council. The empire of that great monarch consisted of a house in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, which house was situated in a town which, although the birthplace of Charles V.[261], had been the chief town of a prefecture of Bonaparte's: those names comprise between them a goodly number of centuries and events.

[Sidenote: And join his Ministry.]

The Abbé de Montesquiou being in London, Louis XVIII. appointed me Minister of the Interior _ad interim._[262] My correspondence with the "departments" did not give me much to do; I easily kept up my correspondence with the prefects, sub-prefects, mayors and deputy-mayors of our good towns, on the inner side of our frontiers; I did not repair the roads much, and I let the steeples tumble down; my budget hardly enriched me; I had no secret funds; only, by a crying abuse, I was a "pluralist:" I was still His Majesty's Minister Plenipotentiary to the King of Sweden, who, like his fellow-townsman Henry IV.[263], reigned by right of conquest, if not by right of birth. We discoursed round a table covered with a green cloth in the King's closet. M. de Lally-Tolendal, who was, I think, Minister of Public Instruction, delivered speeches even more voluminous and more inflated than his cheeks: he quoted his illustrious ancestors the Kings of Ireland and muddled up his father's[264] trial with those of Charles I. and Louis XVI. He refreshed himself in the evening, after the tears, the sweat and the words which he had shed at the council, with a lady who had come all the way from Paris out of enthusiasm for his genius; he virtuously strove to cure her, but his eloquence betrayed his virtue and drove the dart more deeply.

Madame la Duchesse de Duras had come to join M. le Duc de Duras among the exiles. I will speak no more ill of misfortune, because I have spent three months with that admirable woman, talking of all that upright minds and hearts can find in a conformity of tastes, ideas, principles and feelings. Madame de Duras was ambitious for me: she alone saw at once what I might be worth in political life; she always deplored the envy and short-sightedness which kept me removed from the King's counsels; but she even much more deplored the obstacles which my character placed in the way of my fortune: she scolded me, she wanted to correct me of my indifference, my candour, my ingenuousness, and to make me adopt habits of courtierism which she herself could not endure. Nothing, perhaps, leads to greater attachment and gratitude than to feel one's self under the patronage of a superior friendship which, by virtue of its ascendancy over society, passes off your defects as good qualities, your imperfections as an attraction. A man protects you through his worth, a woman through your worth: that is why, of those two empires, one is so hateful, the other so sweet.

Since I have lost that great-hearted person, gifted with a soul so noble, with an intelligence which combined something of the strength of the thought of Madame de Staël with the grace of the talent of Madame de La Fayette[265], I have never ceased, while mourning her, to reproach myself with any unevenness of temper with which I may sometimes have wounded hearts that were devoted to me. Let us keep a close watch upon our character! Let us remember that, with a profound attachment, we can nevertheless poison days which we would buy back again at the price of all our blood. When our friends have sunk into the grave, what means have we to repair our trespasses? Our useless regrets, our vain repentings, are those a remedy for the pain that we have given them? They would have preferred one smile from us during their life than all our tears after their death.

The charming Clara[266] was at Ghent with her mother. We two made up bad couplets to the air of the _Tyrolienne._ I have held many pretty little girls on my knees who are young grandmothers to-day. When you have left a woman, married in your presence at sixteen years of age, if you return sixteen years later, you find her of the same age still:

"Ah, madame, you have not put on a day!"

No doubt: but it is the daughter to whom you are saying so, the daughter whom you will also lead up to the altar. But you, a sad witness to both hymens, you treasure up the sixteen years which you received at each union: a wedding-present which will hasten your own marriage with a white-haired lady, rather thin.

[Sidenote: Marshal Victor.]

Marshal Victor had come to join us, at Ghent, with an admirable simplicity: he asked for nothing, never teased the King with his assiduity; one scarcely saw him; I do not know whether he ever had the honour and the favour of being invited on a single occasion to His Majesty's dinner-party. I have met Marshal Victor since; I have been his colleague in office, and I have always perceived the same excellent nature. In Paris, in 1823, M. le Dauphin was very harsh to that honest soldier: it was very good of this Duc de Bellune to repay such easy ingratitude with such modest devotion[267]! Candour carries me away and touches me, even when, on certain occasions, it attains the final expression of its ingenuousness. For instance, the marshal told me of his wife's[268] death in the language of a soldier, and he made me weep: he pronounced coarse words so quickly, and changed them so chastely, that one might even have written them.

M. de Vaublanc[269] and M. Capelle[270] joined us. The former used to say that he had some of everything in his portfolio. Do you want some Montesquieu? Here you are. Some Bossuet? Here it is! In proportion as the game seemed about to take a different turn, more travellers arrived. The Abbé Louis and M. le Comte Beugnot alighted at the inn where I was lodging. Madame de Chateaubriand was suffering from terrible fits of choking, and I was sitting up with her. The two new-comers installed themselves in a room separated from my wife's only by a thin partition; it was impossible not to hear, unless by stopping one's ears: between eleven and twelve at night the new arrivals raised their voices. The Abbé Louis, who spoke like a wolf and in jerks, was saying to M. Beugnot:

"You, a minister? You'll never be one again! You have committed one stupidity after the other!"

I could not clearly hear M. le Comte Beugnot's answer, but he spoke of thirty-three millions left behind in the Royal Treasury. The abbé, apparently in anger, pushed a chair, which fell down. Through the uproar I caught these words:

"The Duc d'Angoulême? He'll have to buy his national property at the gates of Paris. I shall sell what remains of the State forests. I shall cut down everything. The elms on the highroads, the Bois de Boulogne, the Champs-Élysées: what's the use of all that, eh?"

Brutality formed M. Louis' principal merit; his talent lay in a stupid love of material interests. If the Minister of Finance drew the forests after him, he had doubtless a different secret from that of Orpheus, who "made the woods go after him with his fail; fiddling." In the slang of the time, M. Louis was known as a "special" man; his speciality of finance had led him to accumulate the tax-payers' money in the Treasury in order to let it be taken by Bonaparte. Napoleon had had no use for this special man, who was in no sense an unique man, and who was at the most good enough for the Directory.

The Abbé Louis had gone to Ghent to claim his office; he was in very good favour with M. de Talleyrand, with whom he had solemnly officiated at the first federation in the Champ de Mars: the bishop was the celebrant, the Abbé Louis the deacon, and the Abbé Desrenaudes[271] the sub-deacon. M. de Talleyrand, recollecting this admirable profanation, used to say to the Baron Louis:

"Abbé, you were very fine as the deacon in the Champ de Mars!"

We endured this shame under the great tyranny of Bonaparte: ought we to have endured it later?

The "Most Christian" King had screened himself from any reproach of bigotry: he owned in his Council a married bishop, M. de Talleyrand; a priest living in concubinage, M. Louis; a non-practising abbé, M. de Montesquiou.

The last-named, a man as feverish as a consumptive, gifted with a certain glibness of speech, had a narrow and disparaging mind, a malignant heart, a sour character. One day, when I had made a speech at the Luxembourg on behalf of the liberty of the press, the descendant of Clovis, passing in front of me, who went back only to the Breton Mormoran, caught me a great blow with his knee in my thigh, which was not in good taste; I gave him one back, which was not polite: we played at the Duc de La Rochefoucauld and the Coadjutor[272]. The Abbé de Montesquiou humorously called M. de Lally-Tolendal "an English beast."

[Sidenote: The fish dinners at Ghent.]

In the rivers at Ghent they catch a very dainty white fish: we used, _tutti quanti_, to go to eat this good fish in a suburban road-side inn, while waiting for the battles and the end of empires. M. Laborie never failed us at our meetings: I had first met him at Savigny when, fleeing from Bonaparte, he came in at Madame de Beaumont's by one window and made his way out by another. Indefatigable at work, renewing his errands as often as his bills, as fond of doing services as others are of receiving them, he has been calumniated: calumny is not the impeachment of the calumniated, but the excuse of the calumniator. I have seen men grow tired of the promises in which M. Laborie was so rich; but why? Illusions are like torture: they always help to pass an hour or two[273]. I have often led by the head, with a golden bridle, old hacks of memory unable to stand on their legs, which I took for young and frisky hopes.

I also met M. Mounier[274] at the white-fish dinners, a sensible and upright man. M. Guizot deigned to honour us with his presence[275].

A _Moniteur_[276] had been started at Ghent: my report to the King of the 12th of May[277], inserted in that journal, proves that my feelings on the liberty of the press and on foreign domination have at all times been the same. I can quote the following passages to-day; they in no way belie my life:

"SIRE,

"You were preparing to crown the institutions of which you had laid the foundation-stone.... You had fixed a period for the commencement of the hereditary peerage; the ministry would have gained greater unity; the ministers I would have become members of the two Chambers, according to the true spirit of the Charter; a law would have been brought in to allow the election of a member of the Chamber of Deputies before the age of forty, so that citizens might have had a real political career. It was proposed to discuss a penal code for press offenses, after the adoption of which law the press would have been entirely free, for that freedom is inseparable from all representative government....

"Sire, and this is the occasion solemnly to protest it: all your ministers, all the members of your Council, are inviolably attached to the principles of a wise liberty; they derive from you that love of laws, of order and of justice without which there can be no happiness for a people. Sire, let us be permitted to say that we are ready to shed the last drop of our blood for you, to follow you to the ends of the earth, to share with you the tribulations which it will please the Almighty to send you, because we believe before God that you will maintain the Constitution which you have given to your people, and that the sincerest wish of your royal heart is the liberty of Frenchmen. Had it been otherwise, Sire, we would all have died at your feet in defense of your sacred person; but we would have been only your soldiers, we would have ceased to be your councillors and your ministers....

"Sire, at this moment we share your royal sadness; there is not one of your councillors and ministers who would not give up his life to prevent the invasion of France. You, Sire, are a Frenchman, we are Frenchmen! Alive to the honour of our country, proud of the glory of our arms, admirers of the courage of our soldiers, we would be willing, in the midst of your battalions, to shed the last drop of our blood to bring them back to their duty or to share lawful triumphs with them. We can only look with the deepest sorrow upon the ills that are ready to break over our country."

Thus, at Ghent, did I propose to add to the Charter that which it still lacked, while displaying my sorrow at the new invasion which was threatening France: nevertheless, I was only an exile whose wishes were in contradiction with the facts which could again open the gates of my country to me. Those pages were written in the States of the allied sovereigns, among kings and Emigrants who detested the liberty of the press, in the midst of armies marching to conquest of whom we were, so to speak, the prisoners: these circumstances perhaps add some strength to the feelings which I venture to express.

[Sidenote: The _Rapport au Roi._]

My report on reaching Paris made a great noise; it was reprinted by M. Le Normant the Younger, who risked his life upon this occasion, and for whom I had all the difficulty in the world to obtain a barren warrant of printer to the King. Bonaparte acted, or allowed others to act, in a manner unworthy of him: on the occasion of my report, they did what the Directory had done on the appearance of Cléry's Memoirs; they falsified fragments of it: I was made to propose to Louis XVIII. stupid ideas for the revival of feudal rights, for the tithes of the clergy, for the recovery of the national property, as though the printing of the original piece in the _Moniteur de Gand_ at a fixed and known date, did not confound the imposture. The pseudonymous writer entrusted with the production of an insincere pamphlet was a soldier fairly high up in rank: he was dismissed after the Hundred Days; his dismissal was ascribed to his conduct towards me; he sent his friends to me; they begged me to intervene, lest a man of merit should lose his sole means of existence: I wrote to the Minister of War and obtained a retiring-pension for this officer[278]. He is dead: his wife has remained attached to Madame de Chateaubriand by a feeling of gratitude to which I was far from having any claim. Certain proceedings are too highly prized; the most ordinary persons are susceptible to such feelings of generosity. A name for virtue is cheaply acquired: the superior mind is not that which pardons, but that which has no need of pardon.

I do not know where Bonaparte, at St. Helena, discovered that I had "rendered essential services at Ghent:" if he judged the part I played too favourably, at least there lay behind his opinion an appreciation of my political value.

*

I avoided at Ghent, as far as I could, intrigues, which were opposed to my character and contemptible in my eyes; for, at bottom, I perceived in our paltry catastrophe the catastrophe of society. My refuge against the idlers and rogues was the Enclos du Béguinage. I used to walk round that little world of veiled or tuckered women, consecrated to different Christian works: a calm region, placed like the African quicksands on the edge of the tempests. There no incongruity shocked my ideas, for the sentiment of religion is so lofty that it is never irrelevant to the gravest revolutions: the solitaries of the Thebaid and the Barbarians, destroyers of the Roman world, are in no way discordant facts or mutually exclusive existences.

I was graciously received in the close as the author of the _Génie du Christianisme_: wherever I go, among Christians, the curates flock round me; next come the mothers bringing me their children: the latter recite to me my chapter on the First Communion. Then appear unhappy persons who tell me of the good I have had the happiness to do them. My passage through a Catholic town is announced like that of a missionary or a physician. I am touched by this dual reputation: it is the only agreeable memory of myself that I retain; I dislike myself in all the rest of my personality and my reputation.

I was pretty often invited to festive dinners in the family of M. and Madame d'Ops, a venerable father and mother surrounded by some thirty children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. At M. Coppens', a banquet which I was obliged to accept was prolonged from one in the afternoon to eight in the evening. I counted nine courses: they began with the preserves and finished with the cutlets. The French alone know how to dine methodically, just as they alone know how to compose a book.

[Sidenote: Diversions at Ghent.]

My "ministry" kept me at Ghent; Madame de Chateaubriand, less busy, went to see Ostend, where I had embarked for Jersey in 1792. I had travelled, a dying exile, down the same canals along whose banks I now walked, still an exile, but in perfect health: there has always been something fabulous in my career! The miseries and joys of my first emigration revived in my thoughts; I saw England again, my companions in misfortune, and Charlotte, whom I was to meet once more. There is no one like myself to create a real society by calling up shadows; it goes so far that the life of my memories absorbs the feeling of my real life. Even persons with whom I have never occupied myself, if they come to die, invade my memory: one would say that none can become my companion if he has not passed through the tomb, which leads me to think that I am a dead man. Where others find an eternal separation, I find an eternal union; when one of my friends departs this earth, it is as though he had come to make my home his own; he never leaves me again. According as the present world retires, the past world returns to me. If the actual generations scorn the generations that have grown old, they waste their disdain where I am concerned: I am not even aware of their existence.

My Golden Fleece had not yet reached Bruges[279], Madame de Chateaubriand did not bring it to me. At Bruges, in 1426, "there was a man whose name was John[280]," who invented or perfected the art of painting in oils: let us be grateful to John of Bruges[281]; but for the propagation of his method, Raphael's master-pieces would be obliterated to-day. Where did the Flemish painters steal the light with which they illumined their pictures? What ray from Greece strayed to Batavia's shore?

After her journey to Ostend, Madame de Chateaubriand took a trip to Antwerp. There she saw, in a cemetery, plaster souls in purgatory, smeared all over with fire and black. At Louvain, she recruited a stammerer, a learned professor, who came expressly to Ghent to gaze upon a man so out of the ordinary as my wife's husband. He said to me, "Illus... ttt... rr...;" his speech fell short of his admiration, and I asked him to dinner. When the hellenist had drunk some curaçao, his tongue became loosened. We got upon the merits of Thucydides, whom the wine made us find clear as water. By dint of keeping up with my guest, I ended, I believe, by talking Dutch; at least, I no longer understood what I was saying.

Madame de Chateaubriand spent a bad night at the inn at Antwerp: a young Englishwoman, recently confined, lay dying; during two hours she made her groans heard; then her voice weakened, and her last moan, which the stranger's ear could scarcely catch, was lost in an eternal silence. The cries of this traveller, solitary and forsaken, might be taken as a prelude to the thousand voices of death about to rise at Waterloo.

The customary solitude of Ghent was rendered more striking by the foreign crowd which was then enlivening it and which was soon to disperse. Belgian and English recruits were learning their drill on the squares and under the trees of the public walks; gunners, contractors, dragoons were landing trains of artillery, herds of oxen, horses which struggled in the air while they were being let down in straps; canteen-women came on shore carrying the sacks, the children, the muskets of their husbands: all these were going, without knowing why and without having the smallest interest in it, to the great _rendez-vous_ of destruction which Bonaparte had given them. One saw politicians gesticulating along a canal, near a motionless angler, Emigrants trotting from the King's to "Monsieur's," from "Monsieur's" to the King's. The Chancellor of France, M. Dambray, in a green coat and a round hat, with an old novel under his arm, walked to the Council to amend the Charter; the Duc de Lévis[282] went to pay his court in a pair of old loose shoes, which dropped from his feet, because, brave man and new Achilles that he was, he had been wounded in the heel. He was very witty, as can be judged by the selection from his Reflexions.

The Duke of Wellington used to come occasionally to hold a review. Louis XVIII. went out every afternoon in a coach and six, with his First Lord of the Bed-chamber and his guards, to drive round Ghent, just as though he had been in Paris. If he met the Duke of Wellington on his road, he would give him a little patronizing nod in passing.

[Sidenote: The dignity of Louis XVIII.]

Louis XVIII. never lost sight of the pre-eminence of his cradle; he was a king everywhere, as God is God everywhere, in a manger or in a temple, on an altar of gold or of clay. Never did his misfortune wring the smallest concession from him; his loftiness increased in the ratio of his depression; his diadem was his name; he seemed to say, "Kill me, you will not kill the centuries inscribed upon my brow." If they had scraped his arms off the Louvre, it signified little to him: were they not engraved on the globe? Had commissioners been sent to scratch them off in every corner of the universe? Had they been erased in India, at Pondichéry; in America, at Lima and Mexico; in the East, at Antioch, Jerusalem, Acre, Cairo, Constantinople, Rhodes, in the Morea; in the West, on the walls of Rome, on the ceilings of Caserta and the Escurial, on the arches of the halls of Ratisbon and Westminster, in the escutcheon of all the kings? Had they been torn from the needle of the compass, where they seemed to proclaim the reign of the lilies to the several regions of the earth?

The fixed idea of the grandeur, the antiquity, the dignity, the majesty of his House gave Louis XVIII. a real empire. One felt its dominion: even Bonaparte's generals confessed it; they stood more intimidated before that impotent old man than before the terrible master who had commanded them in a hundred battles. In Paris, when Louis XVIII. accorded to the triumphing monarchs the honour of dining at his table, he passed without ceremony before those princes whose soldiers were camping in the court-yard of the Louvre; he treated them like vassals who had only done their duty in bringing men-at-arms to their liege-lord. In Europe there is but one monarchy, that of France; the destiny of the other monarchies is bound up in the fate of that one. All the Royal Houses are of yesterday beside the House of Hugh Capet[283], and almost all are its daughters. Our old royal power was the old royalty of the world: from the banishment of the Capets will date the era of the expulsion of the kings.

The more impolitic that haughtiness on the part of the descendant of St. Louis (it became fatal to his heirs), the more pleasing was it to the national pride: the French rejoiced at seeing sovereigns who, when conquered, had borne the chains of a man, bear, as conquerors, the yoke of a dynasty.

The unshaken faith of Louis XVIII. in his blood is the real might that restored his sceptre; it was that faith which twice let fall upon his head a crown for which Europe certainly did not believe, did not pretend that she was exhausting her populations and her treasures. The soldier-less exile was to be found at the issue of all the battles which he had not delivered. Louis XVIII. was the Legitimacy incarnate; it ceased to be visible when he disappeared.

*

At Ghent, I took walks by myself, as I do wherever I go. The barges gliding along narrow canals, obliged to cross ten or twelve leagues of pasture-land to reach the sea, appeared to be sailing over the grass; they reminded me of the canoes of the savages in the wild-oat marshes of Missouri. Standing at the edge of the water, while they were dipping lengths of brown holland, I let my eyes wander over the steeples of the town; its history appeared to me on the clouds in the sky: the citizens of Ghent revolting against Henri de Châtillon, the French governor; the wife[284] of Edward III.[285] bringing forth John of Gaunt[286], the stock of the House of Lancaster; the popular reign of van Artevelde[287]:

"Good people, who moves you? Why are you so incensed against me? In what can I have angered you?"

"You must die!" cried the people: it is what Time cries to all of us. Later, I saw the Dukes of Burgundy; the Spaniards came. Then the pacification, the sieges and the captures of Ghent.

When I had done musing among the centuries, the sound of a little bugle or a Scotch bagpipe would rouse me. I saw living soldiers hastening to join the buried battalions of Batavia: ever destructions, powers overthrown; and, at last, a few faded shadows and some names that had passed.

Sea-board Flanders was one of the first cantonments of the companions of Clodion[288] and Clovis. Ghent, Bruges and the surrounding country furnished nearly a tenth of the grenadiers of the Old Guard: that terrible army was in part drawn from the cradle of our fathers, and came in its turn to be exterminated beside that cradle. Did the Lys[289] give its flower to the arms of our Kings?

Spanish manners leave the impress of their character: the buildings of Ghent retraced for me those of Granada, less the sky of the Vega. A large town almost bereft of inhabitants, deserted streets, canals as deserted as the streets.... twenty-six islands formed by those canals, which were not the canals of Venice, a huge piece of ordnance of the middle ages: that is what replaced at Ghent the city of the Zegris[290], the Duero and the Xenil[291] the Generalife and the Alhambra; old dreams of mine, shall I ever see you more?

*

[Sidenote: The Duchesse de Lévis.]

Madame la Duchesse d'Angoulême, who had taken ship on the Gironde, came to us by way of England with General Donnadieu[292] and M. Desèze[293], of whom the latter had crossed the ocean wearing his blue ribbon across his waistcoat. The Duc and Duchesse de Lévis[294] followed in the Princess' suite: they had flung themselves into the diligence and escaped from Paris by the Bordeaux road. Their fellow-travellers talked politics:

"That scoundrel of a Chateaubriand," said one of them, "is no such fool! He had his carriage waiting packed in his court-yard for three days: the bird has flown. They would have made short work of him, if Napoleon had caught him!"

Madame la Duchesse de Lévis was a very handsome, very kind woman, and as calm as Madame la Duchesse de Duras was restless. She never left Madame de Chateaubriand's side; she was our assiduous companion at Ghent. No one has diffused more quietude in my life, a thing of which I have great need. The least troubled moments of my existence are those which I spent at Noisiel, in the house of that woman whose words and sentiments entered into your soul only to restore its serenity. I recall with regret those moments passed under the great chestnut-trees of Noisiel! With a soothed spirit, a convalescent heart, I used to look upon the ruins of Chelles Abbey and the little lights of the boats loitering among the willows on the Marne.

The remembrance of Madame de Lévis is for me that of a silent autumn evening. She passed away in a few hours; she mingled with death as with the source of all rest I saw her sink noiselessly into her grave in the Cemetery of Père-Lachaise; she is laid above M. de Fontanes, and the latter sleeps beside his son Saint-Marcellin, killed in a duel. Thus, bowing before the monument of Madame de Lévis, have I come into contact with two other sepulchres: man cannot awaken one sorrow without reawakening another; during the night, the different flowers which open only in the shade expand.

To Madame de Lévis' affectionate kindness for me was added the friendship of M. le Duc de Lévis, the father: I may now reckon only by generations. M. de Lévis wrote well; he had a versatile and fertile imagination which betrayed his noble race, as it had already displayed itself in his blood shed on the beach at Quiberon.

Nor was that to be the end of all: it was the impulse of a friendship which passed on to the second generation. M. le Duc de Lévis, the son[295], attached at present to M. le Comte de Chambord, has drawn near to me; my hereditary affection will fail him no more than will my fidelity to his august master. The new and charming Duchesse de Lévis[296], his wife, joins to the great name of d'Aubusson the brightest qualities of heart and mind: life is worth something, when the graces borrow unwearied wings from history!

*

The Pavillon Marsan[297] existed at Ghent as in Paris. Every day brought Monsieur news from France which was the offspring of self-interest or imagination.

[Sidenote: Fouché, Duc D'Otrante.]

M. Gaillard[298], an ex-Oratorian, a counsel in the royal courts, an intimate friend of Fouché's, alighted in our midst; he made himself known, and was brought into touch with M. Capelle.

When I waited upon Monsieur, which was rarely, those around him used to talk to me in covert words, and with many sighs, of "a man who (it must be admitted) was behaving admirably: he was impeding all the Emperor's operations; he was defending the Faubourg Saint-Germain, etc., etc." The faithful Marshal Soult was also the object of Monsieur's predilection and, after Fouché, the most loyal man in France.

One day a carriage stopped at the door of my inn, and I saw Madame la Baronne de Vitrolles step out of it: she had arrived bearing powers from the Duc d'Otrante. She took away with her a note, written in Monsieur's hand, in which the Prince declared that he would retain an eternal gratitude to him who saved M. de Vitrolles. Fouché wanted no more; armed with this note, he was sure of his future in case of a restoration. Thenceforward, there was no question at Ghent save of the immense obligations due to the excellent M. Fouché de Nantes[299], save of the impossibility of returning to France otherwise than by that just man's good pleasure: the difficulty was how to make the King relish this new redeemer of the Monarchy.

After the Hundred Days, Madame de Custine compelled me to meet Fouché at dinner at her house. I had seen him once, five years before, in connection with the condemnation of my poor Cousin Armand. The ex-minister knew that I had opposed his nomination at Roye, at Gonesse, at Arnouville; and, as he suspected me of being powerful, he wished to make his peace with me. The death of Louis XVI. was the best thing about him: regicide was his innocence. A prater, like all the revolutionaries, beating the air with empty phrases, he retailed a heap of commonplaces stuffed with "destiny," with "necessity," with "the right of things," mingling with this philosophic nonsense further nonsense on the march and progress of society, and shameless maxims in favour of the strong as against the weak; and he was free in his use of impudent avowals on the justice of success, the little worth of a head which falls, the equity of that which prospers, the iniquity of that which suffers, affecting to speak of the most horrid disasters with airy indifference, as though he were a genius above all such fooleries. Not a choice idea escaped him, not a remarkable thought, on any subject whatsoever. I went away shrugging my shoulders at crime.

M. Fouché never forgave me my dryness and the small effect he produced on me. He had thought he would fascinate me by causing the blade of the fatal instrument to rise and fall before my eyes, like a glory of Mount Sinai; he had imagined that I would look up, as to a colossus, to the ranter who, speaking of the soil of Lyons, had said:

"That soil shall be overturned; on the ruins of that proud and rebellious city shall rise scattered cottages which the friends of liberty will hasten to come and inhabit.... We shall have the energetic courage to walk through the vast tombs of the conspirators.... Their blood-stained corpses, hurled into the Rhône, give on both banks and at its mouth the impression of terror and the image of the omnipotence of the people. . . . . . . .

"We shall celebrate the victory of Toulon; we shall this evening send two hundred and fifty rebels under the lead of the thunder."

Those horrible trimmings did not impose upon me: because M. "de Nantes" had diluted republican crimes with imperial mire; because the _sans-culotte_, transformed into a duke, had wrapped the cord of the lantern in the ribbon of the Legion of Honour, he appeared neither the abler nor the greater for it in my eyes. The Jacobins detest men who make no account of their atrocities and who despise their murders; their pride is provoked, like that of authors whose talent one disputes.

*

[Sidenote: His underhand negotiations.]

At the same time that Fouché was sending M. Gaillard to Ghent to negociate with the brother of Louis XVI., his agents at Bâle were parleying with those of Prince Metternich[300] on the subject of Napoleon II., and M. de Saint-Léon, dispatched by this same Fouché, was arriving in Vienna to treat of the crown as a "possibility" for M. le Duc d'Orléans. The friends of the Duc d'Otrante could rely upon him no more than his enemies: on the return of the legitimate Princes, he maintained his old colleague, M. Thibaudeau[301], on the list of exiles, while M. de Talleyrand struck this or that outlaw off the list, or added that other to the catalogue, according to his whim. Had not the Faubourg Saint-Germain reason indeed to believe in M. Fouché?

M. de Saint-Léon carried three notes to Vienna, of which one was addressed to M. de Talleyrand: the Duc d'Otrante proposed that the ambassador of Louis XVIII. should push the son of Égalité on to the throne, if he saw his way! What probity in those negociations! How fortunate they were to have to do with such honest persons! Yet we have admired, censed, blessed those highway robbers; we have paid court to them; we have called them _monseigneur!_ That explains the world as it stands. M. de Montrond came in addition, after M. de Saint-Léon.

M. le Duc d'Orléans did not conspire in fact but by consent; he let the revolutionary affinities intrigue: a sweet society! In this dark lane, the plenipotentiary of the King of France lent an ear to Fouché's overtures.

Speaking of M. de Talleyrand's detention at the Barrière d'Enfer, I said what had, till then, been M. de Talleyrand's fixed idea as to the regency of Marie-Louise: he was obliged by the emergency to embrace the eventuality of the Bourbons; but he was always ill at ease: it seemed to him that, under the heirs of St. Louis, a married bishop would never be sure of his place. The idea of substituting the Younger Branch for the Elder Branch pleased him, therefore, so much so the more in that he had had former relations with the Palais Royal.

Taking that side, without however exposing himself entirely, he hazarded a few words of Fouché's project to Alexander. The Tsar had ceased to interest himself in Louis XVIII.: the latter had hurt him, in Paris, by his affectation of superiority of race; he had hurt him again by refusing to consent to the marriage of the Duc de Berry with a sister of the Emperor; the Princess was rejected for three reasons: she was a schismatic; she was not of an old enough stock; she came of a family of madmen: these reasons were not put forward upright but aslant, and, when seen through, gave Alexander treble offense. As a last subject of complaint against the old sovereign of exile, the Tsar brought up the projected alliance between England, France and Austria. For the rest, it seemed as though the succession were open; all the world claimed to succeed to the estate of the sons of Louis XIV.: Benjamin Constantin the name of Madame Murat[302], was pleading the rights which Napoleon's sister believed herself to possess over the Kingdom of Naples; Bernadotte was casting a distant glance upon Versailles, apparently because the King of Sweden came from Pau.

La Besnardière[303], head of a department at the Foreign Office, went over to M. de Caulaincourt; he drew up a hurried report on "the complaints and rejoinders of France" to the Legitimacy. After this kick had been let fly, M. de Talleyrand found means of communicating the report to Alexander: discontented and fickle, the Autocrat was struck with La Besnardière's pamphlet. Suddenly, in the middle of the Congress, the Tsar asked, to the general stupefaction, if it would not be a matter for deliberation to examine in how far M. le Duc d'Orléans might suit France and Europe as King. This is perhaps one of the most surprising things in those extraordinary times, and perhaps it is still more extraordinary that it has been so little discussed[304]. Lord Clancarty[305] made the Russian proposal fall through; His Lordship declared that he had no powers to treat so grave a question:

"As for myself," he said, "giving my opinion as a private individual, I think that to put M. le Duc d'Orléans on the throne of France would be to replace a military usurpation by a family usurpation, which is more dangerous to the sovereigns than any other usurpation."

[Sidenote: At the Congress of Vienna.]

The members of the Congress went to dinner, using the sceptre of St. Louis as a rush with which to mark the folio at which they had left off in their protocols.

Upon the obstacles encountered by the Tsar, M. de Talleyrand faced about: foreseeing that the stroke would resound, he sent a report to Louis XVIII. (in a despatch which I have seen and which was numbered 25 or 27) of this strange session of the Congress[306]; he thought himself obliged to inform His Majesty of so exorbitant a proceeding, because this news, said he, would not long delay in reaching the King's ears: a singular ingenuousness for M. le Prince de Talleyrand.

There had been a question of a declaration on the part of the Alliance, in order to make it quite clear to the world that there was no quarrel except with Napoleon, that there was no pretension to impose upon France either an obligatory form of government or a sovereign who should not be of her own choice. This latter part of the declaration was suppressed, but it was positively announced in the official journal of Frankfort. England, in her negociations with the Cabinets, always employs that Liberal language, which is only a precaution against the parliamentary tribune.

We see that the Allies were troubling themselves no more about the re-establishment of the Legitimacy at the Second than at the First Restoration: the event alone did all. What mattered it to such short-sighted sovereigns whether the mother of European monarchies had her throat cut? Would that prevent them from giving entertainments and keeping guards? The monarchs are so solidly seated to-day, the globe in one hand, the sword in the other!

M. de Talleyrand, whose interests were at that time in Vienna, feared lest the English, whose opinion was no longer so favourable to him, should begin the military game before all the armies were drawn up in line, and lest the Cabinet of St. James should thus acquire the predominance: that is why he wished to induce the King to re-enter by the south-eastern provinces, in order that he might find himself under the protection of the Austrian Empire and Cabinet. The Duke of Wellington had given a precise order not to commence hostilities; it was Napoleon who wanted the Battle of Waterloo: the destinies of such a nature are not to be arrested.

Those historic facts, the most curious in the world, have remained generally unknown; in the same way, also, a confused opinion has been formed of the Treaties of Vienna relating to France: they have been thought the iniquitous work of a troop of victorious sovereigns, implacably bent upon our ruin; unfortunately, if they are harsh, they have been envenomed by a French hand: when M. de Talleyrand is not conspiring, he is trafficking.

Prussia desired to have Saxony, which will sooner or later be her prey; France ought to have countenanced this wish, for, Saxony obtaining an indemnification within the sphere of the Rhine, Landau would have remained to us with our surrounding territories; Coblentz and other fortresses would have passed to a small friendly State, which, placed between ourselves and Prussia, prevented any point of contact; the keys of France would not have been handed over to the shade of Frederic. For three millions which Saxony paid him, M. de Talleyrand opposed the combinations of the Cabinet of Berlin; but, in order to obtain the assent of Alexander to the existence of Old Saxony, our Ambassador was obliged to abandon Poland to the Tsar, notwithstanding that the other Powers desired that a Poland of some kind should restrict the freedom of the Muscovite's movements in the North. The Bourbons of Naples redeemed themselves, like the sovereign of Dresden, with money[307]. M. de Talleyrand claimed that he was entitled to a subvention, in exchange for his Duchy of Benevento: he was selling his livery on leaving his master. When France was losing so much, could not M. de. Talleyrand also have lost something? Benevento, moreover, did not belong to the High Chamberlain: by virtue of the revival of the ancient treaties, that principality was a dependency of the States of the Church.

[Sidenote: A letter from Talleyrand.]

Such were the diplomatic transactions which were being completed in Vienna while we were stopping at Ghent. In this latter residence, I received the following letter from M. de Talleyrand:

"VIENNA, 4 _April._

"I learnt, monsieur, with much pleasure that you were at Ghent, for circumstances require that the King should be surrounded with strong and independent men.

"You will certainly have thought that it was useful to refute, by means of strenuously-reasoned publications, the whole of the new doctrine which they are trying to establish in the official documents now appearing in France.

"It would be useful if something could appear of which the object would be to establish that the Declaration of the 31st of March, made in Paris by the Allies, that the Act of Deposition, that the Act of Abdication, that the Treaty of the 11th of April, which resulted from them, are so many preliminary, indispensable and absolute conditions of the Treaty of the 30th of May; that is to say that, without those previous conditions, the treaty would not have been made. This admitted, the man who violates the said conditions or seconds their violation breaks the peace which that treaty established. It is, therefore, he and his accomplices who are declaring war against Europe.

"An argument taken in this sense would do good abroad as well as at home; only it must be well done, so make it your business.

"Accept, monsieur, the homage of my sincere attachment and of my high regard.

"TALLEYRAND.

"I hope to have the honour of seeing you at the end of the month."

Our Minister in Vienna was faithful to his hatred of the great chimera escaped from the shades: he dreaded a blow from its wing. This letter shows, for the rest, all that M. de Talleyrand was capable of doing when he wrote alone: he had the kindness to teach me the "movement," leaving the "graces" to me. It was a question indeed of a few diplomatic phrases on the deposition, on the abdication, on the Treaty of the 11th of April and of the 30th of May, to stop Napoleon! I was very grateful for the instructions given me by virtue of my patent as "a strong man," but I did not follow them: an ambassador _in petto_ I was not at that moment meddling with foreign affairs; I busied myself only with my Ministry of the Interior _ad interim._

But what was taking place in Paris?

[231] Jean Baptiste Baron Dalesme (1763-1832) was a brigadier-general under Napoleon, sat in the Legislative Body as Deputy for the Haute-Vienne from 1802 to 1809, and was created a baron of the Empire in 1810. He rallied to the Restoration, which made him a lieutenant-general in October 1814. He was Governor of Elba during the Hundred Days, and left the service on the Second Restoration. He was reinstated in 1830, and died Governor of the Invalides.--B.

[232] 4 May 1814.--B.

[233] At the celebrated Congress of Erfurt, held in 1808, were present the Emperors Alexander and Napoleon and almost all the sovereigns of Germany. The King of Prussia and the Emperor of Austria were the only crowned heads not invited to it.--T.

[234] Æneid, X. 174.--B.

[235] Marie Countess Walewice-Walewska (circa 1787-1817), _née_ Laczinska, married, first (_circa_ 1804), to Anastasius Colonna, Count Walewice-Walewski, who died in 1814, at the age of eighty-four; secondly, to General Philippe Antoine Comte d'Omano. She visited Napoleon at Elba on the 1st of September 1814, accompanied by a child of four or five years of age. She stayed about fifty hours; during this time the Emperor received no one, not even Madame Mère, who was then in Elba, at Marciana. But, after those fifty hours, Madame Walewska went to Longone to embark for the Continent in a gale so severe that the very sailors feared for her safety. She refused to listen to all representations. The Emperor sent an officer to delay her departure; but she was already out at sea, and Napoleon knew no peace of mind until he had received from the Countess Walewska herself news of her safe arrival. (_Cf._ PONS DE L'HÉRAULT, _Souvenirs et anecdotes de l'île d'Elbe_).--T.

[236] Alexandre Florian Joseph de Colonna, Comte, later Duc de Walewski (1810-1868), the reputed illegitimate son of Napoleon I., Minister of Foreign Affairs and, later, President of the Legislative Body under Napoleon III.--T.

[237] Antoine Francois Claude Comte Ferrand (1758-1825) was Postmaster-general. In 1816, he was created a peer of France and became a member of the French Academy. His best-known literary work is the Esprit de l'histoire in four volumes (1802), which has been many times reprinted.--T.

[238] Antoine Marie Chamans, Comte de Lavallette (1769-1830), was married to a Mademoiselle de Beauharnais, a niece of the Empress Joséphine. He had been Postmaster-general in 1814; lost that office on the return of the Bourbons, and resumed it, in 1816, on the flight of the Princes. He was tried for seconding the return of Bonaparte and sentenced to death, but made his escape from prison by the aid of his wife. Three English officers, Messrs. Hutchinson, Wilson and Bruce, assisted him across the frontier, and he took refuge in Bavaria. Lavallette was permitted to return to France in 1820, when he retired into private life.--T.

[239] The _Nain jaune_ was a satirical Bonapartist journal, inspired by the circle of the ex-Queen Hortense, which adopted a guise of extreme Royalism. The number for the 28th of February 1815 contains a letter from a correspondent who says:

"I have worn out ten goose-quills in writing to you, without receiving a reply; perhaps I shall be luckier if I try a duck-quill" (_plume de cane_).

On the next day, the 1st of March, Napoleon landed at Cannes on his return from Elba.--B.

[240] Carlo Andrea Count Pozzo di Borgo (1764-1842), a native of Corsica, entered the Russian diplomatic service and took part in all the congresses of the Holy Alliance. Pozzo acted as Russian Ambassador to France from 1814 to 1835, and to England from 1835 to 1839. He spent his last years in Paris.--T.

[241] Louis-Philippe Duc d'Orléans (1773-1850), afterwards "King of the French," and son (some say a changeling) of Louis Philippe Joseph Duc d'Orléans (Philippe Égalité).--T.

[242] General Drouet d'Erlon (1765-1844) was placed in command of the 1st Army Corps during the Hundred Days. He was condemned to death by contumacy in 1816, fled to Prussia, and returned to France in 1825, but did not resume service till 1830. In 1834, he was appointed Governor-General of Algeria, but was recalled in 1835 for not displaying sufficient vigour against Abd-el-Kader; nevertheless Drouet was made a marshal in 1843. The military conspiracy in which he engaged with General Lefebvre-Desnoëttes and Lallemand was of a semi-Imperialist, semi-Revolutionary character, and broke out on the 9th of March 1815, but was immediately suppressed.--T.

[243] Marshal Masséna, on the evening of the 3rd of March, sent to the Minister of War, from Marseilles, the dispatch announcing Bonaparte's landing at the Golfe Jouan. In 1815, the aerial telegraph stopped at Lyons. The message was therefore carried by a courier as far as Lyons, and did not reach Paris until mid-day on the 5th of March. Impressed by the gravity of the news, M. Chappe, the Director-General of Telegraphs (brother of the inventor), took upon himself to take the message to M. de Vitrolles, in the King's closet, instead of transmitting it to Marshal Soult. Vitrolles handed the despatch, sealed as it was, to Louis XVIII., who read it several times over and threw it on the table, saying with the greatest calm:

"It is to say that Bonaparte has landed on the coast of Provence. This letter must be taken to the Minister of War. He will see what is to be done."

The Government kept the news secret for two days, and it was only on the 7th of March that it was officially announced in the _Moniteur._--B.

[244] The Comte d'Artois, the King's brother, became "Monsieur" on the latter's accession.--T.

[245] Henri Jacques Guillaume Clarke, Maréchal Comte d'Hunebourg, Duc de Feltre (1765-1818), descended from an Irish family, had been one of Napoleon's generals, and Minister of War from 1807. After rallying to the Bourbons, he managed the War Office at a time of the greatest difficulty, and was created a marshal of France after the Second Restoration, in 1816. The Duc de Feltre retired in 1817, a year before his death.--T.

[246] Caius Valerius Jovius Aulerius Diocletianus (245-313), Roman Emperor, was born at Dioclea, near Salona. Diocletian's mind became weakened in 304, and in 305 he abdicated and retired to Salona, where he cultivated his garden with his own hands.--T.

[247] Camille Hyacinthe Odilon Barrot (1791-1873) became a prominent leader of the Opposition under Louis-Philippe, and was Prime Minister and Minister of Justice in 1848 to 1849.--T.

[248] The battalion of the pupils of the School of Law was formed on the 14th of March 1815; its effective force amounted to 1200 men. After being drilled at Vincennes, the Volunteers, to the number of about 700, joined the Body-guards at Beauvais on Easter Sunday, the 26th of March; they crossed the frontier and were cantoned at Ypres. On the 30th of July, the battalion returned to Paris, amid the cheers of an immense multitude which had come out to greet it. The professors of the school, prevented by their age from leaving France, at least refused to wait upon Napoleon, and it was only at the express invitation of the Minister of the Interior that they went so far as to send an address in which they expressed their gratitude at seeing the Emperor renounce all spirit of conquest.--B.

[249] M. de La Fayette, in some Memoirs published since his death and valuable for their facts, confirms the singular conjunction of his opinion and mine on the occasion of Bonaparte's return. M. de La Fayette was a sincere lover of honour and liberty.--_Author's Note_ (Paris, 1840).

[250] Charles Ferdinand Duc de Berry (1778-1820), second son of the Comte d'Artois, assassinated by the fanatic Louvel on leaving the Opera, 13 February 1820.--T.

[251] Louis Antoine Duc d'Angoulême (1775-1844), eldest son of the Comte d'Artois, was Dauphin of France during the reign of the latter as Charles X. He abdicated his right to the throne immediately after his father, and was thus for only a few minutes King of France, with the title of Louis XIX. He was succeeded by his nephew, the Duc de Bordeaux (the Comte de Chambord), as Henry V. The Duc d'Angoulême died at Goritz, where he lived under the style of Comte de Marnes. He possessed many solid qualities and conciliatory intentions, without being gifted with any hyper-eminent faculties.--T.

[252] A Royal order of the 6th of March, declaring Bonaparte a traitor and rebel, and enjoining all soldiers, national guards, or private citizens "to hunt him down" (_de lui courir sus_), appears in the _Moniteur_ of the 7th of March.--B.

[253] Alexandre Maurice Blanc de La Nautte, Comte d'Hauterive (1754-1830), commenced life as a professor in the Oratorian College at Tours (1779), accompanied the Comte de Choiseul-Gouffier on his embassy to Constantinople (1784), became French _Chargé d'affaires_ in Moldavia (1785), and Consul in New York (1792). In America he grew intimate with Talleyrand, who made him head of a department at the Foreign Office so soon as he obtained his ministry, and later had him appointed Keeper of the Archives (1807).--T.

[254] Alfred Frédéric Chevalier Artaud de Montor (1772-1849), after a long diplomatic career, wrote or edited a large number of historical works, including the _Vie et travaux du comte d'Hauterive_, published at a later date than that at which Chateaubriand wrote the above lines.--T.

[255] MARK ii. II.--T.

[256] Charles Du Fresne, Seigneur Du Cange (1610-1688), the noted historian and philologist, born at Amiens, 18 December 1610.--T.

[257] Robespierre was born at Arras on the 6th of May 1758.--T.

[258] _Cf._ Vol. II. p. 30.--T.

[259] Pierre Louis Bertin de Vaux (1771-1842), younger brother of Louis François Bertin, known as Bertin the Elder, assisted him in founding the _Journal des Débats_ (1799), and in editing that paper, while directing a banking-house which he had established in 1801. Bertin de Vaux was sent as Ambassador to the Netherlands in 1830 and raised to the peerage in 1832.--T.

[260] Amédée Bretagne Malo de Durfort, Duc de Duras (1771-1838), First Lord of the Bed-chamber to the King. He accompanied Louis XVIII. to Ghent and returned with him. He had been created a Peer of France in 1814. After the Revolution of 1830, he retired into private life.--B.

[261] Charles V. Emperor of Germany, King of Spain and of the Two Sicilies (1500-1558), born at Ghent, son of the Archduke Philip of Austria and of Joan, heiress of Castile, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella. He was proclaimed King of Spain in 1516, during his mother's life-time, and elected to the Empire three years later. Charles V. abdicated in 1556, two years before his death.--T.

[262] The other ministers were: M. Louis, Finance; the Duc de Feltre, War; M. Beugnot, Navy; M. Dambray, Chancellor of France; M. de Jaucourt, Foreign Affairs _ad interim_, the Prince de Talleyrand being in Vienna. M. de Blacas was Minister of the King's Household. M. de Lally-Tolendal was _ad interim_ Minister of Public Instruction.--B.

[263] Bernadotte and Henry IV. were both born at Pau.--T.

[264] Thomas Arthur Comte de Lally, Baron Tolendal in Ireland (1702-1766), after contributing to the victory of Fontenoy (1745), was in 1756 appointed Governor of the French possessions in India and drove the English from the Coromandel Coast. He failed, however, before Madras, was himself besieged in Pondichéry, and obliged to surrender with a garrison of 700 men: he had resisted for several months against an army of 22,000 men and a fleet of 14 ships (1761). Nevertheless, he was accused of betraying the King's interests, sent to the Bastille and, after eighteen months' imprisonment and an informal trial, sentenced to death. He was executed on the 9th of May 1766. Voltaire published an eloquent _factum_ in the condemned man's favour and, in 1778, Louis XVI., at the instance of Lally's son, the Marquis de Lally-Tolendal mentioned above, had the iniquitous verdict revised. The sentence was unanimously quashed by a new set of judges, and Lally's memory entirely rehabilitated.--T.

[265] Marie Madeleine Comtesse de La Fayette (1634-1693), _née_ Pioche de La Vergne, daughter of the Governor of the Havre, and the intimate friend of La Rochefoucauld. She made a name in letters by her novels, _Zaïde_ the _Princesse de Clèves_, etc., and also wrote an _Histoire et Henriette d'Angleterre._--T.

[266] Madame La Duchesse de Rauzan.--_Author's Note._

[267] The Duc de Bellune remained absolutely faithful to the Elder Branch after the usurpation of 1830.--T.

[268] Julie Maréchale Duchesse de Bellune, _née_ Vosch van Avesaat, married to the Maréchal Duc de Bellune in 1801. He had previously divorced his first wife, _née_ Muguet, to whom he had been married in 1791.--T.

[269] Vincent Marie Viennot, Comte de Vaublanc (1756-1845), an eager supporter of the Royalist cause and Minister of the Interior from September 1815 to May 1816. He published some political works, a few indifferent tragedies and an epic poem, the _Dernier des Césars_ (1836).--T.

[270] Guillaume Antoine Bénoît Baron Capelle (1775-1843) held various prefectures under Napoleon and Louis XVIII., and was created a baron of the Empire by the former. In May 1830, he became Minister of Public Works in M. de Polignac's Cabinet and, as a signatory of the Ordinances of July, was condemned by contumacy to perpetual imprisonment. He returned to France in 1836, after the amnesty.--B.

[271] The Abbé Martial Borye Desrenaudes (1755-1825), not d'Ernaud as the preceding editions of the Memoirs have it, was grand-vicar to the Bishop of Autun at the time of the Revolution. He had a remarkable talent as a writer, and was of the greatest use to Talleyrand as a literary assistant. After the 18 Brumaire, Desrenaudes became a member of the Tribunate, and later a councillor of the University and Imperial Censor. He retained his censorship under the Restoration.--B.

[272] Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz (1614-1679), was in 1643 appointed Coadjutor to his uncle, Henri de Gondi, Archbishop of Paris, before himself succeeding to the archbishopric.--T.

[273] _Cf._ RACINE, _Les Plaideurs_, Act III. sc. IV.--T.

[274] Claude Philibert Édouard Baron Mounier (1784-1843), son of Joseph Mounier, the celebrated Constituent. Under the Empire, he had been Superintendent of the Crown Lands, in which post he was confirmed by Louis XVIII., and he continued to hold various political and administrative offices. He was created a peer of France in 1819.--B.

[275] Louis XVIII. himself was a great epicure of this fish, and sometimes allowed himself to be taken to this inn, which was called the Halter. (Cf. ROMBERG, _Louis XVIII. à Gand._)--B.

[276] Early in April, under the management of the two Bertins. Upon the objection of the Netherlands Government, which saw difficulties in the way of the co-existence of two _Moniteurs_ in the kingdom, the original title was changed to the _Journal universel_, which continued to be the official organ of Louis XVIII.--B.

[277] _Rapport sur l'état de la France, fait au roi dans son conseil_, May 1815.--B.

[278] A certain M. Bail, an inspector of reviews. Chateaubriand's letter to the Duc de Feltre is dated "Paris, 22 August 1826," and runs:

"A Monsieur Bail, inspector of reviews, wrote a pamphlet against me. He says that he has lost his place for this act. May I venture, monsieur le duc, to hope from your indulgence that you will be so good as to restore him to your kindness? The King's person was respected in the pamphlet. Pray forget, monsieur le maréchal, all that concerns only myself.--B."

[279] The Order of the Golden Fleece was instituted at Bruges, in 1429, by Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy.--T.

[280] JOHN i. 6.--T.

[281] Jan van Eyck (_circa_ 1380-1450) was born at Maaseyk near Maastricht, but settled at Bruges, with his brother Hubert, at an early age. He is usually known as Jean de Bruges in France.--T.

[282] Gaston Pierre Marc Duc de Levis (1764-1830) had been wounded at Quiberon in 1795. Between 1808 and 1814 he published his _Maximes et réflexions sur différents sujets_, the _Suite des quatre Facardins_, imitated from Hamilton's Tales, _Voyage de Khani, ou Nouvelles lettres chinoises, Souvenirs et Portraits_, and L'_Angleterre au commencement du XIX e siècle._ He became a peer of France in 1814, a privy councillor in 1815 and a member of the French Academy in 1816.--B.

[283] Hugh Capet, Duke of France and Count of Paris (_d._ 996), was proclaimed King of France in 987 on the death of Louis V., the last of the Second or Carlovingian Dynasty, thus founding the Third or Capetian Dynasty of Kings of France. The House of Capet proper reigned from 987 to 1328; its two branches, the Houses of Valois and Bourbon from 1328 to 1589 and 1589 to 1830 respectively. The usurpation of Louis-Philippe gives a reign of 18 years (1830 to 1848) to the House of Orleans, or Younger Branch of Bourbon.--T.

[284] Philippa of Hainault, Queen of England (_circa_ 1314-1369).--T.

[285] Edward III. King of England (1212-1377).--T.

[286] John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster (1349-1399), fourth son of Edward III. and father of Henry IV., who founded the House of Lancaster after procuring the murder of Richard II., by usurping the throne to the prejudice of the descendants of Lionel Duke of Clarence, second son of Edward III.--T.

[287] Jacob van Artevelde (_d._ 1345) headed a revolt of his fellow-citizens against the Count of Flanders (1336) and became for some time absolute master of Flanders. Finding himself, however, on the point of being reduced, he proposed to offer the sovereignty to Edward the Black Prince, but failed in his project, and was murdered by the populace of Ghent in 1345.--T.

[288] Clodion (_d. circa_ 448) is accepted as the second King of France (Merovingian Dynasty).--T.

[289] The Lys, or Lily, rises a little below Béthune and flows into the Scheldt at Ghent.--B.

[290] A Moorish tribe which had a violent quarrel with the Abencerrages.--T.

[291] Granada stands near the junction of the Rivers Duero and Xenil.--T.

[292] Gabriel Vicomte Donnadieu (1777-1849), an inveterate enemy of Napoleon and later of Louis-Philippe, and a fervent, although somewhat discredited Royalist.--T.

[293] Raymond Comte Desèze (1748-1828), the famous advocate. He distinguished himself early in his career by his defense of the daughters of Helvétius. In 1789 he obtained the acquittal of the Baron de Bésenval, accused of high treason; and he assisted Malesherbes and Tronchet in their defense of King Louis XVI. before the Convention. Desèze had been made a knight of the Holy Ghost by Louis XVI., which explains the allusion to the blue ribbon. Louis XVIII. made him President of the Court of Appeal and a peer of France in 1815, and a count in 1817. Desèze was, in 1816, elected a member of the French Academy.--T.

[294] Pauline Louise Françoise de Paule Duchesse de Lévis (_d._ 1819), _née_ Charpentier d'Ennery, married to the Duc de Lévis in 1785.--B.

[295] Gaston François Christophe Victor Duc de Ventadour and de Lévis (1794-1863), became aide-de-camp to the Duc d'Angoulême in 1814, and took part in the Spanish War of 1823 and the expedition to Morocco in 1828. He succeeded his father in the peerage in 1830, but refused to sit after the Revolution of July and followed the Royal Family into exile. He was for many years one of the Comte de Chambord's chief councillors, and died at Venice in 1863.--B.

[296] Marie Cathérine Amanda Duchesse de Lévis (1798-1854), daughter of Pierre Raymond Hector d'Aubusson, Comte de La Feuillade, and married to the Duc de Lévis in 1821.--B.

[297] The Pavillon Marsan formed the corner of the Tuileries bounded by the garden and the Rue de Rivoli, and was occupied under Louis XVIII. by the Comte d'Artois.--T.

At Ghent, the Comte d'Artois had his Pavillon Marsan in the Hôtel des Pays Bas, where he was lodged with his suite and his carriages and paid 1000 francs a day. Louis XVIII. lived in the house which the Comte d'Hane de Steenhuyse had placed at his disposal.-B.

[298] Gaillard had been Fouché's secretary.--B.

[299] The Duc d'Otrante was born at the Martinière, near Nantes.--T.

[300] Clemens Wenzel Nepomuk Lothar Prince von Metternich-Winneburg (1773-1859), the great Austrian statesman, was at this time presiding over the Congress of Vienna.--T.

[301] Auguste Clair Thibaudeau (1765-1854) had voted for the death of the King in the Convention, and became one of the most ardent servants of Napoleon, who made him a councillor of State, a prefect, and a count of the Empire (31 December 1809). He was exiled in 1815 and did not return to France until after the Revolution of July. Napoleon III. made him a senator and a grand officer of the Legion of Honour. Thibaudeau left a large number of historical works.--B.

[302] Caroline Murat, Queen of Naples (1782-1839), _née_ Bonaparte, married to Murat in 1800.--T.

[303] Jean Baptiste de Gouy, Comte de La Besnardière (_d._ 1843), had been employed at the Foreign Office since 1795, where he had become the intimate fellow-worker of Talleyrand, who liked both him and his work. He accompanied the prince to the Congress of Vienna; on his return, the King made him a count and director of Public Works. He retired into private life in 1819.--B.

[304] A recently-published pamphlet entitled _Lettres de l'Étranger_, written apparently by an able and well-informed diplomatist, points to this strange Russian negociation in Vienna.--_Author's Note_ (Paris, 1840).

[305] Richard Le Poer Trench, second Earl of Clancarty, later Marquis of Heusden in the Netherlands (1767-1837), British Plenipotentiary to the Congress of Vienna, and later Ambassador to the Netherlands (1816-1822).--T.

[306] It is stated that, in 1830, M. de Talleyrand had his private correspondence with Louis XVIII. removed from the Archives of the Crown, even as he had had removed from the Archives of the Empire all that he, M. de Talleyrand, had written respecting the death of the Duc d'Enghien and the affairs of Spain.--_Author's Note_ (Paris, 1840).

[307] Talleyrand was paid six million francs by the Neapolitan Bourbons for favouring their restoration. (_Cf._ SAINTE-BEUVE, _Nouveaux Lundis_, vol. XII.).--B.