"I am so sick of the word 'fraternity,'" said Prince Metternich, after his return from France, "that, if I had a brother, I should call him cousin." Though it was to the strains of the Marseillaise that Louis-Philippe had been conducted to the Hôtel-de-Ville on the day when Lafayette pointed to him as "the best of all republics," a time came when Louis-Philippe got utterly sick of the Marseillaise.
But what was he to do, seeing that his attempt at introducing a new national hymn had utterly failed? The mob refused to sing "La Parisienne," composed by Casimir de la Vigne, after Alexandre Dumas had refused to write a national hymn; and they, moreover, insisted on the King joining in the chorus of the old hymn, as he had hitherto done on all public occasions.[35]They had grumblingly resigned themselves to his beating time no longer, but any further refusal of his co-operation might have been resented in a less peaceful fashion. On the other hand, there wasthe bourgeoisie who were of opinion that, now that the monarchy had entered upon a more conservative period, the intoning of the hymn, at any rate on the sovereign's part, was out of place, and savoured too much of a republican manifestation. "It was Guizot who told him so," said Lord ——, who had been standing on the balcony of the Tuileries on the occasion of the king's "saint's day,"[36]and had heard the minister make the remark.
"And what did the king reply?" was the question.
"Do not worry yourself, monsieur le ministre; I am only moving my lips; I have ceased to pronounce the words for many a day."
These were the expedients to which Louis-Philippe was reduced before he had been on the throne half a dozen years. "I am like the fool between two stools," observed the king in English, afterwards, when speaking to Lord ——, "only I happen to be between the comfortably stuffed easy-chair of the bourgeois drawing-room and the piece of furniture seated on which Louis XIV. is said to have received the Dutch ambassadors."
While speaking of the Marseillaise, here are two stories in connection with it which are not known to the general reader. The first was told to me by the old tutor already mentioned; the second aroused a great deal of literary curiosity in the year 1860, and bears the stamp of truth on the face of it. It was, however, never fully investigated, or, at any rate, the results of the investigation were never published.[37]
"We were all more or less aware," said my informant, "that Rouget de l'Isle was not the author of the whole of the words of the Marseillaise. But none of us in Lyons, where I was born, knew who had written the last strophe, commonly called the 'strophe of the children,' and I doubt whether they were any wiser in Paris. Some of my fellow-students—for I was nearly eighteen at that time—credited André Chenier with the authorship of the last strophe, others ascribed it to Louis-François Dubois, the poet.[38]All this was, however, so much guess-work, when, one day during theReign of Terror, the report spread that a ci-devant priest, or rather a priest who had refused to take the oath to the Republic, had been caught solemnizing a religious marriage, and that he was to be brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal that same afternoon. Though you may not think so, merely going by what you have read, the appearance of a priest before the Tribunal always aroused more than common interest, nor have you any idea what more than common interest meant in those days. A priest to the Revolutionaries and to the Terrorists, they might hector and bully as they liked, was not an ordinary being. They looked upon him either as something better than a man or worse than a devil. They had thrown the religious compass they had brought from home with them overboard, and they had not the philosophical one to take its place. You may work out the thing for yourself; at any rate, the place was crammed to suffocation when we arrived at the Hôtel de Ville. It was a large room, at the upper end of which stood an oblong table, covered with a black cloth. Seated around it were seven self-constituted judges. Besides their tricolour scarfs round their waists, they wore, suspended by a ribbon from their necks, a small silver axe.
"As a rule there was very little speechifying. 'La mort sans phrase,' which had become the fashion since Louis XVI.'s execution, was strictly adhered to. Half a dozen prisoners were brought in and taken away without arousing the slightest excitement, either in the way of commiseration or hatred. After having listened, the judges either extended their hands on the table or put them to their foreheads. The first movement meant acquittal and liberation, the second death; not always by the guillotine though, for the instrument was not perfect as yet, and did not work sufficiently quickly to please them. All at once the priest was brought in, and a dead silence prevailed. He was not a very old man, though his hair was snow-white.
"'Who art thou?' asked the president.
"The prisoner drew himself up to his full height. 'I am the Abbé Pessoneaux, a former tutor at the college at Vienne, and the author of the last strophe of the Marseillaise,' he said quietly.
"I cannot convey to you the impression produced by those simple words. The silence became positively oppressive; you could hear the people breathe. The president did not say another word; the priest's reply had apparently stunned him also: he merely turned round to his fellow-judges. Soldiers and gaolers stood as if turned into stone; every eye was directed towards the table, watching for the movement of the judges' hands. Slowly and deliberately they stretched them forth, and then a deafening cheer rang through the room. The Abbé Pessoneaux owed his life to his strophe, for, though his story was not questioned then, it was proved true in every particular. On their way to Paris to be present at the taking of the Tuileries on the 10th of August, the Marseillais had stopped at Vienne to celebrate the Fête of the Federation. On the eve of their arrival the Abbé Pessoneaux had composed the strophe, and but for his seizure the authorship would have always remained a matter of conjecture, for Rouget de l'Isle would have never had the honesty to acknowledge it."
My tutor was right, and I owe him this tardy apology; it appears that, after all, Rouget de l'Isle had not the honesty to acknowledgeopenlyhis indebtedness to those who made his name immortal, and that his share in the Marseillaise amounts to the first six strophes. He did not write a single note of the music. The latter was composed by Alexandre Boucher, the celebrated violinist, in 1790, in the drawing-room of Madame de Mortaigne, at the request of a colonel whom the musician had never met before, whom he never saw again. The soldier was starting next morning with his regiment for Marseilles, and pressed Boucher to write him a march there and then. Rouget de l'Isle, an officer of engineers, having been imprisoned in 1791, for having refused to take a second oath to the Constitution, heard the march from his cell, and, at the instance of his gaoler, adapted the words of a patriotic hymn he was then writing to it.
One may fancy the surprise of Alexandre Boucher, when he heard it sung everywhere and recognized it as his own composition, though it had been somewhat altered to suit the words. But the pith of the story is to come. I give it in the very words of Boucher himself, as he told it to a Paris journalist whom I knew well.
"A good many years afterwards, I was seated next to Rouget de l'Isle at a dinner-party in Paris. We had nevermet before, and, as you may easily imagine, I was rather interested in the gentleman, whom, with many others at the same board, I complimented on his production; only I confined myself to complimenting him on hispoem.
"'You don't say a word about the music,' he replied; 'and yet, being a celebrated musician, that ought to interest you. Do not you like it?'
"'Very much indeed,' I said, in a somewhat significant tone.
"'Well, let me be frank with you. The music is not mine. It was that of a march which came, Heaven knows whence, and which they kept on playing at Marseilles during the Terror, when I was a prisoner at the fortress of St. Jean. I made a few alterations necessitated by the words, and there it is.'
"Thereupon, to his great surprise, I hummed the march as I had originally written it.
"'Wonderful!' he exclaimed; 'how did you come by it?' he asked.
"When I told him, he threw himself round my neck. But the next moment he said—
"'I am very sorry, my dear Boucher, but I am afraid that you will be despoiled for ever, do what you will; for your music and my words go so well together, that they seem to have sprung simultaneously from the same brain, and the world, even if I proclaimed my indebtedness to you, would never believe it.'
"'Keep the loan,' I said, moved, in spite of myself, by his candour. 'Without your genius, my march would be forgotten by now. You have given it a patent of nobility. It is yours for ever.'"
I return to Louis-Philippe, who, at the time of my tutor's story, and for some years afterwards, I only knew from the reports that were brought home to us. Of course, I saw him several times at a distance, at reviews, and on popular holidays, and I was surprised that a king of whom every one spoke so well in private, who seemed to have so much cause for joy and happiness in his own family, should look so careworn and depressed in public. For, young as I was, I did not fail to see that, beneath the calm and smiling exterior, there was a great deal of hidden grief. But I was too young to understand the deep irony of his reply to one of my relatives, a few months before his accession to the throne: "Thecrown of France is too cold in winter, too warm in summer; the sceptre is too blunt as a weapon of defence or attack, it is too short as a stick to lean upon: a good felt hat and a strong umbrella are at all times more useful." Above all, I was too young to understand the temper of the French where their rulers were concerned, and though, at the time of my writing these notes, I have lived for fifty years amongst them, I doubt whether I could give a succinct psychological account of their mental attitude towards their succeeding régimes, except by borrowing the words of one of their cleverest countrywomen, Madame Émile de Girardin: "When Marshal Soult is in the Opposition, he is acknowledged to have won the battle of Toulouse; when he belongs to the Government, he is accused of having lost it." Since then the Americans have coined a word for that state of mind—"cussedness."
Louis-Philippe's children, and especially his sons, some of whom I knew personally before I had my first invitation to the Tuileries, seemed to take matters more cheerfully. Save the partisans of the elder branch, no one had a word to say against them. On the contrary, even the Bonapartists admired their manly and straightforward bearing. I remember being at Tortoni's one afternoon when the Duc d'Orléans and his brother, the Duc de Nemours, rode by. Two of my neighbours, unmistakable Imperialists, and old soldiers by their looks, stared very hard at them; then one said, "Si le petit au lieu de filer le parfait amour partout, avait mis tous ses œufs dans le même panier, il aurait eu des grands comme cela et nous ne serions pas dans l'impasse où nous sommes."
"Mon cher," replied the other, "des grands comme cela ne se font qu'à loisir, pas entre deux campagnes."[39]
The admiration of these two veterans was perfectly justified: they were very handsome young men, the sons of Louis-Philippe, and notably the two elder ones, though the Duc d'Orléans was somewhat more delicate-looking than his brother, De Nemours. The boys had all been brought up very sensibly, perhaps somewhat too strict for their position. They all went to a public school, to the Collége Henri IV.,and I remember well, about the year '38, when I had occasion of a morning to cross the Pont-Neuf, where there were still stalls and all sorts of booths, seeing the blue-and-yellow carriage with the royal livery. It contained the Ducs d'Aumale and de Montpensier, who had not finished their studies at that time.
But though strictly brought up, they were by no means milksops, and what, for want of a better term, I may call "mother's babies:" quite the reverse. It was never known how they managed it, but at night, when they were supposed to be at home, if not in bed, they were to be met with at all kinds of public places, notably at the smaller theatres, such as the Vaudeville, the Variétés, and the Palais-Royal, one of which, at any rate, was a goodly distance from the Tuileries. It was always understood that the King knew nothing about these little escapades, but I am inclined to doubt this: I fancy he connived at them; because, when Lord —— told him casually one day that he had met his sons the night before, Louis-Philippe seemed not in the least surprised, he only anxiously asked, "Where?"
"At the Café de Paris, your majesty."
The king seemed relieved. "That's all right," he said, laughing. "As long as they do not go into places where they are likely to meet with Guizot, I don't mind; for if he saw them out in the evening, it might cost me my throne. Guizot is so terribly respectable. I am afraid there is a mistake either about his nationality or about his respectability; they are badly matched."
The fact is, that though Louis-Philippe admired and respected Guizot, he failed to understand him. To the most respectable of modern kings—not even Charles I. and William III. excepted—if by respectability we mean an unblemished private life—Guizot's respectability was an enigma. The man who, in spite of his advice to others, "Enrichissez vous, enrichissez vous," was as poor at the end of his ministerial career as at the beginning, must have necessarily been a puzzle to a sovereign who, with a civil list of £750,000, was haunted by the fear of poverty, and haunted to such a degree as to harass his friends and counsellors with his apprehensions. "My dear minister," he said one day to Guizot, after he had recited a long list of his domestic charges—"My dear minister, I am telling you that my children will be wanting for bread." The recollection of his former misery uprose toofrequently before him like a horrible nightmare, and made him the first bourgeois instead of the first gentilhomme of the kingdom, as his predecessors had been. When a tradesman drops a shilling and does not stoop to pick it up, his neglect becomes almost culpable improvidence; when a prince drops a sovereign and looks for it, the deed may be justly qualified as mean. Theleitmotifof Louis-Philippe's conversation, witty and charming as it was, partook of the avaricious spirit of a Thomas Guy and a John Overs rather than of that of the great adventurer John Law. The chinking of the money-bags is audible through both, but in the one case the orchestration is strident, disagreeable, depressing; in the other, it is generous, overflowing with noble impulses, and cheering. I recollect that during my stay at Tréport and Eu, in 1843, when Queen Victoria paid her visit to Louis-Philippe, the following story was told to me. Lord —— and I were quartered in a little hostelry on the Place du Château. One morning Lord —— came home laughing till he could laugh no longer. "What do you think the King has done now?" he asked. I professed my inability to guess. "About an hour ago, he and Queen Victoria were walking in the garden, when, with true French politeness, he offered her a peach. The Queen seemed rather embarrassed how to skin it, when Louis-Philippe took a large clasp-knife from his pocket. 'When a man has been a poor devil like myself, obliged to live upon forty sous a day, he always carries a knife. I might have dispensed with it for the last few years; still, I do not wish to lose the habit—one does not know what may happen,' he said. Of course, the tears stood in the Queen's eyes. He really ought to know better than to obtrude his money worries upon every one."
I must confess that I was not as much surprised as my interlocutor, who, however, had known Louis-Philippe much longer than I. Not his worst enemies could have accused the son of Philippe Égalité of being a coward: the bulletins of Valmy, Jemmappes, and Neerwinden would have proved the contrary. But the contempt of physical danger on the battle-field does not necessarily constitute heroism in the most elevated sense of the term, although the world in general frequently accepts it as such. A man can die but once, and the semi-positivism, semi-Voltaireanism of Louis-Philippe had undoubtedly steeled him against the fear of death. His religion, throughout life, was not even skin-deep; and whenhe accepted the last rites of the Church on his death-bed, he only did so in deference to his wife. "Ma femme, es-tu contente de moi?" were his words the moment the priests were gone.
Nevertheless, he was too good a husband to grieve his wife, who was deeply religious, by any needless display of unbelief. He always endeavoured, as far as possible, to find an excuse for staying away from church. He, as well as the female members of his family, were very fond of music; and Adam, the composer, was frequently invited to come and play for them in the private apartments. In fact, after his abdication, he seriously intended to write, in conjunction with Scribe, the libretto of an opera on an English historical subject, the music of which should be composed by Halévy. The composer of "La Juive" and the author of "Les Hugenots" came over once to consult with the King, whose death, a few months later, put an end to the scheme.
On the occasion of Adam's visits the princesses worked at their embroidery, while the King often stood by the side of the performer. Just about that period the chamber organ was introduced, and, on the recommendation of Adam, one was ordered for the Tuileries. The first time Louis-Philippe heard it played he was delighted: "This will be a distinct gain to our rural congregations," he said. "There must be a great many people who, like myself, stay away from church on account of their objection to that horrible instrument, the serpent. Is it not so, my wife?"
The ideal purpose of life, if ever he possessed it, had been crushed out of him—first, by his governess, Madame de Genlis; secondly, by the dire poverty he suffered during his exile: and, notwithstanding all that has been said to the contrary, France wanted at that moment an ideal ruler, not the rational father of a large family who looked upon his monarchy as a suitable means of providing for them. He was an usurper without the daring, the grandeur, the lawlessness of the usurper. The lesson of Napoléon I.'s method had been thrown away upon him, as the lesson of Napoléon III.'s has been thrown away upon his grandson. When I said France, I made a mistake,—I should have said Paris; for since 1789 there was no longer a King of France, there was only a King of Paris. Such a thing as a Manchester movement, as a Manchester school of politics, would have been and is still an impossibility in France.
And, unfortunately, Paris, which had applauded the gloriousmise-en-scèneof the First Empire, which had even looked on approvingly at some of the pomp and state of Louis XVIII. and Charles X., jeered at Louis-Philippe and his court with its ridiculous gatherings of tailors, drapers, and bootmakers, "ces gardes nationaux d'un pays où il n'y a plus rien de national à garder," and their pretentious spouses "qui," according to the Duchesse de la Trémoïlle, "ont plus de chemises que nos aïeules avaient des robes."[40]She and the Princesse Bagration were the only female representatives of the Faubourg St. Germain who attended these gatherings; for the Countess Le Hon, of whom I may have occasion to speak again, and who was the only other woman at these receptions that could lay claim to any distinction, was by no means an aristocrat. And be it remembered that in those days ridicule had still the power to kill.
Nor was the weapon wielded exclusively by the aristocracy; the lower classes could be just as satirical against the new court element. I was in the Tuileries gardens on that first Sunday in June, 1837, when the Duchesse d'Orléans made her entrée into Paris. The weather was magnificent, and the set scene—as distinguished from some of the properties, to use a theatrical expression—in keeping with the weather. The crowd itself was a pleasure to look at, as it stood in serried masses behind the National Guards and the regular infantry lining the route of the procession from the Arc de Triomphe to the entrance of the Château. All at once an outrider passes, covered with dust, and the crowd presses forward to get a better view. A woman of the people, in her nice white cap, comes into somewhat violent contact with an elegantly dressed elderly lady, accompanied by her daughter. The woman, instead of apologizing, says aloud that she wishes to see the princess: "You will have the opportunity of seeing her at court, mesdames," she adds. The elegant lady vouchsafes no reply, but turns to her daughter: "The good woman," says the latter, shrugging her shoulders, "is evidently not aware that she has got a much greaterchance of going to that court than we have. She has only got to marry some grocer or other tradesman, and she will be considered a grande dame at once." Then the procession passes—first the National Guards on horseback, then the King and M. de Montalivet, followed by Princesse Hélène, with her young husband riding by the side of the carriage. So far so good: the first three or four carriages were more or less handsome, but Heaven save us from the rest, as well as from their occupants! They positively looked like some of those wardrobe-dealers so admirably described by Balzac.
When all is over, the woman of the people turns to the elegant lady: "I ask your pardon, madame; it was really not worth while hurting you. If these aregrandes dames, I preferles petiteswhom I see in my neighbourhood, the Rue Notre-Dame de Lorette. Comme elles étaient attifées!"—Anglice, "What a lot of frumps they looked!"
In fact, Louis-Philippe and his queen sinned most grievously by overlooking the craving of the Parisians for pomp and display. No one was better aware of this than his children, notably the Duc d'Orléans, Princess Clémentine,[41]and the Duc de Nemours. They called him familiarly "le père." "Il est trop père," said the princess in private; "il fait concurrence au Père Éternel." She was a very clever girl—perhaps a great deal cleverer than any of her brothers, the Solon of the family, the Duc de Nemours, included—but very fond of mischief and practical joking. She found her match, though, in her brother, the Prince de Joinville, the son of Louis-Philippe of whom France heard most and saw least, for he was a sailor. One day, his sister asked him to bring her a complete dress of a Red-Skin chieftain's wife. His absence was shorter than usual, and, a few days before his return, he told her in a letter that he had the costume shewanted. "Here, Clémentine, this is for you," he said, at his arrival, putting a string of glass beads on the table.
"Very pretty," said Clémentine, "but you promised me a complete dress."
"This is the complete dress. I never saw them wear any other."
I did not see the Prince de Joinville very often, perhaps two or three times in all; once on the occasion of his marriage with Princess Françoise de Bourbon, the daughter of Dom Pedro I. of Brazil, and sister of the present emperor, when the prince brought his young bride to Paris. He was a clever draughtsman and capital caricaturist; but if the first of these talents proved an unfailing source of delight to his parents, the second frequently inspired them with terror, especially his father, who never knew which of his ministers might become the next butt for his third son's pencil. I have seen innumerable sketches, ostensibly done to delight his young wife and brothers, which, had they been published, would have been much more telling against his father's pictorial satirists than anything they produced against the sovereign. For in those days, whatever wisdom or caution they may have learnt afterwards, the sons of Louis-Philippe were by no means disposed to sit down tamely under the insults levelled at the head of their house. In fact, nearly the whole of Louis-Philippe's children had graphic talents of no mean order. The trait came to them from their mother, who was a very successful pupil of Angelica Kauffman. Princesse Marie, who died so young, executed a statue of Jeanne d'Arc, which was considered by competent judges, not at all likely to be influenced by the fact of the artist's birth, a very creditable piece of work indeed. I never saw it, so I cannot say, but I have seen some miniatures by the Duc de Nemours, which might fairly rank with performances by the best masters of that art, short of genius.
It is a curious, but nevertheless admitted fact that the world has never done justice to the second son of Louis-Philippe. He was not half as great a favourite with the Parisians as his elder brother, although in virtue of his remarkable likeness to Henri IV., whom the Parisians still worship—probably because he is dead,—he ought to have commanded their sympathies. This lukewarmness towards the Duc de Nemours has generally been ascribed by the partisans of the Orleanist dynasty to his somewhat reticent disposition,which by many people was mistaken forhauteur. I rather fancy it was because he was suspected of being his father's adviser, and, what was worse, his father's adviser in a reactionary sense. He was accused of being an anti-parliamentarian, and he never took the trouble to refute the charge, probably because he was too honest to tell a lie.[42]I met the Duc de Nemours for the first time in the studio of a painter, Eugène Lami, just as I met his elder brother in that of Decamps. In fact, all these young princes were sincere admirers and patrons of art, and, if they had had their will, the soirées at the Tuileries would have been graced by the presence of artists more frequently than they were; but, preposterous and scarcely credible as it may seem, the bourgeoisie looked upon this familiar intercourse of the king's sons with artists, literary men, and the like, as so much condescension, if not worse, of which they, the bourgeoisie, would not be guilty if they could help it. It behoves me, however, to be careful in this instance, for the English aristocracy at home was not much more liberal in those days.
The first thing that struck one in the Duc de Nemours was the vast extent of his general information and the marvellous power of memory. Eugène Lami had just returned from London, and, in the exercise of his profession, had come in contact with some members of the oldest families. The mere mention of the name sufficed as the introduction to the general and anecdotal history of such a family, and I doubt whether the best official at Herald's College could have dissected a pedigree as did the Duc de Nemours. Eugène Lami was at that time engaged upon designing some new uniforms for the army, many of which disappeared only after the war of 1870. He lived in the Rue des Marais, the greater part of which was subsequently demolished to make room for the Boulevard de Magenta, and in the same house with two men whose names have become immortal, Honoré de Balzac and Paul Delaroche. I have already spoken of both, but I did not mention the incident that led to thepainter's acquaintance with the novelist, an incident so utterly fanciful that the boldest farce-writer would think twice before utilizing it in a play. It was told to me by Lami himself. One morning, as he and Paul Delaroche were working, there was a knock at the door, and a stout individual, dressed in a kind of monastic garb, appeared on the threshold. Delaroche remembered that he had met him on the staircase, but neither knew who he was, albeit that Balzac's fame was not altogether unknown to them. "Gentlemen," said the visitor, "I am Honoré Balzac, a neighbour and a confrère to boot. My chattels are about to be seized, and I would ask you to save a remnant of my library."
Of course, the request was granted. The books were stowed away behind the pictures; and, after that, Balzac often dropped in to have a chat with them, but neither Delaroche nor Lami, the latter least of all, ever conceived a sincere liking for the great novelist. Their characters were altogether dissimilar. I have seen a good many men whose names have become household words among the refined, the educated, and the art-loving all the world over; I have seen them at the commencement, in the middle, and at the zenith of their career: I have seen none more indifferent to the material benefits of their art than Eugène Lami and Paul Delaroche, not even Eugène Delacroix and Decamps. Balzac was the very reverse. To make a fortune was the sole ambition of his life.
To return for a moment to Louis-Philippe's sons. I have said that the Duc de Nemours was essentially the grand seigneur of the family; truth compels me to add, however, that there was a certain want of pliability about him which his social inferiors could not have relished. It was Henri IV. minus the bonhomie, also perhaps minus that indiscriminate galanterie which endeared Ravaillac's victim to all classes, even when he was no longer young. In the days of which I am treating just now, the Duc de Nemours was very young. As for his courage, it was simply above suspicion; albeit that it was called in question after the revolution of '48, to his father's intense sorrow. No after-dinner encomium was ever as absolutely true as that of Sir Robert Peel on the sons and daughters of the last King of France, when he described them as respectively brave and chaste. Nevertheless, had the Duc de Nemours and his brothers been a thousand times as brave as they were, party spirit, than whichthere is nothing more contemptible in France, would have found the opportunity of denying that bravery.
If these notes are ever published, Englishmen will smile at what I am about to write now, unless their disgust takes another form of expression. The exploits of the Duc d'Aumale in Algeria are quoted by independent military authorities as so many separate deeds of signal heroism. They belong to history, and not a single historian has endeavoured to impair their value. Will it be believed that the Opposition journals of those days spoke of them with ill-disguised contempt as mere skirmishes with a lot of semi-savages? And, during the Second Republic, many of these papers returned to the charge because the Duc d'Aumale, being the constitutionally-minded son of a constitutionally-minded king, resigned the command of his army instead of bringing it to France to coerce a nation into retaining a ruler whom, ostensibly at least, she had voluntarily accepted, and whom, therefore, she was as free to reject.
In connection with these Algerian campaigns of the Duc d'Aumale, I had a story told to me by his brother, De Montpensier, which becomes particularly interesting nowadays, when spiritualism or spiritism is so much discussed. He had it from two unimpeachable sources, namely, from his brother D'Aumale and from General Cousin-Montauban, afterwards Comte de Palikao, the same who was so terribly afraid, after the expedition in China, that the emperor would create him Comte de Pékin, and who sent an aide-de-camp in advance to beg the sovereign not to do so.[43]
It was to General Montauban that Abdel-Kader surrendered after the battles of Isly and Djemma-Gazhouat. It was in the latter engagement that a Captain de Géreaux fell, and when the news of his death reached his family they seemed almost prepared for it. It transpired that, on the very day of the engagement, and at the very hour in which Captain de Géreaux was struck down, his sister, a young and handsome but very impressionable girl, started all of a sudden from her chair, exclaiming that she had seen her brother, surrounded by Arabs, who were felling him to the ground. Then she dropped to the floor in a dead swoon.
A few years elapsed, when General Montauban, who hadbecome the military Governor of the province of Oran, received a letter from the De Géreaux family, requesting him to make some further inquiries respecting the particulars of the captain's death. The letter was written at the urgent prayer of Mdlle. de Géreaux, who had never ceased to think and speak of her brother, and who, on one occasion, a month or so before the despatch of the petition, had risen again from her chair, though in a more composed manner than before, insisting that she had once more seen her brother. This time he was dressed in the native garb, he seemed very poor, and was delving the soil. These visions recurred at frequent intervals, to the intense distress of the family, who could not but ascribe them to the overstrung imagination of Mdlle. de Géreaux. A little while after, she maintained having seen her brother in a white robe and turban, and intoning hymns that sounded to her like Arabic. She implored her parents to institute inquiries, and General Montauban was communicated with to that effect. He did all he could; the country was at peace, and, after a few months, tidings came that there was a Frenchman held prisoner in one of the villages on the Morocco frontier, who for the last two or three years had entirely lost his reason, but that, previous to that calamity, he had been converted to Islamism. His mental derangement being altogether harmless, he was an attendant at the Mosque. As a matter of course, the information had been greatly embellished in having passed through so many channels, nor was it of so definite a character as I have noted it down, but that was the gist of it.
Meanwhile, Montauban had been transferred to another command, and for a twelvemonth after his successor's arrival the inquiry was allowed to fall in abeyance. When it was finally resumed, the French prisoner had died, but, from a document written in his native language found upon him and brought to Oran, there remained little doubt that he was Captain de Géreaux.
To return for a moment to the Duc d'Aumale, who, curiously enough, exercised a greater influence on the outside world in general than any of his other brethren—an influence due probably to his enormous wealth rather than to his personal qualities, though the latter may, to some people, have seemed remarkable. I met him but seldom during his father's lifetime. He was the beau-ideal of the preux chevalier, according to the French notion of the modern Bayard—thatis, handsome, brave to a fault, irresistibly fascinating with women, good-natured in his way, and, above all, very witty. It was he who, after the confiscation of the d'Orléans' property by Napoléon III., replied to the French Ambassador at Turin, who inquired after his health, "I am all right; health is one of the things that cannot be confiscated." Nevertheless, upon closer acquaintance, I failed to see the justifying cause for the preference manifested by public opinion, and, upon more minute inquiry, I found that a great many people shared my views. I am at this moment convinced that, but for his having been the heir of that ill-fated Prince de Condé, and consequently the real defender in the various suits resulting from the assassination of that prince by Madame de Feuchères, he would have been in no way distinguished socially from the rest of the D'Orléans.
The popularity of his eldest brother, the Duc d'Orléans, was, on the contrary, due directly to the man himself. As far as one can judge of him, he was the reverse of Charles II., in that he never said a wise thing and never did a foolish one. He was probably not half so clever as his father, nor, brave as he may have been, would he have ever made so dashing a soldier as his brother D'Aumale, or so rollicking a sailor as his brother De Joinville. He did not pretend to the wisdom of his brother De Nemours, nor to the mystic tendencies of his youngest sister, nor to the sprightly wit of Princesse Clémentine, and yet withal he understood the French nation better than any of them. Even his prenuptial escapades, secrets to no one, were those of the grand seigneur, though by no means affichées; they endeared him to the majority of the people. "Chacun colon-ise à sa façon," was the lenient verdict on his admiration for Jenny Colon, at a moment when colonization in Algeria was the topic of the day. On the whole he liked artists better, perhaps, than art itself, yet it did not prevent him from buying masterpieces as far as his means would allow him. Though still young, in the latter end of the thirties, I was already a frequent visitor to the studios of the great French painters, and it was in that of Decamps' that I became alive to his character for the first time. I was talking to the great painter when the duke came in. We had met before, and shook hands, as he had been taught to do by his father when he met with an Englishman. But I could not make out why he was carrying a pair of trousers over his arm. After we had been chatting for about tenminutes, I wondering all the while what he was going to do with the nether garment, he caught one of my side glances, and burst out laughing. "I forgot," he said; "here, Decamps, here are your breeches." Then he turned to me to explain. "I always bring them up with me when I come in the morning. The concierge is very old, and it saves her trudging up four flights of stairs." The fact was, that the concierge, before she knew who he was, had once asked him to take up the painter's clothes and boots. From that day forth he never failed to ask for them when passing her lodge.
I can but repeat, the Duc d'Orléans was one of the most charming men I have known. I always couple him in my mind with Benjamin Disraeli, and Alexandre Dumas the elder. I knew the English statesman almost as well during part of my life as the French novelist. Though intellectually wide apart from them, the duke had one, if not two traits in common with both; his utter contempt for money affairs and the personal charm he wielded. I doubt whether this personal charm in the other two men was due to their intellectual attainments; with the Duc d'Orléans it was certainly not the case. He rarely, if ever, said anything worth remembering; in fact, he frankly acknowledged his very modest scholarship, and his inability either to remember the epigrams of others or to condense his thoughts into one of his own. "I should not like to admit as much to my father, who, it appears, is a very fine Greek and Latin scholar," he said—"that is, if I am to believe my brothers, De Nemours and D'Aumale, who ought to know; for, notwithstanding the prizes they took at college, I believe they are very clever. Ah, you may well look surprised at my saying, 'notwithstanding the prizes they took,' because I took ever so many, although, for the life of me, I could not construe a Greek sentence, and scarcely a Latin one. I have paid very handsomely, however, for my ignorance." And then he told us an amusing story of his having had to invent a secretaryship to the duchess for an old schoolfellow. "You see, he came upon me unawares with a slip of paper I had written him while at college, asking him to explain to me a Greek passage. There was no denying it, I had signed it. What is worse still, he is supposed to translate and to reply to the duchess's German correspondence, and, when I gave him the appointment, he did not know a single word of Schiller's language, so I had to pay a German tutor and him too."
I have said that the Duc d'Orléans was absolutely indifferent with regard to money, but he would not be fleeced with impunity. What he disliked more than anything else, was the greed of the shopkeeping bourgeois. One day, while travelling in Lorraine, he stopped at the posting-house to have his breakfast, consisting of a couple of eggs, a few slices of bread and butter, and a cup of coffee. Just before proceeding on his journey, his valet came to tell him that mine host wanted to charge him two hundred francs for the repast. The duke merely sent for the mayor, handed him a thousand-franc note, gave him the particulars of his bill of fare, told him to pay the landlord according to the tariff, and to distribute the remainder of the money among the poor. It is more than probable that mine host was among the first, in '48, to hail the republic: princes and kings, according to him, were made to be fleeced; if they objected, what was the good of having a monarchy?
The popular idol in France must distribute largesse, and distribute it individually, or be profitable in some other way. Greed, personal interest, underlies most of the political strife in France. During one of the riots, so common in the reign of Louis-Philippe, Mimi-Lepreuil, a well-known clever pick-pocket, was shouting with all his might, "Vive Louis-Philippe! à bas la République!" As a rule, gentlemen of his profession are found on the plebeian side, and one of the superintendents of police on duty, who had closely watched him, inquired into the reason of his apostasy. "I am sick of your Republicans," was the answer. "I come here morning after morning"—it happened on the Place de la Bourse,—"and dip my hands into a score of pockets without finding a red cent. During the Revolution of July, at the funeral of General Lamarque, I did not make my expenses. Give me a royal procession to make money." These were his politics.
It would be difficult to say what the Duc d'Orléans would have done, had he lived to ascend the throne. One thing is certain, however, that on the day of his death, genuine tears stood in the eyes of all classes, except the Legitimists. As I have already said, they ascribed the fatal accident to God's vengeance for the usurpation of his father. "If this be the case," said an irreverent but witty journalist, "it argues but very little providence on the part ofyour Providence, for now He will have to keep the peace between the Duc de Berri, the Duc de Reichstadt, and the Duc d'Orléans."
The Revolution of '48 — The beginning of it — The National Guards in all their glory — The Café Grégoire on the Place du Caire — The price of a good breakfast in '48 — The palmy days of the Cuisine Bourgeoise — The excitement on the Boulevards on Sunday, February 20th, '48 — The theatres — A ball at Poirson's, the erstwhile director of the Gymnase — A lull in the storm — Tuesday, February 22nd — Another visit to the Café Grégoire — On my way thither — The Comédie-Française closes its doors — What it means, according to my old tutor — We are waited upon by a sergeant and corporal — We are no longer "messieurs," but "citoyens" — An eye to the main chance — The patriots do a bit of business in tricolour cockades — The company marches away — Casualties — "Le patriotisme" means the difference between the louis d'or and the écu of three francs — The company bivouacs on the Boulevard Saint-Martin — A tyrant's victim "malgré lui" — Wednesday, February 23rd — The Café Grégoire once more — The National Guardsen négligé— A novel mode of settling accounts — The National Guards fortify the inner man — A bivouac on the Boulevard du Temple — A camp scene from an opera — I leave — My companion's account — The National Guards protect the regulars — The author of these notes goes to the theatre — The Gymnase and the Variétés on the eve of the Revolution — Bouffé and Déjazet — Thursday, February 24th, '48 — The Boulevards at 9.30 a.m. — No milk — The Revolutionaries do without it — The Place du Carrousel — The sovereign people fire from the roofs on the troops — The troops do not dislodge them — The King reviews the troops — The apparent inactivity of Louis-Philippe's sons — A theory about the difference in bloodshed — One of the three ugliest men in France comes to see the King — Seditious cries — The King abdicates — Chaos — The sacking of the Tuileries — Receptions and feasting in the Galerie de Diane — "Du café pour nous, des cigarettes pour les dames" — The dresses of the princesses — The bourgeois feast the gamins who guard the barricades — The Republic proclaimed — The riff-raff insist upon illuminations — An actor promoted to the Governorship of the Hôtel de Ville — Some members of the "provisional Government" at work — Méry on Lamartine — Why the latter proclaimed the Republic.
I was returning home earlier than usual on Saturday night, the 19th of February, '48, when, at the corner of the Rue Lafitte, I happened to run against a young Englishman who had been established for some years in Paris as the representative of his father, a wealthy cotton-spinner in the north. We had frequently met before, and a cordial feeling had sprung up between us, based at first—I am bound to say—on our common contempt for the vanity of the French.
"Come and breakfast with me to-morrow morning," hesaid; "I fancy you will enjoy yourself. We will breakfast in my quarter, and you will see the National Guards in all their glory. They will muster very strong to-morrow, if it be fine."
"But why to-morrow?" I replied. "I was under the impression that the idea of the Reformist banquet in the Champs-Élysées had been abandoned, so there will be no occasion for them to parade? Besides, that would be on Tuesday only."
"It has been abandoned, but if you think that it will prevent them from turning out, you are very much mistaken; at any rate, come and listen to the preliminaries."
I promised him to come, but I had not the slightest idea that I was going to witness a kind of mild prologue to a revolution.
Next morning turned out very fine—balmy spring weather—and as I sauntered along the Boulevards Montmartre and Poissonnière to the place of appointment the streets were already crowded with people in their Sunday clothes. The place where I was to meet my English friend was situated in the midst of a busy quarter, scarcely anything but warehouses where they sold laces, and flowers, and silks; something like the neighbourhood at the back of Cheapside. The wealthy tradesmen of those days did not live in the outskirts of Paris, as they did later on; and when my friend and I reached the principal café and restaurant on the Place du Caire—I think it was called the Café Grégoire—there was scarcely a table vacant. The habitués were, almost to a man, National Guards, prosperous business men, considerably more anxious, as I found out in a short time, to play a political part than to maintain public tranquillity. If I remember rightly, one of them, a chemist and druggist, who was pointed out to me then, became a deputy after the fall of the Second Empire; and I may notice en passant that this same spot was the political hothouse which produced, afterwards, Monsieur Tirard, who started life as a small manufacturer of imitation jewellery, and who rose to be Minister of Finances under the Third Republic.
The breakfast was simply excellent, the wine genuine throughout, the coffee and cognac all that could be wished; and, when I asked my friend to let me look at the bill, out of simple curiosity, or, rather, for the sake of comparing prices with those of the Cafés de Paris and Riche, I foundthat he had spent something less than eleven francs. At the Café Riche it would have been twenty-five francs, and, at the present time, one would be charged double that sum. These were the palmy days of the Cuisine Française, or, to call it by another name, the Cuisine Bourgeoise, for which, a few years later, a stranger in Paris would have almost sought in vain. Luckily, however, for my enjoyment and digestive organs, I was no stranger to Paris and to the French; if I had been, both the former would have been spoilt, the excitement of those around me being such as to lead the alien to believe that there would be an instantaneous departure for the Tuileries, and a revival of the bloody scenes of the first revolution. It has been my lot, in after-years, to hear a great deal of political drivel in French and English, but it was sound philosophy compared to what I heard that morning. I have spoken before of the Hôtel des Haricots, where men like Hugo, Balzac, Béranger, and Alfred de Musset chose to be imprisoned rather than perform theirdutiesas National Guards. After that, I could fully appreciate their reluctance to be confounded with such a set of pompous wind-bags.
It came to nothing that day, but I had become interested, and made an appointment with my friend for the Tuesday, unless something should happen in the interval. Still, I did not think that the monarchy of July was doomed, though, on returning to the Boulevards, I could not help noticing that the excitement had considerably increased during the time I had been at breakfast. By twelve o'clock that night I was convinced that I had been mistaken, and that the dynasty of the D'Orléans had not a week to live. All the theatres were still open, but I had an invitation to a ball, given by Poirson, the then late director of the Gymnase Théâtre, at his house in the Faubourg Poissonnière. "Nous ne danserons plus jamais sous Louis-Philippe!" was the general cry, which did not prevent the guests from thoroughly enjoying themselves.
Next morning, Monday, there seemed to be a lull in the storm, but on the Tuesday the signs of the coming hurricane were plainly visible on the horizon. The Ministry of Marine was guarded by a company of linesmen. I had some business in the Rue de Rivoli, which at that time ended almost abruptly at the Louvre; and, on my way to the Café Grégoire, I met patrol upon patrol of National Guards beatingthe "assembly." I had occasion to pass before the Comédie-Française. The ominous black-lettered slip of yellow paper, with the wordRelâche, was pasted across the evening's bill. That was enough for me. I remembered the words of my old tutor: "When the Comédie-Française shuts its doors in perilous times, it is like the battening down of the hatches in dirty weather. There is mischief brewing." When I got to the Place du Caire, I was virtually in the thick of it. With the exception of my friend and I, there was not a man in mufti. Even the proprietor had donned his uniform. Our fillet of beef was brought to us by a corporal, and our coffee poured out by a sergeant. Whether these warrior-waiters meant to strike one blow for freedom and to leave the place to take care of itself, we were unable to make out; but their patrons were no longer "messieurs," but had already become "citoyens." I was tempted to say, in the words of Dupin—the one who was President of the Chamber on the day of the Coup d'État, and who was Louis-Philippe's personal friend, "Soyons citoyens, mais restons messieurs," but I thought it better not. My friend had given up all idea of attending to business. "It will not be of the least use," he said. "If I had ribbons to sell instead of cottons, I might make a lot of money, though; for I am open to wager that some of our patriotic neighbours, while they are going to bell the cat outside, have given orders to their workpeople to manufacture tricolour cockades and rosettes with the magic R. F. (République Française) in the centre."
"You do not mean that they would think of such a thing at such a critical moment, even if the republic were a greater probability than it appears to be?" I remonstrated.
"I do mean to say so," he replied, beckoning at the same time to a sleek, corpulent lieutenant, standing a few paces away. "Can you do with a nice lot of narrow silk ribbon?" he asked, as the individual walked up to our table.
"What colour?" inquired the lieutenant.
My friend gave me a significant look, and named all the hues of the rainbow except white, red, and blue.
"Won't do," said the lieutenant, shaking his head. "If it had been red, white, and blue I would have bought as much as you like, because I am manufacturing rosettes for the good cause." After this he walked away.
On the Thursday afternoon the Boulevards and principal thoroughfares swarmed with peripatetic vendors of the republicaninsignia, and some of my friends expressed their surprise as to where they had come from in so short a time. Seeing that they were Frenchmen, I held my tongue, even when one professed to explain, "They have come from England; they are always speculating upon our misfortunes, though they do it cleverly enough. They got scent of what was coming, and sent them over as quickly as they could. Truly they are a great nation—of shopkeepers!" I was reminded of Béranger's scapegrace, when he was accused of being drunk.
"Qu'est que cela me fait, à moi?Que l'on m'appelle ivrogne?"
he sings.
As the afternoon wore on, the excitement increased; the news from the Boulevards became alarming, and at about three o'clock the company marched away. As a matter of course we followed, and equally, as a matter of course, did not leave them until 2.30 next morning. Casualties to report. A large scratch in one of the drummer's cheeks, made by an oyster-shell, flung at the company as it turned round the corner of the Rue de Cléry. No battles, no skirmishes, a great deal of fraternizing with "le peuple souverain," whom, in their own employ, the well-to-do tradesmen would have ordered about like so many mangy curs.
From that day forth I have never dipped into any history of modern France, professing to deal with the political causes and effects of the various upheavals during the nineteenth century in France. They may be worth reading; I do not say that they are not. I have preferred to look at the men who instigated those disorders, and have come to the conclusion that, had each of them been born with five or ten thousand a year, their names would have been absolutely wanting in connection with them. This does not mean that the disorders would not have taken place, but they would have always been led by men in want of five or ten thousand a year. On the other hand, if the D'Orléans family had been less wealthy than they are there would have been no firmly settled third republic; if Louis-Napoléon had been less poor, there would, in all probability, have been no second empire; if the latter had lasted another year, we should have found Gambetta among the ministers of Napoléon III., just like Émile Ollivier, of the "light heart." "Les convictions politiques en France sont basées sur le fait que le louis d'or vaut sept fois plus que l'écu de trois francs." This is the dictumof a man who never wished to be anything, who steadfastly refused all offers to enter the arena of public life.
My friend and I had been baulked of the drama we expected—for we frankly confessed to one another that the utter annihilation of that company of National Guards would have left us perfectly unmoved,—and got instead, a kind of first act of a military spectacular play, such as we were in the habit of seeing at Franconi's. The civic warriors were ostensibly bivouacking on the Boulevard St. Martin; they stacked their muskets and fraternized with the crowd; it would not have surprised us in the least to see a troupe of ballet dancers advance into our midst and give us the entertainment de rigueur—the intermède. It was the only thing wanting to complete the picture, from which even the low comedy incident was not wanting. An old woebegone creature, evidently the worse for liquor, had fallen down while a patrol of regulars was passing. He was not a bit hurt; but there and then the rabble proposed to carry him to the Hôtel de Ville, and to give him an apotheosis as a martyr to the cause. They had already fetched a stretcher, and were, notwithstanding his violent struggles, hoisting him on it, when prevented by the captain of the National Guards.
Still, we returned next day to the Café Grégoire. In the middle of the place there lay an old man—that one, stark dead, who had been fired upon without rhyme or reason by a picket of the National Guards. It was only about eleven o'clock, and those valiant defenders of public order were still resting from their fatigue—at any rate, there were few of them about. There was a discussion going on whether they should go out or not—a discussion confined to the captain, two lieutenants, and as many sub-lieutenants. They appeared not to have the least idea of the necessity to refer for orders to the colonel or the head-quarters of the regiment or the legion, as it was called. They meant to settle the matter among themselves. The great argument in favour of calling out the men was that one of them, while standing at his window that very morning, was fired at by a passing ragamuffin, who, instead of hitting him, shattered his windowpanes.
"Well," said one of the lieutenants, who had been opposed to the calling out of the men, "then we are quits after all; for look at the old fellow lying out there."
"No, we are not," retorts the captain; "for he was shot by a mistake, so he doesn't count."
"L'esprit ne perd jamais ses droits en France;" so, in another moment or two, the bugle sounded lustily throughout the quarter. We followed the buglers for a little while, it being still too early for our breakfast, and consequently enjoyed the felicity of seeing a good many of the warriors "in their habit as they lived" indoors—namely, in dressing-gown and slippers and smoking-caps. For most of them opened their windows on the first, second, and third floors, to inquire whether the call was urgent. The buglers entered into explanations. No, the call was not urgent, but the captain had decided on a military promenade, just to reassure the neighbourhood, and to stimulate the martial spirit of the lagging members of the company. The explanation invariably provoked the same answer, and in a voice not that of the citizen-warrior: "Que le capitaine attende jusqu'après le déjeûner."
Davoust has said that the first condition of the fitness of an army is its commissariat. In that respect every one of these National Guards was fit to be a Davoust, for their fortifying of the inner man was not accomplished until close upon two o'clock. By that time they marched out, saluted by the cries of "Vive la Réforme!" of all the ragtag and bobtail from the Faubourgs du Temple and St. Antoine, who had invaded the principal thoroughfares. The "Marseillaise," the "Chant des Girondins," "La République nous appelle" resounded through the air; and I was wondering whether they were packing their trunks at the Tuileries, also what these National Guards had come out for. They only seemed to impede the efficient patrolling of the streets by the regulars, and, instead of dispersing the rabble, they attracted them. They were evidently under the impression that they made a very goodly show, and at every word of command I expected to see the captain burst asunder. When we got to the Boulevard St. Martin, the latter was told that the sixth legion was stationed on the Boulevard du Temple. A move was made in that direction.
Now "Richard is himself again;" he is among the crowd he likes best—the crowd of the Boulevard du Crime, with its theatres, large and small, its raree and puppet shows, its open-air entertainments, its cafés and mountebanks; and, what is more, he is there in his uniform, distinguished fromthe rest, and consequently the cynosure of all the little actresses and prettyfiguranteswho have just left the rehearsal—for by this time it is after three—and who are but too willing to be entertained. Appointments are made to dine or to sup together, without the slightest reference as to what may happen in the interval. All at once there is an outcry and a rush towards the Porte Saint-Martin; our warriors are obliged to leave their inamoratas, and when they come to look for their muskets, which they have placed in a corner for convenience' sake, they find that a good many have disappeared. The customers belonging to the sovereign people have slunk off with them. Nevertheless they join the ranks, for the bugle has sounded. At the corner of the Faubourg Saint-Martin, whence the noise proceeded, they are met by three or four score of the sovereign people, ragged, unkempt, who are pushing in front of them two of the students of the École Polytechnique. The two young fellows are very pale, and can scarcely speak. Still they manage to explain that the Municipal Guard at the Saint-Martin barracks have fired upon the people; then they go their way. Whither? Heaven only knows. But our captain, in the most stentorian of voices, gives the word of command, "To the right, wheel!" and we are striding up the faubourg, which is absolutely deserted as far as the Rue des Marais. A collision seems pretty inevitable now, the more that the Municipal Guards are already taking aim, when all at once our captain and one of the lieutenants rush forward, and fling themselves into the arms of the officers of the Municipal Guards. Tableau; and I am baulked once more of a good fight. I leave my friend to see the rest of this ridiculous comedy, and take my departure there and then.
The following is my companion's account of what happened after I left. I am as certain that every word of it is true as if I had been there myself, though it seems almost incredible that French officers, whose worst enemies have never accused them of being deficient in courage, should have acted so inconsiderately.
"The officers of the National Guards appear to have assumed at once the office of protectors of the regulars against the violence of the crowd. Why the regulars should have submitted to this, seeing that they were far better armed than their would-be guardians, I am unable to say. Be this as it may, the regulars consented, the flag floating above theprincipal door of the barracks was taken down, and I really believe that the Municipal Guards stacked their arms and virtually handed them over to the others. But I will not vouch for it. At any rate, a few hours afterwards, while the company had gone to dinner, the barracks were assailed, the men and officers knocked down by the people, and the building set on fire. When the fifth legion returned about eleven o'clock to the Faubourg Saint-Martin, the flames were leaping up to the sky, so they turned their heels contentedly in the direction of the Boulevard du Temple, where they bivouacked between the Théâtre de la Gaîté and the Ambigu-Comique, while those who had made appointments with the little actresses went round by the stage doors to keep them. That, as far as I could judge, was the part of the fifth legion in the day's proceedings. I left them in all their glory, thinking themselves, no doubt, very fine fellows.
"On the Thursday morning"—my companion told me all this on Saturday evening, the 26th of February—"I was up betimes, simply because the drumming and bugling prevented my sleeping. At eight, the Café Grégoire was already very full, the heroes of the previous night had returned to perform their ablutions, and also, I suppose, to reassure their anxious spouses; but they had no longer that conquering air I noticed when I left them the night before. Whether they had come to the conclusion that both in love and war they had reaped but barren victories, I cannot say, but their republican ardour, it seemed to me, had considerably cooled down. I am convinced that, notwithstanding the events of Wednesday night in the Faubourg Saint-Martin, they were under the impression that neither the people nor the military would resort to further extremities. I cannot help thinking that, after I left, not a single man could have remained at his post, because not one amongst them seemed to have an idea of the horrible slaughter on the Boulevard des Capucines.[44]They were not left very long in ignorance of the real state of affairs, and then they saw at once that they had roused a spectre they would be unable to lay. From that moment, it is my opinion, they would have willingly drawn back, but it was too late. While they were still debating, an individual rushed in, telling them that one or two regiments, commanded by a general (who turned out to be General Bedeau), had drawn up in front of the barricade which had been thrown up during the night in the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, and was being defended by a detachment of the fifth legion. They all ran out, and I ran with them. When we got to the boulevard, matters had already been arranged, and they were just in time to join the escort General Bedeau had accepted, after having consented not to execute the orders with which he had been entrusted. By that time I began to perceive which way the wind was blowing: the canaille had unceremoniously linked their arms in those of the National Guards, and insisted, courteously but firmly, on carrying their firearms. When we got to the Rue Montmartre, they took the horses out of the gun-carriages, and the soldiers looked tamely on, notwithstanding the commands of their officers. When the latter endeavoured to enforce their orders by hitting them with the flat of their swords, they simply left the ranks and joined the rabble. I had had enough of it, and made my way home by the back streets. I had had enough of it, and kept indoors until this afternoon."
Thus far my informant. As for myself, I saw little on the Wednesday night of what was going on. It was my own fault: I was too optimistic. I had scarcely gone a few steps, after my dinner, when, just in front of the Gymnase, they began shouting, "La Patrie, Journal du soir; achetezLa Patrie. Voyez le nouveau ministère de Monsieur Molé." I remember giving the fellow half a franc, at which he grumbled, though it was three times the ordinary price. On opening the paper, I rashly concluded from what I read that the revolution was virtually at an end, and I was the more confirmed in my opinion by the almost instantaneous lighting up of the Boulevards. It was like a fairy scene: people were illuminating—a little bit too soon, as it turned out. Being tired of wandering, and feeling no inclination for bed,I turned into the Gymnase. There were Bressant and Rose Chéri and Arnal; I would surely be able to spend a few pleasant hours. But alack and alas! the house presented a very doleful appearance—dead-heads, to a man; and very few of these, people who, if they could not fiddle themselves, like Nero while Rome was burning, would go to hear fiddling under no matter what circumstances, provided they were not asked to pay. I did not stay long, but when I came out into the streets the noise was too deafening for me. The "Marseillaise" has always had a particularly jarring effect upon my nerves. There are days when I could be cruel enough to prefer "the yells of those ferocious soldiers, as they murder in cold blood the sons and the companions" of one section of defenceless patriots, to the stirring strains of the other section as they figuratively rush to the rescue; and on that particular evening I felt in that mood. So, when I got to the Boulevard Montmartre, I turned into the Théâtre des Variétés. I remember the programme up to this day. They were playing "Le Suisse de Marly," "Le Marquis de Lauzun," "Les Extrêmes se touchent," and "Les Vieux Péchés." I had seen the second and the last piece at least a dozen times, but I was always ready to see them again for the sake of Virginie Déjazet in the one, of Bouffé in the other. The lessee at that time was an Englishman. Bouffé and I had always kept up our friendship; so I made up my mind to go and have a chat with him, hoping that Déjazet, whose conversation affected one like a bottle of champagne, would join us. The house, like the Gymnase, was almost empty, but I made my way behind the scenes, and in about half an hour forgot all about the events outside. Bouffé was telling me anecdotes about his London performances, and Déjazet was imitating the French of some of the bigwigs of King Leopold's court; so the time passed pleasantly enough. At the end of the performance we proposed taking supper, and turned down the Rue Montmartre. It was late when I returned home, consequently I saw nothing of the slaughter on the Boulevard des Capucines.
Though I had gone to bed late, I was up betimes on the Thursday morning. A glance at the Boulevards, as I turned the corner of my street about half-past nine, convinced me that the illuminations of the previous night had been premature, and that before the day was out there would be an end of the monarchy of July. A slight mist was still hangingover the city as I strolled in the direction of the Madeleine, and the weather was damp and raw, but in about half an hour the sun broke through. A shot was heard now and then, but I myself saw no collision then between the troops and the people. On the contrary, it looked to me as if the former would have been glad to be left alone. As I had been obliged to leave home without my usual cup of tea for want of milk—the servant had told me there was none—I went back a little way to Tortoni's, where I was greeted with the same answer. I could have tea or coffee or chocolate made with water, but milk there was none on that side of Paris, and, unless things took a turn, there would be no butter. The sovereign people had thrown up barricades during the night round all the northern and north-western issues, and would not let the milk-carts pass. They, no doubt, had some more potent fluids to fall back upon, for a good many, even at that early hour, were by no means steady in their gait. The Boulevards were swarming with them. Since then, I have seen these sovereign people getting the upper hand twice, viz. on the 4th of September, '70, and on the 18th of March, '71. I have seen them during the siege of Paris, and I have no hesitation in saying that, for cold-blooded, apish, monkeyish, tigerish cruelty, there is nothing on the face of God's earth to match them, and that no concessions wrung from society on their behalf will ever make them anything else but the fiends in human shape they are.
After my fruitless attempt to get my accustomed breakfast, I resumed my perambulations, this time taking the Rue Vivienne as far as the Palais-Royal. It must have been between half-past ten and eleven when I reached the Place du Carrousel, which, at a rough guess, was occupied by about five thousand regular infantry and horse and National Guards. The Place du Carrousel was not then, what it became later on, a large open space. Part of it was encumbered with narrow streets of very tall houses, and from their windows and roofs the sovereign people—according to an officer who had been on duty from early morn—had been amusing themselves by firing on the troops,—not in downright volleys, but with isolated shots, picking out a man here and there. "But," I remonstrated, "half a dozen pompiers and a score of linesmen could dislodge them in less than ten minutes, instead of returning their shots one by one." "So they could," was the reply, "but orders came from the Château not to do so, andhere we are. Besides," added my informant, "I doubt very much, if I gave my men the word of command to storm the place, whether they would do so; they are thoroughly demoralized. On our way hither I had the greatest difficulty in keeping them together. Without a roll-call I could not exactly tell you how many are missing, but as we came along I noticed several falling out and going into the wine-shops with the rabble. They did not come back again. I had to shut my eyes to it. If I had attempted to prevent it, there would have been a more horrible slaughter than there was last night on the Boulevards, and, what is worse, the men who remained staunch would have been in a minority, and not able to stand their ground. The mob have got hold of the muskets of the National Guards. I dare say, as you came along, you noticed on many doors, written up in chalk, 'Arms given up,' and on some the words 'with pleasure' added to the statement." It was perfectly true; I had noticed it.