The people collected their dead and their wounded and commandeered
wagons, and loaded them with the pale harvest reaped from the bloody
paving-stones before the great gateway and the tall gilded railings
and the chipped façade with the shattered windows, behind which the
unpopular driver of the Coach of the Crown sat gripping the broken
reins of State.
Pallida Mors headed the grim midnight procession. And as it rolled, to
the slow wailing of a mournful chant, by the light of flaring torches
through the streets, upon its way to the offices of the _National_ and
the _Réforme_,--where lights had burned, and men had sat in conference
for sixty hours past,--those who marched with it knocked at the doors
of scared, unsleeping citizens, crying: “Wake! behold the deeds that
are done by Kings!” And the noise of firing, and of furious cries,
with the clanging of church-bells, sounding the tocsin at the bidding
of Revolutionary hands, reached the ears of pale Louis Philippe at the
Tuileries, and must have shrieked in them that all was over!
For all was over even before the Place du Palais Royal was filled
by thousands of armed insurgents; before the Palais was stormed and
gutted; before the Fifth Legion of the National Guard,--having its
Major, its Lieutenant-Colonel, and several officers in command--marched
upon the Tuileries; followed by the First, Second, Third, Fourth,
Sixth, and Tenth: before the Deed of Abdication was signed--the Royal
dwelling emptied of its garrison--the shabby one-horse hackney coach
called from the stand--(the Royal carriages having been burned)--and
before the Monarchy, covered with an ancient round hat, clad in worn
black garments, and with only five francs or so in its pockets, had
emerged by the little wicket-gateway near the Obelisk, stepped into
the humble conveyance above mentioned, and passed away at full gallop,
surrounded by Chausseurs and Municipal Guards, and accompanied by a
running cortége of mechanics, artisans, nursemaids, gamins, ragpickers,
shoeblacks, and other representatives of the Sovereign People.
With the aid of the English Admiralty, and the British Consul at Havre,
Mr. Thomas Smith, his lady and their grandchildren, obtained berths on
the _Express_ packet-boat; and, despite the activities of the local
Procurer of the Republic--not to mention certain perils incurred
through the too-excellent memory of a certain female commissionaire
or tout for cheap lodging-houses, Madame Mousset by name,--who by
the light of her dark lantern recognized Majesty even _minus_ its
whiskers--the voyage to Newhaven was accomplished without disaster.
Claremont received the Royal refugees; the Tory organs of the English
Press were distinctly sympathetic; even the ultra-Whig prints,
amidst stirring descriptions of barricade-fighting and the carnage
on the Boulevard des Capucines, refrained from the dubious sport of
mud-throwing at the monarch all shaven and shorn....
The popular Reviews devoted some pages to the favorable comparison
of peaceable, contented, happy England (then pinched and gaunt with
recent famine, breaking out in angry spots with Chartist riots)--with
feverish, frantic, furious France. In _The Ladies’ Mentor_, the leading
periodical published for the delectation of the sex we were accustomed
in those days to designate as “soft” and “gentle,” there is indeed in
Our Weekly Letter from Paris a reference to “the landing of a _royal
and venerable_ exile upon our _happier shores_”; but beyond this,
not a single reference or allusion calculated to shock the delicate
sensibilities of my Aunt Julietta, or any other young gentlewoman of
delicacy and refinement....
The pen of the writer of the above-named delicious epistles reverts
with evident relief to the latest thing in Concert-dresses. A
full-gored skirt of green velvet with a gathered flounce in pink
_crèpe_ up to the knee ... could anything be more genteel? The hair
should be waved; brought low to hide the ears--“A _pity_,” reflected
my Aunt Julietta, “_when mine are so much prettier than poor dear
Marietta’s!_”--and wreathed with a garland of natural blooms, in the
ease of young ladies ... the heads of matrons being adorned with caps
of costly lace, or lappets, fastened with the artificial rose.
Pompadour fans were also the rage. One-button gloves, worn with
broad bracelets of gold, or black velvet with cameo clasps, were _de
rigueur_. Sleeves for day-wear were elbow-length with _volantes_ of
_guipure_. For evening, short and puffed. Pray remember that these
were the days of swanlike necks and champagne-bottle shoulders, high,
expansive brows, large melting Oriental eyes, and waists that tapered.
And considering the obstinate preference of Dame Nature for turning out
her daughters in different shapes, makes, and sizes, it is marvelous
how all the women of the era managed to look exactly alike....
* * * * *
My Aunt Julietta had to hunt up the meanings of the descriptive foreign
terms so thickly peppered over Our Weekly Letter from Paris, in
perchance the very dictionary whence their gifted writer, then resident
at Peckham, had culled them, before she could settle down to perusal
of the exquisite _Lines Addressed To A Fading Violet_, which are to be
found at the bottom of the second column of the adjoining page; and
the delicious _Essay upon Woman’s Love_, which usurps the whole of the
first column. It begins like this:
“No _true_ woman ever _loved_ who did not _venerate_ the _object of her
passion_, and who did not _delight_, nay, _rejoice_ to bend in _adoring
worship_ before the throne on which _He_ sits exalted who is at once
_her slave_ and _the idol of her soul_!”
Even as my Aunt Julietta stopped reading to dry her gentle maiden
tears, Paris was bowing before the idol of her soul. She called it
Freedom; and when from a window of the Hôtel de Ville the Citizen
Lamartine proclaimed the Second Republic, how frenzied was her joy!
For Paris is a spoiled and petted courtesan, who, suffering from the
burden of her very luxury, welcomes a fresh possessor. The new lover
may be poorer than the old; he may be even brutal, but he is new....
And while he is new he pleases, and while he pleases he will not be
betrayed....
You are to imagine, amidst what burning of powder and enthusiasm, what
singing of the _Marseillaise_ and the _Chant des Girondins_ by the
multitudes of patriots in the streets, as by red-capped _prime donne_
at the Opera, was carried out the refurbishing and gilding of those
three ancient Jagannaths, baptized so long ago in human blood by the
divine names of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.
And you are to suppose yourself witness--many similar scenes being
enacted elsewhere--of the White Flag of Orleans being hauled down from
above the gilded bronze gates and the great central Pavilion of the
Palace of the Tuileries, and the Tricolor breaking out in its place.
Conceive, this being accomplished with bloodshed, and sweat, and
frenzy; France neighing for a new paramour, even as the perfumed and
adorned harlot of Holy Writ. He came, as for her bitter scourging
it was written he should come.... From what depths he rose up, with
his dull, inscrutable eyes, his manner silky, ingratiating, suave as
that of the Swiss-Italian manager of a restaurant grill-room; his
consummate insincerity, his hidden aims and secret ambitions; and his
horribly-evident, humiliating, galling impecuniosity, it is for a great
writer and satirist to tell in days to be.
The monk of old, dubbed idler and shaveling by the little-read, when
he ceased from his stupendous labors for God with pickaxe and drill
and saw, the crane and pulley and rope, the mortar-hod and trowel, the
plumb and adze and hammer and chisel, to serve Him in the making of
illuminated books of His Word, service and song; took unto him a clean
unused quill, or a pointed brush of woodcock’s hackles or hare’s fur,
and dipped it in liquid gold, or the purple that the Catholic Church
has ever held sacred, when he would write the ineffable Name of the
KING OF KINGS. With ground lapis-lazuli, sprinkled with diamond dust,
he set down the Divine Titles of JESUS CHRIST THE SAVIOR.... Mary the
Immaculate Mother gleams forth with the pearly-white sheen of the
dove’s breast from a background of purest turquoise. No archangel but
has his initial letter of distinctive, characteristic splendor, from
the glowing ruby of Michael, all-glorious Captain of the hosts-militant
of Heaven, to the amethyst of Raphael, and Gabriel’s hyacinth-blue....
The more glorious the Saint, the more gallant the colors that adorn
the strap-borders and historiated initials of the pages. Each prophet,
sage, ruler, lawgiver of Holy Writ is decked as he deserves; nor do
great generals like Saul, David, and Joshua, lack the trumpet-note
of martial scarlet; while Ahab, Jezebel, Haman, are spotted as with
leprosy, and livid as with corruption; and no China-ink is black
enough to score down Judas, the betrayer of his Lord. While to the
dreadful enemy of mankind are allotted the orange-yellow of devouring,
hellish flame, and the livid blue of burning brimstone; and the
verdigris-green, metallic scales of the Snake of Eden diaper the
backgrounds of the letters, and the poisonous bryony, the henbane, and
the noxious trailing vine of the deadly nightshade wreath and garland
them about.
* * * * *
Find me a rusted nib, worn and corroded with long use in the office
of a knavish attorney, where perjurers daily kiss the Book for hire,
and the life-blood of pale men and haggard women is sucked away by the
fierce, insatiable horse-leech of Costs. In what medium shall it be
dipped to pen the cognomen and style of the man I have it in my mind to
write of?
All the blood shed in that accursed December of the Coup d’Etat of
1851 flowed quickly away down the Paris gutters; it has vanished from
the pavements of the Rue Montmartre, and from the flagstones of the
courtyard of the Prefecture; was drunk by the thirsty gravel of the
Champ de Mars, where _battues_ of human beings were carried out, but it
has left its indelible stain behind....
Scrape me a pinch of dust from those dark, accusing, ominous patches;
and pound therewith a fragment of the moldering skull of a British
soldier (of all those hundreds that lie buried in the pest-pits of
Varna, and in those deep trenches beside the lake of Devna, one can
well be spared). Compound from the soil of Crim Tartary (enriched so
well with French and English blood) a jet-black pigment. Dilute with
water from the River Alma. And then, with ink so made, write down the
name of Charles Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the Prince of Pretenders, who
became by fraud and craft and treachery and murder, Emperor of France.