Bouillé.
Dimly visible, at Metz on the North-Eastern frontier, a certain
brave Bouillé, last refuge of Royalty in all straits and
meditations of flight, has for many months hovered occasionally
in our eye; some name or shadow of a brave Bouillé: let us now,
for a little, look fixedly at him, till he become a substance and
person for us. The man himself is worth a glance; his position
and procedure there, in these days, will throw light on many
things.
For it is with Bouillé as with all French Commanding Officers;
only in a more emphatic degree. The grand National Federation, we
already guess, was but empty sound, or worse: a last loudest
universal _Hep-hep-hurrah_, with full bumpers, in that National
Lapithae-feast of Constitution-making; as in loud denial of the
palpably existing; as if, with hurrahings, you would shut out
notice of the inevitable already knocking at the gates! Which new
National bumper, one may say, can but deepen the drunkenness; and
so, the _louder_ it swears Brotherhood, will the sooner and the
more surely lead to Cannibalism. Ah, under that fraternal shine
and clangour, what a deep world of irreconcileable discords lie
momentarily assuaged, damped down for one moment! Respectable
military Federates have barely got home to their quarters; and
the inflammablest, “dying, burnt up with liquors, and kindness,”
has not yet got extinct; the shine is hardly out of men’s eyes,
and still blazes filling all men’s memories,—when your discords
burst forth again very considerably darker than ever. Let us look
at Bouillé, and see how.
Bouillé for the present commands in the Garrison of Metz, and far
and wide over the East and North; being indeed, by a late act of
Government with sanction of National Assembly, appointed one of
our Four supreme Generals. Rochambeau and Mailly, men and
Marshals of note in these days, though to us of small moment, are
two of his colleagues; tough old babbling Lückner, also of small
moment for us, will probably be the third. Marquis de Bouillé is
a determined Loyalist; not indeed disinclined to moderate reform,
but resolute against immoderate. A man long suspect to
Patriotism; who has more than once given the august Assembly
trouble; who would not, for example, take the National Oath, as
he was bound to do, but always put it off on this or the other
pretext, till an autograph of Majesty requested him to do it as a
favour. There, in this post if not of honour, yet of eminence and
danger, he waits, in a silent concentered manner; very dubious of
the future. “Alone,” as he says, or almost alone, of all the old
military Notabilities, he has not emigrated; but thinks always,
in atrabiliar moments, that there will be nothing for him too but
to cross the marches. He might cross, say, to Treves or Coblentz
where Exiled Princes will be one day ranking; or say, over into
Luxemburg where old Broglie loiters and languishes. Or is there
not the great dim Deep of European Diplomacy; where your
Calonnes, your Bréteuils are beginning to hover, dimly
discernible?
With immeasurable confused outlooks and purposes, with no clear
purpose but this of still trying to do His Majesty a service,
Bouillé waits; struggling what he can to keep his district loyal,
his troops faithful, his garrisons furnished. He maintains, as
yet, with his Cousin Lafayette, some thin diplomatic
correspondence, by letter and messenger; chivalrous
constitutional professions on the one side, military gravity and
brevity on the other; which thin correspondence one can see
growing ever the thinner and hollower, towards the verge of
entire vacuity.[305] A quick, choleric, sharply discerning,
stubbornly endeavouring man; with suppressed-explosive
resolution, with valour, nay headlong audacity: a man who was
more in his place, lionlike defending those Windward Isles, or,
as with military tiger-spring, clutching Nevis and Montserrat
from the English,—than here in this suppressed condition, muzzled
and fettered by diplomatic packthreads; looking out for a civil
war, which may never arrive. Few years ago Bouillé was to have
led a French East-Indian Expedition, and reconquered or conquered
Pondicherri and the Kingdoms of the Sun: but the whole world is
suddenly changed, and he with it; Destiny willed it not in that
way but in this.