"The King arrives day after to-morrow. He will be crowned Sunday, the
29th. I shall see him place upon his head a crown that no one dreamed
of when I raised my voice in 1814. I write this page of my Memoirs in
the room where I am forgotten amid the noise. This morning I visited
Saint-Remi and the Cathedral decorated in colored paper. The only clear
idea that I can have of this last edifice is from the decorations of
the Jeanne d'Arc of Schiller, played at Berlin. The opera-scene
painters showed me on the banks of the Spree, what the opera-scene
painters on the banks of the Vesle hide from me. But I amused myself
with the old races, from Clovis with his Franks and his legion come
down from heaven, to Charles VII. with Jeanne d'Arc."
The writer, who some weeks earlier had expressed himself in terms so
dithyrambic as to the consecration, now wrote as follows of this
religious and monarchical solemnity:--
"Under what happy auspices did Louis XVI. ascend the throne! How
popular he was, succeeding to Louis XV.! And yet what did he become?
The present coronation will be the representation of a coronation. It
will not be one; we shall see the Marshal Moncey, an actor at that of
Napoleon, the Marshal who formerly celebrated the death of the tyrant
Louis XVI. in his army, brandish the royal sword at Rheims in his rank
as Count of Flanders or Duke of Aquitaine. To whom can this parade
really convey any illusion? I should have wished no pomp to-day; the
King on horseback, the church bare, adorned only with its ancient
arches and tombs; the two Chambers present, the oath of fidelity to the
Charter taken aloud on the Bible. This would have been the renewal of
the monarchy; they might have begun it over again with liberty and
religion. Unfortunately there was little love of liberty, even if they
had had at least a taste for glory."
This is not all; the curious royalist, as if disabused as to Bourbon
glories, so extolled by him, glorifies, apropos of the coronation of
Charles X., the Napoleon whom in 1814 he called disdainfully
"Buonaparte," loading him with the most cutting insults:--
"After all, did not the new coronation, when the Pope anointed a man as
great as the chief of the second race, by a change of heads alter the
effect of the ancient ceremony of our history? The people have been led
to think that a pious rite does not dedicate any one to the throne, or
else renders indifferent the choice of the brow to be touched by the
holy oil. The supernumeraries at Notre-Dame de Paris, playing also in
the Cathedral of Rheims, are no longer anything but the obligatory
personages of a stage that has become common. The advantage really is
with Napoleon, who furnishes his figurants to Charles X. The figure of
the Emperor thenceforth dominates all. It appears in the background of
events and ideas. The leaflets of the good time to which we have
attained shrivel at the glance of his eagles."
Charles X. left Compiegne the 27th of May in the morning, and slept at
Fismes. The next day, the 28th, he had just quitted this town and was
descending a steep hill, when several batteries of the royal guard
fired a salute at his departure; the horses, frightened, took flight.
Thanks to the skill of the postilion, there was no accident to the
King; but a carriage of his suite, in which were the Duke of Aumont,
the Count de Cosse, the Duke of Damas, and the Count Curial, was
overturned and broken, and the last two wounded. At noon Charles X.
arrived at a league and a half from Rheims, at the village of Tinqueux,
where he was awaited by the Dukes of Orleans and Bourbon, the officers
of his civil and military household, the authorities of Rheims, the
legion of the mounted National Guard of Paris, etc. He entered the gold
carriage,--termed the coronation carriage,--where the Dauphin and the
Dukes of Orleans and Bourbon took their places beside him. The cortege
then took up its march. From Tinqueux to Rheims, the royal coach,
gleaming with gold, passed under a long arcade of triumphal arches
adorned with streamers and foliage. From the gates of the city to the
Cathedral, flowers strewed the sand that covered the ground. All the
houses were hung with carpets and garlands; at all the windows, from
all the balconies, from all the roofs, innumerable spectators shouted
their acclamations; the cortege advanced to the sound of all the bells
of the city, and to the noise of a salvo of artillery of one hundred
and one guns. The King was received under a dais at the door of the
metropolitan church, by the Archbishop of Rheims in his pontifical
robes, and accompanied by his suffragans, the Bishops of Soissons,
Beauvais, Chalons, and Amiens. The Archbishop presented the holy water
to the sovereign, who knelt, kissed the Gospels, then was escorted
processionally into the sanctuary. His prie-dieu was placed at fifteen
feet from the altar, on a platform, about which was a magnificent
canopy hung from the ceiling of the Cathedral.
The Dauphiness had entered her gallery with the Duchess of Berry and
the princesses of the blood. The Archbishop celebrated the vespers, and
then the Cardinal de La Fare ascended the pulpit and delivered a sermon
in which he said:--
"God of Clovis, if there is here below a spectacle capable of
interesting Thy infinite Majesty, would it not be that which in this
solemnity fixes universal attention and invites and unites all prayers?
These days of saintly privilege, in which the hero of Tolbiac, and
thirteen centuries after him, the sixty-fifth of his successors have
come to the same temple to receive the same consecration, can they be
confounded with the multitude of human events, to be buried and lost in
the endless annals? To what, O great God! if not to the persistence of
Thy immutable decrees, can we attribute, on this earth, always so
changing and mobile, the supernatural gift of this miraculous duration?"
The Cardinal covered with praises not only the King, but the Dauphin,
the Dauphiness, the Duchess of Berry, the Duke of Bordeaux. He cried:--
"Constantly happy as King, may Charles X. be constantly happy as father!
"May his paternal glances always see about him, shining with a
brilliancy that nothing can change, this family so precious, the
ornament of his court, the charm of his life, the future of France!
"This illustrious Dauphin, the terror of the genius of evil, the swift
avenger of the majesty of kings, conquering hero and peace-maker!
"This magnanimous Princess, the living image of celestial charity, the
visible Providence of the unfortunate, the model of heroism as of
virtue!
"This admirable mother of the Child of Miracle, who restored hope to
the dismayed nation, astonished it by her courage and captivates it by
her goodness!
"This tender scion of the first branch of the lilies, the object,
before his birth, of so many desires, and now of so many hopes."
The Prince of the Church, amid general emotion, thus closed his
discourse:--
"May it be, O Lord! thy protecting will, that if the excess of ills has
surpassed our presentiments and our fear, the reality of good may, in
its turn, surpass our hopes and our desires.
"Condescend that the lasting succor of Thy grace may guide in an
unbroken progress of prosperity and lead to happiness without
vicissitude or end, our King, Thy adorer, and his people, who, under
his laws, shall be more than ever religious and faithful."
After the sermon, the Archbishop celebrated the Te Deum, to which
Charles X. listened standing. Then after having kissed the altar and a
reliquary in which was a piece of the true cross, the sovereign
returned to his apartments in the Archbishop's palace.
Thus passed the eve of the consecration. The same day M. de
Chateaubriand wrote:--
"Rheims, Saturday, the eve of the consecration. I saw the King enter. I
saw pass the gilded coaches of the monarch who, a little while ago, had
not a horse to mount; I saw rolling by, carriages full of courtiers who
had not known how to defend their master. This herd went to the church
to sing the Te Deum, and I went to visit a Roman ruin, and to walk
alone in an elm grove called the Bois d'Amour. I heard from afar the
jubilation of the bells; I contemplated the towers of the Cathedral,
secular witnesses of this ceremony always the same and yet so different
in history, time, ideas, morals, usages, and customs. The monarchy
perished, and for a long time the Cathedral was changed to a stable.
Does Charles X., when he sees it again to-day, recall that he saw Louis
XVI. receive anointment in the same place where he in his turn is to
receive it? Will he believe that a consecration shelters him from
misfortune? There is no longer a hand with virtue enough to cure the
king's evil, no ampulla with holy power sufficient to render kings
inviolable."
Such was the disposition of the great writer, always content with
himself, discontented with others. The crowd of royalists, far from
showing themselves sceptical and morose, as he was, was about to attend
the ceremony of the morrow in a wholly different mood. It had long been
ready with its enthusiasm, and awaited with impatience mingled with
respect the dawn of the day about to rise.