The dominant quality of Charles X., his piety, was the one that was to
be most used against him. There was in this piety nothing morose,
hypocritical, fanatical, and not an idea of intolerance or persecution
mingled with it. Conviction and feeling united in the heart of the King
to inspire him with profound faith. In 1803, before the death-bed of a
beloved woman, he had sworn to renounce earthly for divine love, and
from that time he had kept his vow. The woman by whom this conversion
was made was the sister-in-law of the Duchess of Polignac, Louise
d'Esparbes, Viscountess of Polastron. The Duchess of Gontaut recounts
in her unpublished Memoirs the touching and pathetic scene of the
supreme adieu of this charming woman and of Charles X., then Count
d'Artois. It was in England during the Emigration. The Viscountess of
Polastron was dying with consumption, and the approach of the end
reawakened in her all the piety of her childhood. A holy priest, the
Abbe de Latil, demanded the departure of the Prince. "I implore
Monseigneur," he said, "to go into the country; you shall see the poor
penitent again; she herself desires it, having one word to say to you,
one favor to ask, but it cannot be until at the moment of death."
The Prince, who, even at the time of his greatest errors, had never
ceased to love and honor religion, obeyed the command of the priest. He
awaited in cruel anguish the hour when he should be permitted to
return. It was authorized only when death was very near. The Duchess of
Gontaut says:--
"The doors of the salon were opened. Monsieur dared not approach; I was
near the dying woman and held her hand; it was trembling. She perceived
Monsieur. He was about to rush toward her. 'Come no nearer,' said the
Abbe, in a firm voice. Monsieur did not venture to cross the threshold.
The agitation redoubled; the agony increased. She raised her hands to
heaven, and said:--
"'One favor, Monseigneur, one favor--live for God, all for God.'
"He fell upon his knees, and said: 'I swear it, God!' She said again,
'All for God!' Her head fell on my shoulder; this last word was her
last breath: she was no more. Monsieur raised his arms to heaven,
uttered a horrible cry: the door was closed."
The Count d'Artois was then but forty-five, but from that day he never
gave occasion for the least scandal, and led an exemplary life. As
Louis XIV. had held in profound esteem the courageous prelates who
adjured him to break with his mistresses, Charles X. was attached to
the truly Christian priest who had converted him by the death-bed of
the Viscountess of Polastron. The Abbe de Latil, the obscure
ecclesiastic of the Emigration, became, under the Restoration, the
Archbishop of Rheims and Cardinal. It was not without profound emotion
that the very Christian King saw himself consecrated by the priest who
twenty-two years before had caused him to return to virtue. This memory
was imposed on the mind and heart of the monarch, and under the vault
of the ancient Cathedral, he certainly thought of Madame de Polastron,
as of a good angel, who, from the height of heaven, watched over him,
and who, by her prayers, had aided him to traverse so many trials, to
reach the religious triumph of the coronation.
Charles X. was happy then. Profoundly sincere in his ardent desire to
make France happy, he believed himself at one with God and with his
people, and rejoiced in that supreme good, so often wanting to
sovereigns,--peace of heart. Could he be reproached for having taken
the ceremony of his coronation seriously? A king who does not believe
in his royalty is no more to be respected than a priest who does not
believe in his religion. Charles X. was convinced, as the Archbishop of
Rheims had said in his letter of 29th May, 1825, that kings exercise
over their subjects the power of God Himself, and that they have that
sacred majesty, upon which, in the fine expression of Bossuet, God, for
the good of things human, causes to shine a portion of the splendor of
divine majesty.
This disposition of mind in Charles X. fortified his piety, so that, at
the time of the jubilee of 1826, he seized eagerly the opportunity to
affirm his religious faith, and to return thanks to the God of his
fathers, who at this epoch of his life was loading him with favors.
The jubilee is a time of penitence and pardon, when the Pope accords
plenary indulgence to all Catholics who submit to certain practices and
assist at certain pious ceremonies. The grand jubilee was formerly
celebrated only once in a hundred years; afterwards it took place every
fifty, and then every twenty-five years. 1825 was the time of its first
celebration in the nineteenth century, and it drew to Rome that year
more than ten thousand pilgrims. The Pope had celebrated the close of
it the 24th of December, 1825, but yielding to the prayers of several
Catholic powers, he accorded to them, by special bulls, the privilege
of celebrating the same solemnity in 1826.
The opening of the French jubilee took place February 15, 1826, at
Notre-Dame de Paris. The papal bull, borne on a rich cushion, was
remitted to the Archbishop for public reading. The nuncio chanted the
Veni Creator. Mass was said by the Cardinal, Prince of Croi, Archbishop
of Rouen, Grand Almoner of France. The relics of the apostles Saint
Peter and Saint Paul were borne around the Place du Parvis, in the
midst of a cortege, in which were present the marshals of France, the
generals, and the four princesses. The order of the Archbishop of Paris
prescribed four general processions. The first took place with great
pomp the 17th of March, 1826. The King and the royal family, the
princes and princesses of the blood, all the court, the marshals, a
multitude of high functionaries, peers of France, deputies, officers,
assisted at this ceremony in which appeared the Archbishop of Paris and
his grand vicars, the metropolitan chapter, the pupils of all the
seminaries in surplice, the priests of all the Paris churches with
their sacerdotal armaments. It was a veritable army of ecclesiastics
that traversed the capital. In the midst of the cortdge, the reliquary
containing the relics of Saint Peter and Saint Paul was the object of
the devotion of the faithful. Surrounded by the Dauphin, the Duke of
Orleans, the young Duke of Chartres, the great officers of the crown,
of the Hundred Swiss, and of the body-guard, Charles X., in a costume
half religious, half military, walked between a double hedge formed by
the royal guard and the troops of the line. The Place du
Parvis-Notre-Dame was hung with draperies in fleur-de-lis, and all the
streets to be traversed by the procession had been draped and sanded.
The first stop of the cortege was under the peristyle of the
Hotel-Dieu, where an altar had been erected; the second, at the Church
of the Sorbonne; the third, at that of Sainte Genevieve. The two other
processions had no less eclat, and their pauses being fixed in the
churches of the principal parishes, they passed through the busiest and
most populous quarters of Paris.
The fourth and last procession, that of the 3d of May, was the most
important of all. It was to close by an expiatory ceremony in honor of
Louis XVI., by the laying and benediction of the corner-stone of the
monument voted by the Chamber of 1815, and which still awaited its
foundation. It is at the very place where the unfortunate sovereign had
been executed that the monument was to be constructed. The cortege left
Notre-Dame and directed its course first to the Church of
Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois. The Chamber of Peers, the Chamber of
Deputies, all the functionaries, all the authorities of the Department
of the Seine, followed the King and Dauphin, who advanced, accompanied
by the ministers, the marshals, the officers of their houses, cordons
bleus, cordons rouges. Never since the end of the old regime had such a
multitude of priests been seen defiling through the streets of Paris.
The pupils of all the seminaries, the almoners of all the colleges, the
priests of all the parishes and all the chapels, stretched out in an
endless double line, at the end of which appeared the Nuncio of the
Pope, Cardinals de Latil, de Croi, and de La Fare, the Archbishop of
Paris, and a crowd of prelates. After the station of
Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, there was a second at Saint-Roch, then a
third and last at the Assumption. When the special prayers of the close
of the jubilee had been said at this last parish, the immense cortege
resumed its march to the place where Louis XVI. had brought his head to
the sacrilegious scaffold. The day chosen for the expiatory solemnity
was the 3d of May, the anniversary of the return of Louis XVIII. to
Paris in 1814, and then a political idea was connected with the
religious ceremony. A vast pavilion surmounted by a cross hung with
draperies in violet velvet, and enclosing an altar, which was reached
on four sides by four stairways of ten steps each, occupied the very
place where, the 10th of January, 1793, the scaffold of the Martyr-King
had been erected, in the middle of the Place called successively the
Place Louis XV. and the Place de La Concorde, and which was thenceforth
to be called the Place Louis XVI.