It is impossible not to admire the single-mindedness and directness of
purpose which characterise Henty's letters from Paris written at this
period of dire trouble, when chapters which rival in tragedy and sadness
any of those that have gone before were being added to the history of
France. He viewed this time of heart-stirring crisis in a
matter-of-fact style, such as was to be expected from a man of his
temperament and businesslike attributes. He went straight forward with
the work of the day, chronicling details which came under his notice,
and keeping to hard plain facts at a time when visionary speculation was
the rule, and when all those who followed the prodigious happenings in
France were amazed and bewildered by the complexity of the situation,
and by the startling suggestiveness of what the morrow might have in
store for the high-strung and imaginative French people. He kept
sedulously to the point, despite of all, notwithstanding the rumours
concerning what Thiers meant to do, and what Marshal MacMahon had said
to the Comte de Chambord regarding the possibility of the latter being
received at Versailles as "Henri Cinq."
Outside the heated arena of politics in Paris there were all these
larger issues of extreme importance, issues of such significance that
they brought into the tumult of that day the quieter spirit of the old
past. At the dinner tables, and in the _salons_ of Paris, and elsewhere
as well, even up to 1875, the talk was of the coming of Henry the Fifth,
the king of the old line, the great-nephew of his majesty, Louis Seize,
and of King Louis the Eighteenth, and the grandson of Charles the Tenth.
Such an advent would have been in curious contrast to the wild
"chicken-and-champagne" days of the corrupt and materialistic Second
Empire, for the Comte de Chambord had lived in monastic seclusion ever
since his protest in the early "fifties." Maybe in his mimic court at
Frohsdorff, surrounded by all the respect and divinity of a prince who
represented an illustrious tradition, and who found in religion his
greatest solace, the heir to the French crown was nearer to happiness
than he would have been had he boldly come forward and assumed the reins
of power, as he might have done had his character been of blunter fibre.
If this had occurred, the change for Paris from the red dominion of the
Commune to the white lilies, with all they signified, would have been
another strikingly dramatic episode in the chronicles of France.
All these things Henty saw and lived among at that time when people were
disgusted with the preceding twenty years, and wished for something
which was better and more earnest, though precisely what was desired it
would be hard to say. Side by side with rank, uncompromising Anarchism,
were the echoes of an old and aristocratic regime, and learned theorists
were busy weighing the various proposals in the balance, while a sort of
hybrid military republic kept the lists. And all this at a time when
the streets of the capital were perhaps the most dangerous of any in the
world, and social order had gone by the board. At one time it really
seemed as though the spirit of the older France would prevail, that
certain incontestable rights would come up for final adjustment, and
that a thread of policy, of which sight had been lost for some years,
would be finally resumed.
Vague speculation about matters which lay outside his immediate purview
was, however, never Henty's method, but here and there a "newsy" item
crops up in his correspondence, such as that the Prince of Orleans
politely saw Thiers to his carriage, and that people were talking of the
Duc d'Aumale, also that the Princes of Orleans, who had always followed
social and military things rather than political, would abide by what
France said. Of course this was rather a doubtful policy, for France
sometimes speaks with an uncertain voice. The demagogue shouts enough
for a hundred, but the silent thinker who disdains noise would be better
worth hearing. That Henty followed all these things we know, and his
real views crop up here and there; but he was a narrator, not a
commentator. The empire was dead. As an actual political power it died
in 1867, and however much Napoleon the Third might protest against his
deposition, the fact that he had finally lost the throne was there
patent to all. Even the statement of the astute M. Pietri, the
secretary of the disinterested ex-monarch, that his master had not one
centime in foreign funds, seems to have had no effect on the course of
events.
Henty was only a bird of passage, an observer of Paris during a few
moments at a period when the influences of centuries were at work, and
his was by no means exclusively a political view. Empty theorising or
the peering into empty houses did not lie his way; but maybe for this
reason more than any other is it most interesting to con over his
lengthy contributions to the newspapers of that time. The almost
photographic minutiae give the reader a vivid impression of the crucible
period, for everything was in the course of remaking. There was the
first review after the Germans had packed up and gone away, the recoming
of the martial spirit under the leadership of MacMahon, who turned in
his saddle with a "There, gentlemen, what do you think of that?" as the
battalions of cadets, the future officers of the armies of France, came
swinging by before the staff and the foreign attaches. There was the
bright spot of the Belfort incident, when the devoted garrison marched
out with all the honours of war. It was a great and stirring time, when
every moment was lived at fever heat; and Henty looked on as a soldier
as well as a correspondent.
Very soon the French were beginning to look up again. "We have an army
of 450,000 men," was the cry. There were a few pride-saving laurels won
in the defeat of the Commune, civil war though it was. Then we see the
recommencement of the social life of the capital. Wonderful was the
exhibition of recuperative power. The broken bits of civic life were
put together, and an order sent to the factories for a new outfit, as it
were. The Comedie Francaise Company toured in London, and refilled the
empty exchequer; the loan necessary to pay off the more urgent demands
was easily subscribed; and Henty fills in the picture with the unerring
touch of a master hand. It is a pen such as his--dispassionate,
observing, restrained--on which the historian rightly relies.