BOOK IV

Napoleon at Elba--Commencement of the Hundred Days--The return from

Elba--Torpor of the Legitimacy--Article by Benjamin Constant--Order

of the day of Marshal Soult--A royal session--Petition of

the School of Law to the Chamber of Deputies--Plan for the

defense of Paris--Flight of the King--I leave with Madame de

Chateaubriand--Confusion on the road--The Duc d'Orléans and the Prince

de Condé--Tournai--Brussels--Memories--The Duc de Richelieu--The

King summons me to join him at Ghent--The Hundred Days at

Ghent--Continuation of the Hundred Days at Ghent--Affairs in Vienna.

Bonaparte had refused to embark in a French ship, setting value at

that time only on the English Navy, because it was victorious; he had

forgotten his hatred, the calumnies, the outrages with which he had

overwhelmed perfidious Albion; he saw none now worthy of his admiration

save the triumphant party, and it was the _Undaunted_ that conveyed

him to the harbour of his first exile. He was not without anxiety as

to the manner in which he would be received. Would the French garrison

hand over to him the territory which it was guarding? Of the Italian

islanders, some wished to call in the English, others to remain free of

all masters; the Tricolour and the White Flag waved on near headlands.

All was arranged nevertheless. When it became known that Bonaparte was

bringing millions with him, opinions generously decided to receive

"the august victim." The civil and religious authorities were brought

round to the same conviction. Joseph Philip Arrighi, the Vicar-General,

issued a charge:

"Divine Providence," said the pious injunction, "has decreed

that in future we shall be the subjects of Napoleon the

Great. The island of Elba, raised to so sublime an honour,

receives the Lord's Anointed in its bosom. We order that a

solemn _Te Deum_ be sung by way of thanksgiving," etc.

[Sidenote: Napoleon in Elba.]

The Emperor had written to General Dalesme[231], commanding the

French garrison, that he must make known to the people of Elba that

"he had selected" their island for his residence in consideration of

the gentleness of their manners and of their climate. He set foot

on land at Porto-Ferrajo[232], amid the dual salute of the English

frigate which had brought him and the batteries on shore. Thence he

was taken under the parish canopy to the church, where the _Te Deum_

was sung. The beadle, the master of ceremonies, was a short, fat man,

who was unable to join his hands across his person. Napoleon was next

conducted to the mayor's, where his lodging was prepared. They unfurled

the new Imperial Standard, a white ground intersected by a red stripe

strewn with three gold bees. Three violins and two basses followed him

with scrapings of delight The throne, hastily erected in the public

ball-room, was decorated with gilt paper and pieces of scarlet cloth.

The actor's side of the prisoner's nature accommodated itself to these

displays: Napoleon made a serious business of trifles, even as he

used to amuse his Court with little old-time games inside his palace

at the Tuileries, going out afterwards to kill men by way of pastime.

He formed his Household: it consisted of four chamberlains, three

orderly-officers, and two harbingers of the palace. He stated that he

would receive the ladies twice a-week, at eight o'clock in the evening.

He gave a ball. He took possession, for his own residence, of the

pavilion intended for the engineers. Bonaparte was constantly meeting

in his life the two sources from which it had issued: democracy and the

royal power; his strength was derived from the citizen masses, his rank

from his genius; and therefore you see him pass without effort from

the market-square to the throne, from the kings and queens who crowded

round him at Erfurt[233] to the bakers and oilmen who danced in his

barn at Porto-Ferrajo. He had something of the people among princes,

and of the prince among the people. At five o'clock in the morning, in

silk stockings and buckled shoes, he presided over his masons in the

island of Elba.

Established in his Empire, inexhaustible in iron since the days of

Virgil,

Insula inexhaustis Chalybum generosa metallis[234],

Bonaparte had not forgotten the outrages to which he had lately

been subjected; he had not renounced his intention of tearing off

his winding-sheet; but it suited him to seem buried, only to make

some appearance of a phantom around his monument. That is why he

was eager, as though thinking of nothing else, to go down into his

quarries of specular iron and adamant; one would have taken him for

the ex-inspector of Mines of his former States. He repented of having

once appropriated the revenue of the forges of "Ilva" to the Legion of

Honour: 500,000 francs now seemed to him worth more than a blood-bathed

cross on the breast of his grenadiers.

"What was I thinking of?" he said. "But I have issued many stupid

decrees of that nature."

He made a commercial treaty with Leghorn and proposed to make another

with Genoa. At all hazards, he began to make five or six furlongs of

high-road and designed the sites of four large towns, just as Dido laid

out the boundaries of Carthage. A philosopher who had seen too much of

human greatness, he declared that he intended thenceforth to live like

a justice of the peace in an English county: and notwithstanding, on

climbing a height which overlooks Porto-Ferrajo, these words escaped

him at the sight of the sea which flowed up on every side at the foot

of the cliffs:

"The devil! It must be owned that my island is very small!"

He had visited his domain within a few hours; he wished to join to it a

rock called Pianosa.

"Europe will accuse me," he said, laughing, "of already having made a

conquest."

The Allied Powers made merry over the fact that they had in derision

left him four hundred soldiers: he needed no more to bring them all

back to the flag.

Napoleon's presence on the coast of Italy, which had witnessed the

commencement of his glory and which retains his memory, agitated

everybody. Murat was his neighbour; his friends, strangers secretly or

publicly landed at his retreat; his mother and his sister, the Princess

Pauline, visited him; they expected soon to see Marie-Louise and her

son arriving. A woman[235] did in fact appear, with a child[236]; she

was received with great mystery, and went to live in a secluded villa

in the most remote corner of the island: on the shores of Ogygia,

Calypso spoke of her love to Ulysses, who, instead of listening to her,

thought of how to defend himself against the suitors. After a two days'

repose, the Swan of the North put out to sea again, to land among the

myrtles of Baja, carrying away her little one in her white yawl.

[Sidenote: Madame Walewska.]

If we had been less trustful, it would have been easy for us to

perceive an approaching catastrophe. Bonaparte was too near his cradle

and his conquests: his funeral island should have been more distant

and surrounded by more waves. It is inexplicable how the Allies had

come to think of banishing Napoleon to the rocks where he was to serve

his apprenticeship in exile: was it possible to believe that at the

sight of the Apennines, that when smelling the powder of the fields

of Montenotte, Areola and Marengo, that on discovering Venice, Rome

and Naples, his three fair slaves, his heart would not be seized with

irresistible temptations? Had they forgotten that he had stirred up

the earth and that he had admirers and debtors everywhere, all of whom

were his accomplices? His ambition was deceived, not extinguished;

misfortune and revenge rekindled its flames: when the Prince of

Darkness from the verge of the created universe looked upon man and the

world, he resolved to destroy them.

Before bursting forth, the terrible captive restrained himself for

some weeks. In the huge public bank at faro which he was holding, his

genius negociated a fortune or a kingdom. The Fouchés, the Guzmans

d'Alfarache swarmed. The great actor had long made his police the home

of melodrama and had reserved the upper stage for himself; he amused

himself with the vulgar victims who disappeared through the trap-doors

of his theatre.

Bonapartism, in the first year of the Restoration, passed on from

simple desire to action in the measure as its hopes increased and as

it became better acquainted with the weak character of the Bourbons.

When the intrigue had been hatched without, it was hatched within, and

the conspiracy became flagrant. Under the able administration of M.

Ferrand[237], M. de Lavallette[238] undertook the correspondence: the

mails of the Monarchy carried the despatches of the Empire. Concealment

was abandoned; the caricatures foretold a desired return: one saw

eagles entering by the windows of the Palace of the Tuileries, through

the doors of which issued a flock of turkeys; the _Nain jaune_[239]

or _vert_ spoke of "_plumes de cane._" Warnings came from every side,

and were disbelieved. The Swiss Government had gone out of its way

to no purpose to inform His Majesty's Government of the intrigues

of Joseph Bonaparte, who had retreated to the Pays de Vaud. A woman

arriving from Elba gave the most circumstantial details of what was

happening at Porto-Ferrajo, and the police sent her to prison. People

held for certain that Napoleon would not venture any attempt before

the dissolution of the Congress and that, in any case, his views would

turn upon Italy. Others, still better advised, prayed that the "Little

Corporal," the "Ogre," the "Prisoner," might land on the French coast;

that would be too great a stroke of luck; they would settle him at one

blow! M. Pozzo di Borgo[240] declared at Vienna that the delinquent

would be strung up to the nearest tree. Were it possible to have

certain papers, one would there find the proof that, as early as 1814,

a military conspiracy was contrived and went side by side with the

political conspiracy which the Prince de Talleyrand was conducting at

Vienna, at Fouché's instigation. Napoleon's friends wrote to him that,

if he did not hasten his return, he would find his place taken at the

Tuileries by the Duc d'Orléans[241]: they imagine that this revelation

served to hurry the Emperor's return. I am convinced of the existence

of these plottings, but I also believe that the determinative cause

which decided Bonaparte was simply the nature of his genius.

[Sidenote: Bonapartist intrigues.]

The conspiracy of Drouet d'Erlon[242] and Lefebvre-Desnoëttes had

broken out. A few days before those generals rose in arms, I was dining

with M. le Maréchal Soult, who had been appointed Minister of War on

the 3rd of December 1814: a simpleton was describing Louis XVIII.'s

time of exile at Hartwell; the marshal listened; to each detail he

answered with the words:

"That's historical."

They used to bring His Majesty's slippers:

"That's historical!"

On days of abstinence the King used to take three new-laid eggs before

commencing his dinner:

"That's historical!"

This reply struck me. When a government is not solidly established,

every man whose conscience goes for nothing becomes, according to the

greater or lesser amount of energy in his character, a quarter, or a

half, or three-quarters of a conspirator; he awaits the decision of

fortune: more traitors are made by events than by opinions.

Suddenly the telegraph announced to Napoleon's braves and to the

doubters that the man had landed[243]: Monsieur[244] hurried to Lyons,

with the Duc d'Orléans and Marshal Macdonald, and returned forthwith.

Marshal Soult, denounced in the Chamber of Deputies, gave up his office

on the 11th of March to the Duc de Feltre[245]. Bonaparte found facing

him, as Minister of War of Louis XVIII. in 1815, the general who had

been his last Minister of War in 1814.

The boldness of the enterprise was unprecedented. From the political

point of view, this enterprise might be regarded as the irremissible

crime and capital fault of Napoleon. He knew that the Princes still

assembled at the Congress, that Europe still under arms would not

suffer him to be reinstated; his judgment must have warned him that a

success, if he obtained one, would be only for a day: he was offering

up to his passion for reappearing on the scene the repose of a people

which had lavished its blood and its treasures upon him; he was laying

open to dismemberment the country from which he derived all that he

had been in the past and all that he will be in the future. In this

fantastic conception lay a ferocious egoism and a terrible absence of

gratitude and generosity towards France.

All this is true according to practical reason, for a man with a heart

rather than brains; but, for beings of Napoleon's nature, there exists

a reason of another sort; those creatures of lofty renown have ways

of their own: comets describe curves which evade calculation; they

belong to nothing, they seem good for nothing; if a globe finds itself

on their passage, they shatter it and return into the abysses of the

sky; their laws are known to God alone. Extraordinary individuals are

monuments of human intelligence; they are not its rule.

Bonaparte, therefore, was persuaded to his enterprise less by the

false reports of his friends than by the needs of his genius: he

took up the cross by virtue of the faith that was in him. To a great

man, to be born is not everything: he must die. Was Elba an end for

Napoleon? Could he accept the sovereignty of a vegetable-patch, like

Diocletian[246] at Salona? If he had waited till later, would he have

had more chances of success, at a time when his memory would have

aroused less emotion, when his old soldiers would have left the army,

when new social positions would have been adopted?

Well, then, he committed a fool-hardy act against the world: at the

commencement he must have believed that he had not deceived himself as

to the spell of his power.

[Sidenote: The return from Elba.]

One night, that of the 25th of February, at the end of a ball of which

the Princess Borghese was doing the honours, he made his escape with

victory, long his comrade and accomplice; he crossed a sea covered with

our fleets, met two frigates, a ship of 74 guns and the man-of-war

brig _Zéphyr_, which spoke and questioned him; he himself replied to

the captain's questions; the sea and the waves saluted him, and he

pursued his course. The deck of the _Inconstant_, his little ship,

served him as a room for exercise and as a writing-closet; he dictated

amid the winds and had copies made, on that shifting table, of three

proclamations to the army and to France; some feluccas, carrying his

companions in adventure, flew the white flag strewn with stars around

his admiral bark. On the 1st of March, at three o'clock in the morning,

he struck the coast of France between Cannes and Antibes, in the Golfe

Jouan; he landed, strolled along the _riviera_, gathered violets, and

bivouacked in a plantation of olive-trees. The dumfoundered population

retired. He avoided Antibes and threw himself into the mountains of

Grasse, passing through Sernon, Barrème, Digne and Gap. At Sisteron,

twenty men could have stopped him, and he found nobody. He went on,

meeting no obstacle among those inhabitants who, a few months earlier,

had wished to cut his throat. Whenever a few soldiers entered the void

which formed around his gigantic shadow, they were invincibly drawn on

by the attraction of his eagles. His fascinated enemies sought him and

did not see him; he hid himself in his glory, as the lion of the Sahara

hides himself in the rays of the sun to avoid the sight of the dazzled

hunters. Enveloped in a fiery cyclone, the bloody phantoms of Areola,

Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, Friedland, Eylau, the Moskowa, Lützen,

Bautzen formed his retinue with a million of dead. From the midst of

this column of fire and smoke, there issued, at the entrance to the

towns, a few trumpet-blasts mingled with the signals of the tricoloured

_labarum_: and the gates of the town fell. When Napoleon crossed

the Niemen, at the head of four-hundred thousand foot and a hundred

thousand horse, to blow up the palace of the Tsars in Moscow, he was

less astonished than when, breaking his ban and flinging his irons in

the faces of the kings, he came alone, from Cannes to Paris, to sleep

peacefully at the Tuileries.

Beside the prodigy of the invasion of one man must be placed another

which was the consequence of the first: the Legitimacy was seized with

a fainting-fit; the failure of the heart of the State attacked the

members and rendered France motionless. For twenty days, Bonaparte

marched on by stages; his eagles flew from steeple to steeple and,

along a road of two hundred leagues the Government, masters of

everything, disposing of money and men, found neither the time nor the

means to cut a bridge, to throw down a tree, so as to delay, at least

by an hour, the progress of a man to whom the populations offered no

opposition, but whom also they did not follow.

This torpor on the part of the Government seemed the more deplorable

inasmuch as public opinion in Paris was greatly excited; it would have

countenanced anything, despite the defection of Marshal Ney. Benjamin

Constant wrote in the newspapers:

"After visiting our country with every plague, he left the

soil of France. Who would not have thought that he was

leaving it for ever? Suddenly he appears, and again promises

Frenchmen liberty, victory and peace. The author of the most

tyrannical Constitution that ever ruled France, he speaks

to-day of liberty! But it was he who, during fourteen years,

undermined and destroyed liberty. He had not the excuse of

memory, the habit of power; he was not born in the purple. It

was his fellow-citizens whom he enslaved, his equals whom he

loaded with chains. He had not inherited power; he desired

and meditated tyranny: what liberty is he able to promise?

Are we not a thousand times more free than under his empire?

He promises victory, and three times he forsook his troops,

in Egypt, in Spain and in Russia, abandoning his companions

in arms to the triple agony of cold, destitution and despair.

He brought upon France the humiliation of invasion; he lost

the conquests which we had made before him. He promises

peace, and his name alone is a signal for war. The nation

unhappy enough to serve him would again become the object

of European hatred; his triumph would be the commencement

of a combat to the death against the civilized world.... He

has therefore nothing to claim, nor to offer. Whom could he

convince, or whom seduce? War at home, war abroad: those are

the gifts which he brings us."

[Sidenote: Soult's order of the day.]

Marshal Soult's Order of the Day, dated 8 March 1815, repeats very

nearly the ideas of Benjamin Constant, with an effusion of loyalty:

"SOLDIERS,

"The man who lately, before the eyes of Europe, abdicated the power

which he had usurped, and which he had so fatally abused, has landed on

French soil, which he was never to see again.

"What does he want? Civil war. What does he seek? Traitors. Where will

he find them? Shall it be among those soldiers whom he has so often

deceived and sacrificed by misleading their valour? Shall it be in the

heart of those families which the mere sound of his name still fills

with terror?

"Bonaparte despises us enough to believe us capable of abandoning a

lawful and dearly-beloved Sovereign to share the fate of a man who is

no longer more than an adventurer. He believes this, the madman, and

his last act of insanity reveals him to us as he is!

"Soldiers, the French Army is the bravest army in Europe; it will also

be the most faithful.

"Let us rally round the banner of the lilies, at the voice of the

father of the people, the worthy heir of the virtues of Henry the

Great. He himself has traced for you the duties which you have to

fulfil. He places at your head that Prince, the model of French

knighthood, who, by his happy return to our country, has already once

driven out the usurper, and who to-day, by his presence among us, will

destroy his sole and last hope."

Louis XVIII. appeared on the 16th of March in the Chamber of Deputies;

the destinies of France and of the world were at stake. When His

Majesty entered, the deputies and the strangers in the galleries

uncovered and rose; cheers shook the walls of the house. Louis XVIII.

slowly mounted the steps of his throne; the Princes, the marshals and

the captains of the guards ranged themselves on either side of the

King. The cheers ceased; none spoke: in that interval of silence, one

seemed to hear the distant footsteps of Napoleon. His Majesty, seated,

cast his eyes over the assembly, and in a firm voice delivered this

speech:

[Sidenote: The King's speech.]

"GENTLEMEN,

"At this critical moment, when the public enemy has

penetrated into a part of my kingdom and threatens the

liberty of all the remainder, I come into your midst to knit

yet more closely the ties which, uniting you to myself,

constitute the strength of the State; I come, by addressing

you, to make manifest my feelings and my wishes to the whole

of France.

"I have seen my country again; I have reconciled it with

foreign Powers, who will, you may be sure, be faithful to the

treaties which have restored peace to us; I have laboured

for the good of my people; I have received, I continue daily

to receive the most touching marks of its love; could I, at

sixty years of age, better end my career than by dying in its

defense?

"I fear nothing, therefore, for myself; but I fear for

France: he who comes to kindle among us the torches of civil

war brings with him also the scourge of foreign war; he

comes to put back our country under his iron yoke; he comes,

lastly, to destroy the Constitutional Charter which I have

given you, that Charter which will be my proudest title in

the eyes of posterity, that Charter which all Frenchmen

cherish and which I here swear to maintain: let us then rally

round it."

The King was still speaking, when a fog spread darkness through the

house; eyes were turned towards the ceiling to ascertain the cause of

that sudden gloom. When the King-Lawgiver ceased to speak, the cries of

"Long live the King!" were renewed, amid tears.

"The assembly," the _Moniteur_ truly says, "electrified by

the King's sublime words, stood up, its hands stretched

towards the throne. One heard only the words: 'Long live the

King! We will die for the King! The King in life and death!'

repeated with an enthusiasm which will be shared by every

French heart"

It was, in fact, a pathetic sight: an old, infirm King who, in reward

for the murder of his family and twenty-three years of exile, had

brought France peace, liberty, forgiveness of all outrages and all

misfortunes; this patriarch of sovereigns coming to declare to the

deputies of the nation that, at his age, after seeing his country

again, he could not better end his career than by dying in defense of

his people! The Princes swore fidelity to the Charter; those tardy

oaths were closed with that of the Prince de Condé and with the

adhesion of the father of the Duc d'Enghien. This heroic race on the

verge of extinction, this race of the patrician sword seeking behind

liberty a shield against a younger, longer and more cruel plebeian

sword offered, by reason of a multitude of memories, a spectacle that

was extremely sad.

When Louis XVIII.'s speech became known outside, it aroused unspeakable

enthusiasm. Paris was wholly Royalist, and remained so during the

Hundred Days. The women in particular were Bourbonists.

The youth of to-day worships the memory of Bonaparte, because it is

humiliated by the part which the present Government makes France play

in Europe; the youth of 1814 hailed the Restoration, because the latter

had thrown down despotism and set up liberty. In the ranks of the

Royal Volunteers were included M. Odilon Barrot[247], a large number

of pupils of the School of Medicine and the whole of the School of

Law[248]; the last, on the 13th of March, addressed this petition to

the Chamber of Deputies:

"GENTLEMEN,

"We offer our services to our King and country; the whole

School of Law asks to go to the front. We will abandon

neither our King nor our Constitution. Faithful to French

honour, we ask you for arms. The feeling of love which we

bear to Louis XVIII. is answerable to you for the constancy

of our devotion. We want no more irons, we want liberty.

We have it, and they come to snatch it from us. We will

defend it to the death. Long live the King! Long live the

Constitution!"

In this energetic, natural and sincere language, one feels the

generosity of youth and the love of liberty. They who come to tell us

to-day that the Restoration was received by France with dislike and

sorrow are ambitious men who are playing a game, or new-comers who have

never known Bonaparte's oppression, or old imperialized revolutionary

liars who, after applauding the return of the Bourbons with the rest,

now, according to their habit, insult the fallen and return to their

instincts of murder, police and servitude.

*

The King's Speech had filled me with hope. Conferences were held at

the house of the President of the Chamber of Deputies, M. Lainé. I

there met M. de La Fayette: I had never seen him except at a distance,

at another period, under the Constituent Assembly. The proposals were

various and for the most part weak, as happens in peril: some wished

the King to leave Paris and fall back upon the Havre; others spoke

of moving him to the Vendée; one stammered out unfinished sentences;

another said that we must wait and see what was coming: what was coming

was very visible, for all that. I expressed a very different opinion:

oddly enough, M. de La Fayette supported it, and warmly[249]. M. Lainé

and Marshal Marmont were also of my opinion. I said:

[Illustration: La Fayette.]

[Sidenote: My advice to the government.]

"Let the King keep his word; let him stay in his capital.

The National Guard is on our side. Let us make sure of

Vincennes. We have the arms and the money; with the money

we shall overcome weakness and cupidity. If the King leaves

Paris, Paris will admit Bonaparte; Bonaparte master of

Paris is master of France. The army has not gone over to

the enemy as a whole; several regiments, many generals and

officers have not yet betrayed their oaths: if we hold

firm, they will remain faithful. Let us disperse the Royal

Family, let us keep only the King. Let Monsieur go to the

Havre, the Duc de Berry[250] to Lille, the Duc de Bourbon to

the Vendée, the Duc d'Orléans to Metz; Madame la Duchesse

and M. le Duc d'Angoulême[251] are already in the South.

Our different points of resistance will prevent Bonaparte

from concentrating his forces. Let us barricade ourselves

in Paris. Already the national guards of the neighbouring

departments are coming to our aid. Amid this movement, our

old Monarch, protected by the will of Louis XVI., will remain

peacefully seated on his throne at the Tuileries, with the

Charter in his hand; the diplomatic body will range itself

round him; the two Chambers will meet in the two wings of the

Palace; the King's Household will encamp in the Carrousel

and in the Tuileries Gardens. We shall line the quays and

the water-terrace with guns: let Bonaparte attack us in this

position; let him carry our barricades one by one; let him

bombard Paris, if he please and if he have mortars; let him

make himself odious to the whole population, and we shall see

the result of his enterprise! Let us resist for but three

days, and victory is ours. The King, defending himself in

his palace, will arouse universal enthusiasm. Lastly, if he

must die, let him die worthy of his rank; let Napoleon's

last exploit be to cut an old man's throat. Louis XVIII., in

sacrificing his life, will win the only battle he will have

fought; he will win it for the benefit of the freedom of the

human race."

Thus I spoke: one is never entitled to say that all is lost so long as

one has attempted nothing. What could have been finer than an old son

of St. Louis overthrowing, with Frenchmen, in a few moments, a man whom

all the confederate kings of Europe had taken so many years to lay low?

This resolution, desperate in appearance, was very reasonable at bottom

and offered not the smallest danger. I shall always remain convinced

that, had Bonaparte found Paris hostile and the King present, he

would not have tried to force them. Without artillery, provisions,

or money, he had with him only troops collected at random, still

wavering, astonished at their sudden change of cockade, at their oaths

taken headlong on the roads: they would promptly have become divided.

A few hours' delay and Napoleon was lost; it but needed a little

heart. Already, even, we could rely on a portion of the army; the two

Swiss regiments were keeping their faith: did not Marshal Gouvion

Saint-Cyr make the Orleans garrison resume the white cockade two days

after Bonaparte's entry into Paris? From Marseilles to Bordeaux, all

recognised the King's authority during the whole month of March: at

Bordeaux, the troops were hesitating; they would have remained with

Madame la Duchesse d'Angoulême, if the news had come that the King was

at the Tuileries and that Paris was being defended. The provincial

towns would have imitated Paris. The loth Regiment of the line fought

very well under the Duc d'Angoulême; Masséna was proving himself crafty

and uncertain; at Lille, the garrison responded to Marshal Mortier's

stirring proclamation. If all those proofs of a possible fidelity took

place in spite of a flight, what would they not have been in the case

of a resistance?

Had my plan been adopted, the foreigners would not have ravaged France

afresh; our Princes would not have returned with the hostile armies;

the Legitimacy would have been saved through itself. One thing alone

would have to be feared after success: the too great confidence of the

Royalty in its strength, and, consequently, attempts upon the rights of

the nation.

Why did I arrive at a period in which I was so ill-placed? Why have I

been a Royalist against my instinct, at a time when a miserable race

of courtiers was unable either to hear or to understand me? Why was I

flung into that troop of mediocrities, who took me for a raver when I

spoke of courage, for a revolutionary when I spoke of liberty?

A fine question of defense, indeed! The King had no fear, and my plan

rather pleased him through a certain "Louis-Quatorzian" grandeur;

but other faces had lengthened. They packed up the Crown diamonds

(formerly purchased out of the privy-purse of the Sovereigns), leaving

thirty-three million crowns in the treasury and forty-two millions in

securities. Those sixty-five millions were the produce of taxation: why

was it not returned to the people, rather than left to tyranny!

A dual procession passed up and down the stair-cases of the Pavillon

de Flore; people were asking what they were to do: no answer. They

applied to the captain of the guards; they questioned the chaplains,

the precentors, the almoners: nothing. Vain talk, vain retailing of

news. I saw young men weep with rage when uselessly asking for orders

and arms; I saw women faint with anger and contempt. Access to the King

was impossible; etiquette closed the door.

[Sidenote: A Royal order: "Hunt him down."]

The great measure decreed against Bonaparte was an order to "hunt him

down[252]:" Louis XVIII., with no legs, "hunting down" the conqueror

who bestrode the earth! This form of the ancient laws, renewed for

the occasion, is enough to show the compass of mind of the statesmen

of that period. "To hunt down" in 1815! "Hunt down!" And "hunt" whom?

"Hunt" a wolf? "Hunt" a brigand chieftain? "Hunt" a felon lord? No:

"hunt" Napoleon, who had "hunted down" kings, who had seized and

branded them for all time on the shoulder with his indelible "N"!

From this order, when considered more closely, sprang a political truth

which no one saw: the Legitimate House, estranged from the nation for

three-and-twenty years, had remained at the day and place at which the

Revolution had caught it, whereas the nation had progressed in point of

time and space. Hence the impossibility of understanding and meeting

one another; religion, ideas, interests, language, earth and heaven,

all were different for the people and for the King, because they were

separated by a quarter of a century equivalent to centuries.

But if the order "to hunt down" appears strange, owing to the

preservation of the old idiom of the law, had Bonaparte originally

the intention of acting better, although employing a newer language?

Papers of M. d'Hauterive[253], catalogued by M. Artaud[254], prove

that it cost great difficulty to prevent Napoleon from having the Duc

d'Angoulême shot, in spite of the official document in the _Moniteur_,

a show document which remains to us: he thought it wrong of the Prince

to have defended himself. And yet the fugitive from Elba, when leaving

Fontainebleau, had recommended the soldiers to be "faithful to the

monarch" whom France had chosen. Bonaparte's family had been respected;

Queen Hortense had accepted from Louis XVIII. the title of Duchesse de

Saint-Leu; Murat, who still reigned in Naples, saw his kingdom sold by

M. de Talleyrand only during the Congress of Vienna.

This period, in which all are lacking in frankness, oppresses the

heart: every one threw out a profession of faith as it were a

foot-bridge to cross the difficulty of the day, free to change his

direction, the difficulty once passed; youth alone was sincere, because

it was near its cradle. Bonaparte solemnly declared that he renounced

the crown; he departed, and returned after nine months. Benjamin

Constant printed his vehement protest against the tyrant, and he

changed in twenty-four hours. It will be seen later, in another book

of these Memoirs, who inspired him with the noble impulse to which the

fickleness of his nature did not permit him to remain faithful. Marshal

Soult excited the troops against their old leader; a few days later he

was roaring with laughter at his own proclamation in Napoleon's closet

at the Tuileries, and became Major-general of the army at Waterloo;

Marshal Ney kissed the King's hands, swore to bring him Bonaparte

locked up in an iron cage, and handed over to the latter all the corps

under his command. And the King of France, alas? He declared that, at

the age of sixty years, he could not better end his career than by

dying in defense of his people ... and fled to Ghent! At sight of this

incapacity for truth in men's feelings, at the want of harmony between

their words and their deeds, one feels seized with disgust for the

human kind.

Louis XVIII., on the 16th of March, was declaring his intention of

dying in the midst of France; had he kept his word, the Legitimacy

might have lasted another century; nature herself seemed to have taken

from the old King the power of retreating by chaining him about with

wholesome infirmities; but the future destinies of the human race would

have been trammelled by the accomplishment of the resolution of the

author of the Charter. Bonaparte hastened to the assistance of the

future; that Christ of the power for evil took the new man sick of the

palsy by the hand, and said to him:

"Arise, take up thy bed, and walk[255]."

*

It was evident that a scamper was being contemplated: for fear of being

detained, they did not even warn those who, like myself, would have

been shot within an hour after Napoleon's entry into Paris. I met the

Duc de Richelieu in the Champs-Élysées:

"They are deceiving us," he said; "I am keeping watch here, for I do

not propose to await the Emperor at the Tuileries all by myself."

[Sidenote: Flight of Louis XVIII.]

On the evening of the 19th, Madame de Chateaubriand had sent a servant

to the Carrousel, with instructions not to return until he had the

certainty of the flight of the King. At midnight, as the man had not

come in, I went to my room. I had just gone to bed, when M. Clausel de

Coussergues entered. He told us that His Majesty had left and had gone

in the direction of Lille. He brought me this news on the part of the

Chancellor, who, knowing me to be in danger, was violating secrecy on

my behalf and sent me twelve thousand francs recoverable on my salary

as Minister to Sweden. I was obstinately bent on remaining, not wishing

to leave Paris until I should be physically certain of the royal

removal. The servant who had been sent to reconnoitre returned: he had

seen the Court carriages go by. Madame de Chateaubriand pushed me into

her carriage, at four o'clock in the morning on the 20th of March. I

was in such a fit of fury that I knew neither where I was going nor

what I was doing.

We passed out through the Barrière Saint-Martin. At dawn, I saw crows

coming down peacefully from the elms on the high-road where they had

spent the night, to take their first meal in the fields, without

troubling their heads about Louis XVIII. and Napoleon: they were not

obliged to leave their country and, thanks to their wings, they were

able to laugh at the bad road along which I was being jolted. Old

friends of Combourg, we were more alike in the old days when, at break

of day, we used to breakfast on mulberries from the brambles in the

thickets of Brittany!

The roadway was broken up, the weather rainy, Madame de Chateaubriand

poorly: she looked every moment through the little window at the

back of the carnage to see if we were not being pursued. We slept at

Amiens, where Du Cange[256] was born; next at Arras, the birth-place of

Robespierre[257]: there I was recognised. When we sent for horses, on

the morning of the 22nd, the postmaster said that they had been engaged

for a general who was taking to Lille the news of "the triumphal entry

of the Emperor-King into Paris;" Madame de Chateaubriand was dying

of fright, not for herself, but for me. I ran to the post-office and

removed the difficulty with money.

On arriving under the ramparts of Lille, at two in the morning of the

23rd, we found the gates closed; the orders were not to open them to

any one whomsoever. They could not, or would not, tell us if the King

had entered the town. I induced the postillion for a few louis to make

for the other side of the place, outside the glacis, and to drive us

to Tournay; in 1792, I had covered the same road on foot, during the

night, with my brother. On arriving at Tournay, I learnt that Louis

XVIII. had certainly entered Lille with Marshal Mortier, and that

he meant to defend himself there. I despatched a courier to M. de

Blacas, asking him to send me a permit to be received into the place.

My courier returned with a permit from the commandant, but not a word

from M. de Blacas. Leaving Madame de Chateaubriand at Tournay, I was

getting into the carriage again to go to Lille, when the Prince de

Condé arrived. We learnt through him that the King had gone and that

Marshal Mortier had had him accompanied to the frontier. From these

explanations it became clear that Louis XVIII. was no longer at Lille

when my letter arrived there.

The Duc d'Orléans followed close after the Prince de Condé. Under an

apparent dissatisfaction, he was glad, at bottom, to find himself out

of the hurly-burly; the ambiguousness of his declaration and of his

behaviour bore the stamp of his character. As to the old Prince de

Condé, the Emigration was his household god. He had no fear of Monsieur

de Bonaparte, not he; he fought if they liked or went away if they

liked: things were a little muddled in his brain; he was none too clear

as to whether he should stop at Rocroi to give battle there or go to

dine at the White Hart. He struck his tents a few hours before us,

telling me to recommend the coffee at the inn to the members of his

Household whom he had left behind him. He did not know that I had sent

in my resignation on the death of his grandson; he was not very sure

that he had had a grandson; he only felt a certain increase of glory in

his name, which might come from some Condé whom he had forgotten.

Do you remember my first passing through Tournay with my brother, at

the time of my first emigration? Do you remember, in that connection,

the man transformed into a donkey, the girl from whose ears grew

corn-spikes, the rain of ravens that set everything on fire[258]? In

1815, indeed, we ourselves were a rain of ravens; but we set nothing on

fire. Alas, I was no longer with my unfortunate brother! Between 1792

and 1815, the Republic and the Empire had passed: what revolutions had

also been accomplished in my life! Time had ravaged me like the rest.

And you, the young generations of the moment, let twenty-three years

come, and then tell me in my tomb what has become of your loves and

your illusions of to-day.

The two brothers Bertin had arrived at Tournay: M. Bertin de Vaux[259]

returned from there to Paris; the other Bertin, Bertin the Elder, was

my friend. You know through these Memoirs what it was that attached me

to him.

[Sidenote: I follow the King to Ghent.]

From Tournay we went to Brussels: there I found no Baron de Breteuil,

nor Rivarol, nor all those young aides-de-camp who had become dead or

old, which is the same thing. No news of the barber who had given me

shelter. I did not take up the musket, but the pen; from a soldier

I had become a paper-stainer. I was looking for Louis XVIII.; he

was at Ghent, where he had been taken by Messieurs de Blacas and

de Duras[260]: their first intention had been to ship the King to

England. If the King had consented to this plan, he would never have

reascended the throne.

Having gone into a lodging-house to look at an apartment, I perceived

the Duc de Richelieu smoking, half-outstretched on a sofa, at the

back of a dark room. He spoke to me of the Princes in the most brutal

manner, declaring that he was going to Russia and that he would not

hear another word about those people. Madame la Duchesse de Duras, on

arriving in Brussels, had the sorrow to lose her niece there.

I loathe the Brabant capital; it has never served me except as a

passage to my exiles; it has always brought sorrow upon myself or my

friends.

An order of the King summoned me to Ghent. The Royal Volunteers and

the Duc de Berry's little army had been disbanded at Béthune, in the

middle of the mud and of the accidents of a military breaking-up:

touching farewells had been exchanged. Two hundred men of the King's

Household remained and were quartered at Alost; my two nephews, Louis

and Christian de Chateaubriand, formed part of that corps.

I had been given a billet of which I did not avail myself; a baroness

whose name I have forgotten came to see Madame de Chateaubriand at the

inn and offered us an apartment in her house: she implored us with so

good a grace!

"You must pay no attention," she said, "to anything my husband says:

his head is a little... you understand? My daughter also is a trifle

eccentric; she has terrible moments, poor child! But the rest of the

time she is as gentle as a lamb. Alas, it is not she who causes me

the greatest trouble, but my son Louis, the youngest of my children:

without God's help, he will be worse than his father!"

Madame de Chateaubriand politely refused to go and live with such

rational people.

The King, well-lodged, having his service and his guards, formed his

council. The empire of that great monarch consisted of a house in the

Kingdom of the Netherlands, which house was situated in a town which,

although the birthplace of Charles V.[261], had been the chief town

of a prefecture of Bonaparte's: those names comprise between them a

goodly number of centuries and events.

[Sidenote: And join his Ministry.]

The Abbé de Montesquiou being in London, Louis XVIII. appointed

me Minister of the Interior _ad interim._[262] My correspondence

with the "departments" did not give me much to do; I easily kept

up my correspondence with the prefects, sub-prefects, mayors and

deputy-mayors of our good towns, on the inner side of our frontiers;

I did not repair the roads much, and I let the steeples tumble down;

my budget hardly enriched me; I had no secret funds; only, by a

crying abuse, I was a "pluralist:" I was still His Majesty's Minister

Plenipotentiary to the King of Sweden, who, like his fellow-townsman

Henry IV.[263], reigned by right of conquest, if not by right of birth.

We discoursed round a table covered with a green cloth in the King's

closet. M. de Lally-Tolendal, who was, I think, Minister of Public

Instruction, delivered speeches even more voluminous and more inflated

than his cheeks: he quoted his illustrious ancestors the Kings of

Ireland and muddled up his father's[264] trial with those of Charles I.

and Louis XVI. He refreshed himself in the evening, after the tears,

the sweat and the words which he had shed at the council, with a lady

who had come all the way from Paris out of enthusiasm for his genius;

he virtuously strove to cure her, but his eloquence betrayed his virtue

and drove the dart more deeply.

Madame la Duchesse de Duras had come to join M. le Duc de Duras among

the exiles. I will speak no more ill of misfortune, because I have

spent three months with that admirable woman, talking of all that

upright minds and hearts can find in a conformity of tastes, ideas,

principles and feelings. Madame de Duras was ambitious for me: she

alone saw at once what I might be worth in political life; she always

deplored the envy and short-sightedness which kept me removed from the

King's counsels; but she even much more deplored the obstacles which my

character placed in the way of my fortune: she scolded me, she wanted

to correct me of my indifference, my candour, my ingenuousness, and to

make me adopt habits of courtierism which she herself could not endure.

Nothing, perhaps, leads to greater attachment and gratitude than to

feel one's self under the patronage of a superior friendship which,

by virtue of its ascendancy over society, passes off your defects as

good qualities, your imperfections as an attraction. A man protects you

through his worth, a woman through your worth: that is why, of those

two empires, one is so hateful, the other so sweet.

Since I have lost that great-hearted person, gifted with a soul so

noble, with an intelligence which combined something of the strength

of the thought of Madame de Staël with the grace of the talent of

Madame de La Fayette[265], I have never ceased, while mourning her,

to reproach myself with any unevenness of temper with which I may

sometimes have wounded hearts that were devoted to me. Let us keep a

close watch upon our character! Let us remember that, with a profound

attachment, we can nevertheless poison days which we would buy back

again at the price of all our blood. When our friends have sunk into

the grave, what means have we to repair our trespasses? Our useless

regrets, our vain repentings, are those a remedy for the pain that we

have given them? They would have preferred one smile from us during

their life than all our tears after their death.

The charming Clara[266] was at Ghent with her mother. We two made up

bad couplets to the air of the _Tyrolienne._ I have held many pretty

little girls on my knees who are young grandmothers to-day. When you

have left a woman, married in your presence at sixteen years of age,

if you return sixteen years later, you find her of the same age still:

"Ah, madame, you have not put on a day!"

No doubt: but it is the daughter to whom you are saying so, the

daughter whom you will also lead up to the altar. But you, a sad

witness to both hymens, you treasure up the sixteen years which you

received at each union: a wedding-present which will hasten your own

marriage with a white-haired lady, rather thin.

[Sidenote: Marshal Victor.]

Marshal Victor had come to join us, at Ghent, with an admirable

simplicity: he asked for nothing, never teased the King with his

assiduity; one scarcely saw him; I do not know whether he ever had

the honour and the favour of being invited on a single occasion to

His Majesty's dinner-party. I have met Marshal Victor since; I have

been his colleague in office, and I have always perceived the same

excellent nature. In Paris, in 1823, M. le Dauphin was very harsh to

that honest soldier: it was very good of this Duc de Bellune to repay

such easy ingratitude with such modest devotion[267]! Candour carries

me away and touches me, even when, on certain occasions, it attains the

final expression of its ingenuousness. For instance, the marshal told

me of his wife's[268] death in the language of a soldier, and he made

me weep: he pronounced coarse words so quickly, and changed them so

chastely, that one might even have written them.

M. de Vaublanc[269] and M. Capelle[270] joined us. The former used to

say that he had some of everything in his portfolio. Do you want some

Montesquieu? Here you are. Some Bossuet? Here it is! In proportion

as the game seemed about to take a different turn, more travellers

arrived. The Abbé Louis and M. le Comte Beugnot alighted at the inn

where I was lodging. Madame de Chateaubriand was suffering from

terrible fits of choking, and I was sitting up with her. The two

new-comers installed themselves in a room separated from my wife's only

by a thin partition; it was impossible not to hear, unless by stopping

one's ears: between eleven and twelve at night the new arrivals raised

their voices. The Abbé Louis, who spoke like a wolf and in jerks, was

saying to M. Beugnot:

"You, a minister? You'll never be one again! You have committed one

stupidity after the other!"

I could not clearly hear M. le Comte Beugnot's answer, but he spoke

of thirty-three millions left behind in the Royal Treasury. The abbé,

apparently in anger, pushed a chair, which fell down. Through the

uproar I caught these words:

"The Duc d'Angoulême? He'll have to buy his national property at the

gates of Paris. I shall sell what remains of the State forests. I shall

cut down everything. The elms on the highroads, the Bois de Boulogne,

the Champs-Élysées: what's the use of all that, eh?"

Brutality formed M. Louis' principal merit; his talent lay in a stupid

love of material interests. If the Minister of Finance drew the forests

after him, he had doubtless a different secret from that of Orpheus,

who "made the woods go after him with his fail; fiddling." In the slang

of the time, M. Louis was known as a "special" man; his speciality of

finance had led him to accumulate the tax-payers' money in the Treasury

in order to let it be taken by Bonaparte. Napoleon had had no use for

this special man, who was in no sense an unique man, and who was at the

most good enough for the Directory.

The Abbé Louis had gone to Ghent to claim his office; he was in very

good favour with M. de Talleyrand, with whom he had solemnly officiated

at the first federation in the Champ de Mars: the bishop was the

celebrant, the Abbé Louis the deacon, and the Abbé Desrenaudes[271] the

sub-deacon. M. de Talleyrand, recollecting this admirable profanation,

used to say to the Baron Louis:

"Abbé, you were very fine as the deacon in the Champ de Mars!"

We endured this shame under the great tyranny of Bonaparte: ought we to

have endured it later?

The "Most Christian" King had screened himself from any reproach of

bigotry: he owned in his Council a married bishop, M. de Talleyrand; a

priest living in concubinage, M. Louis; a non-practising abbé, M. de

Montesquiou.

The last-named, a man as feverish as a consumptive, gifted with a

certain glibness of speech, had a narrow and disparaging mind, a

malignant heart, a sour character. One day, when I had made a speech at

the Luxembourg on behalf of the liberty of the press, the descendant

of Clovis, passing in front of me, who went back only to the Breton

Mormoran, caught me a great blow with his knee in my thigh, which was

not in good taste; I gave him one back, which was not polite: we played

at the Duc de La Rochefoucauld and the Coadjutor[272]. The Abbé de

Montesquiou humorously called M. de Lally-Tolendal "an English beast."

[Sidenote: The fish dinners at Ghent.]

In the rivers at Ghent they catch a very dainty white fish: we used,

_tutti quanti_, to go to eat this good fish in a suburban road-side

inn, while waiting for the battles and the end of empires. M. Laborie

never failed us at our meetings: I had first met him at Savigny when,

fleeing from Bonaparte, he came in at Madame de Beaumont's by one

window and made his way out by another. Indefatigable at work, renewing

his errands as often as his bills, as fond of doing services as others

are of receiving them, he has been calumniated: calumny is not the

impeachment of the calumniated, but the excuse of the calumniator. I

have seen men grow tired of the promises in which M. Laborie was so

rich; but why? Illusions are like torture: they always help to pass an

hour or two[273]. I have often led by the head, with a golden bridle,

old hacks of memory unable to stand on their legs, which I took for

young and frisky hopes.

I also met M. Mounier[274] at the white-fish dinners, a sensible and

upright man. M. Guizot deigned to honour us with his presence[275].

A _Moniteur_[276] had been started at Ghent: my report to the King of

the 12th of May[277], inserted in that journal, proves that my feelings

on the liberty of the press and on foreign domination have at all times

been the same. I can quote the following passages to-day; they in no

way belie my life:

"SIRE,

"You were preparing to crown the institutions of which you

had laid the foundation-stone.... You had fixed a period for

the commencement of the hereditary peerage; the ministry

would have gained greater unity; the ministers I would have

become members of the two Chambers, according to the true

spirit of the Charter; a law would have been brought in to

allow the election of a member of the Chamber of Deputies

before the age of forty, so that citizens might have had a

real political career. It was proposed to discuss a penal

code for press offenses, after the adoption of which law the

press would have been entirely free, for that freedom is

inseparable from all representative government....

"Sire, and this is the occasion solemnly to protest it:

all your ministers, all the members of your Council, are

inviolably attached to the principles of a wise liberty; they

derive from you that love of laws, of order and of justice

without which there can be no happiness for a people. Sire,

let us be permitted to say that we are ready to shed the

last drop of our blood for you, to follow you to the ends

of the earth, to share with you the tribulations which it

will please the Almighty to send you, because we believe

before God that you will maintain the Constitution which you

have given to your people, and that the sincerest wish of

your royal heart is the liberty of Frenchmen. Had it been

otherwise, Sire, we would all have died at your feet in

defense of your sacred person; but we would have been only

your soldiers, we would have ceased to be your councillors

and your ministers....

"Sire, at this moment we share your royal sadness; there is

not one of your councillors and ministers who would not give

up his life to prevent the invasion of France. You, Sire,

are a Frenchman, we are Frenchmen! Alive to the honour of

our country, proud of the glory of our arms, admirers of the

courage of our soldiers, we would be willing, in the midst of

your battalions, to shed the last drop of our blood to bring

them back to their duty or to share lawful triumphs with

them. We can only look with the deepest sorrow upon the ills

that are ready to break over our country."

Thus, at Ghent, did I propose to add to the Charter that which it

still lacked, while displaying my sorrow at the new invasion which was

threatening France: nevertheless, I was only an exile whose wishes were

in contradiction with the facts which could again open the gates of my

country to me. Those pages were written in the States of the allied

sovereigns, among kings and Emigrants who detested the liberty of the

press, in the midst of armies marching to conquest of whom we were, so

to speak, the prisoners: these circumstances perhaps add some strength

to the feelings which I venture to express.

[Sidenote: The _Rapport au Roi._]

My report on reaching Paris made a great noise; it was reprinted by

M. Le Normant the Younger, who risked his life upon this occasion,

and for whom I had all the difficulty in the world to obtain a barren

warrant of printer to the King. Bonaparte acted, or allowed others to

act, in a manner unworthy of him: on the occasion of my report, they

did what the Directory had done on the appearance of Cléry's Memoirs;

they falsified fragments of it: I was made to propose to Louis XVIII.

stupid ideas for the revival of feudal rights, for the tithes of the

clergy, for the recovery of the national property, as though the

printing of the original piece in the _Moniteur de Gand_ at a fixed and

known date, did not confound the imposture. The pseudonymous writer

entrusted with the production of an insincere pamphlet was a soldier

fairly high up in rank: he was dismissed after the Hundred Days; his

dismissal was ascribed to his conduct towards me; he sent his friends

to me; they begged me to intervene, lest a man of merit should lose his

sole means of existence: I wrote to the Minister of War and obtained

a retiring-pension for this officer[278]. He is dead: his wife has

remained attached to Madame de Chateaubriand by a feeling of gratitude

to which I was far from having any claim. Certain proceedings are

too highly prized; the most ordinary persons are susceptible to such

feelings of generosity. A name for virtue is cheaply acquired: the

superior mind is not that which pardons, but that which has no need of

pardon.

I do not know where Bonaparte, at St. Helena, discovered that I had

"rendered essential services at Ghent:" if he judged the part I played

too favourably, at least there lay behind his opinion an appreciation

of my political value.

*

I avoided at Ghent, as far as I could, intrigues, which were opposed to

my character and contemptible in my eyes; for, at bottom, I perceived

in our paltry catastrophe the catastrophe of society. My refuge against

the idlers and rogues was the Enclos du Béguinage. I used to walk round

that little world of veiled or tuckered women, consecrated to different

Christian works: a calm region, placed like the African quicksands

on the edge of the tempests. There no incongruity shocked my ideas,

for the sentiment of religion is so lofty that it is never irrelevant

to the gravest revolutions: the solitaries of the Thebaid and the

Barbarians, destroyers of the Roman world, are in no way discordant

facts or mutually exclusive existences.

I was graciously received in the close as the author of the _Génie du

Christianisme_: wherever I go, among Christians, the curates flock

round me; next come the mothers bringing me their children: the latter

recite to me my chapter on the First Communion. Then appear unhappy

persons who tell me of the good I have had the happiness to do them. My

passage through a Catholic town is announced like that of a missionary

or a physician. I am touched by this dual reputation: it is the only

agreeable memory of myself that I retain; I dislike myself in all the

rest of my personality and my reputation.

I was pretty often invited to festive dinners in the family of M. and

Madame d'Ops, a venerable father and mother surrounded by some thirty

children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. At M. Coppens', a

banquet which I was obliged to accept was prolonged from one in the

afternoon to eight in the evening. I counted nine courses: they began

with the preserves and finished with the cutlets. The French alone know

how to dine methodically, just as they alone know how to compose a

book.

[Sidenote: Diversions at Ghent.]

My "ministry" kept me at Ghent; Madame de Chateaubriand, less busy,

went to see Ostend, where I had embarked for Jersey in 1792. I had

travelled, a dying exile, down the same canals along whose banks I now

walked, still an exile, but in perfect health: there has always been

something fabulous in my career! The miseries and joys of my first

emigration revived in my thoughts; I saw England again, my companions

in misfortune, and Charlotte, whom I was to meet once more. There is

no one like myself to create a real society by calling up shadows; it

goes so far that the life of my memories absorbs the feeling of my

real life. Even persons with whom I have never occupied myself, if

they come to die, invade my memory: one would say that none can become

my companion if he has not passed through the tomb, which leads me to

think that I am a dead man. Where others find an eternal separation, I

find an eternal union; when one of my friends departs this earth, it

is as though he had come to make my home his own; he never leaves me

again. According as the present world retires, the past world returns

to me. If the actual generations scorn the generations that have grown

old, they waste their disdain where I am concerned: I am not even aware

of their existence.

My Golden Fleece had not yet reached Bruges[279], Madame de

Chateaubriand did not bring it to me. At Bruges, in 1426, "there was

a man whose name was John[280]," who invented or perfected the art

of painting in oils: let us be grateful to John of Bruges[281]; but

for the propagation of his method, Raphael's master-pieces would be

obliterated to-day. Where did the Flemish painters steal the light with

which they illumined their pictures? What ray from Greece strayed to

Batavia's shore?

After her journey to Ostend, Madame de Chateaubriand took a trip to

Antwerp. There she saw, in a cemetery, plaster souls in purgatory,

smeared all over with fire and black. At Louvain, she recruited a

stammerer, a learned professor, who came expressly to Ghent to gaze

upon a man so out of the ordinary as my wife's husband. He said to me,

"Illus... ttt... rr...;" his speech fell short of his admiration, and

I asked him to dinner. When the hellenist had drunk some curaçao, his

tongue became loosened. We got upon the merits of Thucydides, whom the

wine made us find clear as water. By dint of keeping up with my guest,

I ended, I believe, by talking Dutch; at least, I no longer understood

what I was saying.

Madame de Chateaubriand spent a bad night at the inn at Antwerp: a

young Englishwoman, recently confined, lay dying; during two hours she

made her groans heard; then her voice weakened, and her last moan,

which the stranger's ear could scarcely catch, was lost in an eternal

silence. The cries of this traveller, solitary and forsaken, might be

taken as a prelude to the thousand voices of death about to rise at

Waterloo.

The customary solitude of Ghent was rendered more striking by the

foreign crowd which was then enlivening it and which was soon to

disperse. Belgian and English recruits were learning their drill

on the squares and under the trees of the public walks; gunners,

contractors, dragoons were landing trains of artillery, herds of oxen,

horses which struggled in the air while they were being let down in

straps; canteen-women came on shore carrying the sacks, the children,

the muskets of their husbands: all these were going, without knowing

why and without having the smallest interest in it, to the great

_rendez-vous_ of destruction which Bonaparte had given them. One saw

politicians gesticulating along a canal, near a motionless angler,

Emigrants trotting from the King's to "Monsieur's," from "Monsieur's"

to the King's. The Chancellor of France, M. Dambray, in a green coat

and a round hat, with an old novel under his arm, walked to the Council

to amend the Charter; the Duc de Lévis[282] went to pay his court in a

pair of old loose shoes, which dropped from his feet, because, brave

man and new Achilles that he was, he had been wounded in the heel. He

was very witty, as can be judged by the selection from his Reflexions.

The Duke of Wellington used to come occasionally to hold a review.

Louis XVIII. went out every afternoon in a coach and six, with his

First Lord of the Bed-chamber and his guards, to drive round Ghent,

just as though he had been in Paris. If he met the Duke of Wellington

on his road, he would give him a little patronizing nod in passing.

[Sidenote: The dignity of Louis XVIII.]

Louis XVIII. never lost sight of the pre-eminence of his cradle; he

was a king everywhere, as God is God everywhere, in a manger or in a

temple, on an altar of gold or of clay. Never did his misfortune wring

the smallest concession from him; his loftiness increased in the ratio

of his depression; his diadem was his name; he seemed to say, "Kill

me, you will not kill the centuries inscribed upon my brow." If they

had scraped his arms off the Louvre, it signified little to him: were

they not engraved on the globe? Had commissioners been sent to scratch

them off in every corner of the universe? Had they been erased in

India, at Pondichéry; in America, at Lima and Mexico; in the East, at

Antioch, Jerusalem, Acre, Cairo, Constantinople, Rhodes, in the Morea;

in the West, on the walls of Rome, on the ceilings of Caserta and the

Escurial, on the arches of the halls of Ratisbon and Westminster, in

the escutcheon of all the kings? Had they been torn from the needle of

the compass, where they seemed to proclaim the reign of the lilies to

the several regions of the earth?

The fixed idea of the grandeur, the antiquity, the dignity, the

majesty of his House gave Louis XVIII. a real empire. One felt its

dominion: even Bonaparte's generals confessed it; they stood more

intimidated before that impotent old man than before the terrible

master who had commanded them in a hundred battles. In Paris, when

Louis XVIII. accorded to the triumphing monarchs the honour of dining

at his table, he passed without ceremony before those princes whose

soldiers were camping in the court-yard of the Louvre; he treated them

like vassals who had only done their duty in bringing men-at-arms to

their liege-lord. In Europe there is but one monarchy, that of France;

the destiny of the other monarchies is bound up in the fate of that

one. All the Royal Houses are of yesterday beside the House of Hugh

Capet[283], and almost all are its daughters. Our old royal power was

the old royalty of the world: from the banishment of the Capets will

date the era of the expulsion of the kings.

The more impolitic that haughtiness on the part of the descendant of

St. Louis (it became fatal to his heirs), the more pleasing was it to

the national pride: the French rejoiced at seeing sovereigns who, when

conquered, had borne the chains of a man, bear, as conquerors, the yoke

of a dynasty.

The unshaken faith of Louis XVIII. in his blood is the real might that

restored his sceptre; it was that faith which twice let fall upon

his head a crown for which Europe certainly did not believe, did not

pretend that she was exhausting her populations and her treasures. The

soldier-less exile was to be found at the issue of all the battles

which he had not delivered. Louis XVIII. was the Legitimacy incarnate;

it ceased to be visible when he disappeared.

*

At Ghent, I took walks by myself, as I do wherever I go. The barges

gliding along narrow canals, obliged to cross ten or twelve leagues of

pasture-land to reach the sea, appeared to be sailing over the grass;

they reminded me of the canoes of the savages in the wild-oat marshes

of Missouri. Standing at the edge of the water, while they were dipping

lengths of brown holland, I let my eyes wander over the steeples of

the town; its history appeared to me on the clouds in the sky: the

citizens of Ghent revolting against Henri de Châtillon, the French

governor; the wife[284] of Edward III.[285] bringing forth John of

Gaunt[286], the stock of the House of Lancaster; the popular reign of

van Artevelde[287]:

"Good people, who moves you? Why are you so incensed against me? In

what can I have angered you?"

"You must die!" cried the people: it is what Time cries to all of

us. Later, I saw the Dukes of Burgundy; the Spaniards came. Then the

pacification, the sieges and the captures of Ghent.

When I had done musing among the centuries, the sound of a little bugle

or a Scotch bagpipe would rouse me. I saw living soldiers hastening

to join the buried battalions of Batavia: ever destructions, powers

overthrown; and, at last, a few faded shadows and some names that had

passed.

Sea-board Flanders was one of the first cantonments of the companions

of Clodion[288] and Clovis. Ghent, Bruges and the surrounding country

furnished nearly a tenth of the grenadiers of the Old Guard: that

terrible army was in part drawn from the cradle of our fathers, and

came in its turn to be exterminated beside that cradle. Did the

Lys[289] give its flower to the arms of our Kings?

Spanish manners leave the impress of their character: the buildings

of Ghent retraced for me those of Granada, less the sky of the Vega.

A large town almost bereft of inhabitants, deserted streets, canals

as deserted as the streets.... twenty-six islands formed by those

canals, which were not the canals of Venice, a huge piece of ordnance

of the middle ages: that is what replaced at Ghent the city of the

Zegris[290], the Duero and the Xenil[291] the Generalife and the

Alhambra; old dreams of mine, shall I ever see you more?

*

[Sidenote: The Duchesse de Lévis.]

Madame la Duchesse d'Angoulême, who had taken ship on the Gironde, came

to us by way of England with General Donnadieu[292] and M. Desèze[293],

of whom the latter had crossed the ocean wearing his blue ribbon

across his waistcoat. The Duc and Duchesse de Lévis[294] followed in

the Princess' suite: they had flung themselves into the diligence and

escaped from Paris by the Bordeaux road. Their fellow-travellers talked

politics:

"That scoundrel of a Chateaubriand," said one of them, "is no such

fool! He had his carriage waiting packed in his court-yard for three

days: the bird has flown. They would have made short work of him, if

Napoleon had caught him!"

Madame la Duchesse de Lévis was a very handsome, very kind woman, and

as calm as Madame la Duchesse de Duras was restless. She never left

Madame de Chateaubriand's side; she was our assiduous companion at

Ghent. No one has diffused more quietude in my life, a thing of which

I have great need. The least troubled moments of my existence are

those which I spent at Noisiel, in the house of that woman whose words

and sentiments entered into your soul only to restore its serenity. I

recall with regret those moments passed under the great chestnut-trees

of Noisiel! With a soothed spirit, a convalescent heart, I used to look

upon the ruins of Chelles Abbey and the little lights of the boats

loitering among the willows on the Marne.

The remembrance of Madame de Lévis is for me that of a silent autumn

evening. She passed away in a few hours; she mingled with death as with

the source of all rest I saw her sink noiselessly into her grave in

the Cemetery of Père-Lachaise; she is laid above M. de Fontanes, and

the latter sleeps beside his son Saint-Marcellin, killed in a duel.

Thus, bowing before the monument of Madame de Lévis, have I come into

contact with two other sepulchres: man cannot awaken one sorrow without

reawakening another; during the night, the different flowers which open

only in the shade expand.

To Madame de Lévis' affectionate kindness for me was added the

friendship of M. le Duc de Lévis, the father: I may now reckon only by

generations. M. de Lévis wrote well; he had a versatile and fertile

imagination which betrayed his noble race, as it had already displayed

itself in his blood shed on the beach at Quiberon.

Nor was that to be the end of all: it was the impulse of a friendship

which passed on to the second generation. M. le Duc de Lévis, the

son[295], attached at present to M. le Comte de Chambord, has drawn

near to me; my hereditary affection will fail him no more than will

my fidelity to his august master. The new and charming Duchesse de

Lévis[296], his wife, joins to the great name of d'Aubusson the

brightest qualities of heart and mind: life is worth something, when

the graces borrow unwearied wings from history!

*

The Pavillon Marsan[297] existed at Ghent as in Paris. Every day

brought Monsieur news from France which was the offspring of

self-interest or imagination.

[Sidenote: Fouché, Duc D'Otrante.]

M. Gaillard[298], an ex-Oratorian, a counsel in the royal courts, an

intimate friend of Fouché's, alighted in our midst; he made himself

known, and was brought into touch with M. Capelle.

When I waited upon Monsieur, which was rarely, those around him used to

talk to me in covert words, and with many sighs, of "a man who (it must

be admitted) was behaving admirably: he was impeding all the Emperor's

operations; he was defending the Faubourg Saint-Germain, etc.,

etc." The faithful Marshal Soult was also the object of Monsieur's

predilection and, after Fouché, the most loyal man in France.

One day a carriage stopped at the door of my inn, and I saw Madame la

Baronne de Vitrolles step out of it: she had arrived bearing powers

from the Duc d'Otrante. She took away with her a note, written in

Monsieur's hand, in which the Prince declared that he would retain

an eternal gratitude to him who saved M. de Vitrolles. Fouché wanted

no more; armed with this note, he was sure of his future in case of

a restoration. Thenceforward, there was no question at Ghent save of

the immense obligations due to the excellent M. Fouché de Nantes[299],

save of the impossibility of returning to France otherwise than by

that just man's good pleasure: the difficulty was how to make the King

relish this new redeemer of the Monarchy.

After the Hundred Days, Madame de Custine compelled me to meet Fouché

at dinner at her house. I had seen him once, five years before,

in connection with the condemnation of my poor Cousin Armand. The

ex-minister knew that I had opposed his nomination at Roye, at Gonesse,

at Arnouville; and, as he suspected me of being powerful, he wished

to make his peace with me. The death of Louis XVI. was the best

thing about him: regicide was his innocence. A prater, like all the

revolutionaries, beating the air with empty phrases, he retailed a

heap of commonplaces stuffed with "destiny," with "necessity," with

"the right of things," mingling with this philosophic nonsense further

nonsense on the march and progress of society, and shameless maxims in

favour of the strong as against the weak; and he was free in his use of

impudent avowals on the justice of success, the little worth of a head

which falls, the equity of that which prospers, the iniquity of that

which suffers, affecting to speak of the most horrid disasters with

airy indifference, as though he were a genius above all such fooleries.

Not a choice idea escaped him, not a remarkable thought, on any subject

whatsoever. I went away shrugging my shoulders at crime.

M. Fouché never forgave me my dryness and the small effect he produced

on me. He had thought he would fascinate me by causing the blade of the

fatal instrument to rise and fall before my eyes, like a glory of Mount

Sinai; he had imagined that I would look up, as to a colossus, to the

ranter who, speaking of the soil of Lyons, had said:

"That soil shall be overturned; on the ruins of that proud and

rebellious city shall rise scattered cottages which the friends of

liberty will hasten to come and inhabit.... We shall have the energetic

courage to walk through the vast tombs of the conspirators.... Their

blood-stained corpses, hurled into the Rhône, give on both banks and at

its mouth the impression of terror and the image of the omnipotence of

the people. . . . . . . .

"We shall celebrate the victory of Toulon; we shall this evening send

two hundred and fifty rebels under the lead of the thunder."

Those horrible trimmings did not impose upon me: because M. "de

Nantes" had diluted republican crimes with imperial mire; because the

_sans-culotte_, transformed into a duke, had wrapped the cord of the

lantern in the ribbon of the Legion of Honour, he appeared neither the

abler nor the greater for it in my eyes. The Jacobins detest men who

make no account of their atrocities and who despise their murders;

their pride is provoked, like that of authors whose talent one disputes.

*

[Sidenote: His underhand negotiations.]

At the same time that Fouché was sending M. Gaillard to Ghent to

negociate with the brother of Louis XVI., his agents at Bâle were

parleying with those of Prince Metternich[300] on the subject of

Napoleon II., and M. de Saint-Léon, dispatched by this same Fouché,

was arriving in Vienna to treat of the crown as a "possibility" for

M. le Duc d'Orléans. The friends of the Duc d'Otrante could rely upon

him no more than his enemies: on the return of the legitimate Princes,

he maintained his old colleague, M. Thibaudeau[301], on the list of

exiles, while M. de Talleyrand struck this or that outlaw off the list,

or added that other to the catalogue, according to his whim. Had not

the Faubourg Saint-Germain reason indeed to believe in M. Fouché?

M. de Saint-Léon carried three notes to Vienna, of which one was

addressed to M. de Talleyrand: the Duc d'Otrante proposed that the

ambassador of Louis XVIII. should push the son of Égalité on to the

throne, if he saw his way! What probity in those negociations! How

fortunate they were to have to do with such honest persons! Yet we have

admired, censed, blessed those highway robbers; we have paid court to

them; we have called them _monseigneur!_ That explains the world as it

stands. M. de Montrond came in addition, after M. de Saint-Léon.

M. le Duc d'Orléans did not conspire in fact but by consent; he let

the revolutionary affinities intrigue: a sweet society! In this dark

lane, the plenipotentiary of the King of France lent an ear to Fouché's

overtures.

Speaking of M. de Talleyrand's detention at the Barrière d'Enfer, I

said what had, till then, been M. de Talleyrand's fixed idea as to the

regency of Marie-Louise: he was obliged by the emergency to embrace

the eventuality of the Bourbons; but he was always ill at ease: it

seemed to him that, under the heirs of St. Louis, a married bishop

would never be sure of his place. The idea of substituting the Younger

Branch for the Elder Branch pleased him, therefore, so much so the more

in that he had had former relations with the Palais Royal.

Taking that side, without however exposing himself entirely, he

hazarded a few words of Fouché's project to Alexander. The Tsar had

ceased to interest himself in Louis XVIII.: the latter had hurt him,

in Paris, by his affectation of superiority of race; he had hurt him

again by refusing to consent to the marriage of the Duc de Berry with

a sister of the Emperor; the Princess was rejected for three reasons:

she was a schismatic; she was not of an old enough stock; she came of

a family of madmen: these reasons were not put forward upright but

aslant, and, when seen through, gave Alexander treble offense. As a

last subject of complaint against the old sovereign of exile, the

Tsar brought up the projected alliance between England, France and

Austria. For the rest, it seemed as though the succession were open;

all the world claimed to succeed to the estate of the sons of Louis

XIV.: Benjamin Constantin the name of Madame Murat[302], was pleading

the rights which Napoleon's sister believed herself to possess over

the Kingdom of Naples; Bernadotte was casting a distant glance upon

Versailles, apparently because the King of Sweden came from Pau.

La Besnardière[303], head of a department at the Foreign Office,

went over to M. de Caulaincourt; he drew up a hurried report on "the

complaints and rejoinders of France" to the Legitimacy. After this

kick had been let fly, M. de Talleyrand found means of communicating

the report to Alexander: discontented and fickle, the Autocrat was

struck with La Besnardière's pamphlet. Suddenly, in the middle of the

Congress, the Tsar asked, to the general stupefaction, if it would not

be a matter for deliberation to examine in how far M. le Duc d'Orléans

might suit France and Europe as King. This is perhaps one of the most

surprising things in those extraordinary times, and perhaps it is

still more extraordinary that it has been so little discussed[304].

Lord Clancarty[305] made the Russian proposal fall through; His

Lordship declared that he had no powers to treat so grave a question:

"As for myself," he said, "giving my opinion as a private individual, I

think that to put M. le Duc d'Orléans on the throne of France would be

to replace a military usurpation by a family usurpation, which is more

dangerous to the sovereigns than any other usurpation."

[Sidenote: At the Congress of Vienna.]

The members of the Congress went to dinner, using the sceptre of St.

Louis as a rush with which to mark the folio at which they had left off

in their protocols.

Upon the obstacles encountered by the Tsar, M. de Talleyrand faced

about: foreseeing that the stroke would resound, he sent a report to

Louis XVIII. (in a despatch which I have seen and which was numbered 25

or 27) of this strange session of the Congress[306]; he thought himself

obliged to inform His Majesty of so exorbitant a proceeding, because

this news, said he, would not long delay in reaching the King's ears: a

singular ingenuousness for M. le Prince de Talleyrand.

There had been a question of a declaration on the part of the Alliance,

in order to make it quite clear to the world that there was no quarrel

except with Napoleon, that there was no pretension to impose upon

France either an obligatory form of government or a sovereign who

should not be of her own choice. This latter part of the declaration

was suppressed, but it was positively announced in the official journal

of Frankfort. England, in her negociations with the Cabinets, always

employs that Liberal language, which is only a precaution against the

parliamentary tribune.

We see that the Allies were troubling themselves no more about the

re-establishment of the Legitimacy at the Second than at the First

Restoration: the event alone did all. What mattered it to such

short-sighted sovereigns whether the mother of European monarchies had

her throat cut? Would that prevent them from giving entertainments and

keeping guards? The monarchs are so solidly seated to-day, the globe in

one hand, the sword in the other!

M. de Talleyrand, whose interests were at that time in Vienna, feared

lest the English, whose opinion was no longer so favourable to him,

should begin the military game before all the armies were drawn up

in line, and lest the Cabinet of St. James should thus acquire the

predominance: that is why he wished to induce the King to re-enter

by the south-eastern provinces, in order that he might find himself

under the protection of the Austrian Empire and Cabinet. The Duke of

Wellington had given a precise order not to commence hostilities; it

was Napoleon who wanted the Battle of Waterloo: the destinies of such a

nature are not to be arrested.

Those historic facts, the most curious in the world, have remained

generally unknown; in the same way, also, a confused opinion has been

formed of the Treaties of Vienna relating to France: they have been

thought the iniquitous work of a troop of victorious sovereigns,

implacably bent upon our ruin; unfortunately, if they are harsh, they

have been envenomed by a French hand: when M. de Talleyrand is not

conspiring, he is trafficking.

Prussia desired to have Saxony, which will sooner or later be her prey;

France ought to have countenanced this wish, for, Saxony obtaining

an indemnification within the sphere of the Rhine, Landau would have

remained to us with our surrounding territories; Coblentz and other

fortresses would have passed to a small friendly State, which, placed

between ourselves and Prussia, prevented any point of contact; the keys

of France would not have been handed over to the shade of Frederic.

For three millions which Saxony paid him, M. de Talleyrand opposed the

combinations of the Cabinet of Berlin; but, in order to obtain the

assent of Alexander to the existence of Old Saxony, our Ambassador was

obliged to abandon Poland to the Tsar, notwithstanding that the other

Powers desired that a Poland of some kind should restrict the freedom

of the Muscovite's movements in the North. The Bourbons of Naples

redeemed themselves, like the sovereign of Dresden, with money[307].

M. de Talleyrand claimed that he was entitled to a subvention, in

exchange for his Duchy of Benevento: he was selling his livery on

leaving his master. When France was losing so much, could not M. de.

Talleyrand also have lost something? Benevento, moreover, did not

belong to the High Chamberlain: by virtue of the revival of the ancient

treaties, that principality was a dependency of the States of the

Church.

[Illustration: Talleyrand.]

[Sidenote: A letter from Talleyrand.]

Such were the diplomatic transactions which were being completed in

Vienna while we were stopping at Ghent. In this latter residence, I

received the following letter from M. de Talleyrand:

"VIENNA, 4 _April._

"I learnt, monsieur, with much pleasure that you were at

Ghent, for circumstances require that the King should be

surrounded with strong and independent men.

"You will certainly have thought that it was useful to

refute, by means of strenuously-reasoned publications, the

whole of the new doctrine which they are trying to establish

in the official documents now appearing in France.

"It would be useful if something could appear of which the

object would be to establish that the Declaration of the

31st of March, made in Paris by the Allies, that the Act of

Deposition, that the Act of Abdication, that the Treaty of

the 11th of April, which resulted from them, are so many

preliminary, indispensable and absolute conditions of the

Treaty of the 30th of May; that is to say that, without those

previous conditions, the treaty would not have been made.

This admitted, the man who violates the said conditions or

seconds their violation breaks the peace which that treaty

established. It is, therefore, he and his accomplices who are

declaring war against Europe.

"An argument taken in this sense would do good abroad as

well as at home; only it must be well done, so make it your

business.

"Accept, monsieur, the homage of my sincere attachment and of

my high regard.

"TALLEYRAND.

"I hope to have the honour of seeing you at the end of the

month."

Our Minister in Vienna was faithful to his hatred of the great chimera

escaped from the shades: he dreaded a blow from its wing. This letter

shows, for the rest, all that M. de Talleyrand was capable of doing

when he wrote alone: he had the kindness to teach me the "movement,"

leaving the "graces" to me. It was a question indeed of a few

diplomatic phrases on the deposition, on the abdication, on the Treaty

of the 11th of April and of the 30th of May, to stop Napoleon! I was

very grateful for the instructions given me by virtue of my patent as

"a strong man," but I did not follow them: an ambassador _in petto_ I

was not at that moment meddling with foreign affairs; I busied myself

only with my Ministry of the Interior _ad interim._

But what was taking place in Paris?

[231] Jean Baptiste Baron Dalesme (1763-1832) was a brigadier-general

under Napoleon, sat in the Legislative Body as Deputy for the

Haute-Vienne from 1802 to 1809, and was created a baron of the

Empire in 1810. He rallied to the Restoration, which made him a

lieutenant-general in October 1814. He was Governor of Elba during the

Hundred Days, and left the service on the Second Restoration. He was

reinstated in 1830, and died Governor of the Invalides.--B.

[232] 4 May 1814.--B.

[233] At the celebrated Congress of Erfurt, held in 1808, were present

the Emperors Alexander and Napoleon and almost all the sovereigns of

Germany. The King of Prussia and the Emperor of Austria were the only

crowned heads not invited to it.--T.

[234] Æneid, X. 174.--B.

[235] Marie Countess Walewice-Walewska (circa 1787-1817), _née_

Laczinska, married, first (_circa_ 1804), to Anastasius Colonna,

Count Walewice-Walewski, who died in 1814, at the age of eighty-four;

secondly, to General Philippe Antoine Comte d'Omano. She visited

Napoleon at Elba on the 1st of September 1814, accompanied by a child

of four or five years of age. She stayed about fifty hours; during this

time the Emperor received no one, not even Madame Mère, who was then

in Elba, at Marciana. But, after those fifty hours, Madame Walewska

went to Longone to embark for the Continent in a gale so severe that

the very sailors feared for her safety. She refused to listen to all

representations. The Emperor sent an officer to delay her departure;

but she was already out at sea, and Napoleon knew no peace of mind

until he had received from the Countess Walewska herself news of her

safe arrival. (_Cf._ PONS DE L'HÉRAULT, _Souvenirs et anecdotes de

l'île d'Elbe_).--T.

[236] Alexandre Florian Joseph de Colonna, Comte, later Duc de Walewski

(1810-1868), the reputed illegitimate son of Napoleon I., Minister of

Foreign Affairs and, later, President of the Legislative Body under

Napoleon III.--T.

[237] Antoine Francois Claude Comte Ferrand (1758-1825) was

Postmaster-general. In 1816, he was created a peer of France and became

a member of the French Academy. His best-known literary work is the

Esprit de l'histoire in four volumes (1802), which has been many times

reprinted.--T.

[238] Antoine Marie Chamans, Comte de Lavallette (1769-1830), was

married to a Mademoiselle de Beauharnais, a niece of the Empress

Joséphine. He had been Postmaster-general in 1814; lost that office

on the return of the Bourbons, and resumed it, in 1816, on the flight

of the Princes. He was tried for seconding the return of Bonaparte

and sentenced to death, but made his escape from prison by the aid

of his wife. Three English officers, Messrs. Hutchinson, Wilson and

Bruce, assisted him across the frontier, and he took refuge in Bavaria.

Lavallette was permitted to return to France in 1820, when he retired

into private life.--T.

[239] The _Nain jaune_ was a satirical Bonapartist journal, inspired by

the circle of the ex-Queen Hortense, which adopted a guise of extreme

Royalism. The number for the 28th of February 1815 contains a letter

from a correspondent who says:

"I have worn out ten goose-quills in writing to you, without receiving

a reply; perhaps I shall be luckier if I try a duck-quill" (_plume de

cane_).

On the next day, the 1st of March, Napoleon landed at Cannes on his

return from Elba.--B.

[240] Carlo Andrea Count Pozzo di Borgo (1764-1842), a native of

Corsica, entered the Russian diplomatic service and took part in all

the congresses of the Holy Alliance. Pozzo acted as Russian Ambassador

to France from 1814 to 1835, and to England from 1835 to 1839. He spent

his last years in Paris.--T.

[241] Louis-Philippe Duc d'Orléans (1773-1850), afterwards "King of the

French," and son (some say a changeling) of Louis Philippe Joseph Duc

d'Orléans (Philippe Égalité).--T.

[242] General Drouet d'Erlon (1765-1844) was placed in command of

the 1st Army Corps during the Hundred Days. He was condemned to

death by contumacy in 1816, fled to Prussia, and returned to France

in 1825, but did not resume service till 1830. In 1834, he was

appointed Governor-General of Algeria, but was recalled in 1835 for

not displaying sufficient vigour against Abd-el-Kader; nevertheless

Drouet was made a marshal in 1843. The military conspiracy in which

he engaged with General Lefebvre-Desnoëttes and Lallemand was of a

semi-Imperialist, semi-Revolutionary character, and broke out on the

9th of March 1815, but was immediately suppressed.--T.

[243] Marshal Masséna, on the evening of the 3rd of March, sent to the

Minister of War, from Marseilles, the dispatch announcing Bonaparte's

landing at the Golfe Jouan. In 1815, the aerial telegraph stopped at

Lyons. The message was therefore carried by a courier as far as Lyons,

and did not reach Paris until mid-day on the 5th of March. Impressed by

the gravity of the news, M. Chappe, the Director-General of Telegraphs

(brother of the inventor), took upon himself to take the message to

M. de Vitrolles, in the King's closet, instead of transmitting it to

Marshal Soult. Vitrolles handed the despatch, sealed as it was, to

Louis XVIII., who read it several times over and threw it on the table,

saying with the greatest calm:

"It is to say that Bonaparte has landed on the coast of Provence. This

letter must be taken to the Minister of War. He will see what is to be

done."

The Government kept the news secret for two days, and it was only on

the 7th of March that it was officially announced in the _Moniteur._--B.

[244] The Comte d'Artois, the King's brother, became "Monsieur" on the

latter's accession.--T.

[245] Henri Jacques Guillaume Clarke, Maréchal Comte d'Hunebourg, Duc

de Feltre (1765-1818), descended from an Irish family, had been one

of Napoleon's generals, and Minister of War from 1807. After rallying

to the Bourbons, he managed the War Office at a time of the greatest

difficulty, and was created a marshal of France after the Second

Restoration, in 1816. The Duc de Feltre retired in 1817, a year before

his death.--T.

[246] Caius Valerius Jovius Aulerius Diocletianus (245-313), Roman

Emperor, was born at Dioclea, near Salona. Diocletian's mind became

weakened in 304, and in 305 he abdicated and retired to Salona, where

he cultivated his garden with his own hands.--T.

[247] Camille Hyacinthe Odilon Barrot (1791-1873) became a prominent

leader of the Opposition under Louis-Philippe, and was Prime Minister

and Minister of Justice in 1848 to 1849.--T.

[248] The battalion of the pupils of the School of Law was formed on

the 14th of March 1815; its effective force amounted to 1200 men. After

being drilled at Vincennes, the Volunteers, to the number of about

700, joined the Body-guards at Beauvais on Easter Sunday, the 26th of

March; they crossed the frontier and were cantoned at Ypres. On the

30th of July, the battalion returned to Paris, amid the cheers of an

immense multitude which had come out to greet it. The professors of the

school, prevented by their age from leaving France, at least refused to

wait upon Napoleon, and it was only at the express invitation of the

Minister of the Interior that they went so far as to send an address in

which they expressed their gratitude at seeing the Emperor renounce all

spirit of conquest.--B.

[249] M. de La Fayette, in some Memoirs published since his death

and valuable for their facts, confirms the singular conjunction of

his opinion and mine on the occasion of Bonaparte's return. M. de La

Fayette was a sincere lover of honour and liberty.--_Author's Note_

(Paris, 1840).

[250] Charles Ferdinand Duc de Berry (1778-1820), second son of the

Comte d'Artois, assassinated by the fanatic Louvel on leaving the

Opera, 13 February 1820.--T.

[251] Louis Antoine Duc d'Angoulême (1775-1844), eldest son of the

Comte d'Artois, was Dauphin of France during the reign of the latter as

Charles X. He abdicated his right to the throne immediately after his

father, and was thus for only a few minutes King of France, with the

title of Louis XIX. He was succeeded by his nephew, the Duc de Bordeaux

(the Comte de Chambord), as Henry V. The Duc d'Angoulême died at

Goritz, where he lived under the style of Comte de Marnes. He possessed

many solid qualities and conciliatory intentions, without being gifted

with any hyper-eminent faculties.--T.

[252] A Royal order of the 6th of March, declaring Bonaparte a traitor

and rebel, and enjoining all soldiers, national guards, or private

citizens "to hunt him down" (_de lui courir sus_), appears in the

_Moniteur_ of the 7th of March.--B.

[253] Alexandre Maurice Blanc de La Nautte, Comte d'Hauterive

(1754-1830), commenced life as a professor in the Oratorian College at

Tours (1779), accompanied the Comte de Choiseul-Gouffier on his embassy

to Constantinople (1784), became French _Chargé d'affaires_ in Moldavia

(1785), and Consul in New York (1792). In America he grew intimate with

Talleyrand, who made him head of a department at the Foreign Office so

soon as he obtained his ministry, and later had him appointed Keeper of

the Archives (1807).--T.

[254] Alfred Frédéric Chevalier Artaud de Montor (1772-1849), after a

long diplomatic career, wrote or edited a large number of historical

works, including the _Vie et travaux du comte d'Hauterive_, published

at a later date than that at which Chateaubriand wrote the above

lines.--T.

[255] MARK ii. II.--T.

[256] Charles Du Fresne, Seigneur Du Cange (1610-1688), the noted

historian and philologist, born at Amiens, 18 December 1610.--T.

[257] Robespierre was born at Arras on the 6th of May 1758.--T.

[258] _Cf._ Vol. II. p. 30.--T.

[259] Pierre Louis Bertin de Vaux (1771-1842), younger brother of Louis

François Bertin, known as Bertin the Elder, assisted him in founding

the _Journal des Débats_ (1799), and in editing that paper, while

directing a banking-house which he had established in 1801. Bertin de

Vaux was sent as Ambassador to the Netherlands in 1830 and raised to

the peerage in 1832.--T.

[260] Amédée Bretagne Malo de Durfort, Duc de Duras (1771-1838), First

Lord of the Bed-chamber to the King. He accompanied Louis XVIII. to

Ghent and returned with him. He had been created a Peer of France in

1814. After the Revolution of 1830, he retired into private life.--B.

[261] Charles V. Emperor of Germany, King of Spain and of the Two

Sicilies (1500-1558), born at Ghent, son of the Archduke Philip of

Austria and of Joan, heiress of Castile, daughter of Ferdinand and

Isabella. He was proclaimed King of Spain in 1516, during his mother's

life-time, and elected to the Empire three years later. Charles V.

abdicated in 1556, two years before his death.--T.

[262] The other ministers were: M. Louis, Finance; the Duc de Feltre,

War; M. Beugnot, Navy; M. Dambray, Chancellor of France; M. de

Jaucourt, Foreign Affairs _ad interim_, the Prince de Talleyrand being

in Vienna. M. de Blacas was Minister of the King's Household. M. de

Lally-Tolendal was _ad interim_ Minister of Public Instruction.--B.

[263] Bernadotte and Henry IV. were both born at Pau.--T.

[264] Thomas Arthur Comte de Lally, Baron Tolendal in Ireland

(1702-1766), after contributing to the victory of Fontenoy (1745),

was in 1756 appointed Governor of the French possessions in India and

drove the English from the Coromandel Coast. He failed, however, before

Madras, was himself besieged in Pondichéry, and obliged to surrender

with a garrison of 700 men: he had resisted for several months against

an army of 22,000 men and a fleet of 14 ships (1761). Nevertheless, he

was accused of betraying the King's interests, sent to the Bastille

and, after eighteen months' imprisonment and an informal trial,

sentenced to death. He was executed on the 9th of May 1766. Voltaire

published an eloquent _factum_ in the condemned man's favour and,

in 1778, Louis XVI., at the instance of Lally's son, the Marquis de

Lally-Tolendal mentioned above, had the iniquitous verdict revised. The

sentence was unanimously quashed by a new set of judges, and Lally's

memory entirely rehabilitated.--T.

[265] Marie Madeleine Comtesse de La Fayette (1634-1693), _née_ Pioche

de La Vergne, daughter of the Governor of the Havre, and the intimate

friend of La Rochefoucauld. She made a name in letters by her novels,

_Zaïde_ the _Princesse de Clèves_, etc., and also wrote an _Histoire et

Henriette d'Angleterre._--T.

[266] Madame La Duchesse de Rauzan.--_Author's Note._

[267] The Duc de Bellune remained absolutely faithful to the Elder

Branch after the usurpation of 1830.--T.

[268] Julie Maréchale Duchesse de Bellune, _née_ Vosch van Avesaat,

married to the Maréchal Duc de Bellune in 1801. He had previously

divorced his first wife, _née_ Muguet, to whom he had been married in

1791.--T.

[269] Vincent Marie Viennot, Comte de Vaublanc (1756-1845), an eager

supporter of the Royalist cause and Minister of the Interior from

September 1815 to May 1816. He published some political works, a few

indifferent tragedies and an epic poem, the _Dernier des Césars_

(1836).--T.

[270] Guillaume Antoine Bénoît Baron Capelle (1775-1843) held various

prefectures under Napoleon and Louis XVIII., and was created a baron

of the Empire by the former. In May 1830, he became Minister of Public

Works in M. de Polignac's Cabinet and, as a signatory of the Ordinances

of July, was condemned by contumacy to perpetual imprisonment. He

returned to France in 1836, after the amnesty.--B.

[271] The Abbé Martial Borye Desrenaudes (1755-1825), not d'Ernaud as

the preceding editions of the Memoirs have it, was grand-vicar to the

Bishop of Autun at the time of the Revolution. He had a remarkable

talent as a writer, and was of the greatest use to Talleyrand as a

literary assistant. After the 18 Brumaire, Desrenaudes became a member

of the Tribunate, and later a councillor of the University and Imperial

Censor. He retained his censorship under the Restoration.--B.

[272] Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz (1614-1679), was in

1643 appointed Coadjutor to his uncle, Henri de Gondi, Archbishop of

Paris, before himself succeeding to the archbishopric.--T.

[273] _Cf._ RACINE, _Les Plaideurs_, Act III. sc. IV.--T.

[274] Claude Philibert Édouard Baron Mounier (1784-1843), son of

Joseph Mounier, the celebrated Constituent. Under the Empire, he had

been Superintendent of the Crown Lands, in which post he was confirmed

by Louis XVIII., and he continued to hold various political and

administrative offices. He was created a peer of France in 1819.--B.

[275] Louis XVIII. himself was a great epicure of this fish, and

sometimes allowed himself to be taken to this inn, which was called the

Halter. (Cf. ROMBERG, _Louis XVIII. à Gand._)--B.

[276] Early in April, under the management of the two Bertins. Upon the

objection of the Netherlands Government, which saw difficulties in the

way of the co-existence of two _Moniteurs_ in the kingdom, the original

title was changed to the _Journal universel_, which continued to be the

official organ of Louis XVIII.--B.

[277] _Rapport sur l'état de la France, fait au roi dans son conseil_,

May 1815.--B.

[278] A certain M. Bail, an inspector of reviews. Chateaubriand's

letter to the Duc de Feltre is dated "Paris, 22 August 1826," and runs:

"A Monsieur Bail, inspector of reviews, wrote a pamphlet

against me. He says that he has lost his place for this act.

May I venture, monsieur le duc, to hope from your indulgence

that you will be so good as to restore him to your kindness?

The King's person was respected in the pamphlet. Pray forget,

monsieur le maréchal, all that concerns only myself.--B."

[279] The Order of the Golden Fleece was instituted at Bruges, in 1429,

by Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy.--T.

[280] JOHN i. 6.--T.

[281] Jan van Eyck (_circa_ 1380-1450) was born at Maaseyk near

Maastricht, but settled at Bruges, with his brother Hubert, at an early

age. He is usually known as Jean de Bruges in France.--T.

[282] Gaston Pierre Marc Duc de Levis (1764-1830) had been wounded at

Quiberon in 1795. Between 1808 and 1814 he published his _Maximes et

réflexions sur différents sujets_, the _Suite des quatre Facardins_,

imitated from Hamilton's Tales, _Voyage de Khani, ou Nouvelles lettres

chinoises, Souvenirs et Portraits_, and L'_Angleterre au commencement

du XIX^e siècle._ He became a peer of France in 1814, a privy

councillor in 1815 and a member of the French Academy in 1816.--B.

[283] Hugh Capet, Duke of France and Count of Paris (_d._ 996), was

proclaimed King of France in 987 on the death of Louis V., the last of

the Second or Carlovingian Dynasty, thus founding the Third or Capetian

Dynasty of Kings of France. The House of Capet proper reigned from 987

to 1328; its two branches, the Houses of Valois and Bourbon from 1328

to 1589 and 1589 to 1830 respectively. The usurpation of Louis-Philippe

gives a reign of 18 years (1830 to 1848) to the House of Orleans, or

Younger Branch of Bourbon.--T.

[284] Philippa of Hainault, Queen of England (_circa_ 1314-1369).--T.

[285] Edward III. King of England (1212-1377).--T.

[286] John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster (1349-1399), fourth son of

Edward III. and father of Henry IV., who founded the House of Lancaster

after procuring the murder of Richard II., by usurping the throne to

the prejudice of the descendants of Lionel Duke of Clarence, second son

of Edward III.--T.

[287] Jacob van Artevelde (_d._ 1345) headed a revolt of his

fellow-citizens against the Count of Flanders (1336) and became for

some time absolute master of Flanders. Finding himself, however, on the

point of being reduced, he proposed to offer the sovereignty to Edward

the Black Prince, but failed in his project, and was murdered by the

populace of Ghent in 1345.--T.

[288] Clodion (_d. circa_ 448) is accepted as the second King of France

(Merovingian Dynasty).--T.

[289] The Lys, or Lily, rises a little below Béthune and flows into the

Scheldt at Ghent.--B.

[290] A Moorish tribe which had a violent quarrel with the

Abencerrages.--T.

[291] Granada stands near the junction of the Rivers Duero and

Xenil.--T.

[292] Gabriel Vicomte Donnadieu (1777-1849), an inveterate enemy of

Napoleon and later of Louis-Philippe, and a fervent, although somewhat

discredited Royalist.--T.

[293] Raymond Comte Desèze (1748-1828), the famous advocate. He

distinguished himself early in his career by his defense of the

daughters of Helvétius. In 1789 he obtained the acquittal of the Baron

de Bésenval, accused of high treason; and he assisted Malesherbes and

Tronchet in their defense of King Louis XVI. before the Convention.

Desèze had been made a knight of the Holy Ghost by Louis XVI., which

explains the allusion to the blue ribbon. Louis XVIII. made him

President of the Court of Appeal and a peer of France in 1815, and a

count in 1817. Desèze was, in 1816, elected a member of the French

Academy.--T.

[294] Pauline Louise Françoise de Paule Duchesse de Lévis (_d._ 1819),

_née_ Charpentier d'Ennery, married to the Duc de Lévis in 1785.--B.

[295] Gaston François Christophe Victor Duc de Ventadour and de Lévis

(1794-1863), became aide-de-camp to the Duc d'Angoulême in 1814, and

took part in the Spanish War of 1823 and the expedition to Morocco in

1828. He succeeded his father in the peerage in 1830, but refused to

sit after the Revolution of July and followed the Royal Family into

exile. He was for many years one of the Comte de Chambord's chief

councillors, and died at Venice in 1863.--B.

[296] Marie Cathérine Amanda Duchesse de Lévis (1798-1854), daughter of

Pierre Raymond Hector d'Aubusson, Comte de La Feuillade, and married to

the Duc de Lévis in 1821.--B.

[297] The Pavillon Marsan formed the corner of the Tuileries bounded by

the garden and the Rue de Rivoli, and was occupied under Louis XVIII.

by the Comte d'Artois.--T.

At Ghent, the Comte d'Artois had his Pavillon Marsan in the Hôtel des

Pays Bas, where he was lodged with his suite and his carriages and paid

1000 francs a day. Louis XVIII. lived in the house which the Comte

d'Hane de Steenhuyse had placed at his disposal.-B.

[298] Gaillard had been Fouché's secretary.--B.

[299] The Duc d'Otrante was born at the Martinière, near Nantes.--T.

[300] Clemens Wenzel Nepomuk Lothar Prince von Metternich-Winneburg

(1773-1859), the great Austrian statesman, was at this time presiding

over the Congress of Vienna.--T.

[301] Auguste Clair Thibaudeau (1765-1854) had voted for the death of

the King in the Convention, and became one of the most ardent servants

of Napoleon, who made him a councillor of State, a prefect, and a count

of the Empire (31 December 1809). He was exiled in 1815 and did not

return to France until after the Revolution of July. Napoleon III. made

him a senator and a grand officer of the Legion of Honour. Thibaudeau

left a large number of historical works.--B.

[302] Caroline Murat, Queen of Naples (1782-1839), _née_ Bonaparte,

married to Murat in 1800.--T.

[303] Jean Baptiste de Gouy, Comte de La Besnardière (_d._ 1843), had

been employed at the Foreign Office since 1795, where he had become the

intimate fellow-worker of Talleyrand, who liked both him and his work.

He accompanied the prince to the Congress of Vienna; on his return, the

King made him a count and director of Public Works. He retired into

private life in 1819.--B.

[304] A recently-published pamphlet entitled _Lettres de l'Étranger_,

written apparently by an able and well-informed diplomatist, points to

this strange Russian negociation in Vienna.--_Author's Note_ (Paris,

1840).

[305] Richard Le Poer Trench, second Earl of Clancarty, later Marquis

of Heusden in the Netherlands (1767-1837), British Plenipotentiary

to the Congress of Vienna, and later Ambassador to the Netherlands

(1816-1822).--T.

[306] It is stated that, in 1830, M. de Talleyrand had his private

correspondence with Louis XVIII. removed from the Archives of the

Crown, even as he had had removed from the Archives of the Empire all

that he, M. de Talleyrand, had written respecting the death of the Duc

d'Enghien and the affairs of Spain.--_Author's Note_ (Paris, 1840).

[307] Talleyrand was paid six million francs by the Neapolitan Bourbons

for favouring their restoration. (_Cf._ SAINTE-BEUVE, _Nouveaux

Lundis_, vol. XII.).--B.