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The Memoirs of Victor Hugo

by Victor Hugo · English · Gutenberg #2523 · 459,858 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Memoirs of Victor Hugo

Author: Victor Hugo


        
Release date: February 1, 2001 [eBook #2523]
                Most recently updated: October 27, 2016

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by Peter Snow Cao, and Yi Guan Miao Fang Cao Jie, and David Widger


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Produced by Peter Snow Cao, and Yi Guan Miao Fang Cao Jie





THE MEMOIRS OF VICTOR HUGO

By Victor Hugo



CONTENTS.

     PREFACE

     AT RHEIMS, 1825-1838

     RECOUNTED BY EYE-WITNESSES:
     I. The Execution of Louis XVI.
     II. The Arrival of Napoleon I. in Paris in 1815.

     VISIONS OF THE REAL:
     I.   The Hovel.
     II.  Pillage.
     III. A Dream.
     IV.  The Panel with the Coat of Arms.
     V.   The Easter Daisy.

     THEATRE:
     I.   Joanny.
     II.  Mademoiselle Mars.
     III. Frédérick Lemaitre.
     IV.  The Comiques.
     V.   Mademoiselle Georges.
     VI.  Tableaux Vivants.

     AT THE ACADEMY

     LOVE IN PRISON

     AT THE TUILERIES, 1844-1848:
     I.   The King.
     II.  The Duchess d’Orleans.
     III. The Princes.

     IN THE CHAMBER OF PEERS: Gen. Febvier

     THE REVOLUTION OF 1848:
     I.   The Days of February.
     II.  Expulsions and Evasions.
     III. Louis Philippe in Exile.
     IV.  King Jerome.
     V.   The Days of June.
     VI.  Chateaubriand.
     VII. Debates on the Days of June.

     1849:
     I.   The Jardin d’Hiver.
     II.  General Bréa’s Murderers.
     III. The Suicide of Antonin Moyne.
     IV.  A Visit to the Old Chamber of Peers.

     SKETCHES MADE IN THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY:
     I.    Odilon Barrot.
     II.   Monsieur Thiers.
     III.  Dufaure.
     IV.   Changarnier.
     V.    Lagrange.
     VI.   Prudhon.
     VII.  Blanqui.
     VIII. Larmartine.
     IX.   Boulay de la Meurthe.
     X.    Dupin.

     LOUIS BONAPARTE:
     I.   His Debuts.
     II.  His Elevation to the Presidency.
     III. His First Official Dinner.
     IV.  The First Month.
     V.   Feeling His Way.

     THE SIEGE OF PARIS

     THE ASSEMBLY AT BORDEAUX





PREFACE.


This volume of memoirs has a double character--historical and intimate.
The life of a period, the XIX Century, is bound up in the life of a man,
VICTOR HUGO. As we follow the events set forth we get the impression
they made upon the mind of the extraordinary man who recounts them; and
of all the personages he brings before us he himself is assuredly not
the least interesting. In portraits from the brushes of Rembrandts there
are always two portraits, that of the model and that of the painter.

This is not a diary of events arranged in chronological order, nor is it
a continuous autobiography. It is less and it is more, or rather, it is
better than these. It is a sort of haphazard _chronique_ in which only
striking incidents and occurrences are brought out, and lengthy and
wearisome details are avoided. VICTOR HUGO’S long and chequered life was
filled with experiences of the most diverse character--literature and
politics, the court and the street, parliament and the theatre, labour,
struggles, disappointments, exile and triumphs. Hence we get a series of
pictures of infinite variety.

Let us pass the gallery rapidly in review.

It opens in 1825, at Rheims, during the coronation of CHARLES X, with
an amusing _causerie_ on the manners and customs of the Restoration.
The splendour of this coronation ceremony was singularly spoiled by the
pitiable taste of those who had charge of it. These worthies took upon
themselves to mutilate the sculpture work on the marvellous façade
and to “embellish” the austere cathedral with Gothic decorations of
cardboard. The century, like the author, was young, and in some things
both were incredibly ignorant; the masterpieces of literature were then
unknown to the most learned _littérateurs_: CHARLES NODIER had never
read the “Romancero”, and VICTOR HUGO knew little or nothing about
Shakespeare.

At the outset the poet dominates in VICTOR HUGO; he belongs wholly to
his creative imagination and to his literary work. It is the theatre;
it is his “Cid”, and “Hernani”, with its stormy performances; it is the
group of his actors, Mlle. MARS, Mlle. GEORGES, FREDERICK LEMAITRE, the
French KEAN, with more genius; it is the Academy, with its different
kind of coteries.

About this time VICTOR HUGO questions, anxiously and not in vain, a
passer-by who witnessed the execution of LOUIS XVI, and an officer who
escorted Napoleon to Paris on his return from the Island of Elba.

Next, under the title, “Visions of the Real”, come some sketches in the
master’s best style, of things seen “in the mind’s eye,” as Hamlet says.
Among them “The Hovel” will attract attention. This sketch resembles
a page from EDGAR POE, although it was written long before POE’s works
were introduced into France.

With “Love in Prison” VICTOR HUGO deals with social questions, in which
he was more interested than in political questions. And yet, in entering
the Chamber of Peers he enters public life. His sphere is enlarged, he
becomes one of the familiars of the Tuileries. LOUIS PHILIPPE, verbose
and full of recollections that he is fond of imparting to others, seeks
the company and appreciation of this listener of note, and makes all
sorts of confidences to him. The King with his very haughty bonhomie and
his somewhat infatuated wisdom; the grave and sweet DUCHESS D’ORLEANS,
the boisterous and amiable princes--the whole commonplace and home-like
court--are depicted with kindliness but sincerity.

The horizon, however, grows dark, and from 1846 the new peer of France
notes the gradual tottering of the edifice of royalty. The revolution of
1848 bursts out. Nothing could be more thrilling than the account, hour
by hour, of the events of the three days of February. VICTOR HUGO is not
merely a spectator of this great drama, he is an actor in it. He is in
the streets, he makes speeches to the people, he seeks to restrain them;
he believes, with too good reason, that the Republic is premature, and,
in the Place de la Bastille, before the evolutionary Faubourg Saint
Antoine, he dares to proclaim the Regency.

Four months later distress provokes the formidable insurrection of June,
which is fatal to the Republic.

The year 1848 is the stormy year. The atmosphere is fiery, men are
violent, events are tragical. Battles in the streets are followed by
fierce debates in the Assembly. VICTOR HUGO takes part in the mêlée. We
witness the scenes with him; he points out the chief actors to us. His
“Sketches” made in the National Assembly are “sketched from life” in the
fullest acceptation of the term. Twenty lines suffice. ODILON BARROT and
CHANGARNIER, PRUDHON and BLANQUI, LAMARTINE and “Monsieur THIERS” come,
go, speak--veritable living figures.

The most curious of the figures is LOUIS BONAPARTE when he arrived in
Paris and when he assumed the Presidency of the Republic. He is gauche,
affected, somewhat ridiculous, distrusted by the Republicans, and
scoffed at by the Royalists. Nothing could be more suggestive or more
piquant than the inauguration dinner at the Elysee, at which VICTOR HUGO
was one of the guests, and the first and courteous relations between
the author of “Napoleon the Little” and the future Emperor who was to
inflict twenty years of exile upon him.

But now we come to the year which VICTOR HUGO has designated “The
Terrible Year,” the war, and the siege of Paris. This part of the volume
is made up of extracts from note-books, private and personal notes,
dotted down from day to day. Which is to say that they do not constitute
an account of the oft-related episodes of the siege, but tell something
new, the little side of great events, the little incidents of everyday
life, the number of shells fired into the city and what they cost, the
degrees of cold, the price of provisions, what is being said, sung, and
eaten, and at the same time give the psychology of the great city, its
illusions, revolts, wrath, anguish, and also its gaiety; for during
these long months Paris never gave up hope and preserved an heroic
cheerfulness.

On the other hand a painful note runs through the diary kept during the
meeting of the Assembly at Bordeaux. France is not only vanquished, she
is mutilated. The conqueror demands a ransom of milliards--it is his
right, the right of the strongest; but he tears from her two provinces,
with their inhabitants devoted to France; it is a return towards
barbarism. VICTOR HUGO withdraws indignantly from the Assembly which
has agreed to endorse the Treaty of Frankfort. And three days after his
resignation he sees CHARLES HUGO, his eldest son, die a victim to the
privations of the siege. He is stricken at once in his love of country
and in his paternal love, and one can say that in these painful pages,
more than in any of the others, the book is history that has been lived.

PAUL MAURICE.

Paris, Sept. 15, 1899.




AT RHEIMS. 1823-1838.


It was at Rheims that I heard the name of Shakespeare for the first
time. It was pronounced by Charles Nodier. That was in 1825, during the
coronation of Charles X.

No one at that time spoke of Shakespeare quite seriously. Voltaire’s
ridicule of him was law. Mme. de Staël had adopted Germany, the great
land of Kant, of Schiller, and of Beethoven. Ducis was at the height of
his triumph; he and Delille were seated side by side in academic glory,
which is not unlike theatrical glory. Ducis had succeeded in doing
something with Shakespeare; he had made him possible; he had extracted
some “tragedies” from him; Ducis impressed one as being a man who could
chisel an Apollo out of Moloch. It was the time when Iago was called
Pezare; Horatio, Norceste; and Desdemona, Hedelmone. A charming and very
witty woman, the Duchess de Duras, used to say: “Desdemona, what an ugly
name! Fie!” Talma, Prince of Denmark, in a tunic of lilac satin trimmed
with fur, used to exclaim: “Avaunt! Dread spectre!” The poor spectre, in
fact, was only tolerated behind the scenes. If it had ventured to put
in the slightest appearance M. Evariste Dumoulin would have given it a
severe talking to. Some Génin or other would have hurled at it the first
cobble-stone he could lay his hand on--a line from Boileau: _L’esprit
n’est point ému de ce qu’il ne croit pas_. It was replaced on the stage
by an “urn” that Talma carried under his arm. A spectre is ridiculous;
“ashes,” that’s the style! Are not the “ashes” of Napoleon still
spoken of? Is not the translation of the coffin from St. Helena to the
Invalides alluded to as “the return of the ashes”? As to the witches
of Macbeth, they were rigorously barred. The hall-porter of the
Théâtre-Français had his orders. They would have been received with
their own brooms.

I am mistaken, however, in saying that I did not know Shakespeare. I
knew him as everybody else did, not having read him, and having treated
him with ridicule. My childhood began, as everybody’s childhood begins,
with prejudices. Man finds prejudices beside his cradle, puts them from
him a little in the course of his career, and often, alas! takes to them
again in his old age.

During this journey in 1825 Charles Nodier and I passed our time
recounting to each other the Gothic tales and romances that have taken
root in Rheims. Our memories and sometimes our imaginations, clubbed
together. Each of us furnished his legend. Rheims is one of the most
impossible towns in the geography of story. Pagan lords have lived
there, one of whom gave as a dower to his daughter the strips of land in
Borysthenes called the “race-courses of Achilles.” The Duke de Guyenne,
in the fabliaux, passes through Rheims on his way to besiege Babylon;
Babylon, moreover, which is very worthy of Rheims, is the capital of
the Admiral Gaudissius. It is at Rheims that the deputation sent by
the Locri Ozolae to Apollonius of Tyana, “high priest of Bellona,”
 “disembarks.” While discussing this disembarkation we argued concerning
the Locri Ozolae. These people, according to Nodier, were called the
Fetidae because they were half monkeys; according to myself, because
they inhabited the marshes of Phocis. We reconstructed on the spot the
tradition of St. Remigius and his adventures with the fairy Mazelane.
The Champagne country is rich in tales. Nearly all the old Gaulish
fables had their origin in this province. Rheims is the land of
chimeras. It is perhaps for this reason that kings were crowned there.



Legends are so natural to this place, are in such good soil, that they
immediately began to germinate upon the coronation of Charles X.
itself. The Duke of Northumberland, the representative of England at
the coronation ceremonies, was reputed fabulously wealthy. Wealthy and
English, how could he be otherwise than _a la mode_? The English, at
that period, were very popular in French society, although not among the
people. They were liked in certain salons because of Waterloo, which
was still fairly recent, and to Anglicize the French language was
a recommendation in ultra-fashionable society. Lord Northumberland,
therefore, long before his arrival, was popular and legendary in
Rheims. A coronation was a godsend to Rheims. A flood of opulent people
inundated the city. It was the Nile that was passing. Landlords rubbed
their hands with glee.

There was in Rheims in those days, and there probably is to-day, at the
corner of a street giving on to the square, a rather large house with
a carriage-entrance and a balcony, built of stone in the royal style
of Louis XIV., and facing the cathedral. About this house and Lord
Northumberland the following was related:

In January, 1825, the balcony of the house bore the notice: “House
for Sale.” All at once the “Moniteur” announced that the coronation of
Charles X. would take place at Rheims in the spring. There was great
rejoicing in the city. Notices of rooms to let were immediately hung
out everywhere. The meanest room was to bring in at least sixty francs
a day. One morning a man of irreproachable appearance, dressed in black,
with a white cravat, an Englishman who spoke broken French, presented
himself at the house in the square. He saw the proprietor, who eyed him
attentively.

“You wish to sell your house?” queried the Englishman.

“How much?”

“Ten thousand francs.”

“But I don’t want to buy it.”

“What do you want, then?”

“Only to hire it.”

“That’s different. For a year?”

“For six months?”

“No. I want to hire it for three days.”

“How much will you charge?”

“Thirty thousand francs.”

The gentleman was Lord Northumberland’s steward, who was looking for a
lodging for his master for the coronation ceremonies. The proprietor
had smelled the Englishman and guessed the steward. The house was
satisfactory, and the proprietor held out for his price; the Englishman,
being only a Norman, gave way to the Champenois; the duke paid the
30,000 francs, and spent three days in the house, at the rate of 400
francs an hour.



Nodier and I were two explorers. When we travelled together, as we
occasionally did, we went on voyages of discovery, he in search of rare
books, I in search of ruins. He would go into ecstasies over a _Cymbalum
Mound_ with margins, and I over a defaced portal. We had given each
other a devil. He said to me: “You are possessed of the demon Ogive.”
 “And you,” I answered, “of the demon Elzevir.”

At Soissons, while I was exploring Saint Jean-des-Vignes, he had
discovered, in a suburb, a ragpicker. The ragpicker’s basket is the
hyphen between rags and paper, and the ragpicker is the hyphen between
the beggar and the philosopher. Nodier who gave to the poor, and
sometimes to philosophers, had entered the ragpicker’s abode. The
ragpicker turned out to be a book dealer. Among the books Nodier noticed
a rather thick volume of six or eight hundred pages, printed in Spanish,
two columns to a page, badly damaged by worms, and the binding missing
from the back. The ragpicker, asked what he wanted for it, replied,
trembling lest the price should be refused: “Five francs,” which Nodier
paid, also trembling, but with joy. This book was the _Romancero_
complete. There are only three complete copies of this edition now in
existence. One of these a few years ago sold for 7,500 francs. Moreover,
worms are vying with each other in eating up these three remaining
copies. The peoples, feeders of princes, have something else to do than
spend their money to preserve for new editions the legacies of human
intellect, and the _Romancero_, being merely an Iliad, has not been
reprinted.



During the three days of the coronation there were great crowds in the
streets of Rheims, at the Archbishop’s palace, and on the promenades
along the Vesdre, eager to catch a glimpse of Charles X. I said to
Charles Nodier: “Let us go and see his majesty the cathedral.”

Rheims is a proverb in Gothic Christian art. One speaks of the “nave
of Amiens, the bell towers of Chartres, the façade of Rheims.” A month
before the coronation of Charles X a swarm of masons, perched on ladders
and clinging to knotted ropes, spent a week smashing with hammers every
bit of jutting sculpture on the façade, for fear a stone might become
detached from one of these reliefs and fall on the King’s head. The
debris littered the pavement and was swept away. For a long time I had
in my possession a head of Christ that fell in this way. It was stolen
from me in 1851. This head was unfortunate; broken by a king, it was
lost by an exile.

Nodier was an admirable antiquary, and we explored the cathedral from
top to bottom, encumbered though it was with scaffolding, painted
scenery, and stage side lights. The nave being only of stone, they had
hidden it by an edifice of cardboard, doubtless because the latter bore
a greater resemblance to the monarchy of that period. For the coronation
of the King of France they had transformed a church into a theatres and
it has since been related, with perfect accuracy, that on arriving at
the entrance I asked of the bodyguard on duty: “Where is my box?”

This cathedral of Rheims is beautiful above all cathedrals. On the
façade are kings; on the absis, people being put to the torture by
executioners. Coronation of kings with an accompaniment of victims.
The façade is one of the most magnificent symphonies ever sung by that
music, architecture. One dreams for a long time before this oratorio.
Looking up from the square you see at a giddy height, at the base of the
two towers, a row of gigantic statues representing kings of France. In
their hands they hold the sceptre, the sword, the hand of justice, and
the globe, and on their heads are antique open crowns with bulging gems.
It is superb and grim. You push open the bell-ringer’s door, climb the
winding staircase, “the screw of St. Giles,” to the towers, to the high
regions of prayer; you look down and the statues are below you. The
row of kings is plunging into the abysm. You hear the whispering of the
enormous bells, which vibrate at the kiss of vague zephyrs from the sky.

One day I gazed down from the top of the tower through an embrasure. The
entire façade sheered straight below me. I perceived in the depth, on
top of a long stone support that extended down the wall directly beneath
me to the escarpment, so that its form was lost, a sort of round basin.
Rain-water had collected there and formed a narrow mirror at the bottom;
there were also a tuft of grass with flowers in it, and a swallow’s
nest. Thus in a space only two feet in diameter were a lake, a garden
and a habitation--a birds’ paradise. As I gazed the swallow was giving
water to her brood. Round the upper edge of the basin were what looked
like crenelles, and between these the swallow had built her nest.
I examined these crenelles. They had the form of fleurs-de-lys. The
support was a statue. This happy little world was the stone crown of an
old king. And if God were asked: “Of what use was this Lothario,
this Philip, this Charles, this Louis, this emperor, this king?”
 God peradventure would reply: “He had this statue made and lodged a
swallow.”



The coronation occurred. This is not the place to describe it. Besides
my recollections of the ceremony of May 27, 1825, have been recounted
elsewhere by another, more ably than I could set them forth.

Suffice it to say that it was a radiant day. God seemed to have given
his assent to the fête. The long clear windows--for there are no more
stained-glass windows at Rheims--let in bright daylight; all the light
of May was in the church. The Archbishop was covered with gilding
and the altar with rays. Marshal de Lauriston, Minister of the King’s
Household, rejoiced at the sunshine. He came and went, as busy as
could be, and conversed in low tones with Lecointe and Hittorf, the
architects. The fine morning afforded the occasion to say, “the sun of
the coronation,” as one used to say “the sun of Austerlitz.” And in the
resplendent light a profusion of lamps and tapers found means to beam.

At one moment Charles X., attired in a cherry-coloured simar striped
with gold, lay at full length at the Archbishop’s feet. The peers of
France on the right, embroidered with gold, beplumed in the Henri IV.
style, and wearing long mantles of velvet and ermine, and the Deputies
on the left, in dress-coats of blue cloth with silver fleurs-de-lys on
the collars, looked on.

About all the forms of chance were represented there: the Papal
benediction by the cardinals, some of whom had witnessed the coronation
of Napoleon; victory by the marshals; heredity by the Duke d’Angoulême,
dauphin; happiness by M. de Talleyrand, lame but able to get about; the
rising and falling of stocks by M. de Villèle; joy by the birds that
were released and flew away, and the knaves in a pack of playing-cards
by the four heralds.

A vast carpet embroidered with fleurs-de-lys, made expressly for the
occasion, and called the “coronation carpet,” covered the old flagstones
from one end of the cathedral to the other and concealed the tombstones
in the pavement. Thick, luminous smoke of incense filled the nave. The
birds that had been set at liberty flew wildly about in this cloud.

The King changed his costume six or seven times. The first prince of the
blood, Louis Philippe, Duke d’Orleans, aided him. The Duke de Bordeaux,
who was five years old, was in a gallery.



The pew in which Nodier and I were seated adjoined those of the
Deputies. In the middle of the ceremony, just before the King
prostrated himself at the feet of the Archbishop, a Deputy for the Doubs
department, named M. Hémonin, turned towards Nodier, who was close to
him, and with his finger on his lips, as a sign that he did not wish to
disturb the Archbishop’s orisons by speaking, slipped something into
my friend’s hand. This something was a book. Nodier took it and glanced
over it.

“What is it?” I whispered.

“Nothing very precious,” he replied. “An odd volume of Shakespeare,
Glasgow edition.”

One of the tapestries from the treasure of the church hanging exactly
opposite to us represented a not very historical interview between John
Lackland and Philip Augustus. Nodier turned over the leaves of the book
for a few minutes, then pointed to the tapestry.

“You see that tapestry?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know what it represents?”

“No.”

“John Lackland.”

“Well, what of it?”

“John Lackland is also in this book.”

The volume, which was in sheep binding and worn at the corners, was
indeed a copy of _King John_.

M. Hémonin turned to Nodier and said: “I paid six sous for it.”

In the evening the Duke of Northumberland gave a ball. It was a
magnificent, fairylike spectacle. This Arabian Nights ambassador brought
one of these nights to Rheims. Every woman found a diamond in her
bouquet.

I could not dance. Nodier had not danced since he was sixteen years
of age, when a great aunt went into ecstasies over his terpsichorean
efforts and congratulated him in the following terms: “_Tu est charmant,
tu danses comme rim chou_!” We did not go to Lord Northumberland’s ball.

“What shall we do tonight?” said I to Nodier. He held up his odd volume
and answered:

“Let us read this.”

We read.

That is to say, Nodier read. He knew English (without being able
to speak it, I believe) enough to make it out. He read aloud, and
translated as he read. At intervals, while he rested, I took the book
bought from the ragpicker of Soissons, and read passages from the
_Romancero_. Like Nodier, I translated as I read. We compared the
English with the Castilian book; we confronted the dramatic with the
epic. Nodier stood up for Shakespeare, whom he could read in English,
and I for the _Romancero_, which I could read in Spanish. We brought
face to face, he the bastard Faulconbridge, I the bastard Mudarra. And
little by little in contradicting we convinced each other, and Nodier
became filled with enthusiasm for the _Romancero_, and I with admiration
for Shakespeare.

Listeners arrived. One passes the evening as best one can in a
provincial town on a coronation day when one doesn’t go to the ball. We
formed quite a little club. There was an academician, M. Roger; a man of
letters, M. d’Eckstein; M. de Marcellus, friend and country neighbour
of my father, who poked fun at his royalism and mine; good old Marquis
d’Herbouville, and M. Hémonin, donor of the book that cost six sous.

“It isn’t worth the money!” exclaimed M. Roger.

The conversation developed into a debate. Judgment was passed upon _King
John_. M. de Marcellus declared that the assassination of Arthur was an
improbable incident. It was pointed out to him that it was a matter of
history. It was with difficulty that he became reconciled to it. For
kings to kill each other was impossible. To M. de Marcellus’s mind the
murdering of kings began on January 21. Regicide was synonymous with
‘93. To kill a king was an unheard-of thing that the “populace” alone
were capable of doing. No king except Louis XVI. had ever been violently
put to death. He, however, reluctantly admitted the case of Charles
I. In his death also he saw the hand of the populace. All the rest was
demagogic lying and calumny.

Although as good a royalist as he, I ventured to insinuate that the
sixteenth century had existed, and that it was the period when the
Jesuits had clearly propounded the question of “bleeding the basilic
vein,” that is to say of cases in which the king ought to be slain;
a question which, once brought forward, met with such success that it
resulted in two kings, Henry III. and Henry IV., being stabbed, and a
Jesuit, Father Guignard, being hanged.

Then we passed to the details of the drama, situations, scenes, and
personages. Nodier pointed out that Faulconbridge is the same person
spoken of by Mathieu Paris as Falcasius de Trente, bastard of Richard
Coeur de Lion. Baron d’Eckstein, in support of this, reminded his
hearers that, according to Hollinshed, Faulconbridge, or Falcasius,
slew the Viscount de Limoges to avenge his father Richard, who had
been wounded unto death at the siege of Chaluz; and that this castle of
Chaluz, being the property of the Viscount de Limoges, it was only right
that the Viscount, although absent, should be made to answer with his
head for the falling of an arrow or a stone from the castle upon the
King. M. Roger laughed at the cry of “Austria Limoges” in the play and
at Shakespeare’s confounding the Viscount de Limoges with the Duke of
Austria. M. Roger scored the success of the evening and his laughter
settled the matter.

The discussion having taken this turn I said nothing further. This
revelation of Shakespeare had moved me. His grandeur impressed me. _King
John_ is not a masterpiece, but certain scenes are lofty and powerful,
and in the motherhood of Constance there are bursts of genius.

The two books, open and reversed, remained lying upon the table. The
company had ceased to read in order to laugh. Nodier at length became
silent like myself. We were beaten. The gathering broke up with a laugh,
and our visitors went away. Nodier and I remained alone and pensive,
thinking of the great works that are unappreciated, and amazed that the
intellectual education of the civilized peoples, and even our own, his
and mine, had advanced no further than this.

At last Nodier broke the silence. I can see his smile now as he said:

“They know nothing about the Romancero!”

I replied:

“And they deride Shakespeare!”

Thirteen years later chance took me to Rheims again.

It was on August 28, 1838. It will be seen further on why this date
impressed itself on my memory.

I was returning from Vouziers, and seeing the two towers of Rheims in
the distance, was seized with a desire to visit the cathedral again. I
therefore went to Rheims.

On arriving in the cathedral square I saw a gun drawn up near the portal
and beside it gunners with lighted fuses in their hands. As I had seen
artillery there on May 27, 1825, I supposed it was customary to keep a
cannon in the square, and paid little attention to it. I passed on and
entered the church.

A beadle in violet sleeves, a sort of priest, took me in charge and
conducted me all over the church. The stones were dark, the statues
dismal, the altar mysterious. No lamps competed with the sun. The
latter threw upon the sepulchral stones in the pavement the long white
silhouettes of the windows, which through the melancholy obscurity of
the rest of the church looked like phantoms lying upon these tombs. No
one was in the church. Not a whisper, not a footfall could be heard.

This solitude saddened the heart and enraptured the soul. There were in
it abandonment, neglect, oblivion, exile, and sublimity. Gone the whirl
of 1825. The church had resumed its dignity and its calmness. Not
a piece of finery, not a vestment, not anything. It was bare and
beautiful. The lofty vault no longer supported a canopy. Ceremonies of
the palace arc not suited to these severe places; a coronation ceremony
is merely tolerated; these noble ruins are not made to be courtiers.
To rid it of the throne and withdraw the king from the presence of God
increases the majesty of a temple. Louis XIV. hides Jehovah from sight.

Withdraw the priest as well. All that eclipsed it having been taken
away, you will see the light of day direct. Orisons, rites, bibles,
formulas, refract and decompose the sacred light. A dogma is a dark
chamber. Through a religion you see the solar spectre of God, but not
God. Desuetude and crumbling enhance the grandeur of a temple. As
human religion retires from this mysterious and jealous edifice, divine
religion enters it. Let solitude reign in it and you will feel heaven
there. A sanctuary deserted and in ruins, like Jumièges, like St.
Bertin, like Villers, like Holyrood, like Montrose Abbey, like the
temple of Paestum, like the hypogeum of Thebes, becomes almost an
element, and possesses the virginal and religious grandeur of a savannah
or of a forest. There something of the real Presence is to be found.

Such places are truly holy; man has meditated and communed with himself
therein. What they contained of truth has remained and become greater.
The _à-peu-prês_ has no longer any voice. Extinct dogmas have not left
their ashes; the prayer of the past has left its perfume. There is
something of the absolute in prayer, and because of this, that which
was a synagogue, that which was a mosque, that which was a pagoda, is
venerable. A stone on which that great anxiety that is called prayer
has left its impress is never treated with ridicule by the thinker. The
trace left by those who have bowed down before the infinite is always
imposing.

In strolling about the cathedral I had climbed to the triforium,
then under the arched buttresses, then to the top of the edifice. The
timber-work under the pointed roof is admirable; but less remarkable
than the “forest” of Amiens. It is of chestnut-wood.

These cathedral attics are of grim appearance. One could almost lose
one’s self in the labyrinths of rafters, squares, traverse beams,
superposed joists, traves, architraves, girders, madriers, and tangled
lines and curves. One might imagine one’s self to be in the skeleton
of Babel. The place is as bare as a garret and as wild as a cavern.
The wind whistles mournfully through it. Rats are at home there. The
spiders, driven from the timber by the odour of chestnut, make their
home in the stone of the basement where the church ends and the roof
begins, and low down in the obscurity spin their webs in which you catch
your face. One respires a mysterious dust, and the centuries seem to
mingle with one’s breath. The dust of churches is not like the dust of
houses; it reminds one of the tomb, it is composed of ashes.

The flooring of these colossal garrets has crevices in it through which
one can look down into the abysm, the church, below. In the corners that
one cannot explore are pools of shadow, as it were. Birds of prey enter
through one window and go out through the other. Lightning is also
familiar with these high, mysterious regions. Sometimes it ventures too
near, and then it causes the conflagration of Rouen, of Chartres, or of
St. Paul’s, London.

My guide the beadle preceded me. He looked at the dung on the floor, and
tossed his head. He knew the bird by its manure, and growled between his
teeth:

“This is a rook; this is a hawk; this is an owl.”

“You ought to study the human heart,” said I.

A frightened bat flew before us.

While walking almost at hazard, following this bat, looking at this
manure of the birds, respiring this dust, in this obscurity among the
cobwebs and scampering rats, we came to a dark corner in which, on a big
wheelbarrow, I could just distinguish a long package tied with string
and that looked like a piece of rolled up cloth.

“What is that?” I asked the beadle.

“That,” said he, “is Charles X.’s coronation carpet.”

I stood gazing at the thing, and as I did so--I am telling truthfully
what occurred--there was a deafening report that sounded like a
thunder-clap, only it came from below. It shook the timber-work and
echoed and re-echoed through the church. It was succeeded by a second
roar, then a third, at regular intervals. I recognised the thunder of
the cannon, and remembered the gun I had seen in the square.

I turned to my guide:

“What is that noise?”

“The telegraph has been at work and the cannon has been fired.”

“What does it mean?” I continued.

“It means,” said the beadle, “that a grandson has just been born to
Louis Philippe.”

The cannon announced the birth of the Count de Paris.

These are my recollections of Rheims.




RECOUNTED BY EYE-WITNESSES

     I.  THE EXECUTION OF LOUIS XVI.
     II. THE ARRIVAL OF NAPOLEON I IN PARIS IN 1815.




I. THE EXECUTION OF LOUIS XVI.



There were certain characteristic details connected with the execution
of Louis XVI. that are not recorded in history. They were recounted to
me by an eye-witness* and are here published for the first time.

     *  This eye witness was one Leboucher, who arrived in Paris
     from Bourges in December, 1792, and was present at the
     execution of Louis XVI. In 1840 he recounted to Victor Hugo
     most of these details which, as can easily be imagined, had
     impressed themselves deeply upon his mind.

The scaffold was not, as is generally believed, erected in the very
centre of the Place, on the spot where the obelisk now stands, but on a
spot which the decree of the Provisional Executive Council designates in
these precise terms: “between the pied d’estal and the Champs-Elysées.”

What was this pedestal? Present generations who have seen so many things
happen, so many statues crumble and so many pedestals overthrown do
not quite know what meaning to give to this very vague designation,
and would be embarrassed to tell for what monument the mysterious stone
which the Executive Council of the Revolution laconically calls the
“pied d’estal” served as a base. This stone had borne the statue of
Louis XV.

Let it be noted _en passant_ that this strange Place which had been
called successively the Place Louis XV., Place de la Revolution, Place
de la Concorde, Place Louis XVI., Place du Garde-Meuble and Place des
Champs-Elysées, and which could not retain any name, could not keep any
monument either. It has had the statue of Louis XV., which disappeared;
an expiatory fountain which was to have laved the bloody centre of the
Place was projected, but not even the first stone was laid; a rough
model of a monument to the Charter was made: we have never seen anything
but the socle of this monument. Just when a bronze figure representing
the Charter of 1814 was about to be erected, the Revolution of July
arrived with the Charter of 1830. The pedestal of Louis XVIII. vanished,
as fell the pedestal of Louis XV. Now on this same spot we have placed
the obelisk of Sesostris. It required thirty centuries for the great
Desert to engulf half of it; how many years will the Place de la
Revolution require to swallow it up altogether?

In the Year II of the Republic, what the Executive Council called the
“pied d’estal” was nought but a shapeless and hideous block. It was a
sort of sinister symbol of the royalty itself. Its ornaments of marble
and bronze had been wrenched off, the bare stone was everywhere split
and cracked. On the four sides were large square gaps showing the places
where the destroyed bas reliefs had been. Scarcely could a remnant of
the entablature still be distinguished at the summit of the pedestal,
and beneath the cornice a string of ovolos, defaced and worn, was
surmounted by what architects call a “chaplet of paternosters.” On the
table of the pedestal one could perceive a heap of debris of all kinds,
in which tufts of grass were growing here and there. This pile of
nameless things had replaced the royal statue.

The scaffold was raised a few steps distant from this ruin, a little
in rear of it. It was covered with long planks, laid transversely, that
masked the framework. A ladder without banisters or balustrade was
at the back, and what they venture to call the head of this horrible
construction was turned towards the Garde-Meuble. A basket of
cylindrical shape, covered with leather, was placed at the spot where
the head of the King was to fall, to receive it; and at one of the
angles of the entablature, to the right of the ladder, could be
discerned a long wicker basket prepared for the body, and on which one
of the executioners, while waiting for the King, had laid his hat.

Imagine, now, in the middle of the Place, these two lugubrious things, a
few paces from each other: the pedestal of Louis XV. and the scaffold of
Louis XVI.; that is to say, the ruins of royalty dead and the martyrdom
of royalty living; around these two things four formidable lines of
armed men, preserving a great empty square in the midst of an immense
crowd; to the left of the scaffold, the Champs-Elysees, to the right
the Tuileries, which, neglected and left at the mercy of the public had
become an unsightly waste of dirt heaps and trenches; and over these
melancholy edifices, over these black, leafless trees, over this gloomy
multitude, the bleak, sombre sky of a winter morning, and one will have
an idea of the aspect which the Place de la Revolution presented at the
moment when Louis XVI., in the carriage of the Mayor of Paris, dressed
in white, the Book of Psalms clasped in his hands, arrived there to die
at a few minutes after ten o’clock on January 21, 1793.

Strange excess of abasement and misery: the son of so many kings, bound
and sacred like the kings of Egypt, was to be consumed between two
layers of quicklime, and to this French royalty, which at Versailles had
had a throne of gold and at St. Denis sixty sarcophagi of granite, there
remained but a platform of pine and a wicker coffin.

Here are some unknown details. The executioners numbered four; two only
performed the execution; the third stayed at the foot of the ladder, and
the fourth was on the waggon which was to convey the King’s body to the
Madeleine Cemetery and which was waiting a few feet from the scaffold.

The executioners wore breeches, coats in the French style as the
Revolution had modified it, and three-cornered hats with enormous
tri-colour cockades.

They executed the King with their hats on, and it was without taking his
hat off that Samson, seizing by the hair the severed head of Louis XVI.,
showed it to the people, and for a few moments let the blood from it
trickle upon the scaffold.

At the same time his valet or assistant undid what were called “les
sangles” (straps); and, while the crowd gazed alternately upon the
King’s body, dressed entirely in white, as I have said, and still
attached, with the hands bound behind the back, to the swing board,
and upon that head whose kind and gentle profile stood out against the
misty, sombre trees of the Tuileries, two priests, commissaries of
the Commune, instructed to be present, as Municipal officials, at
the execution of the King, sat in the Mayor’s carriage, laughing and
conversing in loud tones. One of them, Jacques Roux, derisively drew the
other’s attention to Capet’s fat calves and abdomen.

The armed men who surrounded the scaffold had only swords and pikes;
there were very few muskets. Most of them wore large round hats or red
caps. A few platoons of mounted dragoons in uniform were mingled with
these troops at intervals. A whole squadron of dragoons was ranged in
battle array beneath the terraces of the Tuileries. What was called the
Battalion of Marseilles formed one of the sides of the square.

The guillotine--it is always with repugnance that one writes this
hideous word--would appear to the craftsmen of to-day to be very badly
constructed. The knife was simply suspended to a pulley fixed in the
centre of the upper beam. This pulley and a rope the thickness of a
man’s thumb constituted the whole apparatus. The knife, which was not
very heavily weighted, was of small dimensions and had a curved edge,
which gave it the form of a reversed Phrygian cap. No hood was placed
to shelter the King’s head and at the same time to hide and circumscribe
its fall. All that crowd could see the head of Louis XVI. drop, and it
was thanks to chance, thanks perhaps to the smallness of the knife which
diminished the violence of the shock, that it did not bound beyond
the basket to the pavement. Terrible incident, which often occurred
at executions during the Terror. Nowadays assassins and poisoners are
decapitated more decently. Many improvements in the guillotine have been
made.

At the spot where the King’s head fell, a long rivulet of blood streamed
down the planks of the scaffold to the pavement. When the execution was
over, Samson threw to the people the King’s coat, which was of white
molleton, and in an instant it disappeared, torn by a thousand hands.

At the moment when the head of Louis XVI. fell, the Abbé Edgeworth was
still near the King. The blood spirted upon him. He hastily donned a
brown overcoat, descended from the scaffold and was lost in the crowd.
The first row of spectators opened before him with a sort of wonder
mingled with respect; but after he had gone a few steps, the attention
of everybody was still so concentrated upon the centre of the Place
where the event had just been accomplished, that nobody took any further
notice of Abbé Edgeworth.

The poor priest, enveloped in his thick coat which concealed the blood
with which he was covered, fled in bewilderment, walking as one in a
dream and scarcely knowing where he was going. However, with that sort
of instinct which preserves somnambulists he crossed the river, took the
Rue du Bac, then the Rue du Regard and thus managed to reach the house
of Mme. de Lézardière, near the Barrière du Maine.

Arrived there he divested himself of his soiled clothing and remained
for several hours, in a state of collapse, without being able to collect
a thought or utter a word.

Some Royalists who rejoined him, and who had witnessed the execution,
surrounded the Abbé Edgeworth and reminded him of the adieu he had
addressed to the King: “Son of St. Louis, ascend to heaven!” These
words, however, memorable though they were, had left no trace on the
mind of him who had uttered them. “We heard them,” said the witnesses of
the catastrophe, still moved and thrilled. “It is possible,” he replied,
“but I do not remember having said such a thing.”

Abbé Edgeworth lived a long life without ever being able to remember
whether he really did pronounce these words.

Mme. de Lézardière, who had been seriously ill for more than a month,
was unable to support the shock of the death of Louis XVI. She died on
the very night of January 21.




II. ARRIVAL OF NAPOLEON IN PARIS. March 20, 1815.



History and contemporaneous memoirs have truncated, or badly related, or
even omitted altogether, certain details of the arrival of the Emperor
in Paris on March 20, 1815. But living witnesses are to be met with who
saw them and who rectify or complete them.

During the night of the 19th, the Emperor left Sens. He arrived at three
o’clock in the morning at Fontainebleau. Towards five o’clock, as day
was breaking, he reviewed the few troops he had taken with him and
those who had rallied to him at Fontainebleau itself. They were of every
corps, of every regiment, of all arms, a little of the Grand Army, a
little of the Guard. At six o’clock, the review being over, one hundred
and twenty lancers mounted their horses and went on ahead to wait for
him at Essonnes. These lancers were commanded by Colonel Galbois,
now lieutenant general, and who has recently distinguished himself at
Constantine.

They had been at Essonnes scarcely three-quarters of an hour, resting
their horses, when the carriage of the Emperor arrived. The escort of
lancers were in their saddles in the twinkling of an eye and surrounded
the carriage, which immediately started off again without having changed
horses. The Emperor stopped on the way at the large villages to receive
petitions from the inhabitants and the submission of the authorities,
and sometimes to listen to harangues. He was on the rear seat of the
carriage, with General Bertrand in full uniform seated on his left.
Colonel Galbois galloped beside the door on the Emperor’s side; the
door on Bertrand’s side was guarded by a quartermaster of lancers named
Ferrès, to-day a wineshop keeper at Puteaux, a former and very brave
hussar whom the Emperor knew personally and addressed by name. No one
on the road approached the Emperor. Everything that was intended for him
passed through General Bertrand’s hands.

Three or four leagues beyond Essonnes the imperial cortege found the
road suddenly barred by General Colbert, at the head of two squadrons
and three regiments echelonned towards Paris.

General Colbert had been the colonel of the regiment of lancers from
which the detachment that escorted the Emperor had been drawn. He
recognised his lancers and his lancers recognised him. They cried:
“General, come over to us!” The General answered: “My children, do your
duty, I am doing mine.” Then he turned rein and went off to the right
across country with a few mounted men who followed him. He could not
have resisted; the regiments behind him were shouting: “Long live the
Emperor!”

This meeting only delayed Napoleon a few minutes. He continued on his
way. The Emperor, surrounded only by his one hundred and twenty lancers,
thus reached Paris. He entered by the Barrière de Fontainebleau, took
the large avenue of trees which is on the left, the Boulevard dim
Mont-Parnasse, the other boulevards to the Invalides, then the Pont do
la Concorde, the quay along the river and the gate of the Louvre.

At a quarter past eight o’clock in the evening he was at the Tuileries.





VISIONS OF THE REAL.

     I.   THE HOVEL.
     II.  PILLAGE.
     III. A DREAM.
     IV.  THE PANEL WITH THE COAT OF ARMS.
     V.   THE EASTER DAISY.




I. THE HOVEL.



You want a description of this hovel? I hesitated to inflict it upon
you. But you want it. I’ faith, here it is! You will only have yourself
to blame, it is your fault.

“Pshaw!” you say, “I know what it is. A bleared, bandy ruin. Some old
house!”

In the first place it is not an old house, it is very much worse, it is
a new house.

Really, now, an old house! You counted upon an old house and turned up
your nose at it in advance. Ah! yes, old houses; don’t you wish you may
get them! A dilapidated, tumble-down cottage! Why, don’t you know that a
dilapidated, tumble-down cottage is simply charming, a thing of beauty?
The wall is of beautiful, warm and strong colour, with moth holes,
birds’ nests, old nails on which the spider hangs his rose-window web,
a thousand amusing things that break its evenness. The window is only a
dormer, but from it protrude long poles on which all sorts of clothing,
of all sorts of colours, hang and dry in the wind-white tatters, red
rags, flags of poverty that give to the hut an air of gaiety and are
resplendent in the sunshine. The door is cracked and black, but approach
and examine it; you will without doubt find upon it a bit of antique
ironwork of the time of Louis XIII., cut out like a piece of guipure.
The roof is full of crevices, but in each crevice there is a convolvulus
that will blossom in the spring, or a daisy that will bloom in the
autumn. The tiles are patched with thatch. Of course they are, I should
say so! It affords the occasion to have on one’s roof a colony of pink
dragon flowers and wild marsh-mallow. A fine green grass carpets the
foot of this decrepit wall, the ivy climbs joyously up it and cloaks
its bareness--its wounds and its leprosy mayhap; moss covers with green
velvet the stone seat at the door. All nature takes pity upon this
degraded and charming thing that you call a hovel, and welcomes it.
0 hovel! honest and peaceful old dwelling, sweet and good to see!
rejuvenated every year by April and May! perfumed by the wallflower and
inhabited by the swallow!

No, it is not of this that I write, it is not, I repeat, of an old
house, it is of a new house,--of a new hovel, if you will.

This thing has not been built longer than two years. The wall has that
hideous and glacial whiteness of fresh plaster. The whole is wretched,
mean, high, triangular, and has the shape of a piece of Gruyère
cheese cut for a miser a dessert. There are new doors that do not shut
properly, window frames with white panes that are already spangled here
and there with paper stars. These stars are cut coquettishly and pasted
on with care. There is a frightful bogus sumptuousness about the place
that causes a painful impression--balconies of hollow iron badly fixed
to the wall; trumpery locks, already rotten round the fastenings, upon
which vacillate, on three nails, horrible ornaments of embossed brass
that are becoming covered with verdigris; shutters painted grey that are
getting out of joint, not because they are worm-eaten, but because they
were made of green wood by a thieving cabinet maker.

A chilly feeling comes over you as you look at the house. On entering
it you shiver. A greenish humidity leaks at the foot of the wall. This
building of yesterday is already a ruin; it is more than a ruin, it is
a disaster; one feels that the proprietor is bankrupt and that the
contractor has fled.

In rear of the house, a wall white and new like the rest, encloses a
space in which a drum major could not lie at full length. This is called
the garden. Issuing shiveringly from the earth is a little tree, long,
spare and sickly, which seems always to be in winter, for it has not a
single leaf. This broom is called a poplar. The remainder of the garden
is strewn with old potsherds and bottoms of bottles. Among them one
notices two or three list slippers. In a corner on top of a heap of
oyster shells is an old tin watering can, painted green, dented, rusty
and cracked, inhabited by slugs which silver it with their trails of
slime.

Let us enter the hovel. In the other you will find perhaps a ladder
“rickety,” as Regnier says, “from the top to the bottom.” Here you will
find a staircase.

This staircase, “ornamented” with brass-knobbed banisters, has fifteen
or twenty wooden steps, high, narrow, with sharp angles, which rise
perpendicularly to the first floor and turn upon themselves in a spiral
of about eighteen inches in diameter. Would you not be inclined to ask
for a ladder?

At the top of these stairs, if you get there, is the room.

To give an idea of this room is difficult. It is the “new hovel” in all
its abominable reality. Wretchedness is everywhere; a new wretchedness,
which has no past, no future, and which cannot take root anywhere. One
divines that the lodger moved in yesterday and will move out tomorrow.
That he arrived without saying whence he came, and that he will put the
key under the door when he goes away.

The wall is “ornamented” with dark blue paper with yellow flowers, the
window is “ornamented” with a curtain of red calico in which holes take
the place of flowers. There is in front of the window a rush-bottom
chair with the bottom worn out; near the chair a stove; on the stove a
stewpot; near the stewpot a flowerpot turned upside down with a tallow
candle stuck in the hole; near the flowerpot a basketful of coal which
evokes thoughts of suicide and asphyxiation; above the basket a shelf
encumbered with nameless objects, distinguishable among which are a worn
broom and an old toy representing a green rider on a crimson horse.
The mantelpiece, mean and narrow, is of blackish marble with a thousand
little white blotches. It is covered with broken glasses and unwashed
cups. Into one of these cups a pair of tin rimmed spectacles is
plunging. A nail lies on the floor. In the fireplace a dishcloth is
hanging on one of the fire-iron holders. No fire either in the fireplace
or in the stove. A heap of frightful sweepings replaces the heaps of
cinders. No looking glass on the mantelpiece, but a picture of varnished
canvas representing a nude negro at the knees of a white woman in a
decolletée ball dress in an arbour. Opposite the mantelpiece, a man’s
cap and a woman’s bonnet hang from nails on either side of a cracked
mirror.

At the end of the room is a bed. That is to say, a mattress laid on two
planks that rest upon a couple of trestles. Over the bed, other boards,
with openings between them, support an undesirable heap of linen,
clothes and rags. An imitation cashmere, called “French cashmere,”
 protrudes between the boards and hangs over the pallet.

Mingled with the hideous litter of all these things are dirtiness, a
disgusting odour, spots of oil and tallow, and dust everywhere. In the
corner near the bed stands an enormous sack of shavings, and on a chair
beside the sack lies an old newspaper. I am moved by curiosity to look
at the title and the date. It is the “Constitutionnel” of April 25,
1843.

And now what can I add? I have not told the most horrible thing about
the place. The house is odious, the room is abominable, the pallet is
hideous; but all that is nothing.

When I entered a woman was sleeping on the bed--a woman old, short,
thickset, red, bloated, oily, tumefied, fat, dreadful, enormous. Her
frightful bonnet, which was awry, disclosed the side of her head, which
was grizzled, pink and bald.

She was fully dressed. She wore a yellowish fichu, a brown skirt, a
jacket, all this on her monstrous abdomen; and a vast soiled apron like
the linen trousers of a convict.

At the noise I made in entering she moved, sat up, showed her fat legs,
that were covered with unqualifiable blue stockings, and with a yawn
stretched her brawny arms, which terminated with fists that resembled
those of a butcher.

I perceived that the old woman was robust and formidable.

She turned towards me and opened her eyes. I could not see them.

“Monsieur,” she said, in a very gentle voice, “what do you want?”

When about to speak to this being I experienced the sensation one would
feel in presence of a sow to which it behoved one to say: “Madam.”

I did not quite know what to reply, and thought for a moment. Just then
my gaze, wandering towards the window, fell upon a sort of picture that
hung outside like a sign. It was a sign, as a matter of fact, a picture
of a young and pretty woman, decolletée, wearing an enormous beplumed
hat and carrying an infant in her arms; the whole in the style of the
chimney boards of the time of Louis XVIII. Above the picture stood out
this inscription in big letters:


                     Mme. BECOEUR

                       Midwife

                BLEEDS AND VACCINATES


“Madam,” said I, “I want to see Mme. Bécoeur.”

The sow metamorphosed into a woman replied with an amiable smile:

“I am Mme. Bécoeur, Monsieur.”




II. PILLAGE. THE REVOLT IN SANTO DOMINGO.



I thought that I must be dreaming. None who did not witness the
sight could form any idea of it. I will, however, endeavour to depict
something of it. I will simply recount what I saw with my own eyes. This
small portion of a great scene minutely reproduced will enable you to
form some notion as to the general aspect of the town during the three
days of pillage. Multiply these details _ad libitum_ and you will get
the ensemble.

I had taken refuge by the gate of the town, a puny barrier made of long
laths painted yellow, nailed to cross laths and sharpened at the top.
Near by was a kind of shed in which some hapless colonists, who had been
driven from their homes, had sought shelter. They were silent and seemed
to be petrified in all the attitudes of despair. Just outside of the
shed an old man, weeping, was seated on the trunk of a mahogany tree
which was lying on the ground and looked like the shaft of a column.
Another vainly sought to restrain a white woman who, wild with fright,
was trying to flee, without knowing where she was going, through the
crowd of furious, ragged, howling negroes.

The negroes, however, free, victorious, drunk, mad, paid not the
slightest attention to this miserable, forlorn group of whites. A short
distance from us two of them, with their knives between their teeth,
were slaughtering an ox, upon which they were kneeling with their feet
in its blood. A little further on two hideous negresses, dressed as
marchionesses, covered with ribbons and pompons, their breasts bare, and
their heads encumbered with feathers and laces, were quarrelling over a
magnificent dress of Chinese satin, which one of them had grasped with
her nails while the other hung on to it with her teeth. At their feet
a number of little blacks were ransacking a broken trunk from which the
dress had been taken.

The rest was incredible to see and impossible to describe. It was a
crowd, a mob, a masquerade, a revel, a hell, a terrible buffoonery.
Negroes, negresses and mulattoes, in every posture, in all manner of
disguises, displayed all sorts of costumes, and what was worse, their
nudity.

Here was a pot-bellied, ugly mulatto, of furious mien, attired like
the planters, in a waistcoat and trousers of white material, but with a
bishop’s mitre on his head and a crosier in his hand. Elsewhere three or
four negroes with three-cornered hats stuck on their heads and wearing
red or blue military coats with the shoulder belts crossed upon their
black skin, were harassing an unfortunate militiaman they had captured,
and who, with his hands tied behind his back, was being dragged through
the town. With loud bursts of laughter they slapped his powdered hair
and pulled his long pigtail. Now and then they would stop and force the
prisoner to kneel and by signs give him to understand that they were
going to shoot him there. Then prodding him with the butts of their
rifles they would make him get up again, and go through the same
performance further on.

A number of old mulattresses had formed a ring and were skipping round
in the midst of the mob. They were dressed in the nattiest costumes
of our youngest and prettiest white women, and in dancing raised their
skirts so as to show their lean, shrivelled legs and yellow thighs.
Nothing queerer could be imagined than all these charming fashions and
finery of the frivolous century of Louis XV., these Watteau shepherdess
costumes, furbelows, plumes and laces, upon these black, ugly-faced,
flat-nosed, woolly-headed, frightful people. Thus decked out they were
no longer even negroes and negresses; they were apes and monkeys.

Add to all this a deafening uproar. Every mouth that was not making a
contortion was emitting yells.

I have not finished; you must accept the picture complete to its
minutest detail.

Twenty paces from me was an inn, a frightful hovel, whose sign was a
wreath of dried herbs hung upon a pickaxe. Nothing but a roof window
and three-legged tables. A low ale-house, rickety tables. Negroes and
mulattoes were drinking there, intoxicating and besotting themselves,
and fraternising. One has to have seen these things to depict them.
In front of the tables of the drunkards a fairly young negress was
displaying herself. She was dressed in a man’s waistcoat, unbuttoned,
and a woman’s skirt loosely attached. She wore no chemise and her
abdomen was bare. On her head was a magistrate’s wig. On one shoulder
she carried a parasol, and on the other a rifle with bayonet fixed.

A few whites, stark naked, ran about miserably in the midst of this
pandemonium. On a litter was being borne the nude body of a stout man,
in whose breast a dagger was sticking as a cross is stuck in the ground.

On every hand were gnomes bronze-coloured, red, black, kneeling,
sitting, squatting, heaped together, opening trunks, forcing locks,
trying on bracelets, clasping necklaces about their necks, donning coats
or dresses, breaking, ripping, tearing. Two blacks were trying to get
into the same coat; each had got an arm on, and they were belabouring
each other with their disengaged fists. It was the second stage of a
sacked town. Robbery and joy had succeeded rage. In a few corners some
were still engaged in killing, but the great majority were pillaging.
All were carrying off their booty, some in their arms, some in baskets
on their backs, some in wheelbarrows.

The strangest thing about it all was that in the midst of the
incredible, tumultuous mob, an interminable file of pillagers who were
rich and fortunate enough to possess horses and vehicles, marched and
deployed, in order and with the solemn gravity of a procession. This was
quite a different kind of a medley!

Imagine carts of all kinds with loads of every description: a four-horse
carriage full of broken crockery and kitchen utensils, with two or three
dressed-up and beplumed negroes on each horse; a big wagon drawn by oxen
and loaded with bales carefully corded and packed, damask armchairs,
frying pans and pitchforks, and on top of this pyramid a negress wearing
a necklace and with a feather stuck in her hair; an old country coach
drawn by a single mule and with a load of ten trunks and, ten negroes,
three of whom were upon the animal’s back. Mingle with all this bath
chairs, litters and sedan chairs piled high with loot of all kinds,
precious articles of furniture with the most sordid objects. It was
the hut and the drawing-room pitched together pell-mell into a cart, an
immense removal by madmen defiling through the town.

What was incomprehensible was the equanimity with which the petty
robbers regarded the wholesale robbers. The pillagers afoot stepped
aside to let the pillagers in carriages pass.

There were, it is true, a few patrols, if a squad of five or six monkeys
disguised as soldiers and each beating at his own sweet will on a drum
can be called a patrol.

Near the gate of the town, through which this immense stream of vehicles
was issuing, pranced a mulatto, a tall, lean, yellow rascal, rigged out
in a judge’s gown and white tie, with his sleeves rolled up, a sword in
his hand, and his legs bare. He was digging his heels into a fat-bellied
horse that pawed about in the crowd. He was the magistrate charged with
the duty of preserving order at the gate.

A little further on galloped another group. A negro in a red coat with
a blue sash, a general’s epaulettes and an immense hat surcharged with
tri-colour feathers, was forcing his way through the rabble. He was
preceded by a horrible, helmetted negro boy beating upon a drum, and
followed by two mulattoes, one in a colonel’s coat, the other dressed as
a Turk with a hideous Mardi Gras turban on his ugly Chinese-like head.

Out on the plain I could see battalions of ragged soldiers drawn
up round a big house, on which was a crowded balcony draped with a
tri-colour flag. It had all the appearance of a balcony from which a
speech was being delivered.

Beyond these battalions, this balcony, this flag and this speech was a
calm, magnificent prospect-trees green and charming, mountains of superb
shape, a cloudless sky, the ocean without a ripple.

Strange and sad it is to see the grimace of man made with such
effrontery in presence of the face of God!




III. A DREAM. September 6, 1847.



Last night I dreamed this--we had been talking all the evening about
riots, a propos of the troubles in the Rue Saint Honoré:

I entered an obscure passage way. Men passed and elbowed me in the
shadow. I issued from the passage. I was in a large square, which was
longer than it was wide, and surrounded by a sort of vast wall, or high
edifice that resembled a wall, which enclosed it on all four sides.
There were neither doors nor windows in this wall; just a few holes here
and there. At certain spots it appeared to have been riddled with shot;
at others it was cracked and hanging over as though it had been shaken
by an earthquake. It had the bare, crumbling and desolate aspect of
places in Oriental cities.

No one was in sight. Day was breaking. The stone was grey, the sky also.
At the extremity of the place I perceived four obscure objects that
looked liked cannon levelled ready for firing.

A great crowd of ragged men and children rushed by me with gestures of
terror.

“Save us!” cried one of them. “The grape shot is coming!”

“Where are we?” I asked. “What is this place?”’

“What! do you not belong to Paris?” responded the man. “This is the
Palais-Royal.”

I gazed about me and, in effect, recognised in this frightful,
devastated square in ruins a sort of spectre of the Palais-Royal.

The fleeing men had vanished, I knew not whither.

I also would have fled. I could not. In the twilight I saw a light
moving about the cannon.

The square was deserted. I could hear cries of: “Run! they are going to
shoot!” but I could not see those who uttered them.

A woman passed by. She was in tatters and carried a child on her back.
She did not run. She walked slowly. She was young, cold, pale, terrible.

As she passed me she said: “It is hard lines! Bread is at thirty-four
sous, and even at that the cheating bakers do not give full weight.”

I saw the light at the end of the square flare up and heard the roar of
the cannon. I awoke.

Somebody had just slammed the front door.




IV. THE PANEL WITH THE COAT OF ARMS.



The panel which was opposite the bed had been so blackened by time and
effaced by dust that at first he could distinguish only confused lines
and undecipherable contours; but the while he was thinking of other
things his eyes continually wandered back to it with that mysterious and
mechanical persistence which the gaze sometimes has. Singular details
began to detach themselves from the confused and obscure whole. His
curiosity was roused. When the attention becomes fixed it is like a
light; and the tapestry growing gradually less cloudy finally appeared
to him in its entirety, and stood out distinctly against the sombre
wall, as though vaguely illumined.

It was only a panel with a coat of arms upon it, the blazon, no doubt,
of former owners of the château; but this blazon was a strange one.

The escutcheon was at the foot of the panel, and it was not this
that first attracted attention. It was of the bizarre shape of German
escutcheons of the fifteenth century. It was perpendicular and rested,
although rounded at the base, upon a worn, moss covered stone. Of the
two upper angles, one bent to the left and curled back upon itself like
the turned down corner of a page of an old book; the other, which curled
upward, bore at its extremity an immense and magnificent morion in
profile, the chinpiece of which protruded further than the visor, making
the helm look like a horrible head of a fish. The crest was formed of
two great spreading wings of an eagle, one black, the other red, and
amid the feathers of these wings were the membranous, twisted and almost
living branches of a huge seaweed which bore more resemblance to a
polypus than to a plume. From the middle of the plume rose a buckled
strap, which reached to the angle of a rough wooden pitchfork, the
handle of which was stuck in the ground, and from there descended to a
hand, which held it.

To the left of the escutcheon was the figure of a woman, standing. It
was an enchanting vision. She was tall and slim, and wore a robe of
brocade which fell in ample folds about her feet, a ruff of many pleats
and a necklace of large gems. On her head was an enormous and superb
turban of blond hair on which rested a crown of filigree that was not
round, and that followed all the undulations of the hair. The face,
although somewhat too round and large, was exquisite. The eyes were
those of an angel, the mouth was that of a virgin; but in those heavenly
eyes there was a terrestrial look and on that virginal mouth was the
smile of a woman. In that place, at that hour, on that tapestry, this
mingling of divine ecstasy and human voluptuousness had something at
once charming and awful about it.

Behind the woman, bending towards her as though whispering in her ear,
appeared a man.

Was he a man? All that could be seen of his body--legs, arms and
chest--was as hairy as the skin of an ape; his hands and feet were
crooked, like the claws of a tiger. As to his visage, nothing more
fantastic and frightful could be imagined. Amid a thick, bristling
beard, a nose like an owl’s beak and a mouth whose corners were drawn
by a wild-beast-like rictus were just discernible. The eyes were half
hidden by his thick, bushy, curly hair. Each curl ended in a spiral,
pointed and twisted like a gimlet, and on peering at them closely it
could be seen that each of these gimlets was a little viper.

The man was smiling at the woman. It was disquieting and sinister, the
contact of these two equally chimerical beings, the one almost an angel,
the other almost a monster; a revolting clash of the two extremes of the
ideal. The man held the pitchfork, the woman grasped the strap with her
delicate pink fingers.

As to the escutcheon itself, it was sable, that is to say, black, and
in the middle of it appeared, with the vague whiteness of silver,
a fleshless, deformed thing, which, like the rest, at length became
distinct. It was a death’s head. The nose was lacking, the orbits of the
eyes were hollow and deep, the cavity of the ear could be seen on the
right side, all the seams of the cranium could be traced, and there only
remained two teeth in the jaws.

But this black escutcheon, this livid death’s head, designed with such
minuteness of detail that it seemed to stand out from the tapestry, was
less lugubrious than the two personages who held up the hideous blazon
and who seemed to be whispering to each other in the shadow.

At the bottom of the panel in a corner was the date: 1503.




V. THE EASTER DAISY. May 29, 1841.



A few days ago I was passing along the Rue de Chartres.* A palisade of
boards, which linked two islands of high six-story houses, attracted
my attention. It threw upon the pavement a shadow which the sunshine,
penetrating between the badly joined boards, striped with beautiful
parallel streaks of gold, such as one sees on the fine black satins of
the Renaissance. I strolled over to it and peered through the cracks.

* The little Rue de Chartres was situated on the site now occupied by
the Pavilion de Rohan. It extended from the open ground of the Carrousel
to the Place du Palais-Royal. The old Vaudeville Theatre was situated in
it.

This palisade encloses the site on which was built the Vaudeville
Theatre, that was destroyed by fire two years ago, in June, 1839.

It was two o’clock in the afternoon, the sun shone hotly, the street was
deserted.

A sort of house door, painted grey, still ornamented with rococo carving
and which a hundred years ago probably was the entrance to the boudoir
of some little mistress, had been adjusted to the palisade. There was
only a latch to raise, and I entered the enclosure.

Nothing could be sadder or more desolate. A chalky soil. Here and
there blocks of stone that the masons had begun to work upon, but had
abandoned, and which were at once white as the stones of sepulchres and
mouldy as the stones of ruins. No one in the enclosure. On the walls of
the neighbouring houses traces of flame and smoke still visible.

However, since the catastrophe two successive springtides had softened
the ground, and in a corner of the trapezium, behind an enormous stone
that was becoming tinted with the green of moss, and beneath which were
haunts of woodlice, millepeds, and other insects, a little patch of
grass had grown in the shadow.

I sat on the stone and bent over the grass.

Oh! my goodness! there was the prettiest little Easter daisy in the
world, and flitting about it was a charming microscopical gnat.

This flower of the fields was growing peaceably and in accordance with
the sweet law of nature, in the open, in the centre of Paris, between a
couple of streets, two paces from the Palais-Royal, four paces from the
Carrousel, amid passers-by, omnibuses and the King’s carriages.

This wild flower, neighbour of the pavement, opened up a wide field of
thought. Who could have foreseen, two years ago, that a daisy would be
growing on this spot! If, as on the ground adjoining, there had never
been anything but houses, that is to say, proprietors, tenants, and hail
porters, careful residents extinguishing candle and fire at night before
going to sleep, never would there have been a wild flower here.

How many things, how many plays that failed or were applauded, how
many ruined families, how many incidents, how many adventures, how many
catastrophes were summed up in this flower! To all those who lived upon
the crowd that was nightly summoned here, what a spectre this flower
would have been had it appeared to them two years ago! What a labyrinth
is destiny and what mysterious combinations there were that led up to
the advent of this enchanting little yellow sun with its white rays.
It required a theatre and a conflagration, which are the gaiety and the
terror of a city, one of the most joyous inventions of man and one of
the most terrible visitations of God, bursts of laughter for thirty
years and whirlwinds of flame for thirty horn’s to produce this Easter
daisy, the delight of a gnat.





THEATER

     I.   JOANNY.
     II.  MADEMOISELLE MARS.
     III. FREDERICK LEMAITRE.
     IV.  THE COMIQUES.
     V.   MADEMOISELLE GEORGES.
     VI.  TABLEAUX VIVANTS.




JOANNY. March 7, 1830, Midnight.



They have been playing “Hernani” at the Théâtre-Français since February
25. The receipts for each performance have been five thousand francs.
The public every night hisses all the verses. It is a rare uproar. The
parterre hoots, the boxes burst with laughter. The actors are abashed
and hostile; most of them ridicule what they have to say. The press has
been practically unanimous every morning in making fun of the piece and
the author. If I enter a reading room I cannot pick up a paper without
seeing: “Absurd as ‘Hernani’; silly, false, bombastic, pretentious,
extravagant and nonsensical as ‘Hernani’.” If I venture into the
corridors of the theatre while the performance is in progress I see
spectators issue from their boxes and slam the doors indignantly. Mlle.
Mars plays her part honestly and faithfully, but laughs at it, even in
my presence. Michelot plays his resignedly and laughs at it behind my
back. There is not a scene shifter, not a super, not a lamp lighter but
points his finger at me.

To-day I dined with Joanny, who had invited me. Joanny plays Ruy Gomez.
He lives at No. 1 Rue du Jardinet, with a young seminarist, his nephew.
The dinner party was sober and cordial. There were some journalists
there, among others M. Merle, the husband of Mme. Dorval. After dinner,
Joanny, who has the most beautiful white hair in the world, rose, filled
his glass, turned towards me. I was on his right hand. Here literally is
what he said to me; I have just returned home and I write his words:

“Monsieur Victor Hugo, the old man, now unknown, who two hundred years
ago filled the role of Don Diègue in ‘Le Cid’ was not more penetrated
with respect and admiration in presence of the great Corneille than the
old man who plays Don Buy Gomez is to-day in your presence.”




MADEMOISELLE MARS.



In her last illness Mlle. Mars was often delirious. One evening the
doctor arrived. She was in the throes of a high fever, and her mind was
wandering. She prattled about the theatre, her mother, her daughter,
her niece Georgina, about all that she held dear; she laughed, wept,
screamed, sighed deeply.

The doctor approached her bed and said to her: “Dear lady, calm
yourself, it is I.” She did not recognise him and her mind continued to
wander. He went on: “Come, show me your tongue, open your mouth.” Mlle.
Mars gazed at him, opened her mouth and said: “Here, look. Oh! all my
teeth are my very own!”

Célimène still lived.




FREDERICK LEMAITRE.



Frédérick Lemaitre is cross, morose and kind. He lives in retirement
with his children and his mistress, who at present is Mlle. Clarisse
Miroy.

Frédérick likes the table. He never invites anybody to dinner except
Porcher, the chief of the claque.* Fredérick and Porcher “thee-thou”
 each other. Porcher has common sense, good manners, and plenty of money,
which he lends gallantly to authors whose rent is due. Porcher is the
man of whom Harel said: “He likes, protects and disdains Literary men.”

* A band of men and boys who are paid to applaud a piece or a certain
actor or actress at a given signal. The applause contractor, or _chef de
claque_, is an important factor in French theatrical affairs.

Frédérick has never less than fifteen dishes at his table. When the
servant brings them in he looks at them and judges them without tasting
them. Often he says:

“That is bad.”

“Have you eaten of it?”

“No, God forbid!”

“But taste it.”

“It is detestable.”

“I will taste it,” says Clarisse.

“It is execrable. I forbid you to do so.”

“But let me try it.”

“Take that dish away! It is filthy!” And he sends for his cook and rates
her soundly.

He is greatly feared by all his household. His domestics live in a state
of terror. At table, if he does not speak, no one utters a word. Who
would dare to break the silence when he is mute? One would think it was
a dinner of dumb people, or a supper of Trappists, except for the good
cheer. He likes to wind up the repast with fish. If there is turbot he
has it served after the creams. He drinks, when dining, a bottle and
a half of Bordeaux wine. Then, after dinner, he lights his cigar, and
while smoking drinks two other bottles of wine.

For all that he is a comedian of genius and a very good fellow. He is
easily moved to tears, which start to his eyes at a word said to him
angrily or reproachfully.


This dates back to 1840. Mlle. Atala Beaudouin (the actress who under
the name of Louise Beaudouin created the role of the Queen in Ruy
Bias) had left Frédérick Lemaître, the great and marvellous comedian.
Frédérick adored her and was inconsolable.

Mlle. Atala’s mother had strongly advised her daughter on this occasion.
Frédérick was occasionally violent, notwithstanding that he was very
amorous; and, besides, a Russian prince had presented himself. In short,
Mlle. Atala persisted in her determination and positively refused to see
Frederick.

Frederick made frightful threats, especially against the mother. One
morning there was a violent ringing at Mlle. Atala’s bell. Her mother
opened the door and recoiled in terror. It was Frédérick. He entered,
dropped into the chair that was handiest to him, and said to the old
woman:

“Don’t be afraid, I haven’t come to kick your--, I have come to weep.”




THE COMIQUES September, 1846



Potier, having grown old, played at the Porte Saint Martin towards the
close of his life. He was the same in the street as he was on the stage.
Little boys would follow him, saying: “There is Potier!” He had a small
cottage near Paris and used to come to rehearsals mounted on a small
horse, his long thin legs dangling nearly to the ground.

Tiercelin was a Hellenist. Odry is a connoisseur of chinaware. The
elephantine Lepeintre junior runs into debt and lives the life of a
_coquin de neuveu_.

Alcide Tousez, Sainville and Ravel carry on in the green room just as
they do on the stage, inventing cock-and-bull yarns and cracking jokes.

Arnal composes classic verse, admires Samson, waxes wrath because the
cross has not been conferred upon him. And, in the green room, with
rouge on his nose and cheeks and a wig on his head, talks, between two
slaps in the face given or received, about Guizot’s last speech, free
trade and Sir Robert Peel; he interrupts himself, makes his entry upon
the stage, plays his part, returns and gravely resumes: “I was saying
that Robert Peel----”

Poor Arnal recently was driven almost insane. He had a mistress whom he
adored. This woman fleeced him. Having become rich enough she said to
him: “Our position is an immoral one and an end must be put to it. An
honest man has offered me his name and I am going to get married.” Arnal
was disconsolate. “I give you the preference,” said the belle, “marry
me.” Arnal is married. The woman left him and has become a bourgeoise.
Arnal nearly lost his reason through grief. This does not prevent him
from playing his pasquinades every night at the Vaudeville. He makes
fun of his ugliness, of his age, of the fact that he is pitted with
small-pox--laughs at all those things that prevented him from pleasing
the woman he loved, and makes the public laugh--and his heart is broken.
Poor red queue! What eternal and incurable sorrows there be in the
gaiety of a buffoon! What a lugubrious business is that of laughter!




MADEMOISELLE GEORGES. October, 23, 1867.



Mlle. George came to see me to-day. She was sad, and elegantly dressed
in a blue dress with white stripes. She said: “I am weary and disgusted.
I asked for Mars’ reversion. They granted me a pension of two thousand
francs which they do not pay. Just a mouthful of bread, and even that I
do not get a chance to eat! They wanted to engage me at the Historique
(at the Théâtre Historique). I refused. What could I do there among
those transparencies! A stout woman like me! Besides, where are the
authors? Where are the pieces? Where are the roles? As to the provinces,
I tried touring last year, but it is impossible without Harel.* I don’t
know how to manage actors. How do you think I can get on with these evil
doers? I was to have finished the 24th. I paid them on the 20th, and
fled. I returned to Paris to visit poor Harel’s tomb. It is frightful,
a tomb! It is horrible to see his name there on the stone! Yet I did not
weep. I was dry-eyed and cold. What a strange thing is life! To think
that this man who was so clever, so witty, should die an idiot! He
passed his days doing like this with his fingers. Not a spark of reason
remained. It is all over. I shall have Rachel at my benefit; I shall
play with her that chestnut “Iphigênie”. We shall make money, but I
don’t care. Besides, I’m sure she wouldn’t play Rodogune! I will also
play, if you will permit me, an act of “Lucrèce Borgia”. You see, I am
for Rachel; she is an artful one, if you like. See how she checkmates
those rascally French actors! She renews her engagements, assures for
herself pyrotechnics, vacations, heaps of gold. When the contract is
signed she says: “By the bye, I forgot to tell you that I have been
enceinte for four months; it will be five months before I am able to
play.” She does well. If I had done the same thing I shouldn’t have to
die like a dog on a litter of straw. Tragedians, you see, are comedians
after all. That poor Dorval, what has become of her, do you know? There
is one to be pitied, if you like! She is playing I know not where, at
Toulouse, at Carpentras, in barns, to earn her living! She is reduced
like me to showing her bald head and dragging her poor old carcass on
badly planed boards behind footlights of four tallow candles, among
strolling actors who have been to the galleys, or who ought to be there!
Ah! Monsieur Hugo, all this is nothing to you who are in good health and
well off, but we are poor miserable creatures!”

     *  M. Harel was manager of the Porte St. Martin Theatre.
     Mlle. Georges lived with him.




TABLEAUX VIVANTS



In the year 1846 there was a spectacle that caused a furore in Paris. It
was that afforded by women attired only in pink tights and a gauze skirt
executing poses that were called _tableaux vivants_, with a few men to
complete the groups. This show was given at the Porte Saint Martin and
at the Cirque. I had the curiosity one night to go and see the women
behind the scenes. I went to the Porte Saint Martin, where, I may add in
parentheses, they were going to revive “Lucrêce Borgia”. Villemot, the
stage manager, who was of poor appearance but intelligent, said: “I will
take you into the gynecium.”

A score of men were there--authors, actors, firemen, lamp lighters,
scene shifters--who came, went, worked or looked on, and in the midst of
them seven or eight women, practically nude, walked about with an air of
the most naïve tranquillity. The pink tights that covered them from the
feet to the neck were so thin and transparent that one could see not
only the toes, the navel, and the breasts, but also the veins and the
colour of the least mark on the skin on all parts of their bodies.
Towards the abdomen, however, the tights became thicker and only the
form was distinguishable. The men who assisted them were similarly
arranged. All these people were English.

At intervals of five minutes the curtain parted and they executed a
_tableau_. For this they were posed in immobile attitudes upon a large
wooden disc which revolved upon a pivot. It was worked by a child of
fourteen who reclined on a mattress beneath it. Men and women were
dressed up in chiffons of gauze or merino that were very ugly at a
distance and very ignoble _de prês_. They were pink statues. When the
disc had revolved once and shown the statues on every side to the public
crowded in the darkened theatre, the curtain closed again, another
tableau was arranged, and the performance recommenced a moment later.

Two of these women were very pretty. One resembled Mme. Rey, who played
the Queen in “Ruy Blas” in 1840; it was this one who represented Venus.
She was admirably shaped. Another was more than pretty: she was handsome
and superb. Nothing more magnificent could be seen than her black, sad
eyes, her disdainful mouth, her smile at once bewitching and haughty.
She was called Maria, I believe. In a tableau which represented “A Slave
Market,” she displayed the imperial despair and the stoical dejection
of a nude queen offered for sale to the first bidder. Her tights, which
were torn at the hip, disclosed her firm white flesh. They were, however
only poor girls of London. All had dirty finger nails.

When they returned to the green room they laughed as freely with the
scene shifters as with the authors, and talked broken French while they
adjusted all kinds of frightful rags upon their charming visages. Their
smile was the calm smile of perfect innocence or of complete corruption.





AT THE ACADEMY.




Session of November 23, 1843.



CHARLES NODIER.--The Academy, yielding to custom, has suppressed
universally the double consonant in verbs where this consonant
supplanted euphoniously the _d_ of the radical _ad_.

MYSELF.--I avow my profound ignorance. I had no idea that custom had
effected this suppression and that the Academy had sanctioned it. Thus
one should no longer write _atteindre, approuver, appeler, apprehender_,
etc., but _ateindre, aprouver, apeler, apréhender_?

M. VICTOR COUSIN.--I desire to point out to M. Hugo that the alterations
of which he complains come from the movement of the language, which is
nothing else than decadence.

MYSELF.--M. Cousin having addressed a personal observation to me, I
beg to point out to him in turn that his opinion is, in my estimation,
merely an opinion and nothing more. I may add that, as I view it,
“movement of the language” and decadence have nothing in common. Nothing
could be more distinct than these two things. Movement in no way proves
decadence. The language has been moving since the first day of its
formation; can it be said to be deteriorating? Movement is life;
decadence is death.

M. COUSIN.--The decadence of the French language began in 1789.

MYSELF.--At what hour, if you please?




October 8, 1844.

This is what was told to me at to-day’s session:

Salvandy recently dined with Villemain. The repast over, they
adjourned to the drawing-room, and conversed. As the clock struck eight
Villemain’s three little daughters entered to kiss their father good
night. The youngest is named Lucette; her birth cost her mother her
reason; she is a sweet and charming child of five years.

“Well, Lucette, dear child,” said her father, “won’t you recite one of
Lafontaine’s fables before you go to bed?”

“Here,” observed M. de Salvandy, “is a little person who to-day recites
fables and who one of these days will inspire romances.”

Lucette did not understand. She merely gazed with her big wondering
eyes at Salvandy who was lolling in his chair with an air of benevolent
condescension.

“Well, Lucette.” he went on, “will you not recite a fable for us?”

The child required no urging, and began in her naïve little voice, her
fine, frank, sweet eyes still fixed upon Salvandy:

One easily believes one’s self to be somebody in France.




1845.

During the run of M. Ponsard’s “Lucrece”, I had the following dialogue
with M. Viennet at a meeting of the Academy:

M. VIENNET.--Have you seen the “Lucrece” that is being played at the
Odéon?

MYSELF.--NO.

M. VIENNET.--It is very good.

MYSELF.--Really, is it good?

M. VIENNET.--It is more than good, it is fine.

MYSELF.--Really, is it fine?

M. VIENNET.--It is more than fine, it is magnificent.

MYSELF.--Really, now, magnificent?

M. VIENNET.--Oh! magnificent!

MYSELF.--Come, now, is it as good as “Zaire”?

M. VIENNET.--Oh! no! Oh! you are going too far, you know. Gracious!
“Zaire”! No, it is not as good as “Zaire”.

MYSELF.--Well, you see, “Zaire” is a very poor piece indeed!




AN ELECTION SESSION.

February 11, 1847.

Thirty-one Academicians present. Sixteen votes are necessary.

              First ballot.

      Emile Deschamps      2   votes.
 Victor Leclerc    14     ”
  Empis           15     ”

Lamartine and M. Ballanche arrive at the end of the first ballot. M.
Thiers arrives at the commencement of the second; which makes 34.

The director asks M. Thiers whether he has promised his vote. He
laughingly replies: “No,” and adds: “I have offered it.” (Laughter.)

M. Cousin, to M. Lebrun, director: “You did not employ the sacramental
expression. One does not ask an Academician whether he has *promised*
his vote, but whether he has *pledged* it.”


              Second ballot.

      Emile Deschamps    2 votes.
      Empis             18   ”
       Victor Leclerc    14   ”


M. Empis is elected. The election was decided by Lamartine and M.
Ballanche.

On my way out I meet Leon Gozlan, who says to me: “Well?”

I reply: “There has been an election. It is Empis.”

“How do you look at it?” he asks.

“In both ways.”

“Empis?---”

“And _tant pis_!”




March 16, 1847.



At the Academy to-day, while listening to the poems, bad to the point
of grotesqueness, that have been sent for the competition of 1847, M. de
Barante remarked: “Really, in these times, we no longer know how to make
mediocre verses.”

Great praise of the poetical and literary excellence of these times,
although M. de Barante was not conscious of it.




April 22, 1847.

Election of M. Ampere. This is an improvement upon the last. A slow
improvement. But Academies, like old people, go slowly.

During the session and after the election Lamartine sent to me by an
usher the following lines:

              C’est un état peu prospere
              D’aller d’Empis en Ampere.

I replied to him by the same usher:

              Toutefois ce serait pis
              D’aller d’Ampere en Empis.




October 4, 1847.

I have just heard M. Viennet say: “I think in bronze.”




December 29, 1848. Friday.

Yesterday, Thursday, I had two duties to attend to at one and the same
time, the Assembly and the Academy; the salt question on the one hand,
on the other the much smaller question of two vacant seats. Yet I gave
the preference to the latter. This is why: At the Palais Bourbon the
Cavaignac party had to be prevented from killing the new Cabinet; at the
Palais Mazarin the Academy had to be prevented from offending the memory
of Chateaubriand. There are cases in which the dead count for more than
the living; I went to the Academy.

The Academy last Thursday had suddenly decided, at the opening of the
session, at a time when nobody had yet put in an appearance, when there
were only four or five round the green table, that on January 11 (that
is to say, in three weeks) it would fill the two seats left vacant by
MM. de Chateaubriand and Vatout. This strange alliance, I do not say of
names, but of words,--“replace MM. de Chateaubriand and Vatout,”--did
not stop it for one minute. The Academy is thus made; its wit and that
wisdom which produces so many follies, are composed of extreme lightness
combined with extreme heaviness. Hence a good deal of foolishness and a
good many foolish acts.

Beneath this lightness, however, there was an intention. This giddiness
was fraught with deep meaning. The brave party that leads the Academy,
for there are parties everywhere, even at the Academy, hoped, public
attention being directed elsewhere, politics absorbing everything, to
juggle the seat of Chateaubriand pell-mell with the seat of M. Vatout;
two peas in the same goblet. In this way the astonished public
would turn round one fine morning and simply see M. de Noailles in
Chateaubriand’s seat: a small matter, a great lord in the place of a
great writer!

Then, after a roar of laughter, everybody would go about his business
again, distractions would speedily come, thanks to the veering of
politics, and, as to the Academy, oh! a duke and peer the more in it,
a little more ridicule upon it, what would that matter? It would go on
just the same!

Besides, M. de Noailles is a considerable personage. Bearing a great
name, being lofty of manner, enjoying an immense fortune, of certain
political weight under Louis Philippe, accepted by the Conservatives
although, or because, a Legitimist, reading speeches that were listened
to, he occupied an important place in the Chamber of Peers; which proves
that the Chamber of Peers occupied an unimportant place in the country.

Chateaubriand, who hated all that could replace him and smiled at
all that could make him regretted, had had the kindness to tell him
sometimes, by Mme. Récamier’s fireside, “that he hoped he would be his
successor;” which prompted M. de Noailles to dash off a big book in two
volumes about Mme. de Maintenon, at the commencement of which, on the
first page of the preface, I was stopped by a lordly breach of grammar.

This was the state of things when I concluded to go to the Academy.

The session which was announced to begin at two o’clock, as usual,
opened, as usual, at a quarter past three. And at half past three--

At half past three the candidacy of Monsieur the Duke do Noailles,
*replacing* Chateaubriand, was irresistibly acclaimed.

Decidedly, I ought to have gone to the Assembly.




March 26, 1850. Tuesday.


I had arrived early, at noon.

I was warming myself, for it is very cold, and the ground is covered
with snow, which is not good for the apricot trees. M. Guizot, leaning
against the mantelpiece, was saying to me:

“As a member of the dramatic prize committee, I read yesterday, in a
single day, mind you, no fewer than six plays!”

“That,” I responded, “was to punish you for not having seen one acted in
eighteen years.”

At this moment M. Thiers came up and the two men exchanged greetings.
This is how they did it:

M. THIERS: Good afternoon, Guizot.

M. GUIZOT: Good afternoon, Monsieur.




AN ELECTION SESSION. March 28, 1850.

M. Guizot presided. At the roll call, when M. Pasquier’s name was
reached he said: “Monsieur the Chancellor--” When he got to that of M.
Dupin, President of the National Assembly, he called: “Monsieur Dupin.”


              First ballot.
      Alfred de Musset    5 votes.
      M. Nisard           23  ”

M. Nisard is elected.

                   ----------

To-day, September 12, the Academy worked at the dictionary. A propos
of the word “increase,” this example, taken from the works of Mme. de
Staël, was proposed:

“Poverty increases ignorance, and ignorance poverty.”

Three objections were immediately raised:

1. Antithesis.

2. Contemporary writer.

3. Dangerous thing to say.

The Academy rejected the example.





LOVE IN PRISON.




I.



BESIDES misdeeds, robberies, the division of spoils after an ambuscade,
and the twilight exploitation of the barriers of Paris, footpads,
burglars, and gaol-birds generally have another industry: they have
ideal loves.

This requires explanation.

The trade in negro slaves moves us, and with good reason; we examine
this social sore, and we do well. But let us also learn to lay bare
another ulcer, which is more painful, perhaps: the traffic in white
women.

Here is one of the singular things connected with and characteristic of
this poignant disorder of our civilization:

Every gaol contains a prisoner who is known as the “artist.”

All kinds of trades and professions peculiar to prisons develop behind
the bars. There is the vendor of liquorice-water, the vendor of scarfs,
the writer, the advocate, the usurer, the hut-maker, and the barker. The
artist takes rank among these local and peculiar professions between the
writer and the advocate.

To be an artist is it necessary to know how to draw? By no means. A bit
of a bench to sit upon, a wall to lean against, a lead pencil, a bit of
pasteboard, a needle stuck in a handle made out of a piece of wood,
a little Indian ink or sepia, a little Prussian blue, and a little
vermilion in three cracked beechwood spoons,--this is all that is
requisite; a knowledge of drawing is superfluous. Thieves are as fond of
colouring as children are, and as fond of tattooing as are savages. The
artist by means of his three spoons satisfies the first of these needs,
and by means of his needle the second. His remuneration is a “nip” of
wine.

The result is this:

Some prisoners, say, lack everything, or are simply desirous of living
more comfortably. They combine, wait upon the artist, offer him their
glasses of wine or their bowls of soup, hand him a sheet of paper and
order of him a bouquet. In the bouquet there must be as many flowers
as there are prisoners in the group. If there be three prisoners, there
must be three flowers. Each flower bears a figure, or, if preferred, a
number, which number is that of the prisoner.

The bouquet when painted is sent, through the mysterious means of
communication between the various prisons that the police are powerless
to prevent, to Saint Lazare. Saint Lazare is the women’s prison, and
where there are women there also is pity. The bouquet circulates from
hand to hand among the unfortunate creatures that the police detain
administratively at Saint Lazare; and in a few days the infallible
secret post apprises those who sent the bouquet that Palmyre has chosen
the tuberose, that Fanny prefers the azalea, and that Seraphine has
adopted the geranium. Never is this lugubrious handkerchief thrown into
the seraglio without being picked up.

Thenceforward the three bandits have three servants whose names are
Palmyre, Fanny, and Seraphine. Administrative detentions are relatively
of short duration. These women are released from prison before the men.
And what do they do? They support them. In elegant phraseology they are
providences; in plain language they are milch-cows.

Pity has been transformed into love. The heart of woman is susceptible
of such sombre graftings. These women say:

“I am married.” They are married indeed. By whom? By the flower. With
whom? With the abyss. They are fiancées of the unknown. Enraptured and
enthusiastic fiancées. Pale Sulamites of fancy and fog. When the known
is so odious, how can they help loving the unknown?

In these nocturnal regions and with the winds of dispersion that blow,
meetings are almost impossible. The lovers see each other in dreams. In
all probability the woman will never set eyes on the man. Is he young?
Is he old? Is he handsome? Is he ugly? She does not know; she knows
nothing about him. She adores him. And it is because she does not know
him that she loves him. Idolatry is born of mystery.

This woman, drifting aimlessly on life’s tide, yearns for something to
cling to, a tie to bind her, a duty to perform. The pit from amid its
scum throws it to her; she accepts it and devotes herself to it. This
mysterious bandit, transformed into heliotrope or iris, becomes a
religion to her. She espouses him in the presence of night. She has a
thousand little wifely attentions for him; poor for herself, she is rich
for him; she whelms this manure with her delicate solicitude. She is
faithful to him with all the fidelity of which she is still capable;
the incorruptible emanates from the corruptible. Never does this woman
betray her love. It is an immaterial, pure, ethereal love, subtile as
the breath of spring, solid as brass.

A flower has done all this. What a well is the human heart, and how
giddy it makes one to peer into it! Lo! the cloaca. Of what is it
thinking? Of perfume. A prostitute loves a thief through a lily. What
plunger into human thought could reach the bottom of this? Who shall
fathom this immense yearning for flowers that springs from mud? In
the secret self of these hapless women is a strange equilibrium that
consoles and reassures them. A rose counterbalances an act of shame.

Hence these amours based on and sustained by illusion. This thief is
idolized by this girl. She has not seen his face, she does not know his
name; she sees him in visions induced by the perfume of jessamine or of
pinks. Henceforward flower-gardens, the May sunshine, the birds in their
nests, exquisite tints, radiant blossoms, boxes of orange trees and
daphne odora, velvet petals upon which golden bees alight, the sacred
odours of spring-tide, balms, incense, purling brooks, and soft green
grass are associated with this bandit. The divine smile of nature
penetrates and illumines him.

This desperate aspiring to paradise lost, this deformed dream of the
beautiful, is not less tenacious on the part of the man. He turns
towards the woman; and this preoccupation, become insensate, persists
even when the dreadful shadow of the two red posts of the guillotine
is thrown upon the window of his cell. The day before his execution
Delaporte, chief of the Trappes band, who was wearing the strait-jacket,
asked of the convict Cogniard, whom, through the grating in the door of
the condemned cell, he saw passing by: “Are there any pretty women in
the visitors’ parlor this morning?” Another condemned man, Avril (what
a name!), in this same cell, bequeathed all that he possessed--five
francs--to a female prisoner whom he had seen at a distance in the
women’s yard, “in order that she may buy herself a fichu a la mode.”

Between the male and female wretch dreams build a Bridge of Sighs, as it
were. The mire of the gutter dallies with the door of a prison cell. The
Aspasia of the street-corner aspires and respires with the heart of the
Alcibiades who waylays the passer-by at the corner of a wood.

You laugh? You should not. It is a terrible thing.




II.



The murderer is a flower for the courtesan. The prostitute is the Clytia
of the assassin sun. The eye of the woman damned languourously seeks
Satan among the myrtles.

What is this phenomenon? It is the need of the ideal. A sublime and
awful need.

A terrible thing, I say.

Is it a disease? Is it a remedy? Both. This noble yearning is at
the same time and for the same beings a chastisement and a reward; a
voluptuousness full of expiation; a chastisement for faults committed,
a recompense for sorrows borne! None may escape it. It is a hunger of
angels felt by demons. Saint Theresa experiences it, Messalina also.
This need of the immaterial is the most deeply rooted of all needs. One
must have bread; but before bread, one must have the ideal. One is a
thief, one is a street-walker--all the more reason. The more one drinks
of the darkness of night the more is one thirsty for the light of dawn.
Schinderhannes becomes a cornflower, Poulailler a violet. Hence these
sinisterly ideal weddings.

And then, what happens?

What I have just said.

Cloaca, but abyss. Here the human heart opens partly, disclosing
unimaginable depths. Astarte becomes platonic. The miracle of the
transformation of monsters by love is being accomplished. Hell is being
gilded. The vulture is being metamorphosed into a bluebird. Horror
ends in the pastoral. You think you are at Vouglans’s and
Parent-Duchâtelet’s; you are at Longus’s. Another step and you will
stumble into Berquin’s. Strange indeed is it to encounter Daphnis and
Chloe in the Forest of Bondy!

The dark Saint Martin Canal, into which the footpad pushes the passer-by
with his elbow as he snatches his victim’s watch, traverses the Tender
and empties itself into the Lignon. Poulmann begs a ribbon bow; one is
tempted to present a shepherdess’s crook to Papavoine. Through the straw
of the sabot one sees gossamer wings appearing on horrible heels. The
miracle of the roses is performed for Goton. All fatalities combined
have for result a flower. A vague Rambouillet Palace is superposed upon
the forbidding silhouette of the Salpêtrière. The leprous wall of evil,
suddenly covered with blossoms, affords a pendant to the wreath of
Juliet. The sonnets of Petrarch, that flight of the ideal which soars in
the shadow of souls, venture through the twilight towards this abjection
and suffering, attracted by one knows not what obscure affinity, even
as a swarm of bees is sometimes seen humming over a dungheap from which
arises, perceptible to the bees alone and mingling with the miasms, the
perfume of a hidden flower. The gemoniae are Elysian. The chimerical
thread of celestial unions floats ‘neath the darkest vault of the human
Erebus and binds despairing hearts to hearts that are monstrous. Manon
through the infinite sends to Cartouche a smile ineffable as that with
which Everallin entranced Fingal. From one pole of misery to the other,
from one gehenna to another, from the galleys to the brothel, tenebrous
mouths wildly exchange the kiss of azure.

It is night. The monstrous ditch of Clamart opens. From it arises a
miasm, a phosphorescent glow. It shines and flickers in two separate
tarts; it takes shape, the head rejoins the body, it is a phantom; the
phantom gazes into the darkness with wild, baleful eyes, rises, grows
bigger and blue, hovers for an instant and then speeds away to the
zenith to open the door of the palace of the sun where butterflies flit
from flower to flower and angels flit from star to star.

In all these strange, concordant phenomena appears the inadmissibility
of the principle that is all of man. The mysterious marriage which we
have just related, marriage of servitude with captivity, exaggerates the
ideal from the very fact that it is weighed down by all the most hideous
burdens of destiny. A frightful combination! It is the From it rises a
miasm, a phosphorescent glow. It shines meeting of these two redoubtable
words in which human existence is summed up: enjoy and suffer.

Alas! And how can we prevent this cry from escaping us? For these
hapless ones, enjoy, laugh, sing, please, and love exist, persist; but
there is a death-rattle in sing, a grating sound in laugh, putrefaction
in enjoy, there are ashes in please, there is night in love. All these
joys are attached to their destiny by coffin-nails.

What does that matter? They thirst for these lugubrious, chimerical
glimpses of light that are full of dreams.

What is tobacco, that is so precious and so dear to the prisoner? It
is a dream. “Put me in the dungeon,” said a convict, “but give me some
tobacco.” In other words: “Throw me into a pit, but give me a palace.”
 Press the prostitute and the bandit, mix Tartarus and Avernus, stir the
fatal vat of social mire, pile all the deformities of matter together,
and what issues therefrom? The immaterial.

The ideal is the Greek fire of the gutter. It burns there. Its
brightness in the impure water dazzles the thinker and touches his
heart. Nini Lassive stirs and brightens with Fiesehi’s bilets-doux that
sombre lamp of Vesta which is in the heart of every woman, and which
is as inextinguishable in that of the courtesan as in that of the
Carmelite. This is what explains the word “virgin,” accorded by the
Bible equally to the foolish virgin and to the wise virgin.

That was so yesterday, it is so to-day. Here again the surface has
changed, the bottom remains the same. The frank harshness of the Middle
Ages has been somewhat softened in our times. Ribald is pronounced
light o’ love; Toinon answers to the name of Olympia or Imperia;
Thomasse-la-Maraude is called Mme. de Saint Alphonse. The caterpillar
was real, the butterfly is false; that is the only change. Clout has
become chiffon.

Regnier used to say “sows “; we say “fillies.”

Other fashions; same manners.

The foolish virgin is lugubriously immutable.




III.



Whosoever witnesses this kind of anguish witnesses the extreme of human
misfortune.

Dark zones are these. Baleful night bursts and spreads o’er them. Evil
accumulated dissolves in misfortune upon them, they are swept with
blasts of despair by the tempest of fatalities, there a downpour of
trials and sorrows streams upon dishevelled heads in the darkness;
squalls, hail, a hurricane of distress, swirl and whirl back and forth
athwart them; it rains, rains without cease: it rains horror, it rains
vice, it rains crime, it rains the blackness of night; yet we must
explore this obscurity, and in the sombre storm the mind essays a
difficult flight, the flight of a wet bird, as it were.

There is always a vague, spectral dread in these low regions where
hell penetrates; they are so little in the human order and so
disproportionate that they create phantoms. It is hardly surprising,
therefore, that a legend should be connected with this sinister bouquet
offered by Bicêtre to La Salpêtrière or by La Force to Saint Lazare; it
is related at night in the cells and wards after the keepers have gone
their rounds.

It was shortly after the murder of the money-changer Joseph. A bouquet
was sent from La Force to a woman’s prison, Saint Lazare or the
Madelonnettes. In this bouquet was a sprig of white lilac which one of
the women prisoners selected.

A month or two elapsed; the woman was released from prison. She was
extremely enamoured, through the white lilac, of the unknown master she
had given to herself. She began to perform for him her strange function
of sister, mother, and mystic spouse, ignorant of his name, knowing only
his prison number. All her miserable savings, religiously deposited
with the clerk of the prison, went to this man. In order the better to
affiance herself to him, she took advantage of the advent of spring to
cull a sprig of real lilac in the fields. This sprig of lilac, attached
by a piece of sky-blue ribbon to the head of his bed, formed a pendant
to a sprig of consecrated box, an ornament which these poor desolate
alcoves never lack. The lilac withered thus.

This woman, like all Paris, had heard of the affair of the Palais-Royal
and of the two Italians, Malagutti and Ratta, arrested for the murder of
the money-changer.

She thought little about the tragedy, which did not concern her, and
lived only in her white lilac. This lilac was all in all to her; she
thought only of doing her “duty” to it.

One bright, sunny day she was seated in her room, sewing some garment or
other for her sorry evening toilet. Now and then she looked up from
her work at the lilac that hung at the head of the bed. At one of these
moments while her gaze was fixed upon the sprig of faded flower the
clock struck four.

Then she fancied she saw an extraordinary thing.

A sort of crimson pearl oozed from the extremity of the stalk of the
flower, grew larger, and dripped on to the white sheet of the bed.

It was a spot of blood.

That day, at that very hour, Ratta and Malagutti were executed.

It was evident that the white lilac was one of these two. But which one?

The hapless girl became insane and had to be confined in La Salpêtrière.
She died there. From morn to night, and from night to morn, she would
gibber: “I am Mme. Ratta-Malagutti.”

Thus are these sombre hearts.




IV.



Prostitution is an Isis whose final veil none has raised. There is a
sphinx in this gloomy odalisk of the frightful Sultan Everybody. None
has solved its enigma. It is Nakedness masked. A terrible spectacle!

Alas! in all that we have just recounted man is abominable, woman is
touching.

How many hapless ones have been driven to their fall!

The abyss is the friend of dreams. Fallen, as we have said, their
lamentable hearts have no other resource than to dream.

What caused their ruin was another dream, the dreadful dream of riches;
nightmare of glory, of azure, and ecstasy which weighs upon the chest of
the poor; flourish of trumpets heard in the gehenna, with the triumph
of the fortunate appearing resplendent in the immense night; prodigious
overture full of dawn! Carriages roll, gold falls in showers, laces
rustle.

Why should I not have this, too? Formidable thought!

This gleam from the sinister vent-hole dazzled them; this puff of the
sombre vapour inebriated them, and they were lost, and they were rich.

Wealth is a fatal distant light; woman flies frantically towards it.
This mirror catches this lark.

Wherefore they have been rich. They, too, have had their day of
enchantment, their minute of fête, their sparkle.

They have had that fever which is fatal to modesty. They have drained
the sonorous cup that is full of nothingness. They have drunk of the
madness of forgetfulness. What a flattering hope! What temptation! To
do nothing and have everything; alas! and also to have nothing, not even
one’s own self. To be slave-flesh, to be beauty for sale, a woman fallen
to a thing! They have dreamed and they have had--which is the same
thing, complete possession being but a dream--mansions, carriages,
servants in livery, suppers joyous with laughter, the house of gold,
silk, velvet, diamonds, pearls, life giddy with voluptuousness--every
pleasure.

Oh! how much better is the innocence of those poor little barefooted
ones on the shore of the sea, who hear at nightfall the tinkling of the
cracked bells of the goats on the cliffs!

There was a disastrous morrow to these brief, perfidious joys that they
had savoured. The word love signified hatred. The invisible doubles the
visible, and it is lugubrious. Those who shared their raptures, those to
whom they gave all, received all and accepted nothing. They--the fallen
ones--sowed their seed in ashes. They were deserted even as they were
being embraced. Abandonment sniggered behind the mask of the kiss.

And now, what are they to do? They must perforce continue to love.




V.



Oh! if they could, the unhappy creatures, if they could put from them
their hearts, their dreams, harden themselves with a hardness that
could not be softened, be forever cold and passionless, tear out their
entrails, and, since they are filth, become monsters! If they could no
longer think! If they could ignore the flower, efface the star, stop
up the mouth of the pit, close heaven! They would at least no longer
suffer. But no. They have a right to marriage, they have a right to the
heart, they have a right to torture, they have a right to the ideal.
No chilling of their hearts can put out the internal fire. However cold
they may be they burn. This, we have said, is at once their misery and
their crown. This sublimeness combines with their abjection to overwhelm
them and raise them up. Whether they will or not, the inextinguishable
does not become extinguished. Illusion is untamable. Nothing is more
invincible than dreams, and man is almost made up of dreams. Nature will
not agree to be insolvable. One must contemplate, aspire, love. If need
be marble will set the example. The statue becomes a woman rather than
the woman a statue.

The sewer is a sanctuary in spite of itself. It is unhealthy, there is
vitiated air in it, but the irresistible phenomenon is none the less
accomplished; all the holy generosities bloom livid in this cave.
Cynicism and the secret despair of pity are driven back by ecstasy, the
magnificences of kindness shine through infamy; this orphan creature
feels herself to be wife, sister, mother; and this fraternity which has
no family, and this maternity which has no children, and this adoration
which has no altar, she casts into the outer darkness. Some one marries
her. Who? The man in the gloom. She sees on her finger the ring made of
the mysterious gold of dreams. And she sobs. Torrents of tears well from
her eyes. Sombre delights!

And at the same time, let us repeat it, she suffers unheard-of tortures.
She does not belong to him to whom she has given herself. Everybody
takes her away again. The brutal public hand holds the wretched creature
and will not let her go. She fain would flee. Flee whither? From whom?
From you, herself, above all from him whom she loves, the funereal ideal
man. She cannot.

Thus, and these are extreme afflictions, this hapless wight expiates,
and her expiation is brought upon her by her grandeur. Whatever she may
do, she has to love. She is condemned to the light. She has to condole,
she has to succour, she has to devote herself, she has to be kind.
A woman who has lost her modesty, fain would know love no more;
impossible. The refluxes of the heart are as inevitable as those of the
sea; the lights of the heart are as fixed as those of the night.

There is within us that which we can never lose. Abnegation, sacrifice,
tenderness, enthusiasm, all these rays turn against the woman within her
inmost self and attack and burn her. All these virtues remain to avenge
themselves upon her. When she would have been a wife, she is a slave.
Hers is the hopeless, thankless task of lulling a brigand in the blue
nebulousness of her illusions and of decking Mandrin with a starry rag.
She is the sister of charity of crime. She loves, alas! She endures her
inadmissible divinity; she is magnanimous and thrills at so being. She
is happy with a horrible happiness. She enters backwards into indignant
Eden.

We do not sufficiently reflect upon this that is within us and cannot be
lost.

Prostitution, vice, crime, what matters!

Night may become as black as it likes, the spark is still there.
However low you go there is light. Light in the vagabond, light in the
mendicant, light in the thief, light in the street-walker. The deeper
you go the more the miraculous light persists in showing itself.

Every heart has its pearl, which is the same for the heart gutter and
the heart ocean--love.

No mire can dissolve this particle of God.

Wherefore, there, at the extreme of gloom, of despondency, of
chill-heartedness and abandonment; in this obscurity, in this
putrefaction, in these gaols, in these dark paths, in this shipwreck;
beneath the lowest layer of the heap of miseries, under the bog of
public disdain which is ice and night; behind the eddying of those
frightful snowflakes the judges, the gendarmes, the warders and the
executioners for the bandit, the passers-by for the prostitute, which
cross each other, innumerable, in the dull grey mist that for these
wretches replace the sun; beneath these pitiless fatalities; beneath
this bewildering maze of vaults, some of granite, the others of hatred;
at the deepest depths of horror; in the midst of asphyxiation; at the
bottom of the chaos of all possible blacknesses; under the frightful
thickness of a deluge composed of expectorations, there where all is
extinct, where all is dead, something moves and shines. What is it? A
flame.

And what flame?

The soul.

O adorable prodigy!

Love, the ideal, is found even in the Pit.





AT THE TUILERIES. 1844-1848.

     I.    THE KING.
     II.   THE DUCHESS D’ORLEANS.
     III.  THE PRINCES.




I. THE KING. * June, 28, 1844.

     * Louis Philippe.

The King told me that Talleyrand said to him one day:

“You will never be able to do anything with Thiers, although he would
make an excellent tool. He is one of those men one cannot make use of
unless one is able to satisfy them. Now, he never will be satisfied. It
is unfortunate for him, as for you, that in our times, he cannot be made
a cardinal.”

A propos of the fortifications of Paris, the King told me how the
Emperor Napoleon learned the news of the taking of Paris by the allies.

The Emperor was marching upon Paris at the head of his guard. Near
Juvisy, at a place in the Forest of Fontainebleau where there is an
obelisk (“that I never see without feeling heavy at heart,” remarked the
King), a courier on his way to meet Napoleon brought him the news of the
capitulation of Paris. Paris had been taken. The enemy had entered it.
The Emperor turned pale. He hid his face in his hands and remained thus,
motionless, for a quarter of an hour. Then, without saying a word, he
turned about and took the road back to Fontainebleau.

General Athalin witnessed this scene and recounted it to the King.




July, 1844.

A few days ago the King said to Marshal Soult (in presence of others):

“Marshal, do you remember the siege of Cadiz?”

“Rather, sire, I should think so. I swore enough before that cursed
Cadiz. I invested the place and was forced to go away as I had come.”

“Marshal, while you were before it, I was inside it.”

“I know, sire.”

“The Cortes and the English Cabinet offered me the command of the
Spanish army.”

“I remember it.”

“The offer was a grave one. I hesitated long. Bear arms against France!
For my family, it is possible; but against my country! I was greatly
perplexed. At this juncture you asked me, through a trusty person, for
a secret interview in a little house situated on the Cortadura, between
the city and your camp. Do you remember the fact, Monsieur the Marshal?”

“Perfectly, sire; the day was fixed and the interview arranged.”

“And I did not turn up.”

“That is so.”

“Do you know why?”

“I never knew.”

“I will tell you. As I was preparing to go to meet you, the commander
of the English squadron, apprised of the matter, I know not how, dropped
upon me brusquely and warned me that I was about to fall into a trap;
that Cadiz being impregnable, they despaired of seizing me, but that at
the Cortadura I should be arrested by you; that the Emperor wished to
make of the Duke d’Orleans a second volume of the Duke d’Enghien, and
that you would have me shot immediately. There, really,” added the King
with a smile, “your hand on your conscience, were you going to shoot
me?”

The Marshal remained silent for a moment, then replied, with a smile not
less inexpressible than that of the King:

“No, sire; I wanted to compromise you.”

The subject of conversation was changed. A few minutes later the Marshal
took leave of the King, and the King, as he watched him go, said with a
smile to the person who heard this conversation:

“Compromise! compromise! To-day it is called compromise. In reality, he
would have shot me!”




August 4, 1844.

Yesterday the King said to me:

“One of my embarrassments at present, in all this affair of the
University and the clergy, is M. Affre.” *

     *  Archbishop Affre was shot and killed in the Faubourg
     Saint Antoine on September 25, 1848, while trying to stop
     the fighting between the troops and insurgents.

“Then why, sire,” said I, “did you appoint him?”

“I made a mistake, I admit. I had at first appointed to the
archbishopric of Paris the Cardinal of Arras, M. de la Tour d’Auvergne.”

“It was a good choice,” I observed.

“Yes, good. He is insignificant. An honest old man of no account. An
easy-going fellow. He was much sought after by the Carlists. Greatly
imposed upon. His whole family hated me. He was induced to refuse. Not
knowing what to do, and being in haste, I named M. Affre. I ought to
have been suspicious of him. His countenance is neither open nor frank.
I took his underhand air for a priestly air; I did wrong. And then, you
know, it was in 1840. Thiers proposed him to me, and urged me to appoint
him. Thiers is no judge of archbishops. I did it without sufficient
reflection. I ought to have remembered what Talleyrand said to me one
day: ‘The Archbishop of Paris must always be an old man. The see is
quieter and becomes vacant more frequently.’ I appointed M. Affre, who
is young; it was a mistake. However, I will re-establish the chapter
of St. Denis and appoint as primate of it the Cardinal de la Tour
d’Auvergne. The Papal Nuncio, to whom I spoke of my project just now,
laughed heartily at it, and said: ‘The Abbé Affre will commit some
folly. Should he go to Rome the Pope will receive him very badly. He
has acted pusillanimously and blunderingly on all occasions since he has
been an archbishop. An archbishop of Paris who has any wit ought always
to be on good terms with the King here and the Pope yonder.’”




August, 1844.

A month or two ago the King went to Dreux. It was the anniversary of
the death of the Duke d’Orleans. The King had chosen this day to put the
coffins of his relatives in the family vault in order.

Among the number was a coffin that contained all the bones of the
princes of the House of Orleans that the Duchess d’Orleans, mother
of the King, had been able to collect after the Revolution, when the
sepulchre was violated and they were dispersed. The coffin, placed in a
separate vault, had recently been smashed in by the fall of an arch.
The debris of the arch, stones and plaster, had become mingled with the
bones.

The King had the coffin brought and opened before him. He was alone
in the vault with the chaplain and two aides-de-camp. Another coffin,
larger and stronger, had been prepared. The King himself, with his own
hands, took, one after the other, the bones of his ancestors from the
broken coffin and arranged them carefully in the new one. He would not
permit any one else to touch them. From time to time he counted the
skulls and said: “This is Monsieur the Duke de Penthièvre. This is
Monsieur the Count de Beaujolais.” Then to the best of his ability and
as far as he was able to he completed each group of bones.

This ceremony lasted from nine o’clock in the morning until seven
o’clock in the evening without the King taking either rest or
nourishment.




August, 1844.

Yesterday, the 15th, after having dined at M. Villemain’s, who lives in
a country house near Neuilly, I called upon the King.

The King was not in the salon, where there were only the Queen, Madame
Adelaide and a few ladies, among them Mme. Firmin-Rogier, who is
charming. There were many visitors, among others the Duke de Brogue and
M. Rossi, who were of the dinner party at which I had been present, M.
de Lesseps, who lately distinguished himself as consul at Barcelona, M.
Firmin-Rogier and the Count d’Agout.

I bowed to the Queen, who spoke to me at length about the Princess de
Joinvile, who was delivered the day before yesterday, and whose baby
arrived on the very day the news of the bombardment of Tangier by its
father was received. It is a little girl. The Princess de Joinvile
passes the whole day kissing her and saying: “How pretty she is!” with
that sweet southern accent which the raillery of her brothers-in-law has
not yet caused her to lose.

While I was talking to the Queen, the Duchess d’Orleans, dressed in
black, came in and sat beside Madame Adelaide, who said to her: “Good
evening, dear Helene.”

A moment afterwards, M. Guizot, in black, wearing a chain of
decorations, with a red ribbon in his buttonhole and the badge of the
Legion of Honour on his coat, and looking pale and grave, crossed the
salon. I grasped his hand as he passed and he said:

“I have sought you vainly during the past few days. Come and spend a day
with me in the country. We have a lot to talk about. I am at Auteuil,
No. 4, Place d’Agueneau.”

“Will the King come to-night?” I asked.

“I do not think so,” he replied. “He is with Admiral de Mackau. There is
serious news. He will be occupied all the evening.”

Then M. Guizot went away.

It was nearly ten o’clock, and I also was about to take my departure
when one of Madame Adelaide’s ladies of honour, sent by the Princess,
came and told me that the King desired to speak with me and requested
that I would remain. I returned to the salon, which had become almost
empty.

A moment later, as ten o’clock was striking, the King came in. He wore
no decorations and had a preoccupied air. As he passed by he said to me:

“Wait until I have gone my round; we shall have a little more time when
everybody has left. There are only four persons here now and I have only
four words to say to them.”

In truth, he only tarried a moment with the Prussian Ambassador and
M. de Lesseps, who had to communicate to him a letter from Alexandria
relative to the strange abdication of the Pacha of Egypt.

Everybody took leave, and then the King came to me, thrust his arm in
mine and led me into the large anteroom where he seated himself, and
bade me be seated, upon a red lounge which is between two doors opposite
the fireplace. Then he began to talk rapidly, energetically, as though a
weight were being lifted from his mind:

“Monsieur Hugo, I am pleased to see you. What do you think of it all?
All this is grave, yet it appears graver than it really is. But in
politics, I know, one has sometimes to take as much into account that
which appears grave as that which is grave. We made a mistake in taking
this confounded protectorate. * We thought we were doing something
popular for France, and we have done something embarrassing for the
world. The popular effect was mediocre; the embarrassing effect is
enormous. What did we want to hamper ourselves with Tahiti (the King
pronounced it Taëte) for? What to us was this pinch of tobacco seeds
in the middle of the ocean? What is the use of lodging our honour four
thousand leagues away in the box of a sentry insulted by a savage and a
madman? Upon the whole there is something laughable about it. When all
is said and done it is a small matter and nothing big will come of it.
Sir Robert Peel has spoken thoughtlessly. He has acted with schoolboy
foolishness. He has diminished his consideration in Europe. He is a
serious man, but capable of committing thoughtless acts. Then he does
not know any languages. Unless he be a genius there are perforce gaps in
the ideas of a man who is not a linguist. Now, Sir Robert has no genius.
Would you believe it? He does not know French. Consequently he does
not understand anything about France. French ideas pass before him like
shadows. He is not malevolent, no; he is not open, that is all. He has
spoken without reflection. I judged him to be what he is forty years
ago. It was, too, forty years ago that I saw him for the first time.
He was then a young man and secretary of the Earl of--(I did not quite
catch the name. The King spoke quickly). I often visited that house. I
was then in England. When I saw young Peel I felt sure that he would
go a long way, but that he would stop. Was I mistaken? There are
Englishmen, and of the highest rank, who do not understand Frenchmen a
bit. Like that poor Duke of Clarence, who afterwards was William IV. He
was but a sailor. One must beware of the sailor mind, as I often say to
my son Joinville. He who is only a sailor is nothing on land. Well,
this Duke of Clarence used to say to me: ‘Duke d’Orleans, a war between
France and England is necessary every twenty years. History shows it.’
I would reply: ‘My dear duke, of what use are people of intelligence if
they allow mankind to do the same foolish things over and over again?’
The Duke of Clarence, like Peel, did not know a word of French.

     * The protectorate of Tahiti.

“What a difference between these men and Huskisson! You know, Huskisson
who was killed on a railway. He was a masterly man, if you like. He knew
French and liked France. He had been my comrade at the Jacobins’ Club. I
do not say this in bad part. He understood everything. If there were
in England now a man like him, he and I would ensure the peace of the
world.--Monsieur Hugo, we will do it without him. I will do it alone.
Sir Robert Peel will reconsider what he has said. Egad! he said that!
Does he even know why or how?

“Have you seen the English Parliament? You speak from your place,
standing, in the midst of your own party; you are carried away; you
say more often than not what others think instead of what you think
yourself. There is a magnetic communication. You are subjected to it.
You rise (here the King rose and imitated the gesture of an orator
speaking in Parliament). The assembly ferments all round and close
to you; you let yourself go. On this side somebody says: ‘England has
suffered a gross insult;’ and on that side: ‘with gross indignity.’ It
is simply applause that is sought on both sides. Nothing more. But this
is bad. It is dangerous. It is baleful. In France our tribune which
isolates the orator has many advantages.

“Of all the English statesmen, I have known only one who was able to
withstand this influence of assemblies. He was M. Pitt. M. Pitt was a
clever man, although he was very tall. He had an air of awkwardness
and spoke hesitatingly. His lower jaw weighed a hundredweight. Hence
a certain slowness which forcibly brought prudence into his speeches.
Besides, what a statesman this Pitt was! They will render justice to
him one of these days, even in France. Pitt and Coburg are still being
harped upon. But it is a childish foolishness that will pass. M. Pitt
knew French. To carry on politics properly we must have Englishmen who
know French and Frenchmen who know English.

“Look here, I am going to England next month. I shall be very well
received: I speak English. And then, Englishmen appreciate the fact that
I have studied them closely enough not to detest them. For one always
begins by detesting the English. This is an effect of the surface. I
esteem them, and pride myself upon the fact. Between ourselves, there
is one thing I apprehend in going to England, and that is, a too warm
welcome. I shall have to elude an ovation. Popularity there would render
me unpopular here. But I must not get myself badly received either.
Badly received there, taunted here. Oh! it is not easy to move when one
is Louis Philippe, is it, Monsieur Hugo?

“However, I will endeavour to manage it better than that big stupid
the Emperor of Russia, who went riding full gallop in search of a fall.
There is an addle-pate for you. What a simpleton! He is nothing but a
Russian corporal, occupied with a boot-heel and a gaiter button. What an
idea to arrive in London on the eve of the Polish ball! Do you think I
would go to England on the eve of the anniversary of Waterloo? What is
the use of running deliberately into trouble? Nations do not derange
their ideas for us princes.

“Monsieur Hugo! Monsieur Hugo! intelligent princes are very rare. Look
at this Pacha of Egypt, who had a bright mind and who abdicates, like
Charles V., who, although he was not without genius, committed the same
foolish action. Look at this idiotic King of Morocco! What a job to
govern amid this mob of bewildered Kings. They won’t force me into
committing the great mistake of going to war. I am being pushed, but
they won’t push me over. Listen to this and remember it: the secret of
maintaining peace is to look at everything from the good side and at
nothing from the bad point of view. Oh! Sir Robert Peel is a singular
man to speak so wildly. He does not know all our strength. He does not
reflect!

“The Prince of Prussia made a very true remark to my daughter at
Brussels last winter: ‘What we envy France, is Algeria. Not on account
of the territory, but on account of the war. It is a great and rare
good fortune for France to have at her doors a war that does not trouble
Europe and which is making an army for her. We as yet have only review
and parade soldiers. When a collision occurs we shall only have soldiers
who have been made by peace. France, thanks to Algiers, will have
soldiers made by war.’ This is what the Prince of Prussia said, and it
was true.

“Meanwhile, we are making children, too. Last month it was my daughter
of Nemours, this month it is my daughter of Joinville. She has given me
a princess. I would have preferred a prince. But, pish! in view of the
fact that they are trying to isolate my house among the royal houses of
Europe future alliances must be thought of. Well, my grandchildren will
marry among themselves. This little one who was born yesterday will not
lack cousins, nor, consequently, a husband.”

Here the King laughed, and I rose. He had spoken almost without
interruption for an hour and a quarter. I had only said a few words here
and there. During this sort of long monologue Madame Adelaide passed as
she retired to her apartments. The King said to her: “I will join you
directly,” and he continued his conversation with me. It was nearly
half-past eleven when I quitted the King.


It was during this conversation that the King said to me:

“Have you ever been to England?”

“No, sire.”

“Well, when you do go--for you will go--you will see how strange it
is. It resembles France in nothing. Over there are order, arrangement,
symmetry, cleanliness, wellmown lawns, and profound silence in the
streets. The passers-by are as serious and mute as spectres. When, being
French and alive, you speak in the street, these spectres look back at
you and murmur with an inexpressible mixture of gravity and disdain:
‘French people!’ When I was in London I was walking arm-in-arm with my
wife and sister. We were conversing, not in a too loud tone of voice,
for we are well-bred persons, you know; yet all the passers-by,
bourgeois and men of the people, turned to gaze at us and we could hear
them growling behind us: ‘French people! French people!’”




September 5, 1844.

The King rose, paced to and fro for a few moments, as though violently
agitated, then came and sat beside me and said:


“Look here, you made a remark to Villemain that he repeated to me. You
said to him:

“‘The trouble between France and England a propos of Tahiti and
Pritchard reminds me of a quarrel in a café between a couple of
sub-lieutenants, one of whom has looked at the other in a way the latter
does not like. A duel to the death is the result. But two great nations
ought not to act like a couple of musketeers. Besides, in a duel to the
death between two nations like England and France, it is civilization
that would be slain.’

“This is really what you said, is it not?”

“Yes, Sire.”

“I was greatly struck by your observation, and this very evening I
reproduced it in a letter to a crowned head, for I frequently write
all night long. I pass many a night doing over again what others have
undone. I do not say anything about it. So far from being grateful to me
they would only abuse me for it. Oh! yes, mine is hard work indeed.
At my age, with my seventy-one years, I do not get an instant of real
repose either by day or by night. I am always unquiet, and how can it be
otherwise when I feel that I am the pivot upon which Europe revolves?”




September 6, 1844.

The King said to me yesterday:

“What makes the maintenance of peace so difficult is that there are two
things in Europe that Europe detests, France and myself--myself even
more than France. I am talking to you in all frankness. They hate me
because I am Orleans; they hate me because I am myself. As for France,
they dislike her, but would tolerate her in other hands. Napoleon was a
burden to them; they overthrew him by egging him on to war of which he
was so fond. I am a burden to them; they would like to throw me down by
forcing me to break that peace which I love.”

Then he covered his eyes with his hands, and leaning his head back upon
the cushions of the sofa, remained thus for a space pensive, and as
though crushed.




September 6, 1844.

“I only met Robespierre in society once,” said the King to me. “It was
at a place called Mignot, near Poissy, which still exists. It belonged
to a wealthy cloth manufacturer of Louviers, named M. Decréteau. It
was in ninety-one or two. M. Decréteau one day invited me to dinner
at Mignot. I went. When the time came we took our places at table. The
other guests were Robespierre and Pétion, but I had never before seen
Robespierre. Mirabeau aptly traced his portrait in a word when he said
that his face was suggestive of that of ‘a cat drinking vinegar.’ He was
very gloomy, and hardly spoke. When he did let drop a word from time to
time, it was uttered sourly and with reluctance. He seemed to be vexed
at having come, and because I was there.

“In the middle of the dinner, Pétion, addressing M. Decréteau,
exclaimed: ‘My dear host, you must get this buck married!’ He pointed to
Robespierre.

“‘What do you mean, Pétion?’ retorted Robespierre.

“‘Mean,’ said Pétion, ‘why, that you must get married. I insist upon
marrying you. You are full of sourness, hypochondria, gall, bad humour,
biliousness and atrabiliousness I am fearful of all this on our account.
What you want is a woman to sweeten this sourness and transform you into
an easy-going old fogey.’

“Robespierre tossed his head and tried to smile, but only succeeded in
making a grimace. It was the only time,” repeated the King, “that I
met Robespierre in society. After that I saw him in the tribune of the
Convention. He was wearisome to a supreme degree, spoke slowly, heavily
and at length, and was more sour, more gloomy, more bitter than ever. It
was easy to see that Pétion had not married him.”




September 7, 1844.

Said the King to me last Thursday:

“M. Guizot has great qualities and immense defects. (Queerly enough,
M. Guizot on Tuesday had made precisely the same remark to me about the
King, beginning with the defects.) M. Guizot has in the highest degree,
and I esteem him for it profoundly, the courage of his unpopularity
among his adversaries; among his friends he lacks it. He does not know
how to quarrel momentarily with his partisans, which was Pitt’s great
art. In the affair of Tahiti, as in that of the right of search, M.
Guizot is not afraid of the Opposition, nor of the press, nor of the
Radicals, nor of the Carlists, nor of the Legitimists, nor of the
hundred thousand howlers in the hundred thousand public squares of
France; he is afraid of Jacques Lefebvre. What will Jacques Lefebvre
say? And Jacques Lefebvre is afraid of the Twelfth Arrondissement. * What
will the Twelfth Arrondissement say? The Twelfth Arrondissement does not
like the English: we must stand firm against the English; but it does
not like war: we must give way to the English. Stand firm and give way.
Reconcile that. The Twelfth Arrondissement governs Jacques Lefebvre,
Jacques Lefebvre governs Guizot; a little more and the Twelfth
Arrondissement will govern France. I say to Guizot: ‘What are you afraid
of? Have a little pluck. Have an opinion.’ But there they all stand,
pale and motionless and make no reply. Oh! fear! Monsieur Hugo, it is a
strange thing, this fear of the hubbub that will be raised outside!
It seizes upon this one, then that one, then that one, and it goes the
round of the table. I am not a Minister, but if I were, it seems to
me that I should not be afraid. I should see the right and go straight
towards it. And what greater aim could there be than civilization
through peace?”

     * Twelfth District of Paris.



The Duke d’Orleans, a few years ago, recounted to me that during the
period which followed immediately upon the revolution of July, the King
gave him a seat at his council table. The young Prince took part in the
deliberations of the Ministers. One day M. Merilhou, who was Minister of
Justice, fell asleep while the King was speaking.

“Chartres,” said the King to his son, “wake up Monsieur the Keeper of
the Seals.”

The Duke d’Orleans obeyed. He was seated next to M. Merilhou, and nudged
him gently with his elbow. The Minister was sleeping soundly; the Prince
recommenced, but the Minister slept on. Finally the Prince laid his hand
upon M. Merilhou’s knee. The Minister awoke with a start and exclaimed:

“Leave off, Sophie, you are tickling me!”

This is how the word “subject” came to be eliminated from the preamble
of laws and ordinances.

M. Dupont de l’Eure, in 1830, was Minister of Justice. On August 7, the
very day the Duke d’Orleans took the oath as King, M. Dupont de l’Eure
laid before him a law to sign. The preamble read: “Be it known and
decreed to all our subjects,” etc. The clerk who was instructed to copy
the law, a hot-headed young fellow, objected to the word “subjects,” and
did not copy it.

The Minister of Justice arrived. The young man was employed in his
office.

“Well,” said the Minister, “is the copy ready to be taken to the King
for signature?”

“No, Monsieur the Minister,” replied the clerk.

Explanations. M. Dupont de l’Eure listened, then pinching the young
man’s ear said, half smilingly, half angrily:

“Nonsense, Monsieur the Republican, you just copy it at once.”

The clerk hung his head, like a clerk that he was, and copied it.

M. Dupont, however, laughingly told the King about it. The King did not
laugh. Everything appeared to be a serious matter at that time. M. Dupin
senior, Minister without a portfolio, had entered the council chamber.
He avoided the use of the word and got round the obstacle. He proposed
this wording, which was agreed to and has always been used since: “Be it
known and decreed to all.”




1847.

The State carriage of Louis Philippe was a big blue coach drawn by eight
horses. The interior was of gold coloured damask. On the doors was the
King’s monogram surmounted by a crown, and on the panels were royal
crowns. The roof was bordered by eight little silver crowns. There was
a gigantic coachman on the box and three lackeys behind. All wore silk
stockings and the tri-colour livery of the d’Orleans.

The King would enter the carriage first and seat himself in the right
hand corner. Then the Duke de Nemours would take his place beside the
King. The three other princes would follow and seat themselves, M. de
Joinville opposite the King, M. de Montpensier opposite M. de Nemours,
and M. d’Aumale in the middle.

The day the King attended Parliament, the grand deputations from both
Houses, twelve peers and twenty-five deputies chosen by lot, awaited
him on the grand staircase of the Palais Bourbon. As the sessions were
nearly always held in winter, it was very cold on the stairs, a biting
wind made all these old men shiver, and there are old generals of the
Empire who did not die as the result of having been at Austerlitz,
at Friedland, at the cemetery at Eylau, at the storming of the grand
redoubt at Moskowa and under the fire of the Scottish squares at
Waterloo, but of having waited in the cold upon these stairs.

The peers stood to the right and the deputies to the left, leaving
the middle of the stairs clear. The staircase was partitioned off with
hangings of white drill with blue stripes, which was a poor protection
against draughts. Where are the good and magnificent tapestries of Louis
XIV. They were indeed royal; wherefore they were taken down. Drill is
a common material and more pleasing to the deputies. It charms and it
freezes them.

The Queen arrived first with the princesses, but without the Duchess
d’Orleans, who came separately with the Count de Paris. These ladies
walked quickly upstairs, bowing to right and left, without speaking, but
graciously, followed by a swarm of aides-de-camp and grim turbaned
old women whom M. de Joinville called “the Queen’s Turks”--Mmes. de
Dolokieu, de Chanaleilles, etc.

At the royal session of 1847, the Queen gave her arm to the Duchess de
Montpensier. The princess was muffled up on account of the cold. I
could see only a big red nose. The three other princesses walked behind,
chatting and laughing. M. Anatole de Montesquiou came next in the much
worn uniform of a major-general.

The King arrived about five minutes after the Queen; he walked upstairs
even more quickly than she had done, followed by the princes running
like schoolboys, and bowed to the peers on the right and the deputies
on the left. He tarried a moment in the throne-room and exchanged a few
greetings with the members of the two deputations. Then he entered the
large hall.

The speech from the throne was written on parchment, on both sides of
the sheet, and usually filled four pages. The King read it in a firm,
well modulated voice.

Marshal Soult was present, resplendent with decorations, sashes,
and gold lace, and complaining of his rheumatism. M. Pasquier, the
Chancellor, did not put in an appearance. He had excused himself on the
plea of the cold and of his eighty years. He had been present the year
before. It was the last time.



In 1847 I was a member of the grand deputation. While I strolled about
the waiting room, conversing with M. Villemain about Cracow, the Vienna
treaties and the frontier of the Rhine, I could hear the buzzing of the
groups around me, and scraps of conversation reached my ears.

COUNT DE LAGRANGE.--Ah! here comes the Marshal (Soult).

BARON PEDRE LACAZE.--He is getting old.

VISCOUNT CAVAIGNAC.--Sixty-nine years!

MARQUIS DR RAIGECOURT.--Who is the dean of the Chamber of Peers at
present?

DUKE DE TREVISE.--M. de Pontecoulant, is he not?

MARQUIS DE LAPLACE.--NO, President Boyer. He is ninety-two.

PRESIDENT BARTHE.--He is older than that.

BARON D’OBERLIN.--He no longer comes to the Chamber.

M. VIENNET.--They say that M. Rossi is returning from Rome.

DUKE DE FESENZAC.--Well, I pity him for quitting Rome. It is the finest
and most amiable city in the world. I hope to end my days there.

COUNT DE MONTALEMBERT.--And Naples!

BARON THENARD.--I prefer Naples.

M. FULCHIRON.--Yes, Naples, that’s the place. By the by, I was there
when poor Nourrit killed himself. I was staying in the house next to
his.

BARON CHARLES DUPIN.--He took his life? It was not an accident?

M. FULCHIRON.--Oh! it was a case of suicide, sure enough. He had been
hissed the previous day. He could not stand that. It was in an opera
composed expressly for him--“Polyceucte.” He threw himself from a height
of sixty feet. His voice did not please that particular public. Nourrit
was too much accustomed to sing Glück and Mozart. The Neapolitans said
of him: “Vecchico canto.”

BARON DUPIN.--Poor Nourrit! why did he not wait! Duprez has lost his
voice. Eleven years ago Duprez demolished Nourrit; to-day Nourrit would
demolish Duprez.

MARQUIS DE BOISSY.--How cold it is on this staircase.

COUNT PHILIPPE DE SEGUR.--It was even colder at the Academy the other
day. That poor Dupaty is a good man, but he made a bad speech.

BARON FEUTRIER.--I am trying to warm myself. What a frightful draught!
It is enough to drive one away.

BARON CHARLES DUPIN.--M. Français de Nantes had conceived this expedient
to rid himself of those who came to solicit favours and abridge their
solicitations: he was given to receiving people between two doors.

M. Thiers at this time had a veritable court of deputies about him.
After the session he walked out in front of me. A gigantic deputy, whose
back only I could see, stepped aside, saying: “Make way for historical
men!” And the big man let the little man pass.

Historical? May be. In what way?




II. THE DUCHESS D’ORLEANS.



Madame the Duchess d’Orleans is a rare woman, of great wit and common
sense. I do not think that she is fully appreciated at the Tuileries.
The King, though, holds her in high esteem and often engages in long
conversations with her. Frequently he gives her his arm to escort
her from the family drawing-room to her apartments. The royal
daughters-in-law do not always appear to act as kindly towards her.




February 26, 1844.

Yesterday the Duchess d’Orleans said to me:

“My son is not what one would call an amiable child. He is not one of
those pretty little prodigies who are an honour to their mothers, and of
whom people say: ‘What a clever child! What wit! What grace!’ He has a
kind heart, I know; he has wit, I believe; but nobody knows and believes
this save myself. He is timid, wild, uncommunicative, easily scared.
What will he become? I have no idea. Often at his age a child in his
position understands that he must make himself agreeable, and, little as
he is, sets himself to play his role. Mine hides himself in his mother’s
skirt and lowers his eyes. But I love him, just as he is. I even prefer
him this way. I like a savage better than a comedian.”




August, 1844.

The Count de Paris has signed the birth certificate of the Princess
Françoise de Joinville. It was the first time that the little prince had
signed his name. He did not know what was wanted of him, and when the
King handed him the certificate and said “Paris, sign your name,” the
child refused. The Duchess d’Orleans took him on her knee and whispered
something to him. Then the child took the pen, and at the dictation of
his grandfather wrote upon the certificate L. P. d. O. He made the O
much too large and wrote the other letters awkwardly, and was very much
embarrassed and shy.

He is charming, though, and adores his mother, but he hardly knows that
his name is Louis Philippe d’Orleans. He writes to his comrades, to his
tutor, and to his mother, but he signs his little missives “Paris.” It
is the only name he knows himself by.

This evening the King sent for M. Regnier, the prince’s tutor, and gave
him orders to teach the Count de Paris to sign his name.




1847.

The Count de Paris is of a grave and sweet disposition; he learns well.
He is imbued with a natural tenderness, and is kind to those who suffer.

His young cousin of Wurtemberg, who is two months older, is jealous of
him; as his mother, the Princess Marie, was jealous of the mother of
the Count de Paris. During the lifetime of the Duke d’Orleans little
Wurtemberg was long the object of the Queen’s preferences, and, in the
little court of the corridors and bedchambers, it was the custom to
flatter the Queen by comparisons between the one and the other that were
always favourable to Wurtemberg. To-day that inequality has ceased.
The Queen, by a touching sentiment, inclined towards little Wurtemberg
because he had lost his mother; now there is no reason why she should
not lean towards the Count de Paris, seeing that he has lost his father.

Little Michel Ney plays with the two princes every Sunday. He is eleven
years old, and the son of the Duke d’Elchingen. The other day he said to
his mother:

“Wurtemberg is an ambitious fellow. When we play he always wants to be
the leader. Besides, he insists upon being called Monseigneur. I don’t
mind calling him Monseigneur, but I won’t let him be leader. One day I
invented a game, and I said to him: ‘No, Monseigneur, you are not
going to be the leader. I will be leader, for I invented the game, and
Chabannes will be my lieutenant. You and the Count de Paris will be
soldiers.’ Paris was willing, but Wurtemberg walked away. He is an
ambitious fellow.”

Of these young mothers of the Château, apart from the Duchess d’Orleans,
Mme. de Joinville is the only one who does not spoil her children.
At the Tuileries, everybody, even the King himself, calls her little
daughter “Chiquette.” The Prince of Joinville calls his wife “Chicarde”
 since the pierrots’ ball, hence “Chiquette.” At this pierrots’ ball
the King exclaimed: “How Chicarde is amusing herself!” The Prince de
Joinville danced all the risquée dances. Mme. de Montpensier and Mme.
Liadères were the only ones who were not decolletees. “It is not in good
taste,” said the Queen. “But it is pretty,” observed the King.




III. THE PRINCES. 1847.



At the Tuileries the Prince de Joinville passes his time doing all
sorts of wild things. One day he turned on all the taps and flooded the
apartments. Another day he cut all the bell ropes. A sign that he is
bored and does not know what to do with himself.

And what bores these poor princes most is to receive and talk to people
ceremoniously. This is almost a daily obligation. They call it--for
princes have their slang--“performing the function.” The Duke de
Montpensier is the only one who performs it gracefully. One day the
Duchess d’Orleans asked him the reason. He replied: “It amuses me.”

He is twenty years old, he is beginning.

When the marriage of M. de Montpensier with the Infanta was published,
the King of the Belgians was sulky with the Tuileries. He is an Orleans,
but he is a Coburg. It was as though his left hand had smitten his right
cheek.

The wedding over, while the young couple were making their way from
Madrid to Paris, King Leopold arrived at Saint Cloud, where King Louis
Philippe was staying. The King of the Belgians wore an air of coldness
and severity. Louis Philippe, after dinner, took him aside into a recess
of the Queen’s drawing-room, and they conversed for fully an hour.
Leopold’s face preserved its thoughtful and *English* expression.
However at the conclusion of the conversation, Louis Philippe said to
him:

“See Guizot.”

“He is precisely the man I do not want to see.”

“See him,” urged the King. “We will resume this conversation when you
have done so.”

The next day M. Guizot waited upon King Leopold. He had with him an
enormous portfolio filled with papers. The King received him. His manner
was cold in the extreme. Both were reserved. It is probable that M.
Guizot communicated to the King of the Belgians all the documents
relative to the marriage and all the diplomatic papers. No one knows
what passed between them. What is certain is that when M. Guizot left
the King’s room Leopold’s air was gracious, though sad, and that he
was heard to say to the Minister as he took leave of him: “I came here
greatly dissatisfied with you. I shall go away satisfied. You have,
in fact, in this affair acquired a new title to my esteem and to our
gratitude. I intended to scold you; I thank you.”

These were the King’s own words.



The Prince de Joinville’s deafness increases. Sometimes it saddens him,
sometimes he makes light of it. One day he said to me: “Speak louder, I
am as deaf as a post.” On another occasion he bent towards me and said
with a laugh:

“_J’abaisse le pavillion de l’oreille._”

“It is the only one your highness will ever lower,” I replied.

M. de Joinville is of somewhat queer disposition. Now he is joyous to
the point of folly, anon gloomy as a hypochondriac. He is silent for
three days at a time, or his bursts of laughter are heard in the very
attics of the Tuileries. When he is on a voyage he rises at four o’clock
in the morning, wakes everybody up and performs his duties as a
sailor conscientiously. It is as though he were to win his epaulettes
afterwards.

He loves France and feels all that touches her. This explains his fits
of moodiness. Since he cannot talk as he wants to, he keeps his thoughts
to himself, and this sours him, He has spoken more than once, however,
and bravely. He was not listened to and he was not heeded. “They needn’t
talk about me,” he said to me one day, “it is they who are deaf!”

Unlike the late Duke d’Orleans, he has no princely coquettishness, which
is such a victorious grace, and has no desire to appear agreeable. He
rarely seeks to please individuals. He loves the nation, the country,
his profession, the sea. His manner is frank, he has a taste for noisy
pleasures, a fine appearance, a handsome face, with a kind heart, and
a few feats of arms to his credit that have been exaggerated; he is
popular.

M. de Nemours is just the contrary. At court they say: “There is
something unlucky about the Duke de Nemours.”

M. de Montpensier has the good sense to love, to esteem and to honour
profoundly the Duchess d’Orleans.

The other day there was a masked and costumed ball, but only for the
family and the intimate court circle--the princesses and ladies of
honour. M. de Joinville appeared all in rags, in complete Chicard
costume. He was extravagantly gay and danced a thousand unheard-of
dances. These capers, prohibited elsewhere, rendered the Queen
thoughtful. “Wherever did he learn all this?” she asked, and added:
“What naughty dances! Fie!” Then she murmured: “How graceful he is!”

Mme. de Joinville was dressed as a bargee and affected the manner of a
street gamin. She likes to go to those places that the court detests the
most, *the theatres and concerts of the boulevards*.

The other day she greatly shocked Mme. de Hall, the wife of an admiral,
who is a Protestant and Puritan, by asking her: “Madame, have you seen
the “Closerie des Genêts”?”



The Prince de Joinville had imagined a nuisance that exasperated the
Queen. He procured an old barrel organ somewhere, and would enter her
apartments playing it and singing in a hoarse, grating voice. The Queen
laughed at first. But it lasted a quarter of an hour, half an hour.
“Joinville, stop it!” He continued to grind away. “Joinville, go away!”
 The prince, driven out of one door, entered by another with his organ,
his songs and his hoarseness. Finally the Queen fled to the King’s
apartments.

The Duchess d’Aumale did not speak French very fluently; but as soon as
she began to speak Italian, the Italian of Naples, she thrilled like a
fish that falls back into the water, and gesticulated with Neapolitan
verve. “Put your hands in your pockets,” the Duke d’Aumale would say to
her. “I shall have to have your hands tied. Why do you gesticulate like
that?”

“I didn’t notice it,” the princess would reply.

“That is true, she doesn’t notice it,” said the Prince to me one day.
“You wouldn’t believe it, but my mother, who is so dignified, so cold,
so reserved when she is speaking French, begins gesticulating like
Punchinello when by chance she speaks Neapolitan.”

The Duke de Montpensier salutes passers-by graciously and gaily. The
Duke d’Aumale does not salute more often than he is compelled to; at
Neuilly they say he is afraid of ruffling his hair. The Duke de
Nemours manifests less eagerness than the Duke de Montpensier and
less negligence than the Duke d’Aumale; moreover, women say that when
saluting them he looks at them in a most embarrassing way.



Donizetti’s “Elixir of Love” was performed at court on February 5, 1847,
by the Italian singers, the Persiani, Mario, Tagliafico. Ronconi acted
(acted is the word, for he acted very well) the role of Dulcamara,
usually represented by Lablache. It was in the matter of size, but
not of talent, a giant in the place of a dwarf. The decoration of the
theatre at the Tuileries was then still the same as it had been in the
time of the Empire--designs in gold on a grey background, the ensemble
being cold and pale.

There were few pretty women present. Mme. Cuvillier-Floury was the
prettiest; Mme. V. H. the most handsome. The men were in uniform or
full evening dress. Two officers of the Empire were conspicuous in their
uniforms of that period. Count Dutaillis, a one-armed soldier of the
Empire, wore the old uniform of a general of division, embroidered
with oak leaves to the facings. The big straight collar reached to his
occiput; his star of the Legion of Honour was all dented; his embroidery
was rusty and dull. Count de Lagrange, an old beau, wore a white
spangled waistcoat, black silk breeches, white, or rather pink,
stockings; shoes with buckles on them, a sword at his side, a black
dress coat, and a peer’s hat with white plumes in it. Count Dutaillis
was a greater success than Count de Lagrange. The one recalled Monaco
and Trenitz; the other recalled Wagram.

M. Thiers, who the previous day had made a somewhat poor speech, carried
opposition to the point of wearing a black cravat.

The Duchess de Montpensier, who had attained her fifteenth birthday
eight days before, wore a large crown of diamonds and looked very
pretty. M. de Joinville was absent. The three other princes were there
in lieutenant-general’s uniform with the star and grand cordon of the
Legion of Honour. M. de Montpensier alone wore the order of the Golden
Fleece.

Mme. Ronconi, a handsome person, but of a wild and savage beauty, was in
a small box on the stage, in rear of the proscenium. She attracted much
attention.

There was no applause, which chilled the singers and everybody else.

Five minutes before the piece terminated the King began to pack up. He
folded his programme and put it in his pocket, then he wiped the glasses
of his opera-glass, closed it up carefully, looked round for the case
which he had laid on his chair, placed the glass in it and adjusted
the hooks very scrupulously. There was a good deal of character in his
methodical manner.

M. de Rambuteau was there. His latest “rambutisms” (the word was Alexis
de Saint-Priest’s) were recounted among the audience. It was said that
on the last day of the year M. de Rambuteau wrote on his card: “M.
de Rambuteau et Venus,” or as a variation: “M. de Rambuteau, Venus en
personne.”



Wednesday, February 24, the Duke de Nemours gave a concert at the
Tuileries. The singers were Mlle. Grisi, Mme. Persiani, a Mme. Corbari,
Mario, Lablache and Ronconi. M. Aubert, who conducted, did not put any
of his own music on the programme: Rossini, Mozart, and Donizetti, that
was all.

The guests arrived at half-past eight. The Duke de Nemours lives on
the first floor of the Pavilion de Marsan, over the apartments of the
Duchess d’Orleans. The guests waited in a first salon until the doors of
the grand salon were opened, the women seated, the men standing. As soon
as the prince and princess appeared the doors were thrown wide open and
everybody went in. This grand salon is a very fine room. The ceiling is
evidently of the time of Louis XIV. The wails are hung with green damask
striped with gold. The inner window curtains are of red damask. The
furniture is in green and gold damask. The ensemble is royal.

The King and Queen of the Belgians were at this concert. The Duke de
Nemours entered with the Queen, his sister, upon his arm, the King
giving his arm to the Duchess de Nemours. Mmes. d’Aumale and de
Montpensier followed. The Queen of the Belgians resembles the Queen of
the French, save in the matter of age. She wore a sky-blue toque, Mme.
d’Aumale a wreath of roses, Mme. de Montpensier a diadem of diamonds,
Mme. de Nemours her golden hair. The four princesses sat in high-backed
chairs opposite the piano; all the other women sat behind them; the men
were in the rear, filling the doorway and the first salon. The King of
the Belgians has a rather handsome and grave face, and a delicate and
agreeable smile; he was seated to the left of the princesses.

The Duke de Brogue sat on his left. Next to the Duke were Count Mole and
M. Dupin senior. M. de Salvandy, seeing an empty chair to the right of
the King, seated himself upon it. All five wore the red sash, including
M. Dupin. These four men about the King of the Belgians represented the
old military nobility, the parliamentary aristocracy, the pettifogging
bourgeoisie, and moonshine literature; that is to say, a little of what
France possesses that is illustrious, and a little of what she possesses
that is ridiculous.

MM. d’Aumale and de Montpensier were to the right in the recess of a
window with the Duke of Wurtemberg, whom they called their “brother
Alexander.” All the princes wore the grand cordon and star of Leopold
in honour of the King of the Belgians; MM. de Nemours and de Montpensier
also wore the Golden Fleece. The Fleece of M. de Montpensier was of
diamonds, and magnificent.

The Italian singers sang standing by the piano. When seated they
occupied chairs with wooden backs.

The Prince de Joinville was absent, as was also his wife. It was
said that lately he was the hero of a love affair. M. de Joinville is
prodigiously strong. I heard a big lackey behind me say: “I shouldn’t
care to receive a slap from him.” While he was strolling to his
rendezvous M. de Joinville thought he noticed that he was being
followed. He turned back, went up to the fellow and struck him.

After the first part of the concert MM. d’Aumale and de Montpensier came
into the other salon where I had taken refuge with Théophile Gautier,
and we chatted for fully an hour. The two princes spoke to me at length
about literary matters, about “Les Burgraves,” “Ruy Blas,” “Lucrèce
Borgia,” Mme. Halley, Mlle. Georges, and Frédérick Lemaitre. Also a good
deal about Spain, the royal wedding, bull-fights, hand-kissings,
and etiquette, that M. de Montpensier “detests.” “The Spaniards love
royalty,” he added, “and especially etiquette. In politics as in
religion they are bigots rather than believers. They were greatly
shocked during the wedding fetes because the Queen one day dared to
venture out afoot!”

MM. d’Aumale and de Montpensier are charming young men, bright, gay,
gracious, witty, sincere, full of that ease that communicates itself to
others. They have a fine air. They are princes; they are perhaps men of
intellect. M. de Nemours is embarrassed and embarrassing. When he comes
towards you with his blond whiskers, his blue eyes, his red sash, his
white waistcoat and his melancholy air he perturbs you. He never looks
you in the face. He always casts about for something to say and never
knows what he does say.




November 5, 1847.

Four years ago the Duke d’Aumale was in barracks at Courbevoie with the
17th, of which he was then colonel. During the summer, in the morning,
after the manoeuvres which took place at Neuilly, he frequently strolled
back along the river bank, alone, his hands behind his back. Nearly
every day he happened upon a pretty girl named Adele Protat, who every
morning went from Courbevoie to Neuilly and returned at the same hour
as M. d’Aumale. The young girl noticed the young officer in undress
uniform, but was not aware that he was a prince. At length they struck
up an acquaintance, and walked and chatted together. Under the influence
of the sun, the flowers, and the fine mornings something very much like
love sprang up between them. Adele Protat thought she had to do with a
captain at the most. He said to her: “Come and see me at Courbevoie.”
 She refused. Feebly.

One evening she was passing near Neuilly in a boat. Two young men were
bathing. She recognized her officer.

“There is the Duke d’Aumale,” said the boatman.

“Really!” said she, and turned pale.

The next day she had ceased to love him. She had seen him naked, and
knew that he was a prince.





IN THE CHAMBER OF PEERS. 1846.



Yesterday, February 22, I went to the Chamber of Peers. The weather was
fine and very cold, in spite of the noonday sun. In the Rue de Tournon I
met a man in the custody of two soldiers. The man was fair, pale, thin,
haggard; about thirty years old; he wore coarse linen trousers; his
bare and lacerated feet were visible in his sabots, and blood-stained
bandages round his ankles took the place of stockings; his short blouse
was soiled with mud in the back, which indicated that he habitually
slept on the ground; his head was bare, his hair dishevelled. Under his
arm was a loaf. The people who surrounded him said that he had stolen
the loaf, and it was for this that he had been arrested.

When they reached the gendarmerie barracks one of the soldiers entered,
and the man stayed at the door guarded by the other soldier.

A carriage was standing at the door of the barracks. It was decorated
with a coat of arms; on the lanterns was a ducal coronet; two grey
horses were harnessed to it; behind it were two lackeys. The windows
were raised, but the interior, upholstered in yellow damask, was
visible. The gaze of the man fixed upon this carriage, attracted mine.
In the carriage was a woman in a pink bonnet and costume of black
velvet, fresh, white, beautiful, dazzling, who was laughing and playing
with a charming child of sixteen months, buried in ribbons, lace and
furs.

This woman did not see the terrible man who was gazing at her.

I became pensive.

This man was no longer a man for me; he was the spectre of misery,
the brusque, deformed, lugubrious apparition in full daylight, in full
sunlight, of a revolution that is still plunged in darkness, but which
is approaching. In former times the poor jostled the rich, this spectre
encountered the rich man in all his glory; but they did not look at each
other, they passed on. This condition of things could thus last for some
time. The moment this man perceives that this woman exists, while
this woman does not see that this man is there, the catastrophe is
inevitable.





GENERAL FABVIER



Fabvier had fought valiantly in the wars of the Empire; he fell out
with the Restoration over the obscure affair of Grenoble. He expatriated
himself about 1816. It was the period of the departure of the eagles.
Lallemand went to America, Allard and Vannova to India, Fabvier to
Greece.

The revolution of 1820 broke out. He took an heroic part in it. He
raised a corps of four thousand palikars, to whom he was not a chief,
but a god. He gave them civilization and taught them barbarity. He was
rough and brave above all of them, and almost ferocious, but with that
grand, Homeric ferocity. One might have thought that he had come from a
tent of the camp of Achilles rather than from the camp of Napoleon. He
invited the English Ambassador to dinner at his bivouac; the Ambassador
found him seated by a big fire at which a whole sheep was roasting; when
the animal was cooked and unskewered, Fabvier placed the heel of his
bare foot upon the neck of the smoking and bleeding sheep and tore off
a quarter, which he offered to the Ambassador. In bad times nothing
daunted him. He was indifferent alike to cold, heat, fatigue and hunger;
he never spared himself. The palikars used to say: “When the soldier
eats cooked grass Fabvier eats it green.”

I knew his history, but I had not seen him when, in 1846, General
Fabvier was made a peer of France. One day he had a speech to make, and
the Chancellor announced: “Baron Fabvier has the tribune.” I expected to
hear a lion, I thought an old woman was speaking.

Yet his face was a truly masculine one, heroic and formidable, that one
might have fancied had been moulded by the hand of a giant and which
seemed to have preserved a savage and terrible grimace. What was so
strange was the gentle, slow, grave, contained, caressing voice that was
allied to this magnificent ferocity. A child’s voice issued from this
tiger’s mouth.

General Fabvier delivered from the tribune speeches learned by heart,
graceful, flowery, full of allusions to the woods and country--veritable
idylls. In the tribune this Ajax became a Némorin.

He spoke in low tones like a diplomat, he smiled like a courtier. He
was not averse to making himself agreeable to princes. This is what the
peerage had done for him. He was only a hero after all.




August 22, 1846.

The Marquis de Boissy has assurance, coolness, self-possession, a voice
that is peculiar to himself, facility of speech, wit occasionally, the
quality of imperturbability, all the accessories of a great orator. The
only thing he lacks is talent. He wearies the Chamber, wherefore the
Ministers do not consider themselves bound to answer him. He talks as
long as everybody keeps quiet. He fences with the Chancellor as with his
particular enemy.

Yesterday, after the session which Boissy had entirely occupied with a
very poor speech, M. Guizot said to me:

“It is an affliction. The Chamber of Deputies would not stand him for
ten minutes after the first two times. The Chamber of Peers extends its
high politeness to him, and it does wrong. Boissy will not be suppressed
until the day the whole Chamber rises and walks out when he asks
permission to speak.”

“You cannot think of such a thing,” said I. “Only he and the Chancellor
would be left. It would be a duel without seconds.”



It is the custom of the Chamber of Peers never to repeat in its reply
to the speech from the throne the titles that the King gives to his
children. It is also the custom never to give the princes the title of
Royal Highness when speaking of them to the King. There is no Highness
in presence of his Majesty.

To-day, January 18, the address in reply to the speech from the throne
was debated. Occasionally there are flashes of keen and happy wit in
M. de Boissy’s nonsense. He remarked to-day: “I am not of those who are
grateful to the government for the blessings of providence.”

As usual he quarrelled with the Chancellor. He was making some more than
usually roving excursion from the straight path. The Chamber murmured
and cried: “Confine yourself to the question.” The Chancellor rose:

“Monsieur the Marquis de Boissy,” he said, “the Chamber requests that
you will confine yourself to the question under discussion. It has saved
me the trouble of asking you to do so.” (“Our colleague might as well
have said ‘spared me!’” I whispered to Lebrun.)

“I am delighted on your account, Monsieur the Chancellor,” replied M. de
Boissy, and the Chamber laughed.

A few minutes later, however, the Chancellor took his revenge. M. de
Boissy had floundered into some quibble about the rules. It was late.
The Chamber was becoming impatient.

“Had you not raised an unnecessary incident,” observed the Chancellor,
“you would have finished your speech a long time ago, to your own
satisfaction and that of everybody else.”

Whereat everybody laughed.

“Don’t laugh!” exclaimed the Duke de Mortemart. “Laughter diminishes the
prestige of a constituted body.”

M. de Pontécoulant said: “M. de Boissy teases Monsieur the Chancellor,
Monsieur the Chancellor torments M. de Boissy. There is a lack of
dignity on both sides!”

During the session the Duke de Mortemart came to my bench and we spoke
about the Emperor. M. de Mortemart went through all the great wars.
He speaks nobly of him. He was one of the Emperor’s orderlies in the
Campaign of 1812.

“It was during that campaign that I learned to know the Emperor,” he
said. “I was near him night and day. I saw him shave himself in the
morning, sponge his chin, pull on his boots, pinch his valet’s ear, chat
with the grenadier mounting guard over his tent, laugh, gossip,
make trivial remarks, and amid all this issue orders, trace plans,
interrogate prisoners, decree, determine, decide, in a sovereign manner,
simply, unerringly, in a few minutes, without missing anything, without
losing a useful detail or a second of necessary time. In this intimate
and familiar life of the bivouac flashes of his intellect were seen
every moment. You can believe me when I say that he belied the proverb:
‘No man is great in the eyes of his valet.’”

“Monsieur the Duke,” said I, “that proverb is wrong. Every great man is
a great man in the eyes of his valet.”

At this session the Duke d’Aumale, having attained his twenty-fifth
birthday, took his seat for the first time. The Duke de Nemours and the
Prince de Joinville were seated near him in their usual places behind
the ministerial bench. They were not among those who laughed the least.

The Duke de Nemours, being the youngest member of his committee,
fulfilled the functions of secretary, as is customary. M. de
Montalembert wanted to spare him the trouble. “No,” said the prince, “it
is my duty.” He took the urn and, as secretary, went the round of the
table to collect the votes.



At the close of the session of January 21, 1847, at which the Chamber
of Peers discussed Cracow and kept silent concerning the frontier of the
Rhine, I descended the grand staircase of the Chamber in company with M.
de Chastellux. M. Decazes stopped me and asked:

“Well, what have you been doing during the session?”

“I have been writing to Mme. Dorval.” (I held the letter in my hand.)

“What a fine disdain! Why did you not speak?”

“On account of the old proverb: ‘He whose opinion is not shared by
anybody else should think, and say nothing.’

“Did your opinion, then, differ from that of the others?”

“Yes, from that of the whole Chamber.”

“What did you want then?”

“The Rhine.”

“Whew! the devil!”

“I should have protested and spoken without finding any echo to my
words; I preferred to say nothing.”

“Ah! the Rhine! To have the Rhine! Yes, that is a fine idea. Poetry!
poetry!”

“Poetry that our fathers made with cannon and that we shall make again
with ideas!”

“My dear colleague,” went on M. Decazes, “we must wait. I, too, want
the Rhine. Thirty years ago I said to Louis XVIII.: ‘Sire, I should be
inconsolable if I thought I should die without seeing France mistress of
the left bank of the Rhine. But before we can talk about that, before we
can think of it even, we must beget children.’”

“Well,” I replied, “that was thirty years ago. We have begotten the
children.”




April 23, 1847.

The Chamber of Peers is discussing a pretty bad bill on substitutions
for army service. To-day the principal article of the measure was before
the House.

M. de Nemours was present. There are eighty lieutenant-generals in the
Chamber. The majority considered the article to be a bad one. Under the
eye of the Duke de Nemours, who seemed to be counting them, all rose to
vote in favour of it.

The magistrates, the members of the Institute and the ambassadors voted
against it.

I remarked to President Franck-Carré, who was seated next to me: “It is
a struggle between civil courage and military poltroonery.”

The article was adopted.




June 22, 1847.

The Girardin* affair was before the Chamber of Peers to-day. Acquittal.
The vote was taken by means of balls, white ones for condemnation, black
ones for acquittal. There were 199 votes cast, 65 white, 134 black.
In placing my black ball in the urn I remarked: “In blackening him we
whiten him.”

     *  Emile de Girardin had been prosecuted for publishing an
     article in a newspaper violently attacking the government.

I said to Mme. D--: “Why do not the Minister and Girardin provoke a
trial in the Assize Court?”

She replied: “Because Girardin does not feel himself strong enough, and
the Minister does not feel himself pure enough.”

MM. de Montalivet and Mole and the peers of the Château voted, queerly
enough, for Girardin against the Government. M. Guizot learned the
result in the Chamber of Deputies and looked exceedingly wrath.




June 28, 1847.

On arriving at the Chamber I found Franck-Carre greatly scandalised.

In his hand was a prospectus for champagne signed by the Count de
Mareuil, and stamped with a peer’s mantle and a count’s coronet with the
de Mareuil arms. He had shown it to the Chancellor, who had replied: “I
can do nothing!”

“I could do something, though, if a mere councillor were to do a thing
like that in my court,” said Franck-Carré to me. “I would call the
Chambers together and have him admonished in a disciplinary manner.”




1848.

Discussion by the committees of the Chamber of Peers of the address in
reply to the speech from the throne.

I was a member of the fourth committee. Among other changes I demanded
this. There was: “Our princes, your well-beloved children, are doing in
Africa the duties of servants of the State.” I proposed: “The princes,
your well-beloved children, are doing,” etc., “their duty as servants of
the State.” This fooling produced the effect of a fierce opposition.




January 14, 1848.

The Chamber of Peers prevented Alton-Shée from pronouncing in the
tribune even the name of the Convention. There was a terrific knocking
upon desks with paper-knives and shouts of “Order! Order!” and he was
compelled almost by force to descend from the tribune.

I was on the point of shouting to them: “You are imitating a session of
the Convention, but only with wooden knives!”

I was restrained by the thought that this _mot_, uttered during their
anger, would never be forgiven. For myself I care little, but it might
affect the calm truths which I may have to tell them and get them to
accept later on.





THE REVOLUTION OF 1848.

     I.     THE DAYS OF FEBRUARY.
     II.    EXPULSIONS AND EVASIONS.
     III.   LOUIS PHILIPPE IN EXILE.
     IV.    KING JEROME.
     V.     THE DAYS OF JUNE.
     VI.    CHATEAUBRIAND.
     VII.   DEBATES ON THE DAYS OF JUNE.




I. THE DAYS OF FEBRUARY.




THE TWENTY-THIRD.



As I arrived at the Chamber of Peers--it was 3 o’clock
precisely--General Rapatel came out of the cloak-room and said: “The
session is over.”

I went to the Chamber of Deputies. As my cab turned into the Rue de
Lille a serried and interminable column of men in shirt-sleeves, in
blouses and wearing caps, and marching arm-in-arm, three by three,
debouched from the Rue Bellechasse and headed for the Chamber. The
other extremity of the street, I could see, was blocked by deep rows of
infantry of the line, with their rifles on their arms. I drove on ahead
of the men in blouses, with whom many women had mingled, and who
were shouting: “Hurrah for reform!” “Hurrah for the line!” “Down
with Guizot!” They stopped when they arrived within rifle-shot of the
infantry. The soldiers opened their ranks to let me through. They were
talking and laughing. A very young man was shrugging his shoulders.

I did not go any further than the lobby. It was filled with busy and
uneasy groups. In one corner were M. Thiers, M. de Rémusat, M. Vivien
and M. Merruau (of the “Constitutionnel”); in another M. Emile de
Girardin, M. d’Alton-Shée and M. de Boissy, M. Franck-Carré, M.
d’Houdetot, M. de Lagrenée. M. Armand Marrast was talking aside with M.
d’Alton. M. de Girardin stopped me; then MM. d’Houdetot and Lagrenée.
MM. Franck-Carré and Vignier joined us. We talked. I said to them:

“The Cabinet is gravely culpable. It forgot that in times like ours
there are precipices right and left and that it does not do to govern
too near to the edge. It says to itself: ‘It is only a riot,’ and it
almost rejoices at the outbreak. It believes it has been strengthened by
it; yesterday it fell, to-day it is up again! But, in the first
place, who can tell what the end of a riot will be? Riots, it is true,
strengthen the hands of Cabinets, but revolutions overthrow dynasties.
And what an imprudent game in which the dynasty is risked to save the
ministry! The tension of the situation draws the knot tighter, and now
it is impossible to undo it. The hawser may break and then everything
will go adrift. The Left has manoeuvred imprudently and the Cabinet
wildly. Both sides are responsible. But what madness possesses the
Cabinet to mix a police question with a question of liberty and oppose
the spirit of chicanery to the spirit of revolution? It is like sending
process-servers with stamped paper to serve upon a lion. The quibbles of
M. Hébert in presence of a riot! What do they amount to!”

As I was saying this a deputy passed us and said:

“The Ministry of Marine has been taken.”

“Let us go and see!” said Franc d’Houdetot to me.



We went out. We passed through a regiment of infantry that was guarding
the head of the Pont de la Concorde. Another regiment barred the other
end of it. On the Place Louis XV. cavalry was charging sombre and
immobile groups, which at the approach of the soldiers fled like swarms
of bees. Nobody was on the bridge except a general in uniform and on
horseback, with the cross of a commander (of the Legion of Honour) hung
round his neck--General Prévot. As he galloped past us he shouted: “They
are attacking!”

As we reached the troops at the other end of the bridge a battalion
chief, mounted, in a bernouse with gold stripes on it, a stout man with
a kind and brave face, saluted M. d’Houdetot.

“Has anything happened?” Franc asked.

“It happened that I got here just in time!” replied the major.

It was this battalion chief who cleared the Palace of the Chamber, which
the rioters had invaded at six o’clock in the morning.

We walked on to the Place. Charging cavalry was whirling around us. At
the angle of the bridge a dragoon raised his sword against a man in a
blouse. I do not think he struck him. Besides, the Ministry of Marine
had not been “taken.” A crowd had thrown a stone at one of the windows,
smashing it, and hurting a man who was peeping out. Nothing more.

We could see a number of vehicles lined up like a barricade in the broad
avenue of the Champs-Elysées, at the rond-point.

“They are firing, yonder,” said d’Houdetot. “Can you see the smoke?”

“Pooh!” I replied. “It is the mist of the fountain. That fire is water.”

And we burst into a laugh.

An engagement was going on there, however. The people had constructed
three barricades with chairs. The guard at the main square of the
Champs-Elysées had turned out to pull the barricades down. The people
had driven the soldiers back to the guard-house with volleys of stones.
General Prévot had sent a squad of Municipal Guards to the relief of the
soldiers. The squad had been surrounded and compelled to seek refuge
in the guard-house with the others. The crowd had hemmed in the
guard-house. A man had procured a ladder, mounted to the roof, pulled
down the flag, torn it up and thrown it to the people. A battalion had
to be sent to deliver the guard.

“Whew!” said Franc d’Houdetot to General Prévot, who had recounted this
to us. “A flag taken!”

“Taken, no! Stolen, yes!” answered the general quickly.

M. Pèdre-Lacaze came up arm-in-arm with Napoleon Duchatel. Both were in
high spirits. They lighted their cigars from Franc d’Houdetot’s cigar
and said:

“Do you know? Genoude is going to bring in an impeachment on his own
account. They would not allow him to sign the Left’s impeachment. He
would not be beaten, and now the Ministry is between two fires. On the
left, the entire Left; on the right, M. de Genoude.”

Napoleon Duchâtel added: “They say that Duvergier de Hauranne has been
carried about in triumph on the shoulders of the crowd.”

We had returned to the bridge. M. Vivien was crossing, and came up to
us. With his big, old, wide-brimmed hat and his coat buttoned up to his
cravat the ex-Minister Of Justice looked like a policeman.

“Where are you going?” he said to me. “What is happening is very
serious!”

Certainly at this moment one feels that the whole constitutional machine
is rocking. It no longer rests squarely on the ground. It is out of
plumb. One can hear it cracking.

The crisis is complicated by the disturbed condition of the whole of
Europe.

The King, nevertheless, is very calm, and even cheerful. But this game
must not be played too far. Every rubber won serves but to make up the
total of the rubber lost.

Vivien recounted to us that the King had thrown an electoral reform bill
into his drawer, saying as he did so: “That is for my successor!” “That
was Louis XV.’s _mot_,” added Vivien, “supposing reform should prove to
be the deluge.”

It appears to be true that the King interrupted M. Salandrouze when he
was laying before him the grievances of the “Progressists,” and asked
him brusquely: “Are you selling many carpets?” *

     * M. Salandrouze was a manufacturer of carpets.

At this same reception of the Progressists the King noticed M. Blanqui,
and graciously going up to him asked:

“Well, Monsieur Blanqui, what do people talk about? What is going on?”

“Sire,” replied M. Blanqui, “I ought to tell the King that in the
departments, and especially at Bordeaux, there is a great deal of
agitation.”

“Ah!” interrupted the King. “More agitation!” and he turned his back
upon M. Blanqui.

While we were talking Vivien exclaimed: “Listen! I fancy I can hear
firing!”

A young staff officer, addressing General d’Houdetot with a smile,
asked: “Are we going to stay here long?”

“Why?” said Franc d’Houdetot.

“Well, I am invited out to dinner,” said the officer.

At this moment a group of women in mourning and children dressed in
black passed rapidly along the other pavement of the bridge. A man held
the eldest child by the hand. I looked at him and recognized the Duke de
Montebello.

“Hello!” exclaimed d’Houdetot, “the Minister of Marine!” and he ran over
and conversed for a moment with M. de Montebello. The Duchess had become
frightened, and the whole family was taking refuge on the left bank of
the river.

Vivien and I returned to the Palace of the Chamber. D’Houdetot quitted
us. In an instant we were surrounded. Said Boissy to me:

“You were not at the Luxembourg? I tried to speak upon the situation
in Paris. I was hooted. At the _mot_, ‘the capital in danger,’ I was
interrupted, and the Chancellor, who had come to preside expressly for
that purpose, called me to order. And do you know what General Gourgaud
said to me? ‘Monsieur de Boissy, I have sixty guns with their caissons
filled with grape-shot. I filled them myself.’ I replied: ‘General, I
am delighted to know what is really thought at the Château about the
situation.’”

At this moment Durvergier de Hauranne, hatless, his hair dishevelled,
and looking pale but pleased, passed by and stopped to shake hands with
me.

I left Duvergier and entered the Chamber. A bill relative to the
privileges of the Bank of Bordeaux was being debated. A man who was
talking through his nose occupied the tribune, and M. Sauzet was reading
the articles of the bill with a sleepy air. M. de Belleyme, who was
coming out, shook hands with me and exclaimed: “Alas!”

Several deputies came up to me, among them M. Marie, M. Roger (of
Loiret), M. de Rémusat, and M. Chambolle. I related to them the incident
of the tearing down of the flag, which was serious in view of the
audacity of the attack.

“What is even more serious,” said one of them, “is that there is
something very bad behind all this. During the night the doors of more
than fifteen mansions were marked with a cross, among the marked houses
being those of the Princess de Liéven, in the Rue Saint Florentin, and
of Mme. de Talhouët.”

“Are you sure of this?” I asked.

“With my own eyes I saw the cross upon the door of Mme. de Liéven’s
house,” he replied.

President Franck-Carré met M. Duchâtel this morning and said: “Well, how
goes it?”

“All is well,” answered the Minister.

“What are you going to do about the riot?”

“I am going to let the rioters alone at the rendezvous they arranged
for themselves. What can they do in the Place Louis XV. and the
Champs-Elysées? It is raining. They will tramp about there all day.
To-night they will be tired out and will go home to bed.”

M. Etienne Arago entered hastily at this juncture and said: “There are
seven wounded and two killed already. Barricades have been erected in
the Rue Beaubourg and in the Rue Saint Avoye.”

After a suspension of the session M. Guizot arrived. He ascended the
tribune and announced that the King had summoned M. Mole, to charge him
with the formation of a new Cabinet.

Triumphant shouts from the Opposition, shouts of rage from the majority.

The session ended amid an indescribable uproar.



I went out with the deputies and returned by way of the quays.

In the Place de la Concorde the cavalry continued to charge. An attempt
to erect two barricades had been made in the Rue Saint Honoré. The
paving-stones in the Marché Saint Honoré were being torn up. The
overturned omni-buses, of which the barricades had been made, had
been righted by the troops. In the Rue Saint Honoré the crowd let the
Municipal Guards go by, and then stoned them in the back. A multitude
was swarming along the quays like irritated ants. A very pretty woman in
a green velvet hat and a large cashmere shawl passed by amid a group of
men wearing blouses and with bared arms. She had raised her skirt very
high on account of the mud, with which she was much spattered; for it
was raining every minute. The Tuileries were closed. At the Carrousel
gates the crowd had stopped and was gazing through the arcades at the
cavalry lined up in battle array in front of the palace.

Near the Carrousel Bridge I met M. Jules Sandeau. “What do you think of
all this?” he queried.

“That the riot will be suppressed, but that the revolution will
triumph.”

On the Quai de la Ferraille I happened upon somebody else I knew. Coming
towards me was a man covered with mud to the neck, his cravat hanging
down, and his hat battered. I recognized my excellent friend Antony
Thouret. Thouret is an ardent Republican. He had been walking and
speech-making since early morning, going from quarter to quarter and
from group to group.

“Tell me, now, what you really want?” said I. “Is it the Republic?”

“Oh! no, not this time, not yet,” he answered. “What we want is
reform--no half measures, oh! dear no, that won’t do at all. We want
complete reform, do you hear? And why not universal suffrage?”

“That’s the style!” I said as we shook hands.

Patrols were marching up and down the quay, while the crowd shouted
“Hurrah for the line!” The shops were closed and the windows of the
houses open.

In the Place du Châtelet I heard a man say to a group:

“It is 1830 over again!”

I passed by the Hotel de Ville and along the Rue Saint Avoye. At the
Hotel de Ville all was quiet. Two National Guards were walking to and
fro in front of the gate, and there were no barricades in the Rue Saint
Avoye. In the Rue Rambuteau a few National Guards, in uniform, and
wearing their side arms, came and went. In the Temple quarter they were
beating to arms.

Up to the present the powers that be have made a show of doing without
the National Guard. This is perhaps prudent. A force of National Guards
was to have taken a hand. This morning the guard on duty at the Chamber
refused to obey orders. It is said that a National Guardsman of the 7th
Legion was killed just now while interposing between the people and the
troops.



The Mole Ministry assuredly is not a Reform one, but the Guizot Ministry
had been for so long an obstacle to reform! Its resistance was broken;
this was suffi

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