Part 14

"I certify that this was the extent of the hunting of which calumny, to ruin him, made a crime. Every time he went hunting, the Opposition journals did not fail to announce it, which persuaded nearly all France that he passed all his time in the distractions of this amusement."

The tide of detraction of the sovereign steadily rose. The Viscount de La Rochefoucauld perceived it clearly. He wrote to the King, 13th October, 1825:--

"The interior of France, as regards commerce, agriculture, industry, wealth, offers a most striking spectacle. Let Charles X., as King and father, rejoice in his work; but let him reflect that the lightest sleep would be followed by a terrible awakening."

The 12th of January, 1826, when his father-in-law, the Duke Mathieu de Montmorency, had just been named governor to the Duke of Bordeaux, M. de La Rochefoucauld again wrote to the King:--

"Shall I thank the King for the nomination of M. de Montmorency? Six months ago, it would have been useful. To-day, it is merely good. But alas, how far is that interesting Prince from the crown! and what shocks and revolutions he must traverse first. If ever--God watch over France; the Orleans are making frightful progress."

The signs of the coming storm accumulated in the most alarming manner. Read this other report of the Viscount de La Rochefoucauld (August 8, 1826):--

"Indifference to religion, hatred of the priests, were the symptoms of the Revolution. God grant that the same things do not bring the same results. The unfortunate priests no longer dare to go through the streets; they are everywhere insulted. Three days since, a well-dressed man, passing by the sentinel of the Luxembourg said to him, pointing to a priest: 'Never mind; in a year you'll see no more of all these wretches.' The poor Cure of Clichy was in real danger, surrounded by two or three hundred madmen, who cried; 'Down with the black-hats!' Every day there is a scene of the same sort."

The popularity of Charles X., so great at the beginning of his reign, was dwindling every day at Paris. M. de La Rochefoucauld did not fear to declare it to him.

"By what inconceivable fatality is it," he wrote, February 6, 1827, "that the king amid all the care he takes to ensure the happiness of his people, is losing from day to day in their love and affection? At the play--and it is there, to use an expression of Napoleon, that the pulse of public opinion is to be felt--the most seditious and hostile allusions are eagerly caught up. Saturday last, verses, of which the sense was that kings who have lost the love of their people encounter only silence and coldness, were greeted with triple applause and furiously encored."

The report of May 12,1827, was like an alarm bell:

"Circumstances are so grave that the calmest minds betray fear regarding them; there are now but one opinion and one feeling,--doubt and fear. It is said openly, as eight years since: This branch cannot keep the crown; it is impossible; who will succeed it? How many things, great Heavens, done in eight years; how many things forgotten!"

Exposed to an outpouring of enmities and of incessant intrigues, taken between two fires,--the extreme Right and the Left,--M. de Villele no longer had the strength to govern. His ministry was about to come to an end. Later, in retracing in his journal this phase of his career, he wrote:--

"All that took place was of a feebleness destructive of all government, and disheartening for him who bears all the responsibility for it, with the weight of affairs besides. But he was not, and did not pretend to be, the Cardinal Richelieu. He had not his character, nor his ambition, nor his superior gifts. He did not even envy them. Had he been quite different in this regard, to repress and annul his king, to oppress the daughter of Louis XVI. and the widow of the Duke of Berry, to exile from France the new Gaston d'Orleans, and his numerous family, to bring down the heads of the court pygmies,--more dangerous, perhaps, with their influence over the King and his family and their vexatious intrigues in the Court of Peers than the Montmorencys and the Cinq-Mars,--this was a rele to which he never aspired and would not have accepted."

Charles X. sacrificed M. de Villele, who, however, had his sympathy, and replaced him with a liberal minister, perhaps with a mental reservation as to a ministry, before long, from the extreme Right. The retiring minister wished to remain in the Chamber of Deputies, to defend his acts. For their part, his successors, fearing his influence in that body, wished his transfer to the Chamber of Peers, where, in their judgment, he would be less dangerous. At the last Council of Ministers attended by M. de Villele, the King passed to him a note in pencil, announcing that he had called him to the peerage. The statesman declined, in a note also in pencil. "You wish then to impose yourself upon me as minister?" wrote the King once more. M. de Villele appeared moved, and passed to the sovereign this response: "The King well knows the contrary; but since he can write it, let him do with me what he will." The next day the Martignac ministry entered on its duties, and the Duchess of Angoule'me said to Charles X.: "It is true, then, that you are letting Villele go? My father, you descend to-day the first step of the throne."

XXII

THE MARTIGNAC MINISTRY

Mde. Martignac, who succeeded M. de Villele in the Ministry of the Interior, was a man of merit, honest, liberal, and sincerely devoted to the King. Born in 1776, at Bordeaux, he was at first an advocate at the bar of that city, and at the same time made himself known by some witty vaudevilles. On the return of the Bourbons, he entered the magistracy, became procureur-general at Limoges, was elected a deputy in 1821, and distinguished himself in the tribune. He was Minister of the Interior from January, 1828, to August, 1829, and his name was given to the ministry of which he was a member. He had for colleagues enlightened and moderate men, such as Count Auguste de La Ferronnays, M. Roy, Count Portalis. He tried to reconcile the different parties, and to preserve the throne from the double danger of reaction and revolution. Taken between two fires, the extreme Right and the extreme Left, he was destined to fail in his generous effort.

The royalist sentiment was becoming constantly more feeble. The 24th of January, 1828, some days after the formation of the Martignac ministry, the Viscount Sosthenes de La Rochefoucauld wrote, in a report to the King:--

"In going to Saint-Denis, the 21st of January (the anniversary of the death of Louis XVI.), and seeing the lightness with which the court itself conducted itself there, it was impossible for me not to make many reflections on the futility of an age in which no memory is sacred. And by what right can the people be asked to have a better memory when such an example is given to them? No cortege, no coaches draped, none of the pomp that strikes the imagination and the eye. Some isolated carriages, passing rapidly over the route, as if every one longed to be more promptly rid of whatever is grave and mournful in this day of cruel memory."

The ultras were thinking much less of the real interests of the monarchy than of their own spites and their personal ambitions.

These pretended supports of the throne were digging the abyss in which the throne was to be swallowed up. Charles X., blinded, was already thinking of calling the Prince de Polignac to power, and regarded the Martignac ministry as a provisional expedient. To the despair of the members of this ministry, he maintained relations with M. de Villele, whose fall he regretted. After the opening of the session, he wrote to his former minister, February 6, 1828:--

"What do you think of my discourse? I did my best; but as it was a success with some persons of doubtful opinions, I am afraid that it is not worth much. Everything appears to me so confused, that I know not what to count upon. The eulogies of the Debats and the Constitutionnel make me fear I have said stupid things. Yet I hope not, and I shall continue to arrest with firmness what may lead to dangerous concessions."

On the other hand, if there were among the liberals some sincere and well-intentioned men, who meant to remain faithful alike to the throne and the Charter, there were others who already masked treachery under the appearance of devotion to the King. Those who two years later were to boast of having labored during the entire restoration for the ruin of the elder branch,--actors in the comedy of fifteen years, as they called themselves,--gave themselves out, in 1828, as partisans and enthusiastic admirers of Charles X. At the commencement of the session a deputy of the Left, having affected to say in the tribune that the King had not a single enemy, the Right permitted itself some exclamations of doubt. One of its members, M. de Marinhac, cried: "As a good prince I believe that His Majesty has no enemies, but as King, he has many, and I know them," added he, looking at his opponents. The entire Left was indignant, and caused the orator to be called to order. M. Dupin thanked the president, and said in an agitated voice: "It is a calumny, an insult, that we cannot endure. Nothing wounds us more than to hear ourselves accused of being the enemies of him whom we adore, cherish, bless."

The tactics of the Opposition were to flatter the King, but to disarm him and to make him look on those who were really revolutionists as ministerialists. M. de Martignac was a man of good faith, but many who boasted of supporting him were not so, and perhaps M. de Villele was right when he wrote to Charles X. in June, 1828:--

"I could serve Your Majesty only with the light and the character God has given me. It would have been, it would be, impossible for me to believe that authority can be maintained by concessions and by leaning on those who wish to overthrow it."

Meanwhile there were still some fine days for the old King. His journey in the departments of the east, in 1828, was a continual ovation that recalled to him the enthusiasm of the beginning of his reign. Setting out from Saint Cloud the 31st of August, he arrived at Metz the 3d of September. All the houses of this great military city were hung with the white flag adorned with fleurs-de-lis. After having visited some of the fortifications, Charles X., following the ramparts, came to an elegant pavilion erected on the site of the ancient citadel. Long covered seats were arranged for the ladies of the city; a prodigious number of spectators occupied the ramparts. In the presence of the sovereign a regiment made a simulated attack on a "demi-lune" and a bastion.

On September 6, Saverne arranged a very picturesque reception for the King. All the cantons and all the communes sent thither, together with their mayors and their richest farmers, their prettiest village girls in Alsatian costume. Five hundred peasants, clad in red vest and long black coat, the head covered with a great hat turned up on one side, a white ribbon tied about the left arm, were on horseback at the place of meeting. The young girls, bearing flags and garlands, were brought in wagons, each containing a dozen or sixteen. In other wagons were the musicians. The pretty Alsaciennes presented the monarch with a basket of flowers; then he breakfasted with the authorities, and, at a signal, fires were lighted at the same time on the plain and on the surrounding mountains.

The 7th of September, Charles X. entered Strasbourg in triumph. At a league from the city, on a height from which it was to be seen, and whence the wooded hills of the Black Forest were visible, he was awaited by a crowd of young girls in Alsatian costume, in three hundred wagons, with four or six horses to each. There were also twelve hundred horsemen, divided into squadrons, the mayors with their scarfs at their head and carrying the fleur-de-lis standards. The royal cortege passed, under arbors of verdure and flowers, amid this long file of vehicles and horsemen, who escorted it to the walls of Strasbourg. Delighted with the enthusiasm of which he was the object, the sovereign proceeded to the Cathedral, where a te deum was sung. In the evening the spire of this marvellous church was illuminated: it was like a pyramid of stars.

The King of Wurtemberg, the Grand Duke of Baden, and his three brothers came to greet the King of France in the capital of Alsace. He showed them at the arsenal sixteen hundred pieces of ordnance on their carriages, and arms sufficient for a hundred thousand men.

"Sire, and gentlemen," he said with a smile, in which kingly pride mingled with perfect urbanity, "I have nothing to conceal from you. This is something I can show to my friends as to my enemies."

Yes, France was great then, and no one could have predicted for Alsace the fate reserved for her forty-two years later. The army was the admiration of Europe. The navy had just recaptured at Navarino the prestige and power of the time of Louis XVI. Charles X. said to Mr. Hyde de Neuville:--

"France, when a noble design is involved, takes counsel only with herself. Thus whether England wishes or not, we shall free Greece. Continue the armaments with the same activity. I shall not pause in the path of humanity and honor."

And at the moment when the very Christian King was greeted by the German Princes in the Alsatian capital, his victorious troops were completing in the Morea the enfranchisement of Greece.

Charles X. returned by Colmar, Luneville, Nancy, and Champagne. At Troyes he found himself surrounded by all the liberal deputies, and he decorated Casimir PErier. Everywhere he had an enthusiastic welcome. On his return to Saint Cloud he was warmly congratulated by all his court. Nevertheless, as the Duchess of Gontaut said to him:--

"Sire, you must be happy."--"What do cheers signify?" he answered, not without sadness. "These demonstrations, all superficial, should not dazzle--a friendly gesture of the hand, a prince's, a king's, expression of satisfaction will obtain them."

Despite this philosophic reflection, Charles X. was triumphant. If his ministers wished to credit their liberal policy with the ovations he had received in the east, he called their attention to the fact that he had been not less well received the year before under the Villele ministry at the time of his visit to the camp of Saint Omer. In the enthusiasm manifested by the people, he saw an homage to the monarchical principle, not to the policy of one or another ministry.

"You hear these people. Do they shout hurrah for the Charter? No, they cry long live the King!" Still confident of the future, he wished to persuade himself that the obstacles piled up before his dynasty were but clouds that a favorable wind would scatter soon. "Ah, Monsieur de Martignac," he cried, with deep joy, "what a nation! what should we not do for it!"

At the moment that Charles X. traversed the provinces of the east in triumph, the Duchess of Berry was making in the west a journey not less brilliant than that of the sovereign.

XXIII

THE JOURNEY IN THE WEST

Never was a princely journey more triumphal than that of the Duchess of Berry in the provinces of the west in 1828. Madame, who left Paris June 16, returned there October 1, and there was not a day in these three months that she was not the object of enthusiastic ovations. In a book of nearly six hundred pages, Viscount Walsh has described, with the fidelity of a Dangeau, this journey in which the mother of the Duke of Bordeaux was treated like a queen of a fairy tale.

The 16th of June, the Princess slept at Rambouillet, where two years later such cruel trials were to come to her. The 18th, she visited Chambord, where she was received by Count Adrien de Calonne, the author of the project of the subscription, thanks to which this historic chateau became the property of the Duke of Bordeaux.

In the face of the wind, which was blowing with force, Madame ascended to the highest point of the chateau, the platform of the lantern called Fleur-de-Lis at the end of the famous double balustered staircase. From there her glance wandered over the vast extent of the park, with a circumference of eight leagues, and enclosing, besides six or seven thousand acres of woodland, twenty-three farms, whose buildings, cultivated fields, and scattered flocks, animated the view in all directions. On descending, she said: "I should like to mark my name here; I shall love to see it again when I come to visit the Duke of Bordeaux." And with a stiletto she cut these words: "18th June--Marie Caroline." Some young girls presented her with lambs white as snow, decorated with green and white ribbons, and with a tame roe, on whose collar was engraved: "Homage of the people of Chambord." The same day she paid visits at their chateaux to Marshal Victor, Duke of Bellune, and to the Duke d'Avaray. In the evening she returned to Blois. Madame left there the 19th of June, after examining the Salle des Etats, the room in which the Duke of Guise was assassinated, and the tower where Catharine de' Medici used to consult the astrologers. The 20th, she attended at Saumur a brilliant tournament given in her honor by the Cavalry School. The 21st, she entered Angers amid shouts and cheers. The 22d, she visited the chateau of Count Walsh de Serrant. Her carriage passed under vaults of verdure adorned with flowers and banners.

The Princess arrived the same day at Saint Florent, which, in 1793, had given the signal for the war of the Vendee, and where the Vendean army had effected the famous passage of the Loire, comparable to that of the Berezina. There the aged witnesses of the struggles described by Napoleon as "a war of giants," had assembled near the tomb of Bonchamp to await the Duchess of Berry. All the neighboring heights were bristling with white flags. From afar they were seen fluttering on the church-towers, on the chateaux, over cottages, on isolated trees. They were to be seen even above the graves in the cemeteries. A son had said: "My father died for the white flag; let us plant it on his grave; the dead should rejoice, for Madame comes to honor their fidelity." The example was followed, and the tombs bore the rallying sign of those who rested there. When on the borders of the Loire, the Princess paused a moment, struck with the majesty of the scene. The cannon mingled their noble voices with the acclamations of fifteen thousand Vendedans. The stream was covered with a swarm of boats, dressed with flags. A magnificent sun lighted up this fete.

It was ten o'clock when Madame arrived at Milleraye, opposite Saint Florent. It was there that General de Bonchamp, one of the heroes of the Vendee, had given up his soul to God. The cottage where the soldiers had laid him to die was shown. His widow awaited the Duchess of Berry. What contrast between the festivity of Saint Florent and the consternation of the days of grief and misfortune, when, in October, 1793, its people fled to the right bank of the Loire, leaving their houses a prey to the flames! The cries of distress and despair which sounded along the banks of the stream in that fatal year, were now replaced by shouts of joy. Madame embarked amid cheers. Her boat was escorted by a great number of others, six of which contained Vendeans bearing flags torn by bullets in the battles of Fontenay and of Torfou, of Laval, and of Dol. Grouped on the hill-slopes of Saint Florent, more than fifteen thousand spectators followed with their gaze the flotilla, in the midst of which they saw the Duchess of Berry, standing, visibly agitated. She landed upon the plateau of Saint Florent, and ascended on foot the hill that led to it. When she reached the summit, she found herself in the midst of a camp of five thousand Vendean soldiers who had taken part in the war of 1793 or in the arming of 1815. There it was that Cathelineau, as in the time of the crusades, cried: "It is God's will. Let us march!"--"Oh, what a people!" said the Princess. "What fine and honest faces! What an accent in their cries of 'Long live the King!' Yes, plainly they love us." She proceeded to the church of Saint Florent, where, kneeling beneath a canopy, she heard Mass. She regarded with attention the tomb of Bonchamp, and said, as she beheld his statue: "He looks as if he were still commanding."

On leaving the church, she went to see the place where Bonchamp is buried, and, under a tent, partook of a repast offered her by the Countess d'Autichamp. She had recounted to her in detail the celebrated passage of the Loire, the disastrous period when all the city of Saint Florent was burned by order of the Convention, and the only house left standing was the one occupied by the republican General LEchelle as his headquarters.

At three o'clock in the afternoon, Madame embarked anew on the steamboat awaiting her at the point of Varades, and proceeded in this way to Nantes. The inhabitants from the two banks of the stream greeted her upon her passage. The red aprons and white caps of the women contrasted, in the landscape, with the sombre, costume of the men. That she might be better recognized by the crowd, the Princess, clad in a simple robe of brown silk, with a long chain of gold at the neck, separated herself from her suite, mounted to the highest point on the boat, and greeted with voice and gesture all these faithful people. The men waved banners and standards. The women raised their little children in their arms and said: "Look at her well; it's the mother of the Duke of Bordeaux."

The people seemed to walk upon the water to get a nearer view of Madame. Not a rock pushing out into the stream that was not occupied. Where the Loire was too wide for the features of the Princess to be seen from the shore, the dwellers on the banks had, so to speak, brought them together, by forming in the middle of the stream streets of boats, with their flags and their triumphal arches. At a league from Saint Florent a rock juts into the water of the Loire. Here was an aged Vendean, all alone, his white hair fluttering in the wind. Erect upon the rock, he was holding a white flag, and at his feet was a dog. It was, according to the Moniteur, a symbol of faithful Vendee.