Part 2

"Charles X. appeared to have dissipated all the dangers that for ten years had menaced his august predecessor.

"On all sides there rose only acclamations of delight in favor of the new King, who showed himself so popular, and whose gracious countenance could express only benevolent intentions. I was present, mingling with the crowd, at the first review by Charles X. on the Champ-de-Mars, and the remarks were so frankly royalist, that any one would have been roughly treated by the crowd had he shown other sentiments."

The Duchess of Berry was full of joy. She quivered with pleasure. Very popular in the army and among the people, as at court and in the city, she was proud to show her fine child, who already wore the uniform, to the officers and soldiers. She appeared to all eyes the symbol of maternal love, and the mothers gazed upon her boy as if he had been their own. As soon as the little Prince was seen, there was on every face an expression of kindliness and sympathy. He was the Child of Paris, the Child of France. Who could have foretold then that this child, so loved, admired, applauded, would, innocent victim, less than six years later, be condemned to perpetual exile, and by whom?

Charles X. had won a triumph. Napoleon, at the time of his greatest glories, at the apogee of his prodigious fortunes, had never had a warmer greeting from the Parisian people. In the course of the review the King spoke to all the colonels. On his return to the Tuileries he went at a slow pace, paused often to receive petitions, handed them to one of his suite, and responded in the most gracious manner to the homage of which he was the object. An historian not to be accused of partiality for the Restoration has written: "On entering the Tuileries, Charles X. might well believe that the favor that greeted his reign effaced the popularity of all the sovereigns who had gone before. Happy in being King at last, moved by the acclamations that he met at every step, the new monarch let his intoxicating joy expand in all his words. His affability was remarked in his walks through Paris, and the grace with which he received all petitioners who could approach him." Everywhere that he appeared, at the Hotel-Dieu, at Sainte-Genvieve, at the Madeleine, the crowd pressed around him and manifested the sincerest enthusiasm. M. Villemain, in the opening discourse of his lectures on eloquence at the Faculty of Letters, was wildly applauded when he pronounced the following eulogium on the new sovereign: "A monarch kindly and revered, he has the loyalty of the antique ways and modern enlightenment. Religion is the seal of his word. He inherits from Henry IV. those graces of the heart that are irresistible. He has received from Louis XIV. an intelligent love of the arts, a nobility of language, and that dignity that imposes respect while it seduces." All the journals chanted his praises. Seeing that the Constitutionnel itself, freed from censorship, rendered distinguished homage to legitimacy, he came to believe that principle invincible. He was called Charles the Loyal. At the Theatre-Francais, the line of Tartufe--

"Nous vivons sous un prince ennemi de la fraude"--

was greeted with a salvo of applause. The former adversaries of the King reproached themselves with having misunderstood him. They sincerely reproached themselves for their past criticisms, and adored that which they had burned. M. de Vaulabelle himself wrote:--

"Few sovereigns have taken possession of the throne in circumstances more favorable than those surrounding the accession of Charles X."

It seemed as if the great problem of the conciliation of order and liberty had been definitely solved. The white flag, rejuvenated by the Spanish war, had taken on all its former splendor. The best officers, the best soldiers of the imperial guard, served the King in the royal guard with a devotion proof against everything. Secret societies had ceased their subterranean manoeuvres. No more disturbances, no more plots. In the Chambers, the Opposition, reduced to an insignificant minority, was discouraged or converted. The ambitious spirits of whom it was composed turned their thoughts toward the rising sun. Peace had happily fecundated the prodigious resources of the country. Finances, commerce, agriculture, industry, the fine arts, everything was prospering. The public revenues steadily increased. The ease with which riches came inclined all minds toward optimism. The salons had resumed the most exquisite traditions of courtesy and elegance. It was the boast that every good side of the ancien regime had been preserved and every bad one rejected. France was not only respected, she was a la mode. All Europe regarded her with sympathetic admiration. No one in 1824 could have predicted 1880. The writers least favorable to the Restoration had borne witness to the general calm, the prevalence of good will, the perfect accord between the country and the crown. The early days of the reign of Charles X. were, so to speak, the honeymoon of the union of the King and France.

III

THE TOMBS OF SAINT-DENIS

The funeral solemnities of Louis XVIII. seemed to the people a mortuary triumph of Royalty over the Revolution and the Empire. The profanations of 1793 were expiated. Napoleon was left with the willow of Saint Helena; the descendant of Saint Louis and of Louis XIV. had the basilica of his ancestors as a place of sepulture, and the links of time's chain were again joined. The obsequies of Louis XVIII. suggested a multitude of reflections. It was the first time since the death of Louis XV. in 1774, that such a ceremony had taken place. As was said by the Moniteur:--

"This solemnity, absolutely novel for the greater number of the present generation, offered an aspect at once mournful and imposing. A monarch so justly regretted, a king so truly Christian, coming to take his place among the glorious remains of the martyrs of his race and the bones of his ancestors,--profaned, scattered by the revolutionary tempest, but which he had been able again to gather,--was a grave subject of reflection, a spectacle touching in its purpose and majestic in the pomp with which it was surrounded."

Through what vicissitudes had passed these royal tombs, to which the coffin of Louis XVIII. was borne! Read in the work of M. Georges d'Heylli, Les Tombes royales de Saint-Denis, the story of these profanations and restorations.

The Moniteur of the 6th of February, 1793, published in its literary miscellany, a so-called patriotic ode, by the poet Lebrun, containing the following strophe:--

"Purgeons le sol des patriotes, Par des rois encore infectes. La terre de la liberte Rejette les os des despotes. De ces monstres divinises Que tous lea cercueils soient brises! Que leur memoirs soit fletrie! Et qu'avec leurs manes errants Sortent du sein de la patrie Les cadavres de ses tyrants!"

These verses were the prelude to the discussion, some months later, in the National Convention, of the proposition to destroy the monuments of the Kings at Saint-Denis, to burn their remains, and to send to the bullet foundry the bronze and lead off their tombs and coffins. In the session of July 31, 1793, Barrere, the "Anacreon of the guillotine," read to the convention in the name of the Committee of Public Safety, a report, which said:--

"To celebrate the day of August 10, which overthrew the throne, the pompous mausoleums must be destroyed upon its anniversary. Under the Monarchy, the very tombs were taught to flatter kings. Royal pride and luxury could not be moderated even on this theatre of death, and the bearers of the sceptre who had brought such ills on France and on humanity seemed even in the grave to vaunt a vanished splendor. The strong hand of the Republic should pitilessly efface these haughty epitaphs, and demolish these mausoleums which might recall the frightful memory of kings."

The project was voted by acclamation. The tombs were demolished between the 6th and 8th of August, 1793, and the announcement was made for the anniversary of the 10th of August, 1792, of "that grand, just, and retributive destruction, required in order that the coffins should be opened, and the remains of the tyrants be thrown into a ditch filled with quick-time, where they may be forever destroyed. This operation will shortly take place."

This was done in the following October. For some days there was carried on a profanation even more sacrilegious than the demolition of the tombs. The coffins containing the remains of kings and queens, princes and princesses, were violated. On Wednesday, the 16th of October, 1798, at the very hour that Marie Antoinette mounted the scaffold,--she who had so wept for her son, the first Dauphin, who died the 4th of June, 1789, at the beginning of the Revolution,--the disinterrers of kings violated the grave of this child and threw his bones on the refuse heap. Iconoclasts, jealous of death, disputed its prey, and they profaned among others the sepulchres of Madame Henrietta of England, of the Princess Palatine, of the Regent, and of Louis XV.

In the midst of these devastations, some men, less insensate than the others, sought at least to rescue from the hands of the destroyers what might be preserved in the interest of art. Of this number was an artist, Alexandre Lenoir, who had supervised the demolition of the tombs of Saint-Denis. He could not keep from the foundry, by the terms of the decree, the tombs of lead, copper, and bronze; but he saved the others from complete destruction--those that may be seen to-day in the church of Saint-Denis. He had them placed first in the cemetery of the Valois, near the ditches filled with quicklime, where had been cast the remains of the great ones of the earth, robbed of their sepulchres. Later, a decree of the Minister of the Interior, Benezech, dated 19 Germinal, An IV., authorizing the citizen Lenoir to have the tombs thus saved from destruction taken to the Museum of French Monuments, of which he was the conservator, and which had been installed at Paris, Rue des Petits Augustins. From thence they were destined to be returned to the Church of Saint-Denis, under the reign of Louis XVIII.

At the height of his power, Napoleon dreamed of providing for himself the same sepulture as that of the kings, his predecessors. He had decided that he would be interred in the Church of Saint-Denis, and had arranged for himself a cortege of emperors about the site that he had chosen for the vault of his dynasty. He directed the construction of a grand monument dedicated to Charlemagne, which was to rise in the "imperialized" church. The great Carlovingian emperor was to have been represented, erect, upon a column of marble, at the back of which statues in stone of the emperors who succeeded him were to have been placed. But at the time of Napoleon's fall, the monument had not been finished. There had been completed only the statues, which have taken their rank in the crypt. They represent Charlemagne, Louis le Debonnaire, Charles le Chauve, Louis le Begue, Charles le Gros, and even Louis d'Outremer, who, nevertheless, was only a king.

Like the Pharaohs of whom Bossuet speaks, Napoleon was not to enjoy his sepulture. To be interred with pomp at Saint-Denis, while Napoleon, at Saint Helena, rested under a simple stone on which not even his name was inscribed, was the last triumph for Louis XVIII.,--a triumph in death. The re-entrance of Louis XVIII. had been not only the restoration of the throne, but that of the tombs. The 21st of January, 1815, twenty-two years, to the very day, after the death of Louis XVI., the remains of the unhappy King and those of his Queen, Marie Antoinette, were transferred to the Church of Saint-Denis, where their solemn obsequies were celebrated. Chateaubriand cried:--

"What hand has reconstructed the roof of these vaults and prepared these empty tombs? The hand of him who was seated on the throne of the Bourbons. O Providence! He believed that he was preparing the sepulchres of his race, and he was but building the tomb of Louis XVI. Injustice reigns but for a moment; it is virtue only that can count its ancestors and leave a posterity. See, at the same moment, the master of the earth falls, Louis XVIII. regains the sceptre, Louis XVI. finds again the sepulture of his fathers."

At the beginning of the Second Restoration, the King determined, by a decree of the 4th of April, 1816, that search should be made in the cemetery of the Valois, about the Church of Saint-Denis, in order to recover the remains of his ancestors that might have escaped the action of the bed of quicklime, in which they had been buried under the Terror. The same decree declared that the remains recovered should be solemnly replaced in the Church of Saint-Denis.

Excavations were made in January, 1817, in the cemetery of the Valois, and the bones thus discovered were transferred to the necropolis of the kings.

"It was night," says Alexandre Lenoir, in his Histoire des Arts en France par les Monuments. "The moon shone on the towers; the torches borne by the attendants were reflected from the walls of the edifice. What a spectacle! The remains of kings and queens, princes and princesses, of the most ancient of monarchies, sought with pious care, with sacred respect, in the ditches dug by impious arms in the evil days. The bones of the Valois and the Bourbons found pele-mele outside the walls of the church, and brought again, after a long exile, to their ancient burial place."

In a little vault on the left were deposited the coffins containing the bones of earlier date than the Bourbons, and a marble tablet was placed upon it, with the inscription: "Here rest the mortal remains of eighteen kings, from Dagobert to Henry III.; ten queens, from Nantilde, wife of Dagobert, to Marguerite de Valois, first wife of Henry IV.; twenty-four dauphins, princes, and princesses, children and grandchildren of France; eleven divers personages (Hugues-le-grand, four abbes of Saint-Denis, three chamberlains, two constables, and Sedille de Sainte-Croix, wife of the Counsellor Jean Pastourelle). Torn from their violated sepulchres the 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 October, 1793, and 18 January, 1794; restored to their tombs the 19 January, 1817."

On the right were placed the coffins enclosing the remains of the princes and princesses of the house of Bourbon, the list of which is given by a second marble plaque: "Here rest the mortal remains of seven kings, from Charles V. to Louis XV.; seven queens, from Jeanne de Bourbon, wife of Charles V., to Marie Leczinska, wife of Louis XV.; dauphins and dauphinesses, princes and princesses, children and grandchildren of France, to the number of forty-seven, from the second son of Henry IV. to the Dauphin, eldest son of Louis XVI. Torn from their violated sepulchres the 12, 14, 15, and 16 October, 1793; restored to their tombs the 19 January, 1817."