Volume Iv

BOOK VII

Changes in the world--The years 1815 and 1816--I am made a peer of France--My first appearance in the tribune--Various speeches--The Monarchie selon la Charte--Louis XVIII.--M. Decazes--I am struck off the list of ministers of State--I sell my books and my Valley--My speeches continued, in 1817 and 1818--The Piet meetings--The Conservateur--Concerning the morality of material interests and that of duty--The year 1820--Death of the Duc de Berry--Birth of the Duc de Bordeaux--The market-women of Bordeaux--I cause M. de Villèle and M. de Corbière to take office for the first time--My letter to the Duc de Richelieu--Note from the Duc de Richelieu and my reply--Notes from M. de Polignac--Letters from M. de Montmorency and M. Pasquier--I am appointed Ambassador to Berlin--I leave for that embassy.

To fall back from Bonaparte and the Empire to that which followed them is to fall from reality into nothingness, from the summit of a mountain into a gulf. Did not everything finish with Napoleon? Ought I to have spoken of anything else? What person can possess any interest beside him? Of whom and of what can there be any question after such a man? Dante alone had the right to associate himself with the great poets whom he meets in the regions of another life. How can one speak of Louis XVIII. in the stead of the Emperor? I blush when I think that, at the present moment, I have to cant about a crowd of petty creatures, of whom I myself am one, dubious and nocturnal beings that we were on a stage from which the great sun had disappeared.

The Bonapartists themselves had shrivelled up. Their members had become bent and shrunk; the soul was lacking to the new universe so soon as Bonaparte withdrew his breath; objects faded from view from the moment when they were no longer illuminated by the light which had given them colour and relief. At the commencement of these Memoirs, I had only myself to speak of: well, there is always a sort of paramountcy in man's individual solitude. Later, I was surrounded by miracles: those miracles kept up my voice; but at this present moment there is no more conquest of Egypt, no more Battles of Marengo, Austerlitz and Jena, no more retreat from Russia, no more invasion of France, capture of Paris, return from Elba, Battle of Waterloo, funeral at St. Helena: what remains? Portraits to which only the genius of Molière could lend the gravity of comedy!

While expressing myself upon our worthlessness, I taxed my conscience home: I asked myself whether I did not purposely incorporate myself with the nullity of these times, in order to acquire the right to condemn the others, persuaded though I were in petto that my name would be read in the midst of all these obliterations. No, I am convinced that we shall all fade out: first, because we have not in us the wherewithal to live; secondly, because the age in which we are commencing or ending our days has itself not the wherewithal to make us live. Generations mutilated, exhausted, disdainful, faithless, consecrated to the annihilation which they love, are unable to bestow immortality; they have no power to create a renown; if you were to nail your ear to their mouth, you would hear nothing: no sound issues from the heart of the dead.

One thing strikes me, however: the little world to which I am now coming was superior to the world which succeeded it in 1830; we were giants in comparison with the society of maggots that has engendered itself.

The Restoration offers at least one point in which we can find importance: after the dignity of one man, that man having passed, there was born again the dignity of mankind. If despotism has been replaced by liberty, if we understand anything of independence, if we have lost the habit of grovelling, if the rights of human nature are no longer disregarded, we owe these things to the Restoration. Wherefore also I threw myself into the fray in order, as far as I could, to revive the species when the individual had come to an end.

Come, let us pursue our task! Let us descend, with a groan, to myself and my colleagues. You have seen me amid my dreams; you are about to see me in my realities: if the interest decreases, if I fall, reader, be just, make allowance for my subject!

After the second return of the King and the final disappearance of Bonaparte, the Ministry being in the hands of M. le Duc d'Otrante and M. le Prince de Talleyrand, I was appointed president of the electoral college of the Department of the Loiret. The elections of 1815 gave the King the Chambre introuvable. I was carrying all the votes at Orleans, when I received the Order which called me to the House of Peers. My active career had hardly commenced, when it suddenly changed its course: what would it have been if I had been sent to the Elective Chamber? It is fairly probable that that career would, in the event of my success, have ended in the Ministry of the Interior, instead of taking me to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. My habits and manners were more in touch with the peerage, and, although the latter became hostile to me from the first moment, by reason of my Liberal opinions, it is nevertheless certain that my doctrines concerning the liberty of the press and against the vassalage to foreigners gave the Noble Chamber the popularity which it enjoyed so long as it suffered my opinions.

I received, at my entrance, the only honour which my colleagues ever did me during my fifteen years' residence in their midst: I was appointed one of the four secretaries for the session of 1816. Lord Byron met with no more favour when he appeared in the House of Lords, and he left it for good: I ought to have returned to my deserts.

My first appearance in the tribune was to make a speech on the irremovability of the judges: I applauded the principle, but censured its immediate application. At the Revolution of 1830, the members of the Left who were most devoted to that revolution wished to suspend the irremovability for a time.

On the 22nd of February 1816, the Duc de Richelieu brought us the autograph will of the Queen. I ascended the tribune, and said:

"He who has preserved for us the will of Marie-Antoinette had bought the property of Montboisier: himself one of Louis XVI.'s judges, he raised in that property a monument to the memory of the defender of Louis XVI., and himself engraved on that monument an epitaph in French verse in praise of M. de Malesherbes. This astonishing impartiality shows that all is misplaced in the moral world."

On the 12th of March 1816, the question of the ecclesiastical pensions was discussed:

"You would," I said, "refuse an allowance to the poor vicar who devotes the remainder of his days to the altar, and you would accord pensions to Joseph Lebon, who struck off so many heads; to François Chabot, who asked for a law against the Emigrants of so simple a character that a child might lead them to the guillotine; to Jacques Roux, who, refusing at the Temple to receive Louis XVI.'s will, replied to the unfortunate monarch:

"'My only business is to take you to your death.'"

A bill had been introduced into the Hereditary Chamber relating to the elections. I declared myself in favour of the integral renewal of the Chamber of Deputies. It was not until 1824, being then a minister, that I passed it into law.

It was also in this first speech on the law governing elections, in 1816, that I said, in reply to an opponent:

"I will not refer to what has been said about Europe watching our discussions. Speaking for myself, gentlemen, I doubtless owe to the French blood that flows in my veins the impatience which I experience when, in order to influence my vote, people talk to me of opinions existing outside my country; and, if civilized Europe tried to impose the Charter on me, I should go to live in Constantinople."

On the 9th of April 1816, I introduced a motion to the Chamber relating to the Barbary Powers. The house decided that there was cause for its discussion. I was already thinking of combating slavery, before I obtained that favourable decision from the Peers, which was the first political intervention of a great Power on behalf of the Greeks:

"I have seen the ruins of Carthage," I said to my colleagues; "I have met among those ruins the successors of the unhappy Christians for whose deliverance St. Louis sacrificed his life. Philosophy can take its share of the glory attached to the success of my motion and boast of having obtained in an age of light that for which religion strove in vain in an age of darkness."

I found myself in an assembly in which my words, for three-fourths of the time, turned against myself. One can move a popular chamber; an aristocratic chamber is deaf. With no gallery, speaking in private before old men, dried-up remains of the old Monarchy, of the Revolution and of the Empire, anything that rose above the most commonplace seemed madness. One day, the front row of arm-chairs, quite close to the tribune, was filled with venerable peers, one more deaf than the other, their heads bent forward, and holding to their ears a trumpet with the mouth turned towards the tribune. I sent them to sleep, which is very natural. One of them dropped his ear-trumpet; his neighbour, awakened by the fall, wanted politely to pick up his colleague's trumpet; he fell down. The worst of it was that I began to laugh, although I was just then speaking pathetically on some subject of humanity, I forget what.

The speakers who succeeded in that Chamber were those who spoke without ideas, in a level and monotonous tone, or who found terms of sensibility only in order to melt with pity for the poor ministers. M. de Lally-Tolendal thundered in favour of the public liberties: he made the vaults of our solitude resound with the praises of three or four English Lord Chancellors, his ancestors, he said. When his panegyric of the liberty of the press was finished, came a "but" based upon "circumstances," which "but" left our honour safe, under the useful supervision of the censorship.

The Restoration gave an impulse to men's minds; it set free the thought suppressed by Bonaparte: the intellect, like a caryatic figure relieved of the entablature that bent its brow, lifted up its head. The Empire had struck France with dumbness; liberty restored touched her and gave her back speech: oratorical talents existed which took up matters where the Mirabeaus and Cazalès had left them, and the Revolution continued its course.

My labours were not limited to the tribune, so new to me. Appalled at the systems which men were embracing and at France's ignorance of the principles of representative government, I wrote and had printed the Monarchie selon la Charte. This publication marked one of the great epochs of my political life: it made me take rank among the publicists; it served to determine opinion on the nature of our government. The English papers praised the work to the skies; among us, the Abbé Morellet even could not recover from the transformation of my style and the dogmatic precision of the truths.

The Monarchie selon la Charte is a constitutional catechism: from it have been taken the greater part of the propositions which are put forward as new to-day. Thus the principle that "the King reigns but does not govern" is found fully set forth in Chapters IV., V., VI. and VII. on the Royal Prerogative.

The constitutional principles having been laid down in the first part of the Monarchie selon la Charte, I examine in the second the systems of the three ministries which till then had followed upon one another, from 1814 to 1816; in this part are brought together predictions too well verified since and expositions of doctrines at that time unperceived. These words appear in Chapter XXVI., in the Second Part:

"It passes as unquestionable, in a certain party, that a revolution of the nature of our own can end only by a change of dynasty; others, more moderate, say by a change in the order of right of succession to the Crown."

As I was finishing my work, appeared the ordinance of the 5th of September 1816: this measure dispersed the few Royalists assembled to reconstruct the Legitimate Monarchy. I hastened to write the Postscript, which caused an explosion of anger on the part of M. le Duc de Richelieu and of Louis XVIII.'s favourite, M. Decazes.

The Postscript added, I ran to M. Le Normant, my publisher's. On arriving, I found constables and a police-commissary making out instruments. They had seized parcels and affixed seals. I had not defied Bonaparte to be intimidated by M. Decazes: I objected to the seizure; I declared that, as a free Frenchman and a peer of France, I would yield only to force. The force arrived and I withdrew. I went on the 18th of September to Messieurs Louis-Marthe Mesnier and his colleague, notaries-royal; I protested in their office and called upon them to register my statement of the fact of the apprehension of my work, wishing to ensure the rights of French citizens by means of this protest M. Baudé followed my example in 1830.

I next found myself engaged in a rather long correspondence with M. the Chancellor, M. the Minister of Police and M. the Attorney-General Bellart, until the 9th of November, on which day the Chancellor informed me of the order made in my favour by the Court of First Instance, which placed me in possession of my seized work. In one of his letters, M. the Chancellor told me that he had been distressed to see the dissatisfaction which the King had publicly expressed with my work. This dissatisfaction arose from the chapter in which I stood up against the establishment of a minister of General Police in a constitutional country.

In my account of the journey to Ghent, you have seen Louis XVIII.'s value as a descendant of Hugh Capet; in my pamphlet, Le Roi est mort: vive le roi! I have told the Prince's real qualities. But man is not a simple unit: why are there so few faithful portraits? Because the model is made to pose at such or such a period of his life; ten years later the portrait is no longer like.

Louis XVIII. did not see far the objects before or around him; all seemed fair or foul to him according to the way he looked at it. Smitten with his century, it is to be feared that "the most Christian King" regarded religion only as an elixir fit for the amalgam of drugs of which royalty is composed. The licentious imagination which he had received from his grandfather might have inspired some distrust of his enterprises; but he knew himself and, when he spoke in a positive manner, he boasted (well knowing it), while laughing at himself. I spoke to him one day of the need of a new marriage for M. le Duc de Bourbon, in order to bring back the race of the Condés to life. He strongly approved of that idea, although he cared very little about the sad resurrection; but in this connection he spoke to me of the Comte d'Artois, and said:

"My brother might marry again without changing anything in the succession to the throne: he would only make cadets. As for me, I should only make elders; I do not want to disinherit M. le Duc d'Angoulême."

And he drew himself up with a capable and bantering air; but I had no intention of denying the King any power.

Selfish and unprejudiced, Louis XVIII. desired his peace of mind at any price: he supported his ministers so long as they held the majority; he dismissed them so soon as the majority was shaken and his tranquillity liable to be upset: he did not hesitate to fall back when, to obtain the victory, he ought to have taken a step forward. His greatness was patience: he did not go towards events; events came to him.

Without being cruel, the King was not humane; tragic catastrophes neither astonished nor touched him; he was satisfied with saying to the Duc de Berry, who apologized for having had the misfortune to disturb the King's sleep by his death:

"I have finished my night."

Nevertheless, this quiet man would fly into horrible rages when annoyed; and also, this cold, unfeeling Prince had attachments which resembled passions: thus there succeeded each other in his intimacy the Comte d'Avaray, M. de Blacas, M. Decazes; Madame de Balbi, Madame de Cayla. All these beloved persons were favourites; unfortunately they have a great deal too many letters in their hands.

Louis XVIII. appeared to us in all the profundity of historic tradition; he showed himself with the favouritism of the ancient royalties. Does the heart of our isolated monarchs contain a void which they fill with the first object they light upon? Is it sympathy, the affinity of a nature analogous to their own? Is it a friendship which drops down to them from Heaven to console their greatnesses? Is it a leaning for a slave who gives himself body and soul, before whom one conceals nothing, a slave who becomes a garment, a plaything, a fixed idea bound up with all the feelings, all the tastes, all the whims of him whom it has subdued and whom it holds under the empire of an invincible fascination? The viler and closer a favourite has been, the less easily is he to be dismissed, because he is in possession of secrets which would put one to the blush if they were divulged: the chosen one derives a dual force from his own baseness and his master's weaknesses.

When the favourite happens to be a great man, like the besetting Richelieu or the undismissable Mazarin, the nations, while detesting him, profit by his glory or his power; they only change a wretched king de jure for an illustrious king de facto.

So soon as M. Decazes was made a minister, the carriages blocked the Quai Malaquais in the evenings to set down in the new-comer's drawing-room all that was noblest in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. The Frenchman may do what he pleases, he will never be anything but a courtier, no matter of whom, provided it be a power of the day.

Soon there was formed, on behalf of the new favourite, a formidable coalition of stupidities. In democratic society, prate about liberties, declare that you see the progress of the human race and the future of things, adding to your speeches a few Crosses of the Legion of Honour, and you are sure of your place; in aristocratic society, play whist, utter commonplaces and carefully-prepared witticisms with a grave and profound air, and the fortune of your genius is assured.

Born a fellow-countryman of Murat, but of Murat without a kingdom, M. Decazes had come to us from the mother of Napoleon. He was familiar, obliging, never insolent; he wished me well; I do not know why, I did not care: thence came the commencement of my disgraces. That was to teach me that one must never fail in respect to a favourite. The King loaded him with kindnesses and credit, and subsequently married him to a very well-born person, daughter to M. de Sainte-Aulaire. It is true that M. Decazes served royalty too well; it was he who unearthed Marshal Ney in the mountains of Auvergne, where he had hidden himself.

Faithful to the inspirations of his throne, Louis XVIII. said of M. Decazes:

"I shall raise him up so high that the greatest lords will be envious of him."

This phrase, borrowed from another king, was a mere anachronism: to raise up others, one must be sure of not descending; now, at the time when Louis XVIII. arrived, what were monarchs? If they could still make a man's fortune, they could no longer make his greatness; they had become merely their favourites' bankers.

Madame Princeteau, M. Decazes' sister, was an agreeable, modest and excellent person; the King had fallen in love with her prospectively. M. Decazes, the father, whom I saw in the throne-room in full dress, sword at side, hat under his arm, made no success, however.

At last, the death of M. le Duc de Berry increased the ill-will on both sides and brought about the favourite's fall. I have said that "his feet slipped in the blood," which does not mean, Heaven forbid! that he was guilty of the murder, but that he fell in the reddened pool that formed under Louvel's knife.

I had resisted the seizure of the Monarchie selon la Charte to enlighten misled royalty and to uphold the liberty of thought and of the press; I had frankly embraced our institutions, and I remained loyal to them.

These broils over, I remained bleeding from the wounds inflicted on me at the appearance of my pamphlet. I did not take possession of my political career without bearing the scars of the blows which I received on entering upon that career: I felt ill at ease in it, I was unable to breathe.

Shortly afterwards, an Order countersigned "Richelieu" struck me off the list of ministers of State, and I was deprived of a place till then reputed irremovable; it had been given me at Ghent, and the pension attached to that place was withdrawn from me: the hand which had taken Fouché struck me.

I have had the honour to be thrice stripped for the Legitimacy: first, for following the sons of St. Louis into exile; the second time, for writing in favour of the principles of the Monarchy, as "granted;" the third, for keeping silence on a baleful law at the moment when I had just caused the triumph of our arms. The Spanish Campaign had given back soldiers to the White Flag, and, if I had been kept in power, I should have carried back our frontiers to the banks of the Rhine.

My nature made me quite indifferent to the loss of my salary; I came off with going on foot again and, on rainy days, driving to the Chamber of Peers in a hackney-coach. In my popular conveyance, under the protection of the rabble that surged around me, I re-entered into the rights of the proletariat of which I formed part: from my lofty chariot I looked down upon the train of kings.

I was obliged to sell my books; M. Merlin put them up to auction at the Salle Sylvestre in the Rue des Bons-Enfants. I kept only a little Greek Homer, whose margins were covered with attempts at translation and remarks in my handwriting. Soon it became necessary to take energetic measures; I asked M. the Minister of the Interior for leave to raffle my country-house. The lottery was opened at the office of M. Denis, notary. There were ninety tickets at 1000 francs each: the numbers were not taken up by the Royalists; the Dowager Madame la Duchesse d'Orléans took three numbers; my friend, M. Lainé, the Minister of the Interior, who had countersigned the Order of the 5th of September and consented in the Council to the striking off of my name, took a fourth ticket under a false name. The money was returned to the subscribers; M. Lainé, however, refused to withdraw his 1000 francs; he left it with the notary for the poor.

Not long after, my Vallée-aux-Loups was sold, as they sell the furniture of the poor, on the Place du Châtelet. I suffered much by this sale; I had become attached to my trees, planted and, so to speak, full-grown in my memories. The reserve was 50,000 francs; it was covered by M. le Vicomte de Montmorency, who alone dared to bid one hundred francs higher: the Vallée was knocked down to him. He has since inhabited my retreat. It is not a good thing to meddle with my fortunes: that man of virtue is no more.

After the publication of the Monarchie selon la Charte and at the opening of the new session in the month of November 1816, I continued my contests. In the House of Peers, in the sitting of the 23rd of that month, I moved a proposition to the effect that the King be humbly begged to order an investigation into the proceedings at the last elections. The corruption and violence of the Ministry during those elections were flagrant.

In giving my opinion on the Bill relating to Supply (21 March 1817), I spoke against Clause II. of that Bill: it had to do with the State forests which they proposed to appropriate for the Sinking Fund, in order afterwards to sell one hundred and fifty thousand hectares. These forests consisted of three kinds of properties: the ancient domains of the Crown, a few commanderies of the Order of Malta, and the remainder of the goods of the Church. I do not know why, even to-day, I find a sad interest in my words; they bear some resemblance to my Memoirs:

"With all due deference to those who have administered only during our troubles, it is not the material security but the ethics of a people that constitute the public credit. Will the new owners make good the titles of their new property? To deprive them there will be quoted to them instances of inheritances of nine centuries taken away from their former possessors. Instead of those inalienable patrimonies in which the same family outlived the race of the oaks, you will have unfixed properties in which the reeds will scarcely have time to spring up and die before they change masters. The homes will cease to be the guardians of domestic morality; they will lose their venerable authority; rights-of-way open to all comers, they will no longer be hallowed by the grandfather's chair and the cradle of the new-born child.

"Peers of France, it is your cause that I am pleading here, not mine: I am speaking to you in the interests of your children; I shall have no concern with posterity; I have no sons; I have lost my father's fields, and a few trees which I have planted will soon cease to be mine."

Because of the resemblance of opinions, then very keen, an intimacy had been established between the minorities of the two Chambers. France was learning representative government. As I had been foolish enough to take it literally and make a real passion of it, to my prejudice, I supported those who took it up, without troubling my head as to whether their opposition was not prompted by human motives rather than by a pure love like that which I felt for the Charter: not that I was a simpleton, but I idolized my lady-love and would have gone through fire to carry her off in my arms. It was during this constitutional attack that I came to know M. de Villèle, in 1816. He was calmer; he overcame his ardour; he, too, aimed at conquering liberty, but he laid siege to it according to rule. He opened the trenches methodically: I, who wanted to carry the place by assault, advanced to the escalade, and often found myself flung back into the ditch.

I met M. de Villèle first at the Duchesse de Lévis'. He became the leader of the Royalist Opposition in the Elective Chamber, as I was in the Hereditary Chamber. He had as a friend his colleague M. de Corbière. The latter never left his side, and people used to speak of "Villèle and Corbière" as they speak of "Orestes and Pylades" or "Euryalus and Nisus."

To enter into fastidious details about persons whose names one will not know to-morrow would be an idiotic vanity. Obscure and tedious commotions, which one considers of immense interest and which interest nobody, bygone intrigues, which have decided no important event, should be left to those devoutly happy persons who imagine themselves to be, or to have been, the object of the world's attention.

Nevertheless, there were proud moments in which my contentions with M. de Villèle seemed to me personally like the dissensions of Sulla and Marius, of Cæsar and Pompey. Together with the other members of the Opposition, we went pretty often to spend the evening in deliberation at M. Piet's, in the Rue Thérèse. We arrived looking extremely ugly, and sat down round a room lighted by a flaring lamp. In this legislative fog, we talked of the Bill introduced, of the motion to be made, of the friend to be pushed into the secretaryship, the questorship, the different committees. We were not unlike the assemblies of the early Christians, as depicted by the enemies of the Faith: we broached the worst news; we said that things were going to turn, that Rome would be troubled by divisions, that our armies would be routed.

M. de Villèle listened, summed up, and drew no conclusions; he was a great aid in business: a prudent mariner, he never put to sea in a storm and, though he would cleverly enter a known harbour, he would never have discovered the New World. I often observed, in the matter of our discussions concerning the sale of the goods of the clergy, that the best Christians among us were the most eager in defense of the constitutional doctrines. Religion is the well-spring of liberty: in Rome, the flamen dialis wore only a hollow ring on his finger, because a solid ring had something of a chain; in his clothing and on his head-dress the pontiff of Jupiter was forbidden to suffer a single knot.

After the sitting, M. de Villèle would go away, accompanied by M. de Corbière. I studied many personalities, I learnt many things, I occupied myself with many interests at those meetings: finance, which I always understood, the army, justice, administration initiated me into their several elements. I left those conferences somewhat more of a statesman and somewhat more persuaded of the poverty of all that knowledge. Throughout the night, between sleeping and waking, I saw the different attitudes of the bald heads, the different expressions of the faces of those untidy and ungainly Solons. It was all very venerable, truly; but I preferred the swallow which woke me in my youth and the Muses who filled my dreams: the rays of the dawn which, striking a swan, made the shadows of those white birds fall upon a golden billow; the rising sun which appeared to me in Syria in the stem of a palm-tree, like the phoenix' nest, pleased me more.

I felt that my fighting in the tribune, in a closed Chamber, and in the midst of an assembly which was unfavourable to me, remained useless to victory, and that I required another weapon. The censorship being established over the periodical daily newspapers, I could fulfil my object only by means of a free, semi-daily paper, with the aid of which I would at once attack the system of the Ministers and the opinions of the Extreme Left printed in the Minerve by M. Étienne. I was staying at Noisiel with Madame la Duchesse de Lévis, in the summer of 1818, when my publisher, M. Le Normant, came to see me. I told him of the idea which I had in mind; he caught fire, offered to run all risks and undertook all expenses. I spoke to my friends, Messieurs de Bonald and de La Mennais, and asked them if they would take part: they agreed, and the paper was not long in appearing under the title of the Conservateur.

The revolution worked by this paper was unexampled: in France, it changed the majority in the Chambers; abroad, it converted the spirit of the Cabinets.

In this way the Royalists owed to me the advantage of issuing from the state of nullity into which they had fallen with peoples and kings. I put the pen into the hands of France's greatest families. I decked out the Montmorencys and the Lévises as journalists; I called out the arriere-ban; I made feudality march to the aid of the liberty of the press. I had got together the most brilliant men of the Royalist party, Messieurs de Villèle, de Corbière, de Vitrolles, de Castelbajac, etc. I could not help blessing Providence every time that I spread the red robe of a prince of the Church over the Conservateur by way of a cover, and that I had the pleasure to read an article signed in full: "The Cardinal de La Luzerne." But it came to pass that, after I had led my knights on the constitutional crusade, so soon as they had conquered power by the deliverance of liberty, so soon as they had become Princes of Edessa, of Antioch, of Damascus, they locked themselves up in their new States with Eleanor of Aquitaine, and left me out in the cold at the foot of Jerusalem, where the infidels had recaptured the Holy Sepulchre.

My polemical warfare began in the Conservateur and lasted from 1818 to 1820, that is to say, until the re-establishment of the censorship, for which the death of the Duc de Berry was the pretext. During this first period of my polemics, I upset the old Ministry and placed M. de Villèle in power.

After 1824, when I again took up my pen in pamphlets and in the Journal des Débats, the positions were changed. And yet, what did those futile trifles matter to me, who had never believed in the time in which I lived, to me, who belonged to the past, to me, who had no faith in kings, no conviction with regard to the peoples, to me, who have never troubled about anything, except dreams, and then only on condition that they lasted but a night!

The first article in the Conservateur describes the position of things at the moment when I entered the lists. During the two years for which the paper lasted, I had successively to treat of accidents of the day and to examine interests of importance. I had occasion to criticize the dastardliness of that "private correspondence" which the Paris police was publishing in London. This "private correspondence" might calumniate, but could not dishonour: that which is base has not the power of debasing; honour alone is able to inflict dishonour.

"Anonymous calumniators," I said, "have the courage to say who you are; a little shame is soon over; add your names to your articles: it will be only one contemptible word the more."

I used sometimes to laugh at the ministers, and I gave vent to that ironical propensity which I have always reproved in myself.

Finally, under date 5 December 1818, the Conservateur contained a serious article on the morality of interests and on that of duty: it was this article, which made a stir, that gave birth to the phrase of "moral interests" and "material interests," first put forward by me, and subsequently adopted by everybody. Here it is, much abridged; it rises above the compass of a newspaper, and it is one of my works to which my reason attaches some value. It has not aged, because the ideas which it contains are of all time:

"The ministry has invented a new morality, the morality of interests; that of duties is abandoned to fools. Now this morality of interests, of which it is proposed to make the ground-work of our government, has done more to corrupt the people in a space of three years than the Revolution in a quarter of a century.

"That which destroys morality in the nations and, with that morality, the nations themselves is not violence, but seduction; and by seduction I mean all that is flattering and specious in any false doctrine. Men often mistake error for truth, because each faculty of the heart or the mind has its false image: coldness resembles virtue, reasoning resembles reason, emptiness resembles depth, and so on.

"The eighteenth century was a destructive century; we were all seduced. We distorted politics, we strayed into guilty innovations while seeking a social existence in the corruption of our morals. The Revolution came to rouse us: in pushing the Frenchman out of his bed, it flung him into the tomb. Nevertheless, the Reign of Terror is, perhaps, of all the epochs of the Revolution, that which was least dangerous to morality, because no conscience was forced: crime appeared in all its frankness. Orgies in the midst of blood, scandals that ceased to be so by dint of being horrible: that is all. The women of the people came and worked at their knitting round the murder-machine as round their fire-sides: the scaffolds were the public morals and death the foundation of the government. Nothing was clearer than the position of every one: there was no talk of 'speciality,' nor of 'practicality,' nor of a 'system of interests.' That balderdash of little minds and bad consciences was unknown. They said to a man, 'You are a Royalist, a nobleman, rich: die;' and he died. Antonelle wrote that no count had been found against certain prisoners, but that he had condemned them as aristocrats: a monstrous frankness, which, notwithstanding, allowed moral order to subsist; for society is not ruined by killing the innocent as innocent, but by killing him as guilty.

"Consequently, those hideous times are times of great acts of self-devotion. Then women went heroically to the scaffold; fathers gave themselves up for their sons, sons for their fathers; unexpected assistance was introduced into the prisons, and the priest who was being hunted consoled the victim by the side of the executioner who failed to recognise him.

"Morality, under the Directory, had to combat the corruption of morals rather than of doctrines; license prevailed. Men were hurled into pleasures as they had been heaped up in the prisons; they forced the present to advance joys on the future, in the fear of seeing a revival of the past. Every man, not having yet had time to create himself a home, lived in the street, on the public walks, in the public rooms. Familiarized with the scaffolds, and already half cut off from the world, they did not think it worth the trouble to go indoors. There was question only of arts, balls, fashions; people changed their ornaments and clothes as readily as they would have stripped themselves of their lives.

"Under Bonaparte the seduction commenced again, but it was a seduction that carried its own remedy: Bonaparte seduced by means of the spell of glory, and all that is great carries a principle of legislation within itself. He conceived that it was useful to allow the doctrine of all peoples to be taught, the morality of all times, the religion of eternity.

"I should not be surprised to hear some one reply:

"'To base society upon a duty, is to build it on a fiction; to place it in an interest, is to establish it in a reality.'

"Now it is precisely duty which is a fact and interest a fiction. Duty, which takes its source in the Godhead, descends first into the family, where it establishes a real affinity between the father and the children; from there, passing into society and dividing into two branches, in the political order it rules the relations of the king and the subject; in the moral order it establishes the tie of service and protection, of benefits and gratitude.

"Duty is therefore a most positive fact, since it gives to human society the only lasting existence that the latter can have.

"Interest, on the contrary, is a fiction when it is taken as people take it to-day, in its physical and rigorous sense, since it is no longer in the evening what it was in the morning; since it changes its nature at each moment; since, founded on fortune, it has fortune's fickleness.

"By the morality of interest, every citizen is at enmity with the laws and the government, because in society it is always the great number that suffers. People do not fight for abstract ideas of order, of place, of the mother-land; or, if they fight for them, it is because they attach ideas of sacrifice to them; then they emerge from the morality of interest to enter into that of duty: so true is it that the existence of society is not to be found outside that sacred limit.

"He who does his duty gains esteem; he who yields to his interest is but little esteemed: it was very like the century to draw a principle of government from a source of contempt! Bring up politicians to think only of what affects them, and you shall see how they will dress out the State; by that means you will have only corrupt and hungry ministers, like those mutilated slaves who governed the Lower Empire and who sold all, remembering that they themselves had been sold.

"Mark this: interests are powerful only so long as they prosper; when times are harsh, they become enfeebled. Duties, on the contrary, are never so energetic as when they are painful to fulfil. When times are good, they grow lax. I like a principle of government which grows great in misfortune: that greatly resembles virtue.

"What can be absurder than to cry to the people:

"'Do not be devoted! Have no enthusiasm! Think only of your interests!'

"It is as though one were to say to them:

"'Do not come to our assistance, abandon us if such be your interest.'

"With this profound policy, when the hour of devotion shall have come, each one will shut his door, go to the window, and watch the Monarchy pass."

Such was this article on the morality of interest and the morality of duty.

On the 3rd of December 1819, I again mounted the tribune of the Chamber of Peers: I raised my voice against the bad Frenchmen who were able to give us as a motive for tranquillity the watchfulness of the European armies:

"Had we need of guardians? Were they still going to talk of circumstances? Were we again, by means of diplomatic notes, to receive certificates of good conduct? And should we not only have changed a garrison of Cossacks for a garrison of ambassadors?"

From that time forward, I spoke of the foreigners as I have since spoken of them in the Spanish War; I was thinking of our delivery at a moment when even the Liberals contended with me. Men opposed in opinion make a deal of noise to attain silence! Let a few years arrive, and the actors will descend from the stage and the audience no longer be there to hiss or applaud them.

I had gone to bed, on the evening of the 13th of February, when the Marquis de Vibraye came in to me to tell me of the assassination of the Duc du Berry. In his haste, he did not tell me the place where the event had occurred. I dressed hurriedly and stepped into M. de Vibraye's carriage. I was surprised to see the coachman take the Rue de Richelieu, and still more astonished when he stopped at the Opera: the crowd about the approaches was immense. We went up, between two lines of soldiers, through the side-door on the left, and, as we were in our peers' coats, we were allowed to pass. We came to a sort of little ante-room: the space was obstructed with all the people of the palace. I pushed my way as far as the door of a box and found myself face to face with M. le Duc d'Orléans. I was struck with an ill-disguised expression of jubilation in his eyes, across the contrite countenance which he assumed: he saw the throne nearer at hand. My glance embarrassed him: he left the spot and turned his back to me. Around me, they were telling the details of the crime, the man's name, the conjectures of the different participants in the arrest; they were excited, busy: men love anything theatrical, especially death, when it is the death of one of the great. Each person who came out of the blood-stained laboratory was asked for news. They heard General A. de Girardin relate how, having been left for dead on the battle-field, he had nevertheless recovered from his wounds; this one was hoping and consoling himself, that other was repining. Soon contemplation overcame the crowd, a silence fell; from the inside of the box came a dull sound: I held my ear laid to the door; I distinguished a rattle; the sound ceased: the Royal Family had received the last breath of a grandson of Louis XIV.! I entered at once.

Let the reader picture to himself an empty playhouse, after the catastrophe of a tragedy: the curtain raised, the orchestra deserted, the lights extinguished, the machinery motionless, the scenery fixed and smoke-blackened, the actors, the singers, the dancers vanished through the trap-doors and secret passages!

I have, in a separate work, given the life and death of M. le Duc de Berry. My reflections made at that time are still true to-day:

"A son of St. Louis, the last scion of the Elder Branch, escapes the crosses of a long banishment and returns to his country; he begins to taste happiness; he indulges the hope of seeing himself revive, of at the same time seeing the monarchy revive in the children that God promises him: suddenly he is struck down in the midst of his hopes, almost in the arms of his wife. He is going to die, and he is not full of years! Might he not accuse Heaven, ask It why It treats him with such severity? Ah, how pardonable it would have been in him to complain of his destiny! For, after all, what harm did he do? He lived familiarly among us in perfect simplicity, mingled in our pleasures and assuaged our pains; already six of his relations have perished: why murder him also, why seek out him, innocent, him so far from the throne, twenty-seven years after the death of Louis XVI.? Let us learn to know better the heart of a Bourbon! That heart, all pierced by the dagger, was not able to find a single murmur against us: not one regret for life, not one bitter word was uttered by the Prince. A husband, son, father and brother, a prey to every anguish of the mind, to every suffering of the body, he does not cease to ask pardon for 'the man,' whom he does not even call his assassin! The most impetuous becomes suddenly the gentlest character. It is a man attached to existence by every tie of the heart, it is a prince in the flower of his youth, it is the heir to the fairest kingdom on earth that is dying: and you would think that it was a poor wretch who loses nothing here below."

The murderer Louvel was a little man with a dirty and sorry face, such as one sees by the thousand on the Paris streets. He had something of the cur; he had a snarling and solitary air. It is probable that Louvel was not a member of any society: he was one of a sect, not of a plot; he belonged to one of those conspiracies of ideas, the members of which may sometimes come together, but most frequently act one by one, according to their individual impulse. His brain fed on a single thought, even as a heart slakes its thirst on a single passion. His act was consequent upon his principles: he would have liked to kill the whole Dynasty at one blow. Louvel has his admirers even as Robespierre has his. Our material society, the accomplice of every material enterprise, soon destroyed the chapel raised in expiation of a crime. We abhor moral sentiment, because in it we behold the enemy and the accuser: tears would have appeared a recrimination; we were in a hurry to deprive a few Christians of a cross to weep at.

On the 18th of February 1820, the Conservateur paid the tribute of its regrets to the memory of M. le Duc de Berry. The article concluded with this verse of Racine's:

Si du sang de nos rois quelque goutte échappée!

Alas, that drop of blood now flows away on foreign soil!

M. Decazes fell. The censorship followed and, notwithstanding the assassination of the Duc de Berry, I voted against it. The Conservateur refusing to be soiled by it, that paper came to an end with the following apostrophe to the Duc de Berry:

"O Christian Prince, worthy son of St. Louis, illustrious scion of so many kings, before descending into your last resting-place, receive our last homage! You loved, you read a work which the censorship is about to destroy. You sometimes told us that that work was saving the Throne: alas, we were not able to save your days! We are about to cease to write at the moment when you cease to exist: we shall have the sorrowful consolation of connecting the end of our labours with the end of your life."

M. le Duc de Bordeaux saw the light on the 29th of September 1820. The new-born was called "the child of Europe" and "the child of miracle," while waiting to become the child of exile.

Some time before the Princess' confinement, three market-women of Bordeaux, in the name of all the ladies their companions, had a cradle made, and chose me to present them, their cradle and themselves, to Madame la Duchesse de Berry. Mesdames Dasté, Duranton and Aniche came to see me. I hastened to ask the gentlemen in attendance for a ceremonial audience. Suddenly, M. de Sèze thought that this honour was his by right: it was said that I should never succeed at Court. I was not yet reconciled with the Ministry, and I did not seem worthy of the office of introducer of my humble ambassadresses. I got out of this great negociation, as usual, by paying their expenses.

All this became an affair of State; the pother found its way into the papers. The Bordeaux ladies were aware of this, and wrote me the following letter on the subject:

"BORDEAUX, 24 October 1820.

"MONSIEUR LE VICOMTE,

"We owe you our thanks for the kindness which you have had to lay our joy and our respects at the feet of Madame la Duchesse de Berry: this time at least you will not have been prevented from being our interpreter. We heard with the greatest concern of the stir which M. le Comte de Sèze has made in the newspapers, and, if we have kept silence, it is because we feared to give you pain. Still, monsieur le vicomte, none is better able than yourself to do homage to truth and to undeceive M. de Sèze as to our real intentions in our choice of an introducer to Her Royal Highness. We make you the offer to state all that has passed in a newspaper of your own choosing; and, as no one has the right to choose a guide for us, and as we had been pleased to think until the last moment that you would be that guide, what we shall state in this respect will necessarily silence all tongues.

"That is what we have determined upon, monsieur le vicomte; but we thought it our duty to do nothing without your consent. Rely upon it that we will most gladly publish the handsome way in which you behaved towards everybody in the matter of our presentation. If we are the cause of the mischief, we are quite ready to redress it.

"We are, and always shall be,

"Monsieur le vicomte,

"Your most humble and most respectful servants,

"Wives DASTÉ, DURANTON, ANICHE."

I replied to these generous ladies, who were so unlike the great ladies:

"I thank you, my dear ladies, for the offer you make me to publish in a newspaper all that has happened with regard to M. de Sèze. You are excellent Royalists, and I also am a good Royalist: we must remember before all that M. de Sèze is an honourable man, and that he has been the defender of our King. That fine action is not wiped out by a little movement of vanity. So let us keep silence: I am content with your good accounts of me to your friends. I have already thanked you for your excellent fruits: Madame de Chateaubriand and I eat your chesnuts every day and talk of you.

"Now permit your host to embrace you. My wife sends you a thousand messages, and I remain

"Your servant and friend,

"CHATEAUBRIAND.

"Paris, 2 November 1820."

But who thinks of these futile discussions to-day? The joys and feasts of the christening are far behind us. When Henry was born, on Michaelmas Day, did not people say that the archangel was going to trample the dragon under foot? It is to be feared, on the contrary, that the flaming sword was drawn from its scabbard only to drive out the innocent from the earthly paradise and to guard its gates against him.

However, the events which were becoming complicated determined nothing yet. The assassination of M. le Duc de Berry had brought about the fall of M. Decazes, which was not effected without heart-breakings. M. le Duc de Richelieu would not consent to afflict his aged master, save on a promise from M. Molé to give M. Decazes a mission abroad. He set out for the Embassy in London, where I was to replace him. Nothing was finished. M. de Villèle remained in seclusion with his fatality, M. de Corbière. I on my side offered a great obstacle. Madame de Montcalm never ceased urging me towards quiet: I was much inclined for it, sincerely wishing only to retire from public life, which encroached upon me and for which I entertained a sovereign contempt. M. de Villèle, although more supple, was not at that time easy to deal with.

There are two ways to become a minister: one abruptly and by force, the other by length of time and by dexterity; the first was not for M. de Villèle's use: craftiness excludes energy, but is safer and less liable to lose the ground which it has gained. The essential point in this manner of arriving is to accept many blows and to be able to swallow a quantity of bitter pills: M. de Talleyrand made great use of this dietary of second-rate ambitions. Men generally rise to office through their mediocrity and remain there through their superiority. This conjunction of antagonistic elements is the rarest thing, and it is for that reason that there are so few statesmen.

M. de Villèle had precisely the commonplace qualities that cleared the ground for him: he allowed noise to be made around him, in order to gather the fruits of the alarm that caught hold of the Court. Sometimes he would deliver warlike speeches, in which, however, a few phrases allowed a glimmer of hope to pass of the existence of an approachable nature. I thought that a man of his stamp ought to commence by entering public life, no matter how, and in a not too alarming position. It seemed to me that what he needed was first to be a minister without portfolio, in order one day to obtain the premiership itself. That would give him a reputation for moderation, he would be dressed exactly to suit him; it would become evident that the parliamentary leader of the Opposition was not an ambitious man, since he consented to make himself so small in the interests of peace. Any man who has once been a minister, no matter by what right, becomes one again: a first ministry is the stepping-stone to the second; the individual who has worn the embroidered coat retains a smell of portfolio by which the offices find him again sooner or later.

Madame de Montcalm had told me, from her brother, that there was no longer any ministry vacant, but that, if my two friends were willing to enter the Council as ministers of State without portfolio, the King would be charmed, promising something better later. She added that, if I consented to go so far, I should be sent to Berlin. I answered that that made no difference; that, for myself, I was always ready to leave and that I would go to the devil, in the event of the kings having any mission to their cousin to fulfil; but that I would not, however, accept exile, unless M. de Villèle accepted his entrance into the Council. I should also have liked to place M. Lainé with my two friends. I took the treble negociation upon myself. I had become the master of political France through my own powers. Few people doubt that it was I who made M. de Villèle's first ministry and who drove the Mayor of Toulouse into the arena.

I found an invincible obstinacy in M. Lainé's character. M. de Corbière did not want to become a mere member of the Council; I flattered him with the hope of also obtaining the Public Instruction. M. de Villèle, giving way only with repugnance to my desires, at first raised a thousand objections; his good wits and his ambition at last decided him to set forward: everything was arranged. Here are the irrefutable proofs of what I have just related; wearisome documents of those little facts which have justly passed into oblivion, but useful to my own history:

"20 December, half-past three.

"To M. LE DUC DE RICHELIEU

"I have had the honour to call on you, monsieur le duc, to report on the state of things: all is going admirably. I have seen the two friends: Villèle at last consents to enter the Council as minister secretary of State, without portfolio, if Corbière consents to enter on the same terms, with the Directorship of Public Instruction. Corbière, on his side, is willing to enter on those conditions, provided Villèle approves. And so there are no difficulties left Complete your work, monsieur le duc; see the two friends; and, when you have heard what I am writing to you from their own mouths, you will restore to France her internal peace, even as you have given her peace with the foreigners.

"Permit me to submit one more idea to you: would you think it very inconvenient to make over to Villèle the directorship vacant through the retirement of M. de Barante? He would then be placed in a more equal position with his friend. Still, he told me positively that he would consent to enter the Council without portfolio, if Corbière had the Public Instruction. I say this only as a means the more of completely satisfying the Royalists and of ensuring for yourself an immense and steady majority.

"I will lastly have the honour of pointing out to you that the great royalist meeting takes place to-morrow evening at Piet's, and that it would be very useful if the two friends could to-morrow evening say something which would calm any effervescence and prevent any division.

"As I, monsieur le duc, am outside all this movement, you will, I hope, see in my assiduity no more than the loyalty of a man who desires his country's good and your successes.

"Pray accept, monsieur le duc, the assurance of my high regard.

"CHATEAUBRIAND."

"Wednesday.

"I have just written to Messieurs de Villèle and de Corbière, monsieur, and I have asked them to call on me this evening, for one must not lose a moment in so useful a piece of work. I thank you for having pushed on the business so rapidly; I hope that we shall come to a happy conclusion. Be persuaded, monsieur, of the pleasure I feel at owing you this obligation, and receive the assurance of my high regard.

"RICHELIEU."

"Permit me, monsieur le duc, to congratulate you on the happy issue of this great business, and to applaud myself for having had some part in it. It is very desirable that the Orders should appear to-morrow; they will put a stop to all opposition. I can be of use to the two friends in this respect.

"I have the honour, monsieur le Duc, to renew to you the assurance of my high regard.

"CHATEAUBRIAND."

"Friday.

"I have received with extreme pleasure the note which M. le Vicomte de Chateaubriand has done me the honour to write to me. I believe that he will have no cause to regret having trusted to the King's goodness, and, if he will permit me to add, to the desire which I have to contribute to whatever may be agreeable to him. I beg him to receive the assurance of my high regard.

"RICHELIEU."

"Thursday.

"You are doubtless aware, my noble colleague, that the business was settled at eleven o'clock yesterday evening, and that all is arranged on the terms agreed between yourself and the Duc de Richelieu. Your intervention has been most useful to us; let thanks be given you for this preliminary step towards an improvement which must henceforth be looked upon as probable.

"Ever yours for life,

"J. DE POLIGNAC."

"PARIS, _Wednesday, 20th December,

"Half-past eleven at night._

"I have just called on you, noble viscount, but you had retired: I have come from Villèle, who himself returned late from the conference which you prepared for him and told him of. He asked me, as your nearest neighbour, to let you know that Corbière also wished to tell you, on his side, that the affair which you really conducted and managed during the day is definitely settled in the simplest and shortest manner: he without portfolio, his friend with the Instruction. He seemed to think that one might have waited a little longer and obtained better conditions; but it was not seemly to gainsay an interpreter and negociator like yourself. It is you really who have opened the entrance to this new career to them: they reckon on you to make it smooth for them. Do you, on your side, during the short time that we shall still have the advantage of keeping you among us, speak to your more spirited friends to second, or at least not to oppose the plans for union. Good-night. I once more make you my compliment on the promptness with which you conduct negociations. You must settle Germany in the same way, so as to return sooner to the midst of your friends. I personally am delighted to see your position so much simplified.

"I renew all my sentiments to you.

"M. DE MONTMORENCY."

"I enclose, monsieur, a request addressed by one of the King's Body-guards to the King of Prussia: it has been handed to me and recommended by a field-officer of the Guards. I beg you, therefore, to take it with you and to make use of it if, when you have felt your ground a little in Berlin, you think that it is of a nature to obtain some success.

"I have great pleasure in taking this occasion to congratulate myself as well as you on this morning's Moniteur, and to thank you for the part which you have taken in this fortunate issue, which, I hope, will have the happiest influence on the affairs of our France.

"Pray receive the assurance of my high regard and of my sincere attachment.

"PASQUIER."

This series of notes is sufficient evidence that I am not boasting; it would bore me too much to be the fly on the coach; the pole or the coachman's nose are not places where I have ever had any ambition to sit: whether the coach reaches the top or rolls to the bottom matters little to me. Accustomed to live hidden in my own recesses, or momentarily in the wide life of the centuries, I had no taste for the mysteries of the ante-chamber. I do not enter readily into circulation like a piece of current money; to escape, I withdraw myself nearer to God: a fixed idea that comes from Heaven isolates you and kills everything around you.