An Englishman In Paris Part 14

"Very sure, sire," was the answer. "Why, did not your majesty himself notice yesterday that he was dying?"

"I did, but there is no judging from appearances with Talleyrand, and I have been asking myself for the last four and twenty hours what interest he could possibly have in departing at this particular moment."

To those who knew Louis-Philippe personally, it was very patent that he disliked those who had been instrumental in setting him on the throne, and who, under the cloak of "liberty, fraternity, and equality," were seeking their own interest only, namely, the bourgeoisie. He knew their quasi-goodwill to him to be so much sheer hypocrisy, and perhaps he and they were too much alike in some respects, in their love of money for the sake of h.o.a.rding it. It was, perhaps, the only serious failing that could be laid to the charge of the family, because none of its members, with the exception of the Duc d'Orleans, were entirely free from it. It must not be inferred, though, that Louis-Philippe kept his purse closed to really deserving cases of distress. Far from it. I have the following story from my old tutor, to whom I am, moreover, indebted for a great many notes, dealing with events of which I could not possibly have had any knowledge but for him.

In 1829 the greater part of the Galerie d'Orleans in the Palais-Royal was completed. The unsightly wooden booths had been taken down, and the timber must have been decidedly worth a small fortune. Several contractors made very handsome offers for it, but Louis-Philippe (then Duc d'Orleans) refused to sell it. It was to be distributed among the poor of the neighbourhood for fuel for the ensuing winter, which threatened to be a severe one. One day, when the duke was inspecting the works in company of his steward, an individual, who was standing a couple of yards away, began to shout at the top of his voice, "Vive Louis-Philippe!" "Go and see what the fellow wants, for a.s.suredly he wants something," said the duke, who was a Voltairean in his way, and had interpreted the man's enthusiasm aright. Papa Sournois was one of those nondescripts for whom even now there appear to be more resources in the French capital than elsewhere. At the period in question he mainly got his living by selling contre-marques (checks) at the doors of the theatre. He had heard of the duke's intention with regard to the wood, hence his enthusiastic cry of "Vive Louis-Philippe!" A cartload of wood was sent to his place; papa Sournois converted it into money, and got drunk with the proceeds for a fortnight. When the steward, horribly scandalized, told the duke of the results of his benevolence, the latter merely laughed, and sent for the wife, who made her appearance accompanied by a young brood of five. The duke gave her a five-franc piece, and told her to apply to the concierge of the Palais-Royal for a similar sum every day during the winter months. Of course, five francs a day was not as much as a drop of water out of the sea when we consider Louis-Philippe's stupendous income, and yet when the Tuileries were sacked in 1848, doc.u.ments upon doc.u.ments were found, compiled with the sole view of saving a few francs per diem out of the young princes'

"keep."

"I am so sick of the word 'fraternity,'" said Prince Metternich, after his return from France, "that, if I had a brother, I should call him cousin." Though it was to the strains of the Ma.r.s.eillaise that Louis-Philippe had been conducted to the Hotel-de-Ville on the day when Lafayette pointed to him as "the best of all republics," a time came when Louis-Philippe got utterly sick of the Ma.r.s.eillaise.

But what was he to do, seeing that his attempt at introducing a new national hymn had utterly failed? The mob refused to sing "La Parisienne," composed by Casimir de la Vigne, after Alexandre Dumas had refused to write a national hymn; and they, moreover, insisted on the King joining in the chorus of the old hymn, as he had hitherto done on all public occasions.[35] They had grumblingly resigned themselves to his beating time no longer, but any further refusal of his co-operation might have been resented in a less peaceful fashion. On the other hand, there was the bourgeoisie who were of opinion that, now that the monarchy had entered upon a more conservative period, the intoning of the hymn, at any rate on the sovereign's part, was out of place, and savoured too much of a republican manifestation. "It was Guizot who told him so," said Lord ----, who had been standing on the balcony of the Tuileries on the occasion of the king's "saint's day,"[36] and had heard the minister make the remark.

[Footnote 35: When there was no public occasion, his political antagonists or merely practical jokers who knew of his dislike invented one, like Edouard d'Ourliac, a well-known journalist and the author of several novels, who, whenever he had nothing better to do, recruited a band of street arabs to go and sing the Ma.r.s.eillaise under the king's windows. They kept on singing until Louis-Philippe, in sheer self-defence, was obliged to come out and join in the song.--EDITOR.]

[Footnote 36: In France it is the Patron Saint's day, not the birthday, that is kept.]

"And what did the king reply?" was the question.

"Do not worry yourself, monsieur le ministre; I am only moving my lips; I have ceased to p.r.o.nounce the words for many a day."

These were the expedients to which Louis-Philippe was reduced before he had been on the throne half a dozen years. "I am like the fool between two stools," observed the king in English, afterwards, when speaking to Lord ----, "only I happen to be between the comfortably stuffed easy-chair of the bourgeois drawing-room and the piece of furniture seated on which Louis XIV. is said to have received the Dutch amba.s.sadors."

While speaking of the Ma.r.s.eillaise, here are two stories in connection with it which are not known to the general reader. The first was told to me by the old tutor already mentioned; the second aroused a great deal of literary curiosity in the year 1860, and bears the stamp of truth on the face of it. It was, however, never fully investigated, or, at any rate, the results of the investigation were never published.[37]

[Footnote 37: I have inserted them here in order not to fall into repet.i.tions on the same subject.--EDITOR.]

"We were all more or less aware," said my informant, "that Rouget de l'Isle was not the author of the whole of the words of the Ma.r.s.eillaise.

But none of us in Lyons, where I was born, knew who had written the last strophe, commonly called the 'strophe of the children,' and I doubt whether they were any wiser in Paris. Some of my fellow-students--for I was nearly eighteen at that time--credited Andre Chenier with the authorship of the last strophe, others ascribed it to Louis-Francois Dubois, the poet.[38] All this was, however, so much guess-work, when, one day during the Reign of Terror, the report spread that a ci-devant priest, or rather a priest who had refused to take the oath to the Republic, had been caught solemnizing a religious marriage, and that he was to be brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal that same afternoon.

Though you may not think so, merely going by what you have read, the appearance of a priest before the Tribunal always aroused more than common interest, nor have you any idea what more than common interest meant in those days. A priest to the Revolutionaries and to the Terrorists, they might hector and bully as they liked, was not an ordinary being. They looked upon him either as something better than a man or worse than a devil. They had thrown the religious compa.s.s they had brought from home with them overboard, and they had not the philosophical one to take its place. You may work out the thing for yourself; at any rate, the place was crammed to suffocation when we arrived at the Hotel de Ville. It was a large room, at the upper end of which stood an oblong table, covered with a black cloth. Seated around it were seven self-const.i.tuted judges. Besides their tricolour scarfs round their waists, they wore, suspended by a ribbon from their necks, a small silver axe.

[Footnote 38: Louis-Francois Dubois, the author of several heroic poems, "Ankarstrom," "Genevieve et Siegfried," etc., which are utterly forgotten. His main t.i.tle to the recollection of posterity consists in his having saved, during the Revolution, a great many literary works of value, which he returned to the State afterwards.--EDITOR.]

"As a rule there was very little speechifying. 'La mort sans phrase,'

which had become the fashion since Louis XVI.'s execution, was strictly adhered to. Half a dozen prisoners were brought in and taken away without arousing the slightest excitement, either in the way of commiseration or hatred. After having listened, the judges either extended their hands on the table or put them to their foreheads. The first movement meant acquittal and liberation, the second death; not always by the guillotine though, for the instrument was not perfect as yet, and did not work sufficiently quickly to please them. All at once the priest was brought in, and a dead silence prevailed. He was not a very old man, though his hair was snow-white.

"'Who art thou?' asked the president.

"The prisoner drew himself up to his full height. 'I am the Abbe Pessoneaux, a former tutor at the college at Vienne, and the author of the last strophe of the Ma.r.s.eillaise,' he said quietly.

"I cannot convey to you the impression produced by those simple words.

The silence became positively oppressive; you could hear the people breathe. The president did not say another word; the priest's reply had apparently stunned him also: he merely turned round to his fellow-judges. Soldiers and gaolers stood as if turned into stone; every eye was directed towards the table, watching for the movement of the judges' hands. Slowly and deliberately they stretched them forth, and then a deafening cheer rang through the room. The Abbe Pessoneaux owed his life to his strophe, for, though his story was not questioned then, it was proved true in every particular. On their way to Paris to be present at the taking of the Tuileries on the 10th of August, the Ma.r.s.eillais had stopped at Vienne to celebrate the Fete of the Federation. On the eve of their arrival the Abbe Pessoneaux had composed the strophe, and but for his seizure the authorship would have always remained a matter of conjecture, for Rouget de l'Isle would have never had the honesty to acknowledge it."

My tutor was right, and I owe him this tardy apology; it appears that, after all, Rouget de l'Isle had not the honesty to acknowledge _openly_ his indebtedness to those who made his name immortal, and that his share in the Ma.r.s.eillaise amounts to the first six strophes. He did not write a single note of the music. The latter was composed by Alexandre Boucher, the celebrated violinist, in 1790, in the drawing-room of Madame de Mortaigne, at the request of a colonel whom the musician had never met before, whom he never saw again. The soldier was starting next morning with his regiment for Ma.r.s.eilles, and pressed Boucher to write him a march there and then. Rouget de l'Isle, an officer of engineers, having been imprisoned in 1791, for having refused to take a second oath to the Const.i.tution, heard the march from his cell, and, at the instance of his gaoler, adapted the words of a patriotic hymn he was then writing to it.

One may fancy the surprise of Alexandre Boucher, when he heard it sung everywhere and recognized it as his own composition, though it had been somewhat altered to suit the words. But the pith of the story is to come. I give it in the very words of Boucher himself, as he told it to a Paris journalist whom I knew well.

"A good many years afterwards, I was seated next to Rouget de l'Isle at a dinner-party in Paris. We had never met before, and, as you may easily imagine, I was rather interested in the gentleman, whom, with many others at the same board, I complimented on his production; only I confined myself to complimenting him on his _poem_.

"'You don't say a word about the music,' he replied; 'and yet, being a celebrated musician, that ought to interest you. Do not you like it?'

"'Very much indeed,' I said, in a somewhat significant tone.

"'Well, let me be frank with you. The music is not mine. It was that of a march which came, Heaven knows whence, and which they kept on playing at Ma.r.s.eilles during the Terror, when I was a prisoner at the fortress of St. Jean. I made a few alterations necessitated by the words, and there it is.'

"Thereupon, to his great surprise, I hummed the march as I had originally written it.

"'Wonderful!' he exclaimed; 'how did you come by it?' he asked.

"When I told him, he threw himself round my neck. But the next moment he said--

"'I am very sorry, my dear Boucher, but I am afraid that you will be despoiled for ever, do what you will; for your music and my words go so well together, that they seem to have sprung simultaneously from the same brain, and the world, even if I proclaimed my indebtedness to you, would never believe it.'

"'Keep the loan,' I said, moved, in spite of myself, by his candour.

'Without your genius, my march would be forgotten by now. You have given it a patent of n.o.bility. It is yours for ever.'"

I return to Louis-Philippe, who, at the time of my tutor's story, and for some years afterwards, I only knew from the reports that were brought home to us. Of course, I saw him several times at a distance, at reviews, and on popular holidays, and I was surprised that a king of whom every one spoke so well in private, who seemed to have so much cause for joy and happiness in his own family, should look so careworn and depressed in public. For, young as I was, I did not fail to see that, beneath the calm and smiling exterior, there was a great deal of hidden grief. But I was too young to understand the deep irony of his reply to one of my relatives, a few months before his accession to the throne: "The crown of France is too cold in winter, too warm in summer; the sceptre is too blunt as a weapon of defence or attack, it is too short as a stick to lean upon: a good felt hat and a strong umbrella are at all times more useful." Above all, I was too young to understand the temper of the French where their rulers were concerned, and though, at the time of my writing these notes, I have lived for fifty years amongst them, I doubt whether I could give a succinct psychological account of their mental att.i.tude towards their succeeding regimes, except by borrowing the words of one of their cleverest countrywomen, Madame emile de Girardin: "When Marshal Soult is in the Opposition, he is acknowledged to have won the battle of Toulouse; when he belongs to the Government, he is accused of having lost it." Since then the Americans have coined a word for that state of mind--"cussedness."

Louis-Philippe's children, and especially his sons, some of whom I knew personally before I had my first invitation to the Tuileries, seemed to take matters more cheerfully. Save the partisans of the elder branch, no one had a word to say against them. On the contrary, even the Bonapartists admired their manly and straightforward bearing. I remember being at Tortoni's one afternoon when the Duc d'Orleans and his brother, the Duc de Nemours, rode by. Two of my neighbours, unmistakable Imperialists, and old soldiers by their looks, stared very hard at them; then one said, "Si le pet.i.t au lieu de filer le parfait amour partout, avait mis tous ses oeufs dans le meme panier, il aurait eu des grands comme cela et nous ne serions pas dans l'impa.s.se ou nous sommes."

"Mon cher," replied the other, "des grands comme cela ne se font qu'a loisir, pas entre deux campagnes."[39]

[Footnote 39: It reminds one of the answer of the younger Dumas to a gentleman whose wife had been notorious for her conjugal faithlessness, and whose sons were all weaklings. "Ah, Monsieur Dumas, c'est un fils comme vous qu'il me fallait," he exclaimed. "Mon cher monsieur," came the reply, "quand on veut avoir un fils comme moi, il faut le faire soi-meme."--EDITOR.]

The admiration of these two veterans was perfectly justified: they were very handsome young men, the sons of Louis-Philippe, and notably the two elder ones, though the Duc d'Orleans was somewhat more delicate-looking than his brother, De Nemours. The boys had all been brought up very sensibly, perhaps somewhat too strict for their position. They all went to a public school, to the College Henri IV., and I remember well, about the year '38, when I had occasion of a morning to cross the Pont-Neuf, where there were still stalls and all sorts of booths, seeing the blue-and-yellow carriage with the royal livery. It contained the Ducs d'Aumale and de Montpensier, who had not finished their studies at that time.

But though strictly brought up, they were by no means milksops, and what, for want of a better term, I may call "mother's babies:" quite the reverse. It was never known how they managed it, but at night, when they were supposed to be at home, if not in bed, they were to be met with at all kinds of public places, notably at the smaller theatres, such as the Vaudeville, the Varietes, and the Palais-Royal, one of which, at any rate, was a goodly distance from the Tuileries. It was always understood that the King knew nothing about these little escapades, but I am inclined to doubt this: I fancy he connived at them; because, when Lord ---- told him casually one day that he had met his sons the night before, Louis-Philippe seemed not in the least surprised, he only anxiously asked, "Where?"

"At the Cafe de Paris, your majesty."

The king seemed relieved. "That's all right," he said, laughing. "As long as they do not go into places where they are likely to meet with Guizot, I don't mind; for if he saw them out in the evening, it might cost me my throne. Guizot is so terribly respectable. I am afraid there is a mistake either about his nationality or about his respectability; they are badly matched."

The fact is, that though Louis-Philippe admired and respected Guizot, he failed to understand him. To the most respectable of modern kings--not even Charles I. and William III. excepted--if by respectability we mean an unblemished private life--Guizot's respectability was an enigma. The man who, in spite of his advice to others, "Enrichissez vous, enrichissez vous," was as poor at the end of his ministerial career as at the beginning, must have necessarily been a puzzle to a sovereign who, with a civil list of 750,000, was haunted by the fear of poverty, and haunted to such a degree as to hara.s.s his friends and counsellors with his apprehensions. "My dear minister," he said one day to Guizot, after he had recited a long list of his domestic charges--"My dear minister, I am telling you that my children will be wanting for bread."

The recollection of his former misery uprose too frequently before him like a horrible nightmare, and made him the first bourgeois instead of the first gentilhomme of the kingdom, as his predecessors had been. When a tradesman drops a shilling and does not stoop to pick it up, his neglect becomes almost culpable improvidence; when a prince drops a sovereign and looks for it, the deed may be justly qualified as mean.

The _leitmotif_ of Louis-Philippe's conversation, witty and charming as it was, partook of the avaricious spirit of a Thomas Guy and a John Overs rather than of that of the great adventurer John Law. The c.h.i.n.king of the money-bags is audible through both, but in the one case the orchestration is strident, disagreeable, depressing; in the other, it is generous, overflowing with n.o.ble impulses, and cheering. I recollect that during my stay at Treport and Eu, in 1843, when Queen Victoria paid her visit to Louis-Philippe, the following story was told to me. Lord ---- and I were quartered in a little hostelry on the Place du Chateau.

One morning Lord ---- came home laughing till he could laugh no longer.

"What do you think the King has done now?" he asked. I professed my inability to guess. "About an hour ago, he and Queen Victoria were walking in the garden, when, with true French politeness, he offered her a peach. The Queen seemed rather embarra.s.sed how to skin it, when Louis-Philippe took a large clasp-knife from his pocket. 'When a man has been a poor devil like myself, obliged to live upon forty sous a day, he always carries a knife. I might have dispensed with it for the last few years; still, I do not wish to lose the habit--one does not know what may happen,' he said. Of course, the tears stood in the Queen's eyes. He really ought to know better than to obtrude his money worries upon every one."

I must confess that I was not as much surprised as my interlocutor, who, however, had known Louis-Philippe much longer than I. Not his worst enemies could have accused the son of Philippe egalite of being a coward: the bulletins of Valmy, Jemmappes, and Neerwinden would have proved the contrary. But the contempt of physical danger on the battle-field does not necessarily const.i.tute heroism in the most elevated sense of the term, although the world in general frequently accepts it as such. A man can die but once, and the semi-positivism, semi-Voltaireanism of Louis-Philippe had undoubtedly steeled him against the fear of death. His religion, throughout life, was not even skin-deep; and when he accepted the last rites of the Church on his death-bed, he only did so in deference to his wife. "Ma femme, es-tu contente de moi?" were his words the moment the priests were gone.

Nevertheless, he was too good a husband to grieve his wife, who was deeply religious, by any needless display of unbelief. He always endeavoured, as far as possible, to find an excuse for staying away from church. He, as well as the female members of his family, were very fond of music; and Adam, the composer, was frequently invited to come and play for them in the private apartments. In fact, after his abdication, he seriously intended to write, in conjunction with Scribe, the libretto of an opera on an English historical subject, the music of which should be composed by Halevy. The composer of "La Juive" and the author of "Les Hugenots" came over once to consult with the King, whose death, a few months later, put an end to the scheme.

On the occasion of Adam's visits the princesses worked at their embroidery, while the King often stood by the side of the performer.

Just about that period the chamber organ was introduced, and, on the recommendation of Adam, one was ordered for the Tuileries. The first time Louis-Philippe heard it played he was delighted: "This will be a distinct gain to our rural congregations," he said. "There must be a great many people who, like myself, stay away from church on account of their objection to that horrible instrument, the serpent. Is it not so, my wife?"

The ideal purpose of life, if ever he possessed it, had been crushed out of him--first, by his governess, Madame de Genlis; secondly, by the dire poverty he suffered during his exile: and, notwithstanding all that has been said to the contrary, France wanted at that moment an ideal ruler, not the rational father of a large family who looked upon his monarchy as a suitable means of providing for them. He was an usurper without the daring, the grandeur, the lawlessness of the usurper. The lesson of Napoleon I.'s method had been thrown away upon him, as the lesson of Napoleon III.'s has been thrown away upon his grandson. When I said France, I made a mistake,--I should have said Paris; for since 1789 there was no longer a King of France, there was only a King of Paris.

Such a thing as a Manchester movement, as a Manchester school of politics, would have been and is still an impossibility in France.

And, unfortunately, Paris, which had applauded the glorious _mise-en-scene_ of the First Empire, which had even looked on approvingly at some of the pomp and state of Louis XVIII. and Charles X., jeered at Louis-Philippe and his court with its ridiculous gatherings of tailors, drapers, and bootmakers, "ces gardes nationaux d'un pays ou il n'y a plus rien de national a garder," and their pretentious spouses "qui," according to the d.u.c.h.esse de la Tremolle, "ont plus de chemises que nos aeules avaient des robes."[40] She and the Princesse Bagration were the only female representatives of the Faubourg St. Germain who attended these gatherings; for the Countess Le Hon, of whom I may have occasion to speak again, and who was the only other woman at these receptions that could lay claim to any distinction, was by no means an aristocrat. And be it remembered that in those days ridicule had still the power to kill.