Memoirs (Vieux Souvenirs) of the Prince de Joinville Part 17

The squadron happened to be at Messina on the 15th of August, the day of the Barra Festival, which takes place in honour both of the a.s.sumption of the Virgin and of the entry of Count Roger into Messina, after he had defeated the Saracens. As far as concerned beauty and local colour, the festival, which in those particulars yields to none save that of St. Rosalia at Palermo, was most interesting. But one detail there was which filled me with horror--the sight of an immense car, dragged along by a crowd of, wild enthusiasts, laden from top to bottom with saints, virgins, and angels, represented, for the nonce, by young people of both s.e.xes, the whole thing surmounted, at a great height above it, by a huge sun with gilded rays. So far there was nothing to complain of. But when the car moved along, the rays of the sun, by an ingenious mechanism, turned as well; and at the end of each of these rays a poor little brat, dressed like a cherub, and crowned with roses, had been hung, in a sort of fireman's belt, by its barbarous parents. The tortures of the poor little creatures, hanging thus by their middles, under a burning sun, and shaken up by every jolt the machine gave as it turned, may be imagined.

By the time the abominable thing came past my window, amidst singing and band-playing and cheering, most of the poor children were swinging unconscious from the rays of the great sun which jolted heavily at every turn it made. It was a disgusting sight; but we were the only people to notice it and be shocked by it.

While at Naples, I was ordered to go to Rome to congratulate the new Pope, Pius the Ninth, whose election had just taken place, in the name of France. I started off at once, by Civita Vecchia, and reached the palace of our emba.s.sy at Rome at night. At dawn a great noise made me hastily open my window, anxious to know the reason of the uproar, and also to get a first look at the Eternal City, where I was for the first time in my life. It was raining, and the inhabitants of all the adjacent houses, as well as the soldiers in the barracks over the way, were all shouting at the top of their voices Acqua! Acqua! Acqua! It sounded as if every c.o.c.katoo in Australia had settled upon the papal city.

The rain had been long in its coming, it appears. But my first impression of Rome was not a very inspiring one. And, indeed, I had little opportunity of getting any others.

To mark the fact that I had come to the city solely on the Pope's account, I only stayed two days, so that I saw nothing except the Pope himself, or I rushed by everything else I was shown so hurriedly, that it came to the same thing. During those forty-eight hours I was the sole property of our emba.s.sy, and I could not have been in better hands. We had representatives who were worthy of the name, in those days,--real diplomats.

The amba.s.sador was M. Rossi, my former teacher, a man of generous feeling and high intelligence, who was soon to be the victim of one of the most cowardly crimes ever perpetrated by the revolutionary tribe.

The secretary to the emba.s.sy was the present Due de Broglie. By these two gentlemen I was conducted into the Pope's presence. Being very ignorant of the proper ceremonial to follow, I asked M. Rossi what I was to call his Holiness.

"Tres chaint Pere, ou cha Chaintete," he answered, with an accent which I took good care not to imitate.

Having gone past the fine Swiss Guard, in their sixteenth-century dress, and their officer in helmet and cuira.s.s, and then past the Guardia n.o.bile, and a huge staff of ecclesiastics in violet robes, I bent low before the sovereign pontiff, and kissed his ring with deep emotion. Raising my eyes, I saw a handsome old man, tall in stature, with a kind face, dressed all in white, to whom I delivered the message of which I was the bearer. At that moment I had a glimpse of a fair dream, which M. Rossi endeavoured to realise at a later date. It was to make a close alliance between France and a Confederation of all the Italian States--our allies already by relationship between the reigning families, or by community of interest of all kinds--under the protectorate of the Pope, at once our devoted friend and the head of the Catholic religion all over the whole world. But the fair dream was never to come true. Its patriotic promoter, M. Rossi, fell under the a.s.sa.s.sin's hand, and every pa.s.sion--revolutionary, anti-religious, and anti-French--joined hands to make it fail. In its place we have Italian unity and a dethroned Pope.

After a pleasant evening at the emba.s.sy, with Cardinal Gizzi, Monsignore de Falloux, the Princes and Princesses of the Ma.s.simo family, and a very charming young lady, Princess Rospigliosi, sister to a naval cadet attached to my staff, named Champagny, who afterwards became the Due de Cadore, I returned to Naples by the Pontine Marshes and Terracina, where the strains of Auber's Fra Diavolo kept springing to my lips.

The squadron remained in Neapolitan waters until the festival of Pie di Grotta, on which occasion the King took me with him to a great review he held--a very noisy and lively scene it was--in the Toledo, the great artery of the town, with its picturesque vistas on to Vesuvius. The National Guard was of modern growth, and lamentable at that. Then came the regular army, and especially four Swiss regiments with their artillery, a magnificent division of troops. As long as they are here, I said to myself, there need be no fear of revolutions. But just because their valour and fidelity promised a reception little to the taste of the sedition-mongers, those prudent modern condottieri were waving their warlike pens, and loudly demanding the disembodiment of these very regiments. It pained me to notice the icy reception given to the brave fellows as they marched past, and I could not help feeling a gloomy foreboding.

That sheet anchor of the Neapolitan Monarchy was destroyed before long by one of those compromises with rebellion so frequent in these days--disastrous proceedings, which inevitably lead the way by their evil and demoralising example, to other compromises, infinitely more lamentable, alas!--I mean compromise with a foreign enemy.

At the time when I bore the King company at that review it was not his Swiss regiments alone who were the object of the agitators' fury, but his government and his own person as well. A sort of general conspiracy against them was brewing, fomented for the most part by foreign agents, some of them actually diplomats, who thus openly abused the immunity their functions gave them; and it was propagated by means of the secret societies which are an endemic plague in Italian countries. King and Government alike fought as best they could against the current of revolution, and they did so rightly, in the general interest, for revolution brings nothing but ruin in its train.

But beside the adventurers who shrank from no crime, and who preached a.s.sa.s.sination and plunder, there stood many honourable and enlightened Neapolitans, who desired the reform of abuses (and G.o.d knows there were plenty of them!) and the progressive amelioration of the moral and material conditions of existence. Unhappily it was on these men, whose sole offence lay in their opinions, that the brutality, and I might add the horrors, of the repressive measures adopted seemed by preference to fall. The prisons of those days, in which they were confined, were perfect dens, and I greatly fear they are much the same all over Italy even now. I doubt, for instance, that the convict prison at Pescara would yield in the matter of abominations to the convict prison at Nisida, some forty years ago.

When peoples who have long lived in a state of backwardness, have a sudden fit of cleanliness, in imitation of more advanced nations, they are apt to clean the outside walls only, and to leave all their accustomed filth hidden behind them. I mention these terrible prisons because, during the visit of the squadron to Naples, I was guilty of s.n.a.t.c.hing two distinguished men, both much sought after by the police on account of the offensive opinions I have already spoken of, from their clutches. M. Lutteroth, the secretary to our emba.s.sy, went and fetched them at night from their hiding-place, and I put them on board one of my ships, which was sailing at once for Tunis. I have no recollection of their names. And indeed that was not the only instance in which we saved people compromised in Italian politics, out of sheer humanity. Long after the incident of which I speak, a Piedmontese officer, who performed brilliant services in our African army, side by side with my brothers, begged Aumale to put him into communication with our mother. He then conjured her, as a woman and a Neapolitan, to save a prisoner, who was seriously compromised (whether his relative or his friend I no longer recollect), from the gallows, and my mother wrote a most pressing letter to King Ferdinand at his request. The King, who had always preserved the tenderest and most respectful affection for his aunt, and glad also, I make no doubt (for he was a kind man), to have an opportunity of setting mercy above arguments of state, granted my mother the pardon she craved. The name of the man thus spared was Nicotera.

This taken for granted, as they say in mathematics, I hie me back to my squadron at Spezzia, a splendid bay, which at that time we were the only people to use as an anchorage, but in which the Italians have now established a great naval a.r.s.enal. The bay is very safe and convenient for drill and practice. But I have one fault to find with it. I never took my ships there without an epidemic of influenza colds breaking out, and affecting three or four hundred men in each crew. These outbreaks are due, in my opinion, to the high wooded mountains which shadow the bay on the western side, and to its sudden transitions from the most scorching sunshine to very cool shade. Our ships attracted several tourists, and one morning I saw a party appear on board, consisting, amongst other people, of the Marquis de Boissy, a witty and restless French peer, married to the Comtesse Giuccioli, of Byronian memory, and of the Marquis Oldoini, accompanied by an exquisite young lady, his daughter, who afterwards became that superb beauty, the Comtesse de Castiglione.

M. de Boissy tried to talk politics to me and to reiterate the famous phrase "Be strong." But whenever anybody began to talk to me about questions of home politics, with which I had nothing to do, my partial deafness always became complete.

More cruising and manoeuvring carried the squadron over to Algiers, which it reached in June, 1847, just when Marshal Bugeaud was giving up his position as governor-general of the colony. We rendered him viceregal honours at his departure, and I can still see his grand white head, as he stood uncovered on the bridge of the ship which bore him away, and pa.s.sed slowly between the lines of warships, with their cannon thundering, drums rolling, bands playing the Ma.r.s.eillaise, and crews cheering wildly. He left that Algerian territory, which he had so largely contributed to acquire to France, with a sad heart, and for ever. But the European horizon was darkening, serious events were evidently pending, and if war was to result fiom them, France would have had, in the person of the soldier we were thus saluting, a general whom all, without exception, would have served with equal devotion and absolute confidence. To us Frenchmen, this confidence in our leader, which emboldens every one, and suppresses all doubt and hesitation, is half the battle. It was possessed, and completely, not by Bugeaud himself alone--all his lieutenants had acquired it. During fifteen years of fighting and of detached expeditions, in which they had all, turn about, held independent commands, both officers and soldiers had been able to gauge their valour, their intelligence, and that capacity for bearing the weight of undivided responsibility, which is the great test of a commander-in-chief. The advantage thus gained was immense.

But are we sure the country got the benefit of all the services which this band of soldiers, consecrated already by the opinion of their military compeers, might have rendered her? Was it not rather scattered to the winds by the ruinous action of political forces?

I took advantage of the squadron's visit to Algiers to make an excursion to Boghar, on the desert frontier. This expedition was both interesting and amusing. My first day's stage took me to Blidah, into which place I made the quaintest entry, surrounded by all the authorities, who had come out as far as the monument to Sergeant Blandan to meet me I had not travelled a hundred paces among these gentlemen before the frankest cordiality began to exist between me and them. Colonel Claparede, on my right, with whom this meeting was my first, was asking me if I had ever been fool enough to fall in love; Colonel Baville, of the Cha.s.seurs d'Afrique, on my left, whose face was also a new one to me, was inquiring whether I did not agree with him that children were born with extraordinary rapidity in the African climate, while Bourbaki, the secretary of the Arab office, was performing the wildest fantasia in front of us at the head of the Hadjout Goum.

At Medeah, whither I went by the Mouzai'a Pa.s.s, so as to see the scene of the fights in which my brothers had played such a n.o.ble part, I had another reception, and another fantasia was performed (but this time it was on foot), by the Coulouglis and the Beni Mzab, wearing great hats with ostrich feathers in them. Then came a grotesque imitation of the fantasia, performed by the colonial militia, all drunk, who fired their pistols off under my nose and blackened my face with powder. General Marey, commanding at Medeah, owned the Romance vintage in Burgundy, and gave us some to drink at dinner, which did not diminish the general cordiality. Ah, well! a gla.s.s of good French wine, drunk far from home and the dissensions of the mother country, among comrades ready to give their lives for her at any moment, is a thing worth remembering!

Boghar, hideous and scorchingly hot as it is, would be downright uninhabitable if it were not washed by the waters of the Cheliff. The necessities arising from our conquest of the country had made it a revictualling post for our columns, and a trial had just been made there of a new sort of provision, described as rations maigres. These consisted of biscuit and dried cod, and not having been issued within the period reckoned for, they were beginning to go bad. To avoid financial loss, a pretty numerous garrison had been at once despatched to Boghar to perform the far from pleasant duty of consuming them.

Thanks to the exertions of the officer in command, M. de Monet, who afterwards attained the rank of general, and lost both his arms in the Crimea, the spirit of his men was admirable, but their sanitary condition was quite deplorable. And when I received the officers, one of them, a captain of Engineers, with the tacit a.s.sent of his chief, acted as the mouthpiece of the rest in begging me to raise my voice to put an end to their cruel sufferings. He represented to me that the unhealthiness of the place was aggravated by a process of poisoning.

The troops had been sent up simply to eat damaged biscuit and stinking cod. There was no other food issued for the men, and as the neighbourhood produced nothing whatever, it was impossible to vary it in any way. Everybody was more or less ill in consequence, and if this state of things went on they must all die. A distinguished officer, M.

de Cissey, who had been detailed as my aide-de-camp during my trip, took the poor fellows' case in hand, and undertook to lay their complaint before the general.

I saw something else at Boghar which was not so depressing--another fantasia, a huge one, performed by thousands of Arabs, who had hastened in from all quarters. At the very height of the show, another tribe, the most picturesque of them all, the Ouled-Nails, arrived on the scene, having travelled thirty leagues to do homage to me as the "son of the Sultan." There were 1,500 hors.e.m.e.n and their wives, who were carried by something like a hundred camels in a kind of palanquin, covered with gaudy stuffs, which they call "atatich." When they arrived, the excitement of the fantasia rose to madness. The hors.e.m.e.n from the south, in their splendid dresses, showed off all their skill, and whenever one of them performed any specially brilliant feat, the deafening "you-you" of the women rose from the circle of palanquins as from the benches of a circus.

The background of this eminently picturesque scene, under the blazing eastern sun, was the wide horizon of the mountains of Bou Cada and Taguin, amongst which my brother Aumale captured Abd-el-Kadir's smalah.

On my way back from Boghar I paid a visit to the military works at the Chiffa Gorge, where the 33rd Regiment of the Line was building a wonderful road, under circ.u.mstances of the utmost danger and difficulty; and I returned from my tour in Africa feeling deeper admiration and respect than ever for our soldiers, who are as patient under hardship, and as plucky when they have to work in dangerous places, as they are brave in actual battle.

Leaving Algiers, the squadron continued its cruise. We were a great deal at sea, much more than is feasible nowadays, when it costs something considerable in fuel to go the smallest distance. We anch.o.r.ed one evening in a Sardinian bay, where n.o.body ever stopped by any chance, but which offered a pleasant resting-place for the night at that fine season.

After dinner, I gave the officers leave to go ash.o.r.e. They found a perfect desert, and any houses they came upon barricaded; but though human inhabitants were lacking, there was an incredible amount of game.

Hares swarmed upon the ground. At last one inhabitant turned up, and then some others, and friendly relations were established.

The population, it appeared, had fled at our approach, taking us (I am not joking, truly) for Barbary Moors, coming to make a raid for slaves.

Information travels slowly in those parts.

We went to Cagliari, Palermo, Leghorn, Spezzia, and Genoa in succession, and then the squadron returned to winter at Toulon. The period of my command had run out save for these winter months. Being much overworked, and far from well, I applied to be relieved of my functions, and on the 26th November I made them over to Admiral Trehouard, who had commanded one of the divisions under my orders.

Trehouard was a brave Breton, who had performed a splendid feat during an action at Obligado in La Plata, where he commanded the French portion of an Anglo-French flotilla, sent to force its way up the river, which was blocked by a boom and defended by a number of forts.

The little fleet met with an energetic and obstinate resistance.

Several ships had been put hors de combat, including Trehouard's own, which was disabled and had half her crew on sh.o.r.e. The struggle lasted on still, and threatened to end in our defeat, when Captain Hope, commanding the English contingent, ordered out his boats, and went and cut through the boom under a hail of bullets, while Trehouard boarded the last ship he had that was able to move, and ordered her commander, M. de Miniac, who lost his leg at St. Juan d'Ulloa, to run her ash.o.r.e close to the enemy's princ.i.p.al battery.

After a momentary struggle, and in spite of the Argentine officers'

shouts of "Fuego al pelo blanco!" (Fire at the white head!), (Trehouard was prematurely gray), on the quarterdeck; the moral and physical result of the hand-to-hand struggle ended in a complete rout of the enemy. Trehouard was made a rear-admiral, and no man ever deserved his step better.

A young officer was killed beside him that day whose name was h.e.l.lo.

His father, a friend of mine, had put him under my wing when he left the Naval College, and I had watched over his career with sincere affection for several years. Every time I pa.s.s one of the commonplace statues placed in our public squares in memory of political chatterers who have died quietly in their beds, I think of all those brave fellows who have died obscurely for their country, with no funeral oration but the tears of their broken-hearted families, but who have carried away to their eternal dwelling-place the proud consolation of duty performed.

I returned to Paris. What a state of things was there! Politics had overwhelmed everything else. To the lovers of order, who had already found their condition oppressive, the state of affairs was soon to become fatal. The makers of sedition, on the other hand, found it most blessed. But to the country at large, as events have too surely proved, it was disastrous.

I will not dwell too long on this sad period, my personal recollections of which are mingled with the events of a well-known page of our national history.

Towards the beginning of the winter of 1848 the doctors ordered my wife, who was in very delicate health, to go and spend the cold months in a southern climate, and I started with her and my children for Algiers, where I joined my brother Aumale, who had become governor-general of the colony. I arrived, weighed down with gloomy forebodings, feeling convinced that by dint of trying to respect those so-called legal restraints which paralyse a government, but which do so little to hinder any revolutionary section in its action, we should end by being overwhelmed, and by hearing the fatal hour strike, the "too late" that comes with every revolution. Yet I did not believe that hour so close at hand as it was. For I had hardly settled down at Algiers, when one fine morning the announcement of the February revolution and the proclamation of the republic came upon us like the bursting of a sh.e.l.l. The news arrived in the shape of vague rumours, uncertain information, reports of various kinds, brought over from Ma.r.s.eilles. As to the amount of authenticity they possessed--whether the movement was a general one or confined to Paris only, whether a stand was being made against it anywhere--on all these points the earliest rumours were mute, and they were just as silent as to what had befallen the King and the rest of our family, in the confusion. We were reduced to the wildest conjectures, and were wondering whether we ought not to start for France at once, when a steam corvette from Toulon brought me the following despatch:--

The Minister for Naval Affairs to Monsieur le Prince de Joinville.

28th February, 1848, 8.30 p.m.

Prince,

The well-being of the country demands that you should make no attempt to dissuade the crews or soldiers of the navy from their obedience to the Provisional Government. It is important that you should not attempt to set foot on French soil, nor communicate with any vessel in the French fleet, till further orders.

Prince, your patriotic instinct will enable you to resign yourself to this sacrifice, and to perform it unflinchingly. Such is the confident hope of the Provisional Government. ARAGO.

The signatory of this despatch had taught me in my youth, and I had kept up affectionate intercourse with him since. But the coolness with which the man (a great savant, no doubt, but who up to this had never done anything but make calculations and handle telescopes) invested himself with supreme authority amazed me. Exasperated as I was by his summons "to make no attempt to dissuade the sailors and soldiers of the navy from their obedience" to his hour-old government, in other words, from the violation of their oath which he was about to ask of all the brave fellows, I forgot both my former relations with the man and the courteous form of his despatch; and I was in a transport of rage as I handed the missive to Changarnier, commanding the troops, and M.

Vaisse, the civil secretary-general, who were both of them present, in my brother's study.

"That is a summons from the enemy," I said; "we must do the very contrary."

But M. Vai'sse was silent, and Changarnier shook his head. I bethought me then, alas! that in this day of progress of ours the religion of a man's oath is but an empty word--and I recovered my self-possession.

My aide-de-camp, Commander Touchard, had come from Paris by the same corvette that had brought me the despatch. He had seen the crash, had been present when the National Guard, upon whom my brother Nemours had called to resist the rioters, had overwhelmed him with abuse, had witnessed the abdication, the scenes in the Chamber, and the King's final departure. All the way across France, too, except at Toulon, where the strong hand of the navy made itself felt, Touchard had watched the eager speculations of the majority on the accomplished fact, and the struggle as to who should first offer his services to the Provisional Government, before the corpse of Const.i.tutional Monarchy was cold--for dead it was, without having struck a blow in its own defence.

There was no doubt about the King's personal courage. He had proved it on many battle-fields--at Valmy, Jemmapes, and Nerwinde--and under the frequent attempts made on him by would-be a.s.sa.s.sins. With courage of a rarer kind, he had never hesitated to brave unpopularity, when his doing so was clearly to the country's interest. But he had striven, being honest as well as brave, to be faithful to the inst.i.tutions he had sworn to maintain, although those who opposed him had long ceased to respect the fiction of the const.i.tution, and had become a frankly revolutionist body, which no longer directed its attack against the ministry of the day, but against the King's own person, and all that edifice on the summit of which the throne was placed.

Had he chosen to take the initiative, in order to prevent what ultimately happened, he would not have failed for want of means. When the army and the administration are in a man's hands, he can do very much as he chooses. Successive revolutions have destroyed all respect among us, except respect for main force; and it is a true saying that if strength begets respect, respect in its turn begets affection. But the King, who was the most moderate of men, would not go beyond legal limits except as a last resource. And this characteristic of his was well and universally known to all, both to friends and foes. While it discouraged the former, it to some extent encouraged the latter, and so the signal for recourse to force came from below, the pretorians of the street rose in rebellion, and the defenders of the law were everywhere overcome. In a few moments the confusion became general, and the revolution was an accomplished fact.