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REQUIESCANT
Madame de T.'s salon was all that Marius Pontmercy knew of
the world. It was the only opening through which he could get
a glimpse of life.
This opening was sombre, and more cold than warmth, more night
than day, came to him through this skylight.
This child, who had been all joy and light on entering this
strange world, soon became melancholy, and, what is still more
contrary to his age, grave.
Surrounded by all those singular and imposing personages,
he gazed about him with serious amazement.
Everything conspired to increase this astonishment in him.
There were in Madame de T.'s salon some very noble ladies
named Mathan, Noe, Levis,--which was pronounced Levi,--Cambis,
pronounced Cambyse.
These antique visages and these Biblical names mingled in
the child's mind with the Old Testament which he was learning
by heart, and when they were all there, seated in a circle around
a dying fire, sparely lighted by a lamp shaded with green, with
their severe profiles, their gray or white hair, their long gowns
of another age, whose lugubrious colors could not be distinguished,
dropping, at rare intervals, words which were both majestic and
severe, little Marius stared at them with frightened eyes, in
the conviction that he beheld not women, but patriarchs and magi,
not real beings, but phantoms.
With these phantoms, priests were sometimes mingled, frequenters
of this ancient salon, and some gentlemen; the Marquis de Sass****,
private secretary to Madame de Berry, the Vicomte de Val***, who
published, under the pseudonyme of Charles-Antoine, monorhymed
odes, the Prince de Beauff*******, who, though very young, had
a gray head and a pretty and witty wife, whose very low-necked
toilettes of scarlet velvet with gold torsades alarmed these shadows,
the Marquis de C*****d'E******, the man in all France who best
understood "proportioned politeness," the Comte d'Am*****,
the kindly man with the amiable chin, and the Chevalier de Port-de-Guy,
a pillar of the library of the Louvre, called the King's cabinet,
M. de Port-de-Guy, bald, and rather aged than old, was wont to
relate that in 1793, at the age of sixteen, he had been put in
the galleys as refractory and chained with an octogenarian, the
Bishop of Mirepoix, also refractory, but as a priest, while he
was so in the capacity of a soldier.
This was at Toulon. Their business was to go at night and
gather up on the scaffold the heads and bodies of the persons
who had been guillotined during the day; they bore away on their
backs these dripping corpses, and their red galley-slave blouses
had a clot of blood at the back of the neck, which was dry in
the morning and wet at night. These tragic tales abounded in Madame
de T.'s salon, and by dint of cursing Marat, they applauded Trestaillon.
Some deputies of the undiscoverable variety played their whist
there; M. Thibord du Chalard, M. Lemarchant de Gomicourt, and
the celebrated scoffer of the right, M. Cornet-Dincourt. The bailiff
de Ferrette, with his short breeches and his thin legs, sometimes
traversed this salon on his way to M. de Talleyrand.
He had been M. le Comte d'Artois' companion in pleasures and
unlike Aristotle crouching under Campaspe, he had made the Guimard
crawl on all fours, and in that way he had exhibited to the ages
a philosopher avenged by a bailiff. As for the priests, there
was the Abbe Halma, the same to whom M. Larose, his collaborator
on la Foudre, said:
"Bah!
Who is there who is not fifty years old? a few greenhorns
perhaps?" The Abbe Letourneur, preacher to the King, the
Abbe Frayssinous, who was not, as yet, either count, or bishop,
or minister, or peer, and who wore an old cassock whose buttons
were missing, and the Abbe Keravenant, Cure of Saint-Germain-des-Pres;
also the Pope's Nuncio, then Monsignor Macchi, Archbishop of Nisibi,
later on Cardinal, remarkable for his long, pensive nose, and
another Monsignor, entitled thus:
Abbate Palmieri, domestic prelate, one of the seven participant
prothonotaries of the Holy See, Canon of the illustrious Liberian
basilica, Advocate of the saints, Postulatore dei Santi, which
refers to matters of canonization, and signifies very nearly:
Master of Requests of the section of Paradise.
Lastly, two cardinals, M. de la Luzerne, and M. de Cl******
T*******. The Cardinal of Luzerne was a writer and was destined
to have, a few years later, the honor of signing in the Conservateur
articles side by side with Chateaubriand; M. de Cl****** T*******
was Archbishop of Toul****, and often made trips to Paris, to
his nephew, the Marquis de T*******, who was Minister of Marine
and War.
The Cardinal of Cl****** T******* was a merry little man,
who displayed his red stockings beneath his tucked-up cassock;
his specialty was a hatred of the Encyclopaedia, and his desperate
play at billiards, and persons who, at that epoch, passed through
the Rue M***** on summer evenings, where the hotel de Cl******
T******* then stood, halted to listen to the shock of the balls
and the piercing voice of the Cardinal shouting to his conclavist,
Monseigneur Cotiret, Bishop in partibus of Caryste: "Mark,
Abbe, I make a cannon."
The Cardinal de Cl****** T******* had been brought to Madame
de T.'s by his most intimate friend, M. de Roquelaure, former
Bishop of Senlis, and one of the Forty. M. de Roquelaure was notable
for his lofty figure and his assiduity at the Academy; through
the glass door of the neighboring hall of the library where the
French Academy then held its meetings, the curious could, on every
Tuesday, contemplate the Ex-Bishop of Senlis, usually standing
erect, freshly powdered, in violet hose, with his back turned
to the door, apparently for the purpose of allowing a better view
of his little collar.
All these ecclesiastics, though for the most part as much
courtiers as churchmen, added to the gravity of the T. salon,
whose seigniorial aspect was accentuated by five peers of France,
the Marquis de Vib****, the Marquis de Tal***, the Marquis de
Herb*******, the Vicomte Damb***, and the Duc de Val********.
This Duc de Val********, although Prince de Mon***, that is to
say a reigning prince abroad, had so high an idea of France and
its peerage, that he viewed everything through their medium. It
was he who said:
"The Cardinals are the peers of France of Rome; the lords
are the peers of France of England."
Moreover, as it is indispensable that the Revolution should
be everywhere in this century, this feudal salon was, as we have
said, dominated by a bourgeois. M. Gillenormand reigned there.
There lay the essence and quintessence of the Parisian white
society. There reputations, even Royalist reputations, were held
in quarantine. There is always a trace of anarchy in renown.
Chateaubriand, had he entered there, would have produced the
effect of Pere Duchene.
Some of the scoffed-at did, nevertheless, penetrate thither
on sufferance. Comte Beug*** was received there, subject to correction.
The "noble" salons of the present day no longer
resemble those salons. The Faubourg Saint-Germain reeks of the
fagot even now.
The Royalists of to-day are demagogues, let us record it to
their credit.
At Madame de T.'s the society was superior, taste was exquisite
and haughty, under the cover of a great show of politeness. Manners
there admitted of all sorts of involuntary refinements which were
the old regime itself, buried but still alive.
Some of these habits, especially in the matter of language,
seem eccentric. Persons but superficially acquainted with them
would have taken for provincial that which was only antique.
A woman was called Madame la Generale.
Madame la Colonelle was not entirely disused. The charming
Madame de Leon, in memory, no doubt, of the Duchesses de Longueville
and de Chevreuse, preferred this appellation to her title of Princesse.
The Marquise de Crequy was also called Madame la Colonelle.
It was this little high society which invented at the Tuileries
the refinement of speaking to the King in private as the King,
in the third person, and never as Your Majesty, the designation
of Your Majesty having been "soiled by the usurper."
Men and deeds were brought to judgment there.
They jeered at the age, which released them from the necessity
of understanding it. They abetted each other in amazement.
They communicated to each other that modicum of light which
they possessed. Methuselah bestowed information on Epimenides.
The deaf man made the blind man acquainted with the course
of things.
They declared that the time which had elasped since Coblentz
had not existed. In the same manner that Louis XVIII.
was by the grace of God, in the five and twentieth year of
his reign, the emigrants were, by rights, in the five and twentieth
year of their adolescence.
All was harmonious; nothing was too much alive; speech hardly
amounted to a breath; the newspapers, agreeing with the salons,
seemed a papyrus.
There were some young people, but they were rather dead.
The liveries in the antechamber were antiquated. These utterly
obsolete personages were served by domestics of the same stamp.
They all had the air of having lived a long time ago, and
of obstinately resisting the sepulchre.
Nearly the whole dictionary consisted of Conserver, Conservation,
Conservateur; to be in good odor,-- that was the point.
There are, in fact, aromatics in the opinions of these venerable
groups, and their ideas smelled of it. It was a mummified society.
The masters were embalmed, the servants were stuffed with
straw.
A worthy old marquise, an emigree and ruined, who had but
a solitary maid, continued to say:
"My people."
What did they do in Madame de T.'s salon?
They were ultra.
To be ultra; this word, although what it represents may not
have disappeared, has no longer any meaning at the present day.
Let us explain it.
To be ultra is to go beyond.
It is to attack the sceptre in the name of the throne, and
the mitre in the name of the attar; it is to ill-treat the thing
which one is dragging, it is to kick over the traces; it is to
cavil at the fagot on the score of the amount of cooking received
by heretics; it is to reproach the idol with its small amount
of idolatry; it is to insult through excess of respect; it is
to discover that the Pope is not sufficiently papish, that the
King is not sufficiently royal, and that the night has too much
light; it is to be discontented with alabaster, with snow, with
the swan and the lily in the name of whiteness; it is to be a
partisan of things to the point of becoming their enemy; it is
to be so strongly for, as to be against.
The ultra spirit especially characterizes the first phase
of the Restoration.
Nothing in history resembles that quarter of an hour which
begins in 1814 and terminates about 1820, with the advent of M.
de Villele, the practical man of the Right.
These six years were an extraordinary moment; at one and the
same time brilliant and gloomy, smiling and sombre, illuminated
as by the radiance of dawn and entirely covered, at the same time,
with the shadows of the great catastrophes which still filled
the horizon and were slowly sinking into the past.
There existed in that light and that shadow, a complete little
new and old world, comic and sad, juvenile and senile, which was
rubbing its eyes; nothing resembles an awakening like a return;
a group which regarded France with ill-temper, and which France
regarded with irony; good old owls of marquises by the streetful,
who had returned, and of ghosts, the "former" subjects
of amazement at everything, brave and noble gentlemen who smiled
at being in France but wept also, delighted to behold their country
once more, in despair at not finding their monarchy; the nobility
of the Crusades treating the nobility of the Empire, that is to
say, the nobility of the sword, with scorn; historic races who
had lost the sense of history; the sons of the companions of Charlemagne
disdaining the companions of Napoleon. The swords, as we have
just remarked, returned the insult; the sword of Fontenoy was
laughable and nothing but a scrap of rusty iron; the sword of
Marengo was odious and was only a sabre.
Former days did not recognize Yesterday.
People no longer had the feeling for what was grand.
There was some one who called Bonaparte Scapin. This Society
no longer exists.
Nothing of it, we repeat, exists to-day. When we select from
it some one figure at random, and attempt to make it live again
in thought, it seems as strange to us as the world before the
Deluge.
It is because it, too, as a matter of fact, has been engulfed
in a deluge.
It has disappeared beneath two Revolutions.
What billows are ideas!
How quickly they cover all that it is their mission to destroy
and to bury, and how promptly they create frightful gulfs!
Such was the physiognomy of the salons of those distant and
candid times when M. Martainville had more wit than Voltaire.
These salons had a literature and politics of their own. They
believed in Fievee.
M. Agier laid down the law in them. They commentated M. Colnet,
the old bookseller and publicist of the Quay Malaquais.
Napoleon was to them thoroughly the Corsican Ogre. Later on
the introduction into history of M. le Marquis de Bonaparte, Lieutenant-General
of the King's armies, was a concession to the spirit of the age.
These salons did not long preserve their purity.
Beginning with 1818, doctrinarians began to spring up in them,
a disturbing shade. Their way was to be Royalists and to excuse
themselves for being so. Where the ultras were very proud, the
doctrinarians were rather ashamed. They had wit; they had silence;
their political dogma was suitably impregnated with arrogance;
they should have succeeded. They indulged, and usefully too, in
excesses in the matter of white neckties and tightly buttoned
coats.
The mistake or the misfortune of the doctrinarian party was
to create aged youth.
They assumed the poses of wise men.
They dreamed of engrafting a temperate power on the absolute
and excessive principle.
They opposed, and sometimes with rare intelligence, conservative
liberalism to the liberalism which demolishes.
They were heard to say: "Thanks for Royalism!
It has rendered more than one service.
It has brought back tradition, worship, religion, respect.
It is faithful, brave, chivalric, loving, devoted.
It has mingled, though with regret, the secular grandeurs
of the monarchy with the new grandeurs of the nation.
Its mistake is not to understand the Revolution, the Empire,
glory, liberty, young ideas, young generations, the age.
But this mistake which it makes with regard to us,-- have
we not sometimes been guilty of it towards them?
The Revolution, whose heirs we are, ought to be intelligent
on all points. To attack Royalism is a misconstruction of liberalism.
What an error! And what blindness!
Revolutionary France is wanting in respect towards historic
France, that is to say, towards its mother, that is to say, towards
itself.
After the 5th of September, the nobility of the monarchy is
treated as the nobility of the Empire was treated after the 5th
of July.
They were unjust to the eagle, we are unjust to the fleur-de-lys.
It seems that we must always have something to proscribe!
Does it serve any purpose to ungild the crown of Louis XIV.,
to scrape the coat of arms of Henry IV.? We scoff at M. de Vaublanc
for erasing the N's from the bridge of Jena! What was it that
he did?
What are we doing?
Bouvines belongs to us as well as Marengo.
The fleurs-de-lys are ours as well as the N's. That is our
patrimony.
To what purpose shall we diminish it? We must not deny our
country in the past any more than in the present. Why not accept
the whole of history?
Why not love the whole of France?
It is thus that doctrinarians criticised and protected Royalism,
which was displeased at criticism and furious at protection.
The ultras marked the first epoch of Royalism, congregation
characterized the second. Skill follows ardor.
Let us confine ourselves here to this sketch.
In the course of this narrative, the author of this book has
encountered in his path this curious moment of contemporary history;
he has been forced to cast a passing glance upon it, and to trace
once more some of the singular features of this society which
is unknown to-day. But he does it rapidly and without any bitter
or derisive idea.
Souvenirs both respectful and affectionate, for they touch
his mother, attach him to this past.
Moreover, let us remark, this same petty world had a grandeur
of its own. One may smile at it, but one can neither despise nor
hate it. It was the France of former days.
Marius Pontmercy pursued some studies, as all children do.
When he emerged from the hands of Aunt Gillenormand, his grandfather
confided him to a worthy professor of the most purely classic
innocence. This young soul which was expanding passed from a prude
to a vulgar pedant.
Marius went through his years of college, then he entered
the law school.
He was a Royalist, fanatical and severe.
He did not love his grandfather much, as the latter's gayety
and cynicism repelled him, and his feelings towards his father
were gloomy.
He was, on the whole, a cold and ardent, noble, generous,
proud, religious, enthusiastic lad; dignified to harshness, pure
to shyness.
REQUIESCANT
Madame de T.'s salon was all that Marius Pontmercy knew of
the world. It was the only opening through which he could get
a glimpse of life.
This opening was sombre, and more cold than warmth, more night
than day, came to him through this skylight.
This child, who had been all joy and light on entering this
strange world, soon became melancholy, and, what is still more
contrary to his age, grave.
Surrounded by all those singular and imposing personages,
he gazed about him with serious amazement.
Everything conspired to increase this astonishment in him.
There were in Madame de T.'s salon some very noble ladies
named Mathan, Noe, Levis,--which was pronounced Levi,--Cambis,
pronounced Cambyse.
These antique visages and these Biblical names mingled in
the child's mind with the Old Testament which he was learning
by heart, and when they were all there, seated in a circle around
a dying fire, sparely lighted by a lamp shaded with green, with
their severe profiles, their gray or white hair, their long gowns
of another age, whose lugubrious colors could not be distinguished,
dropping, at rare intervals, words which were both majestic and
severe, little Marius stared at them with frightened eyes, in
the conviction that he beheld not women, but patriarchs and magi,
not real beings, but phantoms.
With these phantoms, priests were sometimes mingled, frequenters
of this ancient salon, and some gentlemen; the Marquis de Sass****,
private secretary to Madame de Berry, the Vicomte de Val***, who
published, under the pseudonyme of Charles-Antoine, monorhymed
odes, the Prince de Beauff*******, who, though very young, had
a gray head and a pretty and witty wife, whose very low-necked
toilettes of scarlet velvet with gold torsades alarmed these shadows,
the Marquis de C*****d'E******, the man in all France who best
understood "proportioned politeness," the Comte d'Am*****,
the kindly man with the amiable chin, and the Chevalier de Port-de-Guy,
a pillar of the library of the Louvre, called the King's cabinet,
M. de Port-de-Guy, bald, and rather aged than old, was wont to
relate that in 1793, at the age of sixteen, he had been put in
the galleys as refractory and chained with an octogenarian, the
Bishop of Mirepoix, also refractory, but as a priest, while he
was so in the capacity of a soldier.
This was at Toulon. Their business was to go at night and
gather up on the scaffold the heads and bodies of the persons
who had been guillotined during the day; they bore away on their
backs these dripping corpses, and their red galley-slave blouses
had a clot of blood at the back of the neck, which was dry in
the morning and wet at night. These tragic tales abounded in Madame
de T.'s salon, and by dint of cursing Marat, they applauded Trestaillon.
Some deputies of the undiscoverable variety played their whist
there; M. Thibord du Chalard, M. Lemarchant de Gomicourt, and
the celebrated scoffer of the right, M. Cornet-Dincourt. The bailiff
de Ferrette, with his short breeches and his thin legs, sometimes
traversed this salon on his way to M. de Talleyrand.
He had been M. le Comte d'Artois' companion in pleasures and
unlike Aristotle crouching under Campaspe, he had made the Guimard
crawl on all fours, and in that way he had exhibited to the ages
a philosopher avenged by a bailiff. As for the priests, there
was the Abbe Halma, the same to whom M. Larose, his collaborator
on la Foudre, said:
"Bah!
Who is there who is not fifty years old? a few greenhorns
perhaps?" The Abbe Letourneur, preacher to the King, the
Abbe Frayssinous, who was not, as yet, either count, or bishop,
or minister, or peer, and who wore an old cassock whose buttons
were missing, and the Abbe Keravenant, Cure of Saint-Germain-des-Pres;
also the Pope's Nuncio, then Monsignor Macchi, Archbishop of Nisibi,
later on Cardinal, remarkable for his long, pensive nose, and
another Monsignor, entitled thus:
Abbate Palmieri, domestic prelate, one of the seven participant
prothonotaries of the Holy See, Canon of the illustrious Liberian
basilica, Advocate of the saints, Postulatore dei Santi, which
refers to matters of canonization, and signifies very nearly:
Master of Requests of the section of Paradise.
Lastly, two cardinals, M. de la Luzerne, and M. de Cl******
T*******. The Cardinal of Luzerne was a writer and was destined
to have, a few years later, the honor of signing in the Conservateur
articles side by side with Chateaubriand; M. de Cl****** T*******
was Archbishop of Toul****, and often made trips to Paris, to
his nephew, the Marquis de T*******, who was Minister of Marine
and War.
The Cardinal of Cl****** T******* was a merry little man,
who displayed his red stockings beneath his tucked-up cassock;
his specialty was a hatred of the Encyclopaedia, and his desperate
play at billiards, and persons who, at that epoch, passed through
the Rue M***** on summer evenings, where the hotel de Cl******
T******* then stood, halted to listen to the shock of the balls
and the piercing voice of the Cardinal shouting to his conclavist,
Monseigneur Cotiret, Bishop in partibus of Caryste: "Mark,
Abbe, I make a cannon."
The Cardinal de Cl****** T******* had been brought to Madame
de T.'s by his most intimate friend, M. de Roquelaure, former
Bishop of Senlis, and one of the Forty. M. de Roquelaure was notable
for his lofty figure and his assiduity at the Academy; through
the glass door of the neighboring hall of the library where the
French Academy then held its meetings, the curious could, on every
Tuesday, contemplate the Ex-Bishop of Senlis, usually standing
erect, freshly powdered, in violet hose, with his back turned
to the door, apparently for the purpose of allowing a better view
of his little collar.
All these ecclesiastics, though for the most part as much
courtiers as churchmen, added to the gravity of the T. salon,
whose seigniorial aspect was accentuated by five peers of France,
the Marquis de Vib****, the Marquis de Tal***, the Marquis de
Herb*******, the Vicomte Damb***, and the Duc de Val********.
This Duc de Val********, although Prince de Mon***, that is to
say a reigning prince abroad, had so high an idea of France and
its peerage, that he viewed everything through their medium. It
was he who said:
"The Cardinals are the peers of France of Rome; the lords
are the peers of France of England."
Moreover, as it is indispensable that the Revolution should
be everywhere in this century, this feudal salon was, as we have
said, dominated by a bourgeois. M. Gillenormand reigned there.
There lay the essence and quintessence of the Parisian white
society. There reputations, even Royalist reputations, were held
in quarantine. There is always a trace of anarchy in renown.
Chateaubriand, had he entered there, would have produced the
effect of Pere Duchene.
Some of the scoffed-at did, nevertheless, penetrate thither
on sufferance. Comte Beug*** was received there, subject to correction.
The "noble" salons of the present day no longer
resemble those salons. The Faubourg Saint-Germain reeks of the
fagot even now.
The Royalists of to-day are demagogues, let us record it to
their credit.
At Madame de T.'s the society was superior, taste was exquisite
and haughty, under the cover of a great show of politeness. Manners
there admitted of all sorts of involuntary refinements which were
the old regime itself, buried but still alive.
Some of these habits, especially in the matter of language,
seem eccentric. Persons but superficially acquainted with them
would have taken for provincial that which was only antique.
A woman was called Madame la Generale.
Madame la Colonelle was not entirely disused. The charming
Madame de Leon, in memory, no doubt, of the Duchesses de Longueville
and de Chevreuse, preferred this appellation to her title of Princesse.
The Marquise de Crequy was also called Madame la Colonelle.
It was this little high society which invented at the Tuileries
the refinement of speaking to the King in private as the King,
in the third person, and never as Your Majesty, the designation
of Your Majesty having been "soiled by the usurper."
Men and deeds were brought to judgment there.
They jeered at the age, which released them from the necessity
of understanding it. They abetted each other in amazement.
They communicated to each other that modicum of light which
they possessed. Methuselah bestowed information on Epimenides.
The deaf man made the blind man acquainted with the course
of things.
They declared that the time which had elasped since Coblentz
had not existed. In the same manner that Louis XVIII.
was by the grace of God, in the five and twentieth year of
his reign, the emigrants were, by rights, in the five and twentieth
year of their adolescence.
All was harmonious; nothing was too much alive; speech hardly
amounted to a breath; the newspapers, agreeing with the salons,
seemed a papyrus.
There were some young people, but they were rather dead.
The liveries in the antechamber were antiquated. These utterly
obsolete personages were served by domestics of the same stamp.
They all had the air of having lived a long time ago, and
of obstinately resisting the sepulchre.
Nearly the whole dictionary consisted of Conserver, Conservation,
Conservateur; to be in good odor,-- that was the point.
There are, in fact, aromatics in the opinions of these venerable
groups, and their ideas smelled of it. It was a mummified society.
The masters were embalmed, the servants were stuffed with
straw.
A worthy old marquise, an emigree and ruined, who had but
a solitary maid, continued to say:
"My people."
What did they do in Madame de T.'s salon?
They were ultra.
To be ultra; this word, although what it represents may not
have disappeared, has no longer any meaning at the present day.
Let us explain it.
To be ultra is to go beyond.
It is to attack the sceptre in the name of the throne, and
the mitre in the name of the attar; it is to ill-treat the thing
which one is dragging, it is to kick over the traces; it is to
cavil at the fagot on the score of the amount of cooking received
by heretics; it is to reproach the idol with its small amount
of idolatry; it is to insult through excess of respect; it is
to discover that the Pope is not sufficiently papish, that the
King is not sufficiently royal, and that the night has too much
light; it is to be discontented with alabaster, with snow, with
the swan and the lily in the name of whiteness; it is to be a
partisan of things to the point of becoming their enemy; it is
to be so strongly for, as to be against.
The ultra spirit especially characterizes the first phase
of the Restoration.
Nothing in history resembles that quarter of an hour which
begins in 1814 and terminates about 1820, with the advent of M.
de Villele, the practical man of the Right.
These six years were an extraordinary moment; at one and the
same time brilliant and gloomy, smiling and sombre, illuminated
as by the radiance of dawn and entirely covered, at the same time,
with the shadows of the great catastrophes which still filled
the horizon and were slowly sinking into the past.
There existed in that light and that shadow, a complete little
new and old world, comic and sad, juvenile and senile, which was
rubbing its eyes; nothing resembles an awakening like a return;
a group which regarded France with ill-temper, and which France
regarded with irony; good old owls of marquises by the streetful,
who had returned, and of ghosts, the "former" subjects
of amazement at everything, brave and noble gentlemen who smiled
at being in France but wept also, delighted to behold their country
once more, in despair at not finding their monarchy; the nobility
of the Crusades treating the nobility of the Empire, that is to
say, the nobility of the sword, with scorn; historic races who
had lost the sense of history; the sons of the companions of Charlemagne
disdaining the companions of Napoleon. The swords, as we have
just remarked, returned the insult; the sword of Fontenoy was
laughable and nothing but a scrap of rusty iron; the sword of
Marengo was odious and was only a sabre.
Former days did not recognize Yesterday.
People no longer had the feeling for what was grand.
There was some one who called Bonaparte Scapin. This Society
no longer exists.
Nothing of it, we repeat, exists to-day. When we select from
it some one figure at random, and attempt to make it live again
in thought, it seems as strange to us as the world before the
Deluge.
It is because it, too, as a matter of fact, has been engulfed
in a deluge.
It has disappeared beneath two Revolutions.
What billows are ideas!
How quickly they cover all that it is their mission to destroy
and to bury, and how promptly they create frightful gulfs!
Such was the physiognomy of the salons of those distant and
candid times when M. Martainville had more wit than Voltaire.
These salons had a literature and politics of their own. They
believed in Fievee.
M. Agier laid down the law in them. They commentated M. Colnet,
the old bookseller and publicist of the Quay Malaquais.
Napoleon was to them thoroughly the Corsican Ogre. Later on
the introduction into history of M. le Marquis de Bonaparte, Lieutenant-General
of the King's armies, was a concession to the spirit of the age.
These salons did not long preserve their purity.
Beginning with 1818, doctrinarians began to spring up in them,
a disturbing shade. Their way was to be Royalists and to excuse
themselves for being so. Where the ultras were very proud, the
doctrinarians were rather ashamed. They had wit; they had silence;
their political dogma was suitably impregnated with arrogance;
they should have succeeded. They indulged, and usefully too, in
excesses in the matter of white neckties and tightly buttoned
coats.
The mistake or the misfortune of the doctrinarian party was
to create aged youth.
They assumed the poses of wise men.
They dreamed of engrafting a temperate power on the absolute
and excessive principle.
They opposed, and sometimes with rare intelligence, conservative
liberalism to the liberalism which demolishes.
They were heard to say: "Thanks for Royalism!
It has rendered more than one service.
It has brought back tradition, worship, religion, respect.
It is faithful, brave, chivalric, loving, devoted.
It has mingled, though with regret, the secular grandeurs
of the monarchy with the new grandeurs of the nation.
Its mistake is not to understand the Revolution, the Empire,
glory, liberty, young ideas, young generations, the age.
But this mistake which it makes with regard to us,-- have
we not sometimes been guilty of it towards them?
The Revolution, whose heirs we are, ought to be intelligent
on all points. To attack Royalism is a misconstruction of liberalism.
What an error! And what blindness!
Revolutionary France is wanting in respect towards historic
France, that is to say, towards its mother, that is to say, towards
itself.
After the 5th of September, the nobility of the monarchy is
treated as the nobility of the Empire was treated after the 5th
of July.
They were unjust to the eagle, we are unjust to the fleur-de-lys.
It seems that we must always have something to proscribe!
Does it serve any purpose to ungild the crown of Louis XIV.,
to scrape the coat of arms of Henry IV.? We scoff at M. de Vaublanc
for erasing the N's from the bridge of Jena! What was it that
he did?
What are we doing?
Bouvines belongs to us as well as Marengo.
The fleurs-de-lys are ours as well as the N's. That is our
patrimony.
To what purpose shall we diminish it? We must not deny our
country in the past any more than in the present. Why not accept
the whole of history?
Why not love the whole of France?
It is thus that doctrinarians criticised and protected Royalism,
which was displeased at criticism and furious at protection.
The ultras marked the first epoch of Royalism, congregation
characterized the second. Skill follows ardor.
Let us confine ourselves here to this sketch.
In the course of this narrative, the author of this book has
encountered in his path this curious moment of contemporary history;
he has been forced to cast a passing glance upon it, and to trace
once more some of the singular features of this society which
is unknown to-day. But he does it rapidly and without any bitter
or derisive idea.
Souvenirs both respectful and affectionate, for they touch
his mother, attach him to this past.
Moreover, let us remark, this same petty world had a grandeur
of its own. One may smile at it, but one can neither despise nor
hate it. It was the France of former days.
Marius Pontmercy pursued some studies, as all children do.
When he emerged from the hands of Aunt Gillenormand, his grandfather
confided him to a worthy professor of the most purely classic
innocence. This young soul which was expanding passed from a prude
to a vulgar pedant.
Marius went through his years of college, then he entered
the law school.
He was a Royalist, fanatical and severe.
He did not love his grandfather much, as the latter's gayety
and cynicism repelled him, and his feelings towards his father
were gloomy.
He was, on the whole, a cold and ardent, noble, generous,
proud, religious, enthusiastic lad; dignified to harshness, pure
to shyness.
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