EMPEROR NAPOLEON I.

FRANCE
IN
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

1830-1890

BY ELIZABETH WORMELEY LATIMER

AUTHOR OF "SALVAGE," "MY WIFE AND MY WIFE'S SISTER," "PRINCESS AMÉLIE," "FAMILIAR TALKS ON SOME OF SHAKESPEARE'S COMEDIES," ETC.

NOTE

The sources from which I have drawn the materials for this book are various; they come largely from private papers, and from articles contributed to magazines and newspapers by contemporary writers, French, English, and American. I had not at first intended the work for publication, and I omitted to make notes which would have enabled me to restore to others the "unconsidered trifles" that I may have taken from them.

As far as possible, I have endeavored to remedy this; but should any other writer find a gold thread of his own in my embroidery, I hope he will look upon it as an evidence of my appreciation of his work, and not as an act of intentional dishonesty.

E. W. L.

SEPTEMBER, 1892.

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

EMPEROR NAPOLEON I
CHARLES X
LOUIS PHILIPPE, DUKE OF ORLEANS
DUCHESSE DE BERRY
QUEEN MARIE AMÉLIE
LOUIS PHILIPPE, "THE CITIZEN KING"
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
LOUIS NAPOLEON, "THE PRINCE PRESIDENT"
DUC DE MORNY
EUGÉNIE
EMPEROR MAXIMILIAN
EMPEROR NAPOLEON III
EMPRESS EUGÉNIE
JULES SIMON
JULES FAVRE
MONSEIGNEUR DARBOY, ARCHBISHOP OF PARIS
PRESIDENT ADOLPH THIERS
LÉON GAMBETTA
COMTE DE CHAMBORD
PRESIDENT JULES GRÉVY
PRESIDENT SADI-CARNOT
GENERAL BOULANGER

FRANCE
IN THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY.

1830-1890.

[CHAPTER I.]

CHARLES X. AND THE DAYS OF JULY.

Louis XVIII. in 1815 returned to his throne, borne on the shoulders of foreign soldiers, after the fight at Waterloo. The allied armies had a second time entered France to make her pass under the saws and harrows of humiliation. Paris was gay, for money was spent freely by the invading strangers. Sacrifices on the altar of the Emperor were over; enthusiasm for the extension of the great ideas of the Revolution had passed away; a new generation had been born which cared more for material prosperity than for such ideas; the foundation of many fortunes had been laid; mothers who dreaded the conscription, and men weary of war and politics, drew a long breath, and did not regret the loss of that which had animated a preceding generation, in a view of a peace which was to bring wealth, comfort, and tranquillity into their own homes.

The bourgeoisie of France trusted that it had seen the last of the Great Revolution. It stood between the working-classes, who had no voice in the politics of the Restoration, and the old nobility,—men who had returned to France full of exalted expectations. The king had to place himself on one side or the other. He might have been the true Bourbon and headed the party of the returned émigrés,—in which case his crown would not have stayed long upon his head; or he might have made himself king of the bourgeoisie, opposed to revolution, Napoleonism, or disturbances of any kind,—the party, in short, of the Restoration of Peace: a peace that might outlast his time; et après moi le déluge!

But animals which show neither teeth nor claws are seldom left in peace, and Louis XVIII.'s reign—from 1814 to 1824—was full of conspiracies. The royalty of the Restoration was only an ornament tacked on to France. The Bourbon dynasty was a necessary evil, even in the eyes of its supporters. "The Bourbons," said Chateaubriand, "are the foam on the revolutionary wave that has brought them back to power;" whilst every one knows Talleyrand's famous saying "that after five and twenty years of exile they had nothing remembered and nothing forgot." Of course the old nobility, who flocked back to France in the train of the allied armies, expected the restoration of their estates. The king had got his own again,—why should not they get back theirs? And they imagined that France, which had been overswept by successive waves of revolution, could go back to what she had been under the old régime. This was impossible. The returned exiles had to submit to the confiscation of their estates, and receive in return all offices and employments in the gift of the Government. The army which had conquered in a hundred battles, with its marshals, generals, and vieux moustaches, was not pleased to have young officers, chosen from the nobility, receive commissions and be charged with important commands. On the other hand, the Holy Alliance expected that the king of France would join the despotic sovereigns of Russia, Austria, and Prussia in their crusade against liberal ideas in other countries. Against these difficulties, and many more, Louis XVIII. had to contend. He was an infirm man, physically incapable of exertion,—a man who only wanted to be let alone, and to avoid by every means in his power the calamity of being again sent into exile.

He placed himself on the side of the stronger party,—he took part with the bourgeoisie. His aim, as he himself said, was to ménager his throne. He began his reign by having Fouché and Talleyrand, men of the Revolution and the Empire, deep in his councils, though he disliked both of them. Early in his reign occurred what was called the White Terror, in the southern provinces, where the adherents of the white flag repeated on a small scale the barbarities of the Revolution.

The king was forced to put himself in opposition to the old nobles who had adhered to him in his exile. They bitterly resented his defection. They used to toast him as le roi-quand-même, "the king in spite of everything." His own family held all the Bourbon traditions, and were opposed to him. To them everything below the rank of a noble with sixteen quarterings was la canaille.

Louis XVIII.'s favorite minister was M. Decazes, a man who studied the interests of the bourgeoisie; and the royal family at last made the sovereign so uncomfortable by their disapproval of his policy that he sought repose in the society and intimacy (the connection is said to have been nothing more) of a Madame de Cayla, with whom he spent most of his leisure time.

Before the Revolution, Louis XVIII. had been known sometimes as the Comte de Provence, and sometimes as Monsieur. Though physically an inert man, he was by no means intellectually stupid, for he could say very brilliant things from time to time, and was very proud of them; but he was wholly unfit to be at the helm of the ship of state in an unquiet sea.

He had passed the years of his exile in various European countries, but the principal part of his time had been spent at Hartwell, about sixty miles from London, where he formed a little court and lived a life of royalty in miniature. Charles Greville, when a very young man, visited Hartwell with his relative, the Duke of Beaufort, shortly before the Restoration. He describes the king's cabinet as being like a ship's cabin, the walls hung with portraits of Louis XVI., Marie Antoinette, Madame Elisabeth, and the dauphin. Louis himself had a singular habit of swinging his body backward and forward when talking, "which exactly resembled the heavings of a ship at sea." "We were a very short time at table," Greville adds; "the meal was a very plain one, and the ladies and gentlemen all got up together. Each lady folded up her napkin, tied it round with a bit of ribbon, and carried it away with her. After dinner we returned for coffee and conversation to the drawing-room. Whenever the king came in or went out of the room, Madame d'Angoulême made him a low courtesy, which he returned by bowing and kissing her hand. This little ceremony never failed to take place." They finished the evening with whist, "his Majesty settling the points of the game at a quarter of a shilling." "We saw the whole place," adds Greville, "before we came away; they had certainly shown great ingenuity in contriving to lodge so great a number of people in and around the house. It was like a small rising colony."

Louis XVIII. was childless. His brother Charles and himself had married sisters, princesses of the house of Savoy. These ladies were amiable nonentities, and died during the exile of their husbands; but Charles's wife had left him two sons,—Louis Antoine, known as the Duc d'Angoulême, and Charles Ferdinand, known as the Duc de Berri. The Duc d'Angoulême had married his cousin Marie Thérèse, daughter of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette. Their union was childless. The Duc de Berri had married Marie Caroline, a princess of Naples. She had two children,—Louise, who when she grew up became Duchess of Parma; and Henri, called variously the Duc de Bordeaux, Henri V., and the Comte de Chambord.

All Louis XVIII.'s efforts during his ten years' reign were directed to keeping things as quiet as he could during his lifetime. He greatly disapproved of the policy of the Holy Alliance in forcing him to make war on Spain in order to put down the Constitutionalists under Riego and Mina. The expedition for that purpose was commanded by the Duc d'Angoulême, who accomplished his mission, but with little glory or applause except from flatterers. The chief military incident of the campaign was the capture by the French of the forts of Trocadéro, which commanded the entrance to Cadiz harbor.

The Duchesse d'Angoulême, that filia dolorosa left to languish alone in the Temple after her parents and her aunt were guillotined, had been exchanged with Austria for Lafayette by Bonaparte in the treaty of Campo-Formio; but her soul had been crushed within her by her sorrows. Deeply pious, she forgave the enemies of her house, she never uttered a word against the Revolution; but the sight of her pale, set, sad face was a mute reproach to Frenchmen. She could forgive, but she could not be gracious. At the Tuileries, a place full of graceful memories of the Empress Josephine, she presided as a dévote and a dowdy. She could not have been expected to be other than she was, but the nation that had made her so, bore a grudge against her. There was nothing French about her. No sympathies existed between her and the generation that had grown up in France during the nineteenth century. Both she and her husband were stiff, cold, ultra-aristocrats. In intelligence she was greatly the duke's superior, as she was also in person, he being short, fat, red-faced, with very thin legs.

The Duc de Berri was much more popular. He was a Frenchman in character. His faults were French. He was pleasure-seeking, pleasure-loving, and he married a young and pretty wife to whom he was far from faithful, and who was as fond of pleasure as himself.

The Duc de Berri was assassinated by a man named Louvel, Feb. 13, 1820, as he was handing his wife into her carriage at the door of the French Opera House. They carried him back into the theatre, and there, in a side room, with the music of the opera going on upon the stage, the plaudits of the audience ringing in his ears, and ballet-girls flitting in and out in their stage dresses, the heir of France gave up his life, with kindly words upon his dying lips, reminding us of Charles II. on his deathbed.

As I have said, Louis XVIII.'s reign was not without plots and conspiracies. One of those in 1823 was got up by the Carbonari. Lafayette was implicated in it. It was betrayed, however, the night before it was to have been put in execution, and such of its leaders as could be arrested were guillotined. Lafayette was saved by the fact that the day fixed upon for action was the anniversary of his wife's death,—a day he always spent in her chamber in seclusion.

It may be desirable to say who were the Carbonari. "Carbone" is Italian for charcoal. The Carbonari were charcoal-burners. The conspirators took their name because charcoal-burners lived in solitary places, and were disguised by the coal-dust that blackened their faces. It was a secret society which extended throughout France, Italy, and almost all Europe. It was joined by all classes. Its members, under pain of death, were forced to obey the orders of the society. The deliverance of Italy from the Austrians became eventually the prime object of the institution.

Lafayette, during his visit to America in 1824, expressed himself freely about the Bourbons. "France cannot be happy under their rule," he said;[1] "and we must send them adrift. It would have been done before now but for the hesitation of Laffitte. Two regiments of guards, when ordered to Spain under the Duc d'Angoulême, halted at Toulouse, and began to show symptoms of mutiny. The matter was quieted, however, and the affair kept as still as possible. But all was ready. I knew of the whole affair. All that was wanted to make a successful revolution at that time was money. I went to Laffitte; but he was full of doubts, and dilly-dallied with the matter. Then I offered to do it without his help. Said I: 'On the first interview that you and I have without witnesses, put a million of francs, in bank-notes, on the mantelpiece, which I will pocket unseen by you. Then leave the rest to me.' Laffitte still fought shy of it, hesitated, deliberated, and at last decided that he would have nothing at all to do with it."

[Footnote 1: Vincent Nolte, Fifty Years in Two Hemispheres.]

Here the gentleman to whom Lafayette was speaking exclaimed, "If any one had told me this but yourself, General, I would not have believed it."

Lafayette merely answered, "It was really so,"—a proof, thinks the narrator, how fiercely the fire of revolution still burned in the old man's soul.

The last months of Louis XVIII.'s life were embittered by changes of ministry from semi-liberal to ultra-royalist, and by attempts of the officers of the Crown to prosecute the newspapers for free-speaking. He died, after a few days of illness and extreme suffering, Sept. 15, 1824, and was succeeded by the Comte d'Artois, his brother, as Charles X. This was the third time three brothers had succeeded each other on the French throne.

Charles X. was another James II., with cold, harsh, narrow ideas of religion, though religion had not influenced his early life in matters of morality. He was, as I have said, a widower, with one remaining son, the Duc d'Angoulême, and a little grandson, the son of the Duc de Berri. His two daughters-in-law, the Duchesse d'Angoulême and the Duchesse de Berri, were as unlike each other as two women could be,—the one being an unattractive saint, the other a fascinating sinner.

Charles X. was not like his brother,—distracted between two policies and two opinions. He was an ultra-royalist. He believed that to the victors belong the spoils; and as Bourbonism had triumphed, he wanted to stamp out every remnant of the Revolution. Constitutionalism, the leading idea of the day, was hateful to him. He is said to have remarked, "I had rather earn my bread than be a king of England!" He probably held the same ideas concerning royal prerogative as those of his cousin, the king of Naples, expressed in a letter found after the sack of the Tuileries in 1848.

"Liberty is fatal to the house of Bourbon; and as regards myself, I am resolved to avoid, at any price, the fate of Louis XVI. My people obey force, and bend their necks; but woe to me if they should ever raise them under the impulse of those dreams which sound so fine in the sermons of philosophers, and which it is impossible to put in practice. With God's blessing, I will give prosperity to my people, and a government as honest as they have a right to expect; but I will be a king,—and that always!"

Charles X. was on the throne six years. He was a fine-looking man and a splendid horseman,—which at first pleased the Parisians, who had been disgusted with the unwieldiness and lack of royal presence in Louis XVIII. His first act was a concession they little expected, and one calculated to render him popular. He abridged the powers of the censors of the Press. His minister at this time was M. de Villèle, a man of whom it has been said that he had a genius for trifles; but M. de Villèle having been defeated on some measures that he brought before the Chamber of Deputies, Charles X. was glad to remove him, and to appoint as his prime minister his favorite, the Prince de Polignac. Charles Greville, who was in Paris at the time of this appointment, writes: "Nothing can exceed the violence of feeling that prevails. The king does nothing but cry; Polignac is said to have the fatal obstinacy of a martyr, the worst courage of the ruat cœlum sort."

CHARLES X.

Six months later Greville writes: "Nobody has an idea how things will turn out, or what are Polignac's intentions or his resources." He appeared calm and well satisfied, saying to those who claimed the right to question him, that all would be well, though all France and a clear majority in the Chambers were against him. "I am told," says Charles Greville, "that there is no revolutionary spirit abroad, but a strong determination to provide for the stability of existing institutions, and disgust at the obstinacy and the pretensions of the king. It seems also that a desire to substitute the Orleans for the reigning branch is becoming very general. It is said that Polignac is wholly ignorant of France, and will not listen to the opinions of those who could enlighten him. It is supposed that Charles X. is determined to push matters to extremity; to try the Chambers, and if his ministers are beaten, to dissolve the House and to govern par ordonnances du roi." This prophecy, written in March, 1830, foreshadowed exactly what happened in July of the same year, when, as an outspoken English Tory told Henry Crabb Robinson, in a reading-room at Florence: "The king of France has sent the deputies about their business, has abolished the d——d Constitution and the liberty of the Press, and proclaimed his own power as absolute king."

"And what will the end be?" cried Robinson.

"It will end," said a Frenchman who was present, "in driving the Bourbons out of France!"

During the last months of Charles X.'s reign France made an expedition against the Dey of Algiers, which was the first step in the conquest of Algeria. The immediate object of the expedition, however, was to draw off the attention of a disaffected nation from local politics. An army of 57,000 soldiers, 103 ships of war, and many transports, was despatched to the coast of Barbary. The expedition was not very glorious, but it was successful. Te Deums were sung in Paris, the general in command was made a marshal, and his naval colleague a peer.

The royalists of France were at this period divided into two parties; the party of the king and Polignac, who were governed by the Jesuits, looked for support to the clergy of France. The other party looked to the army. Yet the most religious men in the country—men like M. de la Ferronays, for example—condemned and regretted the obstinacy of the king.

Louis Philippe, the Duke of Orleans, on whom all eyes were fixed, was the son of that infamous Duke of Orleans who in the Revolution proclaimed himself a republican, took the name of Philippe Égalité, and voted for the execution of the king, drawing down upon himself the rebuke of the next Jacobin whose turn it was to vote in the convention, who exclaimed: "I was going to vote Yes, but I vote No, that I may not tread in the steps of the man who has voted before me."

Égalité was in the end a victim. He perished, after suffering great poverty, leaving three sons and a daughter. The sons were Louis Philippe, who became Duke of Orleans, the Comte de Beaujolais, and the Duc de Montpensier. One of these had shared the imprisonment of his father, and narrowly escaped the guillotine.

Louis Philippe had solicited from the Republic permission to serve under Dumouriez in his celebrated campaign in the Low Countries. He fought with distinguished bravery at Valmy and Jemappes as Dumouriez's aide-de-camp; but when that general was forced to desert his army and escape for his life, Louis Philippe made his escape too. He went into Switzerland, and there taught mathematics in a school. Thence he came to America, travelled through the United States, and resided for some time at Brooklyn.

In 1808 he went out to the Mediterranean in an English man-of-war in charge of his sick brother, the Comte de Beaujolais. The same vessel carried Sir John Moore out to his command, and landed him at Lisbon. Louis Philippe could not have had a very pleasant voyage, for the English admiral, on board whose ship he was a passenger, came up one day in a rage upon the quarter-deck, and declared aloud, in the hearing of his officers, that the Duke of Orleans was such a d——d republican he could not sit at the same table with him.[1]

[Footnote 1: My father was present, and often told the story]

There used to be stories floating about Paris concerning Louis Philippe's birth and parentage,—stories, however, not to be believed, and which broke down upon investigation. These made him out to be the son of an Italian jailer, exchanged for a little girl who had been born to the Duke of Orleans and his wife at a time when it was a great object with them to have a son. The little girl grew up in the jailer Chiappini's house under the name of Maria Stella Petronilla. There is little doubt that she was a changeling, but the link is imperfect which would connect her with the Duke and Duchess of Orleans. She was ill-treated by the jailer's wife, but was very beautiful. Lord Newburgh, an English nobleman, saw her and married her. Her son succeeded his father as a peer of England. After Lord Newburgh's death his widow married a Russian nobleman. Chiappini on his death-bed confessed to this lady all he knew about her origin, and she persuaded herself that her father must have been the Duke of Orleans. She took up her residence in the Rue Rivoli, overlooking the gardens of the Tuileries, and received some small pension from the benevolent royal family of France. She died in 1845.

But whoever the mother of Louis Philippe may have been, she whom he and Madame Adélaide looked up to and loved as though she had been their second mother, was Madame de Genlis. In her company Louis Philippe witnessed, with boyish exultation, the destruction of the Bastile. To her he wrote after the great day when in the Champ de Mars the new Constitution was sworn to both by king and people: "Oh, my mother! there are but two things that I supremely love,—the new constitution and you!"

On Christmas Day, 1809, he married at Palermo the Princesse Marie Amélie, niece to Marie Antoinette, and aunt to the future Duchesse de Berri.

No breath of scandal ever disturbed the matrimonal happiness of Louis Philippe and Marie Amélie. They had a noble family of five sons and three daughters, all distinguished by their ability and virtues. I shall have to tell hereafter how devotion to the interests of his family was one cause of Louis Philippe's overthrow.

In 1814, when Napoleon abdicated at Fontainebleau; Louis Philippe left Palermo, attended only by one servant, and made his way to Paris and the home of his family, the Palais Royal. He hurried into the house, and in spite of the opposition of the concierge, who took him for a madman, he rushed to the staircase; but before he ascended it he fell upon his knees, and bursting into tears, kissed the first step before him.

This was probably the most French-like thing in Louis Philippe's career. He was far more like an Englishman than a Frenchman. Had he been an English prince, his faults would have seemed to his people like virtues.

Of course the son of Égalité could be no favorite with the elder Bourbons; but he soon became the hope of the middle classes, and was very intimate with Laffitte the banker, and with Lafayette, who, as we have seen, were both implicated in conspiracies seven years before the Revolution of 1830. He was for many years not rich, but he and the ladies of his house were very charitable. Madame Adélaïde, speaking one day to a friend[1] of the reports that were circulated concerning her brother's parsimony, said,—

"People ask what he does with his money. To satisfy them it would be necessary to publish the names of honorable friends of liberty who, in consequence of misfortunes, have solicited and obtained from him sums of twenty, thirty, forty, and even three hundred thousand francs. They forget all the extraordinary expenses my brother has had to meet, all the demands he has to comply with. Out of his income he has furnished the Palais Royal, improved the apanages of the House of Orleans; and yet sooner or later all this property will revert to the nation. When we returned to France our inheritance was so encumbered that my brother was advised to decline administering on the estate; but to that neither he nor I would consent. For all these things people make no allowances. Truly, we know not how to act to inspire the confidence which our opinions and our consciences tell us we fully deserve."

[Footnote 1: M. Appert, chaplain to Queen Marie Amélie.]

LOUIS PHILLIPPE.
(Duke of Orleans.)

It is not necessary in a sketch so brief to go minutely into politics. Prince Polignac and the king dissolved the Chambers, having found the deputies unwilling to approve their acts, and a few days afterwards the king published his own will and pleasure in what were called Les Ordonnances du Roi. One of these restricted the liberty of the Press, and was directed against journalism; another provider new rules, by which the ministry might secure a more subservient Chamber.

As we have seen, these ordonnances even in foreign countries spread dismay. The revolution that ensued was the revolution of the great bankers and the business men,—the haute bourgeoisie. In general, revolutions are opposed by the moneyed classes; but this was a revolution effected by them to save themselves and their property from such an outbreak as came forty years later, which we call the Commune. The working-classes had little to do with the Revolution of 1830, except, indeed, to fight for it, nor had they much to do with the Revolution of 1848. It was the moneyed men of France who saw that the resuscitated principles of the old régime had been stretched to their very uttermost all over Europe, and that if they did not check them by a well-conducted revolution, worse would be sure to come.

On July 26, 1830, the ordonnances appeared. The working-classes seemed to hear of them without emotion; but their effect on all those who had any stake in the prosperity of the country was very great. By nightfall the agitation had spread in Paris to all classes. King Charles X. was at Saint-Cloud, apparently apprehending no popular outbreak. No military preparations in case of disturbances had been made, though on the morning of the 26th the Duc d'Angoulême sent word to Marshal Marmont to take command of the troops in Paris, "as there might be some windows broken during the day."

The next morning trouble was begun by the journeymen printers, who, as the newspapers on which they worked had been prohibited, were sent home from their printing-offices. Before long they were joined by others, notably by the cadets from the Polytechnic School. Casimir Perrier and Laffitte were considered chiefs of the revolution. The cry was everywhere "Vive la Charte,"—a compendium that had been drawn up of the franchises and privileges of Frenchmen. M. Thiers, then young, counselled moderation in the emergency.

On July 28 the tricolored flag was again unfurled in Paris,—those colors dear to Frenchmen, who had long hated the white flag, which represented in their eyes despotism and the rule of the Bourbons! The National Guard (or militia) was called out, and the populace began erecting barricades.

It is surprising how rapidly in an emergency a barricade can be formed. A carriage or two is overturned, furniture is brought out from neighboring houses, a large tree, if available, is cut down, and the whole is strengthened with paving-stones. By night all Paris had become a field of battle.

In vain Marshal Marmont had sent courier after courier to Saint-Cloud, imploring the king and his ministers to do something that might allay the fury of the people. No answer was returned. The marshal went himself at last, and the king, after listening to his representation of the state of Paris, said calmly: "Then it is really a revolt?" "No, sire," replied Marmont; "it is not a revolt, but a revolution."

As soon as the idea of ruin broke upon the royal household, everything at Saint-Cloud became confusion and despair. The Duchesse de Berri wanted to take her son, the Duc de Bordeaux, into Paris, hoping that the people would rally round a woman and the young heir to the throne. Some implored the king to treat with the insurgents; some to put himself at the head of his troops; some to sacrifice the ordonnances and the most obnoxious of his ministers.

The Parisian mob by this time had its blood up. It fought with any weapons that came to hand. Muskets were loaded with type seized in the printing-offices. At the Hôtel-de-Ville, Laffitte, Lafayette, and other leading men opposed to the policy of Charles X. were assembled in council.

The troops at first fought in their king's cause bravely, but without enthusiasm. Subsequently the Duke of Wellington was asked if he could not have suppressed the revolution with the garrison of Paris, which was twenty thousand men. He answered, "Easily; but then they must have been fighting for a cause they had at heart."

The fight continued all the night of the 28th, bloody and furious. By morning the soldiers were short of ammunition. As usual, the Swiss Guard was stanch, but the French soldiers faltered. About midday of the 29th two regiments went over to the insurgents.

Two peers were at this juncture sent to negotiate with the royal family. The ministers, with Polignac at their head, went out also to Saint-Cloud. "Sire," said one of the negotiators, "if in an hour the ordonnances are not rescinded, there will be neither king nor kingdom." "Could you not offer me two hours?" said the king, sarcastically, as he turned to leave the chamber. The envoy, an old man, fell on his knees and seized the skirt of the king's coat. "Think of the dauphine!" he cried, imploringly. The king seemed moved, but made no answer.

In Paris, Marmont, whose heart was with the insurgents, endeavored nevertheless to do his duty; but his troops deserted him. On learning this, Talleyrand walked up to his clock, saying solemnly: "Take notice that on July 29, 1830, at five minutes past twelve o'clock, the elder branch of the Bourbons ceased to reign."

The Louvre was taken, and the Tuileries. There was no general pillage, the insurgents contenting themselves with breaking the statues of kings and other signs of royalty.

One of the most obnoxious persons in Paris was the archbishop. The mob fought to the music of "Ça ira." with new words:—

"C'est l'Archevêque de Paris
Qui est Jésuite comme Charles Dix.
Dansons la Carmagnole; dansons la Carmagnole,
Et ça ira!"

There were deeds of heroism, deeds of self-sacrifice. deeds of loyalty, deeds of cruelty, and deeds of mercy, as there always are in Paris in times of revolution. By nightfall on the 29th the fighting was over. It only remained to be seen what would be done with the victory. The evening before, Laffitte had sent a messenger to Louis Philippe, then residing two miles from Paris, at his Château de Neuilly, warning him to hold himself in readiness for anything that might occur. Lafayette had been made governor of Paris, and thus held in his hand the destinies of France. Under him served an improvised municipal commune.

By this time Prince Polignac had been dismissed, and the Duc de Montemart had been summoned by the king to form a more liberal ministry. Everything was in confusion in the palace. The weary troops, who had marched to the defence of Saint-Cloud when the struggle in Paris became hopeless, were scattered about the park unfed and uncared-for.

The king, having at last made up his mind to yield, sent the envoys who had been despatched to him, back to Paris, saying: "Go, gentlemen, go; tell the Parisians that the king revokes the ordonnances. But I declare to you that I believe this step will be fatal to the interests of France and of the monarchy."

The envoys on reaching Paris were met by the words: "Too late! The throne of Charles X. has already passed from him in blood."

The king, however, confident that after such concessions the revolt was at an end, played whist during the evening, while the Duc d'Angoulême sat looking over a book of geography. At midnight, however, both were awakened to hear the news from Paris, and then Charles X.'s confidence gave way. He summoned his new prime minister and sent him on a mission to the capital. The Duc d'Angoulême, however, who was opposed to any compromise with rebels, would not suffer the minister to pass his outposts. The Duc de Montemart, anxious to execute his mission, walked all night round the outskirts of Paris, and entered it at last on the side opposite to Saint-Cloud. The city lay in the profound silence of the hour before day.[1]

[Footnote 1: Louis Blanc, Dix Ans. Histoire de trente heures, 1830.]

The question of who should succeed Charles X. had already been debated in Laffitte's chamber. Laffitte declared himself for Louis Philippe, the Duke of Orleans. Some were for the son of Napoleon. Many were for the Duc de Bordeaux, with Louis Philippe during his minority as lieutenant-general of the kingdom. "That might have been yesterday," said M. Laffitte, "if the Duchesse de Berri, separating her son's cause from that of his grandfather, had presented herself in Paris, holding Henri V. in one hand, and in the other the tricolor." "The tricolor!" exclaimed the others; "why, they look upon the tricolor as the symbol of all crimes!" "Then what can be done for them?" replied Laffitte.

At this crisis the poet Béranger threw all his influence into the party of the Duke of Orleans, and almost at the same moment appeared a placard on all the walls of Paris:—

"Charles X. is deposed.
A Republic would embroil us with all Europe.
The Duke of Orleans is devoted to the cause of the Revolution.
The Duke of Orleans never made war on France.
The Duke of Orleans fought at Jemappes.
The Duke of Orleans will be a Citizen-King.
The Duke of Orleans has worn the tricolor under fire: he
will wear the tricolor as king."

Meantime, early on the evening of the 29th, Neuilly had been menaced by the troops under the Duc d'Angoulême, and Madame Adélaïde had persuaded her brother to quit the place. When M. Thiers and the artist, Ary Scheffer, arrived at Neuilly, bearing a request that the Duke of Orleans would appear in Paris, Marie Amélie received them. Aunt to the Duchesse de Berri and attached to the reigning family, she was shocked by the idea that her husband and her children might rise upon their fall; but Madame Adélaïde exclaimed: "Let the Parisians make my brother what they please,—President, Garde National, or Lieutenant-General,—so long as they do not make him an exile."

Louis Philippe, who was at Raincy (or supposed to be there, for the envoys always believed he was behind a curtain during their interview with his wife and sister), having received a message from Madame Adélaïde, set out soon after for Paris. The resolution of the leaders of the Revolution had been taken, but in the Municipal Commune at the Hôtel-de-Ville there was still much excitement. There a party desired a republic, and offered to place Lafayette at its head.

At Saint-Cloud the Duchesse de Berri and her son had been sent off to the Trianon; but the king remained behind. He referred everything to the dauphin (the Duc d'Angoulême); the dauphin referred everything to the king.

The dauphin's temper was imperious, and at this crisis it involved him in a personal collision with Marshal Marmont. In attempting to tear the marshal's sword from his side, he cut his fingers. At sight of the royal blood the marshal was arrested, and led away as a traitor. The king, however, at once released him, with apologies.

When the leaders in Paris had decided to offer the lieutenant-generalship of France to Louis Philippe during the minority of the Duc de Bordeaux, he could not be found. He was not at Raincy, he was not at Neuilly. About midnight, July 29, he entered Paris on foot and in plain clothes, having clambered over the barricades. He at once made his way to his own residence, the Palais Royal, and there waited events.

At the same moment the Duchesse de Berri was leaving Saint-Cloud with her son. Before daylight Charles X. followed them to the Trianon; and the soldiers in the Park at Saint-Cloud, who for twenty-four hours had eaten nothing, were breaking their fast on dainties brought out from the royal kitchen.

The proposal that Louis Philippe should accept the lieutenant-generalship was brought to him on the morning of July 30, after the proposition had first been submitted to Talleyrand, who said briefly: "Let him accept it." Louis Philippe did so, accepting at the same time the tricolor, and promising a charter which should guarantee parliamentary privileges. He soon after appeared at a window of the Hôtel-de-Ville, attended by Lafayette and Laffitte, bearing the tricolored flag between them, and was received with acclamations by the people. But there were men in Paris who still desired a republic, with Lafayette at its head. Lafayette persisted in assuring them that what France wanted was a king surrounded by republican institutions, and he commended Louis Philippe to them as "the best of republics." This idea in a few hours rapidly gained ground.

By midday on July 30th Paris was resuming its usual aspect. Charles X., finding that the household troops were no longer to be depended on, determined to retreat over the frontier, and left the Trianon for the small palace of Rambouillet, where Marie Louise and the King of Rome had sought refuge in the first hours of their adversity.

The king reached Rambouillet in advance of the news from Paris,[1] and great was the surprise of the guardian of the Château to see him drive up in a carriage and pair with only one servant to attend him. The king pushed past the keeper of the palace, who was walking slowly backward before him, and turned abruptly into a small room on the ground floor, where he locked himself in and remained for many hours. When he came forth, his figure seemed to have shrunk, his complexion was gray, his eyes were red and swollen. He had spent his time in burning up old love-letters,—reminiscences of a lady to whom he had been deeply attached in his youth.

[Footnote 1: All the Year Round, 1885.]

The mob of Paris having ascertained that the fugitive royal family were pausing at Rambouillet, about twelve miles from the capital, set out to see what mischief could be done in that direction. The Duchesse de Berri, her children, and the Duc d'Angoulême were at the Château de Maintenon, and the king, upon the approach of the mob, composed only of roughs, determined to join them. As he passed out of the chateau, which he had used as a hunting-lodge, he stretched out his hand with a gesture of despair to grasp those of some friends who had followed him to Rambouillet, and who were waiting for his orders. He had none to give them. He spoke no word of advice, but walked down the steps to his carriage, and was driven to the Château de Maintenon to rejoin his family.

The mob, when it found that the king had fled, was persuaded to quit Rambouillet by having some of the most brutal among them put into the king's coaches. Attended by the rest of the unruly crowd, they were driven back to Paris, and assembling before the Palais Royal, shouted to Louis Philippe: "We have brought you your coaches. Come out and receive them!" Eighteen years later, these coaches were consumed in a bonfire in the Place du Carrousel.

At the Château de Maintenon all was confusion and discouragement, when suddenly the dauphine (the Duchesse d'Angoulême) arrived. She, whom Napoleon had said was the only man of her family, was in Burgundy when she received news of the outbreak of the Revolution. At once she crossed several provinces of France in disguise. Harsh of voice, stern of look, cold in her bearing, she was nevertheless a favorite with the household troops whose spirit was reanimated by the sight of her.

From Rambouillet the king had sent his approbation of the appointment of the Duke of Orleans as lieutenant-general during the minority of Henri V. Louis Philippe's answer to this communication so well satisfied the old king that he persuaded the dauphin to join with him in abdicating all rights in favor of Henri V., the little Duc de Bordeaux. Up to this moment Charles seems never to have suspected that more than such an abdication could be required of him. But by this time it was evident that the successful Parisians would be satisfied with nothing less than the utter overthrow of the Bourbons. Their choice lay between a constitutional monarchy with Louis Philippe at its head, or a renewal of the attempt to form a republic.

The populace, on hearing that the abdication of the king and of the dauphin had been announced to the Chamber of Deputies, assembled to the number of sixty thousand, and insisted on the trial and imprisonment of the late king. Hearing this, the royal family left the Château de Maintenon the next morning, the king and the Duchesse d'Angoulême taking leave of their faithful troops, and desiring them to return to Paris, there to make their submission to the lieutenant-general, "who had taken all measures for their security and prosperity in the future."

During the journey to Dreux, Charles X. appeared to those around him to accept his misfortunes from the hand of Heaven. The Duchesse d'Angoulême, pale and self-contained, with all her wounds opened afresh, could hardly bring herself to quit France for the third time. Her husband was stolid and stupid. The Duchesse de Berri was almost gay.

Meantime old stories were being circulated throughout France discrediting the legitimacy of the Duc de Bordeaux, the posthumous son of the Duc de Berri. He had been born seven months after his father's death, at dead of night, with no doctor in attendance, nor any responsible witnesses to attest that he was heir to the crown. Louis Philippe had protested against his legitimacy within a week after his birth. There was no real reason for suspecting his parentage; nobody believes the slander now, but it is not surprising that in times of such excitement, with such great interests at stake, the circumstances attending his birth should have provoked remark. They were both unfortunate and unusual.

Charles X. was the calmest person in the whole royal party. He was chiefly concerned for the comfort of the rest. The dauphine wept, her husband trembled, the children were full of excitement and eager for play. Charles was unmoved, resigned; only the sight of a tricolored flag overcame him.

He complained much of the haste with which he was escorted through France to Cherbourg; but that haste probably insured his safety. At Cherbourg two ships awaited him,—the "Great Britain" and the "Charles Carroll;" both were American-built, and both had formed part of the navy of Napoleon.

The day was fine when the royal fugitives embarked. In a few hours they were off the Isle of Wight. For several days they stayed on board, waiting till the English Government should complete arrangements which would enable them to land. They had come away almost without clothes, and the Duchesses of Angoulême and Berri were indebted for an outfit to an ex-ambassadress. The king said to some of those who came on board to see him, that he and his son had retired into private life, and that his grandson must wait the progress of events; also, that his conscience reproached him with nothing in his conduct towards his people.

After a few days the party landed in England and took up their abode at Ludworth Castle. Afterwards, at the king's own request, the old Palace of Holyrood, in Edinburgh, was assigned him. There was some fear at the time lest popular feeling should break out in some insult to him or his family. To avert this, Sir Walter Scott, though then in failing health, wrote in a leading Edinburgh newspaper as follows:—

"We are enabled to announce from authority that Charles of Bourbon, the ex-king of France, is about to become once more our fellow-citizen, though probably only for a limited space, and is presently about to inhabit the apartments again that he so long occupied in Holyrood House. This temporary arrangement has been made, it is said, in compliance with his own request, with which our benevolent monarch immediately complied, willing to consult in every way possible the feelings of a prince under pressure of misfortunes, which are perhaps the more severe if incurred through bad advice, error, or rashness. The attendants of the late sovereign will be reduced to the least possible number, and consist chiefly of ladies and children, and his style of life will be strictly retired. In these circumstances it would be unworthy of us as Scotchmen, or as men, if this unfortunate family should meet with a word or a look from the meanest individual tending to aggravate feelings which must be at present so acute as to receive injury from insults, which in other times would be passed over with perfect disregard. His late opponents in his kingdom have gained the applause of Europe for the generosity with which they have used their victory, and the respect which they have paid to themselves in their moderation towards an enemy. It would be a great contrast to that part of their conduct which has been most generally applauded, were we, who are strangers to the strife, to affect a deeper resentment than those concerned more closely. Those who can recollect the former residence of this unhappy prince in our Northern capital cannot but remember the unobtrusive, quiet manner in which his little court was then conducted, and now, still further restricted and diminished, he may naturally expect to be received with civility and respect by a nation whose good will he has done nothing to forfeit. Whatever may have been his errors towards his own subjects, we cannot but remember in his adversity that he did not in his prosperity forget that Edinburgh had extended him her hospitality, but that at the period when the fires consumed so much of our city, he sent a princely benefaction to the sufferers.... If there be any who entertain angry or invidious recollections of late events in France, they ought to remark that the ex-monarch has by his abdication renounced the conflict, into which perhaps he was engaged by bad advice, that he can no longer be an object of resentment to the brave, but remains, to all, the most striking example of the instability of human affairs which our unstable times have afforded. He may say, with our own deposed Richard,—

'With mine own hands I washed away my blame;
With mine own hands I gave away my crown;
With my own tongue deny my sacred state.'

"He brings among us his 'gray, discrownèd head,' and in a 'nation of gentlemen,' as we were emphatically termed by the very highest authority, it is impossible, I trust, to find a man mean enough to insult the slightest hair of it."

Charles X. was greatly indebted to this letter for the cordiality of his reception at Edinburgh, where he lived in dignified retirement for about two years; then, finding that the climate was too cold for his old age, and that the English Government was disquieted because of the attempts of the Duchesse de Berri to revive her son's claims to the French throne, he made his way to Bohemia, and lived for a while in the Castle of Prague. At last he decided to make his final residence in the Tyrol, not far from the warm climate of Italy. It is said that as the exiled, aged king cast a last look at the Gothic towers of the Castle of Prague, he said to those about him: "We are leaving yonder walls, and know not to what we may be going, like the patriarchs who knew not as they journeyed where they would pitch their tents."[1]

[Footnote 1: Memoirs of the Duchesse d'Angoulême.]

On reaching the Baths of Töplitz, where the waters seemed to agree with him, and where he wished to rest awhile, he found it needful to "move on," for the house he occupied had been engaged for the king of Prussia. The cholera, too, was advancing. The exiled party reached Budweiz, a mountain village with a rustic inn, and there it was forced to halt for some weeks, for the Duc de Bordeaux was taken ill with cholera. It was a period of deep anxiety to those about him, but at last he recovered.

After trying several residences in the Tyrolese mountains, to which the old king had gone largely in hopes that he might enjoy the pleasures of the chase, the exiled family fixed its residence at Goritz towards the end of October, 1836. The king was then in his eightieth year, but so hale and active that he spent whole mornings on foot, with his gun, upon the mountains.

The weather changed soon after the family had settled at Goritz. The keen winter winds blew down from the snow mountains, but the king did not give up his daily sport. One afternoon, after a cold morning spent upon the hills, he was seized at evening service in the chapel with violent spasms. These passed off, but on his joining his family later, its members were struck by the change in his appearance. In a few hours he seemed to have aged years. At night he grew so ill that extreme unction was administered to him. It was an attack of cholera. When dying, he blessed his little grandchildren, the boy and girl, who, notwithstanding the nature of his illness, were brought to him. "God preserve you, dear children," he said. "Walk in paths of righteousness. Don't forget me.... Pray for me sometimes."

He died Nov. 6, 1836, just one week after Louis Napoleon made his first attempt to have himself proclaimed Emperor of the French, at Strasburg.

He was buried near Goritz, in a chapel belonging to the Capuchin Friars. In another chapel belonging to the same lowly order in Vienna, had been buried four years before, another claimant to the French throne, the Duc de Reichstadt, the only son of Napoleon.

On the coffin of the ex-king was inscribed,—

"Here lieth the High, the Potent, and most Excellent Prince, Charles Tenth of that name; by the Grace of God King of France and of Navarre. Died at Goritz, Nov. 6, 1836, aged 79 years and 28 days."

All the courts of Europe put on mourning for him, that of France excepted. The latter part of his life, with its reverses and humiliations, he considered an expiation, not for his political errors, but for the sins of his youth.

As he drew near his end, his yearnings after his lost country increased more and more. He firmly believed that the day would come when his family would be restored to the throne of France, but he believed that it would not be by conspiracy or revolt, but by the direct interposition of God. That time did almost come in 1871, after the Commune.

[CHAPTER II.]

LOUIS PHILIPPE AND HIS FAMILY.

Louis Philippe, after accepting the lieutenant-generalship of the kingdom, which would have made him regent under Henri V., found himself raised by the will of the people—or rather, as some said, by the will of the bourgeoisie—to the French throne. He reigned, not by "right divine," but as the chosen ruler of his countrymen,—to mark which distinction he took the title of King of the French, instead of King of France, which had been borne by his predecessors.

It is hardly necessary for us to enter largely into French politics at this period. The government was supposed to be a monarchy planted upon republican institutions. The law recognized no hereditary aristocracy. There was a chamber of peers, but the peers bore no titles, and were chosen only for life. The dukes, marquises, and counts of the old régime retained their titles only by courtesy.

The ministers of Charles X. were arrested and tried. The new king was very anxious to secure their personal safety, and did so at a considerable loss of his own popularity. They were condemned to lose all property and all privileges, and were sent to the strong fortress of Ham. After a few years they were released, and took refuge in England.

There were riots in Paris when it was known that the ministers and ill-advisers of the late king were not to be executed; one of the leaders in these disturbances was an Italian bravo named Fieschi,—a man base, cruel, and bold, whom Louis Blanc calls a scélérat bel esprit.

The émeute which was formidable, was suppressed chiefly by a gallant action on the part of the king, who, while his health was unimpaired, was never wanting in bravery. "The king of the French," says Greville, "has put an end to the disturbances in Paris about the sentence of the ministers by an act of personal gallantry. At night, when the streets were most crowded and agitated, he sallied from the Palais Royal on horseback, with his son, the Duc de Nemours, and his personal cortège, and paraded through Paris for two hours. That did the business. He was received with shouts of applause, and at once reduced everything to tranquillity. He deserves his throne for this, and will probably keep it."

The next trouble in the new reign was the alienation of public favor from Lafayette, who had done so much to place the king upon the throne. He was accused by one party of truckling to the new court, by the other of being too much attached to revolutionary methods and republican institutions. He was removed from the command of the National Guard, and his office of commander-in-chief of that body was abolished.

All Europe becomes "a troubled sea" when a storm breaks over France. "I never remember," writes Greville at this period, "days like these, nor read of such,—the terror and lively expectation that prevails, and the way in which people's minds are turned backward and forward from France to Ireland, then range exclusively from Poland to Piedmont, and fix again on the burnings, riots, and executions that are going on in England."

Meantime France was subsiding into quiet, with occasional slight shocks of revolutionary earthquake, before returning to order and peace. The king was le bon bourgeois. He had lived a great deal in England and the United States, and spoke English well. He had even said in his early youth that he was more of an Englishman than a Frenchman. He was short and stout. His head was shaped like a pear, and was surmounted by an elaborate brown wig; for in those days people rarely wore their own gray hair.

He did not impress those who saw him as being in any way majestic; indeed, he looked like what he was,—le bon père de famille. As such he would have suited the people of England; but it was un vert galant like Henri IV., or royalty incarnate, like Louis XIV., who would have fired the imagination of the French people. As a good father of a family, Louis Philippe felt that his first duty to his children was to secure them a good education, good marriages, and sufficient wealth to make them important personages in any sudden change of fortune.

At the time of his accession all his children were unmarried,—indeed, only four of them were grown up. The sons all went to collège,—which means in France what high-school does with us. Their mother's dressing-room at Neuilly was hung round with the laurel-crowns, dried and framed, which had been won by her dear school-boys.

The eldest son, Ferdinand, Duke of Orleans, was an extraordinarily fine young man, far more a favorite with the French people than his father. Had he not been killed in a carriage accident in 1842, he might now, in his old age, have been seated on the French throne.

One of the first objects of the king was to secure for his heir a suitable marriage. A Russian princess was first thought of; but the Czar would not hear of such a mésalliance. Then the hand of an Austrian archduchess was sought, and the young lady showed herself well pleased with the attentions of so handsome and accomplished a suitor; but her family were as unfavorable to the match as was the Czar of Russia. Finally, the Duke of Orleans had to content himself with a German Protestant princess, Hélène of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, a woman above all praise, who bore him two sons,—the Comte de Paris, born in 1838, and the Duc de Chartres, born a year or two later.

The eldest daughter of Louis Philippe, the Princess Louise, was married, soon after her father's elevation to the throne, to King Leopold of Belgium, widower of the English Princess Charlotte, and uncle to Prince Albert and to Queen Victoria. The French princess thus became, by her marriage, aunt to these high personages. They were deeply attached to her. She named her eldest daughter Charlotte, after the lamented first wife of her husband. The name was Italianized into Carlotta,—the poor Carlotta whose reason and happiness were destroyed by the misfortunes of her husband in Mexico.

The second son of Louis Philippe was the Duc de Nemours,—a blond, stiff young officer who was never a favorite with the French, though he distinguished himself in Algeria as a soldier. He too found it hard to satisfy his father's ambition by a brilliant marriage, though a throne was offered him, which he had to refuse. He then aspired to the hand of Maria da Gloria, the queen of Portugal; but he married eventually a pretty little German princess of the Coburg race.

The third son was Philippe, Prince de Joinville, the sailor. He chose a bride for himself at the court of Brazil, and brought her home in his frigate, the "Belle Poule."

The charming artist daughter of Louis Philippe, the Princess Marie, pupil and friend of Ary Scheffer, the artist, married the Duke of Würtemberg, and died early of consumption. Her only child was sent to France, and placed under the care of his grandmother. Princess Clémentine married a colonel in the Austrian service, a prince of the Catholic branch of the house of Coburg. Her son is Prince Ferdinand, the present ruler of Bulgaria.

The marriage of Louis Philippe's fifth son, the Duc de Montpensier, with the Infanta Luisa is so closely connected with Louis Philippe's downfall that it can be better told elsewhere; but we may here say a few words about the fortunes of Henri, Duc d'Aumale, the king's fourth son, who has proved himself a man brave, generous, patriotic and high-minded, a soldier, a statesman, an historian, patron of art, and in all these things a man eminent among his fellows. He was only a school-boy when a tragic and discreditable event made him heir of the great house of Condé, and endowed him with wealth that he refuses to pass on to his family, proposing at his death to present it to the French people and the French Academy.

The royal family of the house of Bourbon was divided in France into three branches,—the reigning branch, the head of which was Charles X.; the Orleans branch, the head of which was Louis Philippe; and the Condé branch, the chief of which, and its sole representative at this period, was the aged Duke of Bourbon, whose only son, the Prince d'Enghien, had been shot by order of Napoleon.

This old man, rich, childless, and miserable, had had a romantic history. When very young he had fallen violently in love with his cousin, the Princess Louise of Orleans. He was permitted to marry her, but only on condition that they should part at the church door,—she to enter a convent for two years, he to serve for the same time in the French army. They were married with all pomp and ceremony; but that night the ardent bridegroom scaled the walls of the convent and bore away his bride. Unhappily their mutual attachment did not last long. "It went out," says a contemporary memoir-writer, "like a fire of straw."[1] At last hatred took the place of love, and the quarrels between the Prince de Condé (as the Duc de Bourbon was then called) and his wife were among the scandals of the court of Louis XVI., and helped to bring odium on the royal family.

[Footnote 1: Madame d'Oberkirch.]

The only child of this marriage was the Duc d'Enghien. The princess died in the early days of the Revolution. Her husband formed the army of French émigrés at Coblentz, and led them when they invaded their own country. On the death of his father he became Duke of Bourbon, but his promising son, D'Enghien, was already dead. The duke married while in exile the princess of Monaco, a lady of very shady antecedents. She was, however, received by Louis XVIII. in his little court at Hartwell. She died soon after the Restoration.

In 1830 the old duke, worn out with sorrows and excesses, was completely under the power of an English adventuress, a Madame de Feuchères.[1] He had settled on her his Château de Saint-Leu, together with very large sums of money. Several years before 1830 it had occurred to Madame de Feuchères that the De Rohans, who were related to the duke on his mother's side, might dispute these gifts and bequests, and by way of making herself secure, she sought the protection of Louis Philippe, then Duke of Orleans. She offered to use her influence with the Duke of Bourbon to induce him to make the Duc d'Aumale, who was his godson, his heir, if Louis Philippe would engage to stand her friend in any trouble.

[Footnote 1: Louis Blanc.]

The relations of the Duc de Bourbon to this woman bore a strong resemblance to those that Thackeray has depicted between Becky Sharp and Jos Sedley. The old man became thoroughly in fear of her; and when the Revolution broke out later, he was also much afraid of being plundered and maltreated at Saint-Leu by the populace,—not, however, because he had any great regard for his cousin Charles X., with whom in his youth he had fought a celebrated duel. Impelled by these two fears, he resolved to escape secretly from France, and so rid himself of the tyranny of Madame de Feuchères and the dangers of Revolution.

He arranged his flight with a trusted friend; it was fixed for the day succeeding Aug. 31, 1830,—a month after the Revolution. That evening he retired to his chamber in good spirits, though he said good-night more impressively than usual to some persons in his household. The next morning he was found dead, hanging to one of the espagnolettes, or heavy fastenings, of a tall French window. The village authorities were summoned; but although it was impossible a man so infirm could have thus killed himself and though many other circumstances proved that he did not die by his own hand, they certified his death by suicide. The Catholic Church, however, did not accept this verdict, and the duke was buried with the rites of religion.

There was certainly no proof that Madame de Feuchères had had any hand in the murder of the old man who had plotted to escape from her, and who had expressed to others his dread of the tyranny she exercised over him; but there was every ground for strong suspicion, and the public lost no time in fastening part of the odium that attached to the supposed murderess on the king, whose family had so greatly benefited by her influence over the last head of the house of Condé. She retained her ill-gotten wealth, and removed at once to Paris. She had been engaged in stock operations for some time, and now gave herself up to them, winning enormous sums.

The new throne was sadly shaken by these events, added to discontents concerning the king's prudent policy of non-intervention in the attempted revolutions of other countries, which followed that of France in 1830 and 1831. The next very interesting event of this reign was the escapade and the discomfiture of the young Duchesse de Berri.

About the close of 1832, while France and all Europe were still experiencing the after-shocks which followed the Revolution of July, Marie Caroline, the Duchesse de Berri, planned at Holyrood a descent upon France in the interests of the Duc de Bordeaux, her son.[1] Had he reigned in consequence of the deaths of his grandfather and uncle, Charles X. and the Duc d'Angoulême, the duchess his mother was to have been regent during his minority. She regretted her inaction during the days of July, when, had she taken her son by the hand and presented him herself to the people, renouncing in his name and her own all ultra-Bourbon traditions and ideas, she might have saved the dynasty.

[Footnote 1: Louis Blanc and papers in "Figaro.">[

Under the influence of this regret, and fired by the idea of becoming another Jeanne d'Albret, she urged her plans on Charles X., who decidedly disapproved of them; but "the idea of crossing the seas at the head of faithful paladins, of landing after the perils and adventures of an unpremeditated voyage in a country of knights-errant, of eluding by a thousand disguises the vigilance of enemies through whom she had to pass, of wandering, a devoted mother and a banished queen, from hamlet to hamlet and from château to château, appealing to human nature high and low on its romantic side, and at the end of a victorious conspiracy unfurling in France the ancient standard of the monarchy, was too dazzling not to attract a young, high-spirited woman, bold through her very ignorance, heroic through mere levity, able to endure anything but depression and ennui, and prepared to overbear all opposition with plausible platitudes about a mother's love."[1]

[Footnote 1: Louis Blanc, Histoire de Dix Ans.]

At last Charles X. consented to let her follow her own wishes; but he placed her under the guardianship of the Duc de Blancas. She set out through Holland and the Tyrol for Italy. She travelled incognita, of course. Charles Albert, of Sardinia, received her at Turin with great personal kindness, and lent her a million of francs,—which he borrowed from a nobleman of his court under pretence of paying the debts of his early manhood; but he was forced to request her to leave his dominions, and she took refuge with the Duke of Modena, who assigned her a palace at Massa, about three miles from the Mediterranean. A rising was to be made simultaneously in Southern France and in La Vendée. Lyons had just been agitated by a labor insurrection, and Marseilles was the first point at which it was intended to strike.

The Legitimists in France were divided into two parties. One, under Chateaubriand and Marshal Victor, the Duc de Bellune, wished to restore Henri V. only by parliamentary and legal victories; the other, favored by the court at Holyrood, was for an armed intervention of the Great Powers. The Duc de Blancas was considered its head.

The question of the invasion of France with foreign troops was excitedly argued at Massa. The duchess wished above all things to get rid of the tutelage of M. de Blancas, and she was disposed to favor, to a certain extent, the more moderate views of Chateaubriand. After endless quarrels she succeeded in sending off the duke to Holyrood, and was left to take her own way.

April 14, 1832, was fixed upon for leaving Massa. It was given out that the duchess, was going to Florence. At nightfall a carriage, containing the duchess, with two ladies and a gentleman of her suite, drove out of Massa and waited under the shadow of the city wall. While a footman was absorbing the attention of the coachman by giving him some minute, unnecessary orders, Madame (as they called the duchess) slipped out of the carriage door with one of her ladies, while two others, who were standing ready in the darkness, took their places. The carriage rolled away towards Florence, while Madame and her party, stealing along under the dark shadow of the city wall, made their way to the port, where a steamer was to take them on board.

That steamer was the "Carlo Alberto," a little vessel which had been already used by some republican conspirators, and had been purchased for the service of Marie Caroline. It had some of her most devoted adherents on board, but the captain was in ignorance. He thought himself bound for Genoa, and was inclined to disobey when his passengers ordered him to lay to off the harbor of Massa. However, they used force, and at three in the morning Marie Caroline, who was sleeping, wrapped in her cloak, upon the sand, was roused, put on board a little boat, and carried out to the steamer. She had a tempestuous passage of four days to Marseilles. The steamer ran out of coal, and had to put into Nice. At last, in a heavy sea which threatened to dash small craft to pieces, a fishing-boat approached the "Carlo Alberto," containing some of the duchess's most devoted friends. With great danger she was transferred to it, and was landed on the French coast. She scrambled up slippery and precipitous rocks, and reached a place of safety. But the delay in the arrival of her steamer had been fatal to her enterprise. A French gentleman in the secret had hired a small boat, and put out to sea in the storm to see if he could perceive the missing vessel. His conduct excited the suspicion of his crew, who talked about it at a wine-shop, where they met other sailors, who had their story to tell of a lady landed mysteriously a few hours before at a dangerous and lonely spot a few miles away. The two accounts soon reached the ears of the police, and Marseilles was on the alert, when a party of young men, with their swords drawn and waving white handkerchiefs, precipitated their enterprise, by appearing in the streets and striving to rouse the populace. They were arrested, as were also the passengers left on board the "Carlo Alberto,"—among them was a lady who deceived the police into a belief that she was the Duchesse de Bern.

Under cover of this mistake the duchess, finding that all hope was over in the southern provinces, resolved to cross France to La Vendée. At Massa she had had a dream. She thought the Duc de Bern had appeared to her and said: "You will not succeed in the South, but you will prosper in La Vendée."

She quitted the hut in which she had been concealed, made her way on foot through a forest, lost herself, and had to sleep in the vacant cabin of a woodcutter. The next night she passed under the roof of a republican, who respected her sex and would not betray her. She then reached the château of a Legitimist nobleman with the appropriate name of M. de Bonrecueil. Thence she started in the morning in a postchaise to cross all France along its public roads.

She accomplished her journey in safety, and fixed May 24, 1832, as the day for taking up arms. She made her headquarters at a Breton farm-house, Les Meliers. She wore the costume of a boy,—a peasant of La Vendée—and called herself Petit Pierre.

On May 21, three days before the date fixed upon for the rising, she was waited upon by the chiefs,—the men most likely to suffer in an abortive insurrection,—and was assured that the attempt would fail. Had the South risen, La Vendée would have gladly joined the insurrection; but unsupported by the South, the proposed enterprise was too rash a venture. Overpowered by these arguments and the persuasions of those around her, Marie Caroline gave way, and consented to return to Scotland with a passport that had been provided for her. But in the night she retracted her consent, and insisted that the rising should take place upon the 3d of June. She was obeyed; but what little prospect of success there might have been at first, was destroyed by the counter-order of May 22. All who rose were at once put down by the king's troops, and atrocities on both sides were committed.

Nantes, the capital city of La Vendée, was hostile to the duchess; in Nantes, therefore, she believed her enemies would never search for her. She took refuge there in the house of two elderly maiden ladies, the Demoiselles Duguigney, where she remained five months. They must have been months of anguish to her, and of unspeakable impatience. It is very possible that the Government did not care to find her. She was the queen's niece, and if captured what could be done with her? To set her free to hatch new plots would have been bitterly condemned by the republicans; to imprison her would have made an additional motive for royalist conspiracies; to execute her would have been impossible. Marie Caroline, however, had solved these difficult problems by her own misconduct.

Meantime the premiership of France passed into the hands of M. Thiers. A Jew—a Judas—named Deutz, came to him mysteriously, and bargained to deliver into his hands the Duchesse de Berri. Thiers, who had none of the pity felt for her by the Orleans family, closed with the offer. Some years before, Deutz had renounced his Jewish faith and pretended to turn Christian. Pope Gregory XVI. had patronized him, and had recommended him to the Duc de Berri as a confidential messenger. He had frequently carried despatches of importance, and knew that the duchess was in Nantes, but he did not know her hiding-place. He contrived to persuade her to grant him an interview. It took place at the Demoiselles Duguigney's house; but he was led to believe that she only used their residence for that purpose. With great difficulty he procured a second interview, in the course of which, having taken his measures beforehand, soldiers surrounded the house. Before they could enter it, word was brought to the duchess that she was betrayed. She fled from the room, and when the soldiers entered they could not find her. They were certain that she had not left the house. They broke everything to pieces, sounded the walls, ripped up the beds and furniture. Night came on, and troops were left in every chamber. In a large garret, where there was a wide fireplace, the soldiers collected some newspapers and light wood, and about midnight built a fire. Soon within the chimney a noise of kicking against an iron panel was heard, and voices cried: "Let us out,—we surrender!"

For sixteen hours the duchess and two friends had been imprisoned in a tiny hiding-place, separated from the hearth by a thin iron sliding-panel, which, when the soldiers lit their fire, had grown red hot. The gentleman of the party was already badly burned, and the women were nearly suffocated. The gendarmes kicked away the fire, the panel was pushed back, and the duchess, pale and fainting, came forth and surrendered. The commander of the troops was sent for. To him she said: "General, I confide myself to your honor." He answered, "Madame, you are under the safeguard of the honor of France."

This capture was a great embarrassment to the Government. Pity for the devoted mother, the persecuted princess, the brave, self-sacrificing woman, stirred thousands of hearts. The duchess was sent at once to an old château called Blaye, on the banks of the Gironde, the estuary formed by the junction of the Dordogne and the Garonne. Tradition said that the old castle had been built by the paladin Orlando (or Roland), and that he had been buried within its walls after he fell at Roncesvalles.

In this citadel the Duchesse de Berri was confined, with every precaution against escape or rescue; and the restraint and monotony of such a life soon told upon a woman of her character. She could play the heroine, acting well her part, with an admiring world for her audience; but "cabined, cribbed, confined" in an old, dilapidated castle, her courage and her health gave way. She was cheered, however, at first by Legitimist testimonies of devotion. Chateaubriand wrote her a memorable letter, imploring her, in the name of M. de Malesherbes, his ancestor who had defended Louis XVI., to let him undertake her defence, if she were brought to trial; but the reigning family of France had no wish to proceed to such an extremity. The duchess had not come of a stock in which all the women were sans reproche, like Marie Amélie. Her grandmother, Queen Caroline of Naples, the friend of Lady Hamilton and of Lord Nelson, had been notoriously a bad woman; her sister, Queen Christina of Spain, had made herself equally famous; and doubts had already been thrown on the legitimacy of the son of the duchess, the posthumous child of the Duc de Berri. The queen of France, who was almost a saint, had been fond of her young relative for her many engaging qualities; and what to do with her, in justice to France, was a difficult problem.

To the consternation and disgust of the Legitimists, the heroine of La Vendée dropped from her pedestal and sank into the mire. "She lost everything," says Louis Blanc,—"even the sympathy of the most ultra-partisans of the Bourbon dynasty; and she deserved the fate that overtook her. It was the sequel to the discovery of a terrible secret,—a secret whose publicity became a just punishment for her having, in pursuit of her own purposes, let loose on France the dogs of civil war."

In the midst of enthusiasm for her courage and pity for her fate, rose a rumor that the duchess would shortly give birth to a child. It was even so. The news fell like a blow on the hearts of the royalists. If she had made a clandestine, morganatic marriage, she had by the law of France forfeited her position as regent during her son's minority; she had forgotten his claims on her and those of France. If there was no marriage, she had degraded herself past all sympathy. At any rate, now she was harmless. The policy of the Government was manifestly to let her child be born at Blaye, and then send her to her Neapolitan home.

Her desire was to leave Blaye before her confinement. In vain she pleaded her health and a tendency to consumption. The Government sent physicians to Blaye, among them the doctor who had attended the duchess after the birth of the Duc de Bordeaux; for it insisted on having full proof of her disgrace before releasing her. But before this disgrace was announced in Paris, twelve ardent young Legitimists had bound themselves to fight twelve duels with twelve leading men of the opposite party, who might, if she were brought to trial, injure her cause. The first of these duels took place; Armand Carrel, the journalist, being the liberal champion, while M. Roux-Laborie fought for the duchess. The duel was with swords, and lasted three minutes. Twice Carrel wounded his adversary in the arm; but as he rushed on him the third time, he received a deep wound in the abdomen. The news spread through Paris. The prime minister, M. Thiers, sent his private secretary for authentic news of Carrel's state. The attendants refused to allow the wounded man to be disturbed. "Let him see me," said Carrel; "for I have a favor to ask of M. Thiers,—that he will let no proceedings be taken against M. Roux-Laborie."

Government after this became anxious to quench the loyalty of the Duchesse de Berri's defenders as soon and as effectually as possible. The duel with Armand Carrel was fought Feb. 2, 1833; on the 22d of February General Bugeaud, commander of the fortress of Blaye, received from the duchess the following declaration:—

Under the pressure of circumstances and of measures
taken by Government, I think it due to myself and to my
children (though I have had grave reasons for keeping my
marriage a secret) to declare that I have been privately
married during my late sojourn in Italy.
(Signed) MARIE CAROLINE.

From that time up to the month of May the duchess continued to make vain efforts to obtain her release before the birth of her child. It had been intimated to her that she should be sent to Palermo as soon afterwards as she should be able to travel.

The Government took every precaution, that the event might be verified when it took place. Six or seven of the principal inhabitants of Blaye were stationed in an adjoining chamber, as is the custom at the birth of princes.

A little girl having been born, these witnesses were summoned to the chamber by Madame de Hautfort, the duchess's lady-in-waiting. The duchess answered their questions firmly, and on returning to the next room, her own physician declared on oath that the duchess was the lawful wife of Count Hector Luchesi-Palli, of the family of Campo Formio, of Naples, gentleman of the bedchamber to the king of the Two Sicilies, living at Palermo.

This was the first intimation given of the parentage of the child. A mouth later, Marie Caroline and her infant embarked on board a French vessel, attended by Marshal Bugeaud, and were landed at Palermo. Very few of the duchess's most ardent admirers in former days were willing to accompany her. Her baby died before it was many months old. Charles X. refused to let her have any further care or charge of her son. "As Madame Luchesi-Palli," he said, "she had forfeited all claims to royal consideration."

A reconciliation, however, official rather than real, was patched up by Chateaubriand between the duchess and Charles X.; but her political career was over. She was allowed to see the Duc de Bordeaux for two or three days once a year. The young prince was thenceforward under the maternal care of his aunt, the Duchesse d'Angoulême. The Duchesse de Berri passed the remainder of her adventurous life in tranquillity. Her marriage with Count Luchesi-Palli was apparently a happy one. They had four children. She owned a palace in Styria, and another on the Grand Canal at Venice, where she gave popular parties. In 1847 she gave some private theatricals, at which were present twenty-seven persons belonging to royal or imperial families. Her buoyancy of spirit kept her always gay. One would have supposed that she would be overwhelmed by the fall we have related. She was good-natured, charitable, and extravagant. She died leaving heavy debts, which the Duc de Bordeaux paid for her. Her daughter Louise, sister of the Duc de Bordeaux, married the Duke of Parma, who was assassinated in 1854. Their daughter married Don Carlos, who claims at present to be rightful heir to the thrones of France and Spain. She died in 1864, shortly after the Count Luchesi-Palli. The Duchesse de Berri, who in her later years became very devout, d'après la manière Italienne, as somebody has said, wrote thus about his death:—

"I have been so tried that my poor head reels. The loss of my good and pious daughter made me almost crazy, but the care of my husband had somewhat calmed me, when God took him to himself. He died like a saint in my arms, with his children around him, smiling at me and pointing to heaven."

The duchess died suddenly at Brussels in 1870, aged seventy-one. "And," adds an intensely Legitimist writer from whom I have taken these details of her declining years, "had she lived till 1873, she would have given her son better advice than that he followed."[1]

[Footnote 1: Mémoire de la Duchesse d'Angoulême.]

Without following the ins and outs of politics during the first ten years of Louis Philippe's reign, which were checkered by revolts, émeutes, and attempts at regicide, I pass on to the next event of general interest,—the explosion of the "infernal machine" of Fieschi.

It was customary for King Louis Philippe to make a grand military promenade through Paris on one of the three days of July which during his reign were days of public festivity. On the morning of July 28, 1835, as the clock struck ten, the king, accompanied by his three elder sons, Marshals Mortier and Lobeau, his ministers, his staff, his household, and many generals, rode forth to review forty thousand troops along the Boulevards. At midday they reached the Boulevard du Temple. There, as the king was bending forward to receive a petition, a sudden volley of musketry took place, and the pavement was strewed with dead and dying. Marshal Mortier was killed, together with a number of officers of various grades, some bystanders, a young girl, and an old man. The king had not been shot, but as his horse started, he had received a severe contusion on the arm. The Duke of Orleans and the Prince de Joinville were slightly hurt. Smoke came pouring from the third-story windows of a house (No. 50) on the Boulevard. A man sprang from the window, seized a rope hanging from the chimney, and swung himself on to a lower roof. As he did so, he knocked down a flower-pot, which attracted attention to his movements. A police agent saw him, and a national guard arrested him. He was in his shirt-sleeves, and his face was covered with blood. The infernal machine he had employed consisted of twenty-five gun-barrels on a stand so constructed that they could all be fired at once. Happily two did not go off, and four burst, wounding the wretch who had fired them. Instantly the reception of the king, which had been cold when he set forth, changed into rapturous enthusiasm. He and his sons had borne themselves with the greatest bravery.

The queen had been about to quit the Tuileries to witness the review, when the door of her dressing-room was pushed open, and a colonel burst in, exclaiming: "Madame, the king has been fired at. He is not hurt, nor the princes, but the Boulevard is strewn with corpses." The queen, raising her trembling hands to heaven, waited only for a repetition of his assurance that her dear ones were all safe, and then set out to find the king. She met him on the staircase, and husband and wife wept in each other's arms.

The queen then went to her sons, looked at them, and touched them, hardly able to believe that they were not seriously wounded, and turned away, shuddering, from the blood on M. Thiers' clothes. Then, returning to her chamber, she sent a note at once to her younger boys, D'Aumale and Montpensier, who were with their tutors at the Château d'Eu. It began with these words: "Fall down on your knees, my children; God has preserved your father."

Of course the Legitimists, and likewise the Republicans, were accused of inspiring the attempt of Fieschi. The trials, that took place about six months later, proved that the assassin Fieschi was a wretch bearing a strong resemblance to our own Guiteau.

The funeral ceremonies of the victims of the infernal machine were celebrated with great pomp. The affair led to a partial reconciliation between the new Government and the Legitimist clergy; it led also to certain restrictions on the Press and an added stringency in the punishment for crimes of the like character.

On Jan. 31, 1836, the trial of the prisoners took place before the Peers. The crowd of spectators was immense. There were five prisoners, but the eyes of the spectators were fixed on only three.

The first was a man under-sized, nervous and quick in his movements. His face, which was disfigured by recent scars, had an expression of cunning and impudence. His forehead was narrow, his hair cropped close, one corner of his mouth was disfigured by a scar, his smile was insolent, and so was his whole bearing. He seemed anxious to concentrate the attention of all present on himself, smiled and bowed to every one he knew, and seemed well satisfied with his odious importance.

The second was an old man, pale and ill. He bore himself with perfect calmness. He seated himself where he was told to sit, and gave no sign of emotion throughout the trial.

The third was utterly prostrated by fear.

The first was Fieschi; the second was called Morey; the third was a grocer named Pepin.

The two last had been arrested on the testimony of Nina Lassave, who had had Fieschi for her lover. The life of this man had been always base and infamous. He was a Corsican by birth, and had been a French soldier. He had fought bravely, but after his discharge he had been imprisoned for theft and counterfeiting. He led a wandering life from town to town, living on his wits and indulging all his vices. He had even succeeded in getting some small favors from Government; but finding that he could not long escape punishment for crimes known to the police, he undertook, apparently without any especial motive, the wholesale murder of king, court, and princes.

During his imprisonment his vanity had been so great that the officers of the Crown played upon it in order to obtain confessions and information.

The only witness against Morey was Nina Lassave, who insisted that, Fieschi having invented the murderous instrument, Morey had devised a use for it, and that Pepin had furnished the necessary funds for its completion.

I give Louis Blanc's account of Fieschi's behavior on his trial, because when foreign nations have reproached us for the scandal of the license granted to the murderer of President Garfield on his trial, I have never seen it remarked that Guiteau's conduct was almost exactly like that of Fieschi.

"With effrontery, with a miserable kind of pride, and with smiles of triumph on his lips, he alluded to his victims with theatrical gesticulations, and plumed himself on the magnitude of his own infamy, answering his judges by ignoble buffooneries, playing the part of an orator, making pretensions to learning, looking round to see what effect he was producing, and courting applause. And some of those who sat in judgment on him did applaud. At each of his atrocious vulgarisms many of the Peers laughed, and this laugh naturally encouraged him. Did he make a movement to rise, voices called out: 'Fieschi desires to say something, Monsieur le Président! Fieschi is about to speak!' The audience was unwilling to lose a word that might fall from the lips of so celebrated a scoundrel. He could hardly contain himself for pride and satisfaction. His bloody hand was eager to shake hands with the public, and there were those willing to submit to it. He exchanged signs with the woman Nina who was seated in the audience. He posed before the spectators with infinite satisfaction. What more can we say? He directed the proceedings. He prompted or browbeat the witnesses, he undertook the duties of a prosecuting attorney. He regulated the trial.... He directed coarse jokes at the unhappy Pepin; but reckless as he was, he dared not meddle with Morey. He had no hesitation in accusing himself. He owned himself the worst of criminals, and declared that he esteemed himself happy to be able to pay with his own blood for the blood of the unhappy victims of his crime. But the more he talked about his coming fate, the plainer it was that he expected pardon, and the more he flattered those on whom that pardon might depend."

The trial lasted twelve days, and very little was elicited about the conspiracy,—if indeed there was one. Suddenly Pepin, whose terror had been abject, rallied his courage, refused to implicate Morey or to make revelations, and kept his resolution to the last.

One of the five prisoners was acquitted, one was condemned to a brief imprisonment, and Morey, Pepin, and Fieschi were sent to the block. Up to almost the last moment Fieschi expected pardon; but his last words were to his confessor: "I wish I could let you know about myself five minutes from now."

On the scaffold Morey's white hair elicited compassion from the spectators. Pepin at the last moment was offered a pardon if he would tell whence the money came that he had advanced to Fieschi. He refused firmly, and firmly met his fate.

The next day the woman who had betrayed her lover and the rest was presiding at a café on the Place de la Bourse, having been engaged as an attraction!

After these horrors we turn with relief to some account of good and noble women, the ladies of Louis Philippe's family.

After the murderous attempt of Fieschi the king lived under a continual expectation of assassination. He no longer walked the streets of Paris with his cane under his arm. When he drove, he sat with his back to the horses, because that position gave less certainty to the aim of an assassin. It was said that his carriages were lined with sheet-iron. He was thirteen times shot at, and the pallid looks of the poor queen were believed to arise from continual apprehension. Her nerves had been shaken by the diabolical attempt of Fieschi, and she never afterwards would leave her husband, even for a few days. She stayed away from the deathbed of her daughter, the Queen of the Belgians, lest in her absence he should be assassinated.

Neuilly was the home of the family, its beloved, particular retreat. The greatest pang that Louis Philippe suffered in 1848 was its total destruction by rioters. The little palace was furnished in perfect taste, with elegance, yet with simplicity. The inlaid floors were especially beautiful. The rooms were decorated with pictures, many of them representing passages in the early life of the king. In one he was teaching mathematics in a Swiss school; in another he was romping with his children. His own cabinet was decorated with his children's portraits and with works of art by his accomplished daughter, the Princess Marie. The family sitting-room was furnished with the princesses' embroidery, and there was a table painted on velvet by the Duchesse de Berri. The library was large, and contained many English books, among them a magnificent edition of Shakspeare. The park enclosed one hundred acres. The gardens were laid out in the English style. A branch of the Seine ran through the grounds, with boat-houses and bath-houses for the pleasure of the young princes,—and in one night this cherished home was laid in ruins!

QUEEN MARIE AMÉLIE.

"All is possible," said Louis Philippe to a visitor who talked with him at Claremont in his exile, "all is possible to France,—an empire, a republic, the Comte de Chambord, or my grandson; but one thing is impossible,—that any of these should last. On a tué le respect,—the nation has killed respect."

Queen Marie Amélie was born in Naples in 1782. Her mother was a daughter of Maria Theresa, and sister to Marie Antoinette. This lady was not one who inspired respect, but she had some good qualities. She was a good mother to her children, and had plenty of ability. Of course she hated the French Revolution, and everything that savored of what are called liberal opinions. Her career, which was full of vicissitudes and desperate plots, ended by her being dismissed ignominiously from Naples by the English ambassador, and she went to end her days with her nephew at Vienna.

Marie Amélie used sometimes to tell her children how she had wept when a child for the death of the little dauphin, the eldest son of Louis XVI., who, before the Revolution broke out, was taken away from the evil to come. She was to have been married to him had he lived. When older, she had an early love-affair with her cousin, Prince Antoine of Austria; but he was destined for the Church, and the youthful courtship came to an untimely end. When she first met her future husband, she and her family were living in a sort of provisional exile in Palermo. The princess was twenty-seven, Louis Philippe was ten or twelve years older, and they seem to have been quite determined to marry each other very soon after their acquaintance began. It was not easy to do so, however, for the duke, as we have seen, was at that period too much a republican to suit even an English Admiral; but the princess declared that she would go into a convent if the marriage was forbidden, and on Dec. 25, 1809, she became the wife of Louis Philippe.

No description could do justice to the purity and charity of this admirable woman; and in her good works she was seconded by her sister-in-law, Madame Adélaïde, and by her daughter.

"The queen," her almoner tells us, "had 500,000 francs a year for her personal expenses, and gave away 400,000 of them." "M. Appert," she would say to him, "give those 500 francs we spoke of, but put them down upon next month's account. The waters run low this month; my purse is empty." An American lady, visiting the establishment of a great dressmaker in Paris, observed an old black silk dress hanging over a chair. She remarked with some surprise: "I did not know you would turn and fix up old dresses." "I do so only for the queen," was the answer.

The imposture, ingratitude, and even insolence of some of Marie Amélie's petitioners failed to discourage her benevolence. For instance, an old Bonapartist lady, according to M. Appert, one day wrote to her:—

MADAME,—If the Bourbons had not returned to France, for the misfortune of the country, my beloved mistress and protectress, the Empress Marie Louise, would still be on the throne, and I should not be under the humiliating necessity of telling you that I am without bread, and that the wretched bed on which I sleep is about to be thrown out of the garret I inhabit, because I cannot pay a year's rent. I dare not ask you for assistance, for my heart is with my real sovereign, and I cannot promise you my gratitude. If, however, you think fit to preserve a life which, since the misfortunes of my country, has been full of bitterness, I will accept a loan. I should blush to receive a gift.
I am, Madame, your servant, C.

When this impertinent letter was handed to the almoner, the queen had written on it: "She must be very unhappy, for she is very unjust. A hundred francs to be sent to her immediately, and I beg M. Appert to make inquiries concerning this lady's circumstances."

In vain the almoner remonstrated. The only effect of his remonstrance was that the queen authorized him to make her gift 300 francs if he found it necessary. When he knocked at the door of the garret of the petitioner, she opened it with agitation. "Oh, Monsieur!" she said, "are you the Commissioner of Police come to arrest me for my outrageous letter to the queen? I am so unhappy that at times I became deranged. I am sorry to have written as I did to a princess who to all the poor is good and charitable." For answer, M. Appert showed her her own letter, with the queen's memorandum written upon it. "There was no lack of heartfelt gratitude then," he says, "and no lack of poverty to need the triple benefaction."

[CHAPTER III.]

LOUIS NAPOLEON'S EARLY CAREER.—STRASBURG, BOULOGNE, HAM.

There is a theory held by some observers that the man who fails in his duty to a woman who has claims upon his love and his protection, never afterwards prospers; and perhaps the most striking illustration of this theory may be found in the career of the Emperor Napoleon. Nothing went well with him after his divorce from Josephine. His only son died. The children of his brothers, with the exception of Louis Napoleon, and the Prince de Canino, the son of Lucien, were all ordinary men, inclined to the fast life of their period; while the descendants of Josephine, honored and respected, are now connected with many European thrones.

The son of Napoleon, called by his grandfather, the Austrian emperor, the Duc de Reichstadt, but by his own Bonaparte family Napoleon II., died at Vienna, July 22, 1832. The person from whom, during his short, sad life, he had received most kindness, and to whom, during his illness, he was indebted for almost maternal care, was the young wife of his cousin Francis, the Princess Sophia of Bavaria, who in the same week that he died, became the mother of Maximilian, the unfortunate Emperor of Mexico, who, exactly thirty-five years after, on July 22, 1867, was shot at Queretaro.

The Emperor Napoleon had made a decree that if male heirs failed him, his dynasty should be continued by the sons of his brother Joseph. Lucien, the republican, was passed over, as well as his descendants; and Joseph failing of male heirs, the throne of France was to devolve on Louis, king of Holland, and his heirs. Joseph left only daughters, Zénaide and Charlotte. Louis Bonaparte when he died, left but one son.

Louis Bonaparte was nine years younger than his brother Napoleon, who by no right of primogeniture, but by right of success, was early looked upon as the head of the family of Bonaparte. He assumed the place of father to his little brother Louis, and a very unsatisfactory father he proved. Louis was studious, poetical, solid, honorable, and unambitious. His brother was resolved to make him a distinguished general and an able king. He succeeded in making him a brave soldier and a very good general; but Louis had no enthusiasm for the profession of arms. He hated bloodshed, and above all he hated sack and pillage. He had no genius, and crooked ways of any kind were abhorrent to him. When a very young man he fell passionately in love with a lady, whom he called his Sophie. But his brother and the world thought the real name of the object of his affection was Emilie de Beauharnais, the Empress Josephine's niece by marriage. This lady became afterwards the wife of M. de La Vallette, Napoleon's postmaster-general, who after the return of the Bourbons in 1815, was condemned to death with Ney and Labédoyère. His wife saved him by changing clothes with him in prison; but the fearful strain her nerves suffered until she was sure of his escape, unsettled her reason. She was not sent to an asylum, but lived to a great age in an appartement in Paris, carefully tended and watched over by her friends.[1]

[Footnote 1: Jerrold's Life of Napoleon III.]

But whether it was with a Sophie or an Emilie, Louis Bonaparte fell in love, and Hortense de Beauharnais, the daughter of Josephine, gay, lively, poetical, and enthusiastic, had given her heart to General Duroc, the Emperor Napoleon's aide-de-camp; therefore both the young people resisted the darling project of Napoleon and Josephine to marry them to each other. By such a marriage Josephine hoped to avert the divorce that she saw to be impending. She fancied that if sons were born to the young couple, Napoleon would be content to leave his throne to the heir of his brother Louis, whom he had adopted, and of his step-daughter, of whom he was very fond. But Louis would not marry Hortense, and Hortense would not have Louis. At last, however, in the excitement of a ball, a reluctant consent was wrung from Louis; then Hortense was coerced into being a good French girl, and giving up Duroc. She and Louis were married. A more unhappy marriage never took place. Husband and wife were separated by an insurmountable (or at least unsurmounted) incompatibility of temperament. Louis was a man whose first thought was duty. Hortense loved only gayety and pleasure. He particularly objected to her dancing; she was one of the most graceful dancers ever seen, and would not give it up to please him. In short, she was all graceful, captivating frivolity; he, rigid and exacting. Both had burning memories in their hearts of what "might have been," and above all, after Louis became king of Holland, each took opposite political views. Louis wanted to govern Holland as the good king of the Dutch; Napoleon expected him to govern it in the interests of his dynasty, and as a Frenchman. The brothers disagreed most bitterly. Napoleon wrote indignant, unjust letters to Louis. Hortense took Napoleon's side in the quarrel, and led a French party at the Dutch court.

Intense was the grief of Louis and Hortense, Napoleon and Josephine, when the eldest son of this marriage, the child on whom their hopes were set, died of the croup at an early age. Hortense was wholly prostrated by her loss. She had still one son, and was soon to have another. The expected child was Charles Louis Napoleon, who was to become afterwards Napoleon III.

Soon after Louis Napoleon's birth, King Louis abdicated the throne of Holland. He said he could not do justice to the interests and wishes of his people, and satisfy his brother at the same time. He retired to Florence, where he lived for many years, only once more coming back to public life, viz., in 1814, to offer his help to his brother Napoleon, when others were deserting him.

Napoleon was very fond of Hortense's little boys, though in 1811 he had completed his divorce, had married the Austrian archduchess, and had a son of his own.

Louis Napoleon has left us some fragmentary reminiscences of his childhood, which have a curious interest.

"My earliest recollections," he says, "go back to my baptism, and I hasten to remark that I was three years old when I was baptized, in 1810, in the chapel at Fontainebleau. The emperor was my godfather, and the Empress Marie Louise was my godmother. Then my memory carries me back to Malmaison. I can still see my grandmother, the Empress Josephine, in her salon, on the ground floor, covering me with her caresses, and, even then, flattering my vanity by the care with which she retailed my bons mots; for my grandmother spoiled me in every particular, whereas my mother, from my tenderest years, tried to correct my faults and to develop my good qualities. I remember that once arrived at Malmaison, my brother and I were masters to do as we pleased. The empress, who passionately loved flowers and conservatories, allowed us to cut her sugar-canes, that we might suck them, and she always told us to ask for anything we might want.

"One day, when she wished to know as usual, what we would like best, my brother, who was three years older than I, and consequently more full of sentiment, asked for a watch, with a portrait of our mother; but I, when the empress said: 'Louis, ask for whatever will give you the greatest pleasure,' begged to be allowed to go out and paddle in the gutter with the little boys in the street. Indeed, until I was seven years old it was a great grief to me to have to ride always in a carriage with four or six horses. When, in 1815, just before the arrival of the allied army in Paris, we were hurried by our tutor to a hiding-place, and passed on foot along the Boulevards, I felt the keenest sensations of happiness within my recollection. Like all children, though perhaps even more than most children, soldiers fixed my attention. Whenever at Malmaison I could escape from the salon, I was off to the great gates, where there were always grenadiers of the Garde Impériale. One day, from a ground-floor window I entered into conversation with one of these old grognards who was on duty. He answered me laughing. I called out: 'I know my drill. I have a little musket!' Then the grenadier asked me to put him through his drill, and thus we were found, I shouting, 'Present arms! Carry arms! Attention!' the old grenadier obeying, to please me. Imagine my happiness! I often went with my brother to breakfast with the emperor. When he entered the room, he would come up to us, take our heads in his hands, and so lift us on the table. This frightened my mother very much, Dr. Corvisart having told her that such treatment was very bad for children."

The day before the Emperor Napoleon left Paris for the campaign of Waterloo, Hortense carried her boys to the Tuileries to take leave of him. Little Louis Napoleon contrived to run alone to his uncle's cabinet, where he was closeted with Marshal Soult. As soon as the boy saw the emotion in the emperor's face, he ran up to him, and burying his head in his lap, sobbed out: "Our governess says you are going to the wars,—don't go; don't go, Uncle." "And why not, Louis? I shall soon come back." "Oh, Uncle, those wicked allies will kill you! Let me go with you." The emperor took the boy upon his knee and kissed him. Then, turning to Soult, who was moved by the little scene, he said, "Here, Marshal, kiss him; he will have a tender heart and a lofty spirit; he is perhaps the hope of my race."

After Waterloo, the emperor, who passed one night in Paris, kissed the children at the last moment, with his foot upon the step of the carriage that was to carry him the first stage of his journey to St. Helena.

After this, Hortense and her boys were not allowed to live in France. Protected by an aide-de-camp of Prince Schwartzenberg, they reached Lake Constance, on the farthest limits of Switzerland. There, after a while, Queen Hortense converted a gloomy old country seat into a refined and beautiful home. A great trial, however, awaited her. King Louis demanded the custody of their eldest son, and little Napoleon was taken from his mother, leaving her only Louis. Louis had always been a "mother's boy," frail in health, thoughtful, grave, loving, and full of sentiment.

Hortense's life at Arenenberg was varied in the winter by visits to Rome. Her husband lived in Florence, and they corresponded about their boys. But though they met once again in after years, they were husband and wife no more. Indeed, charming as Hortense was to all the circle that surrounded her, tender as a mother, and devoted as a friend, her conduct as a wife was not free from reproach. She was a coquette by nature, and it is undeniable that more than one man claimed to have been her lover.

After a while her son Louis went for four years to college at Heidelberg. Mother and son never forget the possibilities that might lie before them. When the Italian revolution broke out, in 1832, Hortense went to Rome, both her sons being at that time in Florence with their father. Although the elder was newly married to his cousin, the daughter of King Joseph, both he and Louis were full of restlessness, and caught the revolutionary fervor. They contrived to escape from their father's house and to join the insurgents, to the great displeasure of both father and mother; but they were fired by enthusiasm for Italian liberty, and took the oaths as Carbonari.

King Louis and Queen Hortense were exceedingly distressed; both foresaw the hopelessness of the Italian rising. Queen Hortense went at once to Florence to consult her husband, and it was arranged that she should go in pursuit of her sons, inducing them, if possible, to give up all connection with so hopeless a cause. But before she reached them, the insurgents, who seem to have had no fixed plan and no competent leader, had come to the conclusion that Bonapartes were not wanted in a struggle for republicanism; they therefore requested the young men to withdraw, and their mother went after them to Ancona. On her way she was met by her son Louis, who was coming to tell her that his brother was dead. There has always been mystery concerning the death of this young Napoleon. The accredited account is that he sickened with the measles, and died at a roadside inn on his way to Ancona. The unhappy mother went into that little town upon the Adriatic with her youngest son; but she soon found that the Austrians, having come to the help of the Pope, were at its gates. Louis, too, had sickened with the measles. She hid him in an inner chamber, and spread a report that he had escaped to Corfu. She had with her an English passport for an English lady, travelling to England with her two sons. She was obliged to substitute a young Italian, who was compromised, for her dead son; and as soon as Louis could rise from his bed, they set out, meeting With many adventures until they got beyond the boundaries of Italy. Under cover of their English passport they crossed France, and visited the Château of Fontainebleau, where the mother pointed out to her son the scenes of his childhood.

The death of the Duc de Reichstadt in July, 1832, caused Louis Napoleon to consider himself the head of the Napoleonic family. According to M. Claude, the French Minister of Police, he came on this occasion into Paris, and remained there long enough to dabble in conspiracy.

After spending a few months in England, mother and son went back to Arenenberg, where they kept up a close correspondence with all malcontents in France. The Legitimists preferred them the house of Orleans, and the republicans of that period—judging from their writings as well as their acts—evidently believed that Louis Napoleon, now head of the house of Bonaparte, represented republican principles based on universal suffrage, as well as the glories of France.

One fine morning in October, 1836, Louis took leave of his mother at Arenenberg, telling her that he was going to visit his cousins at Baden. Stéphanie de Beauharnais in the days of the Empire had been married to the Grand Duke of that little country. Queen Hortense knew her son's real destination, no doubt, for she took leave of him with great emotion, and hung around his neck a relic which Napoleon had taken from the corpse of the Emperor Charlemagne when his tomb was opened at Aix-la-Chapelle. It was a tiny fragment of wood, said to be from the True Cross, set beneath a brilliant emerald. It seems possible that this may have been the little ornament found on the neck of the Prince Imperial after his corpse was stripped by savages in Zululand.

With this talisman against evil, and with the wedding-ring with which Napoleon had married Josephine, upon his finger, Prince Louis Napoleon set out upon an expedition so rash that we can hardly bring ourselves to associate it with the character popularly ascribed to the Third Emperor Napoleon.

His plan was to overturn the government of Louis Philippe, and then appeal to the people by a plébiscite,—i. e., a question to be answered yes or no by universal suffrage. This same plan he carried out successfully several times during his reign.

He went from Arenenberg to Baden-Baden,[1] where he made his final arrangements. Strasburg was to be the scene of his first attempt, and at Baden-Baden he had an interview with Colonel Vambéry, who commanded the Fourth Regiment of Artillery, part of the Strasburg garrison.

[Footnote 1: Louis Blanc, Dix Ans.]

Louis Blanc, the republican and socialist historian, writing in 1843, speaks thus of Louis Napoleon:—

"Brought up in exile, unfamiliar with France, Louis Bonaparte had assumed that the bourgeoisie remembered only that the Empire had curbed the Revolution, established social order, and given France the Code Napoléon. He fancied that the working-classes would follow the eagle with enthusiasm the moment it appeared, borne, as of old, at the head of regiments, and heralded by the sound of trumpets. A twofold error! The things the bourgeoisie in 1836 remembered most distinctly about Napoleon were his despotism and his taste for war; and the most lasting impression of him amongst the most intelligent in the working-classes was that whilst sowing the seeds of democratic aspiration throughout Europe, he had carefully weeded out all democratic tendencies in his own dominions."

But though Louis Blanc is right in saying that the evil that Napoleon did, lived after him in the memories of thinking men, it is also true that those born since the fall of the Second Empire can have no idea of the general enthusiasm that still lingered in France in Louis Philippe's reign, round memories of the glories of Napoleon. Men might not wish him back again, but they worshipped him as the national demigod. After Sedan he was pulled down literally and metaphorically from his pedestal; and the old feelings about him which half a century ago even foreign nations seemed to share, now seem obsolete and extravagant to readers of Lanfrey and the books of Erckmann-Chatrian.

Even in 1836, when Louis Napoleon in secret entered Strasburg, he was surprised and disappointed to find that those on whom he had counted to assist him in making the important "first step" in his career, were very doubtful of its prudence. He had counted on the co-operation of General Voirol, an old soldier of the Empire who was in command of the Department in which Strasburg was situated; but when he wrote him a letter, in the most moving terms appealing to his affection for the emperor, the old general not only declined to join the plot, but warned the Prefect of Strasburg that mischief was on foot, though he did not mention in what quarter. The Government in Paris seems, however, to have concluded that it would be best to let a plot so very rash come to a head. There was a public singer, calling herself Madame Gordon, at Baden, who flung herself eagerly into the conspiracy. Louis Napoleon on quitting Arenenberg had expected to meet several generals of distinction, who had served under his uncle, at a certain trysting-place between Arenenberg and Strasburg. He waited for them three days, but they never came. He then resolved to continue his campaign without their aid or encouragement, and entered Strasburg secretly on the night of Oct. 28, 1836. The next morning he had an interview with Colonel Vambéry, who endeavored to dissuade him from his enterprise.

Vambéry's prudent reasons made no impression on the prince, and he then promised his assistance. Having done so, Louis Napoleon offered him a paper, securing a pension of 10,000 francs to each of his two children, in case he should be killed. The colonel tore it up, saying, "I give, but do not sell, my blood." Major Parquin, an old soldier of the Empire, who was in the garrison, had been already won. On the night of the prince's arrival the conspirators met at his lodging.

Three regiments of infantry, three regiments of artillery, and a battalion of engineers formed the garrison at Strasburg. The wisest course would have been to appeal first to the third regiment of artillery; but other counsels prevailed. The fourth artillery, whose adhesion to the cause was doubtful, was chosen for the first attempt. All depended upon the impression made upon this regiment, which was the one in which Napoleon had served when captain of artillery at Toulon.

The night was spent in making preparations. Proclamations were drawn up addressed to the soldiers, to the city, and to France; and the first step was to be the seizure of a printing-office.

At five o'clock in the morning the signal was given. The soldiers of the fourth regiment of artillery were roused by the beating of the assemblée. They rushed, half-dressed, on to their parade-ground. Louis Napoleon, whose fate it was never to be ready, was not prompt even on this occasion; he was finishing two letters to his mother. One was to be sent to her at once if he succeeded, the other if he failed.

On entering the barrack-yard he found the soldiers waiting, drawn up in line. On his arrival the colonel (Vambéry) presented him to the troops as the nephew of Napoleon. He wore an artillery uniform. A cheer rose from the line. Then Louis Napoleon, clasping a gilt eagle brought to him by one of the officers, made a speech to the men, which was well received. His cause seemed won.

Next, followed by the troops, but exciting little enthusiasm in the streets of Strasburg as he passed along them in the gray dawn of a cloudy day, Louis Napoleon made his way to the quarters of General Voirol. The general emphatically refused to join the movement, and a guard was at once set over him.

Up to this moment all had smiled upon the enterprise. The printing of the proclamations was going rapidly on, the third regiment of artillery was bringing out its guns and horses, and the inhabitants of Strasburg, roused from their beds, were watching the movement as spectators, prepared to assist it or to oppose it, according as it made its way to success or failure.

The prince, and the troops who supported him, next marched to the barracks of the infantry. On their road they lost their way, and approached the barracks in such a manner that they left themselves only a narrow alley to retreat by, in case of failure.

On the prince presenting himself to the guard, an old soldier of the army of Napoleon kneeled and kissed his hand, when suddenly one of the officers, who had his quarters in the town, rushed upon the scene with his sword drawn, crying: "Soldiers, you are deceived! This man is not the nephew of the Emperor Napoleon, he is an impostor,—a relative of Colonel Vambéry!"

This turned the tide. Whilst the soldiers stood irresolute, the colonel of the regiment arrived. For a few moments he was in danger from the adherents of the prince. His own soldiers rushed to his rescue. A tumult ensued. The little band of Imperialists was surrounded, and their cause was lost.

Louis Napoleon yielded himself a prisoner. One or two of the conspirators, among them Madame Gordon, managed to escape; the rest were captured.

News was at once sent by telegraph to Paris; but the great wooden-armed telegraph-stations were in those days uncertain and unmanageable. Only half of the telegram reached the Tuileries, where the king and his ministers sat up all night waiting for more news. At daybreak of October 30 a courier arrived, and then they learned that the rising had been suppressed, and that the prince and his confederates were in prison.

Meantime the young officer in charge of Louis Napoleon's two letters to Queen Hortense had prematurely come to the conclusion that the prince was meeting with success, and had hurried off the letter announcing the good news to his mother.

How to dispose of such a capture as the head of the house of Bonaparte was a great puzzle to Louis Philippe's ministers. They dared not bring him to trial; they dared not treat him harshly. In the end he was carried to Paris, lodged for a few days in the Conciergerie, and then sent off, without being told his destination, to Cherbourg, where he was put on board a French frigate which sailed with orders not to be opened till she reached the equator. There it was found that her destination was Rio Janeiro, where she was not to suffer the prince to land, but after a leisurely voyage she was to put him ashore in the United States.

As the vessel was about to put to sea, an official personage waited on the prince, and after inquiring if he had funds enough to pay his expenses on landing, handed him, on the the part of Louis Philippe, a considerable sum.

On reaching Norfolk, Virginia, the prince landed, and learned, to his very great relief, that all his fellow-conspirators had been tried before a jury at Strasburg, and acquitted!

He learned too, shortly afterwards, that his mother was very ill. The shock of his misfortune, and the great exertions she had made on his behalf when she thought his life might be in danger, had proved too much for her. Louis Napoleon recrossed the ocean, landed in England, and made his way to Arenenberg. He was just in time to see Queen Hortense on her death-bed, to receive her last wishes, and to hear her last sigh.

After her death the French Government insisted that the Swiss Confederacy must compel Louis Napoleon to leave their territory. The Swiss refused, repaired the fortifications of Geneva, and made ready for a war with France; but Louis Napoleon of his own free will relieved the Swiss Government from all embarrassment by passing over into England, where it was not long before he made preparations for a new attempt to overthrow Louis Philippe's government.

He lived quietly in London at that period, visiting few persons except Count D'Orsay at Gore House, the residence of Lady Blessington, and occupying himself a great deal with writing. He had already completed a Manual of Artillery, and was engaged on a book that he called "Les Idées napoléoniennes." Its principal "idea" was that France wanted an emperor, a definite head, but that she also needed extreme democratic principles. Therefore an empire ought to be founded on an expression of the will of the people,—in plain words, on universal suffrage. The mistake Napoleon III. made in his after career, as well as in his "Idées napoléoniennes," was in not perceiving that an empire without military glory would become a pool of corruption, while vast military efforts, which would embroil France with all Europe, would lose the support of the bourgeoisie. "In short," as Louis Blanc has said, "he imagined a despotism without its triumphs; a throne surrounded by court favorites, but without Europe at its footstool; a great name, with no great man to bear it,—the Empire, in short, minus its Napoleon!"

During the months that Louis Napoleon passed in London he was maturing the plot of a new enterprise. He was collecting round him his adherents, some of them Carbonaro leaders, with whom he had been associated in Italy. Some were his personal friends; some were men whose devotion to the First Napoleon made them ashamed to refuse to support his nephew, even in an insurrection that they disapproved; while some were mere adventurers.

Very few persons were admitted to his full confidence; the affair was managed by a clique, "the members of which had been previously sounded; and in general those were set aside who could not embark in the undertaking heart and hand."

By all these men Louis Napoleon was treated as an imperial personage. To the Italians he stood pledged, and had stood pledged since 1831, that if they helped him to ascend the throne of France, he would fight afterwards for the cause of Italy. This pledge he redeemed at Solferino and Magenta, but not till after some impatient, rash Italians (believing him forsworn) had attempted his assassination.

In vain he was advised to wait, to let Louis Philippe's Government fall to the ground for want of a foundation. He had made his decision, and was resolved to adhere to it, not fearing to make that step which lies between the sublime and the ridiculous.

The attempt had been in preparation ever since Louis Napoleon had arrived in England. There were about forty of his adherents living in London at his expense, awaiting the moment for action. What form that action was to take, none of them knew.[1] It was resolved to make the movement in the month of August, 1840. The prince calculated that the remains of his great uncle, restored by England to France, being by that time probably on their way from St. Helena, public enthusiasm for the great emperor would be at its height, and that he would have the honor of receiving those revered remains when they had been brought back from exile by Louis Philippe's son. Besides this, the garrisons of northern France happened at that moment to contain the two regiments whose fidelity he had tampered with at Strasburg four years before.

[Footnote 1: In this account I am largely indebted to the interesting narrative of Count Joseph Orsi, an Italian banker, Prince Louis Napoleon's stanch personal friend.]

Of course there were French agents of police (detectives, as we call them) watching the prince in London; and this made it necessary that he should be very circumspect in making his preparations. A steamer, the "Edinburgh Castle," was secretly engaged. The owners and the captain were informed that she was chartered by some young men for a pleasure-trip to Hamburg.

On Tuesday, Aug. 4, 1840, the "Edinburgh Castle" came up the Thames, and was moored alongside a wharf facing the custom-house. As soon as she was at the wharf, Count Orsi, who seems to have been the most business-like man of the party, shipped nine horses, a travelling carriage, and a large van containing seventy rifles and as many uniforms. Proclamations had been printed in advance; they were placed in a large box, together with a little store of gold, which formed the prince's treasure.

At dawn all this was done, and the "Edinburgh Castle" started down the river. At London Bridge she took in thirteen men, and at Greenwich three more. At Blackwall some of the most important conspirators came on board. The boat reached Gravesend about two o'clock, where twelve more men joined them. Only three or four of those on board knew where they were going, or what was expected of them. They were simply obeying orders.

At Gravesend the prince was to have joined his followers, and the "Edinburgh Castle" was at once to have put to sea, touching, however, at Ramsgate before crossing the Channel. Those on board waited and waited, but no prince came. Only five persons in the vessel (one of whom was Charles Thélin, the prince's valet) knew what they were there for.

For some time the passengers were kept quiet by breakfast. Then, having no one at their head, they began to grow unruly. Those in the secret were terribly afraid that the river police might take notice of the large number of foreigners on board, especially as the vessel claimed to be an excursion-boat, and not a petticoat was visible. It was all important to catch the tide,—all important to reach Boulogne before sunrise on the 5th of August, when their friends expected them. But no prince came.

Major Parquin, who had been one of the Strasburg conspirators, was particularly unmanageable; and late in the afternoon he insisted on going ashore to buy some cigars, saying that those on board were detestable. In vain Persigny and Orsi, who in the prince's absence considered themselves to be in command, assured him that to land was impossible; Parquin would not recognize their authority. The rest of the story I will tell in Count Orsi's own words. He wrote his account in "Fraser's Magazine," 1879:—

"The wrath of the major was extreme. There was danger in his anger. I consulted Persigny on the advisability of letting him go on shore, with the distinct understanding that he should be accompanied by me or by Charles Thélin."

The truth, it may be suspected, was that Parquin was drunk, or that, having suspected the object of the expedition, he had some especial object in going ashore, which he would not reveal to his fellow-conspirators.

"Persigny," continues Count Orsi, "consented to the idea, and Parquin and I got into the boat. The vessel was lying in the stream. Thélin was with us. As we were walking to the cigar-shop, the major remarked a boy sitting on a log of wood and feeding a tame eagle with shreds of meat. The eagle had a chain fastened to one of its claws. The major turned twice to look at it, and went on without saying a word. On our way back to the boat, however, we saw the boy within two yards of the landing-place. The major went up to him, and looking at the eagle, said in French, 'Is it for sale?' The boy did not understand him. 'My dear Major,' I said, 'I hope you do not intend to buy that eagle. We have other things to attend to. For Heaven's sake, come away!' 'Why not? I will have it. Ask him what he asks for it.'"

The major paid a sovereign for the eagle, and this unlucky purchase was the cause that endless ridicule was cast on the expedition. It has always been supposed that the eagle was one of the "properties" provided for the occasion, and that it was intended to perch on the Napoleon Column at Boulogne. It may well be supposed that this is not far from the truth, and that Major Parquin had the eagle waiting for him at Gravesend. Eagles are so very uncommon in England that it is unlikely that a boy, without set purpose, would be waiting with a tame one on a wharf at Gravesend. The unfortunate bird became in the end the property of a butcher in Boulogne.

By six P. M. the party in the "Edinburgh Castle" grew very uneasy; the prince had not arrived. Count Orsi took a post-chaise and drove overland to Ramsgate, where Count Montholon (Napoleon's fellow-exile at St. Helena) and two colonels were waiting the arrival of the steamer. Only one of these gentlemen had been let into the plot, and Montholon was subsequently deeply wounded by having been excluded.

About dawn, when this party had just gone to bed, the "Edinburgh Castle" steamed up to the beautiful Ramsgate pier; but it was already the hour when she should have been off Boulogne.

A second time Louis Napoleon had damaged his chances and risked his friends by his want of punctuality. He had not taken proper precautions as to his mode of leaving London. He found that the police were on the alert, and it was late in the day before he contrived to leave his house unseen. He might have made more exertion, but he had quite forgotten the importance of the tide!

What was now to be done? Four hours is the passage from Ramsgate to Boulogne. It would not do to arrive there in broad daylight. They dared not stay at Ramsgate. It became necessary to put to sea, and to steam about aimlessly till night arrived. The captain and the crew had to be told the object of the expedition, the van had to be opened, and the arms and uniforms distributed. This was done after dark, and no light was allowed on board the steamer.

At three o'clock A. M. of Aug. 6, 1840, the "Edinburgh Castle" was off Wimereux, a little landing-place close to Boulogne. The disembarkation was begun at once. The steamer was ill provided with boats. She had but one, and could only land eight men at a time. This was one of the many oversights of the expedition.

At five A. M. the little troop, clad as French soldiers, marched up to the barracks at Boulogne. The gates were thrown open by friends within, and the prince and his followers entered the yard. The reason why it had been so important to reach Boulogne twenty-four hours earlier, was that a certain Colonel Piguellier, who was a strong republican, was sure to be against them. Some French friends of the prince, who were in the secret, had therefore invited Colonel Piguellier to a shooting-party on the 4th, the invitation including one to pass the night at a house in the country; but by the evening of the 5th he had returned to his quarters in Boulogne.

At the moment of the prince's entrance, with his little troop, into the yard of the barracks, the soldiers of the garrison were just getting out of their beds. The few who were already afoot on different duties were soon made to understand who the prince was, and what his party had come for. At the name of Napoleon they rushed up to the dormitories to spread the news. In a short time all the men were formed in line in the barrack-yard.

The prince, at the head of his little troop, addressed them. His speech was received with enthusiasm. At that moment Colonel Piguellier, in full uniform, appeared upon the scene. One of the prince's party threatened to fire on him with a revolver. His soldiers at once took his part. It was the affair of Strasburg over again.

In vain, threats and promises were urged upon the colonel. All he would say was: "You may be Prince Louis Napoleon, or you may not. Napoleon, your predecessor, overthrew legitimate authority, and it is not right for you to attempt to do the same thing in this place. Murder me if you like, but I will do my duty to the last."

The soldiers took the side of their commander. Resistance was of no avail. The prince and his party were forced to leave the barracks, the gates of which were shut at once by Colonel Piguellier's order. The only concession the prince had been able to obtain was that he and his followers should not be pursued by the troops, but be left to be dealt with by the civil authorities.

The failure was complete. The day before, a party of the prince's friends had been at Boulogne on the lookout for his arrival; but when they found he did not come, they had left the city. All that remained to be done was to attempt to save the prince. He was almost beside himself. Apparently he lost his self-command, and men of more nerve and experience did with him what they would.

He and his party reached the sea at last. The National Guard of Boulogne began firing on them. The prince, Count Persigny, Colonel Voisin, and Galvani, an Italian, were put into a boat. As they pushed off, a fire of musketry shattered the little skiff, and threw them into the water. Colonel Voisin's arm was broken at the elbow, and Galvani was hit in the body. The prince and Persigny came up to the surface at some distance from the land. Colonel Voisin and Galvani, being nearer to the shore, were immediately rescued. Count Orsi says that as the prince swam towards the steamer, still fired on by the National Guard stationed on the heights, a custom-house boat headed him off. But in Boulogne it was reported and believed that he was captured and brought to land in a bathing machine.

The prisoners were tried by a royal decree. No one was sentenced to death, but the prince, Count Montholon, Count Persigny, Colonel Voisin, Major Parquin, and another officer were sent to the fortress of Ham, on the frontier of Belgium, where they occupied the same quarters as Prince Polignac and the other ministers of Charles X. had done. Count Montholon, four months after, made piteous appeals to be let out on parole for one day, that he might be present when the body of Napoleon was brought back to the capital.

The prince passed five years in prison, reading much, and doubtless meditating much on the mistakes of his career. Many plans of escape had been secretly proposed to him, but he rejected all of them, fearing they were parts of a trap laid for him by the authorities. It has always been believed, however, and it is probably true, that Louis Philippe would have been very willing to have the jailers shut their eyes while Louis Napoleon walked out of their custody, believing that the ridicule that had attended his two attempts at revolution had ruined his chances as a pretender to the throne.

During the years Louis Napoleon was imprisoned at Ham, he received constant marks of sympathy, especially from foreigners. He was known to favor the project of an interoceanic canal by the Nicaragua route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and the Government of Nicaragua proposed to him to become president of a company that would favor its views, expressing the hope that he would make himself as great in America by undertaking such a work, as his uncle has made himself by his military glory.

The illness of his father in Florence gave Prince Louis Napoleon a good reason for asking enlargement on parole from the French Government. Louis Philippe was willing to grant this; but his ministers demurred, unless Louis Napoleon would ask pardon loyalement. This Louis Napoleon refused to do; and having by this time managed to extract a loan of £6,000 from the rich and eccentric Duke of Brunswick, he resolved to attempt an escape.

Here is the story as he told it himself when he reached England. The governor of Ham, it must be premised, was a man wholly uncorruptible. He was kind to his prisoner, with whom he played whist every evening, but he was bent on fulfilling his duty.

This duty obliged him to See the prince twice a day, and at night to turn the key upon him, which he put into his pocket.

The fortress of Ham forms a square, with a round tower at each of the angles. There is only one gate. Between the towers are ramparts, on one of which the prince daily walked, and in one corner had made a flower-garden. A canal ran outside the ramparts on two sides; barracks were under the others. Thélin, the prince's valet, was suffered to go in and out of the fortress at his pleasure. On the 23d of May, 1845, Thélin went to St. Quentin, the nearest large town, and hired a cabriolet, which was to meet him the next day at an appointed place upon the high-road. The prince's plan depended on there being workmen in the prison, and he had been about to make a request to have his rooms papered and painted, when the governor informed him that the staircase was to be repaired. The day before the one chosen for the attempt, two English gentlemen, probably by a previous understanding, had visited the prisoner, and he asked one of them to lend his passport to the valet Thélin.

"Very early on the morning of May 25th, the prince, Dr. Conneau, and Thélin were looking out eagerly for the arrival of the workmen. A private soldier whose vigilance they had reason to dread had been placed on guard that morning, but by good luck he was called away to attend a dress parade.

"The workmen arrived. They proved to be all painters and masons,—which was a disappointment to the prince, who had hoped to go out as a carpenter. But at once he shaved off his long moustache, and put over his own clothes a coarse shirt, a workman's blouse, a pair of blue overalls much worn, and a black wig. His hands and face he also soiled with paint; then, putting on a pair of wooden shoes and taking an old clay pipe in his mouth, and throwing a board over his shoulder, he prepared to leave the prison. He had with him a dagger, and two letters from which he never parted,—one written by his mother, the other by his uncle, the emperor.

"It was seven o'clock by the time these preparations were made. Thélin called to the workmen on the staircase to come in and have a glass of wine. On the prince's way downstairs he met two warders. One Thélin skilfully drew apart, pretending to have something to say to him; the other was so intent on getting out of the way of the board carried by the supposed workman that he did not look in the prince's face, and the prince and Thélin passed safely into the yard."

As he was passing the first sentinel, the prince let his pipe fall from his mouth. He stooped, picked it up, and re-lighted it deliberately.

"Close to the door of the canteen he came upon an officer reading a letter. A little farther on, a few privates were sitting on a bench in the sun. The concierge at the gate was in his lodge, but his attention was given to Thélin, who was following the prince, accompanied by his dog Ham. The sergeant, whose duty it was to open and shut the gate, turned quickly and looked at the supposed workman; but a movement the prince made at that moment with his board caused him to step aside. He opened the gate: the prince was free.

"Between the two drawbridges the prince met two workmen coming towards him on the side his face was exposed. He shifted his board like a man weary of carrying a load upon one shoulder. The men appeared to eye him with suspicion, as if surprised at not knowing him. Suddenly one said: 'Oh! it is Berthon;' and they passed on into the fortress."

The prince hastened with Thélin to the place where the cabriolet engaged the day before was waiting for them. As Louis Napoleon was about to fling away the board he had been carrying, another cabriolet drove by. As soon as it was out of sight, the prince jumped into his own, shook the dust off his clothes, kicked off his wooden shoes, and seized the reins. The fifteen miles to St. Quentin were soon accomplished. The prince got out at some distance from the town, and Thélin entered it alone, to exchange the cabriolet for a postchaise. The mistress of the post-house offered him a large piece of pie, which he thankfully accepted, knowing that it would be a godsend to his master. A woman, whom they had passed upon the highway on entering the town, took Thélin aside and asked him how he came to be driving with such a shabby, common man that morning; for Thélin was well known in the neighborhood.

Before he rejoined the prince with the pie and the postchaise, Louis Napoleon had become very impatient. Seeing a carriage approach, he stopped it, and asked the occupant if he had seen anything of a postchaise coming from St. Quentin. The traveller proved afterwards to have been the prosecuting attorney of the district (le procureur du roi).

It was nine in the evening when the prince, Thélin, and the dog Ham were safely in the carriage. They reached Valenciennes at a quarter to three A. M., and had to wait more than an hour at the station for the train. The prince had discarded his working clothes, but still wore his black wig. The train arrived at last. By help of the Englishman's passport the prince safely crossed the frontier, and soon reached Brussels. Thence he went by way of Ostend to London.

He was not in time to see his father, who died in Florence before he could get permission from the German States to cross the continent.

All the French papers treated his escape as a matter of no consequence. Immediately on reaching London, he wrote a letter to Louis Philippe, pledging himself to make no further attempt to disturb the peace of France during his reign. He probably judged that the end of the Orleans dynasty might be near.

His escape from prison was not known until the evening. Dr. Conneau gave out that he had been very ill during the night, but under the influence of opiates was sleeping quietly. The governor insisted on remaining all day in the sitting-room, and finally upon seeing him. In the dim light of the sick chamber he saw only a figure, with its face turned to the wall, covered up in the bed-clothes.

At last he became suspicious. Thélin's prolonged absence seemed unaccountable. A closer examination was insisted on, and the truth was discovered. Nobody was punished except Dr. Conneau, who suffered a few months' imprisonment.

LOUIS PHILLIPE.
("The Citizen-King.")

[CHAPTER IV.]

TEN YEARS OF THE REIGN OF THE CITIZEN KING.

Besides the affairs of the Duchesse de Berri, of Louis Napoleon, of Fieschi and his infernal machine, and difficulties attending on the marriage of the Duke of Orleans, the first ten years of Louis Philippe's reign were full of vicissitudes. France after a revolution is always an "unquiet sea that cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt." Frenchmen do not accept the inevitable as Americans have learned to do, through the working of their institutions.

One of the early troubles of Louis Philippe was the peremptory demand of President Jackson for five million dollars,—a claim for French spoliations in 1797. This amount had been acknowledged by the Government of Louis Philippe to be due, but the Chambers were not willing to ratify the agreement. In the course of the negotiations the secretary of General Jackson, having occasion to translate to him a French despatch, read, "The French Government demands—" "Demands!" cried the general, with a volley of rough language; "if the French Government dares to demand anything of the United States, it will not get it."

It was long before he could be made to understand the true meaning of the French word demande, and his own demands were backed with threats and couched in terms more forcible than diplomatic. The money was paid after the draft of the United States for the first instalment had been protested, and France has not yet forgotten that when she was still in the troubled waters of a recent revolution, she was roughly treated by the nation which she had befriended at its birth.

The greatest military success in Louis Philippe's reign was the capture of Constantine in Algeria. So late as 1810 Algerine corsairs were a terror in the Mediterranean, and captured M. Arago, who was employed on a scientific expedition.[1] In 1835, France resolved to undertake a crusade against these pirates, which might free the commerce of the Mediterranean. The enterprise was not popular in France. It would cost money, and it seemed to present no material advantages. It was argued that its benefits would accrue only to the dynasty of Louis Philippe, that Algeria would be a good training-school for the army, and that the main duty of the army in future might be to repress republicanism.

[Footnote 1: About the same time they took prisoner a cousin of my father, John Warner Wormeley, of Virginia. He was sold into slavery; but when tidings of his condition reached his friends, he was ransomed by my grandfather.]

In 1834, a young Arab chief called Abdul Kader, the son of a Marabout of great sanctity, had risen into notice. Abdul Kader was a man who realized the picture of Saladin drawn by Sir Walter Scott in the "Talisman." Brave, honorable, chivalrous, and patriotic, his enemies admired him, his followers adored him. When he made his first treaty with the French, he answered some doubts that were expressed concerning his sincerity by saying gravely: "My word is sacred; I have visited the tomb of the Prophet."

Constantine, the mountain fortress of Oran, was held, not by Abdul Kader, but by Ahmed Bey, the representative of the sultan's suzerainty in the Barbary States. The first attack upon it failed. The weather and the elements fought against the French in this expedition. General Changarnier distinguished himself in their retreat, and the Duc de Nemours showed endurance and bravery.

From the moment of that repulse, popular enthusiasm was aroused. A cry rang through France that Constantine must be taken. It was captured two years later, after a siege in which two French commanders-in-chief and many generals were killed. Walls fell, and mines exploded; the place at last was carried by assault. At one moment, when even French soldiers wavered, a legion of foreign dare-devils (chiefly Irishmen and Englishmen) were roused by an English hurrah from the man who became afterwards Marshal Saint-Arnaud. With echoing cheers they followed him up the breach, the army followed after them, and the city was won.

Louis Philippe had been raised to power by four great men,—Lafayette, Laffitte, Talleyrand, and Thiers. Of these, Laffitte and Lafayette retained little influence in his councils, and both died early in his reign. In 1838 died Talleyrand,—the prince of the old diplomatists. The king and his sister, Madame Adélaïde, visited him upon his death-bed. Talleyrand, supported by his secretary, sat up to receive the king. He was wrapped in a warm dressing-gown, with the white curls he had always cherished, flowing over his shoulders, while the king sat near him, dressed in his claret-colored coat, brown wig, and varnished boots. Some one who was present whispered that it was an interview between the last of the ancienne noblesse and the first citizen bourgeois. Rut the old courtier was touched by the intended kindness, and when the king was about to go away, he said, half rising: "Sire, this honor to my house will be gratefully remembered in the annals of my family."

Deep and true was the grief felt for the loss of Talleyrand in his own household; many and bitter have been the things said of his character and his career. He himself summed up his life in some words written shortly before his death, which read like another verse in the Book of Ecclesiastes:—

"Eighty-three years have rolled away! How many cares, how many anxieties! How many hatreds have I inspired, how many exasperating complications have I known! And all this with no other result than great moral and physical exhaustion, and a deep feeling of discouragement as to what may happen in the future,—disgust, too, as I think over the past."

A writer in "Temple Bar" (probably Dr. Jevons) speaks of Prince Talleyrand thus:—

"On his private life it would be unfair to pass judgment without taking into consideration the turbulence and lawlessness, the immorality and corruption both social and political, which characterized the stormy epoch in which he was called to play a very prominent part. If he did not pass through it blameless, he was less guilty than many others; if his hands were not pure, at least they were not blood-stained; and it is possible that, as Bourienne, who knew him well, says: 'History will speak as favorably of him as his contemporaries have spoken ill.'"

The summer of 1840 seemed peaceful and serene, when a storm burst suddenly out of a cloudless sky. It was a new phase of that Eastern Question which unhappily was not settled in the days of the Crusades, but has survived to be a disturbing element in the nineteenth century. Two men were engaged in a fierce struggle in the East, and, as usual, they drew the Powers of the West and North into their quarrel.

Sultan Mahmoud, who had come to the throne in 1808, had done his best to destroy the power of his pashas. He hated such powerful and insubordinate nobles, and after the destruction of the Mamelukes in 1811, he placed Egypt under the rule of the bold Macedonian soldier, Mehemet Ali, not as a pasha, but as viceroy. In course of time, as the dominions of Sultan Mahmoud became more and more disorganized by misgovernment and insurrection, Mehemet Ali sent his adopted son, Ibrahim Pasha, with an army into Syria. Ibrahim conquered that province and governed it far better than the Turks had done, when he was stopped by a Russian army (1832), which, under pretence of assisting the sultan, interfered in the quarrel. An arrangement was effected by what is called the treaty of Unkiar-Thelessi. Ibrahim was to retain the pashalik of Syria for his life, and Russia stipulated that no vessels of war should be allowed to pass the Dardanelles or Hellespont without the consent of the sultan.

Mehemet Ali, who was anxious above all things to have his viceroyalty in Egypt made hereditary, that he might transmit his honors to his brave son, cast about in every direction to find friends among European diplomatists. Six years before, he had proposed to England, France, and Austria a partition of the sultan's empire. "Russia," he said, "is half mistress of Turkey already. She has established a protectorate over half its subjects, who are Greek Christians, and where she professes to protect, she oppresses instead. If she seizes Constantinople, there is the end of your European civilization. I am a Turk, but I propose to you to inaugurate a crusade which will save Turkey and save Europe. I will raise my standard against the czar; I will put at your disposal my army, fleet, and treasure; I will lead the van; and in return I ask only my independence of the Porte and an acknowledgment of me as an hereditary sovereign." This proposition was promptly declined. It was renewed, in 1838, in a modified form, but again England, France, and Austria would not listen to the viceroy's reasoning. Mehemet Ali became a prey to despair.

Sultan Mahmoud meantime was no less a victim to resentment and anxiety. He hated his enforced subservience to Russia, and above all he hated his great subject and rival, Mehemet Ali. With fury in his heart he watched how, shred by shred, his great empire was wrenched away from him,—Greece, Syria, Servia, Algiers, Moldavia, and Wallachia. Little remained to him but Constantinople and its surrounding provinces. Russia, all-powerful in the Black Sea, could at any moment force him to give up to her the key of the Dardanelles. Among the Turks (the only part of his subjects on whom he could rely) were many malcontents. Fanatic dervishes predicted his overthrow, and called him the Giaour Sultan. He had destroyed Turkish customs, outraged Turkish feelings, and by the massacre o the Janissaries, in 1826, he had sapped Turkish strength. He now began in his own person to set at nought the precepts of the Koran. All day he worked with frenzy, and at night he indulged himself in frightful orgies, till, dead drunk, he desisted from his madness, and was carried by his slaves to his bed.[1]

[Footnote 1: Louis Blanc, Dix Ans.]

In the early months of 1839 Mahmoud made quiet preparations to thrust Ibrahim Pasha out of Syria; and in June a great battle was fought between the Egyptians and the Turks on the banks of the Euphrates, in which Ibrahim Pasha, by superior generalship, wholly defeated the Turkish commander, Hafiz Pasha.

Sultan Mahmoud never heard of this disaster. He died of delirium tremens the very week that it took place, and his son, Abdul Medjid, mounted his throne. Ibrahim Pasha immediately after his victory had made ready to threaten Constantinople, when despatches from his father arrested him. Mehemet wrote that France had promised to take the part of Egypt, and to settle all her difficulties by diplomacy.

Meantime the new sultan, or his vizier, having offended the Capitan Pasha (or Admiral of the Fleet), that officer thought proper to carry the ships under his command over to Mehemet Ali.

It was a proud day for the viceroy when the Turkish ships sailed into the harbor of Alexandria. This defection of the fleet so discouraged Abdul Medjid that he offered his vassal terms of peace, by which he consented to Mehemet's hereditary viceroyalty in Egypt, and Ibrahim Pasha's hereditary possession of the pashalik of Syria.

But the Great Powers would not consent to this dismemberment of the Turkish Empire. A fierce struggle in diplomacy took place between France and England, which might have resulted in an open rupture, had not Louis Philippe and Marshal Soult (then Minister for Foreign Affairs in France) been both averse to war. The old marshal had seen more than enough of it, and Louis Philippe felt that peace alone could strengthen his party,—the bourgeoisie. Mehemet Ali, his rights and his wrongs, seem to have been entirely overlooked in the tempest of diplomacy.

After some weeks of great excitement the Five Great Powers agreed among themselves that Mehemet Ali should become the Khedive, or hereditary viceroy, of Egypt, but that he must give up Syria. To this he demurred, and the allied troops attacked Ibrahim Pasha. Admiral Sir Charles Napier bombarded his stronghold, St. Jean d'Acre, and forced him into submission. The triumph of Lord Palmerston's policy was complete; as Charles Greville remarked: "Everything has turned out well for him. He is justified by the success of his operations, and by the revelations in the French Chambers of the intentions of M. Thiers; and it must be acknowledged he has a fair right to plume himself on his diplomacy."

After the death of Talleyrand, only M. Thiers remained of the four great men who had assisted Louis Philippe to attain supreme power. M. Thiers was not insensible to the advantage it would be to his History of the Consulate and Empire, if he could add to it a last and brilliant chapter describing the restoration to France of the mortal remains of her great emperor. Therefore in the early part of 1840, before any disturbance of the entente cordiale, he made a request to the English Government for the body of Napoleon, then lying beneath a willow-tree at Longwood, on a desolate island that hardly seemed to be part of the civilized world. Lord Palmerston responded very cordially, and Louis Philippe's third son, the Prince de Joinville, in his frigate, the "Belle Poule," attended by other French war-ships, was despatched upon the errand. Napoleon had died May 5, 1821. For almost twenty years his body had reposed at St. Helena. With the Prince de Joinville went Bertrand and Gourgaud, who had been the Emperor's companions in captivity.

The coffin was raised and opened. The face was perfect. The beard, which had been shaved before the burial, had apparently a week's growth. The white satin which had lined the lid of the coffin had crumbled into dust, and lay like a mist over the body, which was dressed in a green uniform, with the cocked hat across its knees.

The corpse was transferred to another coffin brought from France, and was carried over the rough rocks of St. Helena by English soldiers. All the honors that in that remote island England could give to her former captive were respectfully offered; and early in December, 1840, news arrived in Paris that the "Belle Poule" had reached Havre.

This was sooner than her arrival had been looked for, and at once all Paris was in a scramble of preparation. Laborers and artists worked night and day. The weather was piercingly cold. Indeed, no less than three hundred English were said to have died of colds contracted on the day of the funeral procession.

The body was landed at Courbevoie from a flat-bottomed barge that had been constructed to bring it up the Seine. Courbevoie is about two miles from the Arch of Triumph, which is again nearly the same distance from the Place de la Concorde.

Between each gilded lamp-post, with its double burners, and beneath long rows of leafless trees, were colossal plaster statues of Victory, alternating with colossal vases burning incense by day, and inflammable materials for illumination by night. Thus the procession attending the body had about five miles to march from the place of disembarkation to the Invalides, on the left bank of the Seine. The spectators began to assemble before dawn. All along the route scaffoldings had been erected, containing rows upon rows of seats. All the trees, bare and leafless at that season, were filled with freezing gamins. All the wide pavements were occupied. Before long, rows of National Guards fringed the whole avenue. They were to fall in behind the procession as it passed, and accompany it to the Invalides.

The arrival of the funeral barge had been retarded while the authorities hastened the preparations for its reception. When the body of Napoleon was about to re-land on French soil, "cannon to right of it, cannon to left of it, volleyed and thundered." The coffin was received beneath what was called a votive monument,—a column one hundred feet in height, with an immense gilded globe upon the top, surmounted by a gilded eagle twenty feet high. Banners and tripods were there ad libitum, and a vast plaster bas-relief cast in the "Belle Poule's" honor.

The coffin, having been landed, was placed upon a catafalque, the cannon gave the signal to begin the march, and the procession started. The public was given to understand that in a sort of funeral casket blazing with gold and purple, on the top of the catafalque, twenty feet from the ground, was enclosed the coffin of the Emperor; but it was not so. The sailors of the "Belle Poule" protested that the catafalque was too frail, and the height too great. They dared not, they said, attempt to get the lead-lined coffin up to the place assigned for it, still less try to get it down again. It was consequently deposited, for fear of accident, on a low platform between the wheels.

First came the gendarmes, or mounted police, with glittering brazen breastplates, waving horse-hair crests, fine horses, and a band of trumpeters; then the mounted Garde Municipale; then Lancers; then the Lieutenant-General commanding the National Guard of Paris, surrounded by his staff, and all officers, of whatever grade, then on leave in the capital. These were followed by infantry, cavalry, sappers and miners, Lancers, and Cuirassiers, staff-officers, etc., with bands and banners. Then came a carriage containing the chaplain who had had charge of the body from the time it left St. Helena, following whom were a crowd of military and naval officers. Next appeared a led charger, son of a stallion ridden by Napoleon, and soon after came a bevy of the marshals of France. Then all the banners of the eighty-six departments, and at last the funeral catafalque.

As it passed under the Arch of Triumph, erected by Napoleon in commemoration of his victories, there were hundreds in the crowd who expected to see the Emperor come to life again.

Strange to say, the universal cry was "Vive l'empereur!" One heard nowhere "Vive le roi!"

The funeral car was hung with purple gauze embroidered with golden bees. As I said, the coffin of the Emperor was suffered to repose upon a gilded buckler supported by four golden caryatides; but it was, as the sailors would have said, "stowed safely in the hold."

The catafalque was hung all over with wreaths, emblems, and banners. It had solid gilded wheels, and was drawn by eight horses covered with green velvet, embroidered with gold bees; each horse was led by a groom in the Bonaparte livery. At the four corners of the car, holding the tassels of the pall, rode two marshals, an admiral, and General Bertrand, who had shared the captivity of the Emperor. Count Montholon was not suffered to leave his imprisonment for the occasion, though he also had been a companion of the Emperor at St. Helena. Around the catafalque marched the five hundred sailors of the "Belle Poule," headed by their captain, the Prince de Joinville,—slender, tall, and dark, a very naval-looking man. He was supposed to be intensely hostile to England, and only to be kept in check by a strong hand. Then came all the Emperor's aides-de-camp who were still living, and all the aged veterans in Paris who had served under him. This was the most touching feature of the procession. Many tears were shed by the spectators, and a thrill ran through the hearts of eight hundred thousand people as the catafalque creaked onward, passing under the arch which celebrated Napoleon's triumphs, and beneath which at other times no carriage was allowed to pass. But enthusiasm rose to the highest point at the sight of the veterans in every kind of faded uniform,—Grenadiers of the Guard, Chasseurs, Dragoons of the Empress, Red Lancers, Mamelukes, Poles, and, above all, the Old Guard. "Vive la Vieille Garde!" shouted the multitude; "Vive les Polonais! Vive l'empereur!"

The funeral was a political blunder. It stirred up the embers of Napoleonism. Ten years later they blazed into a consuming fire.

The procession passed through the Place de la Concorde, beneath the shadow of the obelisk of Luxor, which of old had looked on triumphs and funeral processions in Egypt; then it crossed the Seine. On the bridge were eight colossal statues, representing prudence, strength, justice, war, agriculture, art commerce, and eloquence.

The statues along the Champs Elysées were Victories, each inscribed with the name of some Napoleonic battle. Great haste had been required to get them ready. At the last moment Government had had to order from certain manufactories pairs of wings by the dozen, and bucklers and spears in the same way. All night the artists had been fixing these emblems on their statues. A statue of Marshal Ney, which had been ordered among those of the other marshals, was found to be, not of colossal, but of life size. It had to be hurriedly cut into three parts. The deficiency in the torso was concealed by flags, and the "bravest of the brave" took his place on a par with his comrades.

On the steps of the Chamber of Deputies was a colossal statue of Immortality, designed for the top of the Pantheon, but pressed into service on this occasion, holding forth a gilded crown as if about to place it on the coffin of the Emperor.

At the gate of the Invalides was another genuine statue, Napoleon in his imperial robes was holding forth the cordon of the Legion of Honor. This statue had been executed for the Pillar at Boulogne commemorative of the Army of England. It was surrounded by plaster statues of the departments of France, and was approached through a long line of marshals, statesmen, and the most illustrious of French kings, among them Louis XIV., who would have been much astonished to find himself rendering homage to a soldier of barely gentlemanly birth, born on an island which was not French in his time.

The coffin was borne by sailors into the Chapelle Ardente at the Invalides. "Sire," said Prince de Joinville to his father, "I present to you the body of the Emperor Napoleon."

"I receive it in the name of France," replied the king.

Then Marshal Soult put the Emperor's sword into the king's hand. "General Bertrand," said the king, "I charge you to lay it on the coffin of the Emperor. General Gourgaud, place the Emperor's hat also on the coffin."

Then began the appropriate religious ceremonies, and during the following week the public were admitted to view the coffin as it lay in state in the Chapelle Ardente. The crowd was very great. Women fainted daily, and many were almost pressed to death against the gilded rails.

After all, there was little to see. The coffin was enclosed in a sort of immense cage to keep it from intrusion, the air was heavy with incense, and the light was too dimly religious to show anything with distinctness.

A splendid tomb has since been erected to Napoleon in the Chapel of the Invalides, where he rests under the care of the war-worn soldiers of France. Few now can be living who fought under him. Not a Bonaparte was at his funeral; the only one then upon French soil was in a prison.

Napoleon sleeps where in his will he prayed that his remains might rest,—on the banks of the Seine.

[CHAPTER V.]

SOME CAUSES OF THE REVOLUTION OF 1848.

After the signing of the treaty of 1841, which restored the entente cordiale between France and England, and satisfied the other European Powers, Louis Philippe and his family were probably in the plenitude of their prosperity. The Duke of Orleans had been happily married; and although his wife was a Protestant,—which was not wholly satisfactory to Queen Marie Amélie,—the character of the Duchesse Hélène was so lovely that she won all hearts, both in her husband's family and among the people.

On the occasion of the fêtes given in Paris at the nuptials of the Duke of Orleans, in 1837, the sad presage of misfortune that had accompanied the marriage festivities of Marie Antoinette was repeated. One of the spectacles given to the Parisians was a sham attack on a sham citadel of Antwerp in the Champ de Mars. The crowd was immense, but all went well so long as the spectacle lasted. When the crowd began to move away, a panic took place. The old and the feeble were thrown down and trampled on. Twenty-four persons were killed, the fêtes were broken up, and all hearts were saddened both by the disaster and the omen.

One part of the festivities on that occasion consisted in the opening of the galleries of historical paintings at Versailles,—a magnificent gift made by the Citizen King to his people.

I have spoken already of the storming of Constantine. No French success since the wars of the Great Napoleon had been so brilliant; yet the Chamber of Deputies, in a fit of parsimony, reduced from two thousand to eleven hundred dollars the pension proposed by the ministers to be settled on the widow of General Damremont, the commander-in-chief, who had been killed by a round shot while giving orders to scale the walls. At the same time they voted two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the year's subsidy to the theatres of Paris for the amusement of themselves and their constituents.

Algeria proved a valuable school for soldiers; there Lamoricière, Changarnier, Cavaignac, Saint-Arnaud, Pélissier, and Bugeaud had their military education. Louis Philippe's three sons were also with the troops, sharing all the duties, dangers, and hardships of the campaign.

By the end of 1847 Abdul Kader had retired to a stronghold in the mountains, where, seeing that his cause was lost, he tendered his submission to the Duc d'Aumale, then governor of Algeria. The offer was accepted. Abdul Kader surrendered on an understanding that he should be conducted to some Mohammedan place of refuge,—Alexandria or St. Jean d'Acre. But this stipulation was disregarded by the French Government, whose breach of faith has always been considered a stain on the honor of Louis Philippe and his ministers. The Duc d'Aumale vehemently remonstrated, believing his own word pledged to the Arab chieftain. Abdul Kader, his wives, children, servants, and principal officers were taken to France, and for five years lived at Amboise, where some of the subordinate attendants, overcome by homesickness, committed suicide. In 1852 Louis Napoleon, who possibly had a fellow-feeling for captives, restored Abdul Kader to liberty, who thereupon took up his residence at Damascus. There he subsequently protected a large number of Christians from massacre, sheltering them in his house, and giving them food and clothing. He afterwards removed to the island of Ceylon, where, as everywhere else, he won "golden opinions" by his generous behavior.

Meantime, while France was in some respects in the full tide of prosperity, great discontent was growing up among the working-classes, reinforced by the worthless class, always ready for disturbances. In May, 1839, Barbès led an émeute in Paris which might have proved formidable. His attempt opened with a deliberate murder, and there was considerable fighting in the streets for about twenty-four hours. Barbès was condemned to death. The king was desirous to spare him, and yielded readily to the prayers of his sister, for whom an opportunity of interceding for him was obtained by the good offices of Lamartine.

The émeute of Barbès was regarded with disfavor by more experienced conspirators, but secret societies had introduced organization among the workmen. Moreover, they were led by the bourgeoisie with a cry for parliamentary reform, which at that period was the supposed panacea for every kind of evil.

The king was not popular. He was not the ideal Frenchman. He was a Frenchman of the épicier, or small grocer, type. As a bon père de famille he was anxious to settle his sons well in life. They were admirable young men, they deserved good wives, and as far as grace, beauty, and amiability went, they all obtained them; but up to 1846 not one of them had made a brilliant marriage. This good fortune Louis Philippe hoped was reserved for his two younger sons,—D'Aumale and Montpensier.

The Duke of Orleans was the most popular of the king's sons. Handsome, elegant, accomplished, and always careful in his toilet, he was a thorough Frenchman,—the approved type of an aristocrat with liberal sympathies and ideas. He was born at Palermo in 1810, and did not come to France till he was four years old. He had an excellent tutor, who prepared him for his collège. There he took his place entirely on a par with other boys, and gained several prizes. All Louis Philippe's sons were sent to public schools.

The duke afterwards prepared for and entered the Polytechnic, which is said to demand more hard study than any other school in the world. He made his first campaign in Africa in 1835, and afterwards served with distinction in the early part of that one which resulted in the retreat from Constantine; but before Constantine was reached, a severe illness invalided him. He was a liberal in politics, the sincere friend of the working-classes, and was on intimate terms with men of letters, even with Victor Hugo, in spite of his advanced opinions. He was a patron of art and artists. Some beautiful table-pieces that he had ordered, by Barye, are now in the gallery of Mr. W. S. Walters, of Baltimore, they not having been completed when he died. His wife charmed every one by her good sense, grace, and goodness. They had had four years of happy married life, and had two little sons, when, in July, 1842, the duchess went for her health to the baths of Plombières, in the mountains of the Vosges. Her husband escorted her thither, and then returned to Paris, on his way to attend some military manœuvres near Boulogne.

As he was driving out to Neuilly to make his adieux to his family, the horses of his carriage were startled by an organ-grinder on the Avenue de Neuilly. The duke, who was alone, tried apparently to jump out of the carriage. Had he remained seated, all would have been well. He fell on his head on the pavé of the broad avenue, breaking the vertebral column.

He was carried into a small grocer's shop by the way-side, where afterwards a little chapel was erected by his family. Messengers were sent to the Château de Neuilly, and his father, mother, and sisters, without bonnets or hats, came rushing to the spot. He lived, unconscious, for four hours. A messenger was despatched at once to bring his wife from Plombières. She had just finished dressing for dinner, in full toilet, when the news reached her. Without changing her dress, she started instantly for Paris, but when she reached it, her husband was in his coffin.

When his will was opened, it was found to contain an earnest exhortation to his son that, whether he proved "one of those tools that Heaven fits for work, but does not use," or ascended the French throne, he "should always hold in his heart, above all things, love to France, and fidelity to the principles of the French Revolution."

Here is the poor Queen Amélie's account of the death of her son, written to a dear friend four days after:—

"My Chartres,[1] my beloved son, he whose birth made all my happiness, whose infancy and growing years were all my occupation, whose youth was my pride and consolation, and who would, as I hoped, be the prop of my old age, no longer lives. He has been taken from us in the midst of completed happiness, and of the happiest prospects of the future, whilst each day he gained in virtue, in understanding, in wisdom, following the footsteps of his noble and excellent father. He was more than a son to me,—he was my best friend. And God has taken him from me!... On the 2d of July he and Hélène left for Plombières, where the latter was to take the baths. He was, after establishing her there, to come back and spend a few days at the camp of St.-Omer, there to take command of an army corps, which was intended to execute great military manœuvres on the Marne, and which had been the object of his thoughts and employments for a year past. Accordingly, on the 9th he returned from Plombières, and came to dine with us at Neuilly, full of the subject of the elections, and talking of them with that warmth of heart and intellect which was apparent in all he did. Next day—my fête day—he came, contrary to his usual custom, with an enormous bouquet, telling me it was given in the name of the whole family. He heard mass, and breakfasted with us. He was so cheerful. He sat beside me at dinner. He got up, drank my health with much vivacity, and made the band play a particular tune,—in my honor, as he said. Who would have thought that this was the last time this dear child was to show me so much affection! On the 11th he again returned to dinner with us, much occupied all the time with the camp and the elections....

[Footnote 1: It was his first title before his father came to the throne. His mother always continued to use it.]

"On the 12th he arrived about four o'clock in his country suit. We conversed together about the health of Hélène, which was a subject of anxiety, about Clémentine's marriage, which he earnestly desired; about the elections and many other subjects, the discussion of which he always ended with the refrain: 'In short, dear Majesty, we finish as usual by agreeing in all important particulars.' And it was very true.

"After dinner we took a turn in the park, he and Victoire, Clémentine, D'Aumale, and I. Never had he been so gay, so brilliant, so affectionate. He spoke to me of his arrangements for the troops, of the time when the king was to go with us to Ste.-Menehoulde, of the time that he would spend there, and of his own daily occupations. He looked forward to giving his father a representation of the battle of Valmy. I gave him my arm, saying: 'Come, dear prop of my old age!' And the next day he was to be alive no longer!

"We returned to the drawing-room a little late. A great many people had arrived. He remained with us talking until ten o'clock, when on going away he came to bid me good-night. I gave him my hand, and said: 'You will come and see us tomorrow before going away?' He replied: 'Perhaps so.'

"On the next day, July 13, about eleven o'clock, we were about to get into the carriage to go to the Tuileries. As I followed the king to the red drawing-room, I saw Troussart, the commissary of police, with a terrified countenance whispering something to General Gourgaud, who made a gesture of horror, and went to speak in a low voice to the king. The king cried out: 'Oh, my God!' Then I cried: 'Something has happened to one of my children! Let nothing be kept from me!' The king replied: 'Yes, my dear; Chartres has had a fall on his way here, and has been carried into a house at Sablonville.' Hearing this, I began to run like a madwoman, in spite of the cries of the king and the remonstrances of M. de Chabannes, who followed me. But my strength was not equal to my impulses, and on getting as far as the farm, I was exhausted. Happily the king came up in the carriage with my sister, and I got in with them. Our carriage stopped. We got out in haste, and went into the cabaret, where in a small room, stretched upon a mattress on the floor, we found Chartres, who was at that moment being bled.... The death-rattle had begun. 'What is that?' said the king to me. I replied: 'Mon ami, this is death. For pity's sake let some one fetch a priest, that my poor child may not die like a dog!' and I went for a moment into a little side room, where I fell on my knees and implored God from my inmost soul, if He needed a victim, to take me and spare so dear a child....

"Dr. Pasquier arrived soon after. I said to him: 'Sir, you are a man of honor; if you think the danger imminent, I beseech you tell me so, that my child may receive extreme unction.' He hung his head, and said: 'Madame, it is true.'

"The curé of Neuilly came and administered the sacrament while we were all on our knees around the pallet, weeping and praying. I unloosed from my neck a small cross containing a fragment of the True Cross, and I put it into the hand of my poor child, that God the Saviour might have pity on him in his passage into eternity. Dr. Pasquier got up and whispered to the king. Then that venerable and unhappy father, his face bathed in tears, knelt by the side of his eldest son, and tenderly embracing him, cried; 'Oh that it were I instead of thee!' I also drew near and kissed him three times,—once for myself, once for Hélène, and once for his children. I laid upon his lips the little cross, the symbol of our redemption, and then placed it on his heart and left it there. The whole family kissed him by turns, and then each returned to his place.... His breathing now became irregular. Twice it stopped, and then went on. I asked that the priest might come back and say the prayers for the dying. He had scarcely knelt down and made the sign of the cross, when my dear child drew a last deep breath, and his beautiful, good, generous, and noble soul left his body.... The priest at my request said a De profundis. The king wanted to lead me away, but I begged him to allow me to embrace for the last time my beloved son, the object of my deepest tenderness. I took his dear head in my hands; I kissed his cold and discolored lips; I placed the little cross again upon them, and then carried it away, bidding a last farewell to him whom I loved so well,—perhaps too well!

"The king led me into the next room. I fell on his neck. We were unhappy together. Our irreparable loss was common to us both, and I suffered as much for him as for myself. There was a crowd in that little room. I wept and talked wildly, and I was beside myself. I recognized no one but the unhappy Marshal Gérard, the extent of whose misfortune I then understood.[1] After a few minutes they said that all was ready. The body had been placed on a stretcher covered with a white cloth. It was borne by four men of the house, attended by two gendarmes. They went out through the stable-yard; there was an immense crowd outside.... We all followed on foot the inanimate body of this dear son, who a few hours before had passed over the same road full of life, strength, and happiness.... Thus we carried him, and laid him down in our dear little chapel, where four days before he had heard mass with the whole family."

[Footnote 1: Marshal Gérard was then mourning for his son.]

The death of the Duke of Orleans was the severest blow that could have fallen on Louis Philippe, not only as a father, but as head of a dynasty. The duke left two infant sons,—the Comte de Paris and the Duc de Chartres. The former is now both the Orleanist and Legitimist pretender, to the French throne.

In the early part of 1845 Louis Philippe, who had already visited Windsor and been cordially received there, was visited in return at his Château d'Eu by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, accompanied by Lord Aberdeen, then English Minister for Foreign Affairs. The king's reception of the young queen was most paternal. He kissed her like a father, and did everything in his power to make her visit pleasant. Among the subjects discussed during the visit was the question of "the Spanish marriages."

The unfortunate Queen of Spain, Isabella II., was just sixteen years old; her sister, the Infanta Luisa, was a year younger. Isabella was the daughter of a vicious race, and with such a mother as she had in Queen Christina, she had grown up to early womanhood utterly ignorant and untrained. One of her ministers said of her that "no one could be astonished that she had vices, but the wonder was that she had by nature so many good qualities." Jolly, kindly, generous, a rebel against etiquette, and an habitual breaker of promises, she was long popular in Spain, in spite of a career of dissoluteness only equalled by that of Catherine of Russia.

In 1846, however, she had not shown this tendency, and in the hands of a good husband might have made as good a wife and as respectable a woman as her sister Luisa has since proved.

There were many candidates for the honor of Queen Isabella's hand. Louis Philippe sent his sons D'Aumale and Montpensier to Madrid to try their fortunes; but England objected strongly to an alliance which might make Spain practically a part of France. The candidature of the French princes was therefore withdrawn.

A prince of the Catholic branch of the Coburgs was then proposed,—Prince Ferdinand, who made subsequently an excellent king-consort in Portugal; but to him France objected, as too nearly allied to the English Crown. Finally the suitors were reduced to three,—the queen's cousin Enrique (Henry), a rough sailor of rather radical opinions and turbulent ways; the Comte de Trepani, a Neapolitan prince, a man of small understanding; and another cousin, Don Francisco d'Assis, a creature weak alike in mind and body, whom it was an outrage to think of as fit mate for a young queen. England was willing to consent to the queen's marrying anyone of these princes, and also that the Duc de Montpensier should marry the Infanta Luisa, provided that the queen was first married and had had a child. All this was fully agreed upon in the conference at Eu. But Christina, the queen-mother, who had been plundering the Spanish treasury till she had accumulated an enormous fortune, offered, if Louis Philippe would use his influence to prevent any inquiry into the state of her affairs, to further his views as to the Duc de Montpensier.

It seems more like a scene in the Middle Ages than an actual transaction in our own century, that at midnight, in a Spanish palace, a dissolute Italian dowager and a French ambassador should have been engaged in coercing a sovereign of sixteen into a detested marriage. As morning dawned, the sobbing girl had given her consent to marry Don Francisco, and the ambassador of Louis Philippe, pale from the excitement of his vigil, left the palace to send word of his disgraceful victory to his master. The Duc de Montpensier, who was in waiting on the frontier, soon arrived in Madrid, and Isabella and Luisa were married on the same day; while M. Guizot, who was head of the French Government, and Louis Philippe excused their breach of faith to the queen of England by saying that Queen Isabella was married before her sister, though on the same morning.

Isabella at once banished her unwelcome husband to a country seat, and flung herself headlong into disgraceful excesses.

Queen Victoria was greatly hurt by the treachery displayed by Louis Philippe and his minister, and doubtless, as a woman she was deeply sorry for the young queen. Louis Philippe not only lost credit, popularity, and the support he derived from the personal friendship of the Queen and the Prince Consort of England, but he obtained no chance of the throne of Spain for his son by his wicked devices; for Queen Isabella, far from being childless, had three daughters and a son. The latter, subsequently Alfonso XII., married, in spite of much opposition, his lovely cousin Mercedes, daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Montpensier. She died a few months after her marriage, so that no son or grandson of Louis Philippe will be permitted by Providence to mount the Spanish throne.

The affair of the Spanish marriages, the quarrel it involved with Queen Victoria, and the loss to Louis Philippe of personal honor, had a great effect upon him; he became irritable and obstinate, and at the same time weak of will.

Troubles multiplied around him. Things with which he had nothing whatever to do increased his unpopularity, and the secret societies kept discontents alive. Everything that went wrong in France was charged upon the king and the royal family.

One of the great families in France was that of Choiseul-Praslin. The head of it in Louis Philippe's time was a duke who had married Fanny, daughter of Marshal Sébastiani, an old officer of Napoleon and a great favorite with Louis Philippe. The Duc de Praslin had given in his adhesion to the Orleans dynasty, while so many old families stood aloof, and was in consequence made an officer in the Duchess of Orleans' household. The Duc and Duchesse de Praslin had ten children. The duchess was a stout, matronly little woman, rather pretty, with strong affections and a good deal of sentiment. Several times she had had cause to complain of her husband, and did complain somewhat vehemently to her own family; but their matrimonial differences had always been made up by Marshal Sébastiani. The world considered them a happy married pair.

After seventeen years of married life a governess was engaged for the nine daughters, a Mademoiselle Henriette de Luzy. She was a Parisian by birth, but had been educated in England, had English connections, and spoke English fluently. She was one of those women who make a favorable impression upon everyone brought into personal contact with them. Soon the children adored her, and it was not long before the duke had come under the same spell. The duchess found herself completely isolated in her own household; husband and children had alike gone over to this stranger. The duchess wrote pathetic letters to her husband, pleading her own affection for him, and her claims as a wife and a mother. These letters no doubt exasperated the duke, but we read them with deep pity for her whose heart they lay bare.

It is to be understood that there was apparently no scandal—that is, scandal in the usual sense—in the relations between the duke and Mademoiselle de Luzy. She had simply bewitched a weak man who had grown tired of his wife, and had cast the same spell over his children; and she had not the superiority of character which would have led her to throw up a lucrative situation because she was making a wife and mother (whom doubtless she considered very unreasonable) extremely unhappy.

At last things came to such a pass that Madame de Praslin appealed to her father, insisting on a legal separation from her husband. The marshal intervened, and the affair was compromised. Mademoiselle de Luzy was to be honorably discharged, and the duchess was to renounce her project of separation. Mademoiselle de Luzy therefore gave up her situation, and went to board in a pension in Paris with her old schoolmistress. Madame de Praslin went to her country house, the magnificent Château de Vaux, where she herself undertook the education of her children; but in their estimation she by no means replaced Mademoiselle de Luzy, whom from time to time they visited in company with their father.

In the middle of the summer of 1847 it was arranged that the whole family should go to the seaside, and they came up to Paris to pass one night in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré at the Hôtel Sébastiani. Like most French establishments, the Hôtel Sébastiani was divided between the marshal and his daughter, the old marshal occupying one floor during the winter, the duke and duchess, with their family, the one above it, while the servants of both establishments had their sleeping-rooms under the roof. The house was of gray stone, standing back in a yard; the French call such a situation entre cour et jardin. The duke had been in Paris several times during the previous week, and had occupied his own rooms, where the concierge and his wife—the only servants left in the house—had remarked that he seemed very busy.

It was afterwards reported in the neighborhood, but I do not think the circumstance was ever officially brought out, that the police found subsequently that all the screws but one that held up the heavy tester over the bed of the duchess, had been removed, and the holes filled with wax; it is certain that the duke partly unscrewed the bolt that fastened the door of her dressing-room.

On the evening of the family's arrival in Paris, the father and children went in a carriage to see Mademoiselle de Luzy. She told the duke that she could get a good situation, provided the duchess would give her a certificate of good conduct; and the duke at parting promised to obtain it for her.

The whole family went to bed early, that they might be ready to start for the seaside betimes upon the morrow. The children's rooms were in a wing of the building, at some distance from the chambers of their father and mother. The concierge and his wife slept in their lodge. Towards one o'clock in the morning they were awakened by screams; but they lay still, imagining that the noise came from the Champs Elysées. Then they heard the loud ringing of a bell, and starting from their bed, rushed into the main building. The noise had proceeded from the duchess's chamber. They knocked at the door, but there was no answer, only low moans. They consulted together, and then roused the maid and valet, who were sleeping in the attic chambers. Again they knocked, and there was no answer. The valet then went to the duke's room, which looked upon the garden and communicated with the dressing-room of the duchess by a balcony and window as well as by the door. The duke opened the door of his chamber. He was in his dressing-gown. When he heard what was the matter, he went at once through the window into the duchess's chamber. There a scene of carnage unparalleled, I think, in the history of murder met their eyes. The duchess was lying across her bed, not yet quite dead, but beyond the power of speech. There were more than forty wounds on her body. She must have struggled desperately. The walls were bloody, the bell-rope was bloody, and the floor was bloody. The nightdress of the duchess was saturated with blood. Her hands were cut almost to pieces, as if she had grasped the blade of the knife that killed her. The furniture was overturned in all parts of the room.[1]

[Footnote 1: We were then living near the Hotel Sébastini. The excitement in the neighborhood the next morning is indescribable.]

At once the valet and the concierge ran for the police, for members of the family, and for a doctor. The duke retired to his dressing-room. One of the gentlemen who first arrived was so sickened by the sight of the bloody room that he begged for a glass of water. The valet ran for the nearest water at hand, and abruptly entered the duke's dressing-room. He had a glass with him, and was going to fill it from a pail standing near, when the duke cried out: "Don't touch it; it is dirty;" and at once emptied the contents out of the window, but not before the valet had seen that the water was red with blood. This roused his suspicions, and when all the servants in the house were put under arrest, he said quietly to the police: "You had better search the duke's dressing-room."

When this was done there could be no more doubt. Three fancy daggers were found, one of which had always hung in the chamber of the duchess. All of them were stained with blood. The duke had changed his clothes, and had tried to wash those he took off in the pail whose bloody water he had thrown away. Subsequently it was conjectured that his purpose had been to stab his wife in her sleep, and then by a strong pull to bring down upon her the heavy canopy. The bolt he had unscrewed permitted him at dead of night quietly to enter her chamber.

The police were puzzled as to how they ought to treat the murderer. As he was a peer of France, they could not legally arrest him without authority from the Chamber of peers, or from the king. The royal family was at Dreux. The king was appealed to at once, and immediately gave orders to arrest the duke and to summon the peers for his trial. But meantime the duke, who had been guarded by the police in his own chamber, had contrived to take poison. He took such a quantity of arsenic that his stomach rejected it. He did not die at once, but lingered several days, and was carried to prison at the Luxembourg, where the poison killed him by inches. He died untried, having made no confession.

His son, who was very young at the time of his parents' death, married an American lady when he grew to manhood. It was a long courtship, for the young duke's income went largely to keep in repair his famous Château de Vaux, where Fouquet had entertained Louis XIV. with regal magnificence. Finally a purchaser was found for the ancestral seat; and relieved of the obligations it involved, the duke married, and retired to his estates in Corsica.

As to Mademoiselle de Luzy, she was tried for complicity in the murder of the duchess, and acquitted. There was no evidence whatever against her. But popular feeling concerning her as the inciting cause of the poor duchess's death was so strong that by the advice of her pastor—the Protestant M. Coquerel—she changed her name and came to America. She brought letters of introduction to a family in Boston, who procured her a situation as governess in Connecticut. There she soon after married a Congregational minister.

It seems hard to imagine how such a tragedy could have borne its part among the causes of Louis Philippe's downfall; but those who look into Alison or Lamartine will see it set down as one of the events which greatly assisted in bringing about the revolution of February. Mobs, like women, are often swayed by persons rather than by principles.

It was believed by the populace that court favor had prevented the duke from going to prison like any common criminal, and that the same influence had procured him the poison by which he escaped a public execution.

[CHAPTER VI.]

THE DOWNFALL OF LOUIS PHILIPPE.

As I said in the last chapter, everything in the year 1847 and during the opening weeks of 1848 seemed unfavorable to Louis Philippe. Besides the causes of dissatisfaction I have mentioned, there was a scarcity of grain, there were drains on the finances, there was disaffection among the National Guard, and hostility among the peers to the measures of the Ministry. Then came the conviction of M. Teste, a member of the Cabinet, for misappropriating public funds. Even private affairs seemed turned against the royal family. Madame Lafarge murdered her husband, and it was said that the court had attempted to procure her acquittal because she was connected with the house of Orleans by a bar-sinister. A quarrel about an actress led to a duel. The man wounded was a journalist who was actively opposed to the king's Government. It was hinted that the duel was a device of the court to get him put out of the way. But the greatest of the king's misfortunes was the death of his admirable sister, Madame Adélaïde, in January, 1848. She had been all his life his bosom friend and his chief counsellor. She died of a severe attack of influenza.

In a letter from the Prince de Joinville to the Duc de Nemours, found in the garden of the Tuileries in February, 1848, among many valuable documents that had been flung from the windows of the palace by the mob, the situation of things at the close of 1847 and the beginning of 1848 is thus summed up by one brother writing in confidence to another:—

"The king will listen to no advice. His own will must be paramount over everything. It seems to me impossible that in the Chamber of Deputies at the next session the anomalous state of the government should fail to attract attention. It has effaced all traces of constitutional government, and has put forward the king as the primary, and indeed sole, mover upon all occasions. There is no longer any respect for ministers; their responsibility is null, everything rests with the king. He has arrived at an age when he declines to listen to suggestions. He is accustomed to govern, and he loves to show that he does so. His immense experience, his courage, and his great qualities lead him to face danger; but it is not on that account the less real or imminent."

Then, after further summing up the state of France,—the finances embarrassed, the entente cordiale with England at an end, and the provinces in confusion,—the prince adds: "Those unhappy Spanish marriages!—we have not yet drained the cup of bitterness they have mixed for us to drink."

In this state of things the opposition party was divided into liberals who wished for reform, and liberals who aimed at revolution. For a while the two parties worked together, and their war-cry was Reform! There was little or no parliamentary opposition, for the Chamber of Peers and the Chamber of Deputies were alike virtually chosen by the Crown. The population of France in 1848 was thirty-five millions; but those entitled to vote were only two hundred and forty thousand, or one to every one hundred and forty-six of the population, and of these a large part were in Government employ. It was said that the number of places in the gift of the Ministry was sixty-three thousand, every place, from that of a guard upon a railroad to that of a judge upon the bench, being disposed of by ministerial favor.

The plan adopted to give expression to the public discontent was the inauguration of reform banquets. To these large crowds were attracted, both from political motives and from a desire in the rural districts to hear the great speakers, Lamartine and others, who had a national renown. Many of the speeches were inflammatory. The health of the king was never drunk on these occasions, but the "Marseillaise" was invariably played.

Seventy-four of these banquets had been given in the provinces, when it was decided to give one in Paris; and a large inclosed piece of ground on the Rue Chaillot, not far from the Arch of Triumph, was fixed upon for the purpose. This banquet was to take place on Tuesday, Feb. 22, 1848. Until Monday afternoon opinions seemed divided as to whether it would be suffered to go on. But meantime the city had been crammed with troops, and the sleep of its inhabitants had been broken night after night by the tramp of regiments and the rumble of artillery. Monday, February 21, was a beautiful day, the air was soft and genial, the streets and the Champs Elysées were very gay. Scarcely any one was aware at that time that it was the intention of the Government to forbid the banquet; but that night the preparations made for it were carted away by order of the liberal leaders, who had been warned of the decision of the authorities, while at the same time every loose paving-stone that might help to erect a barricade was, by orders from the police, removed out of the way.

When morning dawned, a proclamation, forbidding the banquet, was posted on every street-corner. The soldiers were everywhere confined to their quarters, the windows of which were stuffed with mattresses; but to residents in Paris the day seemed to pass quietly, though about noon the Place de la Madeleine was full of men surrounding the house of Odillon Barrot, the chief leader of the opposition, demanding what, under the circumstances, they had better do. In the Place de la Concorde, troops were endeavoring to prevent the crowd from crossing the Seine and assembling in front of the Chamber of Deputies. In order to break up the throng upon the bridge, a heavy wagon was driven over it at a rapid pace, escorted by soldiers, who slashed about them with their sheathed swords. At the residence of M. Guizot, then both Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs, a large crowd had assembled and had broken his windows; but the rioters were dispersed the Municipal Guard and the Police.

In the afternoon, on the Place de la Concorde, a party of men and boys, apparently without leaders, contrived to break through the troops guarding the bridge, and began to ascend the steps of the Chamber of Deputies. Being refused admission to the hall, they proceeded to break windows and do other damage. Then a party of dragoons began to clear the bridge, but good-humoredly, and the people were retiring as fast as they might, when a detachment of the Municipal Guard arrived. The Municipal Guard was a handsome corps of mounted police, the men being all stalwart and fine-looking. They wore brazen helmets and horse-tails and glittering breastplates, but they were very unpopular, while the National Guards were looked on by the rioters as their supporters. The Municipal Guards, when they came upon the bridge, began treating the crowd roughly, a good many persons were hurt, and an old woman was trodden down. At this the crowd grew furious, stones were thrown, and the soldiers drew their swords. Before nightfall there was riot and disorder all over Paris. Towards dusk the rappel—the signal for the National Guard to muster—had been beaten in the streets, and soon many soldiers of that body might be seen, escorted by men in blouses carrying their guns, while the National Guards, unarmed, were shouting and singing.

All Tuesday, February 22, the affair was a mere riot. But during the night the secret societies met, and decided on more formidable action.

The next morning was chilly and rainy, very dispiriting to the troops, who had bivouacked all night in the public squares, where they had been ill-provided with food and forage. The coats and swords of the students at the Polytechnic had been removed during the night, to prevent their joining the bands who were singing the "Marseillaise" and the "Dernier Chant des Girondins" under their windows.

Meantime barricades had been raised in the thickly populated parts of Paris, and successful efforts had been made to enlist the sympathies of the soldiers and the National Guard.

During the early hours of Wednesday, the 23d, reports of these disaffections succeeded each other rapidly at the Tuileries, and a council was held in the king's cabinet, to which the queen and the princes were invited. The king spoke of resigning his crown, adding that he was "fortunate in being able to resign it." "But you cannot abdicate, mon ami," said the queen. "You owe yourself to France. The demand made is for the resignation of the Ministry. M. Guizot should resign, and I feel sure that being the man of honor that he is, he will do so in this emergency."

M. Guizot and his colleagues at once gave in their resignations. The king wept as he embraced them, bidding them farewell. Count Molé was then called in and requested to form a ministry. Before he could do so, however, things had grown worse, and M. Thiers, instead of Count Molé, was made head of the Cabinet. He insisted that Odillon Barrot, the day before very popular with the insurgents, must be his colleague. The king declined to assent to this. To put Odillon Barrot into power, he said, was virtually to abandon the policy of his reign.

But before this matter was decided, there had occurred a lamentable massacre at the gates of the residence of M. Guizot, the Minister for Foreign Affairs. The building had been surrounded by a fierce crowd, composed mainly of working-men from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Some confusion was occasioned by the restlessness of a horse belonging to an officer in command of a squad of cavalry detailed to defend the building. The leader of the mob fired a pistol. The soldiers responded with a volley from their carbines. Fifty of the crowd were killed. The bodies were piled by the mob upon a cart and paraded through Paris, the corpse of a half-naked woman lying conspicuously among them. The sight everywhere woke threats of vengeance.

The king, when he heard of this, yielded. Odillon Barrot was associated with M. Thiers, and Marshal Bugeaud was placed in command of the military.

M. Thiers' foible was omniscience; and to Bugeaud's amazement, amusement, and indignation he insisted on inspecting his military plans and giving his advice concerning them. Happily the marshal's plans met with the approval of the minister, and the commander-in-chief went to his post; while Odillon Barrot, accompanied by Horace Vernet, the painter, went forth into the streets to inform the insurgents that their demand for reform had been granted, that the obnoxious ministers had been dismissed, and that all power was made over to himself and to his colleagues.

Marshal Bugeaud found everything in wild confusion at the War Office; but was restoring order, and had marched four columns of troops through Paris without serious opposition, when he received orders from M. Thiers that not another shot was to be fired by the soldiers. The marshal replied that he would not obey such orders unless he received them from the king. The Duc de Nemours therefore signed the paper in the name of his father, and soon afterwards a new proclamation was posted on the walls:—

Citizens! An order has been given to suspend all firing. We are charged by the king to form a ministry. The Chamber is about to be dissolved. General Lamoricière has been appointed Commander-in-Chief of the National Guard. Messieurs Odillon Barrot, Thiers, Lamoricière, and Duvergier de Haurannes are ministers. Our watchwords are,—Order, Union, Reform!

(Signed) ODILLON BARROT.
THIERS.

This proclamation may be said to have been the beginning of the end. The soldiers were disgusted; supporters of the monarchy lost heart; the secret societies now felt that the game was in their hands. By that time barricades without number, it was said, had been thrown up in the streets. The suburbs of Paris were cut off from the capital. During the previous night, arms had been everywhere demanded from private houses; but in obtaining them the insurgents endeavored to inspire no unnecessary terror. One lady in the English quarter was found kneeling by the bedside of her dying child. When a party of armed men entered the chamber they knelt down, joined their prayers to hers for the soul that was departing, and then quitted the room in silence, placing a guard and writing over the door in chalk: "Respect this house, for death is here."

By nine o'clock on Wednesday morning the troops, disgusted by the order which forbade them to defend themselves, reversed their arms and fraternized with the people, the officers sheathing their swords.

A little later, Odillon Barrot, who supposed himself to be the people's favorite, rode along the Boulevard to proclaim to the rioters that he was now their minister, and that the cause of reform was assured. He was met with cries of "Never mind him! We have no time to hear him! Too late, too late! We know all he has to say!" About the same time the École Militaire was taken; but a guard en blouse was posted to protect the apartments of the ladies of the governor. The fight before the Palais Royal occurred about noon. The palace, which was the private property of Louis Philippe, was sacked, and many valuable works of art were destroyed.

The royal family were sitting down to breakfast about midday when a party of gentlemen, among them M. Émile de Girardin, made their way into the Tuileries, imploring the king to abdicate at once and spare further bloodshed. Without a word, Louis Philippe drew pen and paper towards him and wrote his abdication. Embracing his grandson, the little Comte de Paris, he went out, saying to the gentlemen about him: "This child is your king."

Through the Pavillon de l'Horloge, the main entrance to the Tuileries, came a party of dragoons, leading their horses down the marble steps into the gardens. The victorious blouses already filled the inner court, the Place du Carrousel. The royal family, slenderly attended, followed the king. The crowd poured into the Tuileries on the side of the Carrousel as the royal family quitted it through the gardens.

In the Place de la Concorde, beneath the old Egyptian obelisk which had witnessed so many changes in this troubled world, they found two cabs in waiting. The king and queen entered one, with several of the children. Into the second stepped the Duchesse de Nemours, the Princess Clémentine, and an attendant. Some persons in the crowd who recognized them, cried out: "Respect old age! Respect misfortune!" And when an officer in attendance called out to the crowd not to hurt the king, he was answered: "Do you take us for assassins? Let him get away!"

This, indeed, was the general feeling. Only a few persons ventured to insult the royal family. The coachmen, however, drove off in such haste that the Spanish princess, Luisa, Duchesse de Montpensier, was left alone upon the sidewalk, weeping bitterly. A Portuguese gentleman gave her his arm, and took her in search of her husband's aide-de-camp, General Thierry. With several other gentlemen, who formed a guard about her, they passed back into the garden of the Tuileries, where M. Jules de Lasteyrie, the grandson of Lafayette, took possession of the duchess and escorted her to his own house. From thence, a few days later, he forwarded her to the coast, where she rejoined her husband.

When the king quitted the Tuileries he was urged to leave behind him a paper conferring the regency on the Duchess of Orleans. He refused positively. "It would be contrary to law," he said; "and I have never yet done anything, thank God! contrary to law." "But what must I do," asked the duchess, "without friends, without relations, without counsel?" "Ma chère Hélène," the king replied, "the dynasty and the crown of your son are intrusted to you. Remain here and protect them."

As the mob began to pour into the palace after the king's departure, the duchess, by the advice of M. Dupin, the President (or Speaker) of the Chamber, set out on foot to cross the bridge nearest to the palace, and to reach the Palais Bourbon. She held her eldest son, the Comte de Paris, by the hand; her youngest, who was too small to walk, was carried by an aide-de-camp. Beside them walked M. Dupin, the Duc de Nemours, and a faithful servant. They left the Tuileries in such haste that they failed to give orders to the faithful Garde Municipale, who would have suffered the fate of the Swiss Guard in 1792, had not National Guards in the crowd assisted them to change their conspicuous uniforms and to escape out of the windows.

During the first half hour after the invasion of the palace a great deal of money and many other valuables disappeared; but after that time it was death to appropriate anything, even if it were of little value.

Soon the gardens of the Tuileries were white with papers flung from the windows of the palace, many of them of great historical value. A piece of pink gauze, the property, probably, of some maid-of-honor, streamed from one of the windows in the roof and fluttered across the whole building. The crowd, in high good humor, tossed forth livery coats, fragments of state furniture, and papers. The beds still stood unmade, and all the apparatus of the ladies' toilet-tables remained in disorder. In one royal bed-chamber a man was rubbing pomade with both hands into his hair, another was drenching himself with perfume, a third was scrubbing his teeth furiously with a brush that had that morning parted the lips of royalty. In another room a man en blouse was seated at a piano playing the "Marseillaise" to an admiring audience (the "Marseillaise" had been forbidden in Paris for many years). Elsewhere a party of gamins were turning over a magnificent scrapbook. In the next room was a grand piano, on which four men were thumping at once. In another, a party of working-men were dancing a quadrille, while a gentleman played for them upon a piano. At every chimney-piece and before every work of art stood a guard, generally ragged and powder-stained, bearing a placard, "Death to Robbers!" while at the head of the Grand Staircase others stood, crying, "Enter, messieurs! Enter! We don't have cards of admission to this house every day!" While the cry that passed through the crowd was: "Look as much as you like, but take nothing!" "Are not we magnificent in our own house, Monsieur?" said a gamin to an Englishman; while another was to be seen walking about in one of poor Queen Amélie's state head-dresses, surmounted by a bird-of-paradise with a long tail.

At first the crowd injured nothing, even the king's portraits being respected; but after a while the destruction of state furniture began. Three men were seen smoking in the state bed; some ate up the royal breakfast; and the cigars of the princes were freely handed to rough men in the crowd.

Meantime in the Chamber of Deputies the scene was terrible. M. Dupin, its president, lost his head. Had he, when he knew of the king's abdication, declared the sitting closed, and directed the Deputies to disperse, he might possibly have saved the monarchy. But the mob got possession of the tribune (the pulpit from which alone speeches can be made in the Chamber); they pointed their guns at the Deputies, who cowered under their benches, and the last chance for Louis Philippe's dynasty was over. Odillon Barrot, who had come down to the house full of self-importance, notwithstanding his reception on the Boulevards, found that his hour was over and his power gone.

M. de Lamartine was the idol of the mob, though he was very nearly shot in the confusion. Armed insurgents crowded round him, clinging to his skirts, his hands, his knees. Throughout the tumult the reporters for the "Moniteur" kept their seats, taking notes of what was passing.

The Duchess of Orleans found the Chamber occupied by armed men. She was jostled and pressed upon. A feeble effort was made to proclaim her son king, and to appoint her regent during his minority. She endeavored several times to speak, and behaved with an intrepidity which did her honor. But when Lamartine, mounting the tribune, cast aside her claims, and announced that the moment had arrived for proclaiming a provisional government and a republic, she was hustled and pushed aside by the crowd.

She was dressed in deep mourning. Her long black veil, partly raised, showed her fair face marred with sorrow and anxiety. Her children were dressed in little black velvet skirts and jackets, with large white turned-down collars. Soon the crowd around the tribune, beneath which the duchess had her seat, grew so furious that her attendants, fearing for her life, hurried her away.

In the press and the confusion the Duc de Nemours and her two children were parted from her. The Comte de Paris was seized by a gigantic man en blouse, who said afterwards that he had been only anxious to protect the child; but a National Guard forced the boy from his grasp, and restored him to his mother. The Duc de Chartres was for some time lost, and was in great danger, having been knocked down on the staircase by an ascending crowd.

At last, however, the little party, under the escort of the Duc de Nemours, who had disguised himself, escaped on foot into the streets, then growing dark; and finding a hackney-coach, persuaded the coachman to drive them to a place of safety. The Duc de Chartres was not to be found, and his mother passed many hours of terrible anxiety before he was restored to her arms.

Very strange that night was the scene in the Champs Elysées. They were filled with a joyous and triumphant crowd in every variety of military costume, and armed with every sort of weapon. Soldiers alone were unarmed. They marched arm-in-arm with their new friends, singing, like them, the "Marseillaise" and "Mourir pour la Patrie." In the quarter of the Champs Elysées, where well-to-do foreigners formed a considerable part of the population, there was no ferocity exhibited by the mob. The insurgents were like children at play,—children on their good behavior. They had achieved a wonderful and unexpected victory. The throne had fallen, as if built on sand. Those who had overturned it were in high good-humor.

A French mob at the present day is very different. It has the modern grudge of laborer against employer, it has memories of the license of the Commune, and above all it has learned the use of absinthe. There is a hatred and a contempt for all things that should command men's reverence, which did not display itself in 1848.

May I here be permitted to relate a little story connected with this day's events? I was with my family in Paris during those days of revolution. Our nurse,—an Englishwoman who had then been with us twenty-five years, and who died recently, at the age of ninety-eight, still a member of our family,—when we returned home from viewing the devastation at the Tuileries, expressed strongly her regret at not having accompanied us. She was consoled, however, by an offer from our man-servant to escort her down the Champs Elysées. They made their way to the Place du Carrousel, at the back of the palace, where a dense crowd was assembled, and the good lady became separated from her protector. The National Guard and the servants in the palace had just succeeded in getting the crowd out of the rooms and in closing the doors. This greatly disappointed our good nurse. She had counted on seeing the interior of the king's abode, and above all, the king's throne. She could speak very little French, but she must in some way have communicated her regrets to the crowd around her. "Does Madame desire so much to pass in?" said a big man in a blouse, girt with a red sash, and carrying a naked sword; "then Madame shall pass in!" Thereupon he and his followers in the front rank of the crowd so bepummelled the door with the hilts of their swords and the stocks of their muskets that those within were forced to throw it open. In marched our dear nurse beside her protector. They passed through room after room until they reached the throne-room; there she indicated her wish to obtain a relic of departed royalty. Instantly her friend with the bare sword sliced off from the throne a piece of red velvet with gold embroidery. She kept it ever after, together with a delicate china cup marked L. P.; but the cup was much broken. "You see, dears," she would say to us, "there was lots of things like these lying about, but there were men standing round with naked swords ready to cut your head off if you stole anything. So I took this cup and broke it. It was not stealing to carry off a broken cup, you know." And she would add, when winding up her narrative: "Those Frenchmen was so polite to me that they did n't even tread on my corns."

That night there was a brilliant conflagration in the Carrousel. It was a bonfire of those very carriages which eighteen years before the mob had brought in triumph to Louis Philippe from the stables of Charles X. at Rambouillet.

All the next day not a newspaper was to be had. The "Presse," indeed, brought out a half sheet, mainly taken up in returning thanks to two compositors "who, between two fires," had been "so considerate" as to set up the type. But their consideration could not have lasted long, for the news broke off abruptly in the middle of a sentence on the first page. Events worked faster than compositors.

By noon on Friday, February 25, the entire population of Paris was in the streets. From the flags on public offices, the blue and white strips had been tom away. On that day—but on that day only—every man wore a red ribbon in his button-hole. Many did so very unwillingly, for red was understood to be the badge of Red Republicanism.

On the Boulevards the iron railings had been tom up, and most of the trees had been cut down. They were replanted, however, not long after, to the singing of the "Marseillaise" and the firing of cannon. For more than a week there was a strange quiet in Paris: no vehicles were in the streets, for the paving-stones had been torn up for barricades; no shops were open; on the closed shutters of most of them appeared the words "Armes données," Everywhere a paintbrush had been passed over the royal arms. Even the words "roi," "reine," "royal," were effaced. The patriots were very zealous in exacting these removals. Two gamins with swords hacked patiently for two hours at a cast-iron double-headed Austrian eagle.

Change (small money, I mean) was hardly to be had in Paris. For a month it was necessary, in order to obtain it, to apply at the Mairie of the Arrondissement, and to stand for hours in a queue. Other money could be had only from the bankers in thousand-franc notes. Shopping was of course at an end, and half Paris was thrown out of employment. Gold and silver were hidden away.

Louis Philippe and his family drove in their two cabriolets to Versailles. There they found great difficulty in getting post-horses. Indeed, they would have procured none, had there not been some cavalry horses in the place, which were harnessed to one of the royal carriages. About midnight of their second day's journey they reached Dreux. There Louis Philippe found himself without money, and had to borrow from one of his tenants. He had left behind him in his haste three hundred and fifty thousand francs on a table in the Tuileries.

The Provisional Government, which was kept well informed as to his movements, forwarded to him a supply of money. At Dreux the king's party was joined by the Duke of Montpensier with news that the king's attempt to save the monarchy by abdication had failed.

The old man seemed stupefied by his sudden fall. Over and over again he was heard to repeat: "Comme Charles X.! Comme Charles X.!" The next day, travelling under feigned names, the royal party pushed on to Evreux, where they were hospitably received by a farmer in the forest, who harnessed his work-horses to their carriage. Thence they went on to their own Château d'Eu. The danger to which during this journey they were exposed arose, not from the new Government at Paris, but from the excited state of the peasantry.

After many perils and adventures, sometimes indeed travelling on foot to avoid dangerous places, they reached Harfleur on March 3. An English steamer, the "Express," lay at the wharf, on which the king and queen embarked as Mr. and Mrs. William Smith. The following morning they were off the English coast, at Newbern. They landed, and proceeded at once to Claremont, the palace given to their son-in-law, Leopold of Belgium, for his lifetime by the English Parliament.

The government set up in Paris was a provisional one. The members of the Provisional Government were many of them well known to the public, and of approved character. No men ever had a more difficult task before them, and none ever tried with more self-sacrifice to do their duty.

The measures they proposed were eighteen in number:

1. The retention of the tricolor.
2. The retention of the Gallic cock.
3. The sovereignty of the people.
4. The dissolution of the Chamber of Deputies.
5. The suppression of the Chamber of Peers.
6. The convocation of a National Assembly.
7. Work to be guaranteed to all working-men.
8. The unity of the army and the populace.
9. The formation of a Garde Mobile.
10. The arrest and punishment of all deserters.
11. The release of all political prisoners.
12. The trial of M. Guizot and his colleagues.
13. The reduction of Vincennes and Fort Valérien, still held by the troops for the king.
14. All officials under Louis Philippe to be released from their oaths.
15. All objects at the Mont de Piété (the Government pawn-broking establishment) valued under ten francs, to be restored.
16. All National Guards dismissed under preceding Governments to be reinstated.
17. The million of francs expended on the court to be given to disabled workmen.
18. A paternal commission to be nominated, to look after the interests of the working-classes.

The institution of the Garde Mobile was a device for finding employment for those boys and young men who formed one of the most dangerous of the dangerous classes.

It is easy to see how tempting these promises were to working-men; and yet the better class among them mourned their loss of steady employment. The Revolution of 1848, though it was not originated by the working-classes, was made to appear as if it were intended for their profit; and that indeed was its ruin, for it was found impossible to keep the promises of work, support, parental protection, etc., made to the Parisian masses. The bourgeoisie, when they recovered from their astonishment and found that the stone they had set rolling under the name of reform had dislodged their own Revolution of 1830, and the peasants of the provinces, when they found that all the praise and all the profits were solely for the working-men of the capital, were very far from satisfied.

As to the upper classes, their terror and dismay were overwhelming. Everything seemed sliding away under their feet. Many women of rank and fashion, distrusting the stability of the king's government, had for some time past been yearly adding diamonds to their necklaces, because, as one of them exclaimed to us during this month of February: "We knew not what might happen to stocks or to securities, but diamonds we can put into our pockets. No other property in France can be called secure!"

And yet Paris soon resumed its wonted appearance. Commerce and shopping might be impossible in a city where nobody could make change for two hundred dollars, yet the Champs Elysées were again gay with pedestrians and carriages. All favorite amusements were resumed, but almost all men being idle, their great resource was to assemble round the Hôtel-de-Ville and force Lamartine to make a speech to them.

On Saturday, March 4, all Paris crowded to the Boulevards to witness the funeral cortège of the victims. There were neither military nor police to keep order; yet the crowd was on its good behavior, and strict decorum was maintained. There were about three hundred thousand persons in the procession, and as many more on the sidewalks. As they marched, mourners and spectators all sang the Chant of the Girondins ("Mourir pour la Patrie") and the "Marseillaise."

Two things distinguished this revolution of February from all other French revolutions before or after it,—the high character and self-devotion of the men placed at the head of affairs, and the absence of prejudice against religion. The revolution, so far from putting itself in antagonism with religious feeling, everywhere appealed to it. The men who invaded the Tuileries bowed before the crucifix in the queen's chamber. Priests who were known to be zealous workers among the poor were treated as fathers. Curés blessed the trees of liberty planted in their parishes. Prayers for the Republic were offered at the altars, and in country villages priests headed the men of their congregations who marched up to the polls.

ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE.

[CHAPTER VII.]

LAMARTINE AND THE SECOND REPUBLIC.[1]

[Footnote 1: For the subject-matter of this chapter I am largely indebted to Mrs. Oliphant's article on Lamartine in "Blackwood's Magazine.">[

The Provisional Government hastily set up in France on Feb. 24, 1848, consisted at first of five members; but that number was afterwards enlarged. M. Dupin, who had been President of the Chamber of Deputies, was made President of the Council (or prime minister); but the real head of the Government and Minister for Foreign Affairs was Alphonse de Lamartine. He was a Christian believer, a high-minded man, by birth an aristocrat, yet by sympathy a man of the masses. "He was full of sentimentalities of vainglory and of personal vanity; but no pilot ever guided a ship of state so skilfully and with such absolute self-devotion through an angry sea. For a brief while, just long enough to effect this purpose, he was the idol of the populace." With him were associated Crémieux, a Jew; Ledru-Rollin, the historian, a Red Republican; Arago, the astronomer; Hypolite Carnot, son of Lazare Carnot, Member of the Directory, father of the future president; General Casaignac, who was made governor of Algeria; Garnier-Pagès, who a second time became, in 1870, member of a Provisional Government for the defence of Paris; and several others.

The downfall of Louis Philippe startled and astonished even those who had brought it about. They had intended reform, and they drew down revolution. They hoped to effect a change of ministry: they were disconcerted when they had dethroned a king. There were about thirty thousand regular troops in Paris, besides the National Guard and the mounted police, or Garde Municipale. No one had imagined that the Throne of the Barricades would fall at the first assault. There were no leaders anywhere in this revolution. The king's party had no leaders; the young princes seemed paralyzed. The army had no leader; the commander-in-chief had been changed three times in twenty-four hours. The insurgents had no leaders. On February 22 Odillon Barrot was their hero, and on February 23 they hooted him.

The republicans, to their own amazement, were left masters of the field of battle, and Lamartine was pushed to the front as their chief man.

I may here pause in the historical narrative to say a few words about the personal history of Lamartine, which, indeed, will include all that history has to say concerning the Second Republic.

The love stories of the uncle and father of Alphonse de Lamartine are so pathetic, and give us so vivid a picture of family life before the First Revolution, that I will go back a generation, and tell them as much as possible in Lamartine's own words.

His grandfather had had six children,—three daughters and three sons. According to French custom, under the old régime, the eldest son only was to marry, and the other members of the Lamartine family proceeded as they grew up to fulfil their appointed destinies. The second son went into the Church, and rose to be a bishop. The third son, M. le Chevalier, went into the army. The sisters adopted the religious life, and thus all were provided for. But strange to say, the eldest son, to whose happiness and prosperity the rest were to be sacrificed, was the first rebel in the family. He fell in love with a Mademoiselle de Saint-Huruge; but her dot was not considered by the elder members of the family sufficient to justify the alliance. The young man gave up his bride, and to the consternation of his relatives announced that he would marry no other woman. M. le Chevalier must marry and perpetuate the ancestral line.

Lamartine says,—

"M. le Chevalier was the youngest in that generation of our family. At sixteen he had entered the regiment in which his father had served before him. His career was to grow old in the modest position of a captain in the army (which position he attained at an early age), to pass his few months of leave, from time to time, in his father's house, to gain the Cross of St. Louis (which was the end of all ambitions to provincial gentlemen), and then, when he grew old, being endowed with a small provision from the State, or a still smaller revenue of his own, he expected to vegetate in one of his brothers' old châteaux, having his rooms in the upper story, to superintend the garden, to shoot with the curé, to look after the horses, to play with the children, to make up a game of whist or tric-trac,—the born servant of everyone, a domestic slave, happy in his lot, beloved, and yet neglected by all. But in the end his fate was very different. His elder brother, having refused to marry, said to his father: 'You must marry the Chevalier.' All the feelings of the family and the prejudices of habit rose up in the heart of the old nobleman against this suggestion. Chevaliers, according to his notions, were not intended to marry. My father was sent back to his regiment, and his marrying was put off from year to year."

Meantime, the idea of marriage having been put into the Chevalier's head, he chose for himself, and happily his choice fell on a lady acceptable to his family. His sister was canoness in an aristocratic order, whose members were permitted to receive visits from their brothers. It was there that he wooed and won the lovely, saint-like mother of Alphonse de Lamartine.

The elder brother, as he advanced in life, kept up a truly affecting intercourse with Mademoiselle de Saint-Huruge. She was beautiful even in old age, though her beauty was dimmed by an expression of sadness. They met every evening in Mâcon, at the house of a member of the family, and each entertained till death a pure and constant friendship for the other.

No wonder that when the Revolution decreed the abolition of all rights of primogeniture, and ordered each father's fortune to be equally divided among his children, that M. le Chevalier refused to take advantage of this new arrangement, and left his share to the elder brother, to whom he owed his domestic happiness. In the end, all the property of the family came to the poet; the aunts and uncles—the former of whom had been driven from their convents—having made him their heir.

Madame de Lamartine had received part of her education from Madame de Genlis, and had associated in her childhood with Louis Philippe and Madame Adélaïde. But though the influence of Madame de Genlis was probably not in favor of piety, Madame de Lamartine was sincerely pious. In her son's early education she seems to have been influenced by Madame de Genlis' admiration of Rousseau. Alphonse ran barefoot on the hills, with the little peasant boys for company; but at home he was swayed by the discipline of love. He published nothing till he was thirty years of age, though he wrote poetry from early youth. His study was in the open air, under some grand old oaks on the edge of a deep ravine. In his hands French poetry became for the first time musical and descriptive of nature. There was deep religious feeling, too, in Lamartine's verse, rather vague as to doctrine, but full of genuine religious sentiment. As a Christian poet he struck a chord which vibrated in many hearts, for the early part of our century was characterized by faith and by enthusiasm. Scepticism was latent, but was soon to assert itself in weary indifference. "As yet, doubt sorrowed that it doubted, and could feel the beauty of faith, even when it disbelieved."

From 1820 to 1824 Lamartine was a good deal in Italy; after the death of an innocent Italian girl, which he has celebrated in touching verse, he married an English lady, and had one child, his beloved Julia. He was made a member of the French Academy, and Charles X. had appointed him ambassador to Greece, when the Revolution of 1830 occurred, and he refused to serve under King Charles's successor.

In 1832, partly for Julia's health, he visited the Holy Land and Eastern Europe. Poor little Julia died at Beyrout. On the father's return he published his "Souvenirs of his Journey." Books descriptive of Eastern countries were then rare, and Lamartine's was received with enthusiasm.

In 1833 Lamartine began his political career by entering the Chamber of Deputies. Some one said of him that he formed a party by himself,—a party of one. He pleaded for the abolition of capital punishment, for the amelioration of the poorer classes, for the emancipation of slaves in the colonies, and for various other social reforms; but he was never known as a republican.

In 1847 he published his "Histoire des Girondins," which was received by the public with deep interest and applause. It is not always accurate in small particulars, but it is one of the most fascinating books of history ever written, and has had the good fortune to be singularly well translated. Alexandre Dumas is said to have told its author: "You have elevated romance to the dignity of history."

When the revolution of February, 1848, broke out, Lamartine, being unwell, did not make his way on the first day through the crowds to the Chamber of Deputies, nor did he go thither on the second, looking on the affair as an émeute likely to be followed only by a change of ministry. But when news was brought to him which made him feel it was a very serious affair, he went at once to the Chamber. On entering, he was seized upon by men of all parties, but especially by republicans, who drew him into a side-room and told him that the king had abdicated. He had always advocated the regency of the Duchess of Orleans in the event of Louis Philippe's death, in place of that of the Duc de Nemours. The men who addressed him implored him, as the most popular man in France, to put himself at the head of a movement to make the Duchess of Orleans regent during her son's minority, adding that France under a woman and a child would soon drift into a republic. Lamartine sat for some minutes at a table with his face bowed on his hands. He was praying, he says, for light. Then he arose, and after saying that he had never been a republican, added that now he was for a republic, without any intermediate regency, either of the duchess or of Nemours. With acclamations, the party went back into the Chamber to await events.

We know already how the duchess was received, and how a mob broke into the Chamber. A provisional government was demanded, in the midst of indescribable tumult; and by the suffrages of a crowd of roughs quite as much as by the action of the deputies, a provisional government of five members (afterwards increased to seven) was voted in, the names being written down with a pencil by Lamartine on the spur of the moment. The five men thus nominated and chosen to be rulers of France were Lamartine, Crémieux, Ledru-Rollin, Garnier-Pagès, and Arago.

Meantime in the Hôtel-de-Ville the mob had set up another provisional government under Socialistic leaders, and the first thing the more genuine provisional government had to do was to get rid of the others.

Lamartine says of himself that he felt his mission was to preserve society, and very nobly he set himself to his task. When he and his colleagues reached the Hôtel-de-Ville, where the mob was clamoring for Socialism and a republic, a compromise had to be effected; and thus Louis Blanc, the Socialistic reformer, came into the Provisional Government. It was growing night, and the announcement of this new arrangement somewhat calmed the crowd; but at midnight an attack was made on the Hôtel-de-Ville, and the new rulers had to defend themselves by personal strength, setting their backs against the doors of the Council Chamber, and repelling their assailants with their own hands. But the Press and the telegraph were at their command, and by morning the news of the Provisional Government was spread all over the provinces. "The mob," says Lamartine, "was in part composed of galley slaves who had no political ideas in their heads, nor social principles in their hearts, and partly of that scum which rises to the surface in popular commotions, and floats between the fumes of intoxication and the thirst for blood."

Lamartine was not a great man, but it was lucky for France, and for all Europe, that at this crisis he succeeded in establishing a provisional government, and that he was placed at its head. But for him, Paris might have had the Commune in 1848, as she had it in 1871, but with no great army collected at Versailles to bring it to subjection.

From such a fate France was saved by the energy and enthusiastic patriotism of one man, to whom, it seems to me, justice in history has hardly yet been done. "Lamartine was not republican enough for republicans; he lost at last his prestige among the people, and from personal causes the full sympathy of his friends; and his star sank before the rising sun of Louis Napoleon." Mrs. Oliphant also says of him,—

"In the midst of his manifold literary labors there happened to Lamartine such a chance as befalls few poets. He had it in his power, once in his life, to do something greater than the greatest lyric, more noble than any verse. At the crisis of the Revolution of 1848, chance (to use the word without irreverence) thrust him, and no other, into the place of master, and held him for one supreme moment alone between France and anarchy,—between, we might almost say, the world and another terrible revolution. And then the sentimentalist proved himself a man. He confronted raving Paris, and subdued it. The old noble French blood in his veins rose to the greatness of the crisis. With a pardonable thrill of pride in a position so strange to a writer and a man of thought, into which, without any action of his own, he found himself forced, he describes how he faced the tumultuous mob of Paris for seventy hours almost without repose, without sleep, without food, when there was no other man in France bold enough or wise enough to take that supreme part, and guide that most aimless of revolutions to a peaceful conclusion,—for the moment, at least. It was not Lamartine's fault that the Empire came after him. Long before the Empire came, he had fallen from his momentary elevation, and lost all influence with his country. But his downfall cannot efface the fact that he did actually reign, and reign beneficently, subduing and controlling the excited nation, saving men's lives and the balance of society."

The seventy hours at the Hôtel-de-Ville to which Mrs. Oliphant alludes were passed by Lamartine in making orations, in sending off proclamations to the departments, in endeavoring to calm the excited multitude and to secure the triumph of the Republic without the effusion of blood. The revolution he conducted was, if I may say so, the only respectable revolution France has ever known. Nobody expected it, nobody was prepared for it, nobody worked for it; but the whole country acquiesced in it, and men of all parties, seeing that it was an accomplished fact, gave in their adhesion to the Second Republic.

There were five great questions that came up before the Provisional Government for immediate solution,—

The relation of France to foreign powers.

The enlargement of the army.

The subsistence of working-men out of employment.

The property and safety of the exiled royal family.

And, above all, how to meet these expenses and the payment of interest on national bonds, due the middle of March, with assets in the treasury of about twenty-five cents in the dollar.

These questions were all met by the wonderful energy of Lamartine and his colleagues, seconded by genuine patriotic efforts throughout France.

Lamartine had taken the foreign relations of the new Republic into his own hands; and so well did he manage them that not one potentate of Europe attempted to interfere with the internal affairs of France, or to dispute the right of the French to establish a republic if they thought proper. But although Lamartine's policy was peace, he thought France needed a large army both to keep down communism and anarchy at home, and to show itself strong in the face of all foreign powers. The army of France in January, 1848, had been about three hundred thousand men, of whom one hundred thousand were in Algeria; by May it was five hundred thousand, not including the Garde Mobile, which was of Lamartine's raising. It is well known how fiercely boys and very young men fought when any occasion for fighting was presented in the streets and at the barricades; all business being stopped in Paris, thousands of these were out of employment. Lamartine had them enrolled into his new corps, the Garde Mobile. Their uniform at first was a red sash and a workman's blouse. They were proud of themselves and of their new position, and in May, by dint of discipline, they were transformed into a fine soldierly body of very young men, who several times rendered important help to the Government in maintaining the cause of order. The National Guard was broken up until it could be reorganized, and so was the Garde Municipale.

But how to feed the multitude? Two hundred thousand mechanics alone were out of employment in Paris, besides laborers, servants, clerks, etc. It was proposed to establish national workshops in Louis Philippe's pretty private pleasure-grounds, the Parc des Monceaux. The men applying for work were enrolled in squads; each squad had its banner and its officers, and each man was paid on Saturday night his week's wages, at the rate of two francs a day,—the highest wages in Paris at that time for an artisan. There was no particular work for them to do, but the arrangement kept them disciplined and out of mischief, though at an enormous cost to the country. At the Palace of the Luxembourg Louis Blanc was permitted to hold a series of great labor meetings,—a sort of Socialist convention,—and to inveigh against "capitalists" and "bloated bondholders" in a style that was much more novel then than it is now. Lamartine greatly disapproved of these Luxembourg proceedings; but he argued that it was better to countenance them than to throw Louis Blanc and his friends into open opposition to the Government. Louis Blanc was a charming writer, whose views on social questions have made great progress since his day. His brother Charles wrote a valuable book on art. He himself wrote a "History of the Revolution" and the "History of Ten Years,"—that is, from 1830 to 1840. He bitterly hated Louis Philippe and the bourgeoisie, and yet his book is fair and honest, and the work of a gentleman. He was almost a dwarf, but his face was very handsome, clean-shaved, with bright eyes and brown hair. I may remark en passant that not one of the members of the Provisional Government wore either a beard or a moustache.

One of the first things the Provisional Government did was to decree that the personal property of the Orleans family should not be confiscated, but placed in the hands of a receiver, who should pay the king and princes liberal allowances till it became certain that their wealth would not be spent in raising an army for the invasion of France.

Louis Philippe lived only two years after reaching England. They were apparently not unhappy years to him. He sat at the foot of his own table, and carved the joint daily for his guests, children, and grandchildren. He dictated his Memoirs, and talked with the greatest openness to those who wished to converse with him.

The Duc d'Aumale was head of the army in Algeria, and governor-general of the colony, when the Revolution broke out. Here is the address which he at once published to his soldiers and the people, and with which the whole of his after life has been consistent:—

Inhabitants of Algeria! Faithful to my duties as a citizen and a soldier, I have remained at my post as long as I could believe my presence would be useful in the service of my country. It can no longer be so. General Cavaignac is appointed governor-general of Algeria, and until his arrival here, the functions of governor-general ad interim will be discharged by General Changarnier. Submissive to the national will, I depart; but in my place of exile my best prayers and wishes shall be for the prosperity and glory of France, which I should have wished still longer to serve.

H. D'ORLÉANS.

The greatest problem which demanded solution from the Provisional Government was how to make twenty-five cents do the work of a dollar. The first Minister of Finance appointed, threw up his portfolio in despair. Lamartine refused to sanction any arbitrary means of raising money. At last, by giving some especial privileges and protection to the Bank of France, and by mortgaging the national forests, a sufficient sum was provided for immediate needs. The people, too, throughout the provinces, made it a point of honor to come forward and pay their taxes before they were due. The priests preached this as a duty, for the priests were well disposed towards the Revolution of 1848. Lamartine had put forth a proclamation assuring priests and people that his Government was in sympathy with religion.

In the Provisional Government itself there were two, if not three, parties,—the party of order, headed by Lamartine; the Socialists, or labor party, headed by Louis Blanc; and the Red Republicans, or Anarchists, headed by Ledru-Rollin. The latter was for adopting the policy of putting out of office all men who had not been always republicans. Lamartine, on the contrary, said that any man who loved France and desired to serve her was not incapacitated from doing so by previous political opinions.

Elections for a Constitutional Assembly, which was to confirm or to repudiate the Provisional Government, were held on March 24, and the new Assembly was to meet early in May. Meantime all kinds of duties and anxieties accumulated on Lamartine. The Polish, Hungarian, Spanish, German, and Italian exiles in Paris were all anxious that he should espouse their causes against their own Governments. He assured them that this was not the mission of the Second French Republic, whatever might have been that of the First, and that the cause of European liberty would lose, not gain, if France, with propagandist fervor, embroiled herself with the monarchical powers. A deputation of Irishmen, under Smith O'Brien, waited upon him to beg the assistance of fifty thousand French troops in Ireland, "to rid her of the English." Lamartine peremptorily refused, saying: "When one is not united by blood to a people, it is not allowable to interfere in its affairs with the strong hand." Smith O'Brien and his followers, deeply mortified, repaired at once to Ledru-Rollin's Red Republican Club, where they were loudly applauded, and Lamartine condemned.

Meantime there were disturbances everywhere. Men out of employment, excited by club orators, were ready for any violence. At Lyons they destroyed the hospitals and orphan asylums, out of mere wantonness.

One afternoon Lamartine received news that the soldiers at the Invalides, dissatisfied with General Petit, their commander, had dragged him to the street, placed him on a cart, and were carrying him thus around Paris. On foot he rushed to the rescue, trusting to his powers of haranguing the multitude; but luckily the general had been released before his arrival. There is but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous. We smile at the spectacle of the ruler of France rushing on foot, through dim streets, after a cart he could not find. General Petit was that officer of the Old Guard whom Napoleon had embraced when he took leave of his beloved corps at Fontainebleau. Lamartine re-established him as commander at the Invalides, and the mutiny was put down.

On the night of the first day of the Provisional Government, a mob having demanded that the red flag of Communism should be substituted for the tricolor, Lamartine replied,—

"Citizens! neither I nor any member of the Government will adopt the Drapeau Rouge. We would rather adopt that other flag which is hoisted in a bombarded city to mark to the enemy the hospitals of the wounded. I will tell you in one word why I will oppose the red flag with the whole force of patriotic determination. It is, citizens, because the tricolor has made the tour of the world with the Republic and the Empire, with your liberties and your glory; the red flag has only made the tour of the Champ de Mars, dragged through the blood of citizens."

Muskets in the crowd were here levelled at the speaker, but were knocked up by the more peaceable of his hearers.

There was soon great discontent throughout the departments because of the imposition of a land-tax; but as Lamartine said truly, farmers would have found war or the triumph of Red Republicanism more expensive still.

On March 17, about three weeks after the departure of the king, a great Socialist demonstration was made in Paris. Large columns of men marched to the Hôtel-de-Ville, singing the old revolutionary chant of "Ça ira." Ledru-Rollin, in the fulness of his heart, seeing these one hundred and twenty thousand men all marching with some discipline, said to his colleagues in the Council Chamber: "Do you know that your popularity is nothing to mine? I have but to open this window and call upon these men, and you would every one of you be turned into the street. Do you wish me to try it?"

Upon this, Garnier-Pagès, the Finance Minister, walked up to Ledru-Rollin, and presenting a pistol, said: "If you make one step toward that window, it shall be your last." Ledru-Rollin paused a moment, and then sat down.

The object of the demonstration was to force the Provisional Government to take measures for raising and equalizing wages, and providing State employment for all out of employ. The main body was refused admittance into the Hôtel-de-Ville, but a certain number of the leaders were permitted to address the Provisional Government. To Ledru-Rollin's and Louis Blanc's surprise, they found that half of these leaders were men they had never seen before, more radical radicals than themselves,—that revolutionary scum that rose to the surface in the Reign of Terror and the Commune.

A sense of common danger made Ledru-Rollin and Louis Blanc unite with their colleagues in refusing the demand of the deputation that the measures they advocated should be put in force by immediate decrees. Lamartine harangued them; so did Ledru-Rollin and Louis Blanc; and at last the disappointed multitude, with vengeance in their hearts, filed peaceably away.

A month later, April 15, another outbreak was planned. The chief club leaders wished it to be headed by Ledru-Rollin and Blanqui,—the latter a conspirator in Louis Philippe's time. But Ledru-Rollin refused to serve with Blanqui, having discovered from documents in his office (that of Minister of Justice) that Blanqui had once been a Government spy. "Well, then," said the club leaders, "since you decline to be our chief, you shall to-morrow share the fate of your colleagues." Ledru-Rollin, after a terrible night of vacillation, resolved to throw himself on Lamartine's generosity. He went to him at daybreak and told him of the impending danger. At once Lamartine sent him to call out the National Guard, while he himself summoned the Garde Mobile. The National Guard had been reorganized; but there were no regular soldiers in Paris,—they had been sent away to satisfy the people. The commander of the National Guard, however, refused to let his men be called out on the occasion; and Lamartine, on hearing this, went to the Hôtel-de-Ville alone. But help came to him from an unexpected quarter. General Changarnier, who had been appointed ambassador to Berlin, called at Lamartine's house to return thanks for his appointment. Madame de Lamartine told him of the danger that menaced her husband, and he repaired at once to the Hôtel-de-Ville. There he found only about twelve hundred boys of the Garde Mobile to oppose the expected two hundred thousand insurgents. He drew his Garde Mobile into the building, and prepared to stand a siege. There from early morning till the next day Lamartine remained with Marrast, the Mayor of Paris. He says that he harangued the mob from thirty to forty times. The other members of the Government remained in one of the public offices. With much difficulty the National Guard, whose organization was not yet complete, was brought upon the scene. The procession of the insurgents was cut in two, the commander of the National Guard employing the same tactics as those which the Duke of Wellington had used a week earlier, when dealing in London with the Chartist procession. The result was the complete discomfiture of the insurgents.

A few days afterwards the members of the Provisional Government sat twelve hours, on thrones erected for them under the Arch of Triumph, to see Gardes Mobiles, National Guards, troops of the line, and armed workmen, file past them, all shouting for Lamartine and Order! It was probably the proudest moment of Lamartine's life; in that flood-tide of his popularity he easily could have seized supreme power.

All through the provinces disturbances went on. The object of the Red Republicans had at first been to oppose the election of the National Assembly. So long as France remained under the provisional dictatorship of Lamartine and his colleagues, and the regular troops were kept out of Paris, they hoped to be able to seize supreme power, by a coup de main.

The National Assembly was, however, elected on Easter Day, and proved to be largely conservative. The deputies met May 4,—the anniversary of the meeting of the States-General in 1789, fifty-nine years before. Its hall was a temporary structure, erected in the courtyard of the Palais Bourbon, the former place of meeting for the Chamber of Deputies. There was no enthusiasm in the body for the Republic, and evidently a hostile feeling towards the Provisional Government, which it was disposed to think too much allied with Red Republicanism.

Two days after the Assembly met, the Provisional Government resigned its powers. To Lamartine's great chagrin, he stood, not first, but fourth, on a list of five men chosen temporarily to conduct the government. Some of his proceedings had made the Assembly fear (very unjustly) that he shared the revolutionary enthusiasms of Ledru-Rollin.

It was soon apparent that ultra-democracy in France was not favored by the majority of Frenchmen. The Socialists and Anarchists, finding that they could not form a tyrant majority in the Assembly, began to conspire against it. While a debate was going on ten days after it assembled, an alarm was raised that a fierce crowd was about to pour into its place of meeting. Lamartine harangued the mob, but this time without effect. His day was over. He was received with shouts of "You have played long enough upon the lyre! A bas Lamartine!" Ledru-Rollin tried to harangue in his turn, but with no better effect. The hall was invaded, and Lamartine, throwing up his arms, cried, "All is lost!"

Barbès, the man who led an emeute in 1839, and whose life had been spared by Louis Philippe through the exertions of Lamartine, led the insurgents. They demanded two things,—a forced tax of a milliard (that is, a thousand million) of francs, to be laid on the rich for the benefit of the poor; and that whoever gave orders to call out the National Guard against insurgents should be declared a traitor. "You are wrong, Barbès," cried a voice from the crowd; "two hours' sack of Paris is what we want." After this the president of the Assembly was pulled from his chair, and a new provisional government was nominated of fierce Red Republicans,—not red enough, however, for the crowd, which demanded Socialists and Anarchists redder still. By this time some battalions of the National Guard had been called out. At sight of their bayonets the insurgents fled, but concentrated their forces on the Hôtel-de-Ville. This again they evacuated when cannon were pointed against it, and the cause of order was won.

General Cavaignac, who had just come home from Algeria, was made War Minister, and the clubs were closed. Louis Blanc was sent into exile. The Orleans family, which had been treated considerately by Lamartine, was forbidden to return to France.

The Assembly was now dissolved, and a new Chamber of Deputies was to be chosen in June. Among the candidates for election was Prince Louis Napoleon. He had already, in the days of Lamartine's administration, visited Paris, and had replied to a polite request from the provisional Government that he would speedily leave the capital, that any man who would disturb the Provisional Government was no true friend to France. Now he professed to ask only to be permitted to become a representative of the people, saying that he had "not forgotten that Napoleon, before being the first magistrate in France, was its first citizen."

Then cries of "Vive l'empereur!" began to be heard. Louis Napoleon's earliest "idea" had been that France needed an emperor whose throne should be based on universal suffrage. To this "idea" he added another,—that it was his destiny to be the chosen emperor.

No one in these days can conceive the hold that the memory of the First Napoleon had, in 1848, on the affections of the French people. That he put down anarchy with an iron hand was by the Anarchists forgotten. He was a son of the Revolution. His marches through Europe had scattered the seeds of revolutionary ideas. The heart of France responded to such verses as Béranger's "Grand'-mère." In vain Lamartine represented the impolicy and unfairness of proscribing the Orleans family while admitting into France the head of the house of Bonaparte. Louis Napoleon was elected deputy by four departments; but he subsequently hesitated to take his seat, fearing, he said, that he might be the cause of dissension in the Assembly.

The deputies from Paris were all Socialists, but those from the departments were frequently men of note and reputation. The country members were nearly all friends to order and conservatism.

The first necessary measure was to get rid of the national workshops. On June 20, one hundred and twenty thousand workmen were being paid daily two francs each, only two thousand of whom had anything to do, while fifty thousand more were clamoring for admission.

Of course any measure to suppress the national workshops, or to send home those who had come up to Paris for employment in them, was opposed by the workmen. It was computed that among those employed, or rather paid, by the State for doing nothing, were twenty-five thousand desperate men, ready for any fight, and that half this number were ex-convicts. The Government had nominally large forces at its command, but it was doubtful how far its troops could be relied on.

On June 22, 1848, at nightfall the struggle began. By morning half Paris was covered with barricades. It was very hard to collect troops, but Cavaignac was a tried soldier. He divided his little force into four parts. It was not till the evening of the 23d that hostilities commenced, and at the same time General Cavaignac was named by the Assembly dictator. This inspired confidence. Cavaignac was well supported, and acted with the greatest energy. The street-fighting was fiercer than any Paris had ever seen, and no real success was gained by Cavaignac till the evening of the 24th, after twenty-four hours of hard fighting. That success was the storming of the church of Sainte Geneviève (called also the Panthéon) and the destruction of its walls. But still the fight went on. Many generals were wounded. Cavaignac used his cannon freely, and even his bombs. It was night on June 26 before the troops could be pronounced victorious, and then they had not stormed the most formidable of the barricades,—that of the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Says Sir Archibald Alison,—

"But ere the attack on this barricade commenced, a sublime instance of Christian heroism and devotion occurred, which shines forth like a heavenly glory in the midst of these terrible scenes of carnage. Monseigneur Affre, archbishop of Paris, horror-stricken with the slaughter which for three days had been going on, resolved to attempt a reconciliation between the contending parties, or perish in the attempt. Having obtained leave from General Cavaignac to repair to the headquarters of the insurgents, he set out, dressed in his pontifical robes, having the cross in his hand, attended by his two chaplains, also in full canonicals, and three intrepid members of the Assembly. Deeply affected by this courageous act, which they knew was almost certain death, the people, as he walked through the streets, fell on their knees and besought him to desist; but he persisted, saying, 'It is my duty; a good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.' At seven in the evening he arrived at the Place de la Bastille, where the fire of musketry was extremely warm on both sides. It ceased on either side at the august spectacle, and the archbishop, bearing the cross aloft, advanced with his two priests to the foot of the barricade. A single attendant, bearing a green branch, preceded the prelate. The soldiers, seeing him advance so close to those who had already slain bearers of flags-of-truce, approached in order to give him succor in case of need; the insurgents, on their side, descended the barricade, and the redoubtable combatants stood close to each other, exchanging looks of defiance. Suddenly a shot was heard. Instantly the cry arose of 'Treason! Treason!' and the combatants, retreating on either side, began to exchange shots with as much fury as ever. Undismayed by the storm of balls which incessantly flew over his head from all quarters, the prelate advanced slowly, attended by his chaplains, to the summit of the barricade. One of them had his hat pierced by three balls, but the archbishop himself, almost by a miracle, escaped while on the top. He had descended three steps on the other side, when he was pierced through the loins by a shot from a window. The insurgents, horror-struck, approached him where he fell, stanched the wound, which at once was seen to be mortal, and carried him to a neighboring hospital. When told that he had only a few minutes to live, 'God be praised!' he said, 'and may He accept my life as an expiation for my omissions during my episcopacy, and as an offering for the salvation of this misguided people.' With these words he expired."

As soon as the archbishop's death was known, the insurgents made proposals to capitulate, on condition of a general pardon. This Cavaignac refused, saying that they must surrender unconditionally. The fight therefore lasted until daybreak. Then the insurgents capitulated, and all was over.

No one ever knew how many fell. Six generals were killed or mortally wounded. Ten thousand bodies were recognized and buried, and it is said that nearly as many more were thrown unclaimed into the Seine. There were fifteen thousand prisoners, of whom three thousand died of jail-fever. Thousands were sent to Cayenne; thousands to the galleys. This terrible four days' fight cost France more lives than any battle of the Empire.

The insurrection being over, and Cavaignac dictator, the next thing was for the Assembly to make a constitution. This constitution was short-lived. A president was to be chosen for four years, with re-election as often as might be desired. He was to be elected by universal suffrage. He was to have a salary of about one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars per annum, and he was to have much the same powers as the President of the United States.

There were two principal presidential candidates,—Prince Louis Napoleon, who had taken his seat in the Assembly; and Cavaignac, who had the power of Government on his side, and was sanguine of election. The prince proclaimed in letters and placards his deep attachment to the Republic, and denounced as his enemies and slanderers all those who said he was not firmly resolved to maintain the constitution.

The result of the election showed Louis Napoleon to have had five and a half millions of votes; Cavaignac one and a half million; Lamartine, who six months before had been a popular idol, had nineteen thousand.

LOUIS NAPOLEON.
(The Prince President.)

An early friend of Louis Napoleon, who seems to have been willing to talk freely of the playmate of her childhood, thus spoke of him to an English traveller.

"He is," she said, "a strange being. His mind wants keeping. A trifle close to his eyes hides from him large objects at a distance.... The great progress in political knowledge made by the higher classes in France from 1815 to 1848 is lost on him. When we met in 1836, after three years' separation, I was struck by his backwardness in political knowledge. Up to 1848 he never had lived in France except as a child or a captive. His opinions and feelings were those of the French masses from 1799 to 1812. Though these opinions had been modified in the minds of the higher classes, they were, in 1848, those of the multitude, who despise parliamentary government, despise the pope, despise the priests, delight in profuse expenditure, delight in war, hold the Rhine to be our national frontier, and that it is our duty to seize all that lies on the French side. The people and he were of one mind. I have no doubt that the little he may have heard, and the less that he attended to, from the persons he saw between 1848 and 1852 about liberty, self-government, economy, the supremacy of the Assembly, respect for foreign nations, and fidelity to treaties, appeared to him the silliest talk imaginable. So it would have appeared to all in the lower classes of France; so it would have appeared to the army, which is drawn from those classes, and exaggerates their political views."

"The prince president is romantic, impulsive, and bizarre," said one of his officials to the same English gentleman, "indolent, vain, good-natured, selfish, fearing and disliking his superiors;... he loves to excite the astonishment of the populace. As a child he liked best bad children,—as a man, bad men."

But one good quality he had pre-eminently,—no man was ever more grateful for kindness, or more indulgent to his friends.

Such was the man, untried, uneducated in French politics, covered with ridicule, and even of doubtful courage, whom the voices of five and a half millions of French voters called to the presidential chair. It was to the country Louis Napoleon had appealed, to the rural population of France as against the dangerous classes in the great cities. Paris had for sixty years been making revolutions for the country; now it was the turn of the provincials, who said they were tired of receiving a new Government by mail whenever it pleased the Parisians to make one. Paris contained one hundred and forty thousand Socialists, besides Anarchists and Red Republicans. With these the rural population had no sympathy. Louis Napoleon was not chosen by their votes, nor by those of their sympathizers in other great cities. His success was in the rural districts alone.

His election was a great disappointment to the Assembly, and from the first moment the prince president and that body were antagonistic to each other. The president claimed to hold his powers from the people, and to be in no way under the control of the Assembly; the Assembly was forever talking of deposing him, of imprisoning him at Vincennes, and so on.

Immediately after his election the prince president found it very difficult to form a cabinet. After being repulsed in various quarters, he sent a confidential messenger to Lamartine, asking him to meet him by night on horseback in a dark alley in the Bois de Boulogne. After listening to his rival's appeal for assistance in this emergency, Lamartine frankly told him that for various reasons he felt himself to be not only the most useless, but the most dangerous minister a new Government could select. He said, "I should ruin myself without serving you." The prince seemed grieved. "With regard to popularity," he answered, with a smile, "I have enough for both of us." "I know it," replied Lamartine; "but having, as I think, given you unanswerable reasons for my refusal, I give you my word of honor that if by to-morrow you have not been able to win over and to rally to you the men I will name, I will accept the post of prime minister in default of others."

Before morning the prince president had succeeded elsewhere; but he retained a sincere respect and regard for Lamartine, who after this incident fades out of the page of history. He lived a few years longer; but he was oppressed by pecuniary difficulties, from which neither his literary industry, nor the assistance of the Government, nor the subscriptions of his friends, seemed able to extricate him. Several times Milly, the dear home of his childhood, was put up for sale by his creditors. It was more than once rescued on his behalf, but in the end was sold.

Lamartine was buried with national honors; but among all the chances and changes that have distracted the attention of his countrymen from his career, he does not seem to have received from the world or the French nation all the honor, praise, and gratitude that his memory deserves.

Louis Napoleon, who had all his life dreamed of being the French emperor, though he took care to repudiate such an idea in all his public speeches, had not been president of the Republic six weeks before he read a plan for a coup d'état to General Changarnier, who utterly refused to listen to it.

We need not here dwell on the struggles that went on between the prince president and the Assembly, from December, 1848, to November, 1851. It is enough to say that the Chamber, from being the governing power in France, found itself reduced to a mere legislative body much hampered by the mistrust and contempt of the Executive. Its members of course hated "the Man at the Élysée," or "Celui-ci," as they called him. The Socialists hated the Assembly even more than they hated the president. The army was all for him. The bourgeoisie were thankful that under his rule they might at least find protection from Socialism and anarchy.

From the election of Prince Louis to the coup d'état in December, 1851, there were four serious émeutes in Paris, and once the city was in a state of siege. It was estimated that to put down the smallest of these revolts cost two hundred thousand dollars.

Foreign nations were too busy with their own affairs in 1848 to have time to meddle with the Government of Louis Napoleon,—indeed, Russia and Prussia were much obliged to him for keeping out the Orleans family, whom they by no means wished to see on the French throne.

One thing that Louis Napoleon did to gain favor with the country party caused great indignation among genuine republicans, and, indeed, throughout Europe. This was the part he took against the Republic of Rome.

Pio Nono, having been elected pope in 1846, had started on his career as a liberal pontiff and ruler; but before 1848 he had disappointed the expectations of all parties, and had fled from Rome to Gaeta, where Ferdinand, king of the Two Sicilies (commonly known as King Bomba) had also taken refuge. Lamartine, at the time his power ceased, had been fitting out a French army to lend help to the Romans if they should be attacked by the Austrians, and if need were, to protect the pope, who before his flight was supposed to be opposed to Austrian domination. Louis Napoleon ordered General Oudinot, who commanded the French forces, to disembark his troops at Civita Vecchia, and either to occupy Rome peaceably, or to attack the revolutionists. A battle was fought, and the French worsted; but they ended by gaining the city and holding it, putting down the Roman republicans, and handing the city over to Austrian and papal vengeance on Pio Nono's return.

The new president, anxious to strengthen his popularity in the provinces, made several tours. Everywhere, as the nephew of his uncle, he was received with wild enthusiasm. He was not a man to captivate by his manners on public occasions, neither was he a ready speaker; but he looked his best on horseback, and above all, there was in his favor, among the middle class of Frenchmen, a very potent feeling,—the dread of change.

As a deputy, before his election by the country as its president, he used to sit in the Chamber silent and alone, pitied by some, and neglected by all. Silence, indeed, was necessary to his success, for, "silent and smoking, he matured his plans." One of the first things he did when he became president was to attempt to get possession of all papers in the archives concerning his conduct at Strasburg and Boulogne.

There had been a new Assembly elected. It had few of the old republican leaders in it, but the Left and the Right and half the Centre were opposed to the prince president. The Left in the French Chamber means the Red Republicans; the Right, those members who are in favor of monarchy; the Centre, the Moderates, who are willing to accept any good government.

One of the objects of this Assembly, which foresaw that a coup d'état might be at hand, was to get command of a little army for its own protection. It appointed as commander of this force General Changarnier, with whom the prince president had recently quarrelled, and designated four of its members, whom it called quœstors, to look into all matters relating to its safety.

The constitution was to be revised by this Assembly. Nobody cared much about the constitution, which had not had time to acquire any hold on the affections of the people, and Louis Napoleon had recently acquired popularity with the turbulent part of the population of Paris by opposing a measure calculated to restrict universal suffrage, and to prevent tramps, aliens, and ex-convicts from voting at elections. The prince president, who wanted, for his own purposes, as large a popular vote as possible, was opposed to any restrictions on the suffrage.

Such was the condition of things on Nov. 26, 1851, when Louis Napoleon summoned the principal generals and colonels of the troops in and around Paris to meet him at the Élysée. At this meeting they all swore to support the president if called upon to do so, and never to tell of this engagement. They kept the secret for five years.

Meantime the Assembly on its part was hatching a conspiracy to overturn the president and send him to a dungeon at Vincennes; while all who refused to support its authority were to be declared guilty of treason.

The three men called the generals of the Army of Africa,—namely, Cavaignac, Changarnier, and Lamoricière,—were opposed to the prince president. They were either Republicans or Orleanists.

Thus the crisis approached. Each party was ready to spring upon the other. Again France was to experience a political convulsion, and the party that moved first would gain the day.

[CHAPTER VIII.]

THE COUP D'ÉTAT.

"In voting for Louis Napoleon," says Alison, "the French rural population understood that it was voting for an emperor and for the repression of the clubs in Paris. It seemed to Frenchmen in the country that they had only a choice between Jacobin rule by the clubs, or Napoleonic rule by an emperor." So, though Louis Napoleon, when he presented himself as a presidential candidate, assured the electors, "I am not so ambitious as to dream of empire, of war, nor of subversive theories; educated in free countries and in the school of misfortune, I shall always remain faithful to the duties that your suffrages impose on me," public sentiment abroad and at home, whether hostile or favorable, expected that he would before long make himself virtually, if not in name, the Emperor Napoleon. Indeed, the army was encouraged by its officers to shout, "Vive l'empereur!" and "Vive Napoleon!" And General Changarnier, for disapproving of these demonstrations, had been dismissed from his post as military commander at the capital. He was forthwith, as we have seen, appointed to a military command in the confidence of the Assembly.

By the autumn of 1851 Louis Napoleon had fully made up his mind as to his coup d'état, and had arranged all its details. He had five intimates, who were his counsellors,—De Morny, De Maupas, De Persigny, Fleury, and General Saint-Arnaud.

DUC DE MORNY.

De Morny has always been reputed to have been the half-brother of Louis Napoleon. In 1847 he lived luxuriously in a small hôtel in the Champs Elysées, surrounded by rare and costly works of art. He had then never been considered anything but a man of fashion; but he proved well fitted to keep secrets, to conduct plots, and to do the cruellest things in a jocund, off-hand way.

Saint-Arnaud's name had been originally Jacques Le Roy. At one time, under the name of Florival, he had been an actor in Paris at one of the suburban theatres. He had served three times in the French army, and been twice dismissed for conduct unbecoming an officer. His third term of service for his country was in a foreign legion, composed of dare-devils of all nations, who enrolled themselves in the army of Algeria. There his brilliant bravery had a large share in securing the capture of Constantine. He rose rapidly to be a general, was an excellent administrator, a cultivated and agreeable companion, perfectly unscrupulous, and ready to assist in any scheme of what he considered necessary cruelty. Fleury, who had been sent to Africa to select a military chief fitted to carry out the coup d'état, found Saint-Arnaud the very man to suit the purpose of his master. Saint-Arnaud was tall, thin, and bony, with close-cropped hair. De Morny used to laugh behind his back at the way he said le peuple souvérain, and said he knew as little about the sovereign people as about the pronunciation. He spoke English well, for he had lived for some years an exile in Leicester Square,—the disreputable French quarter of London; this accomplishment was of great service to him during the Crimean War.

De Maupas had been a country prefect, and was eager for promotion. Louis Napoleon converted him into his Minister of Police.

Fleury was the simple-hearted and attached friend of his master.

De Persigny, like Saint-Arnaud, had changed his name, having begun life as Fialin.

These five plotted the coup d'état[1]; arranged all its details, and kept their own counsel.

[Footnote 1: De Maupas, Le Coup d'Etat.]

The generals and colonels in garrison in Paris had been sounded, as we have seen, in reference to their allegiance to the Great Emperor's nephew, and by the close of 1851 all things had been made ready for the proposed coup d'état.

A coup d'état is much the same thing as a coup de main,—with this difference, that in the political coup de main it is the mob that takes the initiative, in the coup d'état the Government; and the Government generally has the army on its side.

Louis Napoleon and his five associates were about to do the most audacious thing in modern history; but no man can deny them the praise awarded to the unjust steward. If the thing was to be done, or, in the language of Victor Hugo, if the crime was to be committed, it could not have been more admirably planned or more skilfully executed.

The world, to all appearance, went on in its usual way. The Assembly, on December 1, 1851, was busy discussing the project of a railroad to Lyons. That evening M. de Morny was at the Opéra Comique in company with General Changarnier, and the prince president was doing the honors as usual in his reception-room at the Élysée. His visage was as calm, his manners were as conciliatory and affable, as usual. No symptoms of anything extraordinary were to be seen, and an approaching municipal election in Paris accounted for the arrival of several estafettes and couriers, which from time to time called the prince president from the room. When the company had taken leave, Saint-Arnaud, Maupas, Morny, and a colonel on the staff went with the prince president into his smoking-room, where the duties of each were assigned to him. Everything was to be done by clock-work. Exactly at the hour appointed, all the African generals and several of their friends were to be arrested. Exactly at the moment indicated, troops were to move into position. At so many minutes past six A. M. all the printing-offices were to be surrounded. Every man who had in any way been prominent in politics since the days of Louis Philippe was to be put under arrest.

By seven o'clock in the morning all this had been accomplished. The Parisians awoke to find their walls placarded by proclamations signed by Prince Louis Napoleon as President, De Morny as Minister of the Interior, De Maupas as Prefect of Police, and Saint-Arnaud as Minister of War.

These proclamations announced,—

1. The dissolution of the Assembly.
2. The restoration of universal suffrage.
3. A general election on December 14.
4. The dissolution of the Council of State.
5. That Paris was in a state of siege.

This last meant that any man might be arrested, without warrant, at the pleasure of the police.

Another placard forbade any printer, on pain of death, to print any placard not authorized by Government; and death likewise was announced for anyone who tore down a Government placard.

Louis Napoleon followed this up by an appeal to the people. He said he wished the people to judge between the Assembly and himself. If France would not support him, she must choose another president. In place of the constitution of 1848 he proposed one that should make the presidential term of office ten years; he also proposed that the president's cabinet should be of his own selection.

Louis Napoleon had entire confidence that all elections by universal suffrage would be in his favor. He had just made extensive tours in the provinces, and had been received everywhere with enthusiasm.

Thus far I have given the historical outline of the story; but if we look into Victor Hugo's "Histoire d'un Crime," and disentangle its facts from its hysterics, we may receive from his personal narrative a vivid idea of what passed in Paris from the night of Dec. 1, 1851, to the evening of December 4, when all was over.

Roused early in the morning by members of the Assembly, who came to announce the events of the night, Victor Hugo, to whom genuine republicans who were not Socialists looked as a leader, was, like all the rest of Paris, taken completely by surprise. One of his visitors was a working-man, a wood-carver; of him Hugo eagerly asked: "What do the working-men—the people—say as they read the placards?" He answered: "Some say one thing, some another. The thing has been so done that they cannot understand it. Men going to their work are reading the placards. Not one in a hundred says anything, and those who do, say generally, 'Good! Universal suffrage is reestablished. The conservative majority in the Assembly is got rid of,—that's splendid! Thiers is arrested,—better still! Changarnier is in prison,—bravo!' Beneath every placard there are men placed to lead the approval. My opinion is that the people will approve!"

At exactly six that morning, Cavaignac, Changarnier, Lamoricière, Thiers, and all those who had lain down to sleep as cabinet ministers of the prince president, were roused from their beds by officers of cavalry, with orders to dress quickly, for they were under arrest. Before each door a hackney-coach was waiting, and an escort of two hundred Lancers was in a street near by. Resistance seemed useless in the face of such precautions, but Victor Hugo and his friends were resolved upon a fight. They put their official scarves as deputies into their pockets, and started forth to see if they could raise the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. But their friend the wood-carver had told them truly,—there was neither sympathy nor enthusiasm in the streets for the constitution that had fallen, the deputies who had been placed under arrest, nor for violated political institutions.

In vain they appealed to the people in the name of the law. The mob seemed to consider that provided it had universal suffrage, and that the man of its choice were at the head of affairs, it had better trust the safety of the nation to one man than risk the uncertainties that might attend the tyranny of many.

The frantic efforts made that day by Victor Hugo and a few other deputies of the Left to rouse the populace are almost ludicrous. Victor Hugo, no doubt, was a brave man, though a very melodramatic one, and he seems to have thought that if he could get the soldiers to shoot him,—him, the greatest literary star of France since the death of Voltaire,—the notoriety of his death might rouse the population.

Here is one scene in his narrative. He and three of his friends, finding that the Faubourg Saint-Antoine gave no ear to their appeals, and for once was disinclined to fight, decided to return home, and took seats in an omnibus which passed them on the Place de la Bastille.

"We were all glad to get in," says Victor Hugo. "I took it much to heart that I had not that morning, when I saw a crowd assembled round the Porte Saint-Martin, shouted 'To arms!'... The omnibus started. I was sitting at the end on the left, my friend young Armand was beside me. As the omnibus moved on, the crowd became more closely packed upon the Boulevard. When we reached the narrow ascent near the Porte Saint-Martin, a regiment of heavy cavalry met us. The men were Cuirassiers. Their horses were in a trot, and their swords were drawn. All of a sudden the regiment came to a halt. Something was in their way. Their halt detained the omnibus. My heart was stirred. Close before me, a yard from me, were Frenchmen turned into Mamelukes, citizen-supporters of the Republic transformed into the mercenaries of a Second Empire! From my seat I could almost put my hand upon them. I could no longer bear the sight. I let down the glass, I put my head out of the window, and looked steadily at the close line of armed men. Then I shouted: 'Down with Louis Bonaparte! Those who serve traitors are traitors!' The nearest soldiers turned their faces towards me, and looked dazed with astonishment. The rest did not stir. When I shouted, Armand let down his glass and thrust half his body out of his window, shaking his fist at the soldiers. He too cried out: 'Down with all traitors!' Our example was contagious. 'Down with traitors!' cried my other two friends in the omnibus. 'Down with the dictator!' cried a generous young man who sat beside me. All the passengers in the omnibus, except this young man, seemed to be filled with terror. 'Hold your tongues!' they cried; 'you will have us all massacred.' The most frightened of them let down his glass and shouted to the soldiers: 'Vive le Prince Napoléon! Vive l'empereur!' The soldiers looked at us in solemn silence. A mounted policeman menaced us with his drawn sword. The crowd seemed stupefied.... The soldiers had no orders to act, so nothing came of it. The regiment started at a gallop, so did the omnibus. As long as the Cuirassiers were passing, Armand and I, hanging half out of our windows, continued to shout at them, 'Down with the dictator!'"

This foolhardy and melodramatic performance was one of many such scenes, calculated to turn tragedy into farce.

Meantime, from early morning the hall of the representatives had been surrounded by soldiers with mortars and cannon. As the deputies arrived they were allowed to pass the gates, but were not permitted to enter their chamber. Their president, or Speaker, M. Dupin, was appealed to. He said he could do nothing; it was hopeless to resist such a display of force. At last the representatives, becoming, as the soldiers put it, "noisy and troublesome," were collared and turned out into the street. One by one the most excited were arrested. The remainder decided to go to the High Court of Justice and demand a warrant to depose and arrest the prince president. But they could not find the judges; they had hidden themselves away. When at last they succeeded in discovering the place where they were sitting, the police followed closely on their track, and the judges were forced to shut up their court and march off, under a guard of soldiers.

The representatives then decided to go to the Mairie of the Tenth Arrondissement, and there reorganize into a legislative body. They were nearly all members belonging to the Right, but they were as indignant as the Left at the outrage.

They formed into a column, marching two and two abreast; but the Left would not march with the Right, so they proceeded in two parallel columns, one on each side of the way. Arrived at the Mairie, they made Jules de Lasteyrie, Lafayette's grandson, president pro tempore, and proceeded to pass a decree deposing Louis Bonaparte. Scarcely was this done when a battalion of cavalry arrived, and the legislators soon perceived that they were prisoners. After a great deal of altercation with the soldiers, they were marched off to a barrack-yard on the Quai d'Orsay.

When all this was reported to De Morny, he remarked: "It is well; but they are the last deputies who will be made prisoners,"—meaning that any others would be shot.

It was half-past three when the deputies were locked into the barrack-yard. The December day was cold and frosty, the sky overcast. The first thing they did was to call the roll. There were two hundred and twenty of them, out of a total membership of seven hundred and fifty. Among them were many of the best and most conservative men of France. There was Jules Grévy, the future president (M. Thiers was already in prison); Jules de Lasteyrie; Sainte-Beuve, the great critic; Berryer, the great lawyer; the Duc de Luynes, the richest man in France; and Odillon Barrot, the popular idol at the commencement of the late revolution. De Tocqueville was there, the great writer on America; General Oudinot, and several other generals; the Duc de Broglie, great-grandson of Madame de Staël; Eugène Sue, the novelist; Coquerel, the French Protestant preacher; and M. de Rémusat, the son of that lady who has given us her experiences of the court of the First Napoleon.

For two hours the deputies remained in the open air; then they were transferred at dark to the third story of a wing of the barracks. They found themselves in two long halls, with low ceilings and dirty walls, used as the soldiers' dormitories. They had no furniture but some wooden benches. M. de Tocqueville was quite ill. The rooms were bitterly cold. An hour or so later, three representatives, who had demanded to share the fate of their colleagues, were brought in. One of these was the Marquis de La Vallette, who had married Mrs. Welles, a very beautiful and fascinating American lady.

Night came. Most of the prisoners had eaten nothing since morning. A collection of five francs apiece was taken up amongst them, and a cold collation was provided by a neighboring restaurant. They ate standing, with their plates in their hands. "Just like a supper at a ball," remarked one of the younger ones. They had very few drinking-glasses. Right and Left, having been reconciled by this time, drank together. "Equality and Fraternity!" remarked a conservative nobleman as he drank with one of the Red Republicans. "Ah," was the answer, "but not Liberty." Eight more prisoners before long were added to their number, and three were released,—one because he was eighty, one because of his wife's illness, and one because he had been accidentally wounded. At last, sixty mattresses were brought in, for two hundred and twenty-five men. They had no blankets, and had to trust to their great-coats to keep them from the cold. A few of them went to sleep, but were roused at midnight by an order that their quarters must be changed. They were taken down by parties to all the voitures cellulaires (or Black Marias) in Paris. Each deputy was put into a separate cell, where he sat cramped and freezing for hours. It was nearly seven A. M., December 3, before these prison-vans were ready to start.

Some went to the great prison of Mazas, some to Vincennes, some to Fort Valérien. At Mazas they were treated in all respects like criminals, except that they were not allowed a daily walk,—a privilege the knaves and malefactors obtained. Two deputies only were favored with beds,—M. Thiers and another elderly man. M. Grévy had none, nor the African generals, the ex-dictator Cavaignac among them.

Such of the members of the Left as were not in prison spent December 2, 3, and 4 in endeavoring to assemble and reorganize the remains of the Assembly; but the police followed them up too closely.

A few barricades were raised, and the first man killed on one of them was named Baudin. He threw away his life recklessly and to no purpose; but it is the fashion among advanced republicans to this day to decorate his grave and to honor his memory with communistic speeches. He was rather a fine young fellow, and might have lived to do the State some service.

By the night of December 3 there was a good deal of commotion in the city. Two days of disorganization, idleness, and excitement had made workmen more inflammable than when they remained passive under the appeals of Victor Hugo. The remainder of the story, so far as it concerns the uprising and massacre in the streets of Paris, I will borrow from the experience of an American eye-witness; but first I will tell what happened to the African generals imprisoned at Mazas.

On the night of December 3 the station of the great railroad to the north was filled with soldiers. About six o'clock the next morning two voitures cellulaires drove up, each attended by a light carriage containing an especial agent sent by the police. These vehicles, just as they were, were rolled on to trucks, and the train moved out of the station. There were eight cells in each voiture cellulaire; four were occupied by prisoners, four by policemen. It was bitterly cold, and in the second of the prison-vans the police, half frozen, opened the doors of their cells and came out to walk up and down and warm themselves. Then a voice was heard from one of the prisoners. "Ah, ça, it is bitterly cold here. Could n't one be allowed to re-light one's cigar?" At this another voice called out: "Tiens! is that you, Lamoricière? Good morning!" "Good morning, Cavaignac," replied the other. Then a third voice came from the third cell. It was that of Changarnier. "Messieurs les Généraux," cried a fourth, "do not forget that I am one of you." The speaker was a quœstor of the Chamber of Deputies, a man charged with the safety of the National Assembly. The generals who had spoken, and Bedeau, who was in the next van, were, with the exception of Bugeaud, the four leading commanders in the French army. The other four prisoners were Colonel Charras, General Le Flô, Baze the quœstor, and a deputy, Count Roger (du Nord). At midnight they had been roused from sleep and ordered to dress immediately. "Are we going to be shot?" asked Charras, but no answer was vouchsafed him. They were put into the voitures cellulaires, each knowing nothing of the presence of the others; even the police who were in charge of them, had no idea what prisoners they had in custody. After this recognition between the generals, they were permitted to come out of their cells and walk up and down the van to warm themselves, taking care, however, that they were not seen at liberty by the special agents in the carriages attending on each van.

On reaching Ham, the former prison of Louis Napoleon, Cavaignac, whom he had succeeded as ruler of France, was put into his former chamber. "Chassez croissez," said De Morny, when the report was made to him.

December 4, the last day of the struggle, was by far the most terrible. Louis Napoleon, in spite of many benefits which France and the world owe him, will never be cleansed from the stain that the outrages of that day have left upon his memory. It may be said, however, that the details of the coup d'état were left to his subordinates, and that probably both success and infamy are due in large part to the flippant Morny.

It was a cold, drizzling day. Such barricades as had been built were very slimly defended, and with no enthusiasm. The insurgents were short of ammunition, nor did the troops attack them with much vigor. In fact, the soldiers were but few, for all were being concentrated on that part of the Boulevard where strangers do their shopping and eat ices at Tortoni's. The programme for that day was not fighting, but a massacre.

The American gentleman whose narrative I am about to quote, says,—

"On December 3 there was more excitement in the streets than there had been on December 2. The secret societies had got to work. The Reds were recovering from their astonishment. Ex-members of the National Assembly had harangued the multitude and circulated addresses calculated to rouse the people to resistance. On the 4th there was not much stirring. The shops were closed. I went into the heart of the city on business, where I soon found myself in the midst of a panic-stricken crowd. The residents were closing their doors and barricading their windows. Some said the Faubourgs were rising; some that the troops were approaching, with cannon.

"Hearing there were barricades at the Porte Saint-Denis, I pushed directly for the spot. The work was going on bravely. Stagings had been torn from unfinished houses, iron railings from the magnificent gateway; trees were cut down, street sheds demolished; carts, carriages, and omnibuses were being triumphantly dragged from hiding-places to the monstrous pile. There were not very many men at work, but those who were engaged, labored like beavers. Blouses and broadcloth were about equally mixed. A few men armed with cutlasses, muskets, and pistols appeared to act as leaders; soon a search was made in neighboring houses for arms. I was surprised to see how many boys were in the ranks of the insurgents. They went to work as if insurrection were a frolic. I shuddered as I thought how many of them would be shot or bayoneted before night fell. The sentiments of the spectators seemed different. Some said, 'Let them go ahead. They want to plunder and kill: they will soon be taught a good lesson.' Others encouraged the barricade-makers. One man, hearing that I was an American, said with a sigh, 'Ah, you live in a true republic!'

"After remaining two hours at this barricade, and seeing no fighting, I turned on to the Boulevard. There, troops were advancing slowly, with loaded cannon. From time to time they charged the people, who slipped out of the way by side streets, as I did myself. Coming back on the Boulevard des Italiens, I found the entire length of the Boulevards, from the Porte Saint-Denis to the Madeleine, filled with troops in order of battle. In the novelty and beauty of the scene I quite lost sight of danger. At one time they chased away the crowd; but soon sentinels were removed from the corners of the streets, and as many spectators as thought proper pressed on to the sidewalks of the Boulevard.... Opposite to me was the Seventh Lancers,—a fine corps, recently arrived in Paris. Suddenly, at the upper end of the line, the discharge of a cannon was heard, followed by a blaze of musketry and a general charge. The spectators on the Boulevard took to flight. They pitched into open doors, or loudly demanded entrance at the closed ones. I was fortunate enough to get into a neighboring carriage-way, through the grated porte-cochère of which I could see what was going on. The firing was tremendous. Volley after volley followed so fast that it seemed like one continued peal of thunder. Suddenly there was a louder and a nearer crash. The cavalry in front of me wavered; and then, as if struck by a panic, turned and rushed in disorder down the street, making the ground tremble under their tread. What could have occurred? In a few minutes they came charging back, firing their pistols on all sides. Then came a quick succession of orders: 'Shut all windows! Keep out of sight! Open the blinds!' etc. It seemed that unexpected shots had been fired from some of the windows on the soldiers, from which they had suffered so much as to cause a recoil. The roll of firearms was now terrific. Mortars and cannon were fired at short-range point-blank at the suspicious houses, which were then carried by assault. The rattle of small shot against windows and walls was incessant. This, too, was in the finest part of the Boulevard. Costly houses were completely riddled, their fronts were knocked in, their floors pierced with balls. The windows throughout the neighborhood were destroyed by the concussion of the cannon. Of the hairbreadth escape of some of the inmates, and of the general destruction of property, I need not speak. The Government afterwards footed all the bills for the last. The firing continued for more than an hour, and then receded to more distant parts of the city; for the field of combat embraced an area of several miles, and there were forty thousand troops engaged in it. As soon as I could do so with safety, I left my covert, and endeavored to see what had happened elsewhere. But troops guarded every possible avenue, and fired on all those who attempted to approach any interdicted spot. I noticed some pools of blood, but the corpses had been removed; in a cross-street I saw a well-dressed man gasping his life away on a rude stretcher. Those around him told me he had six balls in him. In the Rue Richelieu there was the corpse of a young girl. Somebody had placed lighted candles at its head and feet. When I reached the parts of the town removed from the surveillance of the soldiers, I noticed a bitter feeling among the better classes for the day's work. The slaughter had been amongst those of their own class, which was unusual. The number slain was at first, of course, exaggerated, but it was with no gratifying emotions that we could reduce it a few hundreds. It was civil war,—fratricide. I reached home indignant and mournful."

Victor Hugo says of the massacre: "There were no combatants on the side of the people. There could not be said to have been any mob, though the Boulevard was crowded with spectators. Then, as the wounded and terrified rushed into houses, the soldiers rushed in after them."

Tortoni's was gutted; the fashionable Baths of Jouvence were torn to pieces; one hotel was demolished; twenty-eight houses were so injured that they had next day to be pulled down. Peaceful shopkeepers, dressmakers, and English strangers were among the slain,—an old man with an umbrella, a young man with an opera-glass. In the house where Jouvin sold gloves there was a pile of dead bodies.

The firing was over by four P. M. It has never been known how many were massacred. Some said twenty-five hundred, some made it five hundred, and almost every person killed was, not a Red combatant, but an innocent victim.

Thus Louis Napoleon made himself master of Paris. The army was all for him, the masses were apathetic, the rural population was on his side. A few weeks later a plébiscite made him emperor.

The coup d'état having succeeded, most Frenchmen gave in their adhesion to its author. It remained only to dispose of the prisoners. Without any preliminary investigation, squads of them were shot, chiefly in the court-yard of the Prefecture of Police. All deputies of the Left were sent into exile, except some who were imprisoned in Algerine fortresses or sent to Cayenne,—the French political penal colony at that period.

Victor Hugo remained a fortnight in hiding, believing, on the authority of Alexandre Dumas, that a price was set upon his head. He gives some moving accounts of little children whom he saw lying in their blood on the evening of the massacre. His chief associates nearly all escaped arrest, and got away from France in various disguises. Their adventures are all of them very picturesque, and some are very amusing.

Several of the eight prisoners at Ham suffered much from dampness. Lamoricière, indeed, contracted permanent rheumatism during his imprisonment. He begged earnestly to be allowed to write to his wife, but was permitted to send her only three words, without date: "I am well."

On the night of January 6, the commandant of the fortress, in full uniform, accompanied by a Government agent, entered the sleeping-room of each prisoner, and ordered him to rise and dress, as he was to be sent immediately into exile under charge of two agents of police detailed to accompany him over the frontier. Nor was he to travel under his own name, a travelling alias having been provided for him. At the railroad station at Creil, Colonel Charras met Changarnier. "Tiens, Général!" he cried, "is that you? I am travelling under the name of Vincent." "And I," replied Changarnier, "am called Leblanc." Each was placed with his two police agents in a separate carriage. The latter were armed. Their orders were to treat their prisoners with respect, but in case of necessity to shoot them.

The journey was made without incident until they reached Valenciennes, a place very near the frontier line between France and Belgium. There, as the coup d'état had proved a success, official zeal was in the ascendency. The police commissioner of Valenciennes examined the passports. As he was taking Leblanc's into his hand, he recognized the man before him. He started, and cried out: "You are General Changarnier!" "That is no affair of mine at present," said the general. At once the police agents interposed, and assured the commissioner that the passports were all in order. Nothing they could say would convince him of the fact. The prefect and town authorities, proud of their own sagacity in capturing State prisoners who were endeavoring to escape from France, held them in custody while they sent word of their exploit to Paris. They at once received orders to put all the party on the train for Belgium.

Charras was liberated at Brussels, Changarnier at Mons, Lamoricière was carried to Cologne, M. Baze to Aix-la-Chapelle. They were not released at the same place nor at the same time, Louis Napoleon having said that safety required that a space should be put between the generals.

EUGÉNIE.

[CHAPTER IX.]

THE EMPEROR'S MARRIAGE.

A plébiscite—Louis Napoleon's political panacea—was ordered Dec. 20, 1851, two weeks after the coup d'état, to say if the people of France approved or disapproved the usurpation of the prince president. The national approval as expressed in this plébiscite was overwhelming. Each peasant and artisan seemed to fancy he was voting to revive the past glories of France, when expressing his approval of a Prince Napoleon. The more thoughtful voters, like M. de Montalembert, considered that the coup d'état was a crushing blow struck at Red Republicanism, Communism, the International Society, and disorder generally.

For a while the prince president governed by decrees; then a new legislative body was assembled. Its first duty was to revise the constitution. The republican constitution of 1850 was in the main re-adopted, but with one important alteration. The prince president was to be turned into the Emperor Napoleon III., and the throne was to be hereditary in his family.

After the passage of this measure it was submitted by another plébiscite to the people. The plébiscite is a universal suffrage vote of yes or no, in answer to some question put by the Government to the nation. The question this time was: Shall the prince president become emperor? There were 7,800,000 ayes, and 224,000 noes.

When the news of this overwhelming success reached the Élysée, Louis Napoleon sat so still and unmoved, smoking his cigar, that his cousin, Madame Baiocchi, rushing up to him, shook him, and exclaimed: "Is it possible that you are made of stone?"

Having thus secured his elevation by the almost universal consent of Frenchmen, the new emperor's next step was to insure his dynasty by a marriage that might probably give heirs to the throne. He chose the title Napoleon III. because the son of the Great Napoleon had been Napoleon II. for a few days after his father's abdication at Fontainebleau in 1814. The next heir to the imperial dignities (Lucien Bonaparte having refused anything of the kind for himself or for his family) was Jérôme Napoleon, familiarly called Plon-Plon. He was the only son of Jérôme Bonaparte and the Princess Catherine of Würtemberg. But Prince Napoleon, though clever, was wilful and eccentric, and made a boast of being a Red Republican; moreover, his father's Baltimore marriage had made his legitimacy more than doubtful,—at any rate, Louis Napoleon was by no means desirous of passing on to him the succession to the empire; and being now forty-four years old, he was desirous of marrying as soon as possible.

When a boy, it had been proposed to marry him to his cousin Mathilde, and something like an attachment had sprung up between them; but after his fiasco at Strasburg he was no longer considered an eligible suitor either for Princess Mathilde or another cousin who had been named for him, a princess of Baden. Princess Mathilde was married to the Russian banker, Prince Demidorff; but when Louis Napoleon became prince president, he requested her to preside at the Élysée.

The new emperor, or his advisers, looked round at the various marriageable princesses belonging to the smaller courts of Germany. The sister of that Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern whose selection for the throne of Spain led afterwards to the Franco-Prussian war, was spoken of; but the lady most seriously considered was the Princess Adélaïde of Hohenlohe. She was daughter of Queen Victoria's half-sister Feodora; and to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, as heads of the family, the matter was referred. A recent memoir-writer tells us of seeing the queen at Windsor when the matter was under discussion. The queen and her husband were apparently not averse to the alliance, hesitating only on the grounds of religion and morals; but it is doubtful how far the new emperor went personally in the affair. His inclination had for some time pointed to the reigning beauty of Paris, Mademoiselle Eugénie de Montijo.

This young lady's grandfather was Captain Fitzpatrick, of a good old Scottish family, which had in past times married with the Stuarts. Captain Fitzpatrick had been American consul at a port in southern Spain. He had a particularly charming daughter, who made a brilliant Spanish marriage, her husband being the Count de Teba (or Marquis de Montijo, for he bore both titles). The Montijos were connected with the grandest ducal families in Spain and Portugal, and even with the royal families of those nations.

The Count de Teba died while his two daughters were young, and they were left under the guardianship of their very charming mother. The elder married the Duke of Alva; the younger became the Empress Eugénie.

Eugénie was for some time at school in England at Clifton. She was described by those who knew her there as a pretty, sprightly little girl, much given to independence, and something of a tom boy,—a character there is reason to think she preserved until it was modified by the exigencies of her position.

Mr. George Ticknor, of Boston, frequently mentioned Madame de Teba to his friends as a singularly charming woman. In 1818 he wrote home to a friend in America:

"I knew Madame de Teba in Madrid, and from what I saw of her there and at Malaga, I do not doubt she is the most cultivated and interesting woman in Spain. Young, beautiful, educated strictly by her mother, a Scotchwoman,—who for this purpose carried her to London and kept her there six or seven years,—possessing extraordinary talents, and giving an air of originality to all she says and does, she unites in a most bewitching manner the Andalusian grace and frankness to a French facility in her manners and a genuine English thoroughness in her knowledge and accomplishments. She knows the chief modern languages well, and feels their different characters, and estimates their literature aright. She has the foreign accomplishments of singing, painting, playing, etc., joined to the natural one of dancing, in a high degree. In conversation she is brilliant and original, yet with all this she is a true Spaniard, and as full of Spanish feelings as she is of talent and culture."

Washington Irving, in 1853, thirty-five years later, writing to his nephew, speaks in equal praise of Madame de Teba.

"I believe I told you," he says, "that I knew the grandfather of the empress, old Mr. Fitzpatrick. In 1827 I was in the house of his son-in-law, Count Teba, at Granada, a gallant, intelligent gentleman, much cut up in the wars, having lost an eye and been maimed in a leg and hand. Some years after, in Madrid, I was invited to the house of his widow, Madame de Montijo, one of the leaders of ton. She received me with the warmth and eagerness of an old friend. She claimed me as the friend of her late husband. She subsequently introduced me to the little girls I had known in Granada, now fashionable belles in Madrid."

In some lines of Walter Savage Landor, Madame de Montijo was addressed as a "lode-star of her sex."

The Marquis de Montijo had been an adherent of Joseph Bonaparte while the latter was king of Spain, and his eye had been put out at the battle of Salamanca. He was a liberal in politics, and his house was always open to cultivated men.

Such was the ancestry of the beautiful young lady who, tall, fair, and graceful, with hair like one of Titian's beauties, was travelling with her mother from capital to capital, after the marriage of her sister to the Duke of Alva, and who spent the winters of 1850, 1851, and 1852 in the French capital. Mademoiselle Eugénie had conceived a romantic admiration for the young prince who at Strasburg and Boulogne had been so unfortunate. Her father had been a stanch adherent of Bonaparte, and she is said to have pleaded with her mother at one time to visit the prisoner at Ham and to place her fortune at his disposal.

This circumstance, when confided to the prince president, disposed him to be interested in the young lady. She and her mother were often at the Élysée, at Fontainebleau, and at Compiègne. Mademoiselle de Montijo was a superb horsewoman, and riding was the emperor's especial personal accomplishment. On one occasion they got lost together in the forest at Compiègne, and then society began to make remarks upon their intimacy.

The emperor was indeed most seriously in love with Mademoiselle de Montijo. It is said, on the authority of M. de Goncourt, that in one of their rides he asked her, with strange frankness, if she had ever been in love with any man. She answered with equal frankness, "I may have had fancies, sire, but I have never forgotten that I was Mademoiselle de Montijo."[1]

[Footnote 1: Pierre de Lano. La Cour de L'Empereur Napoléon III.]

Such a project of marriage was not approved by the emperor's family, it was not favored by his ministers, and the ladies of his court were all astir.

At a ball given on New Year's Day, 1853, by the emperor at the Tuileries, the wife of a cabinet minister was rude and insulting to Mademoiselle de Montijo. Seeing that she looked troubled, the emperor inquired the cause; and when he knew it, he said quietly: "To-morrow no one will dare to insult you again." There is also a story, which seems to rest on good authority, that a few weeks before this, at Compiègne, he had placed a crown of oak-leaves on her head, saying: "I hope soon to replace it with a better one."[2] Like the Empress Josephine, she had had it prophesied to her in her girlhood that she should one day wear a crown.

[Footnote 2: Jerrold, Life of Napoleon III.]

The day after the occurrence at the ball at the Tuileries, the Duc de Morny waited on Madame de Montijo with a letter from the emperor, formally requesting her daughter's hand.

The ladies, after this, removed to the Élysée, which was given to them, and preparations for the marriage went on apace.

In less than a month afterwards Eugénie de Montijo was empress of France.

Here is the emperor's own official announcement of his intended marriage:—

"I accede to the wish so often manifested by my people in announcing my marriage to you. The union which I am about to contract is not in harmony with old political traditions, and in this lies its advantage. France, by her successive revolutions, has been widely sundered from the rest of Europe. A wise Government should so rule as to bring her back within the circle of ancient monarchies. But this result will be more readily obtained by a frank and straightforward policy, by a loyal intercourse, than by royal alliances, which often create false security, and subordinate national to family interests. Moreover, past examples have left superstitious beliefs in the popular mind. The people have not forgotten that for sixty years foreign princesses have mounted the steps of the throne only to see their race scattered and proscribed, either by war or revolution. One woman alone appears to have brought with her good fortune, and lives, more than the rest, in the memory of the people; and this woman, the wife of General Bonaparte, was not of royal blood. We must admit this much, however. In 1810 the marriage of Napoleon I. with Marie Louise was a great event. It was a bond for the future, and a real gratification to the national pride.... But when, in the face of ancient Europe, one is carried by the force of a new principle to the level of the old dynasties, it is not by affecting an ancient descent and endeavoring at any price to enter the family of kings, that one compels recognition. It is rather by remembering one's origin; it is by preserving one's own character, and assuming frankly towards Europe the position of a parvenu,—a glorious title when one rises by the suffrages of a great people. Thus impelled, as I have been, to part from the precedents that have been hitherto followed, my marriage is only a private matter. It remained for me to choose my wife. She who has become the object of my choice is of lofty birth, French in heart and education and by the memory of the blood shed by her father in the cause of the Empire. She has, as a Spaniard, the advantage of not having a family in France to whom it would be necessary to give honors and dignities. Gifted with every quality of the heart, she will be the ornament of the throne, as in the hour of danger she would be one of its most courageous defenders. A pious Catholic, she will address one prayer with me to Heaven for the happiness of France. Kindly and good, she will show in the same position, I firmly believe, the virtues of the Empress Josephine."

The State coaches of the First Empire were regilded for the occasion, the crown diamonds were drawn from the hiding-place where they had lain since Louis Philippe's time, and were reset for the lady who was to wear them, while her apartments at the Tuileries were rapidly prepared.

The emperor was radiant. He had followed his inclination, and now that his choice was made, it seemed to receive universal approval. The London "Times" said: "Mademoiselle de Montijo knows better the character of France than any princess who could have been fetched from a German principality. She combines by her birth the energy of the Scottish and Spanish races, and if the opinion we hold of her be correct, she is, as Napoleon says, made not only to adorn the throne, but to defend it in the hour of danger."

The Municipal Council of Paris voted six hundred thousand francs to buy her a diamond necklace as a wedding present. Very gracefully she declined the necklace, but accepted the money, with which she endowed an Orphan Asylum.

The wedding-day was Jan. 29, 1853. Crowds lined the streets as the bride and her cortège drove to the Tuileries, where they were received by the Grand Chamberlain and other court dignitaries, who conducted the bride to the first salon. There she was received by Prince Napoleon and his sister, the Princess Mathilde, who introduced her into the salon, where the emperor, with his uncle, King Jérôme, surrounded by a glittering throng of cardinals, marshals, admirals, and great officers of State, stood ready to receive her. Thence, at nine o'clock, she was led by the emperor to the Salle des Maréchaux and seated beside him on a raised throne. The marriage contract was then read, and signed by the bride and bridegroom and by all the princes and princesses present.

The bride wore a marvellous dress of Alençon point lace, clasped with a diamond and sapphire girdle made for the Empress Marie Louise, and she looked, said a beholder, "the imperial beauty of a poet's vision." The emperor was in a general's uniform. He wore the collar of the Legion of Honor which his uncle the Great Emperor used to wear. He wore also the collar of the Golden Fleece that had once belonged to the Emperor Charles V.

The civil marriage being concluded, the imperial pair and the wedding guests passed into the theatre, where a cantata, composed by Auber for the occasion, was sung. The empress, robed in lace and glittering in jewels, seemed, says an eye-witness, to realize the picture presented of herself in the composer's words:—

"Espagne bien aimée,
Où le ciel est vermeil,
C'est toi qui l'as formée
D'un rayon de soleil."[1]

[Footnote 1:
Ah, beautiful Spain,
With thy skies ever bright,
Thou hast formed her for us
From a ray of sunlight.]

When the cantata had been sung, the Grand Master of the Ceremonies conducted the bride, as yet only half married, back to the Élysée.

The next morning all Paris was astir to see the wedding procession pass to the cathedral of Notre Dame. Early in the morning the emperor had repaired to the Élysée, where, in the chapel, he and the empress had heard mass, and after making their confession, had partaken of the Holy Communion. There were two hundred thousand sightseers in Paris that day, in addition to the usual population.

The empress wore upon her golden hair the crown that the First Napoleon had placed upon the head of Marie Louise. The body of the church was filled with men,—ambassadors, military and naval officers, and high officials. Their wives were in the galleries. As the great doors of the cathedral were opened to admit the bridal procession, a broad path of light gleamed from the door up to the altar, adding additional brilliancy to the glittering scene. Up the long aisle the emperor led his bride, flashing with the light of jewels, among them the unlucky regent diamond, which glittered on her bosom. After the Spanish fashion, she crossed her brow, her lips, her heart, her thumb, as she knelt for the nuptial benediction. The ceremony over, the archbishop conducted the married pair to the porch of the cathedral, and they drove along the Quai to the Tuileries.

The first favor the empress asked of her husband was the pardon of more than four thousand unfortunate persons still exiled or imprisoned for their share in the risings that succeeded the coup d'état.

When Washington Irving heard of the marriage, he wrote: "Louis Napoleon and Eugénie de Montijo,—Emperor and Empress of France! He whom I received as an exile at my cottage on the Hudson, she whom at Granada I have dandled on my knee! The last I saw of Eugénie de Montijo, she and her gay circle had swept away a charming young girl, beautiful and accomplished, my dear young friend, into their career of fashionable dissipation. Now Eugénie is on a throne, and the other a voluntary recluse in a convent of one of the most rigorous Orders." This convent is near Biarritz, where the nuns take vows of silence like the monks of La Trappe.[1] The empress when at Biarritz never failed to visit her former friend, who was permitted to converse with her.

[Footnote 1: Saturday Review, 1885.]

The beautiful woman thus raised to the imperial throne[2] was a mixed character,—not so perfect as some have represented her, but entirely to be acquitted of those grave faults that envy or disappointed expectations have attributed to her. Her character united kind-heartedness with inconsideration, imprudence with austerity, ardent feeling with great practical common-sense. Probably the emperor understood her very little at the time of his marriage, and that she long remained to him an enigma may have been one of her charms. With the impetuosity of her disposition and the intrepidity that had characterized her girlhood, she found it hard to submit to the restraints of her position, and the emperor had occasion frequently to remonstrate with her on her indifference to etiquette and public opinion. It was not until after her visit to Windsor in 1855 that she could be induced to establish court rules at the Tuileries, and to prescribe for herself and others, in public, a strict system of etiquette. But in her private hours, among her early friends, in the circle of ladies admitted to her intimacy, the empress was less discreet. Her impressions were apt to run into extremes; she indulged in whims like other pretty women; yet she was never carried by her romantic feelings or her enthusiasm beyond her power of self-control. Though careless of etiquette in private life, whenever a great occasion came, she could act with imperial dignity.

[Footnote 2: Pierre de Lano.]

Although she often experienced ingratitude, she was always generous. She was as ready to solicit favors and pardons as was the Empress Josephine. Sometimes she was even sorely embarrassed to find arguments in favor of her protégés. "Ah, mon Dieu!" she cried once, when pleading for the pardon of a workman, "how could he be guilty? He has a wife and five children to support; he could have had no time for conspiracy!"

As a wife she was devoted, not only to the public interests of her husband, but to his personal welfare. She was constantly anxious lest he should suffer from overwork; and her little select evening parties, which some people found fault with, were instituted by her with the chief object of amusing him.

Ben Jonson makes it a reproach against a lady of the sixteenth century that she would not "suffer herself to be admired." No such reproach could be addressed to the Empress Eugénie. Few women conscious of their power to charm will fail to exercise it. In the case of an empress,—young, lively, of an independent and adventurous spirit, and very beautiful,—all who approached her thought better of themselves from her apparent appreciation of their claims to consideration; and, indeed, in her position was it not the duty of the successor of Josephine to be gracious and charming to everybody?

Unfortunately the ladies who most enjoyed the intimacy of the Empress Eugénie were foreigners. She seems to have felt a certain distrust of Frenchwomen; and considering the ingratitude she often met with from those she served, it is hardly surprising that she preferred the intimacy of women who could not look to her for favors.

One of the ladies most intimate with the empress was the wife of Prince Richard Metternich, the Austrian ambassador. This lady seems to have had personal and political ends in view, and to have succeeded in inducing the empress to adopt and further them. That she was a dangerous and false friend may be judged from a speech she made when remonstrated with for countenancing and encouraging a project, favored by the empress, of making a promenade in the forest of Fontainebleau with her court-ladies in skirts which, like those in the old Scotch ballad, should be "kilted up to the knee." "You would not have advised your own empress," it was said to her, "to appear in such a garb." "Of course not," replied the ambassadress; "but my empress is of royal birth.—a real empress; while yours, ma chère, was Mademoiselle de Montijo!"

Brought up in private life, not early trained to the self-abnegation demanded of princesses, the Empress Eugénie did not bring into her new sphere all the aplomb and seriousness about little things which are early inculcated on ladies brought up to the profession of royalty. The career for which she had formed herself was that of a very charming woman; and one secret of her fascination was the sincerity of the interest she took in those around her. She loved to study character, to see into men's souls. She loved to be adored, while irresponsively she received men's homage. She especially liked the society of famous men, and when she was to meet them, she took pains to inform herself on the subjects about which they were most likely to converse.

That Queen Victoria loves her as a sister and a friend, is a testimony to her dignity and goodness; and we have her husband's own opinion of her, published on her fête-day, Dec. 15, 1868, after nearly sixteen years of marriage. The emperor had under his control a monthly magazine called "Le Dix Décembre," in which he often inserted articles from his own pen. The manuscript of this, in his own handwriting, was found in 1870 in the sack of the Tuileries. He omits all mention of his wife's Scotch ancestry, neither does he allude to her school-days in England. He speaks of her as a member of one of the most distinguished families in Spain, extols her father's attachment to the house of Bonaparte, and tells how she and her sister were placed at the Sacré Cœur, near Paris, declaring that "she acquired, we may say, the French before the Spanish language." He goes on to speak of her, not as the leader of a giddy circle of fashion in Madrid, as Washington Irving describes her, but as the thoughtful, studious young girl, with a precocious taste for social problems and for the society of men of letters; and he adds that after her marriage her simple, natural tastes did not disappear. "After her visit to the cholera patients at Amiens," he says, "nothing seemed to surprise her more than the applause that everywhere celebrated her courage. She seemed at last distressed by it.... At Compiègne," he also tells us, "nothing can be more attractive than five o'clock tea à l'impératrice; though," he adds slyly, "sometimes she is a little too fond of argument."

Assuredly she filled a difficult place, and filled it well; but the court of the Second Empire was all spangles and tinsel. It was composed of men and women all more or less adventurers. It was the court of the nouveaux riches and of a mushroom aristocracy. There were prizes to be won and pleasures to be enjoyed, and it was "like as it was in the days of Noë, until the flood came, and swept them all away."

In the midst of the crowd that composed this court the emperor and the empress shine out as the best. Both wanted to do their duty, as they understood it, to France. Whether it was the emperor's fault or his misfortune, is still undecided; but, with one or two exceptions, he was able to attach to himself only keen-witted adventurers and mediocre men. Among the women, not one who was really superior rose above the crowd. The empress led a giddy circle of married women, as in her youth, according to Washington Irving, she had led a giddy circle of young girls.

The two most able men among the emperor's advisers were his own kinsmen,—Count Walewski, who died in 1868, and the Duc de Morny, a man calm, polished, socially amiable, and so clever that Guizot once said to him: "My dear Morny, you are the only man who could overturn the Empire; but you will never be foolish enough to do it." By his death, in 1865, Louis Napoleon was bereft of his ablest adviser.

Persigny, or Fialin, had been the close personal friend of the emperor in his exile, and took a prominent part in the abortive expedition to Boulogne. In his youth he had led a disreputable life, and was not a man of great intellect, but he was presumed to be devoted to his old comrade. His friendship, however, had not always a happy effect upon the fortunes of his master. In 1872 he made a miserable end of his adventurous life, after having turned against the emperor in his adversity.

Fleury was another personal friend of Louis Napoleon, and was probably his best. The prince president had distinguished him when he was only a subaltern in the army. He had enlisted in the ranks, and had done good service in Algeria. In the emperor's last days of failing health he loved to keep Fleury beside him; but the empress was jealous of her husband's friend, and used her influence to have him honorably exiled to St. Petersburg as French ambassador. This post he occupied when the Franco-Prussian war broke out, so that he could be of little help to his master.

Saint-Arnaud had been made a marshal and minister of war, in spite of having been twice turned out of the French army.

M. Rouher had charge of the emperor's financial concerns, and Fould was a man who understood bureau-work, and how to manipulate government machinery.

Whoever might be the emperor's ministers, this little clique of his personal adherents—De Morny, Persigny, Saint-Arnaud, Fleury, Rouher, and Fould—were always around their master, giving him their advice and sharing (so far as he allowed anyone to share) his intimate councils.

The members of the Bonaparte family were an immense expense to the emperor, and gave him no little trouble. They were not the least thirsty among those who thronged around the fountain of wealth and honor; and their importunate demands upon the emperor's bounty led to a perpetual and reckless waste of money. The empress frequently remonstrated with her husband in regard to his lavish largesses and too generous expenditure. Contrary to what has been generally supposed, she was herself orderly and methodical in her expenditures and accounts, always carefully examining her bills, and though by the emperor's express desire she always expended the large amount annually allowed her, she never exceeded that sum.

Unhappily, the revived imperialism of Louis Napoleon was not, like Legitimacy, a cause, but to most persons who supported it, it was a speculation. Adherents had therefore to be attracted to it by hopes of gain, and all services had to be handsomely rewarded.

The emperor's policy in the early years of his reign may be said to have been twofold. He wanted to make France increase in material prosperity, and he wished to have money freely spent within her borders. He set on foot all kinds of improvements in Paris, and all kinds of useful enterprises in the provinces. Work was plenty; money flowed freely; the empire was everywhere popular. But the government of France was the government of one man; and if anything happened to that one man, where would be the government? There seemed no need to ask that question while France was prosperous and Paris gay. France under the Second Empire was quieter than she had been for any eighteen years since the Great Revolution; and for that she was grateful to Napoleon III.

His foreign policy was still more successful. "The Empire is peace," he had early proclaimed to be his motto. At first the idea of a Napoleon on the throne of France had greatly terrified the nations; but by degrees it seemed as if he really meant to be the Napoleon of Peace, as his uncle had been the Napoleon of War. He took every opportunity of reiterating his desire to be on good terms with his neighbors. With respect to England, those who knew him best asserted earnestly that he had always been in sympathy with the country that had sheltered him in exile. Count Walewski, whom he sent over as ambassador to London, was very popular there. He attended the funeral of the Duke of Wellington in his official capacity, and in return for this courtesy England restored to the French emperor his uncle's will, which had been laid up in Doctor's Commons with other wills of persons who had died on English soil. Russia was haughty to the new emperor; but the other courts of Europe accepted him, and most of them did so with considerable alacrity; for was he not holding down Socialism and Internationalism, which they dreaded far more than Napoleonism, and by which they were menaced in their own lands?

The great perplexity of the new emperor was his relation to Italy. He and his brother had taken the oaths of a Carbonaro in that country, in 1831. It is not to this day certain that his brother did not die by a Carbonaro's knife, rather than by the measles. Be that as it may, Louis Napoleon knew that if he failed to keep his promises as to the liberation of Italy, assassination awaited him.

How he endeavored to reconcile his engagements as a Carbonaro with his policy as the French emperor belongs less to the historical gossip of France than to that of Italy. So too the history of the Crimean War seems to belong par excellence to that of Russia. It was undertaken by England and France as allies, joined afterwards by a Sardinian army under General La Marmora, by the Turkish troops under Omar Pasha, and by an Egyptian contingent; but as we are now engaged on the personal history of the emperor and empress, I will rather here tell how Napoleon III., having formed a camp of one hundred thousand soldiers at Boulogne, on the very ground where his uncle had assembled his great army for the invasion of England, decided to ascertain, through his ambassador in London, if it would be agreeable to Prince Albert to visit that camp and see the manœuvres of his army. Finding that the invitation would be acceptable to the prince, he addressed him the following letter:—

July 3, 1854.

MON FRÈRE,—Your Royal Highness knows that putting in practice your own idea, and wishing to carry out to the end the struggle with Russia that we have begun together, I have decided to form an army between Boulogne and St. Omer. I need not tell your Highness how pleased I should be to see you, and how happy I should be to show you my soldiers. I am convinced, moreover, that personal ties will strengthen the union so happily established between two great nations. I beg you to present my respectful homage to the queen, and to receive this expression of the esteem and sincere affection I have conceived for you.

With this, mon frère, I pray God to have you in his holy keeping.

NAPOLEON.

The prince accepted the invitation, addressing the emperor as "Sire et mon frère." The queen entirely approved the visit, and Baron Stockmar predicted much advantage from it, "inasmuch," he said, "as the good or evil destiny of the present time will directly and chiefly depend upon a rational, honorable, and resolute alliance between England and France."

Prince Albert met the emperor at Boulogne, Sept. 4, 1854. The Duke of Newcastle, who was in attendance on Prince Albert, wrote to a friend that tears stood in the emperor's eyes when he received his guest as he stepped upon French soil; and the prince wrote that evening to the queen:—

"The emperor has been very nervous, if we are to believe those who stood near him and who know him well. He was kindly and courteous, and does not look so old nor so pale as his portraits make him, and is much gayer than he is generally represented. The visit cannot fail to be a source of great gratification to him.... I have had two long talks with him, in which he spoke very sensibly about the war and the questions du jour. People here are sanguine about the results of the expedition to the Crimea, and very sensitive about the behavior of Admiral Sir Charles Napier."

The prince adds in his letter, the same evening:—

"The emperor thaws more and more. This evening after dinner I withdrew with him to his sitting-room for half an hour before rejoining his guests, in order that he might smoke his cigarette,—in which occupation, to his amazement, I could not keep him company. He told me that one of the deepest impressions ever made on him was, when having gone from France to Rio Janeiro and thence to the United States, and being recalled to Europe by the rumor of his mother's serious illness, he arrived in London directly after King William's death, and saw you going to open parliament for the first time."

Subsequently the prince tells the queen,—

"We discussed all topics of home and foreign policy, material and personal, with the greatest frankness, and I can say but good of what I heard.... He was brought up in the German fashion in Germany,—a training which has developed a German turn of mind. As to all modern political history, so far as this is not Napoleonic, he is without information; so that he wants many of the materials for accurate judgment."

Dickens, who was at Boulogne on this occasion, thus tells of Prince Albert's arrival:—

"The town looks like one immense flag, it is so decked out with streamers; and as the royal yacht approached yesterday, the whole range of the cliff-tops was lined with troops, and the artillerymen, matches in hand, stood ready to fire the great guns the moment she made the harbor, the sailors standing up in the prow of the yacht, the prince, in a blazing uniform, left alone on the deck for everybody to see,—a stupendous silence, and then such an infernal blazing and banging as never was heard. It was almost as fine a sight as one could see, under a deep blue sky."

While the guest of the emperor, Prince Albert expressed to him the queen's hope that they should see him in England, and that she should make the acquaintance of the empress.

The prince, an excellent judge of character, in a subsequent memorandum concerning his impressions, says,—

"The emperor appeared quiet and indolent from constitution, not easily excited, but gay and humorous when at his ease. His French is not without a little German accent, and his pronunciation of German is better than of English.... He recited a poem by Schiller on the advantages to man of peace and war, which seemed to have made a deep impression upon him, and appeared to me to be not without significance with reference to his own life. His court and household are strictly kept and in good order, more English than French. The gentlemen composing his entourage are not distinguished by birth, manners, or education. He lives on a familiar footing with them, although they seemed afraid of him. The tone was rather that of a garrison, with a good deal of smoking.... He is very chilly, complains of rheumatism, and goes early to bed, takes no pleasure in music, but is proud of his horsemanship."

Speaking again of the emperor's lack of information as to the history of politics, Prince Albert says:—

"But he is remarkably modest in acknowledging these defects, and in not pretending to know what he does not. All that relates to Napoleonic politics he has at his finger's ends. He also appears to have thought much and deeply on politics, yet more like an amateur politician, mixing many very sound and very crude notions together. He admires English institutions, and regrets the absence of an aristocracy in France, but might not be willing to allow such an aristocracy to control his own power, whilst he might wish to have the advantage of its control over the pure democracy."

The emperor closely questioned the prince about the working of the English government and the queen's relations to her ministers. Prince Albert writes,—

"He said that he did not allow his ministers to meet or to discuss matters together; that they transacted their business solely with him. He seemed astonished when I told him that every despatch went through the queen's hands and was read by her, as he only received extracts made from them, and indeed appeared to have little time or inclination generally to read. When I observed to him that the queen would not be content without seeing the whole of the diplomatic correspondence, he replied that he found a full compensation in having persons in his own employ and confidence at the different posts of importance, who reported solely to him. I could not but express my sense of the danger of such an arrangement, to which no statesman, in England at least, would submit."

I have quoted this memorandum of Prince Albert's, because it points out the perils which led to the downfall or the Empire,—the emperor's bad entourage; his personal government, assisted only by private confidential relations with irresponsible persons; his mixture of crude and sensible ideas of government; his indolence; and his tendency to let things slide out of his own hands.

"Upon the whole," concluded the prince, "my impression is that neither in home nor foreign politics would the emperor naturally take any violent step, but that he appears in distress for means of governing, and is obliged to look about him from day to day. Having deprived the people of any active participation in the government, and reduced them to the mere position of spectators, they grow impatient, like a crowd at a display of fireworks, whenever there is any cessation in the display. Still, he appears the only man who has any hold on France, relying on the name of Napoleon. He said to the Duke of Newcastle: 'Former Governments have tried to reign by the support of one million of the educated classes; I claim to lay hold of the other twenty-nine.' He is decidedly benevolent, and anxious for the good of the people, but has, like all rulers before him, a bad opinion of their political capacity."

Strange to say, in the midst of war the Universal Exposition of 1855 took place in Paris. The winter was horribly severe, and the armies in the Crimea suffered terribly. The emperor was extremely desirous to go himself to the seat of war, but was urged by every one about him to remain at home. All kinds of good reasons were put forward for this advice, but probably not the one subsequently advanced by one of his generals after the campaign of Italy in 1859. "It used to be said that the presence of the First Napoleon with his army was worth a reinforcement of forty thousand men. The army now feels that the presence of the Third Napoleon equals the loss of about the same number."

We have seen that Queen Victoria had expressed a wish to welcome the emperor and empress at Windsor Castle. It was on April 16, 1855, that the imperial pair reached England, and were received by Prince Albert on board their yacht. They met with a hearty national greeting on their way to London. In London itself crowds lined the streets. "It was," says an eye-witness, "one bewildering triumph, in which it was estimated that a million of people took part." The "Times" reporter noticed that as the emperor passed his old residence in King Street, St. James's, he pointed it out to the empress as the place where he was living when the events of 1848 summoned him to Paris.

"Only seven years before," observes his biographer, Mr. Jerrold, "he was wont to stroll unnoticed, with his faithful dog at his heels, from this house to the news-vendor's stall by the Burlington Arcade, to get the latest news from revolutionary France; now he was the guest of the English people, on his way through cheering crowds to Windsor Castle, where the queen was waiting in the vestibule to receive him." The same rooms were prepared for him that had been given to Louis Philippe and to the Emperor Nicholas. Queen Victoria tells us in her diary,—

"I cannot say what indescribable emotions filled me,—how much all seemed like a wonderful dream.... I advanced and embraced the Emperor, ... and then the very gentle, graceful, and evidently nervous empress. We presented the princes and our children (Vicky, with very alarmed eyes, making very low courtesies). The emperor embraced Bertie, and then he went upstairs, Albert leading the empress, who, in the most engaging manner, refused to go first, but at length, with graceful reluctance, did so, the emperor leading me and expressing his great gratification in being here and seeing me, and admiring Windsor."

At dinner, on the day of his arrival, the new ruler of France seems to have charmed the queen. "He is," she records in her journal, "so very quiet. His voice is low and soft. Et il ne fait pas des phrases."

When the war was talked about, the emperor spoke of his wish to go out to the Crimea, and the queen noticed that the empress was as eager as himself that he should go. "She sees no greater danger for him there," she adds, "than in Paris. She said she was seldom alarmed for him except when he went out quite alone of a morning.... She is full of courage and spirit, and yet so gentle, with such innocence and enjouement, that the ensemble is most charming. With all her great liveliness she has the prettiest and most modest manner."

The queen little guessed what commotion and excitement had gone on before dinner in the private apartments of the emperor and empress, when it was discovered that the case containing all the beautiful toilet prepared for the occasion had not arrived. The emperor suggested to his wife to retire to rest on the plea of fatigue after the journey, but she decided to borrow a blue-silk dress from one of her ladies-in-waiting, in which, with only flowers in her hair, she increased the queen's impression of her simplicity and modesty.

During the visit the emperor asked the queen where Louis Philippe's widow, Queen Marie Amélie, was living. She had been at Windsor Castle only a few days before, and the queen had looked sorrowfully after her as she drove away, with shabby post-horses, to her residence near Richmond. The emperor begged her Majesty to express to Louis Philippe's widow his hope that she would not hesitate to pass through France on any journey she might make to Spain.

There was a review of the household troops, commanded by Lord Cardigan, who had led the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava, and who rode the same charger. The emperor rode a fiery, beautiful chestnut, and his horsemanship was much admired. That evening there was a State ball at Windsor Castle, and the queen danced a quadrille with the emperor. The queen wrote that evening in her journal: "How strange to think that I—the granddaughter of George III.—should dance with the Emperor Napoleon, nephew of England's greatest enemy, now my nearest and most intimate ally, in the Waterloo Room, and that ally living in this country only six years ago in exile, poor and unthought of!"

She adds, speaking of the empress: "Her manner is the most perfect thing I have ever seen, so gentle and graceful and kind, and the courtesy is charming,—so modest and retiring withal."

The next day came a council attended by the emperor, Prince Albert, ministers, and diplomatists, which lasted so very long that the queen herself knocked at the door and reminded them that at four o'clock the emperor was to be invested with the Order of the Garter.

After this ceremony was over, the emperor remarked to the queen that he had now sworn fidelity to her Majesty, and would carefully keep his oath.

At dinner that day the talk fell on assassination. The emperor was shot at by a Carbonaro only a few days after his return from Windsor, and four years later by Orsini.

Before leaving England the emperor attended a banquet given to him by the Lord Mayor. At Windsor he read his speech (in English) to the queen and prince, who pronounced it a very good one.

Next day the royalties went to see the Crystal Palace, at Sydenham. There they were surrounded by sight-seeing throngs, and in such a crowd there was every chance for a pistol-shot from some French or Italian refugee. "I own I felt anxious," writes the queen; "I felt as I walked, leaning on the emperor's arm, that I was possibly a protection to him."

Afterwards she writes,—

"On all, this visit has left a permanent satisfactory impression. It went off so well,—not a contre-temps ... fine weather, everything smiling, the nation enthusiastic and happy in the alliance of two great countries whose enmity would be fatal.... I am glad to have known this extraordinary man, whom it is certainly not possible not to like when you live with him, and not, even to a considerable extent, to admire.... I believe him capable of kindness, affection, friendship, gratitude. I feel confidence in him as regards the future. I think he is frank, means well to us, and, as Stockmar says, that we have insured his sincerity and good faith to us for the rest of his life."

Nearly a year after this visit, when the emperor and empress had been married about three years, the Prince Imperial was born, March 16, 1856. A few hours after his birth he was christened Napoleon Eugène Louis Jean Joseph. Pope Pius IX. was his godfather, the Queen of Sweden his godmother. For many hours the empress, like her imperial predecessor Marie Louise, was dangerously ill.

The Crimean War had by that time virtually come to a triumphant end. The emperor had at last an heir; all things appeared to smile upon him. A general amnesty was issued to all political offenders. The emperor became godfather and the empress godmother to all legitimate children born in France upon their son's birthday, and finally the little prince had a public baptism at Notre Dame, followed by a ball of extraordinary magnificence, given by the city of Paris to the mother of the heir-apparent, at the Hôtel-de-Ville.

The chief trouble that menaced the imperial throne at this period was the extraordinary lavishness which the emperor's entourage of speculative adventurers encouraged him to incur in all directions; the recklessness of speculation; the general mania for gain that went on around him. There had also been terrible inundations in France, and a bad harvest. Many things also that disgusted and disquieted the emperor were going on among the persons who surrounded him,—persons in whom he had placed confidence; and it was one of his good qualities that he was always slow to believe evil. Still, these things were forced on his attention, and greatly disturbed him.

His little son was from the first his idol. Here is a letter he wrote to Prince Albert, acknowledging Queen Victoria's congratulations:—

"I have been greatly touched to learn that all your family have shared my joy, and all my hope is that my son may resemble dear little Prince Arthur, and that he may have the rare qualities of your children. The sympathy shown on the late occasion by the English people is another bond between the two countries, and I hope my son will inherit my feelings of true friendship for the royal family of England, and of affectionate esteem for the great English nation."

A few months later, the future Emperor Frederick, then recently engaged to the Princess Royal of England, visited Paris. He was attended by Major Baron von Moltke, who described the emperor, empress, and their court in letters to his friends. "The empress," he says, "is of astonishing beauty, with a slight, elegant figure, and dressing with much taste and richness, but without ostentation. She is very talkative and lively,—much more so than is usual with persons occupying so high a position. The emperor impressed me by a sort of immobility of features, and the almost extinguished look of his eyes."

This look, by the way, was cultivated by the emperor. When his early playfellow, Madame Cornu, saw him after twelve years' separation, her first exclamation was: "Why! what have you done to your eyes?"

"The prominent characteristic of the emperor's face," continues Von Moltke, "is a friendly, good-natured smile which has nothing Napoleonic about it. He mostly sits quietly with his head on one side, and events have shown that this tranquillity, which is very imposing to the restless French nation, is not apathy, but a sign of a superior mind and a strong will. He is an emperor, and not a king.... Affairs in France are not in a normal condition, but it would be difficult to say how, under present circumstances, they could be improved.... Napoleon III. has nothing of the sombre sternness of his uncle, neither his imperial demeanor nor his deliberate attitude. He is a quite simple and somewhat small man, whose always tranquil countenance gives a strong impression of amiability. He never gets angry, say the people round him. He is always polite.... He suffers from a want of men of ability to uphold him. He cannot make use of men of independent character, who insist on having their own notions, as the direction of affairs of State must be concentrated in his hands. Greater liberty ought to be conceded in a regulated state of society, but in the present state of France there must be a strong and single direction, which is, besides, best adapted to the French character. Freedom of the Press is for the present as impossible here as it would be at the headquarters of an army in the field if the Press wished to discuss the measures taken by the general in command. Napoleon has shown wisdom, firmness, self-confidence, but also moderation and clemency; and though simple in his dress, he does not forget that the French people like to see their sovereigns surrounded by a brilliant court."

Of the imperial baby in his nurse's arms, on whom the father looked with a face radiant with pride and joy, Von Moltke remarks: "Truly, he seems a strapping fellow."

The little prince grew up a very promising lad. He was his father's idol. Louis Napoleon never could be brought to give him any sterner reproof than "Louis, don't be foolish,—ne fais pas des bêtises." Discipline was left to his mother, and it was popularly thought that she was much less wrapped up in the child than his father was. His especial talent was for drawing and sculpture. Some of his sketches, of which fac-similes are given in Jerrold's "Life of Napoleon III.," are very spirited, and when he could get a lump of wet clay to play with, he made busts of the persons round him which were excellent likenesses.

The emperor's rooms at the Tuileries were rather low and dark, but he selected them because they communicated with those of the empress in the Pavillon de Flore, by a narrow winding staircase. Often in the day would she come down to him, or he ascend to her.

His study was filled with Napoleonic relics, and littered with political and historical papers. He kept a large room with models of new inventions, which were a great delight to him and to his son. He was fond of wood-turning, and Thélin and he would often make pretty rustic chairs for the park at Saint-Cloud.

For some years before his overthrow he was growing very feeble, and always carried a cane surmounted with a gold eagle. Commonly too some chosen friend, generally Fleury, gave him his arm, but he always walked in silence. In the afternoon he would drive out, and sometimes horrify the police by getting out of his carriage and walking alone in distant quarters of the city.

On one occasion he had a difference of opinion with one of his friends, who assured him that if he insisted on planting an open space in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine with flowers, and protected it by no railing, the flowers would very speedily be destroyed. His pleasure and exultation were very great when he found he had been right, and that not a flower had been plucked or broken.

The emperor was generally gay and ready to converse at table, but he made it a rule never to criticise or discuss living persons himself, or allow others to do so in his hearing.

There was much decorum at court so far as his influence extended in the imperial circle, but there were plenty of scandals outside of it; and as to money matters, even Persigny and Fleury—one the friend of the emperor for five-and-twenty years, and the other devotedly attached to him—could not restrain themselves from cheating him and tricking him whenever they could.

EMPEROR MAXIMILIAN.

[CHAPTER X.]

MAXIMILIAN AND MEXICO.[1]

[Footnote 1: Much of the material of this chapter is taken from Victor Tissot's book of travels in Austria; the chapter on Maximilian as archduke and emperor I translated from advance-sheets, and it was published in the "Living Age" under the title "From Miramar to Queretaro." -E. W. L.]

Maximilian, Archduke of Austria, was born the same week that his cousin, the unfortunate son of Napoleon and Marie Louise, had died. He grew to manhood handsome, well educated, accomplished, and enterprising. He had the great gift of always making himself personally beloved. The navy was his profession, but his great desire was to be made viceroy of the (then) Austrian provinces of Italy. He felt sure that he could conciliate the Italians, and a great Italian statesman is reported to have said that it was well for Italian unity that his wish was never granted. His ideas were all liberal, and opposed to those of Metternich. His family mistrusted his political opinions, but the Italians, when brought into personal contact with him, soon learned to love him. They saw a great deal of him, for Trieste and Venice were at that period the naval stations of the Austrian Empire. He was, therefore, often in those places, and finally took up his residence in an earthly paradise upon the Adriatic, created by himself and called by him Miramar.

In June, 1857, when the Indian Mutiny was at its height, though tidings of it had not yet reached the western world, the Archduke Maximilian, whom the English royal family had never met, arrived at Windsor, and was hailed there as one who was soon to become a relative, for he was engaged to King Leopold's only daughter, the Princess Charlotte of Belgium.

The queen and her husband were charmed with Maximilian. "He is a young prince," writes Prince Albert, "of whom we hear nothing but good, and Charlotte's alliance with him will be one of the heart. May Heaven's blessing," he adds, "be upon a connection so happily begun, and in it may they both find their life's truest happiness!"

The queen also wrote to her uncle Leopold,—

"The archduke is charming,—so clever, natural, kind, and amiable; so English in his feelings and likings. With the exception of the mouth and chin, he is good looking, but I think one does not the least care for that, he is so very kind, clever, and pleasant. I wish you really joy, dearest uncle, at having got such a husband for dear Charlotte. I am sure he will make her happy, and do a great deal for Italy."

Prince Albert crossed over to Belgium for the wedding, and wrote to his wife: "Charlotte's whole being seems to have been warmed and unfolded by the love that is kindled in her heart. I have never seen so rapid a development in the space of one year. She appears to be happy and devoted to her husband with her whole soul, and eager to make herself worthy of her present position."

At the time of her marriage the princess had just entered her seventeenth year. The wedding-day was made a little family fête at Windsor, in spite of Prince Albert's absence. "The younger children," the queen writes to her husband, "are to have a half-holiday. Alice is to dine with us for the first time, in the evening. We shall drink the archduke's and the archduchess's healths, and I have ordered wine for our servants, and grog for our sailors, to do the same."

Maximilian had been round the world in his frigate, the "Novara;" he had travelled into Greece and Asia Minor, he had visited Spain, Portugal, and Sicily; he had been to Egypt and the Holy Land. He loved the ocean like a true sailor, and in 1856 he had taken up his residence at Trieste, to be near its shores. He would frequently go out alone in a light boat, even in rough weather, a dash of danger lending excitement to a struggle with the wind and waves.

One day in a storm his light craft had been borne like a feather round Cape Gignano. In a moment it lay at rest under the lee of the land. Maximilian landed, and found the spot so charming and the sea-view so superb that he resolved to build a little villa there for fishing. He bought the land at once, and began by setting out exotics, persuaded that the soil of such a spot would be favorable to tropical vegetation. A year later he brought his young bride to this favored spot, and with a golden wand transformed his bachelor's fishing-hut into the palace of an emperor.

At this period of his life, Maximilian (an author and a poet) was greatly interested in architecture. He drew the plans for an exquisite church (now one of the beauties of Vienna), and draughted with his own hand those for the grounds and castle of Miramar. The work was pushed on rapidly, yet in 1859, when Austria was forced to give up Lombardy, nothing at Miramar was complete except a fancy farm-house on one of the heights of the property. Maximilian, however, made his home there with his wife, and they found it so delightful that when at length the castle was ready for occupation, they lingered in the farmhouse, which they loved as their first home. It was a large Swiss châlet, covered with vines and honeysuckle, surrounded by groves of camellias and pyrus japonicas. How delicious life must have been to the husband and wife in this solitude, fragrant with flowers, vocal with the songs of birds, a glory of greenness round the house, the blue sky overhead, the glittering ocean at their feet, and holy love and loving kindness everywhere around them!

Maximilian's generosity rendered wealth indispensable to his complete happiness, for he loved to surround himself with artists, learned men, and men of letters. He paid them every kind of attention in his power, and did not omit those little gifts which are "the beads on memory's rosary."

"One feels how happy life must have been to husband and wife in this new Paradise!" cries M. Victor Tissot. "Yet it was Paradise Lost before long, for alas! in this, as in the other Paradise, the Eve, the sweet young wife, was tempted by ambition. She took the apple, ate, and gave it to her husband."

On April 10, 1864, the Mexican deputies commissioned to offer Maximilian the imperial crown, arrived at Miramar. "We come," said Don Gutierrez de Estrada, "to beseech you to ascend the throne of Mexico, to which you have been called by the voice of a people weary of anarchy and civil war. We are assured you have the secret of conquering the hearts of all men, and excel in the rare knowledge of the art of government."

Maximilian replied that he was ready to accept the honor offered him by the Mexican people, and that his government would be both liberal and constitutional. "I shall prove, I trust," he said, "that liberty may be made compatible with law. I shall respect your liberties, and uphold order at the same time."

Don Gutierrez thanked the archduke in the name of the Mexican nation, and then the new emperor swore upon the Gospels to labor for the happiness and prosperity of his people, and to protect their independent nationality. Don Gutierrez was then embraced by Maximilian, who hung around his neck the cross of the new Order of Guadeloupe, of which he was the first member.

But this acceptance of the imperial crown of Mexico was by no means a sudden thought with Maximilian. For eight months he had been debating the matter in his own heart, urged to acceptance of the crown by his wife, but dissuaded by his family.

The history of the offer, connected as it is with one of Napoleon III.'s schemes for extending French influence, must be briefly told.

Before the Civil War broke out in America, it had already entered the head of the emperor that he would like to intermeddle in the affairs of Mexico. That unhappy country, which the United States have been accused of doing their best to keep in a chronic state of weakness, turbulence, and revolution, had been left to recover itself after the Mexican War, which had shorn away its fairest provinces.

In 1853, Santa Aña, who had been president, dictator, exile, and conspirator by turns for thirty years, was recalled to Mexico, and a second time was made dictator. He assumed the title of Serene Highness, and claimed the right to nominate his successor. A popular revolution soon unseated him. Juarez, of Indian parentage, was at its head. The clerical party was outraged by the confiscation of the enormous possessions of the Church, and by the abolition of the right of mortmain (i. e., wills made upon death-beds were pronounced thenceforth invalid, so far as bequests to the Church were concerned). Mexico is a country with eighteen hundred miles of coast-line, but few harbors. It had in 1860 no railroads, and hardly any highroads of any kind. Its provinces were semi-independent, its population widely scattered, a large part of it was Indian, a still larger portion consisted of half-breeds; pure-blooded Spaniards were a small minority. The feeling that stood Mexico in lieu of patriotism was a keen hatred and jealousy of foreigners. Their very pride still keeps the Mexicans from believing that there can be anything better than what they possess. Perpetual revolutions had educated the people into habits of lawlessness; and as to dishonesty, rank itself was no guarantee against petty larceny, while in the larger rascalities of peculation, bribe-taking, and political treachery, no nation had ever such opportunities for exercising its national capacity, nor, apparently, did many Mexicans have conscientious scruples as to its display.

Under these circumstances it is no wonder that foreign bondholders complained loudly to their Governments, or that in the general confusion all manner of wrongs to Englishmen, Frenchmen, Austrians, and Spaniards called loudly for redress. That cry reached the French emperor's ears. He proposed to England and Spain that as Mexico had at last got a government under Juarez, an interventionary force should appear off her coast, composed of English, French, and Spanish ships-of-war, and that Mexico should be summoned to redress their common wrongs.

All this was harmless. The expedition was commanded by the Spanish General Prim; but under the avowed object of demanding a redress of grievances, the Emperor Napoleon concealed a more ambitious aim. The United States were at war; all their resources were absorbed in civil strife. The most sagacious statesmen could not foresee that the end of that strife would be to make the country more great, more rich, more formidable; and Napoleon thought it was the very moment for attacking the Monroe doctrine, and for making, as he said, "the Latin race hold equal sway with the Anglo-Saxon over the New World." If he meant by the "Latin race" the effete half-Indian, Mexican and South American peoples, which were to be set as rivals against the Anglo-Saxon race, represented by Yankees, Southerners, men of the West, and the English in Canada, he was widely wrong in his calculation; but it is probable that "Latin" was his synonym for "French" in this connection.

The Monroe doctrine, as all Americans know, took its rise from certain words in a Presidential message of Mr. Monroe in 1822, though they were inserted in the message by Mr. Adams. They were to the effect that the United States would disturb no nation or government at present (i. e., in 1822) existing on the North or South American continent, but that they would oppose all attempts by any European Government whatever to put down any free institutions that were the choice of the people, or to impose upon them any form of government against their will.

Napoleon III. did not quite dare to fly in the face of the Monroe doctrine, even though the United States were embarrassed by civil war. There were plenty of Mexican exiles in Paris, among them the Don Gutierrez who offered Maximilian the imperial crown. These men had secret interviews with the emperor. Thus the way was paved for Maximilian long before the time came to act, and possibly before he heard of the matter; for there was a power behind the throne that was urging his elevation on the French emperor with all a woman's persuasive powers.[1]

[Footnote 1: Pierre de Lana.]

It was not until after the Empress Eugénie had been left regent of France, during the campaign of Italy, in 1859, that she took any part in politics; but from that time her influence was freely exercised, though she interested herself chiefly in foreign affairs. She did not like Victor Emmanuel, nor her husband's policy as regarded Italy. She dreaded the destruction of the pope's power as a temporal prince. Her sympathies were Austrian, and in conjunction with her friends the Prince and Princess Metternich she lost no opportunity of urging the establishment of Maximilian and Carlotta on the imperial throne of Mexico. She looked upon this as in some sort a compensation given by France to the House of Hapsburg for its losses in Italy. To her imagination, the expedition to Mexico seemed like a romance. She saw two lovers seated upon Montezuma's throne,—the oldest throne in the New World,—surrounded by the glories of the tropics. When there, they would restore the privileges of the Catholic clergy, and would curb the revolutionary aspirations of the mongrel population of Mexico,—a population which, as a Spaniard, she hated and despised. To this end she intrigued with all her heart. Indeed, she and her friends the Metternichs acted in the preliminary arrangements of the plan the part of actual conspirators.

After the French and Spanish forces landed in Mexico, accompanied by a few Englishmen, Juarez offered to make compensation for the wrongs complained of, and an agreement was drawn up and signed by General Prim and the French and English commanders at a place called La Soledad.

England and Spain, when the agreement was sent to Europe for ratification, considered it satisfactory. France, having ulterior designs, repudiated it altogether. The Spaniards and the English therefore withdrew their forces, and the French remained to fight out the quarrel with Juarez alone.

Up to this time no allusion had been made as to any change in the Mexican government; but now French agents began to intrigue in favor of an empire and Maximilian. A small assembly of Mexican notables was with great difficulty convened in the city of Mexico, from which Juarez was absent, being engaged in carrying on the war. The only persons concerned in this assembly who took any real interest in its objects were the clergy, who believed that a prince of the House of Austria would be likely to restore to them all their property and privileges.

There can be no doubt that such a government as Maximilian would have established in Mexico would have been a happy thing for that country and for civilization; but it is equally certain that the Mexicans (meaning by that term the great mass of the people) did not want such a government. Above all, they did not want for their ruler a foreigner, backed by a foreign potentate. The only raison d'être for Maximilian's government in any Mexican's mind was not that it would bring order and peace into the country, but that it might bring money from the coffers of the new emperor's ally. But when, after a while, the reverse of peace and order was the result of this new government, and when the French emperor declined to advance any more funds, nothing kept any man true to Maximilian but the dread of what the party of Juarez might do to him when the cause of the emperor should be overthrown.

With this explanation we will go back to Miramar, where Maximilian and Carlotta, unquestionably deceived by the political manipulations of the French emperor, believed, with joy and pride, that they were the choice of the Mexican people, and that they had nothing to do but to go forth and take possession of the promised land.

On April 13, 1864, almost the darkest date during our war for the cause of the Federal Union, the Archduke Maximilian and his wife quitted the soil of Austria.

Early in the morning, in the port of Trieste and on the road to Miramar, all were astir. Friends from all parts of the Austrian Empire were hastening to bid farewell to the Archduke whom they loved.

The "Novara" and the French frigate "Thémis" were lying off Trieste, ready to start; and near them, riding at anchor, were six steamships belonging to the Austrian Lloyds, full of spectators.

At about one o'clock P. M. the emperor, with his wife leaning on his arm, entered the town-hall of Trieste, where about twenty deputations were assembled to offer him farewell addresses. Maximilian was much moved, and when the burgomaster spoke of the grief that all the people of the city would feel at his departure, he burst into tears. He embraced the burgomaster, shook hands with those about him, and whispered, as if to himself: "Something tells me that I shall never see this dear country more." His sensitive and poetic nature was very susceptible to sad presentiments; his book teems with them.

After the leave-taking, their Majesties entered the magnificent barge prepared for their use by the city of Trieste; a salute of one hundred guns reverberated from the sides of the mountain, while twenty thousand hats and handkerchiefs waved a sad farewell.

Maximilian and Carlotta embarked on board the "Novara," which carried the Mexican flag. By four o'clock both vessels were well down in the offing, and not till then did the crowd separate. Those with telescopes had seen up to the last moment a figure standing on the poop-deck, with its face turned towards Miramar, and knew it for the form of Maximilian.

The "Novara" touched at Jamaica. On May 28 it came in sight of the shores of Mexico, and cast anchor in the harbor of Vera Cruz.

The emperor and empress had expected a public reception. There was nothing of the kind. No welcome awaited them,—not even an official one. This was the more extraordinary because the "Thémis" had been sent forward to announce the approach of the imperial party. Their disappointment at the want of enthusiasm was great. The French vice-admiral did his best to repair unfortunate omissions. He gave orders for a show of festivity; but it was plain to see, from the indifference of the people in the streets, that they had no part or lot in the demonstration.

After leaving the sea-coast, Maximilian proceeded towards his capital in an old shabby English barouche, his journey seeming rather like the expedition of an adventurer than the progress of an emperor. Passing through Orizaba and Puebla, the emperor and empress entered Mexico on June 12. French agents had paid for flowers to be scattered in their path, and a theatrical kind of procession was prepared, which was not agreeable to either of them. The only part of the population which hailed their coming with delight were the descendants of the Aztecs, many of whom appeared on the occasion in feather dresses preserved in their families since the time of Montezuma. In the evening there was a public performance at the theatre in honor of the new sovereigns, but not half the boxes were filled.

The palace of Chapultepec, which had been assigned them as their residence, was destitute of comforts of any kind, and was much more like a second-class hotel than a habitation meet for princes. Yet even here, one of Maximilian's first cares was to layout the grounds and to plant flowers.

He was advised to make an immediate journey through his new dominions, in order to judge for himself of the aspirations and resources of the people. But he found a country broken down by war, without roads, without schools, without agriculture. "The only thing in this country which is well organized, sire," said a Mexican whom he was questioning about the state of things, "is robbery."

There was thieving everywhere. The emperor's palace, and even his private apartments, were not spared. One day, after a reception of officers high in military command, his revolver, inlaid with gold and ivory, which had lain on a table by his side, disappeared, and the empress missed two watches, which had gone astray under the dexterous fingering of her maids-of-honor. General Lopez, who was then commandant of the palace, wishing to give the emperor a proof of the accomplishments of his subjects in matters of this kind, offered to steal off his writing-table, within two hours, and without being noticed, any object agreed upon. He said he believed he could even carry off the table,—a joke at which the emperor laughed heartily.

When Maximilian returned to his capital, after a journey of great peril, he ordered the construction of several high-roads, granted lands and privileges to two or three railroad companies, founded a good many schools, and set on foot a Mexican Academy of Sciences. His own taste for natural history was so great that he gave some foundation for the charge made against him that he would frequently shut himself up in his workroom to stuff birds. He devoted great attention to improvements in agriculture, and planned a manufacturing city, and a seaport on the Gulf of Mexico which he intended to call Miramar.

His wife was an indefatigable helpmeet. She wrote all his European correspondence, but resented the interference of the French, and could be curt and energetic when the occasion called for self-assertion.

An American gentleman who saw her at a court-ball at this period thus describes her: "She was imperial in every look and action. The dignified and stately step so well suited to her station, and with her perfectly natural, would have seemed affectation in another. She did not seem remarkably tall, except in comparison with others. Her voice possessed a refinement peculiar to birth, education, and superior natures."

But while the emperor and empress were laboring for the improvement of their realm, the Juarists were increasing in strength, and banditti carried on their enterprises with impunity up to the very gates of Mexico. Day after day the stage was robbed between Mexico and Jalapa. The Marquis de Radepont, a quiet traveller, saved himself by killing half-a-dozen highwaymen with his revolver; but the Belgian ambassador, on his way to announce to their Imperial Majesties the accession of Leopold II., the brother of Carlotta, was robbed of all his jewelry and money.

In consequence of these disorders the emperor signed, on Oct. 3, 1865, in spite of the remonstrances of Marshal Bazaine, the French general-in-chief in Mexico, an order to the civil and military authorities to treat all armed guerilla bands as brigands, and to apply to them the utmost rigor of martial law.

This was at once interpreted into permission to shoot all prisoners; and three promising young Juarist generals who had fallen into the hands of one of Maximilian's commanders were shot immediately, leaving behind them pathetic farewell letters to their friends. Maximilian did not foresee that he was signing his own death-warrant when he put his hand to this act of severity.

Juarez himself, with a body of his followers, had retreated to the frontier, ready to pass over into Texas if the French attacked him. But the French were too few and too scattered to occupy a vast region of country where every inhabited house was a refuge for their foes. Moreover, the interest of Napoleon in the empire of Mexico was at an end. He hated a long war at any time, and was always ready to abandon an enterprise when he could not carry out his projects by a coup de main. The war was extremely unpopular in France. Financial ruin had come upon many Frenchmen from the failure of the Mexican bonds negotiated by the banker, Jecker, to pay interest to their bond-holders. The Civil War in the United States was at an end, and Mr. Seward was instructing the American ambassador in Paris to threaten the Emperor Napoleon with the enforcement of the doctrine of President Monroe. He resolved to withdraw his troops from Mexico, and to advance no more money to Maximilian. He wrote these orders to Marshal Bazaine.

Maximilian, who fully understood by this time the condition of Mexico, and foresaw all the dangers of his position when the French troops should be withdrawn, sent the empress at this crisis to Europe to represent the situation of affairs to the French emperor, and to remind him of his promises.

She embarked hurriedly and like a private person on board a French mail-steamer. Her stateroom was close to the propeller. The noise, coupled with her great anxiety and excitement, deprived her almost entirely of sleep during the voyage. On landing, she hastened to Paris, went to an hotel, and sent a message to the emperor, requesting an interview. This the emperor declined. Carlotta then hired a carriage and drove out to Saint-Cloud, where she insisted on seeing him. Their interview was very painful. At its close she exclaimed that she felt herself to blame, being a daughter of the house of Orleans, for ever having put faith in the Emperor Napoleon or his promises. Notwithstanding this reproach, the emperor, who was soft-hearted, pitied her extremely. She remained at Saint-Cloud for some hours, and that evening, when surrounded by the court circle, she threw back her head and begged for water. The emperor hastened to bring it to her with his own hand; but she exclaimed that she would not take it from him, for she knew he wished to poison her. It was her first attack of mania. She was calmed, and the symptoms passed off, but continued at intervals to return.

From Paris she went to Rome, and there her mental malady more and more declared itself. She refused to eat anything but fruit, for fear of poison. Her first visit to the pope was made while he was breakfasting, when she snatched the cup of chocolate from his lips and swallowed it eagerly, exclaiming: "I am sure no one can have wished to poison you!" After several other manifestations of her disordered brain at the Quirinal, steps were taken to forward her to Miramar. On reaching that beloved place, she grew more calm. She recovered for a time her interest in music, painting, and literature. The Sclavic peasants around her considered her a saint. When she passed, they used to kneel down on the highway. For years they refused to believe in Maximilian's death. "He will come back! We know he will come back!" was the cry of the Dalmatians, who cherished his memory.

After a time Carlotta was removed to Belgium, where she has been since secluded from the world, but tenderly watched over by her relations. From time to time she partially recovers her reason.

Matters in Mexico after her departure grew worse every day. Bazaine had received orders to withdraw all French troops from the country. He was directed to withhold from Maximilian all French support, and in obedience to these instructions he flung into the river Sequia and Lake Texcoco[1] all the guns and ammunition he could not take away.

[Footnote 1: Prince Salm-Salm, Diary in Mexico.]

Prior to the withdrawal of the French troops, the French Government made several efforts to induce Maximilian to abdicate. The Marquis de Gallifet (of whom we shall hear again in another chapter) was sent, with two other French gentlemen, to urge him to leave Mexico. "I know all the difficulties of my position," Maximilian replied, "but I shall not give up my post. A son of the house of Hapsburg never retreats in the face of danger." Nevertheless, after receiving the first letters from his wife, Maximilian's resolution was shaken. He hoped at least to return to Europe as an emperor, and not a fugitive, and to lay aside his crown of his own accord. With this view he set out for Orizaba, where the "Dandolo" corvette was waiting to receive his orders. On his way he was delayed some hours, because the white mules that drew his carriage had been stolen.

At Orizaba he was attacked by malarious chills. There, too, he received news of his wife's insanity. Some of his generals surrounded him, and prayed him not to abandon his followers to the vengeance of their enemies. The leaders of the clerical party also begged him, for the sake of the Church, to return to Mexico, promising him the support of the clergy throughout the country if he would but give up liberal ideas, and support, at all costs, the temporal prosperity of the Church.

Maximilian, on the strength of these assurances, went back to his capital, protesting that he remained only for the good of other people, and was influenced neither by personal considerations nor political wishes of his own.

But Maximilian was not the man to contend with the difficulties that beset him in Mexico. His very merits were against him. As we read the sad history of his failure, we feel that in his hands the regeneration of Mexico was hopeless. Men like John or Henry Lawrence, heroes of the Indian Mutiny, accustomed to deal with semi-savages, might perhaps have succeeded; but Maximilian was the product of an advanced civilization, and all his sentiments were of a super-refined character. He was no general; his forces were kept scattered over an immense area. He seems to have been no administrator. He was accustomed to deal with Italians,—men of enthusiastic natures and fanatical ideas. Mexicans had no enthusiasms; and in place of patriotism there was a prevailing sentiment of thorough aversion to the French and to the foreigners they had brought with them. Maximilian had come to Mexico with all kinds of liberal projects for its civilization. It was like forcing sanitary improvements on the inhabitants of an Irish shanty, or catching a street gamin and imposing on him the restraints and amenities of high-class culture.

The departure of the French troops left the way clear for the party of Juarez. It rapidly gained strength, and prepared to besiege the emperor in his capital. "I cannot bear to expose the city to danger," said Maximilian, who, in spite of being continually harassed and cruelly deceived day after day, never failed in consideration for those about him. He retired to Queretaro, where Generals Miramon, Castillo, Mejia, Avellano, and Prince Salm-Salm had gathered a little army of about eight thousand men.

Maximilian at Queretaro showed all his nobleness of spirit, kindness of heart, and simplicity of life. During the siege, which lasted over two months, he shared the fatigues and privations of his common soldiers, and lived as they did, on the flesh of mules, while his officers' tables were much better supplied. He exposed his person upon all occasions, taking daily walks upon the bastions as tranquilly as he might have done in the green alleys of his distant home. One day his eye fell upon six dead bodies dangling from the branches of six trees. He turned away, with intense emotion. They were the bodies of six of his own couriers, who had fallen into the hands of the enemy.

He might have cut his way out of Queretaro at the head of his cavalry, but he hesitated to abandon his foot-soldiers. "I will die sword in hand," were now his daily words.

Every day his men brought in prisoners. Even when such persons were suspected of being spies, Maximilian would not order their execution. "No, no," he said; "if things go well, there is no need; if ill, I shall not have their blood upon my soul."

When the siege had lasted seventy days, provisions grew so scarce that the only alternatives seemed a sortie or a surrender. The sortie was decided on. On the night of May 14, 1867, the seven thousand men still in Queretaro were to break through the lines of the enemy and endeavor to make their way to Vera Cruz. Singularly enough, the Juarist general, Escobedo, had fixed on the 15th of May for his final assault.

Neither sortie nor assault took place. The treason of General Lopez prevented the one, and rendered the other unnecessary. Lopez, whom Maximilian had loaded with all sorts of kindness,—Lopez, who called himself the most devoted adherent of the emperor,—had sold the life of his friend and benefactor for two thousand ounces of gold!

One year before, when Lopez had been at Puebla in attendance on the empress, he had sent for his wife, who, having made a hurried journey, was prematurely confined. "I cannot allow your son," wrote Maximilian, "to come into the world in another man's house. I send you the I enclosed sum. Purchase the house where your son was born."

Having kept up constant communication with the camp of the besiegers, Lopez, on the morning of May 13, sent a note to Escobedo, offering to deliver over to him the convent of La Cruz, which was the emperor's headquarters. Escobedo accepted his proposals. About midnight Lopez and the troops under his command went over to the enemy. The soldiers of Juarez quietly entered the town, and surrounded the convent where the emperor and his staff were sleeping.

At dawn Maximilian rose, dressed himself, woke Prince Salm-Salm, and they went out together, with no arms but their swords. As they reached the gates of the convent the emperor perceived Juarist soldiers on guard, and turning to his companion, cried, "We are betrayed; here is the enemy!" At this moment Lopez, who had seen them come into the court-yard, pointed out the emperor to Colonel Rincon Gallardo, who was in command of the detachment from the army of Juarez. Rincon was an honorable soldier and kind-hearted. He said, loud enough to be heard by his own men: "They are citizens; let them pass: they are not soldiers." The emperor was dressed in a black frock-coat, but with military trousers and epaulettes. He and Prince Salm-Salm then walked through the convent gates and made their way in haste to the opposite quarter of the city. The streets were silent and empty. Suddenly a sharp fire of musketry was heard, mingled with Juarist and Imperial war-cries. Miramon with his troops was holding one of the widest streets of Queretaro, when a ball hit him in the face. He fell, half blinded, and was taken prisoner. Miramon was the son of a French father and a Spanish mother, and was one of the very few generals on either side who were of pure white blood.

The emperor, with Generals Mejia, Castillo, Avellano, and Prince Salm-Salm, retired to a little hill which commanded the city. They had no artillery, no means of defending their position. They stood on the bare rock where they had taken refuge, like shipwrecked sailors waiting for the fatal rising of the tide. General Escobedo, a coarse man, who had formerly been a muleteer, prepared to charge up the hill with four battalions of infantry and a strong party of cavalry.

"Do not fire; you will shed blood to no purpose," said the emperor to the little band of followers who surrounded him. Then, in a low, sad voice, he ordered one of his aides-de-camp to fasten a white handkerchief on the end of a bayonet. The Juarists, who were ascending the hill, came to a halt. Then, amid profound silence, the emperor came forward. He paused a moment as he stepped out of the little group of his followers and looked around him. Then he descended the hill with a firm step, followed by several of his generals.

The Juarists saluted him by their party cry, "Viva la libertad!" They recognized the emperor. Maximilian walked straight up to their commander, an ex-Federal United States officer, who under the name of Corona was in command of a party of Americans who had entered the service of Juarez, and were called the Legion of Honor. This legion was composed of fifty men. Some had worn the blue, and some the gray. Each held rank in the Mexican army as an officer.

"General," said Maximilian to Corona, "both men and fortune have betrayed me. There are widows and orphans enough already in the world. Here is my sword."

"Sire," said the general, forgetting that the man who addressed him was no longer emperor, "keep your sword." He then proposed to Maximilian to mount a horse, and escorted him, with the other prisoners, to the convent of Santa Teresita.

There the emperor and his generals were shut up at once in a dark cellar, and not only had to sleep upon the damp earth floor, but were left to suffer from hunger. In a few days, however, Princess Salm-Salm brought them some relief. They were then transferred to the convent of La Capuchina, and their friends obtained permission to send them wine, clothes, and provisions.

Princess Salm-Salm, in the last act of this tragedy, showed herself to be a brave and generous woman. When her husband left the capital she had crossed the enemy's lines in order to get out of Mexico, but was twice in danger of being shot by the soldiers of Diaz. She was accused of supplying money to a troop of Austrian soldiers who, having been captured, were confined at Chapultepec, and she was imprisoned at Guadalupe. After a short detention, however, she obtained leave to quit Mexico for Europe; but changing her route, she managed to rejoin her husband at Queretaro. Thence, hiding by day and travelling by night, she made her way back to San Luis de Potosi, where Juarez had his headquarters. She threw herself at his feet, and implored his mercy for the emperor; but Juarez told her (not without some signs of compassion) that he felt no inclination to spare his life, and that if he were willing to do so, he would not be permitted by his followers to show him any clemency.

When Maximilian heard of this brave enterprise on his behalf, he could not refrain from tears.

The prisoners were three weeks at La Capuchina, in complete uncertainty as to what would be done with them. Indeed, the Juarists seemed much embarrassed by their prize. On June 10 they were informed that Juarez had sent an order to have them tried by a court-martial, which would be held on the 12th of June.

"Where are you going to take me?" asked Maximilian on that day of the officer who came to escort him. "To the court-martial," was the reply. "Where is it held?" said Maximilian. "In the theatre." "Then I refuse to accompany you. I will not be made a public spectacle at a theatre. You may go alone."

The officer, not being authorized to use force, went away. The trial proceeded without the presence of the prisoner. Generals Miramon and Mejia, however, were dragged upon the stage where the court-martial was sitting. The play-house was crowded with spectators. It was a tragedy with no admission-fee. The proceedings lasted three days. The emperor was accused of usurpation, of instigating civil war, and of causing the death of forty thousand patriots, hanged or shot in consequence of his order of October 3, intended to operate only against armed bands of robbers.

On the morning of June 15, 1867, General Escobedo presented himself in the prison, holding the sentence of the court-martial in his hand. Maximilian, who could guess his fate, said quietly: "Read it, General; I am ready to hear you."

Maximilian, Miramon, and Mejia were condemned to be shot.

"I understand you," said the emperor, with perfect calmness. "The law of October 3 was made to put down robbers: this sentence is the work of murderers."

Escobedo laid his hand on his revolver with a sudden exclamation. Then, recovering himself, he said sarcastically: "I suppose that a criminal must be allowed the right to vilify his judges."

Maximilian turned his back on him, and Escobedo left the prison.

The execution had been ordered for the next morning, but was put off till the 19th, by order of Juarez.

Meantime the English and Prussian ambassadors hastened to Juarez, hoping to obtain mercy for the late emperor. The French and Austrian courts, by telegraph, implored the mediation of the United States. There was no American minister at that time in Mexico, but Mr. Seward sent telegraphic despatches to Juarez, pointing out that the execution of Maximilian would rouse the feelings of the civilized world against the Mexican Republic.

All was of no avail. The idea of foreign intervention in the affairs of Mexico was so distasteful to the Mexicans that these pleadings on the late emperor's behalf by foreign Governments only accelerated his fate.

During the night before his death, Maximilian asked his jailers for a pair of scissors. He was refused. Then he implored one of them to cut off a lock of his hair. When that was done, he wrote the following pathetic letter to Carlotta:—

MY BELOVED CARLOTTA,—If God should permit you one
of these days to get well enough to read these lines, you will
know how sad has been my fate ever since your departure.
You took with you my happiness, my very life, and my good
fortune. Why did I not take your advice? So many sad things
have taken place, so many unexpected catastrophes and
undeserved misfortunes have fallen on me, that I have now lost
heart and hope, and look upon death as my good angel.
My death will be sharp and sudden, without pain. I shall fall
gloriously, like a soldier, like a conquered sovereign....
If you cannot, dearest, bear up under your load of sorrow,
if God in His mercy soon reunites us by your death, I will
bless His fatherly hand, which now seems very heavy upon
me. Adieu, adieu!

YOUR POOR MAX.

He kissed this letter, folded into it the light silky lock of his own hair, and placed it with other letters which he had written to his mother and friends. They were all in French, and written in a clear, firm, regular hand. His noble nature shone in every line. They give the key to the irresistible personal sympathy he inspired in all who knew him. His enemies were aware of this, and no judge or general who had ever known him sat on his court-martial.

As six o'clock was striking on the morning of June 19, the door of the prison was unbarred. "I am ready," said Maximilian.

As he stepped forth from the door of the convent, he exclaimed: "What a beautiful morning! I have always fancied I should like to die in sunshine,—on a summer day."

He entered the carriage in waiting. Miramon and Mejia followed him, with the priest who attended them in their last moments. They were escorted by a body of four thousand men, and were driven to the same rocky height on which they had been captured, called the Cerro della Campana. They sat upright in the carriage during the drive, with proud smiles upon their faces. They were carefully dressed, as if for an occasion of festivity. The population of the place was all abroad to see them pass, and looked at them with silent pity and admiration. The calmness and self-possession of the emperor, about to die, touched even the most indifferent spectators. The women freely shed tears.

Maximilian was a handsome, striking-looking man. His beautiful light hair was parted by a straight line from his forehead to the nape of his neck. His blue eyes were clear and soft, with a beseeching look in them. His hands were beautifully white, his fingers elegant and taper.

As they neared the place of execution, General Mejia suddenly turned pale, covered his face, and with a sob fell back in his place in the carriage. He had caught sight of his wife, agonized, dishevelled, with her baby in her arms, and all the appearance of a madwoman.

The party arrived at the foot of the little hill. The emperor sprang out, brushed off some dust which had settled on his clothes, and going up to the firing party, gave each man an ounce of gold. "Take good aim, my friends," he said. "Do not, if possible, hit me in the face, but shoot right at my heart."

One of the soldiers wept. Maximilian went to him, and putting his cigar-case, of silver filigree, into his hand, said: "Keep that, my friend, in remembrance of me. It was given to me by a prince more fortunate than I am now."

The non-commissioned officer then came near, and said he hoped that he would forgive him. "My good fellow," replied Maximilian, cheerfully, "a soldier has but to obey orders; his duty is to do his duty."

Then, turning to Miramon and Mejia, he said: "Let me, true friends, embrace you for the last time!" He did so, and then added: "In a few minutes we shall be together in a better world."

Turning to Miramon, he said: "General, the bravest man should have the place of honor. Take mine."

Mejia being very much cast down by the sad spectacle presented by his poor, distracted wife, Maximilian again pressed his hands, saying: "God will not abandon our suffering survivors. For those who die unjustly, things will be set right in another world."

The drums began to beat. The end was near. Maximilian stepped forward, mounted on a stone, and addressed the spectators.

"Mexicans! men of my rank and of my race, who feel as I feel, must either be the benefactors of the people over whom they reign, or martyrs. It was no rash ambition of my own that called me hither; you, you yourselves, invited me to accept your throne. Before dying, let me tell you that with all the powers I possess I sought your good. Mexicans! may my blood be the last blood that you shed; may Mexico, the unhappy country of my adoption, be happy when I am gone!"

As soon as he had resumed his place, a sergeant came up to order Miramon and Mejia to turn round. As traitors, they were to be shot in the back.

"Farewell, dear friends," said Maximilian, and crossing his arms, he stood firm as a statue.

When the command was given: "Shoulder arms!" a murmur of protestation, accompanied by threats, rose among part of the crowd, in which there were many Indians. Their national superstitions and traditions had attached this simple people to the emperor. They had a prophecy among them that one day a white man would come over the seas to set them free, and many of them looked for this savior in Maximilian.

The officers in command turned towards the crowd, shaking their swords. Then came the words: "Take aim! Fire!"

"Long live Mexico!" cried Miramon.

"Carlotta! Poor Carlotta!" exclaimed Maximilian.

When the smoke of the volley had cleared away, three corpses lay upon the earth. That of the emperor had received five balls. The victims were placed in coffins which lay ready near the place of execution, and, escorted as they had been before, were carried back to the convent of the Capuchins.

"The emperor being dead, we will do all honor to the corpse of the Archduke of Austria," said Colonel Miguel Palacios, to whom this care was given. The corpse was embalmed, and the body placed in a vault.

The Russian ambassador, Baron Magnus, and the American commander of a United States vessel of war which layoff Vera Cruz, in vain solicited the body of the late emperor. The Austrian Vice-admiral Tegethoff (the illustrious conqueror at Lissa) had to come and personally demand it in November of the next year. He at the same time time obtained the release of the Austrian soldiers still retained as prisoners, and of Prince Salm-Salm, lying under sentence of death since the execution of the emperor.

As for the traitor Lopez, instead of the two thousand ounces of gold that he expected, he got only seven thousand dollars. His wife refused to live with him after his treachery to Maximilian; and once when he went to see General Rincon Gallardo to request his influence to get himself restored to his former rank in the Mexican army, which he had forfeited by his connection with the Imperial Government, the answer he received was: "Colonel Lopez, if I ever recommend you for any place, that place will be under a tree, with a rope round your neck tied to one of its branches."

Maximilian will live in history as a good man and a martyred sovereign. Long after his death, the Indians in Queretaro would not put up an adobe hut without inserting in it a pebble from the hill on which he was executed.

On the very day of his death an order signed by him was received in Europe, not for rifled cannon, not for needle-guns, but for two thousand nightingales, which he desired to have purchased in the Tyrol to add to the attractions of his empire.

EMPEROR NAPOLEON III.

[CHAPTER XI.]

THE EMPEROR AND EMPRESS AT THE SUMMIT OF PROSPERITY.

The visit paid by the Emperor Napoleon and the Empress Eugénie to Queen Victoria at Windsor in 1856 was returned in 1857.

It was on the 18th of August that the queen, her husband, the Prince of Wales, then a boy of fourteen, and the Princess Royal landed at Boulogne. The royal yacht had been in sight since daybreak, the emperor anxiously watching it from the shore; but it was two P. M. before it was moored to the quai. There can be no better account of this visit than that given by Queen Victoria. The following extracts are taken from her journal:—

"At last the bridge was adjusted, the emperor stepped across. I met him half-way, and embraced him twice, after which he led me on shore amid acclamations, salutes, and every sound of joy and respect. The weather was perfect, the harbor crowded with war-ships, the town and the heights were decorated with gay colors."

The delay in getting up to the wharf postponed the queen's entrance into Paris, and greatly disappointed the crowds who waited for her coming. They were also disappointed that the greatest lady in the world exhibited no magnificence in costume. But the queen herself was greatly impressed by her first view of Paris:—

"The approaching twilight rather added to the beauty of the scene; and it was still quite light enough when we passed down the Boulevard de Strasbourg (the emperor's own creation) and along the Boulevards by the Porte Saint-Denis, the Madeleine, the Place de la Concorde, and the Arch of Triumph, to see the objects round us."

They drove through the Bois de Boulogne in the dusk to the palace of Saint-Cloud; but all the way was lined with troops, and bands playing "God Save the Queen," at intervals. The queen was particularly impressed by the Zouaves, "The friends," she says (for the Crimean War was then in progress), "of my dear Guards in the Crimea."

The birth of the Prince Imperial being an event in prospect, the empress was not allowed to fatigue herself, and first met the queen on the latter's arrival at Saint-Cloud. "In all the blaze of lamps and torches," says the queen, "amidst the roar of cannon, and bands, and drums, and cheers, we reached the palace. The empress, with Princess Mathilde and the ladies, received us at the door, and took us up a beautiful staircase, lined with magnificent soldiers.... I felt quite bewildered, but enchanted."

At dinner General Canrobert, who was fresh from the Crimea, was placed next to her Majesty, and gave her his war experiences. Next day the royal party went to the Exposition Universelle, then going on in Paris, and afterwards, while the queen was receiving the ambassadors, the emperor drove the Prince of Wales through the streets of Paris; he afterwards took his older guests sight-seeing in his capital. "As we crossed the Pont de Change," writes the queen, "the emperor said, pointing to the Conciergerie, 'That is where I was in prison." He alluded to the time when he was brought from Strasburg to Paris, before being shipped for Rio Janeiro. "Strange," continues the queen, "to be driving with us as emperor through the streets of Paris in triumph!"

They visited Versailles (where the queen sketched), and afterwards went to the Grand Opera. They saw Paris illuminated that night as they drove back to Saint-Cloud, the emperor and Prince Albert recalling old German songs; and the queen says: "The emperor seems very fond of his old recollections of Germany. There is much that is German, and very little—nothing, in fact—markedly French in his character."

One day all the royal party went out in a hack carriage, with what the queen calls "common bonnets and veils," and drove incognito round Paris. Sometimes they talked politics, sometimes they seem to have joked and laughed with childish glee and enjoyment; and one night the emperor took the queen by torchlight to see the tomb of his great uncle at the Invalides. A guard of old warriors who had served under Napoleon, with Santini, his valet at St. Helena, at their head, escorted the queen of England to the chapel where stood Napoleon's coffin, not yet entombed, with the sword of Austerlitz lying upon it. The band in the chapel was playing "God Save the Queen," while without raged a sudden thunder-storm.

The mornings were devoted to quiet pleasures and sight-seeing, the evenings to operas, state dinners, and state balls. The great ball given on this occasion in the galleries of Versailles was talked of in Paris for years after. "The empress," says the queen, "met us at the top of the staircase, looking like a fairy-queen or nymph, in a white dress trimmed with bunches of grass and diamonds, a beautiful tour de corsage of diamonds round the top of her dress, and all en rivière; the same round her waist, and a corresponding headdress, and her Spanish and Portuguese orders. The emperor said when she appeared: 'Comme tu es belle!'"

Next day, as the emperor drove the queen in an open carriage, they talked of the Orleans family, whose feelings had been greatly hurt by a recent sequestration of their property. The emperor tried to make excuses for this act,—excuses that seemed to the queen but tame,—and then he drove to the chapel built over the house where the Duke of Orleans had died on the Avenue de Neuilly. The emperor bought her two of the medals sold on the spot, one of which bore the likeness of the Comte de Paris, with an inscription calling him the hope of France.

The visit ended after eight delightful days, and the emperor escorted his guests back to Boulogne.

Prince Albert, the queen confesses, was not so much carried away by the fascinations of their new friend as herself; but the empress secured his entire commendation.

The queen and the emperor continued to correspond, and subsequently met several times, at Osborne House or at Cherbourg.

I have told at some length of this visit, because it seemed to me to mark the culminating point of Napoleon III.'s successful career; not only was he fully admitted into the inner circle of European sovereigns, but his place there was confirmed by the personal friendship and alliance of the greatest among them.

In 1867 there was another Universal Exposition held in Paris; and this was also a time of great outward glory and triumph for the emperor, surrounded as he was by European emperors, crown princes, and kings; but Queen Victoria was then a sorrowing widow, and decay was threatening Napoleon's apparent prosperity.

It was in 1867 that the emperor and empress received the czar, the sultan, the Crown Prince of Prussia, Princess Alice of Hesse Darmstadt, and many other crowned heads and celebrities. It was a year of fêtes and international courtesies. But in Paris itself there was a strange feeling of insecurity,—a fearful looking for something, society knew not what. "It seemed," said one who breathed the rarefied air in which lived the upper circles of society, "as if the air were charged with electricity; as if the shadows of coming events were being darkly cast over the joyous city."

One of the most remarkable sights of that gay time of hollowness and brilliancy was the review given in honor of the Emperor of Russia, on June 6. No less than sixty thousand French troops, of all arms of the service, filed past the three grand-stands on the race-course of the Bois de Boulogne. On the central stand sat the Empress Eugénie, with the Prince Imperial, the Crown Princess of Prussia, her sister, Princess Alice, and the Grand Duchess of Leuchtenberg. Before this stand, on horseback on one side, sat the Grand Duke Vladimir, the Czarevitch (the present Czar of Russia), the Crown Prince of Prussia (since the lamented Emperor Frederick), Prince Gortschakoff (the Russian prime minister), Count Bismarck, and an English nobleman; on the other side were the Duc de Leuchtenberg, the Duke of Mecklenburg, and the Prince of Hesse Darmstadt; while in the centre of them all rode the czar, with Napoleon III. on one hand, and on the other the king of prussia.[1]

[Footnote 1: Blackwood's Magazine.]

How little could any of those who looked upon that throng of royal personages imagine what in little more than two years was coming on them all!

The emperor was fond of literature, and when drawn into a literary discussion, his half-closed eyes would gleam with sudden light, and his criticisms would be both witty and valuable. During his later years, harassed by sickness and perplexities of all kinds, his greatest pleasure was to shut himself up in his study, and there work upon his "Life of Cæsar." He wrote it entirely himself, though he had many learned men in France and Germany employed in looking up references and making extracts for him. The book was considered a work of genuine merit. To its author it was a labor of love. He threw into it all his experience of life, all his theories, all his Napoleonic convictions; for in Cæsar and Napoleon he found many parallels. He hoped to be admitted as a literary man into the French Academy, and he meant to base his claim upon this book.

I have said nothing of the cares that oppressed the emperor in connection with the war in the Crimea, which was prolonged far beyond his expectations; of the campaign in Italy, broken short off by threats of intervention made by the king of Prussia, and followed by feelings of disappointment and revenge on the part of the Italians; of the intervention of the emperor in 1866, after the battle of Sadowa, to check the triumphant march of the Prussian army through Austria; nor of the bombs of Orsini, which led to a rupture of the friendliness between France and England, breaking up the cordial relations which existed between the two courts in 1857, and reviving that panic about French invasion which seems periodically to attack Englishmen ever since the great scare in the days of Bonaparte. These subjects belong rather to historical reminiscences of England, Italy, or Germany; but the emperor had anxieties besides in France, and often found it hard to regulate with discretion even the ways of his own household.

The empress, who after she had governed France as regent in 1859, during her husband's absence in the Italian war, had been admitted to councils of state, by no means approved either her husband's domestic or foreign policy. We have seen that her influence was strongly exerted to bring about the unfortunate attempt to give an emperor and empress to Mexico; but on two other points that she had at heart she failed. She could not persuade her husband to undertake the reconstruction of the kingdom of Poland, nor to assist Queen Isabella of Spain when her subjects, exasperated at last by her excesses, drove her over the French frontier. The empress disliked many of the coterie who enjoyed her husband's intimacy, especially his cousin, Prince Napoleon. She resented the prince's opposition to her marriage; she disliked his manners, his political opinions, his aggressive opposition to all the offices of religion; and she succeeded in detaching him from the emperor's confidence, and in hindering his taking part in public affairs. To his wife—the Princess Clotilde—she was deeply attached; but that did not serve to reconcile her to the prince, her husband. Both ladies were opposed to any diminution of the pope's temporal power in Italy; but the private circle of the friends of the empress was too gay for the chastened nature of the Princess Clotilde, and by degrees her intimacy with the empress became less close and affectionate than it had been in the early days of her unhappy marriage.

An episode in the private life of the palace, in 1859, created considerable friction in Paris, and provoked remonstrances from the emperor's ministers.[1] This was the admission to the circle of intimates who surrounded the empress of the mesmerist and medium Home. This man gave himself out to be an American; but many persons suspected that his native land was Germany, and some said he was a secret agent of that court, which had emissaries all over France, in search of useful information. The empress, having heard of Home's strange feats of table-turning and spirit-rapping in fashionable salons of the capital, was eager to witness his performances. The women in the high society of Paris were greatly excited about them. Spiritualism was the fad of the season, and the empress caught the infection. The emperor, who was present at many of the exhibitions at the Tuileries, was also, it is said, much impressed by some of them, especially by a mysterious invisible hand laid firmly on his shoulder, and by an icy breath that passed over his face. But although the emperor, always indulgent to his wife, resisted at first the advice of his counsellors to get rid of Home, he was forced at last to put an end to the séances at the Tuileries, Fontainebleau, and Biarritz. The spirits "summoned" had had the imprudence to obtrude upon him their own views of his policy. When the alliance with Italy and a probable war with Austria were under discussion in the cabinet, the spirit-inspired pencil at the Tuileries scrawled these words: "The emperor should declare war and deliver Italy from the Austrians." Not long afterwards, the vulgar presumption of Home, who had accompanied the court to Biarritz, provoked the emperor, and caused him to give ear to the earnest remonstrances of his Minister for Foreign Affairs. He gave orders that Home should appear at the Tuileries no more.

[Footnote 1: Pierre de Lana.]

Home died not long after in Germany, forgotten by the world of fashion, but leaving behind him a little circle of ardent believers.

The story of the emperor's later life seems to me to be one full of pathos and of pain. It is the record of a man who knew himself to be slowly dying, whose physical strength was ebbing day by day, but who was bearing up under the vain hope of accomplishing the impossible. One admires his extreme patience, his uncomplaining perseverance, as he tried to roll the stone of Sisyphus, yet with unspoken misgivings in his heart that it would escape from him and crush the hopes of his life, as it rolled back out of his hands.

"Poor emperor!" says the eye-witness who beheld him in his hour of triumph, before the grand-stand, in 1867, at the great review. "He was a friend to all, and he fell through his friends. He was very true to England, whatever he may have been to other countries; but England failed him, unfortunately in Denmark, fortunately in Mexico, and fatally in 1870."[1]

[Footnote 1: Blackwood's Magazine.]

It seems, too, as if the world forgets now—what assuredly must be remembered hereafter in history—that it was he who relieved Europe from the treaties of Vienna, and asserted the claims of nationalities; that he brought about the resurrection of Italy; that through his policy we have a solution satisfactory to the world in general of the question of the pope's power as a temporal prince in Italy; that he was the builder of modern Paris, the promoter of agriculture, the railroad king of France, the peasant's and the workman's friend.

In early life he had been an adventurer; but a kind heart gave him gracious manners. He was grateful, faithful, and generous; terribly prodigal of money, and the victim of the needy men by whom he was surrounded. It seems as if, in spite of his coup d'état (which, subtracting its massacres, may have been a measure of self-preservation), he deserves better of the world and of France than to have his memory spurned and spat upon, as men do now.

He gave France eighteen years of pre-eminent prosperity; he left her, to be sure, in ruins. In his fall he utterly obliterated the prestige of the name of Bonaparte. No Bonaparte, probably, will ever again awaken the enthusiasm of the French people,—an enthusiasm which Napoleon III. relied on, justly at first, and fatally afterwards, when a generation had arisen in France, from whom the feeling had passed away.

The emperor's malady, which was slowly sapping his strength, is said to be the most painful one that flesh is heir to. Every movement was pain to him. Absolute rest was what he needed, but cares pressed hard upon him on every side. He must die, and leave his empire in the hands of a woman and a child. His government had been wholly personal. He could not transmit his power, such is it was, to any other person,—least of all could he place it in feeble hands. There were no props to his throne. No Bismarck or Cavour stood beside him, to whom he might confide his wife and son, and feel that though his hand no longer held the helm, the ship would sail straight on the course he had laid down for her. The men about him were third and fourth rate men,—all of them enormously his own inferiors. They cheated and deceived and plundered him; and he knew it in a measure, though not as he knew it after his downfall.

The emperor said once: "There is but one Bonapartist among us, and that is Fleury. The empress is a Legitimist, I am a Socialist, and Prince Napoleon a Republican." As he contemplated the future, it seems to have occurred to him that the only thing that could be done was to teach France to govern herself,—to change his despotic authority into a constitutional government. He might live long enough, he thought, to make the new plan work, and if, by a successful war with Germany, a war impending and perhaps inevitable, he could gain brilliant military glory; if he could restore to France that frontier of the Rhine which had been wrested from her by Europe after the downfall of his uncle,—his dynasty would be covered with glory, and all might go on right for a few years, till his boy should be old enough to replace him.

Both these expedients he tried. In 1869 he announced that he was about to grant France liberal institutions. He put the empress forward whenever it was possible, and he made up his mind that as war with Germany was sure to come, the sooner it came, the better, that he might reap its fruits while some measure of life and strength was left him. Long before, Prince Albert had assured him that his policy, which made his ministers mere heads of bureaux, which never called them together for common action as members of one cabinet, which compelled each to report only to his master, who took on trust the accuracy of the reports made to him, was a very dangerous mode of governing. It was indeed very unlike his uncle's practice, though it might have been theoretically his system. Both uncle and nephew came into power by a coup d'état,—the one on the 18th Brumaire (Nov. 9, 1799), the other on Dec. 2, 1851. Both were undoubtedly the real choice of the people; both really desired the prosperity of France: but the younger man was more genuine, more kindly, more human than the elder one. The uncle surrounded himself with "mighty men, men of renown,"—great marshals, great diplomatists, great statesmen. Louis Napoleon had not one man about him whom he could trust, either for honesty, ability, or personal devotion, unless, indeed, we except Count Walewski. All his life he had cherished his early ideas of the liberation of Italy, which he accomplished; of the resurrection of Poland, which he never found himself in a position to attempt; of the rectification of the frontier of France, which he in part accomplished by the attainment of Nice and Savoy; and, finally, his dream included the restoration to France of self-government, with order reconciled to liberty.

As early as January, 1867, the emperor was consulting, not only his friends, but his political opponents as to his scheme of transforming despotism into a parliamentary government. He wrote thus to M. Émile Ollivier, a leader of the liberal party in France:[1]—

[Footnote 1: Pierre di Lana.]

"Believe me, I am not pausing through indecision, nor through a vain infatuation as to my prerogatives; but my fear is of parting in this country, which is shaken by so many conflicting passions, with the means of re-establishing moral order, which is the essential basis of liberty. My embarrassment on the subject of a law of the Press is not how to find the power of repression, but how to define in a law what deserves repression. The most dangerous articles may escape repression, while the most insignificant may provoke prosecution. This has always been the difficulty. Nevertheless, in order to strike the public mind by decisive measures, I should like to effect at one stroke what has been called the crowning of the edifice. I should like to do this at once and forever; for it is important to me, and it is above all important to the country.... I wish to advance firmly in a straight line, without oscillating to the right or left. You see that I have spoken to you with perfect frankness."

We also see in this letter one of Louis Napoleon's characteristics,—a fondness for taking people by surprise. Nearly everything he did was a surprise to the public, and yet it had long been maturing in his own mind.

The next time M. Ollivier saw the emperor he was told of his intention to grant the right of holding political meetings; the responsibility of cabinet ministers to the Chamber; and the almost entire freedom of the Press. The emperor added, with a smile: "I am making considerable concessions, and if my government immediately succeeded that of the First Empire, this would be acknowledged; but since I came after parliamentary governments, my concessions will be considered small."

The emperor's experiment was a failure. The moment restraint was taken off, and the French had liberty of speech and freedom of the Press, they became like boys released from school and its strict discipline. The brutal excesses of language in the Parisian newspapers, the fierceness of their attacks upon the Government, and the shamelessness of their slander, alarmed the emperor and the best of his personal adherents, who had been by no means supporters of his policy. But though the experiment gave signs of never being likely to succeed, and no one seemed pleased with the new system, the emperor persevered. He refused to withdraw his reforms; he declined to make what children call "an Indian gift" to his people: but the effect of the divided counsels by which he was embarrassed was that these reforms were accepted by the public merely as experiments, to be tried during good behavior, and not as the basis of a new system definitively entered upon.

All through the year 1869 the difficulties of the course which the emperor adopted grew greater and greater. The emancipated Press was rampant. It knew no pity and no decency. Its articles on the emperor's failing health (which he insisted upon reading) were cruel in the extreme. Terrible anxieties for the future must have haunted him. If his project for self-government in France must prove a failure, when he was dead, what then? Could a child and a woman govern as he had done by a despotic will? He had done so in his days of health and strength; but events now seemed to intimate that his government had been a failure rather than a success.

Lord Palmerston, writing from Paris in Charles X.'s time, said: "Bonaparte in the last years of his reign crushed every one else, both in politics and war. He allowed no one to think and act but himself."

Somewhat the same remark could be applied to the Third Napoleon. But Napoleon I. was a great administrator as well as a great general; his activity was inexhaustible, he corresponded with everybody, he looked after everything, he knew whether he was well or ill served; and his mode of obtaining power did not hinder his availing himself of the best talent in France. The case of his nephew was the reverse of this. His highest quality was his tenacity of purpose, and his disposition was inclined to kindly tolerance, even of pecuniary greed and slipshod service. He could rouse himself to great exertion; but in the later days of Imperialism, pain and his decaying physical powers had rendered him inert; moreover, in his general habits he had always been indolent and pleasure-loving. In carrying out the coup d'état nine tenths of the public men in France had been subjected to humiliations and indignities, by which they were permanently outraged, and a host of co-conspirators and adventurers had acquired claims upon the emperor that it was not safe to disregard. Places and money were distributed among them with reckless profusion, and many a shady money transaction, throwing discredit on some men high in favor with the emperor, was passed over, to avoid exposure.

On the other hand, the emperor improved Paris till he made it the most beautiful city in the world. It was his aim to open wide streets through the old crowded quarters where revolution hid itself, hatching plots and crimes. He provided fresh air and drainage. He turned the Bois de Boulogne from a mere wild wood into the magnificent pleasure-ground of a great city. He completed the Louvre, and demolished the straggling, hideous buildings which disfigured the Carrousel in Louis Philippe's time. The working population, which his improvements drove out of the Faubourg Saint Antoine emigrated to high and healthy quarters in Montmartre and Belleville, where a beautiful park was laid out for them. No part of Paris escaped these improvements, though it took immense sums to complete them. But while their good results will be permanent, their immediate effect was to raise rents and make the increased cost of living burdensome to people of small incomes. The work brought also into Paris an enormous population of masons, carpenters, and day-laborers,—a population which was a good deal like the monster in the fairy tale, which had to be fed each day with the best; for if once it became hungry or dissatisfied, it might devour the man of science who had brought it into being.

Still, the French are ungrateful to Napoleon III. when they forget how much they are indebted to him for the extension of their commerce, the growth of their railroads, the improvement of their cities, and above all for his attention to sanitary science and to agriculture.

When he came to the throne, every traveller through France was struck by the poor breeds of swine, sheep, and cattle; the slovenly system of cultivation, the wide waste lands, the poor implements for farming, and the want of drainage. In his exile the emperor had lived much with English landowners, and he endeavored more than anything else to improve agriculture. He spent great sums of money himself in model farms for the purpose of showing how things could be done. But while commercial, agricultural, and manufacturing prosperity increased in France,

so also did the cost of living; and the cry, "Put money in thy purse!" found its echo in the hearts of all men in all classes of society. Speculation of every kind ran rampant, and by the year 1869 the cost of the improvements in Paris alone became greater than France could patiently bear.

Personally, Louis Napoleon had strong sympathy with the working-classes, and was always seeking to benefit them. He favored co-operative societies; he was planning, when he fell, a system of state annuities to disabled or to aged workmen. He abolished passports between France and England, and also the French workman's character-book, or livret, which by law he had been compelled to have always at hand.

In the midst of the emperor's other perplexities, there came, during the first days of 1870, a most damaging occurrence connected with his own family,—an occurrence with which the emperor had no more to do than Louis Philippe had had with the Praslin murder; but it helped to impair the remaining prestige which clung to the name of Bonaparte.

Prince Pierre Bonaparte, grandson of Lucien, was a dissolute and irregular character. His cousin, the emperor, had repeatedly paid his debts and given him, as he did to every one connected with the name of Bonaparte, large sums of money. At last Prince Pierre's conduct grew so bad that this help ceased. Then he threatened his cousin; but the emperor would not even buy an estate he owned in Corsica. Prince Pierre went back, therefore, to the cradle of his family, and there got into a fierce quarrel with an opposition member of the Chamber of Deputies. The deputy, like a true Corsican, nourished revenge. He waited till he went up to Paris, and there laid his grievances against the emperor's cousin before his fellow deputies of the opposition. They at once made it a party affair. On Jan. 2, 1870,—the day the reformed Chamber of Deputies was opened,—two journalists of Paris, M. de Tourvielle and M. Victor Noir, went armed to Pierre Bonaparte's house at Auteuil to carry him a challenge. They found the prince in a room where he kept a curious collection of weapons. He was a coarse man, with an ungovernable temper. High words were exchanged. Victor Noir slapped the prince in the face, and the prince, seizing a pistol, shot him dead. He then turned on M. de Tourvielle; but the latter had time to draw a sword from his sword-cane, and stood armed. Victor Noir's funeral was made the occasion of an immense republican demonstration, and M. Rochefort reviled the emperor and all his family in the newspaper he edited, "La Lanterne," calling upon Frenchmen to make an end of the Bonapartes.

Prince Pierre was tried for murder, and acquitted; Rochefort was tried for seditious libel, and condemned. It was an ominous opening for the new Chamber. The emperor had been most anxious that it should contain no deputies violently opposed to his new policy, and the elections had been scandalously manipulated in the interest of his dynasty.

Thiers complained bitterly to an Englishman, who visited him, of the undisguised tampering with voters in this election. He said,—

"The Government pretends to believe in a Chamber elected by universal suffrage, and yet dares not trust the votes of the electors; but mark my words, this tampering with an election is for the last time. What will succeed the Empire, I know not. God grant it may not be our country's ruin! But the state of things under which we live cannot last long. It is incumbent on honest men to lay before the emperor the state of the country, which his ministers do their best to keep from him. For a long time I kept silent,—it was no use to knock one's head against a wall; but now we have revolution staring us in the face, as the alternative with the Empire."

As the little man said this, we are told that the fire in his eyes gleamed through his spectacles; and as he walked about the room, he seemed to grow taller and taller.[1]

[Footnote 1: Blackwood's Magazine.]

The new constitutional ministry, into whose hands the emperor proposed to resign despotic power and to rule thenceforward as constitutional sovereign, had for its chief M. Émile Ollivier; Marshal Le Bœuf (made marshal on the field of Magenta) was the Minister of War.

The debates in the Chamber were all stormy. The opposition might not be numerous, but it was fierce and determined. It scoffed at the idea of France being free when elections were tampered with to sustain the Government; and finally things came to such a pass that the emperor resolved to play again his tromp-card, and to call a plébiscite to say whether the French people approved of him and wished to continue his dynasty. They were to vote simply Yes or No.

There was not such open tampering this time with the vote as there had been in the election of the deputies, but all kinds of Government influences were brought to bear on prefects, maires, and other official personages, especially in the villages. The result was that 7,250,000 Frenchmen voted Yes, and one and a half million, No. But to the emperor's intense surprise and mortification, and in spite of all precautions, there were 42,000 Noes from the army. It was a terrible discovery to the emperor that there was disaffection among his soldiers. Promotion, many men believed, had for some years been distributed through favoritism. The men had little confidence in their officers, the officers complained loudly of their men. A dashing exploit in Algeria made up for irregularities of discipline. Even the staff officers were deficient in geography, and the stories that afterwards came to light of the way in which the War Department collected worthless stores, while serviceable ones existed only on paper, seem almost incredible. Yet when war was declared, Émile Ollivier said that he went into it with a light heart, and Marshal Le Bœuf was reported to have told the emperor that he would not find so much as one button missing on his soldiers' gaiters.

The discovery that the army was not to be depended on, and needed a war of glory to put it in good humor with itself and with its emperor, decided Napoleon III. to enter precipitately into the Franco-Prussian war while he still had health enough to share in it. Besides this, a struggle with Germany was inevitable, and he dared not leave it to his successor. Then, too, if successful,—and he never doubted of success,—all opposition at home would be crushed, and the prestige of his dynasty would be doubled, especially if he could, by a brilliant campaign, give France the frontier of the Rhine, at least to the borders of Belgium. This would indeed be a glorious crowning of his reign.

He believed in himself, he believed in his star, he believed in his own generalship, he believed that his army was ready (though his army and navy never had been ready for any previous campaign), and he believed, truly enough, that the prospect of glory, aggrandizement, and success would be popular in France.

Spain was at that time in want of a king. Several princes were proposed, and the most acceptable one would have been the Duc de Montpensier; but Napoleon III., who dreaded the rivalry of the Orleans family, gave the Spaniards to understand that he would never consent to see a prince of that family upon the Spanish throne. Then the Spaniards took the matter into their own hands, and possibly stimulated by a wish to make a choice disagreeable to the French emperor, selected a prince of the Prussian royal family, Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern. The Emperor Napoleon objected at once. To have Prussia on the eastern frontier of France, and Prussian influence beyond the Pyrenees, was worse in his eyes than the selection of Montpensier; and it was certainly a matter for diplomatic consideration. M. Benedetti, the French minister at Berlin, was instructed to take a very haughty tone with the king of Prussia, and to say that if he permitted Prince Leopold to accept the Spanish crown, it would be a cause of war between France and Prussia. The king of Prussia replied substantially that he would not be threatened, and would leave Prince Leopold to do as he pleased. Prompted, however, no doubt, by his sovereign, Prince Leopold declined the Spanish throne. This was intimated to M. Benedetti, and here the matter might have come to an end. But the Emperor Napoleon, anxious for a casus belli, chose to think that the king of Prussia, in making his announcement to his ambassador, had not been sufficiently civil.

A cabinet council was held at the Tuileries. The empress was now admitted to cabinet councils, that she might be prepared for a regency that before long might arrive. She and Marshal Le Bœuf were vehement for war. The populace, proud of their fine army, shouted with one voice, "A Berlin!" and on July 15, 1870, war was declared.

Let us relieve the sad closing of this chapter, which began so auspiciously with the emperor and empress in the height of their prosperity, by telling of an expedition in which the glory of the empress as a royal lady culminated.

The Suez Canal being completed, its opening was to be made an international affair of great importance. The work was the work of French engineers, led by M. Ferdinand de Lesseps, in every way a most remarkable man.

England looked coldly on the enterprise. To use the vulgar phrase both literally and metaphorically, she "took no stock" in the Suez Canal, and she sent no royal personage, nor other representative to the opening ceremonies; the only Englishman of official rank who was present was an admiral, whose flag-ship was in the harbor of Port Saïd.

The Emperor Napoleon was wholly unable to leave France at a time so critical; but he sent his fair young empress in his stead. He stayed at Saint-Cloud, and took advantage of her absence to submit to a severe surgical operation. The empress went first to Constantinople, where Sultan Abdul Aziz gave a beautiful fête in her honor, at which she appeared, lovely and all glorious, in amber satin and diamonds. She afterwards proceeded to Egypt as the guest of the khedive, entering Port Saïd Nov. 16, 1869, and returning to Paris on the 5th of December.

EMPRESS EUGÉNIE.

The opening of the canal across the isthmus of Suez, which was in a manner to unite the Eastern with the Western world, caused the eyes of all Christendom to be fixed on Egypt,—the venerable great-grandmother of civilization. The great work had been completed, in spite of Lord Palmerston's sincere conviction, which he lost no opportunity of proclaiming to the world, that it was impossible to connect the Red Sea with the Mediterranean. The sea-level, he said, was not the same in the two seas so that the embankments could not be sustained, and drift-sands from the desert would fill the work up rapidly from day to day. Ismaïl Pasha, the khedive of Egypt, had made the tour of Europe, inviting everybody to the opening, from kings and kaisers, empresses and queens, down to members of chambers of commerce and marine insurance companies. Great numbers were to be present, and the Empress Eugénie was to be the Cleopatra of the occasion. But suddenly the khedive was threatened with a serious disappointment: the sultan, his suzerain, wanted to join in the festivities; and if he were present, he must be the chief personage, the khedive would be thrust into a vassal's place, and all his glory, all his pleasure in his fête, would be gone.

The ancient Egyptians, whose attention was much absorbed in waterworks and means of irrigation, had, as far back as the days of Sesostris, conceived the idea of communication between the Nile and the Red Sea. Traces of the canal that they attempted still remain. Pharaoh Necho, in the days of the Prophet Jeremiah, revived the project. Darius and one of the Ptolemies completed the work, but when Egypt sank back into semi-barbarism, the canal was neglected and forgotten. It does not appear, however, that the Pharaohs ever thought of connecting the Red Sea with the Mediterranean. The canal of Sesostris and of Pharaoh Necho was a purely local affair, affecting Egyptian commerce alone.

Some modern Egyptian engineers seem first to have conceived the project of a Suez canal; but the man who accomplished it was the engineer and statesman, M. de Lesseps. In spite of all manner of discouragements, he brought the canal to completion, supported throughout by the influence and authority of the khedive. The first thing to be done was to supply the laborers and the new town of Ismaïlia with drinking water, by means of a narrow freshwater canal from the Nile. Till then all fresh water had been brought in tanks from Cairo. Next, a town—called Port Saïd, after the khedive who had first favored the plan of the canal—was built on the Mediterranean. The canal was to run a straight southerly course to Suez. At Ismaïlia, the new city, it would connect with the railroad to Cairo; between Port Saïd and Ismaïlia it would pass through two swampy lakes.

In seven years Port Saïd became a town of ten thousand inhabitants. The total length of the canal is about ninety miles, but more than half of it passes through the lakes, which had to be dredged. The width of the canal is a little over one hundred yards, its depth twenty-six feet. About sixty millions of dollars were expended on its construction and the preliminary works that it entailed,—these last all tending to the benefit and prosperity of Egypt.

The grand opening took place Nov. 16, 1869. The sultan was not present; he had been persuaded out of his fancy to see the sight, and the khedive was left in peace as master of ceremonies. The Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria was there in his yacht, and the Empress Eugénie, the "bright particular star" of the occasion, was on board the French war-steamer "L'Aigle." As "L'Aigle" steamed slowly into the crowded port, all the bands played,—

"Partant pour la Syrie,
Le brave et jeune Dunois,"

the air of which had been composed by Queen Hortense, the mother of the emperor, so that it was dignified during his reign into a national air.

That afternoon there was a religious ceremony, which all the crowned heads and other great personages were expected to attend. Two of the sovereigns or heirs-apparent present were Roman Catholics, one was a Protestant, and one a Mohammedan. The Crescent and the Cross for the first time overshadowed worshippers joining in one common prayer. The empress appeared, leaning on the arm of the Emperor of Austria. She wore a short pale gray silk, with deep white Brussels lace arranged in paniers and flounces. Her hat and veil were black, and round her throat was a black velvet ribbon. The Mohammedan pontiff who officiated on the occasion was understood to be a man of extraordinary sanctity, brought from a great distance to lend solemnity to the occasion. He was followed by the chaplain of the empress, a stout, handsome Hungarian prelate named M. Bauer.[1]

[Footnote 1: Blackwood's Magazine.]

Even up to the morning of November 17, when the passage of the fleet was to be made through the canal, there were persons at Port Saïd who doubted if it would get through. The ships-of-war had been directed to enter the canal first, and there was to be between each ship an interval of a quarter of an hour. They were ordered to steam at the rate of five miles an hour. "L'Aigle" entered first. "La Pelouse," another French ship, had the greatest draught of water; namely, eighteen or nineteen feet.

The scenery from the Suez Canal was not interesting. Lakes, then undrained, stretched upon either side; the banks of the canal being the only land visible. But as evening fell, and the sun sank, a rich purple light, with its warm tones, overspread everything, until the moon rose, touching the waters with her silvery sheen. Before this, however, the foremost ships in the procession had safely reached Ismaïlia. There the khedive had erected a new palace in which to review his guests. They numbered about six thousand, and the behavior of many of them did little credit to civilization.

The khedive had arranged an exhibition of Arab horsemanship and of throwing the Jereed; but the sand was so deep that the horses could not show themselves to advantage. The empress, wearing a large leghorn hat and yellow veil, rode on a camel; and when an Italian in the crowd shouted to her roughly, "Lean back, or you will fall off, heels over head," the graceful dignity with which she smiled, and accepted the advice, won the hearts of all beholders.

That night a great ball was given by the khedive in his new palace. "It was impossible," says an English gentleman, "to overrate the gracious influence of the empress's presence. The occasion, great as it was, would have lost its romance if she had not been there. She it was who raised the spirit of chivalry, subdued the spirit of strife, enmity, and intrigue among rival men, and over commerce, science, and avarice spread the gauzy hues of poetry."

Alas! poor empress. Ten months later, she was hurrying as a fugitive on board an English yacht on her way into exile, having passed through anxieties and griefs that had streaked her hair with gray. Even in the midst of her personal triumphs in the East, there were clouds on the horizon of her life which she could see darkening and increasing. A few days before the fêtes of the opening of the canal, she writes to her husband, who, though unfit for exertion, had gone into Paris on some state occasion,—

"I was very anxious about you yesterday, thinking of you in Paris without me; but I see by your telegram that everything passed off well. When we observe other nations, we can better perceive the injustice of our own. I think, however, in spite of all, that you must not be discouraged, but continue in the course you have inaugurated. It is right to keep faith touching concessions that have been granted. I hope that your speech to the Chamber will be in this spirit. The more strength may be wanted in the future, the more important it is to prove to the country that we act upon ideas, and not only on expedients. I speak thus while far away, and ignorant of what has passed since my departure, but I am thoroughly convinced that strength lies in the orderly sequence of ideas. I do not like surprises, and I am persuaded that a coup d'état cannot be made twice in one reign. I am talking in the dark, and to one already of my opinion, and who knows more than I can know; but I must say something, if only to prove, what you know, that my heart is with you both, and that if in calm days my spirit loves to roam in space, it is with you both I love to be in times of care or trouble."

[CHAPTER XII.]

PARIS IN 1870: JULY, AUGUST, AND SEPTEMBER.

As soon as relations became "strained" between France and Germany, according to the term used in diplomacy, the king of Prussia ordered home all his subjects who had found employment in France, especially those in Alsace and Lorraine.[1] Long before this, those provinces had been overrun with photographers, pedlers, and travelling workmen, commissioned to make themselves fully acquainted with the roads, the by-paths, the resources of the villages, and the character of the rural officials. In the case of France, however, though all the reports concerning military stores looked well on paper, the old guns mounted on the frontier fortresses were worthless, and the organization of the army was so imperfect that scarcely more than two hundred thousand troops could be sent to defend the French frontier from Switzerland to Luxemburg; while Germany, with an army that could be mobilized in eleven days, was ready by the 1st of August to pour five hundred thousand men across the Rhine. The emperor placed great reliance on his mitrailleuses,—a new engine of war that would fire a volley of musketry at once, but which, though horribly murderous, has not proved of great value in actual warfare. Towards the Rhine were hurried soldiers, recruits, cannon, horses, artillery, ammunition, wagons full of biscuit and all manner of munitions of war. The roads between Strasburg and Belfort were blocked up, and in the disorder nobody seemed to know what should be done. Every one was trying to get orders. The telegraph lines were reserved for the Government. Quartermasters were roaming about in search of their depots, colonels were looking for their regiments, generals for their brigades or divisions. There were loud outcries for salt, sugar, coffee, bacon, and bridles. Maps of Germany as far as the shores of the Baltic were being issued to soldiers who, alas! were never to pass their own frontier. But while this was the situation near the seat of war, in other parts of France the scene was different, especially in Brest and other seaports. These towns were crowded with soldiers and sailors; the streets were filled with half-drunken recruits bawling patriotic sentiments in tipsy songs. And now, for the first time since the Empire came into existence, might be heard the unaccustomed strains of the "Marseillaise." It had been long suppressed in France; but when war became imminent, it was encouraged for the purpose of exciting military ardor.

[Footnote 1: Erckmann-Chatrian, La Plébiscite.]

Every day in the provincial towns the war fever grew fiercer. The bugle sounded incessantly in the streets of any place where there were troops in garrison. Regiment followed regiment on its way into Paris, changing quarters or marching to depots to receive equipments. Orderlies galloped madly about, and heavy ammunition wagons lumbered noisily over the pavements. Everybody shouted "A Berlin," and took up the chorus of the "Marseillaise." The post-offices and telegraph-offices were crowded with soldiers openly dictating their messages to patient officials who put them into shape, and it was said that nearly every telegram contained the words, "Please send me..." Alas, poor fellows! it is probable that nothing sent them in reply was ever received.[1]

[Footnote 1: I am indebted for much in this chapter to a private journal.]

Parisians or residents in Paris all believed at that time in the prestige of the French army; only here and there a German exile muttered in his beard something about Sadowa.

On July 27 all Paris assembled on the Boulevards to see the Garde Impériale take its departure for the frontier. This Imperial Guard was a choice corps created by Napoleon III. at the outset of the Crimean War. It was a force numbering nominally twenty thousand infantry and three thousand cavalry. It was a very popular corps, and the war with Germany was popular; consequently the march from its barracks to the railroad station was one continued triumph. At every halt the Parisians pressed into the ranks with gifts of money, wine, and cigars. "Vive l'armée!" shouted the multitude. "A Berlin!" responded the troops; and now and then, as the bands struck up the "Marseillaise," the population and the troops burst out in chorus with the solemn, spirit-stirring words.

At the head of this brilliant host rode Marshal Le Bœuf, who was minister of war and military tutor to the Prince Imperial. After the departure of the main body of the corps, large detachments of cavalry and artillery which belonged to it were expected to follow; but they remained behind in the provinces, because Lyons, Marseilles, and Algeria, all centres of the revolutionary spirit, could not, it was found, be left without armed protection. Therefore only a portion of the crack corps of the French army went forward to the frontier,—a fact never suspected by the public until events, a few weeks later, made it known.

Paris was jubilant. The theatres especially became centres of patriotic demonstrations. At the Grand Opera House, Auber's "Massaniello" (called in France the "Muette de Portici") was announced. For many years its performance had been interdicted under the Second Empire, the story being one of heroic revolt. The time had come, however, when its ardent patriotism entitled it to resuscitation. Faure, the most remarkable baritone singer of the period, suddenly, at the beginning of the second act, which opens with a chorus of fishermen inciting each other to resist oppression, appeared upon the stage bearing the French flag. The chorus ranged themselves to right and left as he strode forward and waved the tricolor above the footlights. The house broke into wild uproar, cheer after cheer rose for the flag, for the singer, for France.

"The violence of the applause," says one who was present, "continued until all were breathless; then a sudden silence preceded the great event of the evening. In clear, firm tones, Faure launched forth the first notes of the 'Marseillaise;' and as the first verse ended, he bounded forward, and unfurling the flag to its full length and breadth, he waved it high above his head as he electrified the audience with the cry, 'Aux armes citoyens!' and subsequently, when in the last verse he sank upon one knee, and folding the standard to his heart, raised his eyes towards heaven, he drew all hearts with him; tears flowed, hand grasped hand, and deeply solemn was the intonation of the volunteer chorus following the call to arms!