At the time of the consecration of Charles X., the minister of the King's household was the Duke Ambroise de Doudeauville, father of the Viscount Sosthenes de La Rochefoucauld. A philanthropic nobleman, devoted to the throne, the altar, the Charter, and to liberty, respectful for the past but thoughtful for the future, joining intelligent toleration to sincere piety, faithful servitor but no courtier to the King, the Duke of Doudeauville enjoyed the esteem of all and had at court a high standing, due even more to his character than to his birth. The volume of Memoirs that he has left does honor to his heart as well as to his mind. There is grace and gaiety, depth and charm, wisdom and courage, in this short but substantial book, where appears in full light one of the most distinct types of the ancient French society. "My years of grandeur and splendor," this author wrote, "have passed like a dream, and I have beheld the awakening with pleasure. I know not what my destiny shall be. As to my conduct, I believe that I can affirm that it will be always that of an honest man, a good Frenchman, a servant of God, desiring a Christian close to an honorable life, the crown of every human edifice."
The details given by the Duke of Doudeauville as to his early years are very characteristic. He was born in 1765. He was entrusted to the care of a nurse living two leagues from Paris in a little village, the wife of a post-rider. His parents, when they came to see him, found "their eighteen-months-old progeny astride of one of the horses of his foster-father." Like Henry IV., he was raised roughly, leading the life of a real peasant, running the day long, in sabots, through the snow and ice and mud. "My nurse, who was retained as maid," he says, "was a good peasant, and thoroughly proletarian. Afterwards, transferred to the capital, she there preserved with her simple cap her frank and rustic manners, to the admiration of all who knew her, and esteemed her loyal character and her plain ways. It is to her, and to her alone, that I am indebted for receiving any religious instruction either in infancy or youth. Everything about me was wholly foreign to those ideas; my religion was none the less fervent for that. From my earliest years, being born brave, I felt the vocation of the martyr the most desirable means of being joined to our Father which is in Heaven, and I have always thought that to end one's days for one's God, one's wife and family, was a touching and enviable death."
The Duke of Doudeauville was still a child, and a little child—in point of age he was fourteen and a day, in size he was four feet seven inches—when he was married. He espoused Mademoiselle de Montmirail, of the family of Louvois, who brought him, with a beauty he did not then prize, a considerable fortune, the rank of grandee of Spain, and, worth more than all, rare and precious qualities. Nevertheless, the little husband was very sad. When his approaching marriage was announced to him, he cried out, "Then I can play no longer!" When, after the first interview, he was asked how he liked his fiancee, whose fresh face, oval and full, was charming, he responded: "She is really very beautiful; she looks like me when I am eating plums." Listen to his story of the nuptials. "Imagine my extreme embarrassment," he says, "my stupid disappointment, with my excessive bashfulness amid the numerous concourse of visitors and spectators attracted by our wedding. The grandfather of Mademoiselle de Montmirail, being captain of the Hundred-Swiss, a great part of this corps was there, and, as if to play me a trick, all these Hundred-Swiss were six feet tall, sometimes more. One would have said, seeing me by the side of them, the giants and the dwarf of the fair. Every one gazed at the bride, who, although she was only fifteen, was as tall as she was beautiful, and every one was looking for the bridegroom, without suspecting that it was this child, this schoolboy, who was to play the part."
Is it not amusing, this picture of a marriage under the old regime? The little groom was so disturbed when he went to the chapel and during the ceremony, that, though his memory was excellent, he never could recall what passed at that time. "I only remember," he says, "the sound of the drums that were beating during our passage, and cheered me a little; it was the one moment of the day that was to my taste. How long that day seemed! You may imagine it was not from the motives common in like cases, but because I drew all glances upon me, and all vied in laughing at and joking me, pointing their fingers at me."
The day ended with a grand repast that lasted two or three hours. A crowd of strangers strolled around the table all the while. Although the precaution had been taken to put an enormous cushion on the chair of the husband, his chin hardly came above the table. Seated by the side of his young wife, he did not dare look at her. For days beforehand he had been wondering if he should always be afraid of her.
"After this solemn banquet," he adds, "came the soiree, which did not seem any more amusing; after the soiree the return to my parents' home was no more diverting; nevertheless, it was made in the company of my dear spouse, who henceforth was to dwell at my father's house. They bundled me into a wretched cabriolet with my preceptor, and sent me to finish my education at Versailles, and to learn to ride at the riding-school of the pages."
We must note that the marriage thus begun was afterwards a very happy union, and that there was never a pair more virtuous and more attached to each other than the Duke and Duchess of Doudeauville.
In 1789, the Duke was major of the Second Regiment of Chasseurs. He emigrated, though the Emigration was not at all to his liking. "This measure," he said, "appeared to me in every way unreasonable, and yet, to my great chagrin, I was forced to submit to it. The person of the King was menaced, right-thinking people compromised, the tranquillity and prosperity of France lost; they were arming abroad, it was said, to provide a remedy for these evils. The nobles hastened hither. Distaffs were sent to all who refused to rally on the banks of the Rhine. How, at twenty-five, could one resist this tide of opinion?" When he perceived, in the foreign powers, the design of profiting by the discords in France instead of putting an end to them, he laid aside his arms, and never resumed them during the eight years of the Emigration. "This resolve," he said, "was consistent with my principles. Always a good Frenchman, I desired only the good of my country, the happiness of my fellow-countrymen; my whole life, I hope, has been a proof of this view. All my actions have tended to this end."
During his eight years of emigration, the Duke of Doudeauville was constantly a prey to anxiety, grief, poverty, trials of every kind. Thirteen of his relatives were put to death under the Terror. His wife was imprisoned, and escaped the scaffold only through the 9th Thermidor. He himself, having visited France clandestinely several times, ran the greatest risks. In the midst of such sufferings his sole support was the assistance of a devoted servant. "At the moment that I write these lines," he says in his Memoirs, "I am about to lose my domestic Raphael, the excellent man who, for fifty years, has given me such proofs of fidelity, disinterestedness, and delicacy; I have treated him as a friend; I shall grieve for him as for a brother."
Misfortune had fortified the character of the Duke of Doudeauville. Unlike other emigres, he had learned much and forgotten nothing. His attitude under the Consulate and the Empire was that of a true patriot.—Without joining the Opposition, he wished no favor. The sole function he accepted was that of councillor-general of the Department of the Marne, where he could be useful to his fellow-citizens without giving any one the right to accuse him of ambitious motives. Nothing would have been easier for him than to be named to one of the high posts in the court of Napoleon, whose defects he disapproved, but whose great qualities he admired. "Bonaparte," he said in his Memoirs, "had monarchical ideas and made much of the nobility, especially that which he called historic. I must confess, whatever may be said, that the latter under his reign was more esteemed, respected, feted, than it has been since under Louis XVIII. or Charles X. The princes feared to excite toward it and toward themselves the envy of the bourgeois classes, who would have no supremacy but their own. Napoleon, on the contrary, having frankly faced the difficulty, created a nobility of his own. Those who belonged to it, or hoped to, found it quite reasonable that they should be given as peers the descendants of the first houses of France." The Duchess of Doudeauville was a sister of the Countess of Montesquiou, who was governess of the King of Rome, and whose husband had replaced the Prince de Talleyrand as Grand Chamberlain of the Emperor. Very intimate with the Count and Countess, the Duke of Doudeauville had some trouble in avoiding the favors of Napoleon, who held him in high esteem. He found a way to decline them without wounding the susceptibilities of the powerful sovereign.
Under the Restoration, the Duke of Doudeauville distinguished himself by an honest liberalism, loyal and intelligent, with nothing revolutionary in it, and by an enlightened philanthropy that won him the respect of all parties. When he was named as director of the post-office in 1822, many people of his circle blamed him for taking a place beneath him. "Congratulate me," he said, laughing, "that I have not been offered that of postman; I should have taken it just the same if I had thought I could be useful." And he added: "It was thought that it would be a sinecure for me. Far from that, I gave myself up wholly to my new employment, and I worked so hard at it, than in less than a year my eyes, previously excellent, were almost ruined. I always occupied fifteen or twenty places, each more gratuitous than the others. To make the religion that I practise beloved and to serve my neighbor, has always seemed to me the best way to serve God. So I believe that I can say without fear of contradiction that I have never done any one harm, and that I have always tried to do all the good possible."
In the month of August, 1824, the Duke of Doudeauville was named minister of the King's household. In this post he showed administrative qualities of a high order. In April, 1827, not wishing to share in a measure that he regarded as both inappropriate and unpopular, the disbanding of the Parisian National Guard, he gave in his resignation. "I did not wish," he said, "to join the Opposition. The popularity given me by my resignation would have assured me a prominent place, but this role agreed neither with my character nor with my antecedents. I resolved on absolute silence and complete obscurity; I even avoided showing myself in Paris, where I knew that manifestations of satisfaction and gratitude would be given to me." King Louis Philippe said one day to Marshal Gerard: "Had they listened to the Duke of Doudeauville, and not broken up the National Guard of Paris, the revolution would not have taken place."
The great lord, good citizen, and good Christian, who, at periods most disturbed by changes of regime, had always been as firm in the application of his principles as he was moderate in his actions and gentle in his method, made himself as much respected under Louis Philippe as under the Restoration. During the cholera, he set the example of absolute devotion and was constantly in the hospitals. He continued to sit in the Chamber of Peers until the close of the trial of the Ministers, in the hope of saving the servitors of Charles X. But when Louis Philippe quitted the Palais Royal to install himself at the Tuileries, he resigned as Peer of France. He no longer wished to reappear at the Chateau where he had seen Louis XVIII. and Charles X., and in a letter to the Queen Marie-Amelie, who had a real veneration for him, he wrote: "My presence at the Tuileries would be out of place, and even the new hosts of that palace would be astonished at it." The Duke of Doudeauville, who died at a great age, in 1841, devoted his last years to good works, to charity, to the benevolent establishments of which he was the president. One day at the Hotel de Ville, he drew applause from an assembly far from religious, by the words we are about to cite, because they discovered in them his whole mind and heart: "A husband would like a wife reserved, economical, a good housekeeper, an excellent mother for his family, charming, eager to please him—him only, adorning herself with virtue, the one ornament that is never ruinous, having great gentleness for him, great strength as against all others; he would wish, in fine, a perfect wife. I should like to believe that there are many such, especially among my listeners, but I should think it a miracle if one of them united all these qualities without having the principles of religion. A woman, pretty, witty, agreeable, would like her husband to think she was so, that he should be as amiable for her, or almost, as for those he saw for the first time; that he should not keep his ill humor and his brusqueness for his home and lavish his care and attention on society; that he should forget sometimes that he is a master,—in some ways a despotic master,—despite the liberalism of the century and the progress of philosophy; that he should be willing to be a friend, even if he ceased to be a lover; finally, that he should not seek from others what he will more surely find at home. Let this tender wife invoke religion, let her cause her husband to love it, let her win him to it; she will get what she hopes for and thank me for the recipe."
Our lady readers will thank us, we hope, for having spoken of a man who gives them such good advice; and it is with pleasure that we have taken the occasion to render homage to the memory of a great lord, who doubly deserved the title, by the elevation of his ideas and the nobility of his sentiments. Such men—alas! they are rare—would have saved the Restoration if the Restoration could have been saved.
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