The dominant quality of Charles X., his piety, was the one that was to be most used against him. There was in this piety nothing morose, hypocritical, fanatical, and not an idea of intolerance or persecution mingled with it. Conviction and feeling united in the heart of the King to inspire him with profound faith. In 1803, before the death-bed of a beloved woman, he had sworn to renounce earthly for divine love, and from that time he had kept his vow. The woman by whom this conversion was made was the sister-in-law of the Duchess of Polignac, Louise d'Esparbes, Viscountess of Polastron. The Duchess of Gontaut recounts in her unpublished Memoirs the touching and pathetic scene of the supreme adieu of this charming woman and of Charles X., then Count d'Artois. It was in England during the Emigration. The Viscountess of Polastron was dying with consumption, and the approach of the end reawakened in her all the piety of her childhood. A holy priest, the Abbe de Latil, demanded the departure of the Prince. "I implore Monseigneur," he said, "to go into the country; you shall see the poor penitent again; she herself desires it, having one word to say to you, one favor to ask, but it cannot be until at the moment of death."
The Prince, who, even at the time of his greatest errors, had never ceased to love and honor religion, obeyed the command of the priest. He awaited in cruel anguish the hour when he should be permitted to return. It was authorized only when death was very near. The Duchess of Gontaut says:—
"The doors of the salon were opened. Monsieur dared not approach; I was near the dying woman and held her hand; it was trembling. She perceived Monsieur. He was about to rush toward her. 'Come no nearer,' said the Abbe, in a firm voice. Monsieur did not venture to cross the threshold. The agitation redoubled; the agony increased. She raised her hands to heaven, and said:—
"'One favor, Monseigneur, one favor—live for God, all for God.'
"He fell upon his knees, and said: 'I swear it, God!' She said again, 'All for God!' Her head fell on my shoulder; this last word was her last breath: she was no more. Monsieur raised his arms to heaven, uttered a horrible cry: the door was closed."
The Count d'Artois was then but forty-five, but from that day he never gave occasion for the least scandal, and led an exemplary life. As Louis XIV. had held in profound esteem the courageous prelates who adjured him to break with his mistresses, Charles X. was attached to the truly Christian priest who had converted him by the death-bed of the Viscountess of Polastron. The Abbe de Latil, the obscure ecclesiastic of the Emigration, became, under the Restoration, the Archbishop of Rheims and Cardinal. It was not without profound emotion that the very Christian King saw himself consecrated by the priest who twenty-two years before had caused him to return to virtue. This memory was imposed on the mind and heart of the monarch, and under the vault of the ancient Cathedral, he certainly thought of Madame de Polastron, as of a good angel, who, from the height of heaven, watched over him, and who, by her prayers, had aided him to traverse so many trials, to reach the religious triumph of the coronation.
Charles X. was happy then. Profoundly sincere in his ardent desire to make France happy, he believed himself at one with God and with his people, and rejoiced in that supreme good, so often wanting to sovereigns,—peace of heart. Could he be reproached for having taken the ceremony of his coronation seriously? A king who does not believe in his royalty is no more to be respected than a priest who does not believe in his religion. Charles X. was convinced, as the Archbishop of Rheims had said in his letter of 29th May, 1825, that kings exercise over their subjects the power of God Himself, and that they have that sacred majesty, upon which, in the fine expression of Bossuet, God, for the good of things human, causes to shine a portion of the splendor of divine majesty.
This disposition of mind in Charles X. fortified his piety, so that, at the time of the jubilee of 1826, he seized eagerly the opportunity to affirm his religious faith, and to return thanks to the God of his fathers, who at this epoch of his life was loading him with favors.
The jubilee is a time of penitence and pardon, when the Pope accords plenary indulgence to all Catholics who submit to certain practices and assist at certain pious ceremonies. The grand jubilee was formerly celebrated only once in a hundred years; afterwards it took place every fifty, and then every twenty-five years. 1825 was the time of its first celebration in the nineteenth century, and it drew to Rome that year more than ten thousand pilgrims. The Pope had celebrated the close of it the 24th of December, 1825, but yielding to the prayers of several Catholic powers, he accorded to them, by special bulls, the privilege of celebrating the same solemnity in 1826.
The opening of the French jubilee took place February 15, 1826, at Notre-Dame de Paris. The papal bull, borne on a rich cushion, was remitted to the Archbishop for public reading. The nuncio chanted the Veni Creator. Mass was said by the Cardinal, Prince of Croi, Archbishop of Rouen, Grand Almoner of France. The relics of the apostles Saint Peter and Saint Paul were borne around the Place du Parvis, in the midst of a cortege, in which were present the marshals of France, the generals, and the four princesses. The order of the Archbishop of Paris prescribed four general processions. The first took place with great pomp the 17th of March, 1826. The King and the royal family, the princes and princesses of the blood, all the court, the marshals, a multitude of high functionaries, peers of France, deputies, officers, assisted at this ceremony in which appeared the Archbishop of Paris and his grand vicars, the metropolitan chapter, the pupils of all the seminaries in surplice, the priests of all the Paris churches with their sacerdotal armaments. It was a veritable army of ecclesiastics that traversed the capital. In the midst of the cortdge, the reliquary containing the relics of Saint Peter and Saint Paul was the object of the devotion of the faithful. Surrounded by the Dauphin, the Duke of Orleans, the young Duke of Chartres, the great officers of the crown, of the Hundred Swiss, and of the body-guard, Charles X., in a costume half religious, half military, walked between a double hedge formed by the royal guard and the troops of the line. The Place du Parvis-Notre-Dame was hung with draperies in fleur-de-lis, and all the streets to be traversed by the procession had been draped and sanded. The first stop of the cortege was under the peristyle of the Hotel-Dieu, where an altar had been erected; the second, at the Church of the Sorbonne; the third, at that of Sainte Genevieve. The two other processions had no less eclat, and their pauses being fixed in the churches of the principal parishes, they passed through the busiest and most populous quarters of Paris.
The fourth and last procession, that of the 3d of May, was the most important of all. It was to close by an expiatory ceremony in honor of Louis XVI., by the laying and benediction of the corner-stone of the monument voted by the Chamber of 1815, and which still awaited its foundation. It is at the very place where the unfortunate sovereign had been executed that the monument was to be constructed. The cortege left Notre-Dame and directed its course first to the Church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois. The Chamber of Peers, the Chamber of Deputies, all the functionaries, all the authorities of the Department of the Seine, followed the King and Dauphin, who advanced, accompanied by the ministers, the marshals, the officers of their houses, cordons bleus, cordons rouges. Never since the end of the old regime had such a multitude of priests been seen defiling through the streets of Paris. The pupils of all the seminaries, the almoners of all the colleges, the priests of all the parishes and all the chapels, stretched out in an endless double line, at the end of which appeared the Nuncio of the Pope, Cardinals de Latil, de Croi, and de La Fare, the Archbishop of Paris, and a crowd of prelates. After the station of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, there was a second at Saint-Roch, then a third and last at the Assumption. When the special prayers of the close of the jubilee had been said at this last parish, the immense cortege resumed its march to the place where Louis XVI. had brought his head to the sacrilegious scaffold. The day chosen for the expiatory solemnity was the 3d of May, the anniversary of the return of Louis XVIII. to Paris in 1814, and then a political idea was connected with the religious ceremony. A vast pavilion surmounted by a cross hung with draperies in violet velvet, and enclosing an altar, which was reached on four sides by four stairways of ten steps each, occupied the very place where, the 10th of January, 1793, the scaffold of the Martyr-King had been erected, in the middle of the Place called successively the Place Louis XV. and the Place de La Concorde, and which was thenceforth to be called the Place Louis XVI.
The account in the MONITEUR says:—
"A first salvo of artillery announced the arrival of the procession. It presented as imposing a tableau as could be contemplated. This old French nation—the heir of its sixty kings at the head—marched, preceded by the gifts made by Charlemagne to the Church of Paris, and the religious trophies that Saint Louis brought from the holy places. The priests ascend to the altar. Three times in succession they raise to heaven the cry for pardon and pity. All the spectators fall upon their knees. A profound, absolute silence reigns about the altar and over all the Place; a common sorrow overwhelms the people; the King's eyes are filled with tears."
In this multitude the absence of the Dauphiness, the daughter of Louis XVI., is remarked. The Orphan of the Temple had made it a law for herself never to cross the place where her father had perished. She went to the expiatory chapel of the Rue d'Anjou-Saint-Honore, to pass in prayer the time of the ceremony.
M. de Vaulabelle makes this curious comparison:—
"Behind Charles X. there knelt his Grand Chamberlain, Prince Talleyrand, covered with gleaming embroideries, orders, and cordons. It was the ecclesiastical dignitary whom Paris had beheld celebrating the Mass of the Federation on the Champ-de-Mars, the wedded prelate who, as Minister of the Directory, had for some years observed as a national festival the anniversary of this same execution, now the subject of so many tears."
Religious people rejoiced at the ceremony that was celebrated; but the Voltairians and the enemies of royalty complained bitterly at the sight of the quays, the streets, the squares of the capital furrowed by long files of priests, chanting psalms and litanies, dragging devout in their suite the King, the two Chambers, the judiciary, the administration, and the army. Yet was it not just that Charles X. should cause an expiatory ceremony to be celebrated at the place where his unfortunate brother had been guillotined? Was not that for a pious sovereign the accomplishment of a sacred duty? It matters not; there were those who reproached him with this homage to the most memorable of misfortunes. They would have forbidden to Charles X. the memory of Louis XVI. Yet a king could hardly be asked to have the sentiments of a conventionnel, of a regicide. In their systematic and bitter opposition, the adversaries of the Restoration imputed to the royal family as a crime its very virtues and its piety.
Charles X. was not unaware of this half-expressed hostility. That evening he wrote to M. Villele, President of the Council of Ministers:—
"In general I have been content with the ceremony and the appearance of the people; but I wish to know the whole truth, and I charge you to see M. Delavau, and to know from him if the reality corresponds to appearances, if there was any talk against the government and the clergy. I wish to know all, and I trust to you to leave me in ignorance of nothing."
M. de Villele was not a flatterer. He responded discreetly, but without concealing the truth:—
"The aspect of the people," he wrote, "permitted the thoughts agitating its spirit to be recognized. We were following the King at a slight distance and could judge very well of it. It was easy to read in all eyes that the people were hurt at seeing the King humbly following the priests. There was in that not so much irreligion as jealousy and animosity toward the role played by the clergy."
It might have been asked, in these circumstances, whether the criticisms of the opposition were just. If a ceremony was to be observed, such, as the laying and blessing the corner-stone of an expiatory monument, it must be religious. If it were religious, was not the presence of the clergy in large numbers natural?
At heart, there was something noble and touching in the thought of Charles X., and the true royalists sincerely respected it. Prom the monarchical point of view, a monument to Louis XVI. had much more raison d'etre than the obelisk since erected in its place, which represents nothing, and has, moreover, the inconvenience of obstructing the fine perspective of the Champs Elysees and the Tuileries. But there were two camps in France, and these processions, expiations, prayers, which, according to the royalist journals, opened a new era of sanctity, glory, and virtue, exasperated the Voltairians. The opposition determined to make of the King's piety a weapon against royalty.
And yet, we repeat, this piety had nothing about it not worthy of respect. As the Abbe Vedrenne remarks in his Vie de Charles X., this Prince "had a perfect understanding of the duties and convenances of his rank, never refused his presence at fetes where it was desirable, never seemed to blame or fear what a sensible indulgence did not condemn; he loved the charm of society, and increased it by his kindliness, but he was not dazzled by it. He remained to the end the most amiable prince in Europe, but he was also the severest. A surprising thing in a convert, his religion was always full of true charity for others. He excused those who neglected their Christian duties, remembering his delay in practising his own, without ever compromising his own beliefs. He sincerely respected the good faith of those who did not share them. This faith, this piety—a legacy from love—which he guarded so faithfully, was the consolation of his long misfortunes and the principle of his unchanging serenity. It banished even the idea of hatred from his heart. Never did any one forgive as he did."
It must not be forgotten that the pamphleteers and song-writers of the Restoration, violent, unjust, and even cruel as they were toward Charles X., never breathed an insinuation against the purity of his morals. His life was not less exemplary than that of his son, the Dauphin, or of his niece and daughter-in-law, the Orphan of the Temple. Despite the great piety of the sovereign, the court was not melancholy or morose. Charles X. had a foundation of benevolence and gaiety to his character. He was not surprised to see committed about him the gentle trespasses of love, of which he had been himself guilty in youth, and he had become—the very ideal of wisdom—severe for himself, indulgent for others.
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