There were still great illusions among those about Charles X., and the Duchess of Berry had not for a single instant an idea that the rights of her son could be compromised. They persuaded themselves that the Opposition would remain dynastic and that the severest crises would end only in a change of ministry. Nevertheless, even at the court, the more thoughtful began to be anxious, and perceived many dark points on the horizon. Certain royalists, enlightened by experience of the Emigration and Exile, had a presentiment that the Restoration would be for them only a halt in the long way of catastrophes and sorrow. They mourned the optimist tranquillity in which some of the courtiers succeeded in lulling the King. There were courageous and faithful servitors who, at the risk of displeasing their master and losing his good graces, did not recoil from the sad obligation of telling him the whole truth. From the beginning of his reign, Charles X. heard useful warnings, and later he blamed himself for not having listened better to them. This justice, however, must be done him, that if he had not the wisdom to profit by such counsels, he never was offended at the men of heart who dared to give them to him.
In this number was the Viscount Sosthenes de La Rochefoucauld, son of the Duke of Doudeauville, son-in-law of Mathieu de Montmorency, charged with the department of the fine arts, at the ministry of the King's household. In publishing the reports addressed by him to Charles X. from his accession to the Revolution of 1830, he writes:—
"These are respectful and tender warnings of which too little account was taken, and which might have saved the King and France. I put them down here with the gloomy predictions contained in them, which have been only too completely realized. They are not prophecies after the event. We saw in advance the misfortunes of the King, the fall of the monarchy, the ruin of legitimacy. Each page, then each line, and soon every word of this part of my Memoirs will be a cry of alarm: 'God save the King!' Alas! He has not saved him. One is always wrong if one cannot get a hearing and make one's self believed. It is then, with no pride in my previsions, but with bitter regret, that I could not get them accepted, that I recall this long monologue addressed to Charles X."
From the beginning of the reign, as he foresaw that one day the Chamber would sign the Address of the 221, and that M. Laffitte would be the banker of the revolution of July, the Viscount wrote to the sovereign in December, 1824:—
"The King has two things to combat for the glory and strength of his rule, the encroachments of the Chamber of Deputies, and the power of money in Europe. Four bankers could to-day decide war, if such was their pleasure. Sovereigns cannot seek too earnestly to free themselves from the sceptre which is rising above their own. The triumph of moneyed men will blight the character and the morals of France."
M. de La Rochefoucauld added (report of January 31, 1825) this prediction, which shows to what length his frankness went in his loyal explanations with his King:—
"We are between two rocks, equally dangerous: revolution with the Duke of Orleans, and ultraism with the good Polignac. The by-word now is: 'These princes will end like the Stuarts.' Madame de—, who is agitating against the laws now under discussion, has said: 'Yes, it's the second throne of the Stuarts.' The Left compare the Archbishop of Rheims to Father Peters, the restless and ambitious confessor of King James. It is not easy for me to write thus to the King, and I have assumed a hard task in promising myself to conceal nothing from him. Sometimes my heart is oppressed and my hand stops; but I question my conscience, which seems troubled, and the indispensable necessity of telling all to the King, that he may judge in his wisdom, decides me to go on."
How many sagacious warnings given by the brave courtier, or, better, by the faithful friend, during the year 1825, the year of the coronation: "The good Madame de M— of the Sacred Heart was saying the other day: 'We had a King with no limbs, and with a head; now we have limbs and no head.' It is unheard of, the trouble taken in certain circles to make out that the King has no will. The future must give to all a complete refutation; the future must teach them that the King knows how to distinguish those that betray from those that serve him." (Report of March 1, 1825). "Does the King wish to run the chances of a complete overturning by throwing himself into the hands of the ultras? That would be to fall again under the blows of the Revolution, which counts on these to push the monarchy into the abyss always held open at its side."
From 1825, criticism of the King began. He was accused of giving himself up too much to the pleasures of the chase. The time was approaching when his enemies would say of him—a cruel play on words: "He's good for nothing but to hunt," and would translate the four letters over the doors of houses M. A. C. L. (Maison Assuree Contre l'Incendie) by this phrase: Mes Amis, Chassons-le.
The 17th of June, 1825, M. de La Rochefoucauld wrote:—
"I must tell all to the King. I have prevented the giving of a play at the Odeon called Robin des Bois (Robin Hood), because it is a nickname criminally given by the people to him whom they accuse of hunting too often, an accusation very unjust in the eyes of those who know that never did a prince work more than he to whom allusion is made. When the King takes this distraction so necessary to him, why hasten to make it known to the public? All news comes from the Chateau, and the Constitutionnel and the Quotidienne are always the best informed."
He returned to the same subject October 6:—
"I am in despair at seeing the journals recounting hunt after hunt. I know the effect that produces. I wanted to get at the source of these mischievous reports, and M— communicated to me confidentially that these reports came to him from the court, and at such length that he always cut them down three-fourths. In this case, it is for the King to give orders."
Let us put beside this report the following passage from the Memoirs of the Duke of Doudeauville:—
"I must justify Charles X. in this passion for the chase, so bitterly laid up against him in that time when malice and bad faith seized on everything that could injure him. Five whole days every week he remained in his apartment, busy with affairs of state, working with the ministers, examining by himself their different reports with a sensitive heart, much soul, and more intellect than had been believed; he had much reason and a very sound judgment. We were often astonished at it in the Council, over which he presided, and which he prolonged two, three, four, and five hours, without permitting himself the least distraction or showing any sign of weariness. Often, in the most difficult discussions, he would open up an opinion that no one had conceived, and which, full of sagacity, smoothed every difficulty.
"Twice a week, and often only once, when the weather permitted, he went hunting, perhaps gunning, perhaps coursing. It will be conceded that it was a necessary exercise after such assiduous toil and occupations so sedentary.
"I certify that this was the extent of the hunting of which calumny, to ruin him, made a crime. Every time he went hunting, the Opposition journals did not fail to announce it, which persuaded nearly all France that he passed all his time in the distractions of this amusement."
The tide of detraction of the sovereign steadily rose. The Viscount de La Rochefoucauld perceived it clearly. He wrote to the King, 13th October, 1825:—
"The interior of France, as regards commerce, agriculture, industry, wealth, offers a most striking spectacle. Let Charles X., as King and father, rejoice in his work; but let him reflect that the lightest sleep would be followed by a terrible awakening."
The 12th of January, 1826, when his father-in-law, the Duke Mathieu de Montmorency, had just been named governor to the Duke of Bordeaux, M. de La Rochefoucauld again wrote to the King:—
"Shall I thank the King for the nomination of M. de Montmorency? Six months ago, it would have been useful. To-day, it is merely good. But alas, how far is that interesting Prince from the crown! and what shocks and revolutions he must traverse first. If ever—God watch over France; the Orleans are making frightful progress."
The signs of the coming storm accumulated in the most alarming manner. Read this other report of the Viscount de La Rochefoucauld (August 8, 1826):—
"Indifference to religion, hatred of the priests, were the symptoms of the Revolution. God grant that the same things do not bring the same results. The unfortunate priests no longer dare to go through the streets; they are everywhere insulted. Three days since, a well-dressed man, passing by the sentinel of the Luxembourg said to him, pointing to a priest: 'Never mind; in a year you'll see no more of all these wretches.' The poor Cure of Clichy was in real danger, surrounded by two or three hundred madmen, who cried; 'Down with the black-hats!' Every day there is a scene of the same sort."
The popularity of Charles X., so great at the beginning of his reign, was dwindling every day at Paris. M. de La Rochefoucauld did not fear to declare it to him.
"By what inconceivable fatality is it," he wrote, February 6, 1827, "that the king amid all the care he takes to ensure the happiness of his people, is losing from day to day in their love and affection? At the play—and it is there, to use an expression of Napoleon, that the pulse of public opinion is to be felt—the most seditious and hostile allusions are eagerly caught up. Saturday last, verses, of which the sense was that kings who have lost the love of their people encounter only silence and coldness, were greeted with triple applause and furiously encored."
The report of May 12,1827, was like an alarm bell:
"Circumstances are so grave that the calmest minds betray fear regarding them; there are now but one opinion and one feeling,—doubt and fear. It is said openly, as eight years since: This branch cannot keep the crown; it is impossible; who will succeed it? How many things, great Heavens, done in eight years; how many things forgotten!"
Exposed to an outpouring of enmities and of incessant intrigues, taken between two fires,—the extreme Right and the Left,—M. de Villele no longer had the strength to govern. His ministry was about to come to an end. Later, in retracing in his journal this phase of his career, he wrote:—
"All that took place was of a feebleness destructive of all government, and disheartening for him who bears all the responsibility for it, with the weight of affairs besides. But he was not, and did not pretend to be, the Cardinal Richelieu. He had not his character, nor his ambition, nor his superior gifts. He did not even envy them. Had he been quite different in this regard, to repress and annul his king, to oppress the daughter of Louis XVI. and the widow of the Duke of Berry, to exile from France the new Gaston d'Orleans, and his numerous family, to bring down the heads of the court pygmies,—more dangerous, perhaps, with their influence over the King and his family and their vexatious intrigues in the Court of Peers than the Montmorencys and the Cinq-Mars,—this was a rele to which he never aspired and would not have accepted."
Charles X. sacrificed M. de Villele, who, however, had his sympathy, and replaced him with a liberal minister, perhaps with a mental reservation as to a ministry, before long, from the extreme Right. The retiring minister wished to remain in the Chamber of Deputies, to defend his acts. For their part, his successors, fearing his influence in that body, wished his transfer to the Chamber of Peers, where, in their judgment, he would be less dangerous. At the last Council of Ministers attended by M. de Villele, the King passed to him a note in pencil, announcing that he had called him to the peerage. The statesman declined, in a note also in pencil. "You wish then to impose yourself upon me as minister?" wrote the King once more. M. de Villele appeared moved, and passed to the sovereign this response: "The King well knows the contrary; but since he can write it, let him do with me what he will." The next day the Martignac ministry entered on its duties, and the Duchess of Angoule'me said to Charles X.: "It is true, then, that you are letting Villele go? My father, you descend to-day the first step of the throne."
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