Various
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 70, No. 433, November 1851
If the French President receives but rude handling from the German republican, the Orleans family cannot congratulate themselves on much better treatment. His first reference to that fallen dynasty is suggested by a little book, which, at the time of its appearance, attracted some attention both in England and France. M. Louis Tirel's La République dans les Carrosses du Roi was neither calculated nor intended to please the democrats. Mr Stahr, however, is pretty fair in his appreciation of it, sneering a little at the author for taking what he calls a valet-de-chambre's view of the February revolution, but doing justice to the interest and instruction to be found in his pages, which show up the parties honteuses of that most disastrous and ill-advised political convulsion; the scandalous greed, vanity, and egotism of the adventurers and knaves who alone profited by the storm they had contributed to raise. M. Tirel, although to all appearance honest and truthful, certainly wrote like a partisan. His position and attachments were incompatible with a just estimate of circumstances. Whilst accurately describing events, he deluded himself as to the causes that led to them, and, above all, he could see no wrong in his master; could not for the life of him comprehend how it was that Louis Philippe, "who had so faithfully observed his oath to maintain the charter, and who had a majority in the Chambers," should have been ejected from his throne and kingdom. The worthy keeper of the royal carriages never attains to more than a glimmering and confused notion that the nation could scarcely be said to be represented by the majority in question, and that a moderate extension of the suffrage, accorded with a good grace, would probably have maintained the July dynasty at the helm of French affairs to this day, and for years to come. His admiration of Louis Philippe's wisdom and skill is unlimited, as is also his indignation at the ingratitude of the people. Mr Stahr loses patience at the affectionate manner in which the ex-controlleur des equipages lauds the virtues of the old "Jesuit-King," as the German irreverently styles the defunct monarch; and, provoked by Tirel's exaggerated encomiums, he retorts by the following severe but too true remarks with reference to the oft-repeated accusation of miserly hoarding, brought against Louis Philippe by Republican and Legitimist writers: – "Louis Philippe," he says, "was no avare such as Molière has drawn – no comedy-miser – but yet he was immoderately avaricious. There was no end to his demands of money for the princes of his house. He knew, or thought he knew, that money is power; and as he could not obtain enough of the latter, he restlessly strove after the former as the means to an object. He was a good father of a family, in the bourgeois sense of the word; but he had no conception of that which makes a king the father of his people. His defenders celebrate the care which this prince, denounced as grasping, expended upon the conservation of the royal palaces, the great sums which he laid out upon rich furniture, numerous attendants, brilliant equipages, and luxurious festivals – to which latter often three or four thousand guests were invited. 'How,' it is said, 'could the people tax such a sovereign with niggardliness and greed of gold?' But the people had no part or share in these enjoyments. It suffered hunger and want, whilst the higher and middle classes of the bourgeoisie revelled in these feasts, and grew rich by supplying their materials." Raised to the throne by the suffrages of the middle classes, Louis Philippe relied on them for support. He was bitterly disappointed. Scandalous and cowardly was the manner in which the men of July – those whom he had fed, pampered and decorated, favoured and preferred – deserted him in the hour of danger. The very national guards of Neuilly, who had lived and flourished in the shadow of the château walls, refused to turn out, when, in February 1848, the intendant of the castle appealed to them to protect from plunder the property of their patron and king. They had caught the contagion of that intense selfishness which was Louis Philippe's most striking characteristic. "Let those who choose go out to be shot," said the burghers of Neuilly; "we shall stop at home and take care of our houses." And assuredly the inert and unsympathising attitude of the Paris national guard contributed more than anything else to deter Louis Philippe from resisting by force the progress of the February revolutionists. The burghers were disgusted by the dilapidation of the finances, and the venality of the administration – they were disgusted with Guizot for not daring to resist the headstrong will of the old king – and they cried out for electoral reform. With a little more patience they would have achieved their desire; – over-hasty, they suddenly beheld themselves plunged into revolution. They had not foreseen it; they lacked presence of mind to repel its first inroads. And they also lacked, there can be no question, that feeling of personal attachment to the sovereign which would have prevented their standing by, tame witnesses of his dethronement. "Louis Philippe," says Mr Stahr, "never knew how to inspire an earnest and cordial attachment even in those nearest his person. The circumstances of his fall are the most speaking proof of this. His own panegyrist tells us that Louis Philippe himself had a misgiving that none loved him for his own sake. He often said to his most confidential attendants: 'You serve me faithfully, but not with the zeal and warmth which distinguished the servants of Napoleon. Their devotion to his person was unbounded.' If such was the case in the French king's prosperous days, what could he expect in the hour of adversity? M. Tirel himself proves, beyond the possibility of refutation, that, when the moment of danger arrived, the nearest personal attendants of the king thought, almost without exception, only of themselves. Not one of them troubled himself about the safety of the immense sums contained in the treasury of the Tuileries. None thought of holding in readiness the necessary means of travelling, in the possible case of the departure or flight of the king and his family; and even M. Tirel exclaims, with reference to this – 'It is difficult to credit such utter want of foresight, when they knew they were standing on a volcano.'" At Neuilly, as already mentioned, the national guard refused to turn out; whilst the servants of the royal residence busied themselves in saying their own things, leaving their master's property to be pillaged and burned by the rabble, with whose disgusting and disgraceful depredations the troops of the line did not interfere. Regulars and militia, domestics and mob, the same want of feeling was manifest in all; none showed attachment or devotion to the prince, whose star was on the decline. Mr Stahr made a pilgrimage to Neuilly, and devotes a letter to it. It was a grey, sad-looking autumn afternoon, and the road was silent and deserted along which he took his way to the favourite residence of the departed king. The impression made upon him was most melancholy. "Vous verrez de belles choses," said the porter at the lodge, as he pointed out to the Germans the way to the ruins. "Up to this time," says Mr Stahr, "nothing in Paris had reminded me that here had raged, but a very few years before, the hurricane of a revolution that shook the world, and that had swept a dynasty from the soil of France like chaff from the thrashing-floor. At Neuilly I first received this impression. They made clean work of it, those bands of incendiaries of the 28th February 1848. A single night sufficed to convert that stately building, and all its splendour, into a heap of hideous ruins… High grass now grows upon the floors of the state apartments of the destroyed king's-home. Bushes spring up around the columns, over which creepers luxuriantly twine; and the red poppy and the yellow king-cup wave their blossoms in the chambers and saloons in which, so short a time ago, the ruler of proud France paced his Persian carpets, revolving plans for the eternal consolidation of his dynasty! On the ravaged foot-paths before the windows, the melted glass of the magnificent panes has flowed down and formed a brilliant flooring. At the foot of a balcony, whose pillars still supported the remains of broken beams, a flush of pale pink harvest roses exhaled their delicate fragrance. It was an incredibly melancholy sight. The closely-locked doors and shattered windows of the wing that was saved increased the gloom of the whole impression. Everywhere the tall iron lattice-work, and the iron posts supporting lamps, are rent and broken; the statues on the flights of steps are shivered to pieces; there remain but a couple of colossal sphinxes, which gaze inquiringly out of the dark green of the shrubbery. Who shall solve their riddle – the riddle of the history of France and of mankind? Louis Philippe, wise amongst the wise, thought he had done so. Where is he now? His weary bones sleep the eternal sleep in the country of the banished kings of France."
Neuilly has become a place of pilgrimage for the friends of the fallen dynasty. A host of inscriptions, mostly in an anti-republican sense, were to be read upon the walls and pillars at the period of Mr Stahr's visit. Of several which he took the trouble to copy, one only is superior in tone and significance to the usual average of such scribblings. "High upon a broken column a firm hand had inscribed with charcoal, and in gigantic characters, these three words:
Droit du Talion. 1830. 1848
Other hands had tried to obliterate the writing, but in vain. The revengeful word 'RETALIATION' was still quite legible. And this word best expresses the feeling with which plain-dealing probity contemplates the fate of the overthrown July monarch. For here at Neuilly was it that he, a modern Richard III., played the hypocritical part of rejecting power, when the blood of the July revolution still reddened the streets of Paris. Here was it that he wrote the letter to Charles X. in which he assured him of his fidelity and devotion, when he was already extending a lustful hand towards the crown of the rightful heir. Here too, in Neuilly, was it that he spun that Spanish web, whose most secret documents Lord Palmerston carefully preserves, and which gave the world a glimpse into an abyss of moral foulness at which the soul shudders. And here, in presence of this funeral pile of his happiness and his splendour – here, before the memorial of his disgraceful and ignominious fall – here, when I called to mind his acts, I felt no touch of pity for the fallen King. But the man I did indeed pity, the husband and the father. He had loved this Neuilly. Here had he enjoyed such a measure of domestic happiness as is rarely vouchsafed to a monarch. This house had he, for many a long year, built up and decorated with that fine feeling for art and architecture which was proper to him. To this green retirement and solitude, to this remote dwelling, hidden from all eyes, he loved to withdraw. Here, where all was his own creation – where no stone was added, no tree planted, no path cut, but under his eye – exactly here, in the most sensitive spot, the blow struck him. The destruction of this house was more deeply felt by the man than was the loss of his throne by the king! Before the Count of Neuilly had left French ground, the building had ceased to exist from which he had borrowed the name. And all his wiles and stratagems, all his cunning, were as insufficient to avert, from the man and from the king, this last fated climax, as were the fortifications and bastilles with which he had surrounded the dreaded Paris."
Quitting Neuilly, Mr Stahr was startled, as well he might be, by the terms of a bill stuck upon the park-gates —
"House of Orleans, (thus it ran,) château and domain of Neuilly to let for three years with immediate possession; about one hundred and eighty acres, meadows, forest-land, &c., bordering on the fortifications!"
Wandering through the endless galleries of Versailles, Mr Stahr is naturally enough led to reflect how strange it is that Louis Philippe, the Napoleon of Peace, as his flatterers called him, and as he loved to hear himself called – the man whose motto, as his enemies constantly asserted, was "Peace at any price," and who avowedly and upon principle disliked war – should have devised and carried out the plan of a national gallery of French military fame. A merciless analyser of the citizen king's secret thoughts and motives, Mr Stahr declares this gallery to have been a speculation of "the crowned shopkeeper," – a speculation by which his dynasty was to gain strength at the expense of a national weakness. There is truth in this; but, at the same time, the professor's opinion must not here be accepted as impartial evidence. He is evidently led into unusual fervour by his holy horror of war. We suspect him of being a member of the Peace Congress – to which he in one place kindly alludes, as the humble commencement of a great movement. Like many other adherents of the political sect which proposes to itself an aim that could never possibly be attained without terrible convulsions and sanguinary conflicts, he cannot abide the sight of blood, shudders at wounds, and recoils in terror and dismay from the "slaying and murdering, singeing and burning, cutting and stabbing," depicted upon the walls of the Versailles gallery. He looks not lovingly upon this pictorial history of France, sketched from her battle-fields, and including the exploits of her innumerable warriors, from Clodwig down to Bugeaud. On the other hand, he curiously and eagerly examines the pictures illustrating the events of 1830 and Louis Philippe's accession. Of the battle-pieces he has set down some (and not altogether without reason) as mere daubs, which no one would glance at twice but for the sake of the subject. When surveying the illustrations of the July revolution, he forgets artistic criticism in his satirical account of the personages that fill the canvass, and especially of the chief actor in those scenes, Louis Philippe himself. "His arrival at the Palais Royal," says the rancorous professor, "has something sneaking about it. He is profusely adorned with tricolor ribbons, wears white trousers, a brown coat, and a round hat. He looks like a rogue who has just crept into another man's estate. But characteristic above all is the picture in which he signs the proclamation naming him Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom (July 31, 1830.) The figures are the size of life, all in plain clothes, and decorated with the tricolor. They sit round a green council-table, the coming Citizen-King in the midst of them, dressed in a brown coat with a black velvet collar and a black satin waistcoat, a large fine shirt-frill, a neatly tied white cravat, his hair carefully curled, his eyes half closed, the corners of his month lugubriously drawn down. He holds up the momentous sheet of paper, close above which the pen in his right hand hovers, and seems to ask those around him – 'Ought I then? – must I?' All eyes are fixed trustingly upon him, especially those of honest Laffitte, in the corner on the left. Sebastiani looks somewhat keener and shrewder. Never in my life did I see a picture that so perfectly represents an assemblage of Jew bankers, gathered round their leader to advise on a 'bull' or 'bear' speculation. The whole party have this Jewish calculating expression – Louis Philippe more than any of them. And this is the countenance the man has himself had perpetuated! It is a strange historical irony. All the old Bourbons, even the two last Louises and Charles X. looked noble, or at least like noblemen, in the expression of their features, compared with this essentially common physiognomy. Their faces, at any rate, expressed the decided and undeniable consciousness of high descent, whilst the predominating expression in Louis Philippe's countenance is that of a cunning shopkeeper. And this expression is everywhere the same, in all the pictures, &c. &c." There is more in the same strain. Some may be disposed to quarrel with Mr Stahr for pressing so hard upon a dead man; but, living or dead, kings are fair subjects of criticism; and, unsparing and savage as are often the professor's strictures on the character and policy of Louis Philippe, they yet are the most truthful and just of all the political portions of his book. Messrs Montalivet and Miraflores, and the other unscrupulous panegyrists of the late King of the French, would have too good a game left them if it were forbidden to reply by more exact and impartial statements to their exaggerated encomiums.
Passing from the deceased sovereign to his family, we are led to an apparently remote subject – namely, Mr Stahr's visit to Alexander Dumas, who, as is well known, was a favourite and intimate of the dukes of Orleans and Montpensier. When reviewing, a few years ago, the Paris diary of a countryman of Mr Stahr's – a gentleman of similar politics and equal discretion – we noticed an offensive practice common amongst modern German writers, many of whom, on return from foreign travel, scruple not to commit to print the most confidential conversation and minute domestic details of persons who have hospitably welcomed them, and imprudently admitted them to intimacy. No consideration of propriety checks these impudent scribblers. Delicacy and reserve are things unknown to them. The persons concerning whom they flippantly babble may dwell within a day's railroad of them, and be sure to see their books – may be equally sure to feel vexed or disgusted by their unwarrantable revelations and offensive inferences; no matter, they speak of them as though Pekin were their domicile. As regards the radical professor from Oldenburg, we sincerely trust that he may fall in, at an early day, with the martial author of the Mousquetaires, and receive from him, as guerdon for his gossip, a delicately administered estocade. We never heard whether Janin chastised Mr Carl Gutzkow, either with pen or pistol, for his slipshod and indecent chatter concerning him and Madame Janin; but we remember somebody doing it for him in the Revue des Deux Mondes, where we suspect Mr Stahr has a fair chance of being in his turn gibbeted. Here is the German professor's account of Dumas's personal appearance and private residence. It is a curious bit of miniature-painting. "In person he is tall and powerful; his movements, once unquestionably very flexible, are now characterised by an easy negligence. His bright complexion and large prominent light-blue eyes contrast with the mouth and nose, which betray his African origin. Good-nature, and a combination of intellectuality with a keen relish of life, are the most prominent characteristics of his broad round face. His thick woolly hair, now all but grey, seems to have been formerly light-coloured. He sits in a very large room on the first floor of the last house in the Avenue Frochot. His apartment is reached through a dark corridor. On the side that looks out upon the very quiet street, is a glass gallery, which serves as a greenhouse. There was nothing remarkable in it. Mignonette and heliotropes were growing in the tubs in which a few large oleander bushes were planted. Of the magnificent tropical vegetation of which report has spoken, there was no sign. The room was decorated, and divided into two parts, with brown woollen hangings. In the largest division, into which visitors are conducted, and in front of the greenhouse windows, stands a vast writing-table. Ancient and modern arms deck the walls. But of Oriental luxury there was not the least appearance. And some other apartments through which he afterwards took me, to show me his winter reception-room, were by no means so luxuriously fitted up as has been reported in Germany."
"I found his bookseller with him. 'Look well at the man,' said Dumas, 'who pays to one author a hundred thousand francs a-year. Such men are not to be seen every day.' Notwithstanding this little bit of brag, I hear that his finances are in no very brilliant state, and that the failure of his Théatre Historique, especially, threatens him with heavy losses. In the course of conversation, he humourously complained of the total absence of repose in his laborious existence, of which we easy-going, comfortable, German authors could scarcely form an idea. So many newspapers, a theatre of his own, the contract-romances, and the stipulated dramas – truly, it amounts to a considerable total. On subsequent visits, I never found his room and antechamber free from a throng of visitors – booksellers, printers, managers, actors, secretaries, and others – all of whom he knew how to despatch with great rapidity, and without interrupting the thread of our conversation for more than a few moments at a time." Conversations with so lively and versatile a genius as M. Dumas, turned, as may be supposed, on a vast variety of subjects, but that of which Mr Stahr has given us most details related to the ex-royal family of France. "In a side-room he showed us some very pretty pen-and-ink drawings – hunting subjects, by the late Duke of Orleans. This gave him opportunity to speak of his high respect for the mental endowments of the prince, with whom it is well known that he was on a footing of intimacy. 'He had wit enough for ten,' said Dumas. 'When we were five or six hommes d'esprit de Paris together,' added he, with amusing naiveté, 'it was quite impossible to distinguish which was the prince and which the wit. The prince was the incarnation of French esprit, and of the Parisian-French esprit, which includes all possible qualities. Her inability to understand and appreciate this esprit Parisien was a drawback upon the domestic happiness of the Duchess of Orleans, notwithstanding her many excellent qualities. Her heavier German nature did not harmonise with her husband's light elastic disposition. It put her beside herself when he transgressed in the presence of a third person the rules prescribed by the etiquette of little German courts.' Dumas told some interesting examples of this – examples, however, not adapted for publication, as they related to the prince's private life. The Duke of Orleans foresaw a revolution, in a republican sense, as a consequence of his father's system. His testamentary arrangements with respect to the education of his son were all made in anticipation of such an event coming to pass. In any case, he wished his wife to have nothing to do with the government of the country. The passage of his will relating to this point is conceived quite in the spirit of the words with which Homer's Telemachus consigns his mother Penelope to the society of her women. 'If, unhappily, the king's authority could not watch over my son until his majority, Helen should prevent her name being pronounced for the regency. Leaving, as it is her duty and her interest, all the cares of government to virile hands, accustomed to handle the sword, Helen should devote herself entirely to the education of our children.' The Duke of Orleans' death was pregnant with fatal consequences for the dynasty, because he, the most highly gifted of all the old king's sons, was perhaps the only one who would have been capable of giving things a different turn in the event of a conflict like the February revolution. He knew his brothers too well not to be convinced that they were unequal to such an emergency. 'Nemours,' said he to one of his confidants, 'is the man of rule and etiquette: he keeps step well, and keeps himself behind me with scrupulous attention. He will never assume the initiative.' He held the Dukes of Nemours and Aumale to be brave soldiers. Of the Prince de Joinville he said: 'He has a passion for danger: he will commit a thousand acts of brilliant imprudence, and will receive a ball in his breast at the assault of a barricade,' – a fate which Joinville escaped in February probably only by his absence from Paris. 'Now that younger sons are no longer made abbés,' continued the Duke of Orleans, referring to little Montpensier, 'I am at a loss to imagine what is to be done with them.'
"Of none of his sons was the old king more jealous," says Mr Stahr, "than of the heir to the crown. Letters found in the Tuileries in February 1848 show that he kept him in the strictest dependence, and had spies observing him wherever he was. In the year 1839 the duke complained 'that he had less power than any private citizen who had a vote at elections; that he did nothing but the commissions of the ministers; that everything was in danger, nothing gave promise of durability, and that it was impossible to say what might happen from one day to the other.' The prince, expressed himself thus whilst upon a journey, in a confidential circle of officers of rank. Two days later his words, set down in writing, were in the hands of the king. The surprising irresolution and want of presence of mind displayed by the other princes in the hour of danger, can only be accounted for by the slavish dependence in which the old monarch had kept them."
Although easy and affable in his intercourse with his friends, a certain jealous vigilance with regard to the respect due to his rank formed a feature in the character of the Duke of Orleans. The anecdote told to Mr Stahr by Dumas, as an illustration of this trait, can hardly, however, be admitted to prove undue susceptibility, but rather the prince's consciousness that his house stood upon an unstable foundation. It was at a hunting-party at Fontainebleau. The chase was very unsuccessful. The Duke of Orleans turned to an Italian nobleman, to whose family Louis Philippe had obligations of ancient date, and who on that account was on a friendly footing at court. "Well! Monsieur de – ," said the duke, "how are we hunting to-day?" "Like pigs, Monseigneur, (comme les cochons,)" was the Italian's coarse reply. The duke, evidently annoyed, said to Dumas: "And you believe our monarchy possible, when a De … dares thus to answer the heir to the throne?" Mr Stahr was interested to find that Dumas, notwithstanding his monarchical friendships and associations, believed in the necessity and durability of the republic. "It seems," said the ingenious and versatile author of Monte Christo, "as if Providence had resolved to let us try all manner of monarchies, in order to convince us that not one of them is adapted to our character and condition." Then he gave his auditors a detailed sketch of all the French monarchies previous to the Revolution of 1789. "Since that Revolution," he went on, "we have had the monarchy of Genius: it lasted ten years. We have had the restoration of the monarchy of esprit and chivalrous gallantry: it lasted fifteen years; and was succeeded by the citizen-monarchy, which lasted eighteen. What would you have us try now? This republic is bad. But a child in swaddling-clothes matures into a man." Sensibly enough spoken for a romance-writer, indulgently remarks Mr Stahr, who is always glad to obtain a suffrage in favour of republican institutions. We attach the same degree of value to M. Dumas's political vaticinations as to his Frenchified rifaccimenti of Shakspeare's plays. Shakspeare in French, as Mr Ford remarks in his Spanish Handbook, "is like Niagara passed through a jelly-bag." A miracle of degradation which reminds us to turn to a scornful and indignant chapter suggested to Mr Stahr by a certain Monsieur Michel Carré's version of Goethe's Faust, performed at the Gymnase theatre. "Goethe is unknown in France," says the Countess d'Agoult, one of the few competent French appreciators of German literature, in her Esquisses Morales et Politiques. Nothing, according to Mr Stahr, could be better fitted to confirm and perpetuate French ignorance of the great German than such dramas as that which he painfully endured at the Gymnase. According to Madame d'Agoult, her countrymen will not take the trouble to study Goethe. To do so they must first learn a language. "Why did he not write in French? He has only what he deserves, after all. How is it possible to be a German? – (comment est on Allemand?)" "If this is not exactly out-spoken," says Madame d'Agoult, "it is at least privately thought in a country where the arrogance of ignorance attains proportions unknown to other nations." "La superbe de l'ignorance," "der Uebermuth der Unwissenheit!" cries Mr Stahr in an ecstasy: "I kiss the fair lady's hand who wrote the word, for, without it, I should never have hit upon the appropriate term for this newest French atrocity of M. Michel Carré, perpetrated upon the most profound work of German genius. I am not without experience of the theatrical sufferings of our day; but such torture as was yesterday inflicted, at the Gymnase theatre, upon every German fibre in our frames, I never before in my whole life witnessed or underwent. I was prepared for little that was good, and for much that was laughable; but my expectations and fears were surpassed to an extent it was impossible to anticipate. Marsyas flayed by Apollo is no very pleasing picture, but the Belvidere Apollo flayed by a Marsyas is a spectacle which it takes all the nerve of German critical observation to endure." Mr Stahr then proceeds to dissect the drama, act by act, and almost scene by scene, with considerable acuteness and humour. The specimens of fustian he gives, the execrable French taste he exposes, fully justify the intensity of his disgust. The Gymnase drama is evidently worse than a tame translation; it is an obscene parody of Goethe's great poem. It is a compound, as Mr Stahr expresses it, of "dirt and fire – that sort of fire, namely, which is lighted by the brandy-bottle." We believe it impossible that Faust should ever be done justice to in a French version. But if translators, owing to the want of power of the French language, and to the utter absence of affinity and sympathy between it and the German, must ever fall to a certain extent, they at least may avoid degrading and distorting the tone and sentiments of the original. This M. Carré, of whom we now hear for the first time, seems to have cultivated his taste and sought his inspirations in the worst school of modern French literature, and in the orgies of Parisian rakes. The inference is inevitable from the scenes and passages described and quoted by Mr Stahr. As to the verbal spirit and fidelity of the translation, the following may serve as a specimen. "In the church-going scene, the lines, so charming in the original: —