of their own accord, rise in a mass and proceed to attack the royal camp and family; in which case, if left to themselves, they might commit some deplorable excess, which would dishonor the cause of the Revolution. day of uncalculating frantic royalism had long since passed away. The Guards were Frenchmen in spirit as in fact; and selected, as they had been, for their fidelity to the House of Bourbon, still they were too wise, and too fond of their country, to engage to embark The citizens were already ringin a desperate and unavailing con- ing the tocsin, and arming themtention in behalf of a prostrate selves without waiting for orders. dynasty, who had proved them- To prevent the possible conseselves incapable of reigning, and quences, the Government lost no whose fatal incompetency was time in arranging an expedition alike ruinous to their friends and under the command of responsible themselves. Instead of manifest- officers, who might control, as ing any readiness to sustain a civil well as direct, the popular movewar, the Guards resolved, in the ments. The National Guard words of M. de Bermond, only were summoned to their posts, 'to place themselves between the and it was announced to them royal family and any portion of that the ground assumed by the their subjects who might be ex- King required that he should be cited to attack them, pending the compelled to depart or surrender, negotiations which were to decide and that to effect this object the the fate of France.' Government called on the citiThe Commission lost no time zens to enlist for an attack on the in reporting to the Government at camp at Rambouillet. The anParis that Charles refused to ac- nouncement was received with cept of their safe conduct for his the greatest enthusiasm. Thouretirement from the country, in- sands volunteered in the course of sisting that he had abdicated only a few hours, and were despatchin favor of the Duc de Bordeaux, ed in omnibuses, hackney coachand that he should remain at es, cabriolets, diligences, coucous, Rambouillet, and defend himself carts, in short, in every species there, until he received a satisfac- of carriage, which Paris afforded. tory answer from the Lieutenant In addition to six thousand troops General. The announcement of of the National Guard, were this resolution brought matters to a crisis at once. It was impossible to suffer an armed force, which withheld obedience from the new Government, to remain within a day's march of the capital; and equally impossible to restrain the public irritation, excited by the obstinacy of the King. There was imminent danger that the inflamed populace would, thousands of the half armed but resolute and excited men of the Barricades, who poured out of Paris in a tumultuary force, and if they had come in conflict with the royal family would have been as dangerous and as ungovernable as the militant mobs of October, 1789. The command of the expedition was given to General Pajol, having under him General Excelmans, Colonel Jacqueminot, and M. Georges La Fayette. Meanwhile the Commissioners hurried on to Rambouillet once more, in advance of the army, for the purpose of making a last effort to persuade the King to listen to reason. They represented to him the extreme hazard he would run by an encounter with the mighty host of unscrupulous men, who were on the way to Rambouillet. As had all along happened with Charles, he yielded to selfish considerations of personal safety, where he had been regardless of the blood of his People, and consented to dismiss all intention of resistance and accept the safe conduct of the Commissioners. Indeed such was the consternation of the King, that his Court broke up in great confusion at ten o'clock in the evening of August 3d, and set off without waiting for the appearance of his good friends of the faubourgs of Paris. The armed citizens had ere this arrived at a village in the neighborhood of Rambouillet, where they bivouacked for the night. On learning the departure of the King the next morning, they seized on the coaches belonging to the Court, and whatever other vehicles they could find, and returned to Paris on the 4th, forming a vast procession of soldiers and citizens, who entered the city shouting the Marseilles Hymn, and firing their guns into the air in triumph. The King had selected Great Britain as a place of refuge. It was arranged between him, and the Commissioners that he should restore the crown jewels, and be furnished with the sum of four millions of francs in money for his private use. He desired to quit France by the way of Cherbourg, and thither accordingly the Commissioners directed their course. At Dreux, where they halted after leaving Rambouillet, the King dismissed all the troops except the body-guard, which continued with him as far as Cherbourg. The Ministers, aware of the danger they incurred of being brought to trial for their crimes, had fled secretly and in disguise, in different directions, before the King submitted. The royal family passed along slowly through Normandy, deserted by the perfidious counsellors and courtiers, who had contributed by their advice, to the destitution and humiliation, which now pressed upon the last of the Bourbons. They were protected from public insult and injury less by the feeble guard, which surrounded them, than by the tricolored scarfs of the Commissioners, and the universal sympathy entertained for fallen greatness:- for - for everywhere they found the national flag flying on the towers, and the inhabitants in arms for the Charter. The exiles embarked at Cherbourg in an American ship, engaged at Havre for that purpose, and landed in England the 17th of August. They were received there with but little show of respect; for how indeed could any respect be felt for such men as Charles or Louis Antoine? The compassionate hospitality due to their rank and their situation was of course extended towards them, and nothing more. The King repaired to Lulworth in Dorset- The Comte d'Artois was bred shire, the seat of an ancient Eng- in the profligate Court of Louis lish Catholic family, where he XV., and passed a youth of disremained until the old apartments sipation and idleness, until the at Holyrood House, in Edin- Revolution came to arrest his burgh, which he had occupied disorderly career, and teach him previous to the Restoration, were that princes were amenable to again prepared for his recep- the tribunal of public opinion and tion. In that ancient Palace a public justice. public justice. He emigrated at retreat of congenial recollections an early period, and hovered for the relics of a royal House, about the frontiers of France, which had rivalled the Stuarts, joining in the poor schemes of in the infatuation of its folly, invasion of his family circle, unCharles and his son had leisure for the life of peace and seclusion, which alone became their present condition. In thus tracing the responsible members of this unhappy family from power to privacy, from the splendors of the Tuileries and Saint Cloud to the humble retirement of Holyrood, we have hitherto omitted to speak of those companions of their exile, who had participated in a tenfold degree in the calamities and sorrows of their House, whilst wholly free of its guilt. We allude to the daughter of Marie Antoinette, and the widow of the Duc de Berri, who suffered because others had sinned. The language of condemnation and reproach, which we have so frequently had occasion to apply to the male members of the royal family, belongs not to them. Neither the King nor the Dauphin is deserving of much pity, and they are entitled to no respect. The Duchess d'Angoulême has a claim to both respect and pity; and so also has the Duchess de Berri, and will continue to have, unless she forfeits it by a succession of indiscreet attempts in favor of her son. til the success of Bonaparte drove them from the Continent to seek an asylum in England. At the age of sixtyeight he succeeded Louis XVIII., whose dying advice to his successor was to 'govern legally. For a time Charles X. seemed disposed to abide by the death-bed injunction of his brother, and to govern in the sense of the Charter. But he was weak, vain, headstrong, unable to appreciate the exigencies of his position, and fell into the hands of unworthy counsellors, who had never forgiven the Revolution, and longed for the return of absolutism. Had the Dauphin possessed the energy of character demanded by his relation to the country and the situation of his family, he might have retarded the fall of the Bourbons; but unfortunately for them all, however good a hunter, he was a weak man and an incapable ruler. Louis XVIII. sought to acquire for him some of that military renown, which the French so much admire in their princes, by giving him the nominal command of the Spanish expedition. The inglorious events of this war against the Cortes have been sculptured on the arch of the Carrousel, in place of the great victories of the year 1805, which the Allies removed when they occupied Paris. But the title of Duque del Trocadéro is all that the Dauphin can fairly claim as his own share of the honors of the campaign, and he has since reposed on his laurels until he wounded himself in the very brave and highly meritorious act of disarming Marshal Marmont on the last of the Three Days. He appears to have entered cordially into the the mad projects of Polignac, and divides with his father the loss and the shame of unsuccessful usurpation. Not so the Duchesse d'Angoulême, whom Napoleon, with his accustomed discrimination, has termed the only man among the Bourbons. The daughter of a long line of Kings, she has seen her father and mother perish on the scaffold, her brother clandestinely done to death by ignoble hands and ignoble means, her husband's brother assassinated in the streets, her family pensioned exiles and outcasts, and now a third time driven from the throne of France with ignominy. With her poor woman's wit, of which her uncle and husband seem to have thought so meanly, Cassandra like, she foresaw the effect of the infatuated measures they had in train, but vainly uttered her oracles of warning and menace to deter them from rushing upon destruction. With a frame macerated by religious severities, and views fixed upon a happier future, it is for her family more than for herself, that she laments the reverses, which have befallen her House. The Duchesse de Berri possesses a temper naturally gay, light and amiable, designed, in short, for enjoyment and popularity, and which, notwithstanding the untimely death of her husband, and the change in her prospects which that event occasioned, would have assured her the possession of comparative happiness as mother of the young heir to France. Her hopes are once more dashed to the ground, by a series of desperate measures, against which she, as well as the Dauphiness, protested. Being a daughter of the late King of the Two Sicilies, of whom the present Queen of France is a sister, she is doomed to see her aunt occupy the throne, which in better times she looked forward to as probably to become one day her own. She also is rendered an exile by no fault of hers; and considering the advanced age of Charles and the Dauphin, their misfortune affects her and her son more seriously than it does the older members of the family. That son, the last remaining scion of his race, for the posterity of Philip V. are aliens to France by the most sacred oaths and treaties,-leaves the land of his fathers to become the centre and watchword of political intrigues, and to renew in his own person, perhaps, the romantic fortunes of Charles Edward of England. CHAPTER XVIII. FRANCE, CONCLUDED. Proceedings of the Chambers.- The new Charter. Duc d'Orleans King. Settlement of the Government. WE arrive, at length, at the catastrophe of the Revolution, at the fifth act of the political drama, which opened with the appointment of M. de Polignac to office for the purpose of overthrowing the Charter, and terminates with the elevation of the Duc d'Orleans to the throne. This was a result for which all Paris was now prepared, and less doubt was entertained as to the result itself, than as to the best means of reaching it. The republicans continued to dispute the authority of the Chambers to reorganize the institutions, which the victory of the Three Days had laid prostrate. They maintained that the Charter had entirely lost its vitality; that the Chamber of Deputies elected under it, ceased on the 30th of July to be a constitutional element of the State; that of course it had no right to proceed in the performance of ordinary business, and still less any right to remodel the Charter itself and that, when it assembled, it should do nothing more than simply to provide con -- Conclusion. venient and regular means of ascertaining the will of the People on the great question, which now came up for decision. Whatever objections had existed to the substitution of a Lieutenant General in place of the provisional Commission of Government, applied with added authority to finally and permanently settling the public affairs through the agency of the Chambers alone. Particular difficulties presented themselves in great force. How could the Chamber of Deputies dispose of the Chamber of Peers, the existence of which the public voice declared to be contrary to the wishes of regenerated France? It seemed to the numerous party, who maintained these opinions, a fit occasion for proclaiming a return to the true republican principle, the sovereignty of the People, and the establishment of a Government by their immediate intervention. This end might be accomplished by an act of the Chamber reviving the Constitution of 1815, which they contended was pref |
