Louis-Philippe and his family — An unpublished theatrical skit on his mania for shaking hands with every one — His art of governing, according to the same skit — Louis-Philippe not the ardent admirer of the bourgeoisie he professed to be — The Faubourg Saint-Germain deserts the Tuileries — The English in too great a majority — Lord ——'s opinion of the dinners at the Tuileries — The attitude of the bourgeoisie towards Louis-Philippe, according to the King himself — Louis-Philippe's wit — His final words on the death of Talleyrand — His love of money — He could be generous at times — A story of the Palais-Royal — Louis-Philippe and the Marseillaise — Two curious stories connected with the Marseillaise — Who was the composer of it? — Louis-Philippe's opinion of the throne, the crown, and the sceptre of France as additions to one's comfort — His children, and especially his sons, take things more easily — Even the Bonapartists admired some of the latter — A mot of an Imperialist — How the boys were brought up — Their nocturnal rambles later on — The King himself does not seem to mind those escapades, but is frightened at M. Guizot hearing of them — Louis-Philippe did not understand Guizot — The recollection of his former misery frequently haunts the King — He worries Queen Victoria with his fear of becoming poor — Louis-Philippe an excellent husband and father — He wants to write the libretto of an opera on an English subject — His religion — The court receptions ridiculous — Even the proletariat sneer at them — The entrÉe of the Duchesse d'OrlÉans into Paris — The scene in the Tuileries gardens — A mot of Princesse ClÉmentine on her father's too paternal solicitude — A practical joke of the Prince de Joinville — His caricatures and drawings — The children inherited their talent for drawing and modelling from their mother — The Duc de Nemours as a miniature and water-colour painter — Suspected of being a Legitimist — All Louis-Philippe's children great patrons of art — How the bourgeoisie looked upon their intercourse with artists — The Duc de Nemours' marvellous memory — The studio of EugÈne Lami — His neighbours, Paul Delaroche and HonorÉ de Balzac — The Duc de Nemours' bravery called in question — The Duc d'Aumale's exploits in Algeria considered mere skirmishes — A curious story of spiritism — The Duc d'Aumale a greater favourite with the world than any of the other sons of Louis-Philippe — His wit — The Duc d'OrlÉans also a great favourite — His visits to Decamps' studio — An indifferent classical scholar — A curious kind of black-mail — His indifference to money — There is no money in a Republic — His death — A witty reply to the Legitimists.

As will appear by-and-by, I was an eye-witness of a good many incidents of the Revolution of '48, and a great many more have been related to me by friends, whose veracity was and still is beyond suspicion. Neither they nor I have ever been able to establish a sufficiently valid political cause for that upheaval. Perhaps it was because we were free from the prejudices engendered by what, for want of a better term, I must call "dynastic sentiment." We were not blind to the faults of Louis-Philippe, but we refused to look at them through the spectacles supplied in turns by the Legitimists, the Imperialists, and Republicans. How far these spectacles were calculated to improve people's vision, the following specimen will show.

I have lying before me a few sheets of quarto paper, sewn together in a primitive way. It is a manuscript skit, in the form of a theatrical duologue, professing to deal with the king's well-known habit of shaking hands with every one with whom he came in contact. The dramatis personÆ are King Fip I., Roi des Épiciers—read, King of the Philistines or Shopkeepers, and his son and heir, Grand Poulot (Big Spooney). The monarch is giving the heir-apparent a lesson in the art of governing. "Do not be misled," he says, "by a parcel of theorists, who will tell you that the citizen-monarchy is based upon the sovereign will of the people, or upon the strict observance of the Charter; this is merely so much drivel from the political Rights or Lefts. In reality, it does not signify a jot whether France be free at home and feared and respected abroad, whether the throne be hedged round with republican institutions or supported by an hereditary peerage, whether the language of her statesmen be weighty and the deeds of her soldiers heroic. The citizen-monarchy and the art of governing consist of but one thing—the capacity of the principal ruler for shaking hands with any and every ragamuffin and out-of-elbows brute he meets." Thereupon King Fip shows his son how to shake hands in every conceivable position—on foot, on horseback, at a gallop, at a trot, leaning out of a carriage, and so forth. Grand Poulot is not only eager to learn, but ambitious to improve upon his sire's method. "How would it do, dad," he asks, "if, in addition to shaking hands with them, one inquired after their health, in the second person singular—'Comment vas tu, mon vieux cochon?' or, better still, 'Comment vas tu, mon vieux citoyen?'" "It would do admirably," says papa; "but it does not matter whether you say cochon or citoyen, the terms are synonymous."

I am inclined to think that beneath this rather clever banter there was a certain measure of truth. Louis-Philippe was by no means the ardent admirer of the bourgeoisie he professed to be. He did not foster any illusions with regard to their intellectual worth, and in his inmost heart he resented their so-called admiration of him, which he knew to be would-be patronage under another name. They had formed a hedge round him which prevented any attempt on his part at conciliating his own caste, the old noblesse. It is doubtful whether he would have been successful, especially in the earlier years of his reign; but their ostracism of him and his family rankled in his mind, and found vent now and again in an epigram that stung the author as much as the party against which it was directed. "There is more difficulty in getting people to my court entertainments from across the Seine than from across the Channel," he said.

The fact is, that the whole of the Faubourg St.-Germain was conspicuous by its absence from the Tuileries in those days, and that the English were in rather too great a majority. They were not always a distinguished company. I was little more than a lad at this time, but I remember Lord ——'s invariable answer when his friends asked him what the dinner had been like, and whether he had enjoyed himself: "The dinner was like that at a good table-d'hÔte, and I enjoyed myself as I would enjoy myself at a good hotel in Switzerland or at Wiesbaden, where the proprietor knew me personally, and had given orders to the head waiter to look after my comforts. But," he added, "it is, after all, more pleasant dining there, when the English are present. At any rate, there is no want of respect. When the French sit round the table, it is not like a king dining with his subjects, but like half a hundred kings dining with one subject." Allowing for a certain amount of exaggeration, there was a good deal of truth in the remarks, as I found out afterwards. "The bourgeoisie in their attitude towards me," said Louis-Philippe, one day, to the English nobleman I have just quoted, "are always reminding me of AdalbÉron of Rheims with Hugues Capet: 'Qui t'as fait roi?' asked the bishop. 'Qui t'as fait duc?' retorted the king. I have made them dukes to a greater extent, though, than they have made me king."

For Louis-Philippe was a witty king—wittier, perhaps, than any that had sat on the throne of France since Henri IV. Some of his mots have become historical, and even his most persistent detractors have been unable to convict him of plagiarism with regard to them. What he specially excelled in was the "mot de la fin" anglicÉ—the clenching of an argument, such as, for instance, his final remark on the death of Talleyrand. He had paid him a visit the day before. When the news of the prince's death was brought to him, he said, "Are you sure he is dead?"

"Very sure, sire," was the answer. "Why, did not your majesty himself notice yesterday that he was dying?"

"I did, but there is no judging from appearances with Talleyrand, and I have been asking myself for the last four and twenty hours what interest he could possibly have in departing at this particular moment."

To those who knew Louis-Philippe personally, it was very patent that he disliked those who had been instrumental in setting him on the throne, and who, under the cloak of "liberty, fraternity, and equality," were seeking their own interest only, namely, the bourgeoisie. He knew their quasi-goodwill to him to be so much sheer hypocrisy, and perhaps he and they were too much alike in some respects, in their love of money for the sake of hoarding it. It was, perhaps, the only serious failing that could be laid to the charge of the family, because none of its members, with the exception of the Duc d'OrlÉans, were entirely free from it. It must not be inferred, though, that Louis-Philippe kept his purse closed to really deserving cases of distress. Far from it. I have the following story from my old tutor, to whom I am, moreover, indebted for a great many notes, dealing with events of which I could not possibly have had any knowledge but for him.

In 1829 the greater part of the Galerie d'OrlÉans in the Palais-Royal was completed. The unsightly wooden booths had been taken down, and the timber must have been decidedly worth a small fortune. Several contractors made very handsome offers for it, but Louis-Philippe (then Duc d'OrlÉans) refused to sell it. It was to be distributed among the poor of the neighbourhood for fuel for the ensuing winter, which threatened to be a severe one. One day, when the duke was inspecting the works in company of his steward, an individual, who was standing a couple of yards away, began to shout at the top of his voice, "Vive Louis-Philippe!" "Go and see what the fellow wants, for assuredly he wants something," said the duke, who was a Voltairean in his way, and had interpreted the man's enthusiasm aright. Papa Sournois was one of those nondescripts for whom even now there appear to be more resources in the French capital than elsewhere. At the period in question he mainly got his living by selling contre-marques (checks) at the doors of the theatre. He had heard of the duke's intention with regard to the wood, hence his enthusiastic cry of "Vive Louis-Philippe!" A cartload of wood was sent to his place; papa Sournois converted it into money, and got drunk with the proceeds for a fortnight. When the steward, horribly scandalized, told the duke of the results of his benevolence, the latter merely laughed, and sent for the wife, who made her appearance accompanied by a young brood of five. The duke gave her a five-franc piece, and told her to apply to the concierge of the Palais-Royal for a similar sum every day during the winter months. Of course, five francs a day was not as much as a drop of water out of the sea when we consider Louis-Philippe's stupendous income, and yet when the Tuileries were sacked in 1848, documents upon documents were found, compiled with the sole view of saving a few francs per diem out of the young princes' "keep."

"I am so sick of the word 'fraternity,'" said Prince Metternich, after his return from France, "that, if I had a brother, I should call him cousin." Though it was to the strains of the Marseillaise that Louis-Philippe had been conducted to the HÔtel-de-Ville on the day when Lafayette pointed to him as "the best of all republics," a time came when Louis-Philippe got utterly sick of the Marseillaise.

But what was he to do, seeing that his attempt at introducing a new national hymn had utterly failed? The mob refused to sing "La Parisienne," composed by Casimir de la Vigne, after Alexandre Dumas had refused to write a national hymn; and they, moreover, insisted on the King joining in the chorus of the old hymn, as he had hitherto done on all public occasions.[35] They had grumblingly resigned themselves to his beating time no longer, but any further refusal of his co-operation might have been resented in a less peaceful fashion. On the other hand, there was the bourgeoisie who were of opinion that, now that the monarchy had entered upon a more conservative period, the intoning of the hymn, at any rate on the sovereign's part, was out of place, and savoured too much of a republican manifestation. "It was Guizot who told him so," said Lord ——, who had been standing on the balcony of the Tuileries on the occasion of the king's "saint's day,"[36] and had heard the minister make the remark.

"And what did the king reply?" was the question.

"Do not worry yourself, monsieur le ministre; I am only moving my lips; I have ceased to pronounce the words for many a day."

These were the expedients to which Louis-Philippe was reduced before he had been on the throne half a dozen years. "I am like the fool between two stools," observed the king in English, afterwards, when speaking to Lord ——, "only I happen to be between the comfortably stuffed easy-chair of the bourgeois drawing-room and the piece of furniture seated on which Louis XIV. is said to have received the Dutch ambassadors."

While speaking of the Marseillaise, here are two stories in connection with it which are not known to the general reader. The first was told to me by the old tutor already mentioned; the second aroused a great deal of literary curiosity in the year 1860, and bears the stamp of truth on the face of it. It was, however, never fully investigated, or, at any rate, the results of the investigation were never published.[37]

"We were all more or less aware," said my informant, "that Rouget de l'Isle was not the author of the whole of the words of the Marseillaise. But none of us in Lyons, where I was born, knew who had written the last strophe, commonly called the 'strophe of the children,' and I doubt whether they were any wiser in Paris. Some of my fellow-students—for I was nearly eighteen at that time—credited AndrÉ Chenier with the authorship of the last strophe, others ascribed it to Louis-FranÇois Dubois, the poet.[38] All this was, however, so much guess-work, when, one day during the Reign of Terror, the report spread that a ci-devant priest, or rather a priest who had refused to take the oath to the Republic, had been caught solemnizing a religious marriage, and that he was to be brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal that same afternoon. Though you may not think so, merely going by what you have read, the appearance of a priest before the Tribunal always aroused more than common interest, nor have you any idea what more than common interest meant in those days. A priest to the Revolutionaries and to the Terrorists, they might hector and bully as they liked, was not an ordinary being. They looked upon him either as something better than a man or worse than a devil. They had thrown the religious compass they had brought from home with them overboard, and they had not the philosophical one to take its place. You may work out the thing for yourself; at any rate, the place was crammed to suffocation when we arrived at the HÔtel de Ville. It was a large room, at the upper end of which stood an oblong table, covered with a black cloth. Seated around it were seven self-constituted judges. Besides their tricolour scarfs round their waists, they wore, suspended by a ribbon from their necks, a small silver axe.

"As a rule there was very little speechifying. 'La mort sans phrase,' which had become the fashion since Louis XVI.'s execution, was strictly adhered to. Half a dozen prisoners were brought in and taken away without arousing the slightest excitement, either in the way of commiseration or hatred. After having listened, the judges either extended their hands on the table or put them to their foreheads. The first movement meant acquittal and liberation, the second death; not always by the guillotine though, for the instrument was not perfect as yet, and did not work sufficiently quickly to please them. All at once the priest was brought in, and a dead silence prevailed. He was not a very old man, though his hair was snow-white.

"'Who art thou?' asked the president.

"The prisoner drew himself up to his full height. 'I am the AbbÉ Pessoneaux, a former tutor at the college at Vienne, and the author of the last strophe of the Marseillaise,' he said quietly. "I cannot convey to you the impression produced by those simple words. The silence became positively oppressive; you could hear the people breathe. The president did not say another word; the priest's reply had apparently stunned him also: he merely turned round to his fellow-judges. Soldiers and gaolers stood as if turned into stone; every eye was directed towards the table, watching for the movement of the judges' hands. Slowly and deliberately they stretched them forth, and then a deafening cheer rang through the room. The AbbÉ Pessoneaux owed his life to his strophe, for, though his story was not questioned then, it was proved true in every particular. On their way to Paris to be present at the taking of the Tuileries on the 10th of August, the Marseillais had stopped at Vienne to celebrate the FÊte of the Federation. On the eve of their arrival the AbbÉ Pessoneaux had composed the strophe, and but for his seizure the authorship would have always remained a matter of conjecture, for Rouget de l'Isle would have never had the honesty to acknowledge it."

My tutor was right, and I owe him this tardy apology; it appears that, after all, Rouget de l'Isle had not the honesty to acknowledge openly his indebtedness to those who made his name immortal, and that his share in the Marseillaise amounts to the first six strophes. He did not write a single note of the music. The latter was composed by Alexandre Boucher, the celebrated violinist, in 1790, in the drawing-room of Madame de Mortaigne, at the request of a colonel whom the musician had never met before, whom he never saw again. The soldier was starting next morning with his regiment for Marseilles, and pressed Boucher to write him a march there and then. Rouget de l'Isle, an officer of engineers, having been imprisoned in 1791, for having refused to take a second oath to the Constitution, heard the march from his cell, and, at the instance of his gaoler, adapted the words of a patriotic hymn he was then writing to it.

One may fancy the surprise of Alexandre Boucher, when he heard it sung everywhere and recognized it as his own composition, though it had been somewhat altered to suit the words. But the pith of the story is to come. I give it in the very words of Boucher himself, as he told it to a Paris journalist whom I knew well.

"A good many years afterwards, I was seated next to Rouget de l'Isle at a dinner-party in Paris. We had never met before, and, as you may easily imagine, I was rather interested in the gentleman, whom, with many others at the same board, I complimented on his production; only I confined myself to complimenting him on his poem.

"'You don't say a word about the music,' he replied; 'and yet, being a celebrated musician, that ought to interest you. Do not you like it?'

"'Very much indeed,' I said, in a somewhat significant tone.

"'Well, let me be frank with you. The music is not mine. It was that of a march which came, Heaven knows whence, and which they kept on playing at Marseilles during the Terror, when I was a prisoner at the fortress of St. Jean. I made a few alterations necessitated by the words, and there it is.'

"Thereupon, to his great surprise, I hummed the march as I had originally written it.

"'Wonderful!' he exclaimed; 'how did you come by it?' he asked.

"When I told him, he threw himself round my neck. But the next moment he said—

"'I am very sorry, my dear Boucher, but I am afraid that you will be despoiled for ever, do what you will; for your music and my words go so well together, that they seem to have sprung simultaneously from the same brain, and the world, even if I proclaimed my indebtedness to you, would never believe it.'

"'Keep the loan,' I said, moved, in spite of myself, by his candour. 'Without your genius, my march would be forgotten by now. You have given it a patent of nobility. It is yours for ever.'"

I return to Louis-Philippe, who, at the time of my tutor's story, and for some years afterwards, I only knew from the reports that were brought home to us. Of course, I saw him several times at a distance, at reviews, and on popular holidays, and I was surprised that a king of whom every one spoke so well in private, who seemed to have so much cause for joy and happiness in his own family, should look so careworn and depressed in public. For, young as I was, I did not fail to see that, beneath the calm and smiling exterior, there was a great deal of hidden grief. But I was too young to understand the deep irony of his reply to one of my relatives, a few months before his accession to the throne: "The crown of France is too cold in winter, too warm in summer; the sceptre is too blunt as a weapon of defence or attack, it is too short as a stick to lean upon: a good felt hat and a strong umbrella are at all times more useful." Above all, I was too young to understand the temper of the French where their rulers were concerned, and though, at the time of my writing these notes, I have lived for fifty years amongst them, I doubt whether I could give a succinct psychological account of their mental attitude towards their succeeding rÉgimes, except by borrowing the words of one of their cleverest countrywomen, Madame Émile de Girardin: "When Marshal Soult is in the Opposition, he is acknowledged to have won the battle of Toulouse; when he belongs to the Government, he is accused of having lost it." Since then the Americans have coined a word for that state of mind—"cussedness."

Louis-Philippe's children, and especially his sons, some of whom I knew personally before I had my first invitation to the Tuileries, seemed to take matters more cheerfully. Save the partisans of the elder branch, no one had a word to say against them. On the contrary, even the Bonapartists admired their manly and straightforward bearing. I remember being at Tortoni's one afternoon when the Duc d'OrlÉans and his brother, the Duc de Nemours, rode by. Two of my neighbours, unmistakable Imperialists, and old soldiers by their looks, stared very hard at them; then one said, "Si le petit au lieu de filer le parfait amour partout, avait mis tous ses oeufs dans le mÊme panier, il aurait eu des grands comme cela et nous ne serions pas dans l'impasse oÙ nous sommes."

"Mon cher," replied the other, "des grands comme cela ne se font qu'À loisir, pas entre deux campagnes."[39]

The admiration of these two veterans was perfectly justified: they were very handsome young men, the sons of Louis-Philippe, and notably the two elder ones, though the Duc d'OrlÉans was somewhat more delicate-looking than his brother, De Nemours. The boys had all been brought up very sensibly, perhaps somewhat too strict for their position. They all went to a public school, to the CollÉge Henri IV., and I remember well, about the year '38, when I had occasion of a morning to cross the Pont-Neuf, where there were still stalls and all sorts of booths, seeing the blue-and-yellow carriage with the royal livery. It contained the Ducs d'Aumale and de Montpensier, who had not finished their studies at that time.

But though strictly brought up, they were by no means milksops, and what, for want of a better term, I may call "mother's babies:" quite the reverse. It was never known how they managed it, but at night, when they were supposed to be at home, if not in bed, they were to be met with at all kinds of public places, notably at the smaller theatres, such as the Vaudeville, the VariÉtÉs, and the Palais-Royal, one of which, at any rate, was a goodly distance from the Tuileries. It was always understood that the King knew nothing about these little escapades, but I am inclined to doubt this: I fancy he connived at them; because, when Lord —— told him casually one day that he had met his sons the night before, Louis-Philippe seemed not in the least surprised, he only anxiously asked, "Where?"

"At the CafÉ de Paris, your majesty."

The king seemed relieved. "That's all right," he said, laughing. "As long as they do not go into places where they are likely to meet with Guizot, I don't mind; for if he saw them out in the evening, it might cost me my throne. Guizot is so terribly respectable. I am afraid there is a mistake either about his nationality or about his respectability; they are badly matched."

The fact is, that though Louis-Philippe admired and respected Guizot, he failed to understand him. To the most respectable of modern kings—not even Charles I. and William III. excepted—if by respectability we mean an unblemished private life—Guizot's respectability was an enigma. The man who, in spite of his advice to others, "Enrichissez vous, enrichissez vous," was as poor at the end of his ministerial career as at the beginning, must have necessarily been a puzzle to a sovereign who, with a civil list of £750,000, was haunted by the fear of poverty, and haunted to such a degree as to harass his friends and counsellors with his apprehensions. "My dear minister," he said one day to Guizot, after he had recited a long list of his domestic charges—"My dear minister, I am telling you that my children will be wanting for bread." The recollection of his former misery uprose too frequently before him like a horrible nightmare, and made him the first bourgeois instead of the first gentilhomme of the kingdom, as his predecessors had been. When a tradesman drops a shilling and does not stoop to pick it up, his neglect becomes almost culpable improvidence; when a prince drops a sovereign and looks for it, the deed may be justly qualified as mean. The leitmotif of Louis-Philippe's conversation, witty and charming as it was, partook of the avaricious spirit of a Thomas Guy and a John Overs rather than of that of the great adventurer John Law. The chinking of the money-bags is audible through both, but in the one case the orchestration is strident, disagreeable, depressing; in the other, it is generous, overflowing with noble impulses, and cheering. I recollect that during my stay at TrÉport and Eu, in 1843, when Queen Victoria paid her visit to Louis-Philippe, the following story was told to me. Lord —— and I were quartered in a little hostelry on the Place du ChÂteau. One morning Lord —— came home laughing till he could laugh no longer. "What do you think the King has done now?" he asked. I professed my inability to guess. "About an hour ago, he and Queen Victoria were walking in the garden, when, with true French politeness, he offered her a peach. The Queen seemed rather embarrassed how to skin it, when Louis-Philippe took a large clasp-knife from his pocket. 'When a man has been a poor devil like myself, obliged to live upon forty sous a day, he always carries a knife. I might have dispensed with it for the last few years; still, I do not wish to lose the habit—one does not know what may happen,' he said. Of course, the tears stood in the Queen's eyes. He really ought to know better than to obtrude his money worries upon every one."

I must confess that I was not as much surprised as my interlocutor, who, however, had known Louis-Philippe much longer than I. Not his worst enemies could have accused the son of Philippe ÉgalitÉ of being a coward: the bulletins of Valmy, Jemmappes, and Neerwinden would have proved the contrary. But the contempt of physical danger on the battle-field does not necessarily constitute heroism in the most elevated sense of the term, although the world in general frequently accepts it as such. A man can die but once, and the semi-positivism, semi-Voltaireanism of Louis-Philippe had undoubtedly steeled him against the fear of death. His religion, throughout life, was not even skin-deep; and when he accepted the last rites of the Church on his death-bed, he only did so in deference to his wife. "Ma femme, es-tu contente de moi?" were his words the moment the priests were gone.

Nevertheless, he was too good a husband to grieve his wife, who was deeply religious, by any needless display of unbelief. He always endeavoured, as far as possible, to find an excuse for staying away from church. He, as well as the female members of his family, were very fond of music; and Adam, the composer, was frequently invited to come and play for them in the private apartments. In fact, after his abdication, he seriously intended to write, in conjunction with Scribe, the libretto of an opera on an English historical subject, the music of which should be composed by HalÉvy. The composer of "La Juive" and the author of "Les Hugenots" came over once to consult with the King, whose death, a few months later, put an end to the scheme.

On the occasion of Adam's visits the princesses worked at their embroidery, while the King often stood by the side of the performer. Just about that period the chamber organ was introduced, and, on the recommendation of Adam, one was ordered for the Tuileries. The first time Louis-Philippe heard it played he was delighted: "This will be a distinct gain to our rural congregations," he said. "There must be a great many people who, like myself, stay away from church on account of their objection to that horrible instrument, the serpent. Is it not so, my wife?"

The ideal purpose of life, if ever he possessed it, had been crushed out of him—first, by his governess, Madame de Genlis; secondly, by the dire poverty he suffered during his exile: and, notwithstanding all that has been said to the contrary, France wanted at that moment an ideal ruler, not the rational father of a large family who looked upon his monarchy as a suitable means of providing for them. He was an usurper without the daring, the grandeur, the lawlessness of the usurper. The lesson of NapolÉon I.'s method had been thrown away upon him, as the lesson of NapolÉon III.'s has been thrown away upon his grandson. When I said France, I made a mistake,—I should have said Paris; for since 1789 there was no longer a King of France, there was only a King of Paris. Such a thing as a Manchester movement, as a Manchester school of politics, would have been and is still an impossibility in France. And, unfortunately, Paris, which had applauded the glorious mise-en-scÈne of the First Empire, which had even looked on approvingly at some of the pomp and state of Louis XVIII. and Charles X., jeered at Louis-Philippe and his court with its ridiculous gatherings of tailors, drapers, and bootmakers, "ces gardes nationaux d'un pays oÙ il n'y a plus rien de national À garder," and their pretentious spouses "qui," according to the Duchesse de la TrÉmoÏlle, "ont plus de chemises que nos aÏeules avaient des robes."[40] She and the Princesse Bagration were the only female representatives of the Faubourg St. Germain who attended these gatherings; for the Countess Le Hon, of whom I may have occasion to speak again, and who was the only other woman at these receptions that could lay claim to any distinction, was by no means an aristocrat. And be it remembered that in those days ridicule had still the power to kill.

Nor was the weapon wielded exclusively by the aristocracy; the lower classes could be just as satirical against the new court element. I was in the Tuileries gardens on that first Sunday in June, 1837, when the Duchesse d'OrlÉans made her entrÉe into Paris. The weather was magnificent, and the set scene—as distinguished from some of the properties, to use a theatrical expression—in keeping with the weather. The crowd itself was a pleasure to look at, as it stood in serried masses behind the National Guards and the regular infantry lining the route of the procession from the Arc de Triomphe to the entrance of the ChÂteau. All at once an outrider passes, covered with dust, and the crowd presses forward to get a better view. A woman of the people, in her nice white cap, comes into somewhat violent contact with an elegantly dressed elderly lady, accompanied by her daughter. The woman, instead of apologizing, says aloud that she wishes to see the princess: "You will have the opportunity of seeing her at court, mesdames," she adds. The elegant lady vouchsafes no reply, but turns to her daughter: "The good woman," says the latter, shrugging her shoulders, "is evidently not aware that she has got a much greater chance of going to that court than we have. She has only got to marry some grocer or other tradesman, and she will be considered a grande dame at once." Then the procession passes—first the National Guards on horseback, then the King and M. de Montalivet, followed by Princesse HÉlÈne, with her young husband riding by the side of the carriage. So far so good: the first three or four carriages were more or less handsome, but Heaven save us from the rest, as well as from their occupants! They positively looked like some of those wardrobe-dealers so admirably described by Balzac.

When all is over, the woman of the people turns to the elegant lady: "I ask your pardon, madame; it was really not worth while hurting you. If these are grandes dames, I prefer les petites whom I see in my neighbourhood, the Rue Notre-Dame de Lorette. Comme elles Étaient attifÉes!"—Anglice, "What a lot of frumps they looked!"

In fact, Louis-Philippe and his queen sinned most grievously by overlooking the craving of the Parisians for pomp and display. No one was better aware of this than his children, notably the Duc d'OrlÉans, Princess ClÉmentine,[41] and the Duc de Nemours. They called him familiarly "le pÈre." "Il est trop pÈre," said the princess in private; "il fait concurrence au PÈre Éternel." She was a very clever girl—perhaps a great deal cleverer than any of her brothers, the Solon of the family, the Duc de Nemours, included—but very fond of mischief and practical joking. She found her match, though, in her brother, the Prince de Joinville, the son of Louis-Philippe of whom France heard most and saw least, for he was a sailor. One day, his sister asked him to bring her a complete dress of a Red-Skin chieftain's wife. His absence was shorter than usual, and, a few days before his return, he told her in a letter that he had the costume she wanted. "Here, ClÉmentine, this is for you," he said, at his arrival, putting a string of glass beads on the table.

"Very pretty," said ClÉmentine, "but you promised me a complete dress."

"This is the complete dress. I never saw them wear any other."

I did not see the Prince de Joinville very often, perhaps two or three times in all; once on the occasion of his marriage with Princess FranÇoise de Bourbon, the daughter of Dom Pedro I. of Brazil, and sister of the present emperor, when the prince brought his young bride to Paris. He was a clever draughtsman and capital caricaturist; but if the first of these talents proved an unfailing source of delight to his parents, the second frequently inspired them with terror, especially his father, who never knew which of his ministers might become the next butt for his third son's pencil. I have seen innumerable sketches, ostensibly done to delight his young wife and brothers, which, had they been published, would have been much more telling against his father's pictorial satirists than anything they produced against the sovereign. For in those days, whatever wisdom or caution they may have learnt afterwards, the sons of Louis-Philippe were by no means disposed to sit down tamely under the insults levelled at the head of their house. In fact, nearly the whole of Louis-Philippe's children had graphic talents of no mean order. The trait came to them from their mother, who was a very successful pupil of Angelica Kauffman. Princesse Marie, who died so young, executed a statue of Jeanne d'Arc, which was considered by competent judges, not at all likely to be influenced by the fact of the artist's birth, a very creditable piece of work indeed. I never saw it, so I cannot say, but I have seen some miniatures by the Duc de Nemours, which might fairly rank with performances by the best masters of that art, short of genius.

It is a curious, but nevertheless admitted fact that the world has never done justice to the second son of Louis-Philippe. He was not half as great a favourite with the Parisians as his elder brother, although in virtue of his remarkable likeness to Henri IV., whom the Parisians still worship—probably because he is dead,—he ought to have commanded their sympathies. This lukewarmness towards the Duc de Nemours has generally been ascribed by the partisans of the Orleanist dynasty to his somewhat reticent disposition, which by many people was mistaken for hauteur. I rather fancy it was because he was suspected of being his father's adviser, and, what was worse, his father's adviser in a reactionary sense. He was accused of being an anti-parliamentarian, and he never took the trouble to refute the charge, probably because he was too honest to tell a lie.[42] I met the Duc de Nemours for the first time in the studio of a painter, EugÈne Lami, just as I met his elder brother in that of Decamps. In fact, all these young princes were sincere admirers and patrons of art, and, if they had had their will, the soirÉes at the Tuileries would have been graced by the presence of artists more frequently than they were; but, preposterous and scarcely credible as it may seem, the bourgeoisie looked upon this familiar intercourse of the king's sons with artists, literary men, and the like, as so much condescension, if not worse, of which they, the bourgeoisie, would not be guilty if they could help it. It behoves me, however, to be careful in this instance, for the English aristocracy at home was not much more liberal in those days.

The first thing that struck one in the Duc de Nemours was the vast extent of his general information and the marvellous power of memory. EugÈne Lami had just returned from London, and, in the exercise of his profession, had come in contact with some members of the oldest families. The mere mention of the name sufficed as the introduction to the general and anecdotal history of such a family, and I doubt whether the best official at Herald's College could have dissected a pedigree as did the Duc de Nemours. EugÈne Lami was at that time engaged upon designing some new uniforms for the army, many of which disappeared only after the war of 1870. He lived in the Rue des Marais, the greater part of which was subsequently demolished to make room for the Boulevard de Magenta, and in the same house with two men whose names have become immortal, HonorÉ de Balzac and Paul Delaroche. I have already spoken of both, but I did not mention the incident that led to the painter's acquaintance with the novelist, an incident so utterly fanciful that the boldest farce-writer would think twice before utilizing it in a play. It was told to me by Lami himself. One morning, as he and Paul Delaroche were working, there was a knock at the door, and a stout individual, dressed in a kind of monastic garb, appeared on the threshold. Delaroche remembered that he had met him on the staircase, but neither knew who he was, albeit that Balzac's fame was not altogether unknown to them. "Gentlemen," said the visitor, "I am HonorÉ Balzac, a neighbour and a confrÈre to boot. My chattels are about to be seized, and I would ask you to save a remnant of my library."

Of course, the request was granted. The books were stowed away behind the pictures; and, after that, Balzac often dropped in to have a chat with them, but neither Delaroche nor Lami, the latter least of all, ever conceived a sincere liking for the great novelist. Their characters were altogether dissimilar. I have seen a good many men whose names have become household words among the refined, the educated, and the art-loving all the world over; I have seen them at the commencement, in the middle, and at the zenith of their career: I have seen none more indifferent to the material benefits of their art than EugÈne Lami and Paul Delaroche, not even EugÈne Delacroix and Decamps. Balzac was the very reverse. To make a fortune was the sole ambition of his life.

To return for a moment to Louis-Philippe's sons. I have said that the Duc de Nemours was essentially the grand seigneur of the family; truth compels me to add, however, that there was a certain want of pliability about him which his social inferiors could not have relished. It was Henri IV. minus the bonhomie, also perhaps minus that indiscriminate galanterie which endeared Ravaillac's victim to all classes, even when he was no longer young. In the days of which I am treating just now, the Duc de Nemours was very young. As for his courage, it was simply above suspicion; albeit that it was called in question after the revolution of '48, to his father's intense sorrow. No after-dinner encomium was ever as absolutely true as that of Sir Robert Peel on the sons and daughters of the last King of France, when he described them as respectively brave and chaste. Nevertheless, had the Duc de Nemours and his brothers been a thousand times as brave as they were, party spirit, than which there is nothing more contemptible in France, would have found the opportunity of denying that bravery.

If these notes are ever published, Englishmen will smile at what I am about to write now, unless their disgust takes another form of expression. The exploits of the Duc d'Aumale in Algeria are quoted by independent military authorities as so many separate deeds of signal heroism. They belong to history, and not a single historian has endeavoured to impair their value. Will it be believed that the Opposition journals of those days spoke of them with ill-disguised contempt as mere skirmishes with a lot of semi-savages? And, during the Second Republic, many of these papers returned to the charge because the Duc d'Aumale, being the constitutionally-minded son of a constitutionally-minded king, resigned the command of his army instead of bringing it to France to coerce a nation into retaining a ruler whom, ostensibly at least, she had voluntarily accepted, and whom, therefore, she was as free to reject.

In connection with these Algerian campaigns of the Duc d'Aumale, I had a story told to me by his brother, De Montpensier, which becomes particularly interesting nowadays, when spiritualism or spiritism is so much discussed. He had it from two unimpeachable sources, namely, from his brother D'Aumale and from General Cousin-Montauban, afterwards Comte de Palikao, the same who was so terribly afraid, after the expedition in China, that the emperor would create him Comte de PÉkin, and who sent an aide-de-camp in advance to beg the sovereign not to do so.[43]

It was to General Montauban that Abdel-Kader surrendered after the battles of Isly and Djemma-Gazhouat. It was in the latter engagement that a Captain de GÉreaux fell, and when the news of his death reached his family they seemed almost prepared for it. It transpired that, on the very day of the engagement, and at the very hour in which Captain de GÉreaux was struck down, his sister, a young and handsome but very impressionable girl, started all of a sudden from her chair, exclaiming that she had seen her brother, surrounded by Arabs, who were felling him to the ground. Then she dropped to the floor in a dead swoon.

A few years elapsed, when General Montauban, who had become the military Governor of the province of Oran, received a letter from the De GÉreaux family, requesting him to make some further inquiries respecting the particulars of the captain's death. The letter was written at the urgent prayer of Mdlle. de GÉreaux, who had never ceased to think and speak of her brother, and who, on one occasion, a month or so before the despatch of the petition, had risen again from her chair, though in a more composed manner than before, insisting that she had once more seen her brother. This time he was dressed in the native garb, he seemed very poor, and was delving the soil. These visions recurred at frequent intervals, to the intense distress of the family, who could not but ascribe them to the overstrung imagination of Mdlle. de GÉreaux. A little while after, she maintained having seen her brother in a white robe and turban, and intoning hymns that sounded to her like Arabic. She implored her parents to institute inquiries, and General Montauban was communicated with to that effect. He did all he could; the country was at peace, and, after a few months, tidings came that there was a Frenchman held prisoner in one of the villages on the Morocco frontier, who for the last two or three years had entirely lost his reason, but that, previous to that calamity, he had been converted to Islamism. His mental derangement being altogether harmless, he was an attendant at the Mosque. As a matter of course, the information had been greatly embellished in having passed through so many channels, nor was it of so definite a character as I have noted it down, but that was the gist of it.

Meanwhile, Montauban had been transferred to another command, and for a twelvemonth after his successor's arrival the inquiry was allowed to fall in abeyance. When it was finally resumed, the French prisoner had died, but, from a document written in his native language found upon him and brought to Oran, there remained little doubt that he was Captain de GÉreaux.

To return for a moment to the Duc d'Aumale, who, curiously enough, exercised a greater influence on the outside world in general than any of his other brethren—an influence due probably to his enormous wealth rather than to his personal qualities, though the latter may, to some people, have seemed remarkable. I met him but seldom during his father's lifetime. He was the beau-ideal of the preux chevalier, according to the French notion of the modern Bayard—that is, handsome, brave to a fault, irresistibly fascinating with women, good-natured in his way, and, above all, very witty. It was he who, after the confiscation of the d'OrlÉans' property by NapolÉon III., replied to the French Ambassador at Turin, who inquired after his health, "I am all right; health is one of the things that cannot be confiscated." Nevertheless, upon closer acquaintance, I failed to see the justifying cause for the preference manifested by public opinion, and, upon more minute inquiry, I found that a great many people shared my views. I am at this moment convinced that, but for his having been the heir of that ill-fated Prince de CondÉ, and consequently the real defender in the various suits resulting from the assassination of that prince by Madame de FeuchÈres, he would have been in no way distinguished socially from the rest of the D'OrlÉans.

The popularity of his eldest brother, the Duc d'OrlÉans, was, on the contrary, due directly to the man himself. As far as one can judge of him, he was the reverse of Charles II., in that he never said a wise thing and never did a foolish one. He was probably not half so clever as his father, nor, brave as he may have been, would he have ever made so dashing a soldier as his brother D'Aumale, or so rollicking a sailor as his brother De Joinville. He did not pretend to the wisdom of his brother De Nemours, nor to the mystic tendencies of his youngest sister, nor to the sprightly wit of Princesse ClÉmentine, and yet withal he understood the French nation better than any of them. Even his prenuptial escapades, secrets to no one, were those of the grand seigneur, though by no means affichÉes; they endeared him to the majority of the people. "Chacun colon-ise À sa faÇon," was the lenient verdict on his admiration for Jenny Colon, at a moment when colonization in Algeria was the topic of the day. On the whole he liked artists better, perhaps, than art itself, yet it did not prevent him from buying masterpieces as far as his means would allow him. Though still young, in the latter end of the thirties, I was already a frequent visitor to the studios of the great French painters, and it was in that of Decamps' that I became alive to his character for the first time. I was talking to the great painter when the duke came in. We had met before, and shook hands, as he had been taught to do by his father when he met with an Englishman. But I could not make out why he was carrying a pair of trousers over his arm. After we had been chatting for about ten minutes, I wondering all the while what he was going to do with the nether garment, he caught one of my side glances, and burst out laughing. "I forgot," he said; "here, Decamps, here are your breeches." Then he turned to me to explain. "I always bring them up with me when I come in the morning. The concierge is very old, and it saves her trudging up four flights of stairs." The fact was, that the concierge, before she knew who he was, had once asked him to take up the painter's clothes and boots. From that day forth he never failed to ask for them when passing her lodge.

I can but repeat, the Duc d'OrlÉans was one of the most charming men I have known. I always couple him in my mind with Benjamin Disraeli, and Alexandre Dumas the elder. I knew the English statesman almost as well during part of my life as the French novelist. Though intellectually wide apart from them, the duke had one, if not two traits in common with both; his utter contempt for money affairs and the personal charm he wielded. I doubt whether this personal charm in the other two men was due to their intellectual attainments; with the Duc d'OrlÉans it was certainly not the case. He rarely, if ever, said anything worth remembering; in fact, he frankly acknowledged his very modest scholarship, and his inability either to remember the epigrams of others or to condense his thoughts into one of his own. "I should not like to admit as much to my father, who, it appears, is a very fine Greek and Latin scholar," he said—"that is, if I am to believe my brothers, De Nemours and D'Aumale, who ought to know; for, notwithstanding the prizes they took at college, I believe they are very clever. Ah, you may well look surprised at my saying, 'notwithstanding the prizes they took,' because I took ever so many, although, for the life of me, I could not construe a Greek sentence, and scarcely a Latin one. I have paid very handsomely, however, for my ignorance." And then he told us an amusing story of his having had to invent a secretaryship to the duchess for an old schoolfellow. "You see, he came upon me unawares with a slip of paper I had written him while at college, asking him to explain to me a Greek passage. There was no denying it, I had signed it. What is worse still, he is supposed to translate and to reply to the duchess's German correspondence, and, when I gave him the appointment, he did not know a single word of Schiller's language, so I had to pay a German tutor and him too." I have said that the Duc d'OrlÉans was absolutely indifferent with regard to money, but he would not be fleeced with impunity. What he disliked more than anything else, was the greed of the shopkeeping bourgeois. One day, while travelling in Lorraine, he stopped at the posting-house to have his breakfast, consisting of a couple of eggs, a few slices of bread and butter, and a cup of coffee. Just before proceeding on his journey, his valet came to tell him that mine host wanted to charge him two hundred francs for the repast. The duke merely sent for the mayor, handed him a thousand-franc note, gave him the particulars of his bill of fare, told him to pay the landlord according to the tariff, and to distribute the remainder of the money among the poor. It is more than probable that mine host was among the first, in '48, to hail the republic: princes and kings, according to him, were made to be fleeced; if they objected, what was the good of having a monarchy?

The popular idol in France must distribute largesse, and distribute it individually, or be profitable in some other way. Greed, personal interest, underlies most of the political strife in France. During one of the riots, so common in the reign of Louis-Philippe, Mimi-Lepreuil, a well-known clever pick-pocket, was shouting with all his might, "Vive Louis-Philippe! À bas la RÉpublique!" As a rule, gentlemen of his profession are found on the plebeian side, and one of the superintendents of police on duty, who had closely watched him, inquired into the reason of his apostasy. "I am sick of your Republicans," was the answer. "I come here morning after morning"—it happened on the Place de la Bourse,—"and dip my hands into a score of pockets without finding a red cent. During the Revolution of July, at the funeral of General Lamarque, I did not make my expenses. Give me a royal procession to make money." These were his politics.

It would be difficult to say what the Duc d'OrlÉans would have done, had he lived to ascend the throne. One thing is certain, however, that on the day of his death, genuine tears stood in the eyes of all classes, except the Legitimists. As I have already said, they ascribed the fatal accident to God's vengeance for the usurpation of his father. "If this be the case," said an irreverent but witty journalist, "it argues but very little providence on the part of your Providence, for now He will have to keep the peace between the Duc de Berri, the Duc de Reichstadt, and the Duc d'OrlÉans."