Memoirs of the Prince of Joinville. Prince of Joinville
individuals who looked on their country simply as a farm to make money out of. So bit by bit it had been demolished, just as everything has been demolished these past hundred years, in the name of laws and principles which dissolve every kind of government, and which will soon make it absolutely impossible for society to exist. The hour when the words, "Get out of that, and let me take your place," the real and only object of our successive revolutions, should resound, was on the very stroke.
On the 25th of July we had all been dining at Saint-Leu with M. le Duc de Bourbon, an old cousin of ours, who never meddled with politics, and led a leisured and delightful life between Chantilly and Saint-Leu, never coming to Paris except to pass through it, although the beautiful palace there which bears his name, the Palais Bourbon, belonged to him. His great passion
was for sport, in which he excelled; and my father had made a friend of him by giving him the hunting in all his forests. There was another reason too, and perhaps after all it was the chief one, for this cordiality, that my parents had consented to receive the Baronne de Feucheres, who held great sway over the Duke, but who had never been admitted to Court. I can see the handsome old man yet, laconic in speech, his profile of the most strongly marked Bourbon type, his hair and pigtail white, with his tightly buttoned blue coat, from which a lace frill escaped, and his trousers, which were always much too short, showing his white stockings underneath. On the evening I speak of there had been a great gathering at Saint-Leu—a big dinner, then a drawing-room play, acted by Madame de Feucheres and the Duke's gentlemen. In the audience were many officers of the Royal Guard, and numerous other persons, whose names were known to me from having heard them quoted as being amongst those ardent Conservatives called at that time the "Ultras." One of them, a M. de Vitrolles, attracted my attention by holding a long conversation with my father in one of the intervals between the acts. He has since related this conversation in his Memoirs, and also the conviction it gave him of the horror with which the idea of a fresh revolution filled my father. Their only disagreement was as to the means to avert it. Which of the two was in the right?
That evening we went back to Neuilly, and the next morning, 26th of July, as we were just getting ready, Nemours and I, to start for school, somebody opened the door and launched the remark to our tutors: "The coup d'Etat is in the Moniteur!" "What!" "Yes! The Decrees." Whereupon the tutors rushed to the family drawing-room, whither we followed them. There sat my father, thunderstruck, the Moniteur in his hand. When he saw the tutors come in, he threw up his arms in despair, and let them fall again. After a silence on his Part, during which my mother
rapidly acquainted the gentlemen with the state of affairs, my father said: "They are mad!" That was all, and after another silence, a long one—"They will get themselves banished again. Oh! for my part, I have been exiled twice already. I will not bear it again: I stay in France!"
I heard no more, for it was schooltime, and we had to get into the carriage; but those words and that first impression remain graven on my memory.
That day at school was just like any other, but the next, the 27th, as we came back from the College Henri IV, it was easy to see that there was a great stir in Paris Deligny's swimming school, at the corner of the Quai d'Orsay, where we went after school, according to custom, to take our bath, was full of young men discussing and holding forth, and relating incidents, true or not, which had occurred during the day. The Place Louis XV., now the Place de la Concorde, was occupied by the troops. There was a regiment of Foot Guards, a battalion of the Swiss Guard, the Lancers of the Guard, the Artillery of the Military School—magnificent troops all of them, the finest I have seen in any country, and of which the English Foot Guards alone in these days give any idea. Officers inspired in the highest possible degree with esprit de corps and chivalrous devotion, old non-commissioned officers, many of whom had seen the wars of the Empire, commanding seasoned soldiers, young in years but old in discipline and instruction, and all proud of the splendid uniform they wore—such was the Royal Guard. And what shall I say of the superb Swiss battalions, acknowledged by ancient tradition to be the finest infantry in the world? These splendid troops, which might have rendered such great service to France on the battlefield were to disappear within two days. Upon them too I had looked my last. Close to the Porte Maillot we met the Duchesse de Berri, riding amongst a numerous group of
equerries. We exchanged friendly greetings. No doubt her
instinct as a woman and a mother led her to try to keep in touch with passing events.
The next morning, the 28th, we knew Paris to be in open revolt. Cannon boomed, the great bell of Notre-Dame sounded the tocsin, and naturally we did not go to school. But the masters who gave my sisters lessons came out to Neuilly, and from them, in turn, we learnt what was going on within the capital—barricades in all the streets—the troops on the defensive—the tricolour hoisted everywhere.
On the 29th, the struggle grew closer to us. A bullet fell whistling in the park. According to the fugitives from Paris, the insurrection had triumphed, the troops of the line were fraternizing with the rebels, and the Guard was retiring on Saint-Cloud to gather round the King. I pass over all the rumours and false reports accompanying this news, which was all too true. And what were we doing during these anxious hours? We obeyed various impulses. The first, a fervent sympathy with our soldiers, who were engaged in the struggle—ces pauvres soldats, the real France, the real PEOPLE, obeying the noblest motives—honour—duty opposing the POPULACE, whose envy and evil instincts had been let loose by a handful of ambitious men. And we knew no rest till the whole staff of the household had repaired to the various gates of the park, to open them to the soldiers, separated, dispersed, threatened with massacre as they were. They were brought in and fed, and given caps and blouses instead of their uniforms, and put across to the other side of the Seine in boats. And with all that, so full is the heart of man, and yet more that of the child, of contradiction, that we followed the current and made tricolour cockades, my sisters and I, and all of us! There is no doubt the fascination of the tricolour flag had a good deal to do with the rapidity with which the Revolutionary powder-train took fire.
As there must always be a laughable side, even to the grimmest events, the comic element was supplied in this case by our professors of languages, drawing, and so forth, who had not dared to go back into Paris after leaving it on the 28th, on account of the fighting. When they had made up their minds to return on the 29th, we persuaded those of them who wore moustaches that they would run very great risks, and even be taken for soldiers in disguise. Whereupon the schoolroom was at once turned into a barber's shop, where a general shaving was performed, with the inevitable change of appearance resulting there-from, which increased the alarm of the individuals operated upon tenfold.
While our professors were shaving off their moustaches, our father was disappearing from Neuilly. His movements were rigorously concealed from us, and I never learnt what they really were even in later days. So I will not attempt to speak of them. We were soon aware of the bare fact that he was in Paris, exercising public functions which were somewhat ill-defined as yet; and on the evening of the 31st my mother informed us that we were going to join him at the Palais-Royal. [Footnote: It is not for me to pass judgment on my father's conduct in accepting the crown in 1830. There is no doubt the July Revolution was a great misfortune. It gave a fresh blow to the monarchical principle, and it unfortunately encouraged those who speculate in insurrection. But I know as a fact that my father never desired it, and indeed watched its approach with the deepest sorrow. When the throne of Charles X. collapsed without his being able to defend it in any way, he certainly felt the most passionate desire to escape the common exile and to continue living a life which was to him the happiest of lives in France. The struggle one over, and the country in revolt from end to end, he realized that the only way in which he could escape exile was to associate himself with the movement, and at the outset he certainly did it solely in
the hope of bringing back Henri V. to the throne. When this hope failed him, he yielded to the entreaties of those persons who implored him as the only person in a position to do it, to check France on that fateful descent which must bring her from the Republic to a Dictatorship, and so on to invasion, and to mutilation. He delayed that disastrous succession of events for eighteen years, at the risk of his own life, which was incessantly threatened, and history will do him honour for it in spite of the injustice of human nature.]