Part 15 (1/2)

[Footnote 40: She had unconsciously borrowed the words from the d.u.c.h.esse de Coislin, who, under similar circ.u.mstances a few years before, said to Madame de Chateaubriand, ”Cela sent la parvenue; nous autres, femmes de la cour, nous n'avions que deux chemises; on les renouvelait quand elles etaient usees; nous etions vetues de robes de soie et nous n'avions pas l'air de grisettes comme ces demoiselles de maintenant.”--EDITOR.]

Nor was the weapon wielded exclusively by the aristocracy; the lower cla.s.ses 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 d.u.c.h.esse d'Orleans made her entree 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 ma.s.ses behind the National Guards and the regular infantry lining the route of the procession from the Arc de Triomphe to the entrance of the Chateau. All at once an outrider pa.s.ses, 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 pa.s.ses--first the National Guards on horseback, then the King and M. de Montalivet, followed by Princesse Helene, 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 pet.i.tes_ whom I see in my neighbourhood, the Rue Notre-Dame de Lorette. Comme elles etaient attifees!”--_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'Orleans, Princess Clementine,[41] and the Duc de Nemours. They called him familiarly ”le pere.” ”Il est trop pere,” said the princess in private; ”il fait concurrence au Pere eternel.” 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, Clementine, this is for you,” he said, at his arrival, putting a string of gla.s.s beads on the table.

[Footnote 41: The mother of Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg, the present ruler of Bulgaria. She was a particular favourite of Queen Victoria, and Louis-Philippe himself not only considered her the cleverest of his three daughters, but the most likely successor to his sister Adelaide, as his private adviser. That the estimate of her abilities was by no means exaggerated, subsequent events have proved. The last time I saw the princess was at the garden party at Sheen-House, on the occasion of the silver wedding of the Count and Countess de Paris. I did not remember her for the moment, for a score of years had made a difference. I asked an Austrian attache who she was. The answer came pat, ”Alexander III.'s nightmare, Francis-Joseph's bogy, and Bismarck's sleeping draught; one of the three clever women in Europe; Bulgaria's mother.”--EDITOR.]

”Very pretty,” said Clementine, ”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 Francoise 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 b.u.t.t 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 wors.h.i.+p--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, Eugene 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 soirees 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.

[Footnote 42: There was a similar divergence of dynastic opinion during the Second Empire between the sovereign and those placed very near him on the throne. When Alphonse Daudet came to Paris to make a name in literature, the Duc de Morny offered him a position as secretary. ”Before I accept it, monsieur le duc, I had better tell you that I am a Legitimist,”

replied the future novelist. ”Don't let that trouble you,”

laughed De Morny; ”so am I to a certain extent, and the Empress is even more of a Legitimist than I am.”--EDITOR.]

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.

Eugene 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. Eugene 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, Honore 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 Honore Balzac, a neighbour and a confrere 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 Eugene Lami and Paul Delaroche, not even Eugene 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 cla.s.ses, 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 const.i.tutionally-minded son of a const.i.tutionally-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 Pekin, and who sent an aide-de-camp in advance to beg the sovereign not to do so.[43]

[Footnote 43: In order to understand this dread on Montauban's part, the English reader should be told that the term _pekin_ is the contemptuous nickname for the civilian, with the French soldier.--EDITOR.]

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 Gereaux 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 Gereaux 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 Gereaux 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 Gereaux, 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 pet.i.tion, 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 Gereaux. 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 inst.i.tute 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 pa.s.sed 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 doc.u.ment written in his native language found upon him and brought to Oran, there remained little doubt that he was Captain de Gereaux.

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'Orleans' property by Napoleon III., replied to the French Amba.s.sador 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 Conde, and consequently the real defender in the various suits resulting from the a.s.sa.s.sination of that prince by Madame de Feucheres, he would have been in no way distinguished socially from the rest of the D'Orleans.