Part 19 (1/2)
”After the Spanish marriages, Queen Isabella wished to convey to me a signal mark of her grat.i.tude--for what, Heaven alone knows, because it is the only political transaction I would willingly efface from my career. So she conferred upon me the dukedom of San Antonio, and sent me the patent with a most affectionate letter. Honestly speaking, I was more than upset by this proof of royal kindness, seeing that I had not the least wish to accept the t.i.tle. I felt equally reluctant to offend her by declining the high distinction offered, I felt sure, from a most generous feeling. I went to see the King, and explained my awkward position, adding that the name of Guizot was all sufficient for me. 'You are right,' said the King. 'Leave the matter to me; I'll arrange it.'
And he did, much to the disgust of M. de Salvandy, who had received a t.i.tle at the same time, but who could not accept his while the Prime Minister declined.
”Then she sent me this picture. Some witty journalist said, at the time, that it was symbolical of her own married state; for let me tell you that the unfitness of Don Francis d'a.s.sis was 'le secret de polichinelle,' however much your countrymen may have insisted that it only leaked out after the union. Personally I was entirely opposed to it, and, in fact, it was not a ministerial question at all, but one of court intrigue. Lord Palmerston chose to make it the former, and he, and your countrymen through him, are not only morally but virtually responsible for the subsequent errors of Isabella. Do you know what his ultimatum was when the marriage had been contracted, when there was no possibility of going back? You do not. Well, then, I will tell you. 'If Isabella has not a child within a twelvemonth, then there will be war between England and France.' I leave you to ponder the consequences for yourself, though I a.s.sure you that I washed my hands of the affair from that moment. But the French as well as the English would never believe me, and history will record that 'the austere M. Guizot,' for that is what they choose to call me, 'lent his aid to proceedings which would make the most debased pander blush with shame.'
”It is not the only time that my intentions have been purposely misconceived and misconstrued; nay, I have been taxed with things of which I was as innocent as a child. In 1846, almost at the same period that the Spanish imbroglio took place, Count de Montalembert got up in the Upper House one day and declared it a disgrace that France should have begged the tomb of Napoleon I. from Russia. Now, the fact was that France had not begged anything at all. The princ.i.p.al part of the monument at the Invalides is the sarcophagus. The architect Visconti was anxious that it should consist of red porphyry; M. Duchatel and myself were of the same opinion. Unfortunately, we had not the remotest notion where such red porphyry was to be found. The Egyptian quarries, whence the Romans took it, were exhausted. Inquiries were made in the Vosges, in the Pyrenees, but without result, and we were going to abandon the porphyry, when news arrived at the Ministry of the Interior that the kind of stone we wanted existed in Russia.
”Just then my colleague, M. de Salvandy, was sending M. Leouzon le Duc to the north on a special mission, and I instructed him to go as far as St. Petersburg and consult Count de Rayneval, our amba.s.sador, as to the best means of getting the porphyry. A few months later, M. le Duc sent me specimens of a stone from a quarry on the banks of the Onega Lake, which, if not absolutely porphyry, was the nearest to it to be had. M.
Visconti having approved of it, I forwarded further instructions for the quant.i.ty required, and so forth.
”The quarry, it appears, belonged to the Crown, and had never been worked, could not be worked, without due permission and the payment of a certain tax. After a great many formalities, mainly raised by speculators who had got wind of the affair, and had bribed various officials to oppose, or, at any rate, intercept the pet.i.tion sent by M.
le Duc for the necessary authorization, Prince Wolkonsky, the Minister of State, acquainted the Czar himself with the affair, and Nicholas, without a moment's hesitation, granted the request, remitting the tax which M. le Duc had estimated at about six thousand francs. This took place at a cabinet council, and, unfortunately for me, the Czar thought fit to make a little speech. 'What a strange destiny!' he said, rising from his seat and a.s.suming a solemn tone--'what a strange destiny this man's'--alluding to Napoleon--'even in death! It is we who struck him the first fatal blow, by the burning of our holy and venerable capital, and it is from us that France asks his tomb. Let the French envoy have everything he requires, and, above all, let no tax be taken.'
”That was enough; the German and French papers got hold of the last words with the rest; they confounded the tax with the cost of working, which amounted to more than two hundred thousand francs; and up to this day, notwithstanding the explanations I and my colleagues offered in reply to the interpellation of M. de Montalembert, the story remains that Russia made France a present of the tomb of Napoleon.”
From that day forth I often called upon M. Guizot, especially in the daytime, when I knew that he had finished working; for when he found that his political career was irrevocably at an end, he turned very cheerfully--I might say gladly--to his original avocation, literature.
Without the slightest fatigue, without the slightest worry, he produced a volume of philosophical essays or history every year; and if, unlike Alexandre Dumas, he did not roar with laughter while composing, he was often heard to hum a tune. ”En effet,” said one of his daughters, the Countess Henriette de Witt (both his daughters bore the same name and t.i.tles when married), ”notre pere ne chante presque jamais qu'en travaillant.” This did not mean that work, and work only, had the effect of putting M. Guizot in good humour. He was, according to the same authority, uniformly sweet-tempered at home, whether sitting in his armchair, surrounded by his family, or gently strolling up and down his library. ”C'est la politique qui le rendait mechant,” said Madame de Witt, ”heureus.e.m.e.nt il la laissait a la porte. Et tres souvent il l'oubliait de parti-pris au milieu du conseil et alors il nous ecrivait des lettres, mais des lettres, comme on n'en ecrit plus. En voila deux qu'il m'a ecrites lorsque j'etais tres jeune fille.” Whereupon she showed me what were really two charming gossiping little essays on the art of punctuation. It appears that the little lady was either very indifferent to, or ignorant of the art; and the father wrote, ”My dear Henriette, I am afraid I shall still have to take you to task with regard to your punctuation: there is little or none of it in your letters. All punctuation, commas or other signs, mark a period of repose for the mind--a stage more or less long--an idea which is done with or momentarily suspended, and which is being divided by such a sign from the next. You suppress those periods, those intervals; you write as the stream flows, as the arrow flies. That will not do at all, because the ideas one expresses, the things of which we speak, are not all intimately connected with one another like drops of water.”
The second letter showed that Mdlle. Guizot must have taken her revenge, either very cleverly, or that she was past all redemption in the matter of punctuation; and as the latter theory is scarcely admissible, knowing what we do of her after-life, we must admit the former. The letter ran as follows:
”MY DEAR HENRIETTE,
”I dare say you will find me very provoking, but let me beg of you not to fling so many commas at my head. You are absolutely pelting me with them, as the Romans pelted that poor Tarpeia with their bucklers.”
It reminds one of Marguerite Thuillier, who ”created Mimi” in Murger and Barriere's ”Vie de Boheme,” when Murger fell in love with her. ”I can't do with him,” she said to his collaborateur, who pleaded for him,--”I can't do with him; he is too badly dressed, he looks like a scarecrow.”
Barriere advised his friend to go to a good tailor and have himself rigged out in the latest fas.h.i.+on. The advice was acted upon; Barriere waited anxiously for the effect of the transformation upon the lady's heart. A fortnight elapsed, and poor Murger was snubbed as usual.
Barriere interceded once more. ”I can do less with him than before,” was the answer; ”he is too well dressed, he looks like a tailor's dummy.”
To return to M. Guizot, whom, in the course of the whole of our acquaintance, I have only seen once ”put out.” It was when the fiat went forth that his house was to come down to make room for the new Boulevard Malesherbes. The authorities had been as considerate as possible; they had made no attempt to treat the eminent historian as a simple owner of house-property fighting to get the utmost value; they offered him three hundred thousand francs, and M. Guizot himself acknowledged that the sum was a handsome one. ”But I have got thirty thousand volumes to remove, besides my notes and ma.n.u.scripts,” he wailed. Then his good temper got the better of him, and he had a ”sly dig” at his former adversary, Adolphe Thiers. ”Serves me right for having so many books; happy the historian who prefers to trust to his imagination.”
M. Guizot made up his mind to have his library removed to Val-Richer and never to live in Paris again; but his children and friends prevailed upon him not to forsake society altogether, and to take a modest apartment near his old domicile, in the Faubourg St. Honore, opposite the English emba.s.sy, which, however, in those days had not the monumental aspect it has at present.
”It is doubtful,” said M. Guizot afterwards to me, ”whether the idea of living in the country would have ever entered my mind ten or fifteen years ago. At that time, I would not have gone a couple of miles to see the most magnificent bit of natural scenery: I should have gone a thousand to see a man of talent.”
And, in fact, up till 1830, when he was nearly forty-four, he had never seen the sea, ”And if it had not been for an electoral journey to Normandy, I might not have seen it then.” I pointed out to him that M.
Thiers had never had a country house; that he did not seem to care for nature, for birds, or for flowers.
”Ah, that's different,” he smiled. ”I did not care much about the country, because I had never seen any of it. Thiers does not like it, because the birds, the flowers, the trees, live and grow without his interference, and he does not care that anything on earth should happen without his having a hand in it.”
Thiers was the only man at whom M. Guizot tilted in that way. Though brought up in strict Protestant, one might almost say Calvinistic principles, he was an ardent admirer of Roman Catholicism, which he called ”the most admirable school of respect in the world.” No man had suffered more from the excesses of the first Revolution, seeing that his father perished on the scaffold, yet I should not like to say that he was not somewhat of a republican at heart, but not of a republic ”which begins with Plato and necessarily ends with a gendarme.” ”The republic of '48,” he used to say, ”it had not even a Monk, let alone a Was.h.i.+ngton or a Cromwell; and Louis-Napoleon had to help himself to the throne. And depend upon it, if there had been a Cromwell, he would have crushed it as the English one crushed the monarchy. As for Was.h.i.+ngton, he would not have meddled with it at all.”
”Yes,” he said on another occasion, ”I am proud of one thing--of the authors.h.i.+p of the law on elementary education; but, proud as I am of it, if I could have foreseen the uses to which it has been put, to which it is likely to be put when I am gone, I would sooner have seen half of the nation unable to distinguish an '_A_ from a bull's foot,' as your countrymen say.”
With Guizot died almost the last French statesman, ”who not only thought that he had the privilege to be poor, but who carried the privilege too far;” as some one remarked when he heard the news of his demise. Towards the latter years of his life, he occupied a modest apartment, on the fourth floor, in the Rue Billaut (now the Rue Was.h.i.+ngton). Well might M.
de Falloux exclaim, as he toiled up that staircase, ”My respect for him increases with every step I take.”
Since M. de Falloux uttered these words, and very long before, I have only known one French statesman whose staircase and whose poverty might perhaps inspire the same reflections and elicit similar praise. I am alluding to M. Rouher.
M. de Lamartine's poverty did not breed the same respect. There was no dignity about it. It was the poverty of Oliver Goldsmith sending to Dr.