may be imagined. She replied on all points to the best of her ability, and not till she had got to the end of her answers Napoleon seemed to remember that Murat had engaged for him that he should say a few words of softer import.

Napoleon's singular style of gallantry did not prevent the young lady from attaching herself to him.

'She afterwards,' says Madame de Rémusat, 'came to Paris, and had a son on whom many of the Poles fixed their hopes as the future founder in Poland of one more Napoleonic dynasty.' 'I have seen,' says Madame de Rémusat, the mother presented at the Imperial court, at first exciting the jealousy of Josephine, with whom, after her divorce, she became rather intimate, and often brought her son to visit her at the Malmaison. It is said that she remained faithful to the Emperor on the fall of his fortunes, and visited him more than once in his first exile.'

The anonymous author of a pleasant little volume entitled The Island Empire, published in 1855, relates some circumstances of the visit (presumably) of this lady to Elba, and mentions the odd qui-pro-quo to which it gave occasion among some of Napoleon's followers in that island.

'In all the memoirs of the Emperor,' says the above-cited author, it has been stated that, during his sojourn at Elba, a lady with a child came to the island for a short time, who was supposed by the islanders to be the Empress [Marie Louise], but by persons better informed to have been another lady, whose personal attractions and accomplishments had some time before fascinated him. In the beginning of August 1814, a Genoese felucca, the interior of which was fitted up in a luxurious manner, arrived at Porto Ferrajo, bringing a lady, a little boy, and a Polish or German colonel, whose name does not transpire. In the course of the day of their arrival, the Emperor, accompanied by General Bertrand, Captain Baillon, and my informant, started on horseback, as though for San Martino. Arrived at the cross-road where the two roads to San Martino and Marciana branch off, the Emperor, continuing his route to the former place with General Bertrand, ordered his other two followers to wait at this spot for a carriage that would soon pass, and to desire the coachman not to proceed further till his Majesty's return. On his leaving, Captain Baillon said to his companion, 'Voilà, nous avons l'Impératrice à l'île d'Elbe.'

X

The occupants of the carriage had not to wait long for the Emperor to join them, who, on riding up, entered the carriage, while General Bertrand was observed to speak to the lady with marks of extraordinary respect. On arriving at Procchio the party took boat, and proceeded to Marciana Marina, whence they proceeded to the Madonna, where tents were provided for their accommodation. The following day, as the child was playing about under the chestnuttrees, the Emperor came up to Doctor Fourreau, who was in conversation with the Captain, and asked him what he thought of the child. The Doctor answered, 'He appears to be much grown since I had the honour of seeing him at Fontainebleau.' His answer was evidently displeasing to the Emperor, who answered abruptly, "Qu'est ce que vous chantez donc ?' and turned away, leaving the poor Doctor almost in tears, and in a state only to be understood by those attendants who unfortunately fell under their master's displeasure. The Emperor, seeing that the Captain had observed that the child called him 'Papa,' asked him what the Elbans thought of his visitors. The Captain answered, 'They think that Elba is honoured with the presence of the Empress and of your Majesty's son.' On which the Emperor rejoined, ' He may well be my son, and yet not the King of Rome.'

This Polish mystery may be said to have since come under the category of secrets known to all the world.'

307

IX.

MONSIEUR GUIZOTS' OWN TIME. 1

Mémoires pour servir à l'Histoire de Mon Temps. Par M. Guizot. Tomes I.-VIII, Paris, 1858-1867.

MONSIEUR GUIZOT's memory of things and persons goes back to times whither few surviving contemporaries are left to follow it from his first introduction to society and to bureaucracy in the latter days of the Empire--through all the earlier vicissitudes and later fatalities of the elder Bourbon restoration and the perturbed politics, quorum pars magna fuit, of the younger dynasty dethroned in turn. He notes a trait of constant recurrence in French life and character, and which yet, at every epoch of its recurrence, is always a sort of surprise. The lull of politics, and the social fusion for the time being of all the élite of all parties, which had taken place under the strong compression of the government of the first Napoleon, had encouraged hopes which, when that compression was removed by his fall, soon proved fallacious, that the truce which had been enforced on party passions by an absolute government would be observed longer than the time when the liberty to give them again their swing was restored. M. Guizot describes as follows the sort of truce of God' that had suspended party conflicts in France during the years which intervened between the revolutionary troubles in which the last century had closed, and the reopening of the political arena by the restoration of chartered royalty:-

I was living in the midst of a thoroughly French society-more strongly impregnated perhaps than any other with the national taste and spirit. I witnessed there precisely that sort of rapprochement, 1 From the Fortnightly Review, May 1866, September 1867.

harmony, and fusion of different classes, and even of different parties, which appeared to me to supply an essential condition of the stability of the new and free régime which was to succeed. Men of all ranks, all professions, nay, all opinions-men of the old noblesse, magistrates, lawyers, ecclesiastics, men of letters, and men of business— men of the ancien régime, of the Constituent Assembly, of the Convention, and of the Empire, were living at that time in easy and amicable relations, mutually recognising, without constraint or effort, their differences of position or views, and apparently disposed to a good understanding with each other on the affairs of their common country. Strange contradiction in French manners! So long as no other relations are in question than those formed for the pleasures of literary and social intercourse, all class distinctions, all party struggles, are suspended; we all think only of throwing our merits and accomplishments into the common stock of enjoyment. But only let political questions come up again, and the positive interests of life connected with them-only let the question come to be, not of joining in social meetings devoted to mere pleasure and amusement, but of claiming each his part in the rights, affairs, honours, advantages, and burthens of the body politic, on the instant all the suppressed differences reappear all the pretensions, all the stubborn prepossessions, all the susceptibilities, all the struggles, recommence; and the same society which had seemed so harmonious and so united, shows itself at once not less diverse and not less divided than it had ever been.

This unfortunate incoherence between the apparent and real state of French society suddenly revealed itself in 1815. The reaction provoked by the Hundred Days [Napoleon's return from Elba] destroyed in a moment the whole work of social pacification which had been going on in France for sixteen years, and produced a sudden explosion of all the passions, good or bad, of the ancien régime, against all results, good or bad, of the Revolution. (Vol. i. p. 111.)

If the Consulate and Empire of the first Napoleon had effected a sixteen years' suspension of the political passions and conflicts of the ten revolutionary years preceding, on the other hand, his prolonged military dictatorship had equally arrested all acquirement of political experience during the same period. It has often been thrown in the teeth of the men of the old régime who took subsequent part in politics, that, since its downfall, they had forgotten nothing and learned nothing. But the same thing exactly might have

been said, with equal truth, of the men of the Revolution, and of the new generation who sat at their feet and handed down their traditions. There had been no school of public life open in France for sixteen years where either Royalists or Revolutionists could have learned, or could have learned to forget, anything. Accordingly the first use the former made of their temporarily restored ascendancy was to domineer; the first use the latter made of their newly-restored liberties was to conspire. Neither had an idea of anything like a spirit of concession, self-moderation, or self-restraint in politics. While the Royalists remained uppermost, their language and attitude, rather than any overt acts, provoked revolt; whenever the Liberals got a chance they revolted. Neither knew how to use parliamentary government for its proper purpose; both justified, in turn, Mallet Du Pan's sentence in a letter addressed to Count Saint-Aldegonde in 1797:- Une grande assemblée délibérative en France ne sera jamais qu'une pétaudière ou un brûlot."

The worst enemies of the permanent power of the Royalist party in France were in its own ranks; and the most fatal blows which were struck at that power, when it seemed consolidated, were struck by its own malcontent members. Of these, the most conspicuous and the most formidable was Chateaubriand, whose writings attracted M. Guizot's early admiration, as that of young France generally under the First Empire, and whose eccentric character and career he has traced with justice, and not without sympathy:

The situation of M. de Chateaubriand at Ghent [during the refuge taken by Louis XVIII.'s little court there in 1815] was singular. He was a member of the Royal Council; he put forth brilliant expositions of its policy in official documents, and defended it with not less éclat in the "Moniteur de Gand." He was, nevertheless, in a very bad humour with everybody, and nobody paid much personal attention to him. In my opinion, neither the King nor his successive governments at that time, nor afterwards, rightly understood M. de Chateaubriand's character, nor estimated at a high enough rate the importance of his concurrence or hostility. I am ready to admit he was a most inconvenient ally, for he had pretensions to everything, and took offence at everything. With just claims to stand on an equal