Lieutenant-General of the King’s armies, was a concession to the spirit
of the age.
These salons did not long preserve their purity. Beginning with 1818,
doctrinarians began to spring up in them, a disturbing shade. Their way
was to be Royalists and to excuse themselves for being so. Where the
ultras were very proud, the doctrinarians were rather ashamed. They had
wit; they had silence; their political dogma was suitably impregnated
with arrogance; they should have succeeded. They indulged, and usefully
too, in excesses in the matter of white neckties and tightly buttoned
coats. The mistake or the misfortune of the doctrinarian party was to
create aged youth. They assumed the poses of wise men. They dreamed of
engrafting a temperate power on the absolute and excessive principle.
They opposed, and sometimes with rare intelligence, conservative
liberalism to the liberalism which demolishes. They were heard to say:
“Thanks for Royalism! It has rendered more than one service. It has
brought back tradition, worship, religion, respect. It is faithful,
brave, chivalric, loving, devoted. It has mingled, though with regret,
the secular grandeurs of the monarchy with the new grandeurs of the
nation. Its mistake is not to understand the Revolution, the Empire,
glory, liberty, young ideas, young generations, the age. But this
mistake which it makes with regard to us,—have we not sometimes been
guilty of it towards them? The Revolution, whose heirs we are, ought to
be intelligent on all points. To attack Royalism is a misconstruction
of liberalism. What an error! And what blindness! Revolutionary France
is wanting in respect towards historic France, that is to say, towards
its mother, that is to say, towards itself. After the 5th of September,
the nobility of the monarchy is treated as the nobility of the Empire
was treated after the 5th of July. They were unjust to the eagle, we
are unjust to the fleur-de-lys. It seems that we must always have
something to proscribe! Does it serve any purpose to ungild the crown
of Louis XIV., to scrape the coat of arms of Henry IV.? We scoff at M.
de Vaublanc for erasing the N’s from the bridge of Jena! What was it
that he did? What are we doing? Bouvines belongs to us as well as
Marengo. The fleurs-de-lys are ours as well as the N’s. That is our
patrimony. To what purpose shall we diminish it? We must not deny our
country in the past any more than in the present. Why not accept the
whole of history? Why not love the whole of France?”
It is thus that doctrinarians criticised and protected Royalism, which
was displeased at criticism and furious at protection.
The ultras marked the first epoch of Royalism, congregation
characterized the second. Skill follows ardor. Let us confine ourselves
here to this sketch.
In the course of this narrative, the author of this book has
encountered in his path this curious moment of contemporary history; he
has been forced to cast a passing glance upon it, and to trace once
more some of the singular features of this society which is unknown
to-day. But he does it rapidly and without any bitter or derisive idea.
Souvenirs both respectful and affectionate, for they touch his mother,
attach him to this past. Moreover, let us remark, this same petty world
had a grandeur of its own. One may smile at it, but one can neither
despise nor hate it. It was the France of former days.
Marius Pontmercy pursued some studies, as all children do. When he
emerged from the hands of Aunt Gillenormand, his grandfather confided
him to a worthy professor of the most purely classic innocence. This
young soul which was expanding passed from a prude to a vulgar pedant.
Marius went through his years of college, then he entered the law
school. He was a Royalist, fanatical and severe. He did not love his
grandfather much, as the latter’s gayety and cynicism repelled him, and
his feelings towards his father were gloomy.
He was, on the whole, a cold and ardent, noble, generous, proud,
religious, enthusiastic lad; dignified to harshness, pure to shyness.