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curately Talleyrand's lineaments may come out under Guizot's pen, the portraiture betrays the touchiness of personal pique. Our author also well understood and well describes the character of Louis XVIII. In reality an able and sensible man, but utterly passive; condemned by obesity to inaction, he had the pride and in some degree the greatness of royalty, but his horizon was bounded by the precincts of his court. Intellectually akin to Louis Philippe, his character was different. The latter was active both in body and mind; but not so high in his views as Louis, because he felt himself less a king. Louis XVIII. was fond of displaying his literary acquirements; Louis Philippe spoke readily of home politics, without paying much attention to the affairs of Europe, which Louis XVIII. judged with greater acuteness and dignity. Both sovereigns were minds of the middle sort, but in their way very intelligent men. Louis XVIII. needed a favourite because of his indolence; this he found in the Duc de Blacas in 1814, and in M. de Cazes in 1816. When they deprived him of the latter he was all adrift, and took no interest in governing, though he found in it a solace for his pride. The Duc de Richelieu was little to him, M. de Villèle nothing at all. It was then he surrendered himself to his female favourite, Madlle. de Cayla, who was in Villèle's interest, and through whom Villèle was allowed at last to do as he liked.

During the Hundred Days, when Napoleon had accomplished his promenade from Elba to Paris, Guizot consulted with Royer-Collard and other friends on the posture of affairs in France and at Ghent, and on the policy necessary to ensure the return of the Bourbons. As the result of these conferences, he tells us of a commission intrusted to him by RoyerCollard's small party of royalists, to inquire into the state of things at Ghent, to insist upon the dismissal of the Duc de Blacas, and to convince the king that this was a necessary condition for the secure establishment of the Bourbons in France. Guizot's enemies have called this fact in question. M. de Blacas considered it as an intrigue of the personal friends of the Abbé de Montesquiou, with whom he had quarrelled. The matter had no result; for M. de Blacas could only have been torn from the king by Talleyrand, who was then busy at the Congress of Vienna, and by means of that diplomatist's credit with the Austrian and English cabinets. However, as Guizot is perfectly aware, M. de Blacas never aimed at influencing the political views of the king. The Comte d'Artois made much greater efforts to obtain such ascendency through his favourite the Comte de Bruges, who was on good terms with M. de Blacas. But the king had no

confidence whatever in his brother's discernment, and would never have allowed himself to be led by him. These court intrigues are of little consequence, and met with no sympathy from the king. When he set out on his return to France, Talleyrand's temporary removal was urged as a sort of compensation for that of M. de Blacas by the Comte d'Artois, who thus hoped to surround him with his own friends and to entrap him into the policy of the Comte de Bruges. Whoever knew Louis, knew that this must fail, because he held his royal brother very cheap, and felt no personal respect for the Comte de Bruges. Comte Jaucour, Abbé Louis, and Talleyrand's other friends, Guizot among the rest, took this too tragically. The bubble would have burst directly they came to Paris. Louis was attached to his brother, but thought him a noodle in politics; and utterly mistrusted the ambition of M. de Bruges, who afterwards left court, and died in discontented retirement.

Guizot has also well understood a part of the inner and outer man of Chateaubriand, and regrets that neither his own friends the doctrinaires, nor the party of Talleyrand, justly appreciated this distempered genius, brilliant in its disease, and often powerful in its sentimentality: besides which, Louis XVIII. could not endure him; not only was his poetry ill-suited to the classical taste of the king, but what was to be done with this morbid and isolated spirit, that could never agree but for a moment with men who did not pay sufficient homage to him and to his genius? Chateaubriand was a mixture of great and small features; a striking head, with large gleaming eyes, set on an insignificant body, and a mind wherein jostled the old régime and dreams of freedom, Catholicity and independence, the classicism of the eighteenth century and the romanticism of which Bernardin de St. Pierre was the prophet. Guizot understood what none of Chateaubriand's enemies either at court or in the council-chamber perceived, that his ambition was married to a revengeful spirit, that he was keenly sensitive to every affront, and that he could at any moment become an inconvenient friend or an exceedingly dangerous enemy. . M. de Cazes was the first to find out this, and Villèle the next. Guizot foresaw it at Ghent, where Chateaubriand was preparing to swing himself up by taking the lead of the ultras; but his friends thought still less of Chateaubriand's importance than did even Louis XVIII.

Fouché next appears on the stage, and we have an investigation of the reasons that induced Louis XVIII. to endure him as Minister of the Interior. Like Lamartine, in his History of the Restoration, Guizot gives one very incorrect cause

for this, namely, the influence of the Comte d'Artois, whose intimate friend M. de Vitrolles had been formerly connected with Fouché, because he had erased many names of émigrés from the lists of proscriptions. The truth of the matter is, that Fouché had at all times, under both Consulate and Empire, endeavoured to acquire an independent position; in the most barefaced way he had surrounded himself with old Jacobins, his creatures, pretending to employ them in the service of the Empire. He had attached many émigrés to himself; some by erasing their names, others by giving them places, and others with the hope of using them hereafter. He directed the police rather with a view to his own interests than to those of the Emperor; wherefore Napoleon dismissed him in 1806, sent him to Florence, and appointed Savary, who was entirely devoted to him. It was not with Fouché that the Comte d'Artois was connected during the Hundred Days, but with Napoleon's minister of war, Marshal Soult, a man whom he had already succeeded in introducing into the cabinet of his brother in 1814. Soult it was who had coveted the crown of Portugal, whose hostility to the other marshals in Spain was the chief cause of the decline of Joseph's power, who had publicly appeared in a procession of Corpus Christi in 1814, and had raised a monument in honour of the émigrés who had fallen at Quiberon. Soult had become acquainted with the Comte d'Artois through his adjutant, M. Brun de la Villaret, a near relative of the Comte de Bruges. The Comte d'Artois aimed at becoming chief of the national guard, and the Comte de Bruges at exercising the real authority. In this Soult assisted them, and thereby acquired warm defenders at Ghent in spite of his desertion to Napoleon. Talleyrand's party hated Soult, whose ambition was capable of seducing him to the wildest projects. Fouché they knew of old; and it was not through the Comte d'Artois, but through M. de Jaucoust, that Louis received his offers of service at Ghent.

Such was the part played by that insolent, audacious, and presumptuous statesman. He applied to Louis at Ghent through André, the son of a former police-minister of Louis XVI., who went backwards and forwards between that city and Paris in his service. At the same time he made advances to Metternich at Vienna, and sent emissaries to London for the purpose of ingratiating himself with the Duke of Orleans. If Napoleon had been victorious at Waterloo, he would have proved to the emperor how faithfully he had every where served him. What he wanted was a great fortune, and much tripotage. If it had been practicable, he would no doubt have

preferred the son of Egalité for king; he persuaded the Duke of Wellington, who had no great experience in those matters, that he was an indispensable person. Talleyrand committed the great mistake of allowing himself to be coupled with him in the same cabinet. Fouché was so degraded, that even Talleyrand debased himself by giving him his hand.

The first government formed after the fall of Fouché and Talleyrand consisted of heterogeneous elements; the Duke de Feltre, who was one of them, had completely gone over to the émigrés, whom he endeavoured to reconcile with the grande armée. Dubouchage, the minister of marine, was in heart an émigré. Vaublanc, the minister of the interior, a hot-headed medley of conflicting and undigested views, had, in company with the Baron Capelle, become intimate with the Comte d'Artois at Ghent. This Capelle was an ex-Bonapartist, whom Napoleon, on his return from Elba, had proscribed, in consequence of his flight from Geneva, where he was prefect in 1814. The Comte d'Artois flattered himself that in these two men he possessed in epitome the whole of Bonapartist France both were ex-prefects; both entirely devoted to him-Capelle as a political instrument, Vaublanc as a man of mere passion and ardent vanity. It was a capital error in this prince, rich in heart and poor in intellect, to imagine that he could chain and captivate the France of Napoleon by such men as Soult and Clarke as ministers of war, and Vaublanc and Capelle as ministers of the interior; or that by their means he could become popular in the army and civil service, and provide places under government for his own friends and for a number of émigrés. This done, thought he, every thing was gained, the revolution vanquished, old and young France reconciled. He was really as little attached to absolutism as Louis XVIII.; neither of them had the tendencies of Louis XIV. Louis XVIII. inclined towards the new aristocracy; Charles X. towards the old noblesse. The one liked the émigrés, but laughed at them for their incapacity; Charles suspected all that were about the king of a semi-revolutionary tendency, and intrigued against them. The Comte de Bruges was a man of energetic but sour and hasty temperament, inclined not so much to the old régime as to a kind of parliamentary and aristocratic government constructed out of the elements of the past. Vitrolles, who was supple and experienced in the circles of Talleyrand, was, like Bourienne, the ex-secretary of Napoleon, who had gone over to the Comte d'Artois, versed in political intrigues, witty and lively, like the Calonnes, the Champcenetz, and other early friends of the count,-clever political dilettanti, men of

all kinds of combinations and resources, but utterly without range of intellect. These men led the count, and used the hot excitement of the aristocratic adherents of Chateaubriand and Labourdonnage, and of the peers and deputies whom M. de Bonald had organised as a Catholic party. They sought to construct out of these fractions a homogeneous government, they therefore attacked the Duc de Richelieu, and awakened in him a disgust for politics; but as they did not prevail on the king to adopt their plans, they only paved the way, in spite of themselves, for the advent to power of M. de Cazes, whom Louis had chosen as his favourite, and brought about the dissolution of the Chambre Introuvable, which was so full of hot and reactionary legitimists. The king was at first much alarmed at this result; but afterwards took the credit of it on himself, when M. de Cazes had surrounded him in the most skilful manner with his calculated flatteries.

What manner of man this M. de Cazes was, at whose heels Guizot and the doctrinaires rose to political importance, we must briefly tell. His plan for dissolving the chamber was to get the king to do it by appearing always to ask his advice, treating his weak but yet obstinate temper with the greatest delicacy, never allowing his own suggestions to appear as such; for he knew how to deposit them in the king's mind, and then, like an intellectual midwife, to draw them forth as the offspring of his master's own genius. Thus the king had the double satisfaction of doing what was agreeable to his favourite, and at the same time considering him as the humble disciple of his own political sagacity. This was the whole art and the whole policy of M. de Cazes. He thus became odious to the Comte d'Artois, and an abomination to the ex-chamber; and at last fell a sacrifice to the fury of M. Claussel de Coussergues, who was insane enough to impute to him the murder of the Duc de Berri. There is nothing too extravagant for a furious passion to urge even educated men to commit.

Sooth to say, M. de Cazes was a man of no political ideas. Distinguished in his youth for a handsome figure, secretary to Madame Mère, and thus in the imperial service, son-in-law of a violent Napoleonist, and president of the Cour de Cassation, he was yet sprung from a legitimist family of the south; he openly declared for the house of Bourbon during the Hundred Days, and helped the party of the Comte d'Artois, the good-will of which he seemed at that time to enjoy, to overthrow Fouché; but suddenly broke with them when he became aware of the favourable disposition of the king towards him.

The party of the "ultras" was composed of very discordant elements. A portion of the nobility followed the stand

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