As for the Duc de Bordeaux’s supporters, they would picture him in the Hradschin as a King forever on horseback, always landing great blows with his sword. He certainly needs courage; but it is wrong to imagine that in this century right of conquest could be recognised, and that it is sufficient to act like Henri IV to recover a throne. Without courage, one cannot reign; with courage alone one can no longer reign: Bonaparte destroyed victory’s authority.

An extraordinary role might be conceived for Henri V; supposing that at twenty he was to recognise his position and say to himself: ‘I cannot remain inactive; I have a duty to fulfil towards the past, on behalf of my race, but am I obliged to trouble France solely in my own cause? Ought I to burden future centuries with the weight of centuries past? Let us decide the issue; let us inspire regret in those who unjustly exiled me in childhood; let us show them what I could do. It depends only on devoting myself to my country while consecrating myself afresh, whatever might be the outcome of the contest, to the principle of hereditary monarchy.’

Then the scion of Saint-Louis might approach France imbued with the twin ideal of glory and sacrifice; he might descend upon it with the firm resolution of ending with a crown on his forehead or a bullet in his heart: in the latter case his inheritance would pass to Philippe. A triumphant life or a sublime death would re-establish the Legitimacy, stripped only of that which fails to comprehend the century and that which no longer fits the age. However, imagining my young Prince’s sacrifice does little for me: if Henri V died without issue, I could recognize no other monarch in France!

I am left to dream: what I have imagined is not possible for the party who would have to adopt Henri: by reasoning in that way, I am placed in the position of considering an order of things beyond us; an order which, natural to an age of nobility and magnanimity, would appear these days as a novelistic exaggeration; as if I were to assent to the present invoking the age of the Crusades; now we are grounded in the sad reality of a diminished human nature. Such is the attitude of mind that Henri would meet with, apathy within France and invincible obstacles in the kingdoms beyond. He must submit then, he must consent to wait on events, at least he should avoid choosing a role that people would not hesitate to stigmatise as that of an adventurer. He will have to accommodate himself to a succession of mediocre events, and witness, without however allowing himself to be overwhelmed, the difficulties that surround him.

The Bourbons ruled after the Empire because of arbitrary succession: could one imagine Henri transported from Prague to the Louvre after the recent experience of total freedom? Deep down the French nation does not love such freedom; but it adores equality; it only admits absolute power for itself and through itself, and its pride demands that it only obey what it has itself imposed. The Charter attempted vainly to allow two nations which had become strangers to one another, ancient and Modern France, to live under the same laws; how, when prejudice has increased, can you make one France understand the other? You do not win minds by placing incontestable truths before their eyes.

If one listens to the voice of passion or ignorance, the Bourbons are the authors of all our ills; the reinstallation of the elder branch would be the re-establishment of domination by the Palace; the Bourbons are the source of and accomplices to those oppressive treaties of which I have justifiably never ceased to complain: and yet nothing is more absurd than such accusations, in which dates are forgotten and facts grossly altered. The Restoration only exerted influenced in diplomatic activity at the time of the first invasion. It is recognized that no one wanted that Restoration, since they negotiated with Bonaparte at Châtillon; that, if he had wished, he could have remained Emperor of the French. On his proving stubborn and for want of anything better they adopted the Bourbons who were on the spot. MONSIEUR, the Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom, then played a specific role in the transactions of the day; as one sees from the life of Alexander, we agreed to the 1814 Treaty of Paris.

In 1815 it was no longer a question of the Bourbons; they in no way took part in the despoilers’ agreements at the second invasion; those agreements were the result of the breaking of that banishment to the Island of Elba. In Vienna, the Allies declared that they were only uniting against the one man; that they did not pretend to impose any particular master, or any sort of government on France. Alexander even asked the Congress for an alternative monarch to Louis XVIII. If the latter by hastening to seat himself in the Tuileries had not hastened to grab his throne, he might never have reigned. The treaties of 1815 were abominable, precisely because they refused to listen to the hereditary voice of the Legitimacy, and it was to destroy those treaties that I wished to build up our influence in Spain.

The only moment where one sees the spirit of the Restoration is at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle; the Allies had agreed to steal our provinces in the North and East: Monsieur de Richelieu intervened. The Tsar, moved by our misfortunes, prompted by his penchant for justice, handed over to Monsieur de Richelieu the map of France on which the fatal lines had been traced. I saw this map of the Styx with my own eyes, in the hands of Madame de Montcalm, sister of the noble negotiator.

How could France resist, occupied as it was, our strongholds garrisoned by foreigners? Once deprived of our military establishment, how long might we have groaned under the yoke of conquest? Had we had a sovereign from some other family, a chance Prince, no one would have respected him. Among the Allies, some yielded to the illusion of noble lineage, others believed that under a worn-out power the Kingdom would lose its energy and cease to be a source of trouble: Cobbet himself agreed, in his open letter. It is a monstrous ingratitude therefore not to see that, if we are still the Gaul that was, we owe it to the race we have abused the most. That race, whose blood circulated for eight centuries through France’s very veins, blood which has made France what it is, has saved France too. Why be so obstinate as to continually deny the facts? They held our victory against us, as we held it against Europe. Our soldiers went to Russia: she sent our soldiers fleeing back along the tracks they had made. After action, reaction, that is the law. That does not diminish Napoleon’s glory, a singular glory that remains entire; it does not diminish our national glory, covered with the dust of Europe, whose towers our banners have swept. It is useless, in otherwise justified vexation, to seek another cause than the true one for our ills. Far from being a cause, rather the Bourbons shared in our defeats.

Now appreciate the calumnies of which the Restoration has been the object; interrogate the archives of the Foreign Office, and you will be convinced of the independence of language employed towards foreign powers during the reigns of Louis XVIII and Charles X. Our sovereigns had a feeling for national dignity; they were kings above all to the foreigner, who frankly never desired the Restoration, and viewed the resurrection of the old monarchy only with regret. The diplomatic language of France at the epoch I am dealing with is, one must admit, individual and aristocratic; democracy, full of large and fecund virtues, is nevertheless arrogant when it is in power: of incomparable munificence when immense devotion is required, it eschews detail; it is rarely noble, especially during lengthy misfortunes. That party born of hatred for the Legitimacy, established in the Courts of England and Austria, was due to the firmness of the Bourbon government. Far from overthrowing that Legitimacy, we would have been better advised to shore up its ruins; sheltered by it we might have raised a new edifice, as one constructs a vessel to brave the ocean in a sheltered basin cut from the rock: so English liberty was created in the womb of Norman law. There was no need to repudiate the ghost of the monarchy; that centenarian of the Middle Ages, who like Dandolo, certainly had eyes in his head, even if he could barely see; an aged man who could command young crusaders and who, adorned with white hair, nevertheless printed vigorous and ineffaceable steps on the snow.

One conceives that given our long experience of fear, prejudice and shame-faced pride might blind us; but distant posterity will recognise that the Restoration has been, historically speaking, one of the happiest phases of our revolutionary cycle. Those parties whose flame has not yet died may cry for now: ‘We were free under the Empire, slaves under the monarchy of the Charter!’ Future generations, not waylaid by that untruth, laughable if it were not a sophism, will say that the Bourbons prevented the dismemberment of France, founded representative government among us, made our finances prosper, redeemed debts they had not contracted, and even paid, religiously, a pension to Robespierre’s sister. Finally, to replace our lost colonies, they left us, in Africa, one of the richest provinces of the Roman Empire.

Three things can be placed to the restored Legitimacy’s account: it entered Cadiz; it gave Greece independence at Navarino; it freed Christianity by seizing Algiers: enterprises in which Bonaparte, Russia, the Emperor Charles V and Europe all failed. Show me a power of any duration (and one so disputed) which has accomplished such things.

I believe, hand on heart, that I have exaggerated nothing and have only displayed facts, in what I have just said concerning the Legitimacy. It is certain that the Bourbons neither wished to nor could re-establish a monarchy of the palace operating through a tribe of nobles and priests; it is certain that they were not imposed on us by the Allies; they were an accident of, not a cause of, our disasters, the cause of which evidently stemmed from Napoleon. But it is also true that the return of the third race (the Capetians) unfortunately coincided with the success of foreign arms. The Cossacks appeared in Paris at the very moment when Louis XVIII was again visible: thus to a humiliated France, private interests, and every sensitive feeling, the Restoration and the invasion were one and the same; the Bourbons became the victims of a confusion of events, of a slander changed, like so many others, into a half-truth. Alas! It is hard to escape the disasters that nature and time produce; you can fight against them manfully, but being in the right does not always guarantee victory. The Psylli, a tribe of ancient Africa, took up arms against the South Wind; a storm rose and swallowed these warriors: ‘The Nasamonians, ‘says Herodotus, ‘seized their abandoned lands.’

In speaking of the final misfortune of the Bourbons, their beginnings come to mind: I do not know what prophecy of their tomb was heard beside their cradle. Henri IV no sooner found himself master of Paris than he was seized by a gloomy presentiment. The attempts at assassination which were repeated, without diminishing his courage, depressed his natural gaiety. In the procession of the Holy Spirit, on the 5th of January 1595, he appeared dressed in black, bearing a plaster on his upper lip covering the scar that Jean Châtel had made over his mouth while attempting to strike at his heart. He had a gloomy face; Madame de Balagny asking him the cause, he replied: ‘How could I be happy viewing such an ungrateful people, who, though I always do and have done everything I can for them, and though I would sacrifice a thousand lives for their security if God had given me so many, are always making fresh attempts on me, for since I have been here I have been unable to attest to anything else?’

Yet those very people cried: ‘Long live, the King!’ ‘Sire, said a lord of the court, see how all your people rejoice to see you.’ Henri shook his head: ‘They are merely people. If my greatest enemy was where I am, and they saw him pass, they would do as much for him as for me and shout still more loudly.’

A Leaguer, seeing the King sunk in the depths of his carriage, said: ‘He’s on the back of the cart already’ Does it not seem to you that the Leaguer was describing Louis XVI travelling from the Temple to the scaffold?

On Friday the 14th of May 1610, the King, returning from Les Feuillants with Bassompierre and the Duc de Guise, said to them: ‘You do not know me yet, you gentlemen, but when you have lost me, then you will know my worth and the difference between me and other men.’ – ‘My God, Sire,’ replied Bassompierre, ‘will you never cease troubling us with talk of your imminent death?’ And then the Marshal reminded Henri of his glory, his prosperity, and the good health that prolonged his youth. ‘My friend,’ the King responded, ‘we must forget all that.’ Ravaillac was at the gates of the Louvre.

Bassompierre withdrew and only saw the King again in his room.

‘He was lying there’ he says, ‘on his bed; and Monsieur de Vic, sitting on the same bed, had placed his cross of the Order against his lips, and asked him to think of God. Monsieur le Grand (the Grand Écuyer) on arrival fell on his knees by the bedside and took the King’s hand which he kissed, and I flung myself at his feet which I embraced weeping bitterly.’

Such is Bassompierre’s account.

Pursued by these sad memories, it seemed to me that I had seen the last Bourbons pass, sad and melancholy, through the vast rooms of the Hradschin, as the first Bourbon passed through the gallery of the Louvre; I had come to kiss the feet of dead royalty. Whether it has died for ever or whether it will be reborn, it will own my last fealty: the day after its final dissolution, is the first day for me on which the Republic can commence. Should the Fates, who must edit my Memoirs, not publish them quickly, it will be seen, when they appear and are read and weighed, to what extent I am mistaken in my regrets and my conjectures. – Respecting misfortune, respecting what I have served and will continue to serve at the cost of my repose in my last days, I trace these lines, true or mistaken, across my falling hours, leaves, weightless and dry, that the breath of eternity will soon disperse.

If the noble lineages are approaching their end (a departure deriving from the possibilities for the future and the indestructible hopes that stir ceaselessly in men’s hearts) would it not be better for them to vanish in a finish worthy of their grandeur, into the darkness of the past along with the centuries? To prolong one’s days beyond the brightness of one’s renown is futile; the world grows weary of you and your noise; it wishes you to be as you once were forever: Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon have vanished in accord with the laws of fame. To die beautifully, one must die young; say not to the children of spring: ‘See! There is that genius; that person; that race the world applauded, for whose least hair, smile, glance one paid with one’s life!’ How sad it is see the aged Louis XIV finding no one to talk to of his century, other than the old Duc de Villeroi! It was a last victory for the Great Condé on the edge of his grave to have encountered Bossuet: the orator stirred the silent waters of Chantilly; from the old man’s dotage he re-shaped the adolescence of youth; he re-tinted the hair on the conqueror of Rocroi’s brow, in bidding, he Bossuet, an immortal farewell to his white hair. You, who love glory, be mindful of your grave: sleep well there; try to cut a fine figure there, since there you will remain.