CHAPTER XVIII.
RESTORATION OF DIVINE RIGHT.
With the fall of the Dictatorship, an entire European system crumbledaway, and the Empire vanished in a shadow which resembled that of theexpiring Roman world. Nations escaped from the abyss as in the time ofthe Barbarians; but the Barbarism of 1815, which could be called byits familiar name the counter-revolution, had but little breath, soonbegan to pant, and stopped. The Empire, we confess, was lamented, andby heroic eyes, and its glory consists in the sword-made sceptre; theEmpire was glory itself. It had spread over the whole earth all thelight that tyranny can give,--a dim light, we will say, an obscurelight; for when compared with real day, it is night. This disappearanceof the night produced the effect of an eclipse.
Louis XVIII. re-entered Paris, and the dances of July 8 effaced theenthusiasm of March 20. The Corsican became the antithesis of theBearnais, and the flag on the dome of the Tuileries was white. Theexile was enthroned, and the deal table of Hartwell was placed beforethe fleur-de-lysed easy-chair of Louis XIV. People talked of Bouvinesand Fontenoy as if they had occurred yesterday, while Austerlitz wasantiquated. The throne and the altar fraternized majestically, andone of the most indubitable forms of the welfare of society in the19th century was established in France and on the Continent,--Europetook the white cockade. Trestaillon was celebrated, and the motto,_nec pluribus impar_, reappeared in the stone beams representing asun on the front of the barracks, on the Quai d'Orsay. Where therehad been an Imperial Guard, there was a "red household;" and the archof the Carrousel, if loaded with badly endured victories, feeling notat home in these novelties, and perhaps slightly ashamed of Marengoand Arcola, got out of the difficulty by accepting the statue of theDuc d'Angoulême. The cemetery of the Madeleine, a formidable publicgrave in '93, was covered with marble and jasper, because the bones ofLouis XVI. and Marie Antoinette were mingled with that dust. In themoat of Vincennes a tomb emerged from the ground, as a reminder thatthe Duc d'Enghien died there in the same month in which Napoleon wascrowned. Pope Pius VII., who had performed the ceremony very close uponthat death, tranquilly blessed the downfall, as he had blessed theelevation. There was at Schönbrunn a shadow four years of age, whom itwas seditious to call the King of Rome. And these things took place,and these kings regained their thrones, and the master of Europe wasput in a cage, and the old regime became the new, and the light andthe shadow of the earth changed places, because on the afternoon of asummer day a peasant boy said to a Prussian in a wood, "Go this way andnot that!"
That 1815 was a sort of melancholy April; the old unhealthy andvenomous realities assumed a new aspect. Falsehood espoused1789; divine right put on the mask of a charter; fictions becameconstitutional; prejudices, superstitions, and after-thoughts, havingarticle fourteen in their hearts, varnished themselves with liberalism.The snakes cast their slough. Man had been at once aggrandized andlessened by Napoleon; idealism, in this reign of splendid materialism,received the strange name of ideology. It was a grave imprudence ofa great man to ridicule the future; but the people, that food forpowder, so fond of the gunner, sought him. "Where is he? What is hedoing?" "Napoleon is dead," said a passer-by to an invalid of Marengoand Waterloo. "He dead!" the soldier exclaimed; "much you know abouthim!" Imaginations deified this thrown man. Europe after Waterloowas dark, for some enormous gap was long left unfilled after thedisappearance of Napoleon. The kings placed themselves in this gap,and old Europe took advantage of it to effect a reformation. Therewas a holy alliance,--Belle Alliance, the fatal field of Waterloo hadsaid beforehand. In the presence of the old Europe reconstituted, thelineaments of a new France were sketched in. The future, derided bythe Emperor, made its entry and wore on its brow the star--Liberty.The ardent eyes of the youthful generation were turned toward it; but,singular to say, they simultaneously felt equally attached to thisfuture Liberty and to the past Napoleon. Defeat had made the conqueredman greater; Napoleon fallen seemed better than Napoleon standingon his feet. Those who had triumphed were alarmed. England had himguarded by Hudson Lowe, and France had him watched by Montcheme. Hisfolded arms became the anxiety of thrones, and Alexander called him hisinsomnia. This terror resulted from the immense amount of revolution hehad in him, and it is this which explains and excuses Buonapartisticliberalism. This phantom caused the old world to tremble, and kings satuneasily on their thrones, with the rock of St. Helena on the horizon.
While Napoleon was dying at Longwood, the sixty thousand men who fellat Waterloo rotted calmly, and something of their peace spread over theworld. The Congress of Vienna converted it into the treaties of 1815,and Europe called that the Restoration.
Such is Waterloo; but what does the Infinite care? All this tempest,all this cloud, this war, and then this peace. All this shadow did notfor a moment disturb the flash of that mighty eye before which a grub,leaping from one blade of grass to another, equals the eagle flyingfrom tower to tower at Notre Dame.