Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, February, 1885. Various
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of Canada); and myself. I was previously acquainted with all these gentlemen, and had met the Prince a few days previously at the house of Mr. John MacGregor, formerly Secretary of the Board of Trade, and member of Parliament for Glasgow. The Prince, who was then forty years of age, had long been a resident in London as an exile, spoke English exceedingly well, had thoroughly studied the working of the British constitution, and had learned to respect and apparently to love the English people. He was very taciturn and undemonstrative; his dull grey eyes seemed to have little speculation in them, and to have been given to him, if such an expression may be used, to look inwards upon himself rather than outwards upon the world. They brightened up at rare intervals when anything was said that particularly interested him. On this occasion the talk of the breakfast table turned a good deal upon French politics and the probability, more or less imminent, of a revolutionary outbreak in Paris, consequent upon the unwise opposition of Louis Philippe and his too obsequious minister, M. Guizot, to the question of the extension of the franchise and the reform of the French Parliament. As I had within a fortnight or three weeks returned from Paris, where I had associated with some leading liberal politicians, among others with Béranger the poet and the Abbé de Lamennais, my opinion upon the situation was asked, I think, by Mr. Rogers, and whether I thought the agitation would subside. “Not,” I said, “unless the King yields.” “He won’t yield, I think,” said the Prince; “he does not understand the seriousness of the case.” I told the Prince that Béranger, who knew the temper and sympathised with the opinions of the people, had predicted the establishment of a Republic, consequent upon the downfall of the monarchy, within less than a twelvemonth. Lamennais did not give the King so long a lease of power, but foresaw revolution within six months. The Prince remarked that “if there were barricades in the streets of Paris, such as those by which his way to the throne was won in 1830, the King would not give orders to disperse the mob by force of arms.” “Why do you think so?” asked Mr. Rogers. “The King is a weak man, a merciful man. He does not like bloodshed. I often think he was a fool not to have had me shot after the affair of Strasburg. Had our cases been reversed I know that I would have had him shot without mercy,” I thought little of this remark at the time, but in after years, when the exiled Prince became the powerful emperor, my mind often reverted to this conversation, and I thought that if King Louis Philippe had done what the Prince considered he ought to have done – and as he would have been fully justified by law, civil and military, as well as by state policy, in doing – the whole course of European history would have been changed. Personally, the Prince was highly esteemed by all who knew him. Stern as a politician, and in pursuit of the great object of his ambition, as in the famous coup d’état of 1851 by which he raised himself at a bound from the comparatively humble and uncertain chair of a President to the most conspicuous imperial throne in the world – he was, in private life, of a singularly amiable temper. He never forgot in his prosperity the friends or even the acquaintances of his adversity; never ceased to remember any benefit that had been conferred upon him, and not only to be grateful for it, but to show his gratitude by acts of kindness and generosity, if the kindness or generosity could be of benefit to the fortunes of the persons on whom it was bestowed. When he sought the hand in marriage of a Princess of the House of Austria, and the honor was declined for the occult and unwhispered reason that he was a parvenu and an upstart, and that his throne was at the mercy of a revolution (and what throne is not?), he married for pure love and affection a noble lady of inferior rank, and raised her to a throne which she filled for many years with more grace and splendor than any contemporary sovereign born in the purple of royalty had ever exhibited, Queen Victoria alone excepted.
The Prince thoroughly understood the character of the French people. Napoleon I. had called the English a nation of shopkeepers. Napoleon III. knew that the French were entitled in a far greater degree than the English to that depreciatory epithet. He knew that in their hearts they did not care so much for liberty and fraternity as they did for “equality,” – that what they wanted in the first place was peace, so that trade and industry might have a chance to prosper; and secondly, that France as a nation might be the predominant power in Europe. For the first reason, they required a master who would maintain order; for the second reason, they idolised the name of the first Napoleon. These two things were patent to the mind of Napoleon III., and formed the keystone of his domestic and foreign policy.
When London, about three months after the breakfast at Mr. Rogers’, was threatened, on April 10, 1848, by an insurrectionary mob of Chartists, under the guidance of a half-crazy Irishman, named Feargus O’Connor, who afterwards died in a lunatic asylum, the Prince volunteered to act as a special constable, for the preservation of the peace, in common with many thousands of respectable professional men, merchants, and tradesmen. I met him in Trafalgar Square, armed with the truncheon of a policeman. On this occasion, the Duke of Wellington, then commander-in-chief of the British army, had taken the precaution to station the military in sufficient numbers at all the chief strategical points of the metropolis ready, though concealed from the notice of the multitude, to act on an emergency. Happily their services were not required. The sovereign was popular; the upper and middle classes were unanimous; a large section of the laboring classes had no sympathy with Chartism, and the display of the civic force, with bludgeons and staves only, without firearms of any kind, was quite sufficient to overawe the rioters. I stopped for a minute to exchange greetings with the Prince, and said I did not think from all that I had heard that the Chartists would resort to violence, and that their march through the streets would be orderly. The Prince was of the same opinion, and passed upon his beat among other police special constables in front of the National Gallery.
As Lord William Lennox was of the breakfast party, I took the opportunity to ask him a question with regard to a disputed point. I had lately visited Brussels, the city in which I had passed my school-boy days, and which was consequently endeared to my mind by many youthful associations. The mother of Lord William, the beautiful Duchess of Richmond, had given a great ball on the night preceding the battle of Waterloo, in June, 1815, at which Lord William, then in his sixteenth year, was present. Every lover of poetry will remember the splendid description of this ball and of the subsequent battle which occurs in the third canto of Byron’s “Childe Harold.” The passage is unsurpassed in any language for the vigor, the picturesqueness, and the magnificence of its thought and diction, and in its relation to one of the most stupendous events in modern history.
There was a sound of revelry by night,
And Belgium’s capital had gather’d then
Her Beauty and her Chivalry, and bright
The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men;
A thousand hearts beat happily; and when
Music arose with its voluptuous swell,
Soft eyes look’d love to eyes which spake again,
And all went merry as a marriage bell;
But hush! hark: a deep sound strikes like a rising knell.
It has been generally asserted and believed that the ball was given by the duchess in the grand hall of the stately Hôtel de Ville in the Grande Place, and when in Brussels I heard the assertion repeated by many people, though denied by others. One old citizen, who remembered the battle well, affirmed it to have been at the Hôtel de Ville, which he saw brilliantly lighted up for the occasion, and passed among the crowd of equipages that filled the Grande Place, when setting down and taking up the ladies who graced the assembly with their presence. Another equally old and trustworthy inhabitant declared that to his personal knowledge the ball was given in the “Palais d’Aes,” a large building that adjoins the palace of the King of the Belgians, and is now used as a barrack; while a third affirmed it to have been held in the handsome hotel, adjoining the Chamber of Deputies, which was formerly occupied by Sir Charles Bagot, the British Ambassador to Brussels and the Hague in 1830. Thinking there could be no better authority than one who was present on the occasion, one, moreover, who was so nearly allied to the giver of the entertainment, I asked Lord William to decide the point. He replied at once that all these assertions were unfounded. His father, the Duke, took a large house in a back street, called the “Rue de la Blanchisserie” (street of the laundry), abutting on the boulevard, opposite the present Botanic Garden, and that the ball took place in the not extraordinarily spacious drawing-room of that mansion.