DON QUIXOTE IN THE FLESH.
WE are inclined to think, from the detailed story given in the Times of Saturday, from the broad facts admitted in the Union, and from the hints given in Parisian jeetrnals which are under the threat of suppression without reason assigned, that the story of the Comte de Chambord's recent residence in Paris may be true. Any detail may be incorrect or exaggerated, but the main story as we shall repeat it is, we suspect, true; and if it is true, it is perhaps the most dramatic incident in all French history, one which, considering the ridicule occasionally thrown on our estimate of the Comte de Chambord, we cannot quote without a certain feeling of pleasure. The story is that the Count, aware that if the proposal for prolonging Marshal MacMahon's powers were rejected, the Republic would be established, decided to visit Paris and Versailles, to'cletermine for himself in which way his own votes, the votes of the men personally devoted to his house, should be cast, and generally to ascertain the state of affairs and his own prospect of a throne. Quite aware that no one in power in Paria,—neither the Marshal, nor the Due de Broglie, nor M. Benle, their Minister of the Interior, would set the police on him, he crossed the frontier, and established himself ip Paris, in the residence of a devoted Legitimist, only too honoured by the presence of his Sovereign. He met the principal Legitimists, went to Versailles to hear the debating, and either decided that his followers should vote against the Prolongation, or that the struggle would end if they were left to themselves in a defeat for the Marshal. Thereupon he declared, to the amazed annoyance of his followers, that his duty was to present himself before the National Assembly, and by making a quasi-royal speech from the Tribune, clear up finally, as he mid, the misapprehensions existing as to his policy. A more extra- ordinary resolution perhaps never entered into the mind of man, and we cannot avoid a wish that it had been carried out. Of course it looks to the last degree absurd. The notion that he had no place in the Tribune, that as a mere French citizen, con- spictious for antiquity of descent and connection with French history, he had no right to be in the Chamber at all, far less to address it ; that be would be pulled down by ushers, and sent to prison by M. Buffet, evidently never crossed the Count's imagina- tion; but there was no particular reason why it should have done so. If Marshal MacMahon were, as he believed, and for a moment half the world believed, merely his Lieutenant-General, and if his forty devotees would dare anything for him, the ushers would have been powerless, the President silent, and he himself as safe from violence as a Pretender could be. A direct vote would at once have entitled him to be heard, but we have a fancy that the Assembly, half-stupified, half-curious, and alto- gether interested, would, when its members recognised his person, have let him say what he had to say. The Right, of course, would ; the Right Centre would have been checked by the Due d'Aumale ; the Left Centre would have crouched ; and the Left would have been as sure of their man, as willing to let him say his say, as Exeter Hall would be to let the Pope talk for half an hour. They would have believed that his pretensions must come out in some intolerable form, or that he would stamp himself for ever as a cleric. The scene afterwards would have been terrific, but the speech would have been curious, and would probably have let unusual light on the internal mind of a person who interests Europe not so much by his intellect, or even by his claims, as by his curious separateness, alike of destiny and of character, from anybody else within its frontiers. The exile of Frohadorf,118 his first effort in oratory, trying to tell a French Assembly what in that strange sixteenth-century brain it appeared right to do or leave undone, would have been a spectacle of almost unequalled interest. Everything happens in France, and "Henri Cinq " talking frankly to an assemblage elected by universal suffrage, styling itself Republican, and claiming sovereignty in his despite, would have furnished a scene such as man never saw since the night on which an Assembly passed sentence on Louis XVI. It was a pity, on msthetic grounds, to stop him, and except that he ought not to have spoken without permission, his speech would not, after all, have been so unreasonable a proceeding. Why should not the Pretenders speak one after another, like Presbyterian clergymen "under call," and say before the representatives of France what they have got to say for themselves, without prompters or written papers? Some one of them might have somewhat to utter worth hearing, wildly credttlous though that opinion may seem. And if the Count had nothing to say worth saying, all France through the Assembly would have recognised him as a King impossible except for those who, by the strangest of all confusions of thought, believe at once in Divine Right and in a Vicegerent of Christ from whom alone right can spring.
By some pressure, the nature of which we scarcely comprehend —for after all, force could scarcely have been employed—the Comte was dissuaded from this idea, and he then, it is stated, con- ceived one still more romantic, one full of Quixotry as mad as ever Cervantes meant to ridicule, and yet also full of the energy and heroism which Cervantes intended that the world should recognise in the chivalry he laughed down. Henri Cinq, fearing a vote which, in his judgment, would be fatal to France, proposed to gather together the Princes of his house, from the coldly sensible heir to the stern soldier who is trying Marshal Bazaine, and ride from Versailles into Paris, march slowly up past the Bastille Column to the Louvre, and there demand entrance to his borne as King of France! It was represented to him that Paris could not bear it ; that he would be stopped at the barrier ; that he would be shot over and over again before he reached' the Louvre ; that when there he would be refused admittance as a person without rights ; that even there he would be only a citizen, and that he might cover the Monarchy with ridicule. To the threat of assassination he replied only, it is said, "I have heirs now ;" and to every other menace, that it was his clear duty as King of France to enter first into the breach by which France was threatened. It was the maddest Quixotry ever heard of, the decision of a man understanding neither his century nor his people; of a recluse just emerged from a monastery ; but the hostile vote being granted, we are by no means sure that he would not momentarily have succeeded. The Marshal, in his rage at his own defeat, might have accepted the Monarchy as "Indispensable to order." The very audacity of the thing, the utter courage, the unreasoning confidence in self-imagined right, would have charmed hall the Parisians ; and why, with a state of siege, a Monarchical majority, and a beaten Marshal, should he have ex- pected active resistance? He might have been shot ; and what then'? Probably what has always happened in France, an outburst of enthusiasm for the man crushed by the crime all Frenchmen hate, not perhaps on the ground of morality, but as a distinct breach of the laws of honour and fair-play. He might have been arrested by gendarmerie, tried for creating a disturbance in the streets, and sentenced to six weeks' imprisonment ; but his friends are too powerful to allow him to be covered with ridicule in that formal style. He might have been arrested by the soldiers, and whirled rapidly across the frontier ; but the soldiers' action would have depended on an order which the Legitimists might pos- sibly have arranged. It was a bold and, in its way, a chivalric dream, and low as we place the judgment of the dreamer, who would not have been followed by a member of his House, the Princes being people of prudence rather than of enterprise, we cannot refuse to him the admiration we give to his Spanish autitype. He must have failed ? Well, perhaps so, or cer- tainly so, but so thought advisers of Charles Edward when he began his wonderful march to Derby. In the anarchical condition of opinion in France, in the alarm which would have been created by the rejection of Macblahon, in the utter stupor of surprise at an adventure so madly gallant, what might not have happened ! The affair would not have been half so ridiculous as that of Boulogne ; and how many steps was the ridiculous adventurer of that enterprise, reading him as we now do by the light of his subsequent career, from the throne of France? We believe that, granted the hostile vote, and Marshal MacMahon's consequent acquiescence, the Comte de Chambord'e fit of chivalric madness gave him the best chance he ever had in his entire life. For, assuming the story to be true, the attempt would have revealed to Paris and all France, in a day, in a minute, at each footfall of his horse, that there was in the Exile of Frohadorf something besides a cleric and an absolutist, a dash of the hare-brained courage which was in the King whom the recluse has so oddly chosen for himself as his own most fitting exemplar. His proposal, if executed, would have shown to all men why he quotes always the King whose steps he has never followed. After all, what would Henry of Navarre have done under those precise circumstances ? Ridden into Paris just as his suc- cessor proposed to do, utterly regardless of anything but his own birthright, as he deemed it, and the necessities of France. It was the boldest, maddest thing of our day, bold and mad as Garibaldi's seizure of a throne as a railway passenger ; and if there were among the Kings many men capable of such acts, there would be fewer Republicans. This one, in the long run, was not capable. He retreated before an unexpected ob- stacle, the vote, and did not, being Bourbon, seize his hour; but the opportunity may for ten minutes have been at his disposal, and if he had seized it, he might for a time have been a recognised King of France. The Parisians are not Legiti- mists, but neither are they of the men who atop a stage situation because it is too dramatic. We believe his reign would have been a pure misfortune, as the influences around him and his own want of comprehension of his century would have made him a mere point of attack for another Revolution, while he would not have had the strength of intellect to resist ill-advisers ; but to blame him for the one dramatic conception of our day, for a deed of daring that, had it succeeded, would have immortalised him, is fairly beyond our power. It is the first thing these Bourbons have ever done, or rather thought of doing, since 1789, which is outside and above the claim they make to sovereignty by succession. There was little chance—no chance, if you will—for this Don Quixote, for he was in France, where windmills hit back straight ; but if he were riding up and down Navarre, seeking the throne of Spain, Emilio Castelar would have to keep sharper watch than the Carnets have yet imposed upon his scouts.
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