THE QUEEN OF THE FRENCH.*
Tux list of Bourbon memoirs which the last few years have furnished to the students of the great European catastrophes of our and our fathers' generation is completed by this very lucid and interesting volume. That it suggests matter of present political interest is shown by the first edition having sold out so rapidly that when a few days after publication a copy was inquired for on behalf of the Spectator, it had to be produced from M.
Levy's private table ; there were none left on the shelves of that immense publishing house. We doubt not that the book will be received with interest in England, where the grand and somewhat austere figure of the aged Queen of the French so long survived, amidst the respect of all men.
Her birth carries us back to far-away days. She was born at Naples in 1782, her mother being daughter to Maria Theresa, and sister to Marie Antoinette ; Queen Caroline is not pleasantly renowned in England, having been mixed up with Nelson iu certain regrettable episodes of Ida great career. Upon these M. Trognon touches with a fea4ess pen. Ile eharea Louis Philippe's opinion of his mother-in-law, and does not hesitate to say so. For the rest, he does justice to certain good mid even great qualities. She was a good wife to a weak husband, and a devoted mother to a numerous offepriug ; she had plenty of ability and, it may be pre- sumed, a general desire to do her duty as queen. But she hated the French Revolution, which had tortured and then • murdered her sister, and she was unscrupulous and despotic iu her opposition, plotting and ordering with a desperation which brought her schemes to naught. She had Napoleon on one side of leer, and the cool, determined diplomatists of England on the other. Her career ended in her being ignominiously dismissed from Sicily by order of the Euglislt Ambassador ; and she went to end her days with her nephew at Vienna. Not long before her death she wrote to her daughter the Duchess of Genoa that her life was over. "I am no longer an object of interest to any save a few old women who•never stir from home, but who yet do come out to look at the last surviving child of the great Maria Theresa."
But whatever her political sins, she brought up her children carefully, and the l'riucess Amelia was a well taught, orderly, quiet little girl. The King her father spoilt her whenever he could get it chance. Nearly eighty years after, the aged Queen used to talk, at Twickenham, of being taken in her father's hunting parties near Caserta, and of the delight they gave her. Her youth kuew one great pleasure ; a long visit paid to Vienna in 1800. Of the ten children of the great Empress only two survived ; Queen Caroline and the Archduchess Elizabeth, abbess of Innspriiek ; but the Emperor Leopold bad left eight sous, and two of these were married to the Princess Amtilia's own sisters. Eight nice handsome young cousins, one of whom had a romantic habit of wandering beneath her windows, wore enough to make the time pass pleasantly to the best behaved young princess. It was the Archduke Antoine who showed so marked a preference ; but he was destined for the Church, and the youthful courtship came to nothing. One can- not help thinking that this peculiarly tranquil and conscientious nature would have been happier wedded to an Austrian Archduke than to tire uneasy fate of the Duke of Orleans.
Yet her marriage to the latter was purely one of choice. When
first they met, the Royal family of Naples was living in a sort of provincial exile at Palertno, Naples being in the hands of Bonaparte ; while the Duke of Orleans was only a cousin, regarded with peculiar disfavour, at the equally exiled Court of France. The Princess was twenty-seven, the Duke ten or twelve years older, and they seem to have been quite determined to marry each other very soon after their acquaintance began. It was not quite easy ; for the Duke was in bad odour for liberalism, and certain authorities of the Neapolitan Court tried to turn the scales against him. But the Princess declared she would enter it convent if the marriage were forbidden, and ou the 250 of November, 1809, she became the wife of Louis Philippe. The student of human nature may well wonder what quality in the Duke's nature won for him an affection which was in its way romantic, and never seems to have flagged for forty years. Whenever in her private diaries the wife mentions the husband, it is always with a touch of profound and even ceremonious allegiance. She calls him " the best of husbands,"
* 17e de Marie .tai Miro.; do Francais. Par M. Augusto Trognon, Paris
Michel Levy Prem.
and on the occasion of his ellest son's death, " that venerable and unfortunate father."
She held unswervingly to him under public circumstances which cannot but have been painful and disagreeable to her, a most Catholic Bourbon. She ha 1 great affection for Charles X. ; she dearly loved her first cousin, the Duchesse d'Angoula ; but the Citizen King was her lord and her king, and to him she sacrificed all her relations with them, not, so far as we are allowed to know, ever looking back, except on the occasion of the Duchesse d'Angoulerne's death in 1851, when she seems to have felt acutely that her place was not by her dying cousin's bed-side.
We will honestly state the principal impression made upon us by this memoir, for the life of the parents could not but powerfully influence the sons, and those sons are prominent amidst the powers and chances of the future of Europe. It seems to us that Lotiii Philippe to a certain extent misunderstood the principles of the Revolutionary party, and that his short reign, with its disastrous ending, proved his mistake. In this life of his devoted wife we see , him from the first an object of instinctive suspicion to the elder Bourbons ; and this suspicion he did not exactly deserve, for he was unquestionably a good man in the common sense of the word, and we, for one, do not believe he plotted against his cousins. But when, after 1815, he returned to Frauce and settled at the Palais Royal, he allowed himself to be in some sort the centre of the opposition, and the impression rests on our minds, though we are unable to cite texts to support it, that he did not bear himself towards the authorities at the Tuileries in such a manner as to induce them to listen to him. The fifteen years of the Restoration were all-important years for France. Alen of the most brilliant ability were coming into notice both in the political and the religious and literary spheres. It was then that 'Tiers and Guizot, Lamartino, Victor Hugo, Dupanloup, and Monte- lambert were all young,—they and many another such as they, whom France can show no more. We believe that a great and healthy activity then reigned in the country, and that the anta- gonism of the two parties might have been reduced to strong con- stitutional opposition. It is true that the second of the two legitimate Kings was a man, not so much intellectually bigoted, as naturally incapable of understanding any sort of monarchy but a pious paternal rule. Granted. But lie was already very old when he was driven away, and his heir was a boy of ten. It seems, looking back, as if a little patience, a little willingness to let the old type wear out by sheer force of time, might have saved France all that '48 and the Empire have wrought of woe. And we cannot but think that the next of kin to the Crown lacked a due sense of the importance of not breaking with national tradition, unless he were willing to give his whole strength to establishing Republican institutions. We think that he erred, in practical policy, when he sent one sou after another to take his seat on the benches of a public college, against the strong remonstrance of Louis XVIII. Abstractedly it might have been the best thing for the boys (though Louis Philippe himself had had an excellent private education), but it was not the best move in the very deli- cate and difficult circumstances of monarchy in France. We refer our readers to Marie Aunilie's remarkable and touching letter to the King on this head, as one of the many proofs of the way in which her judgment swayed to that of her husband. In short, our feeling is this,—either the monarchy was worth preserving, or it was not. If not, then Republican institutions should have been at once inaugurated in 1830. If it were, then the Duke of Orleans should have been scrupulously careful, amidst a singularly roman- tic and excitable people such as the French, not to break down in any one particular the prestige of the Crown. He took a middle course, and lost apparently all chance of influencing the Court to wiser counsels. We do not say he ever possessed much chance, for he was the son of Egalitis and under suspicion ; but still something he might have done, blessed as he was with a wife who in herself was acceptable to all. When the great crash came ho suffered himself to be pushed on to the vacant throne by the moderato Liberals (such, at least, is the view of his conduct distinctly put forward by M. Trognon), who hoped thus to save France from the Revolution. lie found that throne, indeed, a bed of thorns. Ho worked unceasingly for eighteen years, during which he had plot after plot to put down.ltThirteen times was his own life directly attempted, till at last his wife made up her mind never to leave Paris without him. She refused to go and see her dear daughter, the Queen of the Belgians, lest Louis Philippe should be assassinated in her absence. Assuredly the middle course he had sincerely tried to take was one unsuited to the genius of the people. He was no Wil- liam of Orange, nor was there in France that untouched noble class or that coarse, hard-headed squirearchy so wonderfully described by Thackeray, on whom our first Hanoverian Georges founded their constitutional throne. At the close of his life, when once more an exile iu England, Louis Philippe uttered one of those pregnant sentences in which men sum up their experience of their own mis- takes. Said he, "In France all is possible, the Republic, the Bona- pastes, the Comte de Chambord, my grandson,— all is possible; but nothing will be permanent, car its omit tame le respect." His flight in 1848 is told from his own diary ; we do not wonder that his daughter felt its undignified details acutely. It reads to us like a quaint nemesis upon the Citizen King's systematic lowering of the historic and poetic nimbus around the throne, that he should be welcomed on board the English ship which took him off from Havre by the captain's feigning words, 41 How are you, Uncle Republican institutions may be glorious aids to human develop- ment when limed upon such corner stones as a Washington or a Lafayette, and built up with men who bear the PilgriM Fathers names. But a monarchy of a thousand years, identified with all the moral and material growth of a people, is a grand thing also. If it is a symbolic fiction, it is a fiction which has had the use and force of a sublime reality, and its trappings are as the mask and buskins in which the heroes of the ancient drama subdued the wondering crowd. Compromise between these two ideas is only possible within very narrow limits, and that delicate line was over stepped by the " Citizen King."
To us his loving wife is the grander figure of the two. In her singlemindeduess she managed always to be the pious, conscientious, painstaking Christian which so thany women of her race have been, and yet to be to him the one friend who in her grave simplicity seems never to have thought him wrong. Both are passed away where all the harass of their royal blood, and the cruel responsibilities it entailed, can never vex them more.
We have only space to indicate the many interesting episodes of this book like the story of the marriage of the Princess Louise to King Leopold, and her death, which, writes one of her brothers, tore with grief " that ordinarily so cold husband." The account of the fatal accident to the young Duke of Orleans, always called " Chartres " at home, is told by his own sad mother's pen with heartrending simplicity. The artist-Princess Marie died in Italy of consumption, leaving one son, Philippe of Wurtemburg, his grandmother's peculiar care. Through all these trials we follow the Queen of the French to her long old age at Twickenham. The King died many years before she was called to her rest ; and this relic of an elder world lived to tell her grandchildren how at seven years old she had wept for her little betrothed Dauphin, the elder son of Louis XVI. (whose portrait is given in a charming group of Madame Lebrun's). Always good, honourable, and loving, she was a living proof among us until five years ago of the moral capacities of her much abused family. How many are there not who, when they hoar praise of a Neapolitan Bourbon, will mentally ask, " Can any good come out of Galilee? "
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