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the mandatories and representatives of the people were the only proper organs of public opinion; while others asserted, with equal zeal, the old doctrine, of the king being the true representative of the whole nation, and therefore the only true organ of their thoughts. The king is indeed the representative of the people, but he is so only in regard to the executive power, with which he is clothed for their behoof. According to our ideas, indeed, it being supposed that three bodies jointly invested with legislative authority exist in a state, it seems very difficult to understand upon what rational plea any one of these bodies should be supposed to have no right of suggesting to the consideration of the others a measure, which cannot be carried into effect without the consent of the whole. As it was, no change was introduced into the system adopted by the charter, in consequence of the discussions of this kind which occurred in the assembly. And in truth, the difficulty is one of such a nature, that, however troublesome it may be for the moment, it cannot continue long in operation. Whatever the theory and the form may be, means will easily be found to secure the introduction, in practice and in effect, of a liberty, the want of which will probably be alike disagreeable, upon reflection, to all the parties concerned in the dis

cussion.

In the meantime, the spirit of loyal, ty continued to manifest itself, from day to day, with increasing vigour,

both within the Chambers and without them. In various towns, (that of Montpellier, we believe, having set the first example,) there were circulated papers, expressive of their fervent attachment to the House of Bourbon, and more particularly execrating and renouncing the regicides. These papers lay at the houses of notaries, and in the public offices, and were signed by multitudes of all classes, in the manner of petitions to parliament among ourselves, after which they were published and placarded in the journals, and on the walls of their respective cities. In other places, it being remarked that some of the once venerated Trees of Liberty still survived, the mayors and other magistrates published edicts, declaring the existence of these to be an insult to "the wounded loyalty of all French hearts," and monuments of the murder of the king. Processions, therefore, were formed, and the devoted trees were cut down in the midst of all manner of civic pomp; they were not, however, burned, as might have been expected amidst such a blaze of loyalty, but carefully sold for behoof of "the disconsolate poor." These modes of expression however, although perhaps a little theatrical and absurd, should by no means be permitted to throw any ridicule upon the great and generous public feeling from which they undoubtedly took their rise, It was a natural and a proper feeling which prompted the French to wipe out, in as far as was possible, the traces of that guilt which

The formula of one of these papers was as follows:-"We, the undersigned inhabitants of Versailles, swear, in presence of the Almighty God and his holy Evangelists, that never having adhered, by act or will, to the impious and seditious principles introduced by a factious minority, we regard the death of the most Christian King Louis XVI. as the most execrable of all crimes; we acknowledge that the calamities with which God has afflicted our unhappy country are the just punishment of it; and declare, that our greatest regret is, our not having been able to give the last drop of our blood to arrest the fatal stroke, which fell on a head no less dear than sacred."

had polluted the tenour of their history, and broken the bonds of their confidence.

Accordingly, we find that other methods of expressing the same feeling were adopted by the highest bodies in the state. Very soon after the passing of the bill of amnesty, the king sent down to the Lower Chamber the plan of a law regarding the observance of the 21st of January, the anniversary of the death of the king, his predecessor, and the erection of monuments to his memory, and that of his Queen, the Dauphin, Louis XVII. and Madame Elizabeth. The royal message was brought to the Deputies by M. de Sostheve de Larochefoucalt, and to the Peers by the Keeper of the Seals. "A general prayer," such was the language of their communications, "is pleading throughout all France. France demands an expiatory festival to commemorate her regrets, and the religious reverence with which she will regard, to the most distant futurity, the memory of the prince torn from her love by the fury of parricides. Let a monument, let a day of holy observance, bear witness through every age to the love with which the French lament that august and sacred victim." The bill itself was as follows: :

"L. The 21st of January, in every year, shall be a holiday, and a day of mourning throughout the whole kingdom.

" II. In conformity with the ordinance of last year, a solemn service, peculiar to this day, shall be performed in every church of France.

"III. Monuments, expressive of the national sorrow, shall be erected, at the national expence, to the martyr king, his son, the Queen Marie An

toinette, Madame Elizabeth, and the Duke d'Enghien."

This law was adopted unanimously by both Chambers, and addresses, signed by all the members of each House, were presented to the king the day after it was passed. On the 21st of January, accordingly, the church of St Denis was again hung in black, and the majestic ceremonial of the Roman church exhausted every instrument of splendour and of harmony in honour of the murdered princes of the illustrious house, whose ancestors had, for more than eight centuries, reposed beneath its roof. The fate of this royal cemetery had undergone strange vicissitudes in the course of the Revolution. Not contented with refusing to the body of Louis XVI. a place beside his fathers, the zealots of the early period had violated the sepulchres of long buried monarchs, scattered their dust, and broken and defaced their monuments. When the first storm had subsided, antiquarianism in some measure did the work of loyalty, and the remaining fragments of the royal tombs were arranged with care in the "Museum of French Monuments," an institution which owed its origin to the celebrated M. Millin.* Napoleon, on his assumption of the imperial dignity, and connection by marriage with the old governors of Europe, was anxious, as has already often been remarked, to revive in his own favour those sentiments of attachment to royal authoris ty, which the violences of the Revolution had almost entirely eradicated among the subjects of his empire. He had the portraits of the Bourbon kings, even of Louis XVI. in his anti-chamber; the minutest ceremonial of the Bourbon court was revived with a childish degree of accuracy; and it

Author of the Tour through the South of France, &c. and Editor of the Magazin Encyclopedique. This great scholar died in 1817.

seemed almost as if, in spite of himself, Buonaparte could not entirely divest himself of prejudices, which must have been instilled into his breast, while, in his early years, he bore the uniform, and received education at the expence of Louis. At this period the emperor issued an edict, for purifying St Denis from the sacrilegious invasion which the ashes of his royal predecessors had sustained. Expiatory services were performed in the church; and, it being impossible to restore the monuments, to say nothing of the ashes, to their former situations, three separate chapels were set apart by him for "the three races of French kings," while the chancel of the church was reserved as the future cemetery of the imperial dynasty itself. There was considerable shrewdness in this arrangement of Napoleon. He contrived, as we see, to pay a tribute of respect to the holy character conferred by the oil of coronation; while, at the same time, he took care to keep before the eyes of his people the possibility of this right divine being transferred from one race to another-from the blood of Clovis to that of Charlemagne from Charlemagne to Capet-from Capet to Buonaparte. The superior grandeur of his own achievements, and his confidence in the yet more stable foundations of his own empire, were, symbolized not obscurely in the more magnificent receptacle provided for himself and the future princes of his line.

The funeral rites performed in honour of Louis XVI. and his queen, in the beginning of the year 1815, were the first ceremonies of the kind which followed the regulations promulgated by Napoleon and the second downfall of the adventurer's dynasty was now marked by a repetition of the same services in honour of the martyrs of the house of Bourbon. The Cham

bers of Deputies and of Peers again attended in deep mourning; the troops were again present, with arms reversed and banners covered with crape; but we have seen enough in the history both of the Chambers and of the soldiery, to authorise the belief, that the manifestations of loyalty exhibited on this occasion by both bodies, were far more uniformly sincere than those of their predecessors in 1815. The sentiments of propriety, as well as of loyalty, were no longer outraged by the sight of the Soults and the Fouchés bearing the pall above the coffin of Louis XVI.; nor were the anthems in honour of St Louis and Henry IV. echoed by the voices of men who had been so easily persuaded to transfer their devotion to swell the acclamations of the Champ de Mai. In our own country, the anniversary of the death of King Charles is still. observed as a holiday of the church;. although, even in the British Parliament, that death is spoken of at times as an event by no means worthy of such solemn lamentation. In France, the death of Louis is likely to be celebrated by a people still more divided in their opinions regarding their mo-, narch's fate; but, for the present, the legislative bodies of the kingdom contained apparently a very small proportion of persons disposed to enter with coldness into the services of the 21st of January. By a wise arrangement of the king, no formal eulogy of his brother was permitted to weaken the effect of the awful ceremonies of the day. The only express commemoration of the departed monarch, consisted in the reading of his last will; that beautiful document, which is already well known to our readers, and which, all will allow, is well fitted, if anything can be so, to do new honour to the memory of Louis, and to deepen the penitence of the French.

Very shortly after this solemnity, there was discovered, by a singular accident, a letter written by Marie Antoinette, on the night immediately preceding her execution, and address ed to her sister-in-law, Madame Elizabeth. The authenticity of this letter was ascertained by those acquainted with the hand-writing of the queen, and also (an affecting memorial of the situation in which it was composed) by those who knew the hand-writing of her jailors; for their names had been added as witnesses to the document. M. de Cazes was employed by the king to read this letter to the Chamber of Deputies, who received it as might have been expected from the tenor of their late enactments. The same letter was read to the House of Peers the following day, where it met with a reception no less respectful. Among the many speeches pronounced upon this occasion, the most praised by the royalist journalists, was that of the Viscount de Chateaubriand," A month," said he, " has just elapsed since we were present at St Denis. There you heard the testament of Louis XVI. Here is another testament; when Marie Antoinette wrote it, she had but four hours more to live. Have you observed in these last sentiments of a queen, a mother, a sister, a widow, and a woman, any symptoms of feebleness? the hand was as her heart; her writing is in no respect altered. Marie Antoinette, from the depth of her dungeon, writes to Madame Elizabeth with the same tranquillity which might have been expected in the midst of the splendours of Versailles! The first crime of the Revolution is the death of the king; but the most frightful is that of the queen. The monarch, at least, preserved something of his royalty even in his fetters, even to his scaffold; the tribunal of his pretended judges was numerous; some testimo

nies of respect were granted to the king, even in the Tower of the Temple; last of all, such was their generosity, such their magnificence, the son of St Louis, the heir of so many kings, was attended at his death by a priest of his religion, and was not dragged upon the same car with vulgar victims. But she, the daughter of the Caesars, covered with rags, and reduced to arrange those rags herself, obliged, in her humid prison, to wrap her frozen feet in the covering of wretchedness-insulted before an infamous tribunal by a few rude assassins, who called themselves her judgesdragged to punishment upon a cartand yet, nevertheless, always a queen! It would require the courage of the royal victim herself to be able to finish the recital of her afflictions.

"Twenty three years have elapsed since this letter was written. Those who had a hand in the crimes of that epoch, (those, at least, who have not been summoned before the judgmentseat of their Maker,) have enjoyed three and twenty years of what the world calls prosperity. They cultivated their fields in peace, as if their hands had been innocent; they planted trees for their children, as if Heaven had revoked the sentence which it pronounced of old against the race of the ungodly. The very man who has preserved for us this testament of Marie Antoinette, had purchased the estate of Monboissier, himself one of the judges of Louis XVI.; he had erected on this estate a monument to the memory of the defender of Louis; he had engraven thereon an epitaph in French verses, in praise of M. de Malesherbes. Let us not admire this, gentlemen; let us rather weep for France. This fearful impartiality, productive neither of remorse, nor of expiations, nor of change of life; this calmness of guilt, judging equitably of virtue; all announces a total de

vour was shared by all who were present in the Chamber with him. But the hearts of those men must indeed be framed of strange materials, who could read without emotion the last gentle words of this unfortunate princess. No feeling of wrath or repining is permitted to mingle with that christian resignation, wherewith this afflicted heroine contemplated the late sufferings of her husband, and the approach of that light which was soon to put a period to her own. In her breast

rangement in the moral world, the confusion of good and evil, the dissolution of society. But let us ad mire, gentlemen, that Providence, whose eyes are never averted from the guilty he believes he shall escape amidst the tumults of revolutions; he arrives at power and fortune; generations pass away, years accumulate, remembrance becomes dim, impressions are effaced all appears to be forgot ten. Of a sudden, behold! vengeance arrives, in front of the criminal, uṇforeseen and irresistible. In vain does the testament of Louis secure favour to the guilty; a species of "Revenge, and all ferocious thoughts frenzy siezes them; they themselves tear that testament, and refuse to be saved. The voice of the people made itself be heard in the voice of the deputies; the sentence of the regicides was pronounced, and, such has been the strange linking together of events, the first result of this sentence has been the strange discovery of the testament of our queen."

Such were the expressions of an enthusiastic and devoted royalist. We must not imagine that the same fer

were dead.

Subdued, but not exhausted by her adversities, she retains the memory of her blood and station, only to add a higher gracefulness to the calm and uncomplaining meekness with which she meditates upon her wrongs. We shall insert in a note, the words of this affecting letter, because it forms one of the most sacred monuments from which hereafter the history of the Revolution will be drawn. *

*"October 16, half past four in the morning. It is to you, sister, that I write for the last time; I have just been condemned, not to an ignominious death-it is such to the guilty alone-but to rejoin your brother. Innocent like him, I hope to shew the same firmness in my last moments. I experience the tranquillity of mind ever attending a guiltless conscience. It grieves me very sensibly to leave my poor children; you know that I existed only for them and you, my kind and affectionate sister; you, who have, through affection, sacrificed every thing in order to be with In what situation do I leave you! I learned from what passed at my trial, that my daughter had been separated from you. Alas! poor child, I dare not write to her; she would not receive my letter. I do not know even whether this will reach you. Receive here my blessing for them both; I hope that one day, when they are older, they will be re-united to you, and enjoy your tender cares without interruption.

us.

Let them both reflect on what I have unceasingly taught them, that virtuous principles and the exact performance of every duty, are the first basis of life; that their happiness will depend on their mutual affection and confidence. Let my daughter feel, that considering her age, she ought always to assist her brother with such advice as her reflection and her superior experience may suggest; let my son, in his turn, shew his sister every attention and kindness that affection can inspire; in a word, let them both feel, that in whatever situation they may-be placed, they will not be truly happy but by being united; let them take example from us: how much consolation in our misfortunes has our affection afforded us! And, in prosperity;

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