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Louis-Philippe was hardly more than a delegate of the bourgeois class, who now reaped the full benefits of the great Revolution and entered into possession of its spoils. During Jacobin dictature and Napoleonic sway, the bourgeoisie had played a waiting role.
I walked in the Palais-Royal to-day; and felt much more disposed to pity than envy the King of the French, as Louis-Philippe is styled, when I beheld a crowd of idle miscreants, assembled in front of his dwelling, rudely and boisterously vociferating his name, and in a tone much more resembling command than entreaty, desiring his presence.
"There are only two doors in my room, the Louis-Philippe room of which I told you, Raoul; a door through which Erik comes and goes, and another which he has never opened before me and which he has forbidden me ever to go through, because he says it is the most dangerous of the doors, the door of the torture-chamber!" "Christine, that is where we are!" "You are in the torture-chamber?"
He led me to a neat and decorous salon, furnished in the Louis-Philippe style, with stiff and heavy furniture, from which a little maid of sixteen, slender but not pretty, took off the covers in my honor. Then I was left alone.
This can have reference only to the "Three Glorious Days" of Revolution, 27th to 29th July 1830, during which Charles X. lost, and Louis-Philippe gained, a throne. In 1826 John had gone to Mexico, then looked upon as a land of promise for young Englishmen, who might expect to find fortunes in its silver mines. Allday, brother of Roger Kerrison, was there, and John Borrow determined to join him.
About the events of the 1830 Revolution the novelist was apparently but little concerned. True, the change was one of dynasty only, not of regime, albeit Louis-Philippe posed rather as a plebiscitary monarch. Balzac's clericalism and royalism, which ultimately became so crystallized, were at this date in a position of unstable equilibrium.
Louis-Philippe passed near the base of the column, which seemed to return a sullen echo to the voices that cheered him; did he, or those around him, remember their vicinity to this striking memorial of the inconstancy of the nation?
Is this saying that Louis-Philippe was already at this time thinking of dethroning his benefactor, his relative, and his King? We think not. He profited by the errors of Charles X.; but if Charles X. had not committed them, the idea of usurpation would not have occurred to the mind of the chief of the younger branch. Men are not so profoundly good or so profoundly wicked.
As Louis-Philippe justly observed when he recently inspected the exterior of the whole building, that it should no longer be called the Hôtel-de-Ville, but for the future the City Palace, as the splendour within it is not exceeded in any of the other palaces in Paris. The library belonging to this establishment consists of 55,000 volumes, and is very rich in manuscripts.
As daughter of a Marshal of the First Empire, the Countess preserved the highest regard for the people at the Tuileries, although she was the widow of Count Fontaine, who was one of the brood of Royer- Collard's conservatives, a parliamentarian ennobled by Louis-Philippe, twice a colleague of Guizot on the ministerial bench, who died of spite and suppressed ambition after '48 and the coup d'etat.