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Updated: May 24, 2025
He got a North Pole reception. In fact, M. de Martignac said that it was his busy day, and that playwriting was foolish business anyway; but if a man were bound to write, he should write to amuse, not to instruct. And young Hugo was bowed out. When he found himself well outside the door he was furious. He would see the King himself. And he did see the King.
"Ah, Monsieur de Martignac," he cried, with deep joy, "what a nation! what should we not do for it!" At the moment that Charles X. traversed the provinces of the east in triumph, the Duchess of Berry was making in the west a journey not less brilliant than that of the sovereign. Never was a princely journey more triumphal than that of the Duchess of Berry in the provinces of the west in 1828.
When the Ministry of M. de Villèle fell, and the Cabinet of M. de Martignac was installed, a new attempt at a Government of the Centre commenced, but with much less force, and inferior chances of success, than that which in 1816 and 1821, under the combined and separate directions of the Duke de Richelieu and M. Decazes, had defended France and the crown against the supremacy of the right and left-hand parties.
Neither the King nor himself would have consented, as I think, to encounter at that time the hazard of a new dissolution. M. de Châteaubriand was at Rome. On the formation of the Cabinet of M. de Martignac he had accepted that embassy, and from thence, with a mixture of ambition and contempt he watched the uncertain policy and wavering position of the Ministers at Paris.
A liberal ministry under Martignac was in power for a while; but in 1829 it was succeeded by a ministry the head of which was the unpopular Prince Polignac, and the other principal members of which were hardly less obnoxious. They represented the extreme reactionary and royalist party.
A year before this time, at the opening of the session of 1829, when the Cabinet of M. de Martignac still held power, and the department of Foreign Affairs had fallen vacant by the retirement of M. de la Ferronnays, M. de Polignac had endeavoured, in the debate on the address in the Chamber of Peers, to dissipate, by a profession of constitutional faith, the prejudices entertained against him.
Under the Martignac Ministry I considered it advisable to remain amongst them, that I might endeavour to moderate a little the wants and impatience of the external opposition, which operated so powerfully on the opposition in Parliament.
But, as it happens almost invariably, the errors of men stepped in to interrupt the progress of ideas by precipitating the course of events. The Martignac Ministry adopted a moderate and constitutional policy. Two bills, honestly intended and ably discussed, had given effectual guarantees, the one, to the independence of elections, and the other, to the liberty of the press.
By this time the barricades in the Rues Martignac and Bellechasse had been carried, the red-legs were beginning to make their appearance at the end of the Rue de Lille, and soon all that remained was a little band of fanatics and men with the courage of their opinions, Maurice and some fifty more, who were resolved to sell their lives dearly, killing as many as they could of those Versaillese, who treated the federates like thieves and murderers, dragging away the prisoners they made and shooting them in the rear of the line of battle.
It seems this is very necessary; for although their partisans can do little without their presence, they might do much with it. Martignac has got together sixty members of the Chamber of Deputies who will act en masse for royalty. There is no military force to keep people in order, and the National Guard does not like doing so. In fact the Revolution is not over.
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