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It is said that the ministers were insulted as they entered. This looks ill; nevertheless, I trust that it is nothing more than a demonstration of the spirit that is rife in the people, and that no more violent ones will be resorted to. The visitors I have seen to-day seem much alarmed. The Duc de Guiche set off for St.-Cloud yesterday morning, the moment he had read the ordonnances.
It is said that Polignac is wholly ignorant of France, and will not listen to the opinions of those who could enlighten him. It is supposed that Charles X. is determined to push matters to extremity; to try the Chambers, and if his ministers are beaten, to dissolve the House and to govern par ordonnances du roi."
Seeing that he did not finish, and that he wished to tire us, and to manage the affair in his own way, I interrupted him, saying that the father and the son were two people; that the case in point respected the son alone, and that he had to determine whether an Intendant was authorised or not, by his office, to tax people at will; to raise imposts in the towns and country places of his department, without edicts ordering them, without even a decree of council, solely by his own particular ordonnances, and to keep people in prison four or five months, without form or shadow of trial, because they refused to pay these heavy taxes, rendered still more heavy by expenses.
With a few trifling alterations it was adopted. The Duke called on Marmont to-day, and received from him a military account of the affair at Paris. Marmont said he knew nothing of the Ordonnances, and disapproved of them. He was at the King's levée on the Tuesday, and was told there were quelques inquiétudes at Paris, and to take the command of the troops. He found only 7,000 men.
In January, 1830, he, along with Armand Carrel, Mignet, and other friends, started the National, and in its columns waged relentless war on the Polignac administration. The ministry met the opposition it had provoked by the Ordonnances of July. Among the other repressive measures that were taken was the sending of a commissary of police to the office of the National, interdicting its publication.
Filing past the brilliant staff, he had ridden at only a few yards' distance from his old acquaintance, and, as he saluted, had glanced involuntarily at the face that he had seen oftentimes in the Salles de Marechaux, and even under the roof of the regiment, ready to note a chain loose, a belt awry, a sword specked with rust, if such a sin there were against "les ordonnances" in all the glittering squadrons; and swept over him, seeing in him but one among thousands a unit in the mighty aggregate of the "raw material" of war.
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