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In spite of his old green damask dressing-gown and the bareness of the room in which he sat, where the floor was covered with a shabby tapestry in place of carpet, and the walls were hung with tavern-paper presenting the profiles of Louis XVI. and members of his family, traced among the branches of a weeping willow with other sentimentalities invented by royalism during the Terror, in spite of his ruins, the chevalier, trimming his beard before a shabby old toilet-table, draped with trumpery lace, exhaled an essence of the eighteenth century.
When it was a question of repelling royalism, the young conqueror relied on men like Augereau; when it was necessary to attract men of the old regime, Josephine was the bond of union between him and the French or Italian aristocracy. On her return to Paris, June 2, 1798, she shared her husband's glories. The little house in the rue Chantereine became more famous than the grandest palaces.
At bottom Napoleon III.'s ascendancy was due to several causes, that told against possible rivals rather than directly in his favour. Hatred of the socialists, whose rash political experiments had led to the bloody days of street fighting in Paris in June 1848, counted for much. The antiquated royalism of the Elder or Legitimist branch of that ill-starred dynasty made it equally an impossibility.
When the Duke of Orleans was arrested, Voidel, braving the fury of the revolutionary tribunals, had the courage to defend him, and placarded all the walls of Paris with an apology for the Duke and his two sons. This man, writing now in favour of royalism, can have no other object than to advance a member of the Orleans family to the throne."
Napoleon used this time of respite to form his army and stamp out opposition in France. The French royalist bands gave him little trouble. In the south-west the fleur-de-lys was speedily beaten down; but in La Vendée royalism had its roots deep-seated.
In his selfish royalism he had protested against the new French constitution as being unsuited to Corsica, "though it was exactly the same as that which brought us so much good and was wrested from us only amidst streams of blood." The letter is remarkable for the southern intensity of its passion, and for a certain hardening of tone towards Paoli.
"But Newcastle was at the time occupied by Monk." "Yes, monsieur le cardinal, and that is why I venture to call the idea courageous as well as devoted. It was necessary, if Monk refused the offers of the negotiator, to reinstate King Charles II. in possession of this million, which was to be torn, as it were, from the loyalty and not the royalism of General Monk.
A copy of that surreptitious edition of the Religio Medici found him a prisoner on suspicion of a too active royalism, and with much time on his hands. Browne, with all his distaste for controversy, thus found himself committed to a dispute, and his reply came with the correct edition of the Religio Medici published at last with his name.
Pining in the weariness of exile, he heard from his wife that he might be pardoned if he would perform some service for the Consular Government. At once he consented, and it was agreed that he should feign royalism, should worm himself into the secrets of the émigrés at London, and act as intermediary between them and the discontented republicans of Paris.
Latterly, however, the circles which he mostly frequented in Paris had voted strong revolutionary ardour to be mauvais ton; a kind of modulated royalism, or rather Louis Seizeism, had become fashionable; and Adolphe Denot was not the man to remain wilfully out of the fashion. On the 10th of August, he was a staunch supporter of the monarchy.
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