Note 45 — Chapter X

Personally I saw nothing of the flight of the King, nor of the inside of the Tuileries, until the royal family were gone. The story of that flight was told to me several years later by the Duc de Montpensier. What is worse, in those days it never entered my mind that a time would come when I should feel desirous of committing my reminiscences to paper, consequently I kept no count of the hours that went by, and cannot, therefore, give the exact sequence of events. I do not know how long I stood among the soldiers and the crowd, scarcely divided from one another even by an imaginary line. It was not a pleasant crowd, though to my great surprise there were a great many more decently dressed persons in it than I could have expected, so I stayed on. About half an hour after the King re-entered the Tuileries, I noticed two gentlemen elbow their way through the serried masses. I had no difficulty in recognizing the one in civilian's clothes. Though he was by no means so famous as he became afterwards, there was hardly a Parisian who would not have recognized him on the spot. His portrait had been drawn over and over again, at least as many times as that of the King, and it is a positive fact that nurses frightened their babies with it. He was the ugliest man of the century. It was M. Adolphe Cremieux.[45] His companion was in uniform. I learnt afterwards that it was General Gourgaud, but I did not know him then except by name, and in connection with his polemics with the Duke of Wellington, in which the latter did not altogether behave with the generosity one expects from an English gentleman towards a fallen foe. As they passed, the old soldier must have been recognized, because not one, but at least a hundred cries resounded, "Vive la grande armée! Vive l'Empereur!" In after years I thought that these cries sounded almost prophetic, though I am pretty sure that those who uttered them had not the slightest hope of, and perhaps not even a desire for, a Napoleonic restoration; at any rate, not the majority. There is one thing, however, which could not have failed to strike the impartial observer during the next twenty years. I have seen a good many riots, small and large, during the Second Republic and the Second Empire. "Seditious cries," as a matter of course, were freely shouted. I have never heard a single one of "Vivent les D'Orléans!" or "Vivent les Bourbons!" I have already spoken more than once about the powerful influence of the Napoleonic legend in those days; I shall have occasion to refer to it again and again when speaking about the nephew of the first Napoléon.