Note 403 — BOOK I[330] (continued 2)

The text of Chateaubriand's note to the Duchesse de Berry ran as follows:

"The persons in whom an honourable confidence has been placed cannot refrain from expressing their regret at the counsels in consequence of which the present crisis has arisen. Those counsels were given by men who were doubtless filled with zeal, but who are acquainted with neither the actual state of things nor the disposition of men's minds. It is a mistake to believe in the possibility of a movement within Paris. One would not find twelve hundred men, unmixed with police agents, who, for a few crown-pieces, would make a noise in the streets and who would then have to fight the National Guard and a faithful garrison. One is mistaken about the Vendée as one was mistaken about the South. That land of devotion and of sacrifices is afflicted with a numerous army, aided by the population of the towns, which are almost all anti-legitimist. A rising of peasants would hereafter lead only to the looting of the country-side and the consolidation of the present Government by an easy triumph. We think that, if the mother of Henry V. were in France, she ought to leave without delay, after ordering all her leaders to remain quiet. In this way, instead of coming to organize civil war, she would have come to command peace; she would have had the double glory of achieving an act of great courage and preventing the shedding of French blood. The wise friends of the Legitimacy, who were never warned of what it was proposed to do, who were never consulted on the hazardous steps which it was proposed to take, and who learnt the facts only after they had been accomplished, throw the responsibility of those facts upon those who advised them and carried them through. They can neither merit honour nor incur blame in the chances of either fortune."—B.