When we select from it some one figure at random, and attempt to make it live again in thought, it seems as strange to us as the world before the Deluge.
It is because it, too, as a matter of fact, has been engulfed in a deluge.
It has disappeared beneath two Revolutions.
What billows are ideas!
How quickly they cover all that it is their mission to destroy and to bury, and how promptly they create frightful gulfs!
Such was the physiognomy of the salons of those distant and candid times when M. Martainville had more wit than Voltaire.
These salons had a literature and politics of their own.
They believed in Fievee.
M. Agier laid down the law in them.
They commentated M. Colnet, the old bookseller and publicist of the Quay Malaquais.
Napoleon was to them thoroughly the Corsican Ogre.
Later on the introduction into history of M. le Marquis de Bonaparte, Lieutenant-General of the King’s armies, was a concession to the spirit of the age.
These salons did not long preserve their purity.
Beginning with 1818, doctrinarians began to spring up in them, a disturbing shade.
Their way was to be Royalists and to excuse themselves for being so.
Where the ultras were very proud, the doctrinarians were rather ashamed.
They had wit; they had silence; their political dogma was suitably impregnated with arrogance; they should have succeeded.
They indulged, and usefully too, in excesses in the matter of white neckties and tightly buttoned coats.
The mistake or the misfortune of the doctrinarian party was to create aged youth.
They assumed the poses of wise men.
They dreamed of engrafting a temperate power on the absolute and excessive principle.
They opposed, and sometimes with rare intelligence, conservative liberalism to the liberalism which demolishes.
They were heard to say:
“Thanks for Royalism!
It has rendered more than one service.
It has brought back tradition, worship, religion, respect.
It is faithful, brave, chivalric, loving, devoted.
It has mingled, though with regret, the secular grandeurs of the monarchy with the new grandeurs of the nation.
Its mistake is not to understand the Revolution, the Empire, glory, liberty, young ideas, young generations, the age.
But this mistake which it makes with regard to us,—have we not sometimes been guilty of it towards them?
The Revolution, whose heirs we are, ought to be intelligent on all points.
To attack Royalism is a misconstruction of liberalism.
What an error! And what blindness!
Revolutionary France is wanting in respect towards historic France, that is to say, towards its mother, that is to say, towards itself.
After the 5th of September, the nobility of the monarchy is treated as the nobility of the Empire was treated after the 5th of July.
They were unjust to the eagle, we are unjust to the fleur-de-lys.
It seems that we must always have something to proscribe!
Does it serve any purpose to ungild the crown of Louis XIV., to scrape the coat of arms of Henry IV.?
We scoff at M. de Vaublanc for erasing the N’s from the bridge of Jena!
What was it that he did?
What are we doing?
Bouvines belongs to us as well as Marengo.
The fleurs-de-lys are ours as well as the N’s.
That is our patrimony.
To what purpose shall we diminish it?
We must not deny our country in the past any more than in the present.
Why not accept the whole of history?
Why not love the whole of France?”
It is thus that doctrinarians criticised and protected Royalism, which was displeased at criticism and furious at protection.
The ultras marked the first epoch of Royalism, congregation characterized the second.