In his boyhood everything had been done to keep his thoughts from turning to Napoleon and all that concerned him. Hence almost before his schooldays were over he donned the white cockade and entered the guard of the Bourbons. But the ungrateful Bourbons, ungrateful because they believed that people owed everything to them, kept him waiting nine years for promotion, when he became captain by seniority.
When he began to write, his books gave dissatisfaction at the stupid court; though their whole tendency was royalist, they were regarded as seditious. He was accused of liberalism because he exalted Richelieu at the expense of Louis XIII. His father's early inculcations of devotion to the house of Bourbon proved of no avail; he now began to see what that devotion really was--"superstition, political superstition, a groundless, childish old belief in the fealty incumbent on men of noble birth, a kind of vassalage."[5]
Chivalry might, and did, induce him to preserve the outward appearance of a royalist; he would, for instance, have defended the monarchy during the Revolution of July if his services as an old officer had been required; but at heart he was no longer a monarchist--though this by no means implied that he was a democrat. "The world," he writes in his diary, "is vacillating between two absurdities, monarchy by the grace of God and the sovereignty of the people."
In the matter of religious faith he fell away even earlier. In spite of all the angels and archangels, principalities and powers of his youthful poems, he was suited for anything rather than a champion of the faith. By nature he was melancholy and sceptical, so melancholy that no ray of hope or momentary happiness seems ever to have penetrated into his heart, so sceptical in regard to the creed which he confessed with his lips that he nourished a kind of personal animosity to the idea of God and of the immortality of the soul.
As early as 1824 we find him giving expression (in his diary) to his conception of life in the following parable: "I see a crowd of men, women, and children, all sound asleep. They awake in a prison. They become reconciled to their prison and make little gardens in its yard. By degrees they begin to notice that one after the other of them is taken away, never to return. They neither know why they are in prison nor where they are taken to afterwards, and they know that they will never know it. Nevertheless, some among them tell the others what becomes of them after their period of imprisonment--tell without knowing. Are they not mad? It is plain that the lord of the prison, the governor, could, if such had been his will, have let us know the charge on which we have been arrested and all the particulars of our case. Since he has not done it, and never will do it, let us be content to thank him for the more or less comfortable quarters he has given us...."