An officer in the Navarre Regiment,çoisRené I had returned from the forests of America to join the fleeing Legitimacy, to fight in its ranks against my own judgment, all without conviction, from sheer soldierly duty. I remained eight years on foreign soil, overwhelmed with every wretchedness.
This generous tribute paid, I returned to France in 1800. Bonaparte sought me out and placed me; on the death of the Duc d'Enghien, I devoted myself once more to the memory of the Bourbons. My words on the tomb of Mesdames at Trieste revived the wrath of the dispenser of empires; he threatened to have me cut down on the steps of the Tuileries. The pamphlet _De Bonaparte et des Bourbons_ was worth to Louis XVIII., on his own confession, as much as a hundred thousand men.
With the aid of the popularity which I then enjoyed, anti-Constitutional France understood the institutions of the Legitimate Royalty. During the Hundred Days, the Monarchy saw me by its side in its second exile. Lastly, through the Spanish War, I had contributed to the suppression of the conspiracies, to the union of opinions under one and the same cockade, and to the restoring of its range to our cannon. The rest of my plans are well known: to extend our frontiers, to give new crowns in the New World to the family of St. Louis.
This long perseverance in the same sentiments perhaps merited some consideration. Sensitive to affront, I did not find it possible also to put on one side what I might be worth, to forget entirely that I was the restorer of religion, the author of the _Génie du Christianisme._
My agitation necessarily increased still further at the thought that a paltry quarrel made our country miss an opportunity of greatness which it would not find again. Had they said to me, "Your plans will be followed; what you have taken in hand will be carried out without you," I should have forgotten all for France. Unfortunately, I had the belief that my ideas would not be adopted; the event has proved it.
I was, perhaps, in error, but I was persuaded that M. le Comte de Villèle did not understand the society which he ruled; I am convinced that the solid qualities of that able minister were inadequate at the hour of his ministry: he had come too early under the Restoration. Financial operations, commercial companies, the industrial movement, canals, steamboats, railways, high-roads, a material society which has no passion save that of peace, which dreams only of the comforts of life, which wants to make of the future only a perpetual to-day: in this order of things, M. de Villèle would have been king. M. de Villèle wanted a time which could not be his and, from honour, he will have nothing to do with a time which belongs to him. Under the Restoration, all the faculties of the mind were alive; all parties dreamt of realities or illusions; all, advancing or receding, came into tumultuous collision; none purposed to remain where he was; to no earnest mind did the Constitutional Legitimacy seem to be the last word of the Republic or the Monarchy. We felt stirring in the ground under our feet armies or revolutions which came to offer themselves for extraordinary destinies. M. de Villèle was quite alive to this movement; he saw the wings grow which, sprouting from the nation's shoulders, were about to restore it to its element, to the air, to space, immense and light as it is. M. de Villèle wished to keep this nation to the ground, to fasten it down, but he never had the strength for it. I, on the other hand, wished to occupy the French with glory, to fasten them up above, to endeavour to lead them to reality through dreams: that is what they love.