The Bourbon Kings of France (36 page)

In August 1799, Charles at last reached an arrangement with his creditors and left Edinburgh for London, where he rented a house, 46 Baker Street. Louise de Polastron found a little house just round the corner, 18 Thayer Street, which still exists; here Charles spent most of his time playing whist; he regarded failure to call on Louise as a personal insult. He also went into English society, Lady Harrington’s being a favourite drawing-room, where he often met the Prince of Wales. Mme de Boigne saw them both there, and says of Charles that ‘though his face was not so handsome as the Englishman’s, he had more grace and dignity while his bearing and way of dressing and manner of entering and leaving a room were incomparable.’ Not that Charles neglected the
émigré
community. He received once a week and gave three annual dinners—on New Year’s Day, St Louis’s Day and St Charles’s Day. He also made a point of visiting
émigré
schools, contributing to their maintenance. He even found time to be kind to the young Duc d’Orléans, Egalité’s son, who was shunned by most
émigrés
.

Mme de Polastron had developed tuberculosis. It was aggravated by the foggy Edinburgh climate, and then by her cold damp bedroom in Thayer Street; in addition, her spirits were worn down by a nagging conscience—a devout Catholic, she never ceased to worry about the irregularity of her relationship with Charles. Everyone else saw a deterioration in her appearance, but he was too much in love to notice. Finally friends called in George III’s personal physician, Sir Henry Halford. His diagnosis was: ‘The patient is in the last stage of consumption, and I fear that it is already too late to stop it.’ On his instructions, Charles at once moved her into a stable, then an accepted cure for tuberculosis, in Brompton Grove (now Ovington Square). But it was obvious that Louise was failing, so she was taken back to Thayer Street, where Charles’s chaplain, Père Latil, forbade her to see her lover and made her prepare her soul. She died on 27 March 1804, aged forty.

Louise’s final moments are described by the Duchesse de Gontaut, who was nursing her. Charles had at last been let in, to say goodbye. ‘She raised her hands to heaven and said, “A favour, Monsieur, grant me one request—give yourself to God, surrender yourself entirely to Him!” He fell on his knees and said, “As God is my witness, I swear it!” She repeated “Entirely to God!” Her head fell against my shoulder; that word was the last she uttered—she had ceased to breathe. Monsieur threw up his arms and uttered a dreadful scream.’ Charles confessed and communicated the same day, receiving the sacraments from Latil. Henceforward he was a changed man, who heard Mass daily and spent long hours in prayer.

1804 was altogether a wretched year for him. In March the last serious Royalist plot against Napoleon failed; of its leaders, the Chouan Cadoudal was shot and General Moreau exiled, while General Pichegru committed suicide. Axel Fersen met Charles that autumn and says in his memoirs, ‘He was kind enough to read me the entire account of the recent conspiracy involving Pichegru and Moreau. The whole plan had been his idea.’ In May Bonaparte proclaimed himself ‘Napoleon I, Emperor of the French’. The King had written from Mittau to condole with Artois on Louise’s death, and at the King’s suggestion he joined him in Sweden in October; they had not met for ten years and fell into each other’s arms in tears. Together they issued a formal protest at Bonaparte’s usurpation. But nobody took the Bourbons seriously any more.

Charles went back to Baker Street and his whist parties. Later he moved in with the King at Hartwell. His sons lived there too, though Berry spent most of his time with Amy Brown and their children (there were even rumours of a secret marriage which had later to be annulled by the Pope). However, Angoulême, that ugly and ungracious little man, did not stray—his wife ruled him with an iron hand. It was said that Artois looked the
grand seigneur
as much as his sons behaved like plebeians. None the less, London society lionized them.

Hope revived in 1813, when Napoleon’s reverses became serious. In January 1814 Artois sailed from Yarmouth, landing in Holland, and eventually entered Franche Comté by Switzerland. But most Frenchmen had forgotten the Bourbons, while the allies, who were still thinking of coming to terms with Napoleon, ignored him. However, everything changed when, on
6
April, the French Senate offered the crown to Louis XVIII.

On the morning of 12 April 1814 Artois, in his capacity of Lieutenant-General and escorted by Napoleonic Marshals, rode into Paris on a white horse, wearing the blue and silver uniform of the National Guard. Still a strikingly handsome man at fifty-seven, he made a most felicitous speech, ending with the words, ‘Nothing is changed, save that there is one more Frenchman.’ The streets rang with shouts of
‘Vive les Bourbons! Vive le Roi! Vive Monsieur!’
as he rode to Nôtre-Dame to give thanks. Some people actually embraced his knees. When Charles entered the Tuileries he was asked if he was tired; he replied, ‘Why should I be tired? This is the first happy day I have known for thirty years.’

He was ruler of France for nearly three weeks. But while he charmed the Marshals’ wives, his liking for gentlemen of the
Ancien Régime
and open contempt for the achievements of the past twenty years made many people uneasy. He seems to have expected to remain in power, with his brother as a mere figurehead; his motive being not so much ambition as a profound distrust of Louis’s moderate policies. But Louis XVIII, who entered Paris on 3 May, was determined to reign. The Duc de Duras asked him whether the crown was truly re-established. Louis replied, ‘It will stay in our hands if I outlive my brother. But if he outlives me, then I guarantee nothing.’

When the Hundred Days came, Charles went to the provinces to try and rally support. On hearing that the King had fled, he gave up hope and, escorted by 300 picked cavalry, rode to Belgium where he joined his brother. During the uncertain days at Ghent, he was obviously convinced that Louis’s moderation was responsible for their misfortunes. He had always considered that a show of firmness could have stopped the Revolution in 1789; now he believed that the concessions made to the Revolution had paved the way for Napoleon’s return.

After the royal family came back to Paris in 1815, Artois steadily opposed Louis XVIII’s moderate policies, though never in public. But everybody knew Monsieur’s real opinions, that he was encouraging the White Terror. However, the dissolution of the
Chambre Introuvable
in 1816 put an end to the Ultra majority and diminished his political influence.

Artois was not quite so foolish as is generally assumed. The Ultras were much more than a mere mob of blimpish backwoodsmen; they intended to rebuild, rather than resurrect, the
Ancien Régime
, and their political ideas were so far removed from pre-1789 attitudes as to constitute a Revolution of the Right. They were not only men of the Emigration, but also the heirs of the Notables and Parlementaires of the
revolte nobilaire
of 1787; they accepted Parliamentary government readily, as a means of controlling the King and of perpetuating their own power. And Charles, far from being an Absolutist, believed that a strong monarchy in partnership with a strong ruling class offered the best hope of a lasting Restoration.

The Ultras possessed two formidable political thinkers in Louis de Bonald and Joseph de Maistre, the ‘Prophets of the Past’. Bonald, arguing that the traditional social order had been divinely revealed, proposed an alliance of ‘Throne and Altar’. The Comte de Maistre regarded the ideas of the Enlightenment and the Revolution as Satanic in origin; because of Original Sin men could not be made good simply by restructuring society; the only solution was a rigidly hierarchical society based on ultramontane Catholicism. His belief that ‘Spiritual absolutism is the sole principle of stability and continuity’ has something of Orwell’s 1984 about it, as does his grim
Eulogy of the Executioner
—‘take away from the world that incomparable agent and in a moment order becomes chaos.’ Bonald and de Maistre were supported by translations of Burke’s
Reflections on the French Revolution
, while Romanticism and the emotional Christianity of Chateaubriand supplied the enthusiasm. To be a true Ultra, one had to be a pious Catholic; as a modern historian has written, ‘Gone was the frivolous, Godless aristocracy of
Ancien Régime
France; in its place was a spiritually and politically regenerated caste.’

Charles was unmistakably a man of the nineteenth century, in contrast to Louis XVIII who always remained one of the eighteenth. He readily adopted the new political ideas, corresponding with de Maistre while still in exile. If he did not share his brother’s literary tastes, one need not believe that ‘he never read a book’; we know he was familiar with both de Maistre’s and Bonald’s political writings and with Scott’s novels. His weakness came not from stupidity—although admittedly he was only of mediocre intelligence—but from invariably seeing things as he wished them to be. Unfortunately this was a fault common to almost his entire circle of friends and advisers. Lady Morgan observed in 1816, ‘There appears, indeed, among these ardent royalists a resolute determination to see every object through the medium of their own wishes.’

Throughout Louis’s reign, Charles vehemently opposed any policy of compromise with the Liberals. On one occasion he threatened to leave the Tuileries with his sons, whereupon the infuriated King screamed that there were still prisons for rebellious princes. In 1818 Charles actually begged Wellington to stay with his army of occupation. In the summer of that year there were rumours that he was plotting to seize the throne, the so called ‘Conspiracy of the Water’s Edge’, but so desperate a course was out of character, though he considered the policies of Richelieu and Decazes disastrous—‘a programme which includes persecution of the King’s friends and of those of the realm and contempt for monarchical institutions.’

If he was unhappy about his brother’s government, Charles was content with his family. He quickly took to his new daughter-in-law, Caroline de Berry. After the sadness of a grandson and a grand-daughter dying in infancy, he was overjoyed at the birth of a healthy child in September 1819, Louise-Marie-Thérèse. She was given the ancient title of ‘Mademoiselle’.

Charles was heartbroken by Berry’s murder in 1820. He also realized that the dynasty faced extinction; Angoulême was impotent, while even
Purs
admitted that he seemed unfitted to be King, with no thoughts beyond his hounds and his chess. In tears, Charles actually discussed the possibility of remarrying with his friend Vitrolles, who suggested the sister of Ferdinand VII of Spain, the widowed Duchess of Lucca; he was sufficiently interested to ask Vitrolles what she looked like, but abandoned the idea when Caroline de Berry gave birth to her miraculous son.

His grandson became the most important person in Charles’s life. Young Henri and Mademoiselle watched constantly from the windows of the Elysée, where they lived, for the arrival of his fast little phaeton and then ran eagerly to greet
‘Bon-papa’
who was more like a father than a grandfather. He let them do literally what they wanted; when Sir Thomas Lawrence was painting his portrait, Charles refused to send his grandchildren out of the room, although they were tormenting both Sir Thomas and himself.