ed. 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. Skill follows ardor. Let us confine ourselves
here to this sketch.

In the course of this narrati