grant" them, but in reality, it is the force of things which
gives them. A profound truth, and one useful to know, which the Stuarts
did not suspect in 1662 and which the Bourbons did not even obtain a
glimpse of in 1814.

The predestined family, which returned to France when Napoleon fell, had
the fatal simplicity to believe that it was itself which bestowed, and
that what it had bestowed it could take back again; that the House of
Bourbon possessed the right divine, that France possessed nothing, and
that the political right conceded in the charter of Louis XVIII. was
merely a branch of the right divine, was detached by the House of
Bourbon and graciously given to the people until such day as it should
please the King to reassume it. Still, the House of Bourbon should have
felt, from the displeasure created by the gift, that it did not come
from it.

This house was churlish to the nineteenth century. It put on an
ill-tempered look at every development of the nation. To make use of a
trivial word, that is to say, of a popular and a true word, it looked
glum. The people saw this.

It thought it possessed strength because the Empire had been carried
away before it like a theatrical stage-setting. It did not perceive that
it had, itself, been brought in in the same fashion. It did not perceive
that it also lay in that hand which had removed Napoleon.

It thought that it had roots, because it was the past. It was mistaken;
it formed a part of the past, but the whole past was France. The roots
of French society were not fixed in the Bourbons, but in the nations.
These obscure and lively roots constituted, not the right of a family,
but the history of a people. They were everywhere, except under the
throne.

The House of Bourbon was to France the illustrious and bleeding knot in
her history, but was no longer the principal element of her destiny,
and the necessary base of her politics. She could get along without the
Bourbons; she had done without them for two and twenty years; there
had been a break of continuity; they did not suspect the fact. And how
should they have suspected it, they who fancied that Louis XVII. reigned
on the 9th of Thermidor, and that Louis XVIII. was reigning at the
battle of Marengo? Never, since the origin of history, had princes been
so blind in the presence of facts and the portion of divine authority
which facts contain and promulgate. Never had that pretension here below
which is called t