cts, behind the scenes, more as a sentimental
coquetry with the old superstition than as a serious affair, were now
raised by the party of Order to the dignity of a great State question,
and were conducted upon the public stage, instead of, as heretofore in
the amateurs' theater. Couriers flew from Paris to Venice, from Venice
to Claremont, from Claremont to Paris. The Duke of Chambord issues
a manifesto in which he announces not his own, but the "national"
restoration, "with the aid of all the members of his family." The
Oleanist Salvandy throws himself at the feet of Henry V. The Legitimist
leaders Berryer, Benoit d'Azy, St. Priest travel to Claremont, to
persuade the Orleans; but in vain. The fusionists learn too late
that the interests of the two bourgeois factions neither lose in
exclusiveness nor gain in pliancy where they sharpen to a point in the
form of family interests, of the interests of the two royal houses.
When Henry V. recognized the Count of Paris as his successor--the
only success that the fusion could at best score--the house of Orleans
acquired no claim that the childlessness of Henry V. had not already
secured to it; but, on the other hand, it lost all the claims that it
had conquered by the July revolution. It renounced its original claims,
all the title, that, during a struggle nearly one hundred years long, it
had wrested from the older branch of the Bourbons; it bartered away
its historic prerogative, the prerogative of its family-tree. Fusion,
accordingly, amounted to nothing else than the resignation of the house
of Orleans, its Legitimist resignation, a repentful return from the
Protestant State Church into the Catholic;--a return, at that, that did
not even place it on the throne that it had lost, but on the steps of
the throne on which it was born. The old Orleanist Ministers Guizot,
Duchatel, etc., who likewise hastened to Claremont, to advocate the
fusion, represented in fact only the nervous reaction of the July
monarchy; despair, both in the citizen kingdom and the kingdom of
citizens; the superstitious belief in legitimacy as the last amulet
against anarchy. Mediators, in their imagination, between Orleans and
Bourbon, they were in reality but apostate Orleanists, and as such were
they received by the Prince of Joinville. The virile, bellicose part
of the Orleanists, on the contrary--Thiers, Baze, etc.--, persuaded the
family of Louis Philippe all the easier that, seeing every plan for t