modern kings--not
even Charles I. and William III. excepted--if by respectability we mean
an unblemished private life--Guizot's respectability was an enigma. The
man who, in spite of his advice to others, "Enrichissez vous,
enrichissez vous," was as poor at the end of his ministerial career as
at the beginning, must have necessarily been a puzzle to a sovereign
who, with a civil list of L750,000, was haunted by the fear of poverty,
and haunted to such a degree as to harass his friends and counsellors
with his apprehensions. "My dear minister," he said one day to Guizot,
after he had recited a long list of his domestic charges--"My dear
minister, I am telling you that my children will be wanting for bread."
The recollection of his former misery uprose too frequently before him
like a horrible nightmare, and made him the first bourgeois instead of
the first gentilhomme of the kingdom, as his predecessors had been. When
a tradesman drops a shilling and does not stoop to pick it up, his
neglect becomes almost culpable improvidence; when a prince drops a
sovereign and looks for it, the deed may be justly qualified as mean.
The _leitmotif_ of Louis-Philippe's conversation, witty and charming as
it was, partook of the avaricious spirit of a Thomas Guy and a John
Overs rather than of that of the great adventurer John Law. The chinking
of the money-bags is audible through both, but in the one case the
orchestration is strident, disagreeable, depressing; in the other, it is
generous, overflowing with noble impulses, and cheering. I recollect
that during my stay at Treport and Eu, in 1843, when Queen Victoria paid
her visit to Louis-Philippe, the following story was told to me. Lord
---- and I were quartered in a little hostelry on the Place du Chateau.
One morning Lord ---- came home laughing till he could laugh no longer.
"What do you think the King has done now?" he asked. I professed my
inability to guess. "About an hour ago, he and Queen Victoria were
walking in the garden, when, with true French politeness, he offered her
a peach. The Queen seemed rather embarrassed how to skin it, when
Louis-Philippe took a large clasp-knife from his pocket. 'When a man has
been a poor devil like myself, obliged to live upon forty sous a day, he
always carries a knife. I might have dispensed with it for the last few
years; still, I do not wish to lose the habit--one does not know what
may happen,' he said. Of course, the tears stood in the Qu