6

Marchand was firm, he reported, in his allegiance to the Bourbons, but many of the regiments had been recently called in from Chambéry, and were certainly, like his own, eager to wear the tricolor. Never,' cried Napoleon, as he embraced the young colonel of the Seventh, never will I forget what 'you have done to-day for me and for France,' and then they rode on together to the Porte Bonne. Did either of them remember that promise some months later, when the Emperor, on board the Northumberland,' was far from France, and when Labédoyère, from the prisons of the Abbaye, was led out to be shot, for the sake of that twilight ride from Brié ?

Before seven o'clock the little band stood before a city of which the gates were locked and the walls bristled with cannon; but not a gun was fired, nor had the ditches been filled, so that Napoleon rode straight up to the gate and ordered it to be opened. Numberless sympathisers joined him where he stood; some dropped over the walls to do so, and after a resistance that was merely nominal the Porte Bonne yielded, and Napoleon found himself in Grenoble. M. Fourier, the préfet, was a savant who had been with the army in Egypt, and he had by this time given himself an opportune leave of absence. General Marchand, on receiving Randon's report, abruptly withdrew from the command of a place where no one obeyed him, while the legitimist Comte d'Agoult galloped off to Lyons to warn the Comte d'Artois of the disaffection of the troops, the treason of Labédoyère, and the immediate advent of Napoleon. The Emperor in the meantime supped at the Hôtel des Trois Dauphins, and there received the most influential of his friends. The Place Grenette and the Grande Rue were crowded to a late hour, and the chill night air carried up to the Bastille the songs and cheers of a rejoicing host. This is not the place for following his march by Voreppe and Bourgouin to Lyons. There 100,000 voices greeted him, and when he left it his army consisted of six regiments, which, added to those he had before, brought up his force to nearly 10,000 men. He hurried on his way to the Paris which, as he said, ' let him come ' as it had let the others go,' and to which after less than a hundred days he was to bid farewell for ever. Once more France had to receive a Bourbon prince, and his ministers had to do their utmost to give the most popular aspect possible to a Sovereign who followed in the wake of hostile armies. They succeeded for a time, since most Frenchmen had come to feel that the conscriptions and losses of a military despotism were worse than the worst of the Bourbons.

Yet Didier's conspiracy, in 1819, proves that in Dauphiny at

least there was still a lurking opposition to the Restoration and some sympathy with the Empire. This rising was not, numerically speaking, of very great importance, but it was sufficiently popular in the department of the Isère to reunite at once all the regrets of the Chauvinists and all the aspirations of the more democratic party. Its ostensible object was to restore Napoleon, or at least his son, and its ostensible head was Paul Didier, the advocate. But the real attitude or object of that restless ringleader has never been perfectly understood even in his native department. He was a lawyer whose profession did not suffice for his energies, or for the ambition of a man who was born with the instincts of a conspirator, and nurtured in the convulsions of political anarchy. He was at one time a supporter of Louis XVI., and it is certain that in 1794, and when the émigrés were under sentence of death, he did at his own risk, and disguised as a coachman, drive the Comte Antoine d'Agoult on a secret visit to his family and his estates near Voreppe. He appeared, however, as an Imperialist during the Hundred Days, and now, after coquetting with the Orleans family, and entertaining the notion of a regency conducted by Louis-Philippe, he found Napoleon's name had charms in Vizille and Grenoble, and there excited a mob of hot-headed boys and old soldiers to expect another March 7. He flattered himself and his band that the garrison of Grenoble was with them. The result proved the contrary. The authorities were warned of the plot, Didier's combinations miscarried, and the whole affair collapsed. A signal vengeance was, however, taken of this tragi-comic conspiracy by a king in whose memory still lived. the victorious flight of Napoleon's eagles from steeple to steeple till they reached the towers of Notre-Dame.' Twentyone men were condemned, and fourteen of them were shot on the esplanade of the Porte de France. The unhappy Didier, who had fled to a village in the Maurienne, was betrayed by his landlord, and thus found himself in the hands of justice, represented at that moment by the Minister Décazes and by General Donnadieu. He was executed at Grenoble, at the close of what has been well termed the White Terror' in France, and of a prosecution which served to bring to light many public and private grudges. It did not reconcile the republicans to the government, and we accordingly find a most daring choice made in the Isère in 1819: the Abbé Grégoire was returned to the Chamber as one of its deputies. But public opinion voted this choice rather too daring, for Grégoire, like Sieyes and Cambacérès, had been expelled from the Senate and

from the Institute; so this election was declared void, and the regicide was not permitted to take his seat.

6

Dauphiny was at this moment most nobly represented in Paris by the bank of the brothers Scipio and Casimir Périer. We have said something of Casimir's youth at Vizille. His manhood had been exposed to all the vicissitudes of an era of revolution. His father's fortune had been engulfed in the struggle, and while his brothers and his cousins were preparing their way to eminence he himself, being drawn for the conscription, had to shoulder a musket under the walls of Mantua. His abilities, however, amply fulfilled all their early promise. Proposed as deputy for the department of the Seine before he had attained his political majority, he entered into partnership with his brother Scipio, and in 1817, we find the Périer house negotiating a great public loan, and arranging how to meet the necessities of the Restoration. Casimir, who had made a rich marriage, was able, after his brother's death, to carry on the business alone. And what a business! Everything was grist to his mill; he did everything: banking, 'speculations in estates, mortgages, factories, ore-smelting, sugar works, soap-boiling, and everything on a great scale. Everything succeeded in his hands,'* and because of this success he was named first to the tribunal of the Chamber of Commerce, and then to the government of the Bank of France. In 1817, the Parisians, who had grown fond and proud of the commercial reputation and of the noble figure of Marie Pascal's son, sent him up to the Chamber as their deputy. Sprung from the bourgeoisie and tenacious of those liberties which the tiers état had conquered, he led a strong opposition both to the ministerial manœuvres of M. de Villèle, and then to the clerical tendencies of the men who, like Sosthène de la Rochefoucauld, would fain have covered France with confraternities. He became the Ajax of the opposition; his sonorous voice and the fire of his dark face made him observed whenever he spoke, and during six years he spoke constantly against a ministry which combined, in his opinion, the ruins of the past with the vices of the present. In 1828, when the Martignac Ministry came in, he figured on the list of candidates for the presidency of the Chamber, and sometimes appeared at the whist table of Charles X.; but under the ill-fated Ministry of Polignac he found his work cut out for him in a revolution which he had certainly not invoked,

* Notice nécrologique sur Casimir Périer. Par Nicholas Fleury Bourget. Lyon, 1832.

but which he did his utmost to control. Dramatic were his experiences during the Three days. The mob stormed at the door of his house, where anxious meetings were held, since all constitutional thinkers turned to him instinctively. He did truly embody the principle of constitutionalism, and spared no opportunity of declaring that a ruler must be supported in his rule by the advice of men drawn from the heart of the nation that is governed. When the revolution was over, Casimir Périer, President of the Chamber of Deputies, read the declaration by which a new monarchy was provided for France. Along with Guizot and Sebastiani he tasted all the powers that a subject can ever wield, and Guizot's Memoirs' bear witness alike to his energy and to the anarchical state of many of the great cities of France. The labour of controlling Frenchmen was now almost too great for Casimir Périer, for the violent emotions of life had undermined his gigantic strength, and when he accepted the portfolio of the Ministry of the Interior in 1831, he declared that he should certainly come out of office feet foremost. Yet his adminis tration surprised even those who admired him, as well as those who thought that his day was over. To every act of popular insubordination he presented the boldest front. Determined to make the torrent of revolution retire into its bed, he offered an unflinching resistance to the tyranny of the mob. The proletariat was furious, and the Liberal minister found the struggle almost too great for his strength. The heat of parties in France was such that no question was ever allowed to be argued out on its own merits, nor was any dispute permitted to be localised. The smallest matter, such as a local squabble about a regiment in one of the garrisons of Dauphiny, sufficed to threaten the whole fabric of government, and even the cholera, when it broke out in Paris, was made an excuse for excitement and for scenes of the most deplorable description. To pacify the public mind the Duke of Orleans went to the Hôtel-Dieu, and, in the company of the Minister of the Interior, visited the wards where the patients lay. Casimir Périer, himself an invalid, had a horror of this complaint, and dreaded infection, but duty compelled him to go through this tour of inspection. A dying man, beside whose pallet Périer stood for a moment, seized him by the hand, and, attracted perhaps by the remarkable beauty and dignity of the minister's face and figure, clung to him for some moments. Struck by the incident Périer returned home to sicken, and after a long struggle he died on May 16, 1832.

The attitude of the province of Dauphiny was very republican

throughout the reign of Louis-Philippe, and the popularity of a newspaper called the Patriote des Alpes' did a great deal there towards preparing for 1848. A republic was proclaimed, but before long the words of Barnave must have recurred to many minds: Are you not afraid that this mobile nation 'may not yet be moved by enthusiasm towards some great 'man's name, and in that day upset your republic?' During its first ten years the Second Empire was popular in Dauphiny, but before its close the Dauphinois began by their elections to manifest some of the old stubborn and independent spirit of their province. Then came the end, and a Franco-Prussian campaign which brought very near to Grenoble the horrors and privations of war. If she escaped the cruel experiences of Dijon, she heard at least enough of them to make her signify her determination for the future to discountenance a warlike policy in the rulers of France.

ART. V.-1. La Nuova Italia ed i Vecchi Zelanti. Del Sac. C. M. CURCI. Firenze: 1881.

IT

2. La Gerarchia Cattolica per l'anno 1881. Rome: 1881. T has been said that there is no nobler spectacle than that of a good man struggling with adversity. If this be so, Leo XIII. has assuredly presented such a spectacle to the world during the entire period of his pontificate up to the present time; for there can, we think, be no doubt that he is a good man, highly conscientious, and most anxious to do his duty to the best of his lights and powers in the difficult position to which he has been called. The success which had attended his career as a legate and diplomatist had, in accordance with the almost invariable practice of the Apostolic Court, ensured his promotion to the purple. But it was notorious that Gioachino Pecci was not a man after the heart of Pius IX.; that Cardinal Antonelli, the Secretary of State, disliked him; and that his Archbishopric of Perugia was in fact an honourable exile from Rome, its Apostolic Court, and its intrigues. After having represented Gregory XVI. for three years at the court of Brussels, to the entire satisfaction of King Leopold I., who always entertained a high respect and kindly remembrance of him, he was appointed to the See of Perugia in 1846. He continued for thirty-two years to administer that important diocese in a manner which secured the esteem and affection of a population not much prone to respect their ecclesiastical rulers.