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whom he well knows to be such. His want of moral courage in this instance has fatally marred many high and noble qualities, and has frustrated the great opportunities which the time, and the needs of the Church, placed before him. The strength of will of a Pius V.. joined to his own enlightened perception of the conditions of the time and of his own position in it, might have made of Leo XIII. one of the greatest and most efficacious pontiffs in all the long and wonderful line. But moral cowardice in the place of moral courage mars all. There can be little danger of error in predicting that the remainder of his pontificate will be even as the past portion of it has been, and that the thirteenth Leo must be added to the list of those of whom it may be said, in the words of the Roman historian, Dignus imperii nisi imperasset.'

ART. VI.--Le Comte de Circourt, son temps, ɛes écrits. Madame de Circourt, son salon, ses correspondances. Notice biographique offerte à leurs amis par le Colonel HUBERSALADIN. Paris: 1881.

THIS

HIS unpretending biographical sketch, from the pen of an old friend, privately printed for circulation amongst the members of a generation and a society already thinued by time and death, is probably the only memorial which will exist of one of the most remarkable and accomplished Frenchmen of this century-the more remarkable inasmuch as it was his pleasure and his desire to live and die comparatively unknown by the public, for he was alike devoid of vanity and of ambition. With an insatiable curiosity and love of knowledge, with an extraordinary facility in mastering languages, and a universal love of literature-with a memory so precise and so inexhaustible that it retained without effort all he had acquired, so that hardly the minutest detail of topography, genealogy, or history perplexed or escaped him-M. de Circourt found ir the mere exercise of these singular gifts a sufficient employment for a long and not inactive life. He was entirely indifferent even to literary fame, and though he wrote enormously on a variety of subjects, his works were for the most part published anonymously, scattered in reviews, or never printed at all. Augustin Thierry, the illustrious author of the History of the "Norman Conquest of England,' said to Mr. Ticknor: "If M. de • Circourt would select some obscure passage in history between the sixth and the seventeenth centuries, and set to work upon

it, he would leave us all behind him.' But this vast mass of erudition and of labour was hoarded, or only brought to light in small fragments or fugitive productions. Though a Royalist and a Catholic by birth and education, and a man of intense aristocratic sympathies and fastidious tastes, M. de Circourt belonged to no party, for he was a passionate lover of the noblest forms of freedom, of constitutional government, and of broad principles of thought. What he most abhorred in the revolutionary democracy that seethed around him was its intolerance, its destructive propensities, and its pursuit of low material objects. For himself he cared for none of the ordinary prizes and rewards of life; he would belong to no learned society, he would accept and wear no decoration, he was entirely contented to live on a small competency with the noble frugality of the old French gentry; and although somewhat inclined to take a dark view of an age which had deviated so widely from his own principles and pursuits, he lived upon the whole a happy and contented life, self-contained in the exercise of his own mental powers. He lived too by his strong affections. A wife of incomparable talents, tact, and grace shared his home and collected round it the most cultivated society in Europe; and M. de Circourt himself possessed and enjoyed the friendship of an extraordinary number of men of the highest distinction, not only in France, but in all lands. The correspondence he carried on with his friends in Germany, Italy, England, Switzerland, America, and Russia, was inconceivably voluminous. To each of them he wrote in their own respective language, equally vehement and profuse in every tongue. No man, therefore, was better informed of the events of the time, and he saw history growing beneath his eyes. There are men, even in this stirring struggling age, so jealous of their independence and so indifferent to what is called success in life, that the friendship of the wise, the great, and the good, is their chief, nay, their sole, ambition. They are content to be the intelligent spectators of the great drama of life. He who looks back on the first half of the nineteenth century can hardly fail to be struck with the astonishing array of intellectual power which marked the progress of those fifty years. The great writers, the great statesmen, the great orators, the great discoverers in science, the great inventors of mechanical applications to the wants of society of that time, have left their mark on the history of mankind. It was the good fortune of M. de Circourt to enjoy the happiness of unrestricted intercourse and confidential friendship with a large number of those whom Burke and Lord Beaconsfield called the men of light

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between the Court and the Chamber he foreboded a catastrophe. Polignac had told him nothing of the Ordinances, nor had he told the Princess his wife; for M. de Circourt dined with them on the very day these fatal decrees were signed, on Sunday, July 25, 1830. The minister was distrait. The Princess took Circourt aside to the piano after dinner, and said to him,' Il se 'passe quelque chose: do you know what it is?' Neither of them knew: possibly M. Bois-le-Comte was in the Prince's confidence.

In consequence of the absence of Marshal Bourmont, who was then commanding the expedition against the Dey of Algiers, Prince Polignac was Minister of War ad interim, as well as Minister of Foreign Affairs. But he had not made the smallest military preparations, or even enquiries as to the possibility of putting down a popular tumult. On that Sunday, for the first time, he sent for the officers in command of the

troops about Paris. A dispute arose between them, which Polignac had to settle. It then turned out that in the whole of the first military division, which included not only Paris but Orleans and Rouen and all the intermediate places, there were not 12,000 men; in Paris itself there were about 3,400 at that moment, including the gendarmerie. The reason of this singular absence of troops from the capital was a politica! and military combination which the Government had formed, but which has, we think, to this day escaped the notice of the historians of the Restoration. Polignac had for some time. been intriguing to detach Belgium from the dominions of the King of the Netherlands, partly from a fanatical desire to release a Catholic population from this Protestant connexion (in which he was seconded by the priests), but in part also from a notion that a military demonstration on the side of Belgium would be popular in France, and would disarm the Parliamentary Opposition; so that the movement which took place at Brussels shortly after the Revolution of July, and was attributed to the example of that democratic explosion, had in fact been prepared by Polignac himself. This is strange enough; but what is still more strange is that the very means taken to promote this lawless object proved to be the ruin of Charles X. and his minister.

With a view to the occupation of Belgium, or at least to a demonstration on the frontier, the French Government had assembled two large camps at Luneville and at St. Omer; and in these camps the bulk of the available forces of the kingdom were collected, leaving but a small residue in Paris and the centre of France, the more so as Bourmont had with

him a considerable and well-appointed army in Africa. So that, at the very moment when troops were most needed in Paris, one portion of the King's army was beyond seas, and another out of reach on the Belgian frontier.

Marshal Bourmont was perfectly aware that some such scheme as that of the Ordinances of July was contemplated by the Court and the Ministry. The King had given him special orders to terminate the campaign in Algeria, to carry off the Dey's treasure from the Kasbah, and to bring the troops back to France as soon as possible. About a month before the Revolution a ciphered despatch came from Bourmont to Polignac, in which the Marshal earnestly entreated the King to take no important step until his return, adding that he hoped in a few weeks to terminate the African expedition, and to prove to the King what he was capable of in his Majesty's service. He had calculated that by the month of September he could bring the greater part of the army then in Algeria back to Paris, and that the success they had recently had in Africa would attach the troops to himself as a commander, so that he would then be in a condition to crush all resistance to the measures of the Court. Had this plan been adhered to, it is by no means impossible that the coup d'état might have succeeded, as we have seen other conspiracies succeed on some subsequent occasions. But Bourmont's despatch in cipher had exactly the opposite effect to that contemplated by the Marshal. It produced in the mind of Polignac a violent jealousy of his military colleague, and the determination to act in Bourmont's absence, so as to have all the credit to himself and remain at the head of the King's Government. On the day the Ordinances were signed, the Prince said to M. de Circourt, 'From 'this day the King begins to reign, which he has not done before." These were the motives which precipitated the blow, and caused it to overwhelm its authors with ruin and confusion.

Such was the account of this memorable transaction, taken down many years afterwards from M. de Circourt's own lips; and although he had no previous knowledge of the conspiracy, and would at no period of his life have approved of measures so arbitrary, illegal, and impolitic, probably few persons were at the time living in closer intimacy with the head of that calamitous and infatuated administration. This short narrative is therefore a contribution of some value to history.

The immediate effect of the Revolution of July on M. de Circourt himself was, as we have said, to destroy his prospects in official life. He immediately quitted France, and repaired

VOL. CLIV. NO. CCCXVI.

I I

to Geneva in September, 1830, where he established relations which made that city a second country to him, and at times an adopted home. He had previously made the acquaintance in Paris of Mlle. Anastasie de Klustine, a young Russian lady of the most distinguished talents and attractive grace. We believe a marriage was already in contemplation between this lady and the brilliant young attaché of the ruling minister, Prince Polignac. They met again at Geneva in the autumn, when Circourt was poor, almost an exile, and shorn of all the promise of his life. But Mlle. de Klustine was of too noble a nature to break off her marriage on that account. She gave him her hand, her fortune, and her heart, and never did the union of two remarkable persons turn out more happily. Each of them was said to know at least ten languages. Mile. de Klustine had contributed at eighteen a remarkable paper on Russian literature to the Bibliothèque Universelle of Geneva. Both of them were full of intelligent curiosity, and alive to every incident in the political and literary world. Both excelled in conversation, and were indefatigable lovers o society. If Paris still failed them, they cast themselves upon Europe. Geneva, Italy, Dresden, now and then England, afforded a wide field of research and amusement. For seven years they travelled abroad, everywhere received by the most eminent persons of the age, everywhere forming acquaintances which ripened into friendship.

Geneva itself, in the winter of 1830-31, just fifty years ago, was a microcosm of the most polished society in Europe. De Candolle, De la Rive, Necker de Saussure taught science in her schools; the illustrious Rossi, afterwards the victim of Roman atrocity, professed civil law and lectured on the immortal contest of the United Provinces against the tyranny of Spain; Sismondi, the historian of the Italian Republics and of France, and the brother-in-law of Macintosh, kept an open house; Bonstetten, the friend of Gray and the rival of Alfieri, still survived. The government of the little republic was carried on, with gratuitous and enlightened zeal for the public interests, by men of hereditary reputation for talents and virtues. The recent revolution in Paris had cast on the shores of Lake Leman many of the most brilliant members of French society. M. de Chateaubriand appeared there. Cavour, still young and half Genevese (for his mother was a Mlle. de Sellon, sister of the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre), began to mix in society. Mrs. Marcet and the Romillys represented the most cultivated society of England, and a host of foreigners of all lands, Russians, Poles, Italians, and Greeks, sought in

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