Story of Some Farcical Conspirators

The Weekly Machen

During his tenure at the Evening News, Arthur Machen produced several irregular series of book reviews with running tiles such as “Odd Volumes,” “Among My Books,” and “My Bookshelf.” The following column comes from the last series. Unlike last week’s article, this installment focuses on a single book, one which thoroughly amused Machen as his entertaining comments illustrate.

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My Bookshelf:
Story of Some Farcical Conspirators
by
Arthur Machen
June 7, 1912

In one of the delightful books of the world, “Life on the Mississippi,” Mark Twain develops a queer and entertaining and fantastic theory: that the Civil War in America was in reality the work of Sir Walter Scott.

It was the great maker of great romances, according to Mark, who had fevered the brain of the Southern gentry, filling it with “the old, obsolete chivalry business,” and thus putting sober citizens into a frame of mind quite inconsistent with sober republican ideals.

I don’t know whether there is anything in this notion of Mark Twain’s, so far as the differences of North and South are concerned; but after reading “Recollections of a Great Lady: Being More Memoirs of the Comtesse de Boigne” (Heinemann) I am strongly tempted to declare that Sir Walter Scott’s romances, acting on somewhat feeble minds, had a good deal to do with the collapse of the Legitimists in the France of 1830-1840.

Take the case of the famous Duchesse de Berry as told in these pages.

The monarchy of the last legitimate King of France, Charles X., is falling; the new world of the revolution, exhausted for a time by the Napoleonic wars and the Napoleonic mastery, is surging up again, burning like lava, red and hot from the volcano pit and the central fires, and the Duchesse de Berry, of the Royal House, meets the situation by dressing in male clothing and firing a pistol at frequent intervals.

The old monarch [Charles X.], quite overcome, was seated in an armchair, upon the back of which M. de Maillé was leaning; the door burst open, the Duchesse de Berry dashed into the room, performed certain warlike operations, and fired a blank charge from her pistol. The apparition was visible only for a moment, but long enough to reduce the two old men to stupefaction. After a moment’s silence, the King turned to M. de Maillé and said to him miserably; “What do you think of her, Maillé?”

“A . . . bo . . . mi . . . na . . . ble, sire,” replied the duke, in an equally piteous tone.

Well, this great and royal lady, after this performance in the Di Vernon manner, went abroad with the rest of the exiled family, and the pity of it was that she would not remain abroad.

Duchess’s Vagaries

She returned to France and conspired for the Restoration in a manner and with devices which would hardly be tolerated in a third-rate comic opera. Thus:—

After the failures of the oak of St. Columbia and of la Pénissière, the Duchesse de Berry was obliged to go into hiding once more. The pleasures of this romantic and vagabond life were efficient to induce her to prolong it. On the other hand, the Ministers, and in particular the Royal Family, were extremely anxious to see her leave French soil in safety . . . The authorities confined themselves to keeping a hand upon her shoulder without actually arresting her. One day, in the room of Mme. de Feronays, the abbess of a convent at Nantes, the butt of a gun was dropped upon a board in the floor which was known to cover a hiding-place in which she was. It was hoped that these alarms would induce her to take ship.

But the duchess wouldn’t take ship; when she heard the thump of the gun and found that nothing more happened, she concluded that she must be extremely clever. So she went on conspiring without producing any particular results, till M. Thiers, with the utmost reluctance, was obliged to give the order for her arrest.

This was finally effected, to the immense grief of Louis Philippe and his queen—the reigning sovereigns—the fact that some soldiers on guard felt cold and made a newspaper fire in an apparently empty hearth.

Soon vigorous blows were struck. They called their officers; the blazing papers were speedily withdrawn, and the back of the fireplace, yielding to the mutual efforts of the besiegers and the besieged, turned on its hinges.

“You may abandon your search. I am the Duchesse de Berry,’’ said a woman, stepping out of the fireplace without help . . . while the sentinels hastened to help another woman and two men who were half-suffocated from their burning hiding-place.

And everybody agreed that the duchess had behaved with tremendous dignity; and the Queen of France felt it was very terrible for the Duchess, and the officers in charge of the distinguished prisoner seemed to say by their conduct that it was a shame, and so Madame de Berry was finally bundled politely out of France.

Last Days of Talleyrand

The duchess was not only absurd; she was also disgraceful, something in the fashion of our own “injured Queen” of a few years before; and yet everybody seems to have agreed that she was a thoroughly romantic figure.

So the book goes on: follies on the one side matched by follies on the other, the farcical conspirators being counterchecked by authorities only a little less imbecile than themselves, till the revolution of 1848 rung down the curtain on this after piece of the Revolution.

The best chapter in these “Recollections” tells of the last years and the last days of the life of M. de Talleyrand, the man who survived every shock, every change, whom nobody could afford to neglect, who at last—one may almost say—got the better of the Church on his death-bed.

For he renounced but one or two errors out of a whole damning catalogue of things said and done amiss, and died absolved and fortified with the Sacraments of the Church, while the Pope’s messenger, armed with instructions to the effect that M. de Talleyrand’s retractions were by no means sufficient, was delayed on the way.

But the whole conclusion of the book seems to be that Governments fall not from their vices or their injustices, or their unpopularities, but from their follies.

Charles X. and Louis Philippe and their Ministers all shiver and hesitate in the hour of peril instead of acting; by consequence they come to swift disaster.

They had not understood that the business of Governments is to govern.

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The Weekly

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