Book: The Memoirs of Victor Hugo

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Then Lahr collapsed and began to pray while the decree
for their execution was read to them.

Daix continued to struggle, sobbing, and roaring with
horror. These men who had killed so freely were afraid to
die.

Daix shouted: "Help! Help!" appealed to the soldiers,
adjured them, cursed them, pleaded to them in the
name of General Bréa.

"Shut up! "growled a sergeant. "You are a coward!"



The execution was performed with much ceremony. Let
this fact be noted: the first time the guillotine dared to
show itself after February an army was furnished to guard
it. Twenty-five thousand men, infantry and cavalry,
surrounded the scaffold. Two generals were in command.
Seven guns commanded the streets which converged to the
circus of the Barrière de Fontainebleau.

Daix was executed first. When his head had fallen and
his body was unstrapped, the trunk, from which a stream
of blood was pouring, fell upon the scaffold between the
swing-board and the basket.

The executioners were nervous and excited. A man of
the people remarked: "Everybody is losing his head on
that guillotine, including the executioner!"



In the faubourgs, which the last elections to the National
Assembly had so excited, the names of popular candidates
could still be seen chalked upon the walls. Louis
Bonaparte was one of the candidates. His name appeared on
these open-air bulletins, as they may be termed, in company
with the names of Raspail and Barbès. The day after the
execution Louis Napoleon's name wherever it was
to be seen had a red smear across it. A silent protest, a
reproach and a menace. The finger of the people pending
the finger of God.




III. THE SUICIDE OF ANTONIN MOYNE.

April, 1849.



Antonin Moyne, prior to February, 1848, was a maker
of little figures and statuettes for the trade.

Little figures and statuettes! That is what we had
come to. Trade had supplanted the State. How empty
is history, how poor is art; inasmuch as there are no more
big figures there are no more statues.

Antonin Moyne made rather a poor living out of his work.
He had, however, been able to give his son Paul a good
education and had got him into the Ecole Polytechnique.
Towards 1847 the art-work business being already bad, he
had added to his little figures portraits in pastel. With a
statuette here, and a portrait there, he managed to get
along.

After February the art-work business came to a complete
standstill. The manufacturer who wanted a model for a
candlestick or a clock, and the bourgeois who wanted a
portrait, failed him. What was to be done? Antonin
Moyne struggled on as best he could, used his old clothes,
lived upon beans and potatoes, sold his knick-knacks to
bric-à-brac dealers, pawned first his watch, then
his silverware.

He lived in a little apartment in the Rue de Boursault,
at No. 8, I think, at the corner of the Rue Labruyère.

The little apartment gradually became bare.

After June, Antonin Moyne solicited an order of the
Government. The matter dragged along for six months.
Three or four Cabinets succeeded each other and Louis
Bonaparte had time to be nominated President. At length
M. Leon Faucher gave Antonin Moyne an order for a bust,
upon which the statuary would be able to make 600
francs. But he was informed that, the State funds being
low, the bust would not be paid for until it was finished.

Distress came and hope went.

Antonin Moyne said one day to his wife, who was still
young, having been married to him when she was only
fifteen years old: "I will kill myself."

The next day his wife found a loaded pistol under a piece
of furniture. She took it and hid it. It appears that
Antonin Moyne found it again.

His reason no doubt began to give way. He always carried
a bludgeon and razor about with him. One day he
said to his wife: "It is easy to kill one's self with blows of
a hammer."

On one occasion he rose and opened the window with
such violence that his wife rushed forward and threw her
arms round him.

"What are you going to do?" she demanded.

"Just get a breath of air! And you, what do you want?"

"I am only embracing you," she answered.

On March 18, 1849, a Sunday, I think it was, his wife
said to him:

"I am going to church. Will you come with me?"

He was religious, and his wife, with loving watchfulness,
remained with him as much as possible.

He replied: "Presently!" and went into the next room,
which was his son's bedroom.

A few minutes elapsed. Suddenly Mme. Antonin
Moyne heard a noise similar to that made by the slamming
of a front door. But she knew what it was. She started
and cried: "It is that dreadful pistol!"

She rushed into the room her husband had entered, then
recoiled in horror. She had seen a body stretched upon
the floor.

She ran wildly about the house screaming for help. But
no one came, either because everybody was out or because
owing to the noise in the street she was not heard.

Then she returned, re-entered the room and knelt beside
her husband. The shot had blown nearly all his head away.
The blood streamed upon the floor, and the walls and
furniture were spattered with brains.

Thus, marked by fatality, like Jean Goujon, his master,
died Antonin Moyne, a name which henceforward will
bring to mind two things--a horrible death and a charming
talent.




IV. A VISIT TO THE OLD CHAMBER OF PEERS.

June, 1849.



The working men who sat in the Luxembourg during
the months of March and April under the presidency
of M. Louis Blanc, showed a sort of respect for the
Chamber of Peers they replaced. The armchairs of the
peers were occupied, but not soiled. There was no insult,
no affront, no abuse. Not a piece of velvet was torn, not a
piece of leather was dirtied. There is a good deal of the
child about the people, it is given to chalking its anger,
its joy and its irony on walls; these labouring men were
serious and inoffensive. In the drawers of the desks they
found the pens and knives of the peers, yet made neither
a cut nor a spot of ink.

A keeper of the palace remarked to me: "They have
behaved themselves very well." They left their places as
they had found them. One only left his mark, and he had
written in the drawer of Louis Blanc on the ministerial
bench:


Royalty is abolished.
Hurrah for Louis Blanc!


This inscription is still there.

The fauteuils of the peers were covered with green velvet
embellished with gold stripes. Their desks were of
mahogany, covered with morocco leather, and with drawers of
oak containing writing material in plenty, but having no
key. At the top of his desk each peer's name was stamped
in gilt letters on a piece of green leather let into the wood.
On the princes' bench, which was on the right, behind the
ministerial bench, there was no name, but a gilt plate
bearing the words: "The Princes' Bench." This plate and the
names of the peers had been torn off, not by the working
men, but by order of the Provisional Government.

A few changes were made in the rooms which served as
ante-chambers to the Assembly. Puget's admirable "Milo
of Crotona," which ornamented the vestibule at the top of
the grand staircase, was taken to the old museum and a
marble of some kind was substituted for it. The full length
statue of the Duke d'Orleans, which was in the second
vestibule, was taken I know not where and replaced by a
statue of Pompey with gilt face, arms and legs, the statue
at the foot of which, according to tradition, assassinated
Caesar fell. The picture of founders of constitutions, in
the third vestibule, a picture in which Napoleon, Louis
XVIII. and Louis Philippe figured, was removed by order
of Ledru-Rollin and replaced by a magnificent Gobelin
tapestry borrowed from the Garde-Meuble.

Hard by this third vestibule is the old hall of the Chamber
of Peers, which was built in 1805 for the Senate. This
hall, which is small, narrow and obscure; supported by
meagre Corinthian columns with mahogany-coloured bases
and white capitals; furnished with flat desks and chairs in
the Empire style with green velvet seats, the whole in
mahogany; and paved with white marble relieved by lozenges of
red Saint Anne marble,--this hall, so full of memories, had
been religiously preserved, and after the new hall was built
in 1840, had been used for the private conferences of the
Court of Peers.

It was in this old hall of the Senate that Marshal Ney
was tried. A bar had been put up to the left of the
Chancellor who presided over the Chamber. The Marshal was
behind this bar, with M. Berryer, senior, on his right, and
M. Dupin, the elder, on his left. He stood upon one of the
lozenges in the floor, in which, by a sinister hazard, the
capricious tracing of the marble figured a death's head.
This lozenge has since been taken up and replaced by another.

After February, in view of the riots, soldiers had to be
lodged in the palace. The old Senate-hall was turned into
a guard-house. The desks of the senators of Napoleon and
of the peers of the Restoration were stored in the lumber
rooms, and the curule chairs served as beds for the troops.

Early in June, 1849, I visited the hall of the Chamber
of Peers and found it just as I had left it seventeen months
before, the last time that I sat there, on February 23, 1848.

Everything was in its place. Profound calmness reigned;
the fauteuils were empty and in order. One might have
thought that the Chamber had adjourned ten minutes previously.







SKETCHES



MADE IN THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY.
I. ODILON BARROT.
II. MONSIEUR THIERS.
III. DUFAURE.
IV. CHANGARNIER.
V. LAGRANGE.
VI. PRUDHON.
VII. BLANQUI.
VIII. LAMARTINE.
IX. BOULAY DE LA MEURTHE.
X. DUPIN.







SKETCHES




MADE AT THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY.




ODILON BARROT.



Odilon Barrot ascends the tribune step by step and
slowly; he is solemn before being eloquent. Then he
places his right hand on the table of the tribune, throwing
his left hand behind his back, and thus shows himself
sideways to the Assembly in the attitude of an athlete. He is
always in black, well brushed and well buttoned up.

His delivery, which is slow at first, gradually becomes
animated, as do his thoughts. But in becoming animated
his speech becomes hoarse and his thoughts cloudy. Hence
a certain hesitation among his hearers, some being unable
to catch what he says, the others not understanding. All
at once from the cloud darts a flash of lightning and one
is dazzled. The difference between men of this kind and
Mirabeau is that the former have flashes of lightning,
Mirabeau alone has thunder.




MONSIEUR THIERS.



M. Thiers wants to treat men, ideas and revolutionary
events with parliamentary routine. He plays his old game
of constitutional tricks in face of abysms and the dreadful
upheavals of the chimerical and unexpected. He does not
realise that everything has been transformed; he finds a
resemblance between our own times and the time when he
governed, and starts out from this. This resemblance exists
in point of fact, but there is in it a something that is
colossal and monstrous. M. Thiers has no suspicion of this, and
pursues the even tenour of his way. All his life he has
been stroking cats, and coaxing them with all sorts of
cajolling processes and feline ways. To-day he is trying to play
the same game, and does not see that the animals have
grown beyond all measure and that it is wild beasts that
he is keeping about him. A strange sight it is to see this
little man trying to stroke the roaring muzzle of a
revolution with his little hand.



When M. Thiers is interrupted he gets excited, folds and
unfolds his arms, then raises his hands to his mouth, his
nose, his spectacles, shrugs his shoulders, and ends by
clasping the back of his head convulsively with both hands.



I have always entertained towards this celebrated statesman,
this eminent orator, this mediocre writer, this narrow-minded
man, an indefinable sentiment of admiration, aversion
and disdain.




DUFAURE.



M. Dufaure is a barrister of Saintes, and was the leading
lawyer in his town about 1833. This led him to aspire to
legislative honours. M. Dufaure arrived in the Chamber
with a provincial and cold-in-the-nose accent that was very
queer. But he possessed a mind so clear that occasionally
it was almost luminous, and so accurate that occasionally it
was decisive.

With that his speech was deliberate and cold, but sure,
solid, and calmly pushed difficulties before it.

M. Dufaure succeeded. He was a deputy, then a minister. He
is not a sage. He is a grave and honest man who
has held power without greatness but with probity, and who
speaks from the tribune without brilliancy but with authority.

His person resembles his talent. In appearance he is
dignified, simple and sober. He comes to the Chamber
buttoned up in his dark grey frock-coat, and wearing a
black cravat, and a shirt collar that reaches to his ears.
He has a big nose, thick lips, heavy eyebrows, an intelligent
and severe eye, and grey, ill-combed hair.




CHANGARNIER.



Changarnier looks like an old academician, just as Soult
looks like an old archbishop.

Changarnier is sixty-four or sixty-five years old, and tall
and thin. He has a gentle voice, a graceful and formal air,
a chestnut wig like M. Pasquier's, and a lady-killing smile
like M. Brifaut's.

With that he is a curt, bold, expeditious man, resolute,
but cunning and reserved.

At the Chamber he occupies the extreme end of the
fourth bench of the last section on the left, exactly above
M. Ledru-Rollin.

He usually sits with folded arms. The bench on which
Ledru-Rollin and Lamennais sit is perhaps the most habitually
irritated of the Left. While the Assembly shouts,
murmurs, yells, roars, and rages, Changarnier yawns.




LAGRANGE.



Lagrange, it is said, fired the pistol in the Boulevard des
Capucines, fatal spark that heated the passions of the people
and caused the conflagration of February. He is styled:
Political prisoner and Representative of the people.

Lagrange has a grey moustache, a grey beard and long
grey hair. He is overflowing with soured generosity, charitable
violence and a sort of chivalrous demagogy; there is
a love in his heart with which he stirs up hatred; he is
tall, thin, young looking at a distance, old when seen
nearer, wrinkled, bewildered, hoarse, flurried, wan, has a
wild look in his eyes and gesticulates; he is the Don
Quixote of the Mountain. He, also, tilts at windmills; that
is to say, at credit, order, peace, commerce, industry,--all
the machinery that turns out bread. With this, a lack of
ideas; continual jumps from justice to insanity and from
cordiality to threats. He proclaims, acclaims, reclaims and
declaims. He is one of those men who are never taken
seriously, but who sometimes have to be taken tragically.




PRUDHON.



Prudhon was born in 1803. He has thin fair hair that
is ruffled and ill-combed, with a curl on his fine high brow.
He wears spectacles. His gaze is at once troubled,
penetrating and steady. There is something of the house-dog
in his almost flat nose and of the monkey in his chin-beard.
His mouth, the nether lip of which is thick, has an habitual
expression of ill-humour. He has a Franc-Comtois accent, he
utters the syllables in the middle of words rapidly
and drawls the final syllables; he puts a circumflex accent
on every "a," and like Charles Nodier, pronounces: "~honorable,
remarquable~." He speaks badly and writes well. In
the tribune his gesture consists of little feverish pats
upon his manuscript with the palm of his hand. Sometimes
he becomes irritated, and froths; but it is cold slaver. The
principal characteristic of his countenance and physiognomy
is mingled embarrassment and assurance.

I write this while he is in the tribune.



Anthony Thouret met Prudhon.

"Things are going badly," said Prudhon.

"To what cause do you attribute our embarrassments?"
queried Anthony Thouret.

"The Socialists are at the bottom of the trouble, of
course.

"What! the Socialists? But are you not a Socialist
yourself?"

"I a Socialist! Well, I never!" ejaculated Prudhon.

"Well, what in the name of goodness, are you, then?"

"I am a financier."




BLANQUI.



Blanqui got so that ho no longer wore a shirt. For
twelve years he had worn the same clothes--his prison
clothes--rags, which he displayed with sombre pride at his
club. He renewed only his boots and his gloves, which
were always black.

At Vincennes during his eight months of captivity for
the affair of the 15th of May, he lived only upon bread and
raw potatoes, refusing all other food. His mother alone
occasionally succeeded in inducing him to take a little
beef-tea.

With this, frequent ablutions, cleanliness mingled with
cynicism, small hands and feet, never a shirt, gloves always.

There was in this man an aristocrat crushed and
trampled upon by a demagogue.

Great ability, no hypocrisy; the same in private as in
public. Harsh, stern, serious, never laughing, receiving
respect with irony, admiration with sarcasm, love with
disdain, and inspiring extraordinary devotion.

There was in Blanqui nothing of the people, everything
of the populace.

With this, a man of letters, almost erudite. At certain
moments he was no longer a man, but a sort of lugubrious
apparition in which all degrees of hatred born of all
degrees of misery seemed to be incarnated.




LAMARTINE.

February 23, 1850.



During the session Lamartine came and sat beside me
in the place usually occupied by M. Arbey. While talking,
he interjected in an undertone sarcastic remarks about the
orators in the tribune.

Thiers spoke. "Little scamp," murmured Lamartine.

Then Cavaignac made his appearance. "What do you
think about him?" said Lamartine. "For my part, these
are my sentiments: He is fortunate, he is brave, he is loyal,
he is voluble--and he is stupid."

Cavaignac was followed by Emmanuel Arago. The Assembly was
stormy. "This man," commented Lamartine,
"has arms too small for the affairs he undertakes. He is
given to joining in mêlées and does not know how to get
out of them again. The tempest tempts him, and kills him."

A moment later Jules Favre ascended the tribune. "I
do not know how they can see a serpent in this man," said
Lamartine. "He is a provincial academician."

Laughing the while, he took a sheet of paper from my
drawer, asked me for a pen, asked Savatier-Laroche for a
pinch of snuff, and wrote a few lines. This done he
mounted the tribune and addressed grave and haughty
words to M. Thiers, who had been attacking the revolution
of February. Then he returned to our bench, shook hands
with me while the Left applauded and the Right waxed
indignant, and calmly emptied the snuff in
Savatier-Laroche's snuffbox into his own.




BOULAY DE LA MEURTHE.



M. Boulay de la Meurthe was a stout, kindly man, bald,
pot-bellied, short, enormous, with a short nose and a not very
long wit. He was a friend of Hard, whom he called ~mon
cher~, and of Jerome Bonaparte, whom he addressed as
"your Majesty."

The Assembly, on January 20, made him Vice-President
of the Republic.

It was somewhat sudden, and unexpected by everybody
except himself. This latter fact was evident from the long
speech learned by heart that he delivered after being sworn
in. At its conclusion the Assembly applauded, then a roar
of laughter succeeded the applause. Everybody laughed,
including himself; the Assembly out of irony, he in good
faith.

Odilon Barrot, who since the previous evening had been
keenly regretting that he did not allow himself to be made
Vice-President, contemplated the scene with a shrug of the
shoulders and a bitter smile.

The Assembly followed Boulay de la Meurthe, congratulated
and gratified, with its eyes, and in every look could
be read this: "Well, I never! He takes himself seriously!"

When he was taking the oath, in a voice of thunder
which made everybody smile, Boulay de la Meurthe
looked as if he were dazzled by the Republic, and the
Assembly did not look as if it were dazzled by Boulay de
la Meurthe.




DUPIN.



Dupin has a style of wit that is peculiar to himself. It
is Gaulish, tinged with the wit of a limb of the law and
with jovial grossness. When the vote upon the bill against
universal suffrage was about to be taken some member of
the majority, whose name I have forgotten, went to him
and said:

"You are our president, and moreover a great legist.
You know more about it than I do. Enlighten me, I am
undecided. Is it true that the bill violates the
Constitution?"

Dupin appeared to think for a moment and then replied:

"No, it doesn't violate it, but it lifts its clothes up as
high as possible!"

This reminds me of what he said to me the day I spoke
upon the Education Bill. Baudin had permitted me to
take his turn to speak, and I went up to the presidential
chair to notify Dupin.

"Ah! you are going to speak! So much the better!"
said he; and pointing to M. Barthélemy Saint Hilaire, who
was then occupying the tribune and delivering a long and
minute technical speech against the measure, added:

"He is rendering you a service. He is doing the preparatory
work. He is turning the bill's trousers down. This
done you will be able to at once--"

He completed the phrase with the expressive gesture
which consists of tapping the back of the fingers of the left
hand with the fingers of the right hand.







LOUIS BONAPARTE.

I. HIS DEBUTS.
II. HIS ELEVATION TO THE PRESIDENCY.
III. THE FIRST OFFICIAL DINNER.
IV. THE FIRST MONTH.
V. FEELING HIS WAY.




I. HIS DEBUTS.



Upon his arrival in Paris Louis Bonaparte took up his
residence in the Place Vendome. Mlle. Georges went to
see him. They conversed at some length. In the course
of the conversation Louis Bonaparte led Mlle. Georges to
a window from which ,the column with the statue of Napoleon
I. upon it was visible and said:

"I gaze at that all day long."

"It's pretty high!" observed Mlle. George.



September 24, 1848.

Louis Napoleon appeared at the National Assembly today. He
seated himself on the seventh bench of the third
section on the left, between M. Vieillard and M. Havin.

He looks young, has a black moustache and goatee, and
a parting in his hair, a black cravat, a black coat buttoned
up, a turned-down collar, and white gloves. Perrin and
Leon Faucher, seated immediately below him, did not once
turn their heads. In a few minutes the galleries began to
turn their opera-glasses upon the prince, and the prince
gazed at the galleries through his own glass.

----------


September 26.

Louis Bonaparte ascended the tribune (3.15 P.M.). Black
frock-coat, grey trousers. He read from a crumpled paper
in his hand. He was listened to with deep attention. He
pronounced the word "compatriots" with a foreign accent.
When he had finished a few cries of "Long live the Republic!"
were raised.

He returned leisurely to his place. His cousin Napoleon,
son of Jerome, who so greatly resembles the Emperor,
leaned over M. Vieillard to congratulate him.

Louis Bonaparte seated himself without saying a word
to his two neighbours. He is silent, but he seems to be
embarrassed rather than taciturn.

----------


October 9.

While the question of the presidency was being raised
Louis Bonaparte absented himself from the Assembly.
When the Antony Thouret amendment, excluding members
of the royal and imperial families was being debated,
however, he reappeared. He seated himself at the
extremity of his bench, beside his former tutor, M. Vieillard,
and listened in silence, leaning his chin upon his hand, or
twisting his moustache.

All at once he rose and, amid extraordinary agitation,
walked slowly towards the tribune. One half of the
Assembly shouted: "The vote!" The other half shouted:
"Speak!"

M. Sarrans was in the tribune. The president said:

"M. Sarrans will allow M. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte
to speak."

He made a few insignificant remarks and descended from
the tribune amid a general laugh of stupefaction.

----------


November 1848.

On November 19 I dined at Odilon Barrot's at Bougival.

There were present MM. de Rémusat, de Tocqueville,
Girardin, Leon Faucher, a member of the English Parliament
and his wife, who is ugly but witty and has beautiful
teeth, Mme. Odilon Barrot and her mother.

Towards the middle of the dinner Louis Bonaparte arrived
with his cousin, the son of Jerome, and M. Abbatucci, Representative.

Louis Bonaparte is distinguished, cold, gentle, intelligent,
with a certain measure of deference and dignity, a
German air and black moustache; he bears no resemblance
whatever to the Emperor.

He ate little, spoke little, and laughed little, although
the party was a merry one.

Mme. Odilon Barrot seated him on her left. The Englishman
was on her right.

M. de Rémusat, who was seated between the prince and
myself, remarked to me loud enough for Louis Bonaparte
to hear:

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