France in the Nineteenth Century | Page 5

extremity; to try the Chambers, and if his ministers are beaten, to
dissolve the House and to govern par ordonnances du roi." This
prophecy, written in March, 1830, foreshadowed exactly what
happened in July of the same year, when, as an outspoken English Tory
told Henry Crabb Robinson, in a reading-room at Florence: "The king
of France has sent the deputies about their business, has abolished the
d----d Constitution and the liberty of the Press, and proclaimed his own
power as absolute king."
"And what will the end be?" cried Robinson.
"It will end," said a Frenchman who was present, "in driving the
Bourbons out of France!"
During the last months of Charles X.'s reign France made an expedition
against the Dey of Algiers, which was the first step in the conquest of
Algeria. The immediate object of the expedition, however, was to draw
off the attention of a disaffected nation from local politics. An army of
57,000 soldiers, 103 ships of war, and many transports, was despatched
to the coast of Barbary. The expedition was not very glorious, but it
was successful. Te Deums were sung in Paris, the general in command
was made a marshal, and his naval colleague a peer.
The royalists of France were at this period divided into two parties; the
party of the king and Polignac, who were governed by the Jesuits,
looked for support to the clergy of France. The other party looked to
the army. Yet the most religious men in the country--men like M. de la
Ferronays, for example--condemned and regretted the obstinacy of the
king.
Louis Philippe, the Duke of Orleans, on whom all eyes were fixed, was
the son of that infamous Duke of Orleans who in the Revolution
proclaimed himself a republican, took the name of Philippe Égalité, and
voted for the execution of the king, drawing down upon himself the
rebuke of the next Jacobin whose turn it was to vote in the convention,
who exclaimed: "I was going to vote Yes, but I vote No, that I may not

tread in the steps of the man who has voted before me."
Égalité was in the end a victim. He perished, after suffering great
poverty, leaving three sons and a daughter. The sons were Louis
Philippe, who became Duke of Orleans, the Comte de Beaujolais, and
the Duc de Montpensier. One of these had shared the imprisonment of
his father, and narrowly escaped the guillotine.
Louis Philippe had solicited from the Republic permission to serve
under Dumouriez in his celebrated campaign in the Low Countries. He
fought with distinguished bravery at Valmy and Jemappes as
Dumouriez's aide-de-camp; but when that general was forced to desert
his army and escape for his life, Louis Philippe made his escape too.
He went into Switzerland, and there taught mathematics in a school.
Thence he came to America, travelled through the United States, and
resided for some time at Brooklyn.
In 1808 he went out to the Mediterranean in an English man-of-war in
charge of his sick brother, the Comte de Beaujolais. The same vessel
carried Sir John Moore out to his command, and landed him at Lisbon.
Louis Philippe could not have had a very pleasant voyage, for the
English admiral, on board whose ship he was a passenger, came up one
day in a rage upon the quarter-deck, and declared aloud, in the hearing
of his officers, that the Duke of Orleans was such a d----d republican he
could not sit at the same table with him.[1]
[Footnote 1: My father was present, and often told the story]
There used to be stories floating about Paris concerning Louis
Philippe's birth and parentage,--stories, however, not to be believed,
and which broke down upon investigation. These made him out to be
the son of an Italian jailer, exchanged for a little girl who had been born
to the Duke of Orleans and his wife at a time when it was a great object
with them to have a son. The little girl grew up in the jailer Chiappini's
house under the name of Maria Stella Petronilla. There is little doubt
that she was a changeling, but the link is imperfect which would
connect her with the Duke and Duchess of Orleans. She was ill-treated
by the jailer's wife, but was very beautiful. Lord Newburgh, an English

nobleman, saw her and married her. Her son succeeded his father as a
peer of England. After Lord Newburgh's death his widow married a
Russian nobleman. Chiappini on his death-bed confessed to this lady
all he knew about her origin, and she persuaded herself that her father
must have been the Duke of Orleans. She took up her residence in the
Rue Rivoli, overlooking the gardens of the Tuileries, and received
some small pension from the benevolent