when he met him, on the evening of Sedan, and asked him to do so?  Why did the unfortunate prince not do the same as two sovereigns in possession of hereditary rights and duties, Victor Emmanuel after Novara, and Francis Joseph after Sadowa, who both of them safeguarded their territory and the honour of their armies?  Because he was a bastard sovereign—­and dared not reappear before his electors once he was beaten.

But to return to my story, to which I have but a few lines to add.  The revolution might have been foreseen and the days of the government of 1830 might have been prolonged.  Once it was overthrown, and the dyke which stemmed the torrent of democracy carried away, its rule, which was one of chance convenience and not of right, had no further reason for existence.

That being so, what was I to do?  The re-establishment of the legitimate family on the throne was out of the question.  The disasters of our first revolutionary period had not as yet been renewed in their terrible logical sequence.  We had not yet had our second Waterloo at Sedan, and very few people thought at that moment of coming back to the principle the proof of whose title lies in the centuries of unity and greatness assured by it to France—­the one and only principle capable of checking her on her descent into the abyss of dismemberment, depopulation, and social destruction, down which she is gliding.

It was clear that another elective regime was about to succeed the one which had just collapsed—­one of those modern edifices, all, whatever may be the name with which they are decorated, tainted with the same original weakness—­“What the majority has made, the majority has the right to unmake.”  In fact—­as somebody said in a speech—­a perpetually provisional arrangement Under these ephemeral forms of rule, our national inferiority in face of other stable and far-sighted governments is flagrantly evident.  The sense of duty wears away, devoted service is never given without a mental reservation touching the morrow—­that unknown morrow, which checkmates the boldest plans.  Thus constituted, such regimes are all alike, and it was not for the princes of the House of France to draw their swords to impose one form of national humiliation rather than another on their country.

When once my father’s rule had disappeared, and with it the unvarying line of duty traced by my absolute filial devotion to him, I watched the establishment of a republican form of government without annoyance, for I preferred its clear distinctness to the complicated combinations which pretended to reconcile two opposite principles by putting handcuffs on them both.

Like many others, too, I did not doubt that the shock of revolution would soon bring on a general war.  Under such circumstances, it would have been crime to add the pangs of civil strife to the dangers threatening our country.