‘That is why a conquering General, a Bonaparte is impossible now in France,’ cried the military interrupter.
On this occasion, neither the chairman nor the Duke dared show annoyance, though Julien thought he could read in their eyes that they were tempted to do so. They lowered their eyes, and the Duke contented himself with a sigh loud enough to be audible to them all.
But the speaker had lost his temper.
‘You are in a hurry for me to conclude,’ he said with heat, entirely discarding that smiling politeness and measured speech which Julien had assumed to be the natural expression of his character: ‘you are in a hurry for me to conclude; you give me no credit for the efforts that I am making not to offend the ears of anyone present, however long they may be. Very well, Gentlemen, I shall be brief.
‘And I shall say to you in the plainest of words: England has not a halfpenny left for the service of the good cause. Were Pitt to return in person, with all his genius he would not succeed in hoodwinking the small landowners of England, for they know that the brief campaign of Waterloo cost them, by itself, one thousand million francs. Since you wish for plain speaking,’ the speaker added, growing more and more animated, ‘I shall say to you: Help yourselves, for England has not a guinea for your assistance, and if England does not pay, Austria, Russia, Prussia, which have only courage and no money, cannot support more than one campaign or two against France.
‘You may hope that the young soldiers collected by Jacobinism will be defeated in the first campaign, in the second perhaps; but in the third (though I pass for a revolutionary in your prejudiced eyes), in the third you will have the soldiers of 1794, who were no longer the recruited peasants of 1792.’
Here the interruption broke out in three or four places at once.
‘Sir,’ said the chairman to Julien, ‘go and make a fair copy in the next room of the first part of the report which you have taken down.’ Julien left the room with considerable regret. The speaker had referred to probabilities which formed the subject of his habitual meditations.
‘They are afraid of my laughing at them,’ he thought. When he was recalled, M. de La Mole was saying, with an earnestness, which, to Julien, who knew him, seemed highly amusing:
‘Yes, Gentlemen, it is above all of this unhappy race that one can say: “Shall it be a god, a table or a bowl?”
‘“It shall be a god!” cries the poet. It is to you, Gentlemen, that this saying, so noble and so profound, seems to apply. Act for yourselves, and our noble France will reappear more or less as our ancestors made her and as our own eyes beheld her before the death of Louis XVI.
‘England, her noble Lords at least, curses as heartily as we ignoble Jacobinism: without English gold, Austria, Russia, Prussia cannot fight more than two or three battles. Will that suffice to bring about a glorious occupation, like that which M. de Richelieu squandered so stupidly in 1817? I do not think so.’
At this point an interruption occurred, but it was silenced by a general murmur. It arose once more from the former Imperial General, who desired the Blue Riband, and was anxious to appear among the compilers of the secret note.
‘I do not think so,’ M. de La Mole resumed after the disturbance. He dwelt upon the word ‘I’ with an insolence which charmed Julien. ‘That is well played,’ he said to himself as he made his pen fly almost as fast as the Marquis’s utterance. With a well-placed word, M. de La Mole annihilated the twenty campaigns of the turncoat.
‘It is not to foreigners alone,’ the Marquis continued in the most measured tone, ‘that we can remain indebted for a fresh military occupation. That youthful band who contribute incendiary articles to the Globe will provide you with three or four thousand young captains, among whom may be found a Kleber, a Hoche, a Jourdan, a Pichegru, but less well-intentioned.’
‘We did wrong in not crowning him with glory,’ said the chairman, ‘we ought to have made him immortal.’
‘There must, in short, be two parties in France,’ went on M. de La Mole, ‘but two parties, not in name only, two parties clearly defined, sharply divided. Let us be certain whom we have to crush. On one side the journalists, the electors, public opinion; in a word, youth and all those who admire it. While it is dazed by the sound of its own idle words, we, we have the certain advantage of handling the budget.’
Here came a fresh interruption.
‘You, Sir,’ M. de La Mole said to the interrupter with a supercilious ease that was quite admirable, ‘you do not handle, since the word appears to shock you, you devour forty thousand francs borne on the state budget and eighty thousand which you receive from the Civil List.
‘Very well, Sir, since you force me to it, I take you boldly as an example. Like your noble ancestors who followed Saint Louis to the Crusade, you ought, for those hundred and twenty thousand francs, to let us see at least a regiment, a company, shall I say a half-company, were it composed only of fifty men ready to fight, and devoted to the good cause, alive or dead. You have only footmen who, in the event of a revolt, would frighten nobody but yourself.
The Throne, the Altar, the Nobility may perish any day, Gentlemen, so long as you have not created in each Department a force of five hundred devoted men; devoted, I mean, not only with all the gallantry of France but with the constancy of Spain.
‘One half of this troop will have to be composed of our sons, our nephews, in short of true gentlemen. Each of them will have by his side, not a glib little cockney ready to hoist the striped cockade if another 1815 should arrive, but an honest peasant, simple and open like Cathelineau; our gentleman will have trained him, it should be his foster-brother, if possible. Let each of us sacrifice the fifth part of his income to form this little devoted troop of five hundred men to a Department. Then you may count upon a foreign occupation. Never will the foreign soldier cross our borders as far as Dijon even, unless he is certain of finding five hundred friendly soldiers in each Department.
‘The foreign Kings will listen to you only when you can inform them that there are twenty thousand gentlemen ready to take up arms to open to them the gates of France. This service is arduous, you will say. Gentlemen, it is the price of our heads. Between the liberty of the press and our existence as gentlemen, there is war to the knife. Become manufacturers, peasants, or take up your guns. Be timid if you like, but do not be stupid. Open your eyes.
‘Form your battalions, I say to you, in the words of the Jacobin song; then there will appear some noble Gustavus–Adolphus, who, moved by the imminent peril to the monarchical principle will come flying three hundred leagues beyond his borders, and do for you what Gustavus did for the Protestant princes. Do you propose to go on talking without acting? In fifty years there will be nothing in Europe but Presidents of Republics, not one King left. And with those four letters K-I-N-G, go the priests and the gentlemen. I can see nothing but candidates paying court to draggletailed majorities.
‘It is no use your saying that France has not at this moment a trustworthy General, known and loved by all, that the army is organised only in the interests of Throne and Altar, that all the old soldiers have been discharged from it, whereas each of the Prussian and Austrian regiments includes fifty non-commissioned officers who have been under fire.
‘Two hundred thousand young men of the middle class are in love with the idea of war. . . . ’
‘Enough unpleasant truths,’ came in a tone of importance from a grave personage, apparently high on the ladder of ecclesiastical preferment, for M. de La Mole smiled pleasantly instead of showing annoyance, which was highly significant to Julien.
‘Enough unpleasant truths; Gentlemen, to sum up: the man with whom it was a question of amputating his gangrened leg would be ill-advised to say to his surgeon: this diseased leg is quite sound. Pardon me the simile, Gentlemen, the noble Duke of —— is our surgeon.’[12]
‘There