How many things had passed in that half-century, one of the most
fruitful in vicissitudes and catastrophes, one of the strangest
and most troubled of which history has preserved the memory!
Chateaubriand, who, later, in his Memoires d'outretombe, so full
of sadness and bitterness, was to speak of the coronation in a
tone of scepticism verging on raillery, celebrated at the
accession of Charles, in almost epic language, the merits of this
traditional solemnity without which a "Very Christian King" was
not yet completely King. In his pamphlet, Le roi est mort! Vive le
roi! he conjured the new monarch to give to his crown this
religious consecration. "Let us humbly supplicate Charles X. to
imitate his ancestors," said the author of the Genie du
Christianisme. "Thirty-two sovereigns of the third race have
received the royal unction, that is to say, all the sovereigns of
that race except Jean 1er, who died four days after his birth,
Louis XVII., and Louis XVIII., on whom royalty fell, on one in the
Tower of the Temple, on the other in a foreign land. The words of
Adalberon, Archbishop of Rheims, on the subject of the coronation
of Hugh Capet, are still true to-day. 'The coronation of the King
of the French,' he says, 'is a public interest and not a private
affair, Publica, sunt haec negotia, non privata.' May Charles X.
deign to weigh these words, applied to the author of his race; in
weeping for a brother, may he remember that he is King! The
Chambers or the Deputies of the Chambers whom he may summon to
Rheims in his suite, the magistrates who shall swell his cortege,
the soldiers who shall surround his person, will feel the faith of
religion and royalty strengthened in them by this imposing
solemnity.
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