Before going to
Rheims he stopped at the Chateau of Compiegne, where he remained
until the 27th, amid receptions and fetes and hunts.
M. de Chateaubriand was already at Rheims. He wrote on May 26:--
"The King arrives day after to-morrow. He will be crowned Sunday,
the 29th. I shall see him place upon his head a crown that no one
dreamed of when I raised my voice in 1814. I write this page of my
Memoirs in the room where I am forgotten amid the noise. This
morning I visited Saint-Remi and the Cathedral decorated in
colored paper. The only clear idea that I can have of this last
edifice is from the decorations of the Jeanne d'Arc of Schiller,
played at Berlin. The opera-scene painters showed me on the banks
of the Spree, what the opera-scene painters on the banks of the
Vesle hide from me. But I amused myself with the old races, from
Clovis with his Franks and his legion come down from heaven, to
Charles VII. with Jeanne d'Arc."
The writer, who some weeks earlier had expressed himself in terms
so dithyrambic as to the consecration, now wrote as follows of
this religious and monarchical solemnity:--
"Under what happy auspices did Louis XVI. ascend the throne! How
popular he was, succeeding to Louis XV.! And yet what did he
become? The present coronation will be the representation of a
coronation. It will not be one; we shall see the Marshal Moncey,
an actor at that of Napoleon, the Marshal who formerly celebrated
the death of the tyrant Louis XVI.
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