in his army, brandish the royal
sword at Rheims in his rank as Count of Flanders or Duke of
Aquitaine. To whom can this parade really convey any illusion? I
should have wished no pomp to-day; the King on horseback, the
church bare, adorned only with its ancient arches and tombs; the
two Chambers present, the oath of fidelity to the Charter taken
aloud on the Bible. This would have been the renewal of the
monarchy; they might have begun it over again with liberty and
religion. Unfortunately there was little love of liberty, even if
they had had at least a taste for glory."
This is not all; the curious royalist, as if disabused as to
Bourbon glories, so extolled by him, glorifies, apropos of the
coronation of Charles X., the Napoleon whom in 1814 he called
disdainfully "Buonaparte," loading him with the most cutting
insults:--
"After all, did not the new coronation, when the Pope anointed a
man as great as the chief of the second race, by a change of heads
alter the effect of the ancient ceremony of our history? The
people have been led to think that a pious rite does not dedicate
any one to the throne, or else renders indifferent the choice of
the brow to be touched by the holy oil. The supernumeraries at
Notre-Dame de Paris, playing also in the Cathedral of Rheims, are
no longer anything but the obligatory personages of a stage that
has become common.
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