Saturday last, verses, of which the sense was that kings who have
lost the love of their people encounter only silence and coldness,
were greeted with triple applause and furiously encored."
The report of May 12,1827, was like an alarm bell:
"Circumstances are so grave that the calmest minds betray fear
regarding them; there are now but one opinion and one feeling,--
doubt and fear. It is said openly, as eight years since: This
branch cannot keep the crown; it is impossible; who will succeed
it? How many things, great Heavens, done in eight years; how many
things forgotten!"
Exposed to an outpouring of enmities and of incessant intrigues,
taken between two fires,--the extreme Right and the Left,--M. de
Villele no longer had the strength to govern. His ministry was
about to come to an end. Later, in retracing in his journal this
phase of his career, he wrote:--
"All that took place was of a feebleness destructive of all
government, and disheartening for him who bears all the
responsibility for it, with the weight of affairs besides. But he
was not, and did not pretend to be, the Cardinal Richelieu. He had
not his character, nor his ambition, nor his superior gifts. He
did not even envy them. Had he been quite different in this
regard, to repress and annul his king, to oppress the daughter of
Louis XVI. and the widow of the Duke of Berry, to exile from
France the new Gaston d'Orleans, and his numerous family, to bring
down the heads of the court pygmies,--more dangerous, perhaps,
with their influence over the King and his family and their
vexatious intrigues in the Court of Peers than the Montmorencys
and the Cinq-Mars,--this was a rele to which he never aspired and
would not have accepted.
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