s 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. The advantage really is
with Napoleon, who furnishes his figurants to Charles X. The figure of
the Emperor thenceforth dominates all. It appears in the background of
events and ideas. The leaflets of the good time to which we have
attained shrivel at the glance of his eagles."

Charles X. left Compiegne the 27th of May in the morning, and slept at
Fismes. The next day, the 28th, he had just quitted this town and was
descending a steep hill, when several batteries of the royal guard
fired a salute at his departure; the horses, frightened, took flight.
Thanks to the skill of the postilion, there was no accident to the
King; but a carriage of his suite, in which were the Duke of Aumont,
the Count de Cosse, the Duke of Damas, and the Count Curial, was
overturned and broken, and the last two wounded. At noon Charles X.
arrived at a league and a half from Rheims, at the village of Tinqueux,
where he was awaited by the Dukes of Orleans and Bourbon, the officers
of his civil and military household, the authorities of Rheims, the
legion of the mounted National Guard of Paris, etc. He entered the gold
carriage,--termed the coronation carriage,--where the Dauphin and the
Dukes of Orleans and Bo