uished, trampled on, and finally
included in a general amnesty, the party of the old Royalty, suddenly
imagined that they had become masters, and gave themselves up
passionately to the enjoyment of a new power which they looked upon as
an ancient right. God forbid that I should revive the sad remembrances
of this reaction! I only desire to explain its true character. It was,
in civil society, in internal administration, in local affairs, and
nearly throughout the entire land of France, a species of foreign
invasion, violent in certain places, offensive everywhere, and which
occasioned more evil to be dreaded than it actually inflicted; for these
unexpected victors threatened and insulted even where they refrained
from striking. They seemed inclined to indemnify themselves by arrogant
temerity, for their impotence to recover all that they had lost; and to
satisfy their own consciences in the midst of their revenge, they tried
to persuade themselves that they were far from inflicting on their
enemies the full measure of what they had themselves suffered.

Strangers to the passions of this party, impressed with the mischief
they inflicted on the Royal cause, and personally wounded by the
embarrassments they occasioned to the Government, the Duke de Richelieu
and the majority of his colleagues contended with honest sincerity
against them. Even by the side of the most justly condemned proceedings
during the reaction of 1815, and which remained entirely unpunished, we
find traces of the efforts of the existing authorities either to check
them, prevent their return, or at least to repel the sad responsibility
of permitting them. When the outrages against the Protestants broke out
in the departments of the south, and more than six weeks before
M. d'Argenson spoke of them in the Chamber of Deputies, a royal
proclamation, countersigned by M. Pasquier, vehemently denounced them,
and called upon the magistrates for their suppression. After the
scandalous acquittal, by the Court of Assize at Nismes, of the assassin
of General Lagarde, who had protected the free worship of the
Protestants, M. Pasquier demanded and obtained, from the Court of
Appeal, the annulment of this sentence, in the name of the law, and as a
last protestation of discarded justice. In spite of every possible
intervention of delay and impediment, the proceedings commenced at
Toulouse, and ended in a decree of the prevotal court at Pau, which
inflicted five years'