Biographical fiction; French fiction -- Translations into English
Du Bousquier now posed as a banker. This miniature Lafitte was a partner
in all new enterprises, taking good security. He served himself while
apparently serving the interests of the community. He was the prime
mover of insurance companies, the protector of new enterprises for
public conveyance; he suggested petitions for asking the administration
for the necessary roads and bridges. Thus warned, the government
considered this action an encroachment of its own authority. A struggle
was begun injudiciously, for the good of the community compelled the
authorities to yield in the end. Du Bousquier embittered the provincial
nobility against the court nobility and the peerage; and finally he
brought about the shocking adhesion of a strong party of constitutional
royalists to the warfare sustained by the “Journal des Debats,” and M.
de Chateaubriand against the throne,--an ungrateful opposition based on
ignoble interests, which was one cause of the triumph of the bourgeoisie
and journalism in 1830.
Thus du Bousquier, in common with the class he represented, had the
satisfaction of beholding the funeral of royalty. The old republican,
smothered with masses, who for fifteen years had played that comedy to
satisfy his vendetta, himself threw down with his own hand the white
flag of the mayoralty to the applause of the multitude. No man in
France cast upon the new throne raised in August, 1830, a glance of more
intoxicated, joyous vengeance. The accession of the Younger Branch was
the triumph of the Revolution. To him the victory of the tricolor meant
the resurrection of Montagne, which this time should surely bring
the nobility down to the dust by means more certain than that of the
guillotine, because less violent. The peerage without heredity; the
National Guard, which puts on the same camp-bed the corner grocer
and the marquis; the abolition of the entails demanded by a bourgeois
lawyer; the Catholic Church deprived of its supremacy; and all the other
legislative inventions of August, 1830,--were to du Bousquier the wisest
possible application of the principles of 1793.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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