“And Massena’s daughter,” cried the veteran indignantly, “lives now in the humblest poverty--the wife of a very poor man, who cultivates a little garden near Brussels, where _femmes de chambre_ are sent to buy bouquets for their mistresses! The daughter of a _Maréchal de France_, a title once that Kings loved to add to their royalty, as men love to ennoble station by evidences of high personal desert!” “How little fidelity, however, did these men shew to him who had made them thus great! how numerous were the desertions!--how rapid too!” “Yes, there was an epidemic of treason at that time in France, just as you have seen at different epochs, here, other epidemics prevail: in the Revolution the passion was for the guillotine; then came the lust of military glory--that suited us best, and lasted longest; we indulged in it for twenty years: then succeeded that terrible revulsion, and men hastened to prove how false-hearted they could be. Then came the Restoration--and the passion was to be Catholic; and now we have another order of things, whose worst feature is, that there is no prevailing creed. Men live for the day and the hour. The King’s health--the state of Spain--a bad harvest--an awkward dispute between the commander of our squadron in the Pacific with some of your admirals,--anything may overturn the balance, and our whole political and social condition may have to be built up once more.” “The great remedy against this uncertainty is out of your power,” said I: “you abolished the claims of Sovereignty on the permanent affection of the people, and now you begin to feel the want of ‘Loyalty.’” “Our kings had ceased to merit the respect of the nation when they lost it.” “Say, rather, you revenged upon them the faults and vices of their more depraved, but bolder, ancestors. You made the timid Louis XVI. pay for the hardy Louis XIV. Had that unhappy monarch but been like the Emperor, his court might have displayed all the excesses of the regency twice told, and you had never declared against them.” “That may be true; but you evidently do not--I doubt, indeed, if any but a Frenchman and a soldier can--feel the nature of our attachment to the Emperor. It was something in which personal interest partook a large part, and the hope of future advancement, _through him_, bore its share. The army regarded him thus, and never forgave him perfectly, for preferring to be an Emperor rather than a General. Now, the very desertions you have lately alluded to, would probably never have occurred if the leader had not merged into the monarch.