Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Volume I.Scott, Walter
History
Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Volume I.
Scott, Walter
France -- History -- 1789-1815; Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, 1769-1821
The same healing overture, as it would have been called in the civil
dissensions of England, was brought before the Assembly, [July 9,] and
recommended by the constitutional Bishop of Lyons, the Abbé L'Amourette.
This good-natured orator affected to see, in the divisions which rent
the Assembly to pieces, only the result of an unfortunate error--a
mutual misunderstanding of each other's meaning. "You," he said to the
Republican members, "are afraid of an undue attachment to aristocracy;
you dread the introduction of the English system of two Chambers into
the Constitution. You of the right hand, on the contrary, misconstrue
your peaceful and ill-understood brethren, so far as to suppose them
capable of renouncing monarchy, as established by the Constitution. What
then remains to extinguish these fatal divisions, but for each party to
disown the designs falsely imputed to them, and for the Assembly united
to swear anew their devotion to the Constitution, as it has been
bequeathed to us by the Constituent Assembly!"
This speech, wonderful as it may seem, had the effect of magic. The
deputies of every faction, Royalist, Constitutionalist, Girondist,
Jacobin, and Orleanist, rushed into each other's arms, and mixed tears
with the solemn oaths by which they renounced the innovations supposed
to be imputed to them. The King was sent for to enjoy this spectacle of
concord, so strangely and so unexpectedly renewed. But the feeling,
though strong,--and it might be with many overpowering for the
moment,--was but like oil spilt on the raging sea, or rather like a shot
fired across the waves of a torrent, which, though it counteracts them
by its momentary impulse, cannot for a second alter their course. The
factions, like Le Sage's demons, detested each other the more for having
been compelled to embrace, and from the name and country of the
benevolent bishop, the scene was long called, in ridicule, "_Le Baiser
d'Amourette_," and "_La réconciliation Normande_."[225]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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