Volume 1/Book 3/Chapter 1

Les Misérables, Volume 1: Fantine, Book Third: In the Year 1817, Chapter 1: The Year 1817
(Tome 1: Fantine, Livre troisième: En l'année 1817, Chapitre 1: L'année 1817)

French text

1817 est l'année que Louis XVIII, avec un certain aplomb royal qui ne manquait pas de fierté, qualifiait la vingt-deuxième de son règne. C'est l'année où M. Bruguière de Sorsum était célèbre. Toutes les boutiques des perruquiers, espérant la poudre et le retour de l'oiseau royal, étaient badigeonnées d'azur et fleurdelysées. C'était le temps candide où le comte Lynch siégeait tous les dimanches comme marguillier au banc d'œuvre de Saint-Germain-des-Prés en habit de pair de France, avec son cordon rouge et son long nez, et cette majesté de profil particulière à un homme qui a fait une action d'éclat. L'action d'éclat commise par M. Lynch était ceci: avoir, étant maire de Bordeaux, le 12 mars 1814, donné la ville un peu trop tôt à M. le duc d'Angoulême. De là sa pairie. En 1817, la mode engloutissait les petits garçons de quatre à six ans sous de vastes casquettes en cuir maroquiné à oreillons assez ressemblantes à des mitres d'esquimaux. L'armée française était vêtue de blanc, à l'autrichienne; les régiments s'appelaient légions; au lieu de chiffres ils portaient les noms des départements. Napoléon était à Sainte-Hélène, et, comme l'Angleterre lui refusait du drap vert, il faisait retourner ses vieux habits. En 1817, Pellegrini chantait, mademoiselle Bigottini dansait; Potier régnait; Odry n'existait pas encore. Madame Saqui succédait à Forioso. Il y avait encore des Prussiens en France. M. Delalot était un personnage. La légitimité venait de s'affirmer en coupant le poing, puis la tête, à Pleignier, à Carbonneau et à Tolleron. Le prince de Talleyrand, grand chambellan, et l'abbé Louis, ministre désigné des finances, se regardaient en riant du rire de deux augures; tous deux avaient célébré, le 14 juillet 1790, la messe de la Fédération au Champ de Mars; Talleyrand l'avait dite comme évêque, Louis l'avait servie comme diacre. En 1817, dans les contre-allées de ce même Champ de Mars, on apercevait de gros cylindres de bois, gisant sous la pluie, pourrissant dans l'herbe, peints en bleu avec des traces d'aigles et d'abeilles dédorées. C'étaient les colonnes qui, deux ans auparavant, avaient soutenu l'estrade de l'empereur au Champ-de-Mai. Elles étaient noircies çà et là de la brûlure du bivouac des Autrichiens baraqués près du Gros-Caillou. Deux ou trois de ces colonnes avaient disparu dans les feux de ces bivouacs et avaient chauffé les larges mains des kaiserlicks. Le Champ de Mai avait eu cela de remarquable qu'il avait été tenu au mois de juin et au Champ de Mars. En cette année 1817, deux choses étaient populaires: le Voltaire-Touquet et la tabatière à la Charte. L'émotion parisienne la plus récente était le crime de Dautun qui avait jeté la tête de son frère dans le bassin du Marché-aux-Fleurs. On commençait à faire au ministère de la marine une enquête sur cette fatale frégate de la Méduse qui devait couvrir de honte Chaumareix et de gloire Géricault. Le colonel Selves allait en Égypte pour y devenir Soliman pacha. Le palais des Thermes, rue de la Harpe, servait de boutique à un tonnelier. On voyait encore sur la plate-forme de la tour octogone de l'hôtel de Cluny la petite logette en planches qui avait servi d'observatoire à Messier, astronome de la marine sous Louis XVI. La duchesse de Duras lisait à trois ou quatre amis, dans son boudoir meublé d'X en satin bleu ciel, Ourika inédite. On grattait les N au Louvre. Le pont d'Austerlitz abdiquait et s'intitulait pont du Jardin du Roi, double énigme qui déguisait à la fois le pont d'Austerlitz et le jardin des Plantes. Louis XVIII, préoccupé, tout en annotant du coin de l'ongle Horace, des héros qui se font empereurs et des sabotiers qui se font dauphins, avait deux soucis: Napoléon et Mathurin Bruneau. L'académie française donnait pour sujet de prix: Le bonheur que procure l'étude. M. Bellart était officiellement éloquent. On voyait germer à son ombre ce futur avocat général de Broè, promis aux sarcasmes de Paul-Louis Courier. Il y avait un faux Chateaubriand appelé Marchangy, en attendant qu'il y eut un faux Marchangy appelé d'Arlincourt. Claire d'Albe et Malek-Adel étaient des chefs-d'œuvre; madame Cottin était déclarée le premier écrivain de l'époque. L'institut laissait rayer de sa liste l'académicien Napoléon Bonaparte. Une ordonnance royale érigeait Angoulême en école de marine, car, le duc d'Angoulême étant grand amiral, il était évident que la ville d'Angoulême avait de droit toutes les qualités d'un port de mer, sans quoi le principe monarchique eût été entamé. On agitait en conseil des ministres la question de savoir si l'on devait tolérer les vignettes représentant des voltiges qui assaisonnaient les affiches de Franconi et qui attroupaient les polissons des rues. M. Paër, auteur de l'Agnese, bonhomme à la face carrée qui avait une verrue sur la joue, dirigeait les petits concerts intimes de la marquise de Sassenaye, rue de la Ville-l'Évêque. Toutes les jeunes filles chantaient l'Ermite de Saint-Avelle, paroles d'Edmond Géraud. Le Nain jaune se transformait en Miroir. Le café Lemblin tenait pour l'empereur contre le café Valois qui tenait pour les Bourbons. On venait de marier à une princesse de Sicile M. le duc de Berry, déjà regardé du fond de l'ombre par Louvel. Il y avait un an que madame de Staël était morte. Les gardes du corps sifflaient mademoiselle Mars. Les grands journaux étaient tout petits. Le format était restreint, mais la liberté était grande. Le Constitutionnel était constitutionnel. La Minerve appelait Chateaubriand Chateaubriant. Ce t faisait beaucoup rire les bourgeois aux dépens du grand écrivain. Dans des journaux vendus, des journalistes prostitués insultaient les proscrits de 1815; David n'avait plus de talent, Arnault n'avait plus d'esprit, Carnot n'avait plus de probité; Soult n'avait gagné aucune bataille; il est vrai que Napoléon n'avait plus de génie. Personne n'ignore qu'il est assez rare que les lettres adressées par la poste à un exilé lui parviennent, les polices se faisant un religieux devoir de les intercepter. Le fait n'est point nouveau; Descartes, banni, s'en plaignait. Or, David ayant, dans un journal belge, montré quelque humeur de ne pas recevoir les lettres qu'on lui écrivait, ceci paraissait plaisant aux feuilles royalistes qui bafouaient à cette occasion le proscrit. Dire: les régicides, ou dire: les votants, dire: les ennemis, ou dire: les alliés, dire: Napoléon, ou dire: Buonaparte, cela séparait deux hommes plus qu'un abîme. Tous les gens de bons sens convenaient que l'ère des révolutions était à jamais fermée par le roi Louis XVIII, surnommé «l'immortel auteur de la charte». Au terre-plein du Pont-Neuf, on sculptait le mot Redivivus, sur le piédestal qui attendait la statue de Henri IV. M. Piet ébauchait, rue Thérèse, n° 4, son conciliabule pour consolider la monarchie. Les chefs de la droite disaient dans les conjonctures graves: «Il faut écrire à Bacot». MM. Canuel, O'Mahony et de Chappedelaine esquissaient, un peu approuvés de Monsieur, ce qui devait être plus tard «la conspiration du bord de l'eau». L'Épingle Noire complotait de son côté. Delaverderie s'abouchait avec Trogoff. M. Decazes, esprit dans une certaine mesure libéral, dominait. Chateaubriand, debout tous les matins devant sa fenêtre du n° 27 de la rue Saint-Dominique, en pantalon à pieds et en pantoufles, ses cheveux gris coiffés d'un madras, les yeux fixés sur un miroir, une trousse complète de chirurgien dentiste ouverte devant lui, se curait les dents, qu'il avait charmantes, tout en dictant des variantes de la Monarchie selon la Charte à M. Pilorge, son secrétaire. La critique faisant autorité préférait Lafon à Talma. M. de Féletz signait A.; M. Hoffmann signait Z. Charles Nodier écrivait Thérèse Aubert. Le divorce était aboli. Les lycées s'appelaient collèges. Les collégiens, ornés au collet d'une fleur de lys d'or, s'y gourmaient à propos du roi de Rome. La contre-police du château dénonçait à son altesse royale Madame le portrait, partout exposé, de M. le duc d'Orléans, lequel avait meilleure mine en uniforme de colonel général des houzards que M. le duc de Berry en uniforme de colonel général des dragons; grave inconvénient. La ville de Paris faisait redorer à ses frais le dôme des Invalides. Les hommes sérieux se demandaient ce que ferait, dans telle ou telle occasion, M. de Trinquelague; M. Clausel de Montals se séparait, sur divers points, de M. Clausel de Coussergues; M. de Salaberry n'était pas content. Le comédien Picard, qui était de l'Académie dont le comédien Molière n'avait pu être, faisait jouer les deux Philibert à l'Odéon, sur le fronton duquel l'arrachement des lettres laissait encore lire distinctement: THÉÂTRE DE L'IMPÉRATRICE. On prenait parti pour ou contre Cugnet de Montarlot. Fabvier était factieux; Bavoux était révolutionnaire. Le libraire Pélicier publiait une édition de Voltaire, sous ce titre: OEuvres de Voltaire, de l'Académie française. «Cela fait venir les acheteurs», disait cet éditeur naïf. L'opinion générale était que M. Charles Loyson, serait le génie du siècle; l'envie commençait à le mordre, signe de gloire; et l'on faisait sur lui ce vers:

Même quand Loyson vole, on sent qu'il a des pattes.

Le cardinal Fesch refusant de se démettre, M. de Pins, archevêque d'Amasie, administrait le diocèse de Lyon. La querelle de la vallée des Dappes commençait entre la Suisse et la France par un mémoire du capitaine Dufour, depuis général. Saint-Simon, ignoré, échafaudait son rêve sublime. Il y avait à l'académie des sciences un Fourier célèbre que la postérité a oublié et dans je ne sais quel grenier un Fourier obscur dont l'avenir se souviendra. Lord Byron commençait à poindre; une note d'un poème de Millevoye l'annonçait à la France en ces termes: un certain lord Baron. David d'Angers s'essayait à pétrir le marbre. L'abbé Caron parlait avec éloge, en petit comité de séminaristes, dans le cul-de-sac des Feuillantines, d'un prêtre inconnu nommé Félicité Robert qui a été plus tard Lamennais. Une chose qui fumait et clapotait sur la Seine avec le bruit d'un chien qui nage allait et venait sous les fenêtres des Tuileries, du pont Royal au pont Louis XV c'était une mécanique bonne à pas grand'chose, une espèce de joujou, une rêverie d'inventeur songe-creux, une utopie: un bateau à vapeur. Les Parisiens regardaient cette inutilité avec indifférence. M. de Vaublanc, réformateur de l'Institut par coup d'État, ordonnance et fournée, auteur distingué de plusieurs académiciens, après en avoir fait, ne pouvait parvenir à l'être. Le faubourg Saint-Germain et la pavillon Marsan souhaitaient pour préfet de police M. Delaveau, à cause de sa dévotion. Dupuytren et Récamier se prenaient de querelle à l'amphithéâtre de l'École de médecine et se menaçaient du poing à propos de la divinité de Jésus-Christ. Cuvier, un œil sur la Genèse et l'autre sur la nature, s'efforçait de plaire à la réaction bigote en mettant les fossiles d'accord avec les textes et en faisant flatter Moïse par les mastodontes. M. François de Neufchâteau, louable cultivateur de la mémoire de Parmentier, faisait mille efforts pour que pomme de terre fût prononcée parmentière, et n'y réussissait point. L'abbé Grégoire, ancien évêque, ancien conventionnel, ancien sénateur, était passé dans la polémique royaliste à l'état «d'infâme Grégoire». Cette locution que nous venons d'employer: passer à l'état de, était dénoncée comme néologisme par M. Royer-Collard. On pouvait distinguer encore à sa blancheur, sous la troisième arche du pont d'Iéna, la pierre neuve avec laquelle, deux ans auparavant, on avait bouché le trou de mine pratiqué par Blücher pour faire sauter le pont. La justice appelait à sa barre un homme qui, en voyant entrer le comte d'Artois à Notre-Dame, avait dit tout haut: Sapristi! je regrette le temps où je voyais Bonaparte et Talma entrer bras dessus bras dessous au Bal-Sauvage. Propos séditieux. Six mois de prison. Des traîtres se montraient déboutonnés; des hommes qui avaient passé à l'ennemi la veille d'une bataille ne cachaient rien de la récompense et marchaient impudiquement en plein soleil dans le cynisme des richesses et des dignités; des déserteurs de Ligny et des Quatre-Bras, dans le débraillé de leur turpitude payée, étalaient leur dévouement monarchique tout nu; oubliant ce qui est écrit en Angleterre sur la muraille intérieure des water-closets publics: Please adjust your dress before leaving.

Voilà, pêle-mêle, ce qui surnage confusément de l'année 1817, oubliée aujourd'hui. L'histoire néglige presque toutes ces particularités, et ne peut faire autrement; l'infini l'envahirait. Pourtant ces détails, qu'on appelle à tort petits—il n'y a ni petits faits dans l'humanité, ni petites feuilles dans la végétation—sont utiles. C'est de la physionomie des années que se compose la figure des siècles.

En cette année 1817, quatre jeunes Parisiens firent «une bonne farce».

English text

1817 is the year which Louis XVIII., with a certain royal assurance which was not wanting in pride, entitled the twenty-second of his reign. It is the year in which M. Bruguiere de Sorsum was celebrated. All the hairdressers' shops, hoping for powder and the return of the royal bird, were besmeared with azure and decked with fleurs-de-lys. It was the candid time at which Count Lynch sat every Sunday as church-warden in the church-warden's pew of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, in his costume of a peer of France, with his red ribbon and his long nose and the majesty of profile peculiar to a man who has performed a brilliant action. The brilliant action performed by M. Lynch was this: being mayor of Bordeaux, on the 12th of March, 1814, he had surrendered the city a little too promptly to M. the Duke d'Angoulême. Hence his peerage. In 1817 fashion swallowed up little boys of from four to six years of age in vast caps of morocco leather with ear-tabs resembling Esquimaux mitres. The French army was dressed in white, after the mode of the Austrian; the regiments were called legions; instead of numbers they bore the names of departments; Napoleon was at St. Helena; and since England refused him green cloth, he was having his old coats turned. In 1817 Pelligrini sang; Mademoiselle Bigottini danced; Potier reigned; Odry did not yet exist. Madame Saqui had succeeded to Forioso. There were still Prussians in France. M. Delalot was a personage. Legitimacy had just asserted itself by cutting off the hand, then the head, of Pleignier, of Carbonneau, and of Tolleron. The Prince de Talleyrand, grand chamberlain, and the Abbé Louis, appointed minister of finance, laughed as they looked at each other, with the laugh of the two augurs; both of them had celebrated, on the 14th of July, 1790, the mass of federation in the Champ de Mars; Talleyrand had said it as bishop, Louis had served it in the capacity of deacon. In 1817, in the side-alleys of this same Champ de Mars, two great cylinders of wood might have been seen lying in the rain, rotting amid the grass, painted blue, with traces of eagles and bees, from which the gilding was falling. These were the columns which two years before had upheld the Emperor's platform in the Champ de Mai. They were blackened here and there with the scorches of the bivouac of Austrians encamped near Gros-Caillou. Two or three of these columns had disappeared in these bivouac fires, and had warmed the large hands of the Imperial troops. The Field of May had this remarkable point: that it had been held in the month of June and in the Field of March (Mars). In this year, 1817, two things were popular: the Voltaire-Touquet and the snuff-box a la Charter. The most recent Parisian sensation was the crime of Dautun, who had thrown his brother's head into the fountain of the Flower-Market.

They had begun to feel anxious at the Naval Department, on account of the lack of news from that fatal frigate, The Medusa, which was destined to cover Chaumareix with infamy and Gericault with glory. Colonel Selves was going to Egypt to become Soliman-Pasha. The palace of Thermes, in the Rue de La Harpe, served as a shop for a cooper. On the platform of the octagonal tower of the Hotel de Cluny, the little shed of boards, which had served as an observatory to Messier, the naval astronomer under Louis XVI., was still to be seen. The Duchesse de Duras read to three or four friends her unpublished Ourika, in her boudoir furnished by X. in sky-blue satin. The N's were scratched off the Louvre. The bridge of Austerlitz had abdicated, and was entitled the bridge of the King's Garden [du Jardin du Roi], a double enigma, which disguised the bridge of Austerlitz and the Jardin des Plantes at one stroke. Louis XVIII., much preoccupied while annotating Horace with the corner of his finger-nail, heroes who have become emperors, and makers of wooden shoes who have become dauphins, had two anxieties,—Napoleon and Mathurin Bruneau. The French Academy had given for its prize subject, The Happiness procured through Study. M. Bellart was officially eloquent. In his shadow could be seen germinating that future advocate-general of Broe, dedicated to the sarcasms of Paul-Louis Courier. There was a false Chateaubriand, named Marchangy, in the interim, until there should be a false Marchangy, named d'Arlincourt. Claire d'Albe and Malek-Adel were masterpieces; Madame Cottin was proclaimed the chief writer of the epoch. The Institute had the academician, Napoleon Bonaparte, stricken from its list of members. A royal ordinance erected Angoulême into a naval school; for the Duc d'Angoulême, being lord high admiral, it was evident that the city of Angoulême had all the qualities of a seaport; otherwise the monarchical principle would have received a wound. In the Council of Ministers the question was agitated whether vignettes representing slack-rope performances, which adorned Franconi's advertising posters, and which attracted throngs of street urchins, should be tolerated. M. Paer, the author of Agnese, a good sort of fellow, with a square face and a wart on his cheek, directed the little private concerts of the Marquise de Sasenaye in the Rue Ville l'Eveque. All the young girls were singing the Hermit of Saint-Avelle, with words by Edmond Geraud. The Yellow Dwarf was transferred into Mirror. The Cafe Lemblin stood up for the Emperor, against the Cafe Valois, which upheld the Bourbons. The Duc de Berri, already surveyed from the shadow by Louvel, had just been married to a princess of Sicily. Madame de Stael had died a year previously. The body-guard hissed Mademoiselle Mars. The grand newspapers were all very small. Their form was restricted, but their liberty was great. The Constitutionnel was constitutional. La Minerve called Chateaubriand Chateaubriant. That t made the good middle-class people laugh heartily at the expense of the great writer. In journals which sold themselves, prostituted journalists, insulted the exiles of 1815. David had no longer any talent, Arnault had no longer any wit, Carnot was no longer honest, Soult had won no battles; it is true that Napoleon had no longer any genius. No one is ignorant of the fact that letters sent to an exile by post very rarely reached him, as the police made it their religious duty to intercept them. This is no new fact; Descartes complained of it in his exile. Now David, having, in a Belgian publication, shown some displeasure at not receiving letters which had been written to him, it struck the royalist journals as amusing; and they derided the prescribed man well on this occasion. What separated two men more than an abyss was to say, the regicides, or to say the voters; to say the enemies, or to say the allies; to say Napoleon, or to say Buonaparte. All sensible people were agreed that the era of revolution had been closed forever by King Louis XVIII., surnamed "The Immortal Author of the Charter." On the platform of the Pont-Neuf, the word Redivivus was carved on the pedestal that awaited the statue of Henry IV. M. Piet, in the Rue Therese, No. 4, was making the rough draft of his privy assembly to consolidate the monarchy. The leaders of the Right said at grave conjunctures, "We must write to Bacot." MM. Canuel, O'Mahoney, and De Chappedelaine were preparing the sketch, to some extent with Monsieur's approval, of what was to become later on "The Conspiracy of the Bord de l'Eau"—of the waterside. L'Epingle Noire was already plotting in his own quarter. Delaverderie was conferring with Trogoff. M. Decazes, who was liberal to a degree, reigned. Chateaubriand stood every morning at his window at No. 27 Rue Saint-Dominique, clad in footed trousers, and slippers, with a madras kerchief knotted over his gray hair, with his eyes fixed on a mirror, a complete set of dentist's instruments spread out before him, cleaning his teeth, which were charming, while he dictated The Monarchy according to the Charter to M. Pilorge, his secretary. Criticism, assuming an authoritative tone, preferred Lafon to Talma. M. de Feletez signed himself A.; M. Hoffmann signed himself Z. Charles Nodier wrote Therese Aubert. Divorce was abolished. Lyceums called themselves colleges. The collegians, decorated on the collar with a golden fleur-de-lys, fought each other apropos of the King of Rome. The counter-police of the chateau had denounced to her Royal Highness Madame, the portrait, everywhere exhibited, of M. the Duc d'Orleans, who made a better appearance in his uniform of a colonel-general of hussars than M. the Duc de Berri, in his uniform of colonel-general of dragoons—a serious inconvenience. The city of Paris was having the dome of the Invalides regilded at its own expense. Serious men asked themselves what M. de Trinquelague would do on such or such an occasion; M. Clausel de Montals differed on divers points from M. Clausel de Coussergues; M. de Salaberry was not satisfied. The comedian Picard, who belonged to the Academy, which the comedian Moliere had not been able to do, had The Two Philiberts played at the Odeon, upon whose pediment the removal of the letters still allowed THEATRE OF THE EMPRESS to be plainly read. People took part for or against Cugnet de Montarlot. Fabvier was factious; Bavoux was revolutionary. The Liberal, Pelicier, published an edition of Voltaire, with the following title: Works of Voltaire, of the French Academy. "That will attract purchasers," said the ingenious editor. The general opinion was that M. Charles Loyson would be the genius of the century; envy was beginning to gnaw at him—a sign of glory; and this verse was composed on him:—

    "Even when Loyson steals, one feels that he has paws."

As Cardinal Fesch refused to resign, M. de Pins, Archbishop of Amasie, administered the diocese of Lyons. The quarrel over the valley of Dappes was begun between Switzerland and France by a memoir from Captain, afterwards General Dufour. Saint-Simon, ignored, was erecting his sublime dream. There was a celebrated Fourier at the Academy of Science, whom posterity has forgotten; and in some garret an obscure Fourier, whom the future will recall. Lord Byron was beginning to make his mark; a note to a poem by Millevoye introduced him to France in these terms: a certain Lord Baron. David d'Angers was trying to work in marble. The Abbé Caron was speaking, in terms of praise, to a private gathering of seminarists in the blind alley of Feuillantines, of an unknown priest, named Felicite-Robert, who, at a latter date, became Lamennais. A thing which smoked and clattered on the Seine with the noise of a swimming dog went and came beneath the windows of the Tuileries, from the Pont Royal to the Pont Louis XV.; it was a piece of mechanism which was not good for much; a sort of plaything, the idle dream of a dream-ridden inventor; an utopia—a steamboat. The Parisians stared indifferently at this useless thing. M. de Vaublanc, the reformer of the Institute by a coup d'etat, the distinguished author of numerous academicians, ordinances, and batches of members, after having created them, could not succeed in becoming one himself. The Faubourg Saint-Germain and the pavilion de Marsan wished to have M. Delaveau for prefect of police, on account of his piety. Dupuytren and Recamier entered into a quarrel in the amphitheatre of the School of Medicine, and threatened each other with their fists on the subject of the divinity of Jesus Christ. Cuvier, with one eye on Genesis and the other on nature, tried to please bigoted reaction by reconciling fossils with texts and by making mastodons flatter Moses.

M. Francois de Neufchateau, the praiseworthy cultivator of the memory of Parmentier, made a thousand efforts to have pomme de terre [potato] pronounced parmentiere, and succeeded therein not at all. The Abbé Gregoire, ex-bishop, ex-conventionary, ex-senator, had passed, in the royalist polemics, to the state of "Infamous Gregoire." The locution of which we have made use—passed to the state of—has been condemned as a neologism by M. Royer Collard. Under the third arch of the Pont de Jena, the new stone with which, the two years previously, the mining aperture made by Blucher to blow up the bridge had been stopped up, was still recognizable on account of its whiteness. Justice summoned to its bar a man who, on seeing the Comte d'Artois enter Notre Dame, had said aloud: "Sapristi! I regret the time when I saw Bonaparte and Talma enter the Bel Sauvage, arm in arm." A seditious utterance. Six months in prison. Traitors showed themselves unbuttoned; men who had gone over to the enemy on the eve of battle made no secret of their recompense, and strutted immodestly in the light of day, in the cynicism of riches and dignities; deserters from Ligny and Quatre-Bras, in the brazenness of their well-paid turpitude, exhibited their devotion to the monarchy in the most barefaced manner.

This is what floats up confusedly, pell-mell, for the year 1817, and is now forgotten. History neglects nearly all these particulars, and cannot do otherwise; the infinity would overwhelm it. Nevertheless, these details, which are wrongly called trivial,—there are no trivial facts in humanity, nor little leaves in vegetation,—are useful. It is of the physiognomy of the years that the physiognomy of the centuries is composed. In this year of 1817 four young Parisians arranged "a fine farce."

Translation notes

Redivivus

Come back to life; revived

Même quand Loyson vole, on sent qu'il a des pattes.

Voler means both to fly and to steal in French.

Textual notes

Bruguière de Sorsum

A man of letters, Antoine Bruguière de Sorsum (1773–1823) was responsible for numerous translations from English, including works by Shakespeare, Byron and Southey.

Comte Lynch

In March 1814, shortly before the abdication of Napoleon in April that year, Jean-Baptiste Lynch (1749–1835) handed the keys of Bordeaux to the Duc d’Angoulême (1775–1844), who was representing his uncle in exile, the soon to be King Louis XVIII, and was accompanied by English troops.

Napoleon... St Helena

After his defeat at the battle of Waterloo, Napoleon was exiled in 1815 to St Helena, an island in the South Atlantic then under the control of the English East India Company, where he died on 5 May 1821.

Pellegrini... Bigottini... Potier... Odry... Saqui... Forioso

Felice Pellegrini (1774–1832), Italian baritone opera singer. Émilie Bigottini (1784–1858) was a French dancer of Italian origin who made her career at the Paris Opéra. Charles-Gabriel Potier des Cailletières, known as Potier (1774–1838), a noted French actor of noble birth, and comic actor Jacques-Charles Odry (1779–1858) both performed at the Théâtre des Variétés. Madame Saqui (Marguerite-Antoinette Lalanne, 1786–1866) was a noted French tightrope dancer, and Forioso (1769–1846) was another of the great tightrope artists of the day.

Monsieur Delalot

Charles Delalot (1772–1842), who took part in 1795 in the 13 Vendémiaire royalist rising that was quelled by Napoleon, was elected a deputy under the Restoration and was a contributor to the influential Parisian daily newspaper Journal des Débats, making a name for himself as a moderate royalist.

Pleignier, Carbonneau and Tolleron

Members of an anti-royalist society called the Patriots of 1816, these three foolhardy working men, manipulated to a considerable extent by the police and by an agent provocateur, were found guilty of conspiracy and lese-majesty. Sentenced to death, they first had their right hands cut off and were then guillotined – the penalty for parricide. Their execution took place in 1816.

Talleyrand... Abbé Louis

A consummate politician and diplomat, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754–1838) was an extraordinary survivor. Appointed bishop of Autun by Louis XVI – he resigned from his diocese in 1791 and was excommunicated after taking the oath of loyalty to the civil constitution of the clergy – he held political office during the Revolution, under Napoleon, during the Restoration and under Louis-Philippe, whom he served as ambassador to London until he retired in 1834. He was Grand Chamberlain under Napoleon from 1804 to 1809, and under the Restoration, serving both Louis XVIII and Charles X between 1815 and 1830. Talleyrand was responsible for the selection by the provisional government of Joseph-Dominique Louis (1775–1837) as minister of finance in April 1814, an appointment later confirmed by Louis XVIII. Abbé Louis served five times in this capacity.

===Feast of the Federation===Celebrations on the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, called the Feast of Federation, took the form of a military parade and an open-air mass held on the Champ de Mars, for which a huge temporary amphitheatre was constructed by volunteers.

Champ de Mai

In emulation of the assemblies held under early Frankish kings, originally in March (called the champ de mars), and then in May (the champ de mai), Napoleon during the Hundred Days summoned deputies from all over France to a Champ de Mai, ostensibly to vote on a new constitution; but in effect a constitution was being presented to them simply for their endorsement. Because the deputies could not get to Paris in time for the May date originally scheduled, the assembly was postponed until 1 June. the Austrians bivouacked: In early July 1815 after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, Allied troops occupied Paris, the English on the right bank, the Prussians and Austrians on the left. Under the terms of the 1815 Treaty of Paris signed on 20 November, some regions of France would continue to be occupied for up to five years, though by no more than 150,000 Allied troops.

kaiserlicks

The name given during the French Revolution to Prussian or Austrian soldiers (from the German word kaiserlich, meaning ‘imperial’).

Touquet edition... snuff-box

In 1821 the Bonapartist publisher Colonel Touquet published a fifteen-volume selection of Voltaire’s works. The Charter-engraved snuff-box was one of a series of novelty snuff-boxes invented and sold by the same Colonel Touquet, celebrating the constitutional Charter of 1814, which guaranteed the rights of citizens under the Restoration Bourbon government. A paper edition of the Charter priced at only five centimes was another financially successful venture.

Dautun

Charles Dautun (1780–1815) was tried and found guilty of the murder of his aunt and of his brother, whose dismembered body was found in several different places in Paris. He was guillotined in 1815.

Chaumareix... Géricault

When a French naval vessel, the Medusa, ran aground on a reef off the coast of Senegal in 1816, the ship was evacuated. Of the 146 men and women who boarded a raft in an attempt to reach safety, only fifteen were still alive when they were rescued after thirteen days adrift. The ship’s surgeon Henri Savigny and his shipmate the geographer Alexandre Corréard, who both survived, wrote an account of their experience, which became an international bestseller and inspired Géricault’s famous painting The Raft of the Medusa. The captain of the doomed frigate, Jean-Hugues de Chaumareix (1763–1841), was court-martialled, found guilty, cashiered, and sentenced in 1817 to three years’ imprisonment.

Colonel Selves

Joseph Anthelme Selves (or Sève; 1788–1860), a former soldier in Napoleon’s army, left France under the Restoration and went to Egypt where, having converted to Islam, he helped to modernize and train the Egyptian army and became known as Suleiman Pasha. He returned to France on several occasions, was awarded the Legion of Honour by Louis-Philippe and eventually died in Cairo, where the present-day Talaat Harb Square was once named after him.

Palais des Thermes

Although proposals were made for establishing a museum of Roman and Gaulish antiquities in this Roman brick building, the project was not carried out until 1836, when ownership was transferred from the city to the national government and it became part of the Cluny Museum.

===Messier, the naval astronomer===Charles Messier (1730–1817) worked with a previous astronomer for the navy, Joseph-Nicolas Delisle (1688–1768), who in 1748 established the observatory on the Cluny tower. Messier was appointed naval astronomer in 1771. He identified thirteen new comets during his lifetime.

Duchesse de Duras

Claire de Duras (1777–1828) presided over an influential salon during the Restoration. Her novel Ourika, published anonymously in 1823, tells the story of a young black child rescued from slavery and raised in France. Duras herself lived in Martinique for a number of years.

The Ns... Louvre

As emperor, Napoleon had his initial emblazoned on the Louvre. These Ns were duly removed under the Restoration. The Ns that currently adorn the Louvre façade celebrate his nephew Napoleon III.

Pont du Jardin du Roi

The Pont d’Austerlitz, so named in celebration of Napoleon’s great victory over his Russian–Austrian adversaries in 1805, was known under the Restoration as Pont du Jardin du Roi, the Jardin du Roi itself having been nationalized as part of the Museum of Natural History and renamed the Jardin des Plantes during the Revolution. The Napoleonic and Revolutionary names are the ones that have survived.

Horace... Louis XVIII

Louis XVIII was known to be fond of quoting Horace. Alexandre Dumas made much of this in a scene in The Count of Monte Cristo (1844), ch. 10. Hugo himself translated poems of Horace.

===Mathurin Bruneau===An impostor who claimed to be the son of Louis XVI, Bruneau (1784–1822), a cobbler by trade, was tried in 1818 and imprisoned at Mont St-Michel, where he died.

The French Academy... through Study

Hugo himself entered this poetry competition, but his entry met with disbelief that it could have been written by one so young.

Monsieur Bellart

Famed for his oratory as a lawyer, Nicolas Bellart (1761–1826), having turned against his former protector Napoleon once the emperor was on the brink of losing power, was appointed Attorney-General at the Royal Court of Paris by Louis XVIII in 1815, in which capacity he played a critical role in the trial of Marshal Ney, who in November that year was sentenced to death for treason for rallying to Napoleon during the Hundred Days.

de Broë... Courier

Paul-Louis Courier (1772–1825) was prosecuted for the publication in 1821 of an anti-royalist pamphlet, and retaliated with another pamphlet about his trial, ridiculing the public prosecutor Jacques-Nicolas de Broë (1790–1840).

Chateaubriand

Writer and royalist politician René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848), whose autobiographical Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe (Memories from beyond the Grave) paint an invaluable portrait of the age, was a leading figure of French Romanticism. Victor Hugo, as a schoolboy, is supposed to have said, ‘I want to be Chateaubriand, or nothing!’

Marchangy... d’Arlincourt

Louis de Marchangy (1782–1826), author of La Gaule Poétique; ou l’Histoire de France considérée dans ses rapports avec la poésie, l’éloquence et les beaux-arts (Poetic Gaul; or the History of France in Relation to Poetry, Eloquence and the Fine Arts), was a fervent royalist (also, the ruthless prosecutor of the Four Sergeants of La Rochelle in 1822). In his correspondence, Stendhal wrote of La Gaule Poétique: ‘The style is indebted to that M. de Chateaubriand. If M. de Marchangy wrote novels he would be almost as absurd as M. d’Arlincourt’ (cited in a footnote in Le Vicomte d’Arlincourt, Prince des Romantiques by Alfred Marquiset, Paris: Hachette, 1909, p. 107). Charles d’Arlincourt (1789–1856), poet, novelist and dramatist, enjoyed a wide readership in his day, but was not so successful with the critics. Of his novel Le Solitaire (The Loner), published in 1821, Charles-Marie de Féletz is reported to have commented that it ‘has been translated into every language except French’ (Marquiset, op. cit., p. 107).

Claire d’Albe... Malek-Adel

Sophie Cottin (1770–1807), a popular writer in her day, was the author of five Romantic novels, of which Claire d’Albe (1799) was the first. Malek-Adel is the Muslim hero of her historical novel Mathilde, or Memories Drawn from the History of the Crusades (1805), which enjoyed immense popularity in its day and gave rise to a number of operatic works that took the name of its hero for their title.

The Institute... list of members

The Institut National des Sciences et des Arts (later, the Institut de France) was founded in 1795 to replace the royal academies and to extend their scope to include more disciplines. It was restructured in 1814 under Louis XVIII, who took the opportunity to exclude certain members and to reintroduce the term ‘academy’ for its constituent sections: the French Academy, the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres, the Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Fine Arts, and the Academy of Political and Moral Sciences.

the Duc d’Angoulême

Nephew of Louis XVIII and son of Charles X. The Grand Admiralty was a titular position; Angoulême in the south-west of France is completely landlocked.

Franconi

Antonio Franconi (1737–1836) was an Italian circus impresario whose sons carried on the business when he retired. They called the new theatre they opened the Cirque Olympique.

Paer, author of Agnese... Sassenay

The Italian composer Ferdinando Paer (1771–1839), who was taken up by Napoleon and became director of the Théâtre Italien in Paris, was at one time director of music in the Duchesse de Berry’s household. He wrote his best-known opera, Agnese, in 1809. The Marquis de Sassenay (1760–1840), married to Claudine Bretton des Chapelles (1778–1832), was also a member of the Duchesse de Berry’s household.

L’Ermite de St-Avelle... Géraud

Edmond Géraud (1775–1831) was a journalist, diarist and poet. His poem, actually entitled ‘L’Hermite de Ste-Avelle’, tells of a young man complaining of the anguish of love, for which a hermit tells him there is no cure. Published in 1820, it inspired two vaudeville comedies staged in June of the same year under the title that Hugo gives here.

Le Nain Jaune... Le Miroir

Le Nain Jaune was a literary and political journal founded in 1814 and suppressed in 1815, appearing in Belgium in 1816 as Le Nain Jaune Réfugié. Le Miroir was a monarchist journal published briefly (1796–7) during the Revolution. Another journal, Le Miroir des Spectacles, des Lettres, des Moeurs et des Arts, was published between 1821 and 1823.

Louvel... Duc de Berry

The Duc de Berry (1778–1820), nephew of Louis XVI and Louis XVIII and son of the future Charles X, on 17 June 1816 married Marie-Caroline of Naples, Princess of the Two Sicilies (1798–1870). He was murdered outside the Opéra on 13 February 1820 by Louis Louvel (1783–1820), an anti-Bourbonist.

Madame de Staël

Daughter of Louis XVI’s finance minister Jacques Necker, Germaine de Staël (1766–1817), novelist and outspoken critic of Napoleon, presided over one of the most influential salons in Paris. Her lovers included Talleyrand and Benjamin Constant. She suffered a stroke that paralysed her in February 1817 and died four months later.

Mademoiselle Mars

Anne Boutet (1779–1847), whose stage name was Mademoiselle Mars, was a leading actress and a favourite of Napoleon. After the Restoration this was held against her by some royalist theatre-goers.

freedom of expression

After all censorship was abolished during the Hundred Days, a law passed on 22 February 1817 required newspapers and periodicals to be authorized before publication. This requirement was lifted in 1819, but the assassination of the Duc de Berry in 1820 led to the reimposition of censorship.

Le Constitutionnel... La Minerve

Founded during the Hundred Days under the title of L’Indépendant, then undergoing subsequent name changes, Le Constitutionnel was a paper of liberal anticlerical Bonapartist sentiment. The title ceased publication in 1919. La Minerve was a weekly liberal periodical whose principal editor was Benjamin Constant.

Châteaubriant

The town where Victor Hugo’s parents met.

exiled in 1815... David... Arnault... Carnot

An active Revolutionary (he was a member of the Convention and voted for the execution of Louis XVI), Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), whose Death of Marat is perhaps his best-known painting, went into exile in Brussels, and is buried there. Poet, dramatist and politician, Antoine Arnault (1766–1834), minister of public education during the Hundred Days, was exiled in 1816 and his membership of the French Academy withdrawn. He was allowed to return to France in 1819 and was re-elected to the Academy in 1829. A distinguished mathematician and engineer, Lazare Carnot (1753–1823) was also a leading politician. As a member of the Convention he voted for the execution of Louis XVI, then in 1794 contributed to the downfall of Robespierre. He was the great organizer of the French Revolutionary Army, and one of the first five directors of the Directory. Appointed minister of war in 1800 by First Consul Napoleon, he resigned from public office in 1804 after Napoleon was crowned emperor but returned as minister of the interior during the Hundred Days. He was exiled in 1815 and died in Magdeburg.

===Soult==Marshal Soult (1769–1851) joined the army in 1785 as a private soldier, and was appointed marshal in 1804. Having rallied to Napoleon during the Hundred Days (he was Napoleon’s chief of staff at Waterloo), he went into exile until 1819. Displaying considerable political opportunism, he was made a peer by Charles X and went on to serve under Louis-Philippe as minister of war, minister of foreign affairs, and several times as prime minister. He represented the French government at the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1838.

Descartes

The philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) went to the Netherlands in 1628 and stayed there for most of the rest of his life, making a few brief visits to France in the 1640s, then at the invitation of Queen Christina in 1649 moving to Sweden, where he died. His self-imposed exile in a Protestant country gave him the greatest possible freedom to pursue his philosophical investigations, without fear of Catholic reprisals and without the distractions of life in Paris.

Buonaparte

It was a studied insult to call the Corsican-born Napoleon by his Italian surname. France took control of Corsica in 1768, and all the family eventually adopted the Gallicized version of their name.

the statue of Henri IV

An equestrian statue of Henri IV was erected at the end of the Pont-Neuf in 1614. It was melted down by Revolutionaries in 1792, and replaced in 1818 with a replica commissioned by Louis XVIII.

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Pilorge... according to the Charter

In De la monarchie selon la charte, a pamphlet in defence of the legitimacy of the 1814 Charter and of a constitutional monarchy, Chateaubriand attacked the dissolution of the notoriously reactionary but constitutionally legitimate Chamber of Deputies. This led to Chateaubriand’s fall from favour with the king, and he became a member of the ultra-royalist opposition. Hyacinthe Pilorge (1795–1861) was Chateaubriand’s secretary from 1816 to 1843.

Lafon above Talma

François-Joseph Talma (1763–1826), who started out as a dentist, embarked on his glorious career as an actor during the Revolution. The younger actor Pierre Lafon (1773–1846) had to make his way in Talma’s shadow, but an announcement of his appearance at the Grand Théâtre, Bordeaux, in 1814, for instance, hailed him as the ‘foremost tragic actor on the French stage’ (H. Carrington Lancaster in ‘Letters of Lafon to Napoleon, Talma and Others’, Modern Language Notes, vol. 68, no. 6, June 1953, pp. 377–82, Johns Hopkins University Press).

Monsieur de Féletz... Hoffmann... Z

A churchman who refused to take the oath of loyalty to the civil constitution, Charles-Marie de Féletz (1767–1850) was a journalist, Academician (who voted against Victor Hugo’s candidature) and literary critic, who signed his articles A. A review of Hugo’s Nouvelles Odes in 1824 in the Journal des Débats, written by François-Benoît Hoffmann (1760–1828), who signed himself Z, prompted a response from Hugo, challenging the critic’s literary criteria and the usefulness of the terms ‘classical’ and ‘Romantic’.

Charles Nodier

The Romantic poet and novelist Charles Nodier (1780–1844), a regular contributor to the Journal des Débats, in 1819 published his novel Thérèse Aubert, a story set during the insurrectionary wars in the Vendée region against the Revolutionary government (1793–6). Nodier was a friend of Hugo and a prominent supporter of his candidature for a seat in the French Academy.

Divorce was abolished

Divorce legislation was introduced in France in 1792. Over subsequent years the law was reformed and divorce became harder to obtain. It was abolished in 1816.

The lycées... colleges

The term lycée, introduced with the educational reforms under Napoleon in 1802 and replaced

===during the Restoration with the pre-Revolutionary name collège, was reinstated after the 1848 Revolution.

the king of Rome

The courtesy title of Napoleon’s son (1811–32) by the Archduchess Marie-Louise of Austria, whom Napoleon, when he abdicated in 1815, named as his heir. (For this reason the next Bonaparte to occupy the French throne, in 1852, styled himself Napoleon III.)

Her Royal Highness Madame... Duc d’Orléans... Duc de Berry... dragoons

Son altesse royale was the honorific title of the wife of the king’s brother (later Charles X), Marie Thérèse of Savoy. The future king Louis-Philippe, from a cadet branch of the Bourbons, inherited the title of Duc d’Orléans and the command of the hussars from his father, who was guillotined in 1793. Charles X’s younger son, the Duc de Berry, was colonel-general of the lancers, not the dragoons, whose colonel-general was his older brother the Duc d’Angoulême.

Les Invalides

Louis XIV was the founder of Les Invalides, built as a hospital and home for veteran soldiers. The church of the Dome, a private royal chapel within the complex, designed by Jules Hardouin-Mansart (1646–1708), was completed in 1706. Under Napoleon the Dome became the pantheon of France’s military heroes. Napoleon’s ashes were transferred there in 1840.

Monsieur de Trinquelague

Charles-François de Trinquelague-Dions (1747–1837), a right-wing deputy, in 1815 backed a call for the reintroduction of the gibbet as a more convenient and less complicated instrument of capital punishment than the guillotine. ‘Where would one not be able to find a piece of string? Everyone carries one in his pocket, and there is always a nail, a beam or the branch of a tree to which it may be attached.’

Clausel de Montals... de Coussergues

Clausel de Montals (1769–1857), bishop of Chartres (1824–53), was chaplain to the Duchesse d’Angoulême. His brother Clausel de Coussergues, a zealous supporter of the Bourbons who accused the moderate prime minister Decazes of being accomplice to the murder of the Duc de Berry, shared his Catholic royalist views.

Monsieur de Salaberry

Charles-Marie d’Irumberry Salaberry (1766–1847) was notoriously intemperate in his views and his language in the Chamber of Deputies. In 1816 he advocated the death penalty for anyone who flew the tricolour flag and in 1826 declared that ‘printing was the only plague with which Moses forgot to strike Egypt’.

Picard... Les Deux Philibert

Actor, theatre manager and playwright Louis-Benoît Picard (1769–1828), author of Les Deux Philibert (The Two Philiberts), a comedy first staged at the Théâtre Royal de l’Odéon in 1816, was elected to the French Academy in 1807. The great comic playwright Molière (1622–73) was never a member.

Cugnet de Montarlot

One of those accused of taking part in the Black Pin conspiracy and in a number of other plots and conspiracies against the government but always eventually acquitted, Claude-François Cugnet de Montarlot (1778–1824) ended up being court-martialled and shot in Spain for his involvement with Spanish revolutionaries.

Fabvier

General Charles-Nicolas Fabvier (1782–1855), who was active in the later campaigns of the Empire, rallied to Louis XVIII, but like many ex-soldiers became disaffected and was involved in the 19 August 1820 conspiracy (see note p. 1318 on Delaverderie... Trogoff). In 1823 he joined the Greeks in their War of Independence against the Turks.

Bavoux

Initially in favour of the return of the Bourbons, Nicolas Bavoux (1774–1848) was a law professor and judge who in 1819 began to use his lectures as a platform for criticism of the government. He was charged with inciting citizens to disobey the law, but was acquitted.

Voltaire of the French Academy

Voltaire was eventually elected unanimously to the Academy in 1746, having faced strong religious opposition to his candidature earlier in his career.

Charles Loyson

Poet and political essayist Charles Loyson (1791–1820) competed in the same poetry competition as Victor Hugo in 1817 and won a commendation.

Cardinal Fesch

After the Restoration, Fesch retired to Rome and never returned to his archdiocese, which was run in his absence by Archbishop Pins.

the valley of Dappes... Dufour

Originally part of the Swiss canton of Vaud, the Dappes valley was annexed by Napoleon, and despite rulings made by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 for its restitution a final settlement was not reached until 1863, when it was divided between Switzerland and France. The Swiss-born Guillaume-Henri Dufour (1787–1875) served under Napoleon, then rejoined the Swiss army as captain in 1817. As general, he was involved in the ratification of the Treaty of Berne by which the Valley of Dappes Settlement was reached.

Saint-Simon

An aristocrat by birth, Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), embraced revolutionary ideals, taking part in the American War of Independence. He held Jacobin views during the French Revolution, but within the context of an ordered society governed by a scientific and industrialist hierarchy working together in the spirit of a new religion that recognized the moral value of economics. His ideas gained influence after his death.

Fourier

The physicist Joseph Fourier (1768–1830), author of The Analytic Theory of Heat (1822), was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1817 and to the French Academy in 1826. He was Napoleon’s scientific adviser in Egypt. Charles Fourier (1772–1837), author of The Theory of Universal Unity (1841), published after his death (as were most of his writings), like Saint-Simon was a Utopian socialist.

Lord Byron

George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (1788–1824) is the subject of Victor Hugo’s poem ‘Dédain’ (Disdain), written in 1830 and dedicated ‘To Byron in 1811’, in which he celebrates the poet whose genius would triumph over the clamour of his detractors. Byron’s poetic career began in earnest in 1812 with the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Cantos I and II, continuing with, among other works, his verse tales The Giaour (1813), The Bride of Abydos (1813) and The Corsair (1814), then Childe Harold Canto III in 1816. Don Juan Cantos I and II were first published, anonymously, in 1819. French translations of extracts of his works appeared from 1816.

Millevoye

The Romantic poet Charles Millevoye (1782–1816), whose best-known poem is ‘La Chute des Feuilles’ (Falling Leaves), on which the young Charlotte Brontë wrote in one of her early essays. He referred to ‘Lord Baron’ in a note to his poem ‘Alfred, roi d’Angleterre’, published in 1815.

David d’Angers

The sculptor David d’Angers (1789–1856) made several busts of Victor Hugo, by whom he was much admired. Like Hugo, he went into exile after the 1851 coup d’état by Louis-Napoleon.

Abbé Carron

Guy-Toussaint Carron (1760–1821), an émigré priest who set up charitable foundations for French émigrés first in Jersey, then in London, returned to Paris after the Restoration and ran an orphanage for the children of aristocratic families ruined by the Revolution. He first met Lamennais (see entry below) in London.

Lamennais

Félicité-Robert de Lamennais (1782–1854), ordained as a priest in 1816, was an apologist of ultramontanism as opposed to Gallicanism. He defended this position in numerous journals and periodicals, including Le Drapeau Blanc, an ultra-royalist publication, although politically and socially he was a liberal and increasingly radical in his views. He came to regard the papacy as misguided in its support of politically repressive regimes, and his writings were condemned by Pope Gregory XVI. In 1848 he was elected a deputy and allied himself with the democratic socialists. As unpopular with the government as he was with the Roman Catholic Church, he was revered by the common people and admired by Hugo.

steamboat

In August 1816 Jouffroy d’Abbans (1751–1832), who as early as 1783 successfully trialled his invention the pyroscaphe, a prototype steamboat, on the Saône, launched the Charles-Philippe steamboat on the Seine. (His was not the first steamboat on the Seine – that honour went in 1803 to the American Robert Fulton, who returned to America and had a successful career designing steamboats and running steamboat services.)

Monsieur de Vaublanc

As minister of the interior under Louis XVIII, the Comte de Vaublanc (1756–1845) was responsible for the restructuring of the French Institute under which the Academies were reinstated as independent bodies within the Institute. He was not himself appointed to the Academy.

the Pavillon de Marsan... Monsieur Delavau

The Pavillon de Marsan is the part of the Louvre Palace that was occupied after the Restoration by Louis XVIII’s brother the arch-royalist Comte d’Artois, later Charles X, and his son the Duc de Berry. The ultra-royalist Guy Delavau (1788–1874) was prefect of police 1821–8.

Dupuytren... Récamier... Cuvier

Chief surgeon at the Hôtel-Dieu and professor of clinical surgery, Guillaume Dupuytren (1777–1835), who played an important role in the development of modern surgery, was an alleged atheist. A pioneer in gynaecological and surgical medicine, chief physician at the Hôtel-Dieu, professor at the Faculty of Medicine and at the Collège de France, Joseph Récamier (1774–1852) cultivated a social circle of fellow Catholic intellectuals. A devout Lutheran, Georges Cuvier (1769–1828) was a naturalist and zoologist who made a major contribution to palaeontological research but was critical of contemporary evolutionary theories.

François de Neufchâteau... Parmentier

President of the National Assembly 1791–2, member of the Directory, twice minister of the interior, president of the Senate and member of the French Academy, François de Neufchâteau (1750–1828) actively promoted industry, organizing the first French industrial exhibition in 1798; after the Bourbon Restoration and his retirement from public life, he devoted himself to the study of agriculture. Inspector-general of the armed forces’ health service, Antoine-Augustin Parmentier (1737–1813) is best known as a great promoter of the potato (pomme de terre) as a source of nutrition.

Abbé Grégoire

A Republican priest and for ten years (1791–1801) bishop of Blois, Abbé Grégoire (1750–1831) was a member of the National Convention; he proposed the motion for the abolition of the monarchy and demanded that the king be brought to trial, but he would have suspended the death penalty.

Royer-Collard

Elected to the French Academy in 1827, Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard (1763–1845) led a campaign for the suppression of the neologism baser (‘to base’), which had been accepted as a French word in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie of 1798; he threatened to leave the Academy if baser were not thrown out: ‘S’il entre, je sors’ (‘If it’s in, I’m out’). It was rejected on the grounds that there was no significant difference between baser and the preferred word fonder (Adolphe Thomas, Dictionnaire des difficultés de la langue française, Paris: Larousse, 1988). In Hugo’s text the expression to which Royer-Collard takes exception is ‘passer à l’état de’.

Pont d’Iéna... Blücher

When the Allies occupied Paris after the abdication of Napoleon in 1814, the Prussian commander Blücher (whose troops were to play a decisive role in the battle of Waterloo) attempted to blow up the Pont d’Iéna, one of the four bridges in Paris built during the Napoleonic era and named after Napoleon’s great victory over the Prussians at Jena in 1806. Blücher was eventually dissuaded from this attempt to even scores, and the bridge was temporarily renamed the ‘Pont des Invalides’. It regained its original name in 1830.

deserters from Ligny and Quatre-Bras

Napoleon’s strategy before the battle of Waterloo, fought on 18 June 1815, was to avoid having to face combined Allied forces. So two days before, he launched attacks on the Prussians at Ligny and on the English at Quatre-Bras. The French failed to win a decisive victory at Quatre-Bras; and although the Prussians were defeated, they were able to retreat to a position where they could still play a crucial role in the engagement at Waterloo. There was a considerable number of Prussian deserters, but there are no figures for the French.