Miniatures of French history

There are many squares of soil where the histories of nations touch and the fate of the one is intermixed with the fate of the other upon a few roods of land.

There are the battlefields, of course—but that is obvious. There are the conference rooms: the rooms in which treaties were signed; though most treaties do not mean very much to history, some are of prodigious effect—witness the Treaty of the Pyrenees. There are the universally sacred sites—like the pavement of St. Peter’s, old and new. There are the sites of Decisions, like the quays of Calais; like the palaces of Vienna—where the agents of Governments have met and have doubtfully decided, for a little time, the inferior interests of men—the mechanical interests of men.

But there are also less known places where the fates of nations met oddly, sharply, sometimes fruitfully, sometimes unfruitfully.

For instance, just outside Montreuil, two coaches passed each other in the night—the one going north, the other going south. The one going south was that of the British envoy prepared for war with the French Republic in 1793; the one going north was that bearing the French envoy with orders to prevent war if possibly that could be done.

Of those squares of land, one is not as famous as it should be. It is the land upon which stands the seventeenth-century palace of St. Germains, with the terrace just outside overlooking the plain of the Seine and the low grey line of Paris far beyond, and the distant, diminished towers of St. Denis.

Had the Stuarts returned to the throne of England, that place would be famous enough. It would be counted as the point of their departure, as the rallying place of their cause, as the seed of a new time. It would be a place of national pilgrimage and sacred in English eyes; for there it was that James II., the rightful English king, came as an exile to meet his cousin of France. But the Stuarts did not return; and, therefore, the incident has been pushed away into the lumber-room. There is thought to be something futile about St. Germains. Even Culloden is more famous.

Yet St. Germains has good material for a shrine. It remains just what it was. The past lives there. It is what it is, although success did not follow on the meeting it saw. It is precisely what it would have been had success followed that meeting. It is still itself. I could wish that the tragedy of that palace were better known.

Mary of Modena had come over hurriedly with the child, the heir to the English throne. She had been housed in this palace by the gratitude, the courtesy, and the high policy of Louis XIV., King of France. She was the Queen of England, and the usurpers were (officially) of no account to Versailles. The fatigue of the journey, of the alarms, of the perils, had oppressed the young woman; she had taken to her bed. In a fine cradle, worthy of royalty, swinging in the same room, lay that little baby who was later to be James III.., and never to reign.

Louis XIV. had returned to visit this lady; he had come to her bedside again, making obeisance and reverence, as king to queen. They awaited James himself, for they knew that if he could escape the plots of his enemies he would reach them. The news had come of his landing. He had reached port in the dead of the Christmas dark, at three in the morning. He had travelled down from the sea-coast with haste. He came in no very great state to the doors of that palace, late upon this December (for the French this January) day. The weather was stormy; he had had no relief from travel; his great boots were splashed with mud, and the tails of his long coat also; and his odd, energetic, somewhat pinched face showed his fatigue. Yet he was the King of England, and kingship was the high political note of the time. He was the son of Henrietta Maria, consort of Charles I. No one had a moment’s right against himself—least of all his disappointed, soured, usurping daughter; his alien, vicious, usurping son-in-law.

The man who had had, in varying proportions, ill-fortune to oppress him, ill-judgment to urge him on (but much more ill-fortune than ill-judgment), this courageous, intelligent, tenacious, but now defeated man, stepped down unaided, but awkwardly, from the coach. He was cramped by his journey.

Notice had been given to Louis XIV., sitting there by the bedside in the room above; and that great king, holding the highest throne in Europe, came down at once, almost eagerly, almost forgetting the ritual of his position, to honour such an occasion and such an exile.

The rain still fell slantwise in the open courtyard of that palace of brick and cornered stone. Louis XIV., in plumed hat, and cloak, and sword, and buckled shoes, walked through the weather, indifferent, his gentlemen about him—walked, I say, even eagerly, with some forgetfulness of what he owed to his own royalty, so sharply did he feel the strength of the occasion.

They met under the arch of the portcullis where the guard were mounted, on the house side of the drawbridge, and in that meeting there was something consonant to the ideas of their time, grotesque to those of ours. For you must know that the men of that time bowed low to their superiors—lower and lower in proportion, not to their own inferiority, but to the greatness of him whom they saluted. Now, here were two equals—the King of England and the King of France—meeting to salute the one the other; so each bowed lower and lower as they approached, each sweeping his hat in his hand before him, and modulating his steps exactly as the ritual of that time demanded: the left foot advanced, then the right at right angles to it, in something more like a dance than a walk.

With all this they must give each other the accolade: they were equals; they must embrace as equals. So the arms of the one man, bowed down and obeisant with his head (a large wig upon it), were spread out, inviting, upon either side of his body, the right hand holding the large plumed hat, the left hand making gestures with its fingers in the air.

At last, in such a progress, the two bodies must meet; and so they did. The reception of the one to the other was what we, to-day, mocking such things, might compare to the beginning of a wrestling match. But the onlookers had no such profanity in their minds. For them (and they were right) this strange ceremony was a high symbol. The Great King was treating the ruined Exile as an equal, and some future might be built upon such a foundation. The Stuarts might yet return. For that meeting—to us, as we call up its physical details, grotesque; to them, sublime—might well have been the beginning of a true Restoration, and of an England happier and better than she has been—perhaps less wealthy.

It was not so to be. The ceremony was sterile. It bred no issue. There was to come the Boyne, the ’Fifteen, the ’Forty-five—and nothingness; at last a grave in Rome, and that small, noble memorial in St. Peter’s, which I, for my part, never pass without a movement of the heart. The Stuarts were not to return.

Next day the great king came back to his exiles at St. Germains, and later in the week he came once more. Each time he visited them with an increasing sincerity and fervour of support. He leaned long over the cradle and gazed down at the little Heir of England, with more feeling than he had been known to show in looking at any of his own children.

But, high above men, the fates had decided and the stars were set. For business of this sort works out very slowly; and not within the lives of two or three men that meet, but in many generations, are the ultimate purposes accomplished; and though the Stuarts did not return, perhaps they are to watch their revenge.