IV
Still, notwithstanding these occasional appearances on the public stage, it is certain that the easy though momentary triumph of a cause of which he had somewhat solemnly announced the almost certain defeat, disgusted him from further meddling in affairs, and much of his time was afterwards passed out of Paris, at Valençay, the estate which he meant should be ancestral, in Touraine. His fortune, moreover, was much affected by the bankruptcy of a commercial house in which he had engaged himself as what we call a “sleeping partner.” Nevertheless he held, when in the capital, a great existence:—his drawing-room becoming to the Restoration what it had been to the best days of the Empire—a rival court, and a court which gathered to itself all the eminences of the old times, and all the rising young men of the new.
There, from his easy-chair, drawn up to the window which looks upon the Tuileries, and surrounded by those who had acted in the past with him, or who might make a future for him, he read with pleased composure the fall of ministry after ministry on the flushed countenance of the eager deputy rushing to or from the fatal vote; until, at the nomination of M. de Polignac, he repeated calmly to those about him, the phrase he is said to have pronounced after the Russian campaign: “C’est le commencement de la fin.” Indeed, ever since the dismissal of the National Guard, and the failure of M. de Martignac’s ministry, which, tried as it was and at the time it was, could not but fail, he spoke without reserve, though always with expressions of regret, to those in his intimacy, of the extreme peril to which the legitimate monarchy was hurrying; and he could do this with the more certainty, from the knowledge he possessed of Charles X.’s character, the good and bad qualities of which he considered equally dangerous.