Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/286

Rh 272 GUIZOT of his inflexible adherence to a lost cause. In the afternoon of February 23, 1818, the king summoned his minister from the chamber, which was then sitting, and informed him that the aspect of Paris and the country during the banquet agitation for reform, and the alarm and division of opinion in the royal family, led him to doubt whether lie could retain his ministry. That doubt, replied Guizot, is deoisive of the question, and instantly resigned, returning to the chamber only to announce that the administration was at an end, and that Mol6 had been sent for by the king. Mole failed in the attempt to form a Government, and between midnight and one in the morning Guizot, who had according to his custom retired early to rest, was again sent for to the Tuileries. The king asked his advice. &quot; We are no longer the ministers of your Majesty,&quot; replied Guizot ; &quot; it rests with others to decide on the course to be pursued. But one thing appears to be evident : this street riot must be put down ; these barricades must be taken ; and for this purpose my opinion is that Marshal Bugeaud should be invested with full power, and ordered to take the necessary military measures, and as your Majesty has at this moment no minister, I am ready to draw up and countersign such an order.&quot; The marshal, who was present, undertook the task, saying, &quot;I have never been beaten yet, and I shall not begin to-morrow. The barricades shall be carried before dawn.&quot; After this dis play of energy the king hesitated, and soon added : &quot;I osght to tell you that M. Thiers and his friends are in the next room forming a Government!&quot; Upon this Guizot rejoined, &quot; Then it rests with them to do what they think fit,&quot; and le f t the palace. Thiers and Barrot decided to with draw tha troop?. The king and Guizot next met at Claremont. This was the most perilous conjuncture of Guizot s life, but fortunately lie found a safe refuge in Paris for some days in the lodging of a humble miniature painter whom he hid befriended, and shortly afterwards effected his escape across the Belgian frontier and thence to London, where he arrived on the 3d March. His mother and daughters had preceded him, and ha was speedily installed in a modest habitation in Pelharn Crescent, Brompton. The society of England, though many persons disapproved of mucli of his recent policy, received the fallen statesman with as much distinction and respect as they had shown eight years before to the king s ambassador. Sums of money were placed at his disposal, which he declined. A professorship at Oxford was spoken of, which he was un- abla to accept. His old friends resumed their relations with him. For himself, serene and undisturbed by a catastrophe which had shaken Europe, he immediately collected a few books and resumed the narrative of the British common wealth, until he brought it down to Monk and Puchard Cromwell. Guizot survived the fall of the monarchy and the government he had served twenty-six years. He passed abruptly from the condition of one of the most powerful and active statesmen in Europe to the condition of a philo sophical and patriotic spectator of human affairs. He was aware that the link between himself and public life was broken for ever ; and he never made the slightest attempt to renew it. He was of no party, a member of no political body ; no murmur of disappointed ambition, no language of asperity, ever passed his lips ; it seemed as if the fever of oratorical debate and ministerial power had passed from him and left him a greater man than he had been before, in the pursuit of letters, in the conversation of his friends, and as head of the patriarchal circle of those he loved. The greater part of the year he spent at his residence at Val Richer, an Augustine monastery near Lisieux in Normandy, which had been sold at the time of the first Revolution. His two daughters, who mairied two descend ants of the illustrious Dutch family of De Witt, so con genial in faith and manners to the Huguenots of France, kept his house. One of his sons-in-law farmed the estate. And here Guizot devoted his later years with undiminished energy to literary labour, which was in fact his chief means of subsistence. Proud, independent, simple, and con tented he remained to the last ; and these years of retire ment were perhaps the happiest and most serene portion of his life. Two institutions may be said even under the second empire to have retained their freedom the Institute of France and the Protestant Consistory. In both of these Guizot continued to the last to take an active part. He was a member of three of the five academies into which the Institute of France is divided. The Academy of Moral and Political Science owed its restoration to him, and Ii3 became in 1832 one of its first associates. The .Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres elected him in 1833 as the successor to M. Dacier; and in 1836 he was chosen a member of the French Academy, the highest literary dis tinction of the country. In these learned bodies Guizot continued for nearly forty years to take a lively interest and to exercise a powerful influence. He was the jealous champion of their independence. His voice had the greatest weight in the choice of new candidates ; the younger gene ration of Fren ;li writers never looked in vain to him for encouragement ; and his constant aim was to maintain the dignity and purity of the profession of letters. In the consistory of the Protest int church in Paris Guizot exercised a similar influence. Ilis early education and his experience of Ufa conspired to strengthen the con victions of a religious temperament. He remained through life a firm believer in the truths of revelation, and a volume of Meditations on the Christian Religion was one of his latest works. But though he adhered inflexibly to the church of his fathers and combated the rationalist ten dencies of the age, which seemed to threaten it with destruc tion, he retained not a tinge of the intolerance or asperity of the Calvinistic creed. He respected in the Church of Rome the faith of the majority of his countrymen ; and the writings of the great Catholic prelates, Bossuet and Bour- claloue, were as familiar and as dear to him as those of his own persuasion, and were commonly used by him in the daily exercises of family worship. In these literary pursuits and in the retirement of Val Richer years passed smoothly and rapidly away ; and as his grandchildren grew up around him, he began to direct their attention to the history of their country. From these lessons sprang his last and not his least work, the Ilistuire de France racontce ct mes petits enfants, for although this publication assumed a popular form, it is not less complete and profound than it is simple and attractive. The work extends to five large volumes, and has been brought down to the present time by his accomplished daughter Madame Guizot de Witt, from her father s notes. Down to the summer of 1874 Guizot s mental vigour and activity were unimpaired. His frame, temperate in all things, was blessed with a singular immunity from infirmity and disease ; but in the month of September of that year the vital power ebbed away, and he passed gently, reciting now and then a verse of Corneille or a text of Scripture, into his rest. Public life, ambition, the love of power, and the triumph of debate no doubt shook and agitated his career, and some times misdirected it ; but they produced no effect upon the solid structure of his character, which remained throughout perfectly simple, indifferent to wealth, and prouder of its own integrity than of all the honour the world could bestow. M. Guizot will be remembered in history less by