Page:The Royal Family of France (Henry).djvu/87

 IX.

RECONCILIATION.

know of no word in any tongue more absurd, more revolting, when applied to the reconciliation of Princes of the same blood, than the term fusion. Silver and copper are mixed with gold, and inversely; this is fusion, or alloy. But gold does not fuse with gold, it mingles with it, is identified with it.

A fusion, such as this, if dreamt of by the Paris bourgeois of the Quartier Montmartre or those of the Chaussée d'Antin, would be an abdication on both sides. It would be an acknowledgment of two hostile principles there where only one exists, aggravated as it is by the misfortunes of the period. Should the Royal Princes have been induced to follow this traitorous path, it would have inevitably led to a rupture. That rupture would have proved the closing scene of the History of France. There was but one remedy for the unfathomable sum total of our misfortunes, for the cruel trials of the present, for the sinister fears in the future: a plain and simple reconciliation. Foolish or wicked partisans may strive to compromise the safety of France by giving vent to dangerous opinions, by provoking claims injurious to the Royal dignity. Wretches as they are, that they should prove more ambitious, more inexorable than their leaders, is not surprising; they are time-serving friends. When in 1848 the Orléans family went into exile, these men chose an opposite direction. There is not to-day a single loyal and faithful Orleanist who would speak otherwise than we do. No sensible and practical man would ever sketch a programme of so absurd and risky a policy, which even Louis Philippe himself disowned on his death-bed.

State reasons are imperative, and family questions—say these policy-mongers—must give way to them. "How can we ask Princes who have quarrelled violently with the Head of their 81