“It is in vain,” said the Debats, “that the ministers demand of Time to efface with a sweep of his wing their days, their actions, their thoughts, of yesterday; these live for them, as for us.  The shadow of their past goes before them and traces their route.  They cannot turn aside; they must march; they must advance.—­But I wish to turn back.—­You cannot.—­But I shall support liberty, the Charter, the Opposition.—­You cannot.  March, then, march, under the spur of necessity, to the abyss of Coups d’Etat!  March!  Your life has judged and condemned you.  Your destiny is accomplished.”

The man who excited hatreds so violent was Jules de Polignac.  He was born at Versailles, May 14, 1780.  As the German historian, Gervinus, has said:  “His past weighed upon him like a lash of political interdict.  He was the son of the Duchess of Polignac, who had been the object of so many calumnies, and who had never been pardoned for the intimate friendship with which she was honored by the unfortunate queen, Marie Antoinette, a friendship that had evoked against her, first all the jealousies of the envious courtiers, and then all the aversion of the people.  It was believed that a like favoritism could be recognized in the relations of the son of the Duchess with Charles X. To this unpopularity, inherited from his mother, was joined another that was directed against the person of the emigre.”

After having been one of the courtiers of the little court at Coblenz, he had taken service for some time in Russia, and then passed into England, where he had been one of the most intimate confidants, and one of the most active agents of the Count d’Artois.  Sent secretly into France, with his elder brother, the Duke Armand de Polignac, he was, like the latter, compromised in the Cadoudal conspiracy.  Their trial is remarkable for the noble strife of devotion, in which each of the brothers pleaded the cause of the other at the expense of his own.  Armand was condemned to death.  His wife threw herself at the feet of the First Consul, who, thanks to the intercession of Josephine, commuted the penalty of death to perpetual confinement.  Jules was condemned to prison, and shared the captivity of his brother.  Confined at first in the castle of Ham, then in the Temple, then at Vincennes, they obtained, at the time of the marriage of Napoleon with Marie Louise, their transfer to a hospital.  There they knew the General Mallet, but the part they were suspected of taking in his conspiracy was never proven.  When the allied armies entered France, they succeeded in escaping, and rejoined the Count d’Artois at Vesoul.  They penetrated to Paris some days before the capitulation, and displayed the white flag there the 3d of March, 1814.