assembled each evening before their tents and sang hymns to the sovereign and the glory of the French arms.  In the evening of the 22d of May, these military choruses were closed by the serment francais, sung by all voices.  At the words “Let us swear to be faithful to Charles!” all heads were uncovered, and the soldiers waving their helmets and shakos in the air, cried over and again, “Long live the King!”

On May 24th, the King left Paris with the Dauphin.  Before going to Rheims he stopped at the Chateau of Compiegne, where he remained until the 27th, amid receptions and fetes and hunts.

M. de Chateaubriand was already at Rheims.  He wrote on May 26:—­

“The King arrives day after to-morrow.  He will be crowned Sunday, the 29th.  I shall see him place upon his head a crown that no one dreamed of when I raised my voice in 1814.  I write this page of my Memoirs in the room where I am forgotten amid the noise.  This morning I visited Saint-Remi and the Cathedral decorated in colored paper.  The only clear idea that I can have of this last edifice is from the decorations of the Jeanne d’Arc of Schiller, played at Berlin.  The opera-scene painters showed me on the banks of the Spree, what the opera-scene painters on the banks of the Vesle hide from me.  But I amused myself with the old races, from Clovis with his Franks and his legion come down from heaven, to Charles VII. with Jeanne d’Arc.”

The writer, who some weeks earlier had expressed himself in terms so dithyrambic as to the consecration, now wrote as follows of this religious and monarchical solemnity:—­

“Under what happy auspices did Louis XVI. ascend the throne!  How popular he was, succeeding to Louis XV.!  And yet what did he become?  The present coronation will be the representation of a coronation.  It will not be one; we shall see the Marshal Moncey, an actor at that of Napoleon, the Marshal who formerly celebrated the death of the tyrant Louis XVI. in his army, brandish the royal sword at Rheims in his rank as Count of Flanders or Duke of Aquitaine.  To whom can this parade really convey any illusion?  I should have wished no pomp to-day; the King on horseback, the church bare, adorned only with its ancient arches and tombs; the two Chambers present, the oath of fidelity to the Charter taken aloud on the Bible.  This would have been the renewal of the monarchy; they might have begun it over again with liberty and religion.  Unfortunately there was little love of liberty, even if they had had at least a taste for glory.”

This is not all; the curious royalist, as if disabused as to Bourbon glories, so extolled by him, glorifies, apropos of the coronation of Charles X., the Napoleon whom in 1814 he called disdainfully “Buonaparte,” loading him with the most cutting insults:—­