“After all, did not the new coronation, when the Pope anointed a man as great as the chief of the second race, by a change of heads alter the effect of the ancient ceremony of our history?  The people have been led to think that a pious rite does not dedicate any one to the throne, or else renders indifferent the choice of the brow to be touched by the holy oil.  The supernumeraries at Notre-Dame de Paris, playing also in the Cathedral of Rheims, are no longer anything but the obligatory personages of a stage that has become common.  The advantage really is with Napoleon, who furnishes his figurants to Charles X. The figure of the Emperor thenceforth dominates all.  It appears in the background of events and ideas.  The leaflets of the good time to which we have attained shrivel at the glance of his eagles.”

Charles X. left Compiegne the 27th of May in the morning, and slept at Fismes.  The next day, the 28th, he had just quitted this town and was descending a steep hill, when several batteries of the royal guard fired a salute at his departure; the horses, frightened, took flight.  Thanks to the skill of the postilion, there was no accident to the King; but a carriage of his suite, in which were the Duke of Aumont, the Count de Cosse, the Duke of Damas, and the Count Curial, was overturned and broken, and the last two wounded.  At noon Charles X. arrived at a league and a half from Rheims, at the village of Tinqueux, where he was awaited by the Dukes of Orleans and Bourbon, the officers of his civil and military household, the authorities of Rheims, the legion of the mounted National Guard of Paris, etc.  He entered the gold carriage,—­termed the coronation carriage,—­where the Dauphin and the Dukes of Orleans and Bourbon took their places beside him.  The cortege then took up its march.  From Tinqueux to Rheims, the royal coach, gleaming with gold, passed under a long arcade of triumphal arches adorned with streamers and foliage.  From the gates of the city to the Cathedral, flowers strewed the sand that covered the ground.  All the houses were hung with carpets and garlands; at all the windows, from all the balconies, from all the roofs, innumerable spectators shouted their acclamations; the cortege advanced to the sound of all the bells of the city, and to the noise of a salvo of artillery of one hundred and one guns.  The King was received under a dais at the door of the metropolitan church, by the Archbishop of Rheims in his pontifical robes, and accompanied by his suffragans, the Bishops of Soissons, Beauvais, Chalons, and Amiens.  The Archbishop presented the holy water to the sovereign, who knelt, kissed the Gospels, then was escorted processionally into the sanctuary.  His prie-dieu was placed at fifteen feet from the altar, on a platform, about which was a magnificent canopy hung from the ceiling of the Cathedral.

The Dauphiness had entered her gallery with the Duchess of Berry and the princesses of the blood.  The Archbishop celebrated the vespers, and then the Cardinal de La Fare ascended the pulpit and delivered a sermon in which he said:—­