The Sun.
London, England, 1865-10-03 00:00:00

MONTALEMB.ERT ON LAMORIOIERE.

" A Good Man Struggling with Adversity."
A noble and affecting eulogiurn upon one of the
most heroic warriors of modern times adorns the
current number of Le Correspondant. It is a tribute
worthy of its theme—the life, the death, the genius,
the valour, the heart, the very soul of Leon de
Lamoriciere. And it is a tribute worthy, none the
less, of the generous hand that has but just now
laid it upon this newly-erected tomb of Lamoriciere
—the hand of Charles the Count de Montalembert.
It is comprised within the compass of no more than
two-and-twenty pages of the licraison. It is sub-
divided into three portions, each of them of very
moderate dimensions. It goes directly to the
point, in the very first sentence of the very first
paragraph—in which the writer, or orator, it
might rather be said, laments the sorrowful destiny
of those who, while, so to say, surviving their own
generation, themselves individually, have occasion
at intervals to speak over the graves of those
friends, companions, chieftains who have had the
happiness of preceding them ! Reduced, he says, to
envy the happier lot thus permitted to these their
predecessors, they readily yield to the temptation of
assuaging their grief by recalling their recollections
With this tender but manly utterance, by way of
preamble, the Count de Montalembert remarks at
once that—already the elite of those men whose
lives date from the earlier years of this century have
begun to be lamentably decimated by death. And
that Death while it has thus been striking them down,
one by one, in the very midst of us, with a premature
blow, when they were yet in the full possession of
the great gifts which God had lavished upon them,
has, time and again, been preceded mysteriously by
a seeming disgrace or by a retirement from public
view so prolonged, that one finds oneself not un-
naturally coming to look upon them, as having
long since passed into the region of history.
Their austere and melancholy destiny, aggravated
by the inconstancy of their country, at the very least,
as he beautifully expresses it, thus serving to remove
further back the perspective from which they are
submitted to our contemplation !
He then casts a retrospective glance, at once of
anguish and of admiration, upon those virginal and
splendid years of the parliamentary regime in
which Leon de Lamoriciere was first revealed to
France and to glory ! Then it was, he exclaims,
that a very Pleiad of illustrious men, men of
radiant abilities and of resplendent reputation,
appeared at the head of all the great de-
partments of the national intelligence. The
broad and comprehensive humanity of M.
de Montalembert, at this point, as it appears to
us, renders itself very conspicuously apparent. The
largeness of his sympathies, the true and literal
Catholicism of his impartial judgment, render them-
selves at this point of his argument more than or-
dinarily manifest. Not content with recounting
the names of statesmen, administrators, and parlia-
mentary orators as distinguished as those of M.
Casimir Perier, Royer-Collard, Mole, Berryer,
Guizot, Thiers, Broglie, Cousin, and others—
Montalembert's inevitable omission, here, of his
own name, in this his own enumeration of his
immediate contemporaries, rendering it as doubly
and trebly conspicuous by its absence as ever could
have done the reported absence of Brutus' bust
from the proverbial procession ! Not satisfied with
numbering up these famous names as those impart-
ing to the tribune•and to the government of the
country by itself an eclat unsurpassed even in 1789
—Montalembert, with a large and open-handed
magnanimity, singles out, with a sort of exultation
in the retrospect, the names of Alphonse de La-
martine, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, as having
impressed upon poetry a stamp as new as it was
ineffaceable—of Ary Scheffer, Delaroche, Delacroix,
Meyerbeer, as having done the like by Art—of
Cuvier, Biot, Arago, and others by the Sciences—
of Thierry, Michelet, Tocqueville, by History and
by Political Philosophy ! While, as if to sum up
all in one crowning sentence indicative of the
fecundity in genius of that particular epoch, he ob-
serves that Lacordaire and Ravignau caused then
to radiate around the Christian rostrum an aureole
of eloquence and of popularity such as it had not
known since the days of Bossuet ! Thereupon—
having said thus much—having prepared the way
by this impressive and persuasive preamble for the
mention, befittingly, of the heroic name of Leon de
Lamoriciere—M. de Montalembert takes occasion
to remark that curiosity at that time was awakened
to discover whether in this revivification or
rejuvenescence of the moral and intellectual
energies of the country any analogous development
would become apparent in military life. And
that doubt was decided, as he says, by the Army
of Africa ! One by one, brave and glorious soldiers
began to emerge from the ranks to the world's re-
cognition ! Year by year, day by day, their num-
bers were augmented. The illustrious Changarnier
alone, now, of all that magnificent phalanx, remains
amongst us, still, to receive the homage of our faith-
ful recollections. Of all his noble companions—
some among them such as Damesme, Negrier,
Duvivier, Brea, sacrificed their lives in the streets of
Paris in 1848, to the end that France might yet be
retained within the category of civilised nations—
while otheis, and these the more illustrious of the
number, prominent amongst them Cavaignac,
Bedeau, Lamoriciere, have died, one after another,
prematurely, having prior to their deaths been
rendered, by an implacable destiny, useless to the
country they had saved ! Of all these Preux
Chevaliers, the youngest, says Montalembert, the
most sympathetic, the most brilliant, the most
rapidly popular was this very Lamoriciere who has
but just now been snatched from amongst us, while
still so full of fire, of light and of life, of force and
of faith, of force physical and moral, of faith in God
and in the future of France ! Thereupon it is that
the voice of Montalembert—alternately trembling
into tears, resonant with enthusiasm, thrilling with
emotion, poignant with accents of lamentation—
sounds forth in tones that will not very readily be
hushed, in tones the echoes of which cannot very
speedily die out and be forgotten this impassioned
elope of Leon de Lanaoriciere. Reading it, simply
in its cold printed characters, precisely as it appears
here in these pages of Le Correspondant—as the
verse of Spencer stirred the heart of Sidney, so
does it, too, stir our heart as with the clarion of a
trumpet Read what he has written thus of La-
moriciere, as of one whose name, no less than that
of Changarnier, is henceforth inseparable from the
most dramatic episode of French African history,
the expedition of Constantine! The brush of Horace
Vernet (he delights to remind himself) has famili-
arized every one of us with those prodigious exploits
—it has revived or perpetuated for us the indomi-
table intrepidity of Changarnier, enclosed in the
serried battalion which saved the army through the
perils of the first retreat ; and with that also the
" boiling audacity " of Lamoriciere at the head of
his Zouaves, the scarlet fez upon his brow, the
white burnous upon his shoulders, precipitating him-
self the first upon the summit of the breach, the in-
stant afterwards to disappear there in a cloud of
smoke and dust, in the midst of a tremendous ex-
plosion, among the debris of which he was after-
wards discovered, his eyes nearly burnt out of his
head, his body hidden under a chaotic heap of his
soldiers, blackened by gunpowder, the very clothes
upon their backs calcined, the very flesh upon their
bones scdrched and blasted by the detonation.
Better than any further commentary of our own
upon it, however, will be the production here of one
or two salient passages taken almost at random—
and translated as accurately as the idioms of the
two languages will permit—from this elevated and
exquisite panegyric. Having described Lamoriciere
as a warrior on the field of battle, Montalembert
thus depicts him—quite as picturesquely—as an
orator in the tribune.

"Lamoriciere was born with'the gift of eloquence,
that gift which is not the first requisite either of the
exercise of power or of the love of liberty, but which
is rarely inseparable from either in the lands or the
times of free discussion. lie combined within himself
those three rare qualities which the prince of contempo-
rary orators, M. Thiers, has told us are essential to men
who aspire to govern—a knowledge of the affairs of the
country, the ability to expound them, and the character
requisite for their defence. Bat, contrary to the general
rule, his eloquence was in no way the result of labour.
With him the orator did not proceed slowly, as has
happened to tho most illustrious, advancing stop by stop