It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France,
then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this
orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw
her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere
she just began to move in,--glittering like the morning-star, full of
life and splendor and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what an heart must
I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall!
Little did I dream, when she added titles of veneration to those of
enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged
to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom!
little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen
upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor, and of
cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their
scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the
age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators
has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never,
never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that
proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the
heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an
exalted freedom! The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of
nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone!
It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor, which
felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated
ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice
itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness!
This mixed system of opinion and sentiment had its origin in the ancient
chivalry; and the principle, though varied in its appearance by the
varying state of human affairs, subsisted and influenced through a long
succession of generations, even to the time we live in.
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