THINKING of Canada and Louisiana, looking over the old maps of the former French colonies in America, I must ask myself how my country’s government could have let go of these colonies, which would today be an inexhaustible source of prosperity.
From Acadia and Canada down to Louisiana, from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi, the territory of Nouvelle-France once bordered all the first thirteen United States: the eleven others, together with the District of Columbia, the territories of Michigan, the Northwest, Missouri, Oregon, and Arkansas, belonged to us, or would belong to us, as they now belong to the United States by the cession of the English and the Spanish, our successors in Canada and Louisiana. The country between the Atlantic to the northeast, the Polar Sea to the north, the Pacific and the Russian possessions to the northwest, and the Gulf of Mexico to the south, which is to say more than two-thirds of North America, would now be governed by the laws of France.
I’m afraid that the Restoration will ruin itself by maintaining ideas contrary to the ones I am about to express here. The mania of holding onto the past, a mania that I never cease combatting, would mean nothing if it toppled only me and deposed only me from the Prince’s favor; but it may well topple the throne itself. Political stasis is impossible. We must advance with the march of human intelligence. By all means, let us respect the majesty of time; let us reverently contemplate the bygone centuries, made holy by the memory and the relics of our fathers; but let us not try to return to them, for they no longer have to do with our reality, and if we tried to take hold of them, they would slip away. Around the year 1450, the Chapter of Notre-Dame d’Aix-la-Chapelle ordered the tomb of Charlemagne opened. They found the emperor sitting in a gold chair, holding in his skeleton hands a Book of the Gospels written in gold letters. Before him lay his scepter and his gold shield. At his side he had his sword, Joyeuse, sheathed in a gold scabbard. He was still clad in the Emperor’s robes, and on his head, held upright by the strength of a gold chain, a winding sheet topped with a gold crown covered what had been his face. They reached out to touch the phantom, and it crumbled to dust.
Once we possessed vast lands overseas: they offered asylum to the surplus of our population, a market for our commerce, and nourishment for our navy. We are now excluded from the new universe, where the human race is starting over again. The English, Portuguese, and Spanish languages serve in Africa, in Asia, in Polynesia, on all the islands of the South Sea, and on the continent of the two Americas to express the thoughts of several million men, while we, disinherited from the conquests made by our courage and our genius, rarely hear the language of Colbert and Louis XIV spoken even in the market towns of Louisiana or Canada, which are now under foreign control. The French language lingers there only as evidence of our fortune and the errors of our politics.
And what kind of man is the king whose dominion now takes the place of the King of France in the Canadian forests? The kind who wrote me this note yesterday:
Royal Lodge, Windsor, June 4, 1822
M. le Vicomte,
I have orders from the King to invite Your Excellency to come dine and sleep here Thursday the 6th inst.
Your very humble and very obedient servant,
Francis Conyngham
It is my destiny to be tormented by princes. But I have interrupted myself: I have recrossed the Atlantic and reset the arm I broke at Niagara; I have traded my bearskin for a gold-stitched coat; I have left an Iroquois wigwam for the Royal Lodge of His Majesty, Monarch of the Three United Kingdoms and Controller of the Indies; I have left behind my slit-eared hosts and the beaded little savage girl. I only wish Lady Conyngham had Mila’s charm, and was of that age which still belongs to the earliest springtime—to those days that lead up to the month of May and that our Gallic poets used to call “l’Avrillée.”[11]
Revised July 26, 1846