The standpoint from which Napoleon (who is always called Buonaparte) is viewed harmonises with that from which the Revolution is judged; he is the usurper, the savage soldier, the murderer of Enghien; and again and again it is impressed on us that lilies are better than laurels. Under the name of Colonel G. A. Gustaffson (livre iii. ode 5), Gustavus IV., who lived as an exile in France during the reign of Louis XVIII, is eulogised as the representative of the fallen kings. The personality and story of Gustavus are represented in a manner which witnesses to Hugo's remarkable ignorance of foreign history--the king's whole life is a model life; his great mind is like a temple, whence proceeds the voice of God; he dictates the history of the future; he is the successor of the ancient seers; actuated by disgust at seeing the monarchs bow their necks to Napoleon's yoke, he has voluntarily taken off his crown, and thereby raised his head high above all the other royal heads on earth. Could folly go farther than this? The wretched, insane Gustavus a model king! The Bourbons are of course exalted to the skies. All their family events--birth, baptism, death, ascension, consecration--are treated as of world-wide import. In a poem on the subject of the reprehensible war which France, at Chateaubriand's instigation, carried on with Spain in the interests of the European reaction, royalty, the royal power, is declared to be miraculous; and in the same poem the king is expressly described as the war-lord, supporting himself by the power of the sword; war is, we are told, the companion of royalty:
Il faut, comme un soldat, qu'un prince ait une épée; Il faut, des factions quand l'astre impur a lui, Que, nuit et jour, bravant leur attente trompée Un glaive veille auprès de lui; Ou que de son armée il se fasse un cortège; Que son fier palais se protège D'un camp au front étincelant; _Car de la Royauté la Guerre est la compagne:_ On ne peut briser le sceptre de Charlemagne, Sans briser le fer de Roland.
It is not surprising that all these odes should have mottoes taken either from the Bible or from religious works, notably Chateaubriand's _Les Martyrs_, a book by which men's minds were so powerfully impressed that the younger poets of the day took a pride in transposing whole pages of it into verse.[3] Lamartine addressed his ode _Le Génie_ to Bonald; Hugo dedicates an ode with the same name to Chateaubriand, of whom he writes that "he suffers the double martyrdom of genius and virtue."