BOOK IX[156

The year 1822--My first dispatches from London--Conversation with George IV. on M. Decazes--The noble character of our diplomacy under the Legitimacy--A parliamentary sitting--English society--Continuation of the dispatches--Resumption of parliamentary labours--A ball for the Irish--Duel between the Duke of Bedford and the Duke of Buckingham--Dinner at Royal Lodge--The Marchioness Conyngham and her secret--Portraits of the ministers--Continuation of my dispatches--Parleys on the Congress of Verona--Letter to M. de Montmorency; his reply foreshadowing a refusal--A more favourable letter from M. de Villèle--I write to Madame de Duras--Death of Lord Londonderry--Another letter to M. de Montmorency--Trip to Hartwell--Note from M. de Villèle announcing my nomination to the Congress--The end of old England--Charlotte--Reflexions--I leave London--The years 1824, 1825, 1826 and 1827--Deliverance of the King of Spain--My dismissal--The Opposition follows me--Last diplomatic notes--Neuchâtel, in Switzerland--Death of Louis XVIII.--Coronation of Charles X.--Reception of the knights of the Orders.

It was in London, in 1822, that I wrote, without intermission, the longest part of these Memoirs, including my travels in America, my return to France, my marriage, my passing through Paris, my emigration to Germany with my brother, my residence and misfortunes in England between 1793 and 1800. There is found the description of old England, and, as I retraced all this at the time of my embassy (1822), the changes that had come over the manners and persons of the time between 1793 and the end of the century struck me: I was naturally led to compare what I saw in 1822 with what I had seen during the seven years of my exile across the Channel.

In this way were told, by anticipation, things which I should now have to place under the proper date of my diplomatic mission. I spoke to you of my emotion, of the feelings recalled to me by the sight of those spots dear to my memory; but perhaps you have not read that part of my book? You have done well. It is enough that I should now tell you of the place in which the gaps that will be found in the present story of my embassy in London are filled up. You see me, therefore, writing in 1839, among the dead of 1822 and the dead that went before in 1793.

In London, in the month of April 1822, I was within fifty leagues of Lady Sutton. I strolled in Kensington Gardens with my recent impressions and the early past of my young years: a confusion of times which produces in me a confusion of memories; life which burns out mingles, like the fire of Corinth, the molten brass of the statues of the Muses and Love, of the tripods and the tombs.

[Sidenote: The Marquess of Londonderry.]

The parliamentary holidays were still proceeding when I alighted at my house in Portland Place. The Under-secretary of State, Mr. Planta[157], invited me, on behalf of the Marquess of Londonderry, to go to dine at North Cray, the noble lord's country-place. This villa, with a large tree before the windows on the garden side, looked out over some meadows; a little underwood growing on hillocks distinguished this site from the ordinary English sites. Lady Londonderry[158] was much in vogue in her quality as a marchioness and as wife of the Prime Minister.

My dispatch of the 12th of April, No. 4, relates my first interview with Lord Londonderry; it touches on the affairs with which I had to occupy myself:

"LONDON, 12 _April_ 1822.

"MONSIEUR LE VICOMTE[159],

"I went two days ago, on Wednesday the 10th instant, to North Cray. I shall now have the honour of giving you an account of my conversation with the Marquess of Londonderry. It lasted for an hour and a half before dinner, and we resumed it later, but less at our ease, because we were no longer alone.

"Lord Londonderry first asked for news of the King's health, with a persistency which manifestly revealed a political interest; when I had reassured him on this point, he passed to the Ministry:

"'It is consolidating itself,' he said.

"I replied:

"'It has never been shaken and, as it belongs to one opinion, it will remain the master so long as that opinion prevails in the Chambers.'

"This brought us to speak of the elections: he seemed struck by what I said of the advantage of a summer session to restore order in the financial year; he had not till then well understood the state of the question.

"The war between Russia and Turkey next became the subject of conversation. Lord Londonderry, when speaking of soldiers and armies, appeared to me to be of the opinion of our late ministry as to the danger there might be for us in getting together large bodies of troops; I opposed this idea, I maintained that there was nothing to be feared in leading the French soldier into battle; that he would never be unfaithful in the sight of the enemy's flag; that our army has lately been increased; that it could be trebled to-morrow, if that were necessary, without the smallest inconvenience; that, in truth, a few non-commissioned officers might shout, 'Long live the Charter!' in a garrison, but that our grenadiers would always shout, 'Long live the King!' on the battle-field.

"I do not know whether these greater politics made Lord Londonderry forget the treaty of the negroes; he did not say a word about it to me. Changing the subject, he spoke of the message in which the President of the United States invites Congress to recognise the independence of the Spanish Colonies:

"'Commercial interests,' I said to him, 'may derive some advantage from it, but I doubt whether political interests will find the same profit in it; there are already enough political ideas in the world. To increase the mass of those ideas is to compromise more and more the fate of the monarchies in Europe.'

"Lord Londonderry abounded in my sense and spoke these remarkable words to me:

"'As for us (the English), we are not at all disposed to recognise those revolutionary governments.'

"Was he sincere?

"I have had, monsieur le vicomte, to report to you, word for word, an important conversation. However, we must not hide from ourselves the fact that England will sooner or later recognise the independence of the Spanish Colonies; public opinion and the impulse of her trade will drive her to it. She has already, during the last three years, gone to considerable expense to establish secret relations with the revolted provinces north and south of the Isthmus of Panama.

"Upon the whole, monsieur le vicomte, I have found in the Marquess of Londonderry a man of sense, of perhaps somewhat doubtful frankness; a man still steeped in the old ministerial system; a man accustomed to a submissive diplomacy and surprised, without being offended, at language more worthy of France; a man, in short, who could not refrain from a sort of astonishment while talking with one of those Royalists who, since seven years, have been represented to him as madmen or imbeciles.

"I have the honour, etc."

With these general affairs were mingled, as in all embassies, private transactions. I had to occupy myself with the petitions of M. le Duc de Fitz-James[160], with the lawsuit of the ship _Eliza Ann_, with the depredations of the Jersey fishermen on the Granville oyster-banks, etc., etc. I regretted to be obliged to set aside a little pigeon-hole in my brain for the papers of the claimants. When one ransacks one's memory, it is hard to come across Messieurs Usquin, Coppinger, Deliège and Piffre. But, in a few years, shall we be better known than those gentlemen? A certain M. Bonnet having died in America, all the Bonnets in France wrote to me to claim his succession; those tormentors write to me still! Yet it ought to be time to leave me in peace. It is all very well for me to reply that, the little accident of the fall of the Throne having occurred, I no longer occupy myself with this world: they hold out and want their inheritance at all costs.

[Sidenote: The Eastern question.]

As to the East, it was in contemplation to recall the different ambassadors from Constantinople. I foresaw that England would not follow the movement of the Continental Alliance, and I informed M. de Montmorency of this. The rupture which had been feared between Russia and the Porte did not happen: Alexander's moderation delayed the event. In this connection, I made a great expenditure of going and coming, of sagacity and argument; I wrote a multitude of dispatches, which have gone to must in our archives with the reports of events that never occurred. I at least have this advantage over my colleagues, that I attach no importance to my labours; I saw them, without a care, swallowed up in oblivion with all the lost ideas of mankind.

Parliament resumed its sittings on the 17th of April; the King returned on the 18th, and I was presented to him on the 19th. I gave an account of this presentation in my dispatch of the 19th; it ended thus:

"H. B. M., thanks to his close and varied conversation, did not give me an opening to tell him something with which the King had specially charged me; but the favourable and early occasion of a new audience is about to present itself."

This "something" with which the King had specially charged me related to M. le Duc Decazes. Later, I executed my orders: I told George IV. that Louis XVIII. was distressed at the coldness with which the Ambassador of His Most Christian Majesty had been received. George IV. replied:

"Listen, Monsieur de Chateaubriand, I will confess to you: M. Decazes' mission was not to my liking; it was acting a little cavalierly towards me. My friendship for the King of France alone made me put up with a favourite who had no other merit than his master's attachment. Louis XVIII. reckoned greatly on my good-will, and he was right; but I could not carry indulgence so far as to treat M. Decazes with a distinction at which England would have taken offense. However, tell your King that I am touched by what he ordered you to represent to me, and that I shall always be happy to prove my real attachment for him."

Emboldened by these words, I laid before George IV. all that came to my mind in favour of M. Decazes. He answered, half in English, half in French:

"_À merveille!_ You are a true gentleman!"

When I returned to Paris, I gave Louis XVIII. an account of this conversation: he seemed grateful to me. George IV. had spoken to me like a well-bred but easy-going prince; he was free from bitterness because he thought of other things. Nevertheless it did not do to trifle with him beyond moderation. One of his table-fellows[161] had wagered that he would ask George IV. to ring the bell, and that George IV. would obey. George IV. did in fact ring the bell and said to the gentleman-in-waiting:

"Show this gentleman the door."

The idea of restoring strength and brilliancy to our arms continued to dominate me. I wrote to M. de Montmorency, on the 13th of April:

"I have had an idea, monsieur le vicomte, which I submit to your judgment. Would you think it amiss that, in the form of a conversation with Prince Esterhazy[162], I should give him to understand that, if Austria required to withdraw a part of her troops, we could replace them in Piedmont? A few rumours spread as to an intended muster of our troops in Dauphiné would give me a favourable pretext. I proposed to the former ministry to garrison Savoy at the time of the revolt in June 1821[163]. He rejected that measure and I think that, in so doing, he made a capital mistake. I persist in thinking that the presence of some French troops in Italy would produce a great effect on public opinion and that the King's Government would derive much glory from it."

[Sidenote: Our bold diplomacy.]

Proofs superabound of the noble character of our diplomacy during the Restoration. What does this matter to parties? Have I not read this very morning, in a newspaper of the Left, that the Alliance forced us to act as its policeman and to make war on Spain, when the _Congrès de Vérone_ is there, when diplomatic documents show in an irrefutable manner that all Europe, with the exception of Russia, objected to the war; that not only did it object to it, but that England openly opposed it; and that Austria secretly thwarted us by most ignoble measures? This will not prevent them from lying afresh to-morrow; they will not even take the trouble to examine the question, to read that of which they speak "knowingly" without having read it! Every lie repeated becomes a truth: one cannot have too great a contempt for human opinions.

Lord John Russell[164], on the 25th of April, introduced a motion in the House of Commons on the state of the national representation in Parliament: Mr. Canning opposed it. The latter, in his turn, introduced a Bill to repeal a portion of the Act depriving Catholic peers of their right of sitting and voting in the House. I was present at these sittings on the woolsack[165], where the Speaker had made me sit. Mr. Canning was present, in 1822, at the sitting of the House of Lords which rejected his Bill; he was hurt at a phrase of the old Chancellor's[166]: the latter, speaking of the author of the Bill, exclaimed scornfully:

"They say he is leaving for India: ah, let him go, this fine gentleman, let him go, and a good journey to him!"

Mr. Canning said to me as we went out:

"I'll catch him yet."

Lord Holland spoke very well, without, however, recalling Mr. Fox. He used to spin round, so that he often presented his back to the House and addressed his remarks to the walls. The peers cried, "Hear, hear!" No one was offended by this eccentricity.

In England, every one expresses himself as he can; petty pleading is unknown; there is no resemblance in the voice or in the delivery of the speakers. The members listen patiently; they are not offended when the speaker has no facility; let him splutter, let him hem and haw, let him seek his words, they find that he has made "a fine speech" if he has uttered a few phrases of good sense. This variety of men who have remained what nature made them ends by being agreeable; it breaks the monotony. It is true that there are only a small number of lords and members of the House of Commons who get up to speak. We, always placed upon a stage, hold forth and gesticulate like a solemn puppet-show. It was a useful study to me to pass from the secret and silent monarchy of Berlin to the public and noisy monarchy of London: one could derive some instruction from the contrast between two nations at the two ends of the ladder.

The arrival of the King, the re-opening of Parliament, the commencement of the Season blended duty, business and pleasure: one could meet the ministers only at Court, at balls, or in Parliament. To celebrate His Majesty's birthday, I dined with Lord Londonderry; I dined on the Lord Mayor's[167] galley, which went up to Richmond: I prefer the miniature _Bucentaur_ in the arsenal at Venice, which no longer bears more than the memory of the Doges and a Virgilian name. In the old days, as an Emigrant, lean and half-naked, I had amused myself, without being Scipio, by throwing stones into the water along that bank now hugged by the Lord Mayor's plump and well-lined barge.

[Sidenote: Diners.]

I also dined in the East End of the town with Mr. Rothschild[168] of London, of the younger branch of Salomon[169]: where did I not dine? The roast-beef equalled that of the Tower of London in stateliness; the fish were so long that one could not see their tails; ladies, whom I met there and nowhere else, sang like Abigail. I quaffed tokay not far from the place which had seen me toss off water by the pitcherful and almost die of hunger; reclining against the silk-squabbed back of my well-padded carriage, I saw that same Westminster where I had spent a night locked in the Abbey, and around which I had strolled, covered with mud, with Hingant and Fontanes. My house, the rent of which cost me twelve hundred pounds a year, was opposite the garret inhabited by my cousin de La Boüétardais what time, in a red robe, he used to play the guitar on a borrowed truckle-bed to which I had offered shelter beside my own.

There was no longer a question of those Emigrant hops at which we used to dance to the tune of the violin of a counsellor to the Breton Parliament; it was Almack's, conducted by Collinet, that provided my delight: a public ball under the patronage of the great ladies of the West End. There the old and the young dandies met. Among the old, shone the victor of Waterloo, who aired his glory like a snare for women stretched across the quadrilles; at the head of the young, stood out Lord Clanwilliam[170], said to be the son of the Duke of Richmond[171]. He did wonderful things: he galloped out to Richmond and returned to Almack's after twice falling from his horse. He had a certain manner of utterance, after the fashion of Alcibiades, which was thought enchanting. The fashions in words, the affectations of language and pronunciation changing, as they do, in almost every parliamentary session in high society in London, an honest man is wonder-struck at no longer knowing English, which he believed himself to know perfectly six months before. In 1822, the duty of the man of fashion was, at the first glance, to present an unhappy and ailing figure; he was expected to have something neglected about his person: long nails; beard worn neither full nor shaved, but seeming to have sprouted at a given moment by surprise, through forgetfulness, amid the preoccupations of despair; a waving lock of hair; a profound, sublime, wandering and fatal glance; lips contracted in scorn of the human race; a heart bored, Byronian, drowned in the disgust and mystery of existence.

To-day it is no longer so: the dandy must have a conquering, thoughtless, insolent air; he must attend to his dress, wear mustachios or a beard cut round like Queen Elizabeth's ruff or the radiant disk of the sun; he reveals the lofty independence of his character by keeping his hat on his head, by lolling on the sofa, stretching out his boots before the noses of the ladies seated in admiration on chairs before him; he rides with a cane which he carries like a wax-taper, indifferent to the horse which chances to be between his legs. His health must be perfect and his soul always at the height of five or six felicities. A few Radical dandies, those most advanced towards the future, possess a pipe.

But, no doubt, all these things are changed in the very time which I am taking to describe them. They say that the dandy of the present moment must no longer know if he exists, if the world is there, if there are women, and if he ought to salute his neighbour. Is it not curious to find the original of the dandy under Henry III.?

"Those pretty minions," says the author of the _Isle des Hermaphrodites_[172], "wore their hair longish, curled and curled again, showing above their little velvet caps, like the women, and their shirt-ruffs of linen all around, starched and half-a-foot wide, in such fashion that, to see their heads above their ruffs, it seemed as though it was the head of Saint John in a dish." They leave to go to Henry III.'s chamber, "swinging their body, their heads and their legs so that I thought at every turn that they must needs fall at full length.... They found that manner of walking finer than any other."

[Sidenote: London society.]

All the English are mad by nature or by fashion.

Lord Clanwilliam passed quickly: I met him again at Verona; he became British Minister in Berlin after me. For a moment we followed the same road, although we did not walk with the same step.

Nothing in London succeeded like insolence, as witness d'Orsay[173] the brother of the Duchesse de Guiche[174]: he had taken to galloping in Hyde Park, leaping turnpike gates, gambling, treating the dandies without ceremony; he had an unequalled success and, to crown the whole, he ended by carrying off an entire family, father, mother and children.

The ladies most in fashion pleased me little; there was one, however, who was charming, Lady Gwydyr: she resembled a Frenchwoman in her tone and manners. Lady Jersey still maintained her position as a beauty. I met the Opposition at her house. Lady Conyngham belonged to the Opposition, and the King himself kept a secret liking for his old friends. Among the patronesses of Almack's, one marked the Russian Ambassadress[175].

The Countess de Lieven had had some rather ridiculous affairs with Madame d'Osmond[176] and George IV. As she was audacious and was considered to be in favour at Court, she had become extremely fashionable. She was thought to have wit, because her husband was supposed to have none, which was not true: M. de Lieven[177] was much superior to Madame. Madame de Lieven, with sharp and unprepossessing features, is a commonplace, wearisome, arid woman, who has only one style of conversation: vulgar politics; for the rest, she knows nothing and she hides the dearth of her ideas under the abundance of her words. When she finds herself with people of merit, her sterility is silent; she invests her nullity with a superior air of boredom, as though she had the right to be bored; having fallen through the effect of time, and being unable to keep from meddling with something, the dowager of the Congress has come from Verona to give, in Paris[178], with the permission of the magistrates of St. Petersburg, a representation of the diplomatic puerilities of former days. She keeps up private correspondences and has shown herself a specialist in unhappy marriages. Our novices have rushed to her rooms to learn to know the fine world and the art of secrets; they entrust her with theirs, which, spread abroad by Madame de Lieven, change into underhand tittle-tattle. The ministers, and those who aspire to become so, are quite proud to be protected by a lady who has had the honour to see M. de Metternich at the hours in which the great man, to refresh himself after the weight of business, amused himself by unravelling silk. Ridicule awaited Madame de Lieven in Paris. A serious doctrinaire[179] has fallen at Omphale's feet: "Love, 'twas thou lost Troy."

The day was thus distributed in London: at six o'clock in the morning, one hastened to a party of pleasure, consisting of a breakfast in the country; one returned to lunch in London; one changed one's dress to walk in Bond Street or Hyde Park; one dressed again to dine at half-past seven; one dressed again for the Opera; at midnight, one dressed once more for an evening party or rout. What a life of enchantment! I should a hundred times have preferred the galleys. The supreme height of fashion was to be unable to make one's way into the small rooms of a private ball, to remain on the stair-case blocked by the crowd, and to find one's self nose to nose with the Duke of Somerset[180]; a state of beatitude to which I once attained. The English of the new breed are infinitely more frivolous than we; their heads are turned for a "show:" if the Paris executioner were to go to London, all England would run after him. Did not Marshal Soult enrapture the ladies[181], like Blücher, whose mustachios they kissed? Our marshal, who is not Antipater[182], nor Antigonus[183], nor Seleucus[184], nor Antiochus[185], nor Ptolemy[186], nor any of the captain-kings of Alexander, is a distinguished soldier, who pillaged Spain while getting beaten, and with whom Capuchins redeemed their lives with pictures. But it is true that, in March 1814, he published a furious proclamation against Bonaparte, whom he received in triumph a few days later: he has since done his Easter duty at Saint-Thomas-d'Aquin. They show his old boots in London for a shilling.

[Sidenote: English frivolity.]

All reputations are quickly made on the banks of the Thames and as quickly lost. In 1822, I found that great city immersed in the recollection of Bonaparte; the people had passed from the vilification of "Nick" to a stupid enthusiasm. Memoirs of Bonaparte swarmed; his bust adorned every chimney-piece; his engravings shone in the windows of all the picture-dealers; his colossal statue, by Canova[187], decorated the Duke of Wellington's stair-case. Could they not have consecrated another sanctuary to Mars enchained? This deification seems rather the work of the vanity of a door-porter than of the honour of a warrior. General, you did not defeat Napoleon at Waterloo: you only forced the last link of a destiny already shattered.

After my official presentation to George IV., I saw him several times. The recognition of the Spanish Colonies by England was pretty well decided upon; at least it seemed as though the ships of those independent States were to be received under their own flag in the ports of the British Empire. My dispatch of the 7th of May reports a conversation which I had had with Lord Londonderry, and the ideas of that minister. This dispatch, important for the affairs of that time, would be almost without interest for the reader of to-day. Two things had to be distinguished in the position of the Spanish Colonies with regard to England and France: commercial interests and political interests. I entered into the details of those interests:

"The more I see of the Marquess of Londonderry," I wrote to M. de Montmorency, "the subtler I find him. He is a man full of resource, who never says what he means; one would sometimes be tempted to think him a simple, easy man. In his voice, his laugh, his look, he has something of M. Pozzo di Borgo. He does not exactly inspire one with confidence."

The dispatch concludes thus:

"If Europe is obliged to recognise the _de facto_ governments in America, its whole policy must tend to bring monarchies to life in the New World, instead of these revolutionary republics which will send us their principles together with the products of their soil.

"In reading this dispatch, monsieur le vicomte, you will doubtless, like myself, experience a movement of satisfaction. It is already a great step forward in politics to have forced England to wish to associate herself with us in interests on which she would not have deigned to consult us six months ago. I congratulate myself as a good Frenchman on all that tends to put back our country in the high rank which she should occupy among foreign nations."

This letter was the basis of all my ideas and of all the negociations on colonial affairs with which I occupied myself during the Spanish War, almost a year before that war broke out.

On the 17th of May, I went to Covent Garden, in the Duke of York's[188] box. The King appeared. This sovereign, once detested, was greeted with acclamations such as he would not, in other days, have received from the monks, the inhabitants of that former convent. On the 26th, the Duke of York came to dinner at the Embassy: George IV. was greatly tempted to do me the same honour, but he feared the diplomatic jealousies of my colleagues.

[Sidenote: Death of the Duc de Richelieu.]

The Vicomte de Montmorency refused to enter into negociations on the Spanish Colonies with the Cabinet of St. James. On the 19th of May, I heard of the almost sudden death of M. le Duc de Richelieu[189]. That honest man had patiently borne his first retirement from office; but, when business came to be taken from him for too long a time, he failed because he had not a double life to replace that which he had lost. The great name of Richelieu has been handed down to our time only by women.

The revolutions continued in America. I wrote to M. de Montmorency:

No. 26.

"LONDON, 28 _May_ 1822.

"Peru has just adopted a monarchical Constitution. European policy should employ every care to obtain a similar result in the case of the colonies which declare themselves independent. The United States are singularly afraid of the establishment of an empire in Mexico. If ever the whole of the New World is Republican, the monarchies of the Old World will perish."

There was much spoken of the distress of the Irish peasants, and society danced in order to console them. A great full-dress ball at the Opera occupied sensitive souls. The King, meeting me in a corridor, asked me what I was doing there and, taking me by the arm, he led me to his box.

The English pit, in my days of exile, was noisy and coarse; sailors drank ale in the pit, ate oranges, apostrophized the boxes. I found myself one evening next to a sailor who had entered the theatre drunk; he asked me where he was; I told him:

"At Covent Garden."

"Pretty garden, indeed!" he exclaimed, seized, like Homer's gods, with inextinguishable laughter.

Invited lately to an evening-party at Lord Lansdowne's[190], I was presented by His Majesty to a severe-looking lady, seventy-three years old: she was dressed in crape, wore a black veil like a diadem on her white hair, and resembled a queen who had abdicated her throne. She greeted me in a solemn voice with three mangled sentences from the _Génie du Christianisme_; then she said to me, with no less solemnity:

"I am Mrs Siddons[191]."

If she had said to me, "I am Lady Macbeth," I should have believed her. I had seen her formerly on the stage in all the strength of her talent. One has but to live to find again those wrecks of one century cast by the billows of time upon the shore of another century.

My French visitors in London were M. le Duc[192] and Madame la Duchesse de Guiche[193], of whom I will talk to you at Prague; M. le Marquis de Custine, whom I had seen as a child at Fervacques; and Madame la Vicomtesse de Noailles[194], as agreeable, witty and gracious as though she were still wandering, at fourteen years of age, in the beautiful gardens of Méréville.

People were weary of pleasure; the ambassadors were longing to go on leave; Prince Esterhazy was preparing to set out for Vienna: he hoped to be summoned to the Congress, for already they were speaking of a congress. M. Rothschild[195] was returning to France after concluding with his brother the Russian loan of twenty-three million roubles. The Duke of Bedford[196] had fought a duel with the huge Duke of Buckingham[197], at the bottom of a pit, in Hyde Park; an insulting song against the King of France, sent over from Paris and printed in the London papers, amused the Radical English mob, which laughed without knowing at what.

I left, on the 6th of June, for Royal Lodge, where the King had gone. He had invited me to dine and sleep.

[Sidenote: George IV.]

I saw George IV. again on the 12th, 13th and 14th, at His Majesty's levee, drawing-room and ball. On the 24th, I gave a fête to the Prince[198] and Princess[199] of Denmark: the Duke of York had invited himself to it.

In earlier times, the kindness with which the Marchioness Conyngham treated me would have been an important thing: she told me that the idea of His Britannic Majesty's visit to the Continent was not quite abandoned. I religiously kept this great secret locked in my bosom. What important dispatches would have been written on this word of a favourite in the time of Mesdames de Verneuil[200], de Maintenon[201], des Ursins[202], de Pompadour! For the rest I should have heated myself unduly to obtain any information out of the Court in London: in vain do you speak, they do not listen to you.

Lord Londonderry especially was impassive: he embarrassed you at once by his sincerity as a minister and his reserve as a man. He explained his policy frankly, with the iciest air, and kept a profound silence as to facts. He wore an air of indifference to what he said, even as to what he did not say; one could not tell what one was to believe of what he showed or concealed. He would not have budged if you had "caught him in the ear with a sausage," as Saint-Simon says.

Lord Londonderry had a sort of Irish eloquence which often aroused the laughter of the House of Lords and the gaiety of the public; his blunders were celebrated, but he also sometimes attained flashes of eloquence which carried away the crowd, as, for instance, his words relating to the Battle of Waterloo, which I have recalled.

Lord Harrowby[203] was President of the Council; he spoke correctly, lucidly, and as one acquainted with the facts. It would be considered unbecoming in London for a president of the ministers to express himself prolixly or rhetorically. He was, moreover, a perfect gentleman for manner. One day, at the Pâquis, at Geneva, an Englishman was announced: Lord Harrowby entered; I recognised him only with difficulty: he had lost his old King; mine was exiled. It was the last time that the England of my time of grandeur appeared before me.

I have mentioned Sir Robert Peel[204] and Lord Westmorland[205] in the _Congrès de Vérone._

I do not know if Lord Bathurst[206] was descended from or related to that Earl Bathurst[207] of whom Sterne wrote:

"This nobleman ... is a prodigy; for at eighty-five he has all the wit and promptness of a man of thirty. A disposition to be pleased, and a power to please others beyond whatever I knew[208]."

Lord Bathurst, the minister of whom I am telling you, was well-informed and well-bred; he kept up the tradition of the old French manners of good company. He had three or four daughters who ran, or rather who flew like sea-swallows, along the waves, white, tall, and slender. What has become of them[209]? Did they fall into the Tiber with the young Englishwoman of their name?

[Sidenote: The Earl of Liverpool.]

Lord Liverpool[210] was not, like Lord Londonderry, the principal minister; but he was the most influential and the most respected minister. He enjoyed that reputation of a religious man and a good man which does so much for him who possesses it; one comes to such a man with the confidence which one has for a father; no action seems good if it is not approved by that godly person, invested with an authority far superior to that of talent. Lord Liverpool was the son of Charles Jenkinson, Baron Hawkesbury, Earl of Liverpool[211], the favourite of Lord Bute[212]. Almost all the English statesmen have begun with the literary career, with pieces of poetry more or less good, or with articles, generally excellent, inserted in the reviews. A portrait remains of this first Earl of Liverpool when he was private secretary to Lord Bute; his family is greatly distressed by it: this vanity, puerile at all times, is doubtless much more so to-day; but we must not forget that our most ardent revolutionaries took their hatred of society from natural disgraces or social inferiorities.

It is possible that Lord Liverpool, who was inclined towards reforms, and to whom Mr. Canning owed his last ministry, was influenced, despite the rigour of his religious principles, by some dislike of recollections. At the time when I knew Lord Liverpool, he had almost reached a Puritan illumination. Habitually he lived alone with an old sister, some miles out of London. He spoke little; his countenance was melancholy; he often bent an ear and seemed to be listening to something sad: one would have said that he was hearing his years fall, like the drops of a winter's rain upon the pavement. For the rest, he had no passions and he lived according to God.

Mr. Croker[213], Secretary to the Admiralty, famous as a speaker and as a writer, belonged, like Mr. Canning, to the school of Mr. Pitt; but he was more sophisticated than the latter. He occupied, at Whitehall, one of those gloomy apartments from which Charles I. had passed through a window to walk on the same level to the scaffold. One is astonished, in London, on entering the habitations where sit the directors of those establishments whose weight makes itself felt to the ends of the earth. A few men in black frock-coats sitting at a bare table: that is all you see; yet those are the directors of the British Navy, or the members of that company of merchants, the successors of the Mogul emperors, who number two-hundred millions of subjects in India.

Mr. Croker came to visit me, two years ago, at the Infirmerie de Marie-Thérèse. He pointed out to me the similarity of our opinions and of our destinies. Events separate us from the world; politics make solitaries, even as religion makes anchorites. When man dwells in the desert, he finds within himself some distant image of the Infinite Being who, living alone in immensity, sees the revolutions of the worlds accomplish themselves.

In the course of the months of June and July, the affairs of Spain began seriously to occupy the Cabinet of London. Lord Londonderry and the majority of the ambassadors displayed a ludicrous anxiety and almost dread in talking of these affairs. The Ministry feared lest, in case of a rupture, we should get the better of the Spaniards; the ministers of the other Powers trembled lest we should be beaten: they still saw our army taking the tricolour cockade.

[Sidenote: Dispatch on Spanish affairs.]

In my dispatch of the 28th of June, No. 35, the dispositions of England are faithfully stated:

No. 35.

"LONDON, 28 _June_ 1822.

"MONSIEUR LE VICOMTE,

"It has been more difficult for me to tell you what Lord Londonderry thinks, relative to Spain, than it will be easy for me to penetrate the secret of the instructions given to Sir W. A'Court[214]; however, I will leave nothing undone to procure you the information for which you ask me in your last dispatch, No. 18. If I have correctly estimated the policy of the English Cabinet and the character of Lord Londonderry, I am persuaded that Sir W. A'Court has taken with him scarcely anything in writing. They will have charged him verbally to observe the parties without mixing in their quarrels. The Cabinet of St. James does not love the Cortes, but it despises Ferdinand. It will certainly do nothing for the Royalists. Besides, it will be enough that our influence should be exercised in favour of one opinion for the English influence to support the other. Our reviving prosperity inspires a lively jealousy. It is true that there is here, among the statesmen, a certain vague fear of the revolutionary passions which are agitating Spain; but this fear is silent in the presence of private interests: so much so that if, on the one hand, Great Britain could exclude our wares from the Peninsula and if, on the other, she could recognise the independence of the Spanish Colonies, she would easily resign herself to events and console herself for the misfortunes which might overwhelm the Continental monarchies anew. The same principle that prevents England from withdrawing her ambassador from Constantinople makes her send an ambassador to Madrid: she severs herself from the common destinies and attends only to what she may be able to make out of the revolutions of the empires.

"I have the honour to be, etc."

Reverting to the news from Spain in my dispatch of the 16th of July, No. 40, I said to M. de Montmorency:

No. 40.

"LONDON, 16 _July_ 1822.

"MONSIEUR LE VICOMTE,

"The English newspapers, copying from the French newspapers, this morning give news from Madrid up to and including the 8th. I never expected better from the King of Spain, and I was not surprised. If that unhappy Prince is doomed to perish, the manner of the catastrophe is not a matter of indifference to the rest of the world: the dagger would lay low only the Monarch, the scaffold might kill the Monarchy. Already the judgments on Charles I. and Louis XVI. are a great deal too much: Heaven preserve us from a third judgment which would appear to establish, through the authority of crimes, a sort of right of peoples and a body of jurisprudence against the kings! We can now expect anything: a declaration of war on the part of the Spanish Government is one of the chances which the French Government must have foreseen. In any case, we shall soon be obliged to put an end to the sanitary cordon, for, once the month of September is past and the plague not reappearing at Barcelona, it would be a real mockery still to speak of a _sanitary cordon_; we should therefore quite frankly confess to an _army_ and give the reason which obliges us to maintain that army. Would not that be equivalent to a declaration of war against the Cortes? On the other hand, shall we break up the sanitary cordon? That act of weakness would compromise the safety of France, disgrace the ministry and revive the hopes of the revolutionary faction in our midst.

"I have the honour to be, etc., etc., etc."

Since the Congress of Vienna and of Aix-la-Chapelle, the princes of Europe had their heads turned with congresses: it was there that one amused one's self and divided a few peoples. Scarcely was the Congress, commenced at Laibach and continued at Troppau, ended, when they thought of convoking another in Vienna, at Ferrara, or at Verona; Spanish affairs offered the occasion to hasten the moment. Each Court had already marked out its ambassador.

In London, I saw every one preparing to leave for Verona: as my head was full of Spanish affairs and as I was dreaming of a plan for the honour of France, I thought I could be of some use to the new congress by making myself known in a respect which was not thought of. I had written to M. de Montmorency on the 24th of May; but I met with no favour. The minister's long reply is evasive, embarrassed, entangled; a marked aversion to me is ill-disguised under expressions of friendliness; it ends with this paragraph:

"Since I am in a confidential mood, noble viscount, I wish to tell you what I would not insert in an official dispatch, but what has been urged upon me by some personal observations and also by some opinions from persons who know the ground well upon which you are placed. Has it not already occurred to you that one must be mindful, with the English Ministry, of certain effects of jealousy and temper which it is always ready to conceive at direct marks of favour with the King and of credit in society? You must tell me if you have not happened to observe some traces of this."

Through whom had the complaints of my "credit" with the King and in "society" (meaning, I suppose, with the Marchioness Conyngham) reached the Vicomte de Montmorency? I do not know.

[Sidenote: Letter from M. de Villèle.]

Foreseeing, through this private dispatch, that my game was lost with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, I addressed myself to M. de Villèle, then my friend, who did not lean much towards his colleague. In his letter of the 5th of May 1822, he at first replied with a favourable word:

"PARIS, 5 _May_ 1822.

"I thank you," he said, "for all that you have done for us in London; the determination of the Court there on the subject of the Spanish Colonies can have no influence on ours; the position is very different; we must above all avoid being prevented by a war with Spain from acting elsewhere, as we must, if affairs in the East brought about new political combinations in Europe.

"We will not allow the French Government to be disgraced through a failure to participate in the events which may result from the present situation of the world; others may intervene with more advantage, none with more courage or loyalty.

"People are greatly mistaken, I think, both as to the real means of our country and as to the power which the King's Government is still able to exercise within the forms which it has laid down for itself; they offer more resources than appears to be believed, and I hope that, when the time comes, we shall know how to prove it.

"You will help us, my dear friend, in these great circumstances, if they offer themselves. We know it and rely upon it; the honour will be for all, and it is not a question at present of that partition which will be made according to the services rendered; let us all vie in zeal as to who shall render the most signal services.

"I do not know, indeed, if this will turn to a congress; but, in any case, I shall not forget what you have told me.

"JH. DE VILLÈLE."

At this first word of good understanding, I brought pressure on the Minister of Finance through Madame la Duchesse de Duras; she had already lent me the support of her friendship against the forgetfulness of the Court in 1814. She soon received this note from M. de Villèle:

"All that we were saying is said; all that lies in my heart and in my mind to do for the public good and for my friend is done and shall be done, be certain of it. I have no need to be preached to nor to be converted, as I said before; I act on conviction and sentiment.

"Receive, madame, the homage of my affectionate respect."

My last dispatch, dated 9 August, informed M. de Montmorency that Lord Londonderry would leave for Vienna between the 15th and 20th. The swift and mighty contradiction of mortal projects was given me; I thought that I had to speak to the Most Christian King's Council of human affairs only, whereas I had to report to it on the affairs of God:

[Sidenote: Death of Lord Londonberry.]

"LONDON, 12 _August_ 1822, _four o'clock in the afternoon.

"Dispatch transmitted to Paris by the Calais telegraph._

"The Marquess of Londonderry died suddenly this morning, 12th, at nine o'clock in the morning, at his country-house at North Cray."

No. 49.

"LONDON, 13 _August_ 1822.

"MONSIEUR LE VICOMTE,

"If the weather has put no obstacle in the way of my telegraphic dispatch, and if no accident has arrived to my special messenger, sent off at four o'clock, I hope that you have been the first on the Continent to receive the news of the sudden death of Lord Londonderry.

"This death was extremely tragic. The noble marquess was in London on Friday; he felt his head a little troubled; he had himself bled between the shoulders. After which he left for North Cray, where the Marchioness of Londonderry had been settled since a month. Fever broke out on Saturday the 10th and Sunday the 11th; but it seemed to subside in the night from Sunday to Monday, and on Monday morning the 12th the patient seemed so well that his wife, who was nursing him, thought she might leave him for a moment. Lord Londonderry, whose head was wandering, finding himself alone, got up, went into another room, seized a razor and, at the first attempt, cut his jugular vein. He fell bathed in his blood, at the feet of a doctor who was coming to his assistance.

"They are keeping back this deplorable accident as much as possible, but it has come to the knowledge of the public in a distorted shape and has given rise to all sorts of rumours.

"Why should Lord Londonderry have attempted his life? He had neither passions nor misfortunes; he was established more firmly than ever in his place. He was preparing to leave on Thursday next. He was making a pleasure-trip of a business journey. He was to be back on the 15th of October for shooting-parties, arranged beforehand, to which he had invited me. Providence ordained otherwise, and Lord Londonderry has followed the Duc de Richelieu."

Here are some details which did not enter into my dispatches.

On his return to London, George IV. told me that Lord Londonderry had gone to show him the scheme of instructions which he had drawn up for himself and which he was to follow at the Congress. George IV. took up the manuscript, the better to weigh its terms, and began to read it aloud. He noticed that Lord Londonderry was not listening to him and that he was turning his eyes round the ceiling of the closet:

"What's the matter, my lord?" asked the King.

"It's that insufferable John[215], sir, who is at the door; he will not go away, though I am always telling him."

The King, astonished, folded up the manuscript and said:

"You are ill, my lord; go home; get yourself bled."

Lord Londonderry went out and went to buy the pen-knife with which he cut his throat.

On the 15th, I continued my reports to M. de Montmorency:

"Messengers have been sent in every direction, to the watering-places, to the sea-side, to the country-houses, to fetch the absent ministers. At the time of the accident none of them were in London. They are expected to-day or to-morrow; they will hold a Council, but they cannot decide anything, for in the last result the King will appoint their new colleague, and the King is in Edinburgh. It is unlikely that His Britannic Majesty will hasten to make a choice in the midst of the celebrations. The death of the Marquess of Londonderry is a serious matter for England: he was not loved, but he was feared; the Radicals hated him, but they were afraid of him. Singularly courageous, he overawed the Opposition, which did not dare to insult him too much in Parliament or in the newspapers. His imperturbable coolness, his profound indifference for men and things, his instinct for despotism and his secret contempt for constitutional liberties made him a minister well-fitted to contend successfully with the tendencies of the century. His defects became good qualities at a time when exaggeration and democracy threaten the world.

"I have the honour to be, etc."

"LONDON, 15 _August_ 1822.

"MONSIEUR LE VICOMTE,

"Further intelligence confirms what I had the honour to tell you touching the death of the Marquess of Londonderry, in my ordinary dispatch of the day before yesterday, No. 49. Only, the fatal instrument with which the unfortunate minister cut his jugular vein was a pen-knife, and not a razor as I told you. The coroner's report, which you will read in the newspapers, will inform you fully. This inquest held on the corpse of the Prime Minister of Great Britain, as though on the body of a murderer, adds something still more terrible to this event

"You are doubtless now aware, monsieur le vicomte, that Lord Londonderry had shown proofs of mental alienation some days before his suicide and that the King himself had noticed it. A slight circumstance to which I had paid no attention, but which returned to my memory after the catastrophe, deserves to be told. I had gone to see the Marquess of Londonderry, some twelve or fifteen days ago. Contrary to his custom and to the custom of the country, he received me familiarly in his dressing-room. He was about to shave himself and, laughing a sardonic laugh, he spoke to me in praise of the English razors. I complimented him on the approaching closing of the session:

"'Yes,' said he, 'either that must come to an end, or I must.'

"I have the honour to be, etc."

[Sidenote: Details of the suicide.]

All that the English Radicals and the French Liberals have told concerning the death of Lord Londonderry, namely, that he killed himself through political despair, feeling that the principles opposed to his own were going to triumph, is a pure fable invented by the imagination of some, the party spirit and silliness of others. Lord Londonderry was not the man to repent of having sinned against humanity, for which he cared very little, nor against the enlightenment of the age, for which he had a profound contempt: madness had come into the Castlereagh family through the women.

It was decided that the Duke of Wellington, accompanied by Lord Clanwilliam, should take Lord Londonderry's place at the Congress. The official instructions were reduced to this: to forget Italy entirely, not to mix at all in the affairs of Spain, to negociate, where those of the East were concerned, by maintaining peace without increasing the influence of Russia. The chances continued in favour of Mr. Canning, and the business of the Foreign Office was entrusted _ad interim_ to Lord Bathurst, the Colonial Secretary.

I attended Lord Londonderry's funeral at Westminster on the 20th of August. The Duke of Wellington appeared moved; Lord Liverpool was obliged to cover his face with his hat to hide his tears. One heard a few cries of insult and joy outside, as the body entered the Abbey. Were Colbert[216] and Louis XIV.[217] more respected? The living can teach nothing to the dead; the dead, on the contrary, instruct the living.

THE VICOMTE DE MONTMORENCY TO THE VICOMTE DE CHATEAUBRIAND

"PARIS, 17 _August._

"Although there are no very important dispatches to entrust to your faithful Hyacinthe, I wish nevertheless to send him back, according to your own desire, noble viscount, and to that which he has expressed to me, on behalf of Madame de Chateaubriand, to see him return to you soon. I will make use of this to send you a few words of a more confidential character on the profound impression made upon us here, as in London, by the terrible death of the Marquess of Londonderry, and also, by the same occasion, on a matter to which you seem to attach a very exaggerated and very exclusive interest. The Council of the King has taken advantage of it and has fixed for these days, immediately after the closing, which took place this morning, the discussion of the principal directions to be settled, the instructions to be given, and also the persons to be selected: the first question is to know if these will be one or several. You have somewhere, I seem to think, expressed astonishment that we could think of------, not to put you before him, you know very well that he cannot be on the same line for us. If, after the most mature examination, we did not think it possible to avail ourselves of the good-will which you have very frankly shown us in this respect, it would doubtless require, in order to decide us, grave motives which I would communicate to you with the same frankness: the postponement is rather favourable to your desire, in this sense, that it would be most inconvenient, both for you and for us, that you should leave London within the next few weeks and before the ministerial decision which continues to occupy all the Cabinets. This strikes everybody so much that some friends said to me the other day:

"'If M. de Chateaubriand had come at once to Paris, it would have been rather annoying for him to be obliged to leave again for London.'

"We therefore expect to make this important nomination on the return from Edinburgh. The Chevalier Stuart[218] said yesterday that surely the Duke of Wellington would go to the Congress; it is important that we should know this at the earliest possible moment. M. Hyde de Neuville arrived yesterday in good health. I was delighted to see him. I renew to you, noble viscount, all my inviolable sentiments.

"MONTMORENCY."

This new letter from M. de Montmorency, mingled with some ironical phrases, fully confirmed my impression that he did not want me at the Congress.

I gave a dinner on St. Louis' Day[219], in honour of Louis XVIII., and I went to visit Hartwell in remembrance of the King's exile; I was fulfilling a duty rather than enjoying a pleasure. Royal misfortunes are so common nowadays that one feels but little interest in spots that have not been inhabited by genius or virtue. All that I saw in the sad little park at Hartwell was the daughter of Louis XVI.

[Sidenote: Plenipotentiary at Verona.]

At last, I suddenly received from M. de Villèle an unexpected note which gave the lie to my previsions and put an end to my uncertainties:

"27 _August_ 1822.

"MY DEAR CHATEAUBRIAND,

"It has just been decided that, so soon as the proprieties relating to the King's return to London permit you, you will be authorized to come to Paris, thence to proceed to Vienna or Verona, as one of the three plenipotentiaries charged to represent France at the Congress. The two others will be Messieurs de Caraman[220] and de La Ferronnays; which does not prevent M. le Vicomte de Montmorency from leaving the day after to-morrow for Vienna, in order to assist at the conferences which may take place in that city before the Congress. He is to return to Paris when the sovereigns leave for Verona.

"This for yourself alone. I am glad that this matter has taken the turn which you desire. Cordially and entirely yours."

Upon this note, I prepared to leave.

The thunder-bolt which incessantly falls at my feet followed me everywhere. With Lord Londonderry died old England, which had struggled on till then in the midst of growing innovations. Supervened Mr. Canning: self-love carried him so far as to talk the language of the propagandist from his place in Parliament After him appeared the Duke of Wellington, a Conservative who came to pull down: when the sentence of societies is pronounced, the hand which was to build knows only how to demolish. Lord Grey[221], O'Connell[222], all those labourers at ruins were working successively at the overthrow of the old institutions. Parliamentary reform, Irish emancipation, all things excellent in themselves, became, thanks to the insalubrity of the time, causes of destruction. Fear increased the evils: if men had not been so greatly terrified at the threats, they would have been able to resist with a certain success.

What need had England to consent to our last troubles? Shut up in her island and in her national enmities, she was sheltered. What need had the Cabinet of St. James to dread the separation of Ireland? Ireland is only England's long-boat: cut the painter, and the long-boat, separated from the big ship, will go to wreck amid the waves. Lord Liverpool himself had sad forebodings. I dined with him one day: after dinner, we talked at a window overlooking the Thames; down the river we saw a portion of the City, of which the fog and smoke enlarged the bulk. I praised to my host the solidity of the English Monarchy, kept in balance by the even swing of liberty and power. The venerable peer, raising and stretching out his arm, pointed to the City and said:

"What sense of solidity can there be with these enormous towns? A serious insurrection in London, and all is lost."

It seems to me as though I were finishing a journey in England like that which I made, in earlier days, on the ruins of Athens, of Jerusalem, of Memphis and Carthage. Summoning to my presence the centuries of Albion, passing from renown to renown, seeing them swallowed up by turns, I feel a sort of painful giddiness. What has become of those brilliant and riotous days in which lived Shakespeare and Milton, Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, Cromwell and William[223], Pitt and Burke? All that is finished; superiorities and mediocrities, hatreds and loves, bliss and wretchedness, oppressors and oppressed, executioners and victims, kings and people, all sleep in the same silence and the same dust. But what nullities we are, if it is thus with the most living part of the human kind, with the genius which lingers like a shadow of olden time in the present generation, but which no longer lives in itself and which does not know that it ever existed!

[Sidenote: Changes in England.]

How many times has England, in the space of a few hundred years, been destroyed? Through how many revolutions has she not passed to come to the brink of a greater, a more deep-laid revolution, which will envelop posterity! I have seen those famous British parliaments in all their mightiness: what will become of them? I have seen England in her ancient manners and in her ancient prosperity: everywhere the little lonely church with its steeple, Gray's country churchyard, everywhere narrow and gravelled roads, valleys filled with cows, heaths spotted with sheep, parks, country-houses, towns; few large forests, few birds, the sea-breeze. It was not those plains of Andalusia, where I found the old Christians and the young loves among the voluptuous remains of the palace of the Moors in the midst of the aloes and palm-trees:

Quid dignum memorare tuis, Hispania, terris Vox humana valet?

There was not that Roman Campagna, whose irresistible charm is incessantly calling after me; those waves and that sun were not the waves and the sun that bathe and light the promontory on which Plato[224] taught his disciples, that Sunium where I heard the cricket sing, in vain asking Minerva for the hearth of the priests of her temple; but after all, such as she was, this England, surrounded by her ships, covered with her herds and professing the cult of her great men, was charming and redoubtable.

To-day her valleys are darkened by the smoke of forges and workshops, her roads changed into iron ways; and along those roads, in lieu of Milton and Shakespeare, move wandering boilers. Already the nurseries of knowledge, Oxford and Cambridge, are assuming a deserted aspect: their colleges and their Gothic chapels, half-abandoned, distress the eye; in their cloisters, near the sepulchral stones of the middle ages, lie, forgotten, the marble annals of the ancient peoples of Greece: ruins guarding ruins.

By these monuments, around which the void was beginning to form, I left that part of my spring days which I had re-found; I parted a second time with my youth, on the same shore where I had abandoned it formerly: Charlotte had suddenly reappeared like that luminary, the delight of the shades, which, delayed by the flight of the months, should rise in the middle of the night. If you are not too weary, read in these Memoirs of the effect which the sudden vision of that woman produced upon me in 1822. When she had distinguished me before, I did not know those other Englishwomen who came to flock round me in my hour of power and renown: their homage was as fickle as my fortune. To-day, after sixteen new years have passed away since my embassy in London, after so many new destructions, my eyes are carried back to the daughter of the land of Desdemona and Juliet: she counts now in my memory only from the day on which her unexpected presence rekindled the torch of my recollections. A new Epimenides[225], awakened after a long sleep, I fix my gaze upon a beacon so much the brighter in that the others are extinguished along the shore; one alone excepted will shine long after me.

I did not finish telling all that concerns Charlotte in the preceding pages of these Memoirs: she came with a part of her family to see me in France, when I was a minister, in 1823. Through one of those inexplicable miseries of mankind, preoccupied as I was with a war on which depended the fate of the French Monarchy, something must no doubt have been lacking in my voice, for Charlotte, returning to England, left me a letter in which she shows herself hurt at the coldness of my reception. I have dared neither to write to her nor to send back to her some literary fragments which she had restored to me and which I had promised to return to her augmented. If it were true that she had had a genuine reason to complain, I would fling into the fire all that I have told of my first sojourn across the sea.

Often the thought has come to me to go to solve my doubts; but could I return to England, I, who am weak enough not to dare to visit the paternal rock on which I have marked out my tomb? I am afraid nowadays of my sensations: time, removing my young years, has made me like those soldiers whose limbs have been left on the battle-field; my blood, having a less long road to travel, rushes into my heart with so rapid a flow that that old organ of my joys and sorrows throbs as though ready to burst. The wish to burn all that concerns Charlotte, although she is treated with religious respect, is mingled in my mind with the longing to destroy these Memoirs: if they still belonged to me, or if I could buy them back, I should succumb to the temptation. I have so great a distaste for everything, so great a contempt for the present and for the immediate future, so firm a conviction that men, henceforth, taken all together as a public (and that for several centuries), will be pitiable, that I blush to consume my last moments in the relating of past things, in the depicting of a finished world, of which the language and the name will no more be understood.

[Sidenote: Memories of Lady Sutton.]

Man is as much deceived by the success of his wishes as by their disappointment: I had desired, contrary to my natural instinct, to go to the Congress; taking advantage of a prejudice of M. de Villèle's, I had induced him to force M. de Montmorency's hand. Well, my real inclination was not for that which I had obtained; I should doubtless have felt some spite, if I had been compelled to remain in England; but soon the idea of going to see Lady Sutton, of making a journey through the three kingdoms would have mastered the impulse of a superadded ambition which is not inherent in my nature. God ordained differently, and I left for Verona: thence the change in my life, thence my ministry, the Spanish War, my triumph, my fall, soon followed by that of the Monarchy.

One of the two handsome children on whose behalf Charlotte had asked me to interest myself, in 1822, has just been to see me in Paris: he is now Captain Sutton; he is married to a charming young wife, and he has told me that his mother has been very ill and has lately spent a winter in London.

I embarked at Dover on the 8th of September 1822, at the same port from which, twenty-two years earlier, "M. La Sagne of Neuchâtel" had set sail. Between that first departure to the moment of writing, thirty-nine years have elapsed. When a man looks upon or listens to his past life, he seems to perceive on a deserted sea the track of a vessel that has disappeared; he seems to hear the tolling of a bell of which the old tower is not in sight.

Here, in the order of dates, comes the place of the _Congrès de Vérone_[226], which I have published in two volumes apart. Should any one, by chance, feel a wish to read it, he can find it everywhere. My Spanish War, the great political event of my life, was a gigantic undertaking. The Legitimacy was for the first time about to burn powder under the White Flag, to fire its first gun-shot after those gun-shots of the Empire which will be audible to the utmost posterity. To bestride Spain with one step, to succeed on the same soil where formerly a conqueror's arms had encountered reverses, to do in six months what he was unable to do in seven years: who could have laid claim to that prodigy? That is, however, what I did; but by how many curses has not my head been smitten at the gaming-table at which the Restoration had seated me! I had before me a France hostile to the Bourbons, and two great foreign ministers, Prince von Metternich and Mr. Canning. Not a day passed but I received letters prophesying a catastrophe, for the war with Spain was not at all popular, either in France or in Europe. Indeed, some time after my successes in the Peninsula, my fall was not long in arriving.

In our ardour, after the receipt of the telegraphic dispatch announcing the deliverance of the King of Spain, we ministers hastened to the Palace. There I had a presentiment of my fall; I received a bucketful of cold water over my ears which brought me back to my habitual humility. The King and Monsieur did not notice us. Madame la Duchesse d'Angoulême, distracted by her husband's triumph, had eyes for nobody. That immortal victim wrote a letter on Ferdinand's deliverance ending in this exclamation, sublime in the mouth of a daughter of Louis XVI.:

"So it is proved that one can save an unfortunate king!"

On the Sunday, I returned, before the meeting of the council, to pay my court to the Royal Family; the august Princess spoke an obliging sentence to each of my colleagues: to me she did not address a word. I did not, certainly, deserve such an honour. The silence of the orphan of the Temple can never be ungrateful: Heaven has a right to the worship of the earth and owes nothing to any one.

I then lingered on till Whitsuntide; still, my friends were not without anxiety; they often said to me:

[Sidenote: Dismissed from office.]

"You will be dismissed to-morrow."

"This minute, if they like," I used to reply.

On Whitsunday, the 6th of June 1824, I had found my way to the first drawing-rooms of Monsieur: an usher came to tell me that I was being asked for. It was Hyacinthe, my secretary. He told me, when he saw me, that I was no longer in office. I opened the packet which he handed me; I found in it this note from M. de Villèle:

"MONSIEUR LE VICOMTE,

"In obedience to the King's orders, I am at once communicating to Your Excellency a decree which His Majesty has just issued.

"The Sieur Comte de Villèle, President of our Council of Ministers, is charged _ad interim_ with the business of the Foreign Office, _vice_ the Sieur Vicomte de Chateaubriand."

This decree was written in the hand of M. de Rainneville[227], who is good enough still to be embarrassed at it in my presence. Why, gracious Heaven! Do I know M. de Rainneville? Have I ever given him a thought? I meet him pretty often. Has he ever perceived that I knew that the decree by which I was struck off the list of ministers was written in his hand?

And yet, what had I done? Where did my intrigues or my ambition lie? Had I desired M. de Villèle's place, when going alone and in secret to walk in the depths of the Bois de Boulogne? It was that strange life that ruined me. I had the simplicity to remain as Heaven had made me and, because I longed for nothing, they thought that I wanted everything. To-day I can very well imagine that my life apart was a great mistake. What! You do not want to be anything? Go away! We do not choose that a man should despise what we worship, nor that he should think himself entitled to insult the mediocrity of our life.

The difficulties of wealth and the disadvantages of poverty followed me to my lodging in the Rue de l'Université: on the day of my dismissal, I had invitations sent out for a huge dinner-party at the Foreign Office; I had to send excuses to my guests and to pack three great courses, prepared for forty persons, into my little kitchen for two people. Montmirel and his assistants set to work and, cramming saucepans, frying-pans and stewpans into every corner, he put his warmed-up master-piece under shelter. An old friend came to share the marooned sailor's first meal. The Town and the Court came hastening up, for there was but one voice on the outrageousness of my dismissal after the service which I had just rendered; they were convinced that my disgrace would not last long; they gave themselves airs of independence in consoling a misfortune of a few days, at the end of which they would profitably remind the unlucky man returned to power that they had not abandoned him.

They were mistaken; they wasted their courage; they had reckoned on my lack of spirit, on my whining, on my toad-eating ambition, on my eagerness to plead guilty, to wait standing on those who had driven me out: they ill knew me. I retired without even claiming the salary which was due to me, without receiving a favour or a groat from the Court; I closed my door to whosoever had betrayed me; I refused the condoling crowd, and I took up arms. Then all dispersed; universal condemnation burst forth, and my game, which had at first seemed fine to the drawing-rooms and ante-chambers, appeared horrible.

Should I not have done better, after my discharge, to be silent? Had not the brutality of the proceeding brought back the public to me? M. de Villèle has repeatedly said that the letter of dismissal was delayed; by this accident it had the misfortune to be handed to me only at the Palace. Perhaps this was so; but, when we play, we must calculate the chances of the game; we must, above all, not write to a friend of any worth a letter which we should be ashamed to address to a guilty footman whom we would put out of doors without ceremony or remorse. The irritation of the Villèle party against myself was the greater inasmuch as they wished to appropriate my work to themselves and as I had displayed ability in matters of which I had been supposed to know nothing.

No doubt, with silence and moderation, as they said, I should have been lauded by the race who live in perpetual adoration of the portfolio; by doing penance for my innocence, I should have prepared my return to the Council. It would have been more in the common course of things; but that was taking me for the man I am not; that was suspecting me of a desire to recapture the helm of the State, the wish to make my way: a desire and a wish which would not occur to me in a hundred thousand years.

The idea which I had of representative government led me to enter the Opposition: the systematic Opposition seems to me the only one suited to that form of government; the Opposition known as "conscientious" is impotent. Conscience can decide a moral fact, it is no judge of an intellectual fact. It is absolutely necessary to place one's self under a leader, an appraiser of good laws and bad. If this be not so, then your deputy takes his stupidity for his conscience and votes accordingly. The so-called "conscientious Opposition" consists in fluctuating between the parties, in champing the bit, in even voting, should the case require, for the Ministry, in appearing magnanimous although fretting: an Opposition of mutinous imbecilities among the soldiers, of ambitious capitulations among the chiefs. So long as England was sane, she never had other than a systematic Opposition: a man came in and went out with his friends; on leaving office, he took his place on the bench of the assailants. As he was considered to have resigned because he did not wish to accept a system, that system, being retained by the Crown, must necessarily be combated. Now as men represent only principles, the systematic Opposition aimed only at carrying _principles_ when it attacked _men._

[Sidenote: Effects of my fall.]

My fall made a great noise: those who displayed the most satisfaction censured its form. I have since learnt that M. de Villèle hesitated; M. de Corbière decided the question:

"If he enters the Council by one door," he is reported to have said, "I go out by the other[228]."

I was allowed to go out: it was quite simple that they should prefer M. de Corbière to me. I bear him no ill-will: I was troubling him, he had me turned out; he did well.

The day after my dismissal and the following days, the _Journal des Débats_ contained these words, which do such honour to the Messieurs Bertin:

"This is the second time that M. de Chateaubriand stands the test of a solemn dismissal.

"He was dismissed as a minister of State, in 1816, for having attacked in his immortal work on the _Monarchie selon la Charte_, the famous decree of the 5th of September, pronouncing the dissolution of the _Chambre introuvable_ of 1815. Messieurs de Villèle and Corbière were then simple deputies, leaders of the Royalist Opposition, and it was for taking up their defense that M. de Chateaubriand became the victim of the ministerial anger.

"Now, in 1824, M. de Chateaubriand is again dismissed, and it is Messieurs de Villèle and Corbière, since become ministers, who sacrifice him. Singular thing! In 1816, he was punished for speaking; in 1824, they punish him for holding his tongue: his crime is that he kept silence in the discussion on the law for reducing the rate of interest. Not every disgrace is a misfortune; public opinion, the supreme judge, will tell us in which class to place M. de Chateaubriand; it will tell us also to whom this day's decree shall have proved the more fatal, to the victor or the vanquished.

"Who would have said, at the commencement of the session, that we should thus spoil the results of the Spanish Enterprise? What did we want this year? Nothing except the Septennial Act (but, the complete Act) and the Budget. The affairs of Spain, of the East, of the Americas, conducted as they were, prudently and silently, would have been cleared up; the fairest future lay before us; they wanted to gather green fruit; it did not fall, and they imagined that they could remedy precipitation by violence.

"Anger and envy are evil counsellors; it is not by means of the passions and by proceeding with jerks and starts that States are governed.

"_P.S._--The Septennial Act has been passed this evening in the Chamber of Deputies. One may say that M. de Chateaubriand's doctrines triumph after he has left the Ministry. This Act, which he had long ago conceived as the complement of our institutions, will, together with the Spanish War, for ever mark his passing in public life. It is very keenly regretted that M. de Corbière should, on Saturday, have snatched the opportunity of speaking from him who was then his illustrious colleague. The Chamber of Peers would at least have heard the swan's song.

"As for ourselves, it is with the liveliest regret that we enter again upon a career of combats which we hoped that we had, thanks to the union of the Royalists, abandoned for ever; but honour, political loyalty, the good of France do not permit us to hesitate as to the course which we should take."

The signal for the reaction was thus given. M. de Villèle was not too much alarmed by it at first; he did not know the strength of men's opinions. Many years were necessary to overthrow him, but he fell at last.

[Sidenote: Comments in the _Débuts._]

I received from the President of the Council a letter which settled everything and which proved, to my great simplicity, that I had taken nothing of that which makes a man respected and respectable:

"PARIS, 16 _June_ 1824.

"MONSIEUR LE VICOMTE,

"I have hastened to lay before His Majesty the Order by which you are granted a full and entire discharge for the sums which you have received from the Royal Treasury, for secret expenses, during the whole time of your ministry.

"The King has approved of all the provisions of this Order, which I have the honour to forward you herewith in the original.

"Accept, monsieur le vicomte, etc."

My friends and I expedited a prompt correspondence:

THE VICOMTE DE CHATEAUBRIAND TO THE MARQUIS DE TALARU[229]

"PARIS, 9 _June_ 1824.

"I am no longer minister, my dear friend; they contend that you are. When I obtained the Madrid Embassy for you, I said to several persons who still remember it:

"'I have appointed my successor.'

"I am anxious to have been a prophet. M. de Villèle is holding the portfolio _ad interim._

"CHATEAUBRIAND."

THE VICOMTE DE CHATEAUBRIAND TO THE COMTE DE RAYNEVAL[230]

"PARIS, 16 _June_ 1824.

"I have finished, monsieur; I hope that you have still plenty before you. I have endeavoured that you should have no reason to complain of me.

"It is possible that I may retire to Neuchâtel, in Switzerland; should that happen, ask His Prussian Majesty beforehand for his protection and favours for me; present my respects to Count Bernstorff, my kind regards to M. Ancillon, and my compliments to all your secretaries[231]. You, monsieur, I beg to believe in my devotion and in my most sincere attachment.

"CHATEAUBRIAND."

THE VICOMTE DE CHATEAUBRIAND TO THE MARQUIS DE CARAMAN[232]

"PARIS, 22 _June_ 1824.

"I have received, monsieur le marquis, your letters of the 11th of this month. Others than I will tell you the road which you will henceforth have to follow; if it is conformable to what you have heard, it will carry you far. It is probable that my dismissal will give M. de Metternich great pleasure, for a fortnight or so.

"Receive, monsieur le marquis, my adieus and the renewed assurance of my devotion and of my high regard.

"CHATEAUBRIAND."

THE VICOMTE DE CHATEAUBRIAND TO THE BARON HYDE DE NEUVILLE[233]

"PARIS, 22 _June_ 1824.

"You will doubtless have heard of my dismissal. It remains for me only to tell you how happy I have been to have with you the relations that have now been broken off. Continue, monsieur and old friend, to render services to your country, but do not reckon too much on gratitude, nor believe that your successes will be a reason for maintaining you in the post where you are doing yourself so much honour.

"I wish you, monsieur, all the happiness that you deserve, and I embrace you.

"_P.S._--I have this minute received your letter of the 5th of this month, in which you inform me of M. de Mérona's[234] arrival. I thank you for your good friendship; be sure that I have looked for nothing else in your letters.

"CHATEAUBRIAND[235]."

THE VICOMTE DE CHATEAUBRIAND TO THE COMTE DE SERRE[236]

"PARIS, 23 _June_ 1824.

"My dismissal, monsieur le comte, will have proved to you my inability to serve you; it but remains for me to express the wish to see you where your talents call you. I am retiring, happy to have contributed towards restoring to France her military and political independence, and to have introduced septenniality into her electoral system; it is not what I wanted it to be; the change of age was a necessary consequence of it; but at last the principle is laid down; time will do the rest, if, however, it do not undo it. I venture to flatter myself, monsieur le comte, that you have had no cause to complain of our relations; and I shall always congratulate myself on having met in business a man of your merit.

"Receive, with my adieus, etc.,

"CHATEAUBRIAND."

THE VICOMTE DE CHATEAUBRIAND TO THE COMTE DE LA FERRONAYS[237]

"PARIS, 24 _June_ 1824.

"Should you by chance still be in St. Petersburg, monsieur le comte, I will not end our correspondence without telling you of all the esteem and all the friendship with which you have inspired me: keep well; be happier than I, and believe that you will find me again in any circumstance of life. I am writing a line to the Emperor.

"CHATEAUBRIAND."

The reply to this farewell reached me in the early days of August. M. de La Ferronnays had accepted the functions of ambassador under my ministry; later, I, in my turn, became ambassador under the ministry of M. de La Ferronnays: neither of us thought himself to be rising or descending. Fellow-countrymen and friends, we mutually did each other justice. M. de La Ferronnays endured the harshest trials without complaining; he remained loyal to his sufferings and to his noble poverty. After my fall, he acted on my behalf at St. Petersburg, as I would have acted on his. An honest man is always sure of being understood by an honest man. I am happy to produce this touching evidence of the courage, the loyalty and the elevation of soul of M. de La Ferronnays. At the moment when I received this note, it was a very superior compensation to me for the capricious and hackneyed favours of fortune. It is only here, for the first time, that I think it right to violate the secrecy which friendship recommended to me.

[Sidenote: Letter from La Ferronays.]

THE COMTE DE LA FERRONAYS TO THE VICOMTE DE CHATEAUBRIAND

"ST. PETERSBURG, 24 _July_ 1824.

"The Russian mail of the day before yesterday brought me your little letter of the 16th; it will be for me one of the most precious of all those which I have had the happiness to receive from you; I am keeping it as a title in which I glory, and I have the firm hope and the intimate conviction that soon I shall be able to present it to you in less melancholy circumstances. I shall imitate, monsieur le vicomte, the example which you set me, and I shall permit myself no reflection upon an event which has, in so abrupt and unexpected a manner, broken off the relations which the service established between you and myself; the very nature of those relations, the confidence with which you honoured me, lastly, considerations of a much graver kind, because they are not exclusively personal, will explain to you sufficiently the motives and all the extent of my regrets. What has just occurred still remains entirely inexplicable to me; I am absolutely ignorant of the reasons, but I see the effects; they were so easy, so natural to foresee, that I am astonished that people were so little afraid to set them at naught. I am too well acquainted, however, with the nobility of the sentiments which animate you and with the purity of your patriotism, not to be very sure that you will approve of the conduct which I have thought right to follow in this circumstance; it was required of me by my duty, by my love for my country and even by the interest of your glory; and you are too good a Frenchman to accept, in the position in which you find yourself, the protection and the support of foreigners. You have won for ever the confidence and esteem of Europe; but it is France whom you serve, and you belong to her alone. She may be unjust; but neither you nor your real friends will ever suffer your cause to be made less pure or less fine by entrusting its defense to foreign voices. I have, therefore, silenced every kind of private feeling or consideration in the presence of the general interest; I have forestalled measures, the first effect of which would have been to arouse dangerous divisions among us and to violate the dignity of the Throne. This is the last service which I have rendered here before my departure; you alone, monsieur le vicomte, shall know of it; the confidence was due to you, and I know the nobility of your character too well not to feel very sure that you will keep my secret and that you will consider my conduct, in this circumstance, consonant with the sentiments which you have the right to exact from those whom you honour with your friendship and your esteem.

"Adieu, monsieur le vicomte: if the relations which I have had the good fortune to have with you have been able to give you a correct idea of my character, you must know that it is not changes of position that can alter my sentiments, nor will you ever doubt the attachment and devotion of one who, in the actual circumstances, considers himself the most fortunate of men to be placed by public opinion among the number of your friends.

"LA FERRONAYS."

"Messieurs de Fontenay[238] and de Pontcarré[239] are keenly alive to the value of the remembrance in which you are good enough to bear them: witnesses, like myself, of the increase of consideration which France had gained since your entrance into the ministry, it is quite simple that they should share my sentiments and my regrets."

I began the contest of my new opposition immediately after my fall; but it was interrupted by the death of Louis XVIII.[240] and was not actively resumed until after the coronation of Charles X.[241] In the month of July, I joined Madame de Chateaubriand at Neuchâtel; she had gone there to wait for me, and had hired a cottage beside the lake. The chain of the Alps unfolded itself north and south to a great distance before us; we had our backs to the Jura, whose flanks, black with pine-trees, rose perpendicularly over our heads. The lake was deserted; a wooden gallery served me as an exercise-ground. I thought of _Milord Maréchal._[242] When I climbed to the top of the Jura, I saw the Lake of Bienne, to whose breezes and waters Jean Jacques Rousseau owes one of his happiest inspirations. Madame de Chateaubriand went to visit Fribourg and a country-house which they had described to us as charming, and which she found icy-cold, although it was called the _Petite Provence._ A lean black cat, half wild, which caught little fish by dipping its paw into a large pail filled with water from the lake, was my only distraction. A quiet old woman, who was always knitting, prepared our banquet in an _huguenote._[243] had not lost the habit of the collation of the country-mouse.

Neuchâtel had had its good days; it had belonged to the Duchesse de Longueville[244]; Jean Jacques Rousseau had walked in an Armenian dress on its mountains, and Madame de Charrière[245], so daintily observed by M. de Sainte-Beuve[246], had described its society in the _Lettres Neuchâteloises_; but Juliane, Mademoiselle de La Prise, Henri Meyer[247] were no longer there; I saw only poor Fauche-Borel[248], of the old Emigration; he threw himself soon after from his window. The kept gardens of M. de Pourtalès[249] charmed me no more than did an English rockery raised by man's hands in a neighbouring vineyard facing the Jura. Berthier, last Prince of Neuchâtel, in the name of Bonaparte, was forgotten, in spite of his little Simplon of the Val-de-Travers, and although he smashed his skull in the same way as Fauche-Borel.

[Sidenote: Death of Louis XVIII.]

The King's illness called me back to Paris. The King died on the 16th of September, scarcely four months after my dismissal. My pamphlet, entitled _Le Roi est mort: vive le roi!_ in which I hailed the new Sovereign, performed for Charles X. what my pamphlet _De Bonaparte et des Bourbons_ had performed for Louis XVIII. I went to fetch Madame de Chateaubriand at Neuchâtel, and we came to Paris to live in the Rue du Regard. Charles X. made his reign popular at its commencement by abolishing the censorship; the coronation took place in the spring of 1825. "Already the bees were beginning to hum, the birds to warble, and the lambs to gambol on the green."

Among my papers I find the following pages written at Rheims:

"RHEIMS, 26 _May_ 1825.

"The King arrives the day after to-morrow; he will be crowned on Sunday the 29th; I shall see him place on his head a crown of which no one thought, in 1814, when I raised my voice. I have contributed to opening the doors of France to him; I have given him defenders, by bringing the Spanish War to a satisfactory issue; I have caused the Charter to be adopted, and I have succeeded in finding an army, the only two things with which the King can reign at home and abroad: what part is reserved for me at the coronation? That of an outlaw. I come as one of the crowd to receive a ribbon, distributed broadcast, which I do not even hold from Charles X. The people whom I have served and placed turn their backs on me. The King will hold my hands in his, he will see me at his feet, when I take my oath, without being moved, even as he sees me without interest recommencing my poverty. Does that make a difference to me? No. Freed from the obligation of going to the Tuileries, I am compensated for everything by independence.

"I am writing this page of my Memoirs in the room in which I am forgotten amid all the noise. I have this morning visited Saint-Remi and the Cathedral decorated with stained paper. I shall not have had a clear idea of this latter edifice, except from the decorations of Schiller's _Joan of Arc_, as played before me in Berlin: operatic machinery has shown me, on the banks of the Spree, what operatic machinery hides from me, on the banks of the Vesle; for the rest, I have taken my diversion among the old dynasties, from Clovis[250], with his Franks and his pigeon descending from Heaven, to Charles VII.[251], with Joan of Arc[252]."

Je suis venu de mon pays Pas plus haut qu'une botte, Avecque mi, avecque mi, Avecque ma marmotte[253].

"'A sou-piece, sir, if you please!'

[Sidenote: At Rheims.]

That is what a little Savoyard, just arrived at Rheims, sang to me returning from my walk.

"'And what have you come here for?' I asked him.

"'I have come to the coronation, sir.'

"'With your marmot?'

"'Yes, sir, with-a _mi_, with-a _mi_, with-a my marmot,' he replied, dancing and turning.

"'Well, that's like me, my boy.'

"That was not correct: I had come to the coronation without a marmot, and a marmot is a great resource; I had nothing in my box but some old dream or other which no passer-by would have paid a sou-piece to see climb up a stick.

"Louis XVII. and Louis XVIII. were not crowned; Charles X.'s coronation comes immediately after Louis XVI.'s. Charles X. was present at his brother's coronation; he represented the Duke of Normandy, William the Conqueror. Under what happy auspices did not Louis XVI. ascend the throne? How popular was he on succeeding Louis XV.! And yet, what did he come to? The present coronation will be, not a coronation, but the representation of a coronation: we shall see Marshal Moncey, an actor in the coronation of Napoleon; that marshal, who formerly celebrated in his army the death of the tyrant Louis XVI., we shall now see brandishing the royal sword at Rheims, in the quality of Count of Flanders or Duke of Aquitaine. Who could be taken in by that parade? I would have wished no pomp to-day: the King on horseback, the church bare, adorned only with its old vaults and its old tombs; the two Chambers present, the oath of fidelity to the Charter pronounced aloud on the Gospels. There you would have the renewal of the Monarchy; they might have recommenced it with liberty and religion: unfortunately they had little love for liberty; if still they had, at least, had the taste for glory!

Ah! que diront là-bas, sons les tombes poudreuses, De tant de vaillants rois les ombres généreuses? Que diront Pharamond, Clodion et Clovis, Nos Pepins, nos Martels, nos Charles, nos Louis, Qui de leur propre sang, à tous périls de guerre, Ont acquis à leurs fils une si belle terre[254]?

"Lastly, has not the new coronation, to which the Pope came to anoint a man as great as the chief of the Second Dynasty[255], in changing the heads, destroyed the effect of the ancient ceremony of our history? The people has been led to believe that a pious rite dedicated no one to the throne, or rendered indifferent the choice of the forehead to which the holy oil was applied. The supernumeraries of Notre-Dame de Paris, figuring likewise in the Cathedral of Rheims, will be nothing more than the necessary characters in a scene that has become vulgar: the advantage will remain with Napoleon, who sends his walking gentlemen to Charles X. The figure of the Emperor dominates everything henceforward. It stands at the bottom of events and ideas: the pages of these lower days to which we have come shrivel up under the glance of his eagles."

"RHEIMS, _Saturday, eve of the Coronation._[256]

"I have seen the King's entry; I have seen pass the gilt coaches of the monarch who but lately had not a horse to ride; I have seen those carriages roll by filled with courtiers who were not able to defend their master. This herd went to the church to sing the _Te Deum_, and I went to look at a Roman ruin and to walk by myself in a wood of elm-trees called the 'Wood of Love.' I heard from afar the jubilation of the bells, I contemplated the towers of the Cathedral, secular witnesses of that ceremony which is always the same and yet so different through history, the times, ideas, manners, usages and customs. The Monarchy perished, and the Cathedral was for some years turned into a stable. Does Charles X., who sees it again to-day, remember that he saw Louis XVI. anointed in the same place where he is to be anointed in his turn? Will he believe that a coronation yields protection against misfortune? There is no longer a hand virtuous enough to heal the king's evil, no longer a sacred phial salutary enough to render kings inviolable."

I hurriedly wrote what has just been read on the half-blank pages of a pamphlet entitled, _Le Sacre; par Barnage de Reims, avocat_, and on a printed letter of the Grand Referendary, M. de Sémonville[257], saying:

"The Grand Referendary has the honour to inform His Lordship, Monsieur le Vicomte de Chateaubriand, that places in the chancel of Rheims Cathedral are intended and reserved for those of Messieurs the Peers who wish to be present to-morrow at His Majesty's consecration and coronation, at the ceremony of the reception of the Chief and Sovereign Grand Master of the Orders of the Holy Ghost and of St. Michael and of the reception of Messieurs the Knights and Commanders."

Charles X. nevertheless had intended to conciliate me. The Archbishop of Paris[258] spoke to him at Rheims of the men in the Opposition; the King said:

"Those who will have nothing to do with me, I leave alone."

The Archbishop rejoined:

"But, Sire, M. de Chateaubriand?"

"Oh, him I regret!"

[Sidenote: Coronation of Charles X.]

The Archbishop asked the King if he might tell me so; the King hesitated, took two or three turns in the room, and replied, "Well, yes, tell him," and the Archbishop forgot to speak to me about it.

At the ceremony of the knights of the Orders, I was kneeling at the King's feet at the moment when M. de Villèle was taking his oath. I exchanged two or three words of politeness with my companion in knighthood[259], with regard to a feather that had come loose from my hat. We left the Sovereign's knees, and all was done. The King, finding a difficulty in removing his gloves to take my hands in his, had said to me, laughing:

"A gloved cat catches no mice."

It was thought that he had spoken to me at length, and the rumour was spread of my return to favour. It is probable that Charles X., thinking that the Archbishop had told me of his good-will towards me, expected a word of thanks from me and was offended at my silence.

Thus have I assisted at the last coronation of the successors of Clovis; I had occasioned it by the pages in which I had asked for the coronation and depicted it in my pamphlet, _Le Roi est mort: vive le roi!_ Not that I had the least faith in the ceremony; but, as everything was lacking to the Legitimacy, it was necessary, to sustain it, to make use of everything, for better or for worse. I recalled Adalbéron's[260] definition: "The coronation of a King of France is, a public interest, not a private matter;" I quoted the admirable prayer set apart for the coronation:

"O God, who by Thy virtues counselled Thy peoples, give to this Thy servant the spirit of Thy wisdom! Let to all men born be in these days equity and justice: to friends succour, to enemies hinderance, to the afflicted consolation, to the lofty correction, to the rich instruction, to the needy pity, to pilgrims hospitality, to poor subjects peace and safety in the mother-land! Let him learn to command himself, moderately to govern each one according to his state, so that, O Lord, he may give to all the people an example of life pleasing to Thee!"

Before reproducing in my pamphlet, _Le Roi est mort: vive le roi!_ this prayer preserved by Du Tillet[261], I had exclaimed:

"Let us humbly beseech Charles X. to imitate his ancestors: thirty-two sovereigns of the Third Dynasty have received the royal unction."

All my duties being fulfilled, I left Rheims, and was able to say, like Joan of Arc:

"My mission is ended."

[Footnote 156: This book was written in 1839 and revised in December 1846.--T.]

[Footnote 157: Joseph Planta (1787-1847) was secretary to Lord Londonderry for many years. From 1827 to 1830, he was one of the joint secretaries of the Treasury and, in 1834, was made a Privy Councillor. He sat as M. P. for Hastings, almost without interruption, from 1827 to 1844.--T.]

[Footnote 158: Amelia Anne Marchioness of Londonderry (1772-1829), _née_ Hobart, daughter and co-heiress of John Hobart, second Earl of Buckinghamshire, and married to the Marquess of Londonderry in 1794.--T.]

[Footnote 159: The Vicomte Mathieu de Montmorency, Minister of Foreign Affairs.--B.]

[Footnote 160: Édouard Duc de Fitz-James (1776-1838), descended from James II. through the Duke of Berwick. He was created a peer of France in 1814, and sent in his resignation when the bill was passed suppressing the heredity of the peerage (28th December 1831). From 1835 till his death, he sat in the Chamber of Deputies, as a member of the Right, and distinguished himself by the eloquence of his speeches.--B.]

[Footnote 161: George Bryan Brummell (1778-1840), known as Beau Brummell. The story, as generally told, runs that the Prince Regent ordered "Mr. Brummell's carriage."--T.]

[Footnote 162: Prince Paul Anton von Esterhazy von Galantha (1786-1866), Austrian Minister to Dresden (1810), Ambassador to Rome (1814) and to London from 1815 to 1818 and 1830 to 1848. He was Austrian Minister of Foreign Affairs for a short time in 1848.--T.]

[Footnote 163: See one of my dispatches from Berlin.--_Author's Note._]

[Footnote 164: Lord John Russell, later first Earl Russell (1792-1878). The terms of his motion were "that the present state of representation of the people in parliament requires the most serious consideration of the House." The motion was lost by a majority of 105. Lord John Russell introduced his Reform Bill in 1831, and was Home Secretary (1835-1839), Secretary for War and the Colonies (1839-1841), Prime Minister (1846-1852), Foreign Secretary and later President of the Council (1852-1855), Colonial Secretary (1855), Foreign Secretary (1859-1865), and again Prime Minister (1865-1866). He was created an earl in 1861.--T.]

[Footnote 165: Chateaubriand appears here to confuse the Houses of Lords and Commons; probably, in any case, his memory betrays him.--T.]

[Footnote 166: John Scott, first Earl of Eldon (1751-1838), called to the Bar in 1776, King's Counsel in 1783, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas in 1793, a peer in 1799, Lord Chancellor from 1801 to 1827. Eldon was a violent Tory and vehemently opposed to the Catholic Emancipation Bill.--T.]

[Footnote 167: Christopher Magnay, Lord Mayor of London from 1821 to 1822, would appear to have been Chateaubriand's host on this occasion.--T.]

[Footnote 168: Baron Nathan Mayer de Rothschild (1777-1836), head of all the Rothschild houses, with the exception of that at Frankfort. The dinner in question, Lord Rothschild informs me, must have taken place at the business-house in New Court, St. Swithin's Lane, where, on a foreign post night (Tuesdays and Fridays), it was Baron Rothschild's custom to remain in the city until midnight and frequently to give dinner-parties.--T.]

[Footnote 169: Baron Salomon Mayer de Rothschild (1774-1855), head of the Vienna branch of the house of Rothschild. He and his four brothers, Anselm, Nathan, Charles and James, were created barons of the Austrian Empire in 1822.--T.]

[Footnote 170: Richard Charles Francis Meade, third Earl of Clanwilliam (1795-1879), son of Richard Meade, second Earl of Clanwilliam, and Caroline, daughter of Joseph Count Thun. Lord Clanwilliam was Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs in 1822, British Ambassador to Berlin (1823-1828) and a Grand Cross of Hanover.--T.]

[Footnote 171: Charles Lennox, third Duke of Richmond (1734 or 1735-1806), Ambassador to Paris (1765), Principal Secretary of State (1766), Master-general of the Ordnance (1782) and a knight of the Garter.--T.]

[Footnote 172: A famous political and allegorical satire of the reign of Henry III., attributed to Thomas Artus, Sire d'Embly. It was published without date of place or time, but was reprinted in the fourth volume of the _Journal de Henri III._ (1744).--T.]

[Footnote 173: Gillion Gaspard Alfred de Grimaud, Comte d'Orsay (1801-1852), long a leader of society in London and Paris, and noted for his intimacy with the Countess of Blessington. In 1827, he married Lady Harriet Gardiner, daughter of Lord Blessington by his first wife. She soon left him, and Lady Blessington, who was then a widow, took up her abode with him at Gore House. D'Orsay became bankrupt in 1849 and, to escape arrest, fled, on the 1st of April, to Paris, where Lady Blessington followed him in a fortnight. She died, suddenly, about a month after.--T.]

[Footnote 174: Anna Duchesse de Guiche (1803-1882), _née_ de Grimaud d'Orsay.--T.]

[Footnote 175: Dorothea Christophorowna Countess, later Princess de Lieven (1785-1855), _née_ von Blenkendorf. She was much sought after by the statesmen of her time: Castlereagh, Canning, Metternich were her friends; Lord Grey wrote to her every morning from his bed. She has been said to have had an intrigue with George IV. In Paris, where she settled after her husband's death, she became the Egeria of M. Guizot.--B.]

[Footnote 176: Éléonore Marquise d'Osmond, _née_ Dillon, wife of René Eustache Marquis d'Osmond, who was French Ambassador to London from 1814 to 1819.--T.]

[Footnote 177: General Christopher Andreiëvitch Count, later Prince de Lieven (_d._ 1839), Minister Plenipotentiary to Berlin (1810-1812), and Ambassador to London (1812-1834), Governor to the Tsarevitch, later Tsar Alexander II. (1834-1839).--T.]

[Footnote 178: Madame de Lieven migrated to Paris after the death of her husband in 1839.--T.]

[Footnote 179: Guizot made it a rule of his life to call daily on Madame de Lieven in Paris.--B.]

[Footnote 180: Edward Adolphus Seymour, eleventh Duke of Somerset (1775-1855).--T.]

[Footnote 181: Louis-Philippe appointed Marshal Soult, on the 23rd of April 1838, Ambassador Extraordinary to England for the coronation of Queen Victoria. The population of London accorded the marshal an enthusiastic reception, and he was lionized wherever he went. The coronation of Victoria took place on the 20th of June 1838.--B.]

[Footnote 182: Antipater (_d._ 319 B.C.), a Macedonian general, acted as Viceroy of Macedon and Greece during Alexander's absence, governed for some time after Alexander's death, defeated the Athenians at Cranon, and had just been appointed regent during the minority of Alexander's children when he himself died.--T.]

[Footnote 183: Antigonus (_circa_ 382 B.C.--301 B.C.), surnamed Cyclops, another of Alexander's captains, who shared the latter's empire after his death, and for six years called himself King of Asia, until overthrown and slain at the Battle of Ipsus.--T.]

[Footnote 184: Seleucus I. Nicator(354 B.C.--281 B.C.), one of Alexander's best officers, proclaimed King of Syria, and finally of Macedon, Thrace and Asia Minor. He was killed by Ptolemy II. Ceraunus in 281 B.C.--T.]

[Footnote 185: Antiochus I. King of Syria (_circa_ 323 B.C.--261 B.C.), surnamed Soter, son of Seleucus Nicator, whom he succeeded.--T.]

[Footnote 186: Ptolemy I. King of Egypt (_d._ 283 B.C.), also surnamed Soter, another of Alexander's officers, received Egypt as his share of the Macedonian Empire and assumed the title of King in 308 B.C.--T.]

[Footnote 187: Antonio Canova (1757-1822), the Italian sculptor, long protected by Napoleon.--T.]

[Footnote 188: Frederick Duke of York, titular Bishop of Osnaburg (1763-1827), second son, and one of the most scandalous, of George III.--T.]

[Footnote 189: On quitting office, the Duc de Richelieu had intended to make a journey to Vienna and Odessa in the spring of 1822. Before leaving, he went to spend some time at the Château de Courteille, with his wife and mother-in-law. There he was taken ill; and hastened back to Paris, where he had scarcely arrived when he was attacked by a congestion of the brain. He died on the 17th of May 1822, at the age of fifty-five years and eight months.--B.]

[Footnote 190: Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, third Marquess of Lansdowne (1780-1863), Chancellor of the Exchequer (1806-1807), Home Secretary (1827-1828), Lord President of the Council (1830-1834 and 1846-1852), a member of the Cabinet (1852-1858), and a knight of the Garter.--T.]

[Footnote 191: Sarah Siddons (1755-1831), _née_ Kemble, the famous actress, was 67, not 73, years of age in 1822. She made her first appearance in 1782, her last in 1812. Lady Macbeth was her greatest part.--T.]

[Footnote 192: Antoine Louis Marie de Gramont, Duc de Guiche (1755-1836), had served in the Bodyguard, as Captain Gramont, before the Revolution. On the Restoration, he was created a peer of France. The Duc de Guiche consented to take the oath to the Government of July and remained in the Upper Chamber till his death.--B.]

[Footnote 193: Madame la Duchesse de Guiche was a daughter of the Duchesse de Polignac.--B.]

[Footnote 194: Charlotte Marie Antoinette Léontine Vicomtesse de Noailles (1791-1851), _née_ de Noailles-Mouchy, married, in 1809, to her cousin Alfred Louis Dominique Vincent de Paule Vicomte de Noailles, who was killed at the Battle of the Beresina in 1812.--B.]

[Footnote 195: James de Rothschild (1792-1868), youngest son of Mayer Anselm Rothschild of Frankfort, and created a baron of the Austrian Empire in 1822.--T.]

[Footnote 196: John Russell, sixth Duke of Bedford (1766-1839), Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland (1806-1807), and a knight of the Garter (1830).--T.]

[Footnote 197: Richard Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville, first Duke of Buckingham and Chandos (1776-1839), created a knight of the Garter (1820) and a duke (1822) by George IV.--T.]

[Footnote 198: Christian Prince, later Christian VIII. King of Denmark and, _de jure_, of Norway (1786-1848), succeeded to the throne of Denmark on the death of his cousin, Frederic VI., in 1839. In 1814, when Norway was ceded to Sweden by the Treaty of Kiel, he was proclaimed King of the former country, with the title of Christian I., by the Norwegians, who refused to accept the union with Sweden (May 1814). Unable to maintain his position against the Swedes, he relinquished the crown (October 1814). His son, Frederic VII., was the last Danish Sovereign of the House of Oldenburg.--T.]

[Footnote 199: Caroline Amelia Princess, later Queen of Denmark (1796-1881), daughter of Frederic Christian Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg.--T.]

[Footnote 200: Cathérine Henriette Marquise de Verneuil (1583-1633), _née_ de Balzac d'Entragues, mistress to Henry IV. King of France, after the death of Gabrielle d'Estrées.--T.]

[Footnote 201: Françoise Marquise de Maintenon (1635-1719), _née_ d'Aubigné, mistress to Louis XIV., to whom she was married in 1684 or 1685.--T.]

[Footnote 202: Anne Marie Princesse des Ursins (_circa_ 1643-1722), _née_ de La Trémoïlle, married first to the Prince de Talleyrand-Chalais, secondly to the Duca di Bracciano-Orsini, or des Ursins, for many years the influential favourite of Philip V. King of Spain and his first Queen.--T.]

[Footnote 203: Dudley Ryder, first Earl of Harrowby (1762-1847), Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (1804) and Lord President of the Council (1812-1827).--T.]

[Footnote 204: Sir Robert Peel, second Baronet (1788-1850), Under-secretary for the Colonies (1810), Chief Secretary for Ireland (1812), Home Secretary (1828), First Lord of the Treasury and Prime Minister (1834-1835 and 1841-1846). Peel died on the 2nd of July 1850, through a fall from his horse while riding in Hyde Park.--T.]

[Footnote 205: John Fane, tenth Earl of Westmorland (1759-1841), Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland (1790-1795), Master of the Horse (1795-1798), Lord Privy Seal (1798-1827) and a knight of the Garter (1793).--T.]

[Footnote 206: Henry Bathurst, third Earl Bathurst (1762-1834), President of the Board of Trade (1807-1812), Secretary for War and the Colonies (1812-1827), President of the Council (1828-1830) and a knight of the Garter (1817).--T.]

[Footnote 207: Allen Bathurst, first Earl Bathurst (1684-1775), the friend of Pope, Swift, Prior, Congreve and Sterne, and grandfather to the third Earl Bathurst.--T.]

[Footnote 208: STERNE, _Letters from Yorick to Eliza_, Letter III.--T.]

[Footnote 209: Lord Bathurst had two daughters, Lady Louisa Georgiana Bathurst, who died unmarried in 1874, and Lady Emily Charlotte Bathurst, who married in 1825 Major-General the Hon. Sir Frederick Cavendish Ponsonby, K.C.B., and died in 1877.--T.]

[Footnote 210: Robert Banks Jenkinson, second Earl of Liverpool (1770-1828), Foreign Secretary (1801-1804), Home Secretary (1804-1806 and 1807), Secretary for War (1809), Prime Minister (1812-1827), and a knight of the Garter (1814).--T.]

[Footnote 211: Charles Jenkinson, first Earl of Liverpool (1727-1808), Secretary for War (1778), Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (1786-1802), Earl of Liverpool and Baron Hawkesbury (1796).--T.]

[Footnote 212: John Stuart, third Earl of Bute (1713-1792), Secretary of State (1761), Prime Minister (1761-1762), a knight of the Garter, and an exceedingly unpopular minister.--T.]

[Footnote 213: John Wilson Croker (1780-1857) was Secretary to the Admiralty from 1808 to 1830.--T.]

[Footnote 214: Sir William A'Court, second Baronet, later first Lord Heytesbury (1779-1860), Envoy Extraordinary to the Barbary States (1813), to Naples (1814), to Spain (1822), Ambassador to Portugal (1824), and to Russia (1828-1832). He was created Baron Heytesbury in 1828, and served as Viceroy of Ireland (1844-1846) and, later, as Governor of the Isle of Wight.--T.]

[Footnote 215: A jockey, or groom.--_Author's Note._]

[Footnote 216: Jean Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683), Comptroller-general of Finance under Louis XIV., increased the prosperity of France in a brilliant manner. At the same time he amassed a private fortune, amounting to some ten millions of francs, and, at his death, the populace, seeing in this fortune a proof of depredation, insulted his coffin.--T.]

[Footnote 217: I can find no record of any insult being offered at the funeral of Louis XIV. The obsequies of Louis XV., on the other hand, were certainly disturbed by riotous conduct on the part of the mob.--T.]

[Footnote 218: Sir Charles Stuart, later first Lord Stuart de Rothesay (1779-1845), Envoy to Portugal (1810), where he was created Count of Machico and Marquis of Angra, Minister at the Hague (1815-1816), Ambassador to Paris (1815-1830), raised to the peerage (1828), and Ambassador to St. Petersburg (1841-1845).--T.]

[Footnote 219: 25 August.--T.]

[Footnote 220: Victor Louis Charles de Riquet de Caraman, Marquis, later Duc de Caraman (1762-1839), created a peer of France in 1815 and appointed Ambassador to Vienna in 1816. In 1830, he rallied to the government that issued from the Revolution of July.--B.]

[Footnote 221: Charles Grey, second Earl Grey (1764-1845), First Lord of the Admiralty (1806), Foreign Secretary (1806-1807), First Lord of the Admiralty and Prime Minister (1830-1834), and a knight of the Garter. Lord Grey passed the first Reform Bill in 1832.--T.]

[Footnote 222: Daniel O'Connell (1775-1847), leader of the agitation in favour of Catholic emancipation (passed 1829), was elected to Parliament as member for Clare in 1828. He became leader of the Repeal Movement in 1840. It is interesting here to note that M. Biré speaks of Daniel O'Connell as an "admirable orator, an ardent patriot, a fervent Catholic: the Irish Liberator will be remembered as one of the greatest figures of this century."--T.]

[Footnote 223: William III., Stadtholder of the Netherlands and King of England (1650-1702).--T.]

[Footnote 224: Plato (429 or 430 B.C.--347 or 348 B.C.) often discoursed to his disciples on Cape Sunium, now Cape Colonna, which forms the south-eastern extremity of the Attic Peninsula. Minerva had a temple there, of which nineteen columns are still standing.--T.]

[Footnote 225: Epimenides (596 B.C.--538 B.C.), a pious Cretan, fabulously said to have slept for fifty years in a cave, to have lived three hundred years, etc.--T.]

[Footnote 226: _Congrès de Vérone, Guerre d'Espagne, Négociations, Colonies espagnoles._ Paris: Delloye, 1838. Two volumes, 8vo.--B.]

[Footnote 227: Alphonse Valentin Vaysse, Comte de Rainneville (1798-1864), was in 1824 chief of a department at the Ministry of Finance and one of M. de Villèle's ablest assistants. He sat in the Chamber of Deputies from 1846 to 1848, and retired from political life at the Revolution of February.--B.]

[Footnote 228: The phrase here reported by Chateaubriand was used, not by M. de Corbière, but by the Baron de Damas, Minister for War. _Cf._ the _Mémoires du Comte de Villèle._--B.]

[Footnote 229: Major-General Louis Justin Marie Marquis de Talaru (1769-1850), Ambassador to Madrid, in 1824, and a peer of France.--B.]

[Footnote 230: François Joseph Maximilien Gérard Comte de Rayneval (1778-1836), Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Berlin, in 1824, and, subsequently, Ambassador to Vienna and, under Louis-Philippe, to Madrid.--T.]

[Footnote 231: Chevalier de Bourgoing, First Secretary, and M. Adolphe Billecocq, Second Secretary of Legation in 1824.--T.]

[Footnote 232: Ambassador to Vienna in 1824.--T.]

[Footnote 233: Ambassador to Lisbon in 1824.--T.]

[Footnote 234: French Secretary of Legation at the Hague in 1824.--T.]

[Footnote 235: One year later, on the 3rd of July 1825, Hyde de Neuville, in his turn, informed his friend Chateaubriand that his embassy had been taken from him:

"My noble friend,

"You announced to me your departure from the ministry. I, in my turn, inform you that I am no longer ambassador.

"They strike me because I have followed you. So much the better, that will rivet our bonds of friendship; praise God and bless the King!

"_The King can do wrong._

"Entirely yours,

"HYDE DE NEUVILLE."

He received the following reply:

"Bravo, my dear friend; let them blame men like you, and they will not go far. I cannot offer you, in quarterly payments, the five thousand francs which you had placed at my disposal; but I have still a few china plates at your service, and if you want them we will sell them.

"Poor France!

"Yours more than ever,

"CHATEAUBRIAND."--B. ]

[Footnote 236: Ambassador to Naples in 1824.--T.]

[Footnote 237: Ambassador to St. Petersburg in 1824.--T.]

[Footnote 238: The Chevalier de Fontenay, First Secretary of Embassy in St. Petersburg in 1824.--T.]

[Footnote 239: The Vicomte de Pontcarré, Third Secretary of Embassy in St. Petersburg in 1824.--T.]

[Footnote 240: 16 September 1824.--T.]

[Footnote 241: 29 May 1825.--T.]

[Footnote 242: George Keith, tenth Earl Marischal (_circa_ 1693-1778), was sentenced to death for taking up arms for the Chevalier in 1715, took refuge in Spain, whence he commanded the Spanish expedition, was defeated at Glenshiel in 1719, and again fled to Prussia. Frederic II. appointed him Ambassador to Paris in 1751, and Governor of Neuchâtel in 1752. Here, in 1762, he gave his protection to Rousseau. He is generally known on the continent as Milord Maréchal.--T.]

[Footnote 243: "An earthenware cooking-pot, without feet, in which meat is noiselessly cooked, over a stove, the French Huguenots being said to have taken this precaution to avoid scandal on days when flesh-meat was forbidden" (Littré).--B.]

[Footnote 244: The County of Neuchâtel passed in 1707, on the death of Marie Duchesse de Nemours, the last of the Longuevilles, to Frederic I. King of Prussia, to whom it was guaranteed by the Peace of Utrecht in 1713. In 1806, Napoleon seized it and erected it into a principality for Marshal Berthier; in 1815, it returned to Prussia, while remaining a Swiss canton. Neuchâtel declared its independence in 1848; this independence was recognised by Prussia in 1857.--T.]

[Footnote 245: Isabelle Agnès de Sainte-Hyacinthe de Charrière (1745-1805), _née_ van Tuyll, author, under the pseudonym of the Abbé de La Tour, of the _Lettres Neuchâteloises_ (1784), _Caliste, ou Lettres écrites de Lausanne_ (1786), etc.--T.]

[Footnote 246: Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804-1869), the eminent French critic. His appreciation of Madame de Charrière occurs in his _Portraits de femmes_, published in 1844.--T.]

[Footnote 247: Characters in the _Lettres Neuchâteloises._--B.]

[Footnote 248: Louis Fauche-Borel (1762-1829), a Neuchâtel printer and Royalist agent. He devoted himself to the cause of the Bourbons and was repeatedly imprisoned under the Directorate and Consulate. He met with nothing but ingratitude from the Restoration and returned to Neuchâtel, where he lived in penury and at last put an end to his life in the manner stated by Chateaubriand.--T.]

[Footnote 249: Louis Comte de Pourtalès (1773-1848), Governor of Neuchâtel.--B.]

[Footnote 250: Clovis King of the Franks (465-511), founder of the French Monarchy, embraced Christianity and was baptised and crowned at Rheims at the hands of St. Remy, in 496.--T.]

[Footnote 251: Charles VII. King of France (1403-1461), surnamed the Victorious, defeated the English with the aid of Joan of Arc in 1429, and was crowned at Rheims in the same year.--T.]

[Footnote 252: Joan of Arc (1410-1431) was present at the coronation of Charles VII. on the 17th of July 1429. She was subsequently captured by the English and burned by them at the stake, on the 30th of May 1431, at Rouen.--T.]

[Footnote 253:

"I have come from my country No taller than a boot, With-a _mi_, with-a _mi_, With-a my marmot."--T.

]

[Footnote 254:

"Ah, what will they say from the dust of the grave. The generous spirits of sovereigns brave? What will Pharamond say, Clodion and Clovis, Our Pepins, our Martels, our Charleses and Louis, Who by blood and by peril, a warrior band, Have acquired for their sons such a beautiful land?"--T.

]

[Footnote 255: Pepin King of the Franks (_d._ 768), surnamed the Short, founder of the Second or Carlovingian Dynasty.--T.]

[Footnote 256: 28 May 1825.--T.]

[Footnote 257: Charles Louis Huguet, Marquis de Sémonville (1754-1839), had been sent to Constantinople as Ambassador by the Republic, was arrested by the Austrian Government on his way to his embassy (1793) and was, in 1795, exchanged, together with other members of the Convention, against the daughter of Louis XVI. He declared for Bonaparte and was employed by him; and, in 1814, was appointed Grand Referendary by Louis XVIII. Sémonville retained the functions under Charles X. and also under Louis-Philippe, resigning them in 1834, when he had completed his eightieth year.--T.]

[Footnote 258: Hyacinthe de Quélen, Archbishop of Paris (1778-1839), a member of the French Academy, had received his see in 1821. Monseigneur de Quélen was a man of saintly and charitable life, refused to acknowledge the Government of July, and suffered through the furious riot of 1831, when the Archbishop's Palace was wrecked.--T.]

[Footnote 259: Chateaubriand was a Knight Commander of the Holy Ghost and a Knight Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour; Villèle a Knight Commander of the Holy Ghost and a Knight Grand Cross of St. Louis.--T.]

[Footnote 260: Adalbéron, Archbishop of Rheims (_d._ 988) and Chancellor of France under Lothair and Louis V., officiated at the coronation of Hugh Capet, in 987, and was raised by him to the position of Lord High Chancellor.--T.]

[Footnote 261: Jean Du Tillet, Bishop of Meaux (_d._ 1570), author of the _Chronicon de regibus Francorum_ (1545).--T.]