BOOK II[446

The years 1802 and 1803--Country-houses--Madame de Custine--M. de Saint-Martin--Madame de Houdetot and Saint-Lambert--Journey to the south of France--M. de la Harpe--His death--Interview with Bonaparte--I am appointed First Secretary of Embassy in Rome--Journey from Paris to the Savoy Alps--From Mont Cenis to Rome--Milan to Rome--Cardinal Fesch's palace--My occupations--Madame de Beaumont's manuscripts--Letters from Madame de Caud--Madame de Beaumont's arrival in Rome--Letters from my sister--Letter from Madame de Krüdener--Death of Madame de Beaumont--Her funeral--Letters from M. de Chênedollé, M. de Fontanes, M. Necker, and Madame de Staël--The years 1803 and 1804--First idea of my Memoirs--I am appointed French Minister to the Valais--Departure from Rome--The year 1804--The Valais Republic--A visit to the Tuileries--The Hôtel de Montmorin--I hear the death cried of the Duc d'Enghien--I give in my resignation.

My life became quite disturbed so soon as it ceased to belong to myself. I had a crowd of acquaintances outside my customary circle. I was invited to the country-houses which were being restored. One did as best he could in those half-unfurnished, half-furnished manor-houses, in which old arm-chairs and new stood side by side. Nevertheless, some of these manor-houses had remained intact, such as the Marais[447], which had come into the possession of Madame de La Briche[448], an excellent woman, whom happiness could never succeed in shaking off. I remember that my immortality went to the Rue Saint-Dominique d'Enfer to take a seat for the Marais in a wretched hired coach, where I met Madame de Vintimille and Madame de Fezensac[449]. At Champlâtreux[450] M. Molé was having some small rooms on the second floor rebuilt. His father[451], who had been killed in the revolutionary style, was replaced, in a dilapidated drawing-room, by a picture in which Matthieu Molé was represented stopping a riot with his square cap: a picture which brought home the difference in the times. A splendid intersection of roads lined with lime-trees had been cut down; but one of the avenues still remained in all the magnificence of its old shade; new plantations have since been mixed with it: this is the age of poplars.

On returning from the Emigration, there was no exile so poor but laid out the winding walks of an English garden in the ten feet of land or court-yard which he had recovered: did I myself, in days past, not plant the Vallée-aux-Loups? Was it not there that I began these Memoirs? Did I not continue them in Montboissier Park, whose appearance, disfigured by neglect, its owners were then trying to revive? Did I not lengthen them in the park at Maintenon[452], quite recently restored, a new prey for the returning democracy? The castles burnt in 1789 ought to have warned what remained of the castles to remain hidden in their ruins: but the steeples of engulfed villages which pierce through the lava of Vesuvius do not prevent new steeples and new hamlets from being planted on the surface of that same lava.

[Sidenote: The Marquise de Custine.]

Among the bees adjusting their hive was the Marquise de Custine[453], the heiress of the long tresses of Margaret of Provence[454], wife of St. Louis, whose blood flowed in her veins. I was present when she took possession of Fervacques[455], and I had the honour of sleeping in the bed of the Bearnese, as I had of sleeping in Queen Christina's[456] bed at Combourg. The journey was no trifling matter: we had to take on board the carriage Astolphe de Custine[457], then a child, M. Berstoecher, his tutor, an old Alsatian nurse, who spoke only German, Jenny, the lady's maid, and Trim, a famous dog which ate up the provisions for the journey. Would one not have thought that this colony was going to Fervacques for good? And yet the furnishing of the house was not quite finished when the signal for removal was given. I saw her who faced the scaffold with such great courage[458], I saw her, whiter than one of the Fates, dressed in black, her figure made thin by death, her head adorned only with her silken tresses; I saw her smile to me with her pale lips and her beautiful teeth when she left Sécherons, near Geneva, to breathe her last at Bex, at the entrance to the Valais; I heard her coffin pass at night along the deserted streets of Lausanne to take up its eternal place at Fervacques: she was hastening to hide herself in a property which she had possessed for but a moment, like her life. I had read on the corner of a chimney-piece in the _château_ those bad rhymes attributed to the lover of Gabrielle:

La dame de Fervacques Mérite de vives attacques[459].

The soldier-king had said as much to many others: passing declarations of men, soon effaced and descending from beauty to beauty down to Madame de Custine. Fervacques has been sold.

I also met the Duchesse de Châtillon[460], who adorned my valley at Aulnay during my absence in the Hundred Days. Mrs. Lindsay, whom I continued to see, introduced me to Julie Talma[461]. Madame de Clermont-Tonnerre invited me. We had a common grandmother, and she was good enough to call me cousin. The widow of the Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre[462], she was married again, later, to the Marquis de Talaru[463]. She had converted M. de La Harpe in prison. It was through her that I knew Neveu, the painter, who was enrolled among the number of her _cicisbei_: Neveu brought me into momentary connection with Saint-Martin[464].

M. de Saint-Martin thought he had discovered in _Atala_ a certain cant which was far from my thoughts, but which to his mind proved an affinity of doctrine between us. Neveu, in order to bring two brothers together, asked us to dinner in a top room which he occupied in the out-houses of the Palais-Bourbon. I reached the trysting-place at six o'clock; the heavenly philosopher was at his post. At seven o'clock, a discreet man-servant placed a tureen of soup upon the table, withdrew, and closed the door. We sat down and began to eat in silence. M. de Saint-Martin, who, for the rest, had a very fine manner, pronounced only a few oracular phrases. Neveu replied with exclamations, uttered with a painter's attitudes and grimaces. I said not a word.

After half an hour, the necromancer returned, removed the soup, and placed another dish on the table. The courses succeeded each other in this way, one by one, and at long intervals. M. de Saint-Martin, becoming gradually more excited, began to talk after the manner of an archangel; the more he talked, the more obscure did his language become. Neveu had hinted to me, squeezing my hand, that we should see extraordinary things, that we should hear sounds. For six mortal hours I listened and discovered nothing. At midnight, the man of visions suddenly rose to his feet. I thought that the spirit of darkness or the heavenly spirit was descending, that the bells were about to ring out through the mysterious passages; but M. de Saint-Martin declared that he was exhausted, and that we would resume the conversation another time: he put on his hat and went away. Unhappily for himself, he was stopped at the door and obliged to come back by an unexpected visit: nevertheless he was not long in disappearing. I never saw him again: he went off to die in the garden of M. Lenoir-Laroche[465], my neighbour at Aulnay.

[Sidenote: Swedenborgian nonsense.]

I am a refractory subject for Swedenborgianism; the Abbé Faria[466], at a dinner at Madame de Custine's, boasted of being able to kill a canary by magnetizing it; the canary was the stronger of the two, and the abbé, beside himself, was obliged to leave the party for fear of being killed by the canary. The sole presence of myself, the Christian, had rendered the tripod powerless.

Another time, the celebrated Gall[467], again at Madame de Custine's, dined next to me, without knowing me, mistook my facial angle, took me for a frog, and tried, when he knew who I was, to patch up his science in a way which made me blush for him. The shape of the head can assist one in distinguishing the sex in individuals, in indicating what belongs to the beast, to the animal passions; as to the intellectual faculties, phrenology will never know them. If one could collect the different skulls of the great men who have died since the commencement of the world, and were to place them before the eyes of the phrenologists without telling them to whom they belonged, they would not forward one brain to its right address: the examination of the "bumps" would produce the most comical mistakes.

I feel conscience-smitten: I spoke of M. de Saint-Martin a trifle scoffingly; I am sorry for it. That love of scoffing, which I am constantly thrusting back and which incessantly returns to me, is a cause of suffering to me; for I hate the satirical spirit as being the pettiest, commonest, and easiest of all: of course, I am bringing no charge against high comedy. M. de Saint-Martin was, when all is said and done, a man of great merit, of noble and independent character. His ideas, when they were explicable, were lofty and of a superior nature. Ought I not to sacrifice the two foregoing pages to the generous and much too flattering declaration of the author of the _Portrait de M. de Saint-Martin fait par lui-même[468]?_ I should not hesitate to suppress them, if what I say were able to do the smallest hurt to the serious reputation of M. de Saint-Martin and to the esteem which will always cling to his memory. I am glad, for the rest, to see that my recollection has not deceived me: M. de Saint-Martin may not have received quite the same impressions as myself at the dinner of which I speak; but you will see that I have not invented the scene, and that M. de Saint-Martin's account resembles mine at bottom:

"On the 27th of January 1803," he says, "I had an interview with M. de Chateaubriand at a dinner arranged for the purpose at M. Neveu's, in the Polytechnic School[469]. It would have been a great advantage to me to have known him earlier: he is the only irreproachable man of letters with whom I have come into contact in my existence, and even then I enjoyed his conversation only during the meal. For, immediately afterwards, there came a visit which made him dumb for the rest of the evening, and I do not know when the occasion will return, because the king of this world takes great care to put a spoke in the wheel of my cart. For the rest, of whom do I stand in need except God?"

M. de Saint-Martin is worth a thousand of me: the dignity of his last sentence crushes my harmless banter with all the weight of a serious nature.

I had seen M. de Saint-Lambert[470] and Madame de Houdetot[471] at the Marais. Both represented the opinions and the freedom of days gone by, carefully packed up and preserved: it was the eighteenth century dying and married after its own fashion. One need but hold on to life for unlawfulness to become lawful. Men feel an infinite esteem for immorality because it has not ceased to exist and because time has adorned it with wrinkles. In truth, a virtuous husband and wife, who are not husband and wife, but who remain together out of consideration for their fellow-creatures, suffer a little from their venerable condition; they bore and detest each other cordially with all the ill-humour of old age; that is God's justice:

Malheur à qui le ciel accorde de longs jours[472]!

[Sidenote: Madame de Houdetot.]

It became difficult to understand certain pages of the _Confessions_ when one had seen the object of Rousseau's transports. Had Madame de Houdetot kept the letters which Jean Jacques wrote to her, and which he says were more brilliant than those in the _Nouvelle Héloïse?_ It is believed that she made a sacrifice of them to Saint-Lambert.

When nearly eighty years of age, Madame de Houdetot still cried in agreeable verses:

Et l'amour me console! Rien ne pourra me consoler de lui[473].

She never went to bed without striking the floor three times with her slipper and saying, "Good-night, dear!" to the late author of the _Saisons._ That was what the philosophy of the eighteenth century amounted to in 1803.

The society of Madame de Houdetot, Diderot, Saint-Lambert, Rousseau, Grimm[474], and Madame d'Épinay rendered the Valley of Montmorency insupportable to me, and though, with regard to facts, I am very glad that a relic of the Voltairean times should have come under my notice, I do not regret those times. I have lately again seen the house in which Madame de Houdetot used to live at Sannois; it is now a mere empty shell, reduced to the four walls. A deserted hearth is always interesting; but what can we gather from hearth-stones by whose side beauty has never sat, nor the mother of a family, nor religion, and whose ashes, if they were not dispersed, would carry back the memory only to days which were capable of nought save destruction?

*

A piracy of the _Génie du Christianisme_ at Avignon took me to the south of France in the month of October 1802. I knew only my poor Brittany and the northern provinces through which I had passed when leaving my country. I was about to see the sun of Provence, the sky which was to give me a fore-taste of Italy and Greece, towards which my instinct and my muse alike urged me. I was in a happy mood; my reputation made life seem light to me: there are many dreams in the first intoxication of fame, and one's eyes at first become rapturously filled with the rising light; but should that light become extinguished, it leaves you in the dark: if it last, the habit of seeing it soon renders you unmindful of it.

Lyons pleased me extremely. I renewed my acquaintance with those works of the Romans which I had not seen since the day when I read some sheets of _Atala_ out of my knapsack in the amphitheatre at Trèves. Sailing-boats crossed from one bank of the Saône to the other, carrying a light at night; they were steered by women; a sailor lass of eighteen who took me on board, at each turn of the helm, adjusted a nosegay of flowers badly fastened to her hat. I was awakened in the morning by the sound of bells. The convents poised upon the slopes seemed to have recovered their solitary inmates. The son of M. Ballanche[475], the owner, after M. Migneret, of the _Génie du Christianisme_, had become my host: he has become my friend. Who does not know to-day the Christian philosopher whose writings glow with that placid clearness on which one loves to fix his eyes, as on the ray of a friendly star in the sky?

On the 27th of October the post-barge which was taking me to Avignon was obliged to stop at Tain, owing to a storm. I thought myself in America: the Rhone reminded me of my great wild rivers. I was put into a little river-side inn; a conscript was standing at the chimney-corner; he had his sack on his back, and was on his way to join the Army of Italy. I wrote with the bellows of the chimney for a table, opposite the landlady, who sat silently before me and showed her regard for the traveller by preventing the dog and cat from making a noise. What I was writing was an article which I had almost finished while going down the Rhone, and which related to M. de Bonald's _Législation primitive._ I foresaw what has since come to pass:

"French literature," I said, "is about to change its aspect; with the Revolution new thoughts will come into being, new views of men and things. It is easy to foresee that our writers will become divided. Some will strive to leave the beaten paths; others will try to copy the old models, while nevertheless displaying them in a new light. It is very probable that the latter will end by getting the better of their adversaries, because, in leaning upon the great traditions and the great men, they will have surer guides and more fruitful documents."

The lines ending my travelling criticism are history; my mind was beginning to move with my century:

"The author of this article," I said, "cannot resist an image drawn from the circumstances in which he finds himself placed. At the very moment at which he is writing these concluding words he is descending one of the greatest rivers of France. On two opposite mountains stand two ruined towers; at the top of those towers are fastened little bells, which the mountaineers ring as we pass. This river, those mountains, those sounds, those Gothic monuments, divert the eyes of the spectators for a moment; but not one stops to go whither the bell-tower calls him. Thus the men who to-day preach morality and religion in vain give the signal from the top of their ruins to those whom the torrent of the age carries with it; the traveller is amazed at the grandeur of the ruins, at the sweetness of the sounds that issue from them, at the majesty of the memories that rise above them, but he does not interrupt his journey, and at the first turn in the stream all is forgotten[476]."

[Sidenote: Avignon.]

When I arrived at Avignon, on the eve of All Saints' Day, a child hawking books offered them to me: I then and there bought three different pirated editions of a little novel called _Atala_. By going from one bookseller to the other, I unearthed the pirate, to whom I was not known. He sold me the four volumes of the _Génie du Christianisme_ at the reasonable price of nine francs per copy, and praised both book and author highly to me. He lived in a fine house standing in its own grounds. I thought I had made a great discovery: after four-and-twenty hours, I grew weary of following fortune, and made terms for next to nothing with the robber.

I saw Madame de Janson, a little wizened, white-haired, determined woman, who struggled with the Rhone for her estate, exchanged musket-shots with the inhabitants of the banks, and defended herself against the years.

Avignon reminded me of my fellow-countryman. Du Guesclin was good for more than Bonaparte, because he rescued France from her conquerors. On reaching the city of the Popes with the adventurers whom his glory was leading to Spain, he said to the provost sent by the Pontiff to meet him:

*

"'Brother, do not deceive me: whence comes that treasure? Has the Pope taken it from his treasure?'

"And he answered no, and that the commons of Avignon had paid it, each his portion.

"'Then, provost,' said Bertrand, 'I promise you that we will not take a farthing of it as we live, and wish that this money got together be restored to them that paid it, and tell the Pope that he have it restored to them; for if I knew that any other were done, it would lie heavy on me; and had I crossed the sea, yet would I return thence.'

"Thus was Bertrand paid with the Pope's money, and his folk absolved again, and the said first absolution again confirmed."

*

In former days Avignon was considered the commencement of a Transalpine journey: it was the entrance to Italy. The geographies say:

"The Rhone belongs to the King, but the City of Avignon is watered by a branch of the river, the Sorgue, which belongs to the Pope."

Is the Pope very certain of long preserving the ownership of the Tiber? At Avignon they used to visit the Celestine[477] monastery. Good King René[478], who reduced the taxes when the tramontane wind blew, had painted a skeleton in one of the halls of the Celestine monastery: it was that of a woman of great beauty whom he had loved[479].

*

I looked for the Palace of the Popes and was shown the _ice-house_: the Revolution has done away with celebrated places; the memories of the past are obliged to shoot up through it and to reblossom over dead bones[480]. Alas, the groans of the victims die soon after them! They scarcely reach some echo that causes them to survive a little while after the voice from which they issued is extinguished for ever. But, while the cry of sorrow was expiring on the banks of the Rhone, one heard in the distance the sound of Petrarch's lute: a solitary _canzone_, escaping from the tomb, continued to charm Vaucluse[481] with an immortal melancholy and the love sorrows of olden time.

Alain Chartier[482] had come from Bayeux to be buried at Avignon in the Church of St. Anthony. He had written the _Belle Dame sans mercy_, and the kiss of Margaret of Scotland[483] made him live.

[Sidenote: Marseilles.]

From Avignon I went to Marseilles. What is left to be desired by a town to which Cicero addressed these words, of which the oratorical manner was imitated by Bossuet:

"Nor will I forget thee, O Massilia, who in virtue and dignity shouldst rank not only before Greece, but for aught I know before the whole world[484]!"

Tacitus, in the Life of Agricola, also praises Marseilles as combining the Greek urbanity with the economy of the Latin provinces. Daughter of Hellas, foundress of Gaul, celebrated by Cicero, captured by Cæsar, is not that sufficient glory united? I hastened to climb to _Notre Dame de la Garde_, to admire the sea which the smiling coasts of all the famous countries of antiquity line with their ruins. The sea, which does not move, is the source of mythology, even as the ocean, which rises twice a day, is the abyss to which Jehovah said:

"Thou shalt go no farther[485]."

In this same year, 1838, I climbed again to that summit; I saw again that sea which I now know so well, and at the end of which rose the Cross and the Tomb victorious. The mistral was blowing; I went into the fort built by Francis I., where no longer a veteran of the army of Egypt kept guard, but where stood a conscript destined for Algiers and lost under the gloomy vaults. Silence reigned in the restored chapel, while the wind moaned without. The hymn of the Breton sailors to Our Lady of Succour returned to my mind; you know when and how I have already quoted that plaint of my early ocean days:

Je mets ma confiance, Vierge, en votre secours.

How many events it had needed to bring me back to the feet of the "Star of the Sea," to whom I had been vowed in my childhood! When I gazed at those votive offerings, those paintings of ship-wrecks hung all around me, it was as though I were reading the story of my life. Virgil places the Trojan hero beneath the Porches of Carthage, moved at the sight of a picture representing the burning of Troy, and the genius of the singer of Hamlet has made use of the soul of the singer of Dido.

I no longer recognised Marseilles at the foot of that rock once covered with a forest sung by Lucan: I could no longer lose my way in its long, wide, straight streets. The harbour was crowded with ships; thirty-six years ago I should with difficulty have found a "boat," steered by a descendant of Pytheas[486], to carry me to Cyprus like Joinville[487]: time rejuvenates cities, reversing its action upon men. I preferred my old Marseilles, with its memories of the Bérengers[488], the Duke of Anjou[489], King René, Guise and d'Épernon[490], with the monuments of Louis XIV. and the virtues of Belsunce[491]: the wrinkles on its brow pleased me. Perhaps, in regretting the years which it has lost, I but bewail those which I have found. Marseilles received me graciously, it is true; but the rival of Athens has grown too young for me.

If the _Memoirs_ of Alfieri[492] had been published in 1802 I should not have left Marseilles without visiting the rock from which the poet used to bathe. That rugged man once succeeded in attaining the charm of reverie and of expression:

"After the performance," he writes, "one of my amusements, at Marseilles, was to bathe almost every evening in the sea; I had found a very agreeable spot, on a neck of land situated to the right of the harbour, where, seated on the sand, with my back leaning against a rock, which prevented me from being seen from the land side, I could behold the sky and sea without interruption. Between those two immensities, embellished by the rays of the setting sun, I passed delicious hours dreaming of future delights; and there I might unquestionably have become a poet, could I have given any language whatever to my thoughts and feelings[493]."

[Sidenote: Jean Reboul.]

I returned through Languedoc and Gascony. At Nîmes, the Arena[494] and the Maison Carrée[495] had not yet been extricated: in the present year, 1838, I have seen them exhumed. I have also looked up Jean Reboul[496]. I had my doubts concerning those workmen poets, who are generally neither poets nor workmen: I owe M. Reboul a reparation. I found him in his bakery; I spoke to him without knowing whom I was addressing, failing to distinguish him from his fellow-worshippers of Ceres. He took my name and said he would go and see if the person for whom I was asking was there. He returned soon after and introduced himself: he took me into his shop; we wended our way through a labyrinth of flour-sacks, and clambered up a sort of ladder into a little closet resembling the upper room of a wind-mill. There we sat down and talked. I was as happy as in my garret in London, and happier than in my ministerial armchair in Paris. M. Reboul drew a manuscript from a chest of drawers, and read me some powerful verses from a poem which he is writing on the _Dernier Jour._ I congratulated him on his religion and his talent[497].

I had to take leave of my host, not without wishing him the gardens of Horace. I would have better loved to see him dream beside the Cascade at Tivoli than gather the wheat crushed by the wheel above that cascade. It is true that Sophocles was perhaps a blacksmith in Athens, and that Plautus, in Rome, was a harbinger of Reboul at Nîmes[498].

Between Nîmes and Montpellier, I passed, on my left, Aigues-Mortes, which I have visited in 1838. This town is still quite intact, with its towers and its surrounding rampart; it resembles a large ship stranded on the sands where St. Louis, time and the sea have left it. The Saint-king gave "usages" and statutes to the town of Aigues-Mortes:

"He wills that the prison be such that it serve not for the extermination of the person, but for its safe-keeping; that no information be granted for mere injurious words; that adultery itself be not enquired into, except in certain cases; and that he who violates a maid, _volente vel nolente_, shall not lose his life, nor any of his members, _sed alio modo puniatur._"

At Montpellier I again saw the sea, to which I would gladly have written in the words of the Most Christian King to the Swiss Confederation: "My trusty ally and well-beloved friend." Scaliger[499] would have liked to make Montpellier "the nest of his old age." It received its name from two virgin saints, _Mons puellarum_: hence the beauty of its women. Montpellier[500], falling before the Cardinal de Richelieu, witnessed the death of the aristocratic constitution of France.

On the road from Montpellier to Narbonne, I had a return to my native disposition, an attack of my dreaminess. I should have forgotten that attack if, like certain imaginary invalids, I had not entered the day of my crisis on a tiny bulletin, the only note of that time which I have found to aid my memory. This time it was an arid space covered with fox-gloves that made me forget the world: my eyes glided over that sea of purple stalks, and encountered at the distance only the blue chain of the Cantal Mountains. In nature, with the exception of the sky, the sea and the sun, it is not the immense objects that inspire me; they give me only a sensation of greatness, which flings my own littleness distraught and disconsolate at the feet of God. But a flower which I pick, a stream of water hiding among the rushes, a bird alternately flying and resting before my eyes lead me on towards all kinds of dreams. Is it not better to be moved for no definite reason than to go through life seeking blunted interests, chilled by their repetition and their number? All is worn out nowadays, even misfortune.

At Narbonne I reached the Canal des Deux-Mers[501]. Corneille, singing this work, adds his own greatness to that of Louis XIV.[502]

[Sidenote: Toulouse.]

At Toulouse, from the bridge over the Garonne, I could see the line of the Pyrenees; I was to cross it four years later: our horizons succeed one another like our days. They offered to show me, in a cave, the dried body of Fair Paule[503]: blessed are they that have not seen and have believed! Montmorency[504] had been beheaded in the courtyard of the town-hall: that head struck off must have been very important, since they still speak of it after so many other heads have been taken off? I do not know if, in the history of criminal proceedings, there exists an eye-witness' evidence which has more clearly established a man's identity:

"The fire and smoke which covered him," said Guitaut, "prevented me from recognising him; but seeing a man who, after breaking six of our ranks, was still killing soldiers in the seventh, I thought that it could be only M. de Montmorency; I knew it for certain when I saw him thrown to the ground under his dead horse."

The deserted Church of St. Sernin impressed me by its architecture. This church is connected with the history of the Albigenses, which the poem so well translated by M. Fauriel[505] revives:

"The gallant young count, his father's heir and the light of his eyes, with the cross and the sword, enter together by one of the doors. Not a single young girl remains in chamber or on landing; the inhabitants of the town, great and small, all come out to gaze upon the count as on a fair and blooming rose."

It is to the time of Simon de Montfort[506] that the loss of the _langue d'Oc_ dates back:

"Simon, seeing himself lord of so many lands, bestowed them among the gentle men, both French and others, _atque loci leges dedimus_," say the eight signatory archbishops and bishops.

I should have liked to have had time to inquire at Toulouse after one of my great admirations, Cujas[507], writing, flat on the ground, with his books spread around him. I do not know whether the memory has been preserved of his twice-married daughter Suzanne. Constancy had no great attractions for Suzanne, she set it at naught; but she kept one of her husbands alive with the same infidelities which caused the other's death. Cujas was protected by the daughter of Francis I.[508], Pibrac by the daughter of Henry II.[509]: two Margarets of the blood of the Valois, the true blood of the Muses. Pibrac[510] is famous through his quatrains, which have been translated into Persian. I was perhaps lodged in the house of the president his father. That "good Lord of Pibrac," according to Montaigne, was "a man of so quaint and rare wit, of so sound judgment, and of so mild and affable behaviour." His mind was "so dissonant and different in proportion from our deplorable corruption, and so farre from agreeing with our tumultuous stormes[511]." And Pibrac wrote the apology of St. Bartholomew's Night!

I hurried on without being able to stop: fate threw me back to 1838 to admire in detail the city of Raimond de Saint-Gilles[512], and to speak of the new acquaintances I made there: M. de Lavergne[513], a man of talent, wit, and sense; Mademoiselle Honorine Gasc[514], the Malibran of the future. The latter reminded me, in my new quality of a follower of Clémence Isaure[515], of those verses which Chapelle and Bachaumont[516] wrote in the isle of Ambijoux, near Toulouse:

Hélas! que l'on serait heureux Dans ce beau lieu digne d'envie, Si, toujours aimé de Sylvie, On pouvait, toujours amoureux, Avec elle passer sa vie[517]!

Let Mademoiselle Honorine be on her guard against her beautiful voice! Talents are "gold of Toulouse:" they bring misfortune.

[Sidenote: Bordeaux.]

Bordeaux was as yet scarce rid of its scaffolds and its dastardly Girondins. All the towns which I saw had the appearance of beautiful women lately risen from a violent malady, and hardly commencing to breathe again. In Bordeaux, Louis XIV. had caused the Palais des Tutelles to be razed, in order to build the Chateau Trompette[518]; Spon[519] and the lovers of antiquity groaned:

Pourquoi démolit-on ces colonnes des dieux, Ouvrage des Césars, monument tutélaire[520]?

There were but a few remains of the Arena to be seen. Were we to offer a token of regret to all that falls, life would be too short for our tears.

I took ship for Blaye. I saw the castle, then unknown, to which in 1833 I addressed these words:

"O captive of Blaye[521], I am sorrow-stricken to be able to do nothing to forward your present destinies!"

I travelled towards Rochefort, and went on to Nantes through the Vendée.

This district bore the mutilations and scars due to its valour, like an old warrior. Bones bleached by time and ruins blackened by fire met the gaze. When the Vendeans were on the point of attacking the enemy, they knelt down to receive the blessing of a priest. Prayers uttered under arms were not reckoned as weakness, for the Vendean who raised his sword towards Heaven asked for victory, not for life.

The diligence in which I found myself interred was full of travellers who related the rapes and murders with which they had glorified their lives in the wars of the Vendée. My heart throbbed when, after crossing the Loire at Nantes, we entered Brittany. I passed by the College of Rennes, which witnessed the last years of my childhood. I was able to remain for only four-and-twenty hours with my wife and sisters, and I returned to Paris.

*

I arrived in time for the death of a man who belonged to those superior names of the second rank in the eighteenth century which, forming a solid rear-line in society, gave it a certain fulness and consistency.

I had known M. de La Harpe in 1789: like Flins, he had become smitten with a great passion for my sister, Madame la Comtesse de Farcy. He used to come up with three large volumes of his works under his little arms, quite astounded to find that his glory did not triumph over the most rebellious hearts. Loud-voiced, and eager in manner, he thundered against every abuse, ordered an omelette to be made for him at the ministers' houses when the dinner had not been to his taste, eating with his fingers, dragging his cuffs in the dishes, talking philosophical scurrilities to the greatest lords, who doted on his impertinences; but, when all was said, his was an upright and enlightened mind, impartial amid all its passions, with a quick sense for talent, capable of admiration, of shedding tears over fine poetry or a fine action, and possessing a foundation fit to support repentance. He was not wanting at the end; I saw him die the death of a brave Christian, with his taste enlarged by religion, and retaining no pride except as against impiety, no hatred except that of "Revolutionary language[522]."

[Sidenote: Death of M. de La Harpe.]

On my return from the Emigration, religion had disposed M. de La Harpe in favour of my works: the illness which attacked him did not prevent him from working himself; he read me passages from a poem which he was writing on the Revolution[523]; in it occurred notably some pithy lines directed against the crimes of the age and the "worthy men" who had permitted them:

Mais s'ils ont tout osé, vous avez tout permis: Plus l'oppresseur est vil, plus l'esclave est infâme[524].

Forgetting that he was ill, dressed in a wadded spencer, with a white cotton night-cap on his head, he recited with all his might; then, dropping his copy-book, he said in a voice that hardly reached the ear:

"I can't go on; I feel a grip of iron in my side."

And if, unfortunately, a maid-servant should happen to pass by, he would resume his stentorian voice and roar:

"Go away! Shut the door!"

I said to him one day:

"You will live for the good of religion."

"Ah, yes," he replied, "it would certainly be for God; but He does not wish it, and I shall die within these few days."

Falling back into his chair, and drawing his night-cap over his ears, he expiated his former pride by his present resignation and humility.

At a dinner at Migneret's, I had heard him speak of himself with the greatest modesty, declaring that he had done nothing out of the common, but that he believed that art and the language had not degenerated in his hands.

M. de La Harpe quitted this life on the 11th of February 1803; the author of the _Saisons_ died almost at the same time, fortified with all the consolations of philosophy, as M. de La Harpe died fortified with all the consolations of religion: the one was visited by men, the other by God.

M. de La Harpe was buried on the 12th of February 1803 in the cemetery at the Barrière de Vaugirard. The coffin was placed beside the grave on the little mound of earth that was soon to cover it, and M. de Fontanes delivered a funeral oration. It was a dismal scene: whirling snow-flakes fell from the clouds and covered the pall with white, while the wind blew it upwards, to allow the last words of friendship to reach the ears of death. The cemetery has been destroyed and M. de La Harpe disinterred: there was hardly anything left of his poor ashes. M. de La Harpe had been married under the Directory, and had not been happy with his beautiful wife; she had been seized with loathing at the sight of him, and had persisted in refusing him any of his rights[525].

For the rest, M. de La Harpe, like everything else, had diminished by the side of the Revolution, which was ever growing in dimensions: reputations hastily shrank away before the representative of that Revolution, even as dangers lost their power before him.

*

While we were engrossed with vulgar life and death, the gigantic progress of the world was being realized; the Man of the Time was taking the head of the table at the banquet of the human race. Amid vast commotions, precursors of the universal displacement, I had landed at Calais to bear my part in the general action, within the limits set to each soldier. I arrived, in the first year of the century, at the camp where Bonaparte was beating the destinies to arms: soon after, he became First Consul for life.

After the adoption of the Concordat by the Legislative Body in 1802, Lucien, then Minister of the Interior, gave an entertainment to his brother; I was invited, as having rallied the Christian forces and led them back to the charge. I was in the gallery when Napoleon entered: he struck me pleasantly; I had never seen him except at a distance. His smile was beautiful and caressing; his eyes were admirable, owing especially to the manner in which they were placed beneath his forehead and framed in his eyebrows. There was as yet no charlatanism in his glance, nothing theatrical or affected. The _Génie du Christianisme_, which was then making a great stir, had worked upon Napoleon. A prodigious imagination animated that so frigid politician: he would not have been what he was, if the Muse had not been there; reason but carried out the poet's ideas. All those men who lead the large life are always a compound of two natures, for they must be capable of inspiration and of action: one conceives the plan, the other accomplishes it.

[Sidenote: The First Consul.]

Bonaparte saw me and recognised me, I know not by what. When he turned in my direction no one knew whom he was making for; the ranks opened successively; each hoped that the Consul would stop at him; he appeared to feel a certain impatience with those misconceptions. I hid behind my neighbours; suddenly Bonaparte raised his voice and said:

"Monsieur de Chateaubriand!"

I then remained standing out alone, for the crowd withdrew, and soon formed again in a circle around the speakers. Bonaparte addressed me with simplicity: without paying me any compliments, without idle questions, without preamble, he spoke to me at once of Egypt and the Arabs, as though I had been one of his intimates, and as though he were only continuing a conversation already commenced between us.

"I was always much impressed," he said, "when I saw the sheiks fall on their knees in the middle of the desert, turn towards the East, and touch the sand with their foreheads. What was that unknown thing which they worshipped in the East?"

Bonaparte interrupted himself and broached another idea without any transition:

"Christianity! Have not the ideologists tried to make a system of astronomy of it? And if that should be so, do they think they can persuade me that Christianity is small? If Christianity is the allegory of the movement of the spheres, the geometry of the stars, the free-thinkers may say what they please: in spite of themselves, they have still left tolerable greatness to 'the infamous thing.'"

Incontinently Bonaparte moved away. As with Job, in my night "a spirit passed before me, the hair of my flesh stood up. There stood one whose countenance I knew not ... and I heard the voice as it were of a gentle wind[526]."

My days have been but a series of visions; Hell and Heaven have continually opened up beneath my feet or over my head, without giving me time to explore their darkness or their light. One single time, on the shore of the two worlds, I met the man of the last and the man of the new century: Washington and Napoleon. I conversed for a moment with each; both sent me back to solitude: the first through a kindly wish, the second through a crime.

I observed that, when going round among the crowd, Bonaparte cast deeper glances on me than those which he had fixed upon me while talking to me. I too followed him with my eyes:

Chi è quel grande che non par che curi L'incendio[527]?

In consequence of this interview, Bonaparte thought of me for Rome: he had decided at a glance where and how I could be of use to him. It mattered little to him that I had no experience of public affairs, that I was entirely unacquainted with practical diplomacy; he believed that a given mind always understands and has no need of apprenticeship. He was a great discoverer of men: but he wished them to possess talent only for him, and even then on condition that that talent was not much discussed; jealous of every renown, he regarded it as an usurpation over his own: there was to be none save Napoleon in the universe.

Fontanes and Madame Bacciochi spoke to me of the pleasure the Consul had found in "my conversation:" I had not opened my mouth; that meant that Bonaparte was pleased with himself. They urged me to avail myself of fortune. The idea of being anything had never occurred to me; I flatly refused. Then they persuaded an authority to speak whom it was difficult for me to resist.

The Abbé Émery[528], the superior of the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice, came and entreated me, in the name of the clergy, to accept, for the good of religion, the post of first secretary to the embassy which Bonaparte had reserved for his uncle, Cardinal Fesch[529]. He gave me to understand that the cardinal's intelligence was not very remarkable and that I should soon find myself the master of affairs. A singular chance had brought me into connection with the Abbé Émery: I had crossed to the United States with the Abbé Nagat and several seminarists, as you know. That remembrance of my obscurity, my youth, my life as a traveller, which reflected itself in my public life, seized hold of my imagination and my heart. The Abbé Émery, who was esteemed by Bonaparte, was subtle by nature and by reason of his cloth and of the Revolution; but he used that threefold subtlety only on behalf of his true merit; ambitious only to do good, he acted only in the most prosperous circle of a seminary. Circumspect as he was in his actions and words, it would have been superfluous to do violence to the Abbé Émery, for he always held his life at your disposal, in exchange for his will, which he never surrendered: his strength lay in waiting for you, seated on his tomb.

[Sidenote: I am sent to Rome.]

He failed in his first attempt; he returned to the charge, and his patience ended by persuading me. I accepted the place which he had been commissioned to offer me, without being in the smallest degree convinced of my usefulness in the post to which I was called: I am no good at all in the second rank. I might perhaps have again withdrawn, if the thought of Madame de Beaumont had not come to put an end to my scruples. M. de Montmorin's daughter was dying; she had been told that the climate of Italy would be favourable to her; if I went to Rome she would make up her mind to cross the Alps. I sacrificed myself to the hope of saving her. Madame de Chateaubriand prepared to come to join me; M. Joubert spoke of accompanying her; and Madame de Beaumont set out for Mont-Dore[530], in order afterwards to complete her cure on the banks of the Tiber.

M. de Talleyrand[531] occupied the Ministry for Foreign Affairs; he sent me my nomination. I dined with him: he has always maintained in my mind the place which he occupied at our first meeting. For the rest, his fine manners made a contrast with those of the ruffians of his environment; his profligacy assumed an astounding importance: in the eyes of a brutal gang, moral corruption seemed genius, frivolity profundity. The Revolution was over-modest; it did not sufficiently appreciate its superiority: it is not the same thing to stand above crimes or beneath them.

I saw the ecclesiastics attached to the cardinal's person; I remarked the gay Abbé de Bonnevie[532]: formerly, in his capacity as chaplain to the Army of the Princes, he had taken part in the retreat from Verdun; he had also been grand-vicar to the Bishop of Châlons, M. de Clermont-Tonnerre[533], who set out behind us in order to claim a pension from the Holy See, in his quality as a "Chiaramonte[534]." So soon as my preparations were completed I started: I was to precede Napoleon's uncle to Rome.

*

In Lyons I again saw my friend M. Ballanche. I witnessed the revival of Corpus Christi: I felt as though I had in some way contributed to those posies of flowers, to that joy of Heaven which I had called back to earth.

I continued my journey, finding a cordial welcome wherever I went: my name was linked with the restoration of the altars. The keenest pleasure which I have experienced has been to feel myself honoured in France and abroad with marks of serious interest. It has sometimes happened that, while resting in a village inn, I saw a father and mother enter with their son: they told me they were bringing their child to thank me. Was it self-conceit that then gave me the pleasure of which I speak? How did it affect my vanity that lowly and honest people should give me a token of their satisfaction on the high-road, in a place where none overheard them? What did touch me, at least I venture to think so, was that I had done some little good, consoled a few distressed, caused the hope to revive in a mother's yearnings of bringing up a Christian son: that is to say, a submissive son, respectful, attached to his parents. Should I have tasted this pure joy if I had written a book which morals or religion would have had cause to bewail?

[Sidenote: My journey to Rome.]

The road is somewhat dreary on leaving Lyons: after leaving the Tour-du-Pin, as far as Pont-de-Beauvoisin, it is shady and wooded. At Chambéry, where Bayard's chivalrous soul showed itself so fine, a man was welcomed by a woman, and by way of payment for the hospitality received at her hands, thought himself philosophically obliged to dishonour her. That is the danger of literature: the desire to make a stir gets the better of generous sentiment; if Rousseau had never become a celebrated writer, he would have buried in the valleys of Savoy the frailties of the woman who had fed him; he would have sacrificed himself to the very faults of his friend; he would have relieved her in her old age, instead of contenting himself with giving her a snuff-box and running away. Ah, may the voice of friendship betrayed never be raised against our tombstones!

After passing Chambéry, one comes to the stream of the Isère. On every hand, in the valleys, one meets with road-side crosses and lady-statues fixed in the trunks of the pine-trees. The little churches, surrounded with trees, form a touching contrast with the great mountains. When the winter whirlwinds come sweeping down from those ice-laden summits, the Savoyard takes shelter in his rustic temple and prays.

The valleys which one enters above Montmélian are hemmed by mountains of different shapes, sometimes half bare, sometimes clad in forests. Aiguebelle seems to shut in the Alps; but, on turning round an isolated rock, fallen in the middle of the road, you catch sight of new valleys attached to the course of the Arc. The mountains on either side stand erect; their flanks become perpendicular; their barren summits begin to display a few glaciers: torrents come rushing down to swell the Arc, which runs madly along. Amid this tumult of the waters, one remarks a light cascade which falls with infinite grace beneath a curtain of willows.

After crossing Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne I arrived towards sunset at Saint-Michel, and found no horses. I was obliged to stop, and went for a stroll outside the village. The air became transparent on the ridge of the mountains; their denticulation was outlined with extraordinary clearness, while a great darkness, issuing from their feet, rose towards their crests. The note of the nightingale was heard below, the cry of the eagle above; the blossoming lote-tree stood in the valley, the white snow on the mountain. A castle, popularly believed to be the work of the Carthaginians, showed upon the sheer-cut redan. There, incorporated with the rock, had stood one man's hatred, overcoming all obstacles. The vengeance of the human race weighed down upon a free people, which was able to build its greatness only with the slavery and blood of the rest of the world.

I left at day-break and arrived at about two o'clock in the afternoon at Lans-le-Bourg, at the foot of Mont Cenis. On entering the village, I saw a peasant who held an eaglet by the feet; a pitiless band struck the young king, insulted his youthful weakness and fallen majesty; the father and mother of the noble orphan had been killed. They offered to sell him to me: he died of the ill-treatment to which he had been subjected before I was able to deliver him. I then remembered poor little Louis XVII.; to-day I think of Henry V.: what swiftness of downfall and misfortune!

Here one begins to ascend Mont Cenis and leave the little River Arc, which brings you to the foot of the mountain. On the other side of Mont Cenis, the Dora opens the entrance of Italy to you. Rivers are not only "moving high-roads," as Pascal calls them, but they also mark the road for men.

Standing for the first time on the summit of the Alps, I was seized with a strange emotion. I was like the lark which had just crossed the frozen upland, and which, after singing its little burden of the plains, had alighted amid the snows, instead of dropping down upon the harvest. The stanzas with which those mountains inspired me in 1822 reflect with some accuracy my feeling on the same spot in 1803:

Alpes, vous n'avez point subi mes destinées! Le temps ne vous peut rien; Vos fronts légèrement ont porté les années Qui pèsent sur le mien.

Pour la première fois, quand, rempli d'espérance, Je franchis vos remparts, Ainsi que l'horizon, un avenir immense S'ouvrait à mes regards.

L'Italie à mes pieds, et devant moi le monde[535]!

That world, have I really penetrated into it? Christopher Columbus saw an apparition which showed him the land of his dreams before he had discovered it; Vasco de Gama met the giant of the storms on his road: which of those two great men presaged my future? What I should have loved above all would have been a life glorious through a brilliant result, and obscure through its destiny. Do you know which were the first European ashes to rest in America? They were those of Bjorn the Scandinavian: he died on landing at Winland, and was buried by his companions on a promontory. Who knows that[536]? Who knows of him whose sail preceded the vessel of the Genoese pilot to the New World? Bjorn sleeps on the point of an unknown cape, and since a thousand years his name has been handed down to us only by the sagas of the poets, in a language no longer spoken.

*

[Sidenote: Italy.]

I had begun my wanderings in an opposite direction to that of other travellers. The old forests of America had displayed themselves to me before the old cities of Europe. I happened upon the latter when they were at the same time renewing their youth and dying in a fresh revolution. Milan was occupied by our troops; they were completing the demolition of the castle, that witness to the wars of the Middle Ages.

The French army was settling in the plains of Lombardy as a military colony. Guarded here and there by their comrades on sentry, these strangers from Gaul, with forage-caps on their heads and sabres by way of reaping-hooks over their round jackets, presented the appearance of gay and eager harvesters. They moved stones, rolled guns, drove waggons, ran up sheds and huts of brushwood. Horses pranced, curveted, reared among the crowd, like dogs fawning on their masters. Italian women sold fruit on their flat baskets at the market of that armed fair; our soldiers made them presents of their pipes and steels, saying to them as the ancient barbarians, their ancestors, said to their beloved:

"I, Fotrad, son of Eupert, of the race of the Franks, give to thee, Helgine, my dear wife, in honour of thy beauty (_in honore pulchritudinis tuæ_), my dwelling in the quarter of the Pines[537]."

We are curious enemies: we are at first considered rather insolent, rather too gay, too restless; but we have no sooner turned our backs than we are regretted. Lively, witty, intelligent, the French soldier mixes in the occupations of the inhabitant on whom he is billeted: he draws water at the well, as Moses did for the daughters of Madian, drives away the shepherds, takes the lambs to the washing-place, chops the wood, lights the fire, watches the pot, carries the baby in his arms, or sends it to sleep in its cradle. His good humour and activity put life into everything; one grows to look upon him as a conscript of the family. Does the drum beat? The lodger runs to his musket, leaves his host's daughters weeping on the threshold, and quits the cabin of which he will never think again until he is admitted to the Invalides.

On my passage through Milan, a great people aroused was for a moment opening its eyes. Italy was recovering from her sleep, and remembering her genius as it were a heavenly dream: useful to our reviving country, she brought to the shabbiness of our poverty the grandeur of the Transalpine nature, nurtured as she was, that Ausonia, on the master-pieces of the arts and the lofty reminiscences of the famous motherland. Austria has come; she has again laid her cloak of lead over the Italians; she has forced them back into their coffin. Rome has re-entered her ruins, Venice her sea. Venice sank down, while beautifying the sky with her last smile; she set all charming in her waves, like a star doomed to rise no more.

General Murat was in command at Milan. I had a letter for him from Madame Bacciochi. I spent the day with the aides-de-camp; these were not so poor as my comrades before Thionville. French politeness reappeared under arms; it was bent upon showing that it still belonged to the days of Lautrec[538].

I dined in state, on the 23rd of June, with M. de Melzi[539], on the occasion of the christening of a son of General Murat[540]. M. de Melzi had known my brother; the manners of the Vice-President of the Cisalpine Republic were distinguished; his household resembled that of a prince who had never been anything else. He treated me politely and coldly; he found me in exactly the same disposition as himself.

[Sidenote: First glimpses of Rome.]

I reached my destination on the evening of the 27th of June, the day before the eve of St. Peter's Day[541]. The Prince of Apostles was awaiting me, even as my indigent patron[542] received me since at Jerusalem. I had followed the road of Florence, Siena, and Radicofani. I hastened to go to call upon M. Cacault[543], whom Cardinal Fesch was succeeding, while I was replacing M. Artaud[544].

On the 28th of June, I ran about all day, and cast a first glance upon the Coliseum, the Pantheon, the Trajan Column, and the Castle of St. Angelo. In the evening, M. Artaud took me to a ball at a house in the neighbourhood of the Piazza San-Pietro. One saw the fiery girandole of the dome of Michael Angelo in between the whirling waltzes spinning before the open windows; the rockets of the fireworks on the Molo d'Adriano spread out brilliantly at Sant' Onofrio, over Tasso's tomb: silence, solitude and night filled the Roman Campagna.

The next day, I assisted at the St. Peter's Mass. Pius VII.[545], pale, sad and religious, was the real pontiff of tribulations. Two days later I was presented to His Holiness: he made me sit beside him. A volume of the _Génie du Christianisme_ lay open, in an obliging fashion, upon his table. Cardinal Consalvi[546], supple and firm, gently and politely resistant, was the living embodiment of the old Roman policy, minus the faith of those days and plus the tolerance of the century.

When going through the Vatican, I stopped to contemplate those staircases which one can ascend on mule-back, those sloping galleries folding one upon the other, adorned with master-pieces, along which the popes of old used to pass with all their pomp, those _loggie_ decorated by so many immortal artists, admired by so many illustrious men, Petrarch, Tasso, Ariosto, Montaigne, Milton, Montesquieu, and queens and kings, mighty or fallen, and a whole people of pilgrims from the four quarters of the globe: all that now without movement or sound; a theatre whose deserted tiers, open to solitude alone, are scarce visited by a ray of the sun.

I had been advised to take a walk by moonlight: from the top of the Trinità-del-Monte, the distant buildings looked like a painter's sketches or like softened coast-lines seen from the deck of a ship at sea. The orb of night, that globe supposed to be an extinct world, turned its pale deserts above the deserts of Rome; it cast its light upon streets without inhabitants, closes, squares, gardens where none passed, monasteries where the voices of the cenobites were no longer heard, cloisters as mute and desolate as the porticoes of the Coliseum.

What happened, eighteen centuries ago, at this very hour and in this very spot? What men have here crossed the shadow of those obelisks, after that shadow had ceased to fall upon the sands of Egypt? Not only is Ancient Italy no more, but the Italy of the Middle Ages has disappeared. Nevertheless, traces of the two Italies still linger in the Eternal City: where modern Rome shows its St. Peter's and its master-pieces, ancient Rome boasts its Pantheon and its remains; where, on the one hand, the consuls walked down from the Capitol, on the other, the pontiffs issued from the Vatican. The Tiber separates the two glories: seated in the same dust, pagan Rome sinks deeper and deeper into its tombs, and Christian Rome glides slowly into its catacombs.

*

Cardinal Fesch had hired the Palazzo Lancelotti, not far from the Tiber: I have since seen the Principessa Lancelotti there, in 1828. The top floor of the palace was allotted to me; when I entered, so large a number of fleas hopped on to my legs that my white trousers were quite black with them. The Abbé de Bonnevie and I did the best we could to get our lodging washed down. I had a feeling as though I had returned to my kennel in the New Road; this memory of my poverty was not altogether unpleasant. Once settled in this diplomatic corner, I began to deliver pass-ports and to busy myself with functions of similar importance. My handwriting was an obstacle to my talents, and Cardinal Fesch shrugged his shoulders whenever he saw my signature. As I had almost nothing to do in my aerial chamber, I looked across the roofs at some washing-girls in a neighbouring house, who made signs to me; a future opera-singer, practising her voice, persecuted me with her everlasting _solfeggio_; I was happy when some funeral passed by for a change! From my lofty window I saw, in the abyss of the street below, the convoy of a young mother: she was carried, her face uncovered, between two files of white pilgrims; her new-born babe, dead too and crowned with flowers, lay at her feet.

[Sidenote: My work at the embassy.]

I committed a great mistake: I very innocently believed it my duty to call upon illustrious personages; I coolly went and paid the tribute of my respects to the ex-King of Sardinia[547]. This unusual proceeding caused a terrible hubbub; the diplomatists all drew themselves up.

"He is lost! he is lost!" whispered all the train-bearers and _attachés_, with the charitable pleasure which men take in the mishaps of any of their fellow-creatures. No diplomatic dunce but thought himself superior to me by the full height of his stupidity. Every one hoped for my fall, notwithstanding that I was nobody and counted as nobody; no matter, it was some one who fell, and that is always agreeable. I, in my simplicity, had no notion of my crime, nor, as ever since, would I have given a straw for any place whatever. Kings, to whom I was believed to attach so great an importance, had in my eyes only that of misfortune. My shocking blunders were reported from Rome to Paris: luckily I had to do with Bonaparte; what should have been my ruin saved me.

However, if at once and at the first leap to become First Secretary of Embassy under a prince of the Church, an uncle of Napoleon, seemed something, it was nevertheless as though I had been a copying-clerk in a prefect's office. In the contests that were at hand, I might have found work; but I was initiated into no mysteries. I was perfectly satisfied to be set to the litigious business of the _chancellerie_: but what was the use of wasting my time over details within the capacity of all the clerks?

On returning from my long walks and my rambles along the Tiber, all that I found to interest me was the cardinal's parsimonious worrying, the heraldic boasting of the Bishop of Châlons, and the incredible lying of the future Bishop of Morocco[548]. The Abbé Guillon, taking advantage of a similarity between his name and one almost identical in sound, pretended that he was the man who, after escaping by a miracle from the massacre at the Carmes, gave absolution to Madame de Lamballe[549] at the Force. He bragged that he had been the author of Robespierre's speech to the Supreme Being. I bet one day that I would make him say that he had been to Russia: he did not quite agree to this, but he modestly confessed that he had spent a few months in St. Petersburg.

M. de La Maisonfort[550], a man of intelligence, then in hiding, applied to me for assistance, and soon M. Bertin the Elder[551], proprietor of the _Débats_, helped me with his friendly offices in a painful circumstance. Exiled to the island of Elba by the man who, when himself returned from Elba, drove him to Ghent, M. Bertin, in 1803, had obtained from the Republican M. Briot[552], whom I have known, leave to complete his exile in Italy. With him I visited the ruins of Rome, and was present at the death of Madame de Beaumont: two things which have connected his life with mine. A refined critic, he gave me, as did his brother, excellent advice about my works. Had he been elected to Parliament, he would have shown a real talent for oratory. He had long been a Legitimist, had undergone the trial of imprisonment in the Temple and transportation to Elba, and his principles have in reality remained the same. I will be true to the companion of my sad days; it would be paying too high a price for all the political opinions of the world to sacrifice one hour of sincere friendship: it is enough that my opinions will never vary, and that I shall remain attached to my memories.

[Sidenote: The Princesse Borghèse.]

About the middle of my stay in Rome, the Princesse Borghèse[553] arrived; I had some shoes to deliver to her from Paris. I was presented to her; she made her toilet in my presence; the slippers which she put on her young and pretty feet were but for a moment to tread this ancient soil.

At last a sorrow came to give me occupation: we can always rely upon that resource.

*

At the time of my departure from France we had greatly blinded ourselves regarding Madame de Beaumont's condition; she cried much, and her will has proved that she believed herself to be condemned. Nevertheless her friends, refraining from communicating their fears to one another, sought to console each other; they believed in the miraculous powers of the waters, to be perfected later by the Italian sun; they separated and took different roads; appointments were made in Rome.

Fragments written by Madame de Beaumont in Paris, at Mont-Dore, in Rome, and discovered among her papers, display her state of mind:

"PARIS.

"For some years past my health has been perceptibly declining. Symptoms which I thought to be the signal for departure have supervened before I am ready to depart. The illusions increase as the illness progresses. I have seen many examples of that singular weakness, and I perceive that they will avail me nothing. Already I find myself taking remedies which are as irksome as they are insignificant, and I shall doubtless have no greater strength to protect myself against the cruel remedies with which they never fail to martyrize those condemned to die of consumption. Like the others, I shall abandon myself to hope: to hope! Can I, then, wish to live? My past life has been a series of misfortunes, my present life is full of excitements and disturbances: peace of mind has fled from me for ever. My death would be a momentary sorrow to a few, a boon to others, and the greatest of boons to myself.

"This 21st of Floréal, 10 May, is the anniversary of the death of my mother and brother:

Je péris la dernière et la plus misérable[554]!

[Sidenote: Illness of madame de Beaumont.]

"Oh, why have I not the courage to die? This illness, which I was almost weak enough to dread, has subsided, and perhaps I am condemned still to live long; it seems to me, nevertheless, that I would gladly die:

Mes jours ne valent pas qu'il m'en coûte un soupir[555].

"None has more cause than I to complain of nature: by refusing me everything, it has given me the sense of all I lack. At every moment I feel the weight of the complete mediocrity to which I am condemned. I know that self-content and happiness are often the price of this mediocrity of which I complain so bitterly; but by not adding to it the gift of illusion, nature, in my case, has turned it into a torture. I am like a fallen creature who cannot forget what he has lost, and who has not the force to recover it. That absolute lack of illusion, and hence of enthusiasm, is the cause of my unhappiness in a thousand ways. I judge myself as a stranger might do, and I see my friends as they are. My only value lies in an extreme kindness of heart, which is not active enough to command appreciation, nor to be of any real use, and which loses all its charm owing to the impatience of my character: my suffering from the misfortunes of others is greater than my power to relieve them. Nevertheless, I owe to it the few real joys that have occurred in my life; I owe to it especially my ignorance of envy, the common attribute of conscious mediocrity."

"MONT DORE.

"I had intended to enter into a few details concerning myself, but _ennui_ causes the pen to drop from my fingers.

"All the bitterness and painfulness of my position would change to happiness if I were sure that I had but a few months to live.

"Even if I had the strength myself to end my sorrows in the only possible way, I should not exert it: it would be defeating my own intention, showing the measure of my suffering, and leaving too grievous a wound in the heart which I have deemed worthy to sustain me in my trials.

"I 'beseech myself in tears' to take a step which is as rigorous as it is inevitable. Charlotte Corday says that 'every act of self-sacrifice bestows more pleasure in the execution than it has cost pain in the conception;' but her death was near at hand, and I may still live long. What will become of me? Where can I hide? What tomb shall I choose? How can I shut out hope? What power can block up the door?

"To go away in silence, to court oblivion, to bury myself for ever, that is the duty laid upon me which I hope to have the courage to fulfill. If the cup is too bitter, once I am forgotten, nothing can compel me to empty it to the dregs, and who knows but my life may, after all, not be so long as I fear.

"If I had decided upon the place of my retirement, I believe I should be more calm; but the difficulty of the moment adds to the difficulties that arise from my weakness, and it requires something supernatural to act against one's self with vigour, to treat one's self as harshly as a violent and cruel enemy could do."

"ROME, 28 _October._

"During the past ten months I have never ceased to suffer. During the last six, all the symptoms of consumption, and some in the last degree: I lack only the illusions, and maybe I have some!"

M. Joubert, alarmed at this desire for death which was torturing Madame de Beaumont, addressed these words to her in his _Pensées_:

"Love life and respect it, if not for its own sake, at least for that of your friends. In whatever state your own may be, I shall always prefer to know that you are occupied in spinning it out rather than in tearing it to pieces."

At the same time my sister was writing to Madame de Beaumont. I have the correspondence, which death placed in my hands. The poetry of the ancients pictures one of the Nereids as a flower floating on the deep; Lucile was that flower. In comparing her letters with the fragments just quoted, one is struck by the similarity of heart-heaviness expressed in the different language of those unhappy angels. When I think that I have lived in the company of such minds as those, I am surprised at my own insignificance. My eyes never light without bitter grief upon those pages written by two superlative women, who vanished from this earth at a short distance one from the other.

"LASCARDAIS, 30 _July._

"I was so much charmed, madame, at last to receive a letter from you that I did not allow myself the time to have the pleasure of reading it through at once: I interrupted its perusal to go and tell all the inmates of this house that I had heard from you, without considering that my gladness is of but little importance here, and that hardly anyone even knows that I am in correspondence with you. Seeing that I was surrounded by indifferent faces, I went back to my room, and determined to be glad by myself. I sat down to finish reading your letter, and, although I have read it over many times, in truth, madame, I do not know the whole contents. The joy which I constantly feel at the sight of this so long desired letter interferes with the attention which I ought to give to it.

[Sidenote: Letters from Lucile.]

"And so you are going away, madame? Do not, once you have reached Mont-Dore, forget your health; give it all your care, I entreat you, with all the fervour and affection of my heart. My brother has written to me that he hopes to see you in Italy. Fate and nature alike are pleased to distinguish him from me in a very favourable manner. But at least I will not yield to my brother the happiness of loving you: that I will share with him all my life. Alas, madame, how oppressed and downcast is my heart! You cannot know the good your letters do me, the contempt with which they inspire me for my ills! The idea that you think of me, that you are interested in me, exalts my courage extraordinarily. Write to me therefore, madame, so that I may cherish an idea so essential to me.

"I have not yet seen M. Chênedollé; I long greatly for his arrival. I shall be able to tell him of you and of M. Joubert: that will be a great pleasure to me. Allow me, madame, once more to urge you to think of your health, the bad condition of which incessantly afflicts me and occupies my thoughts. How can you not love yourself? You are so lovable and so dear to all: have the justice, then, to do much for yourself.

"LUCILE."

"2 _September._

"What you tell me, madame, of your health alarms and saddens me; however, I reassure myself by thinking of your youth and remembering that, although you are very delicate, you are full of life.

"I am disconsolate at your being in a country which you do not like. I would wish to see you surrounded with objects calculated to distract and to cheer you. I hope that, when your health recovers, you will become reconciled to Auvergne: there is no spot incapable of presenting some beauty to such eyes as yours. I am now living at Rennes: my loneliness suits me fairly well. I change my residence frequently, madame, as you see; it looks much as though I were out of place on the earth: in reality, it is long since I first began to look upon myself as one of its superfluous products. I believe, madame, that I spoke to you of my sorrows and perturbations. At present, all that is over, and I enjoy an inward peace of which none has it any longer in his power to rob me. In spite of my age, having, through circumstances and taste, almost constantly led a solitary life, I knew nothing whatever, madame, of the world: I have at last made that disagreeable acquaintance. Fortunately, reflection came to my aid. I asked myself in what way that world could be so formidable and where lay the worth of a world which can never, in evil and good alike, be aught but an object of pity. Is it not true, madame, that man's judgment is as shallow as the rest of his being, as changeable and of an incredulity as great as its ignorance? All these reasons, good or bad, have enabled me to fling behind me with ease the fantastic garment in which I had arrayed myself. I found myself full of sincerity and strength; I am no longer capable of being troubled. I am working with all my might to recover possession of my life, to obtain entire control of it.

"You must also, madame, believe that I am not too much to be pitied, since my brother, the best part of myself, is agreeably placed, and since I have eyes left with which to admire the marvels of nature, God for my support, and for an asylum a heart full of peace and gentle memories. If you have the kindness, madame, to continue to write to me, that will be a great added happiness to me."

*

Mystery of style, a mystery everywhere perceptible, nowhere present; the revelation of a painfully privileged nature; the ingenuousness of a girl whom one might imagine to be in her first youth; and the humble simplicity of a genius unaware of its own power, all breathe out of these letters, a large number of which I have suppressed. Did Madame de Sévigné write to Madame de Grignan with a more grateful affection than Madame de Caud to Madame de Beaumont? "Her tenderness might well pretend to keep pace with her own." My sister loved my friend with all the passion of the tomb, for she felt that she was going to die. Lucile had hardly ever left the neighbourhood of the Rochers[556]; but she was the daughter of her century and the Sévigné of solitude.

*

A letter from M. Ballanche, dated 30 Fructidor, informed me of the arrival of Madame de Beaumont, who had come from Mont Dore on her way to Italy. He told me that I need not fear the misfortune which I dreaded, and that the health of the sufferer seemed to be improving. On reaching Milan, Madame de Beaumont met M. Bertin, who had been called there on business: he had the kindness to take charge of the poor traveller and to escort her to Florence, where I had gone to meet her. I was shocked at the sight of her. She had but sufficient strength left to smile. After a few days' rest, we left for Rome, travelling at a foot-pace, in order to avoid the jolting. Madame de Beaumont received assiduous attentions everywhere: a charm interested you in this lovable woman, so suffering and so forlorn. The very maids at the inns gave way to this sweet commiseration.

[Sidenote: Mournful days.]

My feelings may be easily guessed: we have all accompanied friends to the grave, but they were mute, and no remnant of inexplicable hope came to render your sorrow more keen. I no longer saw the fine landscape through which we passed. I had taken the Perugian road: what was Italy to me? I still thought her climate too severe, and, if the wind blew ever so little, its breezes seemed storms to me. At Terni, Madame de Beaumont spoke of going to see the cascade; she made an effort to lean on my arm, and sat down again, saying:

"We must leave the waters to flow without us."

I had hired for her in Rome a lonely house near the Piazza d'Espagna, at the foot of the Monte Pincio[557]; it had a little garden with orange-trees growing against the walls, and a court-yard in which stood a fig-tree. There I set down my dying charge. I had had much difficulty in procuring this retreat, for there is a prejudice in Rome against diseases of the chest, which are considered as infectious.

At that period of the revival of social order, all that had belonged to the old monarchy was sought after. The Pope sent to inquire after the daughter of M. de Montmorin; Cardinal Consalvi and the members of the Sacred College followed His Holiness' example; Cardinal Fesch himself showed Madame de Beaumont, to the day of her death, marks of deference and respect which I should not have expected of him. I had written to M. Joubert of the anxiety with which I was torn before Madame de Beaumont's arrival:

"Our friend writes to me from Mont Dore," I said, "letters that shatter my soul: she says that she feels 'that there is no more oil in the lamp;' she speaks of 'the last throbs of her heart.' Why was she left alone on this journey? Why did you not write to her? What will become of us if we lose her? Who will console us for her? We realize the value of our friends only at the moment when we are threatened with their loss. We are even mad enough, when all is well, to think that we can leave them with impunity. Heaven punishes us; it snatches them from us, and we are appalled at the solitude which they leave around us. Forgive me, my dear Joubert: to-day I feel as though my heart were twenty years old; this Italy has made me young again; I love all that is dear to me with the same vehemence as in my early years. Sorrow is my element: I am myself again only when I am unhappy. My friends at present are of so rare a sort that the mere dread of seeing them taken from me freezes my blood. Bear with my lamentations: I am sure you are as unhappy as I. Write to me, and write also to that other Breton unfortunate."

At first, Madame de Beaumont felt a little relieved. The sufferer herself began again to believe in her life. I had the satisfaction of thinking that at least Madame de Beaumont would not leave me again: I expected to take her to Naples in the spring, and from there to send in my resignation to the Minister for Foreign Affairs. M. d'Agincourt[558], that true philosopher, came to see the light bird of passage, which had stopped at Rome before proceeding to the unknown land; M. Boquet, already the oldest of our painters, called. These relays of hope kept up the sufferer, and lulled her with an illusion which at the bottom of her soul she no longer retained. Letters, cruel to read, expressing hopes and fears, reached me from every side. On the 4th of October, Lucile wrote to me from Rennes:

*

[Sidenote: Letters from Lucile.]

"I commenced a letter for you the other day; I have just made a useless search for it; in it I spoke to you of Madame de Beaumont, and complained of her silence towards me. Dear, what a sad, strange life I have led for some months! And the words of the prophet are constantly recurring to my mind: 'He will crown thee with tribulation, he will toss thee like a ball[559].' But let us leave my troubles and speak of your anxieties. I cannot persuade myself that they are justified. I always see Madame de Beaumont full of life and youth, and almost incorporeal; my heart can feel no foreboding where she is concerned. Heaven, which knows our feelings for her, will doubtless preserve her for us. Dear, we shall not lose her; I seem to have an inward sense that that is certain. I sincerely hope that, when you receive this letter, your anxiety will have disappeared. Tell her from me of all the real and tender interest I take in her; tell her that to me her memory is one of the most beautiful things in this world. Keep your promise and do not fail to let me have news of her as often as possible. Alas, what a long time will elapse before I receive a reply to this letter! How cruel a thing is distance! What makes you speak of your return to France? You are trying to humour me, you are deceiving me. Amid all my troubles there arises one sweet thought, that of your friendship, the thought that I exist in your memory in the shape in which it has pleased God to fashion me. Dear, I see no other safe shelter for me upon earth but your heart; I am a stranger and unknown to all the rest. Adieu, my poor brother. Shall I see you again? This idea does not present itself to my mind very distinctly. If you see me again, I fear you will find me quite out of my senses. Adieu, you to whom I owe so much! Adieu, unmixed felicity! O memories of my happy days, can you not now lighten a little my sad hours?

"I am not one of those who exhaust all their sorrow at the moment of separation; each day adds to the grief which I feel at your absence and, if you were to stay in Rome a hundred years, you would not come to the end of that grief. In order to delude myself as to absence, not a day passes but I read some pages of your work: I make every effort to imagine that I hear you speak. My love for you is very natural: ever since our childhood you have been my protector and my friend; you have never cost me a tear, never made a friend but he has become mine. My kind brother, Heaven, which is pleased to make sport of all my other felicities, wills that I should find my happiness wholly in you, that I should trust myself to your heart. Give me news soon of Madame de Beaumont. Address your letters to me at Mademoiselle Lamotte's, although I do not know how long I shall be able to remain there. Since our last separation, I have always, where my house is concerned, been like a quicksand that gives way beneath my feet: assuredly to anyone who does not know me I must appear incomprehensible; nevertheless I vary only in form, for inwardly I remain constantly the same."

The song of the swan preparing to die was conveyed by me to the dying swan: I was the echo of that last ineffable music!

*

[Sidenote: And Madame de Krüdener.]

Another letter, very different from the above, but written by a woman who has played an extraordinary part, Madame de Krüdener[560], shows the empire which Madame de Beaumont, with no strength of beauty, fame, power, or wealth, exercised over people's minds:

"PARIS, 24 _November_ 1803.

"I learnt two days ago from M. Michaud[561], who has returned from Lyons, that Madame de Beaumont was in Rome and that she was very, very ill: that is what he told me. I was deeply grieved by this; I had a nervous shock, and I thought a great deal of this charming woman, whom I had not known long, but whom I loved truly. How often have I wished for her happiness! How often have I hoped that she might cross the Alps and find beneath the sky of Italy the sweet and profound emotions which I myself have there experienced! Alas, can she have reached that delightful country only to know pain and to be exposed to dangers which I dread! I cannot tell you how this idea grieves me. Forgive me if I have been so much absorbed by this that I have not yet spoken to you of yourself, my dear Chateaubriand; you must know my sincere attachment for you, and to show you the genuine interest which I take in Madame de Beaumont is to touch you more than I should have done by writing of yourself. I have that sad spectacle before my eyes; I have the secret of sorrow, and my soul is always torn at the sight of those souls to which nature gives the power of suffering more than others. I had hoped that Madame de Beaumont would enjoy the privilege which she had received, of being happier; I had hoped that she would recover some little health with the sun of Italy and the happiness of having you by her side. Ah, reassure me, speak to me; tell her that I love her sincerely, that I pray for her! Has she had my letter written in reply to hers to Clermont? Address your answer to Michaud: I ask you only for one word, for I know, my dear Chateaubriand, how sensitive you are, and how you suffer. I thought she was better; I did not write to her; I was overwhelmed with business; but I thought of the happiness she would find in seeing you again, and I imagined how it would be. Tell me something of your own health; believe in my friendship, in the interest which I have vowed to you for ever, and do not forget me.

"B. KRÜDENER."

The improvement which the air of Rome had produced in Madame de Beaumont did not last: true, the indications of an immediate dissolution disappeared; but it seems that the last moment always lingers as it were to deceive us. Two or three times, I had tried the effect of a drive with the patient; I strove to divert her thoughts by pointing out the country and the sky to her: she no longer cared for anything. One day I took her to the Coliseum: it was one of those October days that are to be seen only in Rome. She contrived to alight, and went and sat upon a stone facing one of the altars placed in the circle. She raised her eyes and turned them slowly around those porticoes which had themselves so many years been dead, and which had seen so many die; the ruins were adorned with briers and columbines saffroned by autumn and bathed in light. The dying woman next lowered her eyes, which had left the sun, stage by stage, till they came to the arena; she fixed them upon the altar cross, and said:

"Let us go; I am cold."

I took her home again; she went to bed and rose no more. I was in correspondence with the Comte de La Luzerne[562]; I sent him from Rome, by each mail, the bulletin of his sister-in-law's health. He had taken my brother with him when Louis XVI. charged him with a diplomatic mission to London: André Chénier was a member of this embassy.

The doctors, whom I called together again after the experiment of the drive, declared to me that nothing but a miracle could save Madame de Beaumont. She was impressed with the idea that she would not outlive All Souls' Day, the 2nd of November; then she remembered that one of her kinsmen, I do not know which, had died on the 4th of November. I told her that her imagination was troubled; that she would come to see the falsity of her alarms; she replied, to console me:

"Ah, yes, I shall go farther!"

She noticed a few tears which I was trying to conceal from her; she held out her hand to me, and said:

"You are a child; were you not prepared for it?"

On the eve of her death, Thursday the 3rd of November, she seemed more composed. She spoke to me of the disposal of her property, and said, speaking of her will, "that all was settled, but that all had to be done, and that she would have liked to have had only two hours in which to see to it."

In the evening, the doctor told me that he felt obliged to warn the sufferer that the time had come for her to think of setting her conscience in order: I broke down for a minute; I was staggered by the fear of hastening the few moments which Madame de Beaumont had still to live by the formal preparations for death. I railed at the doctor, and then entreated him to wait at least till the next day.

I passed a cruel night, with this secret locked in my bosom. The patient did not permit me to spend it in her room. I remained outside, trembling at every sound I heard: when the door was half opened, I perceived the feeble gleam of an expiring night-light.

[Sidenote: The last scene.]

On Friday the 4th of November, I entered, followed by the doctor. Madame de Beaumont observed my agitation, and said:

"Why do you look like that? I have had a good night."

The doctor thereupon intentionally told me aloud that he wished to speak to me in the next room. I went out: when I returned, I no longer knew if I lived. Madame de Beaumont asked me what the doctor wanted. I flung myself at her bedside and burst into tears. She lay for a moment without speaking, looked at me, and said in a firm voice, as though she wished to give me strength:

"I did not think that it was quite so near; well, the time has come to say good-bye. Send for the Abbé de Bonnevie."

The Abbé de Bonnevie, having obtained powers, went to Madame de Beaumont. She told him that she had always had a deep religious feeling at heart, but that the extraordinary misfortunes which had befallen her during the Revolution had led her for some time to doubt the justice of Providence; that she was ready to admit her errors and to recommend herself to the eternal mercy; that she hoped, however, that the ills which she had suffered in this world would shorten her time of expiation in the next. She made a sign to me to withdraw, and remained alone with her confessor.

I saw him come back an hour later, wiping his eyes, and saying that he had never heard more beautiful language, nor seen such heroism. The parish priest was sent for to administer the sacraments. I returned to Madame de Beaumont. When she saw me, she asked:

"Well, are you pleased with me?"

She spoke feelingly of what she deigned to call "my kindness" to her: ah, if I had at that moment been able to buy back a single one of her days by the sacrifice of all my own, how gladly would I have done so! Madame de Beaumont's other friends, who were not present at this sight, had at all events but once to weep for her: whereas I stood at the head of the bed of pain in which man hears his last hour strike, and each smile of the patient restored me to life and made me lose it again as it died away. One lamentable thought distracted me: I noticed that Madame de Beaumont had not until her last breath suspected the real attachment which I bore for her; she did not cease to show her surprise, and she seemed to die disconsolate and charmed. She had believed herself a burden to me, and had wished to go to set me free.

The priest arrived at eleven o'clock: the room filled with that indifferent crowd of idlers which cannot be prevented from running after the priest in Rome. Madame de Beaumont faced the formidable solemnity without the least sign of fear. We fell upon our knees, and the patient received Communion and Extreme Unction at once. When all had retired, she made me sit on the edge of her bed and spoke to me for half an hour of my affairs and of my plans with the greatest elevation of mind and the most touching friendship; she urged me, above all, to live with Madame de Chateaubriand and M. Joubert: but was M. Joubert himself to live?

She asked me to open the window, as she felt oppressed. A sun-ray came and lit up her bed: this seemed to cheer her. She then reminded me of plans for retiring to the country which we had sometimes discussed, and she began to cry.

Between two and three in the afternoon, Madame de Beaumont asked to be changed to another bed by Madame Saint-Germain[563], an old Spanish lady's-maid, who waited on her with the affection worthy of so kind a mistress: the doctor forbade this, fearing lest Madame de Beaumont might die during the moving. She then told me that she felt the agony approach. Suddenly she flung back her blanket, held out her hand to me, pressed mine convulsively; her eyes wandered. With her one free hand she made signs to some one whom she saw standing at the foot of her bed; then, bringing the hand back to her breast, she said:

"It is there!"

[Sidenote: Death of madame de Beaumont.]

Dismayed, I asked her if she knew me: a faint smile broke through her delirium; she gave me a little nod of the head: her speech already was no longer of this world. The convulsions lasted only a few minutes. We supported her in our arms, the doctor, the nurse, and myself: one of my hands lay upon her heart, which could be felt against her wasted frame; it beat swiftly, like a clock winding off its broken chain. Oh, moment of fear and horror, I felt it stop! We let down upon her pillow the woman who had found rest; her head drooped. Some locks of her uncurled hair fell over her forehead; her eyes were closed, night had set in for ever. The doctor held a mirror and a light to the stranger's mouth: the mirror was not dimmed with the breath of life and the light remained unmoved. All was ended.

*

Generally those who weep are able to indulge their tears in peace; there are others to take upon themselves to attend to the last cares of religion: as representing for France the Cardinal Minister, then absent, and as the sole friend of M. de Montmorin's daughter and responsible to her family, I was obliged to superintend everything; I had to fix the place of burial, to look after the depth and width of the grave, to order the winding-sheet and to give the carpenter the dimensions of the coffin.

Two monks watched by the coffin, which was to be carried to San Luigi dei Francesi. One of these fathers was from Auvergne and a native of Montmorin itself. Madame de Beaumont had expressed the wish to be buried in a piece of cloth which her brother Auguste[564], the only one to escape the scaffold, had sent her from the Mauritius. This cloth was not in Rome; only a piece of it was found, which she always carried with her. Madame Saint-Germain fastened this strip around the body with a cornelian containing some of M. de Montmorin's hair. The French ecclesiastics were invited; the Princesse Borghèse lent the funeral car of her family; Cardinal Fesch had left orders, in case of an accident but too clearly foreseen, to send his livery and his carriages. On Saturday the 5th of November, at seven o'clock in the evening, by the gleam of torch-light and amidst a large crowd, Madame de Beaumont passed along the road where we have all to pass. On Sunday the 6th of November, the burial mass was celebrated. The funeral would have been less French in Paris than it was in Rome. That religious architecture which displays in its ornaments the arms and inscriptions of our ancient country; those tombs on which are inscribed the names of some of the most historic families of our annals; that church, under the protection of a great saint, a great king and a great man: all this did not console misfortune, but honoured it. I had wished that the last scion of a once exalted race should at least find some support in my humble attachment, and that friendship should not fail it as fortune had done.

The people of Rome, accustomed to strangers, accept them as brothers and sisters. Madame de Beaumont left a pious memory behind her on that soil so hospitable to the dead; she is still remembered: I have seen Leo XII.[565] pray at her tomb[566]. In 1828[567], I visited the monument of her who was the soul of a vanishing society; the sound of my footsteps around this silent monument, in a lonely church, was a warning to me:

"I shall always love thee," says the Greek epitaph; "but thou, among the dead, drink not, I pray thee, of the cup which would cause thee to forget thy former friends[568]."

If the calamities of a private life were to be measured by the scale of public events, those calamities would hardly deserve a word in a writer's Memoirs. Who has not lost a friend? Who has not seen him die? Who could not recall a similar scene of mourning? The comment is just, yet no one has ever corrected himself of telling his own adventures: sailors on board the ship that carries them have a family on shore of whom they think and of whom they talk with one another. Every man has within himself a world apart, foreign to the laws and to the general destinies of the ages. It is, moreover, a mistake to believe that revolutions, famous accidents, resounding catastrophes are the only records of our nature: we all labour singly at the chain of our common history, and all these separate existences together compose man's universe in the eyes of God.

[Sidenote: Letters of sympathy.]

To collect regrets around the ashes of Madame de Beaumont is but to lay upon her tomb the wreaths intended for her:

M. DE CHÊNEDOLLÉ TO CHATEAUBRIAND.

"You can have no doubt, my dear', unhappy friend, of the great part which I take in your affliction. My grief is not so great as yours, because that is impossible; but I am very deeply afflicted by this loss, which darkens yet further this existence which for so long has been nothing but suffering to me. It is thus that all that is good, lovable and sensitive vanishes from the face of the earth. My poor friend, hasten back to France; come and seek consolation with your old friend. You know how well I love you: come.

"I was excessively anxious about you: it was more than three months since I had heard from you, and three of my letters have remained unanswered. Have you received them? Madame de Caud suddenly ceased writing to me two months ago. This hurt me mortally, and yet I cannot think that I have done anything to offend her. But, whatever she may do, she can never take from me the fond and respectful friendship which I have vowed to her for life. Fontanes and Joubert also no longer write to me; so that all whom I loved seem to have combined to forget me at once. Do not you forget me, O my good friend: leave me one heart upon which I can rely in this vale of tears! Farewell, I embrace you weeping. Be sure, my good friend, that I feel your loss as it should be felt.

"23 _November_ 1803."

M. DE FONTANES TO CHATEAUBRIAND.

"I share all your regrets, my dear friend: I feel the painfulness of your position. To die so young, and after outliving all her family! But, at any rate, that interesting and unhappy woman did not lack the help and the remembrance of friendship. Her memory will live in hearts worthy of her. I have forwarded to M. de La Luzerne the touching account intended for him. Old Saint-Germain, your friend's servant, has taken it with him. That faithful attendant made me shed tears when talking of his mistress. I told him that he had a legacy of ten thousand francs; but he did not give it a single thought. If it were possible to talk of money matters under such mournful circumstances, I would say that it would have been very natural to have given you at least the use of a fortune which will have to pass to distant and almost unknown collaterals[569]. I approve of your conduct; I know your delicacy; but I cannot be as disinterested for my friend as he is for himself. I confess that this omission surprises and pains me[570]. Madame de Beaumont spoke to you on her death-bed, with the eloquence of a last farewell, of the future and of your destinies. Her voice must needs have greater strength than mine. But did she advise you to throw up a salary of eight or ten thousand francs just when your path was cleared of its first thorns? Could you rashly, my dear friend, take so momentous a step? You know what a pleasure it would be to me to see you again. Were I only to consult my own happiness, I would say, 'Come at once.' But your interests are as dear to me as my own, and I see no immediate prospects for you which could make good the advantages which you are voluntarily surrendering. I know that your talents, your name and your industry will never leave you in want of the first necessities; but in all that I see more fame than fortune. Your education, your habits, demand some little expenditure. Reputation alone will not provide the wants of life, and the wretched science of 'bread and cheese' takes precedence of all others, if you want to be independent and at ease. I trust that nothing will persuade you to seek your fortune among foreigners. Believe me, my friend, after the first blandishments, they are worth even less than one's fellow-countrymen. If your loving friend made all these reflections, her last moments must have been somewhat disturbed; but I hope that, at the foot of her grave, you will find lessons and lights superior to any which your remaining friends could give you. That amiable woman loved you: she will advise you well. Her memory and your heart will be a safe guide to you: I have no more concern if you listen to them both. Adieu, my dear friend, I embrace you tenderly."

M. Necker wrote me the only letter which I ever received from him. I had witnessed the delight of the Court at the dismissal of this minister, the disregard of whose honest warnings contributed to the overthrow of the monarchy. He had been M. de Montmorin's colleague. M. Necker was shortly to die at the place whence his letter was dated; not at that time having Madame de Staël by his side, he found some tears for his daughter's friend:

[Sidenote: M. Necker, Madame de Staël.]

M. NECKER TO CHATEAUBRIAND.

"SIR,

"My daughter, when setting out for Germany, asked me to open any packets of large size that might be addressed to her, so as to decide whether they were worth the trouble of forwarding by post. This is the reason of my learning the news of Madame de Beaumont's death before she does. I forwarded your letter to her, sir, at Frankfort, whence it will probably be sent on farther to her, perhaps to Weimar or Berlin. Do not, therefore, be surprised, sir, if you do not receive a reply from Madame de Staël as early as you have the right to expect. You must be assured, sir, of the grief which Madame de Staël will feel on hearing of the loss of a friend of whom I have always heard her speak with profound feeling. I join in her sorrow, I join, sir, in yours, and I have my own particular share when I think of the unhappy fate of the whole family of my friend M. de Montmorin.

"I see, sir, that you are on the point of leaving Rome to return to France: I hope you will choose your road through Geneva, where I shall spend the winter. I should be very eager to do you the honours of a town where you are already known by reputation. But where, sir, are you not so known? Your last work, sparkling with incomparable beauties, is in the hands of all who love to read.

"I have the honour, sir, to offer you the assurance and the homage of my most distinguished sentiments.

"NECKER.

"Coppet, 27 _November_ 1803."

MADAME DE STAËL TO CHATEAUBRIAND.

"FRANKFORT, 3 _December_ 1803.

"Ah, Heavens, my dear Francis[571] with what sorrow was I smitten on receiving your letter! Already, yesterday, this frightful news was burst upon me through the papers, and now comes your heart-rending narrative to engrave it for ever in letters of blood on my heart. Can you, can you speak to me of different opinions on religion, on the priests? Are there two opinions where there is but one sentiment? I have read your account through the most sorrowful tears. My dear Francis, think of the time at which you felt the greatest friendship for me; above all, do not forget that at which my whole heart was drawn towards you, and tell yourself that those feelings, more tender, more profound than ever, remain for you at the bottom of my soul. I loved, I admired the character of Madame de Beaumont: I knew not one more generous, more grateful, more passionately sensitive. Since I first entered into the world, I never ceased to have relations with her, and I always felt, even in the midst of some differences, that we held together by the same roots. My dear Francis, give me a place in your heart. I admire you, I love you, I loved her whom you regret. I am a devoted friend, I will be a sister to you. I must respect your opinions more than ever. Matthieu[572], who holds them, has been an angel to me in this last sorrow which I have felt. Give me a new reason for showing them my consideration: let me be useful or agreeable to you in some way. Did you hear that I had been banished to a distance of forty leagues from Paris[573]? I have taken the occasion to go round Germany; but in the spring I shall have returned to Paris itself, if my exile be ended, or near Paris, or to Geneva. Arrange that, in some manner, we may meet. Do you not feel that my mind and my soul understand yours, and do you not feel wherein we resemble each other, notwithstanding the differences? M. de Humboldt[574] wrote me a letter a few days ago in which he spoke to me of your work with an admiration which must flatter you in a man of his merit and opinions. But why speak to you of your successes at such a moment? Yet she loved those successes of yours, and attached her own fame to them. Farewell, my dear François. I will write to you from Weimar, in Saxony. Write to me there, to the care of Messrs. Desport, bankers. What harrowing phrases your story contains! And then your resolve to keep poor Saint-Germain: you must bring her to my house one day.

"Farewell, affectionately: and sorrowfully, farewell.

"M. DE STAËL."

This eager and affectionately informal letter, written by an illustrious woman, redoubled my emotion. Madame de Beaumont would have been very happy at that moment had Heaven permitted her to return to life! But our attachments, which are perceived by the dead, cannot free them from their bonds: when Lazarus rose from the tomb he was bound feet and hands with winding-bands, and his face was bound about with a napkin; but friendship cannot say, as Christ said to Martha and Mary:

"Loose him and let him go[575]."

My consolers have also passed away, and they claim for themselves the regrets which they gave to another.

*

[Sidenote: My grief.]

I had determined to leave this official career in which personal misfortunes had come in addition to the triviality of the work and to paltry political annoyances. One does not know what desolation of the heart means until one has remained alone, wandering through spots once inhabited by a person who accepted your life: you seek her and do not find her; she speaks to you, smiles to you, accompanies you; all that she has worn or touched presents her image; between her and you there is only a transparent curtain, but so heavy that you cannot raise it. The remembrance of the first friend who has left you on the road is a cruel one; for if your days have been prolonged, you have necessarily suffered other losses: the dead who have followed each other become linked to the first, and you mourn at one time and in one person all those whom you have successively lost.

At this distance from France, the arrangements which I was making progressed slowly; meanwhile I remained forlorn among the ruins of Rome. When I first walked out, the aspect of things seemed changed to me: I did not recognise the trees, nor the monuments, nor the sky; I wandered through the fields, along the cascades and aqueducts, as I had done before beneath the overhanging forests of the New World. Then I re-entered the Eternal City, which now added one more extinguished life to so many spent existences. By dint of my many rambles in the solitudes of the Tiber, they became so clearly engraved upon my memory that I was able to describe them fairly accurately in my Letter to M. de Fontanes[576]:

"If the traveller be unhappy," I said, "if he have mingled the ashes that he loved with so many ashes of the illustrious, what a charm will he not find in passing from the tomb of Cæcilia Metella to the grave of an ill-fortuned woman!"

It was also in Rome that I first formed the idea of writing the Memoirs of my Life; I find a few lines jotted down at random, from which I decipher these few words:

"After wandering over the world, spending the best years of my youth far from my native land, and suffering nearly all that man can suffer, not excluding hunger, I returned to Paris in 1800."

In a letter to M. Joubert[577] I thus sketched my plan:

"My only pleasure is to snatch a few hours wherein to busy myself with a work which alone can bring some assuagement to my grief: it is the Memoirs of my Life. Rome will have a place in it; it is in this way only that I can henceforth speak of Rome. Have no fear; there will be no confessions likely to give pain to my friends: if I am to count for anything in the future, my friends' names will therein appear glorified and respected. Nor shall I entertain posterity with the details of my frailties; I shall say of myself only what becomes my dignity as a man, and, I dare say it, the elevation of my heart. One should show to the world only what is beautiful; it is no lie against God to unveil of one's life no more than may lead our fellows towards noble and generous feelings. Not that, in truth, I have anything to conceal: I have not caused the dismissal of a servant-girl for a stolen ribbon, nor left my friend to die in the street, nor dishonoured the woman who sheltered me, nor taken my bastards to the Foundling Hospital[578]; but I have had my moments of weakness, of faint-heartedness: one sigh over myself will be sufficient to make others understand those common miseries, meant to be left behind the veil. What would society gain by the reproduction of sores that occur on every side? There is no lack of examples, where it is a question of triumphing over our poor human nature."

*

[Sidenote: I decide to write my memoirs.]

In this plan which I made for myself I omitted my family, my childhood, my youth, my travels, and my exile: yet these are the recitals in which I took most pleasure.

I had been like a happy slave: accustomed to apply his liberty to the vine-stocks, he no longer knows what to do with his leisure when his chains are broken. Whenever I decided to set to work, a figure came and placed itself before me, and I could not take my eyes from it: religion alone held me by its gravity and by the reflections of a higher order which it suggested to me.

And yet, while occupied with the thought of writing my Memoirs, I felt the price which the ancients attached to the value of their name: there is perhaps a touching reality in this perpetuity of the memories which one may leave on the way. Perhaps, among the great men of antiquity, this idea of an immortal life among the human race supplied the place of the immortality of the soul which for them remained a problem. If fame is but a small thing when it relates to ourselves, it must nevertheless be agreed that to give an imperishable existence to all that it has loved is one of the finest privileges attached to the friendship of genius.

I undertook a commentary upon certain books of the Bible, beginning with _Genesis._ Upon the verse, "Behold, Adam is become as one of us, knowing good and evil: now, therefore, lest perhaps he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever[579]," I remarked the tremendous irony of the Creator: "Behold Adam is become as one of us, etc. Lest perhaps the man put forth his hand and take of the tree of life." Why? Because he has tasted of the fruit of knowledge, and knows good and evil, he is now loaded with ills: "therefore, lest perhaps he live for ever." What a blessing from God is death!

There are prayers begun, some for "disquietude of soul," others "to strengthen one's self against the prosperity of the wicked." I sought to bring back to a centre of repose the thoughts which strayed beyond me.

As God was not pleased to let my life end there, reserving it for prolonged trials, the storms which had arisen abated. Suddenly the Cardinal Ambassador changed his manner towards me; I had an explanation with him, and declared my resolve to resign. He opposed this: he maintained that my resignation at that moment would have the appearance of a disgrace; that I should be delighting my enemies, that the First Consul would take offense, which would prevent me from remaining undisturbed in the places to which I proposed to retire. He suggested that I should go to spend a fortnight or a month at Naples.

Just at this moment, I was being sounded on behalf of Russia with a view to my accepting the place of governor to a grand-duke: it was as much as I would have done had I proposed to sacrifice to Henry V. the last years of my life.

While wavering between a thousand resolutions, I received the news that the First Consul had appointed me Minister to the Valais. He had at first flown into a passion on the faith of some denunciations; but, returning to his senses, he understood that I was of the race which is of value only in the front rank, that I should not be mixed with others, as otherwise I could never be used to advantage. There was no place vacant: he created one, and, choosing it in conformity with my instinct for solitude and independence, he placed me in the Alps; he gave me a Catholic republic, in a world of torrents: the Rhone and our soldiers would cross at my feet, the one descending towards France, the others climbing towards Italy, while the Simplon opened its daring road before me. The Consul was to allow me as frequent leave as I might wish to travel in Italy, and Madame Bacciochi sent me a message through Fontanes that the first important embassy available was reserved for me. I thus won this first diplomatic victory without either expecting or intending it; true that, at the head of the State, was a lofty intelligence, which was not willing to sacrifice to official intrigues another intelligence which it knew to be but too well disposed to secede from the government.

[Sidenote: Cardinal Fesch.]

This remark is all the more true in that Cardinal Fesch, to whom I do justice in these Memoirs in a manner upon which, perhaps, he did not reckon, had sent two malicious dispatches to Paris, almost at the very moment at which his manners had become more obliging, after the death of Madame de Beaumont. Did his true thought lie in his conversations, when he gave me leave to go to Naples, or in his diplomatic missives? The conversations and the missives bear the same date and are contradictory. It would have been easy for me to set M. le Cardinal, right with himself by destroying all traces of the reports that concerned me: I had but to remove the Ambassador's lucubrations from the _cartons_ at the time when I was Minister for Foreign Affairs; I should have done only what M. de Talleyrand did in the matter of his correspondence with the Emperor. I did not consider that I had the right to turn my power to my own advantage. If, by chance, any one should look up these documents, he would find them in their place. That this conduct is self-deceiving I readily admit; but, in order not to make a merit of a virtue which I do not possess, I must say that this respect for the correspondence of my detractors arises more from my contempt than from my generosity. I have also seen, in the archives of the Berlin Embassy, offensive letters from M. le Marquis de Bonnay concerning myself: far from considering my own feelings, I shall make them public.

M. le Cardinal Fesch was no more reticent as to the poor Abbé Guillon (the Bishop of Morocco): the latter was marked out as "a Russian agent." Bonaparte called M. Lainé[580] "an English agent:" these are instances of the gossip of which that great man had taken the bad habit from the police reports. But was there nothing to be said against M. Fesch himself? The Cardinal de Clermont-Tonnerre was at Rome like myself, in 1803: what did he not write of Napoleon's uncle! I have the letters.

For the rest, to whom do these contentions, buried since forty years in worm-eaten files, matter? Of the several actors of that period, one alone will remain: Bonaparte. All of us who make pretensions to live are dead already: can the insect's name be read by the feeble light which it sometimes drags with it as it crawls?

When M. le Cardinal Fesch met me again I was Ambassador to Leo XII.; he gave me marks of his esteem: I on my side made a point of outdoing him in deference. It is natural, moreover, that I should have been judged with a severity which I have never spared myself. All this is past and done with: I do not wish even to recognise the handwriting of those who, in 1803, served as official or semi-official secretaries to M. le Cardinal Fesch.

I set out for Naples: there began a year without Madame de Beaumont, a year of absence to be followed by so many others! I have never seen Naples again since that time, although I was on the threshold of that same town in 1828, having promised myself to go there with Madame de Chateaubriand. The orange-trees were covered with their fruits, the myrtles with their flowers. Baie, the Campi Elysei, and the sea were delights of which I no longer had any one to whom to speak. I have described the Bay of Naples in the _Martyrs._[581] I climbed Vesuvius and descended into its crater. I pilfered from myself: I was enacting a scene in _René._

At Pompeii I was shown a skeleton in irons, and mutilated Latin words scribbled by soldiers on the walls. I returned to Rome. Canova[582] permitted me to visit his studio while he was working at the statue of a nymph. Elsewhere the models for the marbles of the tomb which I had ordered had already attained much expression. I went to pray over ashes at San Luigi, and I left for Paris on the 21st of January 1804, another day of misfortune.

Behold a prodigious misery: five and thirty years have sped since the date of those events. Did not I flatter myself, in those distant days of grief, that the bond just broken would be my last? And yet how soon have I, not forgotten, but replaced what was dear to me! Thus man goes from weakness to weakness. When he is young and drives his life before him, a shadow of an excuse remains to him; but when he gets between the shafts and laboriously drags it behind him, how is he to be excused? The poverty of our nature is so intense that in our volatile infirmities, in order to express our new affections, we can employ only words which we have already worn threadbare in our former attachments. There are words, nevertheless, which ought to be used but once: they become profaned by repetition. Our betrayed and neglected friendships reproach us with the new companionships that we have formed; our hours arraign one another: our life is one perpetual blush, because it is one continued fault.

As my intention was not to remain in Paris, I alighted at the Hôtel de France[583], in the Rue de Beaune, where Madame de Chateaubriand came to join me to accompany me to the Valais. My former society, already half dispersed, had lost the link which held it together.

Bonaparte was marching towards the Empire; his genius rose in the measure that events increased in importance: he was able, like gunpowder when it expands, to carry away the world; already immense, and yet not feeling himself at his zenith, he was tormented by his strength; he groped, he seemed to be feeling his way; when I arrived in Paris he was dealing with Pichegru and Moreau; through petty envy he had consented to admit them as rivals: Moreau, Pichegru, and Georges Cadoudal, who was greatly their superior, were arrested.

This vulgar train of conspiracies, which we encounter in all the affairs of life, was very distasteful to me, and I was glad to seek flight in the mountains.

The council of the town of Sion wrote to me. The simplicity of this despatch has made a document of it to me; I was entering politics through religion: the _Génie du Christianisme_ had opened the doors for me.

[Sidenote: I am promoted.]

"REPUBLIC OF THE VALAIS.

"SION, 20 _February_ 1804.

"COUNCIL OF THE TOWN OF SION.

"_To Monsieur Chateaubriand, Secretary of Legation of the French Republic in Rome._

"SIR,

"An official letter from our High Bailiff apprizes us of your nomination to the post of French Minister to our Republic. We hasten to express to you the very complete satisfaction which this choice gives us. We see in this nomination a precious token of the good-will of the First Consul towards our Republic, and we congratulate ourselves on the honour of having you within our walls: we draw from it the happiest auguries for the welfare of our country and of our town. In order to give you a proof of these sentiments, we have resolved to have a provisional lodging prepared for you, worthy to receive you, fitted with furniture and effects suited for your use, in so far as the locality and our circumstances permit, pending the time when you will yourself have been able to make arrangements to your own convenience.

"Pray, sir, accept this offer as a proof of our sincere inclination to honour the French Government in the person of its envoy, the choice of whom must needs be peculiarly pleasing to a religious people. We beg you to be so good as to acquaint us with the date of your arrival in this town.

"Accept, sir, the assurances of our respectful consideration.

"DE RIEDMATTEN,

"President of the Town Council of Sion.

"By order of the Town Council:

"DE TORRENTÉ,

"Secretary to the Council."

Two days before the 21st of March[584], I dressed to go to take leave of Bonaparte at the Tuileries; I had not seen him again since the moment during which he had spoken to me at Lucien's. The gallery in which he was receiving was full; he was accompanied by Murat and a principal aide-de-camp; he passed through almost without stopping. As he approached me, I was struck by the alteration in his face: his cheeks were sunk and livid, his eyes hard, his complexion pale and muddy, his aspect gloomy and terrible. The attraction which had previously urged me towards him ceased; instead of remaining on his passage, I made a movement to avoid him. He threw a glance at me as though to seek to recognise me, took a few steps towards me, then turned and walked away. Had I appeared to him as a warning? His aide-de-camp noticed me: when the crowd covered me, the aide-de-camp tried to catch sight of me between the persons standing before me, and again drew the Consul in my direction. This sport continued for nearly a quarter of an hour, I always drawing back, Napoleon always following me without knowing it. I have never been able to explain to myself what idea had struck the aide-de-camp. Did he take me for a suspicious man whom he had never seen? Did he, if he knew who I was, wish to force Bonaparte to speak to me? However this may be, Napoleon passed on to another apartment. Content to have done my duty in presenting myself at the Tuileries, I withdrew. From the joy which I have always felt at leaving palaces, it is evident that I was not made to enter them.

[Sidenote: Bonaparte.]

On returning to the Hôtel de France, I said to several of my friends:

"Something strange must be happening, of which we do not know, for Bonaparte cannot have changed to that extent, unless he be ill."

M. de Bourrienne[585] knew of my singular foresight: he has only confused the dates; here is his sentence:

"On returning from the First Consul's, M. de Chateaubriand declared to his friends that he had remarked a great alteration in the First Consul, and something very sinister in his look[586]."

Yes, I remarked it: a superior intelligence does not bring forth evil without pain, because that is not its natural fruit, and it ought not to bear it.

Two days later, on the 21st of March[587], I rose early, for the sake of a memory that was sad and dear to me. M. de Montmorin had built himself a house at the corner of the Rue Plumet, on the new Boulevard des Invalides. In the garden of that house, which was sold during the Revolution, Madame de Beaumont, then almost a child, had planted a cypress-tree, and she had sometimes taken pleasure in showing it to me as we passed: it was to this cypress-tree, of which I alone knew the origin and the history, that I went to bid adieu. It still exists, but it is pining away, and scarce rises to the level of the casement beneath which a hand which has vanished loved to tend it. I distinguish that poor tree from among three or four others of its species; it seems to know me and to rejoice when I approach; mournful breezes bend its yellowed head a little towards me, and it murmurs at the window of the deserted room: a mysterious intelligence reigns between us, which will cease when one or the other shall have fallen.

Having paid my pious tribute, I went down the Boulevard and Esplanade des Invalides, crossed the Pont Louis XV. and the Tuileries Gardens, which I left, near the Pavilion Marsan, by the gate which now opens into the Rue de Rivoli. There, between eleven and twelve o'clock in the morning, I heard a man and a woman crying official news; passers-by were stopping, suddenly petrified by these words:

"Verdict of the special military commission summoned at Vincennes, condemning to pain of death THE MAN KNOWN AS LOUIS ANTOINE HENRI DE BOURBON, BORN ON THE 2ND OF AUGUST 1772 AT CHANTILLY."

[Sidenote: Death of the Duc D'Enghien.]

This cry fell upon me like a thunderbolt; it changed my life, as it changed Napoleon's. I returned home; I said to Madame Chateaubriand:

"The Duc d'Enghien has been shot."

I sat down to a table and began to write my resignation[588]. Madame de Chateaubriand raised no objection, and with great courage watched me writing. She did not blind herself to my danger: General Moreau and Georges Cadoudal were being prosecuted[589]; the lion had tasted blood, this was not the moment to irritate him.

M. Clausel de Coussergues[590] arrived in the interval; he also had heard the sentence cried. He found me pen in hand: my letter, from which, out of compassion for Madame de Chateaubriand, he made me suppress certain angry phrases, was despatched; it was addressed to the Minister of Foreign Relations. The wording mattered little: my opinion and my crime lay in the fact of my resignation: Bonaparte made no mistake as to that. Madame Bacciochi exclaimed loudly on hearing of what she called my "disloyalty;" she sent for me and made me the liveliest reproaches. M. de Fontanes at first went almost mad with fear: he already saw me shot, with all the persons who were attached to me. During several days, my friends went in dread of seeing me carried off by the police; they called on me from one minute to the other, always trembling as they approached the porter's lodge. M. Pasquier came and embraced me on the day after my resignation, saying he was happy to have such a friend as I. He remained for a fairly considerable time in an honourably moderate opposition, removed from place and power.

Nevertheless, the movement of sympathy which impels us to praise a generous action came to an end. I had, in consideration of religion, accepted a place outside France, a place conferred upon me by a mighty genius, the conqueror of anarchy, a leader sprung from the popular principle, the _consul_ of a _republic_, and not a king continuing an usurped _monarchy_; at that time I stood alone in my feeling, because I was consistent in my conduct; I retired when the conditions to which I was able to subscribe altered; but, so soon as the hero had changed himself into a murderer, there came a rush for his ante-chamber. Six months after the 21st of March, one might have thought that there was only one opinion in society, but for a few malicious jests in which people indulged in private. _Fallen_ persons pretended to have been _violated_, and only they, it was said, were _violated_ who possessed a great name or great importance, and each one, to prove his importance or his quarterings, contrived to be _violated_ by dint of solicitation.

Those who had most loudly applauded me fell away; my presence was a reproach to them: prudent people find imprudence in those who yield to honour. There are times in which loftiness of soul is a real infirmity; no one understands it; it passes for a sort of narrowness of mind, for a prejudice, an unintelligent trick of education, a crotchet, a whim which interferes with the judgment: an honourable imbecility, perhaps, but a stupid helotism. What capacity can any one find in shutting your eyes, in remaining indifferent to the march of the century, to the movement of ideas, to the change of manners, to the progress of society? Is it not a deplorable mistake to attach to events an importance which they do not possess? Barricaded behind your narrow principles, your mind as limited as your judgment, you are like a man living at the back of a house, looking out only on a little yard, unaware of what happens in the street or of the noise to be heard outside. That is what a little independence reduces you to, an object of pity to the average man: as to the great minds with their affectionate pride and their haughty eyes, _oculos sublimes_[591], their compassionate disdain forgives you, because they know that "you cannot hear[592]." I therefore shrank back humbly into my literary career, a poor Pindar destined in my first Olympic to praise "the excellence of water," leaving wine to the happy.

[Sidenote: I resign my Embassy.]

Friendship put fresh heart into M. de Fontanes; Madame Bacciochi placed her kindness between her brother's anger and my resolution; M. de Talleyrand, through indifference or calculation, kept my resignation for several days before speaking of it: when he announced it to Bonaparte the latter had had time to reflect. On receiving from me the only direct sign of blame from an honest man who was not afraid to defy him, he uttered merely these two words:

"Very well."

Later, he said to his sister:

"Were you very much alarmed for your friend?"

Long after, in conversation with M. de Fontanes, he confessed that my resignation was one of the things that had impressed him most M. de Talleyrand had an official letter sent to me in which he gracefully reproached me for depriving his department of my talents and services[593]. I returned the expenses of installation, and all was apparently finished. But, in daring to leave Bonaparte, I had placed myself upon his level, and he was incensed against me with all the strength of his perfidy, as I against him with all that of my loyalty. Till the day of his fall, he held the sword suspended over my head: sometimes he returned to me by a natural leaning and tried to drown me in his fatal prosperity; sometimes I was drawn to him by the admiration with which he inspired me, by the idea that I was assisting at a transformation of society, not at a mere change of dynasty: but antipathetic in so many respects, our respective natures gained the upper hand, and if he would gladly have had me shot, I should have felt no great compunction in killing him.

Death makes a great man or unmakes him; it stops him on the stair which he was about to descend, or on the step which he was about to climb: his is a destiny that has succeeded or failed; in the first case, one is reduced to examine what it has been, in the second to conjecture what it might have become.

If, in doing my duty, I had been prompted by far-seeing views of ambition, I should have deceived myself. Charles X. learnt only at Prague what I had done in 1804: he had but lately been King.

"Chateaubriand," he said to me at the Castle of Hradschin, "had you served Bonaparte?"

"Yes, Sire."

"Did you resign on the death of M. le Duc d'Enghien?"

"Yes, Sire."

Misfortune instructs or restores the memory. I have told you how one day in London, when I had taken shelter with M. de Fontanes in a passage during a storm, M. le Duc de Bourbon came and sought cover under the same refuge: in France, his gallant father and he, who so politely thanked whoever wrote a funeral oration on M. le Duc d'Enghien, did not send me one word of remembrance; they were doubtless unaware of my conduct: true, I never told them of it.

[446] This book was commenced in Paris in 1837, continued and completed in Paris in 1838, and revised in February 1845 and December 1846.--T.

[447] The Château du Marais was built by M. Le Maître, a very rich man, who left it to Madame de La Briche, his niece. It stands in the commune of the Val-Saint-Maurice, canton of Dourdan, Department of Seine-et-Oise, and is now the property of the Dowager Duchesse de Noailles.--B.

[448] Adélaïde Edmée de La Briche, _née_ Prévost, widow of Alexis Janvier de La Live de La Briche, Introducer of Ambassadors and Private Secretary to the Queen.--B.

[449] Louise Joséphine Comtesse de Montesquiou-Fezensac (1764-1832), _née_ de La Live de Jully, sister to Madame de Vintimille.--B.

[450] The Château de Champlâtreux, in the commune of Épinay-Champlâtreux, canton of Luzarches, Department of Seine-et-Oise, was the old seat of the Molé family. It belongs now to M. le Duc de Noailles. The Comte Molé died there, 25 November 1855.--B.

[451] Édouard François Matthieu Molé de Champlâtreux (_d._ 1794), a President in the Parliament of Paris, guillotined 20 April 1794.--B.

[452] The domain, now in the Department of Eure-et-Loir, presented to Madame de Maintenon by Louis XIV.--T.

[453] Louise Éléonore Mélanie Marquise de Custine (1770-1826), _née_ de Sabran, married in 1787 to Amand Louis Philippe François de Custine, guillotined 4 January 1794.--B.

[454] Margaret Queen of France (1219-1295), daughter of Raymond Berengarius IV. Count of Provence, and married in 1234 to King Louis IX.: a virtuous queen in every way worthy of her spouse.--T.

[455] The Château de Fervacques is near Lisieux in Calvados. Madame de Custine bought it of the Duc de Montmorency-Laval and his sister the Duchesse de Luynes. It is now the property of M. le Comte de Montgomery.--T.

[456] Christina Queen of Sweden (1626-1689) spent some years in France after her abdication in 1654.--T.

[457] Astolphe Louis Léonor Marquis de Custine (1793-1857), author of an excellent book on La Russie en 1839, in 4 volumes (1843), and many other remarkable works that obtained a well-deserved success.--B.

[458] Madame de Custine had been imprisoned at the Carmelites and had escaped execution thanks only to the Revolution of 9 Thermidor.--T.

[459]

"The lady of Fervacques Deserves a brisk attack."--T.

[460] Afterwards Madame de Bérenger.--B.

[461] Louise Julie Talma (_d._ 1805), _née_ Carreau, married Talma on the 19th of April 1791. They were divorced on the 6th of February 1801 by mutual consent. Talma married next year (16 June 1802) Charlotte Vanhove, the divorced wife of Louis Sébastien Olympe Petit, from whom he was also separated shortly afterwards on the same terms.--B.

[462] Stanislas Marie Adélaïde Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre (1747-1792), a Monarchical member of the Constituent Assembly, butchered by the populace on the 10th of August 1792.--T.

[463] Louis Justin Marie Marquis de Talaru (1769-1850), for some time French Ambassador in Madrid under the Restoration. He was created a peer of France on the same day as Chateaubriand (17 August 1815).--B.

[464] Louis Claude de Saint-Martin (1743-1803), known as the Unknown Philosopher, the exponent of "pure spiritualism." His principal works are _Des Erreurs et de la vérité_ (1775), the _Homme de désir_ (1790), and the _Ministère de l'Homme-Esprit_ (1802).--T.

[465] Jean Jacques Comte Lenoir-Laroche (1749-1825) held office for a few days in 1797, was a Conservative member of the Senate (1799-1814), was made a count by Napoleon, and a peer of France by Louis XVIII. (4 June 1814). On the 31st of August 1817, this dignity was declared hereditary in his family.--B.

[466] The Abbé Joseph Faria (_circa_ 1755-1819), a native of Goa, and a famous magnetizer. He plays an important part in _Monte Cristo_, in which Dumas makes him die at the Château d'If. He died, in fact, in Paris.--B.

[467] Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828), a German doctor (naturalized a Frenchman in 1819) who invented the science of craniology, now known as phrenology.--T.

[468] _Mon portrait historique et philosophique_, M. de Saint-Martin's posthumous work, printed in a very much mutilated and incomplete form.--B.

[469] The Polytechnic School was installed at the time at the Palais-Bourbon, and removed to the building of the former Collège de Navarre in 1804.--B.

[470] Henri François Marquis de Saint-Lambert (1717-1803), author of a poem, the _Saisons_, which secured his admission to the French Academy (1770), and of several philosophical works of a pronounced materialistic tendency.--T.

[471] Élisabeth Françoise Sophie Comtesse de Houdetot (1730-1813), _née_ de La Live de Bellegarde. She married Lieutenant-General the Comte de Houdetot in 1748. She was the author of a few _Pensées_, but owes her reputation rather to the lively passion with which she inspired Rousseau and to her liaison with Saint-Lambert, which lasted nearly half a century.--T.

[472]

"Woe be unto him to whom Heaven grants long days!"--T.

[473]

"And love consoles me still! But nought will e'er console me for love's loss."--T.

[474] Friedrich Melchior Baron Grimm (1723-1807), the friend of Rousseau and Diderot, created a baron by the Duke of Saxe-Gotha, whom he represented at the French Court from 1776-1790. In 1795 the Empress Catherine II. made him her minister in Lower Saxony. His diverting correspondence with both potentates was published in 1812-1813.--T.

[475] Pierre Simon Ballanche (1778-1847) started life as a printer at Lyons, where he published the second and third editions of the _Génie du Christianisme._ He began to devote himself to literature in 1813, wrote several notable works of Christian philosophy, and became elected a member of the French Academy in 1844.--T.

[476] The article on the _Législation primitive_ appeared in the _Mercure_ of the 18 Nivôse Year XI. (8 January 1803).--B.

[477] The Celestines were suppressed in 1778. They were founded in 1244 by Pietro di Murrhone, the hermit Pope, who was elected to the Holy See in 1294, when nearly eighty years of age, and assumed the title of Celestine V. He was canonized in 1313.--T.

[478] René I. Duke of Anjou, titular King of Naples (1408-1480), known as Good King René, and father of Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry VI. of England.--T.

[479] I omit two or three pages devoted mainly to quotations from Petrarch.--T.

[480] A terrible revolutionary massacre took place at Avignon in 1791.--T.

[481] Petrarch immortalized the source of the Sorgue, which rises near Vaucluse, and is known as the Fountain of Vaucluse.--T.

[482] Alain Chartier (1386-1458), the "Father of French Eloquence," an early French poet, and Secretary to the Household to King Charles VI. Margaret kissed him on the mouth, as he lay sleeping, to show the value she set upon the mouth from which so many fair speeches had issued.--T.

[483] Margaret of Scotland (1418-1445), daughter of James I. King of Scots, was married to the Dauphin, later King Louis XI. of France, as a child, in 1428, but was not united to him until 1436. He made her very unhappy.--T.

[484] _Pro. L. Flacco_, XXVI. 36.--T.

[485] JOB XXXVIII. II.--T.

[486] Pytheas (_circa_ 350 B.C.), the famous Greek navigator, was a native of Massilia or Marseilles.--T.

[487] Jean Sire de Joinville (_circa_ 1223--_circa_ 1319) accompanied St. Louis on the Seventh Crusade (1248), which took Cyprus in its course.--T.

[488] Berengarius I. and II., Kings of Italy and Marquises of Ivrea in the tenth century.--T.

[489] Louis II., Duke of Anjou and titular King of Naples (1377-1417), father of Good King René.--T.

[490] Jean Louis de Nogaret de La Valette, Duc d'Épernon (1554-1642), one of the favourites of Henry III., was the head of a Languedoc family and governor of Provence, of which Marseilles was one of the chief cities.--T.

[491] Henri François Xavier de Belsunce de Castel Moron, Bishop of Marseilles (1671-1755), distinguished himself by his courage and zeal during the plague which ravaged the city in the years 1720 and 1721, and by his vigorous opposition to the Jansenistic doctrines.--T.

[492] Vittorio Conte Alfieri (1749-1803), the Italian tragic poet, secretly married in 1788 to the Countess of Albany, widow of Prince Charles Edward Stuart. His _Memoirs_ were published in 1804.--T.

[493] ALFIERI, _Memoirs_, chap. IV.--T.

[494] The Roman amphitheatre or bull-arena at Nîmes was laid in ruins by the English during their occupation in 1417.--T.

[495] The famous Roman remains, in the Corinthian style.--T.

[496] Jean Reboul (1796-1864), the baker-poet, author of _Poésies_ (1836), the _Dernier Jour_ (1839), the _Martyre de Vivia_, a mystery play, performed at the Odéon (1850), and the _Traditionnelles_ (1857). He continued his trade throughout. In 1848 he was sent to the Constituent Assembly as Royalist member for the Department of the Gard.--B.

[497] I omit a quotation from Reboul.--T.

[498] Plautus spent some years in the service of a baker in Rome.--T.

[499] Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540-1609), the Protestant philosopher, Professor of Literature at the University of Leyden, a distinguished philologist and founder of the system of modern chronology.--T.

[500] 1622.--T.

[501] The Canal des Deux-Mers, also known as the Canal du Midi or de Languedoc, joins the Atlantic and Mediterranean.--T.

[502] The project of the canal, first formed under Francis I., was executed by Colbert's orders under Louis XIV. in the years 1666-1681. I omit the quotation from Corneille.--T.

[503] Paule Baronne de Fontenille (1518-1610), _née_ de Viguier, nicknamed Fair Paule by King Francis I., who saw her as a child. She married first the Sire de Bayganuet, and later Philippe de Laroche, Baron de Fontenille. Her beauty, which she retained until extreme old age, was so intense that her resolution to stay at home, in order to save herself from being pestered with the admiration of the people, was checkmated by a resolution of the _Capitouls_ or municipal officers of Toulouse, who ordered her to show herself in public, with uncovered features, two days in the week. _La Belle Paule_ was as virtuous as she was beautiful.--T.

[504] Henri II. Maréchal Duc de Montmorency (1595-1632), revolted against Louis XIII., was defeated and taken prisoner at Castelnaudary, and tried and beheaded at Toulouse.--T.

[505] Claude Fauriel (1772-1844), a capable literary critic and considerable linguist. He translated and published in 1837 the _Histoire de la croisade contre les hérétiques albigeois, écrits en vers provençaux par un poète contemporain_, from which the above extract is taken.--T.

[506] Simon Baron, later Comte, de Montfort (_d._ 1218), known as the Machabee of his century, the leader of the crusade against the Albigenses, of whom he put some 60,000 or more to the sword. Simon de Montfort was killed at Toulouse, 25 June 1218.--T.

[507] Jacques de Cujas (1522-1590), the famous jurist.--T.

[508] Margaret of France, Duchesse de Berry, afterwards Duchess of Savoy (1523-1574), married in 1559 to Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy. Her subjects named her the Mother of the Peoples.--T.

[509] Margaret of Valois, Queen of Navarre (1552-1615), married in 1572 to the Prince of Béarn, afterwards Henry IV., and III. King of France and Navarre.--T.

[510] Gui du Faur, Seigneur de Pibrac (1529-1584), represented France at the Council of Trent and accompanied Henry III. to Poland. His _Quatrains moraux_ have been universally translated, and he also published various political writings.--T.

[511] Florio's MONTAIGNE, the Third Booke, chap. IX.: _Of Vanitie._--T.

[512] Raymond IV. Count of Toulouse, Duke of Bordeaux, and Marquis of Provence (_circa_ 1042-1105), one of the leaders of the First Crusade (1096), and one of the first to storm the walls of Jerusalem.--T.

[513] Louis Gabriel Léonce Guilhaud de Lavergne (1809-1880), a member of the Right in the Chamber of Deputies, became "reconciled" to the Republic, and was ultimately elected a Life Senator in 1875.--B.

[514] Mademoiselle Honorine Gasc, the owner of an admirable voice, married Herr Ol de Kop, Danish Consul at Bordeaux and Paris.--B.

[515] Clémence Isaure, a wealthy lady of Toulouse, who restored the Floral Games at Toulouse in 1490, and left large sums of money to the town to provide for the expenses of annual competitions in the art of poetry.--T.

[516] Claude Emmanuel Luillier Chapelle (1626-1686) and François Le Coigneux de Bachaumont (1624-1702), joint authors of the _Voyage_ and other Epicurean pieces.--T.

[517]

"Ah, how happy one would be In this fair seductive spot If, by Sylvia ne'er forgot, Loving to eternity, With her he could cast his lot!"--T

[518] The Chateau Trompette has also since been destroyed.--T.

[519] Joseph Spon (1647-1685), a French Protestant antiquarian.--T.

[520]

"Ah, why do they throw down those columns of the gods, The work of the great Cæsars, a tutelary shrine?"--T.

[521] The Duchesse de Berry was imprisoned at Blaye Castle in 1833.--T.

[522] In 1797 La Harpe had published his eloquent _Du Fanatisme dans la langue révolutionnaire._--B.

[523] This poem appeared in 1814, with the title, _Le Triomphe de la Religion, ou le Roi martyr._--B.

[524]

"But if they ventured all, 'twas you permitted all: The viler the oppressor, the more infamous the slave."--T.

[525] On the 9th of August 1797, La Harpe, then a widower and fifty-seven years of age, married, at the instance of his friend M. Récamier, Mademoiselle de Hatte-Longuerue, a very beautiful girl of twenty-three. Her mother, a penniless widow, concealed from the bridegroom any repugnance that Mademoiselle de Longuerue entertained for the match; but three weeks after the marriage the latter declared this repugnance to be invincible, and asked for a divorce. La Harpe behaved like a gallant gentleman and a Christian: he was unable to lend himself to the divorce, forbidden as it was by the religious law; but he allowed it to take place, and forgave the young lady the outcry and scandal produced by this rupture.--B.

[526] JOB IV. 15, 16.--T.

[527] DANTE, _Inferno_, XIV. 46.--B.

[528] The Abbé Jacques André Émery (1732-1811), author of the _Esprit_ (later _Pensées) de Leibnitz_, the _Christianisme de Bacon_, the _Pensées de Descartes_, and many other works of a religious tendency.--T.

[529] Joseph Cardinal Comte Fesch, Archbishop of Lyons (1763-1839), was the half-brother of Madame Bonaparte, Napoleon's mother. He was made Archbishop of Lyons in 1802, a cardinal and Ambassador to Rome in 1803, Grand Almoner of the Empire, a count, and a senator in 1805. Later he refused the Archbishopric of Paris, opposed Napoleon's wishes with regard to Pius VII. in 1810, was disgraced and sent into exile in his diocese, where he remained till 1814. After the Emperor's abdication, he retired to Rome, where he lived for twenty-five years, refusing to surrender his archbishopric till the day of his death, 13 May 1839.--T.

[530] In Auvergne.--T.

[531] Talleyrand was Foreign Minister from 1796 to 1807.--T.

[532] The Abbé Pierre Étienne de Bonnevie (1761-1849), a great friend of M. and Madame de Chateaubriand, and a very witty priest.--B.

[533] Anne Antoine Jules Duc de Clermont-Tonnerre, Bishop of Châlons-sur-Marne (1749-1830). Before returning from the Emigration, he had placed his resignation in the hands of the Sovereign Pontiff, in accordance with the terms of the Concordat. Under the Restoration he became a peer of France (1814), Archbishop of Toulouse (1820), and a cardinal (1822).--B.

[534] Pope Pius VII. (_vide infra_, p. 220) was a Chiaramonti. This name is the Italian equivalent for Clermont.--T.

[535]

"Alps, ye have not by my hard fate been torn! On you time leaves no sign; The years have lightly by your brows been borne That heavy weigh on mine.

When first across your rugged walls I passed, Dazzled with hope's bright rays, Like the horizon, a future, boundless, vast, Lay spread before my gaze."

Italy at my feet, and all the world before me!"--T.

[536] Chateaubriand himself had probably not known "that" long, and had learnt it from his young friend Jean Jacques Ampère, the only man in France who at that time interested himself in Scandinavian matters.--B.

[537] This "Fotrad, son of Eupert," is a little far-fetched. When the author was writing this part of his Memoirs his mind was still full of his long and learned researches preparatory to the writing of his _Études historiques_ and his chapters on the Franks.--B.

[538] Odet de Foix, Maréchal Vicomte de Lautrec (1485-1528), was Lieutenant-General in Italy under Francis I., and subdued a part of the Duchy of Milan.--T.

[539] Francesco di Melzi, Duca di Lodi (1753-1826), was Vice-president of the Cisalpine Republic, organized by General Bonaparte in 1797, which in 1802 took the name of the Italian Republic. When, in 1805, it became the Kingdom of Italy, with Napoleon for its King and Eugène de Beauharnais for its Viceroy, Melzi was appointed Grand Chancellor and Keeper of the Seals. In 1807 he was created a duke.--B.

[540] Napoleon Charles Lucien Prince Murat (1803-1873), second son of Joachim Murat, was born 16 May 1803. He was made a senator in 1852, and a member of the civil family of the Emperor Napoleon III. in 1853, with the title of Imperial Highness. He was Grand Master of Freemasons from 1852 to 1862.--B.

[541] The feast of SS. Peter and Paul falls on the 29th of June.--T.

[542] St. Francis of Assisi, honoured on the 4th of October.--T.

[543] François Cacault (1743-1805), French Minister Plenipotentiary in Rome from 1801 to 1803.--B.

[544] The Chevalier Artaud de Montor, author of several works, of which the most important is his _Histoire du pape Pie VII._--B.

[545] Gregorio Luigi Barnaba Chiaramonti, Pope Pius VII. (1740-1823), was elected to the Papacy in 1800. He signed the Concordat with Bonaparte in 1801, crowned him Emperor in Paris in 1804, but excommunicated him in 1809, after the invasion of the Papal States. Napoleon had him kidnapped and taken to Savona, and thence to Fontainebleau, where Pope Pius was kept in captivity until 1814. On returning to his States he had the generosity to give an asylum to the members of his persecutor's family.--T.

[546] Ercole Cardinal Consalvi (1757-1824), Secretary of State to Pius VII., and one of the greatest statesmen of the century. He too signed the famous Concordat, and he too was imprisoned for some time by Napoleon. He represented the Pope at the Congress of Vienna in 1814.--T.

[547] Charles Emanuel IV., King of Sardinia (1751-1819), succeeded his father Victor Amedeus III. in 1796, was obliged to surrender his continental possessions to the French Republic in 1798, and retired to Sardinia. In 1802 he abdicated and was succeeded by his brother Victor Emanuel I. He ended his days in Rome as a Jesuit. Charles Emanuel IV. became Heir in Line of the House of Stuart on the death of the Cardinal of York (Henry IX.) in 1807, and appears in the Jacobite Calendars as Charles IV. King of England.--T.

[548] The Abbé Nicolas Silvestre Guillon (1760-1847) had been chaplain, reader, and librarian to the Princesse de Lamballe. He hid himself under the Terror and reappeared in 1801 to publish his _Recherches sur le Concordat_, which caused him to be confined in the Temple for four months. On returning from Rome he became Professor of Rhetoric at the new University. In 1810 he was appointed to the Faculty of Theology in Paris, and for thirty years professed sacred eloquence in that faculty, of which he ultimately became the dean. He became chaplain to the Orleans Family in 1818, and in 1831 Louis-Philippe named him for the See of Beauvais, which, owing to a technical misdemeanour, he was not allowed to accept. Having confessed his error, he was in the course of the next year installed as Bishop of Morocco _in partibus._--T.

[549] Marie Thérèse Princesse de Lamballe, _née_ Princesse de Savoie-Carignan (1749-1792), was murdered at the prison of the Force in September 1792.--T.

[550] Antoine François Philippe Dubois-Descours, Marquis de La Maisonfort (1778-1827), had returned from the Emigration at the commencement of the Consulate, and was arrested and confined in the island of Elba, whence he escaped to Rome. Under the Restoration, he sat for a time in Parliament and represented France as Minister Plenipotentiary at Florence.--B.

[551] Louis François Bertin (1766-1841), usually known as Bertin the Elder, to distinguish him from his brother Pierre Louis Bertin de Vaux, together with whom he bought the _Journal des Débats_ in 1799, and immeasurably improved the property. He was deprived of it in 1811, but revived the paper in 1814, and vigorously supported the Restoration until 1830, when he allied himself to Louis-Philippe and the new monarchy.--T.

[552] Pierre Joseph Briot (1771-1827) opposed Bonaparte in the Council of the Five Hundred, but nevertheless obtained his appointment as Government Commissary-General in Elba through the influence of Lucien Bonaparte. On Napoleon's coronation as Emperor, Briot went to Italy, and held various offices under Joseph and Joachim Murat, Kings of Naples. He refused to accept titles or decorations from either of these monarchs, which is probably the reason why Chateaubriand speaks of him as "the Republican" Briot.--B.

[553] The Princesse Pauline Borghèse (1780-1825), _née_ Bonaparte, was Napoleon's second sister. She married General Leclerc in 1797, and shortly after his death married Prince Camille Borghèse (1803), from whom she soon separated, leaving Italy to reside at the Château de Neuilly. She enjoyed the title of Duchess of Guastalla from 1806 to 1814. In the latter year, she devoted herself wholly to Napoleon, accompanying him to Elba, and placing her diamonds at his disposal. In her later years, she became reconciled to her husband and lived with him at Florence. Pauline Borghèse was one of the most beautiful of women of her time. She sat to Canova for a nude Venus, and was doubtless in no way shy of "making her toilet" before Chateaubriand.--T.

[554]

"I perish last and most wretched of all!"--T.

[555]

"My days do not warrant the price of a sigh."--T.

[556] Madame de Sévigné's seat in Brittany.--B.

[557] This house stood near the Trinità-del-Monte, and was known by the name of the Villa Margherita.--B.

[558] Jean Baptiste Louis Georges Seroux d'Agincourt (1730-1814), a distinguished antiquarian and archæologist. He had been a farmer-general under Louis XV., and amassed a huge fortune, which he devoted to study and the cultivation of the arts. After visiting England, Holland, Germany, and Italy, he settled in Rome, in 1778, where he became intimate with the Cardinal de Bernis and Azara, the Spanish Ambassador and art-patron, and compiled his great work, the _Histoire de l'Art par les Monuments, depuis le IVe siècle jusqu'au XVIe_, in 6 volumes folio, with 336 plates.--T.

[559] ISAIAS XXII. 18.--T.

[560] Barbara Juliana Baroness Krüdener (1764-1824), _née_ von Vietinghoff-Scheel, a famous Russian mystic, was married, when fourteen years of age, to Baron Krüdener, Russian Ambassador in Berlin. After leading a very dissipated life, and publishing her well-known novel, _Valérie, ou Lettres de Gustave de Linar à Ernest de G._ (1803), she suddenly, in 1807, withdrew from the world, gave way to exalted devotion, and pretended to have received from Heaven a mission for the regeneration of Christianity. She travelled through Germany, visiting the prisons, preaching in the open air, and converting men by the thousand. In 1814, she came into contact with the foreign sovereigns then in Paris, exercised a great ascendant over the Emperor Alexander, foretold to him the return of Napoleon from Elba and his ultimate fall, and inspired him with the idea of the Holy Alliance. She next resumed her travels through Switzerland and the various States of Germany, but her extraordinary influence began to be dreaded, and she was expelled wherever she went. In 1822, she took refuge in the Crimea, where she founded an institution for sinners and criminals, and died at Karasu-Bazar on Christmas Day 1824.--T.

[561] Joseph Michaud (1767-1839), author of the _Printemps d'un proscrit_ and a History of the Crusades, and a member of the French Academy. In 1795, he was condemned to death for professing Royalist opinions in his paper, the _Quotidienne_, but succeeded in evading execution of the sentence, which was revoked in 1796. He was appointed Press Censor under the Restoration.--T.

[562] The Comte Guillaume de La Luzerne, who in 1787 married Madame de Beaumont's elder sister, Mademoiselle Victoire de Montmorin, was the nephew of the Comte de La Luzerne, the ambassador, and son of César Henri de La Luzerne, Minister of Marine under Louis XVI. Chateaubriand appears to have confused the two.--B.

[563] The Saint-Germains, husband (Germain Couhaillon) and wife, had been for thirty-eight years in the service of the Montmorin family. Chateaubriand afterwards took them into his own service, which they never left.--B.

[564] Auguste de Montmorin (_d._ 1793), a naval officer, had perished in a storm when returning from the Mauritius.--B.

[565] Annibale della Genga, Pope Leo XII. (1760-1829), succeeded Pope Pius VII. in 1823.--T.

[566] This tomb, which faces that of the Cardinal de Bernis at San Luigi dei Francesi, was erected by Chateaubriand himself at a cost of some nine thousand francs.--B.

[567] And not in 1827, as is given in all the earlier editions of the Memoirs. Chateaubriand spent the whole of the year 1827 in Paris. It was not until 1828, under the Mortignac Ministry, that he was appointed to the Embassy in Rome.--B.

[568] _Greek Anthology_, VII. 346.--B.

[569] M. de Fontanes' friendship goes much too far: Madame de Beaumont knew me better; she no doubt felt that, if she had left me her fortune, I should not have accepted it.--_Author's Note._

[570] Madame de Beaumont left her books to Chateaubriand in her will, dated Paris, 15 May 1802.--B.

[571] The words italicized are in English.--T.

[572] Baron Matthieu de Staël, Madame de Staël's second son, who died while still very young.--T.

[573] In 1802, for her opposition to Bonaparte.--T.

[574] Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand Baron von Humboldt (1767-1835), the eminent Prussian diplomatist and philologist, and the friend and correspondent of all the literary eminences of his time.--T.

[575] JOHN XI. 44.--T.

[576] The _Lettre à M. de Fontanes_, on the Roman Campagna, is dated to January 1804, and first appeared in the Mercure de France, in its issue of March 1804.--B.

[577] Rome, December 1803.--B.

[578] Cf. ROUSSEAU'S _Confessions._--T.

[579] _Gen._ III. 22.--T.

[580] Jean Henri Joachim Hostein Vicomte Lainé (1767-1835) displayed considerable independence in the Legislative Body, of which he was a member for the Department of the Gironde. Under the Restoration, he was Minister of the Interior from 1816 to 1818. In 1823, he was made a viscount and a peer of France. He had become a member of the French Academy in 1818, although he had never produced any literary work, properly speaking.--T.

[581] _Martyrs_, V.--B.

[582] Antonio Canova (1757-1822), the famous sculptor. In 1819 he was sent to Paris as a special ambassador from the Pope.--T.

[583] Now the Hôtel de France et de Lorraine, at No. 5, Rue de Beaune.--B.

[584] Not the 20th, as the previous editions and the manuscript of the Memoirs have it. This was clearly a slip of the pen. The execution of the Duc d'Enghien took place, not on the 20th, but on the 21st of March 1804.--B.

[585] Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne (1769-1834), private secretary to Napoleon I. and Minister of State under Louis XVIII. The Revolution of 1830 and the consequent loss of his fortune caused him to lose his reason, and he died in a madhouse. His Memoirs, written by himself and revised by M. de Villemarest were published in ten volumes, 1829-1831.--T.

[586] _Mémoires de M. de Bourrienne_, vol. V. p. 348.--B.

[587] Here again the manuscript gives the 20th of March in error.--B.

[588] Chateaubriand's letter of resignation ran as follows:

"CITIZEN MINISTER,

"The doctors have just stated that Madame de Chateaubriand's state of health is such as to raise fears for her life. As it is absolutely impossible for me to leave my wife in these circumstances, or to expose her to the danger of a journey, I beg Your Excellency to approve that I return to you the credentials and instructions which you have sent me for the Valais. I also trust to your extreme kindness to persuade the First Consul to accept _the painful reasons_ which prevent me to-day from undertaking the mission with which he was pleased to honour me. As I do not know whether my position requires me to take any other steps, I venture to appeal to your usual indulgence, Citizen Minister, for orders and advice; I shall receive these with the gratitude which I shall not cease to feel for your past kindnesses.

"I have the honour to greet you respectfully,

"CHATEAUBRIAND.

"HÔTEL DE FRANCE, RUE DE BEAUNE, PARIS.

"1 _Germinal Year XII_ [22 _March_ 1804]."--B.

[589] Moreau had been arrested on the 15th of February; Pichegru on the 28th of February; and Georges Cadoudal on the 9th of March 1804.--B.

[590] Jean Claude Clausel de Coussergues (1759-1846), a distinguished magistrate and orator. Under the Restoration, he became a deputy and a member of the Court of Appeal. He resigned after the Revolution of 1830.--B.

[591] _Prov._ VI. 17.--T.

[592] JOHN VIII. 43.--T.

[593] Talleyrand's letter did not arrive until ten days after the letter of resignation, and was thus worded:

"12 _Germinal_ [2 _April_ 1804].

"CITIZEN,

"I have brought to the notice of the First Consul the motives which prevent you from accepting the Legation in the Valais, to which you had been appointed.

"The Citizen Consul had been pleased to give you a proof of confidence. The same feelings of good-will have caused him to learn with regret the reasons which do not permit you to fulfill that mission.

"I must also express to you the great interest which I attached to the new relations which I should have had to maintain with you; and to this regret, which is personal to myself, I add that of seeing my department deprived of your talents and services."--B.