with deep emotion. I Madame, how great is the gratitude that we owe
you and how happy I shall be, if I can have contributed a little
towards a reconciliation for which I long with all my soul!'
"I proposed to M. de Montbel himself to draw up, then and there,
the rough draft of a letter to the Cardinal Vicar, which would then
be copied out and signed by Madame and by Count Lucchesi. A few
moments were enough to prepare this draft, which was approved of.
"It was arranged that the letter should be written during the day,
and Madame invited us to meet again there at noon the next day; she
added that M. de Montbel could then, set out for Rome and that she
herself would leave Florence two days later to go to Bologna, where
M. de Montbel would join her again.
"The next day, as arranged, we met, at the appointed time, at
the Poggio Imperiale. Her Highness received us with an air of
contentment which I, for my part, had not yet seen her display.
"'I have,' she said, 'done all that you asked. I hope that they
will be pleased at last.'
"At the same time, she showed us her letter to the Cardinal Vicar;
this letter agreed exactly with the copy as given by M. de Montbel.
Madame's signature and Count Lucchesi's were at foot, and the
signatures had been witnessed by the Grand-duke of Tuscany and his
minister, Fossombroni[458]. M. de Montbel set out the same evening
for Rome, and I left Florence two days later.
"At a stage at Viterbo, I met M. de Montbel, who had already
fulfilled his mission; he had stayed only half a day in Rome.
He had seen no one but the Cardinal Vicar, who, after taking
the Pope's instructions, had hastened not only to give him a
declaration in writing of Madame la Duchesse de Berry's marriage
to Count Lucchesi, but had shown him the deed itself, which was
perfectly regular. M. de Montbel had decided to travel without
stopping and was convinced of the definite success of his mission."
APPENDIX II
UNPUBLISHED FRAGMENTS OF THE _MÉMOIRES D'OUTRE-TOMBE_[459]
MAINTENON, _September_ 1836.
I resume my pen at the Château de Maintenon, through whose gardens I
stroll by the autumnal light: _peregrinæ gentis amænum hospitium._
When passing in front of the coasts of Greece, I used to ask myself
what had become of the four acres of the garden of Alcinous, shaded
with pomegranate-trees, apple-trees, fig-trees and adorned with two
fountains? Goodman Laertes' vegetable-garden in Ithaca no longer had
its two and twenty pear-trees when I was sailing before that island,
and they were not able to tell me if Zante was still the home of the
hyacinth. The pleasure-ground of Academus, in Athens, offered a few
stumps of olive-trees to my view, as did the Garden of Gethsemane at
Jerusalem. I have not wandered in the gardens of Babylon, but Plutarch
teaches us that they still existed in the time of Alexander. Carthage
presented to me the aspect of a park strewn with the vestiges of Dido's
palaces. At Granada, looking through the doorways of the Alhambra, I
could not take my eyes from the groves in which the romance of Spain
had placed the loves of the Zegris. From the top of David's house at
Jerusalem, the King-Prophet saw Bethsabee bathing in Urias' gardens; I
saw none pass there save a daughter of Eve, a poor Abigail, who will
never inspire me with the magnificent Penitential Psalms.
During the Conclave of 1828, I strolled in the Gardens of the Vatican.
An eagle, plucked of its feathers and imprisoned in a den, presented
the emblem of Pagan Rome overthrown; an emaciated rabbit was delivered
as a prey to the bird of the Capitol, which had devoured the world.
Monks have shown me, at Tusculum and Tibur, the waste fruit-groves of
Cicero and Horace. I have shot wild-duck in Pliny's Laurentinum; the
waves came to die at the foot of the wall of the dining-room, where,
through three windows, one descried as it were three seas: _quasi tria
maria._
In Rome herself, as I lay among the wild anemones of Bel Respiro,
between the pine-trees that formed a vault above my head, the Sabine
Range opened to the view in the distance; Albano enchanted my eyes
with its azure mountain, whose lofty denticulations were fringed with
gold by the last rays of the sun: a sight that became more admirable
still when I came to think that Virgil had contemplated it, as I was
doing, and that I was seeing it again, from the midst of the ruins of
the city of the Cæsars, across the vine-branch of the Tomb of the
Scipios[460].
If, from these Gardens of the Hesperides of poetry and history, I
descend to the gardens of our days, how many have I seen born and die?
Without speaking of the woods of Sceaux, Marly, Choisy, now razed to
the level of the corn-fields, without speaking of the thickets of
Versailles, which they purpose to restore to their festal condition!
I too have planted gardens; my little water-furrow, which served as a
passage for the winter rains, was in my eyes equal to the ponds of the
_Prædium rusticum._
Seen from the side of the park, the Château de Maintenon, surrounded by
moats filled from the waters of the Eure, presents on the left a square
tower of bluish stone, on the right a round tower of red brick. The
square tower is connected, by a block of buildings, with the surbased
archway which opens from the outer yard to the inner yard of the
castle. Above this, archway rises a mass of turrets from which starts
a building which is attached transversely to another block coming from
the round tower. These three lines of buildings contain a space closed
on three sides and open only on the park.
The seven or eight towers of different thickness, height and shape are
capped with priests' bonnets, which mix with a church-window, placed
outside, towards the village.
The façade of the castle on the village side is of the Renascence
period. The fancifulness of this style of architecture gives the
Château de Maintenon a special character, as who should say of a town
of olden time or a fortified abbey, with its spires and steeples,
grouped at hap-hazard.
To complete the medley of periods, there is a great aqueduct, the work
of Louis XIV.; one would think it a labour of the Cæsars. One goes
down from the drawing-room of the castle into the garden by a bridge,
lately put up, which partakes of the architecture of the Rialto. Thus
are Ancient Rome and the Italian Cinquecento associated with the French
sixteenth century. Memories of Bianca Capello[461] and de' Medici, of
the Duchesse d'Étampes[462] and Francis I. rise up through memories
of Louis XIV. and Madame de Maintenon, while all this is swayed and
completed by the recent catastrophe of Charles X.
The castle was rebuilt by Jean Cottereau[463] Treasurer to Louis XII.
Marot, in his _Cimetière_, maintains that Cottereau was too honest a
man for a financier. One of Cottereau's daughters brought the Maintenon
domain into the d'Angennes family. In 1675, this domain was bought by
Françoise d'Aubigné, who became Madame de Maintenon. Maintenon reverted
to the Noailles family, in 1698, through the marriage of a niece[464]
of the wife of Louis XIV. with Adrien Maurice Duc de Noailles[465].
The park has something of the calm and gravity of the Great King. Near
the middle, the first tier of arcades of the aqueduct crosses the bed
of the Eure and connects the two hills on opposite sides of the valley,
so that at Maintenon a branch of the Eure would have flowed in the
air above the Eure. "In the air" is the word: for the first arcades,
as they exist, are eighty-four feet high and they were to have been
surmounted by two other tiers of arcades.
The Roman aqueducts are nothing beside the aqueducts of Maintenon;
they would all go under one of those arches. I know only the Aqueduct
of Segovia, in Spain, which recalls the massiveness and solidity of
this one; but it is shorter and lower[466]. If you picture to yourself
some thirty triumphal arches linked laterally one with the other and
more or less resembling the Arc de Triomphe de l'Étoile in height and
width of opening, you will have an idea of the Maintenon Aqueduct; but
even then you must remember that what you see is only a third of the
perpendicular and of the perforation which would have been formed by
the treble gallery destined for the passage of the waters.
The fallen fragments of this aqueduct are compact blocks of rocks; they
are covered with trees around which hover crows fat as doves: they flit
to and fro under the curves of the aqueduct like little black fairies
performing fatidical dances under garlands.
At the sight of this monument, one is struck with the imposing
character with which Louis XIV. imprinted all his works. It is for ever
to be regretted that this gigantic conduit was not finished: the water
carried to Versailles would have fed the fountains there and created a
new marvel by making their waters play perpetually; from there it might
have been brought to the suburbs. It is a pity, no doubt, that the camp
formed for the works at Maintenon in 1686 caused the death of a large
number of soldiers[467]; it is a pity that many millions should have
been spent on an uncompleted undertaking. But, certainly, it is a still
greater pity that Louis XIV., driven by necessity, astounded at the
cries of economy which frustrate the loftiest schemes, should have lost
patience: otherwise, the greatest monument on earth would to-day have
belonged to France.
Say what we may, a nation's fame increases that nation's power, and
that is no vain thing. As for the millions, their value would have
been represented at high interest by an edifice as useful as it
was wonderful; as for the soldiers, they would have fallen as the
Roman legions fell in building their famous "roads," another kind of
battle-field, no less glorious for the country.
It was in this alley of old willow-trees, where I was strolling a
moment ago, that Racine, after the triumph of Pradon's[468] _Phèdre_,
sighed his last songs[469].
Madame de Maintenon, having attained the summit of greatness, wrote to
her brother[470]:
"I am done up, I would that I were dead."
She wrote to Madame de La Maisonfort:
"Do you not see that I am dying of melancholy.... I have been young
and pretty; I have tasted pleasure... and I protest to you that
every condition leaves a horrid void."
Madame de Maintenon exclaimed:
"What a torment to have to amuse a man who is no longer capable of
amusement!"
It has been reckoned as a crime against the daughter of a simple
nobleman[471], against the widow of Scarron[472], that she should speak
in this way of Louis XIV., who had raised her to his bed; but I see
in this the accent of a superior nature, which was above the exalted
fortune to which she had attained. Only I would have preferred that
Madame de Maintenon had not left the dying Louis XIV., especially after
hearing these grave and tender words:
"I regret only you; I have not made you happy, but I have always had
for you all the sentiments of esteem and friendship which you deserve:
the only thing that vexes me is to leave you[473]."
The last years of that Monarch were an expiation offered to the first.
Stripped of his prosperity and his family[474], he allowed his eyes
to roam from this window over that garden. He no doubt fixed them on
that water-conduit already abandoned since twenty years: great ruins
that they were, an image of the ruins of the Great King, they seemed to
foretell the exhaustion of his House and to await his great-grandson.
The time in which Le Nôtre[475] designed the gardens of Versailles for
Mademoiselle de La Vallière was past; the time was also past, more than
a century earlier, of Olivier de Serres[476], who said to Henry IV.,
when planning gardens for Gabrielle:
"We can cultivate sugar-canes, so that, coupled with the orange-tree
and its companions, the garden shall be perfectly ennobled and rendered
most magnificent."
In the absorption of those dreams which sometimes confer second sight,
Louis XIV. might have discerned his immediate successor hastening the
fall of the arches in the Eure Valley to take from them the materials
for the mean pavilions of his ignoble mistresses[477]. After Louis XV,
he might have seen yet another shadow kneel down, bow its head and lay
it silently on the pediment of the aqueduct, as though on a scaffold
raised in the sky. Lastly, who knows if, in one of those presentiments
attached to royal Houses, Louis XIV. might not, one night, in that
Château de Maintenon, have heard a knock at his door:
"Who goes there?"
"Charles X., your descendant."
Louis XIV. did not wake up to see Madame de Maintenon's corpse dragged
with a rope round its neck around Saint-Cyr.
MAINTENON, _September_ 1836.
My host[478] has described to me the half-a-night which Charles X.,
banished, spent at the Château de Maintenon. The Monarchy of the Capets
ended in a castle-scene of the middle-ages; the Kings of the past had
gone back into their centuries to die. As in the time of Cæsar,
"the gods announce a great change and revolution in affairs[479]."
The manuscript of one of M. le Duc de Noailles's nieces[480], which he
was good enough to show me, relates the incidents which that young lady
witnessed. He has permitted me to make the following extracts:
"My uncle, anticipating that the King was going to come to ask him
for shelter, gave orders to have the castle made ready.... We got
up to receive the King and, while awaiting his arrival, I went to
a window in the turret which comes before the billiard-room, to
watch what was happening in the court-yard. The night was calm and
clear, the half-veiled moon made every object visible in a pale,
sad light, and the silence, as yet, was disturbed only by the hoofs
of the horses of two regiments of cavalry defiling across the
bridge; after them, over the same bridge, defiled the artillery of
the Guard, with matches lighted. The dull sound of the guns, the
appearance of the black ammunition-wagons, the sight of the torches
amid the shadows of the night oppressed my heart terribly and
presented the image--alas, too true!--of the funeral procession of
the Monarchy.
"Soon, the horses and the first carriages arrived; next, M. le
Dauphin and Madame la Dauphine, Madame la Duchesse de Berry, M.
le Duc de Bordeaux and Mademoiselle; lastly, the King and all his
suite. As the King alighted from his carriage, he seemed extremely
dejected: his head had fallen on his chest; his features were
drawn and his face distorted with sorrow. This almost sepulchral
march of four hours, at a foot's pace[481] and in the midst of the
darkness, had also helped to depress his spirits; and, besides,
did not the crown weigh heavily enough, at that moment, on his
brow? He had some difficulty in ascending the stair-case. My uncle
showed him to his apartment, which had been that of Madame de
Maintenon; he remained there a few moments alone with his family,
after which each of the Princes withdrew to his own room. My uncle
and aunt[482] then went in to the King. He spoke to them with his
ordinary kindness, told them how wretched he was at not having
succeeded in rendering France happy, that that had always been his
dearest wish:
"'My one despair is,' he added, 'to see the state in which I am
leaving her; what is going to happen? The Duc d'Orléans himself
is not sure that his head will be on his shoulders a fortnight
hence. All Paris is there, on the road, marching against me; the
commissaries have assured me so. I did not trust their report
entirely; I called Maison, when they had gone out, and said to him,
"I ask you on your honour to tell me, on your word as a soldier, is
what they have told me true?" He answered, "They have told you only
half the truth[483].'"
"After the King had retired, we all returned to our rooms in
succession. I would not go to bed, and I went back to the window to
watch the sight that lay before my eyes. A foot-guard was standing
sentry at the little door of the grand stair-case, a body-guard
was posted on the outer balcony which leads from the square tower
to the part where the King was sleeping. In the first rays of the
dawn, that warlike figure was outlined in a picturesque manner
on the walls darkened by time and his steps resounded on those
time-worn stones, as did, perhaps, in former days, those of the
steel-clad gallants who had trodden them....
"At half past seven, I went to dress in my aunt's room and, at
nine o'clock, I went down, with Madame de Rivera, to M. le Duc
de Bordeaux's, where Mademoiselle came soon after. M. le Duc de
Bordeaux was amusing himself, with my aunt's children, in throwing
bread to the fish and tumbling with the others on mattresses spread
out in the room. Nothing was so heart-rending as the sight of those
children thus laughing at the misfortunes that struck them. At ten
o'clock, the King went to Mass in the castle chapel. It was in
that little chapel that the unfortunate Monarch made his sacrifice
to God and laid at His feet that brilliant crown which had been
so grievously snatched from him, with that admirable, but useless
virtue of resignation which is an hereditary heroism in his unhappy
family.
"It was, in fact, at Maintenon that Charles X. really ceased to
reign; it was there that he disbanded the Royal Guard and the
Swiss, keeping only the body-guards for his escort. From that
moment, he gave no more orders and in some measure constituted
himself a prisoner: the commissaries settled his road to Cherbourg.
"After Mass, the King went back for a moment to his room, and then
the sinister procession started off again, at half-past ten. The
departure was heart-breaking: every misfortune and the noblest
resignation were depicted on the face of Madame la Dauphine, so
long accustomed to sorrow. She spoke a few words to me; then,
stepping towards the guards who were drawn up in the court-yard,
she held out her hand to them; they flung themselves upon it,
shedding tears; her own eyes were full, and she uttered these
words, in a firm voice:
"'It is not my fault, my friends, it is not my fault.'
"M. le Dauphin embraced M. de Diesbach, who commanded the guards,
and mounted his horse. M. le Duc de Bordeaux and Mademoiselle each
climbed into a separate carriage. The King went last; he spoke for
some time to my uncle, in a manner full of kindness, and thanked
him for the hospitality which he had shown him; then he went up to
the troops and took leave of them with that accent of the heart
which belongs to him:
"'I hope,' he said, 'that we shall soon meet again.'
"A rural gendarme threw himself at his feet and kissed his
hand sobbing; he gave it to several others and, turning to the
foot-guard who was on sentry and who presented arms to him:
"'Come,' he said, 'I thank you, you have done your duty well. I am
pleased with you; but you must be very tired.'
"'Ah, Sire,' answered the old soldier, while great tears trickled
down upon his white mustachios, 'it's nothing to be tired: if only
we had been able to save Your Majesty!'
"A grenadier, at that moment, made his way through the crowd and
came up and stood in front of the King:
"'What do you want?' asked His Majesty.
"'Sire,' answered the soldier, raising his hand to his bear-skin,
'I wanted to look at you once more.'
"The King, deeply moved, threw himself into his carriage, and the
whole scene disappeared."
MAINTENON, _September_ 1836.
Calamities extend their effect by the fate of him who describes them:
this narrative is the work of Madame de Chalais-Périgord, _née_
Beauvilliers-Saint-Aignan. The Duc de Beauvilliers[484] was, under
Louis XIV., the governor of the Prince who was the stock of the
family outlawed to-day. The last daughter of Fénelon's friend came
unexpectedly upon the Duc de Bordeaux on his road and hastened to go to
tell her father that she had seen the last heir of the Duc de Bourgogne
pass. In the young princess, beauty, rank and fortune were combined;
she had first turned her thoughts to the world, in search of pleasure;
her hope, like the dove after the Deluge, finding the earth soiled,
flew back to the Ark of God.
When, in 1816, I passed this spot, on my way to write the eleventh book
of the first part of these Memoirs at Montboissier[485], Maintenon
Castle stood empty; Madame de Chalais was not yet born: since, she has
spread out and reckoned her whole life over twenty-six years of mine.
Thus have the shreds of my existence composed the spring-time of a
number of women who have fallen after their month of May. Montboissier
is now deserted and Maintenon inhabited: its new occupiers are my hosts.
M. le Duc de Noailles, who, if nothing stops him, will achieve a
brilliant career, was not of an age to vote when I was in the House
of Peers: I did not hear him deliver those speeches in which he has
pleaded, with the authority of arguments and the power of words, the
cause of France and of the royal misfortunes. His part in life began
when mine had finished: he took the oath to misfortune in a more useful
way than I.
Madame la Duchesse de Noailles is a niece of M. le Marquis de
Mortemart, my old colonel in the Navarre Regiment; she bears a sad and
gentle likeness to my sister Julie[486].
The rivalries of Madame de Maintenon and Madame de Montespan have been
resolved by the marriage of M. le Duc de Noailles and Mademoiselle de
Mortemart[487]. At this present time, who troubles his brain about
a sovereign's heart? That heart has been chilled these hundred and
twenty years; and, in the decrial and vilification of monarchies, are
the attachments of a king, even though it were Louis XIV., events? What
can one measure by the huge scale of our modern revolutions that does
not contract to an imperceptible point? Do the new generations care
about the intrigues of Versailles, which is no longer anything but a
crypt? What matters to our transformed society the end of the enmities
of blood of some women once destined, in bowers or palaces, to lie on
beds of flowers or down?
And yet, around the general interests of history, would there not be
historical curiosities? If some Aulus Gellius, some Macrobius, some
Strabo, some Suidas, some Athenasus of the fifth or sixth century,
after describing to me the sack of Rome by Alaric, were, by chance, to
tell me what became of Berenice after Titus had repudiated her; if he
were to show me Antiochus returning to that Cæsarea, the "charming
spot where his heart" ...had adored her who loved another; if he were
to take me to a castle in the Lebanon inhabited by a descendant of the
Queen of Palestine, in spite of the destruction of the Eternal City and
the invasion of the Barbarians, it would still please me to come across
the memory of Berenice in the "desert East."
APPENDIX III
(BY M. EDMOND BIRÉ)
THE LAST YEARS OF CHATEAUBRIAND
On the 16th of November, at daybreak, Chateaubriand wrote the last
lines of the _Mémoires d'Outre-tombe_:
"It but remains for me," he said, "to sit down by the edge of
my grave; and then I shall descend boldly, crucifix in hand, to
Eternity."
He had lately entered on his seventy-fourth year, and he had still
seven years to live. Shortly after the Revolution in July, in April
1831, he had said, in the Preface to his _Études historiques_:
"I began my literary career with a work in which I contemplate
Christianity under its poetic and moral aspects; I end it with a
work in which I consider the same religion under its philosophical
and historical aspects. I began my political career with the
Restoration; I end it with the Restoration. It is not without a
secret satisfaction that I behold this consistency with myself. The
main lines of my existence have never wavered: if, like all men,
I have not always been alike in the details, let human frailty be
forgiven for it."
His last years will show him to us consistent with himself to the end.
In the first days of October 1843, he received a letter from the Comte
de Chambord, dated Magdeburg, 30 September, and concluding with these
words:
"I shall be in London in the first fortnight of November and I hope
most eagerly that it will be possible for you to join me there;
your presence with me will be of great use to me and will explain
better than anything could the object of my journey. I shall be
happy and proud to show by my side a man whose name is one of the
glories of France and who has represented her so nobly in the
country which I am about to visit.
"Come, then, monsieur le vicomte, and be sure to believe in all my
gratitude and in the pleasure which it will give me to express to
you, by word of mouth, the feelings of high esteem and attachment
of which I love to send you with this the renewed and most sincere
assurance."
Ill as he was and almost paralyzed with gout, the old man was moved to
tears by the young Prince's invitation:
"To such a letter as that," he said, "one answers by going in one's
coffin, if necessary."
He set out for England on the 22nd of November. The Prince was not to
arrive in London until a week later, the 29th. On the 30th, a large
number of French Royalists, with the Duc Jacques de Fitz-James[488] at
their head, came to Chateaubriand to pay him their respects and thank
him for coming. Suddenly the door opened and the Comte de Chambord
appeared, accompanied by Berryer and the Duc de Valmy[489]:
"Gentlemen," he said to the assembled company, "I heard that you were
all at M. de Chateaubriand's and I decided to come here to pay you a
visit... I am so happy to find myself surrounded by Frenchmen! I love
France, because France is the land of my birth, and, if I have ever
turned my thoughts towards the throne of my ancestors, it has been only
in the hope that it might be possible for me to serve my country in the
principles and sentiments which have been so gloriously proclaimed by
M. de Chateaubriand and which are honoured, in addition, by so many and
such noble defenders in your native land."
This scene moved Chateaubriand deeply. On the same day, he wrote to
Madame Récamier:
"I have just received the reward of my whole life: the Prince has
deigned to speak of me, in the midst of a crowd of Frenchmen,
with an effusiveness worthy of his youth. If I were able to tell
anything, I would tell you about this; but here I am crying like a
fool.
"Protect me with all your prayers."
The Comte de Chambord had had an apartment reserved for him in his own
house in Belgrave Square. Every morning, Chateaubriand would see the
descendant of Louis XIV. come into his room, sit down familiarly on his
bed and talk with him at length of the interest, liberties and future
of France. During the day, the Prince came to take him for a drive in
his carriage, so as to lose hardly an hour of his stay.
When Chateaubriand was on the eve of departure, Henry of France wrote
him the following letter:
"LONDON, 4 _December_ 1843.
"MONSIEUR LE VICOMTE DE CHATEAUBRIAND,
"At the moment when I am about to have the grief of parting from
you, I wish once more to express to you all my gratitude for the
visit which you have come to pay me on foreign soil and to tell you
all the pleasure which I have felt at seeing you again and talking
with you of the great interests of the future. Finding myself as
I do in perfect community of opinion and feeling with yourself,
I am happy to see that the line of conduct which I have adopted
in exile and the position which I have taken up are, in every
respect, consonant with the advice which I wished to ask of your
long experience and of your judgment. I shall, therefore, walk with
still more confidence and firmness in the path which I have marked
out for myself.
"More fortunate than I, you are going to see our dear country
again; tell France of all the love that my heart contains for
her. I am glad to take as my interpreter that voice so dear to
France which has, at all times, so gloriously defended monarchical
principles and the national liberties.
"I renew, monsieur le vicomte, the assurance of my sincere
friendship.
"HENRY."
Chateaubriand replied to the Comte de Chambord:
"LONDON, 5 _December_ 1843.
"MONSEIGNEUR,
"The marks of your esteem would console me for every disgrace; but,
expressed as they are, I see in them more than kindness towards
myself: they discover another world; another universe opens up
before France.
"I greet with tears of joy the future which you proclaim. Shall
you, innocent of all, to whom there is nothing to object save that
you are descended from the House of St. Louis, be the only unhappy
one among the youth that turns its eyes towards you?
"You tell me that, more fortunate than you, I am going to see
France again: 'more fortunate than you!' That is the only reproach
which you found to address to your country. No, Prince, I can never
be happy so long as you lack happiness. I have not long to live,
and that is my consolation. I dare to ask you, after I am gone, to
keep the memory of your old servant.
"I am, with the most profound respect,
"Monseigneur,
"Your Royal Highness' most humble and most obedient servant,
"CHATEAUBRIAND."
On his return to Paris, Chateaubriand put the finishing touches to the
work which was to close his literary career, the _Vie de Rancé._ He
added to his manuscript some pages on his pilgrimage to Belgrave Square
which were worthy of his talent and almost equal to the finest pages
of the Memoirs. After a description of the Château de Chambord, in
the neighbourhood of which the Abbé de Rancé[490] possessed a priory,
the great writer's thought harks back to the Prince whom he has been
visiting in London, and he continues in these words:
"That orphan has lately sent for me to London; I obeyed the close
writ of misfortune. Henry has given me hospitality in a land that
flies from under his feet. I have again seen that town which
witnessed my fleeting greatness and my interminable wretchedness,
those squares filled with fogs and silence, whence issued the
phantoms of my youth. How long a time already has passed between
the days when I dreamt of René at Kensington[491] and these last
hours! The old exile found himself called upon to show to the
orphan a town which my eyes can scarcely recognise.
"A refugee in England for eight years; next, Ambassador to London
and intimately acquainted with Lord Liverpool, Mr. Canning and Mr.
Croker: what changes have I not seen in those spots, from George
IV.[492], who honoured me with his intercourse to Charlotte[493],
whom you will find in my Memoirs! What has become of my brothers
in banishment? ...On that soil, where we were not noticed, we
nevertheless had our merry-makings and, above all, our youth.
Growing girls commencing life in adversity brought the weekly fruit
of their toil, to revel in some dance or other of the country;
attachments were formed; we prayed in chapels which I have just
revisited and found unchanged. We wept aloud on the 21st of
January, and were much moved by a funeral oration pronounced by the
Emigrant curate of our village. We also strolled beside the Thames,
to see vessels laden with the world's riches enter the port, to
admire the country-houses at Richmond, we so poor, we who had lost
the shelter of the paternal roof-tree! All those things constituted
true happiness[494]. Will you ever return, O happiness of my
misery? Ah, come back to life, companions of my exile, comrades
of my bed of straw: behold me returned! Let us go once more into
the little gardens of some despised tavern and drink a cup of bad
tea while we talk of our country[495]: but I see no one; I have
remained behind alone....
. . . . . . . . . . .
"I was not received, on my last visit to London, in a garret in
Holborn by one of my Emigrant cousins[496], but by the 'Heir of the
Ages.' That heir took a pleasure in showing me hospitality in the
places where I had so long awaited him. He hid himself behind me
like the sun behind ruins. The torn screen that sheltered me seemed
to me more magnificent than the wainscotings of Versailles. Henry
was my last sick-nurse: those are the perquisites of misfortune.
When the orphan entered, I tried to stand up; I had no other way of
showing my gratitude. At my age, we have only the impotence of life
left Henry has consecrated his wretchedness; stripped though he be,
he is not without authority: every morning, I saw an Englishwoman
pass before my window; she would stand still and burst into tears
so soon as she saw the young Bourbon: what king on his throne would
have had the power to make such tears as those flow! Those are the
unknown subjects conferred by misfortune."
The _Vie de Rancé_ appeared in the month of May 1844. Chateaubriand had
dedicated his work to the memory of the Abbé Sequin, an old priest,
his spiritual director, who had died the year before at the age of
ninety-five:
"I have written the story of the Abbé de Rancé in obedience to the
orders of the director of my life."
The work had only just appeared, when the Duc d'Angoulême died at
Goritz, on the 3rd of June 1844. The author of the _Congrès de Vérone_,
on this occasion, wrote the following letter, addressed to M. le
Vicomte de Baulny:
"MONSIEUR LE VICOMTE,
"I have just read in the _France_ the letter which you were good
enough to communicate to me and which anticipated the sentiments so
nobly expressed in the _Gazette de France_ and the _Quotidienne._
I congratulate myself that my family has contracted with yours an
alliance which does me honour and which is dear to me. I would
myself have tried to raise my voice once more, if it deserved to be
heard; I would have said once again what I think of the liberator
of Spain, of the man who recalled to existence the last soldiers
of Napoleon. M. le Duc d'Angoulême loved and protected my nephew,
whose daughter has married your brother[497]. Christian, my second
nephew, also much loved by the august Prince, has gone to God. And
so all disappears for me! When I cast back my eyes, I see only
a woman who weeps; and what a woman! Marie-Thérèse over-towers
all ruins. And yet, this family which, for nine centuries, has
commanded the world would to-day scarce find an old servant to
raise to it, on the sea-shore, a funeral pile built out of the
remnants of a shipwreck! Marie-Thérèse buries her grief in the
bosom of God, in order that that sorrow may be everlasting. I have
said that that sorrow was one of the greatnesses of France; was I
wrong? In the wastes of Bohemia, I used to see, at night, at the
window of a tower, a solitary light which proclaimed the new exile
of the Duc d'Angoulême. Alas, that light has disappeared! The
virtuous Prince has gone to seek his true country in Heaven. There
revolutions will no longer strike him. He will stretch out his hand
to us to climb to him, and, under the protection of his stainless
life, we shall find grace with the Father of Mercies."
In the spring of 1845, Chateaubriand wanted to see "his young King"
again for the last time. He accordingly went to Venice, at the end of
May, and spent a few days with the Comte de Chambord. Seeing him set
out in the state of weakness to which his ailments reduced him, his
friends in Paris were very anxious about the journey. He bore it better
than had been expected. The Prince persuaded him to prolong his stay a
little:
"I was about to depart," he wrote, from Venice, in June 1845; "the
young Prince's embraces and prayers retain me. My days are his;
and, when he asks me only for a sacrifice of twenty-four hours,
what right have I to refuse him?"
If rejoicings in exile are rare, the Royal Family nevertheless knew
a few. On the 11th of November 1845 was celebrated, at Frohsdorf,
the marriage of H.R.H. Mademoiselle with the Hereditary Prince of
Lucca[498], like herself of a royal race, like herself sprung from the
House of Bourbon. This was that Princesse Louise, the sister of the Duc
de Bordeaux, whom Chateaubriand had seen in Prague in the month of May
1833 and of whom he had at that time drawn the following portrait:
"Mademoiselle somewhat recalls her father: she is fair-haired;
her blue eyes have a shrewd expression.... Her whole person is a
mixture of the child, the young girl and the young princess: she
looks up, lowers her eyes, smiles with an artless coquetry mingled
with art; one does not know if one ought to tell her fairy stories,
make her a declaration, or talk to her with respect as to a queen.
The Princesse Louise adds to the agreeable accomplishments a good
deal of information....[499]"
So soon as the marriage was announced, the Breton Royalists decided to
offer the Princess a gift, a product of local manufacture. They asked
Chateaubriand to take it to Frohsdorf and present it in their name.
"I owe," he said to their delegate, M. Thibault de La Guichardière, "I
owe Louise of France a wedding-visit; I shall be delighted to offer her
a fine specimen of the work of our Breton looms."
He wrote on this subject, on the 9th of September 1845, to his sister,
the Comtesse de Marigny[500], who was living at Dinan:
"I have received your letter, dear sister; it goes without saying
that I add my name to those of all the Bretons who wish to make
the Princess a present. You can therefore look upon me as a
subscriber for the sum which you think right to fix.... But be sure
to remember that I want to be mixed with the crowd and that I am
ambitious for no distinction but that of my eagerness and my zeal."
On the 15th of the same month, he wrote again to his sister:
"If I am specially charged, by a certain number of Bretons, to be
the bearer of their respects, that is all that I want I shall go
at my own expense. I know the young Princess; she will receive me
well, wherever she may be. I would rather that she were already
in Italy. If we are to believe the newspapers, she is already in
Venice; but the place does not matter.... You can put me down for
100 francs; once more, the amount makes no difference: it is enough
to know that I am commissioned to take a Breton subscription to
the daughter of the Duc de Berry; the choice is everything....
Your canton is more than I need to authorize me to go to Madame la
Princesse de Lucques, whose brother, moreover, has invited me to
go to present my compliments to him next spring."
Shortly before his death, Chateaubriand was anxious to give Henry of
France a last proof of his fidelity. By a disposition "outside his
will," a disposition specially recommended to his family, of which a
duplicate was forwarded to the Comte de Chambord, he gave the latter
his little collection of choice books, some of them "annotated," those
which he was "re-reading," he said, in order to serve for the Prince's
"leisure" and instruction.
Until the end, therefore, to use the very true expression of M. Charles
de Lacombe, "his royalist flame, kept alive by honour, did not cease to
burn, under an appearance of scepticism, in that disabused heart[501]."
And, in the same way, the Christian remained faithful. A whole
volume has been written recently on the _Sincérité religieuse de
Chateaubriand._[502] This was, perhaps, a good subject for a thesis;
it seems to me, however, that the demonstration did not require to be
made: one does not demonstrate evidence. For the rest, I have nothing
to speak of here except the last years of the author of the _Génie du
Christianisme_, those which go from 1841 to 1848.
In a letter to his friend Hyde de Neuville, on the 14th of June 1841,
Chateaubriand wrote:
"I admire you from the bottom of my heart; you interest yourself in
everything; I no longer interest myself in anything; my courage is
not used up; but it is overcome by disgust. I no longer think of
anything but of dying a Christian, and I hope that the good Père
Sequin, old though he be, will have strength enough to raise his
hand to cleanse me and send me to God[503]."
In the month of March 1842, speaking of the recent death of Théodore
Jouffroy[504], one of the professors of the Royal College of
Marseilles, M. Lafaye[505], said to his pupils:
"Jouffroy, the sceptic, sent for a confessor, and no one can give the
name of the confessor of the author of the _Génie du Christianisme._"
These words created some stir, and M. Lafaye, fearing lest he should be
dismissed, begged the Baron de Flotte[506], a friend and co-religionist
of Chateaubriand, to write to the latter asking him to intercede on
his behalf with M. Villemain, the Minister of Public Instruction.
Chateaubriand replied:
"Thank God, monsieur, I neither have nor can have any credit with
the present Government. At the time when I possessed some political
power, I do not remember ever employing it except for the benefit
of persons who might be oppressed. M. Lafaye has not offended me
in the least; but, if he were molested on my account, I would ask
them to leave him in peace. I no longer occupy myself with what
goes on in society. My part is played, monsieur. I live far from
the world, and I shall be forgiven, I hope, because of my great
age, for having a confessor. It is M. l'Abbé Sequin, a priest at
Saint-Sulpice. When one has lived many days, one must needs accuse
one's self of many faults."
He rigorously observed the rules of the Church on fasting and
abstinence, often even, in his practice, going beyond the limits
prescribed by health. I make the following ex-tract from a letter which
Victor de Laprade[507] wrote me, on the 12th of August 1870:
"To those who are inclined to doubt the firmness of his Christian
faith, you can tell this detail, which was given me by a Protestant
lady who was for a long time his neighbour and who still lives
in the house in which he died at No. 120, Rue du Bac. Madame
Mohl[508] was very intimate with Madame de Chateaubriand, who did
not go out and saw hardly any one. The wife of that truly great
man used often to lament to her neighbour about the difficulty
which she had to prevent her husband from following with the most
scrupulous strictness the rules for Lent and the other seasons of
fasting and abstinence. Chateaubriand had at that time reached
the age at which the Church dispenses us from fasting, and his
health suffered greatly from these austerities. He practised them,
nevertheless, with his Breton stubbornness, and it needed all his
wife's entreaties to make him give way sometimes. This was not
done for the world nor for the sake of 'posing,' as one would say
nowadays. Madame de Chateaubriand and her confidant were the only
witnesses, and I am perhaps the only one to know of it to-day. Do
you, who are young, keep and hand down this recollection of the
author of the _Génie du Christianisme._
"I like indulging in this old man's gossip; but it is only thus
that traditions are preserved. I have known a whole vanished world.
There are hardly any people left who have seen Chateaubriand
close. There are only two of us now at the French Academy who have
seen Madame Récamier's _salon_: M. le Duc de Noailles and myself.
Outside the Academy, I know only Madame Lenormant and Madame Mohl
who have lived in that illustrious intimacy."
In his conversations, as in his letters, Victor de Laprade loved
to call up before my eyes those vanished days, those figures
now extinguished. He used frequently to describe to me M. de
Chateaubriand's punctual regularity. The great writer used to
arrive at Madame Récamier's every day at half-past two; they took
tea together and spent an hour in private chat. Then the door would
open for visitors; the worthy Ballanche came first; after him, a
wave of more or less numerous, more or less varied, more or less
animated comers and goers, amid whom was the group of persons
accustomed to see one another daily and, as Ballanche said, to
"gravitate towards the centre" of the Abbaye-aux-Bois[509].
While the author of _Antigone_ and _Orphèe_, lively, smiling,
often flung some light-hearted jest into the midst of the most
serious conversations and sometimes even tried to point a pun, the
author of _René_ usually stayed till six o'clock, but in an almost
absolute silence. Seated in one of the corners of the chimney,
opposite Madame Récamier, he leant upon his cane, listened to
everything with interest and sometimes replied by means of an
ironical and disheartened question.
Because he has, in many places in his Memoirs, spoken of the
strength of the democratic current, some have thought themselves
authorized to turn him into a deserter from Royalism, hailing in
the triumph of Democracy the realization of his supreme hopes.
This is just contrary to the truth. That France was going towards
Democracy he saw and proclaimed aloud; but, far from rejoicing in
this new revolution, or looking upon it in the light of a progress
for humanity or a happiness for France, he saw in Democracy the
worst of governments, _omnium deterrimum_, to use Bellarmine's
strong expression. One day, at the Abbaye-aux-Bois, Laprade,
who, at that time, was an ingenuous person, thought he might
confess before the great poet his juvenile faith in the future of
Democracy, of a Christian Democracy which would fulfil all the
promises of the Divine Law-giver. Chateaubriand received these
enthusiastic confidences with his melancholy smile; and then,
after saying that he believed the fall of the Throne of July to
be near at hand and the advent of Democracy to be inevitable, he
began to sketch in broad lines that future society which would be
the offspring of a democracy without religion or ideals. The more
he spoke, the more did the singer of _Psyché_ see his beautiful
illusions fade away. The New Jerusalem of which he had dreamt so
long crumbled to the noise of that great word, as the walls of
Jericho fell to the sound of the trumpet. Instead of the promised
land, a riotous arena, stained with blood by the struggle of
appetites and covetousness; and, at the furthermost point of the
horizon, at the end of the journey, rest in the stupidity of a
semi-Barbarism, of vast pastures in which human herds browzed
on thick grass, with lowered heads, without ever looking at the
sky[510].
On the subject of the dangers and disgraces which the democratic
system was preparing for France, he spoke the strongest and most
contemptuous words at every juncture. M. de Marcellus tells us how,
in 1844, on a day when they were taking a little stroll together in
his garden in the Rue du Bac, Chateaubriand said:
"The stream of the Monarchy disappeared in blood at the end of
the last century. We have been carried away by the currents of
Democracy, and have only a few times halted on the mud of the foul
places. But the torrent will submerge us and it is all up, in
France, with true political liberty and the dignity of man[511]."
On the 16th of August 1846, driving in the Champ de Mars, he was
trying to alight from his carriage, when his foot slipped and he
broke his collar-bone. This accident marked a new stage in his
physical decay; from that time, he no longer walked. When he came to
the Abbaye-aux-Bois, his footman and Madame Récamier's carried him
from his carriage to the door of the drawing-room; he was then put
into an arm-chair and rolled to the chimney-corner. This happened
in the presence of Madame Récamier only, and the visitors who were
admitted after tea found M. de Chateaubriand settled in his place;
but, when leaving, he had to be moved before the strangers present.
They pretended in vain to notice nothing; it was nevertheless a cruel
torture to the old man that his infirmities should be seen[512].
The hour was now near at which death was to close that _salon_ in the
Abbaye-aux-Bois on which the shades of night were already falling:
Majoresque cadunt celsis de montibus umbræ.
Madame de Chateaubriand was the first one struck. She softly fell
asleep in the Lord on the 9th of February 1847; Ballanche followed:
on the 12th of June 1847, he expired with the calmness of a sage
and the resignation of a saint, gentle towards death as he had
been towards life. Madame Récamier, who had not left her post by
his death-bed, thanks to the tears which she there shed ended by
compromising [Illustration: The Vicomtesse de Chateaubriand.]
her sight, which had been growing more and more weak. She was
threatened with complete blindness; it was then that Chateaubriand
offered to consummate his friendship by asking her to share his
name. She refused that honour and, in doing so, was prompted by the
noblest and nicest scruples.
He was to precede her to the grave[513]. In the month of June 1848,
at the very moment when the cannon of civil war was thundering in
the streets of the capital[514], he took to his bed never to rise
again. He was given the Last Sacraments on the 2nd of July. He
received the Viaticum "not only in full and perfect consciousness,
but also with a profound sense of faith and humility[515]."
The next day, he dictated the following lines to his nephew:
"I declare before God that I retract all that my writings may
contain that is contrary to faith, morals and, generally, to the
principles preservative of goodness.
"PARIS, 3 _July_1848.
"Signed for my uncle François de Chateaubriand, whose hand was
unable to sign, and in conformity with the wish which he expressed
to me.
"Geoffroy-Louis de CHATEAUBRIAND."
When this declaration was written, the dying man made them read it
out to him; next, he insisted on reading it with his own eyes and
then, calmly and with a peaceful mind, the author of the _Génie du
Christianisme_ awaited the hour at which he was to appear before
God. He drew his last breath on Tuesday the 4th of July. Only four
persons were present: his spiritual director, the Abbé Deguerry[516],
Rector of Saint-Eustache; his nephew; a sister of Charity; and Madame
Récamier[517].
In a letter to the _Journal des Débats_, the Abbé Deguerry, the future
martyr of the Commune, describes the great writer's last moments in
these words:
"PARIS, 4 _July_ 1848.
"SIR,
"France has lost one of her noblest children.
"M. de Chateaubriand died this morning at a quarter past eight. We
have gathered his last breath. He drew it in full consciousness.
So beautiful an intellect was bound to prevail over death and to
preserve a visible freedom in its embrace.
"The death of Madame de Chateaubriand, which happened last year,
struck M. de Chateaubriand so hard that he said to us at the time,
laying his hand upon his breast:
"'I have this moment felt life struck and withered at its source;
it is now but a question of a few months.'
"The death of M. Ballanche, which followed only too soon after, was
the last blow for his old and illustrious friend. Since then, M. de
Chateaubriand seemed no longer to be sinking, but rather rushing to
the grave.
"A few moments before his death, M. de Chateaubriand, who had
received the Last Sacraments on Sunday last, once more pressed his
lips to the cross with the emotion of a lively faith and a firm
confidence. One of the sayings that he repeated most frequently
during his last years was that the social problems that are
harassing the nations to-day can never be resolved without the
Gospel, without the spirit of Christ, whose doctrines and examples
have called down a curse upon selfishness, that canker of all
concord. Wherefore M. de Chateaubriand hailed Christ as the Saviour
of the World from the social point of view and he loved to call Him
his King as well as his God.
"A priest, a sister of Charity knelt at the foot of M. de
Chateaubriand's bed at the moment of his death. It was amid
prayers and tears of that nature that the author of the _Génie du
Christianisme_ was to deliver his soul into the hands of God.
"I have the honour to be, etc.
"DEGUERRY,
"Rector of Saint-Eustache[518]."
The Comte de Chambord, on the occasion of this death, wrote the
following letter:
"Your letter, monsieur, was the first to bring me the news of the
death of M. de Chateaubriand. I had in him a sincere friend, a
faithful counsellor, whose opinions I was happy to receive, whose
generous thoughts I was glad to search, in my exile. For several
months I had grieved at seeing that fine genius approach the end
of his career; this great loss is even more painful to me at the
present moment, when my heart has so much to weep for in the
sorrows of my country.
"How many misfortunes have I not to deplore! Those terrible
battles which have stained the capital with blood; the death of
so many honourable and distinguished men in the National Guard
and the Army; the martyrdom of the Archbishop of Paris[519]; the
wretchedness of the poor people; the ruin of our manufactures; the
alarms of all France! I pray to God to stay their course.
"May the spectacle of these calamities and the dread of the evils
that threaten the future not carry away men's minds from the great
principles of justice and public liberty which in these days, more
than ever, the friends of nations and kings ought to defend and
maintain.
"I renew, monsieur, the assurance of my very sincere and constant
affection.
"HENRY.
"15 _July_ 1848."
On Saturday, the 8th of July, a funeral service was celebrated in the
church of the Foreign Missions, in the Rue du Bac, quite close to the
house of the deceased; the body was next taken down into the vaults
of the chapel, to be removed, from there, to Saint-Malo. The solemn
obsequies took place in that town on the 18th of July. The Mass was
celebrated by the Rector of Combourg. At the Elevation, by a touching
inspiration, the musicians played the melody to which Chateaubriand
wrote his well-known lines:
Combien j'ai douce souvenance
Du joli lieu de ma naissance[520]!
After the Mass, the funeral procession took its way between the
ramparts and the sea towards the isle of the Grand-Bé. Two long rows
of surpliced priests wound along the beach. The flags of the national
guards who had come from the different towns of Brittany waved in
the wind; the helmets gleamed in the sun. The cannon thundered at
intervals. An innumerable crowd covered the ramparts of Saint-Malo,
which rise so formidably above the perpendicular rocks and the sea.
All the reefs, all the rocks bore human figures; boats dressed with
mourning flags were laden with spectators. At the foot of the Grand-Bé,
the coffin was shouldered by sailors and carried to the top, in the
midst of a squall that resembled a storm: a last caress which the Ocean
gave him who so much loved the noise of the waves and the winds. Then,
suddenly, there was a great calm, and the coffin was solemnly laid on
the rock which is to guard it for ever. The last prayers of the Church
were recited by the Rector of Saint-Malo and holy water sprinkled on
the bier.
Brittany and Religion gave the author of the _Génie du Christianisme_
a magnificent funeral. For half a century, he has slept, beside the
waves, in his granite sepulchre, under a stone surrounded by a little
Gothic iron railing and surmounted by a cross. For the rest, no
inscription, no name, no date. He had asked that this might be so, in
his letter of 1831 to the Mayor of Saint-Malo:
"The cross," he wrote, "will tell that the man resting at its feet
was a Christian; that will be enough for my memory."
APPENDIX IV
THE TRANSLATOR'S SECOND NOTE
When, eighteen months ago, I wrote my Note to the first volume of this
version of the _Mémoires d'Outre-tombe_, I neglected to add to my list
of omissions from the original work three several items which I have
since felt justified in disregarding. My neglect must be ascribed to
the fact that, at that time, the last volume of M. Biré's edition was
not yet in my hands; and that these three items form the _Supplément à
mes Mémoires_ which occurs at the end of the work and which had escaped
my notice. The reader should, therefore, understand that, to the list
of omissions on pages XV and XVI of Vol. I., must be added:
6. Chateaubriand's Life of his sister Julie de Chateaubriand, Comtesse
de Farcy. This is extracted, for the most part, from the Abbé Carron's
_Vie des justes dans les plus hauts rangs de la Société_ and in no way
affects the interest of the Memoirs.
7. A very long letter addressed by the Comte de La Ferronnays, French
Minister to Russia, to the Vicomte de Chateaubriand, Foreign Secretary,
on the 14th of May 1824 and treating of contemporary politics.
8. The Genealogy of the Family of Chateaubriand, which fills 122 pages
of the first edition and is not of sufficient general interest to be
included in this translation. I can, however, refer the curious to the
very full account of the Chateaubriand Family in M. René Kerviler's
_Essai d'une bio-bibliographie de Chateaubriand et de sa famille_
(Vannes: 1895).
M. Louis Cahen, of Paris, who read and collated the greater part of
the proofs of the first two volumes, died before those volumes were
published and before he could read the tribute which I paid to his
kindness. He was a man of leisure and of great intelligence, and he
made it a labour of love to compare the two versions sentence for
sentence and line for line. I wish also gratefully to acknowledge the
assistance which I have received in the translation of many technical
expressions from Mr. Oswald Barron, of the Society of Antiquaries;
from Mr. W. B. Campbell and Mr. C. H. Swanton of the English Bar; from
Mr. Edgar Jepson, the author of many delightful novels; from Mr. F.
Norreys Connell, who is as able a military expert as he is a diverting
story-writer; from "Snaffle," most accurate of sporting writers; and
from more than one of the Jesuit Fathers at Farm street. But I have not
consulted these gentlemen invariables; and, if any mistakes are found
to occur, those mistakes are mine, not theirs.
No book of reference that I have consulted has been of such constant
daily use to me as the _Century Cyclopædia of Names_, published in
this country by Mr. Unwin; this and my old Bouillet have reduced my
necessary visits to the British Museum to not more than two a month
during the two years and a half for which I have been engaged on
the translation. At the Museum, over and above the splendid French
biographical dictionaries and the ever-ready Larousse, I have found
the _Dictionary of National Biography_ of some service; but it did not
tell me who "Master Bernard" was, the "blind poet," to whom Henry VII.
gave "100 shillings" (_cf._ Vol. V, p. 351). This disappointed me; but
the dictionary sets no great store by the national poets: it has no
biography of Ernest Dowson. In the matter of the European journeys I
have found no gazetteer published so useful as Baedeker's admirable
Guides, which are always accurate and have not that bad modern fault of
too great conciseness which distinguishes so many of their rivals.
*
The reviewers of the first four volumes have done more than write
universally favourable notices: not only have they appraised at its
true worth what is, perhaps, the greatest prose work of, certainly,
the greatest prose writer of nineteenth-century France; but they have
spoken of the translation in generous terms of praise which I cannot
feel that I have deserved. But I thank them for their kindness and I
only wish that I could have earned it by devoting as long a time to the
translating of these Memoirs as Chateaubriand did to the writing of
them. That would have been thirty years: but I should have known scarce
a dull moment.
A. T. DE M.
CHELSEA, _June_ 1902.
[456] September 1833.--T.
[457] Antoine Louis Marie Hennequin (1786-1840) was a distinguished
member of the Paris Bar, who had made a great name for himself in
political cases and invariably placed his talent at the disposal of
the distressed Royalists. In 1830, he defended Peyronnet in his trial
before the Chamber of Peers and, in 1832, assisted the Duchesse de
Berry after her arrest.--T.
[458] Vittorio Fossombroni (1754-1844), Foreign Minister and Premier to
the Grand-duke Ferdinand. He continued in office until his death at the
advanced age of ninety years.--T.
[459] In the spring of 1832, when the cholera was raging most fiercely,
the Duc de Noailles was introduced to Madame Récamier. He was at
once adopted by her and M. de Chateaubriand. The latter prized very
highly the judgment and political feeling, the reason and the upright
character of the young peer of France, who had just made a brilliant
first speech in the tribune of the Upper House, and who, seventeen
years later, was to become his successor in the French Academy. In the
month of September 1836, Chateaubriand went to spend a few days with
M. de Noailles at the Château de Maintenon, and he wrote a chapter
which he intended to form part of his Memoirs. This chapter, however,
was not inserted there; the manuscript was given by the author to
Madame Récamier. Madame Lenormant has published it in Vol. II. of her
_Souvenirs et correspondence tirés des papiers de Madame Récamier_,
pp. 453 _et seq._, and it is reprinted here as forming a natural and
essential complement of the Memoirs.--B.
[460] I omit four lines of verse.--T.
[461] Bianca Capello, Grand-duchess of Tuscany (_circa_ 1548-1587), was
originally an Italian adventuress, the mistress of Francis de' Medici,
Grand-duke of Tuscany, whom she married, in 1578, when he became a
widower. She was recognised as Grand-duchess in 1579.
[462] _Cf._ Vol. I., p. 120, n. 2.--T.
[463] _Cf._ Marot: _La Cimetière_; VIII.: _De Messire Jean Cotereau,
chevalier, seigneur de Maintenon_; IX.: _De luy mesmes_; and X.: _De
luy encores._--T.
[464] Mademoiselle d'Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon's niece and adopted
daughter, married the Duc de Noailles in 1698.--T.
[465] Adrien Maurice Maréchal Duc de Noailles (1678-1766), after
distinguishing himself in the Spanish War of Succession, was created
a grandee of Spain by Philip V. (1712) and a duke and peer of France
by Louis XIV, became President of the Board of Finance under the
Regency (1715) and did much to avert the disasters consequent upon
John Law's "System." He returned to military service in 1733, won
his marshal s baton at the Siege of Philippsburg and forced the the
Germans to evacuate Worms in 1734. In 1743 he was defeated by George
II. at Dettingen. In 1745, he was sent to Spain as Ambassador and,
later, became a member of the Home Administration. The Maréchal Duc de
Noailles is the ancestor of the two present branches of the Noailles
family, the Ducs de Noailles and the Ducs de Mouchy, Princes de
Poix.--T.
[466] The Aqueduct of Segovia, presumed to be of the time of Trajan,
forms a great bridge, 937 feet long, and consisting of 320 arches in
two tiers. The tallest arches, in the middle of the lower tier, are 102
feet high. It is built of large blocks of arches, somewhat rounded at
the edges and assembled without cement.--T.
[467] _Cf._ COMTESSE DE LA FAYETTE: _Mémoires de la cour de France pour
les années 1688 et 1689_; the opening pages:
"France was in a condition of perfect tranquillity; no arms were
known other than the implements necessary for removing the earth
and building. The troops were employed for these purposes, not
only with the intention of the Ancient Romans, which was only to
take them out of a state of idleness as injurious to themselves as
excessive work would be. But the object was also to make the River
Eure flow against its will, to make the fountains of Versailles
play continuously. They employed the troops on this prodigious
plan, so as to advance the King's pleasures by a few years, and
they did so at less expense and in less time than they had dared
hope.
"The quantity of sickness always caused by earth-work rendered the
troops in camp at Maintenon, where the chief part of the work lay,
incapable of performing any service. But this drawback did not seem
worthy of any attention in the midst of the tranquillity which we
were enjoying."--T.
[468] Nicolas Pradon (1632-1698), a tragic poet who has left a
reputation as a ridiculous, vain and jealous author. Nevertheless,
he achieved some success in his day and, when Racine produced his
_Phèdre_, his envious rivals brought out Pradon's tragedy of the same
name in opposition to the great poet's masterpiece (1677). A few days
sufficed to restore the two plays to their relative places in the
judgment of the public. Besides several other tragedies, Pradon wrote
a comedy directed against Racine and entitled the _Jugement d'Apollon
sur Phèdre_ and a pamphlet against Boileau entitled the _Triomphe de
Pradon_ (1684).--T.
[469] I omit ten lines quoted from Racine.--T.
[470] Charles d'Aubigné (1634-1703) answered his sister with a
blasphemous phrase. He married, in 1678, Mademoiselle Geneviève Piètre
and was the father of the Mademoiselle d'Aubigné who married the
Duc de Noailles in 1698, receiving the estates of Maintenon as her
marriage-portion.--T.
[471] Constant d'Aubigné (_d. circa_ 1645), second son of Théodore
Agrippa d'Aubigné, the Calvinist favourite of Henry IV.--T.
[472] Paul Scarron (1610-1660), the burlesque author, married
Mademoiselle d'Aubigné in 1652, when she was only seventeen years of
age. Louis XIV. gave her the domain of Maintenon in 1674 and erected it
into a marquisate for her.--T.
[473] The reproach which M. de Chateaubriand, following the example of
so many others, here levels against Madame de Maintenon has ceased to
bear upon the memory of that illustrious woman since the publication
of the Marquis de Dangeau's _Relation de la dernière maladie de Louis
XIV.--Note by Madame Lenormant._
[474] Louis Dauphin of France (1661-1711), known as the Great
Dauphin, and Louis Duc de Bourgogne (1682-1712), his son, who became
Dauphin, for one year, on his father's death, predeceased Louis XIV.,
their father and grandfather, who was succeeded, in 1715, by his
great-grandson, Louis XV.--T.
[475] André Le Nôtre (1613-1700), the great French architect and
landscape-gardener, designed not only the gardens at Versailles and
most of the other French royal palaces, but laid out Kensington
Gardens, St. James's Park and Greenwich Park in England and a number of
the most celebrated gardens in Rome. Louis XIV. granted him letters of
nobility in 1675.--T.
[476] Olivier de Serres (1539-1619), known in France as the "Father
of Agriculture," was summoned to Paris by Henry IV. and introduced
various improvements into the royal domains. _Inter alia_, he imported
the silk-industry into France and planted fifteen thousand white
mulberry-trees in the Tuileries Gardens.--T.
[477] Louis XV. used part of the materials of the Maintenon Aqueduct
to construct a _château_ for Madame de Pompadour, which has since been
demolished.--T.
[478] Paul Duc de Noailles (1802-1885) took his scat in the Upper House
in 1827. In 1830, he took the oath to Louis-Philippe, but employed all
his oratorical power in favour of the alleviation of the laws against
the exiled Bourbons of the Elder Branch and kindred subjects. He
retired into private life after the Revolution of 1848. In 1849, he was
elected to the French Academy on the strength of some historical works
of no particular merit and of not the slightest originality. The Duc de
Noailles was Ambassador to St. Petersburg for two or three months from
May to July 1871.--T.
[479] Langhome's PLUTARCH: _Julius Cæsar._--T.
[480] Mademoiselle de Beauvilliers Saint-Aignan, later Princesse de
Chalais-Périgord (_vide infra_, p. 245).--T.
[481] The distance from Rambouillet to Maintenon is about 13 miles.--T.
[482] Alice de Rochechouart-Mortemart, Duchesse de Noailles
(1800-1887), married to the Duc de Noailles in 1823.--T.
[483] _Cf._ Vol. V., p. 153.--T.
[484] Paul Duc de Beauvilliers (1648-1714), a soldier and statesman
of austere virtue, was, in 1685, appointed President of the Board of
Finance and governor to the Duc de Bourgogne, Louis XIV.'s grandson,
and his brothers, the Duc d'Anjou, afterwards Philip V. King of Spain,
and Charles Duc de Berry. Beauvilliers took Fénelon to assist him and
the two became very firm friends. He survived the death of the Duc de
Bourgogne by only two years.--T.
[485] _Cf._ Vol. II., pp. 71-72. The "books" are numbered differently
in the original edition of the Memoirs.--T.
[486] I omit five lines of verse from La Fontaine on Madame de
Montespan.--T.
[487] Madame de Montespan was a Mademoiselle de Rochechouart de
Mortemart (_Cf._ Vol. I., p. 103, n. 1).-T.
[488] Jacques Duc de FitzJames (1799-1846).--T.
[489] François Christophe Edmond Kellermann, Duc de Valmy (1802-1868),
grandson of Marshal Kellermann, first Duc de Valmy, shortly after the
Revolution of July became a fervent Legitimist. He resigned his seat
in the Chamber of Deputies, after his visit to Belgrave Square, and
was re-elected; but he retired from political life entirely in 1846.
Like the Duc de Noailles and the other Legitimists, Valmy was opposed
to Louis-Philippe's English Alliance and would have preferred an
alliance with Russia. Those who have read the Memoirs carefully will
entertain little doubt that these were also the views of Chateaubriand
himself.--T.
[490] Armand Jean Le Bouthillier de Rancé (1626-1700), the great
reformer of the Trappist Order. Chateaubriand's Life of Rancé appeared
in 1844.--T.
[491] _Cf._ Vol. I., p. 189 and Vol. II., p. 72.--T.
[492] _Cf._ Vol. IV., Book IX.-T.
[493] _Cf._ Vol. II., pp. 86 _et seq._--T.
[494] _Cf._ Vol. I., p. 187.--T.
[495] _Ibid._ pp. 188-189.--T.
[496] _Cf._ Vol. II., p. 69.--T.
[497] I find that Anne Louise de Chateaubriand, eldest daughter of
Geoffroy Louis Comte de Chateaubriand, became Baronne de Baudry (not
Baulny).--T.
[498] Later Charles III. Duke of Parma (1823-1854), assassinated on the
27th of March 1854, father to the present Duke. (_Cf._ Vol. IV., p.
224, n. 2.)--T.
[499] _Cf._ Vol. V., p. 364.--T.
[500] Marie Anne Françoise de Chateaubriand, Comtesse de Marigny
(1760-1860), who lived to the age of over a hundred years (_Cf._ Vol.
I., _passim_).--T.
[501] LACOMBE: _Vie de Berryer_, VOL. II., P. 401.--B.
[502] By the Abbé Georges Bertram, professor of the Catholic Institute
of Paris (Paris: 1899; one vol. 8vo).--B.
[503] _Mémoires et souvenirs du baron Hyde de Neuville_, VOL. III., P.
579.--B.
[504] Théodore Simon Jouffroy (1796-1842), a noted philosophical
writer, a professor at several institutions and librarian of the
University of Paris from 1838. He translated Dugal Stewart's _Outlines
of Moral Philosophy_ (1826) and the Complete Works of Thomas Reid
(1824-1836) and wrote a _Cours de droit naturel_ (1834-1842), a _Cours
d'esthétique_ (posthumous: 1843), _Mélanges philosophiques_ (1833) and
_Nouveaux mélanges_ (published after his death).-T.
[505] Pierre Benjamin Lafaye (1808-1867), a distinguished philologist,
was appointed professor of philosophy at the Royal College of
Marseilles in 1837 and, in 1849, was transferred to Aix. In 1858, he
published his _Dictionnaire des synonymes de la langue française_, the
finest work of this class that exists in any language.--T.
[506] Étienne Gaston Baron de Flotte (1805-1882), a poet and man of
letters of some merit and an ardent Catholic and Legitimist.--T.
[507] Pierre Marin Victor Richard de Laprade (1812-1885) had published
_Parfums de Madeleine_ (1839), the _Colère de Jésus_ (1840), _Psyché_,
(1841) and _Odes et poèmes_ (1844) before the date of Chateaubriand's
death. None of his poems were of great value; but he was elected to the
French Academy in 1858. He sat as a silent member (of the Right) of the
National Assembly from 1871 to 1873.--T.
[508] Madame Mohl was the wife of Julius von Mohl (1800-1876), the
German-French Orientalist, who had been appointed Professor of Persian
to the Collège de France in 1845.--T.
We read in Vol. II., p. 564, of the _Souvenirs et correspondance de
Madame Récamier_:
"An amiable, witty and kind-hearted Englishwoman, Madame Mohl,
lived on the floor above, in the same house and on the same
stair-case as M. de Chateaubriand."--B.
[509] MADAME LENORMANT: _Souvenirs et correspondance tirés des papiers
de Madame Récamier_, Vol. II., p. 543.--B.
[510] _Cf._ Victor de Laprade's article, _Académie de Lyon. Concours
pour l'éloge de Madame Récamier_, in the _Revue de Lyon_ for 1849, Vol.
I., p. 65.--B.
[511] _Chataubriand et son temps_, p. 290.--B.
[512] _Souvenirs et correspondance de Madame Récamier_, Vol. II., p.
554.--B.
[513] Madame Récamier died on the 11th of May 1849, in the
seventy-third year of her age.--T.
[514] "It was in the midst of the Days of June that the death occurred
of a man who, perhaps, of all men of our day best preserved the spirit
of the old races: M. de Chateaubriand, with whom I was connected by so
many family ties and childish recollections. He had long since fallen
into a sort of speechless stupor, which made one sometimes believe
that his intelligence was extinguished. Nevertheless, while in this
condition, he heard a rumour of the Revolution of February and desired
to be told what was happening. They informed him that Louis-Philippe's
Government had been overthrown. He said, 'Well done!' and nothing more.
Four months later, the din of the Days of June reached his ears, and
again he asked what that noise was. They answered that people were
fighting in Paris, and that it was the sound of cannon. Thereupon he
made vain efforts to rise, saying, 'I want to go to it,' and was then
silent, this time for ever; for he died the next day." (_Recollections
of Alexis de Tocqueville_, p. 230).--T.
[515] _Souvenirs et correspondance de Madame Récamier_, Vol. II., p.
563.--B.
[516] Abbé Gaspard Deguerry (1797-1871), Rector of Saint-Eustache from
1845 to 1849 and of the Madeleine to his death, in 1871, when he was
shot as a hostage under the Commune. A monument has since been erected
to the Abbé Deguerry in the crypt of the Madeleine.--T.
[517] It has often been said that Béranger was present at the death;
but this is not so.--B.
[518] _Journal des Débats_, 5 July 1848.--B.
[519] Denis Auguste Affre (1793-1848), Archbishop of Paris, was
appointed Co-adjutor of Strasburg, in 1839, and Archbishop of Paris, in
succession to Monseigneur de Quélen, in 1840. He was mortally wounded
during the Insurrection of 1848, while admonishing the insurgents, at
the barricades in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, on the 25th of June.
Monseigneur Affre died two days later, repeating Christ's words:
"The good shepherd giveth his life for his sheep.--T."
[520]
"I know no sweeter place on earth
Than the fair spot that gave me birth!"--T.