Title: The Memoirs of François René Vicomte de Chateaubriand sometime Ambassador to England. Volume 6 (of 6)
Author: vicomte de François-René Chateaubriand
Translator: Alexander Teixeira de Mattos
Release date: July 16, 2017 [eBook #55124]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Laura Natal Rodriguez and Marc D'Hooghe at
Free Literature (online soon in an extended version, also
linking to free sources for education worldwide ... MOOC's,
educational materials,...) Images generously made available
by the Hathi Trust.
VOLUME VI
Journal from Carlsbad to Paris—Cynthia—Eger—Wallenstein—Weissenstadt —Berneck—Memories—Bayreuth—Voltaire—Hollfeld—The church—The little girl with the basket—The inn-keeper and his maid-servant—Bamberg—The female hunchback—Würzburg: its canons—A drunkard—The swallow—The inn at Wiesenbach—A German and his wife—My age and appearance—Heidelberg—Pilgrims—Ruins—Mannheim—The Rhine—-The Palatinate—Aristocratic and plebeian armies—Convent and castle—A lonely inn—Kaiserslautern—Saarbrück—Metz—Charles X.'s Council in France—Ideas on Henry V.—My letter to Madame la Dauphine—Letters from Madame la Duchesse de Berry
Journal from Paris to Venice—The Jura—The Alps—Milan—Verona—The roll-call of the dead—The Brenta—Incidental remarks—Venice—Venetian architecture—Antonio—The Abbé Betio and M. Gamba—The rooms in the Palace of the Doges—Prisons—Silvio Pellico's prison—The Frari—The Academy of Fine Arts—Titian's Assumption—The metopes of the Parthenon—Original drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo and Raphael—The Church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo—The Arsenal—Henry IV.—A frigate leaving for America—The Cemetery of San Cristoforo—San Michele di Murano—Murano—The woman and the child—Gondoliers—Bretons and Venetians—Breakfast on the Riva degli Schiavoni—The tomb of Mesdames at Trieste—Rousseau and Byron—Great geniuses inspired by Venice—Old and new courtezans—Rousseau and Byron compared
Arrival of Madame de Bauffremont in Venice—Catajo—The Duke of Modena—Petrarch's Tomb at Arqua—The land of poets—Tasso—Arrival of Madame la Duchesse de Berry—Mademoiselle Lebeschu—Count Lucchesi-Palli—Discussion—Dinner—Bugeaud the gaoler—Madame de Saint-Priest, M. de Saint-Priest—Madame de Podenas—Our band—I refuse to go to Prague—I yield at a word—Padua—Tombs—Zanze's manuscript—Unexpected news—The Governor of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom—Letters from Madame to Charles X. and Henry V.—M. de Montbel—My note to the Governor—I set out for Prague
Journal from Padua to Prague, from the 20th to the 26th of September 1833—Conegliano—The translator of the Dernier Abencerrage—Udine—Countess Samoyloff—M. de La Ferronays—A priest—Carinthia—The Drave—A peasant lad—Forges—Breakfast at the hamlet of St. Michael—The neck of the Tauern—A cemetery—Atala: how changed—A sunrise—Salzburg—A military review—Happiness of the peasants—Woknabrück—Reminiscences of Plancoët—Night—German and Italian towns contrasted—Linx—The Danube—Waldmünchen—Woods—Recollections of Combourg and Lucile—Travellers—Prague—Madame de Gontaut—The young Frenchmen—Madame la Dauphine—An excursion to Butschirad—Butschirad—Charles X. asleep—Henry V.—Reception of the young men—The ladder and the peasant-woman—Dinner at Butschirad—Madame de Narbonne—Henry V.—A rubber—Charles X.—My incredulity touching the declaration of majority—The newspapers—Scene of the young men—Prague—I leave for France—I pass by Butschirad at night—A meeting at Schlau—Carlsbad empty—Hollfeld—Bamberg—My different St. Francis' Days—Trials of religion—France
General politics of the moment—Louis-Philippe—M. Thiers—M. de La Fayette—Armand Carrel—Of some women: the lady from Louisiana—Madame Tastu—Madame Sand—M. de Talleyrand—Death of Charles X.
Conclusion—Historical antecedents from the Regency to 1793—The Past—The old European order expiring—Inequality of fortunes—Danger of the expansion of intellectual nature and material nature—The downfall of the monarchies—The decline of society and the progress of the individual—The future—The difficulty of understanding it—The Christian idea is the future of the world—Recapitulation of my life—Summary of the changes that have happened on the globe during my life—End of the Mémoires d'Outre-tombe
APPENDICES
I. THE MORGANATIC MARRIAGE OF THE DUCHESSE DE BERRY 229-235
II. UNPUBLISHED FRAGMENTS OF THE MÉMOIRES D'OUTRE-TOMBE 236-247
III. THE LAST YEARS OF CHATEAUBRIAND 248
IV. THE TRANSLATOR'S SECOND NOTE 263
Chateaubriand's Tomb
The Duchesse de Berry
The Duc and Duchesse d'angoulême
Louis Philippe
Adolphe Thiers
The Vicomtesse de Chateaubriand
Journal from Carlsbad to Paris—Cynthia—Eger—Wallenstein—Weisaenstadt—Berneck—Memories —Bayreuth—Voltaire—Hollfeld—The church—The little girl with the basket—The inn-keeper and his maid-servant—Bamberg—The female hunchback—Würzburg: its canons—A drunkard—The swallow—The inn at Wiesenbach—A German and his wife—My age and appearance—Heidelberg—Pilgrims—Ruins—Mannheim—The Rhine—The Palatinate—Aristocratic and plebeian armies—Convent and castle—A lonely inn—Kaiserslautern—Saarbrück—Metz—Charles X.'s Council in France—Ideas on Henry V.—My letter to Madame la Dauphine—Letters from Madame la Duchesse de Berry.
1 June 1833, evening.
The journey from Carlsbad to Elbogen, along the Eger, is pleasant. The castle of this little town is of the twelfth century and keeps sentry on a rock, at the entrance to the gorge of a valley. The foot of the rock, covered with trees, is contained within a bend of the Eger: hence the name of the town and the castle, Elbogen, the Elbow.
The donjon was red with the last rays of the sun when I saw it from the high-road. Above the mountains and woods hung the twisted column of smoke of a foundry.
I started at half-past nine from the Zwoda stage. I followed the road along which Vauvenargues passed in the retreat from Prague, the young man to whom Voltaire, in[Pg 2] the Éloge funèbre des officiers morts en 1741, addresses these words:
"Thou art no more, O sweet hope of my remaining days;
I have always beheld in thee the most unfortunate of men
and the most tranquil."
From inside my calash, I watched the stars rise.
Be not afraid, Cynthia,[2] it is but the whispering of the reeds bent by our passage through their mobile forest. I have a dagger for jealous men and blood for thee. Let not this tomb cause thee any alarm; it is that of a woman once loved like thyself: Cecilia Metella lay here.
How wonderful is this night in the Roman Campagna! The moon rises behind the Sabine Hill to contemplate the sea; she causes to stand forth from the diaphanous darkness the ashen-blue summits of Albano, the more distant, less deeply-graven lines of Soracte. The long canal of the old aqueducts lets fall a few globules of its waters through the mosses, columbines, gilliflowers, and joins the mountains to the city walls. Planted one above the other, the aerial porticoes, cutting into the sky, turn in mid-air the torrent of the ages and the course of the brooks. The legislatrix of the world, Rome, seated on the stone of her sepulchre, with her robe of centuries, projects the irregular outline of her tall figure into the milky solitude.
Let us sit down: this pine-tree, like the goat-herd of the Abruzzi, unfolds its parasol among ruins. The moon showers her snowy light upon the Gothic crown of the tower of Metella's tomb and on the festoons of marble that link the horns of the bucrania: a graceful pomp inviting us to enjoy life, which speeds so soon.
Hark! The nymph Egeria is singing beside her fountain; the nightingale warbles in the vine of the Hypogeum of the Scipios; the languid Syrian breeze indolently wafts to us the fragrance of the wild tuberoses. The palm-tree of the abandoned villa waves half-drowned in the amethyst and azure of the Phosbean light. But thou, made pale by the reflections of Diana's purity, thou, O Cynthia, art a thousand times more graceful than that palm-tree. The shades of Delia, Lalage, Lydia, Lesbia, resting on broken cornices, stammer mysterious words around thee.[Pg 3] Thy glances cross those of the stars and mingle with their rays.
But, Cynthia, nothing is real except the happiness which thou canst enjoy. Those constellations which shine so brightly on thy head harmonize with thy bliss only through the illusions of a beguiling perspective. O young and fair Italian, time is ending! On those flowery carpets thy companions have already passed.
A mist unfolds itself, rises and veils the eye of the night with a silvery retina; the pelican cries and returns to the strand; the woodcock alights in the horse-tails of the diamond-studded springs; the bell resounds under the dome of St. Peter's; the nocturnal plain-chant, the voice of the middle-ages, saddens the lonely monastery of Santa-Croce; the monk chants Lauds upon his knees, on the calcined columns of San Paolo; vestals prostrate themselves on the icy slab that closes their crypts; the pifferaro pipes his midnight lament before the solitary Madonna, at the condemned gate of a catacomb. 'Tis the hour of melancholy; religion awakens and love falls asleep!
Cynthia, thy voice is weakening: the refrain which the Neapolitan fisherman taught thee in his swift-sailing bark, or the Venetian oarsman in his gondola, dies away on thy lips. Yield to the exhaustion of thy sleep; I will watch over thy repose. The darkness with which thy lids cover thy eyes vies in suavity with that which drowsy, perfumed Italy pours over thy brow. When the neighing of our horses is heard in the Campagna, when the morning-star proclaims the dawn, the herd of Frascati will come down with his goats and I shall not cease to soothe thee with my whispered lullaby:
"A bundle of jasmin and narcissus, an alabaster Hebe but lately emerging from the hollow way of an excavation, or fallen from the frontal of a temple, lies on this bed of anemones: no, Muse, you err. The jasmin, the alabaster Hebe is a Roman sorceress, born sixteen months ago of May and the half of a spring, to the sound of the lyre, at the rise of dawn, in a field of roses of Pæstum.
"Winds from the orange-trees of Palermo that blow over Circe's isle; breezes that pass to Tasso's tomb, that caress the nymphs and Cupids of the Farnese; you that play in the Vatican among Raphael's Virgins, among the statues of the Muses; you that dip your wings in the cascades of[Pg 4] Tivoli; genii of the arts that live on master-pieces and flutter with the memories, come: you alone do I permit to inspire Cynthia's sleep.
"And you, majestic daughters of Pythagoras, Fates in your robes of flax, inevitable sisters seated at the axle of the spheres, turn the thread of Cynthia's destiny over golden spindles; make it fall from your fingers and rise again to your hands with ineffable harmony; immortal spinsters, open the gate of ivory to those dreams which lie on a woman's breast without oppressing it! I will sing thee, O canephor of the Roman solemnities, young Charite fed on ambrosia in Venus' lap, smile sent from the East to glide over my life, violet forgotten in Horace' garden...."
"Mein Herr, ten kreutzers vor de durnbike!"
A plague upon you with your "crutches!" I had changed my sky! I was just in the right mood! The Muse will not return! That accursed Eger, to which we are coming, is the cause of my unhappiness.
The nights are fatal at Eger. Schiller shows us Wallenstein, betrayed by his accomplices, going to the window of a room in the fortress of Eger:
Am Himmel ist geschäftige Bewegung,
Des Thurmes Fahne jagt der Wind, schnell geht
Der Wolken Zug, die Mondeszichel wankt,
Und durch die Nacht zucht ungewisse Helle[3].
Wallenstein, on the point of being assassinated, expresses himself in touching terms on the death of Max Piccolomini[4], beloved by Thekla[5]:
Die Blume ist hinweg aus meinem Leben
. . . . . . .
Denn er stand neben mir, wie meine Jugend,
Er machte mir das Wirkliche zum Traum[6].
Wallenstein retires to his place of rest:
Sieh, es ist Nacht geworden; auf dem Schloss
Ist's auch schon stille. Leucine, Kämmerling!
[Pg 5]. . . . . . .
Ich denke einen langen Schlaf zu thun;
Denn dieser letzten Tage Qual war gross.
Sorgt, dass sie nicht zu zeitig mir erwecken[7].
The dagger of the murderers snatches Wallenstein from his dreams of ambition, even as the voice of the turnpike-man put an end to my dream of love. Both Schiller and Benjamin Constant, who gave proof of a new talent by imitating the German tragic poet, have gone to join Wallenstein, while I, at the gates of Eger, recall their treble fame.
2 June 1833.
I passed through Eger and, on Saturday the 1st of June, at day-break, entered Bavaria: a tall red-haired girl, bare-foot and bare-headed, came to open the turnpike to me, like Austria in person. The cold lasted: the grass in the moats was covered with a white hoar-frost; wet foxes came out of the oat-fields; grey, zig-zag, wide-spreading clouds hung across in the sky like eagles' wings.
I arrived at Weissenstadt at nine o'clock in the morning; at the same moment, a sort of gig was carrying away a young woman driving without a hat; she looked very much like what she probably was: joy, love's short fortune, then the hospital and the common grave. Strolling pleasure, may Heaven not be too severe on your boards! There are so many actors worse than yourself in this world!
Before entering the village, I passed through "wastes:" this word was at the point of my pencil; it belonged to our old Frankish tongue: it describes the aspect of a desolate country better than the word "lande," which means earth. I still know the song which they used to sing in the evening when crossing the waste-lands:
C'est le chevalier des Landes:
Malheureux chevalier!
Quand il fut dans la lande,
A ouï les sings sonner[8].
After Weissenstadt comes Berneck. On leaving Berneck, the road is lined with poplar-trees, whose winding avenue filled me with an indescribable sentiment of mingled pleasure[Pg 6] and sadness. On ransacking my memory, I found that they resembled the poplars with which the high-road was formerly laid out at the entrance to Villeneuve-sur-Yonne on the Paris side. Madame de Beaumont is no more; M. Joubert is no more; the poplars are felled and, after the fourth fall of the Monarchy, I am passing at the feet of the poplars at Berneck:
"Give me," says St. Augustine, "a man who loves, and he will understand what I say."
Youth laughs at those disappointments; it is charming, happy: in vain do you tell it that the time will come when it too will know a similar bitterness; it thrusts you aside with its light wing and flies away in search of pleasures: it is right, if it dies with them.
Here is Bayreuth, a reminiscence of another sort. This town stands in the middle of a hollow plain of crops mixed with meadow-land: it has wide streets, low houses, a weak population. In the time of Voltaire and Frederic II., the Margravine of Bayreuth was famous; her death inspired the bard of Ferney with the only ode in which he displayed any lyrical talent:
Tu ne chanteras plus, solitaire Sylvandre,
Dans ce palais des arts, où les sons de ta voix
Contre les préjugés osaient se faire entendre,
Et de l'humanité faisaient parler les droits[9].
The poet here praises himself justly, were it not that there was no one less solitary in the world than Voltaire-Sylvander. The poet adds, addressing the Margravine:
Des tranquilles hauteurs de la philosophie,
Ta pitié contemplait, avec des yeux sereins,
Les fantômes changeants du songes de la vie,
Tant de rêves détruits, tant de projets si vains[10].
From the height of a palace, it is easy to look down with calm eyes upon the poor devils who pass along the street; but those lines are none the less mightily true.... Who could feel them better than myself? I have seen so many phantoms defile through the dream of life! At this very moment, have I not been looking on the three royal larvæ in the Castle in Prague and on the daughter of Marie-Antoinette at Carlsbad? In 1733, just a century ago, what was it occupied men's minds? Had they the least idea of what is now? When Frederic was married, in 1733, under the rough tutelage of his father, had he, in Mathew Laensberg[11], seen M. de Tournon[12] Intendant of Bayreuth and leaving his intendance for the "Prefectship" of Rome? In 1933, the traveller passing through Franconia will ask of my shade if I could have guessed the facts of which he will be a witness.
While I was breakfasting, I read some lessons which a German lady, young and pretty, of course, was writing to a master's dictation:
"Celui qu'il est content, est riche. Vous et je nous avons peu d'argent; mais nous sommes content. Nous sommes ainci à mon avis plus riches que tel qui a un tonne d'or, et il est...."
That is true, mademoiselle, you and je have little money; you are satisfied, as it seems, and you laugh at a ton of gold; but, if, by chance, I were not satisfied, you must agree that, for me, a ton of gold might be rather pleasant.
On leaving Bayreuth, one goes up. Slender pruned firs represented to me the pillars of the mosque at Cairo or the Cathedral of Cordova, but shrunk and blackened, like a landscape reproduced in the camera obscura. The road runs on from hill to hill and valley to valley: the hills wide, with a tuft of wood on their brows; the valleys narrow and green, but badly watered. At the lowest point of these valleys, one sees a hamlet marked by the campanile of a little church. The whole of Christian civilization was formed in this way: the missionary, become a parish-priest,[Pg 8] stopped; the Barbarians cantoned themselves around him, like flocks gathering round the shepherd. In former days, those remote habitations would have made me dream more than one kind of dream; to-day, I dream not at all and am nowhere at ease.
Baptiste, suffering from over-fatigue, compelled me to stop at Hollfeld. While supper was being made ready, I climbed the rock which overlooks a part of the village. Upon that rock rises a square belfry; swifts screamed as they swept round the roof and fronts of the turret. That scene consisting of a few birds and an old tower had not repeated itself since the days of my childhood at Combourg; my heart was quite oppressed by it. I went down to the church on a hanging ground towards the west; it was surrounded by its grave-yard abandoned by the new deceased. The old dead only marked out their furrows there: a proof that they had tilled their field. The setting sun, pale and drowned, on the horizon, in a fir-plantation, lit up the lonely refuge where no other man than I stood erect. When shall I be recumbent in my turn? We are beings of nothingness and darkness; our impotency and our potency are strongly characterized: we cannot, at will, procure for ourselves either light or life; but nature, by giving us eye-lids and a hand, has put night and death at our disposal.
Entering the church, whose door was half-open, I knelt down with the intention of saying an Our Father and Hail Mary for the repose of my mother's soul: a servitude of immortality laid upon Christian souls in their mutual affection. Suddenly I thought I heard the shutter of a confessional open; I fancied that Death, instead of a priest, was about to appear at the penance grating. At that very moment, the bell-ringer came to lock the door of the church: I had only time to leave.
Returning to the inn, I met a little basket-carrier: she had bare legs and feet; her skirt was short, her bodice torn; she walked stooping and with her arms crossed. Together we climbed a steep road; she turned her sun-burnt face a little to my side; her pretty and dishevelled head was glued against her basket. Her eyes were black; her mouth was half open to facilitate her breathing; one saw that, under her burdened shoulders, her young breast had as yet felt no other weight than the spoils of the orchards. She tempted one to talk to her of roses:
"Ρόδα μ'εἴ ρηχας[13]."
I applied myself to casting the adolescent vintager's horoscope: will she grow old at the wine-press, unknown and happy as the mother of a family? Will she be carried off to the camps by a corporal? Will she fall a prey to some Don Juan? The abducted village-girl loves her ravisher as much with astonishment as with passion: he transports her to a marble palace on the Straits of Messina, under a palm-tree beside a spring, opposite the sea displaying its azure billows and Etna belching flames.
I had reached this point in my story, when my companion, turning to the left in a wide open space, went towards some lonely dwellings. As she was about to disappear, she stopped, cast a last look at the stranger, and then, bowing her head to pass, with her basket, under a low door-way, entered a cottage, like a little shy cat gliding into a barn among the sheaves. Let us go on to find in her prison Her Royal Highness Madame la Duchesse de Berry:
Je la suivis, mais je pleurai
De ne pouvoir plus suivre qu'elle[14].
My host at Hollfeld is a curious man: he and his maid-servant are inn-keepers with extreme reluctance; they abhor travellers. When they espy a carriage from afar, they go to hide themselves, cursing those vagabonds who have nothing to do but scour the high-roads, those idle persons who disturb an honest publican and prevent him from drinking the wine which he is obliged to sell to them. The old servant sees that her master is being ruined, but she is waiting for a stroke of Providence in his favour; like Sancho, she will say:
"Sir, accept this fine Kingdom of Micomicon which falls from heaven into your hand."
Once the first movement of ill-humour is past, the couple, in the interval between two bouts, put a good face on the matter. The chamber-maid murders a trifle of French, squints for two and has an air of saying to you:
"I have seen finer sparks than you in Napoleon's armies!"
She smelt of tobacco and brandy, like glory by the camp-fire; she ogled me with a provoking and wicked glance: how sweet it is to be loved at the very moment when one had given up all hopes of it! But, Javotte, you come too late for my "broken and mortified temptations," as a Frenchman of old said; my sentence is passed:
"Harmonious veteran, take thy rest," M. Lerminier[15] has said to me.
You see, fair and friendly stranger, I am forbidden to listen to your song:
Vivandière du regiment,
Javotte l'on me nomme,
Je vends, je donne, et bois gaîment
Mon vin et mon rogomme.
J'ai le pied leste et l'œil mutin,
Tin tin, tin tin, tin tin, tin tin,
R'lin lin tin[16].
There you have another reason why I withstand your seductions; you are frivolous; you would betray me. Fly away then, Dame Javotte of Bavaria, like your predecessor, Madame Isabeau[17].
2 June 1833.
I have left Hollfeld, I am passing through Bamberg at night. All is sleeping: I see only a tiny light whose feeble glimmer comes from the back of a room to grow wan at[Pg 11] a window. What is waking here: pleasure or sorrow, love or death?
At Bamberg, in 1815, Berthier, Prince of Neufchâtel, fell from a balcony into the street[18]: his master was about to fall from a greater height.
Sunday 2 June.
At Dettelbach, reappearance of the vines. Four growths mark the limit of four natures and four climates: the birch, the vine, the olive and the palm, always going towards the sun.
After Dettelbach, two stages to Würzburg, and a female hunchback seated behind my carriage; it was Terence's Andria: Inopia.... egregia forma.... ætate integra.[19] The postillion wanted to make her get down; I objected, for two reasons: first, because I should have been afraid lest that fairy should have thrown a spell over me; secondly, because, having read in a biography of myself that I am a hunchback, all female hunchbacks are my sisters. Who can satisfy himself that he is not hunchbacked? Who will ever tell you that you are? If you look at yourself in the glass, you cannot say at all; do we ever see ourselves as we are? You will find a turn in your figure that suits you to perfection. All hunchbacks are proud and happy; the advantages of the hump are hallowed in song. At the entrance to a lane, my hunchback, in her ragged finery, stepped majestically to the ground: carrying her burden, like all mortals, Serpentina plunged into a corn-field and disappeared among spikes taller than herself.
At mid-day, on the 2nd of June, I had reached the top of a hill from which one descried Würzburg: the citadel on a height, the town below, with its palace, its steeples and its turrets. The palace, although thick-set, would be handsome even in Florence; in case of rain, the Prince could give shelter to all his subjects in his mansion without giving up his own apartments.
The Bishop of Würzburg was formerly the Sovereign Bishop: the nomination was in the gift of the canons of the Chapter. After his election, he passed, stripped to the[Pg 12] waist, between his colleagues drawn up in two rows, who scourged him. It was hoped that the princes, offended at this manner of consecrating a royal back, would refrain from presenting themselves as candidates. To-day this would be of no avail: there is not a descendant of Charlemagne but would consent to be whipped for three days on end to obtain the crown of Yvetot.
I have seen the Emperor of Austria's brother Duke of Würzburg[20]; he used to sing very prettily at Fontainebleau, in the Galerie de François Ier, at the concerts of the Empress Joséphine.
They kept Schwartz two hours at the passport-office. Left with my unharnessed carriage in front of a church, I went in: I prayed with the Christian crowd which represents the old society in the midst of the new. A procession went out and marched round the church: why am I not a monk on the walls of Rome? The times to which I belong would be realized in me.
When the first seeds of religion budded in my soul, I opened out like a virgin soil which, cleared of its brambles, bears its first harvest. Came a dry and icy wind, and the soil was parched. The sky took pity on it; it gave it its tepid dews; then the wind blew again. This alternation of faith and doubt long made my life a mixture of despair and unspeakable delights. O my good, sainted mother, pray Jesus Christ for me: your son needs redeeming more than other men!
I left Würzburg at four o'clock and took the Mannheim Road. I entered the Grand-duchy of Baden; I found a village in a merry mood; a drunkard gave me his hand, shouting:
"Long live the Emperor!"
Everything that has happened since the fall of Napoleon is null and void in Germany. The men who rose to snatch their national independence from Bonaparte's ambition dream only of him, so greatly did he stir the imagination of the nations, from the Bedouins in their tents to the Teutons in their huts.
As I went towards France, the children became noisier in the hamlets, the postillions drove faster, life sprang up once more.
At Bischoffsheim, where I dined, a fair onlooker appeared at my state banquet: a swallow, a real Procne, with a reddish breast, came to perch at my open window, on the iron bar from which swung the sign of the Golden Sun; then it warbled most sweetly, looking at me as though it knew me and without showing the least alarm. I have never complained of being awakened by the daughter of Pandion; I have never, like Anacreon, called her a "chatterer;" I have always, on the contrary, hailed her return with the song of the children of the isle of Rhodes:
"She comes, the swallow comes, bringing good seasons and a joyful time! Open the window, do not despise the swallow[21]!"
"François," said my fellow-guest at Bischoffsheim, "my great-great-grandmother used to live at Combourg, under the rafters of the roof of your turret; you used to keep her company every year, in autumn, in the reeds in the pond, when you went dreaming, of an evening, with your sylph. She landed on your native rock, on the very day when you embarked for America, and she followed your sail for some time. My grandmother built her nest in Charlotte's window; eight years after, she arrived at Jaffa with you: you have mentioned this in your Itinéraire?[22] My mother, while twittering to the dawn, fell one day into your room at the Foreign Office[23]; you opened the window for her. My mother has[Pg 14] had many children: I who am speaking to you am of her last nest; I have met you before on the old Tivoli Road in the Roman Campagna: do you remember? My feathers were so black and so glossy! You looked at me sadly. Would you like us to fly away together?"
"Alas, my dear swallow, who know my story so well, you are extremely kind; but I am a poor moulting bird, and my feathers will never come back; I cannot, therefore, fly away with you. And you could not carry me: I am too heavy with sorrows and years. And then, where should we go? Spring and beautiful climates are no longer of my season. For you, the air and love; for me, the ground and loneliness. You are going away: may the dew cool your wings! May a hospitable yard offer to your tired flight, when you are crossing the Ionian Sea! May a peaceful October save you from shipwreck! Greet the olive-trees of Athens and the palm-trees of Rosetta for me. If I am no more when the flowers bring you back, I invite you to my funeral banquet: come at sunset to snap up the gnats on the grass of my grave; like you, I love liberty and I have lived on little[24]."
3 and 4 June 1833.
I set out myself by land, a few moments after the swallow had set sail. The night was overcast; the moon hovered, weakened and wasted, among the clouds; my eyes, half-asleep,[Pg 15] closed as they looked at it; I felt as though I were expiring in the mysterious light which illumines the shadows: "I felt," says Manzoni, "I know not what peaceful depression, the fore-runner of the last rest."
I stopped at Wiesenbach: a solitary inn, a narrow, cultivated valley between two wooded hills. A German from Brunswick, a traveller like myself, hearing my name pronounced, came running up to me. He pressed my hand, spoke to me of my works; his wife, he told me, was learning to read French in the Génie du Christianisme. He did not cease to express surprise at my "youth:"
"But," he added, "that is the fault of my judgment; I ought to think you, from your last works, as young as you look."
My life has been mixed up with so many events that, in my readers' heads, I have the ancientness of those events themselves. I often speak of my grey head; this is calculated vanity on my part, so that people may exclaim, when they see me:
"Ah, he is not so old!"
A man is at ease with white hair: he can boast of it; to glory in having black hair would be in bad taste: a fine matter for triumph, to be as your mother made you! But to be as time, misfortune and wisdom have dressed you, that is fine! My little artifice has succeeded sometimes. Quite recently a priest asked to see me; he stood dumb at the sight of me; at last recovering his speech, he cried:
"Ah, monsieur, so you will be able to fight a long time yet for the faith!"
One day, as I was passing through Lyons, a lady wrote to me; she begged me to give her daughter a seat in my carriage and take her to Paris. The proposal struck me as singular; but, after all, having verified the signature, I found my unknown correspondent to be a highly respectable lady and I replied politely. The mother introduced her daughter to me, a divinity of sixteen. No sooner had the mother set eyes upon me than she blushed scarlet; her confidence forsook her:
"Forgive me," she stammered; "I am none the less filled with esteem.... But you understand the proprieties.... I made a mistake.... I am so greatly surprised."
I insisted, looking at my promised companion, who seemed amused at the discussion; I was lavish with protestations that I would take every imaginable care of that beautiful young[Pg 16] person; the mother humbled herself with excuses and courtesies. The two ladies departed. I was proud of having frightened them so much. For some hours I thought myself made young again by the Dawn. The lady had fancied that the author of the Génie du Christianisme was a venerable Abbé de Chateaubriand, a tall, dry, simple old man, constantly taking snuff out of a huge tin snuff-box, who might very well be trusted to take an innocent school-girl to the Sacred Heart.
They used to tell in Vienna, two or three lustres ago, that I lived all alone in a certain valley called the Vallée-aux-Loups. My house was built on an island; when people wanted to see me, they had to blow a horn on the opposite bank of the river: a river at Châtenay! I then looked out through a hole: if the company pleased me, a thing that hardly ever happened, I came myself to fetch them in a little boat; if not, not. In the evening, I pulled my boat on shore and nobody was allowed to land on my island. In point of fact, I ought to have lived in this way; this Viennese story has always charmed me: M. de Metternich surely did not invent it; he is not sufficiently my friend for that.
I do not know what the German traveller will have told his wife about me, nor if he went out of his way to undeceive her as to my decrepitude. I fear that I possess the drawbacks of black hair and white hair both and that I am neither young enough nor staid enough. For the rest, I was hardly in the mood for coquetry at Wiesenbach; a melancholy wind blew under the doors and through the passages of the inn: when the breeze blows, I am in love with nothing else.
From Wiesenbach to Heidelberg, one follows the course of the Necker, cased by hills which carry forests on a bank of sand and red sulphate. How many rivers I have seen flow! I met pilgrims from Walthüren: they formed two parallel lines on either side of the high-road; the carriages passed in the middle. The women walked bare-foot, beads in hand, with a parcel of linen on their heads; the men bare-headed, also carrying their beads in their hands. It was raining; in some places the watery clouds crept along the sides of the hills. Boats loaded with timber went down the river, others went up, under sail, or in tow. In the broken places in the hills were hamlets standing among the fields, in the midst of rich vegetable-gardens adorned with Bengal roses and different flowering shrubs. Pilgrims, pray for my poor little King: he is exiled, he is innocent; he is commencing his[Pg 17] pilgrimage while you are performing yours and I ending mine. If he is not to reign, it will always be a certain glory to me to have fastened the wreck of so great a fortune to my life-boat God alone sends the fair wind and opens the harbour.
As one approaches Heidelberg, the bed of the Necker, strewn with rocks, widens. One sees the wharf of the town and the town itself, which wears a pleasant mien. The back-ground of the whole picture ends in a tall earthly horizon: it seems to bar the stream.
A red-brick triumphal arch marks the entrance to Heidelberg. To the left, on a hill, stand the ruins of a medieval castle. Apart from their picturesque effect and some popular traditions, the remains of the Gothic period interest only the nations whose work they are. Does a Frenchman trouble his head about the lords Palatine, the princesses Palatine, plump, white and blue-eyed though they may have been? One forgets them for St. Geneviève of Brabant[25]. Those modern ruins have nothing in common with modern nations, excepting their outward aspect of Christianity and their feudal character.
It is different, leaving out the sun, with the monuments of Greece and Italy; these belong to all nations: they commence their history; their inscriptions are written in languages known to all civilized men. The ruins even of renovated Italy possess a general interest, because they are stamped with the seal of the arts and the arts come within the public domain of society. A fresco by Domenichino[26] or Titian that becomes obliterated, a palace by Michael Angelo or Palladio[27] that crumbles throw the genius of all the centuries into mourning.
At Heidelberg, they show a tun of inordinate proportions, a drunkards' Coliseum in ruins: at least no Christian has lost his life in that amphitheatre of the Vespasians of the Rhine; his reason, yes: that is no great loss.
At the outlet of Heidelberg, the hills to the right and left of the Necker fall away, and one enters upon a plain. A winding embankment, raised a few feet above the level of the corn-fields, is delineated between two rows of cherry-trees[Pg 18] harshly treated by the wind and of walnut-trees "often by the wayfarers attacked[28]."
At the entrance to Mannheim, one drives through hop-vines, whose long, dry props were as yet decorated to only one third of their height by the climbing creeper. Julian the Apostate wrote a pretty epigram against beer; the Abbé de La Bletterie[29] imitated it with some elegance:
Tu n'es qu'un faux Bacchus ...
J'en atteste le véritable.
. . . . . . .
Que le Gaulois, pressé d'une soif éternelle
Au défaut de la grappe ait recours aux épis,
De Cérès qu'il vante le fils:
Vive le fils de Semèle[30].
A few orchards, some walks shaded by willow-trees of all sizes form a verdant suburb to Mannheim. The houses in the town have often only one storey above the ground-floor. The main street is wide and planted with trees in the middle: one more down-fallen city. I do not like false gold, and so I did not want any Mannheim gold; but I certainly have "Toulouse gold[31]," to judge by the disasters of my life: yet who has more than I respected the Temple of Apollo?
3 and 4 June 1833.
I crossed the Rhine at two o'clock in the afternoon. At the moment of passing, a steam-boat came up stream. What would Cæsar have said if he had met such a machine while he was building his bridge?
On the other side of the Rhine, opposite Mannheim, one finds Bavaria again, as a result of the odious slashings and jobbings of the Treaties of Paris, Vienna and Aix-la-Chapelle.[Pg 19] Every one cut out his share with scissors, without any regard for reason, humanity or justice, without troubling about the slice of population that fell into a pair of royal chops.
Driving through the Cisrhenan Palatinate, I reflected how this country had once formed a department of France, how white Gaul was girt about by the Rhine, the "blue sash" of Germany. Napoleon and the Republic before him had realized the dream of several of our kings, above all of Louis XIV. So long as we do not occupy our natural frontiers, there will be war in Europe, because the interest of self-preservation drives France to seize the boundaries necessary to her national independence. Here we have planted trophies to claim back in due season.
The plain between the Rhine and the Monts Tonnerre looks sad; earth and men seem to say that their fate is not settled, that they belong to no people; they appear to be expecting new invasions, as it were new river-floods. The Germans of Tacitus devastated great spaces on their frontiers and left them empty between these and their enemies. Woe to the border populations that till the battlefields on which the nations are to meet!
As I approached ——, I saw a sad sight: a wood of young fir-trees, five or six feet high, felled and bound into faggots, a forest mown like grass. I have spoken of the cemetery of Lucerne, where the children's burials throng on one side. I never felt more keenly the need to end my wanderings, to die under the protection of a friendly hand laid upon my heart to interrogate it, when they shall say:
"It has stopped beating."
From the edge of my tomb I would like to be able to cast back a glance of satisfaction over my many years, just as a pontiff, on reaching the sanctuary, blesses the long line of the priests who have served as his retinue.
Louvois[32] burnt down the Palatinate; unfortunately it was Turenne's hand that held the torch. The Revolution laid waste the same country, the witness and victim by turns of our aristocratic and plebeian struggles. It is enough to name the warriors to judge of the difference of the times: on the one side, Condé, Turenne, Créqui[33], Luxembourg,[Pg 20] La Force[34], Villars[35]; on the other, Kellermann, Hoche, Pichegru, Moreau. Let us deny none of our victories; military glories especially have known only enemies of France and held only one opinion: on the battle-field, honour and danger level all ranks. Our fathers called the blood that flowed from a non-mortal wound "volatile blood:" a phrase typical of the contempt for death natural to Frenchmen in every century. Institutions can alter nothing in this national genius. The soldiers who, after the death of Turenne[36], said, "Let the Pie loose, we shall encamp where she stops," would have been quite as good as Napoleon's grenadiers.
On the heights of Dunkheim, the first rampart of the Gauls on that side, one discovers the seats of camps and military positions to-day empty of soldiers: Burgundians, Franks, Goths, Huns, Suevi, so many waves of the Barbarian deluge, have by turns assailed those heights.
Not far from Dunkheim, one sees the remains of a monastery. The monks enclosed within that retreat had seen many armies passing round at their feet; they had shown hospitality to many warriors; there some crusader had ended his life, changed his helm for the frock; there were passions which called for silence and rest before the last rest and the last silence. Did they find what they sought? Those ruins will not tell.
After the remnants of the sanctuary of peace come the fragments of the lair of war: the demolished bastions, mantlets, curtains, trunnions of a fortress. Ramparts crumble even as cloisters. The castle was ambushed in a rugged path to close it to the enemy: it did not keep time and death from passing.
From Dunkheim to Frankenstein, the road pushes through a valley so narrow that it will scarcely hold a carriage way; the trees descending from two opposite slopes join and embrace in the ravine. I have followed similar dales between Messenia and Arcadia, but for the good road: Pan knew nothing about civil engineering. Flowering broom and a[Pg 21] jay carried me back to the recollection of Brittany; I remember the pleasure which the cry of that bird gave me in the mountains of Judea. My memory is a panorama; there the most varied sites and skies, with their scorching sun or their foggy horizon, come to paint themselves on the same canvas.
The inn at Frankenstein is placed in a meadow in the mountains, watered by a stream. The postmaster speaks French; his young sister, or his wife, or his daughter is charming. He complains of being a Bavarian; he busies himself with the cultivation of forests; to me he represented an American planter.
At Kaiserslautern, where I arrived at night as at Bamberg, I passed through the region of dreams: what did all those sleeping inhabitants see in their slumbers? If I had time, I would tell the story of their visions. Nothing would have reminded me of earth, if two quails had not called to one another from cage to cage. In the fields in Germany, from Prague to Mannheim, one meets only carrion crows, sparrows and larks; but the towns are full of nightingales, warblers, thrushes, quails: plaintive prisoners, male and female, who greet you at the bars of their gaol when you pass. The windows are decked with pinks, mignonette, roses, jasmine. The northern nations have the tastes of another clime; they love the arts and music: the Germans came to fetch the vine in Italy; their sons would gladly repeat the invasion to conquer birds and flowers in the same spots.
The change in the post-boy's jacket told me, on Tuesday the 4th of June, at Saarbrück, that I was entering Prussia. I saw a squadron of hussars ride past under the window of my inn; they looked very spirited: I was as spirited as they; I would cheerfully have helped to give those gentry a drubbing, even though a lively feeling of respect makes me attached to the Prussian Royal Family, even though the outbursts of the Prussians in Paris were but reprisals for Napoleon's brutality in Berlin; but, if history has the time to enter into the cold justice which connects consequences with their origins, the man who witnesses living facts is carried away by those facts, without going back to the past to seek the causes from which they sprang and which excuse them. My country has done me great harm; but how gladly I would offer up my blood for her! Oh, what strong heads, what consummate politicians, above all, what good Frenchmen were those negociators of the Treaties of 1815!
A few hours yet, and my native soil will once more quiver beneath my steps. What shall I hear? Since three weeks I have known nothing of what my friends have been saying and doing. Three weeks! A long space of time for man whom one moment carries away, for empires which three days suffice to overthrow! And my prisoner of Blaye: what has become of her? Shall I be able to convey to her the answer which she is awaiting? If ever the person of an ambassador should be sacred, it is mine; my diplomatic career was consecrated near the Head of the Church; it has been completely sanctified near an unfortunate monarch: I have negociated a new family compact among the children of the Bearnese; I have carried and brought back its deeds from prison to exile and from exile to prison.
4 and 5 June.
As I passed the border which separates the territory of Saarbrück from that of Forbach, France did not show herself to me in a brilliant manner: first, a cripple seated in a wooden bowl; then, another man who crawled on his hands and knees, dragging his legs after him like two crooked tails or two dead snakes; next, appeared, in a cart, two swarthy, wrinkled old women, the van-guard of the women of France. It was enough to make one go back again to the Prussian Army.
But presently I found a handsome young soldier walking with a young girl; the soldier was pushing the young girl's wheel-barrow before him and she was carrying the trooper's pipe and sword. Further on, another young girl holding the tail of a plough and an aged ploughman goading the oxen; further on, an old man begging for a blind child; further on, a cross. In a hamlet, a dozen children's heads, at the window of an unfinished house, looked like a group of angels in a glory. Here is a tiny girl of five or six, sitting on the threshold of a cottage-door, with bare head, fair hair, a dirty face, pulling a little grimace because of a cold wind blowing; with her two white shoulders peeping from a torn frock, her arms crossed over her knees drawn up close to her chest, looking at what was going on around her with the curiosity of a bird, Raphael would have sketched her; as for me, I felt inclined to steal her from her mother.
At the entrance to Forbach, a troop of learned dogs appeared: the two biggest harnessed to the costume-wagon; five or six others of different tails, noses, sizes and colours[Pg 23] followed the baggage, each with its piece of bread in its mouth. Two grave instructors, one carrying a big drum, the other carrying nothing, led the band. Go, my friends, go round the world as I have done, in order to learn to know the nations. You have your place in the world just as much as I; you are quite as good as the dogs of my kind. Give a paw to Diane, to Mirza, to Pax, with your hat on your ear, your sword by your side, your tail sticking out like a trumpet between the skirts of your coat: dance for a bone, or for a kick, as we men do; but do not go making the mistake of jumping for the King!
Reader, bear with these arabesques; the hand that traced them will never do you any other harm: it is withered. Remember, when you see them, that they are only the freakish scrolls drawn by a painter on the vault of his tomb.
At the custom-house, an elderly junior clerk made a pretense at examining my calash. I had got a five-franc piece ready; he saw it in my hand, but dared not take it, because of his superiors, who were watching him. He took off his cap, on the pretext of searching me better, laid it on the seat in front of me and said, in an under-tone:
"In my cap, please."
Oh, what a great phrase! It comprises the history of the human race; how often have liberty, loyalty, friendship, devotion, love said:
"In my cap, please!"
I shall give that phrase to Béranger for the chorus of a song.
I was struck, on entering Metz, by something which I had not noticed in 1821; the modern fortifications surround the Gothic fortifications: Guise and Vauban[37] are two names that go well together.
Our years and our memories lie in regular and parallel strata at different depths of our life, deposited by the waves of time that pass over us in succession. It was from Metz, in 1792, that the column issued which was engaged under the walls of Thionville with our little corps of Emigrants. I am returning from my pilgrimage to the retreat of the banished Prince whom I served in his first exile. I then gave him a little of my blood; I have just been weeping with him: at my age, we have little left but tears.
In 1821, M. de Tocqueville[38], my brother's brother-in-law, was Prefect of the Moselle. The trees, no thicker than laths, which M. de Tocqueville planted, in 1820, at the gates of Metz now give shade. There is a scale to measure our days by; but man is not like wine, he does not improve when reckoned by vintages. The ancients used to steep roses in their Falernian; when an amphora of a hundred-year-old consulate was uncorked, it perfumed the banquet. The clearest intelligence might be mingled with old years, and no one would be tempted to get tipsy with it.
I had not been a quarter of an hour in the inn at Metz, when behold Baptiste coming in a great state of excitement: mysteriously he drew from his pocket a white paper parcel, containing a seal; M. le Duc de Bordeaux and Mademoiselle had charged him with that seal, telling him to give it me "only on French soil." They had been very anxious the whole night before my departure, fearing lest the jeweller would not have time to finish the work.
The seal has three faces: on one is engraved an anchor; on the second, the two words which Henry said to me at our first interview: "Yes, always!" on the third, the date of my arrival in Prague. The brother and sister begged me to wear the seal "for love of them." The mystery of this present, the order given by the two exiled children to hand me the token of their memory "only on French soil" filled my eyes with tears. The seal shall never leave me; I shall wear it "for love of Louise and Henry."
I would have liked to see, at Metz, the house of Fabert[39], the common soldier who became a marshal of France and who received the collar of the Orders, his nobility tracing its origin only to his sword.
The Barbarians our fathers, at Metz, butchered the Romans[40] surprised in the midst of the debauchery of a feast; our soldiers have waltzed, in the monastery of Alcobaça, with the skeleton of Iñez de Castro[41]: sorrows and pleasures, crimes[Pg 25] and follies, fourteen centuries separate you and you are all alike completely past. The eternity commenced just now is as old as the eternity dating from the first death, the murder of Abel. Nevertheless, men, during their ephemeral appearance on this globe, persuade themselves that they are leaving some trace behind them: why, good Heaven, yes, every fly has its shadow!
I left Metz and passed through Verdun, where I was so unhappy and where Carrel's lonely friend lives to-day[42]. I skirted the heights of Valmy; I do not care to speak of it any more than of Jemmapes: I should be afraid lest I should find a crown there.
Châlons reminded me of a great weakness of Bonaparte, who banished beauty there[43]. Peace be with Châlons, which tells me that I still have friends!
At Château-Thierry, I found my idol, La Fontaine. It was the hour of the Angelus: Jean's wife was no longer there, and Jean had returned to Madame de La Sablière[44].
As I grazed the wall of Meaux Cathedral, I repeated Bossuet's[45] own words to him:
"Man reaches his tomb dragging behind him the long chain of his hopes deceived."
In Paris, I passed the quarters in which I had lived with my sisters in my youth; next, the Palace of Justice, commemorative of my trial; next, the Prefecture of Police, which served me as a prison. I have returned at last to my hospice, thus winding off the skein of my days. The frail insect of the sheep-folds drops at the end of a silken thread to the ground, where the foot of some ewe will soon crush it.
Paris, Rue d'Enfer, 6 June 1833.
On alighting from my carriage and before going to bed, I wrote a letter to Madame la Duchesse de Berry to give her an account of my mission. My return had put the police into a flutter; the telegraph announced it to the Prefect of Bordeaux and the commandant of the fortress of Blaye:[Pg 26] orders were given to redouble the measures of supervision; it appears even that Madame was put on board before the day fixed for her departure[46]. My letter missed Her Royal Highness by a few hours and was taken to her in Italy.
If Madame had made no declaration; if even, after that declaration, she had denied the consequences of it; much more if, on arriving in Sicily, she had protested against the part which she had been compelled to play in order to escape from her gaolers, France and Europe would have believed her word, so greatly was Philip's Government under suspicion. All the Judases would have suffered punishment for the spectacle which they gave to the world in the smoking-room at Blaye. But Madame would not consent to retain a political character by denying her marriage; what one gains, by a lie, in reputation for cleverness one loses in consideration: any former sincerity which you may have professed hardly avails to defend you. When a man who enjoys public esteem demeans himself, he is no longer sheltered within his name, but behind his name. Madame, by her admission, escaped from the gloom of her prison: the female eagle, like the male eagle, has need of liberty and sunlight.
M. le Duc de Blacas, in Prague, had announced to me the formation of a council of which I was to be the head, with M. the Chancellor[47] and M. le Marquis de Latour-Maubourg: I was going to become alone (still according to M. le Duc) the Council of Charles X., absent on some business. I was shown a plan: the machinery was very complicated; M. de Blacas' work retained a few arrangements made by the Duchesse de Berry, when she, on her side, had laid claim to organizing the State by coming madly, but bravely, to place herself at the head of her Kingdom in partibus. The ideas of that adventurous woman were not at all lacking in good sense: she had divided France into four great military governments, chosen the commanders, appointed the officers, embodied the soldiers and, without troubling whether all her people had joined the flag, she would herself have hastened to carry it; she did not doubt but that she would find in the fields St. Martin's[48] cope or the Oriflamme, Galaor[49] or Bayard. Blows of battle-axes and bullets from fire-locks, retreats into the forests, perils in the homes of a few faithful friends, caves,[Pg 27] castles, cottages, escalades: all this suited and delighted Madame. There is something eccentric, original and captivating in her character that will make her live. The future will take her as it pleases, in spite of correct persons and sober-minded cowards.
I should have brought to the Bourbons, if they had sent for me, the popularity which I enjoyed by my two-fold claim as a writer and a statesman. I could have no doubt of that popularity, for I had received the confidences of every shade of opinion. People had not confined themselves to generalities; each had pointed out to me what he desired in case of eventualities; many had confessed their genius to me and rendered obvious to me the place for which they were eminently fitted. Everybody, friends and enemies alike, sent me to be about the person of the Duc de Bordeaux. By the different combinations of my opinions and my fortunes, by the ravages of death, which had successively carried away the men of my generation, I seemed to be the only one left for the choice of the Royal Family.
I might feel tempted by the part awarded to me: there was something calculated to flatter my vanity, as an unknown servant and rejected by the Bourbons, in the idea of being the support of their House; of holding out my hand to Philip Augustus, St. Louis, Charles V., Louis XII., Francis I., Henry IV. and Louis XIV. in their tombs; of protecting with my feeble renown the blood, the crown and the shades of so many great men: I alone against faithless France and dishonoured Europe.
But to arrive at that what should I have had to do? What the commonest mind would have done: fawn upon the Court of Prague, overcome its antipathies, conceal my ideas from it until I was in a position to develop them.
And, certainly, those ideas went far: if I had been the young Prince's governor, I should have striven to gain his confidence. If he had recovered his crown, I should have advised him to wear it only to lay it aside at the proper time. I would have liked to see the Capets disappear in a manner worthy of their greatness. What a fine, what an illustrious day that would have been when, after setting up religion, perfecting the Constitution of the State, enlarging the rights of citizens, breaking the last fetters of the press, emancipating the commons, destroying monopoly, striking the balance between wages and labour, consolidating property and restricting its abuses, reviving industry, reducing taxation,[Pg 28] re-establishing our honour among the nations, extending our frontiers and thus securing our independence against the foreigner; when, after accomplishing all these things, my pupil would have said to the nation solemnly called together:
"Frenchmen, your education is finished with mine. My first ancestor, Robert the Strong[50], died for you, and my father asked for mercy for the man who took his life. My sires raised and formed France through barbarism; now the march of events, the progress of civilization compel you to dispense with a protector. I am descending the throne; I confirm all the benefits of my fathers, while releasing you from your oaths to the Monarchy."
Say if that end would not have surpassed all that is most wonderful in that dynasty! Say if ever a magnificent enough temple could have been raised to its memory! Compare that end with that which the decrepit sons of Henry IV. would make, stubbornly pinning themselves to a throne swamped by democracy, trying to preserve their power with the aid of measures of police, measures of violence, methods of corruption, and dragging on for a few short moments a degraded existence!
"Let them make my brother King," said the child Louis XIII., after the death of Henry IV., "I do not want to be King."
Henry V. has no other brother than his people: let him make it King.
To arrive at this resolution, chimerical though it may seem, one would have to feel the greatness of one's race, not because one was descended from an old stock, but because one was the heir of men through whom France became powerful, enlightened and civilized.
Now, as I have just said, the way to be called upon to set to work on that plan would have been to wheedle the weaknesses of Prague, to raise magpies with the child of the throne like Luynes[51], to flatter Concini[52] like Richelieu. I had[Pg 29] begun well at Carlsbad; a little note of submission and gossip would have forwarded my business. To bury myself alive in Prague was no easy matter, it is true; for not only should I have had to overcome the repugnance of the Royal Family, but the hatred of the foreigners as well. My ideas are odious to the Cabinets; they know that I detest the Treaties of Vienna, that I would make war at any price to give France the necessary frontiers and to restore the balance of power in Europe.
However, by giving signs of repentance, by weeping, by expiating my sins of national honour, by beating my breast, by admiring for my penance the genius of the blockheads who govern the world, I might perhaps have been able to crawl into the Baron de Damas' place; then, suddenly standing erect, I should have flung away my crutches.
But, alas, where is my ambition? Where is my faculty of dissimulation? Where is my art of enduring constraint and boredom? Where is my capacity for attaching importance to anything whatsoever? I took up my pen two or three times, I began to draft two or three letters in obedience to Madame la Dauphine, who had ordered me to write to her. Soon, revolting against myself, I wrote at one dash and after my own manner the letter which was to break my neck. I knew it quite well; I weighed the results quite well: it matters little. And to-day, now that the thing is done, I am delighted at having sent the whole business to the devil and flung my "governorship " out of so wide a window. I shall be told:
"Could you not have expressed the same truths by stating them less crudely?"
Yes, yes, by diluting, beating about the bush, employing honeyed words, bleating, quavering:
Son œil tout pénitent ne pleure qu'eau béniste[53].
I cannot do that.
Here is the letter, abridged, however, by almost half its length, which will make the hair of our drawing-room diplomatists rise up in dismay: the Duc de Choiseul was somewhat of my humour; therefore he spent the end of his end at Chanteloup:
"Paris, Rue d'Enfer, 30 June 1833.
"Madame,
"The most precious moments of my long career are those which Madame la Dauphine permitted me to spend with her. It was in a humble house at Carlsbad that a Princess who is the object of universal veneration deigned to speak to me with confidence. Heaven has laid at the bottom of her soul a treasure of magnanimity and religion which the prodigality of misfortune has not been able to dry up. I had before me the daughter of Louis XVI. exiled anew; that orphan of the Temple whom the Martyr-King pressed to his heart before going to gather the palm! God's name is the only name that one can pronounce when one comes to plunge one's self in contemplation of the impenetrable counsels of His Providence.
"Praise is suspicious, when it is addressed to prosperity: with the Dauphiness, admiration knows no embarrassment. I have said it, Madame: your sorrows have attained so great a height, that they have become one of the glories of the Revolution. I shall therefore, once in my life, have met destinies so superior, so much apart, that I can tell them, without fear of offending them or of being misunderstood, what I think of the future state of society. One can discuss the fate of empires with you, who would, without regretting them, see pass at the feet of your virtue all those earthly kingdoms, many of which have already flowed away at the feet of your House.
"The catastrophes of which you have been the most illustrious witness and the sublimest victim, great though they appeared to be, are, nevertheless, but the particular accidents of the general transformation which is being operated in the human race; the reign of Napoleon, which shook the world, is but a link in the revolutionary chain. We must start from this truth to understand the possibilities of a third Restoration and what means that Restoration possesses of being included in the plan of social changes. If it did not enter into it as an homogeneous element, it would inevitably be rejected by an order of things contrary to its nature.
"Therefore, Madame, if I told you that the Legitimacy had a chance of returning through the aristocracy of the nobles and clergy, with their privileges; through the Court, with its distinctions; through the Royalty, with its attractions, I should be deceiving you. The Legitimacy, in France, is no longer a sentiment; it is a principle in so far as it guarantees[Pg 31] property and interests, rights and liberties; but if it remained proved that the Legitimacy would not defend or was powerless to protect that property and those interests, those rights and those liberties, it would cease to be even a principle. When any one puts forward that the Legitimacy will necessarily come about, that it cannot be dispensed with, that it is enough to wait, for France to come crying mercy to it on her knees, he is putting forward an illusion. The Restoration may never return, or may last for but a moment, if the Legitimacy seeks its strength where it does not exist.
My letter to the Dauphiness."Yes, Madame, I say it sorrowfully, Henry V. might remain a foreign and banished Prince: a young and new ruin of an edifice already fallen, but, in short, a ruin. We old servants of the Legitimacy will soon have spent the small stock of years that is left to us; we shall shortly be resting in our graves, asleep with our old ideas, like the ancient knights with their ancient suits of armour into which rust and time have eaten, suits of armour which no longer shape themselves to the figure nor adapt themselves to the usages of the living.
"All that was militating, in 1789, for the preservation of the old order of things, religion, laws, manners, customs, property, classes, privileges, corporations, no longer exists. A general ferment has become manifest; Europe is hardly safer than ourselves; no form of society is entirely destroyed, none entirely established; all is worn or new, or decrepit or not yet rooted; all has the weakness of old age or childhood. The kingdoms that have sprung from the territorial limitations drawn by the last treaties are of yesterday; love of country has lost its force, because the country is an uncertain and fleeting thing to populations sold by auction, dealt in like second-hand furniture, now allotted to hostile populations, now handed over to unknown masters. Thus dug up, furrowed, tilled, the soil is prepared to receive the democratic seed which the Days of July have ripened.
"The kings think that, by keeping sentry around their thrones, they will stop the movements of intelligence; they imagine that, by giving a description of the principles, they will have them seized at the frontiers; they are persuaded that, by multiplying customs-officers, gendarmes, police-spies, military commissions, they will prevent them from circulating. But those ideas do not travel on foot: they are in the air, they fly, we breathe them. The absolute governments, which are establishing telegraphs, railways, steam-boats and[Pg 32] trying, at the same time, to keep men's minds on the level of the political dogmas of the fourteenth century, are inconsistent; at once progressive and reactionary, they are lost in the confusion resulting from a contradiction of theory and practice. It is impossible to separate the industrial principle from the principle of liberty; one must needs stifle both or admit both. Wherever the French language is understood, ideas come with the passports of the age.
"You see, Madame, how essential it is that the starting-point should be carefully chosen. The child of hope under your guard, innocence taking refuge under your virtues and misfortunes as under a royal canopy: I know no more imposing spectacle; if there be a chance of success for the Legitimacy, it is there in its entirety. The France of the future will be able to bow, without descending, before the glory of the past, to stand in emotion before that great apparition in her history represented by the daughter of Louis XVI. leading the last of the Henrys by the hand. As the Queen-protectress of the young Prince, you will exercise over the nation the influence of the immense memories mingled in your august person. Who will not feel an unaccustomed confidence revive within him when the orphan of the Temple watches over the education of the orphan of St. Louis?
"It is to be desired, Madame, that this education, directed by men whose names are popular in France, should in a certain measure become public. Louis XIV., who otherwise justifies the pride of his motto[54], did a great injury to his House by isolating the Sons of France behind the barriers of an Oriental education.
"The young Prince appeared to me to be gifted with a quick intelligence. He will have to complete his studies by travels among the nations of the Old and even of the New Continent, so as to become acquainted with politics and to be alarmed at neither institutions nor doctrines. If he could serve as a soldier in some far-off foreign war, one ought not to dread to expose him. He has a resolute air; he seems to have in his heart the blood of his father and of his mother; but, if he could ever experience anything but the sense of glory in danger, let him abdicate: without courage, in France, there is no crown.
"Madame, on seeing me extend into a long future the thought of the education of Henry V., you will naturally[Pg 33] suppose that I do not think him destined to ascend the throne so soon. I will endeavour impartially to deduct the opposite reasons for hopes and fears.
"The Restoration may take place to-day, to-morrow. There is something so sudden, so inconstant observable in the French character, that a change is always probable; it is always safe to wager a hundred to one, in France, that any particular thing will not last: it is at the moment when the Government appears most firmly seated that it falls. We have seen the nation worship Bonaparte and detest him, abandon him, take him back, abandon him again, forget him in his exile, raise altars to him after his death, and then relapse from its enthusiasm. That fickle nation, which never loved liberty save by fits and starts, but which ever dotes on equality; that multiform nation was fanatical under Henry IV., factious under Louis XIII., grave under Louis XIV., revolutionary under Louis XVI., gloomy under the Republic, warlike under Bonaparte, constitutional under the Restoration: to-day it is prostituting its liberties to the so-called Republican Monarchy, perpetually varying its nature in the spirit of its leaders. Its changefulness has increased since it has thrown off the habits of the home and the yoke of religion.
On the prospects."Therefore, a chance may bring about the fall of the Government of the 9th of August; but a chance may be delayed: an abortive child has been born to us, but France is a sturdy mother; she may, with the milk of her breast, be able to correct the vices of a depraved paternity.
"Although the present royalty does not seem as though it were likely to live, I continue to fear that it may live beyond the limit which one might assign to it. Since forty years, all governments have perished in France by their own fault alone. Louis XVI. could have saved his crown and his life twenty times over; the Republic died only of the excesses of its furies; Bonaparte was able to establish his dynasty, yet flung himself down from the height of his glory; but for the Ordinances of July, the Legitimist Throne would still be standing. The head of the present Government will make none of those mistakes that kill; his power will never commit suicide; all his cleverness is employed exclusively for his preservation: he is too intelligent to die by an act of folly nor has he enough in him to be guilty of the mistakes of genius or the weaknesses of honour or virtue. He has felt that he might be[Pg 34] destroyed by war: he will not make war; it matters little to him, whether France be degraded in the eyes of foreigners: publicists will prove to him that disgrace is industry and ignominy credit.
"The sham Legitimacy wants all that the Legitimacy wants, with the exception of the Royal Person: it wants order; it can obtain that through 'arbitrariness' more easily than the Legitimacy. To perpetrate acts of despotism with words of liberty and pretended royalist institutions, that is all that it wants; each accomplished fact brings forth a recent right which combats an ancient right, each hour commences a legality. Time has two powers: with one hand it overthrows, with the other it builds up. Lastly, time acts upon men's minds by the mere fact that it progresses; they sever violently from those in power, attack them, sulk with them; then lassitude supervenes; success reconciles people to its cause: soon none remains outside, save a few lofty souls, whose perseverance confounds those who have failed.
"Madame, this long statement obliges me to make a few explanations to Your Royal Highness.
"If I had not raised a free voice in the day of fortune, I should not have felt the courage to speak the truth in the time of misfortune. I did not go to Prague of my own accord; I would not have ventured to trouble you with my presence; the dangers of devotion do not lie about your august person, they lie in France: that is where I have sought them. Since the Days of July, I have never ceased to fight for the legitimist cause. I was the first to proclaim the kingship of Henry V. A jury of Frenchmen, which acquitted me, left my proclamation in force. I long for nothing but rest, the need of my years; yet I did not hesitate to sacrifice it when the decrees extended and renewed the proscription of the Royal Family. Offers were made to me to attach me to the Government of Louis-Philippe: I had not earned that proof of good-will; I showed how incompatible it was with my nature by claiming my share in my old King's adversity. Alas, I had not brought about that adversity and I had tried to prevent it! I am not recalling these circumstances to give myself an importance or create for myself a merit which I do not possess; I have done no more than my duty; I am only explaining my position, in order to excuse the independence of my language. Madame will pardon the frankness of a man[Pg 35] who would joyfully accept a scaffold to restore to her a throne.
"When I appeared before Your Majesty at Carlsbad, I may say that I had not the happiness to be known to you. You had scarcely done me the honour to address a few words to me in my life. You were able to see, in our solitary conversations, that I was not the man that had perhaps been described to you, that the independence of my mind did not take away from the moderation of my character and, above all, did not break the chains of my admiration and respect for the illustrious daughter of my Kings.
Of the Legitimate Monarchy."I again beseech Your Majesty to consider that the order of the truths developed in this letter, or rather in this memorandum, is what constitutes my strength, if I have any; it is that which enables me to reach men of different parties and bring them back to the royalist cause. If I had rejected the opinions of the age, I should have had no hold upon my time. I am seeking to rally round the ancient throne those modern ideas which, from being hostile, become friendly in passing through my loyalty. If the liberal opinions which abound ceased to be diverted to the profit of the reconstructed Legitimate Monarchy, Monarchical Europe would perish. It is a fight to the death between the two principles, monarchical and republican, if they remain distinct and separate: the consecration of a single edifice built up again out of the various materials of two edifices would belong to you, Madame, to you who have been admitted into the highest as into the most mysterious of initiations, undeserved misfortune, to you who are marked at the altar with the blood of the spotless victim, to you who, in the contemplation attendant upon a saintly austerity, would open with a pure and blessed hand the portals of the new temple.
"Your sagacity, Madame, and your superior reason will throw light upon and correct all that may be doubtful or erroneous in my opinions touching the present state of France.
"My emotion, as I end this letter, passes all that I can say.
"And so the palace of the sovereigns of Bohemia is the Louvre of Charles X. and of his pious and royal son! And so Hradschin is young Henry's Pau Castle! And you, Madame: in what Versailles do you live? With what can[Pg 36] your piety, your greatnesses, your sufferings be compared, if not with those of the women of the House of David who wept at the foot of the Cross? May Your Majesty see the Royalty of St Louis rise radiant from the tomb! May I exclaim, recalling the century which bears the name of your glorious ancestor; for, Madame, nothing becomes you, nothing is contemporaneous with you but what is great and sacred:
O jour heureux pour moi!
De quelle ardeur j'irais reconnaître mon roi[55]!
"I am, Madame, with the most profound respect,
"Your Majesty's most humble and most obedient servant,
"Chateaubriand."
After writing this letter, I resumed the habits of my life: I found my old priests again, the lonely corner in my garden, which seemed to me much finer than Count Chotek's garden, my Boulevard d'Enfer, my Cimetière de l'Ouest, my Memoirs reminding me of my past days and, above all, the select little society of the Abbaye-aux-Bois. The kindness of a serious friendship makes the thoughts abound; a few moments of the commerce of the soul suffice for the needs of my nature; I afterwards make up for this expenditure of intelligence by twenty-two hours of inaction and sleep.
Paris, Rue d'Enfer, 25 August 1833.
While I was beginning to breathe, I saw one morning the traveller enter my house who had handed a packet from me to Madame la Duchesse de Berry at Palermo; he brought me this reply from the Princess:
"Naples, 10 August 1833.
"I have written you a line, monsieur le vicomte, to acknowledge the receipt of your letter, wishing to have a safe opportunity of speaking to you of my gratitude for what you have seen and done in Prague. It seems to me that they let you see very little, but enough, however, to enable[Pg 37] you to judge that, despite the methods employed, the result, in so far as our dear child is concerned, is not what one might fear. I am very glad to receive this assurance from you; but I hear from Paris that M. Barrande has been sent away. What is to be done in this? How I long to be at my post!
"As to the requests which I asked you to make (and which were not quite welcomed), they have proved by their action that they were no better informed than I: for I was not in any need of what I asked, having in no way lost my rights.
"I am going to ask your advice to reply to the solicitations which I receive from all sides. You will make such use of what follows as, in your wisdom, you think proper. Royalist France, the people devoted to Henry V. look to his mother, now at last free, to issue a proclamation.
"I left at Blaye a few lines which must be known to-day; they expect more from me; they want to know the sad story of my detention during seven months in that impenetrable fortress. It ought to be made known in its fullest details; let the cause be seen, in this story, of all the tears and griefs that have broken my heart. Men will learn from it the moral tortures which I have been made to suffer. Justice must be done in it to them to whom it belongs; but also it must reveal the atrocious measures taken against a defenseless woman, defenseless because she was always refused a council, by a Government having her kinsman at its head, in order to tear from me a secret which, in any case, could not concern politics and the discovery of which ought not to change my situation if I was an object of dread to the French Government, which had the power of guarding me, but not the right, without a trial which I claimed more than once.
"But my kinsman, the husband of my aunt, the head of a family which, in spite of the general and so justly wide-spread opinion against it, I had allowed to hope for the hand of my daughter, Louis-Philippe in short, thinking me to be with child and unmarried (which would have decided any other family to open the doors of my prison), had every form of moral torture inflicted on me to force me to take steps by means of which he expected to be able to establish his niece's dishonour. For the rest, if I am bound to explain myself positively as to my declarations and their motives, without entering into any details as to my private life, for which I am[Pg 38] accountable to no one, I will say in all truth that they were torn from me by my vexations, my moral tortures and the hope of recovering my liberty.
"The bearer will give you details and tell you of the forced uncertainty as to the moment of my journey and its destination, which interfered with my wish to avail myself of your obliging offer by inviting you to join me before I went to Prague, as I have great need of your advice. To-day it would be too late, as I wish to be with my children as soon as possible. But, as nothing is certain in this world and as I am used to disappointments, if my arrival in Prague should, against my wish, be delayed, I rely surely upon seeing you at the place where I shall be obliged to stop and will write to you from there; if, on the contrary, I reach my son as soon as I hope, you know better than I if you ought to come there. I can only assure you of the pleasure it would give me to see you at all times and places.
"Marie Caroline."
Naples, 18 August 1833.
"Our friend has not been able to start yet and I have received news of what is happening in Prague which is not of a nature calculated to diminish my longing to go there, but which also makes the need of your advice more urgent. If, therefore, you are able to proceed to Venice without delay, you will find me there, or else letters left at the post-office telling you where you can join me. I shall travel part of the journey with some people for whom I entertain feelings of great friendship and gratitude: M.[56] and Madame de Bauffremont[57]. We often speak of you; their devotion to myself and to our Henry makes them long to see you arrive. M. de Mesnard[58] shares that longing."
Madame de Berry refers in her letter to a little manifesto[59] which was issued after she left Blaye and which was of no great value, because it said neither yes nor no. The letter, on the other hand, is curious as an historical document, since it reveals the feelings of the Princess towards her kinsmen-gaolers and points to the sufferings endured by her. Marie-Caroline's reflections are just; she expresses them with spirit and pride. Again, one likes to see that courageous and devoted mother, whether fettered or free, constantly occupied with the interests of her son. There, at least in that heart, are youth and life to be found. It cost me an effort once more to undertake a long journey; but I was too much touched by the confidence of that poor Princess to refuse to obey her wishes and to abandon her on the high-road. M. Jauge came to the assistance of my poverty, as he had done the first time.
I took the field again with a dozen volumes scattered[Pg 40] around me. Now, while I was peregrinating da capo in the Prince de Bénévent's calash, he was eating in London in the manger of his fifth master, in expectation of the accident which will send him, perhaps, to sleep at Westminster, among saints, kings and wise men: a burial to which his religion, fidelity and virtues have justly entitled him.
[1] This book was written on the road from Carlsbad to Paris, from the 1st to the 5th of June 1833, and in Paris, in the Rue d'Enfer, from the 6th of June to the 25th of August 1833.—T.
[2] The author addresses an imaginary Cynthia. Cynthia was one of the surnames of Diana, from Mount Cynthus, where she was born.—B.
[3] Schiller: Wallenstein's Tod, Act V. Sc. iii.
[4] Max Piccolomini, son to Octavio Piccolomini, the famous Austrian general.—T.
[5] Thekla, Wallenstein's daughter.—T.
[6] Wallenstein: Tod, Act V. Sc. iii.—T.
[7] Wallenstein's Tod. Act V. Sc. v.—T.
[8]
"It is the knight of the Landes:
O unhappy knight!
Heard bells ring on every hand,
When crossing the waste at night."—T.
[9] Voltaire: Ode sur la mort de S. A. S. Mme. la princesse de Bareith, 141-144:
"Lonely Sylvander, thou shalt sing no more
In this Art's palace, where thy voice did ban,
Loudly, the firm-set prejudice of yore
And made the world talk of the rights of man."—T.
[10] Ode sur la mort de S. A. S. Mme. la princesse de Bareith, 91-94:
"From philosophie heights, free from all strife,
Thy pity contemplated, with calm eyes,
The changing phantoms of the dreams of life:
So many a dream or plan in ruin lies."—T.
[11] Mathew Laensberg (fl. 17th Century) was supposed to be the author of the famous Almanack de Liège, called by his name and first published in 1636, containing prognostications in the manner of the modern Zadkiel or Old Moore.—T.
[12] The Comte de Toumon (cf. Vol. V., p. 258, n. 1) was appointed Intendant of Bayreuth by Napoleon before being moved to Rome, as Prefect, in 1809.—T.
[13] Aristophanes.—Author's Note.
[14] Voltaire: Stances à madame la marquise Du Châtelet, 29-36:
"I followed her, but wept that now
I could not follow others as well."
The poet is able to continue the pursuit of friendship, but must abandon that of love.—T.
[15] Jean Louis Eugène Lerminier (1803-1857), a liberal professor and journalist. He had published, on the 15th of October 1832, an article in the Revue des Deux-Mondes, entitled, De l'Opinion légitimiste: M. de Chateaubriand, to which the author of the Memoirs alludes above.—B.
[16] Béranger: La Vivandière, 1-7, not quite correctly quoted. In the original, the vivandière is called "Catin:" Chateaubriand substitutes "Javotte," a favourite name for an inn-servant in France, and alters the last lines so as to avoid the rhyme to "Catin" at the end. To attempt a rough translation:
"I'm the vivandière so gay,
Javotte I'm called: that's handy;
I sell, I drink, I give away
My wine, my rum, my brandy.
I'm light of foot and I give a wink,
Chink chink, chink chink, chink chink, chink chink,
Clink, clink, chink."—T.
[17] Isabel, or Isabeau of Bavaria, Queen of France (d. 1435), married in 1385 to Charles VI. She obtained the Regency when the King became demented in 1392, favoured the enemies of France and, in 1420, concluded the Treaty of Troyes, which placed the crown on the head of Henry V. of England.—T.
[18] Cf. Vol. III., p. 91, n. 3. Berthier was watching a Russian regiment pass under his windows, on its way to the French frontier, when he was seized with a sudden fit of madness and jumped from the balcony to the pavement below (1 June 1815).—T.
[19] Andria, Act. I. Sc. i. 44.45.—T.
[20] Ferdinand III. Archduke of Austria, Grand-duke of Tuscany, later Grand-duke of Würzburg (1769-1824), brother of the Emperor Francis I. He was Grand-duke of Tuscany from 1790, but lost his States in 1796. In 1805, the Bishopric of Würzburg was secularized and turned into a grand-duchy, and the Archduke Ferdinand became its titulary. On the fall of the Empire, Tuscany was restored to Austria and Ferdinand reinstated. At the same time (1814), Würzburg was restored to Bavaria.—B.
[21] These lines are a translation from the χελιδονίζειν, recorded by Athenæus.—B.
[22] Chateaubriand writes, when describing his arrival at Jaffa, in the Itinéraire de Paris à Jerusalem:
"The wind fell, at mid-day. The calm continued for the rest of that day and was prolonged till the 29th [of September 1806]. We were boarded by three new passengers: two wagtails and a swallow."
And then he refers again to the swallows at Combourg in his childhood and to the swallows in America which, in their turn, reminded him of the Combourg swallows.—B.
[23] In the Congrès de Vérone (Vol. II., p. 389), Chateaubriand, writing of his dismissal from the Ministry for Foreign Affairs (6 June 1824), begins with these charming lines:
"On the 6th, in the morning, we were not sleeping; the dawn murmured in the little garden; the birds twittered: we heard the day break; a swallow fell down our chimney into our room; we opened the window for it: if we could only have flown away with it!"—B.
[24] This reply to the swallow was written long before 1833. The Comte de Marcellus relates, in Chateaubriand et son temps, how, in the summer of 1822, he was walking with the Ambassador in Kensington Gardens. Chateaubriand told him how, early that same morning, he had imagined that he heard a swallow twittering outside his window. He looked and saw a smoke and soot-blackened sparrow which might almost be mistaken for a swallow; and he set himself to hold an imaginary conversation with the swallow disguised as a sparrow. He handed Marcellus a paper covered with the words which he had addressed to it and which he had written down so soon as the light permitted. They correspond literally with the above speech.
Marcellus goes on to say that he clapped his hands with delight at reading this inspiration in the manner of the ancients, until, at the end of the paper and as though at the end of his enthusiasm, he began to smile:
"'What is it?' asked the poet, alarmed. 'Some slip?'
'Oh no,' I replied; 'only that "I live on little" troubles me, although it suits the passage so admirably.'
"'Well?' asked M. de Chateaubriand, with a certain animation.
"'Why, have you so soon forgotten that the Duke of York is dining with you to-night and that yesterday we drew up together, under the dictation of our famous Montmirel, the fabric of the most splendid banquet that ever perfumed the kitchens and honoured the annals of diplomacy?'
"M. de Chateaubriand replied:
"'Ah, you are right; I did not think of that this morning.'"—B.
[25] St. Geneviève of Brabant (fl. 8th Century), the subject of a number of romantic legends and adventures.—T.
[26] Domenico Zampieri (1581-1641), known as Domenichino, a noted Italian painter of the Eclectic-Bologna School.—T.
[27] Andrea Palladio (1518-1580), the celebrated Italian architect.—T.
[28] Boileau: Épitres, vi.—B.
[29] Jean Philippe René de La Bletterie (1696-1772), a priest of the Oratory, a native of Brittany like Chateaubriand and author of an Histoire de l'empereur Julien l'Apostat (1735).—T.
[30] The following is John Duncombe's translation of Julian's Greek Epigram on Barley-wine:
"Who, what art thou? Thy name, thy birth declare:
Thou art no Bacchus, I by Bacchus swear.
Jove's son alone I know, I know not thee;
Thou smell'st like goats, but sweet as nectar he.
In Gallia, thirsty Gallia, thou wert born,
Scanty of grapes, but prodigal of corn.
Bromus, not Bromius, styl'd, thy brows with corn,
As sprung from Ceres, not from Jove, adorn."
[31] The common phrase is, "That's Toulouse gold, which will cost him dear:" a reference to the gold stolen by the Romans at Toulouse, which brought ill-luck, according to the legend, to all who possessed it.—T.
[32] François Michel Letellier, Marquis de Louvois (1641-1691), the organizer of the French standing army. Louvois was Minister of War from 1666 to 1691; the Palatinate was burnt down in 1674 and again in 1689.—T.
[33] François de Bonne de Créqui, Maréchal Duc de Lesdiguières (circa 1687), one of the greatest French captains of the seventeenth century, served gloriously under Louis XIV. in the campaigns of Flanders, Alsace and Lorraine, from 1667 to 1678. He took Luxemburg in 1684.—T.
[34] Armand Maréchal de La Force (circa 1586-1675) served with distinction in the Italian and German Wars.—T.
[35] Louis Hector Maréchal Duc de Villars (1653-1734), Marlborough's famous adversary.—T.
[36] Turenne was killed by a cannon-ball while reconnoitering at Sasbach (27 July 1675). The Pic was his favourite piebald charger.—T.
[37] François de Lorraine, Duc de Guise, successfully defended Metz against Charles V. from October 1552 to January 1553; Vauban laid the new fortifications, outside the old, in the reign of Louis XIV.—T.
[38] The father of Alexis de Tocqueville.—Author's Note. Cf. Vol. II., p. 295, n. 1.—T.
The Comte de Tocqueville administered the Department of the Moselle from February 1817 to June 1823.—B.
[39] Abraham Maréchal Fabert (1599-1662), Governor of Sedan, son of Abraham Fabert, the director of the ducal printing-works at Metz, was the first commoner who became a marshal of France (1658).—T.
[40] Metz was plundered by the Vandals in 406.—T.
[41] Iñez de Castro (d. 1355), favourite and, later, wife of Peter of Portugal, son of Alphonsus IV. The King had her murdered to prevent the consequences of an unequal union. When Peter ascended the throne, as Peter I., afterwards surnamed the Justiciary and the Cruel, he avenged her death on her murderers by having their hearts torn out in his presence at Santarem, in 1360. He caused Iñez to be exhumed and crowned and showed her royal honours.—T.
[42] Cf. Vol. V., p. 207, n. 1.—T.
[43] Madame Récamier was banished to Chalons in September 1811.—T.
[44] Madame de La Sablière (fl. 17th Century), wife of Antoine Rambouillet de La Sablière, one of the ornaments of the seventeenth century and immortalized by the hospitality which she accorded to La Fontaine.—T.
[45] Bossuet was Bishop of Meaux.—T.
[46] The Duchesse de Berry embarked on the 9th of June 1833.—B.
[47] The Marquis de Pastoret.—B.
[48] St. Martin (circa 316—circa 397) Bishop of Tours (371). He is honoured on the 11th of November.—T.
[49] The brother of Amadis of Gaul.—T.
[50] Robert Count of Paris (d. 866), surnamed the Strong, father of Robert I. King of France and stock of the Capets, was killed at Brissarthe, in Anjou, while giving battle to the Normans.—T.
[51] Charles d'Albert, Connétable Duc de Luynes (1578-1621), was a page of Henry IV. He curried favour with the Dauphin by his skill in raising speckled magpies. When the latter succeeded as Louis XIII., he loaded Luynes with favours and dignities, gave him his duchy and created him Constable of France. Luynes was on the verge of being disgraced, when he died, of purples, on the 15th of December 1621.—T.
[52] Concino Concini, later Maréchal Marquis d'Ancre, Baron de Lussigny (d. 1617), was a member of the Household of Marie de' Medici, wife of Henry IV. After the King's death, he bought the Marquisate of Ancre and was appointed Governor of Normandy and a marshal of France without ever having drawn the sword. He was, at the same time, Prime Minister of Louis XIII.; and he had Richelieu for his private secretary. The Duc de Luynes contributed towards hastening his downfall and, at last, the young King ordered his assassination, which took place in the court-yard of the Louvre on the 14th of April 1617.—T.
[53] Mathurin Régnier: Sat. XIII.; Macette, 30:
"Her penitent eye sheds holy water and none other."—T.
[54] "L'État c'est moi! The State is I!"—T.
[55] Racine: Athalie, Act I. Sc. i.:
"O happy day for me!
How gladly would I go my King again to see!"—T.
[56] Théodore Demetrius Prince de Bauffremont-Courtenay (1793-1853).—T.
[57] Anne Laurence de Montmorency, Princesse de Bauffremont-Courtenay (1802-1860), married to Théodore Prince de Bauffremont on the 6th of September 1819.—T.
[58] Louis Charles Bonaventura Pierre Comte de Mesnard (1769-1842) emigrated in 1791 and became attached to the person of the Duc de Berry. The Duke, on his return to France, appointed him his aide-de-camp and, in 1816, he was appointed First Equerry to the Duchess, whom he had gone to Marseilles to meet. The Comte de Mesnard was with the Duc de Berry at the moment of his assassination. He was created a peer of France in 1823. In 1830, he accompanied the Duchesse de Berry to England, returned with her to France in 1832, took part in the attempted rising in the Vendée and was arrested with his royal mistress at Nantes. He was tried and acquitted on the 15th of March 1833 and at once joined the Duchesse de Berry in Italy.—T.
[59] The following is the text of this little manifesto, which the newspapers of the day did not dare to publish and which has remained comparatively unknown:
"The mother of Henry V., I returned without other support than his misfortunes and his good right to put an end to the calamities which France is undergoing, by restoring lawful authority, order and stability, pledges essential to the rest and peace of nations. Treachery handed me over to our enemies. Kept a prisoner and long oppressed by persons to whom I had shown nothing but kindness, I have bewailed their ingratitude and suffered with resignation the wrongs with which they have overwhelmed me; but I shall never cease to protest against the usurpation of the rights of a child whom justice, ties of blood, honour and faith obliged them to protect and defend.
"I thank the people of France for the man? marks of attachment which they have given me; my heart will never lose the remembrance of it.
"I beg all those who have been persecuted for the sake of my son and myself, those who have offered me advice of which I was deprived, in spite of the sad situation to which I was reduced and those who have protested, in France's name and mine, against the sequestration and the moral sufferings which stifled my very complaints, to receive the assurance that I shall never forget their affection nor the pains which they have endured.
"The reproaches which some have dared to attribute to me as having been uttered against friends of whose devotion I was too sure to accuse their conduct have offended me to the quick: I indignantly deny those insulting suppositions.
"Whatever may be the future which Providence has in store for my son, to love France, to devote his cares and his life to repairing her misfortunes, to hope that she may be happy, even if he were not himself charged to make her happy: those will at all tunes be his sentiments and his wishes, those will also always be mine.
"The French have never enjoyed real liberty except under the protection of their lawful Sovereign: it will behove the heir of the name and, I hope, the virtues of Henry the Great to continue his reign and to realize all that he promised to France.
"Marie-Caroline."
"Blaye Citadel, 7 June 1833."—B.
Journal from Paris to Venice—The Jura—The Alps—Milan—Verona—The roll-call of the dead—The Brenta—Incidental remarks—Venice—Venetian architecture—Antonio—The Abbé Betio and M. Gamba—The rooms in the Palace of the Doges—Prisons—Silvio Pellico's prison—The Frari—The Academy of Fine Arts—Titian's Assumption—The metopes of the Parthenon—Original drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo and Raphael—The Church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo—The Arsenal—Henry IV.—A frigate leaving for America—The Cemetery of San Cristoforo—San Michele di Murano—Murano—The woman and the child—Gondoliers—Bretons and Venetians—Breakfast on the Riva degli Schiavoni—The tomb of Mesdames at Trieste—Rousseau and Byron—Great geniuses inspired by Venice—Old and new courtezans—Rousseau and Byron compared.
7 to 10 September, on the road.
I left Paris on the 3rd of September 1833, taking the Simplon Road through Pontarlier.
Salins, lately burnt to the ground, had been built up again; I preferred it with its Spanish tumble-down ugliness[61]. The Abbé d'Olivet[62] was born on the banks of the Furieuse; Voltaire's first master, who received his pupil at the Academy, had nothing in common with the paternal stream.
The great storm which caused so many shipwrecks in the Channel assailed me on the Jura. I arrived at night on the "wastes" of the Lévier stage. The caravanserai built of wooden planks, brilliantly lighted and filled with travellers taking shelter suggested not a little the keeping of a witches'[Pg 42] sabbath. I refused to stop; they brought the horses. When it came to closing the lanterns of the calash, a great difficulty arose; the hostess, an extremely pretty young witch, lent a hand, laughing. She took care to hold her candle-end, protected by a glass tube, close up to her face, so as to be seen.
At Pontarlier, my old host, a great Legitimist during his life-time, was dead. I supped at the inn called the National: a good omen for the newspaper of that name. Armand Carrel is the chief of those men who did not lie during the Days of July.
The Castle of Joux defends the approaches to Pontarlier; it has seen two men succeed one another in its donjons, both of whom the Revolution will bear in memory: Mirabeau and Toussaint-Louverture[63], the black Napoleon, imitated and killed by the white Napoleon.
"Toussaint," says Madame de Staël, "was brought to a French prison, where he died in the most wretched manner. Perhaps Bonaparte does not so much as remember this crime, because he has been less often reproached with it than with the others."
The hurricane increased: I encountered its greatest violence between Pontarlier and Orbe. It increased the size of the mountains, rang the bells in the hamlets, drowned the roar of the torrents in that of the thunder, and swept down howling upon my calash, like a heavy squall on the sail of a ship. When low-lying lightning-flashes cracked across the heaths, one saw flocks of sheep stand motionless, their heads hidden between their fore-feet, presenting their tails tucked in and their shaggy quarters to the showers of rain and hail beaten up by the wind. The voice of the man calling the time from the summit of a mountain belfry sounded like the cry of the last hour.
At Lausanne, all was smiling-again: I had often visited that town before; I no longer know a soul there.
At Bex, while they were harnessing to my carriage the horses which had perhaps drawn the bier of Madame de Custine, I stood leaning against the door of the house where my hostess of Fervacques died. She had been celebrated[Pg 43] before the revolutionary tribunal for her long hair. In Rome, I have seen beautiful fair hair taken from a tomb.
In the Rhone Valley, I met an almost naked little girl, dancing with her goat; she asked for alms of a rich young man, well-dressed, who was posting past with a laced courier in front and two footmen sitting behind the glittering chariot. And you imagine that such a distribution of property can exist? You think that it does not justify popular risings?
Sion brings back to me an epoch in my life: after being secretary of embassy in Rome, I was appointed Minister Plenipotentiary to the Valais by the First Consul[64].
At Brigg, I left the Jesuits struggling to raise up again what cannot be raised up[65]: uselessly established at the foot of time, they are crushed beneath its mass, like their monastery beneath the weight of the mountains.
This was the tenth time of my crossing the Alps: I had told them all that I had to tell them in the different years and different circumstances of my life. Ever regretting what he has lost, ever rapt in memories, ever marching towards the grave in tears and isolation: that is man.
The images borrowed from mountain scenery have particularly sensible relations with our fortunes: this one passes in silence, like the outpouring of a spring; that one attaches a noise to his course, like a torrent; that other flings away his existence, like a cataract that appeals and disappears.
The Simplon already wears an abandoned air, even as the life of Napoleon; even as that life, it has nothing left but its glory: it is too great a work to belong to the little States upon which it has devolved. Genius has no family; its inheritance falls by right of escheat to the common crowd, which nibbles at it and plants a cabbage where a cedar grew.
The last time that I crossed the Simplon, I was going as Ambassador to Rome; I fell; the herds whom I had left on the top of the mountain are there yet: snows, clouds, tumble-down rocks, pine-forests and the turmoil of[Pg 44] waters incessantly encompass the hut threatened by the avalanche. The most living person in those chalets is the goat. Why die? I know. Why be born? I cannot tell. Still, admit that the foremost sufferings, moral sufferings, the torments of the mind are wanting among the dwellers in the region of the chamois and the eagles. When I went to the Congress of Verona, in 1822, the station on the peak of the Simplon was kept by a Frenchwoman: in the middle of a cold night and of a squall of wind which prevented me from seeing her, she talked to me of the Scala in Milan; she was expecting ribbons from Paris: her voice, the only thing about that woman that I know, was very sweet through the darkness and the gale.
The descent to Domo d'Ossola appeared to me more and more wonderful; a certain play of light and shadow increased its magic. One was caressed by a little breath which our old tongue called the aure: a sort of early morning-breeze, bathed and scented with the dew. I once more beheld the Lago Maggiore, on which I was so melancholy in 1828 and of which I caught sight from the Valley of Bellinzona in 1832. At Sesto-Calende, Italy presented herself: a blind Paganini sang and played the fiddle at the edge of the lake as I crossed the Ticino.
On entering Milan, I again saw the magnificent avenue of tulip-trees of which no one speaks; the travellers apparently take them for plane-trees. I protest against this silence, in memory of my savages: it is surely the least that America can do, to give shade to Italy. One might also plant magnolias at Genoa, mixed with palm-trees and orange-trees. But who dreams of such a thing? Who thinks of beautifying the earth? That care is left to God. The governments are occupied with their fall, and men prefer a card-board tree on the stage of a fantoccini theatre to the magnolia-tree whose roses would scent the cradle of Christopher Columbus.
In Milan, the annoyance about the passports is as stupid as it is brutal. I did not pass through Verona without emotion; it was there that my active political career had its real beginning. My mind thought on what the world might have become if that career had not been interrupted by a contemptible jealousy.
Verona, so lively in 1822, thanks to the presence of the sovereigns of Europe, had, in 1833, returned to silence; the Congress had passed as completely in its lonely streets as the[Pg 45] Court of the Scaligers and the Senate-house of the Romans. The arenas whose benches I had seen filled with a hundred thousand spectators yawned deserted; the buildings which I had admired under the illuminations embroidered on their architecture wrapped themselves, grey and bare as they were, in an atmosphere of rain.
How many ambitions were stirring among the actors at Verona! How many destinies of nations were examined, discussed and weighed! Let us call the roll of those wooers of dreams; let us open the book of the Day of Wrath: Liber scriptus proferetur[66]; monarchs, princes, ministers, here is your ambassador, your colleague returned to his post: where are you? Answer.
The Emperor of Russia, Alexander?
"Dead."
The Emperor of Austria, Francis I.[67]?
"Dead."
The King of France, Louis XVIII.?
"Dead."
The King of France, Charles X.[68]?
"Dead."
The King of England, George IV.?
"Dead."
The King of Naples, Ferdinand I.?
"Dead."
The Duke of Tuscany[69]?
"Dead."
Pope Pius VII.?
"Dead."
The King of Sardinia, Charles Felix[70]?
"Dead."
The Duc de Montmorency, French Foreign Minister?
"Dead."
Mr. Canning, English Foreign Minister?
"Dead."
M. de Bernstorff, Prussian Foreign Minister?
"Dead."
M. de Gentz, of the Austrian Chancery?
"Dead."
Cardinal Consalvi, Secretary of State to His Holiness?
"Dead."
M. de Serre, my colleague on the Congress[71]?
"Dead."
M. d'Aspremont, my secretary of embassy?
"Dead."
Count Neipperg, the husband of Napoleon's widow?
"Dead."
Countess Tolstoi?
"Dead."
Her tall young son?
"Dead."
My host in the Lorenzi Palace?
"Dead."
If so many men inscribed with me on the roll of the Congress have had their names inserted in the obituary; if nations and royal dynasties have perished; if Poland has succumbed; if Spain is again annihilated; if I have been to Prague to enquire after the flying remnants of the great House whose representative I was at Verona: what, then, are earthly things? No one remembers the speeches which we made round the table of Prince Metternich; but, O power of genius, no traveller will ever hear the lark sing in the fields of Verona without recalling Shakespeare! Each of us, by digging to different depths in his memory, finds another layer of dead, other extinct sentiments, other illusions which uselessly he suckled, like those of Herculaneum, at the breast of Hope.
On leaving Verona, I was obliged to change my measure to compute the time that was past; I was going back twenty-seven years, for I had not made the journey from Verona to Venice since 1806. At Brescia, at Vicenza, at Padua, I passed by the walls of Palladio, Scamozzi[72], Franceschini, Nicholas of Pisa[73], Friar John.
The banks of the Brenta disappointed my hopes; they had remained more smiling in my imagination: the dykes raised[Pg 47] along the canal conceal the marches too much. Several villas have been demolished; but a few very elegant ones still remain. There, perhaps, lives Signor Pococurante[74], whom the city ladies with their sonnets disgusted, to whom the two pretty girls began to grow very indifferent, to whom music grew tiresome after half an hour, who thought Homer mortally tedious, who detested the pious. Æneas, the boy Ascanius, the silly King Latinus, the ill-bred Amata and the insipid Lavinia, who saw nothing extraordinary in Horace' journey to Brundusium and his account of his bad dinner, who declared that he never read Tully and still less Milton, that barbarian who spoiled Tasso's hell and the devil.
"'Alas!' said Candid softly to Martin, 'I am afraid this man holds our German poets in great contempt[75].'"
In spite of my semi-disappointment and many gods in the little gardens, I was charmed with the mulberry-trees, the orange-trees, the fig-trees and the softness of the air, I who, such a short time before, was travelling through the fir-groves of Germany and over the mountains of the Czechs, where the sun looks ill.
I arrived on the 10th of September, at break of day, at Fusina, which Philippe de Comines[76] and Montaigne call "Chaffousine." At half past ten, I had landed in Venice. My first care was to send to the post-office: there was nothing addressed to me direct, nor indirectly to Paolo; of Madame la Duchesse de Berry, no news at all. I wrote to Count Griffi, the Neapolitan Minister in Florence, to ask him to let me know the movements of Her Royal Highness.
Having everything in order, I resolved patiently to await the Princess: Satan sent me a temptation. I longed, at his diabolical suggestion, to stay alone, for a fortnight, at the Hôtel de l'Europe, to the detriment of the Legitimate Monarchy. I wished the august traveller bad roads, without reflecting that my restoration of King Henry V. might be delayed for half a month! Like Danton, I crave pardon for it of God and men.
Venice, Hôtel de l'Europe, 10 September 1833.
Salve, Italuni Regina....
. . . . .
Nec tu semper eris[77].
O d'Italia dolente
Eterno lumine....
Venezia[78]!
In Venice, one can imagine one's self on the deck of a superb galley lying at anchor, on the Bucentaur, where a feast is being given in your honour and from whose side you see wonderful things all around. My inn, the Hôtel de l'Europe, is situated at the entrance to the Grand Canal, opposite the Dogana di Mare, the Giudecca and San Giorgio Maggiore. When one goes up the Grand Canal, between its two rows of palaces, so marked by their centuries, so varied in architectural style, when one moves from the Piazza to the Piazzetta, when one contemplates the basilica and its domes, the Palace of the Doges, the Procuratie Nuove, the Zucca, the Torre dell' Orologio, the campanile of St Mark's and the Column of the Lion, all mingled with the sails and masts of the shipping, the movement of the crowd and the gondolas, the azure of the sky and sea, the freaks of a dream or the frolics of an Oriental imagination present nothing more fantastic. Sometimes Cicéri[79] paints and collects upon a canvas, for the illusions of the stage, monuments of all shapes, all times, all countries, all climates: it is still Venice.
Those double-gilt edifices, so profusely embellished by Giorgione[80], Titian, Paul Veronese[81], Tintoretto[82], Giovanni[Pg 49] Bellini[83], Paris Bordone[84], the two Palmas[85], are filled with bronzes, marbles, granites, porphyries, precious antiques, rare manuscripts; their internal magic is equal to their external magic; and when, in the bland light that illumines them, one discovers the illustrious names and noble memories attached to their vaults, one cries with Philippe de Comines:
"'Tis the most triumphant city that ever I saw!"
And yet it is no longer the Venice of the Minister of Louis XI.; the Venice the Bride of the Adriatic and mistress of the seas; the Venice that gave emperors to Constantinople, kings to Cyprus, princes to Dalmatia, the Peloponnesus, Crete; the Venice that humiliated the German Cæsars and received the Popes as suppliants at her inviolable hearths; the Venice of whom monarchs esteemed it an honour to be the citizens, to whom Petrarch[86], Pletho[87], Bessarion[88] bequeathed the remnants of Greek and Latin literature saved from the shipwreck of barbarism; the Venice, a republic in the midst of Feudal Europe, that served as a buckler to Christianity; the Venice, the "setter-up of lions," that trampled on the ramparts of Ptolemaïs[89], Ascalon[90], Tyre[91] and overthrew the Crescent at Lepanto[92]; the Venice whose doges were men of learning and whose merchants knights; the Venice that laid low the Orient or bought its perfumes, that brought back from Greece conquered turbans or recovered master-pieces; the Venice that issued victorious from the ungrateful League of Cambrai; the Venice that triumphed through her feasts, her courtezans and her arts, as through her arms and her great men; the Venice that was at once Corinth, Athens and Carthage, adorning her head with rostral crowns and floral diadems.
It is no longer even the city through which I passed when I went to visit the shores that had witnessed her glory; but, thanks to her voluptuous breezes and agreeable waters, she retains a charm: it is especially to declining countries that a beautiful climate is a necessity. There is civilization enough in Venice to lend a niceness to existence. The seduction of the sky prevents one from requiring greater human dignity: an attractive virtue is exhaled from those vestiges of greatness, those traces of the arts which surround one. The ruins of an old state of society which produced such things as these, while giving you a distaste for a new state of society, leave you no desire for a future. You love to feel yourself die with all that is dying around you; you have no other care than to adorn what remains of your life as it is gradually laid aside. Nature, which causes young generations to reappear amongst ruins as quickly as it covers those ruins with flowers, keeps for the most enfeebled races the habit of the passions and the enchantment of pleasure.
Venice never knew idolatry: she grew up Christian in the island where she was reared, far from the brutality of Attila. The women descended from the Scipios, the Pauli and the Eustochie escaped from Alaric's violence in the Grotto of Bethlehem. Standing apart from all other cities, the eldest daughter of ancient civilization without ever having been dishonoured by conquest, Venice contains neither Roman remains nor monuments of the Barbarians. Nor does one see there what one sees in the north and west of Europe, in the midst of industrial progress: I refer to those new structures, those whole streets built in a hurry, in which the houses remain either unfinished or empty. What could one build here? Wretched dens which would show the poverty of conception of the sons after the magnificence of the genius of the fathers; white-washed hovels which would not reach to the first storey of the gigantic residences of the Foscaris and the Pesaros. When one sees the trowel of mortar and the handful of plaster that have had to be applied, for an urgent repair, against a marble capital, one is shocked. Better the rotten planks boarding up Grecian or Moorish windows, the rags hung out to dry on graceful balconies, than the imprint of the mean hand of our century.
Why cannot I lock myself up in this town which harmonizes so well with my destiny, in this city of poets, where Dante, Petrarch, Byron passed! Why cannot I finish writing[Pg 51] my Memoirs by the light of the sun that falls upon these pages! At this moment the luminary is still burning my Floridan savannahs and is setting here at the end of the Grand Canal. I can no longer see it; but, through an opening in this wilderness of palaces, its rays strike the ball of the Dogana, the lateen-sails of the boats, the yards of the ships and the porch of the convent of San Giorgio Maggiore. The tower of the monastery, changed into a rosy column, is reflected in the waves; the white front of the church is so brightly lighted that I can pick out the smallest details of the chisel. The outlines of the shops of the Giudecca are painted with a Titian light; the gondolas on the canal and the harbour are swimming in the same light. Venice is there, seated on the shore, like a beautiful woman about to die away with the day-light: the evening breeze lifts up her balmy tresses; she dies saluted by all the graces and all the smiles of nature.
Venice, September 1833.
In Venice, in 1806, there was a young Signor Armani, the Italian translator or a friend of the translator of the Génie du Christianisme. His sister, as he said, was a nun: monaca. There was also a Jew, on his way to the farce of Napoleon's Grand Sanhedrim[93], who had his eyes on my purse; then M. Lagarde, the chief of the French spies, who gave me dinner: my translator, his sister, the Jew of the Sanhedrim are either dead or no longer live in Venice. At that time, I was staying at the Hotel of the Golden Lion, near the Rialto; that hotel has changed its position. Almost opposite my old inn is the Palazzo Foscari, which is falling. Back, all that old lumber of my life! I should go mad with ruins: let us speak of the present.
I have tried to depict the general effect of the architecture of Venice; in order to receive an impression of the details, I have been up and down and again up the Grand Canal, I[Pg 52] have visited and revisited the Piazza San Marco. It would need volumes to exhaust that subject. Count Cicognara's[94] Fabbriche più conspicue di Venezia supply the features of the monuments; but the exposition is not clear. I will content myself with noting down two or three of the most frequently recurring arrangements.
From the capital of a Corinthian column is described a semicircle, the point of which descends upon the capital of another Corinthian column: exactly in the middle of those shafts rises a third, of the same dimensions and the same order; from the capital of that central column two epicycles spring to right and left, the ends of which also come to lie upon the capitals of other columns. The result of this design is that the arches, in crossing each other, give birth to ogives at their point of intersection[95], so that a charming admixture is formed of two architectural styles, the full Roman arch and the ogive of Arab-Gothic or "Mediæval" origin; but it is certain that the latter exists in the so-called Cyclopean monuments; I have seen very pure specimens of it in the tombs of Argos[96].
The Ducal Palace presents twines reproduced in some other palaces, particularly in the Palazzo Foscari: the columns support pointed arches; those arches leave voids between them: between those voids the architect has placed two roses. The rose depresses the extremity of the two ellipses. Those roses, which meet at a point of their circumference in the fore front of the building, become a kind of row of wheels upon which the rest of the edifice is carried.
In every structure, the base is commonly broad; the monument diminishes in thickness as it encroaches on the sky. The Ducal Palace is the exact opposite of that natural scheme of architecture: the base, pierced by light porticoes surmounted by a gallery of arabesques indented with four-leaved open trefoils, supports an almost bare square mass: one would say it was a fortress built upon pillars, or rather an inverted building planted on its light coping with its thick root in the air.
Remarkable in the Venetian monuments are the architectural masks and heads. In the Palazzo Pesaro, the entablature of the first storey, of the Doric order, is decorated with heads of giants; the Ionic order of the second storey is bound by heads of knights which stretch horizontally from the wall, with their faces looking towards the water: some are wrapped in a chin-piece, others have their visors half-lowered; all wear helmets whose plumes bend round into ornaments under the cornice. Lastly, on the third storey, of the Corinthian order, we see heads of female statues with their hair differently knotted.
In St. Mark's, embossed with domes, encrusted with mosaics, loaded with incoherent spoils of the East, I found myself at the same time in San Vitale at Ravenna, in St. Sophia in Constantinople, in St. Saviour's in Jerusalem and in those lesser churches of the Morea, Chios and Malta: St. Mark's, a monument of Byzantine architecture, composite of victory and conquest raised to the Cross, is a trophy, as is the whole of Venice. The most remarkable effect of its architecture is its darkness under a brilliant sky; but to-day, the loth of September, the deadened light from the outside harmonized with the gloomy basilica. They were completing the Forty Hours ordered to obtain fine weather. The fervour of the faithful praying against rain was great: the Venetians look upon a grey and watery sky as the plague.
Our prayers were granted: the evening became charming; at night I went for a walk on the quay. The sea lay smooth; the stars mingled with the scattered lights of the boats and ships anchored here and there. The cafés were full, but one saw no Pulcinelli, Greeks nor Moors: everything comes to an end. A Madonna, brightly illuminated at the crossing of a bridge, attracted the crowd: young girls were devoutly telling their beads on their knees; they made the Sign of the Cross with their right hand and stopped the passers-by with their left. Returning to my inn, I went to bed and to sleep to the singing of the gondoliers stationed under my windows.
I have as my guide Antonio, the oldest and best-informed of the ciceroni of the place; he knows the palaces, statues and pictures by heart
On the 11th of September, I paid a visit to the Abbé Betio and M. Gamba[97], the keepers of the Library: they received[Pg 54] me with extreme politeness, although I had no letter of recommendation.
As one goes through the rooms of the Ducal Palace, one passes from wonders to wonders. There the whole history of Venice unrolls itself, painted by the greatest masters: their pictures have been described a hundred times.
Among the antiques, I remarked, like everybody else, the group of Leda and the Swan and the Ganymede ascribed to Praxiteles. The Swan is prodigious in its embrace and its voluptuousness; Leda is too compliant. The eagle of the Ganymede is not a real eagle; it looks the best-tempered beast in the world. Ganymede, charmed at being carried off, is enchanting: he talks to the eagle, which talks to him.
Those antiques are placed at either end of the magnificent rooms of the Library. I contemplated, with the sacred respect of the poet, a manuscript of Dante's and gazed, with the greed of the traveller, upon the map of the world of Fra Mauro[98] (1460). Africa, however, does not appear to be traced upon it so correctly as they say. They ought, above all, in Venice, to explore the archives: they would find invaluable documents there.
From the painted and gilded halls, I passed to the prisons and the dungeons; the same palace presents the microcosm of society, joy and sorrow. The prisons are under the leads, the dungeons on the level of the water of the canal and on two storeys. A thousand tales are told of strangulations and secret beheadings[99]; by way of compensation we hear that a prisoner[Pg 55] left those dungeons fat, plump and rosy, after eighteen years spent in captivity: he had lived like a toad inside a rock. All honour to the human race! What a fine thing it is!
Plenty of philanthropic phrases stain the vaults and walls of the underground cells, since the day when our Revolution, so adverse to blood,
. . . . . dans cet affreux séjour
D'un coup de hache a fait entrer le jour[100].
In France, the gaols were crammed with victims who were got rid of by cutting their throats; but, in the prisons of Venice, they set free the shades of men who had, perhaps, never been there. The gentle butchers who sliced the throats of children and old men, the kind spectators who assisted at the guillotining of women were melted at the progress of humanity, so well proved by the opening of the Venetian dungeons. As for me, I have a hard heart; I am not like those heroes of sensibility. No old headless ghosts appeared before my eyes in the Palace of the Doges; only it seemed to me that I saw in the cells of the aristocracy what the Christians saw when they shattered the idols: nests of mice escaping from the heads of the gods. That is what happens to every power that is disembowelled and exposed to the light: it lets out the vermin which we used to adore.
The Bridge of Sighs connects the Ducal Palace with the prisons of the town; it is divided into two separate passages: through one of these, the ordinary prisoners entered; through the other, the State prisoners went before the tribunal of the Inquisitors or the Ten. This bridge presents a graceful exterior, and the façade of the prison is admired: beauty cannot be dispensed with in Venice, even for tyranny and misfortune! Pigeons make their nests in the windows of the gaol; little doves, all covered with down, flutter their wings and moan at the bars, while waiting for their mother. In former days, innocent creatures used to be cloistered almost on leaving the cradle; their parents never saw them again except through the gratings of the parlour or the wicket of the door.
Venice, September 1833.
You can readily imagine that, in Venice, I necessarily thought of Silvio Pellico[101]. M. Gamba had told me that the[Pg 56] Abbé Betio was the master of the Palace and that, by applying to him, I should be able to make my researches. The excellent librarian, to whom I had recourse one morning, took a big bunch of keys and led me, along several passages and up various stair-cases, to the garrets of the author of Le mie Prigioni.
M. Silvio Pellico has made only one mistake; he has spoken of his gaol as of one of those famous prison-cells high up in the air, marked by their roofing sotto i piombi. Those prisons are, or rather were five in number, in that portion of the Ducal Palace which adjoins the Ponte della Paglia and the canal of the Bridge of Sighs. Pellico did not dwell there; he was incarcerated at the other end of the Palace, near the Ponte degli Canonici, in a building contiguous to the Palace, which building had been transformed, in 1820, into a gaol for political prisoners. However, he was also "under the leads," for a plate of that metal formed the roofing of his hermitage.
The description which the prisoner gives of his first and second room is exact to the last particular. Through the window of the first room, one looks out on the roof of St. Mark's; one sees the well in the inner yard of the Palace, a corner of the Piazza, the different steeples of the town and, beyond the lagoons, on the horizon, mountains in the direction of Padua. The second room is recognised by its big window and by another smaller and higher window: it was through the big one that Pellico used to perceive his companions in misfortune in a detached building opposite and, on the left, above, the dear children who used to talk to him from their mother's casement.
To-day all those chambers are deserted, for men remain[Pg 57] nowhere, not even in the prisons; the bars of the windows have been removed and the walls and ceilings white-washed. The gentle and learned Abbé Betio, living in this abandoned part of the Palace, is its peaceful and solitary guardian.
The rooms which immortalize Pellico's captivity are lofty and airy; they command a splendid view; they are the prison for a poet; there would not be much to say about them, admitting the tyranny and absurdity: but the death sentence for a speculative opinion! The Moravian[102] dungeons! Ten years taken from life, youth and talent! And the gnats, those nasty animals by which I myself am being eaten up at the Hôtel de l'Europe, hardened though I be by the weather and the mosquitoes of Florida! For the rest, I have often been worse lodged than was Pellico in his belvedere in the Ducal Palace, notably in the prefecture of the doges of the French Police, where I was obliged to climb up on a table to enjoy the light.
The author of Francesca da Rimini thought of Zanze in his gaol; I, in mine, sang of a young girl whom I had just seen die. I was very anxious to know what became of Pellico's little guardian. I have set persons to make researches: if I find out anything, I will tell you.
Venice, September 1833.
A gondola landed me at the Frari, where we French, accustomed as we are to the Grecian or Gothic exteriors of our own churches, are not much struck by those outsides of basilicas in brick, ungrateful and common to the eye; but, in the inside, the harmony of the lines and the disposition of the masses produce a simplicity and a calmness of composition that enchant one.
The tombs in the Frari, placed in the lateral walls, decorate the building without obstructing it The magnificence of the marbles blazes forth on every side, charming foliage bears witness to the finish of the old Venetian sculpture. On one of the squares of the pavement in the nave are these words:
Here Lies Titian, the Rival of Zeuxis and Apelles
This stone is opposite one of the painter's master-pieces. Canova has his gorgeous sepulchre not far from Titian's[Pg 58] flag-stone; this sepulchre is the replica of the monument which he had conceived for Titian himself and which he executed afterwards for the Archduchess Maria Christina[103]. The remains of the sculptor of the Hebe and the Magdalen are not all collected in this work: thus Canova inhabits the representation of a tomb made by himself, not for himself, which tomb is but his semi-cenotaph.
From the Frari, I proceeded to the Manfrini Gallery. The portrait of Ariosto is speaking. Titian painted his mother, an old matron of the people, squalid and ugly: the artist's pride shows itself in the exaggeration of this woman's years and poverty.
At the Academy of Fine Arts, I hurried fast to the picture of the Assumption, discovered by Cicognara[104]: ten large male figures at the bottom of the picture; observe the man rapt in ecstasy on the left, watching Mary. The Virgin, above this group, rises in the centre of a semicircle of cherubs; there is a multitude of admirable faces in that glory: a woman's head, on the right, at the point of the crescent, of unspeakable beauty; two or three heavenly spirits flung horizontally across the sky, in the bold, picturesque manner of Tintoretto. I am not sure that a standing angel does not experience some feeling of a too terrestrial love. The Virgin is largely proportioned; she is clad in a red drapery; her blue scarf floats in the air; her eyes are raised towards the Eternal Father, who appeared at the zenith. Four positive colours, brown, green, red and blue, cover the picture: the aspect of the whole is sombre, the character unideal, but of an incomparable truth and natural vivacity. Nevertheless, I prefer the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, by the same painter, which hangs in the same room.
Facing the Assumption and very cleverly lighted is Tintoretto's Miracle of St. Mark, a vigorous scene which seems dug out of the canvas with the chisel and mallet rather than the brush.
I went on to the plaster-casts from the metopes of the Parthenon; these plasters had a three-fold interest for me:[Pg 59] in Athens, I had seen the voids left by the ravages committed by Lord Elgin[105] and, in London, the kidnapped marbles of which I found the mouldings in Venice. The roving destiny of those master-pieces was linked with mine, and yet Phidias did not fashion my clay.
I was unable to tear myself away from the original drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo and Raphael. Nothing is more interesting than those sketches of genius abandoned alone to its studies and its whims: it admits you to its intimacy; it initiates you into its secrets; it informs you by what steps and by what efforts it has attained perfection: one is enraptured at seeing how it was mistaken, how it perceived its error and corrected it. Those pencil-strokes drawn on the corner of a table on a wretched piece of paper retain a marvellous richness and natural artlessness. When you reflect that Raphael's hand has passed over those immortal scraps, you are angry with the glass which prevents you from kissing those holy relics.
I refreshed myself, after my admiration at the Academy of Fine Arts, with an admiration of a different kind at Santi Giovanni e Paolo, even as one rests one's mind by a change of reading. This church, whose unknown architect followed in the foot-steps of Niccola Pisano, is rich and spacious. The apse into which the high altar retires represents a kind of erect shell; two other sanctuaries accompany this shell laterally: they are tall and narrow, with many-centred vaultings, and are separated from the apse by rabbeted channels.
The ashes of the Doges Mocenigo[106], Morosini[107], Vendramin[108] and several other heads of the Republic[109] rest here. Here also is the skin of Antonio Bragadino[110], the defender of Famagusta, to whom Tertulliano expression may be[Pg 60] applied: "a living skin." Those illustrious remains inspire a great and painful sentiment: Venice herself, the magnificent catafalco of her warlike magistrates, the two-fold coffin of their ashes, is now no more than a living skin.
Stained-glass windows and red curtains, while veiling the light in Santi Giovanni e Paolo, increase the religious effect. The numberless columns brought from the East and from Greece have been planted in the basilica, like avenues of exotic trees. A storm rose while I was roaming in the church: when will the trumpets sound that shall rouse all these dead? I said as much under Jerusalem, in the Valley of Jehoshaphat. Returning to my hotel after those visits, I thanked God for having transported me from the porkers of Waldmünchen to the pictures of Venice.
Venice, September 1833.
After my discovery of the prisons in which material Austria tries to stifle Italian intellects, I went to the Arsenal. No monarchy, however powerful it be or have been, has presented a similar nautical compendium.
An immense space, enclosed by crenellated walls, contains four docks for large ships, yards for building those ships, establishments for all that concerns the military and merchant navy, from the rope-yard to the gun-foundry, from the work-shop where they carve the oar of the gondola to that where they square the keel of a seventy-four, from the rooms devoted to the old armour captured in Constantinople, in Cyprus, in the Morea, at Lepanto to the rooms in which modern armour is exhibited: the whole mingled with galleries, columns, works of architecture raised and designed by the chief masters.
In the naval arsenals of Spain, England, France, Holland, one sees only that which is connected with the objects of those arsenals; in Venice, the arts are allied to industry. The monument to Admiral Emo[111], by Canova, awaits you beside the carcass of a ship; rows of guns meet your eye through long porticoes: the two colossal lions from the Piræus keep the gate of the dock from which a frigate is about to issue for a world which Athens did not know and which was discovered by the genius of modern Italy.
In spite of those fine remains of Neptune, the Arsenal no longer recalls those lines of Dante:
In the Venetians' arsenal as boils
Through wintry months tenacious pitch, to smear
Their unsound vessels; for the inclement time
Sea-faring men restrains, and in that while
His bark one builds anew, another stops
The ribs of his that hath made many a voyage,
One hammers at the prow, one at the poop,
This shapeth oars, that other cables twirls,
The mizen one repairs, and main-sail rent[112].
All this animation is over: the emptiness of seven-eighths of the arsenal, the extinct furnaces, the boilers gnawed with rust, the rope-walks without wheels, the dock-yards without shipwrights bear witness to the same death that has smitten the palaces. Instead of the throng of carpenters, sail-makers, seamen, caulkers, ship's lads, one sees a few galley-slaves dragging their fetters: two of them were eating off the breech of a gun; at that iron table they could at least dream of liberty.
When formerly those galley-slaves rowed on board the Bucentaur, they wore a purple tunic thrown over their branded shoulders, to make them look like kings cleaving the waves with gilded paddles; they gladdened their toil with the clank of their chains, even as in Bengal, at the Feast of the Durga, the nautch-girls, dressed in gold gauze, accompany their dances with the sound of the rings with which their necks, arms and legs are adorned. The Venetian convicts married the doge to the sea and themselves renewed their indissoluble union with slavery.
Of those many fleets which bore the crusaders to the shores of Palestine and forbade any foreign sail to be displayed to the winds of the Adriatic, there remain a model of the Bucentaur, Napoleon's cutter, a savages' canoe and some designs of ships drawn in chalk on the black-board of the school of the Naval Guard.
A Frenchman coming from Prague to Venice and expecting the mother of Henry V. must needs be touched at seeing the armour of Henry IV. in the Venice Arsenal. The sword which the Bearnese wore at the Battle of Ivry[113] used to be joined to that armour: that sword is no longer there.
By a decree of the Grand Council of Venice, dated 3 April 1600:
"Enrico di Borbone IV., re di Francia e di Navarra, con li figluoli e discenditi suoi, sia annumerato tra il nobli di questio nostro maggior consiglio."
Charles X., Louis XIX. and Henry V., descendants of "Enrico di Borbone," are therefore nobles of the Republic of Venice, which no longer exists, even as they are Kings of France in Bohemia, even as they are canons of St. John Lateran in Rome, and always by right of Henry IV.; I have represented them in this last quality: they have lost their president's cap and their amice, and I have lost my embassy. And yet I was so well off in my stall in St. John Lateran! What a beautiful church! What a beautiful sky! What admirable music! Those songs have lasted longer than my grandeurs and those of my Canon-King.
My glory annoyed me greatly at the Arsenal; it shines on my forehead unknown to myself: Field-marshal Pallucci, Admiral and Commandant-General of the Navy, recognised me by my horns of fire. He hastened up to me, himself showed me several curiosities and then, excusing himself for his inability to accompany me any longer, because of a council over which he had to preside, he placed me in the hands of a superior officer.
We met the captain of the frigate which was on the point of sailing. He accosted me without ceremony and said to me, with that sailor's frankness which I like so much:
"Monsieur le vicomte"—as though he had known me all his life—"have you any message for America?"
"No, captain: be sure to give her my compliments; it is long since I saw her!"
I cannot see a vessel without dying of longing to go with her: if I were free, the first ship sailing for the Indies would have a chance of carrying me away. How I regretted not to have been able to accompany Captain Parry[114] to the Arctic regions! My life is at its ease only in the midst of the clouds and the seas: I always cherish the hope that it will disappear under a sail. The weighty years which we heave into the waves of time are not anchors: they do not delay our course.
Venice, September 1833.
In the Arsenal, I was not far from the Isola di San Cristoforo, which serves to-day as a cemetery. This island used to contain a convent of Capuchins; the convent has been pulled down and its site is nothing more than a square enclosure. The tombs are not very many in number, or at least they are not raised above the level and grassy ground. Against the west wall are fixed five or six stone monuments; little black wooden crosses, with a white date, are scattered about the enclosure: that is how they now bury the Venetians whose forefathers rest in the mausoleums of the Frari and Santi Giovanni e Paolo. Society, as it grows larger, has humbled itself: democracy has overtaken death.
On the edge of the cemetery, on the east side, one sees the vaults of the Schismatic Greeks and those of the Protestants; they are separated from each other by a wall and again separated from the Catholic burials by another wall: sad dissents whose memory is perpetuated in the asylum where all quarrels end! Close by the Greek cemetery is another recess which protects a hole into which the still-born children are thrown to Limbo. Happy creatures! You have passed from the darkness of the maternal womb into everlasting darkness, without going through the light!
Near this hole lie bones dug into the ground like roots, as each new grave is cleared: some, the older ones, are white and dry; others, more recently disinterred, are yellow and damp. Lizards run about those remains, glide in between the teeth, through the eyes and nostrils, come out through the mouth and ears of the skulls, their houses or nests. Three or four butterflies hovered over the mallow-flowers entwined with those bones, an image of the soul under that sky which resembles that under which the story of Psyche was invented. One skull still had a few hairs of the same shade as my own. Poor old gondolier! Did you at least steer your bark better than I have steered mine?
A common grave remains open in the enclosure; they had just lowered a physician beside his old practice. His black coffin was covered with earth only at the top and its naked side awaited the side of another dead man to warm it Antonio had stuffed his wife in there, a fortnight ago, and it was the defunct doctor who had dispatched her: Antonio blessed a requiting and avenging God and[Pg 64] bore his misfortune patiently. The coffins of private individuals are taken to that dismal dwelling-place in private gondolas, followed by a priest in another gondola. As the gondolas look like hearses, they suit the ceremony. A larger wherry, an "omnibus" of Cocytus, performs the service of the hospitals. Thus we find renewed the Egyptian burials and the fables of Charon and his ferry-boat.
In the cemetery beside Venice stands an octagonal chapel dedicated to St. Christopher[115]. This saint, taking a child on his shoulders at the ford of a river, found it heavy; now the child was the Son of Mary, who holds the globe in His hand: the altar-picture represents this fair adventure.
And I too have tried to carry a child-king, but I did not perceive that he was sleeping in his cradle with ten centuries: a load too heavy for my arms.
I observed in the chapel a wooden candle-stick: the taper was extinguished; a holy-water font for blessing the burials; and a little book: Pars Ritualis Romani pro usu ad exsequianda corpora defunctorum; when we are already forgotten, Religion, our immortal and never wearied kinswoman, mourns us and follows us: exsequor fugam. A tinder-box contained a steel; God alone disposes of the spark of life. Two quatrains written on common paper were fastened up on the inner panels of two of the three doors of the building:
Quivi dell' uom le frali spoglie ascoce
Pallida morte, O passegier, t'addita, etc.
The only somewhat striking tomb in the cemetery was raised in advance by a woman who subsequently delayed eighteen years in dying: the inscription informs us of this circumstance; thus this woman for eighteen years hoped in vain for her sepulchre. What sorrow nourished this hope within her?
On a little black wooden cross appears this other inscription:
Virginia Acerbi, Anno 72, 1824.
Morta nel bacio del Signore.
The years are harsh to a fair Venetian woman.
Antonio said to me:
"When this cemetery is full, they will give it a rest and bury the dead in the Isola di San Michele di Murano[116]."
The expression was a correct one: when the harvest is gathered, one lets the soil lie fallow and ploughs other furrows elsewhere.
Venice, September 1833.
We have been to see that other field awaiting the Great Husbandman. San Michele di Murano is a smiling monastery with a graceful church, porticoes and a white cloister. The windows of the convent give a view, over the porticoes, of Venice and the lagoons; a garden filled with flowers meets the turf whose compost is still being prepared under the fresh-coloured skin of some young girl. This charming retreat is given over to Franciscans; it would better suit nuns singing like the little pupils of Rousseau's Scuole:
"How happy are they," says Manzoni, "who have taken the holy veil before fixing their eyes on a man's face."
Give me, I entreat you, a cell here in which to finish my Memoirs.
Fra Paolo[117] is buried at the entrance to the church; that seeker after noise must be very wroth at the silence that surrounds him.
Pellico, when sentenced to death, was lodged at San Michele before being transported to the fortress of the Spielberg. The president of the tribunal before which Pellico appeared takes the poet's place at San Michele; he is buried in the cloister; he will not leave that prison.
Not far from the tomb of the magistrate is that of a foreign woman married at the age of twenty-two years, in the month of January; she died in the month of February following. She did not want to go beyond the honeymoon; her epitaph says:
Ci revedremo.
If it were true!
Back, that doubt; back, the thought that no anguish rends annihilation! Atheist, when death buries its nails into your heart, who knows but that, in the last moment of consciousness, before the destruction of the ego, you will feel an atrocity of pain capable of filling eternity, an immensity of suffering of which a human being can have no idea in the circumscribed limits of time! Ah yes, ci revedremo!
I was too near the island and town of Murano not to visit the factories whence came the mirrors in my mother's room at Combourg[118]. I did not see those factories, which are now closed; but they spun out before my eyes, like the thread of our frail lives, a slender cord of glass: it was of that glass that the bead was made that hung from the nose of the little Iroquois at the Falls of Niagara: the hand of a Venetian girl had rounded off the ornament of a savage girl[119].
I met a finer sight than Mila. A woman was carrying a swaddled child; the delicate complexion, the captivating glance of that Muranese are idealized in my memory. She looked sad and preoccupied. Had I been Lord Byron, this would have been a favourable opportunity for making an experiment with seduction on poverty; a little money goes a long way here. Then I should have played the desperate solitary beside the waves, intoxicated with my success and my genius. Love seems a different thing to me: I have lost sight of René since many a year; but I doubt if he sought the secret of his pains in his pleasures.
Every day, after my excursions, I sent to the post, but there was nothing there: Count Griffi did not reply from Florence; the public papers permitted to exist in this land of independence would not have dared to state that a traveller had alighted at the White Lion. Venice, where the gazettes[120] were born, is reduced to reading the placards which advertise[Pg 67] on the same bill the opera of the day and the Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. The Alduses[121] will not come forth from their tombs to embrace, in my person, the defender of the liberty of the press. I had therefore to wait Returning to my inn, I dined and amused myself with the company of the gondoliers stationed, as I have said, under my window at the entrance to the Grand Canal.
The gaiety of those sons of Nereus never forsakes them: clothed by the sun, they are fed by the sea. They do not lie about idly like the lazzaroni in Naples: ever stirring, they are sailors who lack ships and work, but who would still carry on the trade of the world and win the Battle of Lepanto, if the days of Venetian liberty and glory were not past.
At six o'clock in the morning, they come to their gondolas, fastened to posts with their prows aground. Then they begin to scrape and wash their barchette at the Traghetti, just as dragoons curry, brush and sponge their horses on picket. The ticklish sea-horse is restive and refuses to stand still under the movements of its horseman, who draws water in a wooden vessel and pours it over the sides and into the well of the craft. He several times repeats the aspersion, taking care to discard the water from the surface of the sea in order to obtain the cleaner water below. Then he scrubs the oars, polishes the brasses and the glass of the little black deck-house, dusts the cushions and carpets and rubs up the iron head of the prow. The whole is not done without a few words of humour or affection addressed, in the pretty Venetian dialect, to the skittish or docile gondola.
When the gondola's toilet is completed, the gondolier proceeds to make his own. He combs his hair, shakes out his jacket and his blue, red or grey cap, washes his face, feet and hands. His wife, daughter or mistress brings him a bowl containing a mess of vegetables, bread and meat. Breakfast over, each gondolier awaits Fortune, singing: he has her before his eyes, one foot in the air, holding out her scarf to the wind and serving as a weather-cock, at[Pg 68] the top of the monument of the Dogana di Mare. Does she give the signal? The favoured gondolier, with oar upraised, starts out at the back of his craft, even as Achilles used to fly in former days, or as one of Franconi's[122] circus-riders gallops to-day on the crupper of a fiery steed. The gondola, shaped like a skate, glides over the water as over ice: "Sia, stati! Sta longo!" that does for the whole day. Then night comes, and the calle will see my gondolier singing and drinking with his zitella the half-sequin which I leave him, as I go off most certainly to replace Henry V. on the throne.
Venice, September 1833.
I was trying to find out, when I woke, why I liked Venice so much, when I suddenly remembered that I was in Brittany: it was the force of kindred that found utterance within me. Was there not, in Cæsar's time, in Armorica, a country of the Veneti[123]: civitas Venetorum, civitas Venetica? Has not Strabo "said that they said" that the Veneti[124] were the descendants of the Veneti of Gaul?
It has been contradictorily held that the fishermen of Morbihan were a colony of the pescatori of Palestrina: Venice, then, would be the mother and not the daughter of Vannes[125]. One can reconcile this by supposing, which for that matter is very probable, that Vannes and Venice were mutually brought to bed of one another. I therefore look upon the Venetians as Bretons; the gondoliers and I are cousins, sprung from the horn of Gaul: cornu Galliæ.[126]
Delighted with this thought, I went to breakfast in a café on the Riva degli Schiavoni. The bread was new, the tea scented, the cream as in Brittany, the butter as in the Prévalais; for butter, thanks to the progress of enlightenment, has improved everywhere: I have eaten excellent butter at[Pg 69] Granada. The bustle of a harbour always delights me: barge-masters were picnicking; vendors of fruit and flowers offered me lemons, grapes and nosegays; fishermen got ready their tartans; naval cadets, stepping into a long-boat, went off to their lessons in naval tactics on board the flag-ship; gondolas were taking passengers to the Trieste steam-boat. Yet it was that same Trieste which was like to have had me cut down on the steps of the Tuileries by Bonaparte, as he threatened when, in 1807, I took it upon myself to write in the Mercure:
"It was reserved for us to find at the back of the Adriatic the tomb of two king's daughters[127] whose funeral oration we had heard delivered in an attic in London. Ah, at least the grave that holds those noble ladies will have once heard its silence broken; the sound of a Frenchman's foot-steps will have made two Frenchwomen start in their coffins! The respects of a poor gentleman, at Versailles, would have been nothing to princesses; the prayer of a Christian, on foreign soil, will perhaps have been agreeable to saints."
Some few years, it seems to me, have passed, since I began to serve the Bourbons: they have enlightened my fidelity, but they will not tire it I am breakfasting on the Riva degli Schiavoni, while waiting for the exile.
Venice, September 1833.
From the little table at which I sit, my eyes wander over all the roads: a breeze from the offing cools the air; the tide is rising; a three-master is coming in. The Lido on one side, the Doge's Palace on the other, the lagoons in the middle: that is the picture. It is from this port that so many glorious fleets set sail; old Dandolo sallied forth in all the pomp of naval chivalry, of which Villehardouin[128], who began our language and our Memoirs, has left us a description:
"And when the ships were laden with arms, and meats, and knights, and sergeants, and the shields were arrayed all round in the form of a frieze, and the banners waved, of which there were so many fair ones, never did fairer fleets sail from any port."
The morning scene in Venice also puts me in mind of the story of Captain Olivet and Zulietta, which was so well told:
"The gondola lay to, and I saw a dazzlingly beautiful young woman step out, coquettishly dressed and very nimble. In three bounds she was in the cabin and seated at my side, before I perceived that a place had been laid for her. She was a brunette of twenty years at the most, as charming as she was lively. She could speak only Italian; her accent alone would have been enough to turn my head. While eating and chatting, she fixed her eyes on me and then, exclaiming, 'Holy Virgin! O my dear Brémond, how long it is since I saw you!1 she threw herself into my arms, sealed her lips to mine and pressed me almost to suffocation. Her large, black, Oriental eyes darted shafts of fire into my heart; and although surprise at first diverted my senses, my amorous feelings very rapidly overcame me.... She told us that I was the image of M. de Brémond, the director of the Tuscan custom-house; that she had been madly in love with this M. de Brémond; that she was still madly in love with him; that she had left him because she was a fool; that she took me in his place; that she wanted to love me, since it suited her; that, for the same reason, I must love her as long as it suited her; and that, when she left me in the lurch, I must bear it patiently as her dear Brémond had done. No sooner said than done....
"In the evening, we escorted her back to her apartments. While we were talking, I noticed two pistols on her dressing-table.
"'Ah, ah!' said I, taking one up, 'here is a patch-box of a new construction; may I ask what it is used for?'
"She said, with an ingenuous pride which made her still more charming:
"'When I am complaisant to those whom I do not love, I make them pay for the weariness they cause me: nothing can be fairer; but, although I endure their caresses, I will not endure their insults, and I shall not miss the first man who shall be wanting in respect to me.'
'When I left her, I made an appointment for the next day. I did not keep her waiting. I found her in vestito di confidenza, in a more than wanton undress, which is known only in southern countries and which I will not amuse myself with describing, although I remember it too well.... I had no idea of the delights that awaited me. I have spoken of Madame de Larnage, in the transports which the recollection of her still sometimes awakens in me; but how old, ugly, and cold she was, compared with my Zulietta! Do not attempt to imagine the charms and graces of this bewitching girl; you would be too far from the truth. The young virgins of the cloister are not so fresh, the beauties of the harem are not so lively, the houris of paradise are not so piquant.[129]"
This adventure ended with an eccentricity on the part of Rousseau and Zulietta's phrase:
"Lascia le donne e studia la matematica."
Lord Byron also gave up his life to paid Venuses: he filled the Mocenigo Palace with those Venetian beauties, who had " taken refuge," according to him, "under the fazzioli." Sometimes, perturbed by a feeling of shame, he fled, and spent the night on the water in his gondola. He had, as his favourite sultana, Margherita Cogni, surnamed, from her husband's condition, the Fornarina[130]:
"Very dark, tall"—it is Lord Byron who speaks—"the Venetian face, very fine black eyes. She was two-and-twenty years old....
"In the autumn, one day, going to the Lido... we were overtaken by a heavy squall. . . . . . . ....On our return, after a tight struggle, I found Margarita on the open steps of the Mocenigo Palace, on the Grand Canal, with her great black eyes flashing through her tears, and the long dark hair, which was streaming, drenched with rain, over her brows and breast. She was perfectly exposed to the storm; and the wind blowing her hair and dress about her thin tall figure, and the lightning flashing round her, and the waves rolling at her feet, made her look like Medea alighted from her chariot, or the sybil of the tempest that was rolling around her, the only living thing within hail at that moment except ourselves. On seeing me safe, she did not wait to greet me.... but calling out to me, 'Ah![Pg 72] can' della Madonna, ne este il tempo per andar' al' Lido!—Ah! dog of the Virgin, is this a time to go to the Lido?' ran into the house," etc.
In these two stories of Rousseau and Byron, one feels the difference in social position, character and education between the two men. Through the charm of the style of the author of the Confessions peeps something vulgar, cynical, in bad form, in bad taste; the obscenity of expression peculiar to that period still further spoils the picture. Zulietta is superior to her lover in elevation of feeling and in habitual elegance: it is almost a fine lady smitten with the puny secretary of a paltry ambassador[131]. The same inferiority appears again when Rousseau arranges to bring up, with his friend Carrio, at their common expense, a little girl of eleven years whose favours, or rather whose tears, they were to share.
Lord Byron bears himself differently: he shines forth with the manners and the fatuousness of the aristocracy; a peer of Great Britain, playing with the woman of the people whom he has seduced, he raises her to himself by his caresses and the magic of his talent Byron arrived in Venice rich and famous: Rousseau landed there poor and unknown; everybody knows the palace that blabbed the errors of the noble heir of the English commodore[132]: no cicerone could point out to you the house in which the plebeian son of the humble clock-maker of Geneva hid his pleasures. Rousseau does not even speak of Venice; he seems to have lived in it without seeing it: Byron has sung it admirably[133].
You have seen in these Memoirs what I have said of the relations of imagination and destiny that seem to have existed between the historian of René and the poet of Childe Harold. Here I point to another of those conjunctures so[Pg 73] nattering to my pride. Does not the dark-haired Fornarina of Lord Byron bear a certain family likeness to the fair-haired Velléda of the Martyrs, her elder?
"'Hidden among the rocks, I waited some time, but nothing appeared. Suddenly, my ear was struck by sounds which the wind carried to me from the middle of the lake. I listened and distinguished the accents of a human voice; at the same time I discovered a skiff poised on the crest of a wave; it came down again, disappeared between two billows, and then showed itself once more on the summit of a heavy swell; it approached the shore. A woman was steering; she sang as she struggled against the storm and seemed to sport amidst the winds: one would have thought that they were in her power, from the manner in which she seemed to defy them. I saw her throw into the lake by turns, as a sacrifice, pieces of linen, sheep's fleeces, cakes of wax and little gold and silver grindstones.
"Soon she touched land, sprang on shore, fastened her bark to the trunk of a willow and darted into the wood, leaning on the poplar oar which she held in her hand. She passed quite close to me without seeing me. Her figure was tall; a dark, short, sleeveless tunic scarce served to veil her nudity. She carried a golden sickle slung from a brass girdle and her head was encircled with an oaken branch. The whiteness of her arms and complexion, her blue eyes, her rosy lips, her long fair hair that waved dishevelled in the air bespoke the daughter of the Gauls and contrasted, by their gentleness, with her proud and fierce gait She sang words full of terror in a melodious voice, and her uncovered breast rose and fell like the foam of the waves[134].'"
I should blush to show myself between Byron and Jean-Jacques, without knowing what place posterity will award me, if these Memoirs were to appear during my life; but, when they see the light, I shall have gone and for all time, like my illustrious predecessors, to a distant shore; my shade will be delivered to the breath of opinion, vain and light like the little that will remain of my ashes.
Rousseau and Byron had one feature in common in Venice: neither showed any feeling for the arts. Rousseau, who had wonderful gifts for music, does not seem to know that,[Pg 74] near Zulietta, there existed pictures, statues, monuments; and yet with what charm do those master-pieces mate with love, whose object they divine and whose flame they increase! As to Lord Byron, he "loathes the infernal din" of Rubens' colours, he "spits upon" all the pictures of saints with which the churches are glutted; he never met a picture or statue coming within a league of his thought. He prefers to those deceitful arts the beauty of a few mountains, a few seas, a few horses, a certain Morean lion and a tiger which he saw supping in Exeter Change. Is there not a little prejudice in all this?
Que d'affectation et de forfanterie[135]!
Venice, September 1833.
But what, then, is this town in which all the lofty intelligences have arranged to meet? Some have visited it themselves; others have sent their Muses there. Something would have been lacking to the immortality of those talents, if they had not hung pictures on that temple of voluptuousness and glory. Without again recalling the great poets of Italy, the geniuses of the whole of Europe placed their creations there: there breathed Shakespeare's Desdemona, very different from Rousseau's Zulietta and Byron's Margherita, that chaste Venetian who declares her love to Othello:
And bade me, if I had a friend that lov'd her,
I should but teach him how to tell my story,
And that would woo her[136].
There appeared Otway's[137] Belvidera, who says to Jaffeir:
Oh smile, as when our loves were in their spring.
. . . . . . . . .
Oh lead me to some desert wide and wild,
Barren as our misfortunes, where my soul
May have its vent, where I may tell aloud
To the high heavens, and every list'ning planet,
With what a boundless stock my bosom's fraught;
[Pg 75]Where I may throw my eager arms about thee,
Give loose to love, with kisses kindling joy,
And let off all the fire that's in my heart[138].
Goethe, in our time, has celebrated Venice, and the gentle Marot[139], who first made his voice heard at the awakening of the French Muses, took refuge in Titian's native place. Montesquieu wrote:
"Although one had seen all the cities of the world, there might still be a surprise in store for him in Venice[140]."
When, in too undraped a picture, the author of the Lettres persanes depicts a Mussulman woman surrendered in Paradise to two "heavenly men," does he not seem to have painted the courtezan of Rousseau's Confessions and her of Byron's Memoirs? Was not I, between my two Floridans, like Anaïs between her two angels[141]? But the "painted girls" and I were not immortal.
Madame de Staël gives Venice over to the inspiration of Corinne: the latter hears the sound of the cannon that announces "the obscure sacrifice of a young girl[142] ...a solemn counsel, which a woman resigned to her fate gives to those who still struggle with destiny." ...Corinne climbs to the top of the tower of St. Mark's, contemplates the city and the waves, turns her eyes towards Greece "enveloped in clouds;" at night she sees "nothing but the reflection of the lanterns which light the gondolas:" they give her the idea of "spectres gliding upon the water, guided by a little star[143]."
Oswald departs; Corinne darts out of the room to recall him: "The rain then fell in torrents, a most violent wind arose;" Corinne descends to the banks of the canal:
There again you have Lord Byron's Margherita.
I find an unspeakable pleasure in meeting the masterpieces of those great masters in the very place for which they were made. I breathe freely in the midst of the immortal band, like a humble traveller admitted to the hospitable hearth of a rich and beautiful family.
[60] This book was written on the road from Paris to Venice, between the 7th and 10th of September 1833, and in Venice, from the 10th to the 15th of September 1833.—T.
[61] Salins suffered from a terrible conflagration in 1825. It was rebuilt, with regular streets, by public subscription.—T.
[62] Pierre Joseph Thoulier, Abbé d'Olivet (1682-1768) was born at Salins, on the Furieuse, a tributary of the Loire. He first joined the Jesuits, where he was known as the Père Thoulier, but soon left the Company, in order to follow a literary career. Meantime Voltaire had been his pupil at the college of Louis-le-Grand. He became a member of the French Academy in 1723; Voltaire in 1746. D'Olivet is the author of an Histoire de l'Académie française, up to 1700, and of several important grammatical works and translations, and he worked much on the Dictionary of the French Academy.—T.
[63] Mirabeau was imprisoned in the Castle of Joux, at his father's instance, in 1775; Toussaint-Louverture (cf. Vol. III., p. 191, n. 3) died there on the 27th of April 1803, after a ten months' confinement—T.
[64] Cf. Vol. II., pp. 246-250.—T.
[65] "When, on the 7th of August 1814, the Bull of Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum, came to sanction the work of restoration of the Company of Jesus, the primitive cantons of Switzerland did not remain insensible to the joys of Catholicism. Ignace Brocard, Jacques Roh, Gaspard Rothenflue and several of their fellow-countrymen enlisted under the banner of the newly-reinstated Order. The Valais gave back to the Jesuits their old college of Brigg." (Crétineau-Joly, Histoire du Sunderbund, Vol. I., p. 428.)—B.
[66] Dies Iræ, Stanza 5:
Liber seri plus proferetur,
In quo totum continetur,
Unde mundus judicetur.—T.
[67] Francis I. lived till 1835.—T.
[68] Charles X. lived till 1836.—T.
[69] Ferdinand III. Grand-duke of Tuscany (1769-1824). Vide supra p. 12, n. 1.—T.
[70] Charles Felix I. King of Sardinia (1765-1831) succeeded to the throne on the abdication of his brother, Victor Emanuel I., in 1821, the year before the Congress of Verona.—T.
[71] Pierre François Hercule Comte de Serre (1777-1822). He died as Ambassador to Naples.—T.
[72] Vincenzo Scamozzi (1552-1616), the architect of many of the finest buildings in North Italy.—T.
[73] Niccola Pisano (circa 1206-1278), one of the greatest Italian architects.—T.
[74] And not Signor Procurante, as the earlier editions of the Memoirs have it.—T.
[75] Voltaire: Candide, ou l'Optimisme, Part I., Chap. XXV.: Candid and Martin pay a Visit to Seignor Pococurante, a Noble Venetian.—T.
[76] Philippe de Comines (circa 1445-1511), the statesman and historian, author of the valuable Cronique et hystoire faicte et composée par messire Philippe de Comines.—T.
[77] Jacopo Sannazaro.—Author's Note.
[78] Gabriello Chiabrera, Canzoni eroiche, III.: Per Vittorio Cappello, Generale de' Veneziani nella Morea, 10-12.—T.
[79] Pierre Luc Charles Cicéri (1782-1868), a famous French scene-painter, who executed numbers of stage-scenes for the Royal Academy of Music, or grand Opera-house, in Paris.—B.
[80] Giorgio Barbarelli (circa 1477-1511), known as Giorgione, the great Venetian colourist and pupil of Giovanni Bellini (vide infra.)—T.
[81] Paolo Cagliari (1528-1588), of Verona, known as Paul Veronese, one of the most celebrated painters of the Venetian School, went to Venice in 1555 and remained there. He executed the decorations of the Library of St. Mark in 1563 and the ceiling of the council-chamber in the Palace of the Doges in 1577.—T.
[82] Jacopo Robusti (1518-1594), called Tintoretto from the trade of his father, a dyer, received his first important order in 1546, for the decoration of Santa Maria dell' Orto. In 1560, he began to paint the Scuola di San Rocco and the Doges' Palace and, in the same year, seems to have taken Titian's place as Court painter to the Doges.—T.
[83] Giovanni Bellini (post1427-1516), the founder of the Venetian School of painting and the greatest of the fifteenth-century artists. Titian and Giorgione were both his pupils.—T.
[84] Paride Bordone (circa 1500-1571), one of Titian's greatest pupils.—T.
[85] Jacopo Palma the Elder( circa 1480-1528) and Jacopo Palma the Younger (circa 1544-1628), uncle and nephew.—T.
[86] Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374) settled in Venice and presented the city with his library (1362).—T.
[87] George Gemistus Pletho (b. 1390), the celebrated Byzantine Platonic philosopher and scholar.—T.
[88] Johannes Cardinal Bessarion (1395-1472), Archbishop of Nicæa (1437), a cardinal (1439), Archbishop of Siponto and Bishop of Sabina and Tusculum, and Patriarch of Constantinople (1463). Bessarion was a disciple of Plethon and author of, among many other works of Platonic philosophy, the famous Adversus Calumniatorem Platonis (1469).—T.
[89] Or Acre: 1104.—T.
[90] 1176.—T.
[91] 1124.—T.
[92] 10 October 1571.—T.
[93] The so-called Grand Sanhedrim of 1806 was a council summoned by Napoleon for the 20th of October of that year, consisting of representatives of the chief synagogues of France, Italy and Europe. The object of its deliberations was to point out to the Government means of enabling the Jews to participate in the civil and political rights of England, by modifying such of their habits and doctrines as kept them isolated from their fellow-citizens. The sittings of the Grand Sanhedrim, which consisted of 71 members, opened on the 9th of February and ended on the 9th of March 1807. The most notable clause, from Napoleon's point of view, in the solemn public declaration issued on the latter date, is that dispensing Jews who are performing military service from all religious observances that are irreconcilable with such military service.—T.
[94] Leopoldo Conte Cicognara (1767-1834), a distinguished diplomatist and antiquarian. He became President of the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice in 1812. His principal work, the Storia della Scultura, was published in 1813-1818.—T.
[95] It is clear to my eyes that the ogive, whose so-called mysterious origin men go so far to seek, was born casually of the intersection of two semicircular arches; therefore it is found everywhere. Later architects have done no more than release it from the designs in which it originally figured.—Author's Note.
[96] See the previous note.—Author's Note.
[97] Bartolommeo Gamba (1780-1841), a learned Italian bibliographer and biographer. His chief work is the Serie dell' Edizioni dei Testi di Lingua Italiana (1812-1828).—T.
[98] Fra Mauro (fl. 15th Century), a monk of the Camaldule Order, who drew his famous map of the world between 1457 and 1459.—T.
[99] Here for instance, is Charles Dickens' lurid description of the Pozzi, or Prisons, which he pretends to see in a dream:
"I descended from the cheerful day into two ranges, one below another, of dismal, awful, horrible stone cells. They were quite dark. Each had a loophole in its massive wall, where, in the old time, every day a torch was placed—I dreamed—to light the prisoners within, for half an hour. The captives, by the glimmering of these brief rays, had scratched and cut inscriptions in the blackened vaults. I saw them. For their labour with the rusty nail's point had outlived their agony and them, through many generations.
"One cell I saw in which no man remained for more than four-and-twenty hours; being marked for dead before he entered it. Hard by another, and a dismal one, whereto, at midnight, the Confessor came—a monk brown-robed and hooded—ghastly in the day and free bright air, but in the midnight of that murky prison, Hope's extinguisher and Murder's herald. I had my foot upon the spot where, at the same dread hour, the shriven prisoner was strangled; and struck my hand upon the guilty door—low-browed and stealthy—through which the lumpish sack was carried out into a boat, and rowed away, and drowned where it was death to cast a net." (Pictures from Italy: An Italian Dream.)—T.
[100]
. . . . . . "Into that hideous den,
With one blow of the axe, admitted light again."—T.
[101] Silvio Pellico (1788-1854) was imprisoned in Milan and Venice from 1820 to 1822 and at the Spielberg, near Brünn, from 1822 to 1830. His Mie Prigioni had only lately been published (1833) and Chateaubriand was much struck with them. During his previous journey to Italy, in a letter dated Basle, 17 May 1833, he wrote to Madame Récamier:
"Here I am at Basle, safe and sound. You have seen that fine river pass which is going, for a moment, to bring news of me to you in France. Travelling always gives me back my strength, sentiment and thought; I am very busy writing a new prologue to a Book. I nave read the whole of Pellico, cursorily. I am delighted with it; I should like to write an account of that work, the saintliness of which will prevent its success with our revolutionaries, who are free after Fouché's fashion. Are you not enchanted with Zanze sotto i Piombi? And the little deaf-and-dumb person? And Schiller, the old gaoler, and the religious conversations through the window, and our poor Maroncelli? And that poor young wife of the sopr'intendente, who dies so sweetly? And the return to beautiful Italy?"—B.
[102] Bruno, near which the Spielberg stands, is the capital of Moravia.—T.
[103] Maria Christina Josephs Johanna Antonia of Austria, Duchess of Saxe-Teschen (1742-1798), married to Albert Duke of Saxe-Teschen in 1766. The Archduchess Maria Christina's monument, by Canova, is in the church of the Augustines in Vienna.—T.
[104] Titian's Assumption, one of the most renowned of existing pictures, was discovered by Count Cicognara in the church of the Frari, for which it had been painted as an altar-piece. It was restored and removed to the Accademia di Belle Arti, where it still hangs.—T.
[105] Thomas Bruce, seventh Earl of Elgin and eleventh Earl of Kincardine (1766-1841) was British Envoy to Constantinople from 1799 to 1802. Between 1801 and 1803, he removed to England from Athens the so-called Elgin marbles, comprising the bulk of the surviving plastic decoration of the Parthenon, executed under the direction of Phidias about 440 B.C. These stolen goods were purchased by the nation in 1816 and are now in the British Museum.—T.
[106] Tommaso Mocenigo, Doge from 1414 to 1423; Giovanni Mocenigo, Doge from 1475 to 1485; and Luigi Mocenigo, Doge from 1570 to 1577, are all buried in Santi Giovanni e Paolo.—T.
[107] Michele Morosini, Doge of Venice for a few months in 1382.—T.
[108] Andrea Vendramin, Doge of Venice (d. 1478), became Doge in 1476.—T.
[109] Seventeen doges in all are buried in Santi Giovanni e Paolo or "Zanipolo," as the Venetians pronounce it.—B.
[110] Marco Antonio Bragadino (d. 1571), flayed alive by the Turks after his valiant defense of Famagusta, in Cyprus.—T.
[111] Angelo Emo (1731-1792), the last of the Venetian admirals. He bombarded Tunis and forced it to sign a truce with the Republic—T.
[112] Cary's Dante: Hell, Canto XXI. 7-15.—T.
[113] Henry IV. defeated the Leaguers at Ivry-la-Bataille on the 14th of March 1590.—T.
[114] Sir William Edward Parry (1790-1855) started on his second polar expedition in 1821 and his third in 1824. These two expeditions, neither of which was specially successful, are referred to by Chateaubriand on page 136 of Vol. I. of the Memoirs. A later expedition, by way of Spitsbergen, was likewise unsuccessful. From 1823 to 1829, Parry was Acting Hydrographer to the Navy. In 1852, he was made a rear-admiral and, in 1853, Governor of Greenwich Hospital.—T.
[115] St. Christopher (fl. 3rd Century) is said to have lived in Syria and to have been of prodigious height and strength. As a penance for having been a servant of the devil, he devoted himself to the task of carrying pilgrims across a river where there was no bridge. Christ came to the river one day in the form of a child and asked to be carried over, but His weight grew heavier and heavier till His bearer was nearly broken down in the midst of the stream. When they reached the shore:
"Marvel not," said the Child, "for with Me thou hast borne the sins of the world."
St. Christopher is usually represented as bearing the Infant Christ and leaning upon a staff. He was martyred under the Emperor Decius circa 250. The Church celebrates the Feast of St. Christopher on the 25th of July.—T.
[116] The Isola di San Michele contains the modern burying-ground of Venice.—T.
[117] Pietro Paolo Sarpi (1552-1623), known as Fra Paola and surnamed Servita, a noted Venetian historian, entered the Order of the Servites in 1565. In 1570, he was made professor of philosophy in the Servite Monastery in Venice. He was distinguished, in the controversy with Pope Paul V. (1606-1607), as the champion of free thought. His chief work is the Istoria del Concilio di Trento, published in London in 1619. Fra Paolo was a member of the Council of Ten and consulting theologian to the Venetian Republic.—T.
[118] Cf. Vol I., p. 76.—T.
[119] Cf. Vol. I., p. 236.—T.
[120] The gazetta was a Venetian coin, worth about three farthings, the sum charged for a reading of the first Venetian newspaper, a written sheet which appeared about the middle of the sixteenth century during the war with Soliman II.—T.
[121] Aldus Manutius (circa 1450-1515), the celebrated printer and founder of the Aldine Press in Venice; his son, Paulus Manutius (1511-1574); and the latter's son, Aldus Manutius the Younger (1547-1597). All three were distinguished Classical scholars as well as noted printers.—T.
[122] Antonio Franconi (1738-1836), a native of Venice, began life as a tumbler and travelling physician. Afterwards he instituted bull-fights in Lyons and, later, at Bordeaux; and, lastly, went into partnership, in 1783, with Astley, the English circus-proprietor, who had opened a theatrical riding-school in Paris, and founded the circus which he called the Cirque Olympique and which obtained a prodigious success.—T.
[123] The Veneti were an ancient Celtic people living in Brittany, near the coast of the Bay of Biscay. They were subdued by Cæsar, after a severe maritime war, in 56 b.c.—T.
[124] A people dwelling near the head of the Adriatic, between the Po and the Adige.—T.
[125] Vannes, or, in Breton, Gwened is the capital of the Department of Morbihan and is the ancient Civitas Venetorum, the capital of the Veneti.—T.
[126] Cornu Galliæ, Cornouailles, Cornwall.—T.
[127] Madame Adélaïde (1732-1800) and Madame Victoire (1733-1799), daughters of Louis XV.—T.
[128] Geoffroi de Villehardouin (circa 1160—circa 1215), the author of a famous chronicle: Histoire de la conquête de Constantinople, ou Chronique des empereurs Baudouin et Henri de Constantinople. Villehardouin's Chronicle is not only trustworthy from an historical point of view, but is even more deserving for its literary excellence, while being one of the oldest monuments of original French prose. The Fourth Crusade, in which Villehardouin took part, left Venice in October 1203.—T.
[129] Rousseau: Confessions, Part I., Book VII.—T.
[130] The baker's wife.—T.
[131] M. de Montaigu.—T.
[132] Hon. John Byron (1723-1786), second son of William fourth Lord Byron and grand-father of the poet, entered the Navy as a boy. In 1764, he was promoted to commodore and commanded two vessels in a voyage of exploration round the world; he returned in 1766, having accomplished little beyond some curious observations on the Indians of Patagonia and the discovery of some small islands in the Pacific Ocean. He was Governor of Newfoundland from 1769 to 1772; became a vice-admiral in 1778; and on the 6th of July 1779 fought an engagement with the French fleet off Grenada, in the West Indies, the result of which was doubtful.—T.
[133] Cf. Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto IV.—T.
[134] Chateaubriand, Les Martyrs, Book IX.: The Story of Eudorus.—T.
[135] Molière, Tartufe, Act III. Sc. ii.:
"What affectation and blind real is this!"—T.
[136] Shakespeare: Othello, the Moor of Venice, Act I. Sc. iii.—T.
[137] Thomas Otway (1652-1685), the principal tragic poet of the English classical school. The most famous of his tragedies, Venice Preserved, from which the following quotation is taken, appeared in 1682.—T.
[138] Otway: Venice Preserved, or The Plot Discovered, Act I. Sc. i.—T.
[139] Clément Marot (1497-1544), the poet, when compelled to fly from France on account of his scandalous life, took refuge in Béarn (1535), then at the Court of Ferrara, where he was secretary to Renée of France, and, finally, in Venice (1536).—T.
[140] Montesquieu: Lettres persanes. Letter XXXI.: Rhédi à Usbek, à Paris.—T.
[141] The incident of Anals will be found in the Lettres persanes. Letter CXLI.: Rica à Usbek à ***—T.
[142] The cannon was fired when a nun took the veil.—T.
[143] Corinne: Book XV., Chaps, VII. and IX.—T.
Arrival of Madame de Bauffremont in Venice—Catajo—The Duke of Modena—Petrarch's Tomb at Arqua—The land of poets—Tasso—Arrival of Madame la Duchesse de Berry—Mademoiselle Lebeschu—Count Lucchesi-Palli—Discussion—Dinner—Bugeaud the gaoler—Madame de Saint-Priest, M. de Saint-Priest—Madame de Podenas—Our band—I refuse to go to Prague—I yield at a word—Padua—Tombs—Zanze's manuscript—Unexpected news—The Governor of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom—Letters from Madame to Charles X. and Henry V.—M. de Montbel—My note to the Governor—I set out for Prague.
Between Venice and Ferrara, 16 to 17 September 1833.
There was an immense interval between those dreamings and the truths to which I returned when calling at the Princesse de Bauffremont's hotel; I had to jump from 1806, with the memories of which year I had been occupied, to 1833, the year in which I found myself in reality: Marco Polo[146] fell from China into Venice, after an absence of exactly twenty-seven years.
Madame de Bauffremont displays the name of Montmorency wonderfully in her face and manner: she might very well, like that Charlotte, the mother of the Grand Condé and the Duchesse de Longueville, have been loved by Henry IV. The princess told me that Madame la Duchesse de Berry had written me a letter from Pisa which I had not received: Her Royal Highness was arriving at Ferrara, where she hoped to see me.
It cost me a pang to leave my retreat; I needed another week to complete my survey: I especially regretted that I was not able to carry through the adventure of Zanze[147]; but my time belonged to the mother of Henry V., and, whenever I am following a certain road, there comes a jolt that flings me into another path.
I departed, leaving my luggage at the Hôtel de l'Europe, counting on returning with Madame. I found my calash at Fusina: they took it out of an old coach-house, like a jewel from the Crown Wardrobe. I left the bank which perhaps takes its name from the three-pronged fork of the King of the Sea: Fuscina.
On arriving at Padua, I said to the postillion:
"The Ferrara Road."
This road is charming, as far as Monselice: extremely graceful hills, orchards of fig-trees, mulberry-trees and willows festooned with vines, gay meadows, ruined castles. I passed the Catajo, all dressed out with soldiers: the Abbé Lenglet[148], a very learned man otherwise, mistook that manor-house for China. The Catajo does not belong to Angelica[149], but to the Duke of Modena[150]. I ran plump up against His Highness, who was deigning to go on foot along the high-road. This Duke is the scion of the Princes invented by Machiavelli[151]: he has the spirit not to recognise Louis-Philippe.
The village of Arqua shows Petrarch's tomb, sung, together with its site, by Lord Byron[152]:
"Che fai, che pensi? che pur dietro guardi
Nel tempo, che tornar non pote omai,
Anima sconsolata?"
All this country, within a diameter of forty leagues, is the native soil of the writers and poets: Livy[153], Virgil[154], Catullus[155], Ariosto[156], Guarini[157], the Strozzis[158], the three Bentivoglios[159], Bembo[160], Bartoli[161], Bojardo[162], Pindemonte[163], Varano[164], Monti[165] and a crowd of other celebrated men owe their birth to this land of the Muses. Tasso himself was of Bergamasque origin[166]. Of the later Italian poets, I have seen only one of the two Pindemontes. I have known neither Cesarotti[167] nor Monti; I should have been happy to meet Pellico and Manzoni, the parting rays of Italian glory.
The Euganean Hills, which I crossed, were gilded by the gold of the setting sun with an agreeable variety of shapes and a great purity of outline: one of those hills resembled the chief pyramid of Sakkarah, when it imprints itself at sunset on the Libyan horizon.
I continued my journey at night through Rovigo; a sheet of mist covered the earth. I did not see the Po, except when crossing at Lagoscuro. The carriage stopped; the postillion summoned the ferry-boat with his bugle. The silence was complete; only, on the other side of the river, the baying of a dog and the distant cascades, with their treble echo, made answer to his horn: the proscenium of Tasso's Elysian empire, which we were about to enter.
A ripple on the water, through the mist and the darkness, announced the coming of the ferry-boat; it glided along the towing-rope fastened to boats at anchor. I reached Ferrara between four and five o'clock, on the morning of the 16th; I alighted at the Three Crowns Hotel: Madame was expected there.
Wednesday 17.
As Her Royal Highness had not arrived, I visited the church of San Paolo: I saw nothing but tombs there; for the rest, not a soul, except those of a few dead men and mine, which is hardly living. At the back of the choir hung a picture by Guercino[168].
The cathedral is deceptive: you see a front and sides encrusted with bas-reliefs representing sacred and profane subjects. Over this exterior run other ornaments usually placed in the interior of Gothic edifices, such as rudentures, Arab corbels, nimbused soffits, galleries with small columns, pointed arches and trefoils, disposed in the thickness of the walls. You enter, and you stand dumbfounded at the sight of a new church with spherical vaults, with massive pillars. Something of that incongruity exists in France, both physically and morally: in our old castles, they are contriving modern closets, with plenty of pigeon—holes, alcoves and clothes-presses. Break into the souls of a good many of those men tabarded with historic names: what do you find there? Backstair tendencies.
I was quite abashed at the sight of that cathedral: it seemed to have been turned, like a gown worn inside out; a burgess' wife of the time of Louis XV. cloaked as a castellan's lady of the twelfth century[169].
Ferrara, formerly so much fretted by its women, its pleasures and its poets, is almost uninhabited: in places where the streets are wide, they are deserted and sheep could browse there. The dilapidated houses do not gather fresh life, as at Venice, from the architecture, the ships, the sea and the native gaiety of the place. Standing at the gate of the so unfortunate Romagna, Ferrara, under the yoke of an Austrian garrison[170], has something of the face of a persecuted victim: it seems to wear everlasting mourning for Tasso; ready to fall, it is bent like an old woman. As the only monument of the day, rises half from the ground a criminal court, with unfinished prisons. Whom will they send to those cells of recent construction? Young Italy. Those new gaols, topped with cranes and bound with scaffoldings, like the palaces in Dido's city, touch hands with the old cell of the singer of the Gerusalemme.
Ferrara, 18 September 1833.
If there be a life that should make one despair of happiness for men of talent, it is Tasso's. The beautiful sky upon which his eyes looked when they opened to the light was a deceptive sky:
"My adversities," he says, "began with my life. Cruel fortune snatched me from my mother's arms. I remember her kisses moist with tears, her prayers which the winds have carried away. I was not again to press my face to her face. With an uncertain step, like Ascanius or young Camillus, I followed my wandering and outlawed father. I grew up in poverty and exile."
Torquato Tasso lost Bernardo Tasso[171] at Ostiglia. Torquato has killed Bernardo as a poet; he has made him live as a father.
Drawn from obscurity by the publication of Rinaldo[172], Tasso was summoned to Ferrara. He made his first appearance there amid the festivals on the occasion of the marriage[Pg 82] of Alphonsus II. with the Archduchess Barbara. He there met Leonora, Alphonsus' sister: love and misfortune ended in giving his genius all its beauty.
"I saw," says the poet, describing, in Aminta[173], the first Court of Ferrara, "I saw charming goddesses and nymphs, without veils, without clouds: I felt the inspiration of a new virtue, of a new divinity, and I sang of war and heroes."
Tasso read the stanzas of the Gerusalemme, as he composed them, to Alphonsus' two sisters, Lucrezia and Leonora. He was sent to the Cardinal Ippolito of Este[174], who was settled at the Court of France: he pawned his clothes and furniture to take that journey, while the cardinal whom he was honouring with his presence made Charles IX. the gorgeous present of one hundred Barbary horses with their Arab riders superbly dressed. Left at first in the stables, Tasso was afterwards presented to the Poet-King, the friend of Ronsard. In a letter which has been preserved for us, he judges the French harshly. He wrote a few verses of his Gerusalemme in an abbey of men in France with which Cardinal Ippolito was endowed; this was Châlis, near Ermenonville, where Jean-Jacques Rousseau was to dream and die: Dante also had passed obscurely through Paris.
Tasso returned to Italy in 1571 and did not witness the Massacre of St. Bartholomew[175]. He went straight to Rome and from there came back to Ferrara. Aminta was played with great success. Although he became the rival of Ariosto, the author of Rinaldo admired the author of Orlando to such a degree that he refused the homage of that poet's nephew:
"This laurel which you offer me," he wrote, "the judgment of wise men, of men of the world and my own judgment have laid on the head of the man to whom you are bound by ties of blood. Prostrate before his image, I give him the most honourable titles that affection and respect are able to dictate to me. I will loudly proclaim him my father, my lord and my master."
This modesty, so little known in our time, did not disarm jealousy. Torquato beheld the feasts given by Venice to Henry III. returning from Poland, when a manuscript of the Gerusalemme was printed by stealth: the minute criticism of the friends whose tastes he consulted alarmed him. Perhaps he showed himself too sensitive; but perhaps he had built the success of his love-affairs on his hopes of fame. He imagined himself set about by pitfalls and treasons; he was obliged to defend his life. His stay at Belriguardo, where Goethe evokes his shade, failed to calm him. Says the great German poet, who makes the great Italian poet speak:
Thus like the nightingale, conceal'd in shade,
From his love-laden breast he fills the air
And neighbouring thickets with melodious plaint:
His blissful sadness and his tuneful grief
Charm every ear, enrapture every heart[176].
. . . . . . . .
And what is more deserving to survive,
And silently to work for centuries,
Than the confession of a noble love
Confided modestly to gentle song[177]?
Says Goethe again, interpreting Leonora's sentiments:
How charming is it in the mind's clear depths
One's self to mirror . . . .
. . . . . . . .
To feel his presence, and with him to near,
With airy tread, the future's hidden realm!
Thus should old age and time their influence lose.
. . . . . . . .
All that is transient in his song survives;
Still art thou young, still happy, when the round
Of changeful time shall long have borne thee on[178].
The singer of Erminia conjures Leonora (still in the lines of the poet of Germania) to banish him to one of her loneliest villas:
Oh, send me thither! There let me be yours!
And I will tend thy trees, construct the shed
[Pg 84]That shields thy citrons from autumnal blasts,
Fencing them round with interwoven reeds!
Flowers of the fairest hues shall strike their roots,
And ev'ry path be trimm'd with nicest care[179].
The story of Tasso's loves was lost: Goethe found it again.
The sorrows of the Muses and the scruples of religion were beginning to impair Tasso's reason. He was subjected to a temporary confinement. He escaped almost naked: wandering in the mountains, he borrowed the rags of a shepherd and, thus disguised, arrived at his sister Cornelia's. The caresses of this sister and the charms of his native country allayed his sufferings for a moment:
"I wanted," he said, " to retire to Sorrento, as to a peaceful harbour: quasi in porto di quiete."
But he could not remain where he was born. A spell drew him to Ferrara: love is the real mother-land! Coldly received by Duke Alphonsus, he withdrew once more; he wandered through the little Courts of Mantua, Urbino, Turin, singing to pay for the hospitality shown him. He said to the Metauro, Raphael's native stream:
"Weak, but glorious child of the Apennines, I, a vagrant traveller, come to seek safety and repose upon thy banks."
Armida had passed to Raphael's cradle; she was to preside over the enchantments of the Farnesina.
Surprised by a storm in the neighbourhood of Vercelli, Tasso celebrated the night which he had passed in a noble-man's house in the beautiful dialogue known as the Padre di famiglia. At Turin, he was refused admission at the gates, so wretched was his condition. Hearing that Alphonsus[180] was about to contract a new marriage, he again took the road for Ferrara. A divine spirit attached itself to the steps of this god hidden under the garb of the shepherds of Admetus; he thought that he saw and heard that spirit; one day, seated by the fire and seeing the sun-light on the window:
"Ecco ramico spirito," he said, "che cortesemente è venuto a favellarmi."
And Torquato conversed with a sun-beam. He re-entered the fatal city even as the bird flings itself into the jaws of the serpent that fascinates it. Disowned and spurned by the courtiers, taunted by the servants, he launched out into complaints, and Alphonsus ordered him to be locked up in a mad-house in the Hospital of Sant' Anna.
Then the poet wrote to one of his friends:
"Bowed down under the weight of my misfortunes, I have renounced all thoughts of glory; I should think myself lucky if I could only quench the thirst with which I am devoured....The idea of an unlimited captivity and my indignation at the ill-treatment to which I am subjected increase my despair. The filthiness of my beard, hair and clothes renders me an object of disgust to myself."
The prisoner implored the whole earth and even his pitiless persecutor; he drew from his lyre accents which ought to have made the walls to fall with which his wretchedness was girt about:
Piango il morir; non piango il morir solo,
Ma il modo . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .
Mi saria di conforto, aver la tomba,
Ch' altra mole innalzar credea co' carmi.
Lord Byron wrote a poem called the Lament of Tasso; but he cannot get away from himself and substitutes himself everywhere for the persons whom he sets before us; even as his genius lacks tenderness, his "lament" is no more than an imprecation.
Tasso addressed the following petition to the Council of the Ancients of Bergamo:
"Torquato Tasso, a Bergamasque not merely by origin, but by affection, having first lost his father's inheritance and his mother's dowry.... and (after the bondage of many years and the fatigues of a very long period) having not yet lost, in the midst of so much misery, the faith which he has in this city, ventures to ask its assistance. Let it conjure the Duke of Ferrara, once my benefactor and protector, to restore me to my country, my family and myself. The unfortunate Tasso therefore beseeches Your Lordships to send Monsignore Licino or some other to treat for my[Pg 86] deliverance. The memory of their kindness will not end until after my life.
"Di VV. SS. affezionatissimo servidore,
"Torquato Tasso.
"Prigione e infermo nel ospedal di Sant' Anna in Ferrera."
Tasso was refused ink, pens, or paper. He had sung the "magnanimous Alphonsus," and the magnanimous Alphonsus thrust into a madman's cell him who had shed imperishable lustre on his ungrateful head. In a most graceful sonnet, the prisoner beseeches a cat to lend him the brightness of its eyes to replace the light of which he has been deprived; a harmless raillery which proves the poet's gentleness and the excess of his distress:
Fatemi luce a scriver queste carmi.
At night, Tasso imagined that he heard strange noises, the tolling of funeral knells. Ghosts tormented him:
"I am worn out," he cried, "I succumb!"
Attacked by a serious illness, he thought that he saw the Virgin save him by a miracle:
Egrio io languiva, e d'alto, sonno avvinto.
. . . . . . . .
Giacea con guancia di pallor dipinta,
Quando di luce incoronata . . .
Maria, pronta scendesti al mio dolore.
Montaigne visited Tasso reduced to this excess of adversity and showed him no compassion. At the same time, Camoens was ending his life in an alms-house in Lisbon: what consoled him, as he lay dying on a pallet? The verses of the prisoner of Ferrara. The captive author of the Gerusalemme, admiring the mendicant author of the Lusiadas, said to Vasco de Gama:
Tant' oltre stende il glorioso volo
Che i tuoi spalmate legni andar men lungo.
Thus did the voice from the Eridanus resound on the banks of the Tagus; thus did two illustrious sufferers of a like genius and a like destiny congratulate each other across the seas, from hospital to hospital, putting mankind to shame.
How many kings, great men and fools, drowned to-day in oblivion, but believing themselves, towards the close of the[Pg 87] sixteenth century, persons worthy of remembrance, were ignorant of the very names of Tasso and Camoens! In 1754, for the first time, was read "the name of Washington, in the account of an obscure combat delivered in the back-woods between a troop of French, English and savages[181]: which clerk at Versailles, which purveyor to the Parc-aux-Cerfs, which man, above all, of the Court or the Academy would have cared, at that time, to change names with that American planter[182]?"
Ferrara, 18 September 1833.
Envy hastened to spread its poison over open wounds. The Accademia della Crusca declared that "the Gerusalemme Liberata was a cold and heavy compilation, obscure and unequal in style, full of ridiculous lines and barbarous words, with no single beauty to redeem its innumerable defects."
A fanatical love for Ariosto dictated that verdict. But the shout of popular admiration drowned the academic blasphemies: it was no longer possible for Duke Alphonsus to prolong the captivity of a man who was guilty only of singing that captivity. The Pope[183] claimed the deliverance from the honour of Italy.
Tasso was released from prison[184], but none the happier for it Leonora was dead. He dragged himself from town to town with his sorrows. At Loretto, ready to die with hunger, he was on the point, says one of his biographers, "of taking up the hand that had built Armida's palace."
In Naples, he experienced some of the sweet sentiment of country:
E donde
Partii fanciullo, or dopo tanti lustri
Torno . . . . . .
Canuto ed egro alle native sponde.
He preferred to sumptuous abodes a cell at the Convent of Montoliveto. During a journey which he took to Rome,[Pg 88] fever having laid hold of him, a hospital was once more his refuge.
Returning from Rome and Florence to Naples, laying the blame of his ills on his immortal poem, he rewrote it and spoilt it. He commenced his cantos, Delle sette Giornato del Monde Creato, a subject treated by Du Bartas[185]. Tasso makes Eve issue from Adam's bosom, while God:
. . . . irrigò di placida quiete
Tutte le membra al sonnachioso ...
The poet weakens the biblical image, and, in the gentle creations of his lyre, woman becomes no more than man's first dream. The sorrow of leaving uncompleted a pious work which he regarded as an expiatory hymn decided Tasso to condemn his profane songs to destruction.
Less respected by society than by the robbers, the poet received from Marco Sciarra[186], the famous leader of condottieri, the offer of an escort to take him to Rome[187]. He was presented[Pg 89] at the Vatican, and the Pope addressed him in these words:
"Torquato, you do honour to the crown that honoured those who wore it before you."
Posterity has confirmed this eulogy. Tasso replied to the praises by quoting this line from Seneca:
Magnifica verba mors prope admota excutit.
Attacked by an evil which he foresaw was to cure all the others, he retired to the Convent of Sant' Onofrio, on the 1st of April 1595. He climbed up to his last refuge during a tempest of wind and rain. The monks received him at the gate where Domenichino's frescoes are fading away to-day. He greeted the fathers:
"I come to die among you."
O hospitable cloisters, deserts of religion and poetry, you have lent your solitude to outlawed Dante and to dying Tasso!
All succour was unavailing. On the seventh morning of the fever, the Pope's[188] doctor declared to the patient that he had very little hope. Tasso kissed him and thanked him for announcing such good news to him. Next he looked up to the sky and, with an abundant outpouring of the heart, gave thanks to God for His mercies.
His weakness increased; he wished to receive the Eucharist in the church of the monastery: he dragged himself there leaning on the monks and returned carried in their arms. When he was stretched once more upon his couch, the prior asked him as to his last wishes.
"I have troubled very little about fortune's gifts during my life; I care still less for them at my death. I have no will to make."
"Where will you have your burying-place?"
"In your church, if you will deign to do my remains so great an honour."
"Will you dictate your epitaph yourself?"
Thereupon, turning towards his confessor:
"Father, write: I return my soul to God, who gave it me, and my body to the earth, whence it came. I bequeath to this monastery the sacred image of my Redeemer."
He took in his hands a crucifix which the Pope had given him, and pressed it to his lips.
Seven more days passed by. The tried Christian having solicited the favour of the Holy Oils, Cardinal Cintio arrived, bringing the blessing of the Sovereign Pontiff. The dying man displayed great joy at this:
"Here," said he, "is the crown which I came to Rome to seek; I hope to triumph to-morrow with its aid."
Virgil sent to beg Augustus to fling the Æneid into the fire; Tasso entreated Cintio to burn the Gerusalemme. Thereafter, he desired to be left alone with his crucifix.
The cardinal had not reached the door when his tears, till then violently restrained, burst forth: the bell was tolled, and the monks, chanting the prayers for the dead, wept and lamented in the cloisters. At this sound, Torquato said to the charitable recluses, whom he seemed to see wander around him like shadows:
"Friends, you think you are leaving me; I am only going before you."
Thenceforth, he held no converse except with his confessors and a few fathers great in doctrine. When he was on the point of breathing his last, they gathered this stanza from his lips, the fruit of his life's experience:
"If death were not, there would be nothing upon earth more miserable than man."
On the 25th of April 1595, about the middle of the day, the poet cried:
"In manus tuas, Domine....[189]"
The remainder of the verse was scarcely audible, as though it had been uttered by a departing traveller.
The author of the Henriade expires at the Hôtel de Villette, on a quay of the Seine[190], and rejects the aid of the Church; the bard of the Gerusalemme dies a Christian at Sant' Onofrio: compare and see what beauty faith lends to death.
All that is related of Tasso's posthumous triumph appears to me to be open to suspicion. His ill-fortune was even more persistent than has been supposed. He did not die at the hour indicated for his triumph: he survived that projected triumph by twenty-five days. He did not lie to his destiny:[Pg 91] he was never crowned, not even after death; his remains were not exposed at the Capitol in senator's robes amid the throng and the tears of the people: he was buried, as he had ordered, in the Church of Sant' Onofrio. The stone with which they covered him, again according to his wish, bore neither date nor name; ten years later, Manso, Marchese Della Villa[191], Tasso's last friend and Milton's host composed the admirable epitaph:
Hic jacet Torquatus Tassus
Manso succeeded only with difficulty in having it carved; for the monks, who religiously observed testamentary wishes, objected to any inscription: and yet, without the Hic jacet or the words, Torquati Tassi ossa, Tasso's ashes would have been lost in the hermitage on the Janiculum, as Poussin's have been at San Lorenzo in Lucina.
Cardinal Cintio formed the plan of erecting a mausoleum to the singer of the Holy Sepulchre; the plan was abortive. Cardinal Bevilacqua drew up a pompous epitaph destined for the slab of another future mausoleum, and the thing went no further. Two centuries later, the brother of Napoleon thought about a monument at Sorrento: Joseph soon bartered Tasso's cradle for the Cid's tomb.
Lastly, in our own days, a grand funeral decoration has been begun in honour of the Italian Homer, once poor and wandering like the Greek Homer: will the work be completed? As for me, I prefer to any marble tumulus the little stone in the chapel of which I spoke as follows in the Itinéraire:
"I looked[192] in a deserted church for the tomb of this last painter[193], and I had some trouble in finding it: the same thing had happened to me in Rome[194] with the tomb of Tasso. After all, the ashes of a religious and unfortunate poet are not too ill-placed in a hermitage. The singer of the Gerusalemme seems to have taken refuge in this unknown burying-place, as though to escape men's persecutions; he fills the world with his fame and himself lies unrecognised under the orange-tree[195] of Sant' Onofrio."
The Italian committee entrusted with the necrolithic[196] labours asked me to collect for them in France and to distribute the indulgences of the Muses to every faithful donor of a few mites towards the poet's monument. July 1830 came: my fortune and credit began to look like the fate of Tasso's ashes. Those ashes seem to possess a virtue that rejects any display of opulence, repels any lustre, shrinks from any honours: little men want big tombs, big men little ones.
The god who laughs at all my dreams, after hurling me from the Janiculum with the old Conscript Fathers, has brought me back to Tasso in another way. Here I am able to form a still better opinion of the poet whose three daughters were born at Ferrara: Armida, Erminia and Clorinda.
Where is the House of Este to-day? Who thinks of the Obizzos[197], the Nicholases[198], the Hercules[199]? Whose name lingers in those palaces? Leonora's. What do we look for at Ferrara? Alphonsus' dwelling-house? No; Tasso's prison. Whither do men go in procession from century to century? To the sepulchre of the persecutor? No; to the cell of the persecuted.
Tasso, in these parts, obtains an even more memorable victory: he makes us forget Ariosto; the stranger leaves the bones of the singer of Orlando at the Museum and hastens in search of the cell of the singer of Rinaldo at Sant' Anna. Seriousness befits the tomb: one abandons the man who[Pg 93] laughed for the man who cried. During life, happiness may have its merit; after death, it loses its value: in the eyes of the future, only unhappy existences are beautiful. To those martyrs of intelligence, pitilessly immolated upon earth, their adversities are reckoned to the increase of their glory; they sleep in the grave with their immortal sufferings, like kings with their crowns. We vulgar unfortunates are of too little account that our troubles should, among posterity, become the ornament of our lives. Stripped though I be of everything as I complete my course, my tomb will not be a temple, but a cool place; Tasso's fate will not be mine; I shall deceive the affectionate and harmonious predictions of friendship:
Le Tasse, errant de ville en ville,
Un jour, accablé de ses maux,
S'assit près du laurier fertile
Oui, sur la tombe de Virgile,
Étend toujours ses verts rameaux, etc.[200]
I lost no time in carrying my homage to that son of the Muses, so nobly consoled by his brothers: as a rich ambassador, I had subscribed towards his mausoleum in Rome; as a poor pilgrim in exile's train, I went to kneel in his prison at Ferrara. I know that fairly well-founded doubts are raised as to the identity of the spots; but, like all true believers, I set history at defiance: that crypt, whatever men may say, is the very place in which the pazzo per amore lived for seven whole years; one had necessarily to pass through those cloisters; one came to that gaol where the daylight stole in through the iron bars of an air-hole, where the low-hanging vault that freezes your head drips saltpetrous water on a damp soil that petrifies your feet.
On the walls, outside the prison and all around the grating, one reads the names of the worshippers of the god: the statue of Memnon, quivering with harmony under the touch of dawn, was covered with the declarations of the several witnesses of the prodigy. I did not daub my ex-voto; I hid[Pg 94] myself in the crowd, whose secret prayers must, by reason of their very humility, be more acceptable to Heaven.
The buildings in which Tasso's prison is enclosed to-day belong to a hospital open to every infirmity; they have been placed under the protection of the Saints: Sancto Torquato sacrum. At some distance from the blest cell is a dilapidated yard; in the middle of that yard, the porter cultivates a garden-plot surrounded by a hedge of mallows: the pale-green palissade was loaded with large and beautiful flowers. I gathered one of those roses, the colour of royal mourning, that seemed to me to be growing at the foot of a Calvary. Genius is a Christ: denied, persecuted, scourged, crowned with thorns, crucified by men and for men, it dies leaving them the light and rises again to be worshipped.
Ferrara, 18 September 1833.
I went out on the morning of the 18th and, on returning to the Three Crowns, found the street blocked with people; the neighbours were gaping at the windows. An escort of one hundred men of the Austrian and Papal troops occupied the inn. The corps of officers of the garrison, the magistrates of the town, the generals, the Pro-legate were awaiting Madame, whose coming had been announced by a courier wearing the French arms. The stair-case and drawing-rooms were decorated with flowers. Never was finer reception arranged for an exile.
When the carriages came in sight, the drums beat a salute, the music of the regiments burst forth, the soldiers presented arms. Madame, in the midst of the throng, was put to it to descend from her calash, when it drew up in front of the hotel; I had hastened up; she recognised me among the crowd. She held out her hand to me across the established authorities and the beggars who flung themselves upon her, and said:
"'My son is your King;' do help me to pass through."
I did not find her very much changed, though she was thinner; she had something of a sprightly, little girl.
I walked in front of her; she gave her arm to M. de Lucchesi; Madame de Podenas[201] followed her. We climbed the stairs and entered the apartments between two rows of grenadiers, amid the clatter of arms, the sound of trumpets, the cheers of the spectators. They took me for the majordomo,[Pg 95] they applied to me to be presented to the mother of Henry V. My name was linked to those names in the minds of the crowd.
You must know that Madame was received with the same tokens of respect from Palermo to Ferrara, notwithstanding the Notes of Louis-Philippe's envoys. M. de Broglie had had the audacity to ask the Pope to send away the outlaw; Cardinal Bernetti replied:
"Rome has always been the asylum of fallen grandeurs. If the family of Bonaparte, in its later days, found a refuge beside the Father of the Faithful, with still greater reason must hospitality be shown to the family of the Most Christian Kings."
I am no great believer in this dispatch, but I was keenly struck by one contrast: in France, the Government lavishes insults upon a woman of whom it is afraid; in Italy, they remember only the name, the courage and the misfortunes of Madame la Duchesse de Berry.
I was obliged to accept my improvised role of First Lord of the Bed-chamber. The Princess was very funny: she wore a gown of greyish cloth, fitting close to her figure; on her head, a sort of little widow's cap or the biggin of a child or naughty school-girl. She ran here, there and everywhere, like a giddy goose; rushed about heedlessly, in the midst of the curious throng, with an air of assurance, just as she had sped through the woods of the Vendée. She looked at no one, recognised no one; I was obliged to catch her disrespectfully by her dress, or to bar her road, saying:
"Madame, there is the Austrian Commandant, that officer. in white; Madame, there is the commandant of the pontifical troops, that officer in blue; Madame, there is the Pro-legate, that tall young priest in black."
She stopped, spoke a few words in Italian or French, not too appropriate, but roundly, frankly, prettily, so that their very unpleasantness was not displeasing. It was a sort of manner resembling nothing that one had ever known before. It made me feel almost ill at ease, and yet I had no anxiety as to the effect produced by the little woman who had escaped from the flames and gaol.
A comical piece of confusion followed. I must say one thing with all modest reserve: the vain noise of my life grows in volume as the real silence of that life increases. I[Pg 96] am unable nowadays to alight at an inn, either in France or abroad, without being at once besieged. For old Italy, I am the defender of religion; for young Italy, the defender of liberty; for the authorities I have the honour of being Sua Eccellenza GIA Ambasciadore di Francia at Verona and in Rome. Ladies, all doubtless of rare beauty, have lent the language of Angelica and Aquilante il Nero to the Floridan Atala and the Moor Aben-Hamet. I therefore see scholars arrive, old priests with wide skull-caps, women, whom I thank for their translations and their favours; next, mendicanti, too well-bred to believe that an ex-ambassador is as poor a beggar as their lordships.
Now, my admirers had hurried to the Hôtel des Trois-Couronnes, together with the crowd attracted by Madame la Duchesse de Berry: they got me up into a corner of a window and began to address me in an harangue the end of which they went off to recite to Marie-Caroline. In their mental confusion, the two troops sometimes mixed up the patron and the patroness: I was greeted as "Your Royal Highness," and Madame told me that she had been complimented on the Génie du Christianisme; we exchanged our mutual fames. The Princess was charmed at having written a work in four volumes, and I was proud to have been taken for the daughter of kings.
Suddenly, the Princess disappeared: she went off on foot, with Count Lucchesi, to see Tasso's cell; she was a judge of prisons. The mother of the banished orphan, of the child-heir of St. Louis, Marie-Caroline leaving the Fortress of Blaye and seeking in the town of Renée of France[202] only a poet's prison-cell is an unique thing in the history of fortune and human glory. The venerables of Prague would have passed through Ferrara a hundred times without taking such an idea into their heads; but Madame de Berry is a Neapolitan and a country-woman of Tasso, who said:
"Ho desiderio di Napoli, come l'anime ben disposte del paradiso."
It was when I was in opposition and disgrace; the Ordinances were secretly simmering at the Palace and still joyously lying at the bottom of men's hearts. One day, the Duchesse[Pg 97] de Berry saw an engraving representing the singer of the Gerusalemme at the bars of his cell:
"I hope," she said, "that we shall soon see Chateaubriand like that."
Words of prosperity, of which we must take no more notice than of a rash word spoken in drunkenness. I was to join Madame in Tasso's very dungeon, after suffering in the prisons of the police on her behalf. What loftiness of sentiment it showed in the noble Princess, how great a mark of esteem she gave me, when she applied to me in the hour of her misfortune, after the desire that she had expressed! If her first wish appraised my talents too highly, her confidence was less mistaken as to my character.
Ferrara, 18 September 1833.
M. de Saint-Priest[203], Madame de Saint-Priest and M. A. Sala[204] arrived. The latter had been an officer in the Royal Guards; he has been substituted in my publishing arrangements for M. Delloye[205], a major in the same guards.
Two hours after Madame's arrival, I saw Mademoiselle Lebeschu[206], my fellow-Breton; she hastened to tell me of the hopes that they were good enough to place in me. Mademoiselle Lebeschu figures in the Carlo-Alberto trial.
On returning from her poetic visit, the Duchesse de Berry sent for me: I found her waiting for me with M. le Comte de Lucchesi and Madame de Podenas.
Count Lucchesi-Palli is tall and dark: Madame calls him a Tancred on the distaff side. His manners towards the Princess his wife are a master-piece of propriety: neither humble nor arrogant; a respectful mixture of the authority of the husband and the submission of the subject.
Madame at once talked business with me; she thanked me for coming in reply to her invitation; she told me that she was going to Prague, not only to join her family, but to obtain her son's deed of majority: she next declared that she was going to take me with her.
This declaration, for which I was not prepared, struck me with consternation: to return to Prague! I put forward the objections that suggested themselves to my mind.
If I went to Prague with Madame and she obtained her[Pg 99] wish, the honours of the victory would not belong wholly to the mother of Henry V., and that would be a bad thing; if Charles X. persisted in refusing to grant the deed of majority, I being present (and I was persuaded that he would so persist), I should lose my credit. It seemed to me better, therefore, that I should be kept as a sort of reserve force, in case Madame should fail in her negociation.
Her Royal Highness opposed these arguments: she maintained that she would be able to put forth no strength in Prague, if I did not accompany her; that I frightened her great relations; that she consented to leave to me the glory of the victory and the honour of linking my name with her son's accession.
M. and Madame de Saint-Priest entered in the middle of this discussion and laid great stress on the Princess's view of the matter. I persisted in my refusal. Dinner was announced.
Madame was very lively. She described to me, in the most amusing fashion, her contests with General Bugeaud[207] at Blaye. Bugeaud used to attack her on politics and lose his temper; Madame lost her temper even more than he did his: they screamed like a pair of eagles and she ended by turning him out of the room. Her Royal Highness kept back certain details which she would perhaps have communicated to me if I had remained with her. She gave Bugeaud no rest; she pulled him to pieces finely:
"You know," she said, "that I asked for you four times? Bugeaud passed on my demands to d'Argout[208]. D'Argout sent back word to Bugeaud that he was a fool, that he[Pg 100] ought to have refused your admission at once and on the face of it: he has such good taste, that M. d'Argout."
Madame laid stress on the rhyme of those two words[209], with her Italian accent.
Meanwhile the rumour of my refusal had spread among our faithful friends and was beginning to alarm them. Mademoiselle Lebeschu came, after dinner, to read me a lecture in my room; M. de Saint-Priest, an intelligent and sensible man, first sent M. Sala to me, and then replaced him and urged me in his turn: "they had sent M. de La Ferronnays on to Hradschin, in order to remove the first difficulties. M. de Montbel had arrived; he had been told to go to Rome to obtain a copy of the marriage-contract, which was drawn up in due and proper form and which was in Cardinal Zurla's keeping[210].
"Supposing," continued M. de Saint-Priest, "that Charles X. should refuse his consent to the deed of majority, would it not be well if Madame were to obtain a declaration from her son? What should be the nature of that declaration?"
"A very short Note," I replied, "in which Henry would protest against Philip's usurpation."
M. de Saint-Priest conveyed my words to Madame. My resistance continued to occupy the minds of the Princess's environment Madame de Saint-Priest, with her nobility of sentiment, appeared to entertain the keenest regret. Madame de Podenas had not lost the habit of that serene smile which shows her beautiful teeth: her calm was the more perceptible in the midst of our agitation.
We were not unlike a strolling company of French actors playing at Ferrara, by permission of the worshipful magistrates of the town, in the Fugitive Princess or the Persecuted Mother. The scene represented, on the right, Tasso's prison; on the left, Ariosto's house; at the back, the castle in which the feasts of Leonora and Alphonsus took place. This royalty without a kingdom; those anxieties of a Court contained in two wandering carriages and having the Hôtel des Trois-Couronnes for its palace at night; those State councils held in a room at an inn: all that completed the variety of the scenes of my fortune. I put off my knight's helm in the wings and resumed my straw hat; I travelled with the de jure monarchy rolled up in my[Pg 101] portmanteau, while the de facto monarchy flaunted its baubles at the Tuileries. Voltaire calls upon all the royalties to spend their carnival in Venice with Achmet III.[211]: Ivan[212] Emperor of All the Russias, Charles Edward King of England, the two Kings of the Polacks[213], Theodore[214] King of Corsica and four Serene Highnesses.
"'Sire, Your Majesty's post-chaise is at Padua, and the bark is ready.'
"'Sire, Your Majesty may set off when you please.'
"'Troth, Sire, they will trust Your Majesty no longer, nor myself neither; and we may both of us chance to be sent to gaol this very night.'"
For myself, I will say with Candid[215]:
"Gentlemen, how came you all to be kings? I must confess that neither my friend Martin here nor myself have any such titles."
It was eleven o'clock in the evening; I was hoping that I had won my case and obtained my exeat from Madame. I was very far out in my reckoning! Madame does not so soon relinquish a wish; she had not questioned me about France, because, preoccupied as she was with my resistance to her plan, she was making that her business of the moment. M. de Saint-Priest entered my room and brought me the rough draft of a letter which Her Royal Highness proposed to write to Charles X.:
"What!" I exclaimed, "Madame persists in her resolve?[Pg 102] She wants me to take that letter? But it would be impossible for me, even materially, to cross Germany: my passport is only for Switzerland and Italy!"
"You will accompany us as far as the Austrian frontier," replied M. de Saint-Priest; "Madame will take you in her carriage; after crossing the frontier, you will return to your calash and you will arrive thirty-six hours before us."
I hastened to the Princess; I renewed my insistence; the mother of Henry V. said to me:
"Do not desert me."
This word put an end to the struggle; I yielded; Madame appeared over-joyed[216]. Poor woman, she had wept so much! How could I have held out against courage, adversity, fallen grandeur reduced to hide themselves beneath my "protection!" Another Princess, Madame la Dauphine, also had thanked me for my useless services: Carlsbad and Ferrara were two places of banishment, under different suns, where I had gathered the noblest honours of my life.
Madame set out pretty early in the morning, on the 19th, for Padua, where she arranged to meet me; she was to stop at the Catajo, at the Duke of Modena's. I had a hundred things to see at Ferrara: palaces, pictures, manuscripts; I had to be content with Tasso's prison. I started a few hours after Her Royal Highness. I arrived at Padua at night. I sent Hyacinthe to Venice to fetch my luggage, as scanty as a German student's, and I went to bed sadly at the Golden Star, which has never been mine.
Padua, 20 September 1833.
On Friday 20 September, I spent a part of the morning in writing to tell my friends of my change of destination. The persons of Madame's suite arrived in succession.
Having nothing left to do, I went out with a cicerone. We visited the two churches of Santa Giustina and San Antonio di Padova. The first, the work of Jerome of Brescia, is most majestic: from below, in the nave, you do not see a single one of the windows, which are pierced very high above,[Pg 103] so that the church is lighted without your knowing whence the light comes. This church contains many good pictures by Paul Veronese, Liberi[217], Palma[218] and others.
San Antonio di Padova, known as Il Santo, presents a Grecianized Gothic monument, a style peculiar to the old churches of Venetia. The Cappella del Santo is by Giacomo Sansovino[219] and Francesco[220] his son: one perceives it at once; the ornaments and the form are in the same manner as the loggetta in the steeple of St. Mark.
A signora, in a green gown and a straw hat covered with a veil, was praying before the Cappella del Santo; a servant in livery was also praying, behind her: I presumed that she was offering up her prayers for the relief of some moral or physical ailment; I was not mistaken. I saw her again in the street: she was a woman of about forty, pale and thin, walking stiffly and with a look of suffering; I had guessed her love or her paralysis. She had left the church with hope: during the space of time while she was sending up her fervent orisons to Heaven, did she not forget her pain, was she not really cured?
Il Santo abounds in mausoleums, among which Bembo's is famous. In the cloisters stands the tomb of young d'Orbesan, who died in 1595:
Gallus eram, putavi, morior, opes una parentum!
D'Orbesan's French epitaph ends with a line which a great poet would like to have written:
Car il n'est si beau jour qui n'amène sa nuit[221].
Charles Gui Patin[222] is buried in the cathedral: his wag of[Pg 104] a father[223] was no longer there to save him, he who had "treated a gentleman of seven years old, who was bled thirteen times and cured in a fortnight, as though by a miracle."
The ancients excelled in funeral inscriptions:
"Here lies Epictetus[224]," said his monumental pillar, "who was a slave, disfigured, poor as Irus, yet a favourite of the gods."
Camoens, among the moderns, composed the most magnificent of epitaphs, that of John III. of Portugal[225]:
"Who lies in this great sepulchre? What is he whom the illustrious arms on this massive scutcheon indicate? Nothing! For that is what all things come to.... May the earth lie as light on him now as he, formerly, lay heavy on the Moor."
My Paduan cicerone was a chatterbox, very different from my Antonio of Venice: he spoke to me at every turn of "that great tyrant Angelo[226];" in the streets, he told me the name of every shop and every café; at Il Santo, he would absolutely show me the well-preserved tongue of the preacher of the Adriatic[227]. Might not the tradition of those sermons[Pg 105] come from the songs which, in the middle-ages, the fishermen, following the example of the Ancient Greeks, used to sing to the fishes to charm them? A few of these pelagic ballads still remain to us, in Anglo-Saxon.
Of Livy, no news; were he alive, I would gladly, like the inhabitant of Gades, make the journey to Rome expressly to see him; I would gladly, like Panormita[228], have sold my field to buy a few fragments of the History of Rome, or, like Henry IV., promised a province for a "Decade[229]." A mercer of Saumur did not go so far: having purchased a manuscript of Livy's, by way of old papers, from the apothecary of the convent of the Abbey of Fontevrault, he used it quite simply to make drums for battledores.
When I returned to the Stella d'Oro, Hyacinthe was back from Venice. I had charged him to call on Zanze to make my excuses for having gone away without seeing her. He found the mother and daughter in a great state of anger; she had just been reading Mie Prigioni. The mother said that Silvio was a "villain:" he had allowed himself to write that Brollo had pulled him, Pellico, by his leg when he, Pellico, had climbed up on a table. The daughter exclaimed:
"Pellico is a slanderer, and an ungrateful one to boot. After the services which I have done him, he now tries to dishonour me."
She threatened to have the work seized and to sue the author in the law-courts; she had begun to write a refutation of the book: Zanze is not only an artist, but a woman of letters.
Hyacinthe asked her to give me the unfinished refutation; she hesitated and then handed him the manuscript: she was pale and tired from her labours. The old gaoler's wife still claimed to sell her daughter's embroidery and mosaic work. If ever I go back to Venice, I will discharge my debt better to Madame Brollo than I did to Abou Gosch, the chief of the Arabs in the mountains of Jerusalem: I had promised him a bale of rice from Damietta and I never sent it.
Here is Zanze's commentary:
"La Veneziana maravigliandosi che contro di essa vi sieno persona che abbia avutto ardire di scrivere pezze di un romanzo formatto ed empitto di impie falsità, si lagna fortemente contro l'auttore mentre potteva servirsi di altra persona onde dar sfogo al suo talento, ma non prendersi spasso di una giovine onesta di educazione e religione, e questa stimatta ed amatta e conosciutta a fondo da tutti.
"Comme Silvio può dire che nella età ma di 13 anni (che talli erano, alorguando lui dice di avermi conosciuta), comme può dire che io fossi giornarieramente statta a visitarlo nella sua abitazione? se io giuro di essere statta se non pochissime volte, e sempre accompagnata o dal padre, o madre, o fratello? Comme può egli dire che io le abba confidatto un amore, che io era sempre alle mie scuolle, e che appena cominciavo a conoscere, anzi non ancor poteva ne conosceva mondo, ma solo dedicatta alli doveri di religione, a quelli di doverosa figlia, e sempre occupatta a miei lavori, che questi erano il mio sollo piacere? Io giuro che non ho mai parlatto con lui, ne di amore, ne di altra qualsiasi cosa. Sollo se qualche volte io lo vedeva, lo quardava con ochio di pietà, poichè il mio cuore era per ogni mio simille, pieno di compazione; anzi io odiava il luogo che per sola combinazione mio padre si ritrovava: perchè altro impiego lo aveva sempre occupatto; ma dopo essere stato un bravo soldato, avendo bene servito la repubblica e poi il suo sovrano, fù statto ammesso contro sua volontà, non che di quella di sua famiglia, in quell' impiego. Falsissimo è che io abbia mai preso una mano del sopradetto Silvio, ne comme padre, ne comme frattello; prima, perchè abenchè giovinetta e priva di esperienza, avevo abastanza avutta educazione onde conoscere il mio dovere. Comme può egli dire di esser statto de me abbraciatto, che io no avrei fatto questo con un fratello nemeno; talli erano li scrupoli che aveva il mio cuore, stante l'educazione avutta nelli conventi, ove il mio padre mi aveva sempre mantenuta.
"Bensi vero sarà che lui a fondo mi conoscha più di quello che io possa conoscer lui, mentre mi sentiva giornarieramente in compagnia di miei fratelli, in una stanza a lui vicina; che questa era il luogo ove dormiva e studiava li miei sopradetti fratelli, e comme mi era lecitto di stare con loro? comme può egli dire che io ciarlassi con lui degli affari di mia famiglia, che sfogava il mio cuore contro il riguore di mia madre e benevolenza del padre, che io non aveva motivo alcuno di lagnarmi di essa, ma fù da me sempre ammatta?
"E comme può egli dire di avermi sgridatta avendogli portato un cativo caffè? Che io non so se alcuna persona[Pg 107] posia dire di aver avutto ardire di sgridarmi: anzi di avermi per solla sua bontà tutti stimata.
Zanze's manuscript."Mi formo mille maraviglie che un uomo di spirito e di tallenti abbia ardire di vantarsi di simile cose ingiuste contro una giovine onesta, onde farle perdere quella stima que tutti proffessa per essa, non che l'amore di un rispetoso consorte, la sua pace e tranquilità in mezzo il bracio di sua famiglia e figlia.
"Io mi trovo oltremodo sdegnatta contro questo auttore, per avermi esposta in questo modo in un publico libro, di più di tanta prendersi spaso del nominare ogni momento il mio nome.
"Ha pure avutto riguardo nel mettere il nome di Tremerello in cambio di quello di Mandricardo; che tale era il nome del servo che cosi bene le portava ambaciatte. E questo io potrei farle certo, perchè sapeva quanto infedelle lui era ad interessato: che pur per mangiare e bevere avrebe sacrificatto qualunque persona; lui era un perfido contro tutti coloro che per sua disgrazia capitavano poverie e non poteva mangiarlo quanto voleva; trattava questi infelici pegio di bestie. Ma quando io vedeva, lo sgridava e lo diceva a mio padre, non potendo il mio cuore vedere simili tratti verso il suo simile. Lui ero buono sollamente con chi le donava una buona mancia a bene le dava a mangiare: il ciclo le perdoni! Ma avrà da render conto delle suo cattive opere verso suoi simili, e per l'odio cho a me professava e per le coressioni che io le faceva. Per tale cativo sogetto Silvio a avutto riguardo, e per me che non meritava di essere esposta, non ha avutto il minimo riguarde.
"Ma io ben saprò ricorere, ove mi verane fatta una vera giustizia, mentre non intendo ne voglio esser, ne per bene ne malle, nominatta in publico.
"Io sono felice in braccio a un marito che tanto mi amo, e eh' è veramente e virtuosamente coriposto, ben cognoscendo il mio sentimento, non che vedendo il mio operare: e dovrò a cagione di un uomo che si è presso un punto sopra di me, onde dar forza alli suoi mal fondati scritti, essendo questi posti in falso!
"Silvio perdonerà il mio furore; ma doveva lui bene aspetarselo quando al chiaro is era dal suo operatto.
"Questa è la ricompensa di quanto ha fatto la mia famiglia, avendolo trattato con quella umanità, che merita ogni creatura cadutta in talli disgrazie, e non trattata come era li ordini!
"Io intanto faccio qualunque giuramento, che tutto quello[Pg 108] che fù detto a mio riguardo, dà falso. Forse Silvio sarà statto malie informato di me; ma non può egli dire con verità talli cose non essendo vere, ma sollo per avere un più forte motivo onde fondare il suo romanzo.
"Vorei dire di più; ma le occupazioni di mia famiglia non mi permette di perdere di più tempo. Sollo ringraziarò intanto il Signor Silvio col suo operare e di avermi senza colpa veruna posto in seno una continua inquietudine e forse una perpetua infelicità."
Translation
"The Venetian girl is astonished that some one should have had the courage to write against her two scenes of a novel built up and filled with impious falsehoods. She complains bitterly of the author, who might have made use of another person to give scope to his talent and not made a plaything of an honest young woman of education and religion, known to all and universally loved and esteemed.
"How can Silvio say that, at my age of 13 years (which was my age at the time when he says that he knew me), how can he say that I used to go daily to see him in his abode, when I swear that I went there only a very few times and always accompanied by my father, mother, or brother? How can he say that I confided a love to him, when I was always at my classes, and when I had hardly begun to know anything, and could know nothing of love or the world, being devoted only to the duties of religion, to those of a dutiful daughter, and occupied with my studies, which were my only pleasures? I swear that I never spoke to him of love, nor of anything else whatsoever. Only, if sometimes I saw him, I looked upon him with eyes of pity, because my heart was full of compassion for my fellow-creatures, and I hated the place in which my father by ill-chance found himself: he had always occupied another position; but, after being a brave soldier and well serving the Republic and, afterwards, his Sovereign, he was given this employment against his will and that of his family.
"It is most false (falsissimo) to say that I ever took the hand of the aforesaid Silvio, either as a father's or a brother's; first, because, although very young and without experience, I had had enough education to know my duties. How can he say that I kissed him, I who would not have done that[Pg 109] even to a brother: so great were the scruples imprinted in my heart by the education which I had received in the convents, where my father had always kept me?
The manuscript translated."Truly he must have known me more thoroughly than I could know him! I remained daily in the company of my brothers in a room next to his own, which was the place where my aforesaid brothers slept and studied: now, since I was free to remain with them, how can he say that I talked to him of the affairs of my family, that I relieved my heart about my mother's severity and my father's kindness, when I had no motive whatever to complain of the former, but always loved her?
"And how can he say that he shouted at me for bringing him bad coffee? I know of no one who can say that he dared to shout at me, all having shown their esteem for me by their kindness alone.
"It is a thousand wonders to me that a man of spirit and talent should have dared unjustly to boast of such things against an honest girl, which might make her lose the esteem which all profess for her, not to say the love of a respectable husband and her peace and tranquillity in the arms of her family and her daughter.
"I am immeasurably indignant with this author for exposing me in this way in a public book and for taking so great a liberty as to mention my name every moment.
"And yet he took care to put the name of Tremerello in place of that of Mandricardo, which is the name of him who so well carried his messages. And this one I could have made known to him for certain, because I knew how unfaithful he was to him and how much interested: for the sake of eating and drinking, he would have sacrificed any-body; he was perfidious towards all those who, to their misfortune, came to him poor and were unable to make him eat as much as he liked: he treated those unfortunates worse than beasts. But, when I saw him, I reproached him and told my father, my heart not being able to endure such treatment of my fellow-creatures. He was good only to those who gave him una buona mancia[230] and gave him plenty to eat: Heaven forgive him! But he will have to account for his evil actions towards his fellow-creatures and for the hatred which he bore me because of the remonstrances which I made him. For so wicked a man Silvio showed a[Pg 110] regard, and for me, who did not deserve to be exposed, he did not show the slightest regard.
"But I shall surely know where to go to find real justice, for I will not, nor do I intend to be mentioned in public.
"I am happy in the arms of a husband who loves me so well and who is truly and virtuously repaid, well-knowing not only my conduct but my sentiments: and then, because of a man who thinks fit to exploit me in the interest of his ill-founded writings, which are full of falsehoods...!
"Silvio will forgive my anger: but he must surely have expected it when I came clearly to realize his conduct towards me.
"This is the reward for all that my family has done, having treated him with the humanity which every creature deserves that has fallen into such misfortune, and not having treated him according to orders.
"I however take oath that all that has been said in respect of me is false. Perhaps Silvio was misinformed about me; but he cannot say such things, which are untrue, in order to tell the truth, but only to have a stronger motive on which to base his novel.
"I should like to say more; but the occupations of my family do not permit me to waste more time. Only I thank Signor Silvio for his work and for having punished me, who am innocent of guilt, by filling my breast with constant disquiet and perhaps with perpetual unhappiness."
This literal translation is far from rendering the feminine animation, the foreign grace, the spirited simplicity of the text; the dialect which Zanze employs exhales a raciness of the soil which it is impossible to transfuse into another language. The apologia, with its incorrect, nebulous, unfinished phrases, like the vague extremities of a group by Albani[231]; the manuscript, with its defective or Venetian spelling, is like a Greek woman's monument, but of those women of the time when the Bishops of Thessaly[232] sang the loves of Theagenes and Chariclea. I prefer the two pages of the little gaoler's daughter to all the dialogues of the great Isotta[233], although she pleaded for Eve against[Pg 111] Adam as Zanze pleads for herself against Pellico. My fair Provençal country-women of other days still more recall the daughter of Venice by the idiom of those intermediary generations, among which the language of the vanquished is not yet entirely dead and the language of the victor not yet entirely formed.
Which is in the right: Pellico or Zanze? What is the matter in dispute? A simple confidence, a doubtful kiss, which, in effect, was perhaps not meant for him who received it. The angry bride refuses to recognise herself in the delicious growing child pictured by the captive; but she contests the fact with so much charm that she proves it while denying it. The portrait of Zanze in the plaintiffs memorial is so like that we find it again in the defendant's rejoinder: the same sentiment of religion and humanity, the same reserve, the same note of mystery, the same soft and tender unconstraint.
Zanze is full of power when she avers, with passionate candour, that she would not have dared to kiss her own brother, much less M. Pellico. Zanze's filial piety is extremely touching, when it transforms Brollo into an old soldier of the Republic, reduced to the gaoler's state per sola combinazione.
Zanze is quite admirable when she makes this observation: Pellico concealed the name of an unprincipled man and was not afraid to reveal that of an innocent creature who showed compassion for the sufferings of the prisoners.
Zanze is not enticed by the idea of being immortal in an immortal work; that idea does not even occur to her mind: she is struck only by a man's indiscretion; that man, if we are to believe the person offended, sacrifices a woman's reputation to the sports of his talent without giving a care to the harm that he may cause, thinking only of writing a novel to benefit his reputation. A visible dread governs Zanze: will not a prisoner's revelations rouse a husband's jealousy?
The outburst that ends the apologia is pathetic and eloquent:
"I thank Signor Silvio for his work and for having punished me, who am innocent of guilt, by filling my breast[Pg 112] with constant disquiet and perhaps with perpetual unhappiness: una continua inquietudine e forse una perpetua infelicità."
On these last lines, written with a tired hand, the trace of a few tears is visible. I, no party to the trial, wish to lose nothing. I therefore hold that the Zanze of Mie Prigioni is the Zanze according to the Muses and that the Zanze of the apologia is the Zanze according to history. I wipe out the little defect of figure which I thought that I had seen in the daughter of the old soldier of the Republic; I was mistaken: the Angelica of Silvio's prison is shaped like the stem of a rush, like the trunk of a palm-tree. I declare to her that no person in my Memoirs pleases me so much as she, not excepting my sylph. Between Pellico and Zanze herself, with the aid of the manuscript of which I am the depositary, it will be a great wonder if the Veneziana does not go down to posterity! Yes, Zanze, you will take your place among the shades of women that spring up around the poet, when he dreams to the sound of his lyre. Those delicate shades, orphans of an expired harmony and a vanished dream, remain alive between earth and Heaven and inhabit at one time their two-fold country:
"Fair Paradise would not have its complete charms, if thou wert not there," said a troubadour to his mistress absent through death.
Padua, 20 September 1833.
History has again come to strangle romance. I had hardly finished reading Zanze's defense at the Stella d'Oro, when M. de Saint-Priest entered my room, saying:
"Here's something new."
A letter from Her Royal Highness informed us that the Governor of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom had presented himself at the Catajo and announced to the Princess his inability to allow her to continue her journey. Madame desired my immediate departure.
At that moment, an aide-de-camp of the Governor's knocked at my door and asked me if it was convenient for me to receive his general. I replied by at once repairing to the apartments of His Excellency, who had alighted, like myself, at the Stella d'Oro.
The Governor was an excellent man:
"Imagine, monsieur le vicomte," he said, "that my orders against Madame la Duchesse de Berry were dated 28 August.[Pg 113] Her Royal Highness had sent word to me that she had passports of a later date and a letter from my Emperor[234]. And see, on the 17th of this month of September, I receive an express in the middle of the night: a dispatch, dated the 15th, from Vienna, charges me to carry out my first orders of the 28th of August and not to allow Madame la Duchesse de Berry to advance beyond Udine or Trieste. See, my dear and illustrious viscount, what a misfortune for me! To arrest a Princess whom I admire and respect, if she refuses to comply with my Sovereign's wishes! For the Princess did not give me a good reception: she told me that she would do what she pleased. My dear viscount, if you could only prevail on Her Royal Highness to remain in Venice, or at Trieste, pending new instructions from my Court! I will endorse your passport for Prague; you can go there at once, without meeting with the slightest obstacle, and arrange all this; for certainly my Court has done nothing but yield to demands. I beg of you to do me this service."
I was touched by the noble officer's candour. On comparing the date of the 15th of September with that of my departure from Paris, on the 3rd of the same month, I was struck with an idea: my interview with Madame and the coincidence of Henry V.'s majority might have alarmed Philip's Government. A dispatch from M. le Duc de Broglie, handed in a note from M. le Comte de Sainte-Aulaire[235], had perhaps decided the Vienna chancery to renew the prohibition of the 28th of August. I may be making a false conjecture and the fact which I suspect may not have taken place; but two "men of quality," both peers of France of Louis XVIII.'s creation, both violators of their oaths, were, after all, quite worthy of being the instruments of so generous a policy against a woman, the mother of their lawful King. Need we be astonished if France to-day is more and more confirmed in the high opinion that she has of the people of the Court of former times?
I was careful not to betray the depth of my thoughts. This persecution had altered my frame of mind on the subject of the journey to Prague; I was as desirous now of taking it alone in the interests of my Sovereign as I had been opposed to doing so with her when the roads were open to[Pg 114] her. I dissimulated my real feelings and, wishing to keep the Governor to his good intentions of giving me a passport, I increased his loyal anxiety; I replied:
"Monsieur le gouverneur, you are suggesting a difficult thing to me. You know Madame la Duchesse de Berry; she is not a woman to be led as one pleases: if she has made up her mind, nothing will make her change it. Who knows? Perhaps it suits her to be arrested by the Emperor of Austria, her uncle[236], even as she was put in gaol by Louis-Philippe, her uncle! The legitimate kings and the illegitimate kings will be acting alike; Louis-Philippe will have dethroned the son of Henry IV., Francis II. will prevent the meeting of mother and son; M. le Prince de Metternich will relieve M. le Général Bugeaud at his post: that will be perfect!"
The Governor was beside himself:
"Ah, viscount, how right you are! That propaganda, why, it's everywhere! That youth no longer pays any attention to us! Not even so much in the Venetian States as in Lombardy and Piedmont!"
"And the Papal States!" I exclaimed. "And Naples! And Sicily! And the banks of the Rhine! And the whole world!"
"Ah, ah, ah!" cried the Governor. "We can't remain like this, always sword in hand, with an army under arms, without fighting. France and England an example to our peoples! A Young Italy now, after the Carbonari! Young Italy! Who ever heard of such a thing?"
"Monsieur," I said, "I will make every effort to persuade Madame to give you a few days; you must be so good as to grant me a passport: that concession alone can prevent Her Royal Highness from following her first resolve."
"I will take it upon myself," said the reassured Governor, "to allow Madame to pass through Venice on her way to Trieste; if she loiters a little along the roads, she will reach the latter town at just the same time as the orders which you are going to fetch, and we shall be saved. The Deputy of Padua will give you your visa for Prague, in exchange for which you will leave a letter declaring Her Royal Highness' resolve not to go beyond Trieste. What a time! What a time! I congratulate myself upon being an old man, my[Pg 115] dear and illustrious viscount, so that I cannot see what is going to happen."
While insisting on the passport, I inwardly reproached myself for perhaps somewhat abusing the Governor's perfect straightforwardness; for he might be held more guilty for allowing me to go to Bohemia than he would have been had he yielded to the Duchesse de Berry. My sole dread was lest some sly-boots of the Italian Police should put obstacles in the way of the visa. When the Deputy of Padua came to me, I found that he had a secretarial mien, a clerkly bearing, a prefect's air, like a man brought up in the French civil service. This bureaucratic capacity made me tremble. As soon as he had assured me that he had been a commissary in the Army of the Allies in the Department of the Bouches-du-Rhône, my hope revived: I attacked my enemy by taking straight aim at his self-respect I declared that the discipline of the troops stationed in Provence had been remarked upon. I knew nothing about it, but the Deputy, replying with an overflow of admiration, hastened to finish my business: I had no sooner obtained my visa than I ceased to care.
Padua, 20 September 1833.
The Duchesse de Berry returned from the Catajo at nine o'clock in the evening: she appeared very much excited; as for me, the more peaceful I had been before, the more eager I now was for the fray: we were being attacked, we must needs defend ourselves. I proposed to H.R.H., half in jest, to take her in disguise to Prague and, between the "two of us," carry off Henry V. It was a question only of knowing where we should deposit our plunder. Italy would not do, because of the weakness of her Princes; the great absolute monarchies must be discarded for a thousand reasons. There remained Holland and England: I preferred the former because she had not only a constitutional government, but a clever King.
We postponed these extreme measures; we decided on the most reasonable, which laid the burden of the affair on my shoulders. I was to set out alone with a letter from Madame: I was to ask for the declaration of majority; on receiving the reply of the great kinsmen, I was to send a messenger to H.R.H., who would await my dispatch at Trieste. Madame added to her letter for the old King a note for Henry: I was to give it to the young Prince only according to circumstances. The superscription of the note[Pg 116] was by itself a protest against the mental reservations of Prague. Here are the letter and the note:
"Ferrara, 19 September 1833.
"My dear Father,
"At a moment so decisive as the present for Henry's future, allow me to address you with all confidence. I have not relied upon my own judgment in so important a matter; I wished, on the contrary, in this grave circumstance, to consult the men who had shown me the most attachment and devotion. M. de Chateaubriand was naturally at the head of these.
"He has confirmed what I had already heard, namely, that all the Royalists in France look upon a deed setting forth Henry's rights and majority as indispensable for the 29th of September. If loyal M. —— is with you at present, I draw for his evidence, which I know to agree with what I am stating.
"M. de Chateaubriand will lay before the King his ideas on the subject of this deed. He says rightly, so it seems to me, that it should simply declare Henry's majority and not put forward a manifesto: I think that you will approve of this view. In short, my dear Father, I leave it to him to draw your attention and bring about a decision on this essential point. I am much more occupied with it, I assure you, than with what concerns myself, and my Henry's interest, which is that of France, goes before my own. I have proved to him, I think, that I was able to expose myself to dangers for his sake and that I drew back before no sacrifice; he will find me always the same.
"M. de Montbel handed me your letter on his arrival; I read it with lively gratitude: to see you again, to set eyes once more on my children will always be my fondest prayer. M. de Montbel will have written to you that I had done all that you asked; I hope that you have been satisfied with my eagerness to please you and to prove to you my respect and my love. I now have only one longing, to be in Prague for the 29th of September, and, although my health is very much impaired, I hope to arrive. In any case, M. de Chateaubriand will go before me. I beg the King to receive him with kindness and to hear all that he will say to him from me.
"Believe, my dear Father, in all the sentiments, etc.
"P.S. Padua, 20 September. My letter was written, when[Pg 117] I was shown the order not to continue my journey: my surprise equals my sorrow. I cannot believe that an order of this kind can have emanated from the heart of the King; only my enemies can have dictated it. What will France say? And how Philip will triumph! I can but hasten the Vicomte de Chateaubriand's departure and charge him to tell the King that which it would be too painful for me to write to him at this moment."
(Addressed) "To His Majesty Henry V., my dearest son, Prague
"Padua, 20 September 1833.
"I was about to arrive in Prague and embrace you, my dear Henry, when an unexpected obstacle stopped me on the road.
"I am sending M. de Chateaubriand in my place to discuss your business and mine. Have confidence, dear, in what he will tell you from me and be sure to believe in my fond affection.
"I embrace you and your sister and I am
"Your affectionate mother and friend,
"Caroline."
M. de Montbel fell from Rome upon Padua in the midst of our pother. The little Court of Padua was cool with him; it blamed M. de Blacas for the orders from Vienna M. de Montbel, a very moderate man, had no other resource than to seek refuge with me, although he feared me; when I saw that colleague of M. de Polignac's, I explained to myself how he had written the History of the Duc de Reichstadt and admired the Archdukes, all, without his perceiving it, at sixty leagues from Prague, the Duc de Bordeaux's place of exile; if he, M. de Montbel[237], was suited to throw the Monarchy of St. Louis and the monarchies of this base world out of window, it was a little accident of which he had not thought. I behaved graciously to the Comte de Montbel; I talked to him of the Coliseum. He was returning to Vienna to place himself at the disposal[Pg 118] of the Prince de Metternich and to serve as an intermediary for the correspondence of M. de Blacas.
At eleven o'clock, I wrote the Governor the letter agreed upon; I respected Madame's dignity, made no engagements on her behalf and reserved her power of action:
"Padua, 20 September 1833.
"Monsieur le gouverneur,
"H.R.H. Madame la Duchesse de Berry is quite willing, for the moment, to comply with the orders that have been sent you. Her intention is to go to Venice and thence to Trieste; there she will act on the information which I shall have the honour to address to her and will take a final resolve.
"Pray accept my sincerest thanks and the assurance of the high regard with which I am,
"Monsieur le gouverneur,
"Your most humble and most obedient servant,
"Chateaubriand."
The Deputy, when he read this letter, was very much pleased with it. Once Madame had left Venetian Lombardy, he and the Governor ceased to be responsible; the Duchesse de Berry's doings at Trieste concerned only the authorities of Istria or Friuli; each vied with the other to rid himself of misfortune, as, in a certain game, every player hastens to pass a little piece of paper on to his neighbour.
At ten o'clock, I took leave of the Princess. She placed her fate and that of her son in my hands. She made me King of France after her fashion. In a Belgian village, I once received four votes to raise me to the throne occupied by Philip's son-in-law[238]. I said to Madame:
"I submit to Your Royal Highness' wishes, but I fear that I shall deceive your hopes. I shall do no good in Prague."
She pushed me towards the door:
"Go, go, you can do everything."
I stepped into my carriage at eleven o'clock: it was a rainy night. It seemed to me as though I were going back to Venice, for I followed the Mestre Road: I felt more inclined to see Zanze again than Charles X.
[145] This book was written at Ferrara, between 16 and 18 September 1833, and at Padua, on the 20th of September.—T.
[146] Marco Polo (1254-1324) joined his father, Niccolo Polo, and his uncle, Maffeo Polo, at Acre, in 1269. They set out for China in 1271 and, after a protracted stay, left for home, in 1292, and reached Venice in 1295.—T.
[147] Vide Zanze's manuscript, infra.—T.
[148] Abbé Nicolas Lenglet-Dufresnoy (1674-1755), a man of very great learning but no critical taste. He was several times sent to the Bastille, under Louis XV., for the boldness of his writings, and died, at last, of an accident, having fallen into the fire before which he was reading. His chief works are De l'usage des romans, avec une bibliothèque des romans (1734), his Histoire justifiée contre les romans (1735), un Histoire de la philosophie hermétique (1742) and a Traité sur des apparitions (1751). His Histoire de Jeanne d'Arc was published in 1753, two years before his death.—T.
[149] A character in Bojardo's Orlando Innamorato and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, and daughter of Galaphron King of Cathay (Catajo, not Marco Polo's Cathay, as the Abbé Lenglet seems to have thought).—T.
[150] Francis IV. Duke of Modena (1799-1847) was the grandson of the Empress Maria Theresa and nephew of Marie-Antoinette. The Congress of Vienna, in 1815, reinstated him in his Duchy, of which his grandfather, Hercules III., had been dispossessed by the French in 1797. He married Mary Beatrice, daughter of King Victor Emanuel I. of Sardinia and Heiress in Line of the Stuarts, who is known to Legitimists as Mary III. Queen of England (Cf. Vol. IV., p. 251, n. 1). Francis IV. was almost the only European potentate who refused to recognise the sovereignty of Louis-Philippe. On the 14th of November 1846, his daughter, Maria Theresa, married the Comte de Chambord (King Henry V. of France).—T.
[151] Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), author of the Principe and other works of state-craft.—T.
[152] Cf. Byron: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto IV., Stanzas XXX-XXXIV.—T.
[153] Titus Livius (59 b.c.—17 a.c.), the historian, was born at Padua,—T.
[154] Publius Virgilius Maro (70 b.c.—19 b.c.) was born at Urbino.—T.
[155] Caius Valerius Catullus (circa 87 b.c.—circa 54 b.c.) was born at Verona.—T.
[156] Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533) was born at Reggio di Modena.—T.
[157] Giovanni Battista Guarini (1537-1612), the noted diplomatist and poet, author of the Pastor fido, was born at Ferrara.—T.
[158] Tito Vespasiano Strozzi (1422-1501) and his son, Ercole Strozzi (1471-1508), the Latin poets, were both born at Ferrara.—T.
[159] Ercole Bentivoglio (circa 1512-1573), the poet and diplomatist, was born at Bologna; Guido Cardinal Bentivoglio (1579-1644), Nuncio to Flanders (1607) and France (1617) and author of Della Guerra di Flandra (1633-1639), Letters (1631) and Memoirs (1648), was born at Ferrara, as was Cornelio Cardinal Bentivoglio, Archbishop of Carthage (1668-1732), Nuncio to France and the author of some sonnets and a translation of Statius' Thebais.—T.
[160] Pietro Cardinal Bembo (1470-1547), born in Venice, created a cardinal in 1539 and Keeper of the Library of St. Mark. He was the author of poems, letters, a History of Venice in Latin, and the Asolani, a series of dialogues on the nature of love.—T.
[161] Daniello Bartoli (1608-1685), born at Ferrara, Rector of the College of Jesuits in Rome, and author of an important Istoria della Compagnia di Gesù (1653-1675) and various physical treatises.—T.
[162] Matteo Maria Bojardo, Conte di Scandiano (circa 1434-1494), born at Reggio di Modena, author of Orlando Innamorato (1495), of which Ariosto's Orlando Furioso is the continuation.—T.
[163] Ippolyto Pindemonte (1753-1828), the poet, and Giovanni Pindemonte (1751-1812), his brother, the dramatist, were both born at Verona.—T.
[164] Alfonso Marchese di Varano (1705-1788), the poet, was born at Ferrara.—T.
[165] Vincenzo Monti (1754-1828), born at Fusignano, near Ravenna, author of the Bassevilliana(1793), directed against the French Revolution, and a number of other poems, tragedies and translations. Monti was Historiographer to the Court of Italy under Napoleon and a member of the Italian Institute.—T.
[166] Torquato Tasso (1544-1595) was a native of Sorrento, but his father, Bernardo Tasso, was a North Italian, having been born in Venice in 1493.—T.
[167] Melchiore Cesarotti (1730-1808), born at Padua, a poet and miscellaneous writer. His translation of Ossian (1763) is his finest work, but he is also known for his Saggio sulla Filosofia delle Lingue (1785) and a number of prose and metrical translations besides that mentioned.—T.
[168] Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591-1666), known as Guercino, or the Squintling, from an accident which distorted his right eye in babyhood: a well-known painter of the Eclectic-Bologna School.—T.
[169] Ferrara Cathedral was consecrated in 1136; the interior was spoilt in the seventeenth century.—T.
[170] Ferrara was handed back to the Papal States in 1814, but the Austrians retained the right to keep a garrison there.—T.
[171] Bernardo Tasso (1493-1569), Torquato Tasso's father, author of the Amadigi di Francia (Amadis of Gaul, 1560) and a quantity of other poems, died at Ostiglia on the 14th of September 1569.—T.
[172] Rinaldo was published in 1562, while Tasso was a youth of eighteen studying law at Padua.—T.
[173] Produced at Ferrara in 1573.—T.
[174] Ippolito of Este, Cardinal of Ferrara, Archbishop of Milan, Lyons and Narbonne (1509-1572), uncle of Alphonsus II. and a favourite of the Court of France of that time.—T.
[175] 24 August 1572.—T.
[176] Anna Swanwick's Goethe: Torquato Tasso, Act I. Sc. i.—T.
[177] Ibid., Act II. Sc. i.—T.
[178] Ibid., Act III. Sc. iii.—T.
[179] Anna Swanwick's Goethe: Torquato Tasso, Act V. Sc. iv.—T.
[180] Alphonsus II. married three times: first, Lucrezia de' Medici; secondly, Barbara of Austria, daughter of the Emperor Ferdinand I.; thirdly, Margherita di Gonzaga, daughter of William Duke of Mantua.—T.
[181] George Washington, in command of the English and native troops, defeated the French in the Battle of Great Meadows on the 28th of May 1754. He was subsequently besieged at Fort Necessity in Pennsylvania and, on the 4th of July 1754, surrendered to the French, who allowed him and all his troops to march back to Virginia.—T.
[182] My Études Historiques.—Author's Note.
[183] Sixtus V.—T.
[184] In July 1586, after a confinement of more than seven years.—T.
[185] Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas (1544-1590), author of, among other poems, the Semaine, ou La Création en sept journées, which was published in 1579 and passed through thirty editions in a few years. Writing of Du Bartas, Professor Saintsbury, in his Short History of French Literature and French Lyrics, says:
"All that was wanting to make Du Bartas a poet of the first rank was some faculty of self-criticism; of natural verve and imagination as well as of erudition he had no lack, but in critical faculty he seems to have been totally deficient. His beauties, rare in kind and not small in amount, are alloyed with vast quantities of dull absurdity."
Du Bartas' fellow-countrymen entertain a similar view, and Bouillet, in his Dictionnaire universel d'histoire et de géographie, expresses himself in almost the same words when he writes that "ce poète avait de la verve et de l'imagination, mais manquait de goût."—T.
[186] Marco Sciarra (fl. 1592), a celebrated bandit chief, long devastated the Papal States. Neither Sixtus V. nor Clement VIII. was able to subdue him and his band; but he was so hotly pursued by the latter Pope that he left the country and entered the service of the Venetians, who employed him against the Uskoks, the piratical refugees from the north-western provinces of Turkey. The Venetian Government eventually caused Sciarra to be assassinated, upon the repeated demands of Clement VIII. for his extradition.—T.
[187] Samuel Rogers introduces this incident into his description of the "wild life, fearful and full of change," of the "mountain-robber:"
Time was, the trade was nobler, if not honest;
When they that robb'd were men of better faith
Than kings or pontiffs; where such reverence
The poet drew among the woods and wilds,
A voice was heard, that never bade to spare,
Crying aloud, "Hence to the distant hills!
Tasso approaches; he, whose song beguiles
The day of half its hours; whose sorcery
Dazzles the sense, turning our forest glades
To lists that blaze with gorgeous armoury,
Our mountain-caves to regal palaces:
Hence, nor descend till he and his are gone.
Let him fear nothing!"
(Rogers, Italy: Banditti, 5-17).—T.
[188] Ippolito Aldobrandini, Pope Clement VIII. (1536-1605), elected Pope in 1592.—T.
[189] LUKE, XXIII., 46.—T.
[190] Now the Quai Voltaire.—T.
[191] Giovanni Battista Manso, Marchese Della Villa (1561-1645). Milton was ambitious of his acquaintance, as the friend of Tasso, and was introduced to him in Naples in 1638. To him Milton addressed his Latin epistle, Ad Mansum; Tasso had addressed his dialogue on Friendship to him and complimented him in the twentieth canto of the Gerusalemme Conquistata, as the introduction to Ad Mansum shows:
"Joannes Baptista Mansus, Marchio Villensi, vir ingenii laude, turn literarum studio necnon et bellica virtute, apud Italos clarus in primus est; ad quern Torquati Tassi Dialogus extat di Amicitia scriptus; erat enim Tassi amicissimus; ab quo etiam inter Campanile principes celebratur, in ilio poemate cui titulus 'Gerusalemme Conquistata,' lib. 20.
Fra cavalier magnanimi, è cortesi
Risplende il Manso.
"Is auctorem Neapoli commorantem summa benevolentia prosecutus est, multaque ei detulit humanitalis officia: ad hunc itaque hospes ille, antequam ab ea urbe discederet, ut ne ingratum se ostenderet hoc carmen misit."—T.
[192] In Venice, in 1806.—Author's Note.
[193] Titian.—Author's Note.
[194] In 1803.—Author's Note.
[195] I was right in saying the orange-tree: it is an orange-tree that stands in the convent-yard of Sant' Onofrio.—Author's Note (Paris, 1840).
[196] This is one of several cases in which the author coins a word: his expression, nécrolithe, is not known in the French dictionaries.—T.
[197] Obizzo I. first Marquis of Este (fl. 1180); Obizzo II. Marquis of Este and Lord of Ferrara and Verona (d. 1293) added Modena and Reggio to his dominions.—T.
[198] Nicholas III. Marquis of Este (d. 1471) was the father of
[199] Hercules I. first Duke of Ferrara (d. 1505), the father of Alphonsus I.—T.
[200] Fontanes (Cf. Vol III., p. 10):
"Tasso, wandering from town to town,
One day, by his evils overcome,
Sat down by the sumptuous laurel-trees
Which spread out for ever to the breeze
Their green branches over Virgil's tomb," etc.—T.
[201] The Marquise de Podenas, née de Nadaillac, was lady-in-waiting to the Duchesse de Berry.—T.
[202] Renée of France, Duchess of Ferrara (1510-1575), second daughter of Louis XII., married, in 1528, Hercules II. Duke of Ferrara, protected letters, science, art and Lutheranism, sheltered Calvin, and had Clemont Marot as her secretary. She returned to France in 1560, after the Duke's death, and settled at Montargis, ostentatiously proclaiming her Protestantism.—T.
[203] Emmanuel Louis Marie Guignard, Vicomte de Saint-Priest, Duque de Almazan (1789-1881), was taken to St. Petersburg by his family during the Emigration and, in 1805, entered the Russian Army, where he served until the fall of Napoleon. He was made a colonel in 1814 and was taken prisoner; Napoleon's orders to have him shot were intercepted by the Cossacks. Saint-Priest escaped, served the cause of the Kings Government with ardour, endeavoured to raise the populations of the South during the Hundred Days, took ship eventually at Marseilles, was captured by a Tunisian corsair and, after a few weeks' captivity, succeeded in reaching Spain and returning to France at the Second Restoration. He was then appointed a brigadier-general, a lord-in-waiting to the Duc d'Angoulême and an inspector of infantry. In 1823, he took part in the Spanish Expedition and earned his promotion to lieutenant-general. He became Ambassador to Berlin in 1825 and to Madrid in 1827. In August 1830, he sent in his resignation, and Ferdinand VII. created him a grandee of Spain and Duque de Almazan. Saint-Priest became one of the Duchesse de Berry's advisers, was one of the principal organizers of the royalist attempt of 1822 and sailed with the Princess in the Carlo-Alberto. He was arrested at the moment of landing and indicted at the assizes at Montbrison. Together with his co-accused, he was acquitted, on the 15th of March 1833, and at once joined the Duchesse de Berry in Italy. Under the Second Empire, Saint-Priest was one of the most zealous and intelligent servants of the Comte de Chambord, who, in 1867, wrote him a letter on the political situation that made a great noise at the time.—B.
[204] Cf. Vol. V., p. 101, n. 2.—T.
[205] Major H. D. Delloye had been dismissed the service in 1830 and had turned publisher. He very rightly published only royalist works. In 1836, when Chateaubriand was in the greatest difficulties for money, he was able to arrange a combination of a satisfactory character for the interests and intentions of the illustrious writer. The company formed by M. Delloye guaranteed M. and Madame de Chateaubriand a respectable annuity, supplied them with the sums required for their immediate necessities, and postponed to a remote date the publication of the Mémoires d'Outre-tombe, the Congrès de Vérone and other works to which the author might be disposed to devote his leisure.
On the 30th of June 1836, Chateaubriand addressed the following letter to his honourable publisher:
"To Monsieur H. D. Delloye, retired lieutenant-colonel, Knight of the Royal Order of St. Louis and of the Legion of Honour.
"Paris, 30 June 1836.
"And so, monsieur, our business is fairly started: so soon as I had finished the Milton, I resumed work on the Memoirs and I have begun to have that portion copied which I am to deliver to you in the early months of the coming year. I congratulate myself, monsieur, on having met a gallant and loyal officer of the Royal Guard who has brought to a conclusion a piece of business which, but for him, might never have been finished. It is, therefore, to you, monsieur, that I shall owe the repose of my life and, what is more important to me, that of Madame de Chateaubriand. With God's help, the rest will go of itself and I hope that neither you nor, when the time comes, the Shareholders, will have reason to regret becoming the owners of my Memoirs.
"Believe, monsieur, I beg, in my sincere devotion and accept the assurance of my most distinguished consideration.
"Chateaubriand."—B.
[206] Mademoiselle Mathilde Lebeschu, a former woman of the Bed-chamber to Madame la Duchesse de Berry, had accompanied the Princess into exile and sailed with her, in the Carlo-Alberto, on the 21st of April 1832. She was tried, together with the Vicomte de Saint-Priest and M. Sala, and, with them, acquitted, at Montbrison, on the 15th of March 1833.—B.
[207] Thomas Robert Bugeaud de La Piconnerie, Maréchal Duc d'Isly (1784-1849) fought throughout the campaigns of the Empire, winning his promotion from private to colonel on the battle-field. He retired at the Restoration. He was recalled to active employment in 1830, suppressed the Paris insurrections in 1832 and 1834 and, in 1832, as Commandant of Blaye, was charged with the safe keeping of the Duchesse de Berry. His behaviour on this occasion provoked a challenge to a duel, in which he killed his adversary, a deputy named Dulong, on the 27th of January 1834. In 1836, he was sent to Algeria and defeated Abd-el-Kader, but made terms with him and was severely criticized in consequence; he became Governor-general in 1840 and, on the 14th of August 1844, defeated the troops of Morocco at Isly, by which title he was forthwith created a duke, having received his marshal's baton in the previous year. In 1847, he resigned, but was placed in command of the troops in Paris in 1848 and exerted himself, but without success, to suppress the Revolution of February. The Prince-President Louis Napoleon made him Commander-in-Chief of the Army of the Alps, but he died of cholera, on the 10th of June 1849, soon after taking up his appointment.—T.
[208] Cf. Vol. V., p. III., n. 2.—T.
[209] "Il est de bon goût, ce M. d'Argout."—T.
[210] Cf. Appendix I.: The Morganatic Marriage of the Duchesse de Berry.—T.
[211] Achmet III. Sultan of Turkey (1673-1736) succeeded on the deposition of his brother Mustapha II. in 1703. He was deposed by the janissaries in 1730 and assassinated, by poison, in 1736.—T.
[212] Ivan VI. Emperor of All the Russias(1740-1764) succeeded his aunt, the Empress Anne, as an infant of three months, but was deposed in the course of the following year by Elizabeth, the laughter of Peter the Great and Catherine I. He was murdered in prison at the age of twenty-three, under the reign of Catherine II.—T.
[213] Frederic Augustus I. Elector of Saxony, later Augustus II. King of Poland (1670-1733), surnamed the Strong, elected King of Poland in 1697, deposed in 1704, and reinstated in 1709; and Stanislaus I. Leczinski (1677-1766), elected King of Poland in 1704, crowned in 1705, obliged to leave Poland in 1709: he was again a candidate in 1733, on the death of Augustus II., and formally abdicated in 1735.—T.
[214] Theodore King of Corsica (circa 1686-1756) was a German adventurer, Theodor Baron von Neuhof. He aided the Corsicans against the Republic of Genoa in 1735 to 1736; was proclaimed and crowned King of Corsica in 1736; and was driven out by the Genoese in 1738. An attempt made to recapture his power in 1743 failed. Theodore withdrew to London, where his person was seized by his creditors, and he was kept in prison for debt for seven years.—T.
[215] Voltaire: Candide, ou L'Optimisme, Part I., Chap. XXVI.: Candid and Martin sup with six Strangers; and who they were.—T.
[216] Chateaubriand wrote the next day to Madame Récamier:
"Thursday 19 September 1833.
"All is changed. They absolutely want me to go to the end of the journey, where they dare not arrive without me. All my resistance was unavailing; I had to resign myself. So I am leaving. This will prolong my absence another month. I am going to send Hyacinthe to Paris; he will bring you a long letter and details. Nothing in my life ever cost me a greater pang than this last sacrifice, unless it be that attached to my resignation of Rome.—B.
[217] Pietro Liberi (1605-1687), born and died at Padua, a religious and historical painter of the Venetian School.—T.
[218] Jacopo Palma the Younger (circa 1544-1628), a painter of the Venetian School, distinguished for the freshness of his colouring.—T.
[219] Giacomo Tatti (1479-1570), known as Sansovino, a noted Florentine sculptor and architect, held by some to be second, as a sculptor, to Michael Angelo alone. Sansovino is the architect of the Mint, the Library of St. Mark and the Palazzo Cornaro in Venice.—T.
[220] Francesco Sansovino (1521-1586), son of the above, is better known as a man of letters and grammarian than as an artist.—T.
[221] "For there's no day so fair but its night follows after."—T.
[222] Charles Patin (1633-1693) was a physician, like his father, but was distinguished especially for his antiquarian knowledge. He was sentenced to the galleys for distributing some copies of a lewd libel which he had been charged to suppress and fled from France. Eventually he settled in the Venetian States and, in 1677, was appointed Professor of Medicine at Padua. Charles Patin left several important numismatical works.—T.
[223] Gui Patin (1601-1672), the famous doctor and wit, earned an extraordinary reputation by his caustic sallies and eccentric habits. He was the author of a treatise on the Conservation de la santé(1632) and of Letters published nearly fifty years after his death. A collection of his bons mots was published, under the title of Patiniana, in 1703.—T.
[224] Epictetus (fl. 1st Century), of Hierapolis, the Stoic philosopher, was born a slave. When his master, Epaphroditus, who subsequently freed him, broke his leg for him, he was content to observe:
"I told you you would break it"
Epictetus was driven from Rome, with the other philosophers, by the Emperor Domitian; he returned later and won the esteem of the Emperors Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius.—T.
[225] John III. King of Portugal (1502-1557) succeeded his father, Emanuel I., in 1521. He established the Inquisition in 1526.—T.
[226] Angelo Malipieri, Podesta of Padua. Two years after the above was written, Victor Hugo produced his tragedy of Angelo, of which Malipieri is the hero, at the Théâtre-Français (28 April 1835).—B.
[227] St. Anthony of Padua (1195-1231), monk of the Order of St. Francis and a native of Lisbon. He was wrecked on the coast of Italy when on his way to Africa to convert the infidels. St. Anthony is said one day to have preached to a school of fishes and to have been heard with attention.—T.
[228] Antonio Beccadelli Panormita (1394-1471), of Palermo, a distinguished man of letters of his day.—T.
[229] Livy, who was born and died at Padua, divided his History of Rome into 425 books, of which only 35 have been preserved. These books were contained in "Decades," or groups of ten books each. The late Benjamin Jowett used to long for the recovery of the missing books of Livy more than for that of any other lost specimens of literature.—T.
[230] Good drink-money or "tips."—T.
[231] Francesco Albani (1578-1660), surnamed the "Painter of the Graces" and the "Anacreon of Painting," the great painter of the Bologna School.—T.
[232] Heliodonis Bishop of Tricca, in Thessaly (fl. 4th Century), was the author of the earliest Greek romance, the Æthiopica, which relates the loves and adventures of Theagines and Chariclea.—T.
[233] Isotta Nogarola (d. 1466), a great and learned lady of Verona, famous for her beauty, her knowledge and her poetic talent. She was the author of the Dialogus quo utrum Adam vel Eva magis peccaverit, quæstio satis nota, sed non adeo explicata, continetur (Florence: 1563).—T.
[234] Francis I. Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, Bohemia, the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom, etc. (1768-1835).—T.
[235] The Comte de Sainte-Aulaire (cf. Vol. V., p. 161, n. 2) had been appointed Ambassador to Vienna earlier in that same year 1833.—T.
[236] The Duchesse de Berry's mother was Clementina Queen of the Two Sicilies, daughter of Leopold II. Emperor of Germany, and sister of Francis I. Emperor of Austria.—T.
[237] Cf. Vol., V., p. 81, n. 5. The Comte de Montbel's Notice sur le Duc de Reichstadt had appeared in that year 1833. The Duke had died at Schonbrünn, three miles from Vienna, the residence of the Austrian Archdukes, on the 22nd of July; the distance is about 180 miles from Vienna to Prague, where Charles X. and his little Court took up their residence.—T.
[238] Leopold I. King of the Belgians (1790-1865) was the youngest son of Francis Duke of Saxe Saalfeld-Coburg when he was elected to the Belgian Throne in 1831. He was married first, in 1816, to Charlotte Princess Royal of England, who died in 1817. In 1832, Leopold married Louise Princesse d'Orléans, daughter of Louis-Philippe.—T.
Journal from Padua to Prague, from the 20th to the 26th of September 1833—Conegliano—The translator of the Dernier Abencerrage—Udine—Countess Samoyloff—M. de La Ferronays—A priest—Carinthia—The Drave—A peasant lad—Forges—Breakfast at the hamlet of St. Michael—The neck of the Tauern—A cemetery—Atala: how changed—A sunrise—Salzburg—A military review—Happiness of the peasants—Woknabrück—Reminiscences of Plancoët—Night—German and Italian towns contrasted—Linx—The Danube—Waldmünchen—Woods—Recollections of Combourg and Lucile—Travellers—Prague—Madame de Gontaut—The young Frenchmen—Madame la Dauphine—An excursion to Butschirad—Butschirad—Charles X. asleep—Henry V.—Reception of the young men—The ladder and the peasant-woman—Dinner at Butschirad—Madame de Narbonne—Henry V.—A rubber—Charles X.—My incredulity touching the declaration of majority—The newspapers—Scene of the young men—Prague—I leave for France—I pass by Butschirad at night—A meeting at Schlau—Carlsbad empty—Hollfeld—Bamberg—My different St. Francis' Days—Trials of religion—France.
I was greatly distressed, when passing by Mestre, towards the end of the night, not to be able to go down to the shore: perhaps a distant beacon in the furthermost lagoons would have shown me the fairest of the islands of the Old World, even as a tiny light revealed to Christopher Columbus the first island of the New World[240]. It was at Mestre that I landed from Venice, at the time of my first journey in 1806: fugit ætas.
I breakfasted at Conegliano; I there received the compliments of the friends of a lady who had translated the Abencerrage and who doubtless resembled Bianca:
"He saw a young woman come out, attired much after the fashion of those Gothic queens sculptured on the monuments of our old abbeys... a black mantilla was thrown[Pg 120] over her head; with her left hand she held the ends of this mantilla crossed and drawn up close like a veil over her chin, so that nothing was seen of her whole face but her large eyes and rosy mouth."
I pay my debt to the translator of my Spanish reveries by reproducing her portrait here.
When I climbed back into my carriage, a priest harangued me on the Génie du Christianisme. I was crossing the scene of the victories which led Bonaparte to encroach upon our liberties.
Udine is a beautiful town: I noticed a portico copied from the Palace of the Doges. I dined at the inn, in the room lately occupied by Madame la Comtesse de Samoyloff; it was still quite full of her disorder. Is that niece of the Princesse Bagration, "another injustice of years," still as pretty as she was in Rome, in 1829, when she used to sing so wonderfully at my concerts? What breeze had blown that flower once again under my feet? What wind impelled that cloud? O daughter of the North, you enjoy life; make haste: harmonies that used to delight you have already ceased; your days will not have the length of the arctic day.
In the visitors'-book of the hotel I read the name of my noble friend, the Comte de La Ferronnays, who was returning from Prague to Naples, in the same way as I was going from Padua to Prague. The Comte de La Ferronnays, who is my fellow-countryman in more than one respect, since he is both a Breton and a Malouin, mingled his political destinies with mine: he was Ambassador in St. Petersburg when I was Minister of Foreign Affairs in Paris; he occupied this latter office, and I, in my turn, became an ambassador under his direction. I was sent to Rome, and resigned on the accession to power of the Polignac Ministry; La Ferronnays succeeded to my embassy. He is M. de Blacas' brother-in-law, and is as poor as the latter is rich; he resigned the peerage and the diplomatic service at the time of the Revolution of July; every one esteems him and no one hates him, because of the genuineness of his character and the moderation of his mind. In his last negociation in Prague, he allowed himself to be overreached by Charles X., who is approaching the end of his days. Old people take pleasure in secret practices, having nothing to show that is any good. Excepting my old King, I would like every one[Pg 121] to be drowned who is no longer young, myself first of all, together with a dozen of my friends.
At Udine, I took the Villach Road; I was going towards Bohemia by way of Salzburg and Linz. Before attacking the Alps, I heard bells pealing and saw an illuminated campanile in the plain. I had the postilion questioned through the intermediary of a German from Strasburg, my Italian cicerone in Venice, whom Hyacinthe had brought me to act as my Slav interpreter in Prague. The rejoicings about which I was asking were taking place on the occasion of the promotion of a priest to Holy Orders; he was to say his first Mass on the morrow. How often will those bells, which to-day are proclaiming the indissoluble union between a man and his God, summon that man to the sanctuary, and how soon will those same bells ring out for his funeral?
22 September.
I slept almost through the night, to the sound of the torrents, and awoke at day-break, on the 22nd, among the mountains. The Carinthian valleys are pleasant, but present no striking characteristics: the peasants have no distinctive dress; a few women wear furs, like the Hungarian women; others have white hoods set on the back of their heads, or blue woollen caps with a padded edging, half way between the Osmanli's turban and the bonze's skull-cap with the button at the top.
I changed horses at Villach. On leaving that stage, I followed a wide valley on the banks of the Drave, a new acquaintance: by dint of crossing rivers, I shall end by reaching my last shore. Lander[241] has just discovered the mouth of the Niger; the daring traveller surrendered his life to Eternity at the very moment when he taught us that the mysterious African stream discharges its waters into the Ocean.
At nightfall, we were nearly stopped at the village of St. Paternion: the carriage wanted greasing; a peasant screwed the nut of one of the wheels in the wrong direction, with so much force that it was impossible to remove it. All the clever people in the village, with the blacksmith at their head, failed in their attempts. A boy of fourteen or fifteen[Pg 122] years of age left the band, returned with a pair of pincers, thrust aside the workers, wound a brass wire round the bolt, twisted it with his plyers and, bearing with his hand in the direction of the screw, removed the nut without the slightest effort, amid general cheering. Might not that child be a budding Archimedes? The queen of an Esquimaux tribe, the same woman who drew for Captain Parry a chart of the polar seas, used attentively to watch sailors welding pieces of iron at the forge and outstripped all her race through her genius.
During the night of the 22nd, I passed through a thick mass of mountains; their confusion continued before me as far as Salzburg: and yet those ramparts did not protect the Roman Empire. The author of the Essayes, speaking of the Tyrol, says, with his ordinary vivacity of imagination:
"It resembles a gown that we only see plaited up, but that, if it were spread out, it would form a very large country[242]."
The mounts among which I wound were like a landslip from the upper chains, which, covering a vast ground, had formed little Alps presenting the different accidental features of the great ones.
Cascades rushed down from every side, leaping over beds of stones, like the torrents in the Pyrenees. The road passed through gorges hardly open to the gauge of the calash. In the neighbourhood of Gmünd, hydraulic forges mixed the echo of their stamps with that of the sluices; from their chimneys, columns of sparks escaped amid the night and the dark forests of pine-trees. At each blow of the bellows on the hearth-stone, the open roofs of the factory lit up suddenly, like the dome of St. Peter's in Rome on a holiday.
In the Karch Range, they added three couple of oxen to our horses. Our long team, on the torrent waters and in the flooded ravines, looked liked a living bridge. The chain opposite the Tauern was draped in snow.
On the 23rd, at nine o'clock in the morning, I stopped at the pretty hamlet of St. Michael, at the bottom of a valley. Some tall, good-looking Austrian girls served me with a very clean breakfast in a little room whose two windows looked out over meadows and the village-church. The grave-yard, which[Pg 123] surrounded the church, was separated from me only by a rustic yard. Wooden crosses, with semicircular inscriptions and with holy-water fonts hanging from them, rose above the grass of the old tombs: five graves as yet unturfed proclaimed five new resting-places. Some of the graves, like the borders of kitchen-gardens, were adorned with marigolds in full yellow flower; wag-tails chased grass-hoppers in this garden of the dead. A very old lame woman, leaning on a crutch, crossed the cemetery and brought back a cross that had fallen down: perhaps the law permitted her to pilfer that cross for her tomb; dead wood, in the forests, belong to him who picks it up.
Là dorment dans l'oubli des poètes sans gloire,
Des orateurs sans voix, des héros sans victoire[243].
Would not the child of Prague sleep better here, without a crown, than in the chamber in the Louvre where his father's body was laid in state?
My solitary breakfast, taken in the company of the satisfied travellers lying under my window, would have been to my taste if I had not been afflicted by too recent a death: I had heard the screams of the chicken served at my banquet. Poor young bird! It had been so happy, five minutes before my arrival! It was wandering among the grasses, the vegetables and the flowers; it was running about among the troops of goats come down from the mountain; to-night it would have gone to roost with the sun, and it was still small enough to sleep under its mother's wing.
When the calash was put to, I climbed in, surrounded by the women, and the waiters of the inn accompanied me to the carriage-door; they seemed glad to have seen me, although they did not know me and were never to see me again: they gave me so many blessings! I do not tire of this German cordiality. You never meet a peasant but takes off his hat to you and wishes you a hundred good things: in France we salute only death; insolence is accounted as liberty and equality; there is no sympathy between man and man; to envy whoever travels a little comfortably,[Pg 124] to stand with one arm akimbo, ready to draw the sword on any one who wears a new coat or a white shirt: those are the characteristic signs of our national independence, always provided that we spend our days in the antechambers accepting the rebuffs of some upstart clodhopper. This does not take away from our high intelligence, nor prevent us from triumphing with arms in hand; but manners cannot be made à priori: for eight centuries we have been a great military nation; fifty years have not been able to change us: we have not been able to acquire a genuine love for liberty. So soon as we have a moment's rest under a transitory government, the Old Monarchy shoots up again on its stock, the old French spirit reappears: we are courtiers and soldiers, nothing more.
23 and 24 September 1833.
The last range of mountains shutting in the Province of Salzburg commands the arable region. The Tauern has glaciers; its table-land resembles all the table-lands of the Alps, but more particularly that of the Saint-Gotthard. On this table-land, crusted over with reddish, frozen moss, stands a Calvary: an ever-ready consolation, an eternal refuge for the unfortunate. Around that Calvary are buried the victims who perish amid the snows.
What were the hopes of the travellers passing, like myself, through this spot when the snow-storm surprised them? Who are they? Who has wept for them? How do they rest there, so far from their kindred, their country, hearing each winter the roar of the tempests whose breath carried them off the earth? But they sleep at the foot of the Cross; Christ, their sole companion, their only friend, nailed to the sacred wood, leans towards them, is covered with the same hoar-frost that whitens their graves: in the celestial regions, He will present them to His Father and warm them in His breast.
The descent of the Tauern is long, bad and dangerous; I was delighted with it: it reminds one, at one time by its cascades and its wooden bridges, at another by the narrowness of its chasm, of the Valley of the Pont-d'Espagne at Cauterets or the Domo d'Ossola slope of the Simplon; but it is far from leading to Granada or Naples. We find no gleaming lakes, no orange-trees at the bottom: it is unprofitable to give one's self so much trouble to come to some potato-fields.
At the stage, half-way down the descent, I found myself among my family in the room of the inn: the walls were hung with the Adventures of Atala, in six prints. My daughter did not suspect that I should pass that way, nor had I hoped to meet an object so dear to me on the brink of a torrent called, I believe, the Dragon. Poor Atala! She had grown very ugly, very old; she was greatly changed! She wore big feathers on her head and a short, tight skirt round her hips, like the lady savages of the Théâtre de la Gaîté. Vanity turns everything into money; I carried my head high before my works in the depths of Carinthia like Cardinal Mazarin before the pictures in his gallery. I felt inclined to say to mine host:
"I made that!"
I had to separate from my first-born, although with less difficulty than on the island in the Ohio.
As far as Werfen, nothing attracted my attention, unless it were the manner in which they put the second crop of grass to dry: they drive stakes of fifteen to twenty feet in height into the ground; they roll the unbleached grass round those stakes, not too tightly: it dries there and blackens. At a certain distance, those columns look just like cypress-trees or like trophies planted in memory of the flowers mown down in those dales.
24 September, Tuesday.
Germany was determined to revenge herself for my ill-humour against her. In the Salzburg Plain, on the morning of the 24th, the sun appeared to the east of the mountains which I had left behind me; some rocky peaks on the west lit up with its first softest rays. Darkness still hovered over the plain, half green, half tilled, whence rose a smoke, like the steam of man's sweat. Salzburg Castle, raising the summit of the hill that commands the town, encrusted the blue sky with its white surface. With the ascending sun, there rose, from out of the bosom of the cool exhalation of the dew, avenues, clusters of wood, red-brick houses, cottages rough-plastered with gleaming white lime, mediæval towers slashed and pierced, old champions of time, wounded in the head and breast, left standing alone on the battle-field of the centuries. The autumnal light of the scene had the violent tint of the colchicums which blossom at this season of the year and with which the meads along the banks of the Salza were strewn. Flights of crows left the creepers[Pg 126] and holes of the ruins and descended upon the fields; their gleaming wings were glazed with rose in the reflection of the dawn.
It was the Feast of St. Rupert[244], the Patron of Salzburg. The peasant-women were going to market, decked out in the fashion of their village: their fair hair and snowy foreheads were enclosed in a sort of helmet of gold, well suited to women of Germania. When I had passed through the town, which is clean and handsome, I saw two or three thousand foot-soldiers in a field; they were being reviewed by a general, accompanied by his staff. Those white lines cutting into the green grass, the glitter of arms at sunrise formed a stately display worthy of those peoples depicted or rather sung by Tacitus: Mars the Teuton was offering a sacrifice to Aurora. What were my gondoliers doing at that moment in Venice? They were sporting like swallows, after the night was past, in the returning dawn and preparing to skim over the surface of the water; next would come the joys of the night, loves and barcarolles. Every nation has its lot: this one enjoys strength; that one, pleasures: the Alps make the division.
From Salzburg to Linz, a fertile country-side; the horizon on the right denticulated with mountains. Forests of pines and beeches, wild and similar oases, are surrounded by a skilful and varied cultivation. Herds of all kinds of cattle, hamlets, churches, oratories, crosses furnish and enliven the landscape.
After we had passed the radius of the festival of St. Rupert (festivals do not last long with men, nor do they go far), we found all the people in the fields, busy with the autumnal sowing and the potato-harvest. Those rustic populations were better clad, more polite, and appeared happier than our own. Do not let us disturb the order, the peace, the simple virtues which they enjoy, under the pretext of substituting for them political boons which are neither conceived nor felt in the same manner by all, whereas the whole of mankind understands the joys of the home, family affection, the abundance of life, simplicity of heart and religion.
The Frenchman, who is so much in love with women, is very well able to dispense with them in a number of cares and works; the German cannot live without his mate:[Pg 127] he employs her and takes her with him wherever he goes, to the battle-field as to the plough-field, to feasts and funerals alike.
In Germany, the very animals partake of the temperate character of their sober-minded masters. It is interesting, when travelling, to observe the physiognomy of the brute beasts. We can judge beforehand of the manners and passions of the inhabitants of a country by the gentleness or wickedness, the tameness or wildness, the cheerfulness or sadness of that living part of creation which God has subjected to our sway.
An accident to the calash obliged me to stop at Woknabrück. As I roamed about the inn, I came upon a back-door which let me out on a canal. Beyond it lay meadows striped with pieces of brown holland. A river, inflected under wooded hills, served as a belt for those meadows. Something, I know not what, reminded me of the village of Plancoët, where happiness had appeared to me in my childhood. O shades of my old kinsfolk, I did not expect to find you on these shores! You are drawing nearer to me, because I am drawing nearer to the grave, your shelter; we are going to meet again there. My kind aunt, do you still sing your ballad of the Sparrow-hawk and the Warbler[245] on the banks of Lethe? Have you met the fickle Trémigon[246] among the dead, just as Dido saw Æneas in the region of the shades?
The day was drawing to a close when I left Woknabrück; Sol transferred me to his sister's hands: a double light of undefinable hue and fluidity. Soon Luna reigned alone: she was inclined to renew our conversation of the forests of Haselbach[247]; but I was not in the mood for her. I preferred Venus, who rose at two o'clock on the morning of the 25th; she was as beautiful as amid those dawns in which I used to contemplate and invoke her on the seas of Greece.
Leaving many mysteries of woods, streams and valleys to the right and left, I passed through Lambach, Wels and Neuban, quite new little townships, with flat-roofed houses, as in Italy. In one of those houses, they were making music; there were young women at the windows: things were different in Maroboduus'[248] time.
In the towns of Germany, the streets are wide, drawn up in line like the tents of a camp or the files of a battalion; the market-places are spacious, the drill-grounds extensive: the people want sun, and everything happens in public.
In the towns of Italy, the streets are narrow and winding, the market-places small, the drill-grounds cramped: the people want shade, and everything happens in secret.
At Linz, my passport was endorsed without difficulty.
24 and 25 September 1833.
I crossed the Danube at three o'clock in the morning: I had said to it in the summer what I could no longer find to say to it in the autumn; its waters were no longer the same and I was there at a different hour. Far on my left, as I passed, lay my good village of Waldmünchen, with its droves of pigs[249], Eumaus the shepherd[250] and the peasant-girl who looked at me over her father's shoulder[251]. The dead man's grave in the cemetery was filled up by now[252]; the deceased had been eaten by some thousands of worms for having had the honour of being a man.
M. and Madame de Bauffremont, who had arrived at Linz, were a few hours ahead of me; they themselves were preceded by some Royalists, bearing a message of peace, who believed Madame to be travelling quietly behind them: and I came after them all, like Discord, with news of war.
The Princesse de Bauffremont, née de Montmorency[253], was going to Butschirad[254] to congratulate the Kings of France, née Bourbons: what could be more natural?
On the 25th, at nightfall, I entered some woods. Carrion-crows flew screaming through the air; their thick flights whirled above the trees whose tops they were making ready to crown. Behold me returning to my early youth: I saw once more the crows in the Mall at Combourg[255]; I imagined myself renewing my family life in the old castle[256]: O memories, you pierce the heart like a sword! O Lucile[257], we are parted by many years: now the crowd of my days[Pg 129] has passed and, in dispersing, allows me to see your image more clearly!
I reached Thabor at night: its square, surrounded by arcades, struck me as immense; but the moonlight is deceptive.
On the morning of the 26th, a mist wrapped us in its boundless solitude. At about ten o'clock, it seemed to me that I was passing between two lakes. I was now only a few leagues from Prague.
The fog lifted. The approaches by the Linz Road are livelier than by the Ratisbon Road; the landscape is less insipid. One sees villages, country-houses with woods and ponds. I met a woman with a resigned and pious face, going bent under the weight of an enormous basket; two old market-women with apples spread out for sale beside a ditch; a young girl and a young man sitting on the grass, the man smoking, the girl glad, spending the day beside her friend and the night in his arms; children at a cottage-door playing with cats or driving geese to the common; turkeys in coops going to Prague, like myself, for Henry V.'s coming of age; next, a shepherd blowing his horn, while Hyacinthe, Baptiste, the Venetian cicerone and My Excellency jolted along in our patched calash: such are the destinies of life. I would not give a doit for the best of them.
Bohemia had nothing new to show me: my ideas were fixed on Prague.
Prague, 29 September 1833.
The second day after my arrival in Prague, I sent Hyacinthe to take a letter to Madame la Duchesse de Berry, whom, according to my reckoning, he ought to meet at Trieste. This letter informed the Princess that "I had found the Royal Family leaving for Leoben; that some young Frenchmen had arrived for the coming of age of Henry V. and that the King was avoiding them; that I had seen Madame la Dauphine; that she had bidden me to go at once to Butschirad, where Charles X. still was; that I had not seen Mademoiselle, because she was a little unwell; that I had been admitted to her room, where the shutters were closed, and that she had held out to me her hot hand in the dark and asked me to save them all; that I had gone to Butschirad, seen M. de Blacas and talked with him about the declaration of the majority of Henry V.; that I had been taken to the King's room and[Pg 130] found him asleep and that, after I had subsequently handed him Madame la Duchesse de Berry's letter, he had appeared to me to be very much incensed against my august client; that, otherwise, the short deed drawn up by me on the subject of the coming of age had seemed to be to his liking."
My letter concluded with the following paragraph:
"And now, Madame, I must not conceal the fact from you that there is a great deal amiss here. Our enemies would laugh if they saw us contending for a kingship without a kingdom, a sceptre which is merely the stick with which we assist our steps on the pilgrimage, perhaps a long one, of our exile. All the drawbacks lie in your son's education, and I see no prospect of its being changed. I am returning to the midst of the poor whom Madame de Chateaubriand provides for; there I shall always be at your orders. If ever you become Henry's absolute mistress, if you continue to think that that precious trust might safely be placed in my hands, I shall be as happy as I shall be honoured to devote the rest of my life to him; but I could not undertake so terrible a responsibility except on the condition of remaining entirely free, subject to your advice, in my selections and ideas and of being placed on an independent soil, outside the circle of the absolute monarchies."
The letter enclosed the following copy of my draft for the declaration of majority:
"We, Henry V., having attained the age at which the laws of the Realm settle the majority of the Heir to the Throne, do ordain that the first act of that majority shall be a solemn protest against the usurpation of Louis-Philippe Duc d'Orléans. Wherefore, and by the advice of Our Council, We have drawn up this present Act to maintain Our rights and the rights of Frenchmen.
"Given on the thirtieth day of September in the Year of Our Lord one thousand eight hundred and thirty-three."
Prague, 30 September 1833.
My letter to Madame la Duchesse de Berry described the general facts, but did not enter into details.
When I saw Madame de Gontaut, surrounded by half-packed[Pg 131] trunks and open boxes, she threw herself on my neck and, sobbing:
"Save us!" she said. "Save us!"
"And what am I to save you from, madame? I have just arrived, I know nothing about anything."
Hradschin was deserted; one would have thought that we were in the midst of the Days of July and the flight from the Tuileries, as though revolutions had become attached to the footsteps of the outlawed House.
Young men were coming to congratulate Henry on the day of his attaining his majority[258]; several were under penalty of death: some of them, who had been wounded in the Vendée[259], almost all of them poor, had been obliged to club together in order to enable them to go to Prague and give voice to their loyalty. Forthwith an order closed the frontiers of Bohemia to them. Those who succeeded in reaching Butschirad were received only after making great efforts; etiquette barred their way, even as Messieurs the lords of the Bed-chamber defended the door of Charles X.'s closet at Saint-Cloud, while the Revolution entered by the windows.[Pg 132] The young men were told that the King was going away, that he would not be in Prague on the 29th. The horses were ordered, the Royal Family packed up bag and baggage. When the travellers at last obtained leave to pronounce some hurried compliments, they were listened to in fear and trembling. Not so much as a glass of water was offered to the faithful little band; they were not bidden to the table of the orphan whom they had come to seek from so far away; they were driven to drink to the health of Henry V. in a tap-house. Men fled before a handful of Vendeans, even as they scattered before five score heroes of July.
And what was the pretext for this stampede? They were going to meet the Duchesse de Berry, they were going to make an appointment with the Princess on the high-road in order stealthily to show her her daughter and her son. Was she not very guilty? She persisted in claiming an empty title for Henry. And, in order to extricate themselves from the simplest position, they displayed before the eyes of Austria and France (always presuming France to notice such pin-points) a spectacle which rendered the Legitimacy, already too much disparaged, the despair of its friends and an object of calumny to its enemies.
Madame la Dauphine realized the disadvantages of the education of Henry V., and her virtues ran over in tears, even as at night the skies fall in dew. The brief audience which she granted me did not give her time to speak of my letter of the 30th of June from Paris; she wore an air of concern when she looked at me.
A means of safety seemed to lie hidden in the very rigours of Providence: the orphan's expatriation separated him from that which threatened to ruin him at the Tuileries; in the school of adversity, he might have been brought up under the guidance of a few men of the new social order, qualified to instruct him in the new theories of kingship. Instead of adopting those masters of the moment, so far from bettering Henry V.'s education, they made it more fatal by the intimacy produced by the constricted family-life: during the winter evenings, old men, stirring up the centuries by the fireside, taught the child about days the light of which nothing will ever bring back; they transformed the Chronicles of Saint-Denis[260] into nursery-tales for his benefit: surely the two[Pg 133] First Barons of the modern era, Liberty and Equality, would know how to force Henry "Lackland" to grant a Great Charter!
The Dauphine had urged me to take the trip of Butschirad. Messieurs Dufougerais[261] and Nugent[262] escorted me on my embassy to Charles X. on the evening of my arrival in Prague. They were at the head of the deputation of the young men and were going to complete the negotiations which had been entered into on the subject of the presentation. The former of the two, who had been implicated in my trial before the Assize-court, had pleaded his case with great intelligence; the second had just finished a term of imprisonment of eight months for a royalist newspaper offense. The author of the Génie du Christianisme, therefore, had the honour of going to wait on the Most Christian King seated in a hired calash between the author of the Mode and the author of the Revenant.
Prague, 30 September 1833.
Butschirad is a villa belonging to the Grand-duke of Tuscany at about six leagues from Prague, on the road to Carlsbad. The Austrian Princes have their ancestral possessions in their own country and are merely owners for life on the other side of the Alps: they hold Italy on lease. Butschirad is reached by a triple avenue of apple-trees. The villa makes no show; with its out-houses, it looks like a fine farm-house: it stands in the middle of a bare plain and the view commands a hamlet with green trees and a tower. The inside of the house is an Italian misconception, in the latitude of 50 degrees: large living-rooms without stoves or chimneys. The apartments are enriched in a melancholy fashion with the spoils of Holyrood. The palace of James II., which Charles X. refurnished[263], has supplied Butschirad, by the removal, with its carpets and chairs.
The King had a touch of fever and had gone to bed when I arrived at Butschirad at eight o'clock in the evening, on the[Pg 135] 28th. M. de Blacas introduced me into Charles X.'s bed-room, as I wrote to the Duchesse de Berry. A little lamp was burning on the mantel-piece; in the silence of the darkness, I heard only the loud breathing of the thirty-fifth successor of Hugh Capet. O my old King, your sleep was painful; time and adversity, those heavy nightmares, were seated on your breast! A young man might approach the bed of his young bride with less love than I felt respect as I stepped with stealthy tread towards your lonely couch. At least, I was not a bad dream like that which woke you to go to see your son die! I inwardly addressed you with these words, which I could not have uttered aloud without bursting into tears:
"May Heaven protect you against all ills to come! Sleep in peace during these nights adjoining your last sleep! Long enough have your vigils been vigils of sorrow. May this bed of exile lose its hardness while awaiting the visit of God: He alone can make the foreign earth lie light upon your bones!"
Yes, I would joyfully have given all my blood to make the Legitimacy possible for France. I had imagined that it would be with the Old Royalty as with the dry rod of Aaron: when taken away from the Temple of Jerusalem, it was budded, and the buds swelling it had bloomed blossoms, which, swelling the leaves, were formed into almonds, a token of the renewal of the covenant. I do not study to stifle my regrets, to keep back the tears with which I would like to wash out the last trace of the royal sorrows. The impulses which I experience in different directions with respect to the same persons bear witness to the sincerity with which these Memoirs are written. In Charles X., the man moves me to pity, the Sovereign offends me: I give way to these two impressions as they succeed one another, without seeking to reconcile them.
On the 28th of September, after Charles X. had received me in the morning by his bed-side, Henry V. sent for me: I had not asked to see him. I spoke a few serious words to him on his coming of age and on the loyal Frenchmen whose ardour had led them to offer him a pair of golden spurs.
For the rest, it was impossible to be better treated than I was. My arrival had given alarm; they dreaded the report of my journey in Paris. For me, therefore, every attention; all the rest were neglected. My companions, scattered, dying of hunger and thirst, wandered about the passages, the staircases,[Pg 136] the court-yards of the château, amid the scare of the occupiers and the preparations for their escape.
The Austrian guards wondered at these individuals in mustachios and mufti; they suspected them of being French soldiers in disguise, thinking of taking Bohemia by surprise.
During this storm without, Charles X. was saying to me indoors:
"I am busy correcting the act establishing my 'Government' in Paris. You will have M. de Villèle as your colleague, as you asked, and the Marquis de La Tour-Maubourg and the Chancellor[264]."
I thanked the King for his goodness, while wondering at the illusions of this world. Society crumbles to pieces, monarchies come to an end, the face of the earth is renewed, and Charles in Prague establishes a "government" in France, after "taking the opinion" of his Council! Let us not jeer overmuch: which of us but has his delusions? Which of us but feeds his budding hopes? Which of us but has his "government in petto," after "taking the opinion" of his passions? Raillery would ill beseem me, the man of dreams. These Memoirs, which I scribble as I run, are not they my "government," after "taking the opinion" of my vanity? Do not I think that I can speak very seriously to the future, which is as little at my disposal as France is at the orders of Charles X.?
Cardinal Latil, wishing to escape the hubbub, had gone to spend a few days with the Duc de Rohan[265]. M. de Foresta[266] passed by mysteriously with his portfolio under his his arm; Madame de Bouille made me deep courtesies, like a party-person, with lowered eyes that tried to see through their lids; M. La Villate was waiting to receive his dismissal; there was no longer any question of M. Barrande,[Pg 137] who cherished the hope of being restored to favour and was living in a corner in Prague.
I went to pay my court to the Dauphin. Our conversation was brief:
"How does Monseigneur find himself at Butschirad?"
"Getting oldish."
"We're all doing that, Monseigneur."
"How's your wife?"
"Monseigneur, she has the tooth-ache."
"Inflammation?"
"No, Monseigneur: age."
"You're dining with the King? We shall meet again."
And we parted.
Prague, 28 and 29 September.
I found myself free at three o'clock: they dined at six. Not knowing what to do with myself, I went for a walk through avenues of apple-trees worthy of Normandy. The fruit-crop from those mock orange-trees in good years amounts to the value of eighteen thousand francs. The calvilles are exported to England. They are not made into cider, as the Bohemian beer-monopoly is opposed to it. According to Tacitus, the Germans had words to express spring, summer and winter, but none for autumn, of which they knew neither the name nor the gifts: nomen ac bona ignorantur. Since Tacitus' time, a Pomona has come to dwell among them.
Feeling very tired, I sat down on the steps of a ladder leaning against the trunk of an apple-tree. I was there in the Œil-de-bœuf of the château of Butschirad or at the railing of the Council-chamber. Looking at the roof which covered the three generations of my Kings, I called to mind the complaint of the Arab Maoual:
"Here we saw vanish below the horizon the stars which we love to see rise under the sky of our country."
Full of these melancholy ideas, I fell asleep. A gentle voice woke me. A Bohemian peasant-woman came to gather apples; throwing forward her breast and lifting her head, she made me a Slav bow with a queenly smile: I thought I should fall from my roosting-place; I said to her in French:
"You are very beautiful; I thank you!"
I saw from her look that she had understood me: apples[Pg 138] always play a part in my encounters with "Bohemians[267]." I climbed down from my ladder like one of those condemned men of feudal times delivered by the presence of a young woman. Thinking on Normandy, Dieppe, Fervacques, the sea, I resumed my way to the Trianon of Charles X.'s old age.
We sat down to table, namely, the Prince and Princesse de Bauffremont, the Duc and Duchesse de Narbonne, M. de Blacas, M. de Damas, M. O'Heguerty, I, M. le Dauphin and Henry V.: I would rather have seen the young men there than myself. Charles X. did not come in to dinner: he was nursing himself, in order to be able to start on the morrow. The banquet was noisy, thanks to the young Prince's prattle: he never ceased talking of his ride on horseback, his horse, his horse's pranks on the grass, his horse's snorting in the ploughed fields. This conversation was most natural, and yet it grieved me; I liked our old talk on travels and history better.
The King came and chatted to me. He complimented me again on the note on the majority: it pleased him because it left the abdications on one side as an accomplished thing, required no signature except Henry's and revived no sores. According to Charles X., the declaration would be sent from Vienna to M. de Pastoret before my return to France; I bowed with an incredulous smile. His Majesty, after striking me on the shoulder according to his custom, asked:
"Chateaubriand, where are you going now?"
"Quite foolishly to Paris, Sire."
"No, no, not foolishly," replied the King, seeking, with a sort of uneasiness, to discover what was at the back of my thought
The newspapers were brought in; the Dauphin took possession of the English journals; suddenly, amid profound silence, he translated aloud the following passage from the Times:
"The Baron de—- is here; he is four feet high, seventy—five years old and as brisk as though he were fifty."
And Monseigneur said nothing more.
The King retired; M. de Blacas said to me:
"You ought to come to Leoben with us."
The proposal was not seriously meant. Besides, I was not at all anxious to be present at a family scene; I wished neither to divide relations nor to meddle with dangerous reconciliations. When I half saw a chance of becoming the favourite of one of the two powers, I shuddered; the post did not seem fast enough to take me away from my possible honours. I trembled before the shadow of fortune even as the Philistines trembled before the shadow of Richard's horse.
On the next day, the 28th, I locked myself up at the Bath Hotel and wrote my dispatch to Madame. That same evening, Hyacinthe set out with the dispatch.
On the 29th, I went to see the Comte and Comtesse de Chotek; I found them confounded by the uproar at the Court of Charles X. The Grand Burgrave sent by means of expresses to recall the orders which were delaying the young men at the frontiers. For the rest, those who were to be seen in the streets of Prague had lost none of their national characteristics: a Legitimist and a Republican, politics apart, are the same man. What a noise they made, what joking, what merriment! The travellers came to see me to tell me their adventures. M.—— had visited Frankfort with a German guide, who delighted in the French; M.—— asked him the reason; the guide answered:
"De Vrench gome to Frankfort; dey trink de vine und mague loff to de breddy vifes of de cidicens. Cheneral Aucherau lay a dax of vorty-vun millions on de Down of Frankfort."
Those are the reasons why the French were so much loved in Frankfort.
A great breakfast was served at my inn; the rich paid the scot of the poor. They drank champagne on the banks of the Moldau to the health of Henry V., who was covering the roads with his grandfather, for fear of hearing the toasts proposed to his crown. At eight o'clock, having arranged my business, I drove off, hoping never to return to Bohemia in my life.
It has been said that Charles X. had intended to retire to the altar: he had precedents for such a plan in his family. Richer, monk of Senones, and Geoffroy de Beaulieu, confessor to St. Louis, narrate that that great man had thought of shutting himself up in a convent, when his son should have[Pg 140] reached an age to take his place on the throne. Christine de Pisan[268] says of Charles V.:
"The wise King[269] had deliberated within himself that, if he could live so long that his son was of age to wear the crown, he would relinquish the Kingdom to him... and turn priest."
Such princes as these, if they had laid down the sceptre, would have been missed as guardians to their sons; and still, by remaining kings, did they make their successors worthy of them? What was Philip the Bold[270] beside St. Louis? All Charles V.'s wisdom turned into madness in his heir[271].
I passed at ten o'clock in the evening in front of Butschirad, in the silent fields, brightly lit by the moon. I saw the huddled mass of villa, hamlet and ruin inhabited by the Dauphin: the rest of the Royal Family were travelling. Such profound isolation came upon me with a shock; that man, as I have already told you, possessed virtues: he was moderate in politics, he entertained few prejudices; he had only a drop of the blood of St. Louis in his veins, but he had that; his uprightness was unequalled, his word as inviolable as God's. Gifted by nature with courage, he was undone at Rambouillet by his filial piety. He showed himself brave and humane in Spain, and had the glory of restoring a kingdom to his kinsman, but was not able to save his own. Louis-Antoine, since the Days of July, thought of asking a shelter in Andalusia: Ferdinand would doubtless have refused it to him. The husband of Louis XVI.'s daughter was languishing in a village in Bohemia; a dog whose voice I heard was the Prince's only guard: thus Cerberus barks at the shades in the regions of death, silence and darkness.
I was never able, in the course of my long life, to revisit my paternal hearth; I was not able to settle down in Rome, where I so greatly longed to die; the eight hundred leagues which I was now completing, including my first journey to Bohemia, would have taken me to the most beautiful sites in Greece, Italy and Spain. I have covered all this distance and spent my last days to return to this cold, grey land: what have I done to Heaven to deserve this?
I entered Prague on the 29th, at four o'clock in the evening. I alighted at the Bath Hotel. I did not see the young Saxon servant-girl[272]; she had gone back to Dresden to console the banished pictures of Raphael with the songs of Italy.
29 September to 6 October 1833.
At Schlau, at midnight, a carriage was changing horses in front of the post-office. Hearing French spoken, I put my head out of the calash and said:
"Gentlemen, are you going to Prague? You will not find Charles X. there; he has gone away with Henry V."
I mentioned my name.
"What, gone?" exclaimed several voices together. "Go ahead, postillion, go ahead!"
My eight fellow-countrymen, after being stopped at Eger, had obtained permission to continue their journey, but under the care of an officer of police. It was curious, in 1833, to meet a convoy of servants of the Throne and the Altar, dispatched by the French Legitimacy and escorted by a policeman! In 1822, at Verona, I had seen cages full of Carbonari pass, accompanied by gendarmes. What is it that the sovereigns want? Whom do they recognise as friends? Do they fear the too-great crowds of their partisans? Instead of being touched by their fidelity, they treat men devoted to their crowns as propagandists and revolutionaries[273].
The post-master at Schlau had just invented the accordion[274]: he sold me one; the whole night I played upon its bellows, the sound of which carried away for me the memories of this world.
Carlsbad, through which I passed on the 30th of September, was deserted, like an opera-house after the performance. I met at Eger the extortioner who had made me tumble from the moon where I was spending the month of June with a lady from the Roman Campagna[275].
At Hollfeld, no swifts[276], no little girl with her basket[277]; this saddened me. Such is my nature: I idealize real personages and impersonate dreams, making matter and mind change places. A little girl and a bird to-day swell the crowd of the beings of my creation with whom my imagination is peopled, like those day-flies which sport in a ray of the sun. Forgive me, I am speaking of myself: I notice it when it is too late.
Here is Bamberg. Padua reminded me of Livy[278]; at Bamberg, Father Horrion recovered the first portion of the third and of the thirtieth books of the Roman historian. While I was supping in the birthplace of Joachim Camerarius[279] and Clavius[280], the librarian of the town came to greet me on account of my fame, the greatest in the world, according to him, which warmed the marrow of my bones.[Pg 143] Next, a Bavarian general came running up. At the door of the inn, the crowd surrounded me when I made for my carriage. A young woman had climbed upon a mile-stone, as did the Sainte-Beuve to see the Duc de Guise go by. She laughed:
"You are laughing at me?" I asked.
"No," she replied, in French, with a German accent, "it is because I am so glad!"
From the 1st to the 4th of October, I saw again the places which I had seen three months before. On the 4th, I reached the French frontier. To me St. Francis' Day is, every year, a day for examining my conscience. I turn my eyes upon the past; I ask myself where I was, what I was doing on each previous anniversary. This year 1833 found me wandering, a slave to my roving destinies. At the end of the road I saw a cross; it stood in a cluster of trees which silently dropped a few dead leaves upon the Man-God crucified. Twenty-seven years before, I spent St. Francis' Day at the foot of the real Golgotha.
My Patron Saint also visited the Holy Sepulchre. Francis of Assisi[281], the founder of the Mendicant Orders, by virtue of that institution caused the Gospel to take a great step forward: a fact that has not been sufficiently remarked upon. He achieved the introduction of the people into religion; by clothing the poor in a monk's frock, he forced the world to charity, raised the beggar in the eyes of the rich and, in a Christian proletarian army, established the model of that brotherhood of men which Christ had preached, a brotherhood which will be the fulfilment of that political side of Christianity as yet undeveloped, without which there will never be complete liberty and justice upon earth.
My Patron extended this brotherly love to the very animals, over whom he appeared to have reconquered by his innocence the empire which man exercised over them before his fall; he spoke to them as if they understood him; he gave them the name of "brothers" and "sisters." Near Baveno, as he was passing, a multitude of birds gathered around him; he greeted them and said:
"My winged brothers, love and praise God, for He hath clothed you with feathers and given you the power to fly in the sky."
The birds of the Lake of Rieti followed him. He rejoiced when he met flocks of sheep; he had a great compassion for them:
"Brothers," he said to them, "come to me."
Sometimes he would give his clothes in exchange for a sheep which was being led to the butcher's; he remembered a very meek Lamb, illius mentor agni minissimi, offered up for the salvation of mankind. A grass-hopper lived on the bough of a fig-tree near his door at the Portiuncula; he called it to him; it came to lie upon his hand and he said to it:
"Sister grasshopper, sing God thy Creator."
He did the same by a nightingale and was beaten at the concerts by a bird which he blessed and which flew away after its victory. He was obliged to have the little wild animals which ran up to him and sought shelter in his breast carried far away into the woods. When he wished to pray in the morning, he ordered silence of the swallows and they were dumb. A young man was going to Siena to sell some turtle-doves; the servant of God begged him to give them to him, so that doves, which, in the Scriptures, are the symbol of innocence and candour, might not be killed. The saint carried them to his convent at Ravacciano: he planted his stick at the door of the monastery; the stick changed into a tall evergreen oak; the saint let the turtle-doves go to it and commanded them to build their nest in its branches, which they did for many years.
Francis dying wished to leave the world naked, as he had entered it; he asked that his stripped body might be buried in the spot where the criminals were executed, in imitation of Christ, whom he had taken for his model. He dictated a will which was wholly spiritual, for he had nothing to leave to his brethren except poverty and peace: a sainted woman laid him in his tomb.
I received, from my Patron, poverty, the love of the small and humble, compassion for animals; but my barren stick will not change into an evergreen oak to protect them. I ought to think myself lucky to have trodden French soil on my saint's-day; but have I a country? Have I ever, in that country, enjoyed a moment of rest? On the 6th of October, in the morning, I returned to my Infirmary. The gale of St. Francis was still blowing. My trees, the budding refuges[Pg 145] of the miseries collected by my wife, bent before the anger of my Patron. In the evening, through the branchy elms of my boulevard, I saw the hanging street-lamps shaken to and fro, their half-extinguished lights flickering like the little lamp of my life[282].
[239] This book was written on the road from Padua to Prague, from 20 to 26 September 1833, and on the road from Prague to Paris, from 26 September to 6 October.—T.
[240] Columbus first touched land in America at Guanahani, one of the Bahama Islands, on the 12th of October 1492. The island is called "Watling's Island" on the English maps: it is possible to vulgarize most things; Christopher was content to christen it San Salvador.—T.
[241] Richard Lemon Lander (1804-1834) made several journeys of discovery in Africa, penetrated to the mouth of the Niger in 1831 and settled the question of its course and outlet. He returned to the Nun mouth in 1833, when he was fired upon by the natives and struck by a musket-ball in the thigh. He was removed to Fernando Po, where he died in February 1834.—T.
[242] Hazlitt's Montaigne: A Journey into Italy.—T.
[243] Chateaubriand: Tombeaux champêtres, 52-53, imitated from Gray's Elegy written in a Country Church-yard. Cf. 57-60:
"Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little Tyrant of his fields withstood,
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood."—T.
[244] Saint Rupert Bishop of Worms (fl. circa 700), known as the Apostle of the Bavarians from his missionary labours at Ratisbon, Salzburg, etc.—T.
[245] Cf. Vol. I., p. 21.—T.
[246] Ibid.—T.
[247] Cf. Vol. V., p. 354.—T.
[248] Maroboduus, or Marbod, King of the Marcomanni (b. 18 B.C.), mentioned in Tacitus.—T.
[249] Cf. Vol. V., p. 346.—T.
[250] Ibid., p. 347.—T.
[251] Ibid., p. 353.—T.
[252] Ibid., p. 350.—T.
[253] Cf. p. 38, n. 2, supra.—T.
[254] During the summer and part of the autumn, the Royal Family used to live at Butschirad, a lonely and gloomy residence, situated in a dull and desolate country, about five hours' drive from Prague.—B.
[255] Cf. Vol. I., p. 88.—T.
[256] Ibid., pp. 74 et seq.—T.
[257] Ibid., pp. 81 et seq.—T.
[258] By the old laws of the Monarchy, the majority of the Kings of France was fixed at the commencement of their fourteenth year. The memory of this law determined several hundreds of Frenchmen to go together to visit the Elder Branch of the Bourbons, at fifteen hundred miles from their country. This manifestation carried with it a certain hostility to the new Dynasty. The Government of July, accordingly, did not fail, naturally enough, when all is said and done, to put some petty annoyances in the way of the travellers. It prevailed upon the Austrian Government to turn a large number of them back at the frontiers. In Frankfort and Munich, King Louis-Philippe's chargés d'affaires refused to give the necessary visas; several were detained at Pilsen and Waldmünchen, as also at Mayence and Eger.
Moreover, this little manifestation was looked upon almost as unfavourably in Prague as in Paris. King Charles X. and his son, the Dauphin, had abdicated at Rambouillet, and they had no thought of withdrawing their respective abdications; only, in order to keep up the moral absence of responsibility of the Duc de Bordeaux and also to facilitate the relations between the exiles and the Cabinets, particularly the Cabinet of Vienna, they wished to retain, while on foreign soil, a title which seemed to them inseparable from that of heads of the Bourbon Family. The journey of the young Frenchmen who were coming to greet Henry of France on the day of his entering upon his fourteenth year might upset those private arrangements of the exiled Family. It was therefore not calculated to please the old King and his son. Hence the little incidents which the author of the Memoirs will presently describe to us.—B.
The Duc de Bordeaux was born on the 29th of September 1820, seven and a half months after his father's assassination, and therefore attained his majority, according to the laws of the French Monarchy, on the 29th of September 1833—T.
[259] "Among the visitors to Prague were Vendeans whose wounds were not yet closed and as many as eight persons who had been sentenced to death in their absence and who had saved their heads by flight." (Alfred Nettement: Henri de France, Vol. I, p. 264).—B.
[260] The Chroniques de Saint-Denys or Grandes chroniques de France were chronicles compiled from the earliest times of the French Monarchy by the Benedictines of Saint-Denis and kept in the treasury of the abbey. The Abbot of Saint-Denis used to appoint a monk as historiographer whose duty it was to follow the Court in order to collect and write down events as they occurred. On the death of the king, a history of his reign was drawn up from these notes, and this history, after being submitted to the Chapter, was incorporated in the Grandes chroniques. Suger, who became Abbot of Saint-Denis in 1122, collected all the chronicles compiled from the commencement of the Monarchy and himself wrote those of his own time. After the discovery of printing, an abstract of the Grandes chroniques was prepared and published by Jean Chartier, the Benedictine, in 1476, under the title, Chroniques de France depuis les Troiens jusqu'à la mort de Charles VII., in 3 volumes 4to. They constitute the first French book known to have been printed in Paris. These three volumes, which brought up the History of France to 1461, were reprinted, with a continuation to 1513, in 1514. A more recent edition appeared in Paris in 1836 to 1841, in 6 volumes 8vo.—T.
[261] Alfred Xavier Baron Dufougerais (1804-1874), a member of a royalist family, was a barrister in Paris when, in 1828, he became one of the proprietors and one of the editors of the Quotidien. In April 1831, he bought the Mode, revue du monde élégant from Émile de Girardin, its founder, and turned it into a political organ. He kept the fashion article and plates, so as to justify the title and retain the advantages attaching to the speciality; but at the same time the paper, in his hands, became a formidable weapon against the Monarchy of July. Without being exactly a writer, Alfred Dufougerais possessed the journalistic instinct to a high degree, and, under his management, the Mode soon took the leading place in the van-guard of the royalist press. In September 1834, the state of his health obliged him to transfer the ownership of his paper to other hands. Alfred Dufougerais, who was gifted with a genuine talent for speaking, preferred the contests of the bar to those of the press. He appeared in all the leading newspaper trials and soon became standing counsel to the royalist journals both in the provinces and in Paris. Among other feats, he thrice obtained the acquittal of the Indépendant de l'Ouest at Laval. In 1849, Dufougerais was elected by the Department of the Vendée to the Chamber of Deputies, where he constantly voted with the Right until the coup d'État of 2 December 1851, when he retired into private life.—B.
[262] Charles Vicomte de Nugent, poet and prose-writer and a member of the editorial staff of the Revenant and the Mode.—B.
[263] The modern apartments at Holyrood Palace were quite bare, when they were lent to Charles X. in 1830, and almost uninhabitable. The Wellington Administration, which made great difficulties about lending the palace to the King and his family at all, did so only on the express and almost barbarous condition that, "if there was a nail to be knocked in, they would have to do it at their own expense." In short, the unfortunate French exiles were allowed to arrive in Edinburgh, during a Scotch winter, to take possession of a lodging in which the very essentials of comfort were lacking, in which there was little but the four walls of each room: and these, the Duchesse de Gontaut, in 1831, informed M. P. J. Fallon, whose interesting little volume, Voyage à Holyrood pendant l'automne de 1831, is my authority, were, in the case of Mademoiselle's apartment, so cold and damp that at first they gave up the idea of occupying it. The state of the chimneys was such that it was impossible to warm the rooms without being stifled with smoke. M. Fallon gives a few details of the furniture supplied by Charles X. The throne-room or picture-gallery was left empty, but for a small table supporting an old lamp. The room before it was turned into a chapel, in which Mass was said daily: Charles X. used to hear Vespers at three o'clock on Sundays in the Catholic chapel next to the Adelphi Theatre. The large drawing-room leading out of the throne-room was fully but very simply furnished and contained a sofa with a back about four feet high: the little Duc de Bordeaux used to amuse himself by vaulting over it with one hand resting on the kick of it. The room leading out of this drawing-room, on the left, was almost empty; it contained a picture, by M. d'Hardivilliers, representing the landing of Charles X. at Leith. Next to this was the closet of Charles X., a large room completely furnished. The Dauphin and Dauphiness at first occupied a little eight-roomed house at 34 Regent's Terrace, in the New Town, at a rental of £80 a year, and did not move into Holyrood until October 1831. M, Fallon adds a further anecdote typical of the timorous policy of the Duke of Wellington's Ministry. So long as it remained in power, no guard was placed at the palace gate. Later, when the duke was succeeded by Earl Grey (November 1830), sentries were posted in the entrance-hall and at the foot of the two towers. But they were considered to be a guard of protection or convenience, not of honour, and they received no orders to present arms when the members of the Royal Family passed them.—T.
[264] The Marquis de Pastoret (Cf. Vol. V., p. 303, n. 2). He succeeded Dambray in 1829 as Chancellor of France and, although he resigned all his functions after the Revolution of July, he always remained the "Chancellor" to Charles X. In 1834, he became tutor to the children of the Duchesse de Berry, a charge to which he applied himself with great devotion, in spite of his advanced years: he was born in 1756.—B.
[265] Cf. Vol. V., p. 187, n. 4 and p. 188, n. 1.—T.
[266] Marie Joseph Marquis de Foresta (d. 1858) was prefect of different departments, under the Restoration, and an honorary lord of the Bed-chamber to the King. He had a cultured, nice and penetrating mind and had given proof of his literary talents at an early age, having dedicated to the Duchesse de Berry two charming and ingenious volumes entitled, Lettres sur la Sicile and published when he was only twenty-two. He remained attached to the person of the Comte de Chambord until his death (11 February 1858). The Marquise de Foresta was the finished type of a Christian gentleman.—B.
[267] Bohémiennes: gipsy-women. Cf. Vol. II., p. 55, where Chateaubriand, suffering from smallpox and starving, meets a gipsy-woman who gives him an apple.—T.
[268] Christine de Pisan (1363-1415), born in Venice, came to the Court of France with her father, Thomas de Pisan, who had been appointed astrologer to Charles V. She married a Frenchman of good family, was left a widow at an early age, and devoted herself to literature for her consolation. She left ballads, lays, virelays, rondeaus and short poems, such as the Débat des deux amants, the Chemin de longue étude, etc., and a number of prose works, including the Vision de Christine de Pisan and the work from which the above quotation is taken, entitled, the Livre des faiets et bonnes mœurs de Charles V. Some of her works were translated from the Romance language into French and published separately, in Paris, in 1522, 1536, 1549 and later years.—T.
[269] King Charles V. of France was surnamed the "Wise."—T.
[270] Philip III. King of France (1245-1285), surnamed the Bold, succeeded St. Louis IX., in 1270. He was a gallant King and would have cut a fine figure beside any other than his glorious father.—T.
[271] Charles VI. (1368-1422), surnamed the Well-Beloved, succeeded his father in 1380 and lost his reason in 1392 (Cf. supra p. 10, n. 3).—T.
[272] Cf. Vol. V., p. 392.—T.
[273] I received from Périgueux, on the 14th of November, the following letter, which, leaving the praises of myself on one side, states facts as I have told them:
Périgueux, 10 November 1833.
"Monsieur le vicomte,
"I cannot resist the wish to tell you of my disappointment when I was told, on Monday the 28th of October, that you were away. I had called on you to have the honour of paying you my respects and exchanging a few words with the man to whom I have devoted all my admiration. Obliged as I was to leave Paris that same night, where perhaps I shall not return again, it would have been very pleasant for me to have seen you. When, in spite of my family's moderate means, I undertook the journey to Prague, I had placed among the Dumber of my hopes that of introducing myself to you. And yet, monsieur le vicomte, I cannot say that I have not seen you: I was one of the eight young men whom you met in the middle of the night at Schlau, not far from Prague. We arrived after having, for five mortal days, been the victims of the intrigue that has since been revealed to us. That meeting, at that place and hour, has something odd about it and will never be effaced from my memory, any more than will the image of him to whom royalist France owes the most useful services.
"Pray accept, etc.
"P. G. Jules Determes."—(Author's Note).
[274] The accordion appears to have been invented really by Damian, in Vienna, in the year 1829.—T.
[275] Cf. supra, p. 4.—T.
[276] Cf. supra, p. 8.—T.
[277] Cf. supra, p. 8.—T.
[278] Cf. supra, p. 105.—T.
[279] Joachim Liebhard (1500-1574), known as Camerarius, because several members of his family had been chamberlains, a native of Bamberg, a learned scholar, a friend of Melanchthon. Camerarius was the author of valuable Latin translations of many of the Greek classics, published editions, with commentaries, of many of the Latin classics, edited Melanchthon's Letters and left a Life of Melanchthon, Letters, Fables, etc.
[280] Christopher Clavius (1537-1612), a native of Bamberg and a great Jesuit mathematician, was sent to Rome, where Gregory XIII. employed him on the reform of the Calendar.—T.
[281] Giovanni Francesco Bernardone (1182-1226), canonized by Pope Gregory IX., in 1228, as St. Francis of Assisi, founded the Order of the Franciscans, or Mendicant Friars, in 1208: their rule was confirmed by Pope Honorius III. in 1223. St. Francis visited the Holy Land in 1219. In 1224, two years before his death, he received the Stigmata, on the heights of Monte La Verna, on the morning of the 14th of September, the Feast of the Exaltation of Holy Cross.—T.
[282] The above page was written on the 6th of October 1833. Those which follow were begun in 1837. In September 1836, Chateaubriand wrote, at the Château de Maintenon, a chapter which was intended for his Memoirs, but not included in the earlier editions. This short chapter has been recovered by M. Biré and it will be found at the end of this volume as Appendix II.: Unpublished Fragments of the Mémoires if Outre-tombe.—T.
General politics of the moment—Louis-Philippe—M. Thiers—M. de La Fayette—Armand Carrel—Of some women: the lady from Louisiana—Madame Tastu—Madame Sand—M. de Talleyrand—Death of Charles X.
When, passing from the politics of the Legitimacy to general politics, I re-read what I wrote on those politics in the years 1831, 1832 and 1833, I find that my previsions were fairly correct
Louis-Philippe is a man of intelligence whose tongue is set in movement by a torrent of commonplaces. He pleases Europe, which reproaches us with not knowing his worth; England is glad to see that, like herself, we have dethroned a king; the other sovereigns forsake the Legitimacy, which they did not find obedient. Philip has lorded it over the men who have come closer to him; he has made game of his ministers; he has employed them, dismissed them, reemployed them, dismissed them afresh, after compromising them, if anything can compromise one nowadays.
Philip's superiority is real, but it is only relative; place him in a period when society still retains some life, and his mediocrity shall come to the surface. Two passions spoil his good qualities: his exclusive love for his children and his insatiable eagerness to increase his fortune; on those two points his eyes will always be dazzled.
Philip has not that feeling for the honour of France which the elder Bourbons had; he has no occasion for honour: he fears nothing except popular risings, even as the nearest relations of Louis XVI. feared it. He is sheltered by his father's crime; the hatred of what is good does not weigh heavy on him: he is an accomplice, not a victim.
Having realized the lassitude of the times and the vileness of men's souls, Philip has made himself at home. Laws of intimidation have come to suppress our liberties, as I foretold[Pg 147] at the time of my farewell speech in the House of Peers, and not a thing has stirred; the Government has resorted to arbitrary measures; it has murdered people in the Rue Transnonain, shot them down in Lyons, instituted numerous newspaper prosecutions; it has arrested private citizens, has kept them for months and years in prison without trial, and has been applauded for doing so. The exhausted country, which no longer understands what is happening, has suffered all. There is hardly a man whom it is not possible to face with his own past. From year to year, from month to month, we have written, said and done the exact opposite of what we used to write, say and do. By dint of having cause for blushing, we have ceased to blush; our inconsistencies escape our memory, so numerous have they become. To have done with it, we adopt the course of declaring that we have never changed, or that we have changed only through the progressive transformation of our ideas and our enlightened apprehension of the times. Events so rapid have aged us so speedily that, when men remind us of our doings of a past period, it seems to us that they are talking of some other man than ourselves: and besides, to have changed is to have done what everybody does.
Philip did not think it necessary, as did the Restored Branch, to be the master in every village in order to reign; he considered that it was enough to hold sway in Paris: therefore, if ever he could turn the Capital into a warlike town, with an annual roll of sixty thousand pretorians, he would think himself safe. Europe would let him alone, because he would persuade the sovereigns that he was acting with a view to stifling the revolution in its old cradle, while leaving the liberties, independence and honour of France as a pledge in the hands of the foreigners. Philip is a policeman: Europe can spit in his face; he wipes himself, gives thanks and shows his patent as a king. Moreover, he is the only Prince whom the French would, at present, be capable of supporting. The degradation of the elected Head constitutes his strength; we momentarily find in his person enough to satisfy our monarchical habits and our democratic leanings; we obey a power which we believe ourselves to have the right to insult; that is all the liberty that we require: on our knees as a nation, we slap our master's face, re-establishing privilege at his feet, equality on his cheek. Crafty and guileful, a Louis XI. of the age of philosophy, the monarch of our choice dexterously steers his ship over a[Pg 148] liquid mire. The Elder Branch of the Bourbons is dried up, save one bud alone; the Younger Branch is rotten. The Head inaugurated at the town-hall has never thought of any one but himself: he sacrifices Frenchmen to what he believes to be his security. When men argue about what would be fitting for the greatness of the country, they forget the nature of the Sovereign: he is persuaded that he would be undone by methods which would be the saving of France; according to him, that which would give life to the Royalty would be the death of the King. For the rest, none has the right to despise him, for every one is on the same contemptible level. But, whatever may be the prosperity that forms the object of his dreams, in the last result, either he or his children will fail to prosper, because he abandons the people, from whom he holds all. On the other hand, the legitimate kings, abandoning the legitimate kings, will fall: principles are not denied with impunity. Though the revolutions may, for a moment, have been diverted from their course, they will none the less come to swell the torrent which is under-mining the ancient edifice: none has played his part, none shall be saved.
Since no power among us is inviolable, since the hereditary sceptre has fallen four times within thirty-eight years, since the royal diadem fastened by victory has twice slipped from the head of Napoleon, since the Sovereignty of July has been incessantly attacked, we must conclude from this that it is not the Republic which is impossible, but the Monarchy.
France is under the dominion of an idea hostile to the throne: a diadem of which men at first recognised the authority, which they next trod under foot, then picked up, only to tread it under foot again, is merely a useless temptation and a symbol of disorder. A master is set over men who seem to call for him by their memories and who no longer support him by their manners; he is set over generations which, having lost the sense of moderation and social decency, know only how to insult the royal person or to replace respect by servility.
Philip has within him the wherewithal to delay the march of destiny, but not to stop it. The Democratic Party alone is progressing, because it is advancing towards the world of the future. Those who refuse to admit the general causes of destruction where monarchical principles are concerned in vain look to be delivered from the present yoke by a motion of the Chambers; the latter will never consent to[Pg 149] reform, because reform would be their death. The Opposition, on its side, which has become an industrial Opposition, will never give the death-thrust to the King of its own making, as it gave it to Charles X.: it makes a disturbance in order to obtain places, it complains, it is peevish; but, when it finds itself face to face with Philip, it draws back; for, though it wishes to have the handling of affairs, it does not wish to overthrow that which it has created nor that by which it lives. Two fears stop it: the fear of the return of the Legitimacy, the fear of the reign of the people; it clings to Philip, whom it does not love, but whom it looks upon as a safeguard. Stuffed full of offices and money, abdicating its own will, the Opposition obeys what it knows to be fatal and goes to sleep in the mire, which is the down invented by the industry of the age: it is not so pleasant as the other, but it is cheaper.
All these things notwithstanding, a sovereignty of a few months, of a few years, even, if you wish, will not change the irrevocable future. There is hardly any one now but confesses the Legitimacy to have been preferable to the Usurpation, in so far as security, liberty, property were concerned, and also our relations with foreign Powers, for the principle of our present Sovereignty is hostile to that of the European sovereignties. Since he was pleased to receive the investiture of the Throne at the good pleasure and with the certain knowledge of the democracy, Philip missed his opportunity at the start: he ought to have leapt on horseback and galloped to the Rhine; or rather, he ought to have resisted a movement which was carrying him without conditions towards a crown: more durable and more suitable institutions would have arisen from that resistance.
It has been said that "M. le Duc d'Orléans could not have refused the crown without plunging us into dreadful troubles:" this is the argument of cowards, dupes and cheats. No doubt, conflicts would have ensued; but they would have been swiftly followed by a return to law and order. What has Philip done for the country after all? Would there have been more blood shed by his refusing the sceptre than flowed because of the acceptance of that same sceptre in Paris, Lyons, Antwerp, the Vendée, without reckoning those streams of blood spilt, as a consequence of our Elective Monarchy, in Poland, Italy, Portugal, Spain? Has Philip, in compensation for these misfortunes, given us liberty? Has he given us glory? He has spent his time[Pg 150] in begging for his legitimation among the potentates, in degrading France by making her the handmaid of England, by giving her as a hostage; he has tried to make the age come to him, to make it old with his House, not wishing to become young himself with the age.
Why did he not marry his eldest son[284] to some fair commoner of his country? That would have meant wedding France: those nuptials of the people and the Royalty would have made the Kings repent; for those Kings, who have already taken advantage of Philip's submissiveness, will not be content with what they have obtained: the might of the populace which appears through our Municipal Monarchy terrifies them. The Potentate of the Barricades, to become completely agreeable to the absolute potentates, ought above all to destroy the liberty of the press and abolish our constitutional institutions. At the bottom of his soul, he detests them as much as they, but he has to keep within bounds. All this remissness offends the other sovereigns; the only way to make them have patience is to sacrifice everything to them abroad: in order to accustom us to becoming Philip's liegemen at home, we are commencing by making ourselves the vassals of Europe.
I have said a hundred times and I repeat again, the old society is dying. I am not easy-going enough, nor quack enough, nor sufficiently deceived by my hopes to take the smallest interest in that which exists. France, the ripest of the present nations, will probably be the first to go. It is likely that the Elder Bourbons, to whom I shall die attached, would not even to-day find a lasting shelter in the Old Monarchy. Never have the successors of an immolated monarch worn his torn mantle long after him: there is distrust on both sides; the prince dares not rely upon the nation, the nation refuses to believe that the reinstated family is capable of forgiving it. A scaffold raised between a people and a king prevents them from seeing each other: there are tombs that never close. Capet's head was so high that the little executioners were obliged to strike it off to take its crown, even as the Caribbees used to cut down the palm-tree in order to gather its fruit. The stem of the Bourbons had[Pg 151] propagated itself in the different trunks which, bending down, took root and rose again as haughty shoots; that family, after being the pride of the other royal Houses, seems to have become their fatality.
But would it be more reasonable to think that the descendants of Philip would have more chances of reigning than the young heir of Henry IV.? It is vain to contrive different combinations of political ideas: the moral verities remain unchangeable. There are inevitable reactions, instructive, magisterial, avenging. The Monarch who initiated us into liberty, Louis XVI., was made to expiate in his own person the despotism of Louis XIV. and the corruption of Louis XV.: and shall it be said that Louis-Philippe, he or his line, shall not pay the debt of the depravity, of the Regency? Was that debt not contracted anew by "Égalité" at the scaffold of Louis XVI., and did Philip his son not increase the paternal contract when, a faithless guardian, he dethroned his ward? "Égalité" redeemed nothing by losing his life; the tears shed with the last breath redeem nobody: they only wet the breast and do not fall upon the conscience. If the Orleans Branch were able to reign by the right of the vices and crimes of its ancestors, where, then, would Providence be? Never would a more terrible temptation have disquieted the good man. What deludes us is that we measure the designs of Eternity by the scale of our short life. We pass away so quickly that God's punishment cannot always fall within the short moment of our existence: the punishment descends when the time comes; it no longer finds the original culprit, but it finds his House, which leaves room for action.
Rising up in the universal order of things, this reign of Louis-Philippe's, however long it last, will never be anything but an anomaly, a momentary breach of the permanent laws of justice: those laws are violated in a restricted and relative sense; they are followed in an unlimited and general sense. From an enormity that has received the apparent consent of Heaven, we must draw a loftier conclusion: we must deduce from it the Christian proof of the abolition of the Royalty itself. It is this abolition, and not any individual chastisement, that will become the expiation of the death of Louis XVI.; none will be admitted to gird on the diadem, after that just man: as witness Napoleon the Great and Charles X. the Pious. To render the crown completely hateful, it will have been permitted to the son of the[Pg 152] regicide to stretch himself for a moment, as a false king, in the blood-stained bed of the martyr.
For the rest, all these arguments, just though they be, will never shake my loyalty to my young King: were none but myself to remain in France, I shall always be proud to have been the last subject of him who was to be the last king.
The Revolution of July has found its King: has it found its representative? I have, at different times, described the men who, from 1789 to this day, have appeared upon the scene. Those men were more or less connected with the old race of mankind: we had a scale of proportion to measure them by. We have now come to generations that no longer belong to the past; studied under the microscope, they do not seem capable of life, and yet they combine with elements in which they move; they are able to breathe an air which we cannot breathe. The future will perhaps discover formulas to calculate the laws of existence of those beings; but the present has no means of appreciating them.
Without, therefore, being able to explain the changed species, we notice, here and there, a few individuals whom we are able to grasp, because of their peculiar failings or distinctive qualities which make them stand out from among the crowd. M. Thiers, for instance, is the only man that the Revolution of July has produced. He has founded the school that admires the Terror, a school to which he himself belongs. If the men of the Terror, those deniers and denied of God, were such great men, the authority of their judgment ought to carry weight; but those men, reviling one another, declare that the party whose throats they are cutting is a party of rascals. See what Madame Roland says of Condorcet, what Barbaroux[285], the principal actor of the 10th of August, thinks of Marat, what Camille Desmoulins writes against Saint-Just[286] Are we to appreciate Danton according[Pg 153] to Robespierre's opinion, or Robespierre according to Danton's? When the Conventionals have so poor a notion of one another, how can we, without failing in the respect which we owe them, entertain an opinion different from theirs?
With its material mind, Jacobinism does not perceive that the Terror failed from not being capable of fulfilling the conditions of its continuance. It was unable to achieve its aim, because it was unable to cut off enough heads: it would have needed four or five hundred thousand more; now time was wanting for those long massacres; nothing remains but unfinished crimes whose fruit cannot be gathered, because the last sun of the storm did not ripen it sufficiently.
The secret of the inconsistencies of the men of the day lies in the privation of moral sense, the absence of any fixed principle and the worship of force: whoever goes to the wall is guilty and without merit, at least without that merit which assimilates with events. Behind the liberal phrases of the devotees of the Terror, you must see only what lies hidden there: the deification of success. Do not adore the Convention except in the manner in which one adores a tyrant. When the Convention is upset, go over with your baggage of liberties to the Directory, then to Bonaparte, and that without having a suspicion of your metamorphosis, without thinking that you have changed. Sworn dramatist that you are, while looking upon the Girondins as poor wretches because they have been "beaten," nevertheless draw a fantastic picture of their death: they are beautiful young men marching, crowned with flowers, to the sacrifice. The Girondins, a cowardly faction, who spoke in favour of Louis XVI. and voted for his execution, did wonderfully, it is true, on the scaffold; but who did not, in those days, run full butt at death? The women were distinguished for their heroism: the young girls of Verdun climbed the steps of the altar like Iphigenia; the artisans, about whom we are prudently[Pg 154] silent, those plebeians of whom the Convention reaped so large a crop, braved the steel of the executioner as resolutely as our grenadiers braved the steel of the enemy. For one priest and one noble, the Convention offered up thousands of workmen taken from the lowest classes of the population[287]: this is what we always refuse to remember.
Does M. Thiers set store by his principles? Not in the least: he has cried up massacre and he would preach humanity in quite as edifying a manner; he gave himself out as a bigot for liberty, and he has oppressed Lyons, shot people down in the Rue Transnonain, and upheld the September Laws against all men: if he ever reads this, he will take it for a panegyric.
Since he became President of the Council and Minister for Foreign Affairs[288], M. Thiers is enraptured with the diplomatic intrigues of the Talleyrand School; he runs the risk of being taken for a buffoon-in-waiting, for lack of equilibrium, gravity and silence. One can turn up one's nose at earnestness and greatness of soul: but it does not do to say so, before one has brought the subjugated world to take its seat at the orgies of Grand-Vaux[289].
For the rest, M. Thiers combines with inferior manners an instinct for higher things; while the feudal survivors have become misers and turned themselves into stewards of their own land, he, M. Thiers, a great lord by second birth, travels like a new Atticus[290], purchases works of art on the roads and[Pg 155] revives the prodigality of the old aristocracy: this is a distinction; but, if he sows as easily as he reaps, he ought to be more cautious of the intimacy of his old habits: consideration is one of the ingredients that go to make the public man.
Stirred by his mercurial nature, M. Thiers has pretended that he was going to kill, in Madrid, the anarchy which I had overthrown there in 1823: a project all the bolder inasmuch as M. Thiers was struggling with the opinions of Louis-Philippe. He may suppose himself to be a Bonaparte; he may think that his pen-cutter is but an elongation of the Napoleonic sword; he may be persuaded that he is a great general, he may dream of the conquest of Europe, by reason that he has constituted himself its historian[291] and that he is very inconsiderately bringing back the ashes of Napoleon[292]. I acquiesce in all these pretensions; I will only say, as for Spain, that, when M. Thiers thought of invading her, he was deceived in his calculations; he would have ruined his King in 1836, and I saved mine in 1823. The essential thing, then, is to do in the nick of time what one wants to do; there are two forces, the force of men and the force of things: when these two are in opposition to one another, nothing is accomplished. At the present moment, Mirabeau would rouse nobody, even though his corruption would do him no harm; for, just now, none is cried down because of his vices: one is slandered only for his virtues. M. Thiers must make up his mind to one of three courses: to declare himself the representative of the republican future[293], or perch himself[Pg 156] upon the counterfeit Monarchy of July like a monkey on a camel's back, or revive the imperial order of things. This last would be to M. Thiers's taste; but the Empire without an emperor: is that possible? It is more natural to believe that the author of the Histoire de la Révolution will allow himself to be absorbed by a vulgar ambition: he will want to remain in power or return to it; in order to keep or recover his place, he will recant anything that the moment or his own interest will seem to him to require[294]; to strip one's self before the public, there is audacity: but is M. Thiers young enough for his beauty to serve him as a veil?
Putting Deutz[295] and Judas on one side, I recognise in M. Thiers a supple, prompt, shrewd and malleable mind, perhaps the heir to the future, capable of comprehending everything, except the greatness that comes from moral order. Free from jealousy, pettiness and prejudice, he stands out against the tame and obscure background of the mediocrities of the time. His excessive pride is not yet odious, because it does not consist in despising others. M. Thiers possesses resources, variety, fortunate gifts; he troubles little about differences of opinion, bears no malice, is not afraid of compromising himself, does justice to a man, not for his probity or for what he thinks, but for what he is worth: which would not prevent him from having us all strangled, in case of need. M. Thiers is not what he is able to be: years will modify him, unless the elation of self-love should place obstacles in the way. If his brain stands firm and he is not carried away by some headstrong act, public life will reveal unheeded superior qualities in him. He must soon rise or fall; the chances are that M. Thiers will either become a great minister or remain a marplot.
M. Thiers has already been wanting in resolution at a time when he held the fate of the world in his hands: if he had given the order to attack the English Fleet, with the superior[Pg 157] force that we had in the Mediterranean, our success was assured; the Turkish and Egyptian Fleets, lying together in the harbour of Alexandria, would have come to swell our fleet; a success obtained over England would have electrified France. We should have at once found 150,000 men to enter Bavaria and fling themselves upon some point in Italy, where nothing was prepared in prevision of an attack. The whole world might once more have changed its aspect. Would our aggression have been a just one? That is another affair; but we could have asked Europe whether it had acted loyally towards us in the treaties, or whether, abusing their victory, Russia and Germany had enlarged their territory beyond measure, while France had been reduced to her old clipped frontiers. Be this as it may, M. Thiers did not dare play his last card; looking upon his life, he did not think himself sufficiently supported, and yet it was because he was staking nothing that he might have played for all. We have fallen under the feet of Europe; such an opportunity to recover ourselves will perhaps not occur for long.
In the last result, M. Thiers, in order to save his system, has reduced France to a space of fifteen leagues which he has made to bristle with fortresses; we shall soon see if Europe is right in laughing at this piece of child's play on the part of the great thinker.
And this is how, allowing my pen to run away with me, I have devoted more pages to a man of uncertain future than I have given to persons whose memory is assured. It is a misfortune to live too long; I have come to a period of sterility in which France sees only lean generations run: Lupa carca nella sua magrezza.[296] These Memoirs diminish in interest with the days that have supervened, diminish by what they were able to borrow from the greatness of events: they will end, I fear me, like the daughters of Achelous[297]. The Roman Empire, so magnificently proclaimed by Livy, contracts and goes out dimly in the accounts of Cassiodorus. You were more fortunate, O Thucydides and Plutarch, Sallust and Tacitus, when you told of the parties that divided Athens and Rome! You were certain, at least, of animating them, not only with your genius, but also with the splendour[Pg 158] of the Greek and the gravity of the Latin language! What could we relate of our expiring society, we Welshmen, in our jargon confined to narrow and barbarous limits? If these later pages reproduced our parliamentary tautology, those eternal definitions of our rights, our ministerial prize-fights, would they, fifty years hence, be anything more than the unintelligible columns of an old newspaper? Of a thousand and one conjectures, would a single one prove to be true? Who would foresee the strange leaps and bounds of the inconstancy of the French spirit? Who could understand how its execrations and infatuations, its curses and blessings become transformed without apparent reason? Who would be able to guess and explain how, by turns, it adores and detests, how it springs from a political system, how, with liberty on its lips and bondage in its heart, it believes in one truth in the morning and is persuaded of a contrary truth at night? Throw us a few grains of dust: like Virgil's bees, we shall cease our conflict to fly away elsewhither[298].
If, by chance, anything great should still be stirring here below, our country will remain supine. The womb of a society that is becoming discomposed is barren; the very crimes which it begets are still-born crimes, smitten as they are with the barrenness of their origin. The period upon which we are entering is the tow-path along which fatally condemned generations will draw the old world towards a world unknown.
In this year 1834, M. de La Fayette has just died[299]. I think I must have been unjust in speaking of him in former days; I think I must have represented him as a sort of double-faced, double-famed ninny: a hero on the other side of the Atlantic, a Giles on this side[300]. It has needed more than forty years to recognise in M. de La Fayette qualities[Pg 159] that had been persistently denied him. He expressed himself in the Tribune with ease and in the tone of a well-bred man. His life was unblemished; he was affable, obliging and generous. Under the Empire, he behaved nobly and lived a life apart; under the Restoration, he was less dignified: he stooped so far as to allow himself to be called the "grand old man" of the auction-rooms of Carbonarism and the ring-leader of petty conspiracies, glad as he was to escape from justice at Belfort[301], like a vulgar adventurer. In the early stages of the Revolution, he did not mix with the cut-throats; he fought them by force of arms and tried to save Louis XVI.; but, though abhorring the massacres, obliged though he were to fly from them, he found words of praise for scenes in which some heads were carried at the ends of pikes.
M. de La Fayette became exalted because he lived: there is a reputation which bursts forth spontaneously from talent and of which death increases the splendour by arresting the talent in youth; there is another sort of reputation which is the offspring of age, the backward daughter of time: without being great of itself, it is great through the revolutions in whose midst chance has placed it. The bearer of that reputation, by the mere fact of his existence, is mixed up with everything; his name becomes the sign or the banner of everything: M. de La Fayette[302] will be the "National Guard" to the end of time. By an extraordinary effect, the result of his actions was often in contradiction with his thoughts: as a Royalist, he overthrew, in 1789, a Royalty eight centuries old; as a Republican, he created, in 1830, the Royalty of the Barricades: he went away giving Philip the crown which he had taken from Louis XVI. Moulded as he was with events, when the alluvium of our misfortunes shall have become consolidated, his image will be found encrusted in the revolutionary dough.
The ovation which he received in the United States enhanced his fame to a singular degree: a nation, rising to greet him, covered him with the effulgence of its gratitude. Everett[303] apostrophized him as follows in the peroration to the speech which he delivered in 1824:
"Welcome, friend of our fathers, to our shores!... Enjoy a triumph such as never conqueror or monarch enjoyed.... The friend of your youth, the more than friend of his country, rests in the bosom of the soil he redeemed. On the banks of his Potomac he lies in glory and peace. You will revisit the hospitable shades of Mount Vernon, but him whom you venerated as we did, you will not meet at its door.... But the grateful children of America will bid you welcome, in his name. Welcome, thrice welcome to our shores; and whithersoever throughout the limits of the continent your course shall take you, the ear that hears you shall bless you, the eye that sees you shall bear witness to you, and every tongue exclaim, with heartfelt joy:
"'Welcome, welcome, La Fayette[304]!'"
In the New World, M. de La Fayette contributed to the formation of a new society; in the Old World, to the destruction of an old society: liberty invokes him in Washington, anarchy in Paris.
M. de La Fayette had only one idea, and, unfortunately for him, it was that of his century; the fixity of that idea constituted his empire: it served him as a blinker, prevented him from looking to right or left of him; he walked with a firm step along a single line; he marched on without falling into precipices, not because he saw them, but because he did not see them; blindness stood him in the stead of genius: all that is fixed is fatal, and that which is fatal is powerful.
I still see M. de La Fayette, at the head of the National Guard, passing along the boulevards, in 1790, on his way to the Faubourg Saint-Antoine; on the 22nd of May 1834, I saw him lying in his coffin, following the same boulevards. In the funeral procession one remarked a troop of Americans, each with a yellow flower in his button-hole. M. de La Fayette had sent to the United States for a quantity of earth sufficient to cover him in his grave; but his intentions[Pg 161] were not carried out[305]: when the fatal moment came, forgetting both his political dreams and the romance of his life, he expressed the wish to lie at Picpus beside his virtuous wife[306]: death restores order to all things.
At Picpus are buried the victims of the Revolution[307] commenced by M. de La Fayette; there stands a chapel where perpetual prayers are said in honour of those victims. I accompanied M. le Duc Matthieu de Montmorency to Picpus[308]; he had been M. de La Fayette's colleague in the Constituent Assembly: on touching the bottom of the grave, the rope turned that Christian's coffin on one side, as though he had raised himself on his hip to say a last prayer.
I stood in the crowd, at the entrance to the Rue Grange-Batelière, when M. de La Fayette's funeral passed by: at the top of the ascent to the boulevard, the hearse stopped; I saw it, all gilded by a fleeting ray of the sun, gleam above the helmets and arms: then the shadow returned, and it disappeared from sight.
The multitude dispersed; sellers of "goodies" cried their oublies[309], vendors of trifles hawked about paper mills, which twirled round in the same wind whose breath had shaken the plumes of the funeral car.
In the sitting of the Chamber of Deputies of the 20th of May 1834, the President[310] spoke:
"General La Fayette's name," he said, "will remain famous in our history.... While expressing to you the sentiments of condolence of the Chamber, I join to these, sir and dear colleague[311], the private assurance of my attachment."
After these words, the reporter of the sitting adds, in brackets, the word, "(Laughter)."
That is what one of the most serious lives is reduced to. What remains of the death of the greatest men? A grey mantle and a straw cross, as on the corpse of the Duc de Guise, assassinated at Blois.
Within earshot of the public crier who was selling for a son, at the gate of the Tuileries Palace, the news of the death of Napoleon, I heard two quacks shouting the praises of their antidotes; and, in the Moniteur of the 21st of January 1793, I read the following words below the account of the execution of Louis XVI.:
"Two hours after the execution, nothing remained to show that he who had once been the head of the nation had just undergone the punishment of criminals."
Following on those words came this notice:
"Ambroise, comic opera[312]."
The last actor in the drama played fifty years ago, M. de La Fayette remained upon the scene; the last chorus of the Greek tragedy delivers the moral of the play:
"Learn, O blind mortals, to turn your eyes upon the last day of life."
And I, a spectator seated in an empty play-house, amid deserted boxes and extinguished lights, remain alone, of my time, before the lowered curtain, alone with the silence and the night.
Armand Carrel threatened Philip's future even as General La Fayette beset his past You know how I came to be acquainted with M. Carrel[313]; since 1832, I did not cease to keep up relations with him until the day when I followed him to the Cemetery of Saint-Mandé.
Armand Carrel was melancholy; he began to fear that the French were incapable of a rational feeling of liberty; he had a vague presentiment of the shortness of his life: as though it were a thing upon which he did not rely and to which he attached no value, he was always willing to risk it on a cast of the die. If he had fallen in his duel with young Laborie[314], about Henry V., his death would at least have had a great cause and a great stage; probably his funeral would have been honoured by a great display of bloodshed: he left us for a miserable quarrel which was not worth a hair of his head.
He was suffering from one of his native attacks of gloom, when he inserted an article on myself, in the National, to which I replied by the following note:
"Paris, 5 May 1834.
"Your article, monsieur, is full of that exquisite feeling for situations and proprieties which places you above all the political writers of the day. I say nothing to you of your exceptional talent; you know that I did it ample justice before I had the honour of knowing you. I do not thank you for your praises: I like to owe them to what I look upon now as an old friendship. You are rising very high, monsieur; you are beginning to stand alone, like all men made for a great fame: gradually the crowd, unable to follow them, leaves them, and we see them the better because they hold themselves aloof.
"Chateaubriand."
I tried to console him by another letter, on the 31st of August, when he was condemned for a newspaper offense. I received the following reply from him; it shows forth the opinions of the man, his regrets and his hopes:
To Monsieur le Vicomte le Chateaubriand
"Monsieur,
"Your letter of the 31st of August was handed to me only on my arrival in Paris. I would come to thank you for it, at once, if I were not obliged to devote the short time which can still be left to me by the police, who are informed of my return, to a few preparations for entering prison. Yes, monsieur, here am I condemned by the bench to six months' imprisonment for a fanciful offense and by virtue of an equally fanciful piece of legislation; for the jury wittingly let me go unpunished upon the best-founded charge, and that in spite of a defense which, so far from extenuating my crime of telling the truth to the person of King Louis-Philippe, had aggravated that crime by setting it up as an established right for the whole of the opposition press. I am glad that the difficulties of so bold a thesis, as times go, appeared to you to be almost surmounted by the defense which you read and in which it was so great an advantage to me to be able to invoke the authority of the book in which, eighteen years ago, you instructed your own party in the principles of constitutional responsibility.
"I often ask myself with a heavy heart what purpose will have been served by writings such as yours, monsieur, such as those of the most eminent men of the opinion to which I myself belong, if, from this agreement between the highest intellects of the country for the constant defense of the rights of discussion, there did not at last result, for the bulk of French minds, a resolve thenceforth to insist upon, under every form of government, to exact from all victorious systems, whatever they may be, liberty of thought, speech and writing, as the first condition of all lawfully exercised authority. Is it not true, monsieur, that when, under the last government, you asked for the most complete liberty of discussion, it was not for the momentary service which your political friends might derive from it in opposition to adversaries who had forced their way into power by intrigue? There were some who made use of the press in this way, as they have since proved; but you, monsieur, asked for liberty of discussion as essential to the public welfare, as the weapon and general protection of all ideas, young or old; that is what earned for you, monsieur, the gratitude[Pg 165] and respect of opinions to which the Revolution of July has opened the lists again. That is why our work is incident on yours, and, when we quote your writings, we do so less from admiration of the incomparable talent which produced them than as aspiring to continue the same task at a great distance, young soldiers as we are of a cause of which you are the most glorious veteran.
"What you have wished for thirty years, monsieur, what I would wish, if I be permitted to mention myself after you, is to secure to the interests that divide our beautiful France a law of combat that shall be more humane, more civilized, more brotherly, more conclusive than civil war. When shall we succeed in bringing ideas face to face, instead of parties, and lawful and avowable interests, instead of disguises, egoism and cupidity? When shall we see speech and persuasion cause those inevitable transactions which the contest of parties and the shedding of blood also bring to pass by exhaustion, but too late for the dead in both camps and, too often, without profit for the wounded and survivors? As you so sorrowfully say, monsieur, it seems that many lessons have been wasted and that men no longer know in France what it costs to take refuge in a despotism that promises silence and repose. We must none the less continue to speak, write and print; resources most unforeseen sometimes issue from constancy. And so, of all the splendid examples which you, monsieur, have set, that which I have most constantly before my eyes is expressed in one word: Persevere.
"Accept, monsieur, the sentiments of unalterable affection with which I am glad to call myself
"Your most devoted servant,
"A. Carrel.
"Puteaux, near Neuilly, 4 October 1834."
M. Carrel was locked up at Sainte-Pélagie; I used to go to see him two or three times a week: I found him standing behind his window-grating. He reminded me of his neighbour, a young African lion in the Jardin des Plantes: motionless at the bars of its cage, the son of the desert turned its vague and sad look upon the objects outside; one could see that he would not live. Then M. Carrel and I used to go down the stairs; the servant of Henry V. walked with the enemy of the Kings in a damp, dark, narrow yard, surrounded by high walls, like a well. There[Pg 166] were other Republicans also taking exercise in this yard: those young and ardent Revolutionaries, with their mustachios, beards, long hairs, Greek or German caps, pale faces, fierce looks, threatening aspect, were like those pre-existent souls in Tartarus that had not yet reached the light; they were preparing to break into life. Their dress acted upon them as the uniform upon the soldier, as Nessus' blood-stained shirt upon Hercules: they were an avenging world, which lay hidden behind the society of the present and which made one shudder.
In the evening, they met in the room of their leader, Armand Carrel; they spoke of what would have to be accomplished when they came into power and of the necessity for bloodshed. Discussions arose on the "great citizens of the Terror:" some, who were partisans of Marat, were atheists and materialists; others, who admired Robespierre, adored that new Christ. Had not St. Robespierre said, in his speech on the Supreme Being, that belief in God "gives strength to defy misfortune" and that "innocence on the scaffold made the tyrant turn pale in his triumphal car?" The hocus-pocus of an executioner who talks meltingly of God, misfortune, tyranny, scaffolds, in order to persuade men that he kills only the guilty, and even then in consequence of virtue; the foresight of evil-doers who, feeling the punishment draw nigh, pose in advance as Socrates before the judge and try to frighten the blade by threatening it with their innocence!
The stay at Sainte-Pélagie did M. Carrel harm: shut up with hot-heads, he fought against their ideas, blamed them, defied them, nobly refusing to illuminate his room on the 21st of January; but, at the same time, he chafed at his sufferings, and his reason was disturbed by the murderous sophistry that resounded in his ears.
The mothers, sisters and wives of those young men came to look after them in the mornings and to do their rooms. One day, as I was passing along the dark corridor which led to M. Carrel's room, I heard a bewitching voice issue from a neighbouring den: a beautiful woman, hatless, with her hair hanging loose, was sitting on the edge of a pallet-bed, mending the tattered clothes of a kneeling prisoner, who seemed less the captive of Philip than of the woman at whose feet he was chained.
M. Carrel, delivered from his captivity, came, in his turn, to see me. A few days before his fatal hour had struck,[Pg 167] he came to bring me the number of the National in which he had taken the trouble to insert an article on my Essais sur la littérature anglaise, in which article he had, with too much praise, quoted the concluding pages of those Essays. After his death, they gave me that article written entirely in his own hand, and I keep it as a token of his friendship. "After his death:" what words I have just written without noticing it!
Though forming a necessary supplement to laws which take no cognizance of offenses against honour, the duel is a horrible thing, especially when it destroys a life full of hopes and robs society of one of those rare men who came only after the labour of a century, in the concatenation of certain ideas and certain events. Carrel fell in the wood that saw the Duc d'Enghien fall: the shade of the grandson of the Great Condé served as a witness to the illustrious plebeian and took him with it. That fatal wood has twice made me weep: at least I cannot reproach myself for having, in those two catastrophes, failed in what I owed to my sympathies and my grief.
M. Carrel, who, in his other meetings, had never dreamt of death, thought of it before this one: he employed the night in writing his last wishes, as though he had been warned of the result of the combat. At eight o'clock in the morning, on the 22nd of July 1836, he went with a quick, light step to those shadows where the roebuck gambols at that hour.
Placed at the distance measured out, he moved swiftly forwards, fired without turning sideways, as was his custom: it would seem as though there were never enough danger for him. Wounded to the death and supported in the arms of his friends, as he passed before his adversary[315], who was himself wounded, he said to him:
"Are you in great pain, sir?"
Armand Carrel was as gentle as he was fearless.
On the 22nd, I heard of the accident too late; on the morning of the 23rd, I went to Saint-Mandé: M. Carrel's friends were most exceedingly anxious. I wanted to go in, but the surgeon observed that my presence might over-excite the patient and dissipate the faint glimmer of hope that still remained. I went away in consternation. The next day, the 24th, when I was making ready to return to Saint-Mandé, Hyacinthe, whom I had sent ahead of me, came to tell me that the unfortunate young man had expired at half-past five, after suffering atrocious pain: life in all its force had waged a desperate fight with death.
The funeral took place on Tuesday the 26th. M. Carrel's father and brother had arrived from Rouen. I found them gathered in a little room with three or four of the most intimate companions of the man whose loss we were mourning. They embraced me and M. Carrel's father said to me:
"Armand would have been a Christian like his father, his mother, his brothers, his sisters; the hand of the clock had but a few hours to travel over in order to reach the same point on its face."
I shall eternally regret that I was not able to see Carrel on his death-bed: I should not have despaired, at the last moment, of making the hand "travel over" the space beyond which it would have stopped at the hour of the Christian.
Armand Carrel was not so irreligious as has been supposed; he had doubts: when from fixed incredulity a man passes to indecision, he is very near to arriving at certainty. A few days before his death, he said:
"I would give the whole of this life to believe in the other."
When reporting the suicide of M. Sautelet[316], he wrote this powerful passage:
"I have been able to carry my life, in thought, to that instant, swift as lightning, in which the sight of objects, the power of movement, speech and perception will escape me and the last forces of my mind will gather to form the one idea, 'I am dying;' but of the minute, the second that will immediately follow I have always had an undefinable dread; my imagination has always refused to guess at any[Pg 169] part of it. The depths of hell are a thousand times less terrible to measure than that universal uncertainty:
. . . . . . . To die; to sleep;
To sleep! Perchance to dream[317]!
"I have seen in all men, whatever their strength of character or belief, that same inability to go beyond their last earthly impression. There we lose our heads, as though, on reaching that boundary, we found ourselves suspended over a precipice of ten thousand feet. We drive away that terrifying sight to go to fight a duel, deliver an assault on a redoubt or face a stormy sea; we even seem to sneer at life; we display a bold, contented, serene countenance; but that is because our imagination reveals success rather than death, because our minds are much less exercised upon the dangers than upon the means of escaping them[318]."
These words are remarkable in the mouth of a man fated to be killed in a duel.
In 1800, when I returned to France, I did not know that a friend was being born to me on the shore where I was landing[319]. In 1836, I saw that friend lowered into the grave without those consolations of religion of which I brought back the memory to my country in the first year of the century.
I followed the coffin from the residence of the deceased to the place of burial; I walked beside M. Carrel's father and gave my arm to M. Arago: M. Arago has measured the Heaven which I have sung. On reaching the gate of the little rural cemetery, the procession stopped; speeches were delivered. The absence of the cross informed me that the emblem of my affliction was to remain enclosed in the depths of my soul.
Six years before, during the Days of July, passing in front of the colonnade of the Louvre, near an open grave, I met young men who carried me back to the Luxembourg, when I was going to make my protest in favour of a Royalty[Pg 170] which they had just overthrown[320]; after six years, I was returning, on the anniversaries of the July festivals, to associate myself with the regrets of those young Republicans, even as they had associated themselves with my fidelity. How strange is destiny! Armand Carrel breathed his last in the house of an officer of the Royal Guard[321] who did not take the oath to Philip; I, a Royalist and a Christian, have had the honour of bearing a corner of the pall which covered noble ashes, but which will not hide them.
Many kings, princes, ministers, men who thought themselves powerful, have gone off before me: I have not condescended to raise my hat to their coffin or devote a word to their memory. I have found more to study and depict in the intermediary ranks of society than in those which make men wear their livery; a gold-laced cloak is not worth the morsel of flannel which the bullet drove into Carrel's body.
Carrel, who remembers you? The mediocrities and poltroons whom your death delivered from your superiority and their fears and I, who was not of your views. Who thinks of you? Who remembers you? I congratulate you on having, at one step, finished a journey whose prolonged passage becomes so disgusting and so lonely, on having brought the end of your march within the range of a pistol, a distance which to you appeared still too great and which you hastened to reduce to a sword's length.
I envy those who have departed before me: like Cæsar's soldiers at Brundusium, from the top of the rocks on shore I cast my eyes upon the main sea and gaze towards Epirus to look if I can see the ships which have taken over the first legions come back to carry me across in my turn.
After reading the above lines again, in 1839, I will add that, having, in 1837, visited M. Carrel's grave, I found it much neglected, but I saw a black wooden cross which the dead man's sister Nathalie had planted near him. I paid Vaudran, the grave-digger, eighteen francs that remained owing for trellis-work; I instructed him to tend the grave, to sow grass on it and keep it adorned with flowers. At[Pg 171] each new season, I go to Saint-Mandé to discharge what is due and to make sure that my intentions have been faithfully fulfilled[322].
As I am preparing to end my recollections and taking a last look round, I perceive women whom I have involuntarily forgotten; like angels grouped at the bottom of my picture, they stand leaning against the frame to watch the end of my life.
In former days, I met women who were known or celebrated in different ways. Women have changed their manner of being to-day: are they worth more, are they worth less? It is only natural that I should incline towards the past; but the past is surrounded by a mist through which objects assume an agreeable and often deceptive complexion. My youth, to which I can never go back again, produces the effect upon me of a grandmother; I hardly remember it and I should be charmed to see it once more.
A Louisianan lady came to see me from the Mississippi: I thought that I was setting eyes upon the virgin of the last loves. Célestine wrote me several letters: they might have been dated from the "Moon of the Flowers;" she showed me fragments of Memoirs which she had composed in the savannahs of Alabama. Some time after, Célestine wrote to me that she was busy with a dress for her presentation at the Court of Philip: I resumed my bear's skin. Célestine has changed into an alligator from the water of the Floridas: may Heaven grant her peace and love, for as long as those things last!
There are persons who, by thrusting themselves between you and the past, prevent your memories from coming to your recollection; there are others who become mingled from the first with what you have been. Madame Tastu[323][Pg 172] produces this latter effect. She has a natural turn of expression; she has left the Gallic jargon to those who believe that they make themselves younger by disguising themselves in the cloaks of our ancestors. Favorinus[324] said to a Roman who affected to talk the language of the Twelve Tables[325]:
"You want to speak with the mother[326] of Evander."
Since I have touched upon antiquity, I will say a few words on the women of its peoples and descend the ladder down to our own time. The Greek women sometimes celebrated philosophy; more often they followed another divinity: Sappho[327] has remained the immortal sibyl of Cnidus; we know very little now of what Corinna[328] did after she had conquered Pindar[329]. Aspasia taught Socrates to know Venus:
"Socrates, observe my lessons. Fill thyself with poetic enthusiasm: by its potent charm thou shalt know how to win the object that thou lovest; thou shalt enchain her to the sound of the lyre, by carrying the finished image of thy passion through her ear to her heart."
The breath of the Muses, passing over the women of Rome without inspiring them, came to quicken the nation of Clovis, still in its cradle. The langue d'Oyl had Marie de France[330]; the langue d'Oc the Dame de Die[331], who, in her castle of Vaucluse, complained of a cruel friend:
"I would know, my gentle and fair friend, why you treat me so fiercely and so harshly:"
Per que vos m'etz tan fers, ni tan salvatges.
The middle-ages handed those ballads on to the Renascence. Loyse Labé[332] said:
Oh! si j'étois en ce beau sein ravie
De celui-là pour lequel vais mourant[333]!
Clémence de Bourges[334], surnamed the Oriental Pearl, who was buried with her face uncovered and her head crowned with flowers because of her beauty; the two Margarets[335] and Mary Stuart[336], all three Queens, expressed ingenuous frailties in ingenuous language.
I had an aunt at about that period of our Parnassus: Madame Claude de Chateaubriand; but I am more embarrassed with Madame Claude than with Mademoiselle de Boistelleul. Madame Claude, disguising herself under the name of the Lover, addresses her seventy sonnets to her mistress. Reader, forgive my Aunt Claude's two-and-twenty years: parcendum teneris. If my Aunt de Boistelleul was more discreet, she reckoned fifteen lustres and a half when she was singing, and the traitor Trémigon no longer appeared before her old Warbler's thought save as a Sparrow-hawk[337].
When the language was settled, liberty of sentiment and thought contracted. One remembers hardly any one, under[Pg 174] Louis XIV., expect Madame Deshoulières[338], by turns too much extolled and too much depreciated. Elegy extended, through woman's sorrow, under the reign of Louis XV. to the reign of Louis XVI., when the great elegies of the people commence; the old school came to die with Madame de Bourdic[339], who is but little known to-day, although she left a remarkable Ode on Silence.
The new school has thrown its thoughts into another mould: Madame Tastu walks in the midst of the modern choir of poetesses in prose or verse, the Allarts[340], the Waldors[341], the Valmores[342], the Ségalas[343], the Révoils[344], the[Pg 175] Mercœurs[345], and so on, and so on: Castalidum turba. Must we regret that, following the example of the Aonides, she has not celebrated the passion which, according to antiquity, smooths the brow of Cocytus and makes it smile at Orpheus' sighing? At Madame Tastu's concerts, love recites only hymns borrowed from foreign voices. This reminds me of what is related of Madame Malibran[346]: when she wanted to tell of a bird whose name she had forgotten, she used to imitate its song.
George Sand[347], otherwise Madame Dudevant, having spoken of René in the Revue des Deux-Mondes[348], I thanked her; she did not reply. Some time after, she sent me Lélia: I did not reply. Soon a short explanation took place between us:
"I venture to hope that you will forgive me for not having answered the flattering letter which you were good enough to send me when I spoke of René in writing on Obermann. I did not know how to thank you for all the kind expressions which you have used towards my books.
"I have sent you Lélia, and I anxiously desire that it may obtain the same protection from you. The fairest privilege of an universally accepted glory like your own is to welcome and encourage at their start those inexperienced writers for whom there can be no lasting success without your patronage.
"Accept the assurance of my high admiration and believe me, monsieur,
"One of your most faithful believers,
"George Sand."
At the end of October[349], Madame Sand gave me her new novel, Jacques: I accepted the present.
"30 October 1834.
"I hasten, madame, to offer you my sincere thanks. I am going to read Jacques in Fontainebleau Forest or at the sea-side. Were I younger, I should be less brave; but my years will defend me against solitude, without taking anything from the passionate admiration which I profess for your talent and which I hide from nobody. You have attached a new enchantment, madame, to that city of dreams whence I set out, in former days, for Greece with a whole world of illusions: returning to his starting-point, René lately aired his memories and his regrets on the Lido, between Childe-Harold, who had vanished, and Lelia about to appear.
"Chateaubriand."
Madame Sand possesses a talent of the first order; her descriptions have the truth of those of Rousseau in his Rêveries[350] and of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre in his Études.[351] Her frank style is tainted with none of the faults of the day. Lélia, though painful to read and offering none of the delicious scenes of Indiana and Valentine, is nevertheless a master-piece of its kind: of the nature of an orgy, it is without passion, but perturbing like passion; it lacks soul, and yet it weighs upon the heart; the depravity of its maxims, its insults thrown at rectitude of life could go no further than they do; but over that abyss the author sends down her talent In the Valley of Gomorrah, the dew falls at night upon the Dead Sea.
The works of Madame Sand, her novels, the poetry of matter, are born of the time. In spite of her superiority, it is to be feared that the author has, by the very nature of her works, narrowed the circle of her readers. George[Pg 177] Sand will never belong to every age. Of two men of equal genius, of whom one preaches order, the other disorder, the first will attract the greater number of admirers: the human race refuses to accord unanimous applause to that which offends, morality, the pillow on which the weak and the just sleep; we can hardly associate with all the memories of our life books which caused our first blush, books whose pages we did not learn by heart on leaving the cradle, books which we have read only by stealth, which have not been our acknowledged and cherished companions, which are connected with neither the purity of our sentiments nor the integrity of our innocence. Providence has confined successes that do not take their origin in good within strait limits and has given universal glory as an encouragement to virtue.
I am arguing here, I know, like a man whose restricted sight does not embrace the immense "humanitarian" horizon, like a reactionary attached to a ridiculous moral system, a decrepit moral system of olden time, good at most for unenlightened minds, in the infancy of society. A new Gospel is about to take birth forthwith, placed far above the commonplaces of that conventional wisdom which arrests the progress of mankind and the rehabilitation of that poor body of ours, so sadly slandered by the soul. When the women will be running about the streets, when it will be sufficient, in order to get married, to open a window and summon God to the wedding as witness, priest and guest: then all prudery will be destroyed; there will be nuptials everywhere and we shall rise, like the doves, to nature's level. My criticism of the taste of Madame Sand's works would, therefore, possess a certain value only in the vulgar order of past things; wherefore I hope that she will not be offended by it: the admiration which I profess for her must make her excuse remarks which owe their origin to the infelicity of my age. In former days, I should have been more carried away by the Muses; those daughters of the olden sky were my fair mistresses: they keep me company in the evening in the chimney-corner, but they soon leave me, for I go to bed early, and they go to sit up by Madame Sand's fire-side.
No doubt Madame Sand will in this way prove her intellectual omnipotence, and yet she will please less, because she will be less original: she will believe herself to be increasing her power by sounding the depths of those reveries[Pg 178] under which she buries us vulgar men, and she will be mistaken; for she stands far above that pit, that watery hollow, that proud balderdash. While we have to put a rare, but too flexible faculty on its guard against the follies of superiority, we must also warn it that fantastic writings, intimate descriptions, to employ the jargon of the day, are limited, that their source lies in youth, that each moment of time dries up a few drops of it and that, after a certain number of productions, we end with feeble repetitions.
Is it quite sure that Madame Sand will always find the same charm in what she is writing to-day? Will not the merit and allurement of the passions of twenty years depreciate in her mind, even as the works of my early days have lost their value in mine? It is only the works of the Ancient Muse that do not change, supported as they are by the nobility of manners, the beauty of language and the majesty of those sentiments bestowed upon the whole human race. The fourth book of the Æneid remains for ever exposed to the admiration of men, because it is hung up in the sky. The fleet carrying the founder of the Roman Empire; Dido, the foundress of Carthage, stabbing herself after foretelling the coming of Hannibal:
Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor[352];
Love causing the rivalry of Rome and Carthage to blaze forth from its torch, setting fire to the funeral pile whose flame the flying Æneas sees on the waves: these are very different from the walk of a dreamer in a wood or the disappearance of a libertine who drowns himself in a pond. Madame Sand will, I hope, link her talent with subjects worthy of her genius.
Madame Sand can be converted only by the preaching of that missionary with the bald forehead and the white beard whose name is Time. At present, a less austere voice enchains the poet's captive ear. Now I am convinced that Madame Sand's talent is in some way rooted in corruption; she would become commonplace if she became timorous. The case would be different if she had always remained within the sanctuary unfrequented by men; her power of love, restrained and hidden under the virginal fillet, would have drawn from her bosom those decent melodies which[Pg 179] suggest the woman and the angel. Be this as it may, boldness of doctrine and voluptuousness of manners are a field which had not yet been cleared by a daughter of Adam and which, delivered to female cultivation, has produced a harvest of unknown flowers. Let us leave Madame Sand to bring forth perilous marvels till the winter; she will sing no more "when the cold winds blow:" meantime let us permit her, less improvident than the grasshopper, to make a provision of glory for the time when there shall be a dearth of pleasure. Musarion's mother used to say to her:
"Thou wilt not always be sixteen.... Will Ch‚‚‚æreas always remember his oaths, his tears and his kisses[353]?"
For the rest, many women have been seduced and as it were carried off by their young years: when the autumn days come, brought back to the maternal hearth, they have added to their cithern the grave or plaintive string on which religion or misfortune is expressed. Old age is a nocturnal traveller: the earth is hidden to her and she no longer discerns aught save the sky shining over her head.
I have not seen Madame Sand dressed as a man or wearing the smock-frock and the ferruled stick of the mountaineer; I have not seen her drink of the bacchantes' cup or smoke, seated indolently on a sofa, like a sultana: these are natural or affected singularities that would add nothing, in my eyes, to her charm or her genius.
Is she more inspired when she sends a cloud from her mouth to mount up around her hair? Did Lélia escape from her mother's brain through a burning puff of smoke, even as Sin, according to Milton, issued from the head of the beautiful, guilty archangel amid a whirl of flame[354]? I do not know what happens in the Heavens; but, here below, Néméade[355], Phila[356],[Pg 180] Lais[357], the witty Gnathæna[358], Phryne[359], the despair of Apelles'[360] pencil and Praxiteles'[361] chisel, Lesena[362], who was loved by Harmodius[363], the two sisters surnamed Aphyes, because they were slender and had large eyes, Dorica, whose head-band and perfumed robe were dedicated in the temple of Venus: all these enchantresses, in fine, knew none but the perfumes of Araby. Madame Sand, it is true, has on her side the authority of the Odalisks and the young Mexican girls who dance with a cigar between their lips.
After a few superior women and so many charming women whom I have met, after those daughters of the earth who said, like Madame Sand, with Sappho, "Come, in our delicious banquets, O mother of Eros, to fill our goblets with the nectar of the roses," what effect did the sight of Madame Sand have on me? Placing myself alternately in the domain of fiction and truth, I find the author of Valentine making two very different impressions upon me. In the domain of fiction: I will not speak of that, for I must have ceased to understand its language. In that of reality: as a man of a serious age, entertaining notions of seemliness, attaching, as a Christian, the highest price to the timid virtues of woman, I could not say how unhappy I was made at the sight of so many fine qualities abandoned to those prodigal and fickle hours which consume and fly.
Paris, 1838.
In the spring of this year 1838, I busied myself with the Congrès de Vérone[364], which I was obliged to publish by the[Pg 181] terms of my literary engagements: I have told you of it in its proper place in these Memoirs.
A man has gone[365]: that guard of the aristocracy escorts to the rear the mighty plebeians who have already departed. When M. de Talleyrand first appeared in my political career, I said a few words about him[366]. Now his whole existence has become known to me through his last hour, to use the fine expression of one of the ancients.
I have had relations with M. de Talleyrand: as a man of honour, I have been faithful to him, as the reader will have observed, especially in the matter of the disagreement at Mons, when I most gratuitously ruined myself for him[367]. I was too simple; I shared in anything that happened to him of a disagreeable character; I pitied him when Maubreuil slapped his face[368]. There was a time when he ran after me in a coquettish manner; he wrote to me at Ghent, as you have read, that I was a "strong man[369];" when I was staying in the Rue des Capucines, he sent me, with perfect gallantry, a seal of the Foreign Office, a talisman doubtless engraved under his constellation. It is, perhaps, because I did not abuse his generosity that he became my enemy without any provocation on my part, if it was not because of a few successes which I obtained and which were not his handiwork. His tattle ran through society and did not offend, for M. de Talleyrand could not offend any one; but his intemperance of language has released me and, since he permitted himself to judge me, he left me free to make use of the same right in respect to him.
M. de Talleyrand's vanity duped him: he mistook the part which he played for his genius; he thought himself a prophet, while deceiving himself in all things; his authority had no value in matters concerning the future; he was quite unable to see ahead: he saw only behind him. Deprived of the strength of the outlook and light of conscience, he discovered nothing like superior intelligence, he appreciated[Pg 182] nothing like uprightness. He made much of the accidents of fortune, when those accidents, which he never foresaw, had taken place, but only for himself personally. He knew nothing of that large ambition in which the interests of public glory are wrapped as the most profitable treasure for private interests. M. de Talleyrand, therefore, does not belong to the class of beings calculated to become one of those fantastic creatures to whom men's opinions, whether forced or deceived, are constantly adding fanciful attributes. Nevertheless it is certain that several sentiments, agreeing with one another for different reasons, concur to form an imaginary Talleyrand.
In the first place, the kings, the Cabinets, the former Foreign Ministers, the ambassadors who were once that man's dupes and who were always incapable of fathoming him are anxious to prove that they bowed only before a real superiority: they would have taken off their hats to Bonaparte's scullion. Then again, the members of the old French aristocracy who are connected with M. de Talleyrand are proud to number in their ranks a man who had the kindness to assure them of his greatness. Lastly, the Revolutionaries and the immoral generations, while railing against names, have a sneaking fondness for the aristocracy: those singular neophytes eagerly aspire to its baptism and think that they will learn fine manners from it. The prince's double apostasy at the same time charms another side of the young Democrats' self-love: for they conclude from it that their cause is the right one and that a noble and a priest are very contemptible persons.
Be it as it may with these obstacles to a true insight, M. de Talleyrand is not of the height to create a lasting illusion; he has not in him a great enough power of growth to turn lies into an increase of stature. He has been seen too near; he will not live, because his life is not connected with a national idea that survives him, nor with a celebrated action, nor with a peerless talent, nor with a useful discovery, nor with an epoch-making conception. Existence through virtue is forbidden him; dangers did not so much as deign to honour his days: he spent the Reign of Terror away from his country and returned only when the forum had become transformed into an antechamber.
Diplomatic monuments go to prove Talleyrand's relative mediocrity: you cannot quote a fact held in any esteem that belongs to him. Under Bonaparte, no important negociation[Pg 183] was his; when he was free to act alone, he allowed occasions to escape him and spoilt what he touched. It is well averred that he was the cause of the death of the Duc d'Enghien; that stain of blood cannot be wiped out: so far from over-drawing the minister when telling the story of the Prince's murder, I spared him a great deal too much.
In his affirmations contrary to the truth, M. de Talleyrand displayed terrible effrontery. I have not spoken, in the Congrès de Vérone, of the speech which he read to the Chamber of Peers with reference to the address on the Spanish War; that speech opened with these solemn words:
"It is sixteen years to-day since I was called upon by him who was then governing the world to give him my opinion as to the struggle to be engaged upon with the Spanish people, when I had the misfortune to displease him by unveiling the future to him, by revealing to him all the dangers which were about to arise in a mass from an act of aggression which was as unjust as it was reckless. My disgrace was the fruit of my sincerity. How strange is the destiny that brings me back, after this long space of time, to repeat with the Legitimate Sovereign the same efforts, the same advice[370]!"
There are lapses of memory or lies that are terrifying: you open your ears, you rub your eyes, not knowing whether to believe that you are waking or sleeping. When the retailer of those imperturbable assertions descends the tribune and goes impassively to sit down in his seat, you follow him with your eyes, hung up as you are between a kind of dismay and a sort of admiration: you are not sure that that man has not received from nature an authority so great that he has the power of reconstructing or annihilating truth.
I did not reply; it seemed to me as though the shade of Bonaparte was about to ask leave to speak and to repeat the terrible contradiction which he had once given M. de Talleyrand. Witnesses of that scene were sitting among the peers, among others M. le Comte de Montesquiou[371]; the[Pg 184] virtuous Duc de Doudeauville[372] has described it to me: he had it from the lips of the same M. de Montesquiou, his brother-in-law; M. le Comte de Cessac[373], who was present at that scene, tells it to whoever cares to listen to him: he thought that the great elector would be arrested on leaving the Emperor's closet. Napoleon, in his rage, apostrophizing his pallid minister, shouted:
"It suits you well to decry the Spanish War, you who advised me to embark on it, you from whom I have a heap of letters in which you try to prove to me that that war was as essential as it was politic[374]."
Those letters disappeared at the time of the abduction of the archives in the Tuileries, in 1814[375].
M. de Talleyrand declared, in his speech, that he had had "the misfortune to displease "Bonaparte" by unveiling the[Pg 185] future to him, by revealing to him all the dangers which were about to arise from an act of aggression which was as unjust as it was reckless." Let M. de Talleyrand console himself in his grave: he did not have that misfortune; he must not add that calamity to all the afflictions of his life.
M. de Talleyrand's principal mistake as against the Legitimacy was that he deterred Louis XVIII. from concluding the proposed marriage between the Duc de Berry and a Russian Princess[376]; M. de Talleyrand's unpardonable mistake as against France was that he consented to the revolting Treaties of Vienna.
The result of M. de Talleyrand's negociations is that we are left without frontiers: a battle lost at Metz or Coblentz would bring the enemy's cavalry under the walls of Paris in a week. Under the Old Monarchy, not only was France enclosed within a circle of fortresses, but she was defended on the Rhine by the independent States of Germany. It was necessary to invade the electorates or negociate with them in order to reach us. On another frontier stood Switzerland, a neutral and free country; she had no roads; no one would violate her territory. The Pyrenees were impassable, guarded as they were by the Spanish Bourbons. That is what M. de Talleyrand failed to understand; those are the mistakes which will for ever condemn him as a politician: mistakes which, in one day, deprived us of the work of Louis XIV. and the victories of Napoleon.
It has been contended that his policy was superior to Napoleon's: in the first place, we must well bear in mind that a man is purely and simply a clerk, when he holds the portfolio of a conqueror who every morning puts into it the bulletin of a victory that changes the geography of States. When Napoleon had once become inebriated, he made mistakes so enormous as to strike every eye: M. de Talleyrand probably perceived them, like everybody else; but that points to no lynx-like vision. He compromised himself in a strange fashion in the catastrophe of the Duc d'Enghien; he was mistaken about the Spanish War of 1808, although he tried, later, to disown his advice and take back his words.
However, an actor creates no illusion, if he is utterly unprovided with means of fascinating the pit: therefore the prince's life was a perpetual deception. Knowing what he lacked, he avoided, shunned whosoever was able to know[Pg 186] him: his constant study was not to allow his measure to be taken; he withdrew into silence at seasonable times; he concealed himself during the three dumb hours which he devoted to whist. Men wondered that so great a capacity could descend to the amusements of the vulgar: who knows if that capacity was not partitioning empires while sorting the four knaves in his hand? During those moments of juggling, he inwardly worded some effective phrase, inspired by a pamphlet of the morning or a conversation of the evening. If he took you on one side to render you illustrious by his conversation, his chief manner of seduction was to load you with praises, to call you the hope of the future, to prophesy brilliant destinies for you, to give you a bill of exchange as a great man, drawn upon himself and payable at sight; but, if he thought that your faith in him was a little open to suspicion, if he perceived that you did not sufficiently admire a few short sentences with pretensions of depth, but with nothing behind them, he went away, lest he should allow the end of his wit to come to the surface. He would have told a good story, were it not that his jests fell upon an underling or a fool, at whose cost he amused himself without danger, or upon a victim, attached to his person, who formed a butt for his jokes. He was unable to keep up a serious conversation: the third time that he opened his lips, his ideas evaporated.
Old engravings of the "Abbé de Périgord" represent a very pretty man; as he grew old, M. de Talleyrand's face had turned into a death's head: his eyes were dull, so that one had a difficulty in reading them, which served his purpose. As he had received a great deal of contempt, he had soaked himself in it and placed it in the two hanging corners of his mouth.
A great manner, which came from his birth, a strict observance of the niceties, a cold and disdainful air contributed to keep up the illusion that surrounded the Prince de Bénévent. His manners exercised an empire over second-rate people and the men of the new society, to whom the society of the old days was unknown. Formerly one met persons at every turn whose ways resembled M. de Talleyrand's, and one took no notice of them; but, almost alone in the field in the midst of democratic customs, he appeared a phenomenon: in order to submit to the yoke of his forms, it suited self-love to ascribe to the minister's wit the ascendant exercised by his breeding.
When, occupying a considerable place, you find yourself mixed up with prodigious revolutions, these give you a chance importance which the common herd take for your personal merit: lost in Bonaparte's rays, M. de Talleyrand shone, under the Restoration, with the brightness borrowed from a fortune that was not his. The accidental position of the Prince de Bénévent permitted him to attribute to himself the power of overthrowing Napoleon and the honour of restoring Louis XVIII.: have I myself, like all those gapers, not been foolish enough to fall into that fable? When I was better informed, I came to know that M. de Talleyrand was not a political Warwick: his arm lacked the strength that lays low and raises thrones.
Impartial numskulls say:
"We agree, he was a very immoral man; but what ability!"
Alas, no! That hope must be lost too, so consoling for his enthusiasts, so desirable in the interests of the prince's memory: the hope of making M. de Talleyrand a demon. Beyond certain ordinary negociations, at the bottom of which he had the cleverness to place his personal interest in the first rank, there was nothing to be expected of M. de Talleyrand.
M. de Talleyrand kept up a few habits and a few maxims for the use of the sycophants and worthless fellows of his intimate circle. His toilet in public, copied after that of a minister in Vienna, was a triumph of diplomacy. He boasted of never being in a hurry; he boasted that time is our enemy and that we must kill it: by this he reckoned to be occupied for only a few moments.
But, as, in the last result, M. de Talleyrand did not succeed in transforming his idleness into a master-piece, it is probable that he was mistaken in talking of the necessity of getting rid of time: we triumph over time only by creating immortal things; with works that have no future, with frivolous distractions, we do not kill it: we waste it.
M. de Talleyrand entered into office[377] on the recommendation of Madame de Staël, who obtained his appointment from Chénier. He was then very destitute and he began to make his fortune five or six times over again: by the million which he received from Portugal in the hope of a[Pg 188] signature of peace with the Directory, a peace which was never signed; by the purchase of Belgian bonds on the Peace of Amiens, of which he, M. de Talleyrand, knew before it was known to the public; by the erection of the short-lived Kingdom of Etruria; by the secularization of the ecclesiastical properties of Germany; by the jobbing of his opinions at the Congress of Vienna. The prince went so far as to try to make over some old papers in our archives to Austria; but this time he was duped by M. de Metternich, who religiously returned him the originals, after having copies taken of them.
Incapable of writing a single sentence unaided, M. de Talleyrand made men work competently under him: when, by dint of erasions and alterations, his secretary had succeeded in drafting his dispatches to his liking, he copied them out with his own hand. I have heard him read, from the Memoirs which he commenced, a few pleasing details about his youth. As he varied in his tastes, detesting to-morrow what he loved yesterday, if those Memoirs exist in their entirety, which I doubt, and if he has preserved the opposite versions, it is probable that his judgments on the same fact and especially on the same man will contradict each other outrageously. I do not believe in the story that the manuscripts have been deposited in England; the order which, they pretend, has been given to publish them not before forty years hence[378] seems to me a piece of posthumous jugglery.
Slothful and without attainments, with a frivolous nature and a dissipated heart, the Prince de Bénévent gloried in that which ought to have humbled his pride, in remaining standing after the fall of empires. The minds of the first order which produce revolutions disappear; the minds of the second order which profit by them survive. Those persons of the morrow and of their wits preside at the march-past of the generations; it is their business to endorse the passports, to confirm the sentence: M. de Talleyrand was of that inferior species; he signed events, he did not make them.
To survive governments, to remain when a power goes, to declare one's self permanent, to boast of belonging only to the country, of being the man of things and not the man of individuals: that is the fatuousness of an uneasy egoism, which strives to hide its want of elevation under lofty words.[Pg 189] Nowadays we count many of those unruffled characters, many of those citizens of the soil: still, if there is to be any greatness in growing old like the hermit in the ruins of the Coliseum, they must be guarded with a cross; M. de Talleyrand had trodden his underfoot.
Our species is divided into two unequal parts: the men of death, loved by death, a chosen band which is born again; the men of life, forgotten by life, a multitude condemned to annihilation which is born no more. The temporary existence of these latter consists of name, credit, place, fortune; their fame, their authority, their power fade away with their person: closed are their drawing-room and their coffin, closed is their destiny. Thus befell M. de Talleyrand; his mummy, before descending into its crypt, was shown for a moment in London[379], as the representative of the corpse-like Royalty that reigns over us.
M. de Talleyrand betrayed all governments and, I repeat, raised or overthrew none. He had no real superiority, in the sincere acceptance of those two words. A fry of trite prosperities, so common in aristocratic life, does not take a man two feet beyond the grave. The evil which is not worked with a terrible explosion, the evil parsimoniously exerted by the slave for the master's benefit is no more than turpitude. Vice, the pander of crime, enters into domestic service. Suppose M. de Talleyrand a plebeian, poor, obscure, having, besides his immorality, nothing save his incontestable drawing-room wit: we should certainly never have heard speak of him. Take away from M. de Talleyrand the debased great lord, the married priest, the degraded bishop: what remains to him? His reputation and his successes have depended on that treble depravity.
The comedy with which the prelate crowned his eighty-two years is a pitiful thing: first, to give a proof of strength, he went to pronounce at the Institute the common eulogy of a poor German dolt[380] whom he did not care about. In spite of all the sights with which our eyes have been glutted, people lined up to see the great man go out[381]; next, he came to die at home, like Diocletian, showing himself to the universe.[Pg 190] The crowd gaped at the last moments[382] of that prince three parts rotten, with a gangrenous aperture in his side, his head falling on his breast in spite of the bandage that supported it, he disputing minute by minute his reconciliation with[Pg 191] Heaven, his niece playing beside him a part long prepared between a priest who was imposed upon and a little girl who was deceived. Weary of resistance, when his power of speech was about to leave him, he signed (or perhaps he did not even sign) the disavowal of his early adhesion to the Constitutional Church; but without giving any sign of repentance, without fulfilling the Christian's last duties, without retracting the immorality and scandal of his life. Never did pride appear so contemptible, admiration so foolish, piety so greatly duped. Rome, always prudent, did not make the retractation public, for a very good reason.
M. de Talleyrand failed to put in an appearance in answer to a long-standing summons issued by the Judgment Seat on High; death sought him on the part of God and has found him at last.
To analyze minutely a life as corrupted as that of M. de Lafayette was healthy, one would have to face a distaste which I am incapable of overcoming. Men of sores resemble prostitutes' carcasses: they have been so much eaten away by the ulcers that they are of no use to the dissecting-room. The French Revolution is one vast political destruction, set in the midst of the old world; let us fear lest a much more fatal destruction be established, let us fear a moral destruction through the evil side of that Revolution. What would become of the human race if a strenuous attempt were made to rehabilitate manners justly stigmatized, to offer odious examples to our enthusiasm, to show us the progress of the age, the establishment of liberty, the profundity of genius in abject natures and atrocious actions? Not daring to extol the evil under its own name, they sophisticate it: beware of taking that brute for a spirit of darkness; it is an angel of light! All ugliness is beautiful, every shame honourable, every enormity sublime; every vice has its admiration awaiting it. We have gone back to that material society of paganism in which every form of depravity had its altars. Back, those cowardly, lying, criminal praises, which pervert the public conscience, which debauch youth, which discourage good people, which are an outrage against virtue and the spitting of the Roman soldier in the face of Christ!
Paris, 1839.
When I was in Prague, in 1833, Charles X. said to me:
"So that old Talleyrand is still alive?"
And Charles X. left this life two years before M. de Talleyrand; the Monarch's private and Christian death forms a contrast with the public death of the apostate bishop, dragged against his will to the feet of the divine incorruptibility.
On the 3rd of October 1836, I wrote the following letter to Madame la Duchesse de Berry, and I added a postscript to it on the 15th of November of the same year:
"Madame,
"M. Walsh[383] has handed me the letter with which you have been good enough to honour me. I should be ready to obey Your Royal Highness' wishes, if writing could do anything at present; but public opinion has fallen into such a state of apathy that the greatest events would hardly be able to stir it. You have permitted me, Madame, to speak with an amount of frankness which only my devotion could excuse: as Your Royal Highness knows, I have been opposed to almost all that has been done; I ventured even not to be in favour of your journey to Prague. Henry V. is now emerging from childhood; he will soon enter the world with an education that has taught him nothing of the age in which we live. Who will be his guide, who will show him Courts and men? Who will make him known and as it were appear, at a distance, to France? These are important questions which will, probably and unfortunately, be resolved in the same sense as all the others. Be this as it may, the rest of my life belongs to my young King and his august mother. My previsions of the future will never make me unfaithful to my duty.
"Madame de Chateaubriand asks leave to lay her respects at Madame's feet. I offer to Heaven all my prayers for the glory and prosperity of the mother of Henry V. and I am, with profound respect,
"Madame,
"Your Royal Highness' most humble and most obedient servant,
"Chateaubriand.
"P.S. This letter has been waiting for a month for a safe opportunity of reaching Madame. This very day, I hear[Pg 193] of the death of Henry's august grandfather[384]. Will the sad news cause any change in Your Royal Highness' destiny? Dare I beg Madame to permit me to enter into all the sentiments of regret which she must feel, and to offer the respectful tribute of my grief to Monsieur le Dauphin and Madame la Dauphine?
"Chateaubriand.
"15 November."
Charles X. is no more:
Soixante ans de malheurs out paré la victime[385]!
Thirty years of exile; death at seventy-nine in a foreign land! So that none might doubt of the errand of misfortune with which Heaven had entrusted that Prince, it was a plague that came to fetch him.
Charles X., at his last hour, recovered the calm, the equanimity which sometimes failed him during his long career. When he learnt the danger that threatened, he was content to say:
"I did not think that this illness would turn so short."
When Louis XVI. set out for the scaffold, the officer on duty refused to receive the will of the condemned man because there was no time, and he, the officer, had to take the King to execution; the King replied:
"That is so."
If Charles X., in other days of peril, had treated his life with the same indifference, what wretchedness would he not have spared himself! One can understand that the Bourbons cling to a religion which makes them so noble at the moment of death; Louis IX., attached to his posterity, sends them the saint's courage to await them beside the coffin. That House knows wonderfully how to die: true, it has been learning death for more than eight hundred years.
Charles X. went away persuaded that he had made no mistake: if he hoped for the divine mercy, it was because of the sacrifice which he believed that he had made of his crown to what he thought to be the duty of his conscience and the welfare of his people; conviction is too rare not to be valued. Charles X. was able to bear himself this witness that the reign of his two brothers and his own were neither without liberty nor without glory: under the Martyr King, the enfranchisement of America and the emancipation of France; under Louis XVIII., representative government given to our country, the Royalty restored in Spain, the independence of Greece recovered at Navarino; under Charles X., Africa left to us in compensation for the territory lost through the conquests of the Republic and the Empire: those are results which remain established in our records, in spite of stupid jealousies and vain enmities; those results will stand out more prominently as we sink lower into the abasement of the Royalty of July. But it is to be feared that those costly ornaments will be for the benefit of past days only, like the garland of flowers on Homer's head discarded with great respect by the Republic of Plato. The Legitimacy to-day seems to have no intention of going further; it appears to be adopting its fall.
The death of Charles X. could be an effective event only by putting an end to a deplorable contest for a sceptre and giving a new direction to the education of Henry V.: now it is to be feared that the absent crown will always be disputed, that the education will be finished without having been virtually changed. Perhaps, by saving themselves the trouble of taking sides, they will fall asleep in habits dear to[Pg 195] weakness, sweet to family-life, easy to lassitude, the result of long sufferings. Misfortune perpetuated produces on the mind the same effect as old age on the body: one can no longer move, one takes to one's bed. Misfortune again resembles the executioner of the high decrees of Heaven: it strips the condemned man, snatches the sceptre from the king, the sword from the warrior; it takes the noble's dignity, the soldier's heart, and sends them back degraded into the crowd.
On the other hand, one derives from extreme youth arguments in favour of postponement: when one has much time to spend, one persuades one's self that one can wait, that one has years to play with before events happen:
"They will come to us," one cries, "without our going to any trouble; all will ripen; the throne will come of itself; in twenty years, prejudice will be wiped out."
This calculation might have some justness, if generations did not pass away or did not become indifferent; but a certain thing may appear a necessity at one time and not be even felt at another.
Alas, how swiftly things fade away! Where are the three brothers whom I have seen reign in succession? Louis XVIII. is at Saint-Denis, with the mutilated relics of Louis XVI.; Charles X. has just been laid, at Gorlitz, in a coffin locked with three keys.
The remains of that King, falling from on high, startled his ancestors; they turned in their sepulchres; drawing closer together, they said:
"Let us make room; here is the last of our number."
Bonaparte did not make so much noise on entering eternal life; the old dead did not wake for the emperor of the new dead. They did not know him.
The French Monarchy connects the Ancient World with the Modern World. Augustulus[386] laid down the diadem in 476. Five years later, in 481, the first dynasty of our kings, in the person of Clovis, was reigning over the Gauls.
Charlemagne, when associating Louis the Débonnaire with himself on the throne, said to him:
"Son dear to God, my years are hastening, even my old age escapes me; the time of my death is drawing nigh. The[Pg 196] land of the Franks beheld my birth: Christ accorded me that honour. First among the Franks, I have obtained the name of Cæsar and transferred to the Empire of the Franks the Empire of the House of Romulus."
Under Hugh, with the Third Dynasty, the Elective Monarchy became hereditary. Hereditary right gave birth to legitimacy, or permanence, or duration.
The Christian Empire of the French must be placed between the baptismal fonts of Clovis and the scaffold of Louis XVI. The same religion stood at either barrier:
"Gentle Sicamber, bow thy neck, worship what thou hast burnt, burn what thou hast worshipped," said the priest who administered the baptism of water to Clovis.
"Son of St. Louis, rise up to Heaven," said the priest[387] who assisted Louis XVI. at the baptism of blood.
If there were nothing in France save that old House of France built up by time and of astounding majesty, we could make a finer show than all the other nations in the matter of illustrious things. The Capets were reigning when the other sovereigns of Europe were still subjects. The vassals of our kings have become kings. Those sovereigns have handed down to us, with their names, titles which posterity has accepted as authentic: some are called Augustus[388], Saint[389], the Pious[390], the Great[391], the Courteous[392], the Bold[393], the Wise[394], the Victorious[395], the Well-beloved[396]; others the Father of the People[397], the Father of Letters[398]:
"As it is writ in blame," says an old historian, "that all the good Servian kings could easily go into a ring, the bad kings of France could do so more easily, so small is their number."
Under the Royal Family, the darkness of the Barbarians was dispelled, the language was formed; literature and arts produced their master-pieces; our towns were beautified, our monuments raised, our roads opened, our harbours constructed; our armies astonished Europe and Asia and our fleets covered the two oceans.
Our pride waxes furious at the mere display of those magnificent tapestries in the Louvre; shadows, shadowy embroideries shock us. Unknown this morning, still more unknown this evening, we are none the less persuaded that we efface all that went before us. And yet each fleeting moment asks us, "Who art thou?" and we know not what to reply. Charles X. replied: he went away with a whole era of the world; the dust of a thousand generations is mingled with his; history salutes him, the centuries kneel before his tomb; all have known his House; it has never failed them: it is they who have been wanting towards that House.
O banished King, men have been able to outlaw you, but you shall not be driven out by time: you are sleeping your hard sleep in a monastery, on the last plank but yesterday destined for some Franciscan. No heralds-at-arms at your obsequies: none save a troop of bleached and hoary old times; no grandees to fling the emblems of their dignities into the vault: they have done homage for them elsewhere. Mute ages are seated beside your bier; a long procession of past days, with closed eyes, silently mourns around your coffin.
By your side lie your heart and your intestines, snatched from your breast and your loins, even as we lay beside a dead mother the abortive fruit that has cost her her life. At each anniversary, O Most Christian Monarch, O cenobite after death, some brother will recite to you the prayers of the memorial service; you will attract to your eternal Hic Jacet none save your sons banished with you: for even at Trieste the monument of Mesdames is empty; their sacred relics have returned to their country and you have paid to exile, by your own exile, the debt of those noble ladies.
Ah, why do they not to-day bring together so many dispersed remains, even as they collect antiques unearthed from different excavations? The Arc de Triomphe would carry Napoleon's sarcophagus as its crowning, or the bronze column raise motionless victories over immortal remains.[Pg 198] And yet the stone carved by order of Sesostris hence-forward buries the scaffold of Louis XVI. under the weight of the ages. The hour will come when the obelisk of the desert shall find again, on the place of the murders, the silence and solitude of Luxor.
[283] This book was written in Paris, in 1837 and 1838, and revised in June 1847—T.
[284] Ferdinand Philippe Louis Charles Henri Duc d'Orléans (1810-1842) married, on the 30th of May 1837, the Princess Helen of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. He was killed, on the 13th of July, at Neuilly, by leaping from his carriage, of which the horses had run away. His widow, who was and remained a Lutheran, died in 1858.—T.
[285] Charles Jean Marie Barbaroux (1767-1794), a noted Girondin orator and politician, belonged, like most of the participants in the Revolution of 1789, to the middle-classes, and was a lawyer by profession. He led the Marseillaise section in the attack on the Tuileries, on the 10th of August 1792. He was sent, as a Girondin deputy, to the Convention, where he appears to have been noted for the beauty of his person no less than for his eloquence, and soon went to loggerheads with Marat and Robespierre. In the trial of Louis XVI., he voted for the appeal to the nation. He was proscribed, on the 31st of May 1793, as a Royalist and an enemy of the Republic: he sought shelter in Calvados and took ship at Quimper for Bordeaux. Hardly had he arrived there when he was arrested and well and duly guillotined, on the 25th of July 1794 and in the twenty-eighth year of his age. Carlyle says, wrongly, I believe, that he shot himself to escape arrest.—T.
[286] Antoine Saint-Just (1767-1794) has been only once mentioned in the Memoirs (Cf. Vol. III., p. 196). He was born a few months after Barbaroux, and died three days later. This "black-haired, mild-toned youth," to quote Carlyle, was one of the most violent organizers of the Terror. He became President of the Convention in February 1794 and took charge of the reports against his colleagues Danton, Camille Desmoulins and others, who were promptly sent to the scaffold. Almost alone he defended Robespierre, was eventually involved in the same condemnation, and was guillotined with him on the 28th of July. Saint-Just cultivated the Muse: at the early age of twenty, he published Organt, a licentious poem in twenty cantos (1789). He also left the Esprit de la Révolution (1791) and a number of Reports and Opinions delivered in the Convention.—T.
[287] Cf., in Chateaubriand's preface to his Études historiques, the table of the victims of the Terror, taken from the six volumes of Prudhomme, the Republican. There were 18,923 men not of noble birth, of different conditions; 2,231 wives of labourers or artisans; and 2,000 children guillotined, drowned and shot. In the Vendée, 15,000 women were killed, and almost all of these were peasant-women. Terrible as they are, these figures are very far below the reality.—B.
[288] Thiers was Premier and Foreign Minister from the 22nd of February to the 25th of August 1836 and, for the second time, from the 1st of March to the 28th of October 1840.—T.
[289] This is in allusion to an episode which occurred in 1834, of which the country-house of a ministerial deputy was the scene and M. Thiers, then Minister of the Interior, the hero. Dr. Bonnet de Malherbe, in his Notes inédites sur M. Thiers (1888, p. 73) refers to it in the following words:
"One episode especially, the feast of Grand-Vaux, at the château of the Comte Vigier, which the newspapers called the 'Orgy of Grand-Vaux,' made a great stir at the time. M. Thiers, if the chroniclers of the time are to be credited, played a part in it which went far beyond the 'pranks' of the Marseilles school-boy, and 'showed himself' in a 'posture' which was not exactly that of which another minister spoke, with some emphasis, half a century later. The Quotidienne published a very spicy article in this connection, nor was the Charivari sparing in caricatures."—B.
[290] Tiberius Claudius Atticus Herodes (circa 104—circa 180), a Greek rhetorician celebrated for his munificence. He erected many public works at his own expense and restored several decayed towns in various parts of Greece.—T.
[291] Thiers had published his Histoire de la Révolution française in 1823 to 1827. The Histoire du Consulat et de l'Empire did not appear till many years later (1845 to 1862).—T.
[292] The remains of Napoleon were brought back to France in 1840.—T.
[293] M. Thiers had said in the Tribune, under the Monarchy of July, in the course of the discussion of the law against the associations:
"France abhors the Republic; speak of it to her, and she recoils in affright; she knows that that form of government turns to blood or imbecility."
In 1872, Henry Reeve met him in Paris and describes the conversation as follows in his Journal:
"M. Thiers' conversation on the war, the Commune and the siege was very interesting. He said to me:
"'Certainement je suis pour la République! Sans la République qu'est-ce que je serais, moi? Un bourgeois, Adolphe Thiers!'
"He described the withdrawal of the troops from Paris, which was his own act. Then the siege, which he claims to have directed, the battery of Mouton Tout, adding:
"'Nous avons enterré, en entrant à Paris, vingt mille cadavres!'"
(John Knox Laughton: Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, Vol. II., p. 202).—B.
[294] At the same time that Chateaubriand was drawing this portrait of M. Thiers, another seer, Balzac, wrote in the Chronique de Paris, on the 12th of May 1836:
"M. Thiers has always wished for the same thing, he has never had but one thought, one system, one aim; all his efforts have been constantly directed towards it: he has always thought of M. Thiers.... M. Thiers is a weather-cock which, in spite of its incessant mobility, remains on the same building."—B.
[295] Simon Deutz was the converted Jew who betrayed the Duchesse de Berry's hiding-place to Thiers in 1832 (cf. Vol. III., p. 156).—T.
[296] Dante: Hell, Canto I., 50.—B.
[297] The Sirens, daughters of Achelous and Calliope, represented as having the head, arms and bust of a young woman and the wings and lower part of the body of a bird.—T.
[298] Cf. Vir., Geor., IV., 82-83, 86-87:
Ipsi per medias acies, insignibus alis,
Ingentes animos angusto in pectore versant.
. . . . . . . .
Hi motus animorum atque hæc certamina tanta
Pulveris exigui jactu compressa quiescunt.—B.
[299] La Fayette died in Paris on the 19th of May 1834. He was already suffering from indisposition, when he insisted on following, on foot, the funeral of Dulong, the deputy killed in a duel by General Bugeaud. He took to his bed on returning home and did not leave it again.—B.
[300] Rivarol, in the early days of the Revolution, had nicknamed General La Payette "César-Gille."—B.
[301] La Fayette was mixed up in Caron's military conspiracy at Belfort in 1821 (Cf. Vol. IV., p. 211, nn. 4-5).—T.
[302] Having failed to secure his re-election as a deputy in 1824, La Fayette took advantage of this enforced rest to revisit America. He was absent from France for fourteen months.—B.
[303] Edward Everett (1794-1865), a celebrated American statesman, orator and author. He was professor of Greek at Harvard College from 1819 to 1825; editor of the North American Review from 1820 to 1824; Member of Congress from Massachusetts from 1825 to 1835; Governor of Massachusetts from 1836 to 1840; Minister to England from 1841 to 1845; President of Harvard College from 1846 to 1849; Secretary of State from 1852 to 1853; and Senator from Massachusetts from 1853 to 1854. In 1860, he was the candidate for Vice-president of the Constitutional Union Party. His Orations and Speeches on various Occasions were published in Boston, in 4 volumes, in 1850.—T.
[304] Everett: An Oration pronounced at Cambridge before the Society of Phi Beta Kappa, August 26, 1824 (Boston, Mass.: 1824).—T.
[305] I omit six lines of verse.—T.
[306] La Fayette was married to Mademoiselle de Noailles on the 11th of April 1774; she died in 1807.—T.
[307] La Fayette's tomb is in one corner of the little Picpus Cemetery, near the Avenue de Saint-Mandé. At the end of the Picpus Cemetery is the Cimetière des guillotinés, where 1300 victims of the Revolution, executed at the Barrière du Trône, are interred. These include André Chénier, Lavoisier, General Beauharnais and many other bearers of noted names.—T.
[308] The Duc de Montmorency-Laval died in 1826.—T.
[309] A sort of cakes.—T.
[310] M. Dupin the Elder.—B.
[311] Georges de La Fayette.—Author's Note.
Georges Washington de La Fayette (1779-1849), La Fayette's only son and a godson of Washington, sat in the Chamber of Deputies, on the Extreme Left, from 1827 to 1849.—T.
[312] Chateaubriand is wrong. The notice of Ambroise, a comic opera by Monvel and Nicolas Dalayrac occcurs in the Gazette nationale, ou Le Moniteur universel of the 22nd of January 1793! but the report of the execution of Louis XVI. appears in the issue of the next day, Wednesday 23 January, two days after the tragedy took place. Immediately after the report comes this paragraph:
"That excellent patriot, Lepelletier Saint-Fargeau, member of the Convention, was assassinated on Sunday at a tavern-keeper's, in the Palais ci-devant Royal, by a former body-guard called Paris. The details of the crime were communicated to the National Convention; they will be found in the report of Monday's sitting."
This report of "Monday's sitting" appears in the following Thursday's Moniteur.—T.
[313] Cf. Vol. V., pp. 206.207.—T.
[314] At the time of the failure of the Duchesse de Berry's plans, followed by her arrest and imprisonment, feelings of irritation and regret reigned among the Royalists, of which several duels with members of the opposite party were the direct consequence. At the end of January 1833, Armand Carrel, after a certain article that appeared in the National, accepted a personal provocation and, from a list of ten names put before him, selected that of M. Roux-Laborie the Younger, who was personally quite unknown to him. Swords were the chosen weapons; the adversaries were both wounded: M. Roux-Laborie by two thrusts in the arm and hand; Carrel by a thrust in the stomach, which put his life in danger.—B.
[315] Émile de Girardin (1806-1881), the journalist and economist (Cf. Vol. IV., p. 21, n. 2). A duel was arranged between Girardin and Armand Carrel in consequence of articles published in their respective journals, the Presse and the National. It was fought in the Bois de Vincennes; the weapons chosen were pistols. The two adversaries were placed at forty paces from one another, with powers each to walk ten paces and to fire at will, a very much more dangerous method than the firing at the word of command, at a fixed distance, which is generally practised to-day. After each taking a few steps, the two adversaries fired almost at the same time: Émile de Girardin was shot through the thigh and Carrel was hit in the pit of the stomach. He succumbed to acute peritonitis from the lesions caused by the bullet, which had torn the intestines.—B.
[316] Cf. p. 83, supra.—T.
[317] Shakespeare: Hamlet, Act III., sc. i.—T.
[318] Carrel's article on Sautelet's suicide (Cf. Vol. V., p. 83.—T.) appeared in the Revue de Paris of June 1830, under the title of Une Mort volontaire.—B.
[319] Armand Carrel was born, at Rouen, on the 8th of May 1800, the day on which Chateaubriand set foot at Calais (Cf. Vol. II., p. 148, n. 1).—T.
[320] Cf. Vol. V., pp. 120-122.—T.
[321] The gravity of Carrel's wound did not allow of his being conveyed to the house in which he lived, at No. 7, now No. 18, Rue Grange-Batelière. He was accordingly taken to one of his old school-fellows of the Military School, M. Adolphe Peyra, who was spending the summer at his mother's house at Saint-Mandé. M. Peyra was a retired officer in the Guards, who had himself fought many duels and had kept up friendly relations with Carrel, although they were in different camps: Peyra was an ardent Royalist.—B.
The Grave-Digger's Receipt.
"I have received from M. de Chateaubriand the sum of eighteen francs that remained owing for the trellis-work which surrounds the grave of M. Armand Carrel.
"Saint-Mandé, 21 June 1838.
"Paid: Vaudran."
"Received from M. de Chateaubriand the sum of twenty francs for keeping up the grave of M. Carrel at Saint-Mandé.
"Paris, 28 September 1839.
"Paid: Vaudran."—B.
[323] Sabine Casimir Amable Voïart, Dame Tastu (1798-1885), author of several volumes of verse: Poésies(1826), Chroniques de France(1829), Poésies nouvelles (1834), Œuvres politiques(1837). She also published a large number of educational books. Some of her poems, notably the Ange gardien, the Dernier jour de l'année and the Feuilles de saule are happily inspired and deserve to live.—B.
[324] Favorinus (d. circa 135), a skeptical philosopher, a native of Arles, in Gaul, who taught rhetoric in Athens and in Rome under Hadrian.—T.
[325] 451-450 b.c.—T.
[326] Carmenta, the Arcadian prophetess, mother of Evander by Mercury.—T.
[327] Sappho (b. circa 612 b.c.), the most famous of poetesses. She was surnamed the Tenth Muse.—T.
[328] Corinna (fl. circa 470 b.c.), the Greek poetess, surnamed the Lyric Muse. She conquered Pindar in a trial of poetry and carried off the palm before him no less than five times.—T.
[329] Pindar (circa 520 b.c.—circa 450 B.C.), the greatest of the Greek lyric poets.—T.
[330] Marie de France (fl. 13th Century), author of a collection of fables entitled Ysopet, narrative poems entitled Laïs and a Purgatory of St. Patrick. Her works were collected and published in Paris in 1832.—T.
[331] Beatrix Comtesse de Die in her own right (fl. 12th Century), author of a few Provençal poems.—T.
[332] Cf. Vol. II., p. 308, n. 6.—T.
[333] Loyse Labé, Sonnets, XIII., 1-2:
"Oh, if I were in that fair bosom rapt
Of him for whom I ever dying go!"—T.
[334] Clémence de Bourges was a young girl of Lyons, famous for her wit and her beauty and a friend and admirer of Loyse Labé. She died early, of a broken heart, and was given a magnificent funeral by the Lyonese. The poets of the day called her the "Pearl of Damsels, a truly Oriental pearl."—T.
[335] Margaret of Valois, Queen of Navarre (1492-1549), sister of Francis I. and married, in 1526, to Henry II. d'Albret, King of Navarre, is the author of the Heptaméron des nouvelles de très-illustre et très-excellente princesse Marguerite de Valois (1558-1559), the Miroir de l'âme pêcheresse (1533), Marguerites de la Marguerite des princesses, très-illustre royne de Navarre (1547), the Miroir de Jésus-Christ crucifié (1556) and Letters, published in the last century. The other Margaret is Margaret of France, Queen of Navarre (1552-1615), sister of Henry III. and married, in 1572, to Henry III. King of Navarre, later Henry IV. King of France, and left her admirable Memoirs for the enjoyment of posterity, with some Poems.—T.
[336] Mary Queen of Scots, France and (de jure) England (1542-1587). The only extant specimens of Mary's poetry, in addition to the reputed sonnets to Bothwell, are the verses on the death of her husband Francis II., printed by Brantôme in his Memoirs; a sonnet to Elizabeth in Latin and French; a Méditation faite par la Reyne d'Escosse Douarière de France, recueillie d'un Livre des Consolations Divines; and a sonnet written at Fotheringay, in the State Paper Office (Cf. the article in the Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. XXXVI., p. 389).—T.
[337] Cf. Vol. I., p. 21. I omit Madame Claude de Chateaubriand's sixty-sixth sonnet, which is quoted by her nephew many times removed.—T.
[338] Antoinette du Ligier de La Garde, Dame Deshoulières (1638-1694), married, in 1651, to Guillaume de Lafon de Boisguérin, Seigneur Deshoulières, enjoyed a great reputation under Louis XIV., when she was surnamed the Tenth Muse and the French Calliope. She is now remembered chiefly by her idyll of the Moutons, although her collected idylls, odes, elegiacs and songs, to say nothing of two highly unsuccessful tragedies, fill two, volumes 8vo.—T.
[339] Marie Anne Henriette Payan de L'Étang, Marquise d'Antremont, later Baronne de Bourdic, later Madame Viot (1746-1802) was three times married. She was already known for several pieces of verse inserted in the Almanach des Muses when, for a while, she acquired a real fame through her Ode au Silence, which was long considered one of the master-pieces of the eighteenth century.—B.
[340] Hortense Allan de Méritens (1801-1879) published, as her first work, in 1821, a remarkable novel, the Conjuration d'Amboise, which was succeeded by Sextus, ou le Romain des Maremmes, the Indienne, Settimia and others. In 1873 and 1874, she published, under the pseudonym of "Madame Prudence de Saman" and the title of the Enchantements de Prudence, a series of erotic confidences, or romantic autobiography, in which she mixes up Chateaubriand, Lamennais, Béranger and a score of others with her imaginary adventures.—B.
[341] Mélanie Villenave, Dame Waldor (1796-1871), author of some volumes of poems, of which the principal, entitled Poésies du cœur, had appeared in 1835. Her novels include André le Vendéen (1843) and the Moulin en deuil (1849).—B.
[342] Marceline Josèphe Félicité Desbordes, Dame Desbordes-Valmore (1786-1859) had appeared, with some success, at the Opéra-Comique, when, in 1817, she married François Prosper Lanchantin, known as Valmore, the actor, and left the stage. Her poetry is distinguished for sweetness and pathos, without affectation. That published before the time in which Chateaubriand is writing includes Élégies et romances (1818), Élégies et poésies nouvelles (1824) and the Pleurs (1833). Pauvres fleurs appeared in 1839 and Bouquets et prières in 1843.—T.
[343] Anaïs Ménard, Dame Ségalas (b. 1814), published the Algériennes in 1831, when only seventeen years of age. Next came the Oiseaux de passage (1836) and, later, Enfantines: poésies à ma fille (1844), the Femme (1847) and Nos bons Parisiens (1865). To these must be added a number of novels and plays of various descriptions. Madame Ségalas will, however, remain known mainly as the author of the Enfantines, a collection of verse that has had no less than ten editions.—B.
[344] Louise Révoil, Dame Colet (1815-1876), published her first volume, Fleurs du Midi, accompanied by two kindly letters from Chateaubriand, in 1836. From that year till the year of her death she did not cease writing in prose and verse. The list of her works, which include poems, novels, dramatic essays, travels and works on history and politics, would exceed the space of these notes. She obtained the prize for poetry at the French Academy four times between 1839 and 1854. For the rest, Madame Colet mixed romance with her life in such proportions that it is best to keep silence upon both the lady and her career.—B.
[345] Elisa Mercœur (1809-1835), the girl poet, died before the above lines were written. The first edition of her Poésies appeared in 1827, when Mademoiselle Mercœur was only eighteen years old. Her Complete Works were published in 1843, in three volumes 8vo.—T.
[346] Maria Felicita Garcia, Dame Malibran, later Dame de Bériot (1808-1836), one of the most famous opera-singers of the time, was the daughter of Manuel del Popolo Vicente Garcia, the Spanish singer and composer. She made her first appearance in opera in London, on the 7th of June 1825, when she took the place of Madame Pasta, who was ill. She made a great sensation and was at once engaged for the rest of the season. In 1826, she went to New York and there, in the middle of a successful season, married Malibran, the French banker, who soon became bankrupt. She left him in 1827, returned to France and appeared for the first time in Paris, on the 12th of January 1828, in Sémiramide. Her success was prodigious and she continued to rouse unparalleled enthusiasm in all the great cities of Europe. On the 30th of March 1836, Madame Malibran married Charles Auguste de Bériot, the Belgian violinist; six months later, on the 23rd of September, she died, in Manchester, from the effects of a fall from her horse, in London, a few days earlier.—T.
[347] At this time (1833), George Sand had published only Indiana (September 1832) and Valentine (November 1832). Lélia appeared in September 1833, the Secrétaire intime and Jacques in 1834.—T.
[348] In an article on Etienne Pivert de Sénancour's Obermann, in the Revue des Deux-Mondes of 15 June 1833.—B.
[349] October 1834.—B.
[350] Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, published in 1782, four years after Rousseau's death.—T.
[351] Études de la nature(1784).—T.
[352] Æn., IV. 625.—T.
[353] Lucian: Dialogues of the Courtezans, VII.—Author's Note.
[354] Cf. Milton, Paradise Lost, II., 752-760.
"All on a sudden miserable pain
Surprised thee; dim thine eyes, and dizzy swum
In darkness, while thy head flames thick and fast
Threw forth; till on the left side opening wide,
Likest to thee in shape and countenance bright,
Then shining heavenly fair, a goddess arm'd
Out of thy head I sprung: amazement seized
All the host of heaven; back they recoil'd afraid
At first, and cal I'd me Sin."—T.
[355] Sic, in all the editions.—T.
[356] Phila (fl. 370 b.c.), a celebrated Athenian courtezan and mistress to Hyperides the Attic orator.—T.
[357] Lais (d. circa 340 b.c.), a noted Corinthian courtezan, said to have been advised to adopt her profession by Apelles. Demosthenes was one of her many lovers; Diogenes another. She was assassinated in Thessaly by a number of women jealous of their husbands' affections.—T.
[358] Gnathæna, a Greek poetess and courtezan, of an uncertain period. Some of her witty sayings are recorded by Athenæus.—T.
[359] Phryne (fl. circa 328 b.c.), a celebrated Athenian hetaira, mistress to Praxiteles, one of whose many statues of her is known as the Cnidian Aphrodite, while Apelles took her for his model for the Aphrodite Anadyomene.—T.
[360] Apelles (fl. circa 332 b.c.), the famous Greek painter. His Aphrodite Anadyomene (vide supra) was originally painted for the Temple of Æsculapius in Cos. It was afterwards bought by Augustus and placed in the Temple of Cæsar in Rome.—T.
[361] Praxiteles (circa 360 B.C.—circa 280 b.c.), the greatest Greek sculptor after Phidias. His Aphrodite of Cnidus ranks as one of the most admired statues of antiquity. A replica of this statue is now in the Glyptothek in Munich.—T.
[362] Leæna (fl. 514 b.c.), the mistress of Harmodius and Aristogiton, the Athenian patriots.—T.
[363] Harmodius (d. 514 b.c.), who, with Aristogiton, delivered Athens from the tyranny of Hipparchus.—T.
[364] Cf., on the Congrès de Vérone, M. Biré's Appendix, Vol. IV., pp. 215-219.—T.
[365] Talleyrand died in Paris on the 17th of May 1838.—B.
[366] Cf. Vol. III., pp. 145 et seq.—T.
[367] Ibid., pp. 171-175.—T.
[368] The Marquis de Maubreuil (cf. Vol. III., p. 86, n. 1), escaping from police surveillance, went, on the 20th of January, to Saint-Denis, during the celebration of the anniversary of the death of Louis XVI., and there, in the midst of the solemnity, he struck Talleyrand in the face and threw him to the ground. Maubreuil was charged with the offense and received sentence; but the affair made a terrible noise, of which Talleyrand's innumerable enemies did not fail to take advantage.—B.
[369] Cf. Vol. III., p. 147—T.
[370] Speech of the Prince de Talleyrand against the vote of one hundred millions proposed for the cost of the Spanish War (March 1823).—B.
[371] Elisabeth Pierre Comte de Montesquiou-Fézensac (1764-1834) was President of the Legislative Body in 1810, 1811 and 1813. He was created a count of the Empire in 1809 and, in the following year, was appointed Great Chamberlain of France in Talleyrand's stead.—B.
[372] The Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Doudeauville (Cf. Vol. IV., p. 134, n. 1) was a member of the Chamber of Peers from 1814 to 1831.—B.
[373] Jean Girard Lacuée, Comte de Cessac (1752-1841) was an inspector-general of reviews under Napoleon (1806), a minister of State (1806) and Minister of the Board of Military Administration. He was a member of the French Academy.—B.
[374] The Comte Roederer, in his Souvenirs, describes a conversation which he had with the Emperor, at the Élysée, on the 6th of March 1809. The subject of the conversation was King Joseph, who, in his letters from Madrid to his wife and Napoleon, complained of his brother and threatened to leave the Throne of Spain to go and grow his small potatoes at Mortefontaine. Napoleon, in the course of this interview with Roederer, walked to and fro, and became more and more excited as he spoke of the contents of those letters:
"'He says that he wants to go to Mortefontaine, rather than stay in a country bought by blood unjustly shed. And what is this Mortefontaine? It is the price of the blood which I spilled in Italy. Does he hold it from his father? Does he hold it from his work? He holds it from me. Yes, I have spilt blood, but it is the blood of my enemies, of the enemies of France. Does it become him to use their language? Does he want to act like Talleyrand? Talleyrand! I have covered him with honours, riches, diamonds. He has employed all of that against me. He has betrayed me as much as he could, on the first occasion that he had to do it in.... He said, during my absence'—during the Spanish War—'that he had gone on his knees to prevent the Spanish business; and he pestered me for two years to undertake it! He maintained to me that I should require only twenty thousand men; he gave me twenty memorandums to prove it. He behaved in the same way in the affair of the Duc d'Enghien; I knew nothing about him; it was Talleyrand who told me about him.' The Emperor always pronounces it Taillerand. 'I did not know where he was.' The Emperor stopped in front of me. 'It was he who told me the place where he was and, after advising his death, he bemoaned it with all his acquaintances.' The Emperor resumed his walk and, in a calmer tone, after a short pause, continued, 'I shall do him no harm; I am keeping him in all his offices; I even have the same feelings for him that I used to have; but I have taken from him the right to enter my closet at all times. He shall never have a private conversation with me; he will no longer be able to say that he has advised me or dissuaded me from one thing or the other.'"
[375] Cf. Vol. II., pp. 281-282.—T.
[376] Cf. Vol. III., p. 144.—T.
[377] Talleyrand was appointed Minister of External Relations, on the 16th of July 1797, in succession to Charles Delacroix, the father of Eugène Delacroix the painter.—B.
[378] Yet Talleyrand's Memoirs were not published until 1891-1892. They were disappointing when published.—T.
[379] After the Revolution of July, Talleyrand accepted the London Embassy at the hands of the new Government (September 1830); he asked to be recalled on the 13th of November 1834.—B.
[380] Charles Frédéric Comte Reinhard (1761-1838), a retired head of a department at the Foreign Office and a native of Schöndorf, in Wurtemberg.—B.
[381] Talleyrand read his Éloge de Reinhard at the Institute on the 3rd of March 1838. The room was crowded. M. Mignet, the Perpetual Secretary, went to meet him in the room adjoining the lecture-room. The prince, who was then in his eighty-fifth year, was not able to climb the stairs on foot; he was carried up by two men in livery. When he entered the lecture-room, leaning on M. Mignet's arm and on his crutch, the whole audience stood up. His speech was delivered in a very strong voice and was frequently interrupted by applause. The reading took less than half an hour in all, which constituted the whole performance. When it was over, the enthusiasm knew no bounds:
"On his way out," says Sainte-Beuve (Nouveaux Lundis, Vol. I., p. 110), "the prince had to pass through a double row of foreheads which bowed with redoubled reverence."—B.
[382] The Prince de Talleyrand died on the 17th of May 1838, at thirty-five minutes past three in the afternoon; he was horn on the 2nd of February 1754, and was consequently 84 years, 3 months and 15 days old. He was assisted in his last illness by the Abbé Dupanloup, the future Bishop of Orleans, who himself wrote the story of the prince's last moments. On the morning of the 17th of May, M. de Talleyrand had signed his retractation and a letter to the Pope; some hours later, the Abbé Dupanloup arrived. Upon a word from the abbé, saying that Monseigneur de Quélen, the Archbishop of Paris, would be happy to give his life for him, he raised himself a little and said, in a very distinct voice:
"Tell him that he can make a much better use of it."
"Prince," continued the abbé, "this morning you gave the Church a great consolation; I now come, in the name of the Church, to offer you the last consolations of faith, the last succour of religion. You have been reconciled with the Catholic Church, which you had offended; the moment is come to be reconciled with God by a new confession and a sincere repentance for all the faults of your life."
"Thereupon," in the words of the Abbé Dupanloup, "he made a movement as though to come towards me; I went up to him, and, at once grasping my two hands in his and pressing them with extraordinary force and emotion, he did not leave go of them during the whole time that his confession took to make; I had even to make a great effort to release my hand from his, when the moment had come to give him absolution. He received it with an humility, an amount of feeling and faith that made me shed tears."
He also received Extreme Unction while fully conscious. Then the Abbé Dupanloup, kneeling beside him, recited the Litany of the Saints. When he came to the invocation of the martyrs and pronounced the name of St. Maurice, M. de Talleyrand's patron-saint, the prince was seen to bow his head and his glance to seek that of the Abbé Dupanloup, to prove to him that he was joining in those prayers. At three o'clock, seeing the last hour come, the Abbé Dupanloup began the Prayers for the Dying. The sick man appeared to join in them so visibly that one of those present remarked upon it:
"Monsieur l'abbé, see how he is praying!"
He was in fact seen, with eyes now open, now lowered, to follow with evidences of perfect understanding all that was happening around him. At last his strength suddenly failed him and his lips closed for ever.
The Abbé Dupanloup ends his narrative with these words:
"God sees the secrets of men's hearts; but I ask Him to give those who thought that they might doubt M. de Talleyrand's sincerity, I ask for them, at the hour of death, the same sentiments which I beheld in M. de Talleyrand when dying, the memory of which will never leave me."(Cf. Lagrange: Vie de Monseigneur
[383] Édouard Vicomte Walsh had, since the 25th of September 1835, had the management of the Mode, the liveliest of the royalist papers, published under the patronage of the Duchesse de Berry.—B.
[384] Charles X. died at Goritz, on the 6th of November 1836, of an attack of cholera, of which he had felt the first symptoms two days before, on St. Charles's Day, the 4th of November. The doctor asked to have the King's grandchildren taken away, because of the danger of the illness, but the Duc de Bordeaux declared that no consideration would prevent his following the impulse of his heart and Mademoiselle made the same reply as her brother. The King kissed them fondly and laid his hand upon their heads:
"May God protect you, my children!" he said. "Walk before Him in the paths of justice.... Do not forget me.... Pray sometimes for me!"
The Cardinal de Latil and Doctor Bougon, who had already met by the Duc de Berry's bed-side on the night of the 13th February 1820, met again, on the night of the 6th of November 1836, by the bed-side of Charles X. An altar had hurriedly been erected near the bed for the celebration of Mass. It was said by the Bishop of Hermopolis, Monseigneur de Frayssinous. At the end of the Mass, the King meditated an instant; he prayed for France and blessed her; and, as the bishop exhorted him to forgive, at that last moment, those who had done him so much harm:
"I have long forgiven them," he replied. "I forgive them again, at this moment, with all my heart; may the Lord be merciful to them and me."
"At one o'clock in the morning, on the 6th of November, M. Bougon announced that the King had but a few moments to live. All fell on their knees; M. le Dauphin (the Duc d'Angoulême) had his head bowed towards his father. Madame la Dauphine alone remained standing at the King's feet, with her hands joined, and seemed to be presiding over that scene of sorrow. At half past one, M. Bougon made a sign to the Duc de Blacas, who leant towards the Dauphin and said a few words to him in a low voice. Then the Prince respectfully closed his father's eyes, and Madame la Dauphine's sobs, bursting forth suddenly amid the silence of death that reigned in the room, announced that all was over." (Nettement: Histoire de quinze ans d'exil, Vol. II., pp. 96 et seq.)—B.
[385] "Sixty years with misfortunes the victim have decked!"—T.
[386] Romulus Momyllus Augustus, the last Roman Emperor of the West, nicknamed Augustulus because of his youth, was placed on the throne at a very early age, in 475, but compelled to abdicate in the following year by Odoacer King of the Heruli.—T.
[387] Henry Essex, Abbé Edgeworth de Firmont (1745-1807).—T.
[388] Philip II. Augustus (1165-1223), son of Louis VII., succeeded in 1180.—T.
[389] St. Louis IX. (1215-1270), son of Louis VIII., succeeded in 1226.—T.
[390] Robert II. (circa 970-1031), son of Hugh Capet, succeeded in 996.—T.
[391] Henry IV. (1553-1610) succeeded Henry III. in 1569; and Louis XIV. (1638-1715), son of Louis XIII., succeeded in 1643.—T.
[392] Charles VIII. (1470-1498), surnamed the Affable or the Courteous, son of Louis XI., succeeded in 1483.—T.
[393] Philip III. (1245-1285), son of St. Louis IX., succeeded in 1270.—T.
[394] Charles V. (1337-1380), son of John II., succeeded in 1364.—T.
[395] Charles VII. (1403-1461), son of Charles VI., succeeded in 1422.—T.
[396] Charles VI. (1368-1422), son of Charles V., succeeded in 1380.—T.
[397] Louis XII. (1462-1515) succeeded his cousin Charles VIII. in 1498.—T.
Conclusion—Historical antecedents from the Regency to 1793—The Past—The old European order expiring—Inequality of fortunes—Danger of the expansion of intellectual nature and material nature—The downfall of the monarchies—The decline of society and the progress of the individual—The future—The difficulty of understanding it—The Christian idea is the future of the world—Recapitulation of my life—Summary of the changes that have happened on the globe during my life—End of the Mémoires d'Outre-tombe.
25 September 1841.
I began to write these Memoirs, at the Vallée-aux-Loups, on the 4th of October 1811; I am about to finish reading and correcting them, in Paris, on the 20th of September 1841: I have, therefore, for thirty years, eleven months and twenty-one days[400], been secretly holding the pen while writing my public books, in the midst of all the revolutions and all the vicissitudes of my existence. My hand is tired: may it not have weighed upon my ideas, which have never wavered and which I feel to be as lively as when I started on my career! I had the intention of adding a general conclusion to my thirty years' work: I meant to say, as I have often mentioned, what the world was like when I entered it, what it is like now that I am leaving it. But the hour-glass is before me; I observe the hand which the sailors used to think that they saw come forth from the waves at the hour of shipwreck: that hand beckons to me to be brief; I will therefore reduce the scale of the picture, without omitting anything essential.
Louis XIV. died[401]. The Duc d'Orléans was Regent during the minority of Louis XV. A war with Spain broke out as[Pg 200] the result of Cellamare's[402] conspiracy: peace was restored by the fall of Alberoni[403]. Louis XV. attained his majority on the 15th of February 1723. The Regent succumbed ten months later. He had communicated his gangrene to France; he had seated Dubois[404] in Fénelon's pulpit and raised Law[405] to power. The Duc de Bourbon[406] became Prime Minister to Louis XV., and he had as his successor the Cardinal de Fleury[407], whose genius lay in his years. In 1734, the war[408] broke out in which my father was wounded outside Dantzig[409]. In 1745 was fought the Battle of Fontenoy; one of the least warlike of our kings made us triumph in the only great pitched battle that we have won over the English: and the conqueror of the world has, at Waterloo, added one more disaster to the disasters of Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt. The church at Waterloo is decorated with the names of the English officers who fell in 1815; in the church at Fontenoy we find only a stone with these words:
Near this spot lies the body of Messire Philippe De Vitry,
who, aged 27 years, was killed at the Battle of
Fontenoy on the 11th of May 1715
No mark indicates the place of the action; but skeletons are taken from the ground with bullets flattened into their skulls. The French carry their victories written on their foreheads.
Later, the Comte de Gisors, son of the Maréchal de Belle-Isle[410] fell at Crefeld[411]. With him died out the name and the direct descent of Fouquet[412]. Things had passed from Mademoiselle de La Vallière to Madame de Châteauroux. There is something sad in seeing names come to their end, from century to century, from beauty to beauty, from glory to glory.
In the month of June 1745, the second Stuart Pretender had begun his adventures: misfortunes on which I was brought up pending the time when Henry V. should replace the English Pretender in exile.
The end of those wars was the harbinger of our disasters in our colonies. La Bourdonnais[413] avenged the French flag in Asia; his dissensions with Dupleix[414], after the capture[Pg 202] of Madras, undid all. The peace of 1748 suspended those misfortunes; hostilities broke out again in 1755; they opened with the earthquake of Lisbon[415], in which Racine's grandson perished. Under the pretext of a few plots of land at issue on the frontier of Acadia, England, without declaring war, seized upon three hundred of our merchant-ships; we lost Canada: facts immense in their consequences, above which floats the death of Wolfe and Montcalm. We were stripped of our possessions in Africa and India, and Lord Clive[416] began the conquest of Bengal. Now, during this time, the Jansenist quarrels were taking place: Damiens[417] had struck at Louis XV.; Poland had been partitioned, the expulsion of the Jesuits effected, the Court had descended to the Parc-aux-Cerfs. The author of the Family Compact[418] retired to Chanteloup, while the intellectual revolution was being completed under Voltaire. Maupeou's Plenary Court[419] was installed: Louis XV. left the scaffold to the favourite[420] who had degraded him, after sending Garat[421] and Sanson to Louis XVI., one to read, the other to execute the sentence.
This last monarch had married, on the 16th of May 1770, the daughter of Maria Theresa of Austria: we know what became of her. Next passed the ministers: Machault, old Maurepas, Turgot the economist, Malesherbes, with his ancient virtues and modern opinions, Saint-Germain[422], who[Pg 203] destroyed the King's Household and gave a baleful order; Calonne and Necker lastly.
Louis XVI. recalled the parliaments, abolished forced labour, repealed the power of inflicting torture before the verdict had been given, restored Protestants to the enjoyment of civil rights and recognised their marriages as legal. The American War of 1779, although impolitic for France, the dupe, as always, of her generosity, was useful to the human race; it restored throughout the world the esteem in which our arms were held and the honour of our flag.
The Revolution sprang up, ready to give birth to the warlike generation which eight centuries of heroism had laid in its womb. The personal merits of Louis XVI. did not redeem the faults which his ancestors had left to him to expiate; but the blows of Providence fall on the evil, never on the man: God shortens virtue's days upon earth only to lengthen them in Heaven. Under the star of 1793, the sources of the great abyss were broken; all our glories of former days next united and made their last explosion under Bonaparte: he sends them back to us in his coffin.
I was born while these facts were being accomplished[423]. Two new empires, Prussia[424] and Russia[425], preceded me by scarcely half a century on the earth; Corsica became French at the moment when I appeared[426]; I arrived in the world twenty days before Bonaparte[427]. He brought me with him. I was about to enter the navy, in 1783, when the fleet of Louis XVI. put in to Brest[428]: it carried the birth certificate of a nation[429] that had been hatched under the wings of France. My birth is connected with the birth of a man and a people, pale reflection that I was of an immense light.
If we fix our eyes on the actual world, we see it, following the movement communicated by a great revolution, shaken from the East to China, which seemed closed for ever: so[Pg 204] that our past subversions would be nothing and the noise of Napoleon's fame be hardly audible in the general topsy-turviness of the nations, even as he, Napoleon, drowned all the noises of our ancient globe.
The Emperor left us in a condition of prophetic agitation. We, the ripest and most advanced State, display numerous symptoms of decadence. Just as a sick man in danger becomes preoccupied with what awaits him in his grave, a nation which feels itself decaying grows restless as to its future fate. Hence the political heresies which succeed one another. The old European order is expiring; our present contests will appear puerile struggles in the eyes of posterity. Nothing more exists; authority of experience and age, birth or genius, talent or virtue: all are denied; a few individuals clamber to the top of the ruins, proclaim themselves giants and roll down to the bottom as pygmies. With the exception of a score of men who will survive and who were destined to hold the torch across the murky steppes upon which we are entering, with the exception of those few men, a generation which bore within it an abundant intelligence, acquired knowledge, germs of success of all kinds has stifled these in a restlessness as unproductive as its arrogance is barren. Nameless multitudes are agitated without knowing why, like the popular associations of the middle-ages: famished flocks which recognise no shepherd, which rush from the plain to the mountain and from the mountain to the plain, disdaining the experience of the herdsmen hardened to the wind and sun. In the life of that city, all is transitory: religion and morals cease to be admitted, or else each interprets them after his own fashion. Among things of an inferior nature, even in power of conviction and existence, a man's renown throbs for barely an hour, a book grows old in a day, writers kill themselves to attract attention: one more vanity; no one hears even their last breath.
From this predisposition of men's minds it results that we imagine no other means of touching people than scenes of the scaffold and tainted manners: we forget that the real tears are those which flow at the bidding of a beautiful poem and with which as much admiration as sorrow is blended; but at present, when talents feed upon the Regency and the Terror, what need was there of subjects for our tongues destined so soon to die? No more will fall from man's genius some of those thoughts which become the patrimony of the universe.
That is what everybody says and what everybody deplores, and yet illusions superabound, and the nearer a man is to his end the longer he thinks that he will live. We see monarchs who imagine that they are monarchs, ministers who believe that they are ministers, deputies who take their speeches seriously, landlords who, possessing property to-day, are persuaded that they will possess it to-night. Private interests, personal ambitions hide the gravity of the moment from the vulgar: notwithstanding the oscillations of the affairs of the day, they are but a wrinkle on the surface of the deep; they do not decrease the depth of the waters. Beside the paltry contingent lotteries, the human race is playing the great game; the kings still hold the cards and hold them for the nations: will the latter do better than the monarchs? A side issue, which does not alter the principal fact. What importance have children's amusements, shades gliding over the whiteness of a shroud? The invasion of ideas has succeeded on the invasion of the Barbarians; our actual decomposing civilization is becoming lost in itself; the vessel that contains it has not poured the liquid over into another vessel: it is the vessel that has been shattered.
At what period will society disappear? What accidents will be able to suspend its movements? In Rome, the reign of man was substituted for the reign of law: they passed from the Republic to the Empire; our revolution is being accomplished in a contrary sense; we are inclined to pass from the Royalty to the Republic, or, not to specify any form, to Democracy: this will not be effected without difficulty.
To touch upon only one point in a thousand: will property, for instance, remain distributed as it is? The Royalty born at Rheims was able to keep that property going by tempering its severity by the diffusion of moral laws, even as it changed humanity into charity. Given a political state of things in which individuals have so many millions a year, while other individuals are dying of hunger: can that state of things subsist, when religion is no longer there with its hopes beyond this world to explain the sacrifice? There are children to whom their mothers give suck at their withered breasts for want of a mouthful of bread to feed their dying babes; there are families whose members are reduced to huddle together at night, for want of blankets to warm them. That man sees his many furrows ripen;[Pg 206] this one will possess only the six feet of earth lent to his tomb by his native land. Now with how many ears of corn can six feet of earth supply a dead man?
As instruction comes down to those lower classes, the latter discover the secret sore which gnaws at the irreligious social order. The too great disproportion of conditions and fortunes was endurable so long as it remained concealed; but, so soon as this disproportion was generally perceived, it received its death-blow. Recompose the aristocratic fictions, if you can; try to persuade the poor man, when he shall have learnt to read correctly and ceased to believe, when he shall be as well-informed as yourself, try to persuade him that he must submit to every sort of privation, while his neighbour possesses superfluity a thousand times told: as a last resource, you will have to kill him.
When steam shall be perfected, when, joined to the telegraph and railways, it shall have caused distances to disappear, we shall see not only merchandise travel, but also ideas, restored to the use of their wings. When fiscal and commercial barriers shall have been abolished between the various States, as they already are between the provinces of the same State; when different countries entertaining daily relations shall tend to promote the unity of the peoples: how will you resuscitate the old manner of separation?
Society, on the other hand, is no less threatened by the spread of intellect than it is by the development of brute nature: suppose labour to be condemned to idleness by reason of the multiplication and variety of machinery; admit that one only and general mercenary, matter, replaces the mercenaries of the farm and the household: what will you do with the unemployed human race? What will you do with passions that are idle at the same time as, the intellect? The vigour of the body is maintained by physical occupation; when labour ceases, strength disappears; we shall become like those nations of Asia which fall a prey to the first invader and which are unable to defend themselves against a hand that bears the sword. Thus liberty is preserved only by work, because work produces strength; withdraw the curse pronounced against the sons of Adam, "In the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread[430]," and they will die in servitude. The divine curse therefore enters into the mystery of our lot; man is less the slave of his sweat than of his thought: that is how, after making the[Pg 207] circuit of society, after passing through the different civilizations, after supposing unknown perfections, we find ourselves once more at the starting-point, in the presence of the truths of Scripture.
At the time of our Monarchy of eight centuries, Europe had in France the centre of its intelligence, its perpetuity, its repose; when deprived of that Monarchy, Europe at once inclined towards democracy. The human race, for good or ill, has become its own master; the princes have enjoyed its property during its minority; now that the nations have come of age, they contend that they have no more need of guardians. From David to our time, the kings have been called: the vocation of the peoples is commencing. The brief and small exceptions of the Greek, Carthaginian, Roman Republics, with slaves, do not take away the fact that, in antiquity, the monarchic state was the normal state of the globe. The whole of modern society, since the banner of the French kings has ceased to exist, is laying aside the monarchy. God, to hasten the degradation of the royal power, has delivered the sceptres in different countries to infirm kings, to little girls in long-clothes[431] or in the white veils of their weddings[432]: those are the toothless lions, the clawless lionesses, the sucking babes, the marrying babes, whom grown men are to follow in this era of unbelief.
The boldest opinions are proclaimed in the face of the monarchs, who pretend to feel safe behind the three-fold hedge of a suspected guard. The flood of democracy is overtaking them; they climb from storey to storey, from the ground-floor to the attic roof of their palace, whence they will leap into the water through the dormer windows.
In the midst of this, observe a phenomenal contradiction: material conditions are improving, intellectual progress increases, and the nations, instead of profiting, are diminishing. Whence comes this contradiction?
It is because we have lost in the moral order of things.[Pg 208] There have been crimes at all periods; but they were never committed in cold blood, as they are nowadays, because of the loss of the religious sentiment. At this hour, they no longer revolt us, they seem a consequence of the march of time; if formerly we judged them in a different manner, it was because we were not yet, as we dare to assert, sufficiently advanced in the knowledge of man; we analyze them at the present moment; we test them in the crucible, in order to see what useful thing we can obtain from them, even as chemistry finds ingredients in the sewers. The corruption of the mind, which is very much more destructive than that of the senses, is accepted as a necessary result; it no longer belongs to a few wayward individuals: it has become public property.
Many men would feel humiliated if it were proved to them that they have a soul, that beyond this life they will find another life; they would think that they were wanting in firmness and strength and genius, if they did not rise superior to the pusillanimity of our fathers; they admit annihilation, or, if you like, doubt, as a disagreeable fact perhaps, but as a truth which it is impossible to deny. Admire the stultification of our pride!
That is how the decline of society and the increase of the individual are explained. If the moral sense were developed in proportion to the development of the intellect, there would be a counterpoise, and humanity would grow up without danger; but the exact opposite is happening: our perception of good and evil becomes dimmer as our intellect becomes more enlightened; our conscience shrinks as our ideas expand. Yes, society will perish: liberty, which could save the world, will not make progress, for want of leaning on religion; order, which could maintain the observance of rules, will not be solidly established, because it is combated by the anarchy of men's ideas. The purple, which used formerly to confer power, will henceforth serve as a bed only for misfortune: none will be saved unless he be born on the straw, like Christ. When the monarchs were disinterred at Saint-Denis, at the moment when the trumpet sounded for the popular resurrection; when, taken from their crumbling tombs, they lay awaiting plebeian burial, the ragmen came to this Last Judgment of the centuries: they looked with their lanterns into the eternal night; they rummaged among the remains that had escaped the first pillage. Already the Kings were there no more, but the Royalty was there still: they snatched[Pg 209] it from the womb of time and flung it into the rubbish-basket.
So much for old Europe: it will never revive. Does young Europe offer better prospects? The present world, the world without consecrated authority, seems placed between two impossibilities, the impossibility of the past and the impossibility of the future. And do not go to think, as some imagine, that, if we are badly off at present, good will come out of evil: human nature, when disordered at its source, does not proceed with such correctness. For instance, the excesses of liberty lead to despotism; but the excesses of tyranny lead only to tyranny; the latter, in degrading us, makes us incapable of independence: Tiberius did not cause Rome to go back to the Republic; he left only Caligula to follow him.
To avoid explanations, we are satisfied to declare that the times may have hidden in their womb a political constitution which we do not perceive. Did the whole of antiquity, did the finest geniuses of that antiquity conceive a society without slaves? Yet we see it existing. We assert that, in this civilization as yet unborn, the human race will grow greater; I have advanced this theory myself: is it not to be feared, however, that the individual will grow less? We may become industrious bees occupied in common with the manufacture of our honey. In the material world, men unite for purposes of labour; a multitude attains sooner and by different roads the thing after which it strives; masses of individuals will raise pyramids; by dint of study, each on his own side, those individuals will light upon scientific discoveries and explore every corner of physical creation. But are things the same in the moral world? It will be vain for a thousand brains to combine: never will they compose the master-piece that issues from the head of a Homer.
It has been said that a city whose members enjoy an equal division of goods and education will present to the gaze of the Divinity a spectacle surpassing the spectacle of the city of our fathers. The madness of the moment tends to achieve the unity of peoples and to make but one man of the whole race: well and good; but, in acquiring general faculties, will not a whole series of private sentiments perish? Good-bye to the delights of the home; good-bye to the charms of the family: among all those beings, white, yellow and black,[Pg 210] reputed as your fellow-countrymen, you would not be able to throw yourself on a brother's neck! Was there nothing in the life of old, nothing in that limited space upon which you looked out from your ivy-framed casement? Beyond your horizon, you suspected the existence of unknown lands of which the bird of passage, the only traveller that you had seen in autumn, scarce spoke to you. It was happiness to think that the hills which surrounded you would not disappear from before your eyes; that they contained your friendships and your loves; that the moaning of the night around your dwelling would be the only sound to which you would fall asleep; that never would your soul's solitude be disturbed; that you would always meet there the thoughts that await you to resume their familiar intercourse with you. You knew where you were born, you knew where your tomb lay; as you entered the forest, you were able to say:
Beaux arbres qui m'avez vu naître,
Bientôt vous me verrez mourir[433]!
Man does not need to travel in order to grow greater: he carries immensity with him. The accents that escape from your bosom are not measured, they find an echo in thousands of souls: he who has not that melody within himself will ask it in vain of the universe. Sit down on the trunk of the tree felled in the depths of the wood: if in your profound forgetfulness of self, in your immobility, in your silence you do not find the infinite, it is useless for you to wander on the banks of the Ganges.
What would an universal society be that should have no particular country, that should not be French, nor English, nor German, nor Spanish, nor Portuguese, nor Italian, nor Russian, nor Tartar, nor Turkish, nor Persian, nor Indian, nor Chinese, nor American, or rather that should be all these societies at once? What would be the outcome for its manners, its science, its arts, its poetry? How would passions be expressed felt at the same time in the manner of different peoples in different climates? How would the language entertain that confusion of needs and images produced[Pg 211] by the various suns that should have cast their light upon a common youth, manhood and old age? And what would that language be? Would an universal idiom result from this fusion of societies, or would there be a dialect of compromise, employed for daily use, while each nation would talk its own language, or else would the different languages be understood by all? Under what like rule, under what one law would this society have its being? How would one find one's place on an earth enlarged by the power of ubiquitousness and narrowed by the petty proportions of a globe tainted on every hand? There would be nothing for it but to apply to science for means to change one's planet.
Are you weary of private ownership and do you wish to turn the government into a sole proprietor, distributing to what will have become a mendicant community a share commensurate with the merit of each individual? Who shall judge of the merits? Who will have the strength and the authority to compel the execution of your decrees? Who will keep and make the most of that bank of living real estate?
Will you seek to bring about the association of labour? What will the weak, the sick, the unintelligent bring to the community left burdened with their unfitness?
Here is another contrivance: one might form, in place of wages, a sort of limited company or partnership between manufacturers and workmen, between mind and matter, to which the one would bring his capital and his idea, the others their industry and their labour; the eventual profits to be shared in common. That would be very good, admitting complete perfection among men; very good, if you meet with no quarrelling, avarice, nor envy: but, if a single partner protests, the whole crumbles to the ground; divisions and law-suits begin. This method, which seems a little more possible in theory, is quite as impossible in practice.
Would you, having modified your opinion, seek to build a city in which every man shall possess a roof, a fire, clothes and sufficient to eat? When you have succeeded in endowing every citizen, the good and bad qualities of each will disturb your division and make it an unjust one: this one requires more to eat than that; that one is unable to work as much as this: the economical and industrious will become rich men, the spendthrifts, the idlers, the cripples[Pg 212] will relapse into poverty; for you cannot give all men the same temperament: natural inequalities will reappear in spite of your efforts.
And do not think that we should allow ourselves to be tied by the complicated legal precautions demanded by the organization of the family, patrimonial rights, wardships, recaptions by heirs and assigns, and so on, and so on. Marriage is notoriously an absurd oppression: we abolish all that. If the son kills the father, it is not the son, as is easily proved, who commits parricide but the father who, by living, sacrifices the son. Do not therefore let us go confusing our brains with the labyrinth of an edifice which we put down level with the ground; it is unnecessary to linger over those crazy trifles of our grandfathers.
This notwithstanding, there are some among the modern sectarians who, half seeing the impossibility of their doctrines, mix with them, to obtain sufferance for them, words of morality and religion; they think that, pending better things, we might first be brought up to the ideal mediocrity of the Americans; they close their eyes and are good enough to forget that the Americans are landlords and ardent landlords, which alters the question somewhat.
Others, still more obliging, who admit a sort of elegance of civilization, would be content to transform us into "Constitutional" Chinese, all but atheists, free and enlightened old men, sitting in yellow robes for centuries in our flowery seed-plots, spending our days in a state of comfort acquired to the multitude, having invented everything, discovered everything, vegetating peacefully in the midst of our accomplished progress and only going on board a railway-train, like a bale of merchandise, in order to travel from Canton to the Great Wall to chat about a marsh that wants draining or a canal that wants cutting with some other manufacturer of the Celestial Empire. In either supposition, American or Chinese, I shall be glad to have departed before so great a felicity happened to me.
Lastly, one solution remains: it might be that, in consequence of the complete degradation of the human character, the peoples would put up with what they have; they would lose the love of independence, replaced by the love of money, at the same time that the kings lost the love of power, bartered for the love of the Civil List. Hence would result a compromise between monarchs and subjects charmed to crawl promiscuously in a bastard political order of things;[Pg 213] they would display their infirmities to one another at their ease, as in the old leper-hospitals or in those mud-baths in which sick people soak nowadays to obtain relief: one would dabble in a common mire like a peaceful reptile.
We misconstrue our times, however, when we desire, in the present condition of society, to replace the pleasures of our intellectual nature by the joys of our physical nature. The latter, we can understand, were able to occupy the life of the old aristocratic nations: masters of the world, they owned palaces, troops of slaves; they absorbed whole regions of Africa in their private possessions. But under what portico would you now air your paltry leisure? In what vast and decorated baths would you shut up the perfumes, the flowers, the flute-players, the courtezans of Ionia? One is not Heliogabalus[434] for the asking. Where will you find the wealth indispensable to those material delights? The soul is thrifty; but the body is extravagant.
And now, a few words of a more serious character touching absolute equality. That equality would bring back not only the servitude of bodies, but the slavery of souls; it would be a question of nothing less than destroying the moral and physical inequality of the individual. Our will, administered under the general eye, would see our faculties falling into disuse. The infinite, for instance, is part of our nature: forbid our intellect, or even our passions to think of endless blessings, and you reduce man to the life of the snail, you transform him into a machine. For make no mistake: without the possibility of attaining all, without the idea of living eternally, you have nothingness everywhere; without individual property, none is free; whosoever has no property cannot be independent; he becomes a proletarian or a salaried servant, whether he live under the present condition of separate ownerships or in the midst of a common ownership. Common ownership would make society resemble one of those monasteries at whose door stewards used to stand distributing bread. Hereditary and inviolable property is our personal defense; property is nothing else than liberty. Absolute equality, which presupposes complete submission to that equality, would reproduce the harshest form of servitude; it would turn the human individual into a beast of burden[Pg 214] subjected to the action which would constrain him and obliged to walk endlessly in the same path.
While I was arguing thus, M. de Lamennais[435], behind the bolts of his gaol, was attacking the same systems with his logical power, which is enlightened by the brilliancy of the poet. A passage borrowed from his pamphlet entitled, Du Passé et de l'avenir du peuple[436] will complete my arguments; listen to him, it is he now who speaks:
"Of those who put before them this object of strict, absolute equality, the most consistent, in order to establish it and maintain it, agree upon the use of force, despotism, dictatorship, under one form or another.
"The partisans of absolute equality are, at the out-set, compelled to attack the natural inequalities, in order to extenuate and, if possible, destroy them. Unable to affect the primary conditions of organization and development, their work begins at the moment when man is born or when the child leaves its mother's womb. The State then seizes upon it: behold it the absolute master of the spiritual as of the organic being. Mind and conscience, all depends upon the State, all is subject to the State. No more family, no more paternity, no more marriage henceforth; a male, a female, children whom the State handles, with which it does as it pleases, morally, physically: an universal servitude and so profound that nothing escapes it, that it penetrates to the very soul.
"Where material things are concerned, equality can never be established in ever so little a lasting manner by a simple partition. If it be a question of land only, one can understand that it can be divided into as many portions as there are individuals; but, as the number of individuals varies perpetually, it would also be necessary perpetually to vary that primitive division. All individual property being abolished, there is no lawful owner except the State. This mode of ownership, if it be voluntary, is that of the monk bound down by his vows to poverty as to obedience; if it be not voluntary, it is that of the slave, where nothing[Pg 215] modifies the harshness of his condition. All human ties, sympathetic relations, mutual devotion, exchange of services, free gift of self, all that constitutes the charm of life and its greatness, all, all has disappeared, disappeared for ever.
"The methods hitherto proposed to solve the problem of the future of the people end in the negation of all the indispensable conditions of existence, destroy, either directly or by implication, duty, right, the family and would produce, if they could be applied to society, instead of the liberty in which all real progress is summarized, only a servitude with which history, however far we go back into the past, can offer nothing to compare."
There is nothing to be added to this logic.
I do not go to see prisoners, like Tartuffe, to distribute alms to them, but to enrich my intelligence by contact with men who are worth more than I. If their opinions differ from mine, I am not afraid: stubborn Christian that I am, all the fine geniuses in the world would not shake my faith; I am sorry for them, and my charity protects me against seduction. If I sin through excess, they sin through deficiency; I understand what they understand, they do not understand what I understand. In the same prison where I used to visit the noble and unfortunate Carrel, I now visit the Abbé de Lamennais[437]. The Revolution of July has relegated to the darkness of a gaol the remnant of the superior men of whom it can neither appraise the merit nor endure the effulgency. In the last room as one goes up, under a slooping roof which we can touch with our heads[438], we silly believers in liberty, François[439] de Lamennais and François de Chateaubriand, talk of serious things. Struggle as he please, his ideas have remained in the religious mould; their form has remained Christian, even when their substance is furthest removed from dogma: his speech has retained the sound of Heaven.
A true believer professing heresy, the author of the Essai sur l'indifférence[440] talks my language with ideas that are not my ideas. If, after having embraced the popular evangelical teaching, he had remained attached to the priesthood, he[Pg 216] would have preserved the authority which variations have destroyed. The parish priests, the new members of the clergy (and the most distinguished among those ecclesiastics) were going towards him; the bishops would have found themselves involved in his cause if he had clung to the Gallican liberties, while continuing to venerate the successor of St. Peter and defending unity.
In France, the youth of the country would have gathered round the missionary, in whom it found the ideas which it loves and the progress to which it aspires; in Europe, the attentive dissenters would have raised no obstacle; great Catholic nations, the Poles, the Irish, the Spaniards, would have blessed the preacher who had risen up. Rome herself would have ended by seeing that the new evangelist was causing the dominion of the Church to take new birth and supplying the oppressed Pontiff with the means of resisting the influence of the absolute kings. What power of life! Intellect, religion, liberty represented in a priest!
God did not wish it: the light suddenly failed him who was the light; the guide, stealing away, left his flock in darkness. But my fellow-countryman, though his public career has been interrupted, will always have his private superiority left and his pre-eminence in natural gifts. In the order of time, he ought to survive me; I summon him to my death-bed to agitate our great conquests at those gates through which there is no returning. I should like to see his genius shed upon me the absolution which once his hand had the right to call down upon my head. We were lulled at our birth by the same waves[441]; may my ardent faith and my sincere admiration be permitted to hope that I shall meet my reconciled friend once more on the same shore of eternal things[442].
On the upshot, my investigations lead me to conclude that the old society is giving way beneath itself, that it is impossible for whosoever is not a Christian to understand the future society pursuing its career and satisfying at one time either the purely republican or the moderate monarchical idea. In any hypothesis, you can derive the improvements which you desire only from the Gospel.
At the bottom of the actual sectarians, what we find is always the plagiarism, the parody of the Gospel, always the apostolic principle: that principle has entered into us so deeply that we use it as though it belongs to us; we presume it to be natural, even though it be not so to us; it has come to us from our old faith, to take the latter two or three steps in the ascending line above us. Many a man of independent mind occupied with the perfecting of his fellows would never have thought of it if the right of the peoples had not been laid down by the Son of Man. Every act of philanthropy in which we indulge, every system of which we dream in the interests of humanity, is but the Christian idea turned over, changed in name and too often disfigured: it is always the Word made Flesh[443]!
Do you say that the Christian idea is only the human idea in progression? I agree; but open the different cosmogonies, and you shall learn that a traditional Christianity preceded revealed Christianity upon earth. If the Messiah "had not come" and if He "had not spoken[444]," as He says of Himself, the idea would not have been disengaged, the truths would have remained confused, such as we see them in the writings of the ancients. However you interpret it, therefore, it is from the Revealer, or from Christ that you hold everything; it is from the Saviour, Salvator, from the Comforter, Paracletus, that you must always start; it is from Him that you have received the germs of civilization and philosophy.
You see, therefore, that I find no solution for the future except in Christianity and in Catholic Christianity; the religion of the Word is the manifestation of truth, even as the Creation is God made visible. I do not pretend that a general renovation will absolutely take place, for I admit that whole nations are vowed to destruction; I admit also that the faith is drying up in certain countries: but, if a single grain of it remain, if it fall upon a little earth, were it but in the remnants of a vase, that grain will spring up[Pg 218] and a second incarnation of the Catholic spirit will revive society.
Christianity is the most philosophical and rational appreciation of God and the Creation; it contains the three great laws of the universe, divine law, moral law, political law: divine law, the unity of God in three Persons; moral law, charity; political law, that is, liberty, equality, fraternity.
The two first principles are fully developed; the third, political law, has not received its complements, because it could not flourish so long as the intelligent belief in the infinite being and universal morality were not firmly established. Now Christianity had first to clear away the absurdities and abominations with which idolatry and slavery had encumbered the human race.
Enlightened persons cannot understand how a Catholic like myself can persist in sitting in the shadow of what they call ruins; according to those persons, it is a wager on my part, an obstinate determination. But tell me, for pity's sake, where shall I find a family and a God in the individual and philosophical society which you offer me? Tell me that, and I follow you; if not, do not find it amiss that I lie down in the tomb of Christ, the only shelter which you have left to me while abandoning me.
No, I have made no wager with myself: I am sincere; see here what has happened to me: of my plans, my studies, my experiments, all that has remained to me is a complete disillusionment touching all the things which this world pursues. My religious conviction, as it grew greater, has swallowed up all my other convictions; there is no more believing Christian and no more incredulous man here below than I. Far from drawing near its end, the religion of the Deliverer has hardly entered upon its political period: liberty, equality, fraternity. The Gospel, the sentence of acquittal, has not yet been read to all; we have not gone beyond the curses pronounced by Christ:
"Wo to you ... because you load men with burdens which they cannot bear, and you yourselves touch not the packs with one of your fingers[445]."
Christianity is stable in its dogma and mobile in its enlightenment; its transformation involves the universal transformation. When it has reached its highest point, the[Pg 219] darkness will become completely lightened; liberty, crucified on Calvary with the Messiah, will descend from it with Him; it will hand to the nations that new Testament written in its favour and hitherto trammelled in its clauses. Governments will pass away, moral evil will disappear, rehabilitation will proclaim the consummation of the centuries of death and oppression born of the Fall.
When will that longed-for day arrive? When will society reconstruct itself after the secret methods of the generating principle? None can say; it is impossible to calculate the resistance of the passions.
More than once will death enervate races of men and shed silence upon events even as snow falling during the night deadens the noise of the traffic. Nations do not grow up so rapidly as the individuals of whom they are composed, nor do they disappear so quickly. How long does it not take to attain a single thing sought after! The death-agony of the Lower Empire threatened to be endless; the Christian Era, already so extensive, has not sufficed to abolish servitude. These calculations, I know, do not suit the French temper; in our revolutions, we have never admitted the element of time: that is why we are always wonder-struck at results contrary to our impatience. Full of generous courage, young men rush onwards; they make straight for a lofty region which they see dimly and which they strive to reach: nothing could be worthier of admiration; but they will wear out their lives in those efforts and, coming to the end, after disappointment upon disappointment, they will consign the weight of the years of deception to other deluded generations, which will carry it on to the next tombs; and so on. The time of the desert has returned; Christianity is beginning over again, in the barrenness of the Thebaid, amid a formidable idolatry, the idolatry of man for himself.
There are two kinds of consequences in history: one is immediate and instantly known; the other distant and not seen at once. Those two consequences are often contradictory: the first come from our short wisdom, the others from long-continued wisdom. The providential event appears after the human event. God rises behind men. Deny the Supreme Counsel as much as you please; do not consent to its action; dispute about words; call what the vulgar call Providence the force of things or reason; but look at the end of an accomplished fact, and you shall see that it has always produced[Pg 220] the contrary of what was expected of it, when it was not first established on morals and justice.
If Heaven has not pronounced Its last decree; if there is to be a future, a free and mighty future, that future is still far away, far beyond the visible horizon: we can reach it only with the aid of that Christian hope whose wings grow in proportion as all things seem to betray it, that hope which is longer than time and more powerful than misfortune.
Will the work inspired by my ashes and destined for my ashes be extant after me? It is possible that my work may be bad; it is possible that these Memoirs may fade into nothing on seeing the light: at least the things which I have told myself will have served to beguile the tedium of those last hours which no one wishes and which we know not how to employ. At the end of life is a bitter age: nothing pleases, because one is worthy of nothing; useful to none, a burden on all, near to our last resting-place, we have but a step to take to reach it: what would be the good of musing on a deserted shore? What pleasing shadows would one see in the future? Fie upon the clouds that now hover over my head!
One idea comes back to me and troubles me: my conscience is not reassured as to the innocence of my vigils; I dread my blindness and man's complacency towards his faults. Is what I am writing really in keeping with justice? Are morality and charity rigorously observed? Have I had the right to speak of others? What would it avail me to repent, if these Memoirs did any harm? O you unknown and hidden of the earth, you whose life, pleasing to the altars, works miracles, all hail to your secret virtues!
This or that poor man, destitute of knowledge, about whom none will ever trouble, has, by the mere doctrine of his manners, exercised upon his companions in suffering the divine influence which emanated from the virtues of Christ. The greatest book on earth is not worth so much as an unknown act of those nameless martyrs "whose blood Herod had mingled with their sacrifices[446]."
You have seen me born; you have seen my childhood, my idolatry of my singular creation in Combourg Castle,[Pg 221] my presentation at Versailles, my attendance, in Paris, at the first spectacle of the Revolution. In the New World, I met Washington; I penetrated into the backwoods; shipwreck brought me back to the coast of my Brittany. Came my sufferings as a soldier, my wretchedness as an Emigrant. Returning to France, I became the author of the Génie du Christianisme. In a changed society, I counted and lost friends. Bonaparte stopped me and flung himself, with the blood-stained body of the Duc d'Enghien, across my path; I stopped myself in my turn and brought the great man from his cradle, in Corsica, to his tomb, in St. Helena. I shared in the Restoration and saw its end.
Thus I have known public and private life. I have four times crossed the sea; I have followed the sun in the East, touched upon the ruins of Memphis, Carthage, Sparta and Athens; I have prayed at the tomb of St. Peter and worshipped on Golgotha. Poor and rich, powerful and weak, happy and miserable, a man of action, a man of thought, I have placed my hand in the century, my mind in the desert; effective existence has shown itself to me in the midst of illusions, even as the land appears to sailors in the midst of mists. If those facts spread over my dreams, like the varnish that preserves fragile paintings, do not disappear, they will mark the place through which my life passed.
In each of my three careers, I placed an important object before myself: as a traveller, I aimed at discovering the polar world; as a man of letters, I have striven to reconstruct religion from its ruins; as a statesman, I have endeavoured to give the nations the system of balanced monarchy, to restore France to her rank in Europe, to give back to her the strength which the Treaties of Vienna had taken from her; I have at least assisted in winning that one of our liberties which is worth all the others: the liberty of the press. In the divine order of things, religion and liberty; in the human order, honour and glory (which are the human generation of religion and liberty): that is what I have desired for my country.
Of the French authors of my own period, I may be said to be the only one who resembles his works: a traveller, soldier, publicist, minister, it is amid forests that I have sung the forests, aboard ship that I have depicted the Ocean, in camp that I have spoken of arms, in exile that I have learnt to know exile, in Courts, in affairs of State, in Parliament that I have studied princes, politics and laws.
The orators of Greece and Rome played their part in the republic and shared its fate; in Italy and Spain, at the end of the Middle Ages and under the Renascence, the leading intellects in letters and the arts took part in the social movement. How stormy and how fine were the lives of Dante, of Tasso, of Camoens, of Ercilla, of Cervantes! In France, of old, our songs and stories came to us from our pilgrimages and battles; but, commencing from the reign of Louis XIV., our writers have too often been men leading detached lives, and their talents have perchance expressed the spirit, but not the deeds of their age.
I, as luck would have it, after camping in Iroquois shelters and Arab tents, after wearing the cloak of the savage and the caftan of the mameluke, have sat at the tables of kings only to relapse into indigence. I have meddled with peace and war; I have signed treaties and protocols; I have taken part in sieges, congresses and conclaves, in the restoration and overturning of thrones; I have made history and I could write it: and my solitary and silent life went on through the tumult and uproar in the company of the daughters of my imagination, Atala, Amélie, Bianca, Velléda, without speaking of what I might call the realities of my days, if they had not themselves been the seduction of chimeras. I am afraid lest I should have a soul of the nature of that which an ancient philosopher called a sacred sickness[447].
I have found myself caught between two ages, as in the conflux of two rivers, and I have plunged into their waters, turning regretfully from the old bank upon which I was born, yet swimming hopefully towards an unknown shore[448].
The whole of geography has changed since, according to the expression of our old customs, I was able to look at the sky from my bed. If I compare the two terrestrial globes, the one at the commencement, the other at the end of my life, I no longer recognise them. A fifth part of the world, Australia, has been discovered and populated[449]; French sails have recently caught sight of a sixth continent amid the ice-fields of the Antarctic Pole[450], and the Parrys, Rosses and Franklins have turned the coasts, on our own pole, that mark[Pg 223] the limits of North America; Africa has opened its mysterious solitudes; in short, there is not a corner of our abode that is at present unknown. We are attacking all the necks of land that separate the world; soon, no doubt, we shall see ships pass through the Isthmus of Panama and, perhaps, the Isthmus of Suez[451].
History has made parallel discoveries in the depths of time; the sacred languages have allowed us to read their lost vocabulary; on the very granite-blocks of Mezraim, Champollion[452] has deciphered those hieroglyphics which seemed to be a seal set upon the lips of the desert that answered for their eternal discretion[453]. If new revolutions have struck off the map Poland, Holland[454], Genoa and Venice, other republics occupy a part of the shores of the Pacific and Atlantic. In those countries, a perfected civilization would be able to lend assistance to a vigorous nature: steam-boats would ascend those rivers destined to become easy means of communication after having been invincible obstacles; the banks of those rivers would become covered with towns and villages, even as we have seen new American States spring from the deserts of Kentucky. Through those forests once reputed impenetrable would fly horseless chariots, transporting enormous weights and thousands of travellers. Along those rivers, along those roads, would descend, together with the trees for the construction of the ships, the wealth of the mines which would serve to pay for them; and the Isthmus of Panama would burst its barrier to give passage to those ships from one sea to the other.
The shipping which borrows movement from fire is not restricted to the navigation of rivers: it crosses the Ocean; distances are shortening: no more currents, monsoons, contrary winds, blockades, close-ports. It is a far cry from this romance of industry to the hamlet of Plancoët[455]: in those days, the ladies used to play at old-time games by their fireside; the peasant-women spun the hemp for their clothes; the meagre resin-torch lit up the village evenings; chemistry had[Pg 224] not worked its wonders; machinery had not set all the waters and all the irons in motion to weave the wools or embroider the silks; gas, left to the fire-balls, did not yet supply the lighting for our theatres and streets.
Those transformations are not confined to our abodes: obeying the instinct of his immortality, man has sent his intellect on high; at each step that he has taken in the firmament, he has recognised miracles of the Unspeakable Power. That star, which seemed single to our fathers, is double and treble to our eyes; suns interposed before suns eclipse one another and lack space for their multitude. In the centre of the Infinite, God sees passing around Him those magnificent theories, proofs added to the proofs of the Supreme Being.
Let us picture, according to our enlarged knowledge, our paltry planet swimming in an ocean whose waves are suns, in that milky way, the raw matter of light, the molten metal of worlds which the hand of the Creator will shape. The distance of certain stars is so prodigious that their brightness will not be able to reach the eye that watches them until those stars are extinct: the focus before the ray. How small is man on the atom where he moves! But how great he is as an intellect! He knows when the face of luminaries is to be overcast with shadow, at what hour comets will return after thousands of years: he who lives but an instant! Microscopic insect though he be, lying unperceived in a fold of the robe of the sky, the globes cannot hide from him a single one of their movements in the depth of space. What destinies will those stars, new to us, shine upon? Is the revelation of those stars linked with some new phase of humanity? You will know, O races yet to be born; I do not know, and I am going.
Thanks to the exorbitancy of my years, my monument is finished. It is a great relief to me; I felt some one urging me: the skipper of the bark in which my seat is taken was warning me that I had but a moment left to go on board. If I had been the master of Rome, I should say, like Sulla, that I am ending my Memoirs on the very eve of my death; but I should not conclude my story with those words with which he concludes his:
"I have seen, in a dream, one of my children who showed me Metella, his mother, and exhorted me to come to enjoy repose in the breast of eternal happiness."
If I had been Sulla, glory could never have given me repose and happiness.
New storms will arise; men seem to have a presentiment of calamities that will surpass the afflictions with which we have been overwhelmed; already they are thinking of binding up their old wounds again in order to return to the field of battle. Still, I do not believe in the early outbreak of misfortunes; peoples and kings alike are tired out; no unforeseen catastrophe will fall upon France: what comes after me will be only the effect of the general transformation. No doubt, there will be painful stations; the world cannot change its aspect without causing suffering. But, once more, there will be no separate revolutions; it will be the great revolution approaching its end. The scenes of to-morrow do not concern me; they call for other painters: it is your turn, gentlemen!
As I write these last words, on the 16th of November 1841, my window, which looks west over the gardens of the Foreign Missions, is open: it is six o'clock in the morning; I see the pale and spreading moon; it is sinking over the spire of the Invalides scarce revealed by the first gold ray from the East: one would say that the old world was ending and the new commencing. I behold the reflections of a dawn of which I shall not see the sun rise. It but remains for me to sit down by the edge of my grave; and then I shall descend boldly, crucifix in hand, to Eternity.
[399] This book was written partly in 1834 and partly in 1841, from the 25th of September to the 16th of November.—T.
[400] Chateaubriand is a year out in his calculation; but, as has been said before and as he himself has stated, he was an indifferent arithmetician.—T.
[401] 1 September 1715.—T.
[402] Antonio Giudice, Duca di Giovenazza, Principe di Cellamare (1657-1733), of Neapolitan birth, was Spanish Ambassador to the Court of France in 1715. He became the soul of a conspiracy directed against the Duc D'Orléans and having for its object the transfer of the Regency to Philip V. King of Spain. But the plot was discovered and Cellamare made to leave the Kingdom in 1718.—T.
[403] Cf. Vol. V., p. 15, n. 5. Alberoni's fall occurred in 1719.—T.
[404] Guillaume Cardinal Dubois, Archbishop of Cambrai (1656-1723), became Foreign Minister in 1717, was useful to the Regent in discovering Cellamare's conspiracy and received the See of Cambrai, as his reward, in 1718. He became Prime Minister in 1722. Dubois added to the Court of the Regency such depravity as there was room for.—T.
[405] John Law (1671-1729), the Scotch financier, became French Controller-general of Finance in May 1720. He was the inventor of a marvellous "System," which collapsed in May of the same year, and Law with it. He was driven from France and his estates confiscated.—T.
[406] Louis Henri Duc de Bourbon (1692-1740), known as M. le Duc, was Prime Minister from 1723 to 1726, when Fleury obtained his banishment to Chantilly.
[407] André Hercule Cardinal de Fleury, Bishop of Fréjus (1653-1743), was seventy-three years old, when he became Prime Minister, and remained in power till his death, at the age of ninety.—T.
[408] The War of the Polish Succession.—B.
[409] 29 May 1734 (Cf. Vol. I., p. 13).—T.
[410] Charles Louis Auguste Fouquet, Maréchal Duc de Belle-Isle (1684-1761), father of the Comte de Gisors and grandson of Fouquet (vide infra), created a marshal of France, after meritorious services, in 1700. His finest feat of arms was his masterly retreat from Prague in 1742. He was Minister for War from 1757 till his death.—T.
[411] The French were defeated by the Brunswickers, at Crefeld, on the 23rd of June 1758.—T.
[412] Nicolas Fouquet, Marquis de Belle-Isle (1615-1680), Superintendent of Finance from 1652 to 1661, is more celebrated for the disgrace that followed on his administration than for that administration itself. He was arrested and condemned for peculation in 1661 and imprisoned at Pignerol, in Piedmont, where he died in 1680, after nineteen years' captivity. He retained many good friends during his reverses of fortune, notably La Fontaine, who sang his sufferings, and Madame de Sévigné.-T.
[413] La Bourdonnais (Cf. Vol. I., p. 26, n. 6) was Governor-General of the Isles of France and Bourbon when, in 1743, he went to the assistance of Dupleix, Governor of French India, who was threatened by the English. La Bourdonnais laid siege to Madras and compelled it to capitulate (1746). By the terms of the capitulation, Madras was to be restored to the English on payment of a ransom. Dupleix quashed this capitulation and a collision arose between him and La Bourdonnais which was fatal to the latter. Furious at Dupleix's want of faith, La Bourdonnais evacuated Madras and went back as a private individual to the Isle of France, where he had been replaced in the command by the instructions of the masterful Dupleix. He returned to France, in 1748, to reply to the accusations levelled against him at the instance of his persecutor, was imprisoned in the Bastille and remained there for several years without receiving an opportunity of justifying himself. At last, in 1752, his innocence was established and he released; but he was a ruined man and he died in 1753 of a long and painful illness.—T.
[414] Joseph François Marquis Dupleix (1697-1764) was Governor of the French East Indies from 1742 to 1754. In the war which ensued on his breach of faith (vide supra), he displayed a courage and capacity that went far to atone for the wrong he had undoubtedly committed. For forty-two days, he defended Pondicherry against a formidable English fleet and an army on land, and he added a great tract of country to the French dominions. Puffed out by his successes, he ended by struggling against the French East India Company itself, whose agent he was, when it tried to oppose his enterprises. Ruined at last by all these wars, he strove for a time to conceal the real state of things: the truth became known, and he was recalled (1754). He spent the rest of his life in bringing actions against the Company for sundry millions of francs advanced to them and died in poverty and humiliation, in Paris, in 1764.—T.
[415] 1 November 1755.—T.
[416] Robert first Lord Clive of Plassey (1725-1774) started on his first expedition against Bengal in 1756. He won the Battle of Plassey on the 23rd of June 1757 and was Governor of Bengal from 1758 to 1760 and from 1765 to 1767. Clive committed suicide in London on the 22nd of November 1774.—T.
[417] Robert François Damiens (1715-1757) made an unsuccessful attempt on the life of King Louis XV. on the 5th of January 1757. He succeeded in stabbing him. The punishment inflicted on Damiens was one of the most serious known in history: his right hand was burnt in a slow fire; his flesh was torn with pincers and burnt with melted lead; resin, wax and oil were poured upon the wounds; and he was torn to pieces by four horses.—T.
[418] The Family Compact was a treaty signed on the 15th of August 1761 between the Kings of France, Spain and the Two Sicilies and the Duke of Parma, and so-called because all the contracting parties belonged to the Bourbon Family. The object of this treaty, of which the Duc de Choiseul was the chief author, was to counteract the superiority of the British Navy by the union of the French, Spanish and Italian forces.—T.
[419] Cf. Vol. I., p. 139, n. 1.—T.
[420] Madame Du Barry was guillotined on the 6th of December 1793—T.
[421] Dominique Joseph Garat (Cf. Vol. II., p. 106, n. 6) was sent, as Minister of Justice under the Convention, on the 20th of January 1793, to notify Louis XVI.'s condemnation to him.—T.
[422] Claude Louis Comte de Saint-Germain (1707-1778) became Minister for War to Louis XVI., in 1775, on the advice of Turgot. He effected many useful reforms, especially in the King's Military Household, but displeased the army by attempting to introduce the Austrian discipline and corporal punishment. He resigned office in 1777 and died in the course of the following year.—T.
[423] Chateaubriand was born on the 4th of September 1768.—T.
[424] Prussia declared herself a kingdom in 1701.—T.
[425] Russia underwent her greatest development under Peter the Great, whose reign lasted from 1682 to 1725.—T.
[426] Corsica was annexed to France on the 15th of August 1768.—T.
[427] Napoleon I. was born on the 15th of August 1768.—T.
[428] Cf. Vol. I., pp. 68-69.—T.
[429] American Independence was recognised by Great Britain in 1783.—T.
[430] Gen., IV., 19.—T.
[431] Isabella II. Queen of Spain (b. 1830 and still living) was made to usurp the throne, in 1833, on the death of Ferdinand VII., when a child of three, by the machinations of her mother, Maria Christina (cf. Vol. III., p. 221, n. 2 and Vol. V., p. 74, n. 4). Queen Isabella was deposed and driven from Spain in 1868, since which time she has resided in Paris.—T.
[432] Victoria Queen of Great Britain and Ireland (cf. Vol. IV., p. 47, n. 2) married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha on the 10th of February 1840, when in her twenty-first year.—T.
[433] Guillaume Anfrie, Abbé de Chaulieu, Les Louanges de la vie champêtre, à Fontenay, en 1707, 71-72:
"O beautiful trees that presided
O'er my birth, you shall soon see me die!"—T.
[434] Varius Avitus Bassianus, known as Heliogabalus, Roman Emperor (205-222) was proclaimed Emperor in 218 and gave himself up to the most extravagant licentiousness. He was killed, in the eighteenth year of his age, by his soldiers, whom his rapacity and debaucheries had irritated.—T.
[435] Lamennais (cf. Vol. I., p. 27, n. 1) had been prosecuted for one of his political writings, the Pays et le Gouvernement, and sentenced, on the 26th of December 1840, to twelve months' imprisonment and a tine of 2,000 francs.—B.
[436] Lamennais' pamphlet had just been published when Chateaubriand was writing these last pages of the Memoirs in the autumn of 1841.—B.
[437] Lamennais was locked up at Sainte-Pélagie from January to December 1841. He here composed his Voix de prison, an admirable little volume containing, beside the furious rage of the pamphleteer, pages of exquisite poetic feeling.—B.
[438] It is interesting in this connection to note that Lamennais was a dwarf in stature and Chateaubriand himself only five feet four inches high.—T.
[439] Lamennais' name was not François, but Félicité Robert.—T.
[440] 1817-1823.—T.
[441] Lamennais was born at Saint-Malo on the 19th of June 1782, fourteen years after Chateaubriand.—T.
[442] Lamennais died in Paris on the 27th of February 1854, six years after Chateaubriand. His funeral was held almost by stealth, on the 1st of March. The hour of the funeral was accelerated by the authorities, who were afraid of disturbances; six or eight persons followed the hearse, from which the crowd was kept off by an armed force.
"The coffin," says M. Blaize, in his Essai biographique sur M. F. de La Mennais, "was lowered into one of those long and hideous trenches in which the common people are buried. When it was covered with earth, the grave-digger asked:
"'Is there to be a cross?'"
M. Barbet answered:
"'No. M. de La Mennais said, "They must put nothing on my grave.'"
"Not a word was spoken over the tomb."—B.
[443] John, I., 14.—T.
[444] John, XV., 22.—T.
[445] Luke, XI., 46.—T.
[446] Cf. Luke, XIII., 1: "And there were present at that very time some that told him of the Galileans, whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices." An earlier edition gives Herodotus! I have little doubt that the misquotation was a slip on the part of the author's pen.—T.
[447] Epilepsy.—T.
[448] Cf. Vol. I., pp. XXI.-XXIV.: The Author's Preface.—T.
[449] Australia was explored by Cook in 1770-1777. The first settlement was at Port Jackson in 1788.—T.
[450] Jules Sébastien César Dumont d'Urville (1790-1842) visited the Antarctic Ocean in the Coquille, in 1839. He was killed in the burning of a railway train between Paris and Versailles on the 8th of May 1842.—T.
[451] Ferdinand Vicomte de Lesseps (1805-1894) made his first investigation of the Isthmus of Suez in 1849. The Canal was thrown open for navigation in 1869. Work on the Panama Canal began in 1881.—T.
[452] Jean François Champollion (1791-1831) discovered the key to the Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions in 1822, with the aid of the famous Rosetta Stone.—T.
[453] M. Charles Lenormant, Champollion's learned travelling-companion, has preserved the grammar of the obelisks which M. Ampère has gone to study to-day on the ruins of Thebes and Memphis.—Author's Note.
[454] Sic, in all the editions!—T.
[455] Cf. Vol. I., pp. 21-22.—T.
(By M. Edmond Biré)
The Comte de La Ferronnays, in the course of his interviews with King Charles X. at Hradschin Castle[456], brought himself to say:
"If Madame has not yet complied with Your Majesty's wish, if she has hitherto refused to furnish the proof which is asked of her, it is because her advisers in Paris, M. Hennequin[457] among others, have frightened her as to the consequences that might ensue to her from the publicity which it may perhaps be intended to give to her marriage. She has been told that Your Majesty would not be satisfied until you had the original instrument in your hands. Now Madame, I fear, will never part with that document. But, if there were any other means of obtaining the certainty which Your Majesty desires to have, if a man honoured with all the King's confidence, such as M. de Montbel, for instance, could, on his word of honour, vouch for the existence and the perfect regularity of the marriage-deed, would the King then declare himself satisfied?"
Since the Emigration, Charles X. had the habit of addressing M. de La Ferronnays in the second person singular. He replied eagerly:
"Yes, certainly, I only ask to be convinced."
It was then arranged that M. de La Ferronnays and M. de Montbel should go to Florence to the Duchesse de Berry. The Comte de La Ferronnays continues his narrative in the following words:
"On returning to Prague, I found M. de Montbel's carriage standing ready harnessed before my door. He was waiting for my return to set out for Florence, where we were to join the Duchess. He purposed to pass through Vienna, where he had to supply himself with certain papers which he thought useful. I intended to go straight to Tuscany. Nevertheless, in spite of all the haste that I made, I did not arrive until twenty-four hours after him.
"I immediately called at his hotel; it was six o'clock in the morning. Soon, Montbel joined me in a little sitting-room next to his bed-room:
"'We have made an useless journey,' he said to me at once; 'I much regret having undertaken it. I saw the Duchesse de Berry yesterday, one hour after my arrival. I found her more excited, more irritated against the King than ever. She is firmly decided to yield on no point and to risk all the consequences of a rupture by arriving in Prague, in spite of the measures taken to close the road to her. All my arguments, all my entreaties were useless. She ended by flying out against what she calls the partiality of my conduct. I can do no more. As for you, she expects you with impatience. She is persuaded that the letter which you are bringing her from the Emperor will give her the liberty to continue her journey. That letter, so different from what she expects, will increase her irritation two-fold. You will have a painful scene and it appears to me impossible that you should succeed in making her listen to reason.'"
As the Duchesse de Berry was not to receive M. de La Ferronnays until eleven o'clock, the latter, on leaving M. de Montbel, went to the Comte de Saint-Priest. M. de Saint-Priest was the Princess's most authorized adviser. The reception was perfect, but nevertheless wrapped up in every imaginable kind of reserve.
"At bottom, the question remains the same," said M. de Saint-Priest. "However affectionate the letter which M. de Montbel brought from the King may be, it makes no alteration in the first demands, nor, consequently, in the reasons which the Duchess has for rejecting them. The mere fact," concluded M. de Saint-Priest, "of handing over the marriage-deed, as Madame is asked to do, would be enough to deprive her of her rights as a mother, a princess of the Blood and Regent She refuses and will always refuse to hand it over."
This was brusquely broaching a question which M. de La Ferronnays meant to discuss only with the Duchess herself. He therefore left M. de Saint-Priest, not, however, without obtaining from him a promise of complete neutrality.
"At the appointed hour," he continues, in his narrative, "I called at the Poggio Imperiale, where Madame was staying. When I was announced, she was alone, in a small drawing-room, with Count Lucchesi, who at once withdrew.
"Her Royal Highness' first sentence was one of thanks. The second was to ask me for the Emperor's letter. She read it with ever-increasing excitement:
"'I see,' she at last said, angrily, 'that the party against me is firmly united. This letter of the Emperor's is evidently dictated by the King. They want to drive me to extremities. They want to be able to say to France and to my children that there is no Duchesse de Berry now, that there is only a foreigner entitled to neither protection nor pity! They are erecting a pillory and they want me to fasten myself to it.... They know me very little, if they think me capable of so mean-spirited an act. They who employ such lofty language to me have a false appreciation of their position and mine. They do not know the strength which public opinion can give me against them. They shall learn to know, for, as they want war, I accept it. I shall have everything printed, everything published. I shall prove that it is for me to impose conditions and not for me to accept any. I shall force the King to respect my rights and at last to give me back my children.'
"Madame la Duchesse de Berry's utterance was loud and short, her gestures abrupt; and, but for her extreme agitation, I might have thought that she was repeating a part which she had studied. I expected this outburst; I was also prepared with the language which I should have to hold; but I did not hurry to reply.
"Astonished at my silence:
"'But, after all,' she asked, 'don't you think that I am right?'
"'I shall dare to tell you everything, Madame, because my reasons for being absolutely sincere will justify the harshness of my words. All that Your Highness has just told me makes me fear that you are ill-informed, ill-advised or ill-inspired. I have listened to Madame with great attention[Pg 232] and I am obliged to tell her that she is mistaken as to the King's intentions, but that she is also unfortunately mistaken as to her own position. The King, Madame, does not believe in Your Highness' marriage. He does not believe in it, because you refuse to give him the proof of it and because your friends continue to protest against the reality of this marriage. And yet it is important that the truth about this should be known. Too much has been said about it, or not enough. M. le Comte Lucchesi's presence about Your Highness is no longer to be explained. As long as this remains so, I am not afraid to say that the King, having his grand-children with him, cannot admit you into the interior of his family. Right, justice and reason are on His Majesty's side.'
"Here the Duchesse de Berry, whose agitation was extreme, was unable to contain herself any longer and cried:
"'But, monsieur, I give you my word of honour that I am married. The marriage-deed, which is perfectly regular, exists. It is deposited in safe hands, and I shall certainly not take it from them to place it in those of Charles X. and M. de Metternich.'
"'I beg Your Highness to observe that this is the first time that you have deigned to speak to me with such confidence. One declaration of this kind made to me in Naples with that accent of truth would, I dare to think, have been enough to enable me to fulfil in an entirely satisfactory manner the mission with which Your Royal Highness was pleased to entrust me. But what had I to oppose to the King's doubts? What could I tell him to reassure his conscience? Nothing, Madame, for you had told me nothing. My personal conviction could carry no weight Your friends, moreover, reproached me with it. To admit that one believed in Your Highness' marriage seemed to them almost an act of treachery. I could therefore say nothing and I was obliged to leave the King in the fulness of his doubts. Do not believe, Madame, that it is to Charles X.'s interest to stigmatize the widow of his son and the mother of his grandson. No, he shows himself only jealous of your honour as a widow and a mother, believe me. The King may have disapproved of a marriage contracted without his knowledge, he may even have become irritated at it; but to-day he asks only to set his conscience at rest and to shelter your honour. Your Royal Highness speaks of the strength which public opinion will give you. You seem to threaten the King and[Pg 233] the Powers with your anger. Alas, all those outbursts would only be new and great misfortunes. It is very painful for me to be reduced to give utterance only to cruel words. But it is necessary that Madame should at last know the truth, so that she may resolve upon a necessary sacrifice. No, Madame is no longer in a situation to dictate terms or impose conditions: she still judges her position from the height of the pedestal upon which public opinion for some time placed her. No doubt, if Your Royal Highness had remained there; if, after the admiration inspired by her sublime courage, constancy, devotion, we had had to bemoan only her reverses and her captivity, not only would Madame have lost none of her spell, but she would have left Blaye even greater than when she entered it. She would not have had to dictate conditions, for she would have found none but submissive wills before her. But, unhappily for Madame and for France, the declaration made in the month of February has completely and cruelly changed all that. Believe, Madame, the voice of a friend who will never be able to give you a greater proof of his devotion than he is doing at this moment; or rather, listen only to your reason. It will make you understand why and to what extent your position is changed. You will admit how guilty is the want of reflection of those who advise you to resort to resistance and even threats. Everyone pities you, Madame, but no one is any longer afraid of you. The struggle which you are being urged to maintain is henceforth too unequal. Its prolongation can henceforth have fatal consequences for you alone.'
"While speaking, I saw the unhappy Princess turn red, then pale; tears poured down her cheeks, but she did not try to interrupt me. I was able to fulfil my sad duty to the end. She then looked at me with an indefinable expression of face:
"'If all that you have just told me is true, they are deceiving me and I am very unhappy. What do you want me to do? Can I send that original document which, before the courts, would be my condemnation?'
"'No, Madame, I am the first to tell Your Highness that you must in no case part with it. Only, the King's conscience desires to be reassured; there is no other motive in his demand. If the King could obtain the certainty of Your Highness' marriage, without your parting with the original, without your even giving a copy of it, should you[Pg 234] see any danger, for yourself or your interests, in satisfying Charles X.?'
"The Princess tried to guess my thought.
"'But what means can you contrive that would satisfy the King, since he refuses to believe my word?'
"'The King does not believe it, because you have not given it him.'
"'But I tell you again that I am married. The deed is in Rome, in the Pope's hands.'
"'Well then, Madame, if a man honoured by your confidence and the King's, if M. de Montbel were to go to Rome, would you refuse to allow the holder of your marriage-deed to give him cognizance of it, or at least to certify its existence to him? I am certain that M. de Montbel's declaration would be immediately followed by the dispatch of the passports which Your Highness so impatiently desires.'
"Madame la Duchesse de Berry, at last conquered, came up to me and said, with a sad smile:
"'I see no harm in trying the method which you propose, but you understand that I cannot decide alone. Count Lucchesi's consent is as necessary as my own.'
"M. le Comte Lucchesi was in a neighbouring room, with Messieurs de Montbel and de Saint-Priest; I called him in. Madame herself repeated to him the proposal which I had just made. He did not hesitate to accept.
"I then asked that the two other gentlemen might be brought in. We all sat round a little table before which Madame la Duchesse de Berry was herself seated and, at her bidding, I gave an account of the explanation which I had just had with her. As I was finishing, I addressed the Comte de Montbel:
"'And now, monsieur, it is for you alone, who know the King's mind and who, so to speak, represent him here, to judge and declare if the method which I propose will be able to satisfy His Majesty and put an end to his opposition to Madame's journey to Prague.'
"'I give a formal undertaking to that effect,' cried M. de Montbel, 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[Pg 235] 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."
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.[Pg 237] 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[Pg 238] 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[Pg 240] 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[Pg 242] 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[Pg 243] 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[Pg 244] 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[Pg 245] 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[Pg 246] 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[Pg 247] 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."
(By M. Edmond Biré)
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[Pg 249] 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. 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[Pg 252] 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.[Pg 253] 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[Pg 254] 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[Pg 255] 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,[Pg 256] 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[Pg 257] 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,[Pg 258] 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[Pg 259] 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[Pg 260] 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[Pg 261] 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 July1848.
"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[Pg 262] 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[Pg 263] 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[Pg 264] 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."
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[Pg 266] 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.
A
Aaron, vi. 135
Aaron the Hermit, Saint, i. 24, 30; ii. 46
Abailard (See Abélard)
d'Abbéville, Comtesse, i. 29
Abbon the Crooked, iii. 59
Abd-el-Kader, iii. 111; vi. 99
Abdul-Medjid Sultan of Turkey, v. 51
Abel, iii. 39; vi. 25
Abélard, Peter, i. 94; ii. 184, 310-311
Abercromby, Sir Ralph, i. 224
Abercromby, Sir Robert, i. 224
Aberdeen, George Gordon, fourth Earl of, iii. 49
Abigail, vi. 237
Abou Gosch, vi. 105
d'Abrantès, Andoche Junot, Duc, iv. 164
d'Abrantès, Laure Permon-Comnène,
Duchesse, iv. 149, 207-214
Acerbi, Virginia, vi. 65
Achard, Comte, i. 106; ii. 24
Achmet III. Sultan of Turkey
A'Court (see Heytesbury)
Adalbéron Archbishop of Rheims, iv. 112
Adalgarius (see Oger)
Adam, ii. 245; v. 9; vi. 89, 111, 206
Adams, President of the United States
of America, John, i. 252
Adelaide of Savoy, Queen of France,
later Dame de Montmorency, iv. 209
Adélaïde Princess of France, Madame,
i. 160, 177; vi. 69, 197
Adélaïde, known as Mademoiselle d'Orléans,
Madame, v. 128, 156-157, 161
Addison, Joseph, ii. 86, 121; iv. 246-247; v. 57
Ader, Jean Joseph, v. 96
Admetes King of the Molossians, iii. 189
Adrian I., Pope, i. 74
Adrian (see also Hadrian)
Æmilius Paulus Macedonicus, Lucius,
iii. 34; iv. 259; vi. 50
Æschylus, i. 82; ii. 124
Affre, Archbishop of Paris, Denis Auguste, vi. 263
Agier, M., i. 97
d'Agincourt, Jean Baptiste Louis
Georges Seroux, ii. 230-231
Agnes of Savoy, Dame de Bourbon, iv. 209
d'Agoult, Vicomtesse, v. 363, 408-409
Agricola, the Emperor, ii. 201
Agrippina, the Empress, i. 234; ii. 33, 258
Agrippina Julia, the Empress, ii. 258
d'Aguesseau, Marquis, ii. 146
d'Aguesseau, Marie Cathérine de
Lamoignon, Marquise, ii. 146-147, 155
d'Aguesseau, Henri Cardin Jean Baptiste Comte, iii. 29
d'Aguesseau, Henri François Chancelier, i. 135; iii. 29
Ahasuerus (see Assuerus)
Ahenobarbus, Domitianus, ii. 258
d'Aiguillon, Armand de Wignerod-Duplessis-Richelieu,
Duc, i. 163; iii. 13
d'Aiguillon, Armand Désiré de Wignerod-Duplessis-Richelieu,
Duc, i. 163
d'Aiguillon, Duchesse, i. 174
Ain (see Girod de l'Ain)
Alan III. Count of Brittany, i. 6
Alan IV. Duke of Brittany, ii. 137
Alaric I. King of the Visigoths, iii. 51,
224; iv. 180, 226; v. 334; vi. 50, 247
Alaric II. King of the Visigoths, i. 24
Albani, Giuseppe Cardinal, v. 5-6, 18,
30, 33, 35, 39, 46-49, 52
Albani, Francesco, vi. 110
Albany, Countess of (see Louisa of
Stolberg, Queen of England)
Albéric, ii. 30
Alberoni, Giulio Cardinal, v. 15-16; vi. 200
Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Prince
Consort of Great Britain and Ireland, iv. 47; vi. 207
Albert Duke of Prussia, iv. 37
Albert of Prussia, Prince Henry, iv. 33, 271
Albert Duke of Saxe-Teschen, v. 127; vi. 58
d'Albert, Julie, i. 65
Albertus Magnus, i. 27
Alcibiades, iii. 45, 96; iv. 72, 123-124; v. 229
Aldus Manutius (see Manutius)
d'Alembert, Jean Baptiste Le Rond, ii. 172, 180, 187
Alexander III., Pope, v. 12
Alexander VI., Pope, v. 13
Alexander VII., Pope, v. 14
Alexander VIII., Pope, v. 15
Alexander III. King of Macedon, i.
196, 229; ii. 159; iii. 149, 186, 195,
202-203, 205, 220-221, 224; iv. 75,
176, 192, 255, 264; v. 14, 298, 403; vi. 236
Alexander IV. King of Macedon, iv. 192
Alexander I. Tsar of All the Russias,
i. xxi, 65, 99; ii. 232, 289; iii. 30,
49, 50, 57-64, 72-73, 77, 86, 92, 94,
98, 107, 144-146, 149, 157, 172, 186,
194, 211; iv. 33, 36, 67, 104, 118,
122, 146, 166, 203-204, 236, 277,
281; v. 272, 387, 398; vi. 45
Alexander II. Tsar of All the Russias, iv. 74, 271
Alexander, Captain, iii. 225
Alexandra Feodorowna of Russia,
Charlotte of Prussia, Empress, i. 99; iv. 33, 35-36, 271
Alfieri, Vittorio Conte, i. xxiii; ii.
202-203; iv. 249-251; v. 55
Alfred King of England, ii. 140
Allart de Merftens, Hortense Dame, vi. 174
Almazan (see Saint-Priest)
d'Alopeus, David Count, iv. 36
d'Alopeus, Countess, iv. 36
d'Alopeus (see also La Ferronnays)
Alphonsus King of Aragon, i. 9
Alphonsus IX. King of Castile, ii. 256
Alphonsus I. Duke of Ferrara, iv. 42; v. 13; vi. 92
Alphonsus II. Duke of Ferrara, v. 330; vi. 82, 84-87, 92, 100
Alphonsus V. King of Leon and Asturias, v. 377
Alphonsus II. King of Naples, v. 13
Alphonsus IV. King of Portugal, vi. 24
Alphonsus of Bisceglie, v. 13
Altieri, Victoria Boncompagni-Ludovisi
degli Principi di Piombino, Principessa, iv. 256
Amador Bishop of Auxerre, ii. 43
Amalasontha Queen of the Ostrogoths, iv. 227
d'Amboise (see Choiseul et d'Amboise)
Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, Saint, iii. 30
d'Ambrugeac, Louis Alexandre Marie
Valon de Boucheron, Comte, v. 106
Amherst, William Pitt first Earl, iii. 211
Ampère, André Marie, v. 261, 389
Ampère, Jean Jacques, ii. 217; iv.
213, 254; v. 261, 389; vi. 223
Anacreon, i. 131; iii. 29; v. 257; vi. 13
Ancillon, Jean Pierre Fréderic, iv. 34,
60-61, 102; v. 91
Ancillon, Madame, iv. 34
d'Ancre, Baron de Lussigny, Concino
Concini, Marquis, vi. 28
d'Andilly, Robert Arnauld, known as
Arnauld, v. 54
d'Andrezel, Christophe François
Thérèse Picon, Comte, i. 106-107, 111
Angelo (see Malipieri)
d'Angély (see Regnaud de Saint-Jean d'Angély)
d'Angennes, née Cottereau, Dame, vi. 238
Angles, Jules Jean Baptiste Comte, iii. 100; iv. 7
d'Angoulême, Duc (see Louis XIX.
King of France and Navarre)
d'Angoulême, Duchesse (see Marie-Thérèse
Queen of France)
d'Angoulême, Comtesse, i. 120
Aniche, Dame, iv. 24-25, 59
Anna Maria of Orleans, Queen of
Sardinia, iv. 251
"Anna-Marie," pseud. (see d'Hautefeuille, Comtesse)
Anne of Prussia, Electress of Brandenburg, iv. 37
Anne Queen of England, v. 333
Anne Boleyn, Queen of England, ii. 138
Anne Duchess of Brittany, Empress,
Queen of France, i. 27, 141
Anne of Austria, Queen of France, i. 126;
ii. 151, 172; iv. 245; v. 101
Anne of Russia, Queen of the Netherlands,
iii. 144; vi. 185
Anne Empress of Russia, i. 13; vi. 101
Année, Antoine, v. 96
Annibal (see Hannibal)
Anselme, Pierre de Gibours, known as Père, i. 5
Anson, George first Lord, i. 126
Anspach, Elizabeth Berkeley, Lady
Craven, later Margravine of, iv. 161
Antar, i. 122
Anthony, Saint, ii. 43; iv. 230
Anthony of Padua, Saint, vi. 104
Anthony King of Navarre, ii. 279
Anthony Duke of Parma, v. 15
Anthony King of Saxony, iv. 231
Antigonus King of Asia, iv. 75
Antiochus King of Syria, iv. 75; vi. 247
Antipater Viceroy of Macedon, iv. 75
Antomarchi, Dr. Francesco, iii. 216-218
d'Antonelle, Pierre Antoine Marquis, iv. 18
Antoninus, the Emperor, ii. 62
Antonio, the Vicomte de Chateaubriand's
Venetian guide, vi. 53, 63-65, 104
Antony, Marcus Antonius, known as Mark, ii. 122
d'Antremont (see Bourdic)
Antrodocco (see Frimont)
Apelles, vi. 57, 180
Appius Claudius (see Claudius Crassus)
Apollodorus, iv. 256
Apponyi, Anton Rodolf Count, v. 17, 146
Aquaviva of Aragon, Cardinal, v. 15
Arago, Dominique François Jean, v.
106, 115, 156, 206; vi. 169
d'Arblay, Fanny Burney, Dame, ii. 126
Arc (see Joan of Arc)
Archilochus, v. 56
Archimedes, vi. 122
Arezzo, Tommaso Cardinal, v. 6
d'Argentre, Bertrand, i. 5
d'Argout, Apollinaire Antoine Maurice
Comte, v. 111, 113-114, 116; vi. 99-100
Ariosto, Ludovico, ii. 220; iv. 42-43,
228; vi. 78-79, 82, 87, 92, 100
Ariosto the Younger, vi. 82
Aristogiton, vi. 180
Aristophanes, ii. 124; vi. 9
Aristotle, v. 70
Armani, Signor, vi. 51
Armani, Signorina, vi. 51
d'Armano (see Corday)
Arnaud (see Gibert-Amaud)
Arnauld, Abbé Antoine, iv. 245
Arnauld, Antoine, v. 54
Arnauld (see also d'Andilly and Pomponne)
Arnott, Dr., iii. 217
d'Arnouville (see Machault d'Arnouville)
Arouet (see Voltaire)
Arrhidæus King of Macedon, iv. 192
Arrighi, Giuseppe Filippo, iii. 106
d'Arsoli, Camillo Massimiliano Massimo,
Principe, iv. 238
Artaud de Montor, Alfred Frédéric
Chevalier, ii. 219; iii. 122
Artaxerxes I. King of Persia, iii. 189
Artevelde, Jacob van, iii. 138
Arthur II. Duke of Brittany, i. 9
Artois, Robert Count of, ii. 73
d'Artois, Comte (see Charles X. King
of France and Navarre)
Asdrubal (see Hasdrubal)
Asgill, Sir Charles, i. 216-217
"Ashwood, Sir," v. 16
Aspasia, i. 244; iii. 45; iv. 117; v.
25; vi. 172
d'Aspremont, Comte, vi. 46
Assuerus King of the Medes and Persians, v. 383
Astley, Philip, vi. 68
Astolf King of the Lombards, iv. 228
Atawulf King of the Visigoths, iv. 227
Athalric King of the Ostrogoths, iv. 227
Athenæus, i. 259; vi. 180, 247
Attalus, the Emperor, iii. 88
Atticus Herodes, Tiberias Claudius vi. 154-155
Attila King of the Huns, i. 212; ii.
185; iii. 47, 90, 157, 224; v. 58,
334; vi. 50
d'Aubeterre, Joseph Henri Bouchard,
Maréchal Marquis, ii. 41-42
Aubiac, ii. 172
d'Aubigné, Charles, vi. 240
d'Aubigné, Geneviève Piètre, Dame, vi. 240
d'Aubigné, Constant, vi. 241
d'Aubigné, Théodore Agrippa, vi. 241
Audry de Puyravault (see Puyravault)
d'Auerstädt, Prince d'Eckmühl, Louis
Nicolas Davout, Maréchal Duc, iii. 164
Augereau (see Castiglione)
Auguis, Pierre René, iii. 21
Augustine, Saint, i. 31; ii. 154; vi. 6
Augustulus, the Emperor, vi. 195
Augustus, the Emperor, i. 68; v. 8
Augustus II. King of Poland, Frederic
Augustus I. Elector of Saxony, later, vi. 101
Augustus of Prussia, Prince, iv. 34, 172-173
d'Aulnay, Comte Lepelletier, i. 135
d'Aulnay, née de Rosanbo, Comtesse
Lepelletier, i. 135
Aulne (see Turgot)
d'Aulps (see Blacas d'Aulps)
Aulus Gellius (see Gellius)
d'Aumale, Henri Eugène Philippe
Louis d'Orléans, Duc, ii. 110, 293
d'Auvergne, Charles, ii. 65
d'Auvergne, Philippe (see Bouillon)
d'Avaray, Antoine Louis Frédéric de
Bésiade, Comte, later Duc, ii. 301; iv. 8-9
d'Avaray, Claude Antoine de Bésiade, Duc, ii. 301
d'Avaray, née de Mailly, Duchesse, ii. 301
Avenel, Denis Louis Martial, v. 95
Azara, José Nicola de, ii. 230
B
Bacciochi, later Prince of Lucca and
Piombino, Félix Pascal Prince, ii. 166
Bacciochi, Élisa Bonaparte, Princess
(see Élisa Grand-duchess of Tuscany)
Bachaumont, François le Coigneux de, ii. 207
Bacon, Sir Francis (see St. Albans)
Baedeker, Karl, vi. 266
Bagration, Princess, vi. 120
Bail, M., iii. 133
Bail, Dame, iii. 133-134
Bailly, Jean Sylvain, i. 160-161, 165
Bajazet II. Sultan of Turkey, iii. 179
Balagni, Madame de, v. 401
Balbi, Anne Jacoby Caumont La Force,
Comtesse de, iv. 9-10
Baldwin I. Emperor of the East and
IX. Count of Flanders, vi. 69
Ballanche, Pierre Simon, ii. 198, 214,
229, 303, 310, 319; iv. 149, 162,
172, 180, 213; v. 89, 199; vi. 258-260, 262
Balmaine, Alexander Count de, iii. 210-211
Balsamo (see Cagliostro)
Balue (see La Balue)
Balzac, Honoré de, i. 111; v. 202; vi. 156
Balzac d'Entragues (see d'Entragues)
Baptiste, the Vicomte de Chateaubriand's
valet, v. 250, 256, 325-326,
330, 349-350, 352; vi. 8, 24, 129
Barante, Aimable Guillaume Prosper
Brugière, Baron de, iv. 28, 285
Barante, Césarine de Houdetot, Baronne de, iv. 285
Barante, Claude Ignace Brugière de, ii. 303
Barba, Victor, v. 121
Barbara of Austria, Duchess of Ferrara, vi. 82, 84
Barbarelli (see Giorgione)
Barbarini, Signora, iv. 37
Barbauld, Anna Letitia Aiken, Mrs., ii. 126
Barberini, Cardinal, iv. 245
Barberini-Colonna di Palestrina (see Palestrina)
Barbet, Auguste, vi. 216
Barbieri (see Guercino)
Barboux, M., v. 96
Barcarola, Nina, iv. 245
Barchou de Penhoen (see Penhoen)
Bardi, Beatrice Portinari, Signora de', iv. 225-227
Bareau de Girac, Bishop of Rennes, François, i. 152
Barentin, Charles Louis François de, ii. 177, iv. 43
Barentin, Abbess of the Annunciation, Dame de, iv. 43
Barère de Vieuzac, Bertrand, i. 143; ii. 26-27, 85
Bargemont (see Villeneuve-Bargemont)
Barillon, Nicolas, v. 50
Barnage, Maître, iv. 110
Baro, Balthazar, ii. 303
Baroni, Leonora (see Castellani)
Baronnais (see La Baronnais)
Barrande, M., v. 361, 363, 365, 367;
vi. 37, 136-137
Barozzi (see Vignola)
Barrocchio (see Vignola)
Barrois, Colonel, ii. 262
Barron, F.S.A., Mr. Oswald, vi. 266
Barrot, Camille Hyacinthe Odilon, iii.
117; v. 95, 113, 128, 152-153
Barrucand, M. Victor, iii. 213
Barry (see Du Barry)
Bart, Jean, iv. 34-35
Bartas (see Du Bartas)
Barthe, Félix, v. 95, 265-266, 302
Barthélemy, Abbé Jean Jacques, ii. 9
Barthélemy, Auguste Marseille, v. 214-216
Bartoli, Daniello, vi. 79
Bartolozzi, Francesco, iv. 162
Bartram, William, i. 238
Basel the Hermit, Saint, i. 43
Basil, Saint, i. 103
Basil II. Emperor of the East, v. 376
Baslé, Jean, i. 108
Bassano, Bernard Hugues Maret, Duc
de, ii. 26; iii. 65, 168
Bassompierre, François Maréchal Baron
de, i. 114-117; v. 383, 402
Bastide, Jules, v. 109, 137, 140-141
Basville, Chrétien François de Lamoignon,
Marquis de, ii. 100
Bathsheba (see Bethsabee)
Bathurst, Allen Erst Earl, iv. 80-81
Bathurst, Henry third Earl, iii. 215;
iv. 80-81, 89, 287
Bathurst, Lady Louisa Georgiana, iv. 81
Bathurst, Lady Emily Charlotte (see Ponsonby)
Bathurst, Miss, iv. 81, 287-288
Baude, Jean Jacques Baron, iv. 7; v.
96-97, 112, 115-116, 144, 210
Baudry, Vicomte de, vi. 253
Baudry, Baron de, vi. 253-254
Baudry, Anne Louise de Chateaubriand,
Baronne de, vi. 253
Bauffremont-Courtenay, Théodore
Démetrius Prince de, vi. 38, 128, 138
Bauffremont-Courtenay, Anne Laurence
de Montmorency, Princesse de, vi.
38, 77, 128, 138
Baulny (see Baudry)
Bausset, Bishop of Alais, Louis François
Cardinal Duc de, iii. 18-20
Baville (see Lamoignon de Baville)
Bavoux, Jacques François Nicolas, v.
96, 115
Bayard, Pierre du Terrail, Chevalier de,
ii. 107, 215; iii. 6; iv. 228; v. 151-152;
vi. 26
Bayard, Dame de, v. 151-152
Bayganuet, Sire de, ii. 205
Bayle, Pierre, ii. 183-184
Baylis, the printer, ii. 71-72, 76-77, 80, 97
Bazancourt, Colonel, ii. 262
Beatrice (see Bardi)
Beattie, James, ii. 129
Beattie the Younger, ii. 129
Beaufort, née de Chateaubriand,
Marquise de, ii. 333
Beaufort, Renée Dame of, i. 6
Beaufort (see also Chateaubriand and
d'Estrées)
Beauharnais, Alexandre Vicomte de,
ii. 261; iii. 17; iv. 165; vi. 161
Beauharnais, Eugène de (see Leuchtenberg)
Beaujolais, Louis d'Orléans, Comte de, iv. 161
Beaulieu, Geoffroy de, vi. 139
Beaumanoir, John Lord of, i. 9
Beaumarchais, Pierre Auguste Caron
de, i. 128, 132, 173
Beaumont, Archbishop of Paris,
Christophe de, ii. 180
Beaumont, Christophe François Comte de, i. 174
Beaumont, Pauline Marie Michelle
Frédérique Ulrique de Montmorin-
Saint-Hérem, Comtesse de, i. 174;
ii. 167-168, 172-177, 213, 223-243,
246, 248, 295, 302, 306, 311, 316-318;
iii. 7, 131; iv. 165, 183, 221,
233, 238; v. 48, 319; vi. 6
Beaumont de La Bonnière, Gustave
Auguste de, ii. 295
Beaupoil de Saint-Aulaire (see Saint-Aulaire)
Beaurepaire (see d'Hautefeuille)
Beauvau, Charles Juste Maréchal Duc de, i. 119
Beauvilliers, Paul Duc de, vi. 246
Beauvilliers Saint-Aignan (see Chalais-Périgord)
Becdelièvre-Penhouët, Comte de, i. 146
Becquet, Étienne, v. 96
Bedée, Alexis Marquis de, i. 146
Bedée, Seigneur de La Boüétardais,
Ange Annibal Comte de, i. 14
Bedée, Marie Antoine Bénigne de
Bedée de La Boüétardais, Comte
de, i. 17, 22-23, 74, 152; ii. 4-5, 9,
54, 62, 64-65, 69, 77, 82, 118-120
Bedée, Marie Angélique Fortunée
Cécile Ginguené, Comtesse de, i. 23;
ii. 5, 9, 62, 64
Bedée, Marie Anne de Ravenel du
Boisteilleul, Dame de i. 14, 17, 21-22
Bedée, Charlotte Suzanne Marie, known
as Caroline de, i. 22-23, ii. 5, 9, 62,
64, 119-120
Bedée, Flore de, i. 22-23, ii. 5, 9, 62,
64, 119
Bedée, Marie de, i. 22-23, ii. 5, 9, 62,
64, 119
Bedée (see also La Boüétardais)
Bedford, John Russell, sixth Duke of, iv. 79
Bédoyère (see La Bédoyère)
Beethoven, Ludwig van, ii. 332
Beker, Nicolas Léonard Comte, iii. 188
Belgiojoso, Cristina Trivulzio, Principessa,
v. 202, 286
Belinaye (see La Belinaye)
Bellarmine, Archbishop of Capua,
Roberto Cardinal Bellarmino, known
as Cardinal, vi. 259
Bellart, Nicolas François, iv. 7
Bellay, Bishop of Bayonne, later Archbishop
of Paris, Jean Cardinal du,
iv. 243; v. 14, 50
Belle-Isle, Charles Louis Auguste
Fouquet, Maréchal Duc de, vi. 201
Belle-Isle, Nicolas Fouquet, Marquis
de, vi. 201
Bellini, Giovanni, vi. 48-49
Bellocq, M., v. 28, 31, 48-49
Belloy, Madame du, ii. 100
Bellune, Victor Perrin, Maréchal Duc
de, iii. 95, 129; iv. 62
Bellune, Julie Vosch van Avesaat,
Maréchale Duchesse de, iii. 129
Bellune, née Muguet, Maréchale Duchesse
de, iii. 129
Belsunce, Comte de, i. 13
Belsunce de Castel Moron, Bishop of
Marseilles, Henri François Xavier
de, ii. 202; v. 231
Bembo, Pietro Cardinal, vi. 79, 103
Bénard (see Fleury)
Benedict XIV., Pope, iv. 234; v. 15
Benedict XIII., Anti-pope (see Luna, Pedro de)
Bénévent (see Talleyrand-Périgord)
Benjamin, the Vicomte de Chateaubriand's
gardener, iii. 8
Benoît, Frédéric, v. 254
Benoît the Elder, v. 254
Benoît, Dame, v. 254
Bentivoglio, Archbishop of Carthage,
Cornelio Cardinal, vi. 79
Bentivoglio, Guido Cardinal, vi. 79
Bentivoglio, Ercole, vi. 79
Benvenuti, Giacomo Antonio Cardinal,
iv. 235; v. 6, 8, 23
Béranger, Pierre Jean de, ii. 132-133,
152-153; iii. 68, 199; iv. 140; v.
206-209, 260, 270, 291; vi. 10, 23,
174, 262
Bérard, Auguste Simon Louis, v. 96, 116-117
Bérard, Pierre Clement, v. 267
Berengarius I. Marquis of Ivrea, King
of Italy, ii. 202
Berengarius II. Marquis of Ivrea, King
of Italy, ii. 202
Bérenger (see Chatillon)
Berenice Queen of Chalcis, later Queen
of Cilicia, vi. 247
Bergasse, Nicolas, i. 175
Berger, Mayor of the 2nd Ward of
Paris, v. 236
Bergerac, Savinien Cyrano de, v. 70
Bériot, Charles Auguste de, vi. 175
Bériot (see also Malibran)
Bermond, M. de, v. 244
Bernadotte (see Charles XIV. King of
Sweden and Norway and Désirée
Queen of Sweden)
Bernard, Saint, ii. 184, 310
Bernard, Jean, iv. 149
Bernard, Madame, iv. 149, 173
Bernard, Louis Rose Désiré, v. 96
Bernard, Master, v. 351; vi. 266
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Jacques
Henri, ii. 9-10, 63, 133; iii. 30; vi. 176
Bernetti, Tommaso Cardinal, iv. 234-235,
290, 293, 300-301; v. 4, 8, 45-46,
52; vi. 95
Bernis, François Joachim Cardinal de
Pierres de, ii. 166, 230, 238; iv. 38
Bernstorff, Christian Gunther Count
von, iv. 34, 60, 102; vi. 45
Berry, Charles Duc de, vi. 246
Berry, Charles Ferdinand Duc de, i.
97, 160; ii. 54, 63-64, 152-153, 259,
278; iii. 89, 119, 126, 144, 156, 158,
161; iv. 8, 11, 17, 21-23, 25; v. 161,
168, 190, 215, 226, 236, 303-304,
394, 410; vi. 28, 38, 123, 185,
193, 255
Berry, Marie Caroline Ferdinande
Louise Duchesse de, ii. 152-154, 156,
208; iii. 156; iv. 16, 24, 135, 196;
v. 81, 101, 144, 147, 151, 157-158,
160, 209, 215, 221-229, 235-239,
241-242, 244-246, 265-266, 269,
302-311, 320-325, 327, 340, 359,
362, 365-366, 369, 375, 384, 391,
405-408, 414-415; vi. 9, 22, 25-27,
36-39, 47, 61, 77-78, 80, 94-102,
118, 128-130, 132, 135-136, 139,
156, 163, 192-193, 229-235, 243
Berryer the Elder, Pierre Nicolas
Berryer, known as, v. 246
Berryer the Younger, Pierre Antoine
Berryer, known as, v. 246-248, 259,
264-266, 269, 302, 309-310; vi. 249,
256
Bertrin, Abbé Georges, vi. 256
Berstoecher, M., ii. 193; iv. 121
Bert, M., v. 96
Bertalozzi, Francesco Cardinal, v. 8
Berthe de Rohan, Queen of Spain and
France, H.M., ii. 279
Berthelin, the Polytechnic scholar, v. 107
Berthier (see Wagram)
Berthois, Auguste Marie Baron, v. 135
Berthollet, Claude Louis Comte, ii. 188
Bertier de Sauvigny, Lieutenant Albert
Anne Jules, v. 108
Bertier de Sauvigny, Louis Bénigne
François, i. 161; v. 108
Bertin the Elder, Louis François Bertin,
known as, ii. 175, 223, 229; iii. 8,
125, 132; iv. 100-101; v. 29, 260, 368
Bertin the Younger, Pierre Louis Bertin,
known as Bertin de Vaux or, ii.
175, 223; iii. 125, 132; iv. 100-101,
260; v. 368
Bertrand, Henri Gratien Comte, iii. 81,
188, 192, 210
Bertrand, née Dillon, Comtesse, iii. 192, 210
Bertrand, Captain, iii. 16
Berwick, James Fitzjames, Duke of, iv. 67
Besenval, Pierre Victor Baron de, i. 177; iii. 139
Besnardière (see La Besnardière)
Bessarion, Archbishop of Nicosa, later
of Siponto, Patriarch of Constantinople,
Johannes Cardinal, vi. 49
Bessus Satrap of Bactriana, iii. 149
Bethsabee, vi. 237
Bettio, Abbate Pietro, vi. 53, 55-57
Beugnot, Jacques Claude Comte, iii.
99, 127, 129-130, 178
Beurnonville, Pierre Ruel, Maréchal
Marquis de, iii. 73
Bevilacqua, Cardinal, vi. 91
Béville, Marquis de, iii. 5
Béville (see also Lavalette)
Beyle (see Stendhal)
Bezout, Étienne, i. 44
Bianca Capello, Grand-duchess of
Tuscany, vi. 238
Billard, A., v. 96
Billarderie (see Flahaut de La Billarderie)
Billardière (see Launay de La Billardière)
Billaud-Varenne, Jacques Nicolas, ii. 18
Billecocq, Adolphe, iv. 102
Billing, Baron, i. 185
Billot, M., v. 97
Biré, M. Edmond, i. xvi-xvii, 5, 33;
iv. 92, 215-219, 284; v. 360; vi.
145, 180, 229-235, 248-265
Biron, Charles de Gontaut, Duc de, ii. 121
Biron, Louis Antoine de Gontaut, Duc de, i. 51, 176
Biron (see also Lauzun)
Bisceglie (see Alphonsus of Bisceglie)
Bissy, Claude VIII. de Thiard, Comte de, v. 162
Bissy (see also Thiard-Bissy and Thiard de Bissy)
Bivar (see Diaz de Bivar)
Bjorn the Scandinavian, ii. 217
Blacas d'Aulps, Pierre Louis Casimir
Duc de, iii. 100, 102, 124-127, 159,
171-175; iv. 8-9, 59, 132-133; v.
28-29, 34, 45, 52, 341-343, 352,
357-359, 363, 365-366, 368-369,
374-375, 378, 383-385, 408, 415; vi. 26,
117-118, 120, 129, 135, 138-139, 193
Blacas d'Aulps, the Great Warrior, v. 385
Blacas d'Aulps, the troubadour, v. 385
Blair, Rev. Hugh, ii. 121
Blaize, Ange, vi. 216
Blanc, Jean Joseph Charles Louis, v.
119-120, 140
Blanche of Castile, Queen of France,
ii. 256; v. 225, 377
Blessington, Charles John Gardiner,
first Earl of, iv. 73
Blessington, Marguerite Power,
Countess of, iv. 73
Bletterie (see La Bletterie)
Blin, Joseph Marie Jacques, i. 153
Blitersdorff, Quarter-master, ii. 260
Blondel, the troubadour, v. 377
Blossac, M. de, ii. 314
Blossac, Madame de, ii. 314
Blücher (see Wahlstadt)
Boccaccio, Giovanni, iv. 185; v. 229-230
Bodsey, the publisher, ii. 97
Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus, iv. 227
Boigne, Benoît Comte de, ii. 103
Boigne, née d'Osmond, Comtesse de,
ii. 103; v. 106
Bohain, Victor, v. 96
Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas, i. 133; ii.
100, 179, 187, 293; iii. 10, 33; iv.
247; v. 53; vi. 240
Boisé-Lucas the Elder, M. Delaunay, iii. 13
Boisé-Lucas the Younger, M. iii. 13, 16-17
Boisgarein, François Nicolas Magon,
Seigneur de, i. 51
Boisgarein, Élisabeth Anne Dame de, i. 51
Boisgelin, Louis Brune Comte de, i. 152
Boisgelin, née de Boufflers, Comtesse de, i. 152
Boisgelin de Cicé, Archbishop of Aix,
later of Tours, Jean-de-Dieu Raymond
Cardinal de, ii. 103
Bois de La Ferronnière (see Du Bois de
La Ferronnière)
Boishamon, M. du, i. 23
Boishue, Jean Baptiste René de
Guehenneuc, Comte de, i. 154; ii. 38
Boishue (see also Guehenneuc de Boishue)
Boisrobert, Abbé Francis Le Metel,
Sieur de, v. 55
Boissonade, Jean François, iii. 8
Boissy, Hilaire Étienne Octave Rouillé,
Marquis de, ii. 136; iv. 227; v. 89
Boissy (see also Guiccioli)
Boistelleul, Jean Baptiste Joseph
Eugène de Ravenel, Comte du, i. 67, 69
Boistelleul, Captain Hyacinthe Eugène
Pierre de Ravenel du, i. 67
Boistelleul, Pauline Zoé Marie de
Farcy de Montavallon, Dame de
Ravenel du, i. 67
Boistelleul, Mademoiselle de, i. 17,
21-23; ii. 120; vi. 127, 173
Bojardo, Conte di Scandiano, Matteo
Maria, vi. 78-79
Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, first
Viscount, v. 57
Bolivar, President of Columbia, Simon,
i. xxi; iv. 291-292
Bolton, William Orde-Powlett, second Lord, ii. 68
Bolzona, Count, v. 404
Bon, Dame, ii. 277
Bonald, Louis Gabriel Ambroise
Vicomte de, i. 97; ii. 167, 168,
170, 187, 198; iv. 16
Bonaparte, Prince Charles Napoléon
Louis, iv. 241; v. 58, 297
Bonaparte, Charlotte Bonaparte, Princesse, iv. 241
Bonaparte, known as Madame Mère,
Maria Letizia Ramolino, Dame, ii.
166, 213; iii. 64, 108-109; iv. 10
Bonaparte, Christine Éléonore Boyer,
Dame, ii. 166
Bonaparte, Elizabeth Patterson, Dame, iii. 200
Bonaparte, Jerome (see Jerome King of Westphalia)
Bonaparte, Joseph (see Joseph King of
Naples, later of Spain)
Bonaparte, Louis (see Louis King of Holland)
Bonaparte, Prince Louis Napoléon (see
Napoleon III. Emperor of the French)
Bonaparte, Lucien (see Canino)
Bonaparte, Napoleon (see Napoleon I.
Emperor of the French, King of Italy)
Bonaparte Caroline (see Caroline Queen
of Naples)
Bonaparte, Élisa (see Élisa Grand-duchess of Tuscany)
Bonaparte, Marie Alexandrine Charlotte
Louise Laurence de Bleschamp,
Dame (see Canino)
Bonaparte, Marie Josèphe Rose
Tascher de La Pagerie, Vicomtesse de
Beauharnais, later Dame (see Joséphine
Empress of the French)
Bonaparte, Pauline (see Borghese)
Bonaparte (see also Buonaparte)
Bonaventure, Saint, i. xxx
Bonchamp, General Artus de, ii. 53, 107; v. 245
Bonchamp, Dame de, ii. 53
Bondy, Pierre Marie Comte de Taillepied
de, v. 229, 235-238
Bondy, Comtesse de Taillepied de, v. 134
Boniface VIII., Pope, v. 48
Boniface IX., Pope, v. 13
Bonnay, François Marquis de, i. 175,
176; ii. 247; iv. 32-33, 43-44
Bonnet, M., iv. 67
Bonnet de Malherbe, Dr., vi. 154
Bonnevie, Abbé Pierre Étienne de, ii.
214, 221, 235, 307
Bonnière (see Beaumont de La Bonnière)
Bonrecueil, M. de, v. 244
Bonstetten, Charles Victor de, iv. 250, 258
Boquet, Pierre Jean, ii. 231; iv. 238
Borde (see La Borde)
Bordeaux, Duc de (see Henry V. King
of France and Navarre)
Bordesoulle, Étienne Tardif de
Pommeroux, Comte de, v. 148
Bordier, M., i. 178
Bordone, Paride or Paris, vi. 49
Borel (see Fauche-Borel)
Borghese, Camillo Principe, ii. 223-224
Borghese, Duchess of Guastalla,
Pauline Bonaparte, Principessa, ii.
223-224, 237; iii. 108, 113,
215-216; iv. 184, 248-249
Borghese, Principessa, iv. 248
Borgia, Duc de Valentinois, Cesare, iv.
229; v. 13
Borgne (see Le Borgne)
Borromeo (see Charles Cardinal Count
Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan, Saint)
Bossinot de Vauvert (see Vauvert)
Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux, Jacques
Bénigne, i. 102, 151, 234; ii. 151,
201, 292, 336; iii. 18-19, 33, 129; iv.
127, 292; v. 84-86, 177, 388, 403;
vi. 25
Boucher, Abbé, v. 140
Boüétardais (see Bedée and La Boüétardais)
Boüétiez, Chevalier de, i. 8
Boufflers, Louis François Maréchal de, iii. 27
Boufflers, Joseph Marie Duc de, iii. 27
Boufflers, née de Beauvais-Craon,
Marquise de, iii. 27
Boufflers, Stanislas Chevalier de, i.
152; iii. 26-27; iv. 164
Boufflers, Comtesse de Sabran, later
Dame de, iv. 164
Boufflers, Louis de, iii. 27
Bougainville, Louis Antoine de, i. xxi.
Bougon, Dr., vi. 193
Bouillé, Marquise de, v. 363; vi. 136
Bouillerie (see La Bouillerie)
Bouillet, Marie Nicolas, vi. 88, 266
Bouillon, Godefroy Duc de, ii. 65; iv. 138
Bouillon, Henri de La Tourd'Auvergne,
Vicomte de Turenne, Duc de, iii. 27
Bouillon, Philippe d'Auvergne, Prince
de, ii. 65
Bouillon (see also Godfrey of Bouillon,
King of Jerusalem)
Boulin, Joseph, i. 108
Boulogne, Bishop of Troyes, later
Archbishop of Vienne, Étienne
Antoine de, ii. 180
Bounelet, Sieur, ii. 277
Bourbon, Charles Cardinal de, iii. 74-75
Bourbon, Charles Connétable Duc de, v. 16, 58
Bourbon, Louis Henri Duc de, vi. 200
Bourbon, Archambaud VII. Sire de, iv. 209
Bourbon, Louis Henri Joseph Duc de
(see Condé, Louis VI. Prince de)
Bourbon, Louise d'Orléans, Duchesse
de (see Condé)
Bourdaloue, Louis, ii. 100
Bourdasse, Jacques, i. 108
Bourdic, later Dame Viot, Marie Anne
Henriette Payan de L'Étang,
Marquise d'Antremont, later, vi. 174
Bourdonnais (see La Bourdonnais)
Bourdonnaye (see La Bourdonnaye)
Bourdonnaye-Montluc (see La
Bourdonnaye-Montluc)
Bourg (see Du Bourg)
Bourges, Clémence de, vi. 173
Bourgoing, Chevalier de, iv. 102
Bourgogne, Louis Duc de (see Louis
Duc de Bourgogne, later Dauphin
of France)
Bourmont, Louis Auguste Victor de
Ghaisne, Comte Maréchal de, v. 72,
81-84, 95, 244-245, 323
Bourmont, Adolphe de, v. 82, 244
Bourmont, Charles de, v. 82, 244
Bourgueney, François Adolphe Comte de, i. 185
Bourrienne, Louis Antoine Fauvelet de,
ii. 251, 270; iii. 86
Boutet (see Mars and Monvel)
Bouthillier de Rancé (see Rancé)
Boutin, M., ii. 27
Brabant (see Geneviève of Brabant)
Bracciano, Giovanni Torlonia, Principe
Duca di, iv. 262; v. 19
Bracciano-Orsini (see Orsini)
Brackenridge, Henry M., i. 252
Bragadino, Marco Antonio, vi. 59
Brahe, Tycho, v. 387
Bramante, Donato d'Agnolo, iv. 230
Brancas, née de Colbert-Montboissier,
Dame de, v. 291
Brandon (see Hamilton)
Braunfels (see Solm-Braunfels)
Breil de Pontbriand, Vicomtesse de, i. 150
Brémond, M. de, vi. 70
Brennus, v. 305
Breteuil, Louis Auguste Le Tonnelier,
Baron de, i. 132, 156; ii. 31; iii. 125
Breton (see Le Breton)
Breuning, Fräulein Eleonora, ii. 332
Briche (see La Briche)
Brien, Jean, iii. 14
Brienne, Archbishop of Sens, Étienne
Charles de Loménie, Comte de, i. 141
Brienne, Henri Auguste Comte de
Loménie de, ii. 152
Brienne, Comtesse de Loménie de, ii. 152
Brignon, Seigneur de Laher, Nicolas Jean, i. 13
Brignon, Marie Anne Le Tendu, Dame, i. 13
Brillat-Savarin, Anthelme, iv. 167-168
Brinvilliers, Marie Marguerite Dreux
d'Avray, Marquise de, ii. 163
Briot, Pierre Joseph, ii. 223
Briqueville, Armand François Bon
Claude Comte de, v. 209-210, 213
Briqueville the Elder, Comte de, v. 209
Briqueville, Comtesse de, v. 209
Brissac (see Cossé-Brissac)
Brisson, Barnabé Président, ii. 21
Brissot de Warville, Jean Pierre, ii. 14
Britannicus, Claudius Tiberius
Germanicus, known as, ii. 258
Britard (see Brizard)
Brittany, Giles of (see Chateaubriand
and Chantocé)
Brizard, Jean Baptiste Britard, known as, i. 128
Brocard, Pere Ignace, vi. 43
Broglie, Victor François Maréchal Duc de, i. 156
Broglie, Achille Charles Léonce Victor
Duc de, v. 81, 105, 122-123, 127
vi. 95, 113
Broglie, Albertine de Staël-Holstein,
Duchesse de, v. 81
Brollo, the gaoler, vi. 105-112
Brollo, Signora, vi. 105-110
Brollo, Angelica (see "Zanze")
Brosses, René Comte de, iv. 300; v. 30
Brosses (see also De Brosses)
Brougham and Vaux, Henry Brougham,
first Lord, i. 188
Broussais, François Joseph Victor, i. 27, 74
Brown, Charles Brockden, i. 253-254
Bruce, Lieutenant Michael, iii. 110
Brugière de Barante (see Barante)
Brummell, George Bryan, iv. 69
Brun (see Le Brun and Malte-Brun)
Brune, Marshal Guillaume Marie Anne, iii. 91
Bruno, Saint, ii. 33, 309-310
Brutus, Lucius Junius, v. 132, 312
Brutus, Marcus Junius, v. 57, 132, 394
Brutus, Tiberius Junius, v. 312
Brutus, Titus Junius, v. 312
Bruyère (see La Bruyère)
Buckingham and Chandos, Richard
Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Greville,
first Duke of, ii. 140; iv. 79
Buckinghamshire, John Hobart, second
Earl of, iv. 65
Buffon, George Louis Leclerc, Comte
de, i. 127, 174; iii. 33; iv. 122
Buffon, George Louis Marie Leclerc,
Comte de, i. 173
Buffon, later Dame de Bussières,
Marguérite Françoise de Bouvier de
Cepoy, Comtesse de, i. 173
Bugeaud de La Piconnerie (see d'Isly)
Buisson de La Vigne (see La Vigne)
Bullion, Claude de, i. 150
Bülow (see Dennewitz)
Bunsen, Christian Karl Josias Baron
von, iv. 236
Buonaparte, Carlo, vi. 184
Buonaparte, Giacomo, v. 58
Buonaparte (see also Bonaparte)
Buonarotti (see Michael Angelo)
Buonavita, Abbé, iii. 215-216
Burghersh, Lord, pseud (see Napoléon
I. Emperor of the French, King of Italy)
Burke, Edmund, i. xxi; ii. 121,
144-145; iv. 93; v. 57
Burney (see d'Arblay)
Burns, Robert, ii. 127, 129
Busoni, Philippe, v. 96
Bussi, Giovanni Battista Cardinal, v. 18
Bussières (see Buffon and Renouard de Bussières)
Bute, John Stuart, first Earl of, iv. 81
Buti, Lucrezia, iv. 232
Butler (see Dubourg-Butler)
Buttafuoco, Matteo, iii. 196
Byron, William fourth Lord, vi. 72
Byron, George Gordon sixth Lord, i.
xxiii; ii. 8, 91, 123-124, 127, 129-136,
158; iii. 68, 88, 191, 220; iv. 3,
227, 232, 254; v. 59, 89, 202-203,
209, 300, 389; vi. 50, 66, 71-76,
78, 85
Byron, Anne Isabella Milbanke, Lady, ii. 136
Byron, Commodore Hon. John, vi. 72
Byron, Hon. Augusta Ada (see Leigh)
C
Cacault, François, ii. 219
Cadet de Gassicourt the Elder, Charles
Louis Félix, v. 237
Cadet de Gassicourt the Younger, Félix,
v. 98-99, 190-191, 237-239
Cadoudal, Georges, i. 65; ii. 249, 252,
259; iii. 36, 138-139; iv. 167-168
Cæsar, Caius Julius, i. 17; ii. 121, 201,
331, 337; iii. 87-88, 159, 186, 195,
197, 214, 218; iv. 14, 176, 229,
264; v. 40, 56, 131-132, 155, 333,
403; vi. 68, 180, 196, 243
Cagliari (see Veronese)
Cagliostro, Giuseppe Balsamo, known
as Alessandro Conte di, i. 145
Cahen, Louis, i. xvii; vi. 265-266
Caillet, Guillaume, ii. 108
Cajetan, Saint, ii. 159
Calas, Jean, iii. 30
Caligula, the Emperor, ii. 33; vi. 209
Calixtus II., Pope, iv. 304
Calixtus III., Pope, v. 13
Callot, Jacques, ii. 95
Calonne, Abbé de, ii. 72
Calonne, Charles Alexandre de, i. 140-141,
162; ii. 4; vi. 203
Calvin, John, v. 199, 273, 388; vi. 96
Camargo, Marie Anne Cuppi, known
as the, ii. 119
Cambacérès, Second Consul, later Duke
of Parma, Jean Jacques Régis de,
ii. 259, 282; iii. 21, 54, 63, 75;
v. 409
Cambacérès, Marie Jean Pierre Hubert
Duc de, ii. 259
Camden, William, ii. 80
Camerarius, Joachim Liebhard, known
as, vi. 142
Camoens, Luiz de, i. xxiv, 196, 242-243;
ii. 123; iii. 30, 208, 219, 222,
237; vi. 86-87, 104, 222
Campan, Jeanne Louise Henriette
Genest, Dame, v. 296
Campbell, Sir Neil, iii. 78-79, 81
Campbell, Thomas, ii. 128
Campbell, Mr. William Bernard, vi. 266
Campo-Franco, Lucchesi-Palli, Principe
di, v. 322-323
Camuccini, Vicenzo, iv. 241
Canaris, Constantine, iv. 119
Canaris the Younger, iv. 118-119
Candoles, M. de, v. 244
Canecaude, M. de, i. 164
Cange (see Du Cange)
Canino, Lucien Bonaparte, Prince of,
ii. 166, 179, 210; iii. 152, 154, 170,
215; iv. 155-158, 196, 220
Canino, Marie Alexandrine Charlotte
Louise Laurence de Bleschamp,
Princess of, ii. 166
Canning, George, i. xxii-xxiii, 188;
ii. 68-69, 79, 92-93, 128; iv. 70,
73, 82, 89, 92, 96, 128, 217-218,
266; v. 57, 145, 180-181; vi. 45, 252
Canning, Joan Scott, Mrs., ii. 79
Canova, Antonio, i. xxiii, 189; ii.
224, 248; iv. 75, 162, 180-182, 220,
238; vi. 57-58, 60
Capefigue, Jean Baptiste Honors
Raymond, iv. 131
Capelan, Abbé, ii. 117
Capellari (sec Gregory XVI., Pope)
Capelle, Guillaume Antoine Benoît
Baron, iii. 129, 141; v. 88,
378-379, 422
Capello, General Vittorio, vi. 48
Capet, Hugh (see Hugh Capet, King
of France)
Capodistrias, Giovanni Anton Count, i. xxi
Capponi, Gino Alessandro Giuseppe
Gaspardo Marchese, v. 25
Capua, Charles Ferdinand Prince of, v. 323
Caractacus King of Britain, ii. 129
Caraffa, Bishop of Chieti, Giovanni
Pietro, ii. 159
Caraman, Victor Louis Charles de
Riquet de Caraman, Marquis, later
Duc de, i. 185; iv. 91, 102; v. 123
Caraman, Georges Comte de, i. 185
Carracci, Agostino, iv. 225, 236
Carracci, Annibale, iv. 225, 236
Carracci, Lodovico, iv. 225
Carbon, Flins des Oliviers (see Flins
des Oliviers)
Carignan, Charles Emanuel Ferdinand
Prince of Savoy, v. 322
Carignan, Maria Cristina Albertina
Carlotta of Saxe-Courlande, Princess
of Savoy, v. 322
Carignan, Louis Victor Prince of Savoy,
Carignan, Count of Villafranca, Eugène
Prince of Savoy, i. 51
Carignan, Charles Albert Prince of
Savoy (see Charles Albert, King of
Sardinia)
Carignan, Élisabeth Anne Princesse de
Savoie (see Boisgarein)
Carignan (see also Eugène)
Carline, Marie Gabrielle Malagrida,
Dame Nivelon, known as, i. 173
Carlskron (see Dumont)
Carlyle, Thomas, v. 381
Carnot, Lazare Nicolas Marguerite
Comte, iii. 100, 153, 167-169
Caroline of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg
-Augustenburg, Queen of Denmark and Norway, iv. 79
Caroline of Brunswick, Queen of
England, i, 188; ii. 142-143
Caroline of Hesse-Darmstadt, Land-gravine
of Hesse-Homburg, iv. 49
Caroline of Hesse-Darmstadt, Duchess
of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, iv. 41
Caroline Bonaparte, Queen of Naples,
ii. 25; iii. 144; iv. 184-185,
189-196, 198, 201, 203
Carolsfeld, (see Schnorr von Carolsfeld)
Caron, Colonel Augustin Joseph, iv.
211; vi. 159
Caron de Beaumarchais (see Beaumarchais)
Carrel, Nicolas Armand, v. 82-83, 96,
105, 206-208, 291; vi. 25, 42,
162-171, 215
Carrel the Elder, M., vi. 168-169
Carrel, Dame, vi. 168
Carrel the Younger, M., vi. 168
Carrel, Nathalie, vi. 168, 170
Carrio, Señor, vi. 72
Cartier, Jacques, i. 26, 30, 204, 232
Cary, Henry Francis, iv. 226; v. 66; vi. 61
Casimir-Périer (see Périer)
Cassiodorus, Magnus Aurelius, iv. 227; vi. 157
Castelbajac, Marie Barthélemy Vicomte
de, i. 97; iv. 16
Castellani, Giulio Cesare, iv. 245
Castellani, Leonora Baroni, Signora, iv. 245
Castelnau, Seigneur de La Mauvissière,
Michel de, i. 212
Castiglione, Pierre François Charles
Augereau, Maréchal Duc de, iii. 49,
80; v. 227; vi. 139
Castiglioni (see Pius VIII., Pope)
Castlereagh (see Londonderry)
Castries, Madame de, iv. 285
Castro, Inez de, vi. 24-25
Castro, João de, v. 380
Cathcart, William Schaw first Earl, iii. 49
Cathcart, Charles ninth Lord, i. 188
Cathelineau, General Jacques, ii. 107,
109; v. 245
Catherine de' Medici, Queen of France, v. 84
Catherine I. Empress of All the Russias, vi. 101
Catherine II. Empress of All the Russias,
i. 132; ii. 197, 289; vi. 101
Catherine of Wurtemberg, Queen of
Westphalia, iii. 64, 86, 200
Catiline, Lucius Sergius Catilina, known as,
v. 215, 221
Cato Uticensis, Marcus Porcius, ii. 79,
331; iv. 246; v. 336, 394
Catullus, Caius Valerius, i. 162; ii.
114; vi. 79
Cauchie, Dame, i. 126
Cauchie, Anne, i. 126
Cauchois-Lemaire, Louis François
Auguste, v. 95, 126
Caud, Jacques Louis René Chevalier,
later Comte de, i. 83; ii. 176
Caud, Lucile Angélique de Chateaubriand,
Comtesse de, i. xvi, 6, 12,
15, 19, 29, 31, 40, 65, 70, 76-79,
81-84, 91, 94-96, 102-103, 107, 111-112,
122, 125-126, 130, 137, 151, 155,
180, 182; ii. 4, 6, 7, 9, 27, 82, 103,
146, 175-177, 226-229, 231-232,
239, 302, 311-319; v. 258; vi. 128-129
Caulaincourt (see Vicence)
Caumont de La Force (see La Force)
Caux, Roger Comte de, i. 99; iv. 33
Caux, Louis Victor Vicomte de, iv.
138; v. 120
Cavaignac, General Eugène Louis, v. 141
Cavaignac, Éléonore Louis Godefroy, v. 140-141
Cavaignac, Jean Baptiste, v. 140-141
Cayet, Pierre Victoire Palma, v. 140
Cayla, Zoé Victoire Talon du Boullay
Thierry, Comtesse de, iv. 9-10
Cazales, Jacques Antoine Marie de, iv. 6
Cazes (see Decazes)
Cazotte, Jean, i. 179; ii. 56
Ceccaldi (see Colonna-Ceccaldi)
Celestine V., Pope, ii. 200
"Célestine," vi. 171
Cellamare, Antonio Giudicce, Duca di
Giovenazza, Principe di, vi. 200
Celles, Antoine Philippe Fiacre Ghislain
Visscher, Comte de, iv. 237; v. 37
Celles, née de Valence, Comtesse de, iv. 237
Celles, Demoiselles de, iv. 237
Cellini, Benvenuto, iv. 181, 239
Cels, the nursery-gardener, v. 318
Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, i. xxiv,
151; iv. 232; v. 263, 351; vi. 222
Cesarotti, Melchiore, iii. 214; vi. 79
Cessac, Jean Girard Lacuee, Comte de, vi. 184
Chabot, François, iv. 4
Chabot (see also Rohan-Chabot)
Chabrol-Croussol, André Jean Comte
de, iv. 134-135, 138-139; v. 72, 81,
88, 94
Chabrol-Volvic, Gilbert Joseph Gaspar,
Comte de, v. 94, 100, 112
Chafner, Major, i. 66, 181
Chalais (see Talleyrand-Chalais)
Chalais-Périgord, née de Beauvilliers
Saint-Aignan, Princesse de, vi. 243-246
Chalas, Prosper, v. 96
Chalmel, Abbé Jean François, i. 48
Chalotais (see La Chalotais)
Chambolle, François Adolphe, v. 95
Chambord, Comte de, pseud. (see Henry
V. King of France and Navarre)
Chambord, Comtesse de, pseud, (see
Marie-Thérèse of Modena, Queen of
France)
Chamfort, Sébastien Roch Nicolas,
known as, i. 83, 129-130, 132, 175,
178; ii. 27, 102
Chamisso, Charles de, iv. 40
Chamisso, Hippolyte de, iv. 40
Chamisso, Louis Charles Adélaïde de
Chamisso de Boncourt, known as
Adelbert von, iv. 39-40
Champagny, Vicomte de, v. 94
Champcenetz, Louis Chevalier de, i.
175-176; ii. 80; v. 267
Champion de Cicé, Vicomte de, i. 146
Champlain, Samuel, i. 232
Champlatreux (see Molé de Champlatreux)
Champmeslé, Marie Desmare, known
as Mademoiselle, ii. 179
Champollion, Jean François, vi. 223
Champollion Figeac, Jean Jacques, v. 86
Chantelauze, Jean Claude Balthazar
Victor de, v. 88, 90, 189, 422
Chanteloup, Jean Antoine Chaptal,
Comte de, ii. 188, 309
Chapelier (see Le Chapelier)
Chapelle, Claude Emmanuel Luillier, ii. 207
Chappe, Claude, iii. 112
Chappe, Ignace Urbain, iii. 112
Chaptal (see Chanteloup)
Chardel, Casimir Marie Marcellin
Pierre Célestin, v. 96, 115
Charette de La Contrie, François
Athanase, i. 154; ii. 109; v. 245
Charlemagne (see Charles I. King of France)
Charles Cardinal Count Borromeo,
Archbishop of Milan, Saint, iv. 223;
v. 230; vi. 193
Charles the Hammer, Duke of Austrasia,
ii. 338; iv. 109, 263
Charles of Blois, Duke of Brittany, i.
Charles Duke of Burgundy, ii. 32; iii. 153, 181
Charles IV. King of Bohemia, the
Emperor, v. 388, 410-411
Charles V., the Emperor, i. 25; ii. 74,
121; iii. 126-127, 158; iv. 239; v.
14, 84, 400
Charles VI., the Emperor, ii. 78; iv. 246
Charles I. King of England, Scotland
and Ireland, i. 187; ii. 18, 39, 73,
124; iii. 93, 104, 127; iv. 82, 84,
124, 251-252; v. 115, 137, 178, 255,
295
Charles II. King of England, Scotland
and Ireland, i. 189; ii. 137, 140;
iii. 93; v. 50
Charles III. King of England, Scotland
and Ireland, ii. 202; iv. 249-252;
v. 372-373: vi. 101, 201
Charles IV. King of England, Scotland
and Ireland (see Charles Emanuel
IV. King of Sardinia)
Charles I. King of France, known as
Charlemagne, the Emperor, i. 235;
ii. 32-33, 63; iii. 205, 228; iv. 50,
170, 227, 264; v. 11, 65, 196, 337,
376; vi. 195-196
Charles II. King of France and III.
Emperor of the Romans, v. 297
Charles V. King of France, ii. 108;
vi. 27, 140, 196
Charles VI. King of France, ii. 201;
v. 378; vi. 10, 140, 196
Charles VII. King of France, ii. 108;
iv. 108; v. 378; vi. 133, 196
Charles VIII. King of France, i. 141;
v. 227; vi. 196
Charles IX. King of France, i. 35, 109,
117, 212; ii. 18; iii. 30, 33; v. 49,
104, 137; vi. 82
Charles X. King of France and Navarre,
i. 35, 135, 156, 160, 163; ii. 4-5, 16,
22, 34, 40, 54, 63, 79, 101, 103, 107,
255, 259; iii. 55, 76-77, 89, 94,
98-99, 112, 119, 136, 140-141, 155-156,
159, 161, 166, 171, 176, 178, 184,
188, 227; iv. 8, 14, 16, 21, 44,
61-62, 96-97, 103, 106-112, 117, 120,
124, 130-141, 161, 252, 280, 290-291,
293, 296, 302, 304; v. 6, 8, 17-18,
20-21, 23, 30-32, 34-36, 40, 47-48,
67-69, 74-78, 84, 86-97, 99-100,
103-104, 106-108, 110-111, 114,
116-118, 121-123, 127-128, 130-131,
133, 135, 138, 143-157, 160, 164-165,
168-170, 173-177, 180, 188, 191-192,
194, 209-211, 220, 222, 226-228, 235,
238-239, 260, 268, 271, 307, 321-322,
327, 336, 339-340, 342-343, 349,
357-362, 364-375, 378 379, 383-387,
390-391, 393-396, 398-399, 402,
404-405, 408, 415, 421-426; vi. 23,
26, 34-35, 45, 62, 99, 101, 115-118,
120, 128-141, 149, 151, 165, 191, 195,
197, 229-234, 238, 242-246
Charles XI. King of France and
Navarre (see Charles VII. King of
Spain)
Charles II. Grand-Duke of
Mecklenburg-Strelitz, iv. 33
Charles II. Duke of Parma, Charles
Louis de Bourbon, Duke of Lucca,
later, iv. 224
Charles III. Duke of Parma, iv. 224;
v. 361; vi. 254
Charles I. King of Spain (see Charles
V., the Emperor)
Charles III. King of Spain and IV. of
the Two Sicilies, iv. 58; v. 51; vi. 202
Charles IV. King of Spain, i. 49; ii.
257-258; iii. 191; iv. 236; v. 74
Charles V. King of Spain, iii. 221; v. 75
Charles VII. King of Spain and XI.
of France and Navarre, ii. 279
Charles IV. King of the Two Sicilies
(see Charles III. King of Spain)
Charles XI. King of Sweden, v. 51
Charles XIII. King of Sweden, ii. 257; iii. 46
Charles XIV. John King of Sweden
and Norway, ii. 257; iii. 46, 102,
127, 144, 181, 162-167, 202, 208,
220; v. 144
Charles I. King of Wurtemberg, v. 322
Charles of Prussia, Prince, iv. 33, 271
Charles Albert King of Sardinia, iv.
54; v. 38, 322
Charles Edward Stuart, Prince (see
Charles III. King of England, Scotland
and Ireland)
Charles Emanuel I. King of Sardinia, iii. 27
Charles Emanuel II. King of Sardinia, i. 130
Charles Emanuel III. King of Sardinia, iv. 251
Charles Emanuel IV. King of Sardinia,
de jure Charles IV. King of England,
Scotland and Ireland, ii. 221; iv. 242, 251
Charles Felix King of Sardinia, iv. 54,
251; v. 38; vi. 45
Charles Frederic Elector, later
Grand-duke of Baden, ii. 280; iii. 73
Charles Frederic Augustus of
Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Prince, iv. 164
Charles Frederic William, Duke of
Brunswick-Lüneburg, ii. 33-34; iii.
162, 164; v. 127
Charles Louis, Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz,
ii. 258; iii. 60
Charlevoix, Père Pierre François Xavier
de, i. 232-233
Charlotte Princess Royal of England,
ii. 142; vi. 118
Charlotte of Prussia, Princess (see Alexandra
Feodorowna Empress of Russia)
Charlotte Mademoiselle de Valois,
Duchess of Modena, v. 230
Charrière, Isabelle Agnes van Tujil,
Dame de Sainte-Hyacinthe de, iv.
107, 121-122
Charras, Jean Baptiste Adolphe, v. 107
Chartier, Alain, ii. 201
Chartier, Jean, vi. 133
Chassé, David Hendrik Baron, v. 94
Chastenay, Dame de, i. 101, 104-105,
112; ii. 44; iii. 8
Chastenay-Lanty, Louise Marie
Victorine Comtesse de, ii. 169
Chateau-d'Assie, Michel Charles
Locquet, Comte de, i. 108
Chateaubourg, Comte de, i. 150
Chateaubourg, Paul François de La
Celle, Vicomte, later Comte de, i. 104-105
Chateaubourg, Bénigne Jeanne de
Chateaubriand, Comtesse de Québriac,
later Vicomtesse, later Comtesse
de, i. 15, 40, 53, 66, 106, 111,
150; ii. 319
Chateaubriand, Geoffrey I. Baron of, i. 6, 24
Chateaubriand, Sybil Baroness of, i. 6
Chateaubriand, Geoffrey IV. Baron of, i. 8
Chateaubriand, Geoffrey V. Baron of, i. 9
Chateaubriand, ninth Baron of, i. 9
Chateaubriand, François Comte de, i. 11-12
Chateaubriand, Geoffroy Louis Comte
de, i. 8, 82-83; ii. 295-296, 319,
333; iii. 126; v. 64-65, 154, 269;
vi. 253, 261-263
Chateaubriand, Henriette Félicité Zélie
d'Orglandes, Comtesse de, i. 8; ii. 296
Chateaubriand, Jean Baptiste Auguste
Comte de, i. 6-7, 12, 15-16, 18, 52,
73, 83, 94-96, 101, 104-105, 111-112,
117, 119, 122, 135-137, 167, 178,
180, 182; ii. 3, 22-23, 27-32, 60, 62,
65, 81-84, 146, 294-295; iii. 31, 125;
v. 64, 304, 309; vi. 24
Chateaubriand, Aline Thérèse Le
Pelletier de Rosanbo, Comtesse de,
i. 15, 95, 111, 135; ii. 23, 49,
83-84: v. 64
Chateaubriand, Louis Comte de, i. 8
Chateaubriand, René Comte de, i. 8,
10, 12-14, 17-19, 29, 35, 38, 42-43.
46-47, 49, 57-58, 63, 70, 72-80, 91,
93-96, 107-111, 125; ii. 131, 176;
v. 65, 377; vi. 200
Chateaubriand, Apolline Jeanne
Suzanne de Bedée, Comtesse de, i. 14-15
18-20, 28, 30, 35-36, 38, 40, 53,
60-62, 70, 73-74, 76-81, 91-96, 101,
105, 107-109, 111, 125, 146-148,
182; ii. 4, 60, 65, 82, 84-85, 114-116,
120, 146, 176, 318; v. 65, 152; vi. 66
Chateaubriand, Françoise de Foix,
Comtesse de, i. 120; iv. 228
Chateaubriand, Pétronille Claude
Lamour de Lanjégu, Comtesse de,
i. 11-13
Chateaubriand, François René Chevalier,
later Vicomte de, passim
Chateaubriand, Céleste Buisson de La
Vigne, Vicomtesse de, i. xxiii, 130;
ii. 5-9, 24, 27, 82, 85, 146, 171,
175-176, 213, 236, 248-249, 252,
299-300, 302, 310, 317, 319; iii. 3, 5-7,
21, 39, 51-53, 99, 123-126, 129-130,
134-136, 140, 161, 176, 178; iv. 63,
90, 106-107, 120, 221, 223-224,
230-231, 233, 285, 287, 296; v. 69-70,
75, 93, 201, 205, 209, 234, 249,
251-253, 256, 258, 264, 267, 270, 290,
297-299, 313, 316-317, 359, 570; vi.
97-98, 130, 137, 145, 258, 260, 262
Chateaubriand, Amaury de, i. 7, 11
Chateaubriand, Armand Louis de, i.
13, 32; ii. 34, 40, 50, 64; iii.
12-18, 142; iv. 176
Chateaubriand, Brien de, i. 6
Chateaubriand, Christian de, i. 8; ii.
23, 295, 319; iii. 126; v. 63-65,
326; vi. 253
Chateaubriand, François Henri de, i. 11
Chateaubriand, Frédéric de, i. 109; ii. 64
Chateaubriand, Geoffroy de, i. 15
Chateaubriand, Lord of Beaufort,
Guillaume de, i. 43
Chateaubriand, Guy of, i. 9
Chateaubriand, Michel de, i. 7, 11
Chateaubriand, Pierre de, i. 32
Chateaubriand, Thiern de, i. 6
Chateaubriand, Bénigne Jeanne de
(see Chateaubourg)
Chateaubriand, Charlotte of (see Croï)
Chateaubriand, Claude Dame de, vi. 173
Chateaubriand, Julie Marie Agathe
(see Farcy)
Chateaubriand, Lucile de (see Caud)
Chateaubriand, Margaret of (see Rohan)
Chateaubriand, Marie Anne Françoise
de (see Marigny)
Chateaubriand, Marie Jeanne Therèse
Brignon de Laher, Dame de, i. 13,
15-16
Chateaubriand, Jeanne de, ii. 64
Chateaubriand, Jeanne Le Brun, Dame
de, ii. 64; iii. 12
Chateaubriand, Joan of, i. 9
Chateaubriand de La Guerrande, Abbé
Charles Hilaire de, i. 59
Chateaubriand de La Guerrande, Alexis
de, i. 11
Chateaubriand de La Guerrande,
Christophe II. de, i. 6-7, 11
Chateaubriand du Parc, Joseph, i. 11
Chateaubriand du Plessis, Pierre Marie
Anne, i. 11-13, 32
Chateaubriand du Plessis-Bertrand,
Brien de, i. 9
Chateaubriand and Chantocé, Giles of
Brittany, Lord of, i. 25
Chateaugiron, Abbé de, i. 63
Châteauroux, Marie Anne de Mailly-Nesle,
Marquise de La Tournelle,
later Duchesse de, ii. 297-298; vi. 201
Châtel, Jean, v. 401
Châtelain, René Theophile, v. 95
Châtelet (see Du Châtelet)
Chatham, William Pitt, first Earl of,
ii. 73, 146
Châtillon, Henri de, iii. 138
Châtillon (see also Godet de Châtillon)
Chaulieu, Guillaume Anfrie, Abbé de, vi. 211
Chaulnes, M. de, i. 143
Chaumette, Pierre Gaspard, ii. 16
Chauvin, Pierre, iv. 297
Chauvin, Demoiselle, iv. 297
Cheftel, Dr, i. 92
Cheftel the Younger, M., i. 92
Chênedollé, Charles Lioult de, ii. 167,
171-173, 176, 227, 239, 312, 318
Chénier, André Marie de, i. 73, 133;
ii. 234; iii. 31, 35; iv. 152; vi. 161
Chénier, Marie Joseph de, i. 73, 133;
ii. 17, 105; iii. 18, 20-22, 25-26,
31-33, 35, 68-69; vi. 187
Cheops, or Khufu, King of Egypt, v. 244
Chérin, Bernard, i. 6
Chevalier, Michel, v. 126, 137
Chevalier (see also Poncelet)
Chéverus, Bishop of Boston, later
Bishop of Montauban, later
Archbishop of Bordeaux, Jean Louis
Anne Madeleine Lefébure, Cardinal
Comte de, iv. 139
Chevreuse, Claude de Lorraine, Duc
de, ii. 172
Chevreuse, Marie de Rohan-Montbazon,
Duchesse de Luynes, later Duchesse
de, ii. 172
Chevreuse, Duc de, iv. 178
Chevreuse, née Norbonne-Pelet,
Duchesse de, iv. 178-179
Chevet, the restaurateur, v. 311
Chiabrera, Gabriello, vi. 48
Child, Robert, i. 188
Chilperic I. King of the Franks, i. 120, 223
Choderlos de Laclos (see Laclos)
Choiseul et d'Amboise, Étienne François
Comte de Stainville, later Duc de,
v. 50-51; vi. 28, 202
Choiseul-Gouffier, Marie Gabriel
Florent Auguste Comte de, iii. 123
Choiseul-Praslin (see Praslin)
Choiseul-Stainville, Claude Antoine
Gabriel, Duc de, i. 176; ii. 9; v. 94, 112
Choiseul-Stainville, Duchesse de, ii. 9
Chopin, J., v. 263
Choulot, Paul Comte de, v. 322
Christian VIII. King of Denmark and
Norway, iv. 79
Christian IX. King of Denmark, iv. 118
Christina Queen of Sweden, i. 75; ii.
192; iii. 22; v. 14, 51
Christophe, King of Hayti, Henri,
ii. 71; v. 205, 412
Christopher, Saint, vi. 64
Chotek, Karl Count von, v. 340-343,
352-353, 365, 381-382, 391; vi. 36, 139
Chotek, Countess von, v. 381; vi. 139
Chotkowa and Wognin, Johann Rudolf
Count von, v. 382
Cicé (see Boisgelin de Cicé and
Champion de Cicé)
Cicéri, Pierre Luc Charles, vi. 48
Cicero, Marcus Tullius, ii. 81, 129,
132, 201; iii. 28; v. 56, 161, 341;
vi. 47, 237
Cicognara, Leopolde Conte, vi. 52, 58
Cid Campeador, the (see Diaz de Bivar)
Cimarosa, Domenico, i. 225; iv. 185
Cincinnatus, Lucius Quinctius, i. 210;
iii. 228
Cintio, Cardinal, vi. 90-91
Cisher, iv. 170
Clanwilliam, Richard Meade, second
Earl of, iv. 72
Clanwilliam, Richard Charles Francis
Meade, third Earl of, iv. 72-73, 89
Clanwilliam, Caroline Thun, Countess
of, iv. 72
Clancarty, Marquis of Heusden,
Richard Le Poer Trench, second
Earl of, iii. 145
Clarence, Lionel Duke of, iii. 138
Clarendon, Edward Hyde, first Earl
of, v. 57
Clarke, Captain Edward, ii. 319-320
Clarke, Mary Anne Thompson, Mrs, ii. 68
Clary; Colonel, iv. 199
Claude Duchess of Brittany, Queen of
France, i. 141
Claudius, the Emperor, ii. 258
Claudius Crassus, Appius, iii. 51
Clausel de Cousserques, Jean Claude,
ii. 252, 319; iii. 3-4, 51, 123; v. 70
Clausel de Montals, Bishop of Chartres,
Claude Hippolyte, iii. 9-10
Clavel (sec Saint-Huberti)
Clavius, Christopher, vi. 142
Clémence de Bourges (see Bourges)
Clement, Saint, i. 103
Clement of Alexandria, Saint, i. 231
Clement IV. Pope, v. 12
Clement V., Pope, i. 9
Clement VIII., Pope. vi. 88-90
Clement XII., Pope, v. 14-15
Clement XIII., Pope, ii. 180
Clement XIV., Pope, v. 373
Clement VII., Anti-pope (see Robert of Geneva)
Clément, Jacques, ii. 18
Clementina of Austria, Queen of the
two Sicilies, v. 74; vi. 114
Cleopatra Queen of Egypt, ii. 122; iv. 247
Clerfayt, François Sébastien Charles
Joseph de Croix, Comte de, ii. 147
Clermont-Tonnerre, Bishop of Châlons,
later Archbishop of Toulouse, Anne
Antoine Jules Cardinal Duc de, ii.
214, 222, 247; iv. 304; v. 27-28,
32-33, 41
Clermont-Tonnere, Aimé Marie
Gaspard Marquis, later Duc de, iv. 62,
135, 138
Clermont-Tonnerre, Stanislas Marie
Adélaïde Comte de, ii. 194
Clermont-Tonnerre (see also Talaru)
Clery, Jean Baptiste Cant Havet, ii.
106-107
Clinchamp de Malfilatre (see Malfilatre)
Clisson, Olivier de, i. 9, 12
Clive of Plassey, Robert first Lord, vi. 202
Clodion King of the Franks, i. 120;
iii. 139; iv. 109
Clodoald, Saint, v. 404
Clodomir King of Orleans, v. 404
Clorivière (see Limoëlan de Clorivière)
Clotaire I. King of the Franks, i. 223
Clotilda Queen of the Franks, Saint,
ii. 303
Cloud (see Clodoald)
Clovis I. King of the Franks, i. 24;
ii. 29, 303; iii. 131, 139, 224; iv.
108-109, 112; v. 142, 196, 279, 404;
vi. 172, 195-196
Cobbett, William, v. 399
Cockburn, Admiral Sir George, iii. 210
Coëtlogon, M. de. i. 143
Cogni, the baker, vi. 71
Cogni, surnamed the Fornarina,
Margherita, vi. 71-74, 76
Coigneux de Bachaumont (see Bachaumont)
Coigny, Marie Henri François
Franquetot, Duc de, i. 119, 121
Coislin, Charles Georges René de
Cambout, Marquis de, ii. 297
Coislin, later Duchesse de Mailly,
Marie Anne Louise Adélaïde de
Mailly, Marquise de, ii. 170,
297-302; iii. 5
Cokayne, Clarenceux King-of-Arms,
Mr. George Edward, iv. 251
Colbert, Jean Baptiste, i. 72, 236; ii.
205; iv. 89, 127
Colbert de Maulevrier, Édouard Charles
Victornien Comte de, i. 72
Colbert-Montboissier, Comtesse de, i.
72; v. 290-291
Colburn, Henry, i. xv
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, ii. 128
Colet, Louise Revoil, Dame, vi. 174
Coligny, Gaspard de Châtillon,
Amiral Sire de, i. 168
Collard (see Royer-Collard)
Collinet, the band-master, ii. 143; iv. 71
Collot d'Herbois, Jean Marie, ii. 18
Colonna, Sciarra, v. 48
Colonna-Ceccaldi, Mayor of Vescovato, iv. 196
Colonna di Palestrina (see Palestrina)
Columbus, Christopher, i. 26, 195-196;
ii. 217; iii. 209; v. 335; vi. 44, 119
Combourg, Comte de (see Chateaubriand,
René Comte de)
Combourg, Rivallon, Lord of, i. 43
Comines, Philippe de, vi. 47, 49
Compignano, Countess of (see Élisa
Grand-duchess of Tuscany)
Concini (see d'Ancre)
Condé, Henri II. Prince de, ii. 152
Condé, Charlotte Marguerite de
Montmorency, Princesse de, ii. 152; vi. 77
Condé, Louis II. Prince de, i. 77; ii.
40, 51, 151, 271, 273, 278-279, 290,
292; iii. 18, 27, 227; iv. 198; v.
403; vi. 19, 77, 167
Condé, Louis V. Prince de, i. 59, 83,
160; ii. 4, 54, 110, 171, 255, 259,
263, 275, 292-293; iii. 29, 55; 117,
124-125; v. 162, 297
Condé, Louise d'Orléans, Princesse de, i. 59
Condé, Louis VI. Duc de Bourbon,
later Prince de, i. 59, 160; ii. 48,
110-111, 255, 259, 263, 279, 293;
iii. 117, 119; iv. 8
Condé, Louise d'Orléans, Duchesse de
Bourbon, later Princesse de, ii. 279
Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas
Caritat, Marquis de, i. 136; ii. 180
Conégliano, Bon Adrien Jeannot
Moncey, Maréchal Duc de, iii. 90, 155;
iv. 109
Congreve,William, iv. 80
Connell, Mr. Conal Holmes O'Connell
O'Riordan, known as F. Norreys,
vi. 266
Consalvi, Ercole Cardinal, ii. 220,
230; vi. 47
Constant, M. de, v. 200, 202
Constant, Madame de, v. 200
Constant, Mademoiselle de, v. 202
Constant de Rebecque, Henri
Benjamin, ii. 187, 275; iii. 68-69,
114-115, 122, 144, 166, 168; iv. 129,
145, 149-153, 165-166, 201-204, 208,
211-213, 218, 220, 264; v. 118,
138-139, 200, 202; vi. 5
Constantine I., the Emperor, ii. 188;
iii. 206; iv. 235; v. 196
Constantine of Russia, Grand-duke, i.
99; iv. 281
Constantius I., the Emperor, iii. 206
Constantius III., the Emperor, iii. 47, 227
Contades, Louis Georges Erasme Maréchal
Marquis de, i. 16
Contat, Dame de Parny, Mademoiselle,
i. 128, 173
Contencin, A. de, ii. 83
Conyngham, Henry first Marquess, i. 236
Conyngham, Elizabeth Dennison,
Marchioness, i. 236; ii. 298; iv. 73, 79, 85
Conyngham, Hon. Francis Nathaniel
Conyngham, later second Marquess,
i. 236
Cook, Captain James, i. 69; ii. 319-320;
iv. 40; vi. 222
Cooper, James Fenimore, i. 254
Copernicus, v. 327
Coppens, M., iii. 134
Coppinger, M., iv. 67
Coquereau, Abbé Félix, iii. 226
Corbière, Jacques Joseph Guillaume
François Pierre Comte de, iv. 14-16,
26-30, 51, 59, 61-62, 99-101, 132,
135, 138; v. 87
Corbigny, M., vi. 176
Corday, Marie Anne Charlotte Corday
d'Armans, known as Charlotte, ii. 225
Corinna, vi. 172
Cordonnier (see Saint-Hyacinthe)
Corentin, Bishop of Quimper, Saint, i. 144
Corinna, iv. 34
Coriolanus, Cnæus Marcius, ii. 122
Corné, Marquis de, i. 146
Corneille, Pierre, i. 156, 212; ii. 178,
205, 261; iii. 33
Cornelius, Peter von, iv. 240
Cornwallis, Charles first Marquess, i. 216, 218
Coronini, Count, v. 358
Cortois de Pressigny, Bishop of Saint-Malo,
later Archbishop of Besançon,
Gabriel Comte, i. 146, 148
Cortois de Quincey, Abbé, v. 15
Corvaisier, Julien, i. 48
Cosmo I. Grand-duke of Tuscany, iv. 239
Cossé-Brissac, Charles Maréchal Comte,
later Duc de, iii. 75
Cossé-Brissac, Emmanuel de, v. 244
Cossé, Comte de, v. 360, 365, 374-375, 404
Cossé, Comtesse de, v. 374-375, 404-405
Coste, Jacques, v. 96-97
Cottens, Madame de, iv. 120
Cottereau, Jean, vi. 238
Cottreau, Felix, v. 298
Coucy, Robert de, ii. 177
Coudert, Quarter-master Charles, iv.
208, 211
Coudert, Eugène, iv. 208
Coudrin, Abbé Pierre Marie Joseph, v. 23-24
Couëdic, Captain, i. 69; ii. 300
Couhaillon (see Saint-Germain)
Coulanges, Philippe Emmanuel
Marquis de, iv. 246-247
Couppart, Demoiselles, i. 19, 31
Courcelles, Chevalier de, i. 5
Courchamp, née Becquet, Madame de, v. 96
Courier de Méré. Paul Louis, iii. 68
Courmenin (see Deshayes)
Courtenay (see Bauffremont-Courtenay)
Courtois, Edme Bonaventure, iv. 4
Courtois (see also Cortois de Quincey)
Courvoisier, Jean Joseph Antoine de,
v. 72, 81, 88
Cousans de Mauléon, Jacques Vincent
Marquis de, i. 49, 51
Coussergues (see Clausel de Coussergues)
Cowper, William, ii. 127, 129
Crabbe, George, ii. 128
Créqui (see Lesdiguières)
Cresap, Captain Michael, i. 253
Crétineau-Joly, Jacques Augustin Marie,
vi. 43
Cristaldi, Belisario Cardinal, v. 23
Croï, Charlotte de Chateaubriand,
Dame de, i. 9
Croker, John Wilson, ii. 128; iv. 82;
vi. 252
Cromwell, Lord Protector of the British
Commonwealth, Oliver, i. 169; ii.
73; iii. 22-23, 93, 198; iv. 42, 93,
251; v. 115, 177; vi. 123
Cromwell, Lord Protector of the British
Commonwealth, Richard, v. 115
Cronier, Mayor of the 9th Ward of
Paris, v. 237
Croussol or Crouzol (see Chabrol-Croussol)
Crouzas, M. de, iv. 120
Crowe, Eyre Evans, iv. 3; v. 97
Croy, Bishop of Strasburg, later
Archbishop of Rouen, Gustave Maximilien
Juste Cardinal Prince de, v. 22-23
Crussol, Alexandre Charles Emmanuel
Bailli de, iii. 183-184
Cucurron Sicard (see Sicard)
Cujas, Jacques de, ii. 206
Cujas, Suzanne de, ii. 206
Cumberland, Duke of (see Ernest I.
King of Hanover)
Cumberland, Duchess of (see Frederica
Queen of Hanover)
Curchod (see Necker)
Curtius, the showman, ii. 163
Cussy, Chevalier de, i. 99; iv. 33
Custine, Amand Louis Philippe
François Marquis de, ii. 192
Custine, Louise Éléonore Mélanie de
Sabran, Marquise de, ii. 192-193,
195; iii. 142; iv. 121, 223; v. 347;
vi. 42
Custine, Astolphe Louis Leonor
Marquis de, ii. 193; iv. 78, 121
Custine, née de Saint-Simon de
Courtomer, Marquise de, iv. 121
Custine, Louis Philippe Enguerrand
de, iv. 121
Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, Saint, ii. 309
Cyrano de Bergerac (see Bergerac)
Czartoriska, Princess, i. 176
Czelakovsky, Frantisek Ladislav, v. 389
D
Dagobert I. King of the Franks, i. 74,
120; ii. 32; iii. 182; iv. 35
Dalayrac, Nicolas, v. 198; vi. 162
Dalberg, Archbishop-Elector of
Mayence, Prince Primate, later
Grand-duke of Frankfort, Karl Theodor
Anton Maria Prince von, v. 337
Dalberg, Emmerich Joseph Wolfgang
Heribert Duc de, iii. 73; iv. 16
Dalesme, Jean Baptiste Baron, iii. 106-107
Dallas, Governor of St Helena, iii. 225
Dallas, Lady, iii. 225
Dalmatie, Nicolas Jean-de-Dieu Soult,
Maréchal Duc de, iii. 49, 99, 111-112
115-116, 122, 141, 155, 164; iv. 75; v. 303
Damas, Alfred Charles François
Gabriel Comte de, v. 374-375
Damas, Anne Hyacinthe Maxence
Baron de, iv. 99, 135, 139; v. 80,
342-343, 361-365, 367, 371-372, 374-375,
377, 379-380, 382, 415; vi. 29, 138
Damasus I., Pope Saint, v. 11
Damaze de Raymond, M., iii. 36
Dambray, Charles Henry Chancelier,
iii. 100, 123, 127, 136; iv. 7; v. 28;
vi. 136
Damian, Herr, vi. 142
Damiens, Robert François, vi. 202
Dampierre, Marquis de, v. 245
Damrémont, Charles Marie Denys,
Comte de, iii. 57
Dandini, Ercole Cardinal, v. 24
Dandolo, Doge of Venice, Enrico, v.
400; vi. 69
Dangeau, Philippe de Courcillon,
Marquis de, iv. 44
Dante Alighieri, i. xxiii-xxiv, 24, 86,
89; ii. 122, 124, 141, 186, 212; iii.
208, 219; iv. 1, 42-43, 140, 225-228;
v. 66, 78, 85; vi. 50, 54, 60-61,
82, 89, 222
Danton, Georges Jacques, ii. 4, 12, 18-21,
106, 109, 159, 259; iii. 196; iv.
152; v. 215, 310; vi. 47
Darius III. King of Persia, iii. 149
Daru, Pierre Antoine Noel Brunot,
Comte, iii. 23-24
Darwin, Charles, ii. 129
Darwin, Erasmus, ii. 129
Dasies, Sieur, iii. 86
Dasté, Dame, iv. 24-25, 59
Dautancourt, Major, ii. 262-264, 267
Daunou, Pierre Claude François, v. 96
David King of Israel, vi. 36, 207, 237
David II. Bruce, King of Scots, v. 411
David, Jacques Louis, i. 189; ii. 17,
158; iii. 7, 211; iv. 162; v. 290
Davout (see d'Auerstädt)
Dazincourt, the actor, i. 128
Deane, Silas, ii. 23
Deboffe, J., ii. 70, 76, 81, 94, 97
Debrett, John, ii. 97
De Brosses, Charles Président, iv. 242,
248-249, 257; v. 14-17, 30
Decazes, Élie, later Duc, i. 186; iv.
7, 9-11, 13, 23, 25-26, 63, 68; v. 98,
161
Decazes, née Muraire, Madame, iv. 10
Decazes, née de Saint-Aulaire, Duchesse, iv., 10
Decazes, Élie Baron, i. 185
Decazes the Elder, M., iv. 10-11
Decius, the Emperor, ii. 309; vi. 64
Deffant, Marie de Vichy-Chamroud,
Marquise du, ii. 172
Degousée, Marie Anne Joseph, v. 141
Deguerry, Abbé Gaspard, vi. 262-263
Dejean, Napoléon Aimé Comte, v. 95
Delacroix, Charles, vi. 187
Delacroix, Ferdinand Victor Eugène, vi. 187
Delarue, M., v. 131
Delattre, Doctor, ii. 62
Delaunay, Matthieu, v. 140
Delaunay-Boisé-Lucas (see Boisé-Lucas)
Del Drago, Teresia Massimo, Principessa, iv. 256
Delessert, Jules Paul Benjamin Baron, v. 116, 123
Delessert, Dame, v. 249
Delga, M., ii. 276
Deliège, M., iv. 67
Delille, Abbé Jacques, i. 132; ii. 102-103,
118; iii. 27-28, 35
Delille, Dame, ii. 102
Delisle de Sales, Jean Baptiste Isoard,
known as, i. 126-127; ii. 157
Della Gracia (see Lucchesi-Palli)
Della Marmora, Teresio Cardinal
Ferrero, v. 21
Della Somaglia, Bishop of Frascati,
later of Ostia and Velletri, Giulio
Maria Cardinal, v. 5-6, 17
Della Villa, Giovanni Battista Manso,
Marchese, vi. 91
Delloye, Lieutenant-Colonel H. D., vi. 97-98
Delphin-Récamier (see Récamier)
Demangeat, M., v. 266
Demosthenes, i. 252; ii. 129; iii. 195,
214; v. 56; vi. 180
Denain, Dame, ii. 294
Denis, Jean Ferdinand, iii. 21
Denis, the notary, iv. 12
Denis, Dame, i. 167
Dennewitz, Friedrich Wilhelm Bülow,
Count von, iii. 162
Denon, Dominique Vivant Baron, iii. 7
Denys (see Damrémont)
Deplace, Père Étienne, v. 363
Desaix de Veygoux, General Louis
Charles Antoine, ii. 261
Desbrosses, the Vicomte de Chateaubriand's
hall-porter, v. 250
Desclozeaux, M., iii. 104
Des Escotais, Louis Joseph, i. 7
Desèze, Raymond Comte, iii. 139
Desgarcins, Mademoiselle, i. 128; ii. 104
Desgraviers-Marceau (see Marceau)
Desgranges, M., v. 48
Deshayes, Baron de Courmenin, Louis, iv. 245
Deshoulières, Guillaume de Lafon de
Boisguérin, Seigneur, vi. 174
Deshoulières, Antoinette du Ligier de
La Garde, Dame, vi. 174
Desilles, André, i. 92, 181
Désirée Clary, Queen of Sweden, iv. 208-210
Des Mahir, M., i. 106
Desmarais, Cyprien, v. 240
Desmarais (see also Régnier-Desmarais)
Desmare (see Champmeslé)
Desmarets, Charles, iii. 15
Desmarets, Jean, i. 64
Desmortiers, Louis Henri, v. 258-260
Desmoulins, Benoit Camille, i. 129,
155; ii. 17-18, 20-21, 158; v. 215
Desmoulins, Dame, ii. 20
Desmousseaux de Givré (see Givré)
des Nétumières (see Hay des Nétumières)
des Oliviers (see Flins des Oliviers)
Despagne, the boatman, iii. 14-15
Desport, Messieurs, ii. 242
Despréaux (see Boileau-Despréaux)
Desprès, M., i. 20
Desprez, Louis, iv. 285-286
des Réaux (see Taboureau des Réaux
and Tallemant des Réaux)
Desrenaudes, Abbé Martial Borye, iii. 130
Dessolle, Jean Joseph Paul Augustin
Marquis, iii. 94
De Stendhal (see Stendhal)
Determes, P. G. Jules, vi. 142
Deuteric, ii. 52
Deutz, Simon, iii. 156; v. 307; vi. 156
Devienne, Jeanne Françoise Thévenin,
known as Sophie, ii. 308
Devoise, M., ii. 330
Devoise, Dame, ii. 330
Devonshire, William Cavendish, fifth
Duke of, iv. 160
Devonshire, Georgiana Spencer, Duchess
of, iv. 160-162
De Witt, Cornelis, iii. 88
De Witt, Grand Pensionary of Holland,
Jan, iii. 88
Diaz de Bivar, the Cid Campeador,
Ruy, i. 244; v. 239; vi. 91
Dickens, Charles, vi. 54
Diderot, Denis, i. 52, 126; ii. 85, 180, 197
Dido Queen of Tyre, ii. 331; iii. 19,
108; iv. 284; vi. 81, 127, 178, 236
Die, Béatrix Comtesse de, vi. 172
Diesbach, M. de, vi. 245
Dighton, John, ii. 75
Di Gregorio, Emmanuele Cardinal, v. 4-5, 8, 23
Dillon, Arthur Comte de, i. 176
Dillon, Théobald de, i. 176
Dillon, Captain, i. 69
"Dinarzade," ii. 46-47
Dinelli, Captain, ii. 328
Dino (see Talleyrand-Périgord)
Diocletian, the Emperor, iii. 11-12,
113; v. 58; vi. 189
Diogenes, vi. 180
Domenichino, Domenico Zampieri,
known as, v. 26; vi. 17, 89
Dominic Loricatus, Saint, ii. 43
Domitian, the Emperor, ii. 108; iv.
299; vi. 104
Donarin (see Le Donarin)
Donnadieu, Gabriel Vicomte, iii. 139
Donoughmore, John Hely-Hutchinson,
third Earl of, iii. 110
Dorat, Claude Joseph, ii. 106
Doria, Lamba, ii. 66
Doria, Principessa, iv. 235
Dorica, the courtezan, vi. 180
Dorléans, Louis, i. 130
Douay (see Merlin de Douay)
Doudeauville (see La Rochefoucauld-Doudeauville)
Douglas, Marquess of (sec Hamilton)
Downshire, Wills Hill, first Marquess
of, iv. 161
Dowson, Ernest Christopher, vi. 266
Drago (see Del Drago)
Drake, Francis, ii. 259
Drouet d'Erlon, Jean Baptiste Maréchal
Comte, iii. 111
Drouot, Antoine Comte, iii. 84, 169
Drovetti, M., ii. 327-328
Druilhet, Père Julien, v. 363
Dryden, John, ii. 121
Du Barry, Jeanne Vaubernier, Comtesse,
i. 177; v. 51, 215; vi. 202
Du Bartas, Guillaume de Salluste, vi. 88
du Bellay (see Bellay)
Dubochet, M., v. 95
Dubois, Archbishop of Cambrai,
Guillaume Cardinal, vi. 200
Dubois, Paul François, v. 260-261
Du Bois de La Ferronnière, Marquis, i. 146
du Boistelleul (see Boistelleul)
Du Bourg, iii. 74
Dubourg-Butler, "General" Frédéric,
iii. 181; v. 112-113, 118-120, 139
Du Cange, Charles Du Fresne,
Seigneur, i. 146; iii. 124
Duchatelet, Dame, ii. 84
Du Châtelet, Gabrielle Émilie Le
Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise, vi. 9
Duchesnois, Catherine Joséphine
Rafin, known as Mademoiselle, ii. 177
Ducis, Jean François, iii. 29, 68-69; iv. 212
Duclos, Charles Pineau, i. 74; ii. 180;
iii. 25; iv. 252-253
du Deffant (see Deffant)
Dudevant, Dame (see Sand, George)
Dudley, Lord Guildford, ii. 74
Dufay, Major, v. 110-111
Dufey, Pierre Joseph Spiridion, v. 55
Dufougerais, Alfred Xavier Baron, vi. 133
Du Fourni, Honoré Caille, i. 5
Dufour de Pradt (see Pradt)
Dufresne (see Duris-Dufresne)
Dugazon, Henri Gourgaud, known as,
i. 128, 173
Dugazon, Louise Rosalie Lefèvre,
Dame, i. 173
Dugied, the conspirator, v. 140
Duguay-Trouin, René, i. 26, 30
Du Guesclin, Connétable Comte de
Longueville, Bertrand, i. 6, 9, 74;
ii. 39, 200; v. 319
Du Guesclin, Tiphaine, i. 9
Duhamel, Abbé, i. 73
Duhamel de Monceau, Henri Louis, i. 180
Dujardin Pinte-de-Vin, Captain, i. 181, 209
Dulau, A., ii. 97, 116, 147
Dulong, François Charles, vi. 99, 158
Dumas the Elder, Alexandre Davy de
La Pailleterie Dumas, known as, ii.
195; v. 290
Dumont, Baron von Carlskron, Jean,
iv. 246-247
Dumont d'Urville, Jules Sébastien
César, vi. 222
Dumorey, M., iv. 287
Dumoulin, Évariste, v. 95, 120
Dumouriez, General Charles François,
ii. 14, 25, 259, 263, 300; iii. 73,
203, 299; v. 127
Duncker, Maximilian Wolfgang, v. 412
Duncombe, John, vi. 18
Dunmore, John Murray, fourth Earl of, i. 253
Dupan (see Mallet-Dupan)
Dupanloup, Bishop of Orleans, Félix
Antoine Philibert, vi. 190
Dupaty, Charles, iv. 253
Dupaty, Charles Marguerite Jean
Baptiste Mercier, iv. 253
Du Paz, Père, i. 5
Dupeloux, Sub-prefect of Aix, iii. 84
Duperron, Bishop of Évreux, later
Archbishop of Sens, Jacques Davy
Cardinal, v. 14, 50
Dupin the Elder, André Marie Jean
Jacques Dupin, known as, ii. 264-269,
274, 277; v. 95; vi. 161
Dupleix, Joseph François Marquis,
vi. 201-202
Dupont, Jacques François, v. 95
Dupont de l'Étang, Pierre Antoine
Comte, iii. 86, 99
Dupont de l'Eure, Jacques Charles,
v. 173
Dupont de Nemours, Pierre Samuel,
iii. 56, 73
Duport du Tertre, Louis François,
ii. 25
Duport du Tertre, Dame, ii. 25
Dupuis, Charles François, ii. 180
Duquesne, Abraham Marquis, i. 38; ii. 35
Durand de Mareuil, M., iv. 211
Durante, Francesco, iv. 185
Duranton, Dame, iv. 24-25, 59
Duras, Emmanuel Félicité de Durfort,
Maréchal Duc de, i. 17, 111, 118
Duras, Louise Françoise Macloven
Céleste de Coëtlequen, Maréchale
Duchesse de, i. 17
Duras, Amedée Bretagne Malo de
Durfort, Duc de, iii. 101, 125-126,
128, 174-175; v. 107, 114
Duras, Claire Lechat de Coetnempren
de Kersaint, Duchesse de, ii. 104;
iii. 51, 101-102, 126, 128, 140; iv.
86, 121, 205-206, 222
Duras, Duchesse Douairière de, iii. 183
Dureau de La Malle, Adolphe Jules
César Auguste, ii. 335
Dureau de la Malle, Jean Baptiste
René, ii. 335
Duris-Dufresne, François, v. 162
Durrieu, Xavier, v. 96
Dussard, Hippolyte, v. 96
du Thiel (see Thiel)
Du Tillet, Bishop of Meaux, Jean, iv. 112
Duval, Alexandre, v. 199
Duvergier de Hauranne, Prosper Louis,
iv. 114, 217
Du Viviers, M., iv. 296; v. 28
E
d'Eckmühl (see d'Auerstädt)
d'Eckstein, Ferdinand Baron, iii. 161
Edgeworth, Maria, ii. 126
Edgeworth de Firmont, Henry Essex,
Abbé, vi. 196
Edith the Swan-necked, i. 104
Edmund II. King of England, v. 377
Edward I. King of England, i. 9
Edward III. King of England, ii. 73-74
108, 137-138; iii. 138; iv. 58,
175; v. 411
Edward IV. King of England, ii. 75; v. 351
Edward V. King of England, ii. 75
Edward VII. King of Great Britain and
Ireland and of the British Dominions
beyond the Seas, Emperor of India,
H.M., v. 372
Edward VII. (see also Charles III. King
of England, Scotland and Ireland)
Égault, Abbé, i. 44-45, 53, 55-56, 63
Eggers, Karl, iv. 240
Eginhard, iv. 50
d'Églantine (see Fabre d'Églantine)
d'Egmont, Comtesse, i. 132; ii. 10
d'Eichstadt (see Leuchtenberg)
d'Elbée, General Gigot, ii. 187; v. 245
Elbeuf (see Lambesc)
d'Elchingen, Prince de la Moskowa,
Michel Ney, Maréchal Duc, iii. 50,
90, 114, 122, 169; iv. 7, 10; v. 246
Eldon, John Scott, first Earl of, iv. 70
Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen of France,
later of England, iv. 17
Elfrida Queen of England, ii. 129
Elgin and eleventh of Kincardine,
Thomas Bruce, seventh Earl of, vi. 59
Élisa Bonaparte, Princess Bacciochi,
later Princess of Lucca and Piombino,
later Grand-duchess of Tuscany,
ii. 166, 212, 219, 246, 253-254,
294; iii. 46, 147
Élisabeth, Princess of France, Madame,
i. 83, 160; ii. 37, 295
Elizabeth Queen of England, v. 351
Elizabeth Tudor, Queen of England,
ii. 121, 138; iv. 72, 93; vi. 173
Elizabeth of Brunswick, Queen of
Prussia, iv. 38
Elizabeth Empress of All the Russias,
i. 13; vi. 101
Elizabeth Farnese, Queen of Spain, v. 15
Elleviou, Jean, v. 199
Elleviou the Elder, M., v. 199
Elzear of Sabran, Saint, i. 144
Emanuel I. King of Portugal, vi. 104
Emanuel Philibert Duke of Savoy, ii. 206
d'Embly, Thomas Artus, Sire, iv. 73
Emery, Abbé Jacques André, ii. 212-213
Emma Princess of France, iv. 50
Emo, Admiral Angelo, vi. 60
d'Enghien, Louis Antoine Henri de
Bourbon-Condé, Duc, i. 59, 160;
ii. 110, 164, 188, 252, 255, 257-293,
295; iii. 4, 18, 21, 47, 60, 102, 117,
125, 194, 219, 226; iv. 143, 145, 189,
198; v. 293; vi. 167, 183-185, 221
d'Enghien, Charlotte Louise Dorothée
de Rohan-Rochefort, Duchesse, ii. 279
d'Enghien, François de Bourbon-Vendôme,
Comte, ii. 279
Enke, the musician, iv. 38
d'Entragues, Comte, i. 113
d'Entragues, François de Balzac, i. 117
d'Entragues, Marie Touchet, Dame de
Balzac, i. 117
d'Entragues, Demoiselle de Balzac, i. 117
d'Entragues (see also Saint-Huberti and
Verneuil)
Epaphroditus, vi. 104
d'Épernon, Jean Louis de Nogaret
de La Valette, Duc, ii. 202; v. 385
Epictetus, vi. 104
Epicurus, v. 129
Epimenides, iv. 94
d'Épinay, Denis Joseph de La Live, ii. 26
d'Épinay, Louise Florence Pétronille
Tardieu d'Esclavelles, Dame de La
Live, ii. 26, 197
Erasmus, Desiderius, v. 272
Érard, Sébastien, iv. 42
d'Ercilla y Zuñiga, Alonso, i. xxiv, 212; vi. 222
Eresby (see Gwydyr)
d'Erlon (see Drouet d'Erlon)
d'Ermenonville, Dominique de Vic,
Vicomte, v. 402
Ernest I. King of Hanover, iv. 33, 46
Ernest II. Duke of Saxe-Gotha, ii. 197
Erskine, Thomas first Lord, ii. 143
d'Esclavelles (see d'Épinay)
Escotais (see Des Escotais)
Esmenard, Joseph Alphonse, iii. 30
Espaing, Messire, v. 70
Espartero (see Vittoria)
d'Esprémenil, M., ii. 84
d'Essling (see Rivoli)
d'Estaing, Charles Hector Comte, i.
69, 164, 193
Esterhazy von Galantha, Nikolaus
Field-Marshal Prince von, iii. 64
Esterhazy von Galantha, Paul Anton
Prince von, iv. 69, 79; v. 146
Esterhazy, Countess von, v. 408
Esterhazy, Demoiselle, v. 408-409
Esther Queen of the Medes and Persians, v. 383
Esther, Anna, v. 383
Éstoile (see L'Éstoile)
d'Estrées, Duchesse de Beaufort,
Gabrielle, i. 72, 117, 120; ii. 193; iii.
63; iv. 79; vi. 242
d'Étampes, Anne de Pisseleu d'Heilly,
Duchesse, i. 120; vi. 238
Étang (see Dupont de L'Étang)
Ethelred II. King of England, v. 377
Étienne, Charles Guillaume, iv. 15, 129; v. 87
Eudes, Jean, i. 55
Eudes (see also Odo)
Eudes de Mézeray (see Mézeray)
Eugène, Francis Eugène Prince of
Savoy-Carignan, known as Prince, v. 333
Eugenius, iii. 47
Eupert, ii. 218
Eure (see Dupont de l'Eure)
Euripides, ii. 124, 178; iii. 29
Eve, vi. 88, 110-111, 237
Everett, Edward, vi. 159-160
Exelmans, Isidore Maréchal Comte, v. 108
Exmouth, Edward Pellew, first Viscount, v. 86
Eyck, Hubert van, iii. 135
Eyck, Jan van, iii. 135
F
Fabert, Abraham Maréchal, vi. 24
Fabert, Abraham, vi. 24
Fabre, François Xavier Pascal, iv. 249-250
Fabre, Jean Raymond Auguste, v. 88, 96
Fabre, Marie Joseph Victorin, v. 89
Fabre d'Églantine, Philippe François
Nazaire, ii. 18, 20, 21
Fabricius Luscinus, Caius, iii. 31
Fabry, Jean Baptiste Germain, iii. 87
Fabvier, Charles Nicolas Baron, iii. 57;
iv. 117-118
Fagel, Robert Baron, iv. 211
Fairfax, Edward, i. 203
Falconieri, Signora, iv. 256
Falkland, Lucius Carey, second Viscount,
ii. 39; v. 57, 295
Fall, pseud., John (see Chateaubriand,
Armand Louis de)
Fallon, P. J., vi. 134
Falloux, Frédéric Alfred Pierre Comte
de, v. 310-311
Faneau de Lahorie (see Lahorie)
Farcy, Jean George, v. 109
Farcy, Annibal Pierre François de Farcy
de Montavallon, Comte de, i. 66
Farcy, Julie Marie Agathe de Chateaubriand,
Comtesse de, i. 12, 15, 40,
66-67, 83, 96, 101-104, 111-112,
122, 125-126, 130, 137, 151, 155,
180; ii. 6, 9, 27, 65, 114-115, 146,
176, 208, 312-313, 319; v. 65, 258;
vi. 246, 265
Farcy, Demoiselle de, ii. 319
Fare (see La Fare)
Faria, Abbé Joseph, ii. 195
Fariau (see Saint-Ange)
Fauche, J. F., ii. 97
Fauche-Borel, Louis, iv. 107
Faure, the "knight of July," v. 240
Fauriel, Claude, ii. 205
Fauvelet de Bourrienne (see Bourrienne)
Faverolles (see Salvage de Faverolles)
Favorinus, vi. 172
Favras, Thomas Mahi, Marquis de, i. 165, 173
Fayette (see La Fayette)
Fayolle, M. de, i. 63-64
Fazy, Jean Jacques, v. 96
Feltre, Henri Jacques Guillaume Clarke,
Comte d'Hunebourg, Maréchal Duc
de, iii. 112, 127, 133, 181
Fénelon, Archbishop of Cambrai,
François de Salignac de La Mothe, i. 14,
107; ii. 105, 313-314, 336; iii. 18-19
30, 33, 176; vi. 200, 246
Ferdinand I. the Emperor, vi. 84
Ferdinand II. the Emperor, v. 355
Ferdinand V. King of Spain, iii. 127, 176
Ferdinand VII. King of Spain, i. 49;
ii. 257; iii. 221; iv. 53, 83-84, 96,
236, 272; v. 5, 8, 74-75, 84; vi. 97,
140, 207
Ferdinand III. Grand-duke of Tuscany,
also of Würzburg, vi. 12, 45, 235
Ferdinand I. King of the Two Sicilies
and IV. of Naples, ii. 25, 139, 153;
iii. 147, 156; iv. 52, 193, 196-197;
v. 51, 74, 134; vi. 45
Ferdinand II. King of the Two Sicilies,
v. 322-323
Ferdinand IV. King of the Two Sicilies,
vi. 202
Ferdinand of Prussia, Prince, ii. 289;
iv. 34
Ferdinand Victor of Modena, Archduke, iv. 251
Ferrand, Antoine François Claude
Comte, iii. 110
Ferrari, the supercargo, v. 244
Ferrero Della Marmora (see Delia Marmora)
Ferron de La Sigonnière, François
Prudent Malo, ii. 48, 54-55
Ferronnays (see La Ferronnays)
Ferronnière (see Du Bois de La Ferronnière)
Feryd-Eddyn-Atthar, i. 259
Fesch, Archbishop of Lyons, Joseph
Cardinal Comte, ii. 213-214, 219,
221-222, 230, 237, 246-248; iii. 64,
215-216; iv. 238; v. 6, 30, 44-45,
52, 293
Feuchères, Madame de, i. 59
Feuillade (see La Feuillade)
Feuquières, Manassés de Pas, Marquis, de, ii. 40
Feutrier, Bishop of Beauvais, François
Jean Hyacinthe Comte, iv. 139, 304
Fézensac (see Montesquiou-Fézensac)
Fielding, Henry, ii. 125
Fiévée, Joseph, i. 97
Fieschi, Joseph Marie, v. 101
Figeac (see Champollion Figeac)
Filippo de' Giunazzi (see Romano)
Firmont (see Edgeworth de Firmont)
Fitz-James, Édouard Duc de, i. 97; iii.
74; iv. 67, 242, 250, 256, 258-260
Fitz-James, Jacques Duc de, vi. 249
Flahaut de La Billarderie, Auguste
Charles Joseph Comte de, iii. 169
Flamarens, M. de, ii. 302
Flavigny, Maurice Adolphe Charles
Vicomte de, iv. 33
Flesselles, Jacques de, i. 158
Fleury, Bishop of Fréjus, André Hercule
Cardinal de, i. 13; vi. 200
Fleury, Joseph Abraham Bénard, known
as, i. 128-129, 173
Flins des Oliviers, Claude Marie Louis
Emmanuel Carbon, i. 127-128; ii. 10, 208
Flora, the courtezan, v. 204
Florio, John, i. 52, 71, 79, 231; ii. 22,
73, 127, 206; iii. 60, 149; iv. 243-244; v. 333
Flotte, Étienne Gaston Baron de, ii. 257
Foissac-Latour, Vicomte de, v. 151
Foix (see Lautrec, Narbonne and Nemours)
Folks, Mr., v. 98-99
Fonchais (see La Fonchais)
Fontaine, Pierre François, iii. 102-103
Fontaine (see also La Fontaine)
Fontanes, the Elder, Marquis de, ii. 104
Fontanes, Jean Pierre Louis Marquis
de, i. 82, 127, 133-134, 175, 217;
ii. 27, 104-107, 109-114, 146, 156-167,
161-162, 166, 168, 170-171, 177,
187, 210, 212, 239-240, 243, 253-254,
307, 319; iii. 3-4, 7-8, 10-11,
28, 35-36, 51, 140; iv. 39, 71, 147,
183, 213, 250-251, 258-259; v. 334;
vi. 93
Fontanes, Marquise de, ii. 105
Fontanes, Christine Dame de, ii. 105
Fontanes-Saint-Marcellin (see Saint-Marcellin)
Fontanges, Marie Angélique de
Scoraille de Roussille, Duchesse
de, v. 215
Fontenay, Chevalier de, iv. 106
Fontenille, Philippe de Laroche, Baron de, ii. 205
Fontenille, known as Fair Paule, Paule
de Vignier, Dame de Bayganuet,
later Baronne de, ii. 205
Fontevrault, née de Kochechouart de
Mortemart, Abbesse de, i. 103
Forbin, Louis Nicolas Philippe Auguste
Comte de, ii. 304-305
Forbin-Janson, Palamède de, v. 116
Force (see La Force)
Foresta, Marie Joseph Marquis de, vi. 136
Formage, Alexandre, v. 254
Forrest, Miles, ii. 75
Foscari, Doge of Venice, Francesco, vi. 50
Fossombroni, Vittorio, vi. 235
Fotrad, ii. 218
Fouchard de Grandmenil (see Grand-ménil)
Fouché (see d'Otrante)
Foullon, Joseph François, i. 156, 161
Fouquet (see Belle-Isle and Hachette)
Fouquier-Tinville, Antoine Quentin,
ii. 20, 83-84; v. 310
Fourier, Charles, ii. 184
Fourni (see Du Fourni)
Fourquet (see Hachette)
Fox, Charles James, i. xxi; ii. 128,
143-145; iii. 215; iv. 70; v. 50
Foy, General Maximilien Sébastien,
iv. 128, 218-219
Français de Lalande (see Lalande)
France (see La France and Marie de France)
Francesca da Rimini (see Malatesta)
Franceschetti, General Dominique
César, iv. 196
Franceschini, the sculptor, vi. 46
Francis of Assisi, Giovanni Francesco
Bernardone, known as Saint, ii. 219;
iv. 230; v. 65-66; vi. 143-145
Francis of Paula, Saint, i. 102
Francis I. Emperor of Austria (see
Francis II., the Emperor)
Francis II. Duke of Brittany, i. 25, 141
Francis I., the Emperor, i. 156
Francis II., later Francis I. Emperor
of Austria, King of Hungary and
Bohemia, the Emperor, ii. 9, 14, 58,
264; iii. 34, 49, 64, 86, 107; iv.
187, 191, 193; v. 272, 339, 341,
358, 364, 369; vi. 12, 45, 106, 108,
113-114, 230-231
Francis I. King of England, Scotland
and Ireland (see Francis V. Duke of
Modena)
Francis I. King of France, i. xxiv, 77,
85-109, 120, 141, 172; ii. 17,
205-206, 219; iii. 77, 188, 228;
iv. 58, 180, 239; v. 110, 227, 330,
395; vi. 27, 173, 196, 238
Francis II. King of France, i. 109,
245; v. 49; vi. 173
Francis III. Duke of Modena, v. 230
Francis IV. Duke of Modena, iv. 251;
v. 38, 40, 146; vi. 78, 102
Francis V. Duke of Modena, de jure
Francis I. King of England, Scotland
and Ireland, iv. 251
Francis I. Duke of Saxe-Saalfeld-Coburg, vi. 118
Francis I. Grand-duke of Tuscany, vi. 238
Francis I. King of the Two Sicilies,
v. 157, 238, 322-323
Franco (see Campo-Franco)
François de Neufchâteau, Nicolas
Louis, iii. 23
Françoise d'Aubigné, Queen of France
(see Maintenon)
Franconi, Antonio, vi. 68
Franklin, Sir John, i. 136; vi. 222
Franklin, Benjamin, i. 251; ii. 23
Franqueville, M., v. 48
Fraser, J., v. 249
Frayssinous, Bishop of Hermopolis,
Denis Comte de, iv. 135, 138-139;
v. 88, 363; vi. 193
Frederic Margrave of Brandenburg-Bayreuth, iv. 38
Frederic II. Elector of Brandenburg, iv. 36-37
Frederic VI. King of Denmark and Norway, iv. 79
Frederic VII. King of Denmark and Norway, iv. 79
Frederic I. King of Prussia, Frederic
III. Elector of Brandenburg, later,
iv. 37, 58, 107
Frederic II. King of Prussia, i. 97-99,
107; ii. 33, 46, 258, 289; iii. 146;
iv. 32, 34, 37-38, 40, 47, 55, 58,
106; v. 57, 381; vi. 6-7
Frederic I. King of Wurtemberg, v. 41
Frederic Augustus I. Elector of Saxony
(see Augustus II. King of Poland)
Frederic Augustus III. King of Saxony, iii. 146
Frederic Christian Duke of Schleswig-Holstein
-Sonderburg-Augustenburg, iv. 49
Frederic Eugene Duke of Wurtemburg-Mumpelgard,
iii. 49
Frederic Josiah of Coburg, Prince, iii. 162
Frederic William Elector of Brandenburg, iv. 37
Frederic William Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, ii. 34, 162
Frederic William I. King of Prussia, v. 37
Frederic William II. King of Prussia, i. 98, 107;
ii. 33-34, 52-53, 258; iv. 38, 55
Frederic William III. King of Prussia,
i. 99, 107; ii. 258, 290; iii. 60, 86,
94, 107, 164; iv. 30, 33, 35, 41-42,
44, 49, 60, 102, 271, 279; v. 272
Frederic William IV. King of Prussia,
iv. 33-34, 271
Frederic William Charles of Prussia,
Prince, iv. 33
Frederica of Baden, Queen of Bavaria, v. 345
Frederica of Mecklenburg-Strelitz,
Queen of Hanover, iv. 33, 35, 40-41,
46-50, 58, 62
Freemantle, Messrs., i. xv
Freslon, Bailli de, i. 8
Friedland (see Wallenstein)
Frimont, Prince of Antrodocco, Johann
Maria Field-marshal Baron, later
Count von, iv. 193
Frisell, John Fraser, v. 249
Frisell, Eliza, v. 249, 255-256
Froissart, Jean, i. xxiv; v. 70
Fronsac, Duc de, iii. 51
Fronsac, née de Gallifet, Duchesse de, iii. 51
Fronsac, née d'Hautefort, Duchesse de,
iii. 51; iv. 77
Fruglaye (see La Fruglaye)
Fuguera, Basco, v. 227
Führich, Joseph, iv. 240
Fulton, Robert, i. 251
Funchal, Conde de, iv. 237; v. 18, 52
Fürst, Walther, v. 27, 277
Fuscaldo, Conte, iv. 236
G
Gabriella of Savoy, Queen of Spain, iv. 80
Gagarin, Prince, iv. 236
Gaillard, Dr., iii. 227
Gaillard, M., iii. 141, 143
Galaizière (see La Galaizière)
Galantha (see Esterhazy von Galantha)
Galerius, the Emperor, iii. 12
Gall, Franz Joseph, ii. 195
Galleffi, Pietro Francesco Cardinal, v. 6, 23
Gallienus, the Emperor, ii. 184
Gallon II. King of Brittany, i. 144
Gama, Viceroy of India, Vasco da,
i. 196; iii. 30, 208; vi. 86
Gamaches, Léonore de Montaigne,
Vicomtesse de, iv. 231
Gamba, Bartolommeo, vi. 53, 55
Gamberini, Cardinal, v. 6
Garambouville (set Turreau de Garambouville)
Garat, Dominique Joseph, ii. 105-106; vi. 202
Garcia, Manuel del Popolo Vicente, vi. 175
Gamier, Jean Jacques, i. 222
Gasc (see Kop)
Gassicourt (see Cadet-Gassicourt)
Gauja, M., v. 95
Gay, Marie Françoise Sophie Nichault
de Lavalette, Dame, iii. 35; v. 200
Gay (see also Girardin)
Gelée (see Lorraine)
Gellius, Aulus, vi. 247
Gemistus Pletho (see Pletho)
Geneviève, Saint, v. 232
Geneviève of Brabant, Saint, vi. 17
Genlis, Stéphanie Félicité Ducrest de
Saint-Aubin, Comtesse de, iv. 44,
120, 149, 172-173, 200-201, 220, 237
Genoude, Eugène, i. 97
Genseric King of the Vandals, ii. 45
Gensonne, Armand, ii. 14
Gentz, Friedrich von, iii. 79; v. 342; vi. 46
Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou, i. 8
Geoffrin, Marie Thérèse Rodet, Dame,
ii. 51, 172
Geoffroy, Julien Louis, i. 63
George Podiebrad, King of Bohemia, v. 355
George II. King of Great Britain
and Ireland, Elector of Hanover,
ii. 120; vi. 239
George III. King of Great Britain,
Ireland and Hanover, ii. 68, 71,
139, 142, 145-146; iv. 77, 250-251
George IV. King of Great Britain,
Ireland and Hanover, i. 184, 186,
236; ii. 79, 91, 139, 142-143, 298;
iii. 189-190; iv. 33, 49, 63, 68, 71,
73-74, 76-80, 85, 87-88, 91, 161-162,
164, 281; v. 19, 325; vi. 45, 252
George V. King of Hanover, Prince
George of Cumberland, later, iv. 47, 49-50
George I. King of the Hellenes, iv. 118
George William Elector of Brandenburg, iv. 37
Gérard, Étienne Maurice Maréchal
Comte, v. 94, 105, 112, 117, 139
Gérard, François Pascal Simon Baron,
i. 189; iv. 34, 162, 172; v. 317
Gerbe, Abbé de, i. 63
Germanicus, the Emperor, ii. 33, 258,
291; iii. 34
Germanus of Auxerre, Saint, ii. 43
Gervase of Tilbury, ii. 30
Gesbert de La Noé-Sécho, Jean Baptiste, i. 48
Gesril, M. de, i. 32
Gesril, Demoiselles de, i. 32
Gesril du Papeu, Joseph François Anne
de, i. 32-36, 43, 64, 66, 69-70; ii.
66-67; iii. 13-14
Gessler, Hermann, v. 277, 279
Gessner, Salomon, v. 291
Gevres, Duchesse de, v. 319
Giannuzzi (see Romano)
Gibbon, Edward, ii. 120; iv. 120
Gibert-Arnaud, the "knight of July,"
v. 240-241
Gibours (see Anselme)
Gigot d'Elbée (see d'Elbée)
Ginguené, François Écuyer, i. 23
Ginguené, Thérèse Françoise Jean,
Dame, i. 23
Ginguené, Pierre Louis, i. 63, 129-131,
178; ii. 27, 99, 157-158, 181
Ginguené, Dame, i. 130, 179
Giorgini, the Vicomte de Chateaubriand's
courier, iv. 232
Giorgione, Giorgio Barbarelli, known as, vi. 48-49
Giovanni, Fra (see John, Friar)
Giovinezza (see Cellamare)
Girac (see Bareau de Girac)
Girardin, Alexandre Comte de, iv. 21
Girardin, Émile de, iv. 21; v. 200;
vi. 133, 167
Girardin, Delphine Gay, Dame de, iii.
35; v. 200
Girod de l'Ain, Amédée Baron, v. 115
Girodet Trioson, Anne Louis Girodet
de Roussy, later, iii. 7
Gisors, Fouquet, Comte de, vi. 201
Gisquet, Henri Joseph, iv. 115, 250,
256-257, 261-264, 370
Gisquet, Dame, v. 256-257, 261
Gisquet, Demoiselle, v. 256-257, 261-262
Giunazzi (see Romano)
Giustiniani, Bishop of Imola, Giaccomo
Cardinal, v. 4-6, 8, 23
Giustiniani, Bishop of Nebbis, Agostino
Pantaleone, i. 196
Givré, M. Desmousseaux de, v. 28, 31-32, 114-115
Gluck, Christopher Willibald, i. 179; iv. 41
Gnathæna, the courtezan, vi. 180
Gobbien (see Le Gobbien)
Godard, Sieur, ii. 277
Godet de Châtillon, Comte, i. 146
Godfrey of Bouillon, King of Jerusalem, v. 110
Godwin, William, i. 254; ii. 126
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, i. xxiii;
ii. 127, 133; iv. 32, 181, 253 254;
v. 412; vi. 75, 83-84
Goldsmith, Oliver, ii. 125
Gomer, i. 143
Gondi, Archbishop of Paris, Henri de, iii. 131
Gondi (see also Retz)
Goodwyn, Dr. Edmund, ii. 70
Gontaut-Biron, Vicomte de, ii. 104
Gontaut-Biron, née de Montault-Navailles,
Vicomtesse, later Duchesse de,
ii. 103-104; v. 361-362, 364-365,
375, 376, 378, 391; vi. 130-131, 134
Gordon, Captain, i. 227
Gordon, John, i. 227
Gosch (see Abou Gosch)
Gottorp, pseud., Count of Holstein (see
Gustavus IV. Adolphus King of Sweden)
Gouffier (see Choiseul-Gouffier)
Goujon, Jean, iv. 238
Gourgaud, Gaspard Baron, ii. 280; iii.
169, 192, 209, 211; v. 98
Gourgaud (see also Dugazon)
Gourlet de Lamothe (see Lamothe)
Gouvion-Saint-Cyr, Laurent Maréchal
Marquis, i. 172; iii. 120
Gouyon-Beaufort, Luc Jean Comte de, i. 75
Gouyon de Miniac, Pierre Louis
Alexandre de, ii. 35, 54
Goyon, Citizeness, i. 108-109
Goyon, M. de, v. 103
Goyon-Miniac (sec Gouyon de Miniac)
Goyon-Vaurouault, M. de, iii. 16-17
Goyon-Vaurouault, Dame de, iii. 17
Gracia (see Lucchesi-Palli)
Gracchus, Caius Sempronius, iii. 30; v. 10
Gracchus, Tiberius Sempronius, v. 10
Grammaticus (see Saxo Grammaticus)
Gramont, Duc de, ii. 84
Gramont, Duchesse de, ii. 84
Gramont (see also Guiche)
Grandmaison, Geoffroy de, v. 259
Grandmenil, Jean Baptiste Fouchard de, i. 128
Grant, Mr., iii. 98
Grant (see also Talleyrand-Périgord)
Gray, Thomas, ii. 99, 140-141; iv.
233; vi. 123
Gregorio (see Di Gregorio)
Gregory Bishop of Tours, Saint, ii. 52
Gregory I., Pope Saint, v. 4, 11
Gregory V., Pope, v. 376
Gregory VII., Pope Saint, iv. 260; v. 47
Gregory IX., Pope, vi. 143
Gregory X., Pope, v. 12
Gregory XIII., Pope, ii. 18; vi. 142
Gregory XVI., Pope, i. xxi, 65; v. 4,
8, 23, 295, 384; vi. 95, 216, 234-235
Grenier, Paul Comte, iii. 167-168
Grenville, William Wyndham, first
Lord, ii. 143
Grétry, André Ernest Modeste, i. 164, 173
Grétry, Demoiselles, i. 173
Greville, Hon. Charles, ii. 139; iv. 185
Greville, Hon. Fulke, i. 188
Grew, Nehemiah, i. 180
Grey, Lady Jane, ii. 74
Grey, Charles second Earl, iv. 73, 92; vi. 134
Grey de Wilton, Arthur Grey, fourteenth Lord, v. 57
Griffi, Count, vi. 47, 66
Grignan, Françoise Marguerite de
Sévigné, Comtesse de, i. 143, 228
Grimm, Friedrich Melchior Baron, ii. 26, 197
Grimod, Seigneur de La Reynierc, Gaspard, ii. 27
Grimod (see also Malesherbes)
Grotius, Hugo de Groot, known as
Hugo, iii. 22; iv. 280; v. 51, 57
Grotius, Pieter de Groot, known as
Peter, v. 51
Grouchy, Emmanuel Maréchal Marquis
de, iii. 163-164, 169
Grünstein, the Duc d'Enghien's
body-servant, ii. 260
Guadagni, Bishop of Arezzo, Bernardo
Gaetano Cardinal, v. 15
Guarini, Giovanni Battista, vi. 79
Guastalla (see Borghese)
Guehenneuc de Boishue, Louis Pierre
de, i. 154
Guénan, Chevalier de, i. 106
Gueneau de Musey, M., ii. 171
Guer, Julien Hyacinthe de Marnière,
Chevalier de, i. 104, 146, 152
Guercino, Giovanni Francesco Barbieri,
known as, vi. 80
Guérin, Pierre Narcisse Baron, iv. 234,
241, 285; v. 317
Guernon-Ranville, Martial Côme Annibal
Perpétue Magloire Comte de, v.
82, 88, 131, 189, 422
Guerrande (see La Guerrande)
Guerri de Maubreuil (see Maubreuil)
Guesclin (see Du Guesclin)
Guiccioli, later Marquise de Boissy,
Teresa Gamba, Contessa, ii. 136;
iv. 227; v. 59, 89
Guichardière (see La Guichardière)
Guiche, later Duc de Gramont,
Antoine Geneviève Héraclius Agenor
de Gramont, Duc de, iv. 78; v. 130,
360, 363, 365
Guiche, later Duchesse de Gramont,
Anne Quintina Albertina Ida de
Grimaud d'Orsay, Duchesse de, iv.
73, 78; v. 363-365, 381, 409
Guiche, later Duc de Gramont, Antoine
Louis Marie de Gramont, Duc de, ii. 142;
iv. 78; v. 130, 360
Guiche (see also La Guiche)
Guidal, General Maximilien Joseph, ii. 269
Guignes, Duc de, iv. 160
Guilford, Frederick Lord North, later
second Earl of, ii. 143
Guillaume Le Breton (set Le Breton)
Guillaumy, the Saint-Pierre fisherman,
i. 202-203
Guilleminot, Armand Charles Comte,
iv. 299; v. 19
Guillemot, Commandant, v. 246
Guillon, Bishop of Morocco, Nicolas
Silvestre, ii. 222-223, 247
Guinard, Joseph Augustin, v. 109-110,
126, 137, 141
Guiscard (see Robert Guiscard)
Guise, Archbishop of Rheims, Louis
II. de Lorraine, Cardinal de, ii. 21
Guise, Charles de Lorraine, Duc de, v. 402
Guise, François de Lorraine, Duc de,
ii. 15, 21, 45; iii. 74; v. 131; vi. 23
Guise, Henri I. de Lorraine, Duc de,
ii. 21; iii. 173; iv. 245; v. 104-105,
131, 257-258; vi. 143, 162
Guise, Henri II. de Lorraine, Duc de, iv. 245
Guizard, Sylvain, v. 95
Guizot, François Pierre Guillaume, iii.
99-100; iv. 73-74, 219, 289; v. 80-81,
87, 105, 116, 123, 135, 258
Gundling, Johann Paul, iv. 37
Gurowsky, the poet, v. 412
Gustavus IV. Adolphus King of Sweden,
ii. 257-258; iv. 32, 37, 212
Gustawson, pseud. Colonel (see
Gustavus IV. Adolphus King of Sweden)
Guy of Penthièvre (see Penthièvre)
Guyet, Isidore, v. 95
Guyomarais (see La Guyomarais)
Gwydyr, Peter Burrell, first Lord, i. 188
Gwydyr, Baroness Willoughby de
Eresby, Priscilla Barbara Elizabeth
Bertie, Lady, i. 188; iv. 73
H
Hachette, Jeanne Fouquet, Fourquet or
Lainé, known as Jeanne, iii. 181
Hadrian, the Emperor, i. 249; vi. 104, 172
Hall, Captain Basil, iii. 212
Hallay-Coëtquen, Comte de, i. 18
Hallay-Coëtquen, Jean Georges Charles
Emmanuel Marquis de, i. 17
Halleck, Fitz-Greene, i. 254
Ham, ii. 125
Ham (see also Jacqueminot)
Hamilton and seventh of Brandon,
Alexander Douglas-Hamilton,
Marquess of Douglas, later tenth Duke
of, iv. 161
Hamilton, Anthony Count, iii. 136
Hamilton, Sir William, ii. 139; iv. 185
Hamilton, Emma Lyon or Hart, Lady,
ii. 139-140; iv. 185
Hamilton, Horatia, ii. 139
Hampden, John, vi. 123
Handel, George Frederick, ii. 146
d'Hane de Steenhuyse, Jean Baptiste
Comte, iii. 141
Hanka, Vaclav, v. 389
Hannibal, ii. 330-331; iii. 87;
iv. 123-124, 232; v. 336; vi. 178
d'Harcourt, Duc, ii. 107
Hardenberg, Karl August Prince von,
iv. 44, 51
d'Hardivilliers, M., vi. 134
Harel, F. A., v. 290
Harel, Jacques, ii. 270
Harlay, Achille de, ii. 21; v. 257-258
Harlotta of Falaise, ii. 62
Harmodius, vi. 180
Harold II. King of England, i. 104
Harpe (see La Harpe)
Harrowby, Dudley Rider, first Earl of, iv. 80
Hasdrubal, the third, ii. 331
Hasdrubal, the fourth, ii. 331
Hassenstein, Boguslav Lobkowitz,
Baron von, v. 389, 410
Hastings, Warren, ii. 143
Hatte-Longuerue, Madame de, ii. 210
Hauranne (see Duvergier de Hauranne)
d'Haussez, Charles Le Mercher de
Longpré, Baron, v. 72, 379, 422
Haussmann, Nicolas Valentin, v. 96
d'Haussonville, M., v. 28
d'Hautefeuille, Charles Louis Felicité
Texier, Comte, i. 119
d'Hautefeuille, née de Beaurepaire,
Comtesse, i. 119
d'Hauterive, Alexandre Maurice Blanc
de La Nautte, Comte, iii. 121-122
Hauteville, Tancred de, iv. 185-186
Hay des Nétumières, Comte, i. 146
Haymès, M., v. 135
Hazlitt, William Carew, iv. 243-244,
257; vi. 122
Hearne, Samuel, i. 136, 214
Heber, Bishop of Calcutta, Reginald, ii. 335
d'Hector, Charles Jean Comte, i. 67, 69
Heiden, Lodewijk Sigismund Vincent
Gustaaf Count van, iv. 270
Helen, the Empress, Saint, iii. 206
Helen Pavlowna of Russia, Princess
Frederica Charlotte Mary of Wurtemburg,
Grand-duchess, iv. 36; v. 35, 41-42, 330
Helerius, Saint, ii. 62
Helgine, ii. 218
Hélier (see Helerius)
Heliodorus Bishop of Tricca, vi. 110
Heliogabalus, the Emperor, vi. 213
"Hell," M., ii. 84
Hello, Charles Guillaume, v. 258-259
Hello, Ernest, v. 258
Héloïse, i. 94, 114, 137; 310-311; iii. 53
Helvétius, Claude Adrien, ii. 180; iii. 139
Hely-Hutchinson (see Donoughmore)
d'Hénin, Madame, i. 174
Hennequin, Antoine Louis Marie, vi. 229
Hennin, Pierre Michel, ii. 300
Henrietta Maria of France, Queen of
England, iv. 251
Henry IV. the Emperor, v. 47
Henry VI. the Emperor, v. 377
Henry Emperor of the East, vi. 69
Henry I. King of England, i. 8, 39;
ii. 62; iv. 209
Henry II. King of England, i. 39;
iv. 17
Henry IV. King of England, ii. 121;
iii. 138
Henry V. King of England, ii. 121; vi. 10
Henry VI. King of England, ii. 121, 200
Henry VII. King of England, i. 25;
ii. 74-75; v. 351
Henry VIII. King of England, ii. 74,
122, 124, 138; iii. 30; iv. 93; v. 14
Henry IX. King of England, Scotland
and Ireland, ii. 221; iv. 249, 251-252
Henry II. King of France, i. 109; ii.
172, 206, 294; iii. 176; iv. 58; v. 49
Henry III. King of France and I. of
Poland, i. 109, 175, 212; ii. 18,
21, 202, 206; iii. 74, 173, 188; iv.
72-73, 124, 280; v. 16, 84, 137, 257;
vi. 83, 173, 196
Henry IV. King of France and III. of
Navarre, i. 25, 72, 85, 114, 117,
120, 126, 130, 175; ii. 37, 56, 63,
121, 152-153, 172, 206; iii. 29, 63,
74-75, 77, 89, 97, 116, 127, 177, 228;
iv. 58, 79, 124, 275, 280; v. 14, 50,
74, 118, 137, 142, 147, 155, 162, 170,
187-188, 196, 215, 223, 227, 229,
239, 266, 303, 324-325, 333, 346-347,
366, 377, 395-396, 401-402;
vi. 27-28, 33, 61-62, 77, 105, 114,
151-152, 173, 196, 241-242
Henry V. King of France and Navarre,
i. 124; ii. 54, 104, 216, 246; iii.
119, 140-141, 166, 178; iv. 12, 24,
47-49, 58-59, 122, 138-139, 252;
v. 81, 111, 146-147, 149-151, 153,
155, 157-159, 168-169, 171, 174,
179, 191-192, 211-212, 215, 217,
220, 222-223, 226, 235, 246, 255,
266, 269, 302-303, 307-312, 321-325
327, 336, 342, 359-368, 371 372,
374 385, 390-391, 396-397, 402,
406-408, 415-417; vi. 16-17, 24, 27-28,
31-32, 34-35, 37-39, 47, 61, 68,
77-78, 94-100, 102, 113-118, 123,
128-141, 148, 151, 163, 165, 192-194,
197, 201, 231-232, 243-246, 248-254,
256, 263
Henry I. King of Hayti (see Christophe)
Henry II. King of Navarre, vi. 173
Henry Prince of Nassau-Saarbrück, iv. 10
Henry of Prussia, Prince, iv. 38
Henry Albert of Prussia, Prince (see
Albert of Prussia, Prince Henry)
Henry-Larivière, Pierre François
Joachim, iii. 13, 16
Hérault (see Rio)
d'Herbey (see Saint-Aubin)
d'Herbois (see Collot d'Herbois)
d'Herbouville, Marquis, i. 97
Hercules I. Duke of Ferrara, vi. 92
Hercules II. Duke of Ferrara, vi. 96
Hercules III. Duke of Modena, vi. 78
Herder, Johann Gottfried von, v. 412
Hermer, M., i. 108
Herod King of Judæa, vi. 220
Herodias, v. 173
Herodotus, i. 216, 258; v. 401; vi. 220
Herrara, Juan de, iv. 58
Herschel, Sir William, ii. 140
Herschel, Caroline, ii. 140
Heytesbury, Sir William A'Court, later
first Lord, iv. 83
Hilary Bishop of Poitiers, Saint, v. 161
Hildebert Archbishop of Tours, ii. 30
Hill, George, i. 254
Hingant, Jean, i. 25
Hingant de La Tiemblais, François
Marie Anne Joseph, ii. 66, 72, 76-78,
80, 85, 90; iv. 71, 213
Hingray, Charles, v. 126, 137
Hinton, the boatswain, iii. 89
Hipparchus, vi. 180
Hippocrates, iii. 7; v. 229-230
Hlodwigh (see Clovis)
Hoche, General Lazare, ii. 109; iii.
67-68, 203
Hocquart, née Pourrat, Dame, ii. 172
Hoffman, François Benoît, iii. 9
Hohenhausen, Élise Philippine Amalie
von Ochs, Baroness von, iv. 35-36
Holbein the Younger, Hans, v. 272-273
Holland, Henry Richard Vassall Fox,
third Lord, ii. 128; iii. 215; iv. 70
Holstein (see Staël-Holstein)
Holstein-Gottorp, pseud. Count of (see
Gustavus IV. Adolphus King of Sweden)
Homer, i. 51, 200, 213, 232; ii. 48,
86, 124; iii. 5, 12, 24, 214; iv. 12,
123, 160, 258, 284; v. 347, 351; vi.
47, 91, 194
Honoria, Tusta Grata, iii. 47
Honorius III., Pope, vi. 143
Honorius, the Emperor, i. 74; iv. 227
Hontan (see La Hontan)
Honoratus, Bishop of Aries, Saint, iii. 228
Hôpital (see L'Hôpital)
Horace, Quintus Horatius Flaccus,
known as, i. 53, 229; ii. 124, 204;
iii. 23, 99; iv. 185; v. 25, 55, 63,
285, 314; vi. 4, 47, 237
Horatius Cocles, i. 35
Horrion, Father, vi. 142
Hortense de Beauharnais, Queen of
Holland, iii. 17, 110, 122, 154; iv.
203, 287; v. 44, 291-298
Houdet, Comte de, ii. 196
Houdetot, Élisabeth Françoise Sophie
de La Live de Bellegarde, Comtesse
de, ii. 196-197, 301; iv. 285
Houdetot, General César Ange de, iv. 285
Hovius, Mayor of Saint-Malo, i. xxxi;
vi. 264
Hubert, Jean, i. 63
Hubert, M., v. 137
Hugh Capet, King of France, iii. 137;
iv. 7, 112; v. 196, 376; vi. 135, 196
Hugo, Victor Marie Vicomte, iii. 68;
vi. 104
Hulin, Pierre Auguste Comte, ii. 262,
264-265, 267, 269-275, 283; iii. 16, 18
Hulot, Madame, iv. 167
Humbert I. King of Italy, i. 51
Humbert I. Count of Savoy, iv. 209
Humbert II. Count of Savoy, iv. 209
Humboldt, Friedrich Heinrich Alexander
von, iii. 207-208; iv. 39
Humboldt, Friedrich Wilhelm Christian
Karl Ferdinand Baron von, ii. 242; iv. 39
Humboldt, Fräulein von, iv. 39
Hume, David, ii. 120; iv. 250
Humphrey Count of Apulia, iv. 185
Hunt, James Henry Leigh, ii. 128
Huss, John, v. 296, 388
Hutchinson (see Donoughmore)
Hyacinthe (see Pilorge)
Hyde de Neuville, Jean Guillaume
Baron, iii. 177; iv. 91, 102-103,
139-140, 142; v. 68, 117, 123, 250,
256, 258-259, 304; vi. 256
Hyperides, vi. 179
I
Ibrahim Pasha, Viceroy of Egypt, ii. 338; iv. 263
Ignatius Loyola, Saint, v. 367
Inez de Castro (see Castro)
Infantado, Duquesa de, iii. 74
Innocent VIII., Pope, ii. 53
Innocent X., Pope, v. 14
Innocent XIII., Pope, v. 15
Ippolito of Este, Cardinal Archbishop
of Milan, Lyons and Narbonne,
Prince, vi. 82
Ireneus Bishop of Lyons, Saint, ii. 308
Irving, Washington, i. 254
Isabel of Bavaria, Queen of France, vi. 10
Isabella of Angoulême, Queen of
England, i. 9
Isabella I. Queen of Spain, iii. 127
Isabella II. Queen of Spain, H.M.,
iii. 221; v. 75; vi. 207
Isabey, Jean Baptiste, iii. 211
Isaias, iii. 195
Isaure, Clémence, ii. 207; v. 72
Iscariot, Judas, v. 307; vi. 26, 156
d'Isly, Thomas Robert Bugeaud de La
Piconnerie, Maréchal Duc, vi. 99,
114, 158
Isnard, Maximin, ii. 14
Isoard (see also Delisle de Sales)
d'Isoard, Archbishop of Auch, Joachim
Jean Xavier Cardinal Duc, v. 22
Isotta (see Nogarola)
Ivan VI. Tsar of All the Russias
Ives, Rev. John Clement, ii. 80,
86-88, 92-93
Ives, Mrs., ii. 86-88, 92-93, 96
Ives, Charlotte (see Sutton)
J
Jacob, iii. 25
Jacob, J. J., i. 253
Jacquemin, potter and inn-keeper, iii. 227
Jacqueminot, Vicomte de Ham, Jean
François, v. 153-154
Jacquin, Nikolaus Joseph Baron von, i. 180
Jacquin, Major, ii. 262-263
James Intercisus, Saint, ii. 43
James I. and VI. King of England,
Scotland and Ireland, ii. 122
James II. and VII. King of England,
Scotland and Ireland, i. 187; iv. 67,
106; v. 50, 115, 163, 178, 372;
vi. 134
James III. and VIII. King of
England, Scotland and Ireland, iv.
242, 249, 373
James I. King of Scots, ii. 201
Janson, Madame de, ii. 200
Janson (see also Forbin-Janson)
Japhet, i. 142
Jaucourt, Arnail François Marquis de
iii. 73, 99, 127, 171
Jauge, M., v. 369; vi. 39
Jay (see Le Jay)
Jean de Bruges (see Eyck)
Jeannin, Pierre Président, v. 50
Jebb, M.P., Sir Richard Claverhouse,
v. 56, 335
Jefferson, President of the United
States of America, Thomas, i. 252-253
Jenny, the Marquise de Custine's
maid, ii. 193
Jepson, Mr. Edgar Alfred, vi. 266
Jeremias, v. 37
Jerome, Saint, iv. 232, 244
Jerome, King of Westphalia, iii. 64,
99, 162-163, 200; iv. 57, 242; v.
44, 46
Jerome of Brescia, vi. 102
Jerome of Prague, v. 296
Jersey, George Child Villiers, fifth
Earl of, i. 188
Jersey, Sarah Fane, Countess of, i. 188;
ii. 79; iv. 73
Joan of Arc, Venerable, ii. 109, 128;
iii. 90, 98; iv. 41, 108, 112; vi. 78
Joan of Penthièvre, Duchess of Brittany, i. 141
Joan Queen of Castile, iii. 127
Joachim II. Elector of Brandenburg, iv. 37
Joachim King of Naples, ii. 25, 219,
223, 250, 262, 273, 275, 278, 283;
iii. 46, 122, 144, 154-155; iv. 10,
184-185, 189-198, 220
Job, i. xxi, 82-83, ii. 201, 211, 212, 339
John the Baptist, Saint, v. 173
John the Evangelist, Saint, ii. 243; vi. 217
John the Silent, Bishop of Colonus, Saint, ii. 43
John of the Gridiron, Blessed, i. 25
John I. King of Bohemia, v. 355, 410-411
John III. Duke of Brittany, i. 141
John IV. Duke of Brittany, i. 141
John V. Duke of Brittany, i. 141
John King of England, i. 9; ii. 22, 121
John II. King of France, ii. 46, 108;
iii. 193; vi. 196
John III. King of Portugal, vi. 104
John VI. King of Portugal and Brazil, iv. 53
John, Friar, vi. 46
John, the Marquess of Londonderry's
groom, iv. 87
John of Bruges (see Eyck)
John of Gaunt (see Lancaster)
John Sigismund, Elector of Brandenburg, iv. 37
Johnson, Samuel, ii. 121; iii. 23; v. 413
Johnson, Thomas, iii. 216
Joinville, François Ferdinand Philippe
Louis Marie d'Orléans, Prince de, ii.
280; iii. 81, 225
Joinville, Jean Sire de, i. xxiv; ii. 132,
202, 278
Joly (see Crétineau-Joly)
Joques, Père Isaac, i. 229
Jordan, Camille, iii. 68-69; iv. 128,
180, 213
Joseph King of Naples, later of Spain,
i. 128; ii. 223, 257, 280; iii. 46,
54-55, 63-64, 73, 110, 154, 188; iv.
164, 195, 210, 241; v. 44; vi. 91,
184
Joseph, the Milanese tinman, ii. 321-322; v. 326
Josephine of Sardinia, Queen of France, iv. 9
Josephine of Saxony, Dauphiness of
France, ii. 298
Joséphine Tascher de La Pagerie,
Vicomtesse de Beauharnais, later
Dame Bonaparte, later Empress of
the French, ii. 261-262, 282; iii. 17,
98, 110, 184, 196; iv. 42, 165-166,
178; vi. 12
Joubert, General Barthélemy Cathérine, iii. 67-68
Joubert, Joseph, ii. 104, 157, 167-177,
213, 226-227, 230, 236, 239, 244,
307, 310, 317-319; iii. 51; iv. 213,
221; vi. 6
Joubert, Dame, ii. 171, 174
Joubert the Younger, ii. 174
Joubert, the conspirator, v. 140
Jouberthon, Jean François Hippolyte, ii. 166
Jouffroy, Théodore Simon, vi. 256-257
Jourdain, M., i. 178
Jourdan, Jean Baptiste Maréchal
Comte, iii. 67, 155, 162, 203
Jowett, Benjamin, vi. 105
Judas Iscariot (see Iscariot)
Julia, Saint, i. 102
Julian, the Emperor, i. 97; v. 196,
378; vi. 18
Julie Clary, Queen of Naples, later of
Spain, iv. 210-211; v. 44; vi. 184
Julien, the Vicomte de Chateaubriand's
body-servant, i. xvi; ii. 319-333, 338
Julius II., Pope, iii. 176; iv. 42, 228
Julius III., Pope, iv. 241
Jullien, M., ii. 177
Jumilhac, Simplicis du Plessis,
Marquis de, iii. 51
Junken, Bishop of Dol, i. 17
Junot (see d'Abrantès)
Jussac, M. de, ii. 302
Jussieu, Alexis de, v. 95
Jussieu, Bernard de, i. 180
Justinian, the Emperor, iv. 227; v. 230
K
Kaumann, Captain, v. 101
Keith, tenth Earl Marischal, George, iv. 106
Keith, George Keith Elphinstone, first
Viscount, iii. 191-192
Keller, Xavier, v. 289
Kellermann (see Valmy)
Kepler, Johann, v. 337
Kéralieu (see Kersalaün)
Keranevant, Abbé de, iv. 168
Kératry, Auguste Hilarion Comte de, v. 27
Kératry, Jean François de, i. 144
Kergariou, Comte de, i. 149
Kergorlay, Louis Florian Paul Comte de, v. 244
Kergorlay, Louis Gabriel César Vicomte,
later Comte de, v. 244
Kergu (see La Baronnais)
Kersalaün, Marquis de, i. 153
Kersalaün, Jean Joseph Comte de, i. 153
Kerviler, M. René, vi. 265
Khlodwig (see Clovis)
Khufu (sec Cheops)
Kincardine (see Elgin)
Kléber, General Jean Baptiste, iii. 67
Knowles, James Sheridan, ii. 128
Koller, Franz Baron von, iii. 78, 84, 87
Komierowski, Colonel, v. 107
Kop, Ol de, ii. 207
Kop, Honorine Gasc, Fru de, ii. 207
Koreff, Dr. David Friedrich, iv. 44-45
Kotzebue, Captain Otto von, iv. 40, 46
Kotzebue, August Friedrich Ferdinand
von, iv. 40, 46
Krüdener, Baron von, ii. 232
Krüdener, Barbara Juliana von
Vietinghoff-Scheel, Baroness
von, ii. 232-233, 299; iv. 203-204
Kutuzoff, Field-marshal Prince of
Smolensk, Mikhail, iii. 190
L
La Balue, Jean Cardinal, ii. 53
La Baronnais, Chevalier de, ii. 41
La Baronnais, François Pierre Collas,
Seigneur de, ii. 41-42
La Baronnais, Renée de Kergu, Dame
de, ii. 41
Labat, Père Jean Baptiste, iv. 247-248
Labé, Dame Perrin, Loyse, ii. 308;
vi. 173
La Bédoyère, Charles Angélique François
Huchet, Comte de, iii. 170
La Belinaye, Armand Magdelon Comte de, i. 126
La Belinaye, Renée Élisabeth de, i. 126
La Besnardière, Jean Baptiste de Gouy,
Comte de, iii. 144-145
La Billarderie (see Flahault de La
Billarderie)
La Billardière (see Launay de La Billardière)
La Bletterie, Abbé Jean Philippe René
de, vi. 18
La Bonnière (see Beaumont de La Bonnière)
Laborde, Captain, iv. 168
Laborde, Alexandre Louis Joseph
Comte de, ii. 291; iii. 4, 39, 56; v. 96, 115
La Borde, Jean Joseph de, ii. 296
Laborie, Antoine Athanase Roux de,
ii. 175; iii. 56, 86, 131, 177
Laborie the Younger, Roux, vi. 163
Labouchere, M. P., Mr. Henry Du Pré, ii. 121
La Boüétardais, Marie Joseph Annibal
de Bedée, Comte de, i. 22-23; ii. 4
9, 62, 64-65, 69, 78, 80-81; iv. 71;
v. 205; vi. 252
La Boüétardais, Marie Vincente de
Francheville, Dame de Trélan,
Comtesse de, ii. 69
La Boüétardais (see also Bedée)
La Bouillerie, François Marie Pierre
Roullet, Baron de, iv. 288
La Bourdonnais, Bertrand François
Mahé de, i. 26; vi. 201
La Bourdonnaye, François Régis Comte
de, iv. 136; v. 72, 81-82
La Bourdonnaye de Montluc, Marquis
de, i. 146
La Bourdonnaye-Montluc, Chevalier de, i. 7
Labrador, Pedro Gomez Kavalo,
Marques de, iv. 236; v. 8
Labre, Blessed Benedict Joseph, ii. 9
La Briche, Alexis Janvier de La Live
de, ii. 191
La Briche, Adélaïde Edmée Prévost,
Dame de La Live de, ii. 191
La Bruyère, Jean de, iii. 33
La Chalotais, Louis René de Caradeuc
de, i. 18, 26
Lachambre, M., i. 149
Lachaud, M. de, v. 244
Laclos, Pierre Ambroise François
Choderlos de, i. 135, 176
Lacombe, Charles de, vi. 256
Lacretelle the Elder, Pierre Louis
Lacretelle, known as, i. 51; iii. 23
Lacretelle the Younger, Charles Jean
Lacretelle, known as, i. 51; iv. 128;
v. 80
Lacroix, the Polytechnic scholar, v. 110
Ladvocat, the publisher, iv. 120, 136
Lælius Sapiens, Caius, v. 56
Laensberg, Mathew, vi. 7
La Fare, Bishop of Nancy, later
Archbishop of Sens, Anne Louis Henri
Cardinal Duc de, v. 22
Lafaye, Pierre Benjamin, vi. 256-257
La Fayette, Marie Paul Joseph Gilbert
Motier, Marquis de, i. 160, 163, 165,
181; ii. 14, 23, 102; iii. 28, 68-69,
118, 165-168, 177; iv. 127; v. 94,
105 107, 112-113, 126, 128, 135 139,
141, 159, 163, 217; vi. 158, 162, 191
La Fayette, née de Noailles, Marquise
de, vi. 161
La Fayette, Georges Washington Motier
de, vi. 161
La Fayette, Marie Madeleine Pioche
de La Vergne, Comtesse de, ii. 152;
iii. 128; vi. 240
La Ferronnays, Pierre Louis Auguste
Ferron, Comte de, i. 27; iv. 36, 91,
104-106, 138, 215-216, 261-263,
265-284, 290-296; v. 22, 28, 68,
77; vi. 100, 120, 229-235, 264
La Ferronnays, Albert de, iv. 36
La Ferronnays, Alexandrine d'Alopeus,
Dame de, iv. 36
La Ferronnière (see Du Bois de La
Ferronnière)
La Feuillade, Pierre Raymond Hector
d'Aubusson, Comte de, iii. 141
Laffitte, Jacques, iv. 137; v. 105-107,
113-114, 116-117, 127-128, 133,
137-139, 141, 159, 265, 267, 370
Lafitau, Père Joseph François, i. 232
La Fonchais, Angélique Françoise
Dame de, i. 92, 181
Lafontaine, August Heinrich Julius, v. 344
La Fontaine, Jean de, ii. 56, 124, 128,
152, 169; v. 314, 334; vi. 25, 201, 246
La Force, Armand Maréchal de, vi. 20
La Force, François Philibert Bertrand
Nompar de Caumont, Marquis de, ii. 103
La Force, Marie Constance de Lamoignon,
Marquise de Caumont de, ii. 103-104
Laforest, Antoine René Charles
Mathurin Comte de, ii. 279-280, 289
La France, the Comte de Chateaubriand's
man-servant, i. 29, 35
La Fruglaye, Comte de, i. 146
La Galaizière, M., i. 156
Lagarde, M., vi. 51
Lagrange, Bishop of Chartres, François,
vi. 190
Lagrange, Joseph Louis Comte, ii. 187
La Guerrande (see Chateaubriand de La
Guerrande)
La Guichardière, Thibault de, vi. 255
La Guiche, Philibert de, i. 25
La Guyomarais, Dame de La Motte de, i. 92
La Harpe, Jean François de, i. 127-128,
131, 133, 175, 178; ii. 27, 99, 104-105,
138, 172, 194, 208-210; iii. 17,
152-155, 158, 220; v. 335
La Harpe, née de Hatte Longuerue,
Dame de, ii. 210
Laher (see Brignon)
Lahire, Étienne de Vignoles, known as, v. 378
La Hontan, Armand Louis de Delondarce,
Baron de, i. 232
Lahorie, General Victor Claude
Alphonse Faneau de, ii. 269
l'Ain (see Girod de l'Ain)
Lainé, Jean Henri Joachim Hostein,
Vicomte, ii. 247; iii. 100-101, 118;
iv. 12, 27, 118, 202; v. 303-304, 416
Lainé (see also Hachette)
Lais, the courtezan, vi. 180
Lalande, Joseph Jérôme Le Français
de, iv. 252-253, 257
La Laurencie, Chevalier de, i. 7
La Live d'Épinay (see d'Épinay)
La Live de La Briche (see La Briche)
Lallemand, Charles François Antoine
Baron, iii. 111
Lallemand, Henri Dominique Baron, iii. 111
Lallemant, Père Jérôme, i. 229
Lally, Thomas Arthur Baron Tolendal,
Comte de, iii. 127
Lally-Tolendal, Trophine Gérard
Marquis de, i. 161; ii. 294; iii. 127,
131; iv. 5-6, 128
Lalor, Alice, i. 65
La Luzerne, Bishop of Langres, César
Guillaume Cardinal de, i. 97, 156;
iv. 16
La Luzerne, Comte de, i. 73; ii. 234
La Luzerne, Guillaume Comte de, ii.
167, 234, 239
La Luzerne, Victoire de Montmorin
Saint-Hérem, Comtesse de, ii. 167, 234
La Luzerne, César Henri de, ii. 234
La Maisonfort, Antoine François
Philippe Dubois-Descours, Marquis
de, ii. 223
La Maisonfort, Dame de, vi. 241
La Malle (see Dureau de La Malle)
Lamarque, Maximilien Comte, v. 243, 290
Lamartine, Alphonse Marie Louis,
v. 57, 79 80
Lamartinière, Antoine Auguste Bruzen
de, i. 125
La Martinière, M. de, i. 106-107,
125-126; ii. 35; iii. 176; v. 317
La Mauvissière (see Castelnau)
Lamballe, Marie Therèse Louise de
Savoie-Carignan, Princesse de, i. 51;
ii. 222
Lambesc, Charles Eugène de Lorraine,
Duc d'Elbeuf, Prince de, i. 157
Lambruschini, Archbishop of Genoa,
Luigi Cardinal, iv. 300; v. 23, 29, 35
Lamennais, Abbé Hugues Felicité
Robert de, i. 27, 97; iv. 16; vi.
174, 214-216
Lameth, Alexandre Théodore Victor
Comte de, iii. 170
Lameth, Charles de, iv. 43
La Mettrie, Offroy de, i. 26
Lamoignon, René Chrétien Auguste
Marquis de, ii. 100, 146, 156
Lamoignon, Anne Pierre Christian
Vicomte de, ii. 100, 137, 146, 167
Lamoignon, Guillaume Président de,
i. 50, 134; ii. 100
Lamoignon, Chrétien François de, i.
134; iv. 164
Lamoignon, Christian de, i. 134; iii.
57; iv. 164
Lamoignon (see also Basville and
Malesherbes)
Lamoignon de Baville, Nicolas, i. 134
La Morandais, François Placide Maillard,
Seigneur de, i. 50, 52
Lamothe, Étienne Auguste Baron
Gourlet de, iii. 177
La Mothe-Fénelon (see Fénelon)
Lamotte, Demoiselle, ii. 232
La Motte de La Guyomarais (see La
Guyomarais)
Lamotte-Piquet, Comte de, i. 69
Lancaster, John of Gaunt, Duke of, iii. 138
Lancelotti, Ottavio Principe, iv. 238
Lancelotti, Giuseppina Massimo
d'Arsoli, Principessa, ii. 221; iv. 238
Lanchantin (see Valmore)
Lander, Richard Lemon, vi. 121
Langhorne, John, ii. 337; vi. 243
Langhorne, William, ii. 337; vi. 243
Langres, Pierre de, i. 36
Lanjamet, Chevalier de, i. 8
Lanjuinais, Jean Denis Comte, iii.
68-69, 165, 167
La Noue, François de, ii. 56
La Noue, M. de, v. 80
Lansdowne, Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice,
third Marquess of, iv. 78
Lansfeld, Marie Dolores Eliza Rosanna
Gilbert, known as Lola Montes, later
Countess von, v. 25
Lante Monfeltrio delle Rovere, Maria
Colonna, Duchessa di, iv. 256
Lanty (see Chastenay-Lanty
La Pailleterie Dumas (see Dumas)
Lapanouze, Alexandre César Comte
de, v. 201-202
Lapelouse, V. de, v. 95
La Pérouse, Jean François Galaup,
Comte de, i. xxi, 69, 193; ii. 36
La Piconnerie (see d'Isly)
Laplace, Pierre Simon Marquis de, ii. 187
La Porta (see Sébastiani de La Porta)
La Porte, Arnaud de, i. 156
Laprade, Pierre Marin Victor Richard
de, vi. 257-260
Laqueville, Jean Claude Marin Victor
Marquis de, ii. 4
La Revellière-Lepeaux, Louis Marie,
v. 119
La Reynière (see Grimod)
Larive, Jean Mauduit de, i. 128
Larivière (see Henry-Larivière)
Larnage, Dame de, vi. 71
Laroche (see Lenoir-Laroche)
La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac,
François Duc de, ii. 152; iii. 128, 131
La Rochefoucauld, Louis Alexandre,
Duc de, i. 174
La Rochefoucauld, Sosthène de, iii. 97; v. 97
La Rochefoucauld-Doudeauville, Ambroise
Polycarpe Duc de, iv. 134-135, 177; vi. 184
La Rochefoucauld-Doudeauville, Marie
Charles Gabriel Sosthène Duc de,
iv. 12, 177
La Rochefoucauld-Doudeauville, Élisabeth
de Montmorency-Laval, Duchesse de, iv. 12
La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, François
Alexandre Frédéric Duc de, i. 171; iv. 132
La Rochejacquelein, Auguste du
Vergier, Comte de, iii. 101
La Rochejacquelein, Claire Louise
Augustine Félicité Magloire de
Durfort, Princesse de Talmont,
later Comtesse de, iii. 101
La Rochejacquelein, Henri du Vergier,
Comte de, i. 181; ii. 107; v. 245
La Rosa (see Martinez de La Rosa)
La Rouerie, Armand Marquis de, i.
66, 92, 146, 180-181
La Rouerie, Anne Joseph Jacques
Tuffin de, i. 126
La Rouerie, Therèse de La Belinaye,
Dame de, i. 126
Larousse, Pierre Athanase, vi. 266
Larreguy, F., v. 96
Larrey, Félix Hyppolite Baron, v. 103
Larrey, Jean Dominique Baron, v. 103
La Sablière, Antoine Rambouillet de, vi. 25
La Sablière, Dame de, vi. 25
La Salle, Antoine de, v. 371
La Saudre, François Guillaume de, i. 149
La Saudre, Pierre de, i. 149
Las Cases, Emmanuel Augustin Dieudonné
Comte de, ii. 281, 285-288;
iii. 192, 209, 211, 215
Las Cases the Younger, M. de, iii. 209, 211
La Sigonnière (see Ferron de La Sigonnière)
La Somaglia (see Della Somaglia)
Lassalle, Sieur, ii. 156
Lassalle, pseud. (see Chateaubriand,
François René Vicomte de, passim)
La Suze, Marquis de, iii. 176
Latapie, Colonel, iii. 216
La Tiemblais (see Hingant de La Tiemblais)
Latil, Bishop of Amycla, later Bishop
of Chartres, later Archbishop of
Rheims, Jean Baptiste Marie Anne
Antoine Cardinal Duc de, v. 18,
20, 22-23, 35, 52, 343, 363, 373-375,
378, 415; vi. 136, 193
La Tour, pseud., Abbé de (see Charrière, Madame de)
Latour (see also Foissac-Latour)
Latour-Maubourg, Marie Victor Nicolas
de Fay, Marquis de, v. 321, 323; vi.
26, 136
La Tournelle, Marquis de, ii. 298
La Tournelle (see also Châteauroux)
La Trémoille, Vicomte de Thouars,
Prince de Talmont, Louis II. Sire de, i. 150
Lauderdale, James Maitland, eighth
Earl of, ii. 143
Laughton, M.A., Professor John Knox, vi. 155-156
Laujon, Pierre, iii. 23, 29
L'Aulne (see Turgot)
Launay de La Billardière, David, i. 47
Launay de La Billardière, Gilles Marie
de, i. 47, 108
Launey, Bernard René Jourdan, Marquis de, i. 158
Lauraguais, Diane Adélaïde de Mailly-Nesle,
Duchesse de, ii. 297
Laurence, Saint, v. 307
Laurencie (see La Laurencie)
Lauriston, Jacques Alexandre Bernard
Law, Maréchal Marquis de, iv. 62
Lautrec, Odet de Foix, Maréchal
Vicomte de, i. 120; ii. 219; iv. 228
Lautrec de Saint-Simon, M., i. 171
Lauzun, later Duc de Biron, Armand
Louis de Gontaut de Biron, Duc de,
i. 51, 176, 181; ii. 142; v. 318
Laval, Agnes of, i. 8
Laval (see also Montmorency-Laval)
Laval-Montmorency, Anne Pierre
Adrien Prince de Montmorency,
later Duc de, ii. 179; iii. 97; iv.
140, 158-160, 164-166, 213, 302; v.
3, 7 8, 17, 27, 49, 52, 68, 78
Lavalette, M. de, iii. 5
Lavalette, Marquise de Béville, later
Dame de, iii. 5
Lavallette, Antoine Marie Chamans,
Comte de, iii. 110, 169, 190
Lavallette, Émilie Louise de Beauharnais,
Comtesse de, iii. 110
La Vallière, Françoise Louise de La
Baume Le Blanc, Duchesse de, i.
102, 120; ii. 172; v. 215; vi. 201, 242
Lavandier, M., i. 58
Lavater, Johann Caspar, v. 291
La Vauguyon, M., i. 156
Lavergne, Louis Gabriel Léonce Guilhaud de, ii. 207
La Vergne (see Pioche de La Vergne)
La Vigne, Alexis Jacques Buisson de, ii. 5
La Vigne, Céleste Rapion de La Placelière,
Dame Buisson de, ii. 5
La Vigne the Elder, M. Buisson de, ii. 5-6
La Vigne (see also Chateaubriand and
Plessix de Parscau)
La Villate, M. de, v. 361-362, 380; vi. 136
La Villate the Elder, M. de, v. 362
La Villedeneu (see Loisel de La Villedeneu)
Lavoisier, Antoine Laurent, vi. 161
Law, John, vi. 200, 239
Laya, Jean Louis, iii. 16
Leæna, the courtezan, vi. 180
Lebeschu, Mathilde, v. 244; vi. 98, 100
Lebon, Joseph, iv. 4
Le Borgne, Sieur, i. 5
Le Bouthillier de Rancé (see Rancé)
Le Breton, Guillaume, i. 199; ii. 30
Lebrun, Third Consul, later Duke of
Piacenza, Charles François, ii. 259;
iii. 68
Le Brun, Ponce Denis Escouchard, i. 131
Lebrun, Élisabeth Vigée, Dame, i. 131; ii. 168
Le Chapelier, Isaac René Guy, i. 167; ii. 84
Leclerc, General Victor Emmanuel, ii. 223;
iii. 30, 191
Le Coigneux de Bachaumont (see Bachaumont)
Le Corvaisier (see Corvaisier)
Lecoulteux, née Pourrat, Dame, ii. 172
Led'huy, Édouard, v. 244
Le Donarin, M., i. 108
Ledru, Charles, v. 261, 309-310
Ledru-Rollin, Alexandre Auguste, v. 261
Lefebvre, Jacques, v. 96
Lefebvre-Desnoettes, Charles Comte, iii. 111
Lefebvre de Vatimesnil (see Vatimesnil)
Lefranc, Jean Baptiste Antoine, iii. 213
Le Français de Lalande (see Lalande)
Le Gobbin, i. 55
Legouvé, Gabriel Marie Jean Baptiste, iii. 23
Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm Baron
von, iv. 292
Leiberich (see Mack von Leiberich)
Leigh, Hon. Augusta Ada Byron, Mrs., ii. 136
Le Jay, the bookseller, i. 176
Le Jay, Dame, i. 176
Lelièvre, the boatman, iii. 16
Lemaire (see Cauchois-Lemaire)
Le Maître, M., ii. 191
Lemercier, Louis Jean Népomucène, ii. 187;
iii. 68-69
Le Metel (see Boisrobert)
Lemierre, Antoine Marie, ii. 99
Lemierre, Auguste Jacques, ii. 99, 157
Lemoine, M., v. 319
Lemontey, Pierre Édouard, iv. 44; v. 230
Le Motha, Captain, v. 129
Lemoyne-Saint-Paul, Paul Lemoyne,
known as, iv. 285
Lenclos, Anne, known as Ninon de, ii. 100
Lenglet-Dufresney, Abbé Nicolas, vi. 78
Lenoir-Laroche, Jean Jacques Comte, ii. 195
Lenormant, Charles, iv. 180, 299;
v. 85, 200, 261
Lenormant, Amélie Cyvoct, Dame, i. 5;
iv. 180, 188, 234, 299; v. 85,
197, 261; vi. 237, 258-261
Le Normant, the publisher, ii. 181;
iii. 91, 103, 133; iv. 7, 15-16;
v. 122
Le Nôtre, André, vi. 241-242
Leo I., Pope Saint, ii. 185
Leo III., Pope, ii. 32
Leo IV., Pope Saint, v. 11
Leo X., Pope, iv. 226, 228; v. 14, 58, 273
Leo XII., Pope, ii. 238, 247; iv. 232,
234-235, 238, 287, 290-296, 299-303;
v. 1-5, 7-8, 15, 18, 20, 23, 31, 36-37,
53, 316, 373, 384
Leo XIII., Pope, v. 57
Léon, Bishop of Saint-Pol-de-Léon,
Jean François de La Marche, Comte de, ii. 103
Leonardo da Vinci (see Vinci)
Leonidas I. King of Sparta, i. 216; iv. 298
Leonora of Este, Princess, v. 330; vi.
82-84, 87, 92, 100
Leonora (see also Castellani)
Leopold I. Duke of Austria, v. 377
Leopold I. King of the Belgians, v.
323, 381; vi. 118
Leopold I. the Emperor, iv. 37
Leopold II. the Emperor, ii. 9; vi. 114
Léotaud, the gaoler, v. 252-253
Léotaud, Dame, v. 252
Lepeaux (see La Revellière-Lepeaux)
Lepelletier, the committee-man, v. 126
Lepelletier d'Aulnay (see d'Aulnay)
Lepelletier de Saint-Fargeau (see Saint-Fargeau)
Le Prestre de Vauban (see Vauban)
Leprince, Abbé, i. 44, 57, 63
Lerminier, Jean Louis Eugène, vi. 10
Leroux, Pierre, v. 95, 260
Lerva, Gendarme, ii. 262-263
Le Sage, Alain René, ii. 81, 332
Lescarbot, Marc, i. 232
Lescourt (see Maillard de Lescourt)
Lescure, Louis Marie Marquis de, ii. 107
Lesdiguières, François de Bonne de
Créqui, Maréchal Duc de, vi. 19-20
Lesseps, Ferdinand Vicomte de, vi. 223
L'Estoile, Pierre de, i. 175; ii. 15; v.
104, 187-188, 239
Le Sueur, Eustache, ii. 309
Le Sueur, Dame, ii. 309
L'Étang (see Dupont de L'Étang)
Leuchtenberg, Prince d'Eichstadt,
Viceroy of Italy, Eugène Vicomte de
Beauharnais, Duc de, ii. 261; iii. 17; iv.
165-166, 191; v. 103
l'Eure (see Dupont de L'Eure)
Levasseur, M., v. 96
Lévis, Gaston François Christophe
Victor Duc de Ventadour and de,
iii. 140-141; v. 268
Lévis, Marie Cathérine Amande
d'Aubusson de La Feuillade, Duchesse
de, iii. 141
Lévis, Gaston Marc Pierre Duc de, iii.
136, 139-140, 174
Lévis, Pauline Louise Françoise
Charpentier d'Ennery, Duchesse de, iii.
51, 139-140, 176; iv. 14-15
Lewis, Matthew Gregory, ii. 126
Lewis, the Vicomte de Chateaubriand's
footman, i. 190
L'Herault (see Rio)
L'Hôpital, Michel Chancelier de, ii.
102; v. 49-50, 55
Liancourt (see La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt)
Libba, or Libbe, Armand de Chateaubriand's
mistress, ii. 50
Liberi, Pietro, vi. 103
Lichtenau, Wilhelmina Enke, Frau
Rietz, later Countess von, iv. 38
Licino, Monsignor, vi. 85
Lieven, Khristopher Andreievitch
Count, later Prince de, iv. 74
Lieven, Doroteya Khristoforovna von
Benkendorf, Countess, later Princess
de, iii. 72; iv. 73-74
Ligne, Charles Joseph Field-marshal
Prince de, ii. 58-59
Lille, pseud., Comte de (see Louis
XVIII. King of France and Navarre)
Limoëlan de Clorivière, Joseph Pierre
Picot, i. 65
Lindsay, Mrs., ii. 100, 147, 155, 156,
193; iii. 35
Linnæus, Carolus, i. 180
Lioult de Chênedollé (see Chênedollé)
Lippi, Fra Filippo, iv. 232
Lippold, the poisoner, iv. 37
Lipsius, Joest Lips, known as Justus, v. 62
Live d'Épinay (see d'Épinay)
Live de La Bride (see La Bride)
Liverpool, Charles Jenkinson, Baron
Hawkesbury, first Earl of, iv. 81
Liverpool, Robert Banks Jenkinson,
second Earl of, i. 187; ii. 145-146;
iii. 215; iv. 81-82, 89, 92, 217; vi. 252
Livorel, Robert Lambert, i. 150
Livy, Titus Livius, known as, i. 33; ii.
335; iv. 185, 225; v. 155; vi. 79,
105, 142, 157
Lobau, Georges Mouton, Maréchal
Comte de, v. 113
Lobineau, Dom, i. 5
Lobkowitz (see Hassenstein)
Lodi, Vice-president of the Cisalpine
Republic, Francesco di Mela, Duca
di, ii. 219
Lodin, Mayor of Combourg, i. 108
Lœwenhielm, Gustav Karl Frederik
Count, v. 144, 146
Logan, James, i. 253
Logan, Tah-Gah-Jute, known as John, i. 253
Lointier, the tavern-keeper, v. 137
Loisel de La Villedeneu, Demoiselles,
i. 22; ii. 310
Lomaria, M. de, i. 143
Lombard, Charles, i. 227
Loménie-Brienne (see Brienne)
Londonderry, Robert Stewart, first
Marquess of, i. 188
Londonderry, Robert Stewart, Viscount
Castlereagh, later second Marquess
of, i. xxxi, 188; ii. 79, 93; iii. 49,
163; iv. 65-67, 71, 73, 76, 80-83,
86-90, 92, 190
Londonderry, Amelia Anne Hobart,
Marchioness of, iv. 65, 87
Longuerue (see Hatte-Longuerue)
Longueville, Anne Geneviève de Bourbon-Condé,
Duchesse de, ii. 151-154, 172; vi. 77
Longueville (see also Du Guesclin)
Longueville-Nemours, Marie Duchesse
de, iv. 106-107
Lopez, Fernando, iii. 207
Lorgeril, Comte de, v. 87
Lorges, Comte, later Duc de, v. 245
Lorrain, Claude Gelée, known as
Claude, iv. 242, 258-259; v. 288
Lorraine, Charles de Guise, Cardinal
de, iii. 30, 74
Lothair King of France, iv. 112
Lothon, the Polytechnic scholar, v. 107
Loudoun, John Campbell, fourth Earl
of, i. 224
Louis I. King of Bavaria, iv. 118, 164;
v. 25, 41
Louis I. Count of Flanders, iii. 138
Louis I. King of France, the Emperor,
v. 11; vi. 195
Louis V. King of France, iii. 137; iv. 112
Louis VI. King of France, i. 9; iv. 209
Louis VII. King of France, iv. 17; vi. 196
Louis VIII. King of France, ii. 256;
v. 225; vi. 196
Louis IX. King of France, Saint, i. 6,
118, 144, 164; ii. 15, 38, 192, 202,
204, 256, 278, 297, 331; iii. 90, 103,
120, 138, 144-145, 177, 228; iv. 5,
11, 22-23, 143, 291; v. 12, 85-86,
142, 155, 175, 188, 212, 225,
229, 239, 268, 273, 296, 302, 336,
356, 372, 379, 396; vi. 27, 36, 96,
117, 139-140, 194, 196, 251
Louis XI. King of France, ii. 32, 53,
105, 201; iii. 153; v. 355; vi. 49,
147, 196
Louis XII. King of France, i. 141,
150, 172; ii. 17; iii. 176; iv. 229;
v. 395; vi. 27, 96; vi. 196, 238
Louis XIII. King of France and
Navarre, i. 25, 114; ii. 151, 205;
iv. 245; vi. 28-29, 33, 196
Louis XIV. King of France and
Navarre, i. 7, 26, 38, 77, 85, 100,
103, 117, 120, 126, 232, 236; ii. 100,
105, 151, 159, 172, 188, 192, 202,
204-205, 207, 309; iii. 25, 27, 58,
94, 177, 194, 197-198, 225, 228;
iv. 22, 34-35, 38, 44, 58-59, 79, 89,
122, 137, 217, 274; v. 50, 85-86,
101, 137, 143, 215, 230, 272, 330,
332-333, 403; vi. 19-20, 27, 32, 33,
151, 174, 185, 196, 199, 222, 238-242,
246-247, 250
Louis XV. King of France and
Navarre, i. 26, 138, 163, 176-177,
224; ii. 102, 188, 230, 298-299, 301;
iii. 127, 181, 194; iv. 8, 38, 89,
109, 252; v. 51, 137, 215, 333; vi.
69, 78, 80, 151, 174, 199-200, 202,
241-242
Louis XVI. King of France and
Navarre, i. xxi, 6, 18, 51, 111-112,
118-123, 134, 138, 140, 143-144, 146,
156-157, 159-165, 168-169, 176, 178,
187, 216, 247, 261; ii. 4, 5, 12-14,
18, 22, 25, 34, 43, 48, 52, 54, 61-62,
73, 82, 106-107, 119, 142, 156-157,
167, 171, 234, 257, 259, 296, 300-301;
iii. 5, 16-17, 56, 59, 65, 73,
75-76, 79, 94, 99, 102-104, 119,
127, 139, 142-143, 167, 177, 182,
188, 218; iv. 4, 22, 25, 38, 40, 55,
84, 91, 96, 109-111, 124, 189, 198,
252; v. 162, 175, 177-178, 180,
189, 275, 303, 321, 332, 356, 387,
393, 402, 407-409; vi. 30, 32-33,
140, 146, 150, 153, 159, 162,
174, 181, 194-196, 198, 202-203,
242
Louis XVII. King of France and
Navarre, i. 156-157, 160, 163; ii.
216; iii. 94; iv. 109
Louis XVIII. King of France and
Navarre, i. xxi, 32, 37, 59, 71, 107,
160-161, 163, 176, 178, 184-186,
190; ii. 4, 17, 22, 34, 40, 64, 71,
79, 100-101, 104, 107, 137, 156,
187, 195, 251, 257-259, 279-280,
301; iii. 13, 37, 57, 61, 63, 65, 68,
73, 76, 78-81, 84-85, 87, 89-102,
104, 111-112, 116-124, 126-129,
131-133, 136-139, 141-147, 150, 153, 155
158-159, 161-162, 165, 168-178,
180-184, 188-189, 211; iv. 1, 3, 7-12,
14, 21, 27, 29-30, 43-44, 59, 61-63
65-66, 68-69, 79, 85-86, 90-91,
96-97, 101, 106-107, 109, 111, 138-139,
169-170, 187, 199, 212, 217,
230, 302; v. 18, 44, 78, 81, 97, 106,
108, 119, 146-148, 160, 172, 178,
227, 267, 339, 342, 348, 360, 393,
395, 398-399, 401; vi. 45, 97, 113,
155, 183, 185, 187, 194-195
Louis XIX. King of France and
Navarre, Louis Antoine Duc
d'Angoulême, later, i. 156, 160; ii.
63, 259; iii. 119-120, 122, 129-130,
140; iv. 8, 96, 116, 169, 219, 252,
280, 299; v. 69, 84, 88, 96, 104, 106,
110-111, 129-132, 143, 147-151, 153,
157, 168-169, 191-192, 220, 307,
321, 342, 360-361, 372, 374-375, 378-379,
385-386, 394, 402, 406, 417;
vi. 35, 62, 97, 128, 131-132, 134,
137-138, 140, 193, 197, 243, 245,
253-254
Louis King of Holland, iii. 17; iv.
241; v. 44, 292
Louis II. Duke of Anjou, King of
Naples, ii. 202
Louis of Bavaria, H.R.H. Prince, iv. 251
Louis of Bavaria, de jure Mary IV.
Queen of England, Scotland and
Ireland, Maria Theresa Henrietta
Dorothea of Modena, H.R.H. Princess, iv. 251
Louis Dauphin of France, known as
the Great Dauphin, vi. 241
Louis Duc de Bourgogne, later Dauphin
of France, vi. 241, 246
Louis of Prussia, Prince, iv. 33
Louis, Joseph Dominique Abbé Baron,
i. 177; iii. 100, 127, 129-131, 171-173;
v. 72, 115, 172-173
Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, Prince, ii.
289-290; iv. 34
Louis-Philippe Duc d'Orléans, later
King of the French, i. 37, 134, 177,
185; ii. 26, 100, 163, 168, 222-223,
261, 280, 293; iii. 13, 50-51, 57, 65,
89-90, 95, 99, 111-112, 117, 119,
124-125, 137, 139, 143, 145, 163, 165,
168, 178, 225; iv. 15, 21, 58, 75,
102, 111, 114, 135, 138, 145, 161;
v. 27, 86-87, 94, 101, 103, 105-106,
108, 114, 118, 123, 126-128, 132-143,
147-152, 156-163, 168, 171-174,
178, 193, 211, 218-220, 222, 225,
238, 253, 258, 260-261, 264, 290,
307-308, 325, 327, 366, 368, 396,
398; vi. 26, 33-34, 37, 78, 95, 113-114,
117-118, 130-131, 146-152, 155,
159, 162, 164-166, 170-171, 242,
244, 249, 261
Louisa of Mecklemburg-Strelitz, Queen
of Prussia, ii. 258; iii. 60, 86; iv.
41, 49, 58, 164
Louise of Orleans, Queen of the Belgians, vi. 118
Louise of Stolberg-Godern, Queen of
England, known as Countess of
Albany, ii. 202; iv. 249-250
Louise of France, Duchess of Parma,
v. 174, 321, 324-325, 359, 361-366,
374-378, 383, 388, 390-391, 406-408,
415; vi. 24, 129, 132, 134, 136, 193,
231-232, 243-245, 254-255
Louvel, Louis Pierre, ii. 54; iii. 89,
119; iv. 11, 21-23, 59; v. 303
Louverture (see Toussaint-Louverture)
Louvois, François Michel Letellier,
Marquis de, vi. 19
Louÿs, M. Pierre, i. xiii.
Lovelace, Richard, v, 255
Lowe, Sir Hudson, ii. 286; iii. 88,
192, 210
Lowes, Mrs., ii. 97
Loyola (see Ignatius Loyola)
Luc (see Vintimille du Luc)
Lucan, Marcus Annæus Lucanus,
known as, v. 29
Lucas (see Boisé-Lucas)
Lucchesi-Palli di Campo Franco e
Pignatelli, Duca Della Gracia, Ettore
Conte di, iii. 156; v. 321-323, 366;
vi. 94, 96, 98, 231-232, 234-235
Lucchesi-Palli Demoiselle de, iii. 156
Lucchesi-Palli (see also Campo-Franco)
Lucian, v. 379; vi. 179
Lucretius, Titus Lucretius Carus, known
as, 53, 83; v. 229
Lucrezia Borgia, Duchess of Ferrara, v. 13
Lucrezia de'Medici, Duchess of Ferrara, vi. 84
Lucrezia of Este, Princess, vi. 82
*Luke, Saint, v. 300, 307; iv. 240; vi. 90, 220
Luna, Pedro de, v. 13
Lusignan, Hugh of, i. 9
Lussigny (see d'Ancre)
Luther, Martin, iv. 32; v. 16, 273, 332, 388
Lützow, Count von, iv. 236; v. 7, 32, 38
Lützow, Countess von, iv. 236
Luxembourg, François Henri de
Montmorency-Bouteville, Maréchal Duc
de, iii. 162; vi. 19
Luynes, Charles d'Albert Connétable
Duc de, ii. 172; vi. 28-29
Luynes, née de Montmorency-Laval,
Duchesse de, ii. 192
Luynes, Duc de, iv. 178
Luynes, Duchesse de (see also Chevreuse)
Luzerne (see La Luzerne)
Lycurgus, iv. 31
Lydia, the courtezan, v. 285
M
Macbeth King of Scotland, ii. 122
Mac Carthy, Abbé Nicolas de, v. 367
Mac Carthy, Mr., v. 367
Macchi, Archbishop of Nisibis, Vincento
Cardinal, v. 18, 38-39
Macdonald (see Tarente)
Maceroni, Colonel Francis, iv. 197
Machault d'Arnouville, Jean Baptiste,
iii. 181; vi. 202
Machiavelli, Niccolo, vi. 78
M'Intyre (see Simms and M'Intyre)
Macirone (see Maceroni)
Mack von Leiberich, Karl Baron, ii. 40
Mackenzie, Sir Alexander, i. 136, 215
Mackintosh, Sir James, ii. 139
Macpherson, James, ii. 133
Macrobius, Ambrosius Theodosius, vi. 247
Madrid, Duque de (see Charles VII.
and XI. King of Spain, France and
Navarre)
Madrid, Duquesa de (see Bertha Queen
of Spain and France)
Magnay, Christopher, iv. 71
Magon, Hervine, i. 34
Mahaffy, Dr. John Pentland, v. 56, 229
Mahé de La Bourdonnais (see La Bourdonnais)
Mahis (see Des Mahis)
Mahmud II. Sultan of Turkey, iv. 267-269,
272, 277-279, 283-284, 297, 303;
v. 25-26, 51, 389
Mahomet, iv. 277
Mailhe, Jean Baptiste, iii. 75
Maillard de Lescourt, Major, iii, 62
Mailleville, M., v. 55
Mailly, Louis Marie Duc de, ii. 297
Mailly, Louise Julie de Mailly-Nesle,
Comtesse de, ii. 297-299
Mailly (see also Coislin and Nesle)
Maintenon, later Queen of France,
Françoise d'Aubigné, Dame Scarron,
later Marquise de, i. 14; ii. 172,
192; iii. 27; iv. 79; vi. 238,
240-243, 246-247
Maison, Nicolas Joseph Maréchal
Comte, later Marquis, iii. 89-90; iv.
267; v. 152-153; vi. 244
Maison-Blanche, Sieur, iv. 245-246
Maisonfort (see La Maisonfort)
Maitland, Admiral Sir Frederick Lewis,
iii. 189-190, 192
Majorian, the Emperor, ii. 45
Malatesta, Francesca da Rimini,
Signora, iv. 229; vi. 57
Malcolm, Admiral Sir Pulteney, iii. 212
Malescot, i. 7
Malesherbes, Guillaume de Lamoignon,
Seigneur de, i. 134
Malesherbes, Chrétien Guillaume de
Lamoignon de, i. xxi, 8, 50, 72, 83,
134-137, 161, 167, 180, 215-216, 227;
ii. 22-23, 27, 32, 49, 60, 81-82, 84,
295; iii. 139; iv, 4; v. 64-65, 304;
vi. 202
Malesherbes, Françoise Thérèse Grimod,
Dame de, ii. 27
Malet, General Claude François de, ii.
262, 269
Malfilatre, Alexandre Henri de, i. 83
Malfilatre, Jacques Charles Louis de
Clinchamp de, i. 83; ii. 176
Malherbe (see Bonnet de Malherbe)
Malibran, Mr., vi. 175
Malibran, later Dame de Bériot,
Maria Felicita Garcia, Dame, ii.
207; vi. 175
Malipieri, Podesta of Padua, Angelo,
vi. 104
Malle (see Bureau de La Malic)
Mallet-Dupan, Jacques, i. 175
Malo Bishop of Aleth, Saint, i. 25
Malouet, Pierre Victor Baron, ii. 100;
iii. 99
Malte-Brun, Conrad, iii. 8
Mame, Auguste, iii. 53
Mandaroux-Vertamy, M., v. 304
Mandelot, François de, ii. 308
Mandini, Signor, i. 173
Mandini, Signora, i. 173
Mandricardo, Silvio Pellico's
messenger, vi. 107, 109, 111
Mangin, Jean Henri Claude, v. 94, 96
Mansfield, David Murray, second Earl of, i. 188
Mansfield, Louisa Cathcart, Countess of, i. 188
Manso (see Della Villa)
Manuel I. Emperor of the East, v. 400
Manuel, Jacques Antoine, iii. 166; iv. 128
Manutius, Aldus, vi. 67
Manutius the Younger, Aldus, vi. 67
Manutius, Paulus, vi. 67
Manzoni, Alessandro Conte, i. xxiii;
iii. 214; v. 229-230; vi. 15, 65, 79
Marat, Jean Paul, i. 132, 161, 164;
ii. 14, 16-19, 21, 159; iv. 189
Marbod (see Maroboduus)
Marceau, General François Séverin
Desgraviers, iii. 67
Marcellus, Marie Louis Jean André
Charles Demartin du Tyrac, Comte
de, i. 5, 185; iv. 139, 215-219; v.
21, 40-41, 153; vi. 14, 260
Marchais, André Louis Augustin, v. 105
Marchal, Pierre François, v. 96, 115
Marchand, Abbé, i. 63
Marchand, Napoleon's valet, iii. 211
Marck, Alexander Count von der, iv. 38
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, the
Emperor, v. 57-58; vi. 104
Maret (see Bassano)
Mareuil (see Durand de Mareuil)
Margaret of Anjou, Queen of England, ii. 200
Margaret of Lusignan, Queen (?) of
England, i. 9
Margaret of Provence, Queen of France,
ii. 192
Margaret of Scotland, Dauphiness of
France, ii. 200
Margaret of Valois, Queen of France
and Navarre, ii. 172-173, 206; vi. 173
Margaret of France, Queen of Navarre, vi. 173
Margaret of Valois, mother of Charles
of Blois, i. 141
Margherita di Gonzaga, Duchess of
Ferrara, vi. 84
Maria Christina of Austria, Duchess
of Saxe-Teschen, vi. 58
Maria Christina of Naples, Queen of
Spain, iii. 221; v. 74, 207
Maria Feodorowna (Maria Sophia) of
Wurtemberg-Mümpelgard, Empress
of Russia, iii. 49; iv. 281
Maria Isabella of Spain, Queen of the
Two Sicilies, v. 74-75
Maria Louisa of Spain, Queen of
Etruria, iv. 224
Maria Theresa, Queen of Hungry and
Bohemia, the Empress, v. 410; vi.
78, 202
Maria Wilhelmina of Hesse-Darmstadt,
Queen of Bavaria, v. 345
Marie Leczinska, Queen of France, ii. 299
Marie de Medici, Queen of France, i. 117;
vi. 28
Marie de France, vi. 172
Marie, Sister, iv. 207
Marie-Amélie of Naples, Duchesse
d'Orléans, later Queen of the French,
v. 134, 156-161; vi. 37
Marie-Antoinette of Austria, Queen of
France, i. 32, 100-101, 118-119, 156-157,
160-161, 163, 175, 187, 216-217;
ii. 12; iii. 102-104; iv. 4; v. 144,
307, 309, 356, 407-408; vi. 7, 78,
202
Marie-Antoinette of Naples, Queen of
Spain, iv. 178
Marie-Louise of Austria, Empress of
the French, later Duchess of Parma,
ii. 264; iii. 34, 54-56, 64, 73,
108-109, 144, 154, 156, 194, 217; iv.
187, 224; v. 322; vi. 46
Marie-Thérèse Duchesse d'Angoulême,
later Queen of France, i. 102, 156-157
160; iii. 65, 73, 91, 103, 119-120
139, 176; iv. 91, 96-97, 111,
134; v. 111, 144, 147, 275, 297,
321, 325, 359, 361, 363, 365-366,
372, 374, 391, 405-410, 412-417;
vi. 7, 29-36, 102, 129, 133-134, 140,
193, 243, 245, 253-254
Marie-Thérèse of Modena, Queen of
France, v. 146; vi. 78
Marigny, Jean Joseph Geffelot, Comte
de, i. 53
Marigny, Marie Anne Françoise de
Chateaubriand, Comtesse de, i. 15,
40, 53, 66, 111-112, 150; ii. 175,
319; vi. 255-256
Marin, Chevalier, iv. 162
Marischal (see Keith)
Marius, Caius, iii. 87; iv. 14; v. 40
Mark, Saint, iii. 123; v. 374; vi. 58
Marlborough, John Churchill, first
Duke of, ii. 139; iii. 197; v. 333;
vi. 20
Marlborough, Sarah Jennings, Duchess
of, v. 333
Marmont (see Raguse)
Marmontel, Jean François, i. 133
Marmora (see Della Marmora)
Marnes, pseud., Comte and Comtesse
de (see Louis XIX. King of France
and Navarre and Marie-Thérèse
Queen of France)
Maroboduus King of the Marcomanni, vi. 127
Marolles, Abbé Michel de, i. 75
Maroncelli, Signor, vi. 56
Marot, Clement, vi. 75, 96, 238
Mars, Marguerite Salvetat, known as
Madame, i. 128
Mars, Anne Françoise Hippolyte
Boutet, known as Mademoiselle, i. 128
Martignac, Jean Baptiste Silvere Gaye,
Vicomte de, iv. 13, 138, 221, 261;
v. 67-69, 120
Martin Bishop of Tours, Saint, vi. 26
Martin, K.C.B., Sir Theodore, iv. 225
Martinez de La Rosa, Francisco, i. xxii
Martinière (see La Martinière)
Mary II. Queen of England, Scotland
and Ireland (see Mary I. Queen of
Scots)
Mary III. Queen of England, Scotland
and Ireland (see Mary Beatrice
Duchess of Modena)
Mary IV. Queen of England, Scotland
and Ireland, H.M. (see Louis of
Bavaria, H. R. H. Princess)
Mary I. Queen of Scots, Queen of
France, de jure Mary II. Queen of
England and Ireland, i. 245; iv.
251; vi. 173
Mary of Saxe-Altenburg, Queen of
Hanover, iv. 47
Mary I. Queen of Portugal, iv. 53
Mary II. Queen of Portugal and the
Algarves, iv. 237
Mary, the Vicomte de Chateaubriand's
house-maid, i. 190
Mary Beatrice of Sardinia, Duchess of
Modena, de jure Mary III. Queen
of England, Scotland and Ireland,
iv. 251; vi. 78
Masinissa King of Massylia and
Numidia, ii. 331
Mason, William, ii. 129
Massa, Claude Ambroise Regnier, Duc
de, ii. 273
Masséna (see Rivoli)
Massias, Nicolas Baron, ii. 280
Massillon, Bishop of Clermont, Jean
Baptiste, i. 54, 84
Massimo (see d'Arsoli)
Masson, M. Frédéric, iv. 189
Matignan, Madame de, iii. 17
Matthew, Saint, iv. 291; v. 374
Mattos (see Teixeira de Mattos)
Maubourg (see Latour-Maubourg)
Maubreuil, Marie Armand, Comte de
Guerri de Maubreuil, Marquis
d'Orvault, known as Marquis de,
iii. 86-87; vi. 181
Maud de jure Queen of England, the
Empress, i. 8
Mauduit, Quarter-master, iii. 15
Mauduit de Larive (see Larive)
Mauguin, François, v. 96, 113, 116
Mauléon (see Causans de Mauléon)
Maulevrier, Comte de, i. 72
Maulevrier, Louis de Brézé, Comte de, ii. 294
Maulevrier (see also Colbert de Maulevrier
and Valentinois)
Maunoir, Père, i. 30
Mauny (see Noury de Mauny)
Maupcou, René Nicolas, i. 138; vi. 202
Maupertuis, Pierre Louis Moreau de, i. 18-26
Maurel, the game-keeper, v. 244
Maurepas, Jean Frédéric Phelippeaux,
Comte de, vi. 202
Maurice, Saint, vi. 190
Mauro, Fra, vi. 54
Maury, Bishop of Montefiascone, later
Archbishop of Paris, Jean Siffrein
Cardinal, iii. 30
Mauvissière (see Castelnau)
Maximian, the Emperor, iii. 206
Maximilian I. Elector of Bavaria, ii. 51
Maximilian I. King of Bavaria, iv. 57,
164; v. 25, 345
Maximilian II. King of Bavaria, v. 25
Maximilian I., the Emperor, i. 141;
iii. 176
Maximus, v. 60
Mayenne, Charles de Lorraine, Duc de,
ii. 15, 21; iii. 74-75
Mazarin, Jules Cardinal, ii. 151, 153;
iv. 9, 245; v. 50; vi. 125
Méchin, Alexandre Edme Baron, v. 138-139
Mecklenburg (see Wallenstein)
Medici (see Sforza)
Megret de Sérilly (see Sérilly)
Mehemet Ali Viceroy of Egypt, i. xxi;
iv. 264, 278
Melanchthon, Philipp, vi. 142
Melbourne, Peniston Lamb, first
Viscount, iv. 160
Melbourne, Elizabeth Milbanke,
Viscountess, iv. 160
Melchthal, Arnold von, v. 274, 277
Melmoth the Younger, William, v. 60
Melzi (see Lodi)
Mennais (see Lamennais)
Méot, the tavern-keeper, ii. 17
Mercier Dupaty (see Dupaty)
Mercœur, Élisa, vi. 175
Mercy, Franz Field-Marshal Baron von, ii. 510
Méré (see Courier de Méré and Poltrot de Méré)
Merfeld, General, v. 103
Méricourt (see Théroigne de Mencourt)
Mérilhou, Joseph, v. 95, 115, 265
Méritens (see Allart de Méritens)
Merlin, the auctioneer, iv. 11
Merlin de Douay, Philippe Antoine
Comte, ii. 108; iii. 153
Merlin de Thionville, Antoine
Christophe, ii. 108; iii. 153
Mérona, M. de, iv. 103
Merovius (see Merowig)
Merowig King of the Franks, ii. 29
Mesmer, Friedrich Anton, i. 145
Mesnard, Paul, iv. 128
Mesnard, Louis Charles Bonaventure
Pierre Comte de, v. 244; vi. 38
Mesnard, Vicomte de, v. 28
Mesnier, Louis Marthe, iv. 7
Metastasio, Pietro Bonaventura
Trapassi, known as, ii. 78
Metel (see Boisrobert)
Métel, Hugues, ii. 44
Metella, Cæcilia, ii. 244; iv. 236; v.
58, 61; vi. 2
Metternich-Winneburg, Clemens
Wenzel Nepomuk Lothar Prince von, ii.
134, 143; iii. 154; iv. 73-74, 96,
102, 128, 266; v. 38, 91, 123, 181,
339, 341-342, 352-353, 369, 384,
408; vi. 16, 46, 114, 118, 187, 232
Mettrie (see La Mettrie)
Meunier, Captain, v. 110
Mézeray, François Eudes de, i. 55
Mézy, Dame de, ii. 296
Micara, Luigi Cardinal, v. 8
Michael I. King of Portugal and the
Algarves, iv. 237; v. 81
Michael II. King of Portugal and the
Algarves, iv. 237
Michael Pavlowitch of Russia, Grand-duke, iv. 36
Michael Angelo, Michelagnolo Buonarotti,
known as, i. 166; ii. 123,
219; iii. 225; iv. 181, 226, 236, 239,
241-243, 256, 286; v. 2, 29, 36, 59,
61, 316; vi. 17, 59, 103
Michaud, Joseph, ii. 233; iv. 131-132, 204
Migneret, the publisher, ii. 157, 181, 198, 209
Mignet, François Auguste Marie, v. 82-83,
95-96, 105, 127, 206; vi. 189-190
Mila, the Indian girl, i. 231, 236; vi. 66
Milbanke-Noel, Sir Ralph, ii. 136
Milton, John, i. 95, 166; ii. 17, 74, 94,
110, 121-122, 220, 292; iii. 22, 24,
27, 34; iv. 42-43, 93-94, 245, 257;
v. 133; vi. 47, 91, 123, 179
Miniac (see Gouyon de Miniac)
Mionnet, Theodore, v. 53-54
Mirabeau, Victor Riquetti, Marquis de,
i. 167; vi. 42
Mirabeau, Gabriel Honoré Riquetti,
Comte de, i. xxi, 83, 155, 166-171,
175-177, 179, 182; ii. 4, 12, 71, 77,
109; iii. 166; iv. 6, 39, 47, 55-56;
vi. 42, 155
Mirabeau, André Boniface Louis
Riquetti, Vicomte de, i. 170-171,
175-176; ii. 4, 80
Mirabeau, Jean Antoine Joseph Charles
Elzéar de Riquetti, known as the
Bailli de, i. 167
Misson, François Maximilien, iv. 246
Mithridales VI. Eupator King of Pontus, v. 335
Mnata, v. 386
Mocenigo, Doge of Venice, Giovanni, vi. 59
Mocenigo, Doge of Venice, Luigi, vi. 59
Mocenigo, Doge of Venice, Tommaso, vi. 59
Moëlien de Trojolif, Thérèse Josèphe
de, i. 66, 92, 126
Mohl, Julius von, vi. 258
Mohl, Madame, vi. 258
Molé, Matthieu Louis Comte, i. 134;
ii. 168, 192, 319; iv. 26, 118-119
Molé, Édouard, i. 134
Molé, Matthieu, i. 134; ii. 192
Molé, François René Molet, known as,
i. 128, 173
Molé de Champlatreux, Édouard François
Matthieu Président, i. 134; ii. 192
Molet (see Molé)
Molière, Jean Baptiste Poquelin, known
as, ii. 122, 124, 128, 170; iv. 2; v.
15, 19, 70, 345, 353; vi. 74
Moligny, Abbé de, v. 363, 372
Molin, Captain, ii. 262, 267
Monceau (see Duhamel de Monceau)
Moncey (see Conegliano)
Monet, M., i. 179
Monet, Demoiselle, i. 179
Monfeltrio delle Rovere (see Lante
Monfeltrio delle Rovere)
Monge (see Péluse)
Monica, Saint, i. 31
Monmerqué, Louis Jacques Nicolas, iv. 44
Monnier, Marquis de, i. 168
Monnier, Sophie Ruffei, Marquise de,
i. 167-168
Monroe, President of the United States
of America, James, iv. 66, 127
Montaigne, Michel Eyquem, Seigneur
de, i. 52, 71, 79, 231; ii. 22, 73,
124, 126-127, 206, 220; iii. 60, 177;
iv. 149, 231, 243-244, 257; v. 72,
333; vi. 47, 122
Montaigne (see also Gamaches)
Montaigu, M. de, vi. 70
Montalivet, Marthe Camille Bachasson,
Comte de, iv. 114-115, 247-248, 259, 266
Montauban, Arthur de, i. 25
Montbel, Guillaume Isidore Baron,
Comte de, v. 72, 81-82, 379, 422;
vi. 100, 116-118, 229-230, 234-235
Montboissier, Baron de, ii. 32, 49, 60
Montboissier, née de Malesherbes,
Baronne de, ii. 49
Montboissier (see also Colbert de Montboissier)
Montboissier-Beaufort-Canillac, Charles
Philippe Simon Marquis de, i. 72, 135
Montboissier-Beaufort-Canillac,
Françoise Pauline de Malesherbes,
Marquise de, i. 135
Montbourcher, René François Joseph
Comte de, i. 153
Montcalm, Armande du Plessis de
Vignerot, Marquise de, iii. 51, 97;
iv. 26-27; v. 398
Montcalm de Saint-Véran, Louis Joseph
Marquis de, i. 224; vi. 202
Montchenu, Marquis de, iii. 210-211
Montebello, Jean Lannes, Maréchal
Duc de, iv. 300; v. 28
Montebello, Napoléon Auguste Lannes,
Comte, later Duc de, iv. 300-302; v.
18, 28-29
Montenoy (see Palissot de Montenoy)
Montenuovo, Wilhelm Albert Prince
von, iv. 187, 224; v. 322
Montes, Lola (see Lansfeld)
Montespan, Françoise Athénais de
Rochechouart de Mortemart,
Marquise de, i. 103, 120; v. 215; vi.
246-247
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat,
Baron de La Brède and de, ii. 220; iii.
10, 22, 33, 129; iv. 122, 127, 253;
vi. 75
Montesquiou-Fézensac, François Xavier
Marc Antoine Abbé Duc de, iii. 73-74,
99-100, 127, 131; iv. 59
Montesquiou-Fézensac, Ambroise Anatole
Augustin Comte, later Marquis
de, v. 134, 156-157
Montesquiou-Fézensac, Élisabeth Pierre
Comte de, vi. 183-184
Montesquiou-Fézensac, Louise Joséphine
de La Live de Briche, Comtesse
de, ii. 191
Montesson (see d'Orléans)
Montfort, Simon Comte de, ii. 206
Montfort, pseud., Comte de (see Jerome
King of Westphalia)
Montgascon, M. de, v. 131
Montgelas, Max Jose Garnerin, Count
von, iv. 57
Montgomery, Comte de, ii. 192
Montholon-Sémonville, Charles Jean
François Tristan Comte, later Marquis
de, ii. 280; iii. 192, 209, 211, 222-223
Montholon-Sémonville, Albinie Hélène
de Vassal, Comtesse de, iii. 209
Monti, Vincenzo, i. xxiii; vi. 79
Montléart, Prince de, v. 322
Montlosier, François Dominique
Reynaud Comte de, i. 175; ii. 71,
100-102; iv. 123-125
Montlouët, François Jean Raphaël de
Brunes, Comte, later Marquis de, i.
75, 108-109
Montluc, Blaise de Lasseran-Massencome,
Maréchal Seigneur de, i. 109; v. 380
Montluc (see also La Bourdonnaye-Montluc
and La Bourdonnaye de Montluc)
Montmirel, the Vicomte de Chateaubriand's
cook, iv. 98; v. 326; vi. 14
Montmorency, Anne Maréchal Connétable de,
iii. 182
Montmorency, Mathieu I. Connétable
Seigneur de, iv. 209
Montmorency, Aline Dame de, iv. 209
Montmorency, Henry II. Maréchal
Duc de, ii. 105
Montmorency, François Duc de, ii. 121
Montmorency, née de Matignon,
Baronne-Duchesse de, iii. 17
Montmorency, Baronne de, ii. 31
Montmorency, Demoiselle de, i. 117
Montmorency (see also Adelaide,
Laval-Montmorency and Luxembourg)
Montmorency-Laval, Mathieu Jean
Félicité Vicomte, later Duc de, i.
163; ii. 192; iv. 12, 29-30, 62, 65-69
76-77, 83-91, 95, 122, 133, 160,
164-166, 169, 171, 176-177, 180,
207-209, 213, 216-217, 286; vi. 45,
161
Montmorin the Elder, Comte de, ii. 35
Montmorin, Antoine Hugues Calixte
de, ii. 172
Montmorin, Auguste de, ii. 237
Montmorin, Louis Victor Hippolyte
Luce de, ii. 167
Montmorin-Saint-Hérem, Armand Marc
Comte de, i. 140, 145, 156; ii.
167, 213, 230, 237, 241, 251; iv.
183; v. 319
Montmorin-Saint-Hérem, Comtesse de, ii. 167
Montolieu, Baron de, iv. 120
Montolieu, Jeanne Isabelle Pauline
Polier de Bottens, Dame de Crouzas,
later Baronne de, iv. 120
Montor (see Arnaud de Montor)
Montpensier, Antoine Philippe d'Orléans,
Duc de, iv. 161
Montrond, M. de, iii. 143
Monvel, Jacques Marie Boutet, known
as, i. 128; vi. 162
Moore, Thomas, ii. 128
Morandais (see La Morandais)
More, Blessed Sir Thomas, v. 57
Moreau, Marshal Jean Victor, i. xxi,
65, 153; ii. 249, 252; iii. 67, 68,
203; iv. 164-170, 220, 299; v. 246,
330, 332, 387
Moreau, née Hulot, Maréchale, ii. 64;
iv. 166-167, 169
Moreau, Demoiselle, iv. 169
Moreau, Annibal, i. 101, 104-105, 112;
ii. 44; iii. 8
Moreau, Julie Angélique Hyacinthe de
Bedée, Dame, i. 101
Moreau de Saint-Méry, Méderic Louis
Élie, i. 161
Morellet, Abbé André, ii. 51, 163; iii.
21-22, 28; iv. 6
Moréti, Louis, i. 5
Morey, the assassin, v. 101
Morice, Dom, i. 5
Mornay, Demoiselle de, v. 115
Morny, Charles Auguste Louis Joseph
Duc de, iii. 169
Morosini, Doge of Venice, Michele, vi. 59
Mortemart, Casimir Louis Victurnien
de Rochechouart, Prince de Tonnay-Charente,
Duc de, v. 111, 113-114,
116-118, 122-123, 128
Mortemart, Gabriel de Rochechouart,
Marquis de, i. 103, 178
Mortemart, Victurnien Bonaventure
Victor de Rochechouart, Marquis de,
i. 106; ii. 35; vi. 246
Mortemart (see also Fontevrault,
Montespan and Thianges)
Mosbourg, Jean Michel Laurent Agar
Comte de, iv. 190
Mosbourg, née Marat, Comtesse de, iv. 190
Moses, ii. 218; iv. 226, 285; v. 392
Moskowa (see d'Elchingen)
Mosselmann, M., iv. 170
Motha (see Le Motha)
Motier de La Fayette (see La Fayette)
Motteux, Peter Anthony, i. 133; iv. 243
Motteville, Nicolas Langlois, Sieur de,
iv. 245
Motteville, Françoise Bertaud, Dame
de, iv. 245; v. 71
Mouchy, Philippe de Noailles, Maréchal
Duc de, i. 163
Mouchy, Antoine Juste Léon Marie
de Noailles, Prince de Poix, Duc de,
vi. 239
Mouchy, Philippe Louis Marie Antoine
de Noailles, Prince de Poix, Duc de,
iii. 95
Mouchy, Arthur Jean Tristan Charles
Languedoc Comte de Noailles, later
Duc de, ii. 296
Mouchy, Nathalie Luce Léontine
Joséphine de La Borde de Méréville,
Comtesse de Noailles, later Duchesse
de, ii. 296
Mounier, Claude Philibert Édouard
Baron, iii. 131, 171
Mounier, Jean Joseph, iii. 131
Mousette, M., v. 95
"Mousset," M. de, ii. 84
Muiron, Colonel, iii. 210
Müller, Johann von, v. 274
Munich, Christoph Burchard,
Fieldmarshal Count von, i. 13
Muraire, Honoré Comte, iv. 10
Murat, Napoléon Achille Prince, iv. 198
Murat, Napoléon Lucien Charles Prince,
ii. 219; iv. 198
Murat, the inn-keeper, ii. 25; iv. 184
Murat (see also Caroline Queen of
Naples, Joachim King of Naples,
Pepoli and Rasponi)
Murillo, Bartolomé Estéban, iv. 239;
v. 381
Musset, Louis Charles Alfred de, v. 203
Mussy (see Gueneau de Mussy)
Mustapha II. Sultan of Turkey, vi. 101
Mustapha IV. Sultan of Turkey, iv. 267-268
Muther, Dr. Richard, iv. 240
N
Nacquart, Colonel de, v. 245
Nagault (see Nagot)
Nagot, Abbé François Charles, i. 181, 195, 200
Nangis, Guillaume de, ii. 30
Napoleon, Saint, iii. 209
Napoleon I. Emperor of the French, i.
15, 21-22, 13, 16, 71, 99, 102, 104,
128, 132, 134, 170, 176, 179, 211-214,
217, 235; ii. 17, 25-26, 40, 52,
54, 100, 108, 110, 118, 139, 147,
154, 159, 161, 175, 180-181, 187-188
190, 195, 200, 210-214, 219-220
222-224, 232, 246-247, 249-255,
257-265, 269-275, 278, 280-292, 294,
301, 303, 309; iii. 4-5, 7-9, 12, 15-18,
21-24, 29-30, 34-36, 46-52, 54-91,
93-99, 102-103, 106-124, 127,
129-131, 133-134, 136-137, 139-141,
143, 145-146, 148-171, 179-180, 182-206
208-228; iv. 1-3, 6-7, 10, 19,
21, 32, 40, 49, 53, 56, 58, 75-76,
107, 109-111, 143, 145, 158, 163-169,
174-180, 183-184, 187-203, 205, 208,
220, 223-224, 231, 237-238, 242, 254-255,
264, 274, 295; v. 4-5, 40, 43-44,
46, 48, 58-59, 68, 80-82, 90, 92,
100, 103, 108, 113, 116, 121, 134,
150, 160, 162, 164, 166, 174, 176,
180, 202, 211, 227, 232, 235, 245,
249, 263, 272, 280, 291-296, 330-331,
332-333, 337, 379, 390, 393-394,
397-401, 403; vi. 7, 10-12, 19-21,
25, 30, 33, 42-43, 46, 51, 61, 79, 91,
95, 97, 120, 148, 151, 155, 162,
182-185, 195, 197, 200, 203-204, 221,
253
Napoleon II. Emperor of the French,
ii. 264; iii. 34, 54, 64, 109, 143,
154, 166-167, 170, 217; iv. 59, 224,
44; v. 92, 280; vi. 117
Napoleon III. Emperor of the French,
Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte,
President of the French Republic,
later, i. 185; ii. 219, 280, 295; iii.
64, 109, 143, 169, 192, 227; iv. 33,
114; v. 58, 83, 94, 103, 108, 292-298,
301-302: vi. 99
Narbonne, Duc de, vi. 138
Narbonne, Duchesse de, vi. 138
Narbonne, Jean de Foix, Vicomte de, i. 120
Narischkine, Alexander, iv. 236
Narischkine, Maria Antonovna, iv. 236
Navarre, Dame de, ii. 311, 316
Nay, M., v. 256, 263
Neale, Mary, ii. 99
Necker, Jacques, i. 130, 141, 155-157,
160, 162-163, 165, 177; ii. 240-241;
iv. 120, 158-160, 170, 183; v. 300;
vi. 203
Necker, Suzanne Curchod, Dame, iv. 120, 300
Necker de Saussure, Albertine Adrienne
de Saussure, Dame, v. 200
Nefftzer, A., v. 96
Neipperg, Adam Adalbert Count von,
ii. 264; iv. 187, 224; v. 322; vi. 46
Nelson, Duke of Bronte, Horatio first
Viscount, i. 21; ii. 139-140; iv. 185
Nemours, Gaston de Foix, Maréchal
Duc de, i. 120; iv. 228
Nemours (see also Dupont de Nemours
and Longueville-Nemours)
Nero, the Emperor, ii. 258, 291; iv.
233, 299; v. 196, 215
Nerva, the Emperor, iv. 229
Nesle, Regent of France, Jean II. de,
ii. 297
Nesle, Raoul Connétable de, ii. 297
Nesle, Louis de Mailly, Marquis de, ii. 297
Nesle the Younger, Marquis de, ii. 299
Nesle, Drogon de, ii. 297
Nesselrode, Karl Robert Count, v. 384
Nettement, Alfred François, v. 99,
101; vi. 131, 193
Nétumières (see Hay des Nétumières)
Neuchâtel (see Wagram)
Neufchâteau (see François de Neufchâteau)
Neuhof (see Theodore King of Corsica)
Neuville (see Hyde de Neuville)
Neveu, the painter, ii. 194, 196
Neville, Archbishop of York, George, v. 336
Newton, Sir Isaac, i. 151; ii. 74, 86,
187; v. 387
Ney (see d'Elchingen)
Nicholas Bishop of Myra, Saint, i. 174;
v. 289
Nicholas II., Pope, v. 11
Nicholas III. Marquis of Este, vi. 92
Nicholas I. Tsar of All the Russias,
i. 99; iv. 33, 36, 118, 266-270, 274-279,
281-283; v. 322
Nicholas of Russia, Grand-duke (see
Nicholas I. Tsar of All the Russias)
Nicholas of Russia, Grand-duchess (see
Alexandra Feodorowna Empress of
Russia)
Nicholas of Pisa (see Pisano)
Nicolaï, Monsignore Nicola Maria, iv. 259
Nicolas (see Chamfort)
Niebuhr, Barthold Georg, iv. 236
Nivelon, M., i. 173
Nivelon (see also Carline)
Nivernais, Louis Jules Mancini-Mazarini,
Duc de, i. 156
Noah (see Noe)
Noailles, Adrien Maurice Maréchal
Duc de Noailles, vi. 238-240
Noailles, nie d'Aubigné, Duchesse de,
vi. 238, 240
Noailles, Adrien Maurice Victurnien
Mathieu Duc de, ii. 191; vi. 239
Noailles, Clotilde de la Ferté-Méung-Molé
de Champlatreux, Duchesse
Douairière de, ii. 191
Noailles, Paul Duc de, vi. 236, 242-244,
246, 249, 259
Noailles, Alice de Rochechouart-Mortemart,
Duchesse de, vi. 243-244, 246
Noailles, Alexis Louis Joseph Comte
de, iii. 97; iv. 199
Noailles, Louis Marie Vicomte de, i.
163, 176
Noailles, Alfred Louis Dominique
Vincent de Paule Vicomte de, iv. 78
Noailles, Charlotte Marie Antoinette
Léontine de Noailles-Mouchy,
Vicomtesse de, iv. 78
Noailles (see also Mouchy)
Noe, v. 182
Noel (see Milbanke-Noel)
Nogart, Guillaume de, v. 48
Nogarola, Isotta, vi. 110-111
Noirot, Lieutenant, ii. 262-263; v. 103
Normandie, Duc de (see Louis XVII.
King of France and Navarre)
Normant (see Le Normant)
North (see Guilford)
Norvins, Jacques Marquet de Montbreton,
Baron de, iv. 180, 182
Nôtre (see Le Nôtre)
Nouail, Pierre Henri, i. 15-16
Noue (see La Noue)
Noury de Mauny, i. 108
Nova, João de, iii. 206-207
Nugent, Charles Vicomte de, vi. 133
O
Obizzo I. Marquis of Este, vi. 92
Obizzo I. Marquis of Este and Lord of
Ferrara, vi. 92
O'Connell, Daniel, iv. 92, 293
Odescalchi, Carlo Cardinal, iv. 235;
v. 5, 8
Odo King of France, iii. 58
Odo of Orleans, ii. 30
Odoacer King of the Heruli, iv. 227;
vi. 195
Oger or Ogier, v. 378
O'Heguerty the Elder, Comte, v. 371,
374-375, 378; vi. 138
O'Heguerty the Younger, M., v. 408, 410
O'Larry, Mrs., ii. 99
O'Larry, Miss. ii. 99
Olewieff, Major, iii. 83-84
Olga Nicolaiëvna of Russia, Queen of
Wurtemberg, v. 322
Olimpia (see Pamfili)
Olivarez, Gasparo de Guzman, Conde
de, v. 51
Olive, Demoiselle, iv. 148
Olivet, Captain, vi. 70
d'Olivet, Pierre Joseph Thoulier, Abbé,
vi. 41
Olivier, François Chancelier, v. 49-50
Olivier, Jeanne Adélaïde Gérardine, i. 128, 173
Oliviers (see Flins des Oliviers)
O'Meara, Dr. Barry Edward, iii. 216
Oppian, ii. 27, 306-307
Oppizzoni, Carlo Cardinal, iv. 235; v.
18, 21, 23
d'Ops, M., iii. 134
d'Ops, Dame, iii. 134
d'Orbesan, Sieur, vi. 103
Orford, Horace Walpole, third Earl of, ii. 172
d'Orglandes (see Chateaubriand)
O'Riordan (see Connell)
d'Orléans, Philippe I. first Duc, iv. 251; v. 137
d'Orléans, Henrietta Anna of England,
Duchesse, iii. 128; iv. 251; v. 137
d'Orléans, Charlotte Elizabeth of
Bavaria, Duchesse, v. 137
d'Orléans, Philippe II. second Duc, v.
137, 230; vi. 199-200
d'Orléans, Françoise Mademoiselle de
Blois, Duchesse, v. 137
d'Orléans, Louis third Duc, v. 137
d'Orléans, Augusta of Baden, Duchesse,
v. 137
d'Orléans, Louis Philippe fourth Duc,
v. 137
d'Orléans, Louise de Bourbon-Conti,
Duchesse, v. 137
d'Orléans, Jeanne Béraud de La Haye
de Riou, Marquise de Montesson,
later Duchesse, v. 137
d'Orléans, Louis Philippe Joseph fifth
Duc, i. 51, 145, 157, 174, 176; ii.
71, 294; iii. 111, 143; iv. 12; v.
137, 141, 151
d'Orléans, Louis Philippe sixth Duc
(see Louis-Philippe King of the
French)
d'Orléans, Ferdinand Philippe Louis
Charles Henri seventh Duc, vi. 150
d'Orléans, Louise Marie Adélaïde de
Penthièvre, Duchesse, iv. 12
d'Orléans, Helen of Mecklenburg-Schwerin,
Duchesse, vi. 150
Orléans (see Dorléans and Odo of Orléans)
d'Ornano, Philippe Antoine Comte, iii. 109
d'Ornano (see also Walewska)
d'Orsay, Gillion Gaspard Alfred de
Grimaud, Comte, iv. 73
d'Orsay, Lady Harriet Gardiner,
Comtesse, iv. 73
Orsini, Duca di Bracciano, iv. 80
Osman Seid, ii. 333
d'Osmond, René Eustache Marquis, ii.
103; iv. 74
d'Osmond, Éléonore Dillon, Marquise, iv. 74
d'Ossat, Bishop of Rennes, later of
Bayeux, Arnaud Cardinal, iv. 280;
v. 50, 55, 70
Ossian, ii. 133; iii. 214; vi. 79
Osten-Sacken, Fabian Wilhelm Prince
von der, iii. 63
Otho, the Emperor, i. 158
d'Otrante, Joseph Fouché Duc, ii. 17,
118, 259, 261; iii. 16-17, 111, 141-144
144, 151, 154-155, 165, 167-168,
175-176, 178-180, 182-184; iv. 3,
11, 180, 194, 196
Otto III., the Emperor, v. 376
Otto IV., the Emperor, ii. 43
Otto King of the Hellenes, iv. 118
Ottoboni, Pietro Cardinal, v. 15
Otway, Thomas, vi. 74-75
Oudart, M., v. 135
Oudinot (see Reggio)
Outcaire (see Oger)
Ouvrard, the printer, v. 132
Ouvrier, the Polytechnic scholar, v. 110
Overbeck, Friedrich Johann, iv. 240
Ovid, Publius Ovidius Naso, known as,
ii. 9, 186; v. 63, 69, 229
Oxenstiern, Axel Count, v. 51
Oxenstiern, Benedikt, v. 51
P
Pacca, Bishop of Velletri, Bartolommeo
Cardinal, v. 4-5, 23
Paganini, Nicola, iv. 237
Paisiello, Giovanni, i. 225
Pajol, Pierre Claude Comte, v. 108,
138, 152-153
Pajol, Élise Oudinot de Reggio,
Comtesse, v. 108
Palestrina, Principessa Barberini-Colonna
di, iv. 256
Palissot de Montenoy, Charles, i. 132
Palladio, Andrea, vi. 17, 46
Palli (see Lucchesi-Palli)
Pallucci, Field-Marshal, vi. 62
Palm, Johann Philipp, iii. 78-79
Palma the Elder, Jacopo, vi. 49
Palma the Younger, Jacopo, vi. 49, 103
Palma-Cayet (see Cayet)
Pamfili, Olimpia Maldachini, Donna, v. 14
Pan (see Mallet-Dupan)
Panat, Chevalier de, ii. 100, 117-118
Panckoucke, Charles Joseph, ii. 300
Pange, François de, i. 174
Pange (see also Silléry)
Panormita, Antonio Beccadelli, vi. 105
Paolo, Pietro Paolo Sarpi, known as
Fra, vi. 65
Paolo, the Vicomte de Chateaubriand's
Italian servant, vi. 47
Parc (see Chateaubriand du Parc)
Pardessus, Jean Marie, v. 304
Paris, Louis Philippe Albert d'Orléans,
Comte de, v. 22
Paris (see also Robert Count of Paris)
Pâris, Body-guard, ii. 296; vi. 162
Parma (see Cambacérès)
Parmentier, M. de, ii. 84
Parny, Évariste Désiré Desforges,
Chevalier de, i. 64, 129, 178; iii. 30
Parny, M. de, i. 128
Parny, Dame de (see Contat)
Parquin, Charles, v. 296
Parquin, née Cochelet, Dame, v. 296
Parry, Sir William Edward, i. 136;
vi. 62, 122, 222
Pascal, Blaise, ii. 152, 216; v. 406
Paskevitch (see Warsaw)
Pasquier, Étienne Denis Baron, later
Chancelier Duc, i. 37; ii. 168, 253;
iii. 87; iv. 26, 30, 45, 51-55, 59;
v. 89, 172-173, 256
Pasquin, the lampooner, v. 273
Pasta, Giuditta Negri, Dame, ii. 86;
v. 67; vi. 175
Pastoret, Claude Emmanuel Joseph
Pierre Chancelier Marquis de, v. 303-304;
vi. 26, 136, 138
Patin, Charles Gui, vi. 103-104
Patin, Gui, vi. 103-104
Patrick Bishop of Armagh, Saint, vi. 172
Paul the Apostle, Saint, v. 241
Paul the Hermit or the Simple, Saint,
ii. 43; v. 54
Paul IV., Pope, ii. 45
Paul V., Pope, vi. 65
Paul I. Tsar of all the Russias, ii. 289;
iii. 49; iv. 33, 281
Paul (see also Vincent of Paul)
Paul Charles Frederic Augustus of
Wurtemberg, Prince, iv. 36; v. 41
Paule, Fair (see Fontenille)
Paulin, the bookseller, v. 127
Paulus (see Æmilius Paulus)
Paz (see Du Paz)
Pecquet, Jean, i. 125
Pedicini, Carlo Maria Cardinal, v. 8,
21, 23
Peel, Sir Robert, iv. 80, 219
Peggy, the Vicomte de Chateaubriand's
house-maid, i. 190
Pellico, Silvio, i. xxiii; v. 348; vi. 55-57,
65, 79, 105-112
Pellisson, Paul, iv. 292
Peltier, Jean Gabriel, i. 175; ii. 71-72,
76, 80-81, 99-100, 139-141; v. 205, 333
Péluse, Gaspard Monge, Comte de, ii. 187-188
Penhoën, Auguste Théodore Hilaire
Baron Barchon de, v. 86
Penhouet (see Becdelièvre-Penhouët)
Penn, William, i. 207
Penthièvre, Louis Joseph Marie de
Bourbon, Duc de, iv. 12
Penthièvre, Eudon Count of, i. 9
Penthièvre, Guy of, i. 141
Pepe, General Florestano, iv. 52
Pepin King of the Franks, iv. 109-110, 228
Pepin, the assassin, v. 101
Pepoli, Contessa di Castiglione, Letizia
Josefina Murat, Marchesa, iv. 198
Peretti, Signorina, v. 13
Pericles, i. 252; iii. 45, 96; v. 56, 272
Périer, Augustin Charles, v. 116, 123
Périer, Casimir, iv. 115, 137, 142; v.
88, 95-96, 98, 106-107, 113, 116-117,
128, 154, 229
Périer, ex-President of the French
Republic, M. Jean Paul Pierre Casimir,
iv. 137
Périgord (see Chalais-Périgord and
Talleyrand-Périgord)
Pérouse (see La Pérouse)
Perray, M. de, iii. 175
Perrin, Ennemond, ii. 308
Perrin (see also Bellune and Labé)
Perlet, Adrien, v. 120
Perrers, Alice, ii. 138
Perron (see Duperron)
Perseus King of Macedon, iii. 34
Persil, Jean Charles, v. 96, 310
Perugino, Pietro Vannucci, known as,
iv. 240
Pesaro (see Sforza)
Peter, Pope Saint, ii. 219; v. 9-10, 78,
316; vi. 216, 221
Peter I. Tsar of All the Russias, iv.
271; vi. 101, 203
Peter III. Tsar of All the Russias, i. 13;
ii. 289
Peter I. King of Portugal, vi. 24-25
Peter IV. King of Portugal and I.
Emperor of Brazil, iv. 53
Peter, the Vicomte de Chateaubriand's
footman, i. 190
Petermann, Lieutenant, ii. 261
Pétion de Villeneuve, Jérôme, ii. 13-14, 27
Petit, Jean Martin Baron, iii. 78
Petit, Louis Sébastien Olympe, ii. 193
Petit, René, i. 48, 108
Petit-Bois, Roger Vicomte du, i. 48
Petit-Bois (see also Pinot du Petit-Bois)
Petrarch, Francesco Petrarca, known as,
ii. 33, 124, 200-201, 220; iv. 181;
vi. 49-50, 78
Peyra, Adolphe, vi. 170
Peyronnet, Charles Ignace Comte de,
iv. 62, 117, 135-136; v. 87-88, 189,
422; vi. 229
Peysse, M., v. 95
Pezay, Alexandre Frédéric Jacques
Masson, Marquis de, i. 162
Pharamond King of the Franks, iv. 109
Phidias, v. 26; vi. 59
Phila, the courtezan, vi. 179
Philip III. Duke of Burgundy, iii. 135
Philip II. Augustus King of France,
i. 199; ii. 43, 173; iii. 177; vi. 27,
196
Philip III. King of France, i. 9; vi.
140, 196
Philip IV. King of France, v. 48
Philip VI. King of France, i. 141; ii.
73; v. 355, 411
Philip II. King of Macedon, iv. 192
Philip Duke of Parma, vi. 202
Philip II. King of Spain, Naples, Sicily
and England, i. 212; ii. 50; iii. 176;
iv. 58, 239; v. 13
Philip III. King of Spain, ii. 151
Philip V. King of Spain, iv. 80; v. 15;
vi. 200, 238, 246
Philip of Austria, Archduke, iii. 127
Philip, Pompey's freedman, ii. 337
Philipon, Charles, v. 261-263
Philipon, Emma, v. 261-263
Philippa of Hainault, Queen of
England, iii. 138
Phocion, i. 223; iii. 96
Phryne, the courtezan, vi. 180
Piacenza (see Lebrun)
Piat, Demoiselles, ii. 310
Pibrac, Gui du Faur, Seigneur de, ii. 206
Picard, Louis Benoit, ii. 170
Piccini, Nicola, i. 179
Piccolomini, Octavio Trince, vi. 4
Piccolomini, Max, vi. 4
Pichegni, General Charles, i. 65; ii.
249, 252, 263; iii. 67, 203;
iv. 167-168, 299
Piconnerie (see d'Isly)
Piégard Sainte-Croix (see Sainte-Croix)
Pierre, Madame de Bedée's
man-servant, i. 22
Pierres de Bernis (see Bernis)
Piet-Tardiveau, Jean Pierre, iv. 14
Pietro di Filippo de' Giunazzi (see
Romano)
Piffre, M., iv. 67
Pilate, Pontius Pilatus, known as
Pontius, vi. 220
Pillet, Léon, v. 96
Pilorge, Hyacinthe, iv. 45, 90, 97, 298;
v. 28, 89, 121, 197-198, 218, 236,
325, 330-331, 338, 340-341, 348,
351; vi. 102, 105, 121, 129, 139, 168
Pindar, i. 131; ii. 254; vi. 172
Pindemonte, Giovanni, vi. 79
Pindemonte, Ippolyto, i. xxiii; vi. 79
Pinelli, Bartolomeo, iv. 241
Pinot du Petit-Bois, Jean Anne Comte
de, i. 48, 108
Pinsonnière, the Polytechnic scholar,
v. 107
Pinte-de-Vin (see Dujardin Pinte-de-Vin)
Pioche de La Vergne, Aymar, iii. 128
Piron, Alexis, v. 55
Pisan, Thomas de, vi. 140
Pisan, Christine de, vi. 140
Pisano, Nicholas of Pisa, known as
Niccola, vi. 46, 59
Pitt, William, i. xxi, 186; ii. 69, 142-143,
145-146; iv. 82, 93, 120
Pitton de Tournefort (see Tournefort)
Pius II., Pope, ii. 53
Pius VI., Pope, iii. 30; v. 373
Pius VII., Pope, i. xxi, 181; ii. 180,
213, 219-220, 230, 238, 248; iii. 9,
51, 63, 194, 209; iv. 29, 110, 180,
182, 198-199, 220, 225, 229, 231,
255, 262, 297, 302; v. 1-2, 4-6,
23-24, 48, 59; vi. 45
Pius VIII., Pope, v. 4-5, 23, 27, 29-31,
35-40, 46, 49, 53, 61, 78, 384
Pius IX., Pope, iv. 33
Placence (see Lebrun)
Placidia Queen of the Visigoths, later
the Empress Galla, iv. 227
Plagnol, M., v. 96
Planta, Joseph, iv. 65
Plato, ii. 169; iv. 93; v. 53; vi. 194
Plautus, Titus Maccius, ii. 204
Pleineselve, Colonel de, v. 103
Plélo, Louis Robert Hippolyte de
Bréhan, Comte de, i. 13
Plessix, M. du, v. 85
Plessix de Parscau, Hervé Louis Joseph
Marie Comte du, ii. 5; v. 85
Plessix de Parscau, Anne Buisson de
La Vigne, Comtesse du, ii. 5, 24
Plessix de Parscau née de Kermalun,
Comtesse du, ii. 5
Pletho, Georgius Gemistus, vi. 49
Pliny the Elder, Caius Plinius Secundus,
known as, i. 39; iv. 140; v. 60, 334;
vi. 237
Pliny the Younger, Caius Plinius
Cæcilius Secundus, known as, v. 60
Ploërmel, Bemborough, Lord of, i. 9
Plotinus, ii. 184
Plouer, Françoise Gertrude de
Contades, Comtesse de, i. 15-16, 18
Plutarch, i. 23; ii. 337; iii. 220; vi.
157, 236
Podenas, née de Nadaillac, Marquise
de, vi. 94, 98, 100
Podiebrad (see George Podiebrad, King
of Bohemia)
Poe, Edgar Allen, i. 254
Poitiers (see Saint-Vallier and Valentinois)
Poix, Dame de, i. 174
Poix (see also Mouchy)
Polastron, Vicomte de, v. 373
Polastron, Marie Louise Françoise de
Lussan d'Esparbès, Vicomtesse de,
v. 373-374
Polignac, Jules François Armand
Vicomte, later Duc de, i. 160
Polignac, Yolande Martine Gabrielle
de Polastron, Vicomtesse, later
Duchesse de, i. 160; v. 373
Polignac, Armand Prince de, iii. 97
Polignac, Jules Auguste Armand Marie
Prince de, i. 160; iii. 97, 129; iv.
29, 33, 136, 138, 167; v. 69, 72,
74-78, 81-82, 84, 87, 92-93, 95-96,
99-100, 106, 108, 144, 189, 320, 375,
380, 422; vi. 117
Pollio, Caius Asinius, iii. 197
Polo, Maffeo, vi. 77
Polo, Marco, vi. 77-78
Polo, Nicolo, vi. 77
Poltrot de Méré, Sieur, ii. 45
Pombal, Sebastiio Jose de Carvalho e
Mello, Marques de, v. 51
Pommereul, François René Jean Baron
de, i. 104-105; iii. 36
Pommereul, Messieurs de, i. 111, 125
Pompadour, Jeanne Antoinette Poisson
Le Normant d'Étioles, Marquise de,
ii. 166, 298: iii. 181; iv. 38, 79;
v. 51; vi. 242
Pompey, Sextus Pompeius Magnus,
known as Sextus, i. 68; ii. 331, 337;
iv. 14, 180; v. 85, 204
Pomponne, Simon Arnauld, Marquis
de, v. 54
Poncelet, alias Chevalier, Louis, v. 220
Pons de L'Hérault (see Rio)
Pons de Verdun, Philippe Laurent, ii. 52
Ponsonby, Hon. Sir Frederick Cavendish, iv. 81
Ponsonby, née Bathurst, Lady Emily
Charlotte, iv. 81
Pontbriand (see Breil de Pontbriand)
Pontcarré, Vicomte de, iv. 106
Pontecoulant, Louis Gustave Le
Doulcet, Comte de, iii. 168, 170
Pontmartin, Armand Augustin Joseph
Marie Ferrand, Comte de, v. 101
Pope, Alexander, ii. 121; iv. 80
Poppœa Sabina, the Empress, v. 215
Poquelin (see Molière)
Porcher, Abbé, i. 43, 45, 56-57, 63
Porta (see Sébastiani de La Porta)
Portal, M., i. 108
Portalis, Joseph Marie Comte, iv. 138,
296, 299-303; v. 2-8, 17-18, 20-24,
27, 30-34, 37-42, 46-49, 52, 68, 77
Porte (see La Porte)
Portland, Henrietta Scott, Duchess of, ii. 79
Portsmouth, Duchesse d'Aubigny,
Louise Renée de Kerouaille, Duchess
of, ii. 137
Potelet, Seigneur de Saint-Mahé and de
La Durantais, François Jean Baptiste,
i. 47
Pothin Bishop of Lyons, Saint, ii. 308
Potier, Charles, v. 21
Potocki, Jan Count, iv. 232
Poubelle, M., v. 137
Poullain, known as Saint-Louis, Louis,
ii. 27-29
Poultier, M., v. 258
Pouqueville, François Charles Hugues
Laurent, v. 206, 234
Pourrat, ii. 172
Pourtales, Louis Comte de, iv. 107
Poussin, Nicolas, iv. 232, 242, 258-259,
285-286, 298, 304
Poussin, Anne Marie Dughet, Dame,
iv. 242
Pozzo di Borgo, Carlo Andrea Count,
iii. 50, 111, 158, 162, 171-172; iv.
76; v. 145-147
Pradon, Nicolas, vi. 240
Pradt, Bishop of Poitiers, later
Archbishop of Mechlin, Dominique Baron
Dufour de, iii. 72, 78, 98
Prague (see Jerome of Prague)
Praslin, Charles Laure Hugues Théobald
Duc de Choiseul, iii. 168
Praslin, Altarice Rosalba Sébastiani,
Duchesse de Choiseul, iii. 168
Praxiteles, vi. 54, 180
Pressigny (see Cortois de Pressigny)
Prestre de Vauban (see Vauban)
Princeteau, Marie Decazes, Dame, iv. 10
Prior, Matthew, iv. 80
Probus, the Emperor, ii. 105
Procopius, iv. 227
Propertius, Sextus, i. 162; iv. 248
Proudhon, Pierre Joseph, v. 219
Proudhon, née Sainte-Croix, Madame, v. 219
Provence, Comte de (see Louis XVIII.
King of France and Navarre)
Provence, Comtesse de (see Josephine
of Sardinia, Queen of France)
Prudhomme, Louis Marie, vi. 154
Prunelle, Dr. Clement François Victor
Gabriel, iv. 120
Ptolemy I. King of Egypt, iv. 75
Ptolemy II. King of Egypt, iv. 75
Ptolemy, Claudius Ptolemæus, known as, v. 335
Pufendorf, Samuel Baron von, iv. 280
Puyravault, Pierre François Audrey de,
v. 98, 105-106, 113
Pythagoras, i. 196; iv. 206; v. 68; vi. 4
Pytheas, ii. 202
Q
Quatt, Herr, iv. 37
Québriac, Seigneur de Patrion, Jean
François Xavier Comte de, i. 53, 106
Québriac, Comtesse de (see Chateaubourg)
Quecq, Jacques Édouard, iv. 241
Queensberry, William Douglas, fourth
Duke of, ii. 138
Quélen, Archbishop of Paris, Hyacinthe
de, iv. 111-112; v. 190, 241-242;
vi. 190, 263
Quincy (see Cortois de Quincy)
Quinette, Nicolas Marie Baron, iii. 167-168
Quintal, the boatman, iii. 13, 15, 17
R
Rabbe, Colonel, ii. 262
Rabbe, Alphonse, v. 97
Rabelais, François, i. 133; ii. 98, 124,
155; 243
Rachel, iii. 25
Racine, Jean Baptiste, i. 14, 62, 178;
ii. 102, 106, 128, 178, 183, 293;
iii. 10, 33, 131, 223; iv. 23; v. 57,
335; vi. 36, 202, 240
Racine the Younger, M., vi. 202
Radcliffe, Ann Wood, Mrs., ii. 126
Radziwill, Princess von, iv. 46
Radziwill the Younger, Princess von, iv. 46
Rafin (see Duchesnois)
Raguse, Auguste Frédéric Louis Viesse
de Marmont, Maréchal Duc de, iii.
50, 57, 118, 124; iv. 202; v. 94-96,
98, 100-101, 106-110, 130-131
Raineral (see Ruvigny and Raineval)
Rainneville, Alphonse Valentin Vaysse,
Comte de, iv. 97
Ranville (see Guernon-Ranville)
Rambouillet de La Sablière (see La
Sablière)
Rameses II. King of Egypt (see
Sesostris)
Rancé, Abbot of the Trappe, Armand
Jean Le Bouthillier de, vi. 251, 253
Raphael Sanzio, i. 31; ii. 140, 178,
306, 309; iii. 135; iv. 181, 225, 232,
239-240, 242-243, 248-249; v. 42,
47, 58, 61, 89, 273, 286, 353; vi. 3,
22, 59, 84, 141
Rasponi, Luisa Giulia Carolina Murat,
Contessa, iv. 198
Raulx, the Comte de Chateaubriand's
game-keeper, i. 49
Rauzan, Henri Louis Comte de
Chestellux, later Duc de, iii. 101
Rauzan, Claire Henriette Philippine
Benjamine de Durfort, Duchesse de,
iii. 101, 128
Ravenel du Boistelleul (see Boistelleul)
Ravier, Colonel, ii. 262
Raymond IV. Count of Toulouse,
Duke of Bordeaux, Marquis of
Provence, ii. 207, 292
Raymond (see also Damaze de Raymond)
Raymond Berengarius IV. Count of
Provence, ii. 192
Raynal, Abbé Guillaume Thomas
François, i. 110
Rayneval, François Joseph Maximilien
Gérard Comte de, iv. 102
Raynouard, François Juste Marie, iii. 29
Razumowsky, Cyrille Field-Marshal
Count, iii. 49
Réal, Pierre François Comte, ii. 259, 283
Réaux (see Taboureau des Réaux and
Tallemant des Réaux)
Rebecque (see Constant de Rebecque)
Reboul, Jean, ii. 203
Récamier, Jacques Rose, i. 189; ii.
210; iv. 150, 158, 170-171, 178
**Récamier, Jeanne Françoise Julie
Adélaïde Bernard, Dame, i. 5, 188;
ii. 67; iii. 102; iv. 34, 40, 119, 121,
147-174, 177-184, 186-192, 194, 198-214
220, 233-234, 261-262, 284-288,
296-299, 302-304; v. 2, 18-19,
21-22, 25, 30, 35-37, 49, 64, 66-67, 89,
93-94, 156; 162, 197-201, 217,
260-261, 291-293, 296-301; vi. 25,
56, 102, 236, 250, 258-262
Récamier, Madame Delphin, iv. 178
Reeve, Henry, vi. 155-156
Reggio, Nicolas Charles Oudinot,
Maréchal Duc de, iii. 95; iv. 135
Regnaud de Saint-Jean-d'Angély,
Michel Louis Étienne, iii. 23
Regnaud de Saint-Jean-d'Angély,
Dame, iii. 35
Regnault, Jean Baptiste, iv. 234
Regnier (see Massa)
Régnier, Mathurin, ii. 305; vi. 29
Régnier-Desmarais, François Séraphin,
v. 336
Regulus Bishop of Senlis, Saint, iii. 177
Regulus, Marcus Atilius, i. 33
Reid, Thomas, vi. 256
Reinhard, Charles Frédéric Comte, vi. 189
Rembrand van Rijn, Paul, ii. 178
Rémusat, Jean Pierre Abel, v. 80
Rémusat, Auguste Laurent Comte de,
ii. 261
Rémusat, Claire Élisabeth Jeanne
Gravier de Vergennes, Comtesse de,
ii. 261, 282; iii. 17
Rémusat, Charles de, v. 95
Rémusat, M. Paul Louis Étienne de,
ii. 282
René I. Duke of Anjou, King of
Naples, ii. 200, 202
Renée of France, Duchess of Ferrara,
vi. 75, 96
Renouard de Brussières, M., i. 174
Renouard de Brussières (see also Buffon)
Reshid Pasha, Mustapha Mehemed, v. 51
Retz, Archbishop of Paris, Jean François
Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de, iii.
131; iv. 246; v. 14, 16
Revellière-Lepeaux (see La Revellière-Lepeaux)
Reynière (see Grimrod)
Riario, Lord of Imola and Forli,
Girolamo, iv. 229
Riario, Ottaviano, iv. 229
Riario (see also Sforza)
Ricé, M. de, iii. 171, 173
Richard I. King of England, v. 70,
329, 377
Richard II. King of England, ii. 121;
iii. 138
Richard III. King of England, i. 25;
ii. 75, 121
Richard de Laprade (see Laprade)
Richardson, Samuel, ii. 125-126
Richelieu, Armand Jean du Plessis,
Cardinal Duc de, i. 114; iv. 212,
245; v. 50, 55, 90
Richelieu, Louis François Armand du
Plessis de Vignerot, Maréchal Duc
de, i. 132; ii. 298
Richelieu, Armand Emmanuel du
Plessis de Vignerot, Duc de, iii. 51,
123, 223; iv. 4, 7, 9, 11, 25-29, 43,
59-77, 87, 141; v. 398
Richelieu, née de Rochechouart,
Duchesse de, iv. 77
Richer, vi. 139
Richmond and Lennox, Charles Lennox,
first Duke of, ii. 137
Richmond and Lennox, Charles
Lennox, third Duke of, iv. 72
Ricimer, ii. 48
Riedmatten, President of the Town
Council of Sion, M. de, ii. 250
Rietz, Frederic William II.'s footman,
iv. 38
Rietz (see also Lichtenau)
Rigaud, Chief Syndic of Geneva, v. 201
Rigny, Henri Comte de, v. 72
Rigoltus (see Rigord)
Rigord, ii. 30
Rijn (see Rembrand van Rijn)
Rimini (see Malatesta)
Rio, André Pons de L'Hérault, Comte
de, iii. 109
Riouffe, Honoré Jean Baron, ii. 52
Rivarol, Antoine Comte de, i. 175-176;
ii. 31-32, 80, 100; iii. 125; v. 267;
vi. 158
Rivarola, Agostino Cardinal, iv. 235
Rivaux, M., v. 103
Rivera, Dame de, vi. 244
Rivière, Charles François Riffordeau,
Duc de, iv. 138-139, 167; v. 342, 379
Rivoli, Prince d'Essling, André Masséna,
Maréchal Duc de, ii. 269; iii.
63, 68, 112, 120, 170, 203; iv. 164,
170, 227, 282
Robert I. Bruce, King of Scots, v. 411
Robert I. King of England (see Robert
II. Duke of Normandy)
Robert I. King of France, vi. 28
Robert II. King of France, iv. 58; v.
376; vi. 196
Robert I. Duke of Normandy, ii. 62
Robert II. Duke of Normandy, de jure
Robert I. King of England, ii. 62
Robert Count of Paris, vi. 28
Robert I. Duke of Parma, H.R.H., iv.
224; v. 361; vi. 254
Robert of Geneva, Count, v. 12
Robert, Hubert, ii. 296
Robert, Louis Léopold, iv. 240-241
Robert de Lamennais (see Lamennais)
Robert Guiscard, Duke of Apulia and
Calabria, iv. 185-186
Robertson, Étienne Gaspard, ii. 159
Robertson, William, ii. 121, 300
Robespierre, Maximilien Marie Isidore,
i. 132, 170-171, 175, 218; ii. 19-21,
52, 160, 222, 257, 259; iii. 124, 201;
iv. 4, 23, 189; v. 215; vi. 166
Robion, M., i. 108
Robusti, the dyer, vi. 48
Robusti (see also Tintoretto)
Rocca, M. de, i. 163; iv. 177-178,
205-206
Rochambeau, Jean Baptiste Donatien
de Viveur, Comte de, i. 218-219
Roche, Achille, ii. 265, 275-276
Rochechouart, Dame de, ii. 84
Rochefort (see d'Enghien)
Rochefoucauld (see La Rochefoucauld)
Rochejacquelein (see La Rochejacquelein)
Rockingham, Charles Watson Wentworth,
second Marquess of, ii. 143
Rocoules, Madame de, iv. 37
Rodriguez de Silva Velasquez (see
Velasquez)
Rodney, George Brydges, first Lord, i. 215
Roederer, Pierre Louis Comte, vi. 184
Roger I. Count of Sicily, iv. 186
Roger I. King of the Two Sicilies,
Roger II. Count of Sicily, later, iv. 186
Roger, Lieutenant, iv. 211-212
Rogers, Samuel, ii. 128; vi. 88-89
Roh, Père Jacques, vi. 43
Rohan, Edward of, i. 9
Rohan, Margaret of, i. 9
Rohan, Renée de, i. 75
Rohan-Chabot, Archbishop of Auch,
later of Besançon, Louis François
Auguste Prince de Léon, Cardinal
Duc de, iv. 187-188; v. 64; vi. 136
Rohan-Chabot, née de Serent, Duchesse
de, iv. 187
Rohan-Rochefort (see d'Enghien)
Roland de La Platière, Jean Marie, ii.
12, 14, 25, 106
Roland de la Platière, Manon Jeanne
Philipon, Dame, ii. 12, 25, 26
Rolle, Jacques Hippolyte, v. 95
Rollin, Charles, i. 63
Rollin, Dame, v. 261
Rollin (see also Ledru-Rollin)
Rollo Duke of Normandy, i. 39
Romano, Giulio di Pietro di Filippo
de' Giunnazzi, known as Giulio, iv. 239
Romanzoff, Nikolai Count, iv. 40
Romberg, Édouard, iii. 132
Romulus King of Rome, vi. 196
Ronsard, Pierre de, i. 133, 245; vi. 82
Roqueplan, Louis Victor Nestor, v. 96
Rosa (see Martinez de La Rosa)
Rosanbo, Marquis de, ii. 296
Rosanbo, Louis Le Péletier, Vicomte
de, i. 135
Rosanbo, Louis de Péletier, President
de, i. 126, 134, 136, 178; ii. 28; v. 64
Rosanbo, Marie Thérese de Malesherbes,
Présidente de, i. 135-136; ii.
49, 81, 84; v. 64
Rosanbo, Dame de, ii. 296
Rose, the milliner, Madame, i. 99-100
Rose, the Vicomte de Chateaubriand's
house-maid, i. 190
Rose Récamier (see Récamier)
Roseau, Jean, ii. 21
Rosny (see Sully)
Rospigliosi (see Zagarolo)
Ross, Sir James Clark, vi. 222
Rossignol, General Jean Antoine, iii. 213
Rossini, Gioachino Antonio, iv. 41; v. 19, 43
Rostopchin, Feodor Count, iii. 55
Rostrenen, Père Grégoire de, i. 142
Rothenflue, Père Gaspard, vi. 43
Rothesay (see Stuart de Rothesay)
Rothschild, Nathaniel Mayer first Lord, iv. 71
Rothschild, Alphonse Baron de, iii. 72
Rothschild, Anselm Mayer Baron de, iv. 71
Rothschild, Charles Mayor Baron de, iv. 71
Rothschild, James Mayer Baron de, iv. 71, 79
Rothschild, Nathan Mayer Baron de, iv. 71, 79
Rothschild, Salomon Mayer Baron de, iv. 71
Rothschild, Mayer Anselm, iv. 79
Rouërie (see La Rouërie)
Rouillac, Abbé de, i. 73
Rousseau, Jean Baptiste, i. 131
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, i. 83, 122, 180,
219; ii. 22, 26, 85, 105, 133, 164,
176, 197, 215, 244, 303-304, 307-308;
iv. 106-107, 122, 202, 253, 285; v.
292, 300-301, 318; vi. 65, 70-75, 82,
Rousseau, Dame, ii. 164
Rousseau, the clock-maker, vi. 72
Roussel, the boatman, iii. 13
Roussy (see Girodet)
Roux, Jacques, iv. 4
Roux de Laborie (see Laborie)
Rovere (see Lante Monfeltrio delle Rovere)
Roxana Queen of Macedon, iv. 192
Rovedino, Signor, i. 173
Rovigo, Anne Jean Marie René Savary,
Duc de, ii. 261-262, 265, 270,
272-277, 279, 283; iii. 188; iv. 176
Roy, Antoine Comte, iv. 138-139
Royer-Collard, Pierre Paul, iv. 61, 136,
138, 142; v. 304, 416
Rubempré, Louis de Mailly, Comte de,
ii. 297
Rubens, Peter Paul, iv. 250; vi. 74
Rudolph II., the Emperor, v. 387
Rulhière, Claude Carloman de, i. 132;
ii. 10
Rupert Bishop of Worms, Saint, vi. 126
Russell, John first Earl, iv. 69
Ruvigny and Raineval, Melville
Amadeus Henry Douglas Heddle de La
Caillemotte de Massue de Ruvigny,
Marquis de, iv. 237
Rysbrack, Michael, ii. 74
S
Sabatier, Alexis, v. 244
Sablière (see La Sablière)
Sabran, Marquis de, i. 144
Sabran, Elzéar Louis Marie Comte de,
iv. 164
Sabran (see also Boufflers and Elzear)
Sacchetti, v. 14
Sacchini, Antonio Maria Gasparo, i. 179
Sacken (see Osten-Sacken)
Sagan (see Wallenstein)
Saget, M., ii. 307-309
Saint-Agnan, Comte de, v. 247
Saint-Aignan (see Chalais-Périgord)
St. Albans, Sir Francis Bacon, first
Lord Verulam, first Viscount, ii. 74;
v. 57
Saint-Ange, Ange François Fariau,
known as de, ii. 9
Saint-Aubin, Jeanne Charlotte Schroeder,
Dame d'Herbey, known as Madame, i. 173
Saint-Balmont, Alberte Barbe d'Ercecourt,
Comtesse de, ii. 53
Saint-Chamans, Alfred Armand Robert
Comte de, v. 101
Saint-Cyr (see Gouvion de Saint-Cyr)
Saint-Germain, Claude Louis Comte
de, vi. 202-203
Saint-Germain, Germain Couhaillon,
known as, ii. 236, 239-240, 316-317
Saint-Germain, Dame, ii. 236-237
Saint-Gilles (see Raymond IV. Count
of Toulouse)
Saint-Huberti, later Comtesse
d'Entragues, Antoinette Cécile Clauvel,
Dame, i. 113
Saint-Hyacinthe, Hyacinthe Cordonnier,
known as Thémiseuil, v. 413
Saint-Fargeau, Michel Lepelletier de,
ii. 296; vi. 162
Saint-Fargeau, Dame de, ii. 295-296
Saint-Gall, the Monk of, iv. 170
Saint-Jean d'Angely (see Regnaud de
Saint-Jean d'Angely)
Saint-Just, Antoine, iii. 196
Saint-Lambert, Henri François Marquis
de, ii. 196-197, 209
Saint-Léon, M. de, iii. 143
Saint-Leu, pseud., Duc de (see Louis
King of Holland)
Saint-Leu, pseud., Duchesse de (see
Hortense Queen of Holland)
Saint-Leu, pseud., Comte de (see
Napoleon III. Emperor of the French)
Saint-Louis (see Poullain)
Saint-Luc (see Toussaint de Saint-Luc)
Saint-Mahé (see Potelet)
Saint-Marcellin, M. de Fontanes,
Comte de, ii. 105; iii. 140
Saint-Marsault, Baron de, i. 119
Saint-Marsault-Chatelaillon, Baron de,
i. 119
Saint-Martin, Louis Claude de, ii. 194-196
Saint-Martin, Antoine Jean, v. 80
Saint-Méry (see Moreau de Saint-Méry)
Saint-Paul (see Lemoyne-Saint-Paul)
Saint-Phal, the actor, i. 128
Saint-Pierre (see Bernardin de Saint-Pierre)
Saint-Pol, Antoine Montbreton,
Maréchal de, v. 131
Saint-Priest, François Emmanuel
Guignard, Comte de, i. 156; vi. 96,
230-231, 234-235
Saint-Priest, Duque de Almazan,
Emmanuel Louis Marie Guignard,
Vicomte de, vi. 97-192, 112
Saint-Priest, Vicomtesse de, vi. 97,
99-100
Saint-Riveul, Henri du Rocher, Comte
de, i. 64
Saint-Riveul, André François Jean du
Rocher de, i. 64, 154
Saint-Simon, Claude Anne Duc de, i. 49
Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvray, Duc
de, i. 167; iv. 80; v. 333
Saint-Simon, Claude Henri Comte de, ii. 184
Saint-Simon (see also Lautrec de Saint-Simon)
Saint-Tropez (see Suffren de Saint-Tropez)
Saint-Val the Elder, Demoiselle, i. 128
Saint-Val the Younger, Demoiselle, i. 128
Saint-Vallier, Jean de Poitiers,
Seigneur de, ii. 294
Saint-Véran (see Montcalm de Saint-Véran)
Sainte-Aulaire, Louis Clair Comte de
Beaupoil, de, iv. 10; v. 161-162;
vi. 113
Sainte-Aulaire, Comtesse de, iv. 10
Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, ii.
105; iii. 147; iv. 107; vi. 190
Sainte-Beuve, Demoiselle, vi. 143
Sainte-Croix, Gaudet de, ii. 163
Sainte-Croix, Piégard, v. 219
Sainte-Hyacinthe de Charrière [see
Charrière)
Sainte-Rosalie, Père Ange de, i. 5
Saintsbury, Professor George Edward
Bateman, vi. 88
Sala, Alexandre Adolphe, v. 101, 244;
vi. 97-98, 100
Sales (see Delisle de Sales)
Salisbury, William de Montacute, first
Earl of, ii. 74
Salisbury, Catharine Grandison,
Countess of, ii. 74, 138
Salisbury, James Cecil, seventh Earl,
later first Marquess of, iv. 161
Salisbury, Emily Mary Hill,
Marchioness of, iv. 161
Salle (see La Salle)
Sallust, Caius Sallustius Crispus, known
as, ii. 335; vi. 157
Salluste, Du Bartas (see Du Bartas)
Salmasius (see Saumaise)
Salome, v. 175
Salvage de Faverolles, née Dumorey,
Dame, iv. 287, 297; v. 297
Salvandy, Narcisse Achille Comte de,
iv. 144
Salverte, Eusèbe, v. 105
Salvetat (see Mars)
Salvianus, ii. 36
Samoyloff, Countess, vi. 120
Sand, Karl Ludwig, iv. 46, 56
Sand, Armandine Lucile Aurore Dupin,
Dame Dudevant, known as George,
v. 70; vi. 175-180
Sannazaro, Jacopo, iv. 185; vi. 48
Sanson, Charles Henri, i. 156; ii. 11;
vi. 202
Sansovino, Francesco, vi. 103
Sansovino, Giacomo Tatti, known as,
vi. 103
Santeuil, Jean Baptiste, v. 255
Sappho, vi. 172, 180
Sarrans the Younger, Bernard Alexis, v. 96
Saudre (see La Saudre)
Saumaise, Claude de, ii. 53
Saunois, the Revolutionary, iii. 213
Saussure, Horace Benedicte de, v. 200
Saussure (see also Necker de Saussure)
Sautelet, the publisher, v. 83; vi. 168-169
Sauvigny (see Bertier de Sauvigny)
Sauvo, François, v. 116
Savarin (see Brillat-Savarin)
Savoie-Carignan (see Carignan and Eugène)
Savary (see Rovigo)
Saxo Grammaticus, v. 277
Say, Thomas, i. 253
Scaliger, Joseph Justus, ii. 204; vi. 45
Scaliger, Julius Cæsar, vi. 45
Scandiano (see Bojardo)
Scarron, Paul, vi. 241
Schadow, Wilhelm Friedrich von, iv. 240
Scheffer, Ary, v. 128
Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich,
iv. 41, 108, 253, 274, 279; v. 412;
vi. 4-5
Schiller, the gaoler, vi. 56
Schnetz, Jean Victor, iv. 240
Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Julius, iv. 240
Schouwaloff, Paul Count, iii. 63, 78,
81, 83-84, 87
Schonen, Auguste Jean Marie Baron
de, v. 96, 98, 113, 152-153
Schwartz, the Vicomte de Chateaubriand's
travelling footman, v. 326,
330, 339-340, 352; vi. 12
Schwarzenberg, Karl Philipp Fieldmarshal
Prince von, iii. 56-57, 94
Schwed, Margrave, iv. 38
Sciarra, Marco, vi. 88
Scipio Africanus, Publius Cornelius
Scipio Africanus Major, known as,
i. 27; ii. 331; iii. 33; iv. 184-185,
247; v. 56; vi. 2, 50, 237
Scipio Numantinus, Publius Cornelius
Scipio Æmilianus Africanus Major,
known as, v. 56; vi. 2, 50, 237
Scipio, Metellus, ii. 331; iv. 184; vi.
2, 50, 237
Scott, Sir Walter, i. xxiii, 82; ii.
123-124, 127; iii. 88-89, 209; v. 246
Scudéry, Madeleine de, i. 14
Sébastiani de La Porta, Horace François
Bastien Comte, iii. 167-168; iv.
117, 127-128, 137, 142; v. 88, 105,
116, 123, 154
Sedaine, Michel Jean, i. 179
Ségalas, Anais Ménard, Dame, vi. 174
Séguier, Pierre Chancelier, i. 135
Séguier, Antoine, i. 135
Séguier, Antoine Louis, i. 135
Séguier, Matthieu, i. 135
Séguier, Pierre, i. 134-135
Ségur, Philippe Henri Maréchal Marquis
de, iii. 29
Ségur, Louis Philippe Comte de, iii.
28-29
Ségur, Philippe Paul Comte de, iii. 29,
89; v. 80
Ségur, Joseph Alexandre Vicomte de,
i. 177
Seleucus I. Nicator King of Syria,
Macedon, Thrace and Asia Minor,
iv. 75
Selkirk, Thomas Douglas, fifth Earl
of, i. 233
Semallé, Comte de, iii. 87
Semonville, Charles Louis Huguet,
Marquis, later Duc de, iv. 8, 110-111,
132; v. 111, 113-114, 116-118, 122,
128, 173
Sénacour, Étienne Pivert de, vi. 175
Seneca, Lucius Annæus, ii. 258, 335;
vi. 89
Senozan, Président Marquis de, ii. 295
Senozan, Anne Nicole de Lamoignon
de Malesherbes, Marquise de, ii. 295
Senty, M., v. 96
Sequin, Abbé, vi. 253, 256-257
Sérilly, Antoine Jean François de
Megret de, i. 174
Sérilly, later Dame de Pange, Anne
Louise Thomas, Dame de, i. 174
Seroux d'Agincourt (see d'Agincourt)
Serre, Pierre François Hercule Comte
de, iv. 103, 128; vi. 46
Serres, Olivier de, vi. 242
Sérurier, Jean Marie Philippe Maréchal
Comte, iii. 91
Sesmaisons, Donatien Comte de, v. 28
Sesmaisons, née Dambray, Comtesse
de, v. 28
Sesmaisons, Vicomte de, v. 28
Sesostris King of Egypt, Rameses II.,
known as, vi. 198
Severoli, Cardinal, v. 6
Sévigné, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal,
Marquise de, i. 14, 105, 125, 143;
ii. 100, 152, 179, 228-229, 302;
iii. 6, 89, 246; vi. 201
Sévigné, M. de, i. 143
Sévin, Abbé René Malo, i. 48, 108-109
Sèze, Raymond Comte de, iv. 24-25
Sforza, Galeazzo Maria, iv. 229
Sforza, later Signora Riario, later
Signora de' Medici, Caterina, iv. 229
Sforza, Lord of Pesaro, Giovanni, v.
13; vi. 50
Shakspeare, William, ii. 57, 75, 110,
121-125, 142, 202; iv. 93-94, 297;
v. 272, 387-388; vi. 46, 74, 169
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, i. 254
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin,
Mrs., i. 254
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley Butler, i. xxi;
ii. 143; iii. 68
Sicard, Abbé Roch Ambroise Cucurron,
iii. 16, 29
Siddons, Sarah Kemble, Mrs., iv. 78
Sidonius Apollinaris, Saint, ii. 45, 102;
v. 11
Sieyès, Emmanuel Joseph Comte
Sieyès, known as Abbé, v. 68-69
Sigonnière (see Ferron de La Sigonnière)
Silvester II., Pope, v. 376
Simiane, Dame de, i. 174
Simmons, Mr. Frederic John, i. xvii.
Simms and M'Intyre, i. xv.
Simon, Père Richard, i. 125
Simon, Antoine, i. 156
Simond, Louis, iv. 258
Simonde de Sismondi, Jean Charles
Léonard, iii. 152; v. 200
Simonides of Amorgos, v. 56
Simplicius Bishop of Bourges, Saint, v. 11
Sismondi (see Simonde de Sismondi)
Sivry, M. de, iv. 120
Sixtus V., Pope, ii. 18; iv. 296; v.
13, 47; vi. 87-88
Skrynecki, General Jan Sigismund
Boncza, v. 381-382
Skrynecki, Dame, v. 381-382
Smith, William, i. 186
Smolensk (see Kutuzoff)
Smollett, Tobias George, ii. 120
"Snaffle," pseud., vi. 266
Socrates, iii. 96; v. 63, 229; vi. 172
Solm-Braunfels, Frederic William
Prince of, iv. 33
Solon, v. 6
Somaglia (see Della Somaglia)
Somerset, Edward Adolphus Seymour,
eleventh Duke of, ii. 68; iv. 75, 161
Somerset, Charlotte Douglas-Hamilton,
Duchess of, iv. 161
Sophia Charlotte of Hanover, Queen
of Prussia, iv. 58
Sophocles, ii. 124, 178, 294; iii. 29;
v. 56
Sophonisba, ii. 331
Soubise, Charles de Rohan, Prince de,
ii. 293
Soult (see Dalmatie)
Southey, Robert, ii. 128
Spenser, Edmund, v. 57
Spinoza, Baruch, ii. 183
Spon, Jacques, ii. 208; iv. 246-247
Spontini, Gaspardo, iv. 42
Spontini, née Érard, Dame, iv. 42
Stadion, Johann Philipp Karl Joseph
Count von, iii. 49
Staël-Holstein, Baron de, i. 163
Staël-Holstein, later Dame de Rocca,
Anne Louise Germaine Necker,
Baronne de, i. 163, 174, 177; ii. 99,
104, 134, 161, 177, 179, 187, 241-243,
289-290, 303-304; iii. 61, 68-69,
101-102, 128; iv. 120-121, 148-149,
158-160, 163-164, 166, 170-178,
183, 200-201, 205-206, 213, 220, 254,
286; v. 198, 200, 202, 209, 237,
301; vi. 42, 75-76, 187
Staël-Holstein, Auguste Baron de, iv.
178; v. 300
Staël-Holstein, Matthieu Baron de, ii. 242
Staël-Holstein the Younger, Baron de,
iv. 178; v. 300
Stanislaus I. Leczinski, King of Poland,
ii. 299; iii. 27; vi. 101
Stapfer, Albert, v. 95
Statius, Publius Papinius, i. 56; v. 326;
vi. 79
Stauffacher, Werner, v. 274, 277
Steele, Sir Richard, ii. 121
Steenhuyse (see d'Hane de Steenhuyse)
Steibelt, Daniel, iv. 213
Steinle, Eduard, iv. 240
Stendhal, Marie Henri Beyle, known as
de, v. 202
Sterne, Rev. Laurence, ii. 125; iv. 80
Stewart, Dugald, v. 109; vi. 256
Stoltzenberg, Baroness von, iv. 38
Strabo, i. 27; vi. 68, 247
Strozzi, Pietro Marshal, ii. 45
Strozzi, Ercole, vi. 79
Strozzi, Tito Vespasiano, vi. 79
Stuart de Rothesay, Sir Charles Stuart,
first Lord, iii. 49, 90; v. 144-145
Stürmer, Bartholomäus Baron von,
iii. 210-211
Suard, Jean Baptiste Antoine, ii. 300;
iii. 24, 28
Suard, née Panckoucke, Dame, ii. 300
Suetonius Tranquillus, Caius, i. 57; iv. 225
Sueur (see Le Sueur)
Suffren de Saint-Tropez, Pierre André
de, i. xxi
Suger, Abbot of Saint-Denis, vi. 133
Suidas, vi. 247
Suleau, François, i. 175
Sulla, Lucius Cornelius, iv. 14; vi.
224-225
Sulla, Metella, vi. 224
Sully, Maximilien de Béthune, Baron
de Rosny, later Duc de, i. 117; ii.
121; iv. 127
Surcouf, Robert, i. 26
Survilliers,pseud., Comte and Comtesse
de (see Joseph King of Naples, later
of Spain and Julia Queen of Naples,
later of Spain)
Sussy, Jean Baptiste Henry Collin,
Comte de, v. 117, 122, 128
Sutton, Admiral Sir John, ii. 92
Sutton, Charlotte Ives, Lady, ii. 86-94,
96-97; iii. 135; iv. 63, 65, 94-95;
vi. 13, 252
Sutton, Captain, iv. 95
Sutton, Mrs., iv. 95
Suze (see La Suze)
Suwaroff, Alexander Count, v. 282
Swanton. Mr. Calvert Hutchinson, vi. 266
Swanwick, Anna, vi. 83-84
Swedenborg, Emanuel, ii. 76, 86
Swift, Dean Jonathan, iv. 80
Swift, the fur-trader, i. 217-218
Symmachus, Quintus Aurelius, v. 418
Symonds, John Addington, iv. 181
T
Taboureau des Réaux, M., i. 162
Tacitus, Cornelius, ii. 29, 97, 201, 291,
335; iii. 9, 195; iv. 225; v. 177;
vi. 19, 126-127, 137, 157
Taillepied de Bondy (see Bondy)
Talaru, Louis Justin Marie Marquis de,
ii. 194; iv. 101
Talaru, Comtesse de Clermont-Tonnerre,
later Marquise de, ii. 193-194; iv. 153
Tallart, Camille d'Hostun, Maréchal
Duc de, v. 333
Tallemant des Réaux, Gedeon, iv. 44
Talleyrand-Chalais, Prince de, iv. 79
Talleyrand-Périgord, Bishop of Autun,
Prince de Bénévent, Charles
Maurice Duc de, i. 99, 130, 176-177;
ii. 175, 214, 230, 247, 252,
259, 261, 265, 274-276, 279-284,
289; iii. 55-56, 60, 64, 72-74,
86-87, 98-100, 111, 122, 127, 131, 143,
148, 157, 159, 165, 171-175, 177-178,
180, 182, 196; iv. 3, 16, 26;
v. 83, 271, 325; vi. 40, 181-192
Talleyrand-Périgord, Mrs. Grant, née
Wortley, later Duchesse de, iii. 98
Talleyrand-Périgord, Édouard Duc de
Dino, later Duc de, i. 99
Talleyrand-Périgord, Princess Dorothea
of Courland, Duchesse de Dino,
later Duchesse de, i. 99; iv. 33
Talma, François Joseph, i. 128, 173;
ii. 177-178, 193; iv. 212
Talma, Charlotte Vanhove, Dame
Petit, later Dame, ii. 193
Talma, Louise Julie Carreau, Dame,
ii. 193
Talmont, Charles Léopold Henri de La
Trémoille, Prince de, iii. 101
Talmont (see also La Rochejacquelein
and La Trémoille)
Talon, General, v. 101
Tamerlane Khan of Tartary, iii. 191
Tancred Prince of Galilee, later of
Edessa, ii. 177; iv. 186
Tancred (see also Hauteville)
Tardieu d'Esclavelles (see d'Épinay)
Tardiveau (see Piet-Tardiveau)
Tarente, Étienne Jacques Joseph
Alexandre Macdonald, Maréchal Duc de,
iii. 90, 112, 177-178
Tasso, Bernardo, vi. 79, 81
Tasso, Torquato, i. xxiv, 203, 247; ii.
86, 123-124, 220; iii. 10; iv. 185-186,
231, 244, 286; v. 26-27, 63-64,
70, 254, 286, 330; vi. 3, 47,
79, 81-94, 96-97, 100, 102, 222
Tasso, Cornelia, vi. 84
Tastu, Sabine Casimir Amable Voïart,
Dame, vi. 171-172, 174-175
Tavernier, Jean Baptiste, i, 88
Taylor, the British agent, ii. 259
Teixeira de Mattos, Mr. David, i. xiii-xiv
Telemachus, ii. 48
Tell, William, v. 264-275, 277-279
Terence, Publius Terentius Afer, known
as, v. 56; vi. 11
Termes, M. de, ii. 302
Ternaux, Louis Guillaume Baron, iv. 117
Terray, Abbé Joseph Marie, i. 162
Tertre (see Duport du Tertre),
Tertullian, Quintus Septimius Florens
Tertullianus, known as, v. 10; vi. 59
Terwagne (see Théroigne de Méricourt)
Teste, Charles, v. 137
Teste, Jean Baptiste, v. 126
Tharin, Bishop of Strasburg, Claude
Marie Paul, iv. 139
Tharsis, Gendarme, ii. 262-263
Thiel, Jean François du, ii. 107, 111
Themistocles, i. 223; ii. 231; iii. 189-190
Theodatus King of the Ostrogoths, iv. 227
Theodebert I. King of Austrasia, ii. 52
Theodora, the Empress, iii. 206
Theodore I. King of Corsica, Theodor
Baron von Neuhof, later, vi. 101
Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoths, iv. 227
Theodoric II. King of the Visigoths, ii. 45
Theodosius I., the Emperor, iv. 227
Théroigne de Méricourt, Anne Joseph
Terwagne, known as Demoiselle, ii. 11
Thévenin (see Devienne)
Thianges, née de Rochechouart de
Mortemart, Duchesse de, i. 103
Thiard (see Bissy, Thiard-Bissy and
Thiard de Bissy)
Thiard-Bissy, Henri Charles Comte
de, i. 140, 145, 153; v. 162
Thiard de Bissy, Auxonne Marie
Théodose Comte de, v. 162
Thibaudeau, Auguste Clair, iii. 143, 217
Thibaut IV. Count of Champagne, i. xxiv
Thionville (see Merlin de Thionville)
Thierry, Amedée Simon Dominique), v. 271
Thierry, Jacques Nicolas Augustin, iv.
261, 288-289; v. 28, 208, 270-271
Thiers, President of the French
Republic, Marie Joseph Louis Adolphe,
iii. 156, 192; v. 82-83, 95-96, 105,
114, 127-128, 134, 137, 140-141, 198,
206, 217, 307; vi. 125, 154-157
Thomas, Antoine Leonard, i. 162; ii. 102
Thomas, Jacques Léonard Clément, v.
109, 140-141
Thomas, Victor, v. 310
Thomas Aquinas, Saint, ii. 184
Thomson, James, ii. 99
Thorwaldsen, Albert Bertel, iv. 241,
297; v. 275
Thorwaldsen, Miss, iv. 297
Thouars (see La Trémoille)
"Thouret," M., ii. 84
Thucydides, iii. 96, 136, 195; v. 56,
255, 177, 229-230; vi. 157
Thumery, Marquis de, ii. 259
Tiberius, the Emperor, ii. 331; iv.
291, 297; vi. 209
Tibullus, Albius, i. 54, 84, 162; v. 63
Tiemblais (see Hingant de La Tiemblais)
Tilbury (see Gervase of Tilbury)
Tillet (see Du Tillet)
Tilleul, M. du, ii. 162
Timon, ii. 122
Tinténiac, i. 9
Tinténiac, M. de, i. 48
Tintoretto, Jacopo Robusti, known as,
vi. 48, 58
Tinville (see Fouquier-Tinville)
Titian, Tiziano Vicelli, known as, iv.
239; vi. 17, 48-49, 57-58, 75
Titus, the Emperor, iii. 183; v. 58,
63; vi. 247
Tobias, ii. 122
Tocqueville, Hervé Louis François
Joseph Bonaventure Clérel, Comte
de, i. 135; ii. 295; vi. 24
Tocqueville, née de Rosanbo, Comtesse
de, i. 135; ii. 295
Tocqueville, Alexis Charles Henri
Clérel de, i. 135; ii. 295; vi. 24,
261
Tolendal (see Lally-Tolendal)
Tollendal (see Lally-Tolendal
Tolstoi, Countess, vi. 46
Tolstoi the Younger, Count, vi. 46
Tonnerre (see Clermont-Tonnerre)
Torlonia (see Bracciano)
Torrenté, M. de, ii. 250
Torrington, George Byng, sixth
Viscount, ii. 68
Touchet (see Du Touchet and d'Entragues)
Tour (see La Tour)
Tourel, the "knight of July," v. 240
Tourneaux, the Polytechnic scholar, v. 107
Tournefort, Joseph Pitton de, i. 180
Tournelle (see La Tournelle)
Tournon, Philippe Camille Marcelin,
Comte de, iv. 258; vi. 7
Tourton, M., iii. 56
Tourville, Anne Hilarion de Contentin,
Comte de, v. 175
Toussaint-Louverture, Dominique
François, iii. 191; vi. 42
Toussaint de Saint-Luc, Père, i. 5
"Tout-le-Monde," the cow-keeper, v. 346
Townsend, John Kirk, i. 253
Trajan, the Emperor, iii. 225; iv. 229;
v. 58, 60; vi. 239
Trapassi (see Metastasio)
Travanet, rufe de Bombelles, Marquise
de, ii. 37
Trélat, Ulysse, v. 126, 141
Trémargat, Louis Anne Pierre Geslin,
Comte de, i. 145-146, 152
Trémaudun, Nicolas Pierre Philippes,
Seigneur de, i. 48
Trémaudun, Dame de, i. 48
Tremerello (see Mandricardo)
Trémigon, Comte de, i. 21; vi. 127, 173
Trémoille (see La Trémoille)
Trevelec, Abbé de, i. 108
Treves, Clement Wenceslaus Duke in
Saxony, Archbishop-Elector of, ii. 4
Trévise, Édouard Adolphe Casimir
Joseph Mortier, Maréchal Duc de,
iii. 50-51, 57, 120, 124, 155; v. 101
Triboulet, the Court fool, ii. 17
Trioson (see Girodet Trioson)
Trivulzio, Signorina, iv. 229
Trochu, General Louis Jules, v. 109
Trogoff, Joachim Simon Comte de, v.
404-405, 408-409, 417
Trojolif, Sébastien Marie Hyacinthe
de Moëlien, Chevalier Seigneur de,
i. 66
Trojolif (see also Moëlien de Trojolif)
Tromelin, Jacques Jean Marie François
Boudin, Comte de, v. 106
Tronchet, François Denis, iii. 139
Tronjoli (see Trojolif)
Trouin (see Duguay-Trouin)
Trublet, Abbé Nicolas Charles Joseph,
i. 18, 27
Truchsess von Waldburg (see Waldburg)
Tuffin de La Rouërie (see La Rouërie)
Tulloch, Francis, i. 195, 197, 208
Tully (see Cicero)
Turenne, Henri Amédée Mercure
Comte de, iii. 164-165
Turenne, Henri de La Tourd'Auvergne,
Maréchal Vicomte de, i. 57, 77; ii.
151; iii. 27, 89, 225; v. 101, 143;
vi. 19-20
Turenne (see also Bouillon)
Turgot, Baron de L'Aulne, Anne
Robert Jacques, i. 162; vi. 202-203
Turpin, Archbishop of Rheims, ii. 33
Turreau de Garambouville, Louis
Marie Baron de, ii. 108
Tyler, Wat, ii. 128
Tyrtæus, v. 213
U
Ulliac, M., i. 153
Unwin, Mr. Thomas Fisher, vi. 166
Urban V., Pope, ii. 200
Urias, vi. 237
d'Urte, Honoré, ii. 303; v. 132
Urquhart, Sir Thomas, i. 133; iv. 243
Ursins (see also Orsini)
Ursins, Anne Marie de La Trémoille,
Princesse de Talleyrand-Chalais, later
Princesse des, iv. 79-80; v. 50
Ursinus, Anti-pope, v. 11
d'Urville (see Dumont d'Urville)
Usquin, M., iv. 67
V
Vachon, Mademoiselle, v. 364
Vaillant, M., v. 96
Valangin (see Wagram)
Valence, Comte de, iv. 237
Valence, née de Genlis, Comtesse de, iv. 237
Valentine, the Vicomte de
Chateaubriand's footman, i. 190
Valentinian III., the Emperor, ii. 185;
iii. 47; iv. 227
Valentinois, Diane de Poitiers,
Comtesse de Maulevrier, later Duchesse
de, ii. 294
Valentinois (see also Borgia)
Valerian, the Emperor, ii. 309
Valmore, François Prosper Lanchantin,
known as, vi. 174
Valmore, Marceline Josèphe Félicité
Desbordes, Dame Desbordes, vi. 174
Vallière (see La Vallière)
Valmy, François Christophe Kellermann,
Maréchal Duc de, ii. 49; v.
127; vi. 249
Valmy, François Edmond Kellermann,
Duc de, vi. 249
Vancouver, George, i. 215
Vaneau, the Poly technic scholar, v. 110
Vannucci (see Perugino)
Vanozza, Rosa, v. 13
Varano, Alfonso Marchese di, vi. 79
Varenne (see Billaud-Varenne)
Vassal, M., v. 96
Vatimesnil, Antoine François Henri
Lefebvre de, iv. 139
Vauban, Sébastien Maréchal Le Prestre
de, ii. 52; iii. 225; vi. 23
Vaublanc, Vincent Marie Viennot,
Comte de, ii. 129
Vaudreuil, Louis Philippe de Rigaud,
Marquis de, i. 131
Vaudreuil, Dame de, i. 174
Vaudrin, the grave-digger, vi. 170-171
Vaufreland, M. de, v. 304
Vauguyon (see La Vauguyon)
Vauquelin, Burgess, i. 126
Vaurouault (see Goyon-Vaurouault)
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapier,
Marquis de, v. 387; vi. 1-2
Vauvert, Michel Bossinot de, ii. 6
Vauxelles, Jacques Bourlet, Abbé de,
ii. 105
Vega Carpia, Lope Felix de, ii. 38; v. 318
Veit, Philipp, iv. 240
Velasquez, Diego Rodriguez de Silva,
iv. 239
Velly, Abbé Paul François, i. 222-223
Vendramin, Doge of Venice, Andrea,
vi. 59
Ventador, Duc de, v. 130
Veremund II. King of Leon and
Asturias; v. 377
Vergne (see Pioche de La Vergne)
Vernet, Antoine Charles Horace Vernet,
known as Carle, ii. 298
Vernet, Claude Joseph, ii. 298
Vernet, Émile Jean Horace Vernet,
known as Horace, ii. 298; iv. 241
Verneuil, Cathérine Henriette de Balzac
d'Entragues, Marquis de, i. 117; iv. 79
Veronese, Paolo Cagliari, known as
Paul, vi. 48, 103
Vertamy (see Mandaroux-Vertamy)
Vespasian, the Emperor, v. 58; vi. 17
Vestris, Marie Rose Gourgaud, Dame, i. 128
Vezderdjerd I. King of Persia, ii. 43
Vibraye, Anne Victor Denis Hubault,
Marquis de, iv. 21
Vic (see d'Ermenonville)
Vicence, Armand Auguste Louis Marquis
de Caulaincourt, later Duc de,
ii. 275, 282-283; iii. 49, 77, 98, 157,
167-168
Victoire Princess of France, Madame,
i. 160, 177; vi. 69, 197
Victor I. King of England, Scotland
and Ireland (see Victor Emanuel I.
King of Sardinia)
Victor (see also Bellune)
Victor Amadeus II. King of Sardinia, iv. 251
Victor Amadeus III. King of Sardinia,
ii. 221; iv. 251
Victor Emanuel I. King of Sardinia,
de jure Victor I. King of England,
Scotland and Ireland, ii. 221; iv.
54, 251; vi. 45, 78
Victor Emanuel II. King of Sardinia,
later of Italy, iv. 224
Victoria Queen of Great Britain and
Ireland, Empress of India, iv. 47, 50,
75, 251; vi. 207
Vidal, Pierre, v. 328
Vidocq, François Eugène, v. 258
Vidoni, Pietro Cardinal, iv. 235-236
Vieillard, Narcisse, v. 297-298
Viennet, Jean Pons Guillaume, v. 138-139
Vieuzac (see Barère de Vieuzac)
Viganoni, Signor, i. 173
Vigarous, Dr. Joseph Marie Joachim, ii. 165
Vigée-Lebrun (see Lebrun)
Vigier, Comte, vi. 154
Vignale, Abbé, ii. 215-217
Vignola, Giacomo Barrocchio or Barozzi,
known as, iv. 241
Vignoles (see Lahire)
Vigny, Alfred Victor Comte de, v. 128
Vildéneux (see Loisel de La Villedeneu)
Villa (see Della Villa)
Villafranca (see Carignan)
Villafranca-Soisson, Conti di, i. 51
Villaret, Claude, i. 222
Villars, Louis Hector Maréchal Duc de, vi. 20
Villate (see La Villate)
Villehardouin, Geoffroi de, i. xxiv;
vi. 69-70
Villèle, Jean Baptiste Guillaume Marie
Anne Séraphin Joseph Comte de, i.
37, 97, 124; iv. 13-17, 26-30, 51,
59, 61-62, 85-86, 91, 95, 97-101, 111,
117, 124-125, 131-132, 135-144, 217;
v. 68, 82, 88, 180, 303-304, 361,
415-416; vi. 136
Villemain, Abel François, ii. 133; iv.
259-261; v. 29, 86, 260, 263; vi. 257
Villemarest, Charles Maxime de, ii. 251
Villeneuve, Pierre, i. 193-194
Villeneuve, the Vicomte de
Chateaubriand's nurse, i. 19, 23, 28,
30-31, 34, 93, 193
Villeneuve, Pons Louis François Marquis
de, v. 340
Villeneuve (see also Pélion de Villeneuve)
Villeneuve-Bargemont, Alban de, v. 245
Villeneuve-Bargemont, Dame de, v. 245
Villeroi, François de Neufville,
Maréchal Duc de, iii. 197-198; v. 403
Villeroi, Nicolas de Neufville, Seigneur
de, v. 50, 55
Villette, Charles Michel Marquis de, i.
167-178
Villette, Reine Philiberte Roupt de
Varicourt, Marquise de, i. 167-168
Villette, Demoiselle de, i. 178
Villo, Gonzalo, i. 196
Vincent, Baron von, iii. 158, 163
Vincent, General, v. 107
Vincent of Paul, Saint, v. 315
Vinci, Leonardo da, iv. 239; v. 26;
vi. 59
Vintimille, Pauline Félicité de Mailly-Nesle,
Comtesse de, ii. 297-298
Vintimille du Luc, née de La Live de
Jully, Comtesse de, ii. 172-173, 191,
296; iii. 21
Viot (see Bourdic)
Virgil, Publius Virgilius Maro, known
as, i. 24, 84, 195, 201, 249; ii. 89,
97, 124, 202; iii. 27, 108, 214; iv.
185, 258, 284; v. 57, 63, 229, 286,
326-327; vi. 79, 158, 237
Virginia, iii. 53
Virginie, the Comtesse de Caud's maid,
ii. 316-317
Virginius, iii. 53
Violet, the dancing-master, i. 218-220;
ii. 70
Visconti, Cavaliere Filippo Aureliano,
iv. 298
Vitellius, the Emperor, i. 158; iv. 241
Vitré, Baron of, i. 9
Vitrolles, Eugène François Auguste
d'Armand, Baron de, iii. 55, 112;
iv. 16; v. 111, 113-114
Vitrolles, Baronne de, iii. 141
Vitry, Philippe de, vi. 200
Vittoria, Baldomero Espartero, Duque
de, iii. 221
Viviers (see Du Viviers)
Voltaire, François Marie Arouet, known
as de, i. 4, 18, 27, 97, 99, 167; ii.
63, 104, 106, 119, 135, 166, 172,
180, 184, 186, 331; iii. 33, 127; iv.
32, 38, 44, 47, 58, 122, 150, 248,
253; v. 203-204, 208, 300; vi. 1-2,
6, 9, 41, 47, 90, 100-101, 202
Voss, Fräulein, iv. 38
W
Wace, Robert, i. 39; ii. 62
Wagram, Alexandre Berthier, Maréchal
Duc de Valangin, Prince of
Neuchâtel, Duc de, ii. 273; iii. 91, 98;
iv. 107, 256; vi. 11
Wahlstadt, Gebhart Leberecht von
Blücher, Field-marshal Prince von,
iii. 49, 162, 186; iv. 75
Waldburg, Friedrich Ludwig Count
Truchsess von, iii. 78-85, 87
Waldeck, Prince Christian Augustus
of, ii. 40, 42, 44, 49-51
Waldeck, Prince George Frederic of,
iii. 162
Waldor, Mélanie Villenave, Dame, vi. 174
Wales, known as the Black Prince,
Edward Prince of, ii. 46; iii. 193
Walewska, later Comtesse d'Ornano,
Maria Laczinska, Countess Walewice,
iii. 109
Walewski, Alexandre Florian Joseph
de Colonna, Comte, later Duc de,
iii. 109
Walewski, Anastasius Colonna, Count
Walewice, iii. 109
Wallenstein, Duke of Friedland,
Mecklemburg and Sagan, Albrecht
Eusebius von, v. 354-355, 383; vi. 4-5
Wallenstein, Thekla von, vi. 4
Walpole (see Orford)
Walsh, Édouard Vicomte, vi. 192
Ward, Dr., ii. 280
Warsaw, Ivan Paskevitch, Fieldmarshal
Prince of, iv. 267
Warville (see Boissot de Warville)
Warwick, Richard Neville, sixteenth
Earl of, v. 336; vi. 187
Washington, President of the United
States of America, George, i. xv,
180, 207, 210-214, 217, 251, 255;
iii. 187-188, 228; v. 113, 143; vi.
87, 160, 221
Weisse, Christian Hermann, v. 412
Weld, Bishop of Amycla, Thomas
Cardinal, v. 358
Wellesley, General Hon. Arthur (see
Wellington)
Wellington, Arthur Wellesley,
Fieldmarshal first Duke of, i. 188; ii. 69,
79, 134; iii. 79, 136-137, 146, 158,
160, 162-164, 166, 178, 180, 190,
223-224; iv. 71, 76, 89, 91-92,
204-205; v. 360; vi. 134
Wenceslaus VI. King of Bohemia, the
Emperor, v. 388
Wendel, Clara, v. 289
Wentworth, Judith Noel, Viscountess, ii. 136
Werther, Karl Anton Philpp Baron von, v. 146
Werther, Wilhelm Baron von, v. 146
Westmoreland, John Fane, tenth Earl
of, i. 188; iv. 80
Wheler, Sir George, iv. 247
Whitbread, Samuel, ii. 143
Whitelocke, Bulstrode, ii. 122
Wignacourt, Antoine Louis, Marquis
de, i. 50
Wilberforce, William, ii. 143
Wilhelmina of Prussia, Margravine of
Brandenburg-Bayreuth, Sophia, iv.
38; vi. 6
William I. Count of Apulia, iv. 185
William II. Duke of Apulia, iv. 186
William of Bavaria, Duke of Birkenfeld,
iii. 91
William I. Duke of Normandy, King
of England, i. 257; ii. 62, 137; iv.
58, 109; v. 175
William III. King of Great Britain and
Ireland, Stadtholder of the Netherlands, iv. 93
William IV. King of Great Britain,
Ireland and Hanover, iv. 33, 281
William I. Elector of Hesse-Cassel,
William IX. Landgrave, later, iv. 57
William Duke of Mantua, vi. 84
William I. King of the Netherlands,
William Prince of Orange, later, iii.
163; iv. 162, 164, 237; v. 226, 323;
vi. 115
William II. King of the Netherlands,
iii. 163; v. 323
William V. Stadtholder of the Netherlands,
iv. 270
William I. King of Prussia, German
Emperor, iv. 33, 271
William I. King of Wurtemberg, v.
41, 329
William of Prussia, Amelia Marianne of
Hesse-Homburg, Princess, iv. 41, 49
Willoughby de Eresby (see Gwydyr)
Wilson, Sir Robert Thomas, iii. 110, 190
Wilson, Alexander, i. 253
Wimpfen, Louis Félix Baron de, ii. 40
Windsor, William de, ii. 138
Witt, Grand Pensionary of Holland,
Jan de, v. 51
Witt, Cornelis de, v. 51
Wolfe, General James, i. 224; ii.
107; vi. 202
Wordsworth, William, ii. 128
Wrangham, Archdeacon Francis, iii. 23
Wright, the inn-keeper, i. 185
Wyclif, John, v. 388
X
Xenophon, v. 56
Ximenes, Archbishop of Toledo, Francisco
Cardinal, v. 51
Y
York, Henry Cardinal of (see Henry
IX. King of England, Scotland and Ireland)
York, Richard Duke of, ii. 75
York and Albany, Bishop of Osnaburg,
Frederick Duke of, ii. 68, 79; iv.
77, 79
Young, Arthur, ii. 131
Z
Zagarolo, Margherita Gioeni-Colonna,
Principessa Rospigliosi, Duchessa di,
iv. 256
Zampieri (see Domenichino)
"Zanze," Angelica Brollo, known as,
vi. 56-57, 77, 105-112, 118
Zarviska, the poet, iv. 179-180
Zeno, ii. 136
Zeuxis, vi. 57
Zimmer, "Colonel," v. 112-113
Zuccaro, Taddeo, iv. 241
Zulietta, the Venetian courtezan, vi.
70, 74
Zuñiga (see Ercilla y Zuñiga)
Zurla, Placido Cardinal, v. 8, 23; vi. 100
