Note 50 — Chapter VIII

Nearly two centuries later, this adventure of Bassompierre so impressed the romantic imagination of Chateaubriand, then a young man of twenty, that he made a pilgrimage to the Rue Bourg-l’Abbé and “the third door on the side of the Rue Saint-Martin.” But, to the great disappointment of the future author of René, he found himself confronted, not by the old gabled house which Bassompierre must have entered and quitted so abruptly, but by a hopelessly modern residence, the ground-floor of which was occupied by a hairdresser’s shop, with “a variety of towers of hair behind the window-panes.” And “no frank, disinterested, passionate young woman” was to be seen, but only “an old crone, who might have been the aunt of the assignation.”

“What a fine story, that story of Bassompierre!” he writes. “One of the reasons which caused him to be so passionately loved ought to be understood. At that time, France was divided into two classes, one dominant, the other semi-servile. The sempstress clasped Bassompierre in her arms as though he were a demi-god who had descended to the bosom of a slave: he gave her the illusion of glory, and Frenchwomen alone amongst women are capable of intoxicating themselves with that illusion. But who will reveal to us the unknown causes of the catastrophe? Was the body which lay upon the table by the side of another body that of the pretty wench of the Two Angels? Whose was the other body? Was it the husband or the man whose voice Bassompierre had heard? Had the plague (for the plague was raging in Paris) or jealousy reached the Rue Bourg-l’Abbé before love? The imagination can easily find matter for exercise in such a subject as this. Mingle with the poet’s inventions, the chorus of the populace, the approaching grave-diggers, the ‘crows’ and Bassompierre’s sword, and a magnificent melodrama springs from the adventure.”—Mémoires d’Outre Tombe, Vol. I.