Volume 2 — BOOK II[446] (continued 2)

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

"Well, are you pleased with me?"

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

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

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

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

"It is there!"

Death of madame de Beaumont.

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

Letters of sympathy.

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

M. de Chênedollé to Chateaubriand.

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

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

"23 November 1803."

M. de Fontanes to Chateaubriand.

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

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

M. Necker, Madame de Staël.

M. Necker to Chateaubriand.

"Sir,

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

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

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

"Necker.

"Coppet, 27 November 1803."

Madame de Staël to Chateaubriand.

"Frankfort, 3 December 1803.

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

"Farewell, affectionately: and sorrowfully, farewell.

"M. de Staël."

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

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

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

*

My grief.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

I decide to write my memoirs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cardinal Fesch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am promoted.

"REPUBLIC OF THE VALAIS.

"Sion, 20 February 1804.

"Council of the Town of Sion.

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

"Sir,

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

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

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

"De Riedmatten,

"President of the Town Council of Sion.

"By order of the Town Council:

"De Torrenté,

"Secretary to the Council."

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

Bonaparte.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Verdict of the special military commission summoned at Vincennes, condemning to pain of death the man known as Louis Antoine Henri de Bourbon, born on the 2nd of August 1772 at Chantilly."

Death of the Duc D'Enghien.

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

"The Duc d'Enghien has been shot."

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

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

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

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

I resign my Embassy.

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

"Very well."

Later, he said to his sister:

"Were you very much alarmed for your friend?"

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

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

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

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

"Yes, Sire."

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

"Yes, Sire."

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