Note 508 — BOOK XII[500]

If Chateaubriand did not see Marie-Louise in 1828, when passing through Parma, he had dined with her, some years before, at Verona, where she had gone to see her father, during the sitting of the Congress.

"We at first," he writes, "refused an invitation from the Archduchess of Parma. She insisted, and we went. We found her very gay; the universe having made it its business to remember Napoleon, she no longer had the trouble of thinking of him. She spoke a few careless words, and as it were casually, about the King of Rome: she was pregnant. Her Court had a certain air of dilapidation and decay, excepting M. de Neipperg, a man of good manners. There was nothing out of the common except ourselves dining at Marie-Louise's table and the bracelets, made out of the stone of Juliet's sarcophagus, worn by Napoleon's widow. As we crossed the Po, at Piacenza, a single bark, newly painted, carrying a sort of imperial ensign, attracted our eyes. Two or three dragoons, in shell-jackets and forage-caps, were watering their horses; we were entering the States of Marie-Louise; that was all that remained of the power of the man who clove the rocks of the Simplon, planted his banners on the capitals of Europe, and raised Italy which had lain prostrate for so many centuries."

When speaking to Marie-Louise, Chateaubriand told her that he had met her soldiers at Piacenza, but that that little troop was nothing beside the great imperial armies of former days. She answered drily:

"I never think of that now." (Congrès de Vérone, Vol. I. p. 69.)—B.