 Book 1 Part 2 of Part 4 of the Memoirs of Chateaubriand Volume 5. This is Librivox Recording. All Librivox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librivox.org. Recording by Nicole Lee. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand Volume 5, Part 4. By François-René de Chateaubriand. Translated by Alexander Texer and Amatos. Book 1, Part 2. Paris, Redom Fair, end of November 1831. Returning to Paris on the 11th of October, I published my pamphlet at the end of the same month. It is entitled De la nouvelle proposition relative au banissement de Charles X et de sa famille, où suite de mon dernier écrit, de la restauration et de la monochie élective. When these posthumous Memoirs appear, welcome daily polemics, the events of which men I enamoured at this present hour of my life, the adversaries against whom I am fighting, who live in the outer banishment of Charles X and his family, count for anything. There you have the drawback of all diaries. You find in them ardent discussions of subjects that have become indifferent. The reader sees paths like shadows, a host of persons whose very names he does not remember, silent supernumeraries, who fill the back of the stage. Yet it is in these driest dust portions of the chronicles that one gathers the observations and facts of the history of mankind and men. I placed first at the commencement of the pamphlet, the decree brought forward successively by Messias, Baud, and Biqueville. After examining the five courses that lay open after the Revolution of July, I said, the worst of the periods through which we have passed seems to be that in which we are, because Anarchy reigns in men's reasons, morals, and intellects. The existence of nations is longer than that of individuals. A paralytic man often remains stretched on his couch for many years before disappearing, an infirm nation lies long on its bed before expiring. What the new royalty needed was buoyancy, youth, intrepidity, to turn its back upon the past, to march with France to meet the future. All this in neglects, it appeared before us reduced and debilitated by the doctors who were fizzling it. It arrived piteous, empty-handed, having nothing to give, everything to receive, playing the poor thing, begging everybody's pardon in yet snappish, aiming against the legitimacy, and aping the legitimacy, against republicanism, and trembling before it. This abdominous system beholds enemies only in two forms of opposition which it threatens. To support itself it has built itself a phalanx of re-enlisted veterans. If they bore as many stripes as they have taken oaths, their sleeves would be more motley than the livery of the murmuriancies. I doubt whether liberty will long be content with this stupot of a domestic monarchy. The Franks place liberty in a camp. In their descendants it has retained the taste and love of its first cradle. Like the old royalty it wants to be raised on the shield, and its deities are soldiers. From this general argument I pass on to the details of the system followed in our foreign relations. The immense mistake of the Congress of Vienna is that it placed a military nation like France in a condition of forced hostility with the neighbouring peoples. I point to all that the foreigners have gained in territory and power, all that we could have taken back in July, a mighty lesson, a striking proof of the vanity of military glory and of the work of conquerors. If one were to draw up a list of the princes who have increased the possessions of France, Bonaparte would not figure on it, but Charles X would occupy a remarkable place. Passing from argument to argument I come to Louis Philippe. Louis Philippe is king, I say. He wields the sceptre of the child whose immediate heir he is, of the ward from Charles X placed in the hands of the lieutenant general of the kingdom, as into those of a tried guardian, a faithful trustee, a generous protector. In that palace of the Tuileries, instead of an innocent couch, free from insomnia, free from remorse, free from ghosts, what has the prince found? An empty throne presented to him by a headless spectre bearing in its blood-stained hand the head of another spectre. Must we, to finish the business, put a handle to Levelle's blade in the shape of a law in order to strike a last blow at the proscribed family? If it were driven to these shores by the tempest, if Henry too young as yet had not attained the year's requisite for the scaffold, well then, do you, the masters, give him a dispensation of age to die? After speaking to the French government I turn to Hollywood and add, dare I, in conclusion, take the respectful liberty of addressing a few words to the men of exile? They have returned to sorrow as into their mother's womb. Miss Fortune, a seduction from which it is difficult for me to defend myself, seems to me to be always in the right. I fear to offend its sacred authority, and the majesty which it adds to insulted grandeurs, which henceforth have none but me to flatter them. But I will overcome my weakness. I will strive to voice words which, in a day of ill-fortune, might give ground for hope to my country. The education of a prince should be analogous to the form of government, and the manners of his native land. Now there in France neither chivalry nor knights, neither soldiers of the oriflam, nor nobles barbed in steel, ready to march behind the white flag. There is a people which is no longer the people of other days, a people which changed by the centuries, has lost the old habits and the ancient manners of our fathers. Whether we deplore the social transformations that have arisen, or glorify them, we must take the nation as it is, facts as they are, entered to the spirit of our time, in order to exercise an action over that spirit. All is in God's hand except the past, which, once fallen from that hand, does not return to it. The moment all doubtless arrive when the oriflam will leave that palace of the stewards, the ill-omend refuge, which seems to spread the shadow of its fatality over his youth, the last born of the biennies, must mix with children of his own age, attend the public schools, learn all that is known to-day. Let him become the most enlightened young man of his time. Let him be acquainted with the knowledge of the period. Let him add to the virtues of a Christian of the age of St. Louis, the sagacity of a Christian of our age. Let travel be his instructor in manners and laws. Let him cross the seas, compare institutions and governments, free peoples and enthralled peoples. Let him, if he find the occasion while abroad, expose himself as a simple soldier to the dangers of war. For none is fit to reign over Frenchmen who has not heard the hiss of the canon ball. Then you will have done for him all that humanly speaking you can do. But above all, beware of fostering him in ideas of invincible right. Far from flattering him with the thought of re-ascending the throne of his fathers. Prepare him never to re-ascend it. Bring him up to be a man, not to be a king. Those are his best chances. Enough. Whatever God's counsel may provide, there will remain to the candidates of my font and pious loyalty, a majesty of the ages which men cannot take from him, a thousand years attached to his young head will always deck him with a pomp exceeding that of all monarchs. If, in a private condition, he bear bravely this diadem of days, of memory and of glory, if his hand raised without effort this sceptre of time, which his ancestors have bequeathed to him, what empire will he be able to regret? Basilicon de Brighville, whose motion I thus contested, printed some reflections on my pamphlet. He sent them to me with the following note. Monsieur, I have yielded to the need, to the duty, to publish the reflections brought to my mind by your eloquent words on my motion. I obey a feeling no less sincere when I deplore that I should find myself in opposition to you, monsieur, who add to the power of genius so many claims to public consideration. The country is in danger, and from that moment I cease to believe in a serious dissension between us. This France of ours invites us to unite to save her, a sister with your genius. We shall work, we shall assist her with our strong arms. On that field, monsieur, is it not true that we shall not be long in coming to an understanding? You shall be the tortures of a people of which we are the soldiers, and it will be with the greatest happiness that I shall then proclaim myself the most ardent of your political adherents, as I am already the sincerest of your admirers, your most humble and obedient servant, the Conte Armand de Bricveal. Paris, 15 November 1831 I was not slow in answering, and I broke a second stillborn lance against the champion. Paris, 15 November 1831 Monsieur, your letters worthy of a gentleman, forgive me for using this old word which becomes your name, your courage, your love of France. Like you I detest the foreign yoke. If the question were that of defending my country, I should not ask to wear the lyre of the pert, but the sword of the veteran, in the ranks of your soldiers. I have not yet read your reflections, monsieur, but if the state of politics led you to withdraw the motion which has so strangely saddened me, how happy I should be to find myself by your side, with no obstacle between us, on the field of liberty, of honour, of the glory of our country. I have the honour to be, monsieur, with the most distinguished regard, your most humble and most obedient servant, Chateaubriand. Paris, 15 November 1831 A poet mingling the prescriptions of the muses with those of the Laws, attacked the widow and the orphan in a vigorous improvisation. As these verses were by a rite of talent, they acquired a sort of authority, which forbade me to let them pass in silence. I faced about to meet another enemy. The reader would not understand my reply if he did not read the pert's lampoon. I invite you therefore to cast your eyes over those verses, they are very fine and are to be found everywhere. My reply has not been published. It appears for the first time in these memoirs. Wretched contentions in which revolutions end. See to what a struggle we come. The feeble successors of those men who, arms in hand, treated great questions of glory and liberty by shaking the universe. Pygmies today utter their little cry among the tombs of the giants, buried beneath the mountains which they have overturned upon themselves. This Wednesday evening, 9th November, 1831 Sir, I receive this morning the last number of nemesis, which you have done me the honor to send me. To protect myself against the seduction of those praises awarded with so much brilliancy, grace and charm, I need to recall the obstacles that exist between us. We live in two worlds apart. Our hopes and fears are not the same. You burn what I adore, and I burn what you adore. You, sir, have grown up amid a crowd of abortions of July. But even as all the influence which you attribute to my prose will not, according to you, raise up a fallen house, so, according to me, will all the might of your poetry fail to abase that noble house. Can it be that both you and I are thus placed in two impossible positions? You are young, sir, like the future which you dream of, and which will trick you. I am old, like time, which I dream of, and which escapes me. If you were to come to sit by my fireside, you obligingly say, you would reproduce my features with your graver. I should strive to make you a Christian and a Royalist. Since you're lyre at the first chord of its harmony, sighing my martyrs and my pilgrimage, why should not you complete the course? Enter the holy place. Time has stripped me only of my hair, as it strips a tree of its leaves in winter. But the sap remains in my heart. My hand is still firm enough to hold the torch, which would guide your steps under the vaults of the sanctuary. You declare, sir, that it would need a people of parts to understand my contradictions of extinct kingdoms and young republics. Is it likely that you, too, have not celebrated liberty, and yet found some magnificent words for the tyrants who have rested? You quote the Dubarries, the Mont Spans, the Fontanges, the Lavalliers. You recall royal weaknesses. But did those weaknesses cost France what the debauchers of Danton and Camille de Moulin cost her? The morals of those plebeian catalines were reflected even in their speech. They borrowed their metaphors from the piggeries of infamous persons and prostitutes. Did the frailties of Louis Cartos and Louis Caes send the fathers and husbands to the gallows after dishonoring the daughters and wives? Did his blood-baths do more to render chaste a revolutionary's lewdness than did her milk-baths to render virginal a fapeur's pollution? Here Rob Spears-Hucksters had retailed to the people of Paris the blood from Danton's bathing-tub, as nearer slaves sold to the inhabitants of Rome the milk from his courtesans' termae. Do you think that any virtue would have been found in the rinsings of the obscene headsmen of the terror? The swiftness and the height of the flight of your muse have deceived you, sir. The son, which laughs at all misery, must have struck the garments of a widow. They must have seemed gilded to you. I have seen those garments, they were of mourning. They knew nothing of pleasure. The child in the entrails which bore him was rocked only to the sound of tears. If he had danced nine months in his mother's womb, as you say, he would then have known joy only before being born, between conception and delivery, between the assassination and the prescription. The pallor of fearsome omen which you remarked on Henry's face is the result of his father's bloodletting, and not of a ball of two hundred and seventy-nights. The old curse was kept up for the daughter of Henry IV, in Doloré Paris's filios. I know none save the goddess of reason whose confinements hastened by adultery took place amid the dancers of death. From her public flanks fell unclean reptiles which, at that very instant, began to jig in the ring with the knitting women around the scaffold, to the sound of the rise and fall of the knife, the refrain of that devil's dance. Ah, sir, I entreat you, in the name of your rare talent, cease to reward crime and to punish misfortune by the sentences improvised by your muse. Do not condemn the first to heaven, the second to hell. If, while remaining attached to the cause of liberty and enlightenment, you were to afford an asylum to religion, humanity, innocence, you would see another sort of nemesis appear before you, in your waking hours, one worthy of all the earth's homage, and while waiting to pour over virtue, better than I know how, the whole ocean of your fresh ideas, continue in the spirit of vengeance which you have adopted, to drag our turpitude to the gemmoniae. Overthrow the false monuments of a revolution, which has not built the temple fit for its cult, turn up their ruins with the plowsher of your satire. So salt in that field to make it barren, so that no new vileness can shoot there. I recommend above all, sir, to your attention, that government which has fallen so low, that it trembles before the pride of the obedience, the victory of the defeats, and the glory of the humiliations of the country. Chateaubriand. Paris, read on fair, end of March 1832. Those travels in those contests came to an end for me in the year 1831. At the beginning of the year 1832, a new annoyance. The Paris Revolution had left on the streets of Paris a host of Swiss, of bodyguards, of men of all conditions kept by the court, who were now starving, and whom certain monarchical dunderheads, young and foolish under their grey hairs, thought of enlisting for surprise. In this formidable plot, there was no lack of serious, pale, lean, diaphanous bent persons with noble faces, eyes still bright, white heads, and that past suggested honour resuscitated, coming to try with its shadowy hands, to restore the family which it had been unable to maintain with its living hands. Often men on crutches pretend to prop crumbling monarchies, but at this period of society the restoration of a medieval monument has become impossible, because the genius which quickened that architecture is dead. What we take for Gothic is merely antiquated. On the other hand, the heroes of July, whom this used to milieu had swindled out of the Republic, desired nothing more than to come to an understanding with the car-lists, to revenge themselves on a common enemy, remaining free to cut each other's throats after the victory. Monsieur Thier, having extolled the system of 1793 as the work of liberty, victory and genius, young imaginations became kindled at the flame of a conflagration of which they saw only the distant reverberation. They have gone no further than the poetry of the terror, a mad and hideous parody which sets back the hour of liberty. This is to disregard at once time history and humanity. It is to oblige the world to recoil under the whip of the convict-keeper, in order to escape those fanatics of the scaffold. Many of us needed to feed all those malcontents, dismissed heroes of July, or servants out of place. People clubbed together. Carlist and Republican cabals were held in every corner of Paris, and the police-informed of all that went on, sent its spies from club to garret to preach equality and liberty. I was told of these proceedings, which I opposed. The two parties wanted to declare me their leader at the assured moment of triumph. A Republican club asked me if I would accept the presidency of the Republic. I answered, yes, most certainly, but after Monsieur de Lafayette. This was thought modest and proper. General Lafayette used sometimes to come to Madame Recamier's. I used to make fun of his best of republics. I asked him if he would not have done better to proclaim Henry V, and to be the real President of France, during the minority of the royal infant. He agreed and took the just and good part, for he was a well-bred man. Each time he met he would say, ah, you are going to pick your quarrel again. I used to make him admit that no one had been more court than himself by his good friend Philip. In the midst of this excitement in these extravagant plottings arrived a man in disguise. He landed on my door with a tow-wig on his plate, and a pair of green spectacles on his nose hiding his eyes, which could see quite well without spectacles. He had his pockets stuffed with bills of exchange, which he displayed, and suddenly aware that I wanted to sell my house and settle my affairs, he offered me his services. I could not help laughing at this gentleman, a man otherwise of intelligence and resource, who thought himself obliged to buy me for the legitimacy. When his offers became too pressing he saw on my lips a certain scornfulness, which obliged him to beat a retreat, and he wrote to my secretary this little note which I have kept. Sir! Yesterday evening I had the honour to see Musula Viconde de Chateaubriand, who received me with his customary kindness. Nevertheless I seemed to perceive that he no longer showed his usual geniality. Tell me, I beg of you, what can have caused me to lose his confidence, which I valued more highly than anything else. If he has been told stories about me, I am not afraid to expose my conduct to the light of day, and I am prepared to reply to anything that he may have been told. He knows too well the spitefulness of intriguing people to condemn me unheard. There are timid persons, too, who make others so. But we must hope that the day will come when we shall see people who are really devoted. Well, he told me that it was of no use for me to meddle in his business. I am sorry for that, because I flatter myself that it would have been arranged according to his wishes. I have little doubt as to the person who has wrought this change in him. If I had been less discreet at the time, this person would not have been in a position to injure me with your excellent patron. However, I am nonetheless devoted to him, as you may assure him once more with my respectful homage. I venture to hope that a day will come when he will be able to know me and to judge of me. He accepts her, etc. Yesante answered this note with a following reply at my dictation. My patron has nothing whatever in particular against the person who has written to me, but he wishes to live outside everything, and does not wish to accept any service. Shortly afterwards, the catastrophe came. Do you know the Rédu Prouveur, a narrow, dirty popular street, Yesante Stache, and the markets? It was there that the famous supper of the Third Restoration was held. The guests were armed with pistols, daggers, and keys. After drinking they were to make their way into the gallery of the Louvre, and passing at midnight through a double row of masterpieces, go to strike the usurping monster in the midst of a fit. Their conception was a romantic one. The sixteenth century had returned, one might have believed oneself in the times of the Borgias, the Florentine Medici, and the Parisian Medici, only the men were different. On the first of February at nine o'clock in the evening, I was going to bed when a zealous man and the individual of the bills of exchange forced my door in the Rédon Faire to tell me that all was ready, that in two hours Réphilippe would have disappeared. They came to inquire if they might declare me the principal chief of the provisional government, and if I would consent to take the reins of the provisional government in the name of Henry V, with the Council of Regency. They admitted that the thing was dangerous, but said that I should reap all the greater glory and that, as I was acceptable to all parties, I was the only man in France in a position to play such a part. This was pressing me very hard, two hours to decide upon my crown, two hours in which to sharpen the Big Mamalouc Sabre, which I had bought in Cairo in 1806. However, I felt no embarrassment, and I said to them, Gentlemen, you know that I have never approved of your enterprise, which seems to me a mad one. If I were disposed to meddle in it, I would have shared your dangers, and would not have waited for your victory to accept the prize of your risks. You know that I have a serious love of liberty. And it is clear to me, to judge by the leaders of all this business, that they do not want liberty, and that, if they remain masters of the field of battle, they would begin by establishing the reign of arbitrariness. They would have no one, they would have me least of all, to support them in these plans. Their success would bring about complete anarchy, and other countries profiting by our discords would come to dismember France. I cannot therefore enter into all this. I admire your devotion, but mine is not of the same character. I am going to bed. I advise you to do the same, and I am very much afraid that I shall hear tomorrow morning of the misfortune of your friends. The supper took place. The proprietor of the tavern, who had prepared it only with the authorization of the police, knew what he was about. The police spies at table touched glasses to the health of Henry V, with the best of them. The officers arrived, seized the guests, and once more upset the cup of the legitimate royalty. Though I know of the royalist adventurers, was a cobbler in the redescent, a hero of July, who had fought valiantly during the three days, and who seriously wounded one of Louis-Philippe's policemen, even as he had killed soldiers of the guard to drive out Henry V, and the two old kings. During this business I had received a note from Madame la Duchesse de Berry, appointing me a member of a secret government, which she was establishing in her quality as regent of France. I took advantage of this occasion to write the following letter to the princess. Madame. I have received, with the deepest gratitude, the mark of confidence and esteem, with which you have consented to honour me. It lays upon my loyalty the duty of doubling my zeal, while not refraining from placing before the eyes of your royal highness, what appears to me to be the truth. I will speak first of the so-called conspiracies, the room of which will perhaps have reached your royal highness. It is asserted that these have been concocted or provoked by the police, leaving the fact on one side, and without insisting upon the intrinsically reprehensible nature of conspiracies, be they true or false, I will contend myself with observing that our national character is at once too light and too frank to succeed in such tasks. And so, during the last forty years, this sort of guilty enterprise has invariably failed. Nothing is more common than to hear Frenchmen publicly boast of being in a plot. He tells the whole details of it. Without forgetting the day, place and hour, to some spy whom he takes for a brother, he says aloud, or rather exclaims to the past the spy, We have forty thousand men, all told, we have sixty thousand cartridges in such a street, number so and so, the corner house. And then our cat-a-line goes off to dance and laugh. Secret societies have a long range only because they proceed by revolutions, and not by conspiracies. They aim at changing doctrines, ideas and manners, before changing men and things. Their progress is slow, but their results certain. Publicity of thought will destroy the influence of secret societies. It is public opinion, which will now effect in France that which occult congregations accomplish among un- emancipated nations. The departments in the western south, which they seem to wish to drive to extremities by means of arbitrary measures and violence, retain the spirit of loyalty, for which our old manners were distinguished. But that half of France will never conspire, in the narrow sense of the word. It forms a sort of camp standing at ease under arms. Admirable as the reserve force of the legitimacy, it would be insufficient as an advanced guard, and would never assume the offensive successfully. Britain has made too much progress to allow off the outburst of one of those intestinal wars leading to great results, which were the outlet and the scourge of centuries at once more Christian, and less enlightened than our own. What exists in France is not a monarchy, it is a republic, one truly of the worst quality. This republic is plastroned with the royalty, which receives the blows and prevents them from striking on the government itself. Besides, if the legitimacy is a considerable force, the right of election is also a preponderating power, even when it is only fictitious, especially in this country where men live only on vanity. The French passion for equality is flattered by the right of election. Louis Philippe's government abandons itself to a double excess of arbitrariness and obsequiousness which the government of Charles X had never dreamt of. This excess is endured, and why? Because the people more easily endure the tyranny of a government which they have created than the lawful strictness of the institutions which are not their work. Forty years of storms have shattered the strongest souls, apathy's great egoism orms general, men shrivel up to escape danger, to keep what they possess, to make shift to live in peace. After a revolution there remain also conquered men who communicate their contamination to everything, even as after a battle there remain corpses which pollute the air. If by a mere wish Henry V could be transported to the Trilleroo without trouble, without a shock, without compromising the slightest interest, we should be very near a restoration. But in order to effect it, if one had to spend as much as one sleepless night, the chances would decrease. The results of the days of July have not turned to the profit of the people, nor to the honour of the army, nor to the advantage of literature, art, commerce or industry. The state has fallen prey to the professional ministerialists, and to the class which sees the country in its stupot, public affairs in its domestic economy. It is difficult, madam, for you at your distance to know what is here called the juiced milieu. Your Royal Highness must imagine a complete absence of elevation of soul, of nobility of heart, of dignity of character. You must picture to yourself people swelled up with their importance, bewitched with their employs, doting on their money, determined to die for their pensions. Nothing will part them from those. It is a question of life or death to them. They are wedded to them as were the galls to their swords, the knights to the auriflam, the huganos to the white plume of Henry IV, the soldiers of Napoleon to the tricolor. They will die only when they are exhausted of oaths to every form of government after shedding the last drop of those oaths on their last place. These eunuchs of the sham legitimacy dogmatize about independence while having the citizens bludgeoned in the streets and the writers crowded into prison. They strike up songs of triumph while evacuating Belgium at the bidding of an English minister, and soon after, Ancona by an order of an Austrian corporal. During the threshold of Saint Pelagie and the doors of the cabinets of Europe, they strut or puffed out with liberty and soiled with glory. What I have said concerning the temple of the French must not discourage your royal highness, but I wish that the road that leads to the throne of Henry V were better known. You know my way of thinking as regards the education of my young king. My opinions I expressed at the end of the pamphlet which I laid at your royal highness' feet. I could only repeat myself. When Henry V be brought up for his sentry, with and by the men of his sentry, my whole system is summed up in those two words. Let him above all be brought up not to be king. He may reign tomorrow. He may reign only in ten years. He may never reign, for if the legitimacy has the different chances of returning which I will presently set out, nevertheless the present edifice might crumble to pieces without the form as rising from its ruins. You have a firm enough soul, madame, to be able, without allowing yourself to be cast down, to suppose a judgment of God which would thrust back your illustrious house into the popular sources, even as you have a large enough heart to cherish just hopes without allowing them to intoxicate you. I must now place this other side of the picture before you. Your royal highness can defy, can dare everything at your age. You have more years left to run than have elapsed since the commencement of the revolution. Now what have these latter years not seen? When the republic, the empire, the legitimacy, have passed. Shall the amphibious thing known as the juicet milieu not pass? What? Was it to arrive at the wretchedness of the men and things of the present moment that we have gone through and expended so many crimes, so much misfortune, talent, liberty, and glory? What? Europe overturned, thrones tumbling one over the other. Things hurled into the common ditch with the steel in their breasts, the world laboring for half a century, and all this to bring forth the sham legitimacy. One could conceive a great republic emerging from this social cataclysm. It would at least be fitted to inherit the conquest of the revolution, that is, political liberty, liberty and publicity of thought, the levelling of ranks, the admission to all officers, the equality of all before the law, popular election and sovereignty. But how can we suppose a troop of sordid mediocrities save from shipwreck to be able to employ those principles? To what a proportion have they not already reduced them? They detest them, they hanker only after laws of exception. They would like to catch all those liberties in the crown which they have forged, as in a trap, after which they would fiddle faddles sanctimoniously with canals, railways, a mishmash of arts, literary arrangements, a world of machinery, locustity and self-sufficiency denominated a model society, woe to any superiority, to any man of genius, ambitious or preferment of glory and pleasure, of sacrifice and renown, aspiring to the triumph of the tribune, the liar or arms, who should rise up some day in that universe of boredom? There is but one chance, madam, for the sham legitimacy to continue to vegetate. That is, if the actual state of society were the natural state of that very society at the period in which we live, if the people grown old found itself in sympathy with its decrepit government, if there were harmony of infirmity and weakness between the governors and the governed, then, madam, all would be over for your royal highness and for the rest of the French. But if we have not come to the age of national dotage, and if the immediate republic be impossible, then the legitimacy seems called to be born again. Live your youth, madam, and you shall have the royal tatters of the poor thing known as the monarchy of July. Say to your enemies what your ancestors' queen blanche said to hers during the minority of St. Louis, No matter, I can wait. Life's beautiful hours have been given you in compensation for your sufferings, and the future will give you as many occasions of happiness as the present has robbed you of days. The first reason which militates in your favour, madam, is the justice of your cause and the innocence of your son. All the eventualities are not against the good right. After setting forth in detail the reasons for hope which I hardly entertained, but which I endeavored to amplify in order to console the princess, I continued. There, madam, you see the precarious state of the sham legitimacy at home. Abroad its position is no more assured. If Lou Philippe's Government had felt that the Revolution of July cancelled the earlier transactions, that a new national constitution entailed a new political right and changed social interests, if it had shown judgment and courage at the outset of its career, it could, without firing a single cartridge, have endowed France with the frontier which has been taken from her, so keen was the assent of the peoples, so great the stupefaction of the kings. The sham legitimacy would have paid ready money for its crown with an increase of territory, and would have entrenched itself behind that bulwark, instead of profiting by its Republican element to go fast. It has been afraid of its own principles. It has dragged itself on its belly. It has abandoned the nations which have risen for it and threw it. It has turned them from the clients that they were into adversaries. It has extinguished warlike enthusiasm. It has changed into a pusillanimous wish for peace and enlightened desire to restore the balance of power between ourselves and the neighbouring states, or at least to claim from those states enlarge out of all proportion the shreds torn from our old country. Thanks to his faint heartedness and lack of genius, Louis Philippe has recognised treaties which are not connatural with the Revolution, treaties with which it cannot live and which the foreigners themselves have violated. The juiced milieu has left the foreign cabinets time to recover themselves and to form their armies, and as the existence of a democratic monarchy is incompatible with the existence of the continental monarchies, a state of hostilities might issue from this incompatibility in spite of protocols, financial embarrassments, mutual fears, prolonged armistices, gracious dispatches and demonstrations of friendship. If our bourgeois royalty has resigned itself to accept insult, if men dream of peace, still the state of things may become such as to necessitate war. But whether war shatter the sham legitimacy or not, I know, madame, that you will never fix your hopes in the foreigner. You would rather that Henry V should never reign, then see him triumph under the patronage of an European coalition. You place your hopes in yourself and in your son. In whatever manner we might argue about the ordinances, they could never affect Henry V. Innocent of all, he has the election of the ages, and his native misfortunes in his favour. If unhappiness touches us in the solitude of a tomb, it moves us still more when it keeps watch beside a cradle, for then it is no longer the memory of a thing that is past, of a being who is miserable but who has ceased to suffer. It is a painful reality. It saddens an age which ought to know only joy. It threatens a whole life which has done nothing to deserve its rigours. For you, madame, your adversities provide a powerful authority. Bathed in your husband's blood, you have carried in your womb the son whom politics named the child of Europe, and religion the child of Miracle. What influenced you not exercise of a public opinion when you are seen to be keeping unaided for the exiled orphan, the heavy crown which Charles X shook from his whiteened head and from whose weight two other brows escaped sufficiently laden with sorrow to permit them to reject this new burden? Your image presents itself to our memory with those feminine graces which seem to occupy their natural place when seated on the throne. The people entertain no prejudice against you. They pity your sorrows. They admire your courage. They remember your days and mourning. They are grateful to you for mingling later in their pleasures, for sharing their tastes and their festivals. They find a charm in the vivacity of this foreign French woman who has come from a land endeared to our glory by the days of Fornovo or Marignano, of Areola and of Marengo. The muses regret their protectress, born under that fair sky of Italy, which inspired her with the love of the arts, and which turned a daughter of Henry IV into a daughter of Francis I. And since a revolution has often changed leaders, and has not yet seen a woman at the helm of the state. God wills, perhaps, that the reigns of this unmanageable people, which slipped from the devouring hands of the convention, broke in the victorious hands of Bonaparte, and were taken up in vain by Louis XVIII and Charles X, should be fastened again by a young princess, who would know how to make them at once less fragile and less light. Lastly, reminding madame that she has been good enough to think of me as a member of the secret government, I conclude in my letters as follows. In Lisbon there stands a magnificent monument on which one reads his epitaph, here lies Pasco Fugueira against his will. My mausoleum shall be a modest one, and I shall not rest there unwillingly. You know, madame, the order of ideas in which I perceive the possibility of a restoration. The other combinations would be beyond the range of my mind. I should confess my insufficiency. It would be overtly, by proclaiming myself the man of your consent, of your confidence, that I should find some strength. But I should feel no aptity to act as an octurnal minister plenipotentiary, a chargé d'affaires to the darkness. If your royal highness were patently to appoint me your ambassador to the people of New France, I should inscribe in large letters over my door, legation of old France. Things would happen as God pleased, but I would have nothing to do with secret devotions. I know how to be guilty of loyalty only in flagrante delicto. Madame, without refusing your royal highness the services which you have the right to command of me, I entreat you to allow the plan which I have formed of ending my days in retirement. My ideas cannot be acceptable to the persons who enjoy the confidence of the noble exiles of Holyrood. Once misfortune were passed, the nautrantipathy to my principles in person would revive with prosperity. I have beheld the rejection of the plans which I had put forward for the greatness of my country, to give France frontiers within which she could exist safe from invasion, to remove from her the disgrace of the treaties of Vienna and Paris. I have heard myself treated as a renegade when I was defending religion. As a revolutionary, when I was striving to establish the throne on the basis of the public liberties, I should find the same obstacles increased by the hatred which the faithful of the court, the town and the country, would have conceived from the lesson inflicted upon them by my conduct on the day of trial. I have too little ambition, too great a longing for repose, to make my attachment a burden to the crown, and to thrust upon it my importunate presence. I have done my duty without thinking for a moment that it gave me a right to the favour of an august family. Happy in being permitted to embrace its adversity, I see nothing higher than that honour. It will find no more zealous servant than myself, but it will find those who are younger and abler. I do not believe myself a necessary man, and I think that there are no necessary men left at this day, useless henceforth, I am going to retire into solitude to busy myself with the past. I hope, madame, still to live long enough, to add to the history of the restoration the glorious page which your future destinies promise to France. I am, madame, with the most profound respect, your royal highness' most humble and most obedient servant, Chateaubriand. The letter was obliged to await a safe messenger. Time went on, and I added the following post-cript to my dispatch. Paris, 12 April, 1832. Madame, all things grow old early in France. Each day opens out new chances for politics, and commences a series of events. We now have Monsieur Perrier's illness, and the plagues sent by God. I sent Monsieur the prefect of the Seine the sum of twelve thousand francs, which the outlaw daughter St. Louis and Henry IV has destined for the relief of the unfortunate, a worthy use of her noble indigence. I shall strive, madame, to be the faithful interpreter of your sentiments. I have never in my life received a mission with which I felt myself more honoured. I am, with the most profound respect, etc. Before speaking of the affair of the twelve thousand francs for the cholera stricken sufferers mentioned in the above post-cript, I must speak of the cholera. I had not met with the plague during my journey in the east. It came to visit me at home. The fortune which I had run after awaited me seated at my door. I am, with the most profound respect, and I shall strive, madame, to be the faithful interpreter of your sentiments. According to Nicolae, the memos of Chateaubriol, Volume 5, Part 4, by François-René de Chateaubriol, translated by Alexander Tixar de Matos, Book 1, Part 3. At the time of the plague of Athens in the year 431 before our era, already twenty-two great plagues had ravaged the world. The Athenians imagined that their wills had been poisoned, a popular fancy renewed in all contagions. Thucydides has left us a description of the Attic scourge which has been copied among the ancients by Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, among the moderns by Boccaccio and Manzoni. It is a remarkable thing that, when writing of the plague of Athens, Thucydides does not say a word of Hippocrates in the same way as he does not name Socrates in connection with Alcibiades. His pestilence first attacked the head, descended to the stomach, thence to the bowels, lastly to the legs. If it went out by the feet, after passing through the whole body, like a long serpent, the patient recovered. Hippocrates called it the Divine Evil, and Thucydides the Sacred Fire. They both regarded it as the fire of the heavenly wrath. One of the most dreadful plagues was that of Constantinople in the fifth century, under the reign of Justinian. Christianity had already modified the imagination of the peoples, and given a new character to a calamity, even as it had changed poetry. The Sikhs seemed to see ghosts hover around them, and to hear threatening voices. The black plague of the fourteenth century, known by the name of the Black Death, took rise in China. It was imagined that it moved rapidly in the shape of a fiery vapour, while spreading a noxious smell. It carried off four-fifths of the inhabitants of Europe. In 1575, descended upon Milan the contagion which immortalized the charity of St. Charles Borromeo. Fifty-four years later, in 1629, that unfortunate city was again exposed to the calamities of which Manzoni has made a painting far superior to the celebrated picture by Boccaccio. In 1660 the scourge was renewed in Europe, and in those two pestilences of 1629 and 1660 were reproduced the same symptoms of delirium as in the plague of Constantinople. Marseilles, says M. Le Monti, was in 1720 concluding the festivals which had signalized the passage of Marmezolle de Valois, married to the Duke of Modena. Beside the galleys still decorated with garlands and filled with musicians lay some vessels which brought from the ports of Syria the most terrible calamity. The fatal ship of which M. Le Monti speaks, having exhibited a clean bill, was for a moment admitted to Pratik. That moment was enough to poison the air, a storm increased the evil, and the plague spread to the crash of thunder. The gates of the city and the windows of the houses were closed. In the midst of the general silence sometimes a window was heard to open, and a corpse to fall. The walls streamed with its cankered blood, and dogs without a master waited below to deviate. In one quarter all of whose inhabitants had died they had been walled up at home, as though to prevent death from leaving the house. From these avenues of great family tombs one came to open places in which the pavement was covered with sick and dying persons stretched on mattresses and abandoned without aid. Precisely half-rotten with old clothes mixed with mud, other corpses stood upright against the walls in the attitude in which they had expired. All had fled, even the doctors. The bishop, M. de Belsence, wrote, They ought to abolish the doctors, or at least to give us abler and less timorous ones. I have had great difficulty in having one hundred and fifty half-rotten corpses which were lying around my house removed. One day the galley slaves hesitated to fulfill their funeral functions. The apostle climbed into one of the tumbles, sat down on a heap of corpses, and ordered the convicts to proceed. Death in virtue went off to the cemetery, drawn by vice and crime filled with dread and admiration. On the esplanade de la Tourette, beside the sea, bodies had been lying for three weeks, and these, exposed to the sun and melted by its rays, offered merely an infected lake to the site, on this surface of liquefied flesh. Only the worms imparted some movement to crushed, vague forms which might possess human shape. When the contagion began to relax, M. de Belsence, at the hill of his clergy, repaired to the church of the Akul, mounting on an esplanade commanding a view of Marseille, the harbors and the sea. He gave the benediction, even as the pope in Rome blesses the city in the world. What braver and purer hand could there be to bring down the blessings of heaven upon so many misfortunes? It was thus that the plague devastated Marseille, and five years after these kilometers the following inscription was placed upon the frontage of the town hall, resembling the pompous epitaphs which we read on a sepulchre. Marseille, Fersense-Infilia, Romais-Saurot, Carthaginus-Terro, Athenarum-Emila, Paris-Riedon-Fair, May 1832. The cholera, starting from the Delta de Ganges in 1817, has spread over space measuring 2,200 leagues, from north to south, and 3,500 leagues from east to west. It has wasted 1,400 towns, and mowed down 40 million inhabitants. We have a chart tracing the conqueror's march. It has taken 15 years to come from India to Paris. This means going as fast as Bonaparte. The latter occupied almost the same number of years, in passing from Cadiz to Moscow, and he caused the death of only two or three millions of men. What is the cholera? Is it a mortal wind? Is it insects which we swallow and which devour us? What is this great black death armed with its scythe which crossing mountains and seas has come like one of those terrible pagodas worshipped on the shores of the Ganges to crush our Sundates' chariot-wheels on the banks of the Seine? If this scourge had fallen in the midst of us in a religious age, if it had spread amid the purgy of manness and of popular beliefs, it would have left a striking picture behind it. Then a pole waving by way of a flag from the top of the Tars of Notre-Dame. The cannon firing single shots at intervals to warn the imprudent traveler to turn back. A cordon of troops surrounding the city and allowing none to enter or leave. The church is filled with a great multitude. The priests by day and night chanting the prayers of a perpetual agony. The viaticum carried from house to house with bell in candle. The church bells incessantly tolling the funeral knell. The monks crucifix in hand in the open places, summoning the people to repentance, preaching the wrath and judgment of God, made manifest by the corpses already blackened by hills' fires. Then the clothes-shops, the pontiffs surrounded by his clergy, going with each recta at the head of his parish to fetch the shrinus at Genevieve. The sacred relics carried round the town, preceded by the long procession of the different religious orders, brotherhoods, corporations, congregations, or penitents, associations of veiled women, scholars of the university, ministers of the arms-houses, soldiers marching without arms or with pikes reversed, the miseraree, chanted by the priests mingling with the hymns of girls and children, all at certain signals prostrating themselves in silence and rising to utter fresh complaints. There was none of all this with us. The cholera came to us in an age of philanthropy, of incredulity, of newspapers, of material administration. This scourge devoid of imagination came upon no old cloisters, nor monks, nor sellers, nor gothic tombs. Like the terror of 1793 it stalked abroad with a mocking air in the light of day, in a quite new world, accompanied by its bulletin, which recited the remedies that had been employed against it, the number of victims that it had made, how matters stood, the hopes that were entertained of seeing it come to an end, the precautions that had to be taken to ensure oneself against it, what one should eat, how one ought to address, and everyone continued to attend to his business, and the theatres were filled. I have seen drunkards at the barrier seated outside the pot-house door, drinking at a little wooden table, and saying as they raised their glasses, here's your health, morbis. Others out of gratitude came running up, and they fell dead under the table. The children played at cholera, calling it Nicholas Morbis, and Morbis the Rascal, and yet the cholera had its terrible side. The brilliant sunshine, the indifference of the crowd, the ordinary course of life, which was continued everywhere, gave a new character and a different sort of frightfulness to those days of pestilence. You felt uncomfortable in every limb, you were parched by a cold dry north wind. The atmosphere had a certain metallic flavour which hurt the throat. In the redesherch midi, wagons of the artillery depot were used to cart away the dead bodies. In the redeserve, which was completely devastated, especially on one side, the hurstess came and went from door to door. There were not enough of them to satisfy their demand. A voice would shout from the window, here, hurst, this way! The driver answered that he was full up and could not attend to everybody. One of my friends, Monsieur Poukville, on his way to Dine at my house on Easter Sunday, was stopped at the boulevard du Mont-Parnasse by a succession of beers, nearly all of which were carried by bearers. He saw in this procession the coffin of a young girl, on which was laid a wreath of white roses, a smell of chlorine spread a tainted atmosphere in the wake of this floral ambulance. On the plastilabores, where processions of workmen used to meet, singing the Parisian, one often saw funerals passed by towards the Montmartre Cemetery, as late as eleven o'clock at night, by the light of pitch torches. The ponder first blocked with litters laden with patience for the hospitals, or dead, who had expired on the road. The toll ceased for some days, and the ponder's are. The booth disappeared, and as the northeast wind was blowing, all the store-holders and all the shopkeepers on the keys closed their doors. One met tilted convencers, preceded by a crow, or mute, with a registrar of births, deaths, or marriages, walking in front, dressed in mourning, and carrying a list in his hand. There was a dearth of these tabellans, or registrars. They had to send for more from Saint-Germain, the Villette Saint-Cloud. For the rest the herces were piled up with five or six coffins, kept in place with ropes. Omnibuses and hackney-coaches were employed for the same purpose. It was not uncommon to see a cub adorned with a dead body stretched across the apron. A few of the dead were laid out in the churches. A pre-sprinkled holy water over those collected faithful of eternity. In Athens the people believed that the wells near the purées had been poisoned. In Paris the tradesmen were accused of poisoning their wines, spirits, sugar-plums, and provisions. Several individuals had their clothes torn from their backs, were dragged in the gutter, flung into the sen. The authorities were to blame for these stupid or guilty opinions. How did the scourge like an electric spark pass from London to Paris? It cannot be explained. This fantastic death often fixes us on a spot of the ground, on a house, and leaves the neighbourhood of that infested spot untouched. Then it retraces its steps and picks up what it has forgotten. One night I felt myself attacked. I was seized with a shoving, together with cramp in my legs. I did not want a ring for fear of frightening Madame de Chateaubriand. I got up, I heaped all I could find in my room on the bed, got back under the blankets, and a copious perspiration pulled me through. But I remained shattered, and it was in this condition of discomfort that I was obliged to write my pamphlet on the twelve thousand francs of Madame de Chateaubriand. I should not have been too sorry to go, carried off under the arm of the oldest son of Vishnu, whose distant glance killed Bonaparte upon his rock, at the entrance to the Indian Sea. If all mankind stricken with this general contagion came to die, what would happen? Nothing. The world, depopulated, would continue its solitary course, with our need of any other astronomer to count its steps, than him who has measured them from all eternity. It would present no change to the eyes of the inhabitants of the other planets. They would see it fulfilling its accustomed functions. Upon its surface our little works, our cities, our monuments, would be replaced by forests restored to the sovereignty of the lions. No void would manifest itself in the universe, and nevertheless there would be lacking that human intelligence which knows the stars and rises to a knowledge of the author. What art thou then, O immensity of the works of God, in which, if the genius of man, which is equal to the whole of nature, came to disappear? It would be no more miss, and the smallest atom withdrawn from creation. This read on fair May 1832. Madame de Berry has her Chamber Council in Paris, as Charles X has his. Poultry sums were collected in her name to succour the poor of the royalists. I propose to distribute among the cholera patients a sum of twelve thousand francs, on behalf of the mother of Henry V. We wrote to Massa not only did the princess approve of the disposition of the funds, but she would have liked us to apportion a more considerable sum. The approval arrived on the day on which I sent the money to the mayor's office. Thus everything is strictly true in my explanations, concerning the gift of the exile. On the 14th of April I sent the whole sum to the Prefect of the Seine, to be distributed among the indigent class of the cholera-stricken population of Paris. Monsieur de Bondi was not at the Hotel de Ville when my letter was taken there. The Secretary-General opened my messif and did not consider himself authorized to receive the money. The money dates elapsed. Monsieur de Bondi replied at last that he could not accept the twelve thousand francs, because people would see in it, beneath an apparent benevolence, a political combination against which the entire population of Paris would protest by its refusal. Then my Secretary went to the twelve mayor's offices. Our five mayors were present, four accepted the gift of the thousand francs, one refused it. Of the seven mayors were absent, five kept silent, two refused. I was forthwith besieged by an army of paupers, benevolent and charitable societies, workmen of all kinds, workmen and children, Polish and Italian exiles, men of letters, artists, soldiers, all wrote or demanded a share in the bounty. If I had had a million it would have been distributed in a few hours. Monsieur de Bondi was wrong in saying that the entire population of Paris would protest by its refusal. The population of Paris will always take money from everybody. The sacred attitude of the government was enough to make one die of laughing. One would have thought that this perfidious, legitimate money was going to stir up the cholera patients, to excite an insurrection among the men dying in the hospitals, to march to the assault of the trillery with coffins rolling, with tolling of funeral knells, with winding sheet unfurled under the command of death. My correspondence with the mayors was prolonged through the complication of the refusal of the prefect of Paris. Some of them wrote to me to send me back my money, or to ask for the return of their receipts for the gifts of Madame la Duchesse de Berry. I sent these back loyally, and I handed the following receipt to the office of the Mayor of the Twelfth Ward. I have received from the Mayor's office of the Twelfth Ward the sum of one thousand francs, which it had at first accepted, and which it has returned to me by order of Monsieur the Prefect of the Sin. Paris, 22nd April, 1832. The Mayor of the Ninth Ward, Monsieur Cronier, was braver. He kept the thousand francs, and was dismissed. I wrote in this note, 29th April, 1832 Sir, I hear with keen sorrow of the disgrace of which Madame la Duchesse de Berry's benevolence has, in your case, been the cause or the pretext. You will have, for your consolation, the esteem of the public, the sense of your independence, and the happiness of having sacrificed yourself to the cause of the unfortunate. I have the honour, et cetera, et cetera. The Mayor of the Twelfth Ward is a very different man, Monsieur Cadet de Gassiqueau, repote, apothecary, composing little verses, writing in his time, in the time of liberty in the Empire, an agreeable classical declaration against my romantic prose, and that of Madame Nostyle. Monsieur Cadet de Gassiqueau is the hero who took the cross of the front of Saint-Germain-Locce-roix by assault, and who, in a proclamation on the cholera, gave us to understand that possibly those wicked carlists were the wine-poisoners to whom the people had already done ample justice. And so the illustrious champion wrote me the following letter. Paris, 18th April, 1832. Sir, I was not at the Mayor's office when the person sent by you called. This will explain to you the delay in my reply. Monsieur the Prefect of the Sin, when declining to accept the money which you undertook to offer him, seems to me to have traced the line of conduct which the members of the Municipal Council must follow. I shall imitate Monsieur the Prefect's example, the more riddly, inasmuch as I think that I know, and as I share the sentiments which must have prompted his refusal. I will refer only in passing to the title of Her Royal Highness, given with some affectation to the person whose mouthpiece you constitute yourself. The daughter-law Charles X is no more a royal highness in France than her father-in-law's king. But, sir, there is no one who is not morally convinced that this lady is very actively at work, and that she is spending sums of money very much more considerable than that of which she has entrusted the employment to yourself to stir up trouble in our country and bring about civil war. The alms which she pretends to make are but a means for drawing upon herself and her party an attention and a kindly feeling which her intentions are far from justifying. You will therefore not think it extraordinary that a magistrate, firmly attached to the constitutional royalty of Louis Philippe, should refuse a relief which comes from such a source, and should look to true citizens for pure abounties addressed sincerely to humanity and the country. I am served with a very distinguished regard, et cetera, F. Cadet de Gasicourt. This is a very proud revolt on the part of Monsieur Cadet de Gasicourt against this lady and her father-in-law. What a progress in enlightenment and philosophy! It is not indomitable independence. Monsieur Fleurot and Pergon dared not look people in the face, except upon their knees. He, Monsieur Cadet, says with the cid, then we rise up. His limit is the more courageous in as much as that father-in-law, in other words the descendant of Saint Louis, is an outlaw. Monsieur de Gasicourt is above all that. He despises equally the nobility of time and of misfortune. With the same contempt for aristocratic prejudices, he takes away my dear and assumes it for himself, as though it were conquests snatched from the petty gentry. But could there not have been some ancient historical quarrels between the House of Cadet and the House of Capit? Henry IV, the ancestor of that father-in-law, who is no more king than that lady, is a royal highness, was one day passing through the forests of Saint-Germain. Eight lords were lying in ambush there to kill the bare knees. They were taken. One of those gallants, says L'Itoile, was an apothecary who asked to speak with the king, of whom his majesty, having inquired of what condition he was, he answered that he was an apothecary. What said the king? Is it the habit to perform the condition of an apothecary here? Do you lie and wait for the wayfarers, too? Henry IV was a soldier, modestly troubled him but little, when he ran away from a word no more than from the enemy. I suspect Monsieur de Gassicle, because of his ill-humour towards the descendant of Henry IV, of being himself the descendant of the apothecary liga. The mayor of the Fourth Ward had doubtless written to me in the hope that I would engage him in mortal combat. But I do not care to engage Mr. Cadet in anything. I hope that he will forgive me for leaving him this little token of my remembrance. It's the days when the great revolutions and the great revolutionaries passed before my eyes. Everything had trivelled greatly. The men who caused the fall of an oak, replanted when too old to take root, applied to me. They asked me for a portion of the widow's might to buy bread. The letter from the Committee of the Decorée du Juillet, or Nights of July, is a document worth noting for the instruction of posterity. August 20, April 1832 Please address your reply to Mr. Jebe Arnaud, Manager and Secretary to the Committee, 3 re-sandices. Monsieur Le Bicot. The members of our Committee approach you with confidence to ask you kindly to honour them with a gift in favour of the Nights of July. Any benevolence shown to these unhappy fathers of families at this time of plague and misery inspires the sincere's gratitude. We venture to hope that you are concerned to allow your illustrious name to figure beside those of General Bertrand, General Exelmans, General Lamarck, General Lafayette, and several ambassadors, Gears of France, and deputies. We beg you to honour us with a word in reply, and if, contrary to our expectation, our request should meet with a refusal, be good enough to return us the present letter. With the gentler sentiments, we beg you, Monsieur Le Bicot, to accept the homage of our respectful salutations. The active members of the Constitutive Committee of the Nights of July, 4, Visiting Member, Cyprien Demaye, Special Commissary, Jebe Arnaud, Manager and Secretary, Turelle, Assistant Member. I was too wise not to take the advantage which the Revolution of July here gave me over itself. By distinguishing between persons, one would create ellipse among the unfortunate who, because of certain political opinions, might never obtain relief. I lost no time in sending a hundred francs to these gentlemen with this note. Paris, 22nd April, 1832. Gentlemen, I am infinitely grateful to you for applying to me to come to the assistance of some unhappy fathers of families. I hasten to send you the sum of one hundred francs. I regret that I am not able to offer you a more considerable gift. I have the honor, etc., Chateaubriand. The following receipt was sent to me by Retin. Monsieur le Bicot, I have the honor to thank you, and to acknowledge the receipt of the sum of one hundred francs, devoted by your kindness to the succor of the unfortunate of July. Greetings and respects, Jebe Arnaud, Manager and Secretary to the Committee, 23rd April. And so Madame La Duchesse de Berry gave charity to those who had driven her from the country. The transactions show things in their true light. How come I believe in any reality in a country where no one looks after the invalids of his party? Where the heroes of yesterday are the destitute persons of today? Where a little gold makes the multitude hurry to one, like pigeons in a farmyard flocking to the hand that flings grain to them? Four thousand francs of my twelve remained. I addressed myself to religion. Monsignor, the Archbishop of Paris, wrote me this noble letter. Paris, 26th April, 1832. Monsieur le Bicot. Charity is Catholic, like faith, foreign to men's passions, independent of their movements. One of its chief distinguishing characteristics is that, as St. Paul says, it worketh no evil, non-cogitat malum. It blesses the hand that gives, and the hand that receives, without attributing to the generous benefactor, any other motive than that of doing good, and without asking of the indigent poor any other condition than that of need. It accepts with deep and feeling gratitude the gift which the Auguste widow has charged you to confide to it, to be employed for the relief of our unfortunate brothers, the victims of the plague which is devastating the capital. It will distribute with the most grufulous fidelity the four thousand francs which he have handed me on her behalf, and for which my letters and your receipt. But I shall have the honour to send you an account of the distribution when the intentions of the benefactors have been fulfilled. Be so good, Monsieur le Bicot, as to present to Madame la Duchesse de Berry the thanks of a pastor and a father, who daily offers his life to God for his sheep and his children, and who calls on every side for help capable of levelling their wretchedness. Her royal heart has already doubtless found within itself its reward for the sacrifice which she has devoted to our misfortunes. Religion ensures to her moreover the effect of the divine promises set forth in the book of the Beatitudes for those who are merciful. The money has been divided with our delay among the rectus of the twelve principal parishes of Paris, to whom I have addressed the letter of which I enclose a copy. Monsieur le Bicot, the Assurance, et cetera, Yesante, Archbishop of Paris. One is always amazed to realise in how high a degree religion suits even style, and gives an immediate gravity and seamliness to common places. This forms a contrast with the heap of anonymous letters which have become mixed with the letters I have quoted. The spelling of these anonymous letters is fairly correct. The handwriting neat, they are properly speaking literary, like the Revolution of July. They display scribbling, jealousies, hatreds, fanaties, safe in the inviolability of a cardus which, refraining to show its face, cannot be made visible by a blow. Here are some samples. Will you let us know, you old republicanquist, the day on which you would like to grease your moccasins? It would be easy for us to procure you some chants, fat. And should you want some of your friend's blood to write their history in, there is no lack of it in the Paris mud, its element. You old brigand, ask your rascally and worthy friend Fitz James if he liked the stone which he received in his feudal part. Pack of scoundrels that you are, you will pull your guts from your stomachs, etc. In another missive I find a very well drawn gallows with these words. Go down on your knees to a priest and make an act of contrition, for we want your old head to put an end to your treacherous. For the rest the cholera still continues. The answer which I might address to a known or unknown adversary would perhaps reach him when he was lying on his threshold. If, on the contrary, he were destined to live, where would his reply find me? Perhaps in that resting place of which no one can be frightened to-day, especially we men who have lengthened out our years between the terror and the plague, the first and last horizons of our lives. A truce. Let the coffins pass. Paris, Redont Faire, 10th June, 1832. General Lamarck's funeral has brought about two days of bloodshed and the victory of the sham legitimacy over the Republican Party. This incomplete and divided party has made unheroic resistance. Paris has been declared in a state of siege. This is the censorship on the largest possible scale. A censorship in the manner of the convention, with this difference, that a military commission takes the place of the revolutionary tribunal. They are shooting in June, 1832, the men who achieved the victory in July, 1830. That same polytechnic school, that same artillery of the National Guard, are being sacrificed. They conquered the power for those who are crushing, disowning, and disbanding them. The Republicans are certainly wrong to have cried up the measures of anarchy and disorder. But why did you not employ such noble arms on our frontiers? They would have delivered us from the ignominious yoke of the foreigner, generous if exalted heads would not have remained to ferment in Paris, to blaze up against the humiliation of our foreign policy, and the bad faith of the new royalty. You have been pitiless, you who, without sharing the dangers of the three days, have gathered their fruit. Know now with the mothers to identify the corpses of those knights of July, from whom you hold places, riches, and honors. Young men, you do not all obtain the same lot on the same shore. You have a tomb under the colonnade of the Louvre, and a place in the morgue. Some for snatching, others for bestowing a crown. Your names, who knows them? You sacrifices, and for ever unknown victims of a memorable revolution. Is the blood known that cements the monuments which men admire? The workmen who built the Great Pyramid for the corpse of an unglorious king, sleep forgotten in the sand, near the needy root that served to feed them during their labours. Paris, redone fair, end of July, 1832. Madame La Duchestor Berry, no sooner sanctioned the measure of the twelve thousand francs, than she took ship for her famous adventure. The rising of Marseilles failed. They remained but to try the west. For the Vendee and Glory is a thing apart. It will live in our annals. In any case, seven-eighths of France has chosen a different glory, the object of jealousy or antipathy. The Vendee is an oriflam, venerated and admired in the treasure-syntany, and of its youth in the future will henceforth gather no longer. Madame, when she landed, like Bonaparte on the coast of Provence, did not see the white flag fly from steeple to steeple. Received in her expectations, she found herself almost alone on shore with Monsieur de Pormole. The Marshal wanted to make her recross the frontier at once. She asked to have the night to think it over. She slept well among the rocks to the sound of the sea. In the morning, on waking, she found a noble dream in her thoughts. Since I am on French soil, I will not leave it. Let us set out for the Vendee. Madame had been informed by a faithful man, took her in his carriage as his wife, crossed the whole of France with her, and has put her down at—she has remained some time in a country house without being recognized by anybody except the curate of the place. The Marshal de Bourmor is to join her in the Vendee by another road. Informed of all this in Paris, it was easy for us to foresee the result. The Enterprise has a further drawback for the royalist cause. It would discover the weakness of that cause and dispel illusions. If Madame had not gone to the Vendee, France would always have believed that in the West there was a royalist camp standing at ease, as I called it. But, however, there remains still one means of saving Madame, and casting a new veil over the truth. The princess should have left again at once, arriving at her own risk and peril, like a brave general who comes to review his army. To moderate its impatience and its order, she would have declared that she had hastened to tell her soldiers that the moment for action was not yet favorable, that she would return to place herself at the ahead when the occasion should summon her. But I would at least have once shown a bourbon to the Vendeeans, the shades of the Cathillinaires, the Delbais, the Bonchamps, the La Roche-Coleins, the Sherrits would have rejoiced. Our committee met, while we were discoursing that came from Nantes to Captain, who told us the place where the heron is staying. The captain is a good-looking young man, brave as a sailor, eccentric as a Briton. He disapproved of the enterprise. He thought it man, but he said, Madame is not going away. It is the question of dying, and that is all. And then, gentlemen of the council, have Walter Scott hanged, for he is the real culprit. I thought that we ought to write what we felt to the princess. Monsieur Berrier, who was preparing to go to defend a case at Campé, generously offered to take the letter and to see Madame if he could. When it became necessary to draw up the note, no one thought of writing it. I undertook to do so. Our messenger set out and be awaited events. I soon received by post the following note, which had not been sealed and which had doubtless come under the eyes of the authorities. Angolème, 7th June. Monsieur la Vicente. I have received and forwarded your letter of Friday last when, on Sunday, the prefect of the Loire Amphéria sent word requiring me to leave the town of Nantes. I was on my way and at the gates of Angolème. I have just been taken before the prefect who has notified me of an order from Monsieur de Montalibé, by which I am to be taken back to Nantes under escort of gendarmes. Since my departure from Nantes, the department of the Loire Amphéria has been placed under martial law, and by this entirely legal transfer I am subject to the laws of exception. I am writing to the minister to ask him to have me taken to Paris. He will receive my letter by the same post. The object of my journey to Nantes seems to have been utterly misinterpreted. Decide, therefore, whether in the light of your prudence, you will think of right to mention the matter to the minister. I apologise for addressing this request to you, but I have no one to whom to apply but yourself. I believe, Monsieur Le Viscont, in my old and sincere attachment, and in my profound respect, your most devoted servant, Berrier the Younger. P.S. There is not a moment to lose if you are willing to see the minister. I am going to tour where his new orders will still find me on Sunday. He can dispatch them either by telegraph or express. I inform Monsieur Berrier in the following reply of the decision to which I came. August 10, 1832 I received your letter, Monsieur, dated Anglain the seventh instant. It was too late for me to see Monsieur the minister of the interior as you wished, but I wrote to him at once, sending him your own letter enclosed in mine. I hope that the mistake which occasioned your arrest will soon be admitted, and that you will be restored to liberty and to your friends, among whom I beg you to number myself. A thousand hearty compliments, with the renewed assurance of my sincere and entire devotion, shot a drill. Here is my letter to the minister of the interior. Paris, 9 June, 1832 Monsieur la ministre de l'Anterre. I at this moment received the enclosed letter. As I should probably not be able to see you as quickly as Monsieur Berrier wishes, I have decided to send you his letter. His complaint appears to me to be justified. He will be instant in Paris, as at naut, and at naut as in Paris. This is the thing which the authorities must admit, and by writing Monsieur Berrier's complaint, they will avoid giving a retractive effect to the law. I venture to hope all, Monsieur Laconte, from your impartiality. I have the honour to be et cetera, et cetera, chateau bien. End of Book 1, Part 3.