part M

. de Montmorency conceived the idea of confiding his hopes to her, painted the restoration of the Bourbons to her in colours calculated to arouse her enthusiasm, and charged her to bring together two men at that time of importance in France, Moreau and Bernadotte, to see if they could unite against Bonaparte. She was intimately acquainted with Bernadotte, who has since become Prince Royal of Sweden. Something chivalrous in his appearance, something noble in his manners, something very subtle in his intelligence, something declamatory in his conversation make him a remarkable man. Courageous in battle, bold in speech, but timid in actions which are not military, irresolute in all his designs, he has one thing which makes him very seductive at first sight, but which, at the same time, places an obstacle to any combination of plans with him, and that is a habit of haranguing, a relic of his revolutionary education which does not leave him. He sometimes has movements of real eloquence; he knows it, he loves this kind of success and, when he has entered upon the development of some general idea connected with what he has heard in the clubs or the rostrum, he loses sight of all that occupies him and is no longer anything but an impassioned orator. That is what he appeared in France during the early years of the reign of Bonaparte, whom he always hated and by whom he was suspected, and that again is what he has shown himself in these later days, amid the disorder of Europe, of which, nevertheless, we owe the liberation to him, because he reassured the foreigners by showing them a Frenchman ready to march against the tyrant of France and knowing how to say only such things as could have an influence for his nation's good.

"Anything that offers a woman the means of exercising power is always agreeable to her. Moreover, in the idea of rousing against the despotism of Bonaparte men important through their dignities and their glory there was something generous and noble which was bound to tempt Madame Récamier. She therefore lent herself to M. de Montmorency's wishes. She often threw Bernadotte and Moreau together at her house. Moreau wavered, Bernadotte spouted. Madame Récamier took Moreau's indecisive speeches for a commencement of resolution and Bernadotte's harangues as a signal for the overthrow of tyranny. The two generals, on their side, were enraptured to see their discontent pampered by so much beauty, wit and grace. There was, in fact, something romantic and poetic in that young and bewitching woman who talked to them of the liberty of their country. Bernadotte never ceased repeating to Madame Récamier that she was made to electrify the world and create fanatics."

While noting the delicacy of this portraiture by Benjamin Constant, it must be said that Madame Récamier would never have entered into political interests but for the irritation which she felt at the banishment of Madame de Staël. The future King of Sweden had a list of the generals who still held with the party of independence, but Moreau's name was not on it; it was the only one fit to be opposed to Napoleon's, only Bernadotte did not know what manner of man the Bonaparte was whose power he was attacking.

Madame Moreau[372] gave a ball: all Europe was there, excepting France, which was represented only by the Republican Opposition. In the course of this entertainment, General Bernadotte led Madame Récamier to a little drawing-room where only the sound of the music followed them to remind them where they were. Moreau passed into this drawing-room; Bernadotte said to him, after long explanations:

"You have a popular name; you are the only one of us who can put himself forward with the support of the people; see what you can do, what we can do under your leader-ship."

Moreau repeated what he had often said before, that "he felt the danger with which liberty was threatened, that they must watch Bonaparte, but that he feared civil war."

This conversation was prolonged and became animated; Bernadotte lost his temper, and said to General Moreau: "You do not dare to take up the cause of liberty; well, then, Bonaparte will make sport of liberty and you. It will perish in spite of our efforts and, as for you, you will be involved in its ruin without having fought."

Prophetic words!

Madame Récamier's mother was intimately acquainted with Madame Hulot, the mother of Madame Moreau, and Madame Récamier had contracted with the latter one of those childish friendships which it is a pleasure to continue in after life.

[Sidenote: The trial of General Moreau.]

During General Moreau's trial, Madame Récamier spent all her time with Madame Moreau. The latter told her friend that her husband complained that he had not yet seen her among the public which filled the court and the bench. Madame Récamier arranged to be present at the sitting on the day after this conversation. One of the judges, M. Brillat-Savarin[373], undertook to pass her in through a private door which opened on to the amphitheatre of the court. She raised her veil, on entering, and cast a glance over the rows of prisoners in order to find Moreau. He recognised her, rose and bowed. All eyes were turned in her direction; she hastened to descend the steps of the amphitheatre to reach the place intended for her. The prisoners were forty-seven in number; they filled the benches placed opposite the judges of the court. Each prisoner was placed between two gendarmes: the soldiers treated General Moreau with deference and respect.

Messieurs de Polignac and de Rivière attracted attention, but especially Georges Cadoudal. Pichegru, whose name will remain associated with that of Moreau, was missing from his side, or, rather, one seemed to see his shadow there, for it was known that he was also missing from prison[374].

There was no more question of Republicans: it was Royalist loyalty fighting against the new power; nevertheless, this cause of the Legitimacy and of its high-born partisans had, as its leader, a man of the people, Georges Cadoudal. One saw him there, with the thought that that so pious and so fearless head was about to fall on the scaffold, that he, Cadoudal, alone, perhaps, would not be saved, for he would do nothing to be saved. He defended only his friends; as for what concerned him in particular, he told all. Bonaparte was not so generous as people supposed: eleven persons devoted to Georges perished with him[375].

Moreau did not speak. At the end of the sitting, the judge who had brought Madame Récamier came to take her away. She crossed the bar at the opposite side to that by which she had entered, and passed by the bench of the prisoners. Moreau came down, followed by his two gendarmes; he was separated from her only by a hand-rail. He addressed a few words to her, which, in her startled condition, she did not hear; she tried to reply, her voice broke.

To-day, when the times are changed and when Bonaparte's name alone seems to fill them, we do not conceive how small a hold his power as yet had. On the night preceding the sentence, during which the court sat, all Paris was on foot. Floods of people went towards the Palace of Justice. Georges wanted no mercy; he replied to them who wished to ask it for him:

"Do you promise me a finer occasion of death?"

Moreau, condemned to transportation, set out for Cadiz, whence he was to cross to America. Madame Moreau went to join him. Madame Récamier was with her at her departure. She saw her kiss her son in his cradle and saw her turn back again to kiss him a second time; she took her to her carriage, and received her last farewell.

[Sidenote: Letter from General Moreau.]

General Moreau wrote the following letter from Cadiz to his generous friend:

"CHICLANA (near Cadiz), 12 _October_ 1804.

"MADAME,

"You will, no doubt, be pleased to hear news of two fugitives in whom you have shown so much interest. After going through all sorts of fatigues, by land and sea, we were hoping to rest at Cadiz, when the yellow fever, which in some way may be compared to the ills we had recently undergone, came to besiege us in that town.

"Although my wife's confinement obliged us to remain there for more than a month during the sickness, we were lucky enough to escape infection; only one of our servants caught it.

"At last we are at Chiclana, a very pretty village at a few leagues from Cadiz, enjoying good health, and my wife quite convalescent, after giving me a very healthy daughter.

"She is persuaded that you take as great an interest in this event as in all that has happened to us, and she asks me to acquaint you with it and to send you her kind remembrances.

"I say nothing of the kind of life which we lead: it is excessively tedious and monotonous, but at least we breathe at liberty, although in the land of the Inquisition.

"I beg you, madame, to receive the assurance of my respectful attachment, and to believe me ever

"Your most humble and most obedient servant,

"V. MOREAU."

This letter is dated from Chiclana, a spot which, together with glory, seemed to promise an assured reign to M. le Duc d'Angoulême: and yet he appeared on that coast only with as fatal a result as Moreau, who has been believed devoted to the Bourbons. Moreau, in the depths of his soul, was devoted to liberty; when he had the misfortune to join the Coalition, the question in his eyes was solely that of contending against the despotism of Bonaparte. Louis XVIII. said to M. de Montmorency, who was deploring the death of Moreau as a great loss to the Crown:

"Not so great: Moreau was a Republican."

The general returned to Europe only to find the cannon-ball on which his name was engraved by the finger of God.

Moreau recalls to my mind another illustrious captain, Masséna. The latter was going to the Army of Italy; he asked Madame Récamier for a white ribbon from the trimming of her dress. One day she received this note in Masséna's hand:

"The charming ribbon given him by Madame Récamier was worn by General Masséna in the battles and the blockade of Genoa: it never left the general and constantly promoted his victory."

The old manners peep out through the new manners of which they form the ground-work. The gallantry of the knight of gentle birth appeared again in the plebeian soldier: the memory of the tournaments and crusades lay hidden in the feats of arms with which modern France has crowned her ancient victories. Cisher, the companion of Charlemagne, did not deck himself in the fight with his lady's colours:

"He carried," says the Monk of Saint-Gall[376], "seven, eight, or even nine enemies strung on his lance."

Cisher went before and Masséna came after chivalry.

Madame de Staël in Berlin heard of her father's illness; she hurried back, but M. Necker was dead[377] before she reached Switzerland.

At that time happened M. Récamier's ruin[378]; Madame de Staël was soon informed of this unfortunate event. She at once wrote to Madame Récamier, her friend:

[Sidenote: Letter from Madame de Staël.]

"GENEVA, 17 _November._[379]

"Ah, my dear Juliet, what pain have I felt at the shocking news that reaches me! How I curse the exile which does not permit me to be with you, to press you to my heart! You have lost all that has to do with the ease and comfort of life; but, if it were possible to be more loved, more interesting than you are, that is what would have happened to you. I am going to write to M. Récamier, whom I pity and respect. But, tell me, would it be a dream to hope to see you here this winter? If you were willing, three months spent here, in a narrow circle where you would be passionately cared for: but in Paris also you inspire that feeling. At any rate, I will come to see you at Lyons, or anywhere outside my 'forty leagues,' to embrace you, to tell you that I have felt more tenderness for you than for any woman I have ever known. I can say nothing to you by way of consolation, unless it be that you will be loved and valued more than ever and that the admirable features of your generosity and benevolence will be known, in spite of yourself, through this misfortune, as they never would have been without it. Certainly, to compare your situation with what it was, you have lost; but if it were possible for me to envy what I love, I would give all that I am to be you. A beauty unmatched in Europe, a stainless reputation, a proud and generous character, what a fortune of happiness that remains in this sad life through which we go so naked! Dear Juliet, let our friendship draw closer; let it consist not only of generous services, which have all come from you, but of a sustained correspondence, a reciprocal desire to confide our thoughts in one another, a life together. Dear Juliet, you shall make me come back to Paris, for you are still an all-powerful person, and we shall see each other every day; and, as you are younger than I, you shall close my eyes, and my children shall be your friends. My daughter cried this morning at my tears and yours. Dear Juliet, we both enjoyed the luxury that surrounded you; your fortune was ours, and I feel myself ruined because you are no longer rich. Believe me, some happiness remains when one has made herself loved thus.

"Benjamin wants to write to you; he is much upset. Mathieu de Montmorency has written me a very touching letter about you. Dear friend, may your heart remain calm amid so many sorrows. Alas, neither the death nor the indifference of your friends threaten you, and those are the eternal wounds. Adieu, dear angel, adieu! Respectfully I kiss your charming face...."

Madame Récamier now became the object of a new interest: she left society without complaining and seemed as much made for solitude as for the world. Her friends remained to her, "and this time," M. Ballanche has said, "fortune withdrew alone."

Madame de Staël drew her friend to Coppet[380]. Prince Augustus of Prussia, captured at the Battle of Eylau[381], passed through Geneva on his way to Italy: he fell in love with Madame Récamier. The intimate and private life that belongs to every man continued its course beneath the general life, the blood of battles and the transformation of empires. The rich man, on waking, beholds his gilded panellings, the poor man his smoky rafters: there is but one sun-ray to give light to both.

Prince Augustus, believing that Madame Récamier might consent to a divorce, proposed to her in marriage. A record of this passion remains in the picture of Corinne, which the Prince obtained from Gérard; he made a present of it to Madame Récamier as an undying reminder of the feeling with which she had inspired him and of the intimate friendship which united Corinne and Juliet.

The summer was spent in merry-making: the world was upset; but it happens that the echo of public catastrophes, mingling with the joys of youth, redoubles their charm; we surrender ourselves the more eagerly to pleasures the nearer we feel to losing them.

Madame de Genlis has made a novel out of this attachment of Prince Augustus. I found her one day in the throes of composition. She was living at the Arsenal, surrounded by dusty books, in a gloomy apartment. She expected nobody; she was dressed in a black gown; her white hair obscured her face; she held a harp between her knees, and her head was sunk upon her breast. Hanging on to the strings of the instrument, she allowed her pale and emaciated hands to wander on either side of the sonorous wire-work, from which she drew feeble sounds, resembling the distant and undefinable voices of death. What was the ancient sybil singing? She was singing Madame Récamier. She had at first hated her, but had later been conquered by beauty and distress. Madame de Genlis had just finished this page on Madame Récamier, giving her the name of Athenais:

[Sidenote: Prince Augustus of Prussia.]

"The Prince entered the drawing-room, with Madame de Staël showing him the way. Suddenly the door half opened, and Athenais advanced. By the elegance of her figure, by the dazzling brilliancy of her features, the Prince could not fail to recognise her, but he had formed a quite different idea of her: he had represented this woman to himself as famous for her beauty, as proud of her successes, with an assumed bearing and the kind of confidence which that sort of celebrity only too often gives; and he saw a timid young person step forward with embarrassment and blush as she appeared. The sweetest sentiment mingled with his surprise.

"After dinner, they did not go out, because of the excessive heat; they went down into the gallery to make music until the time came to take the air. After a few brilliant chords and harmonious sounds of entrancing sweetness, Athenais sang to her own accompaniment on the harp. The Prince listened to her with rapture and, when she had finished, looked at her with inexpressible commotion, exclaiming:

"'And such talents!'"

Madame de Staël, in her maturity, loved Madame Récamier: Madame de Genlis, in her decrepitude, found back for her the accents of her youth; the author of _Mademoiselle de Clermont_[382] lays the scene of her novel[383] at Coppet, with the author of _Corinne_, a rival whom she detested: that was one wonder. Another wonder is to see me writing these details. I am turning over letters which remind me of times in which I lived solitary and unknown. There was happiness without me on the shores of Coppet, which I have not seen since without a certain movement of envy. The things which have escaped me on earth, which have fled from me, which I regret, would kill me, were I not so near my tomb; but, at this short distance from eternal oblivion, truths and dreams are equally vain: at the end of one's life, all is time lost.

Madame de Staël set out a second time for Germany[384]. Here begins again a series of letters to Madame Récamier, perhaps even more charming than the first.

There is nothing in Madame de Staël's printed works which approaches this naturalness, this eloquence, in which imagination lends its expression to the feelings. The virtue of Madame Récamier's friendship must have been great, since it was able to make a woman of genius produce what was hidden and, as yet, unrevealed in her talent. We divine, moreover, in the sad accent of Madame de Staël a secret displeasure, of which the beauty would naturally be the confidant, she who could never receive like wounds.

Madame de Staël, having returned to France, came, in the spring of 1810[385], to live at the Château de Chaumont[386], on the banks of the Loire, at forty leagues from Paris, the distance fixed by the radius of her banishment. Madame Récamier joined her at that country-house.

Madame de Staël was at that time supervising the impression of her work on Germany; when it was on the point of publication, she sent it to Bonaparte with this letter:

[Sidenote: Madame de Staël to Napoleon.]

"SIRE,

"I take the liberty of presenting to Your Majesty my work on Germany. If you deign to read it, it seems to me that you will find in it proof of a mind capable of some reflection and ripened by time. Sire, it is twelve years since I saw Your Majesty and since I was exiled. Twelve years of misfortune modify all characters, and destiny teaches resignation to those who suffer. Prepared to put to sea, I beseech Your Majesty to grant me half-an-hour's conversation. I believe that I have things to tell you which may interest you, and it is on that score that I beseech you to grant me the favour of speaking to you before my departure. I will allow myself only one thing in this letter, which is an explanation of the motives which oblige me to leave the Continent, if I do not obtain permission from Your Majesty to live at a country-place near enough to Paris for my children to stay there. Your Majesty's disgrace casts so great a disfavour in Europe upon the persons who are its object, that I cannot take a step without encountering its effects. Some fear to compromise themselves by seeing me, others think themselves Romans when triumphing over that fear. The simplest social relations become services which a proud mind cannot put up with. Among my friends are some who have allied themselves to my lot with admirable generosity; but I have seen the most intimate sentiments shattered against the necessity to live with me in solitude, and I have spent my life during the past eight years between the dread of not obtaining sacrifices and the sorrow of being the object of them. It is perhaps ridiculous thus to enter into details of one's impressions with the sovereign of the world; but that which gave you the world, Sire, is a sovereign genius. And, in respect of observation of the human heart, Your Majesty's comprehension embraces the greatest and the most delicate springs. My sons have no career, my daughter is thirteen years of age; in a few years it will be necessary to settle her: it would be selfish to compel her to live in the insipid residences to which I am condemned. I shall therefore have to part from her, alas! This life is unendurable, and I know no remedy for it on the Continent. What city can I choose in which Your Majesty's disgrace does not place an invincible obstacle to both the settling of my children and my personal repose? Your Majesty is not yourself, perhaps, aware of the fear which most of the authorities of every country entertain of exiles, and in this connection I should have things to tell you which surely exceed what you may have ordered. Your Majesty has been told that I regretted Paris because of the Museum and Talma: this is an agreeable jest upon exile, in other words upon the misfortune which Cicero and Bolingbroke have declared to be the most insupportable of all; but, if I were to love the master-pieces of art which France owes to Your Majesty's conquests, if I were to love those beautiful tragedies, the images of heroism: would it be for you, Sire, to blame me for it? Is not the happiness of each individual compounded of the nature of his faculties? And, if Heaven has given me talents, have I not the imagination which renders the enjoyment of the arts and the mind necessary? So many people ask of Your Majesty real advantages of every kind! Why should I blush to ask of you friendship, poetry, music, pictures, all that ideal existence which I can enjoy without swerving from the submission which I owe to the Monarch of France?"

This unpublished letter was worth preserving[387]. Madame de Staël was not, as has been contended, a blind and implacable enemy. She was listened to no more than I, when I also saw myself obliged to write to Bonaparte to ask him for the life of my cousin Armand. Alexander and Cæsar would have been touched by this letter so lofty in tone, written by so famous a woman; but the confidence of the merit which judges itself the equal of the supreme dominion, that sort of familiarity of the intellect which places itself on the level of the master of Europe to treat with him as from crown to crown appeared to Bonaparte but the arrogance of a disordered self-esteem. He thought himself set at defiance by all that had any independent greatness; to him baseness seemed fidelity, pride revolt: he did not know that true talent recognises no Napoleons save in genius, that it has its right of entry into the palaces as into the temples, because it is immortal.

Madame de Staël left Chaumont and returned to Coppet[388]; Madame Récamier again hastened to go to her; M. Mathieu de Montmorency also remained devoted to her. Both were punished for it; they were smitten with the very penalty which they had gone to console: the forty leagues' distance from Paris was inflicted on them[389].

Madame Récamier retired to Châlons-sur-Marne[390] influenced in her selection by its propinquity to Montmirail[391], where Messieurs de La Rochefoucauld-Doudeauville resided.

A thousand details of Bonaparte's oppression have become lost in the general tyranny: the persecuted persons dreaded to see their friends for fear of compromising them; their friends dared not visit them, for fear of drawing down upon them some increase of severity. The unhappy outlaw, becoming as one infected with the plague, lived sequestered from the human race, in quarantine in the despot's hatred. You were well received so long as your independence of opinion was unknown; so soon as it became known, every one drew back; there remained around you none save authorities spying on your connections, your feelings, your correspondence, your proceedings: such were those times of honour and liberty.

Madame de Staël's letters reveal the sufferings of that period, in which talents were at each moment threatened with a dungeon, in which one busied one's self only with the means of escaping, in which one aspired to flight as to a deliverance: when liberty has disappeared there remains a country, but no more mother-land.

[Sidenote: Madame de Staël's marriage.]

When writing to her friend that she did not wish to see her, from apprehension of the evil which she might bring upon her, Madame de Staël did not say all: she was secretly married to M. de Rocca[392], whence resulted a complication of difficulties by which the imperial police profited. Madame Récamier, from whom Madame de Staël thought it right to conceal her new cares, was astonished, with good reason, at the stubbornness which she displayed in forbidding her the entry of her place at Coppet: though wounded by the resistance of Madame de Staël, for whom she had already sacrificed herself, she persisted in her resolve to join her.

All the letters which ought to have restrained Madame Récamier only served to confirm her in her intention; she started and, at Dijon, received this fatal note:

"I bid you adieu, dear angel of my life, with all the tenderness of my soul. I recommend Auguste[393] to you: let him see you and then let him see me again. You are a celestial creature. If I had lived in your company, I should have been too happy: fate carries me away. Adieu[394]."

Madame de Staël was to meet Juliet again only to die. Her note struck the traveller with a thunder-bolt: to fly suddenly, to depart before pressing in her arms her who was hastening to fling herself into her adversity, was not that a cruel resolution on Madame de Staël's part? It appeared to Madame Récamier that friendship might have been less "carried away by fate."

Madame de Staël went in search of England by way of Germany and Sweden: the power of Napoleon was a second sea separating Albion from Europe, even as the Ocean separates her from the world.

Auguste, Madame de Staël's son, had lost his brother killed by a sword-thrust in a duel[395]; he married and had a son: this son, a few months old, followed him into the tomb. With Auguste de Staël the male posterity of an illustrious woman died out, for it does not revive in the honourable, but unknown name of Rocca.

[Sidenote: The Duchesse de Chevreuse.]

Madame Récamier, left alone and full of regret, first sought a refuge in her native town of Lyons[396]: there she met Madame de Chevreuse[397], another exile. Madame de Chevreuse had been forced by the Emperor and, afterwards, by her own family to enter the new society. You would scarce find an historic name which did not consent to lose its honour rather than a single forest. Once engaged at the Tuileries, Madame de Chevreuse thought she would be able to hold sway in a Court newly-issued from the camps: that Court, it is true, sought to acquaint itself with the airs of olden times, in the hope of covering its recent origin; but the plebeian manner was still too rough to receive lessons from aristocratic impertinence. In a revolution which endures and which has taken its last step, as for instance in Rome, the Patricians, a century after the fall of the Republic, could resign themselves to being no more than the Senate of the Emperors; the past had nought wherewith to reproach the Emperors of the present, since that past was finished; every existence was branded with a like stigma. But in France the nobles who converted themselves into chamberlains were in too great a hurry; the new-born Empire disappeared before them, and they found themselves face to face with the old Monarchy raised to life again.

Madame de Chevreuse, attacked by a disease of the chest, begged and was refused the favour of ending her days in Paris; we do not expire when and where we please: Napoleon, who made so many dead, would never have done with them if he had left them the choice of their tomb.

Madame Récamier succeeded in forgetting her own sorrows only by interesting herself in those of others; through the charitable connivance of a sister of Mercy, she secretly visited the Spanish prisoners in Lyons. One of them, brave and handsome, a Christian like the Cid, was passing away to God: seated on his straw, he played the guitar; his sword had betrayed his hand. So soon as he caught sight of his benefactress, he sang her ballads of his country, having no other means to thank her. His enfeebled voice and the confused sounds of the instrument were lost in the silence of the prison. The soldier's comrades, half wrapped in their torn cloaks, their black locks hanging over their bronzed and emaciated faces, raised eyes, proud of their Castilian blood, moist with gratitude, on the exile who recalled to them a mother, a sister, a sweetheart, and who bore the yoke of the same tyranny.

The Spaniard died. He could say with Zarviska, the young and valorous Polish poet:

"An unknown hand shall close my eyes; the tolling of a foreign bell shall announce my death, and voices which are not those of my country shall pray for me."

Mathieu de Montmorency came to Lyons to visit Madame Récamier. She then knew M. Camille Jordan and M. Ballanche, both worthy to swell the train of friendships attached to her noble life.

Madame Récamier was too proud to solicit her recall. Fouché had long and to no purpose urged her to adorn the Court of the Emperor: the details of these palace negociations can be read in the writings of the time. Madame Récamier retired to Italy[398]; M. de Montmorency accompanied her as far as Chambéry. She crossed the rest of the Alps with no other travelling-companion than a little niece of seven, to-day Madame Lenormant[399].

Rome was at that time a French town, the capital of the Department of the Tiber. The Pope was repining a prisoner at Fontainebleau, in the palace of Francis I.

Fouché was on a special mission in Italy and commanded in the city of the Cæsars, even as the chief of the black eunuchs commands in Athens: he merely passed through; M. de Norvins[400] was installed in the quality of Minister of Police: the movement was bearing upon a different point in Europe.

Conquered without having seen its second Alaric, the Eternal City lay silent, plunged in its ruins. Artists dwelt alone on that heap of centuries. Canova received Madame Récamier as though she were a Greek statue which France was returning to the Vatican Museum: the pontiff of the arts, he inaugurated her into the honours of the Capitol in deserted Rome.

[Sidenote: Antonio Canova.]

Canova had a house at Albano; he offered it to Madame Récamier; she passed the summer there. The balconied window of her bed-room was one of those large painter's casements which frame the landscape. It opened upon the ruins of Pompey's Villa; in the distance, over olive trees, one saw the sun set in the sea. Canova returned at that hour; stirred by that beautiful sight, he loved to sing, with a Venetian accent and a pleasant voice, the barcarolle, _O pescator dell'onda_; Madame Récamier accompanied him on the piano. The sculptor of Psyche and the Magdalen revelled in this harmony, and sought in Juliet's features the type of the Beatrix which he was dreaming of one day making. Rome had of old seen Raphael and Michael Angelo crown their models in poetic orgies, too freely related by Cellini[401]: how much superior to them was this pure and decent little scene between an exiled woman and that simple and gentle Canova!

More solitary than ever, Rome at that moment wore widow's weeds: she no longer saw pass, blessing her as they did so, the peaceful sovereigns who rejuvenated her old days with all the wonders of the arts. The noise of the world had once again withdrawn from her; St. Peter's was deserted like the Coliseum.

I have read the eloquent letters which the most illustrious woman of our past days wrote to her friend; read the same feelings of tenderness, expressed with the most charming artlessness, in the language of Petrarch[402], by the first sculptor of modern times. I will not be guilty of the sacrilege of trying to translate them:

"_Domenico, mattina._

"Dio eterno? siamo vivi, o siamo morti? lo voglio esser vivo, almeno per scriveri; si, lo vuole il mio cuore, anzi mi comanda assolutamente di farlo. Oh! se'l conoscete bene a fondo questo povero cuor mio, quanto, quanto mai ve ne persuadereste! Ma per disgrazia mia pare ch'egli sia alquanto all'oscuro per voi. Pazienza! Ditemi almeno come state di saluto, se di più non volete dire; benchè mi abbiate promesso di scrivere a di scrivermi dolce. Io davvero che avrei voluto vedervi personalmente in questi giorni, ma non vi poteva essere alcuna via di poterlo fare; anzi su di questo vi dirò a voce delle cose curiose. Convenie dunque che mi contenti, a forza, di vidervi in spirito. In questo modo sempre mi siete presente, sempre vi veggo, sempre vi parlo, vi dico tante, tante cose, ma tutte, tutte al vento, tutte! Pazienza anche di questo! gran fatto che la cosa abbia d'andare sempre in questo modo! voglio intanto però che siate certa, certissima che l'anima mia vi ama molto più assai di quello che mai possiate credere ed imaginare."

Madame Récamier had succoured the Spanish prisoners in Lyons; another victim of the power which struck her enabled her to exercise her compassionate humour at Albano: a fisherman, accused of holding intelligence with the subjects of the Pope, had been tried and sentenced to death. The inhabitants of Albano entreated the stranger who had taken refuge with them to intercede for the unfortunate man. She was taken to the gaol; she saw the prisoner; struck by the man's despair, she melted into tears. The unhappy man begged her to come to his assistance, to intercede for him, to save him; his prayer was the more harrowing in that it was impossible to snatch him from the punishment. It was already night, and he was to be shot at sunrise.

Nevertheless, Madame Récamier, although persuaded of the uselessness of her application, did not hesitate. She sent for her carriage and stepped into it, without the hope which she left to the condemned man. She drove through the Campagna infested with brigands, reached Rome, and failed to find the Director of Police. She waited two hours at the Palazzo Fiano, counting the minutes of a life of which the last was approaching. When M. de Norvins arrived, she explained to him the object of her journey. He replied that the sentence was pronounced and that he had not the necessary power to suspend it.

[Sidenote: The Albano fisherman.]

Madame Récamier set out again heart-broken; the prisoner had ceased to live when she approached Albano. The inhabitants were awaiting the Frenchwoman on the road; so soon as they discovered her, they hastened up to her. The priest who had attended the culprit brought her his last vows: he thanked _la dama_, whom he had not ceased to seek with his eyes while going to the place of execution; he begged her to pray for him: for a Christian has not done with everything and is not beyond fear when he is no more. Madame Récamier was led by the ecclesiastic to the church, where the crowd of handsome Albano peasant-women followed her. The fisherman had been shot at the hour at which the sun rose upon the bark, now unguided, which he had been accustomed to steer over the seas and upon the shores which he had been accustomed to survey.

To become disgusted with conquerors, one must have known all the ills they cause, one must have been a witness to the indifference with which men sacrifice to them the most inoffensive creatures in a corner of the globe in which they have never set foot. Of what consequence to Bonaparte's successes were the days of a poor net-maker in the Papal States? Undoubtedly, he never knew that that paltry fisherman existed; amid the clatter of his struggle with kings, he did not so much as know the name of his plebeian victim.

The world perceives in Napoleon naught save victories; the tears with which the triumphal columns are cemented do not fall from his eyes. And I, I think that, out of those despised sufferings, those calamities of the small and the lowly, are formed, in the councils of Providence, the secret causes which hurl the ruler from his pinnacle. When instances of injustice accumulate in such a way as to bear down the weight of fortune, the scale descends. There is blood which is dumb and blood which cries out: the blood of the battle-field is drunk in silence by the earth; peaceable blood when shed spurts with a moan towards Heaven; God receives it and avenges it. Bonaparte slew the Albano fisherman; a few months later[403], he was banished among the fishermen of Elba, and he died among those of St. Helena.

Did my vague memory, scarce outlined in Madame Récamier's thoughts, appear to her amid the plains of the Tiber and the Anio? I had already passed through those melancholy wastes; I had left a tomb there honoured by Juliet's friends. When M. de Montmorin's daughter[404] died, in 1803, Madame de Staël and M. Necker wrote me letters of regret; you have seen those letters. Thus I received at Rome, almost before I knew Madame Récamier, letters dated from Coppet; it was the first sign of an affinity of destiny. Madame Récamier has also told me that my Letter of 1804 to M. de Fontanes served her as a guide in 1814, and that she often read and re-read the following passage:

"Whosoever has no tie left in life should come to live in Rome. There he will find for company a land which will feed his reflections and occupy his heart, and walks which will always say something to him. The stone which he treads under foot will speak to him; the dust which the wind raises beneath his steps will contain some human greatness. If he is unhappy, if he has mingled the ashes of those whom he loved with so many illustrious ashes, with what charm will he not pass from the sepulchre of the Scipios to the last resting-place of a virtuous friend!... If he is a Christian, ah! how can he then tear himself away from that land which has become his country, from that land which has witnessed the birth of a second empire, holier in its cradle, greater in its might than that which preceded it, from that land where the friends whom we have lost, sleeping with the martyrs in the catacombs, under the eye of the Father of the Faithful, appear as though they ought to be the first to awake in their dust and seem to be nearer to the skies?"

But, in 1814, I was only a vulgar cicerone to Madame Récamier, the common property of all travellers; more fortunate in 1823, I had ceased to be a stranger to her and we were able to talk together of the Roman ruins.

In Naples, where Madame Récamier went in the autumn[405], the occupations of solitude ceased. Scarce had she alighted at her inn, when King Joachim's ministers came hastening up. Murat, forgetting the hand which had changed his whip[406] into a sceptre, was ready to join the Coalition. Bonaparte had planted his sword in the middle of Europe, as the Gauls planted their blade in the middle of the _mallus_[407]; around Napoleon's sword were drawn up in a circle kingdoms which he distributed to his family. Caroline[408] had received that of Naples. Madame Murat was not so elegant an antique cameo as the Princess Borghese; but she had more expression and more wit than her sister. In the firmness of her character one recognised the blood of Napoleon. If the diadem had not been for her an ornament for a woman's head, it would still have been the emblem of a queen's power.

[Sidenote: Queen Caroline Murat.]

Caroline received Madame Récamier with an alacrity which was the more affectionate that the oppression of tyranny made itself felt as far as Portici. Nevertheless, the city which possesses Virgil's[409] tomb and Tasso's[410] cradle, the city in which Horace[411], Livy[412], Boccaccio[413] and Sannazaro[414] lived, in which Durante[415] and Cimarosa[416] were born, had been beautified by its new master. Order had been restored; the _lazzaroni_ no longer played at ball with human heads to amuse Admiral Nelson[417] and Lady Hamilton[418]. The excavations at Pompeii had been extended; a road wound over the Posilipo[419], into whose flanks I had penetrated, in 1803[420], to go to ask at Liternum[421] for Scipio's retreat. Those new royalties of a military dynasty had brought back life to regions in which before them the moribund languor of an old race of kings had made itself manifest. Robert Guiscard[422], William Iron-arm[423], Roger[424] and Tancred[425] seemed to have returned, minus the chivalry.

Madame Récamier was in Naples in February 1814; where was I then? In my Vallée-aux-Loups, commencing the story of my life. I was concerning myself with the sports of my childhood to the sound of the foreign soldier's footsteps. The woman whose name was to close these Memoirs was strolling on the _marine_ of Baja. Had I not a presentiment of the good which was one day to come to me from that quarter, when I was depicting the Parthenopian seduction in the _Martyrs_:

"Every morning, so soon as dawn began to appear, I went under a portico.... The sun rose before me... it illumined with its tenderest fires the mountain-chain of Salernum[426], the blue sea studded with the white sails of the fishermen, the islands of Capræ[427], Œnaria[428], Prochyta[429]... the cape of Misenum[430] and Baiæ[431] with all its enchantments.

"Flowers and fruits moist with dew are less sweet and less fresh than the Neapolitan landscape emerging from the shades of night. I was always surprised, on reaching the portico, to find myself beside the sea; for the waves in that spot scarce gave forth a fountain's gentle murmur. In an ecstasy before that picture, I leant against a pillar and, void of thoughts, desires, or plans, remained whole hours breathing a delicious air. The charm was so intense that it seemed to me that that divine air was transforming my own substance, and that, with an unspeakable pleasure, I was rising towards the firmament like a pure spirit....

"To await or go in search of beauty; to see her come towards us in a wherry and smile to us from amid the waves; to float with her on the sea, while strewing its surface with flowers; to follow the enchantress into the recesses of that wood of myrtles and into the fortunate fields where Virgil set Elysium; that was the occupation of our days.... Perhaps there are climates dangerous to virtue through their extreme voluptuousness. And is it not this that an ingenious fable strove to teach, when telling that Parthenope[432] was built upon a syren's tomb? The velvet brilliancy of the country-side, the lukewarm temperature of the air, the rounded outlines of the mountains, the soft inflexions of the streams and valleys form at Naples so many seductions for the senses, which everything tends to rest, nothing to wound....

"To escape the noonday heat, we would retire to that part of the palace built under the sea. Stretched on beds of ivory, we listened to the murmuring of the waves above our heads. If some storm surprised us down in these retreats, the slaves brought us lamps filled with the most precious nard of Araby. Then entered young Neapolitan girls, bearing roses of Pæstum in vases of Nola; while the billows moaned without, they sang, performing tranquil dances before us which reminded me of the manners of Greece: thus were realized for us the fictions of the poets; we seemed in Neptune's cave to be watching the sports of the Nereids[433]."

Madame Récamier met, at Naples, Count von Neipperg[434] and the Duc de Rohan-Chabot[435]: one was destined to climb to the eagle's nest, the other to wear the purple. They said of the latter that he was devoted to red, having worn the coat of a chamberlain, the uniform of a light-horseman of the Guard, and the robe of a cardinal.

[Sidenote: The Duc de Rohan.]

The Duc de Rohan was very pretty; he warbled plaintive ballads, painted little water-colours and was eminent for his coquettish and studied dress. When he became an abbé, his pious hair, tried by the iron, had all a martyr's elegance. He used to preach at dusk, in sombre oratories, before devout women, taking care, with the aid of two or three artistically-distributed tapers, to light up his pale features in mezzotint, like a picture[436].

We cannot, at first sight, explain to ourselves how men whose names rendered them stupid by sheer force of pride came to accept wages from a parvenu. Looking more closely into this aptness for entering service, we find that it proceeded naturally from their manners: accustomed to the domestic condition, little recked they if the livery was changed, provided the master were lodged at the castle under the same sign-board. Bonaparte's contempt appraised them at their true value; the great soldier, abandoned by his own people, said to a great lady:

"As a matter of fact, there are only yourselves that know how to serve."

Religion and death have passed the sponge over a few weaknesses, very pardonable after all, of the Cardinal de Rohan. A Christian priest, he consummated his sacrifice at Besançon, succouring the unhappy, feeding the poor, clothing the orphan, and wearing out in good works his life, the course of which was naturally shortened by deplorable ill-health.

Reader, if you grow impatient at these quotations, these accounts, reflect, first, that perhaps you have not read my works and, next, that I can no longer hear you; I am sleeping in the ground on which you tread; if you be angry with me, stamp on the ground, you will insult only my bones. Reflect, moreover, that my writings form an essential part of that existence whose leaves I am unfolding. Ah, why had not my pictures of Naples a background of truth! Why was not the daughter of the Rhone[437] the real woman of my imaginary delights? But no; if I was Augustine, Jerome, Eudorus, I was all these alone; my days went before the days of the friend of Corinne in Italy. How happy should I have been could I have spread my whole life under her feet like a carpet of flowers! My life is rough and its unevenness hurts. May my dying hours at least reflect the tenderness and charm with which she has filled them upon her who was beloved by all and of whom none had ever to complain!

[Sidenote: Murat, King of Naples.]

Murat, King of Naples, born 25 March 1767, at the Bastide, near Cahors, was sent to Toulouse for his studies. He took a dislike to letters, enlisted in the Ardennes Chasseurs, deserted, and ran away to Paris. Admitted into Louis XVI.'s Constitutional Guard, he received, after the disbanding of that guard, a cornetcy in the 12th Regiment of Mounted Chasseurs. On the death of Robespierre, he was dismissed as a Terrorist[438]; the same thing happened to Bonaparte, and both soldiers were left without resources. Murat was restored to favour on the 13 Vendémiaire, and became aide-de-camp to Napoleon. He served under him in the early Italian campaigns, took the Valtellina and added it to the Cisalpine Republic[439]; he took part in the Egyptian Expedition and distinguished himself at the Battle of Abukir[440]. Returning to France with his master, he was ordered to turn out the Council of the Five Hundred[441]. Bonaparte gave him his sister Caroline in marriage[442]. Murat commanded the cavalry at the Battle of Marengo[443]. He was Governor of Paris at the time of the death of the Duc d'Enghien and bemoaned in secret a murder which he had not the courage to condemn aloud.

Brother-in-law to Napoleon, and a marshal of the Empire[444], Murat entered Vienna in 1805[445]; he contributed to the victories of Austerlitz[446], Jena[447], Eylau[448], and Friedland[449], became Grand-duke of Berg[450], and invaded Spain in 1808.

Napoleon recalled him and gave him the Crown of Naples. Proclaimed King of the Two Sicilies on the 1st of August 1808, he pleased the Neapolitans through his magnificence, his theatrical dress, his cavalcades and his entertainments.

Summoned in his capacity as a grand vassal of the Empire to the invasion of Russia, he reappeared in all the battles and found himself charged with the command of the retreat from Smolensk to Wilna[451]. After manifesting his discontent, he left the army, following Bonaparte's example, and went to warm himself in the sun of Naples, as did his captain at the fireside of the Tuileries. Those men of triumph could never accustom themselves to reverses. Then began his connexion with Austria. He appeared once more in the camps of Germany in 1813, returned to Naples after the loss of the Battle of Leipzig[452], and resumed his Austro-British negociations. Before entering into a complete alliance, Murat wrote Napoleon a letter which I have heard read by M. de Mosbourg[453]: he told his brother-in-law in this letter that he had found the Peninsula in a very agitated condition, that the Italians were demanding their national independence and that, if this were not restored to them, it was to be feared that they should join the European Coalition and thus increase the dangers of France. He besought Napoleon to make peace, as the only means of preserving so powerful and fine an empire. He added that, if Bonaparte refused to listen to him, he, Murat, abandoned at the further end of Italy, would find himself compelled to leave his kingdom or embrace the interests of Italian liberty. This very reasonable letter was left for several months unanswered; Napoleon was, therefore, not able to reproach Murat justly with having betrayed him.

Murat, obliged to make a quick choice, signed a treaty with the Court of Vienna on the 11th of January 1814; he bound himself to furnish the Allies with a corps of thirty thousand men. As the price of his defection, he was guaranteed his Kingdom of Naples, and his right of conquest over the Papal Marches. Madame Murat revealed this important transaction to Madame Récamier. At the moment when he was about to declare himself openly, Murat, very much excited, met Madame Récamier at Caroline's, and asked her what she thought of the decision which he had to take; he begged her to weigh well the interests of the people whose sovereign he had become. Madame Récamier said to him:

"You are a Frenchman and you must remain faithful to the French."

Murat's face became distorted; he rejoined:

"So I am a traitor? What can I do? It is too late!"

He threw open a window and pointed to an English fleet entering under full sail.

Vesuvius was in a state of eruption and throwing out flames. Two hours later, Murat was on horseback at the head of his guards; the crowd surrounded him, shouting, "Long live King Joachim!" He had forgotten all; he seemed drunk with delight. The next day, a great performance at the Teatro di San-Carlo; the King and Queen were received with frantic acclamations unknown to people on this side of the Alps. The Envoy of Francis II. was also applauded; the box of Napoleon's Minister was empty; Murat appeared troubled at this, as though he had seen the ghost of France at the back of that box.

[Sidenote: Fall of Murat.]

Murat's army, set in motion on the 16th of February 1814, forced Prince Eugene to fall back upon the Adige. Napoleon, who had at first obtained unhoped for successes in Champagne, wrote to his sister Caroline some letters which were captured by the Allies and their contents communicated to the English Parliament by Lord Castlereagh. He said to her:

"Your husband is very brave on the battle-field, but he is weaker than a woman or a monk when he does not see the enemy before him. He has no moral courage. He has been afraid, and he would not risk to lose in one instant what he can hold only through me and with me."

In another letter, addressed to Murat himself, Napoleon said to his brother-in-law:

"I presume that you are not one of those who think that the lion is dead; if that was your calculation, it would be erroneous.... You have done me all the harm you could since your departure from Wilna. The title of King has turned your head; if you wish to keep it, behave yourself."

Murat did not pursue the Viceroy to the Adige; he hesitated between the Allies and the French, according to the chances which Bonaparte seemed to be winning or losing.

In the fields of Brienne, where Napoleon was educated by the old Monarchy, he gave, in the latter's honour, the last and most admirable of his blood-stained tourneys[454]. Favoured by the Carbonari, Joachim at one time wished to declare himself the liberator of Italy, at another hoped to divide her between himself and Bonaparte become victorious. One morning, a courier brought to Naples the news of the entry of the Russians into Paris. Madame Murat was still in bed and Madame Récamier was talking with her, seated at her pillow; an enormous pile of letters and newspapers was laid upon the bed. Among the latter was my pamphlet, _De Bonaparte and des Bourbons._ The Queen exclaimed:

"Ah, here is a work by M. de Chateaubriand; we will read it together."

And she went on opening her letters.

Madame Récamier took the pamphlet and, after casting her eyes over it at random, placed it back on the bed and said to the Queen:

"Madame, you shall read it alone, I am obliged to return home."

Napoleon was relegated to Elba; the Allies, with rare cleverness, had placed him on the coast of Italy. Murat learnt that they were trying at the Congress of Vienna to despoil him of the States which he had nevertheless bought so dear; he came to a secret understanding with his brother-in-law, who had become his neighbour. One is always surprised that the Napoleons should have relations: who knows the name of Arrhidæus[455], the brother of Alexander? In the course of the year 1814, the King and Queen of Naples gave an entertainment at Pompeii; an excavation was conducted to the sound of music: the ruins which Caroline and Joachim had dug up did not apprize them of their own ruin; on the last borders of prosperity we hear but the last strains of the dream that passes away.

At the time of the Peace of Paris, Murat formed part of the Alliance, the Milanese having been handed back to Austria: the Neapolitans retired within the Roman Legations. Murat, perplexed, having changed his interest, sallied forth from the Legations and marched with forty thousand men towards Upper Italy to make a diversion in favour of Napoleon[456]. At Parma, he refused the conditions which the affrighted Austrians offered him once more: to each of us comes a critical moment; ill chosen or well, it decides our future. The Baron de Frimont[457] forced back Murat's troops, took the offensive and drove them before him fighting to Macerata[458]. The Neapolitans left the ranks; their King and general returned to Naples[459], accompanied by four lancers. He went to his wife and said:

"Madame, I have not been able to die."

The next day, a boat took him in the direction of the island of Ischia; he joined at sea a smack carrying a few officers of his staff, and set sail with them for France.

[Sidenote: Murat's flight.]

Madame Murat, left behind alone, displayed admirable presence of mind. The Austrians were on the point of appearing: in the passing from one authority to another, an interval of anarchy might have been filled with disorders. The Regent did not precipitate her retreat; she allowed the German soldier to occupy the town and had her galleries lighted up at night. The people, seeing the lights from the outside, thinking that the Queen was still there, remained quiet. Meantime Caroline left by a secret stair-case and went on board ship. Seated on the poop, she saw gleaming on the bank the illuminated, but deserted palace from which she was departing, an image of the dazzling dream which she had had during her sleep in the realm of the fairies.

Caroline met the frigate which was bringing Ferdinand[460] back. The ship of the fugitive Queen fired a salute, the ship of the recalled King did not return it: Prosperity does not recognise her sister Adversity. Thus do illusions, faded for the one, begin anew for the other; thus do the fickle destinies of humanity pass each other in the winds and on the billows: smiling or baleful, one and the same abyss bears them or engulfs them.

Murat was achieving his career elsewhere. On the 25th of May 1815, at ten o'clock at night, he landed in the Golfe Juan, where his brother-in-law had landed. Fortune made Joachim play the parody of Napoleon. The latter did not believe in the strength of misfortune, nor in the succour which it brings to great minds: he forbade the dethroned King the approach to Paris; he consigned to the lazar-house this man stricken with the plague of the conquered; he shut him up in a country-house called _Plaisance_, near Toulon. He would have done better to show less dread of a contagion with which he had himself been seized: who knows what a soldier like Murat might have altered in the Battle of Waterloo?

The King of Naples, in his trouble, wrote to Fouché on the 19th of June 1815:

"I shall reply to those who accuse me of commencing hostilities too soon that it was done at the Emperor's formal demand and that, for three months, he did not cease to reassure me as to his sentiments by accrediting ministers to me and writing to me that he relied on me and would never abandon me. It is only when people saw that I had lost, together with the throne, the means of continuing the powerful diversion which had lasted three months that they tried to mislead public opinion by insinuating that I acted on my own behalf and without the Emperor's knowledge."

There existed a generous and beautiful woman; when she arrived in Paris, Madame Récamier received her and would not abandon her in times of misfortune. Among the papers which she has left behind were found two letters from Murat written in the month of June 1819; they are useful to the study of history:

[Sidenote: Letters from Murat.]

6 _June_ 1815.

"I have lost the fairest existence for France's sake; I have fought for the Emperor; it is for his cause that my wife and my children are in captivity. The country is in danger, I offer my services; they put off accepting them. I know not if I am free or a prisoner. I must needs be involved in the Emperor's ruin if he falls, and they deprive me of the means of serving him and serving my own cause. I ask their reasons; they reply obscurely and I am unable clearly to establish my position. At one time I cannot go to Paris, where my presence would injure the Emperor, and I must not join the army, where my presence would too much attract the attention of the soldiers. What am I to do? Wait: that is what they reply. On the other hand, I am told that I am not forgiven for having abandoned the Emperor last year, whereas letters from Paris said, when I was recently fighting for France, '_Every one here is delighted with the King._' The Emperor wrote to me, _I rely on you, do you rely on me, I shall never abandon you._' King Joseph wrote to me, '_The Emperor orders me to write to you to move rapidly upon the Alps._' And when, on arriving, I display generous sentiments and offer to fight for France, I am sent into the Alps. Not a word of consolation is addressed to one who never did him any other wrong than to rely too greatly on generous sentiments which he never entertained for me.

"My friend, I come to ask you to inform me of the opinion of France and the army regarding me. A man must know how to endure all and my courage will make me rise superior to every misfortune. All is lost save honour; I have lost the throne, but I have preserved all my glory; I have been abandoned by my soldiers, who were victorious in every fight, but I have never been beaten. The desertion of twenty thousand men placed me at the mercy of my enemies; a fisher's bark saved me from captivity, and a merchant ship cast me in three days on the coasts of France."

"Near TOULON, 18 _June_ 1815.

"I have just received your letter. I cannot describe to you the different sensations which it made me experience. I have been able for a moment to forget my misfortunes. I am occupied only with my friend, whose noble and generous soul comes to console me and show me its sorrow. Reassure yourself: all is lost, but honour remains; my glory will survive all my misfortunes, and my courage will be able to make me rise superior to all the rigours of my destiny: have no fear on that score. I have lost my throne and family unmoved; but ingratitude has revolted me. I have lost all for France, for her Emperor, by his order, and to-day he makes it a crime in me to have done so. He refuses me permission to fight and revenge myself, and I am not free to choose my own retreat: can you conceive all my unhappiness? What can I do? What decision can I take? I am a Frenchman and a father: as a Frenchman, I must serve my country; as a father, I must go to share my children's lot: honour lays upon me the duty of fighting and nature tells me that I must belong to my children. Which am I to obey? Cannot I satisfy both? Shall I be allowed to listen to either? Already the Emperor refuses me armies; and will Austria grant me the means to go to join my children? Shall I ask them of her, I who have never been willing to treat with her ministers? There is my situation: give me advice. I shall await your reply, the Duc d'Otrante's and Lucien's, before taking a determination. Consult opinion well as to what it is thought right for me to do, for I am free in the choice of my retreat; they are returning to the past and making it a crime in me to have, by order, lost my throne, when my family is languishing in captivity. Advise me; listen to the voice of honour, to that of nature, and, as an impartial judge, have the courage to write to me what I am to do. I shall await your reply on the road between Marseilles and Lyons."

Putting aside the personal vanities and the illusions which issue from the throne, even from a throne on which one has been seated but for a moment, these letters show us the idea which Murat entertained of his brother-in-law.

Bonaparte lost the Empire a second time; Murat was a shelterless vagrant on the same sands which have since beheld the roamings of the Duchesse de Berry. Some smugglers consented, on the 22nd of August 1815, to put him and three others across to Corsica. A tempest greeted him: the felucca which plies between Bastia and Toulon took him on board. Scarce had he left his shore-boat, when she split. Landing at Bastia on the 25th of August, he hastened to hide himself in the village of Vescovato, at old Colonna-Ceccaldi's[461]. Two hundred officers joined him with General Franceschetti[462]. He marched on Ajaccio: Bonaparte's maternal town alone still cared for her son; of all his Empire, Napoleon owned only his cradle. The garrison of the citadel saluted Murat and wished to proclaim him King of Corsica: he refused; he thought only the sceptre of the Two Sicilies equal to his greatness. His aide-de-camp Macirone[463] brought him from Paris the decision of Austria, by virtue of which he was to give up the title of King and retire at will to Bohemia or Moldavia:

"It is too late," replied Joachim; "my dear Macirone, the die is cast."

On the 28th of September, Murat sailed for Italy; seven bottoms were laden with his two hundred and fifty followers: he had scorned to have for his kingdom the narrow mother-land of the immense man; full of hope, led away by the example of a fortune higher than his own, he set out from the island whence Napoleon had issued to take possession of the world: it is not the same spots, but similar geniuses, that produce the same destinies.

A storm dispersed the flotilla; Murat was cast ashore, on the 8th of October, in the Gulf of Santa Eufemia, almost at the moment when Bonaparte was approaching the Rock of St. Helena[464].

Of his seven praams, only two were left to him, including his own. Landing with some thirty men, he tried to stir up the population of the coast; the inhabitants fired on his band. The two praams stood out to sea; Murat was betrayed. He ran to a stranded boat, tried to float it; the boat would not move. Surrounded and captured, Murat, insulted by the same mob that once used to shout itself hoarse with "Long live King Joachim!" was taken to Pizzo Castle. Upon him and his companions were seized insensate proclamations: they showed with what dreams men delude themselves to their last hour.

Unruffled in his prison, Murat said:

"I shall have only my Kingdom of Naples; my cousin Ferdinand will keep the second Sicily."

[Sidenote: Death of Murat.]

And at that moment a military commission was condemning Murat to death. When he heard his sentence, his firmness deserted him for a few instants; he shed tears and exclaimed:

"I am Joachim King of the Two Sicilies!"

He forgot that Louis XVI. had been King of France, the Duc d'Enghien grandson of the Grand Condé, and Napoleon arbiter of Europe: Death reckons as nothing what we may have been.

A priest is always a priest, say and do what we will; he comes and restores its failing strength to an intrepid heart. On the 13th of October 1815, Murat, after writing to his wife, was taken to a room in Pizzo Castle, renewing in his romantic person the brilliant or tragic adventures of the middle ages. Twelve soldiers, who perhaps had served under him, awaited him, drawn up in two lines. Murat saw them load their muskets, refused to let his eyes be bandaged, and himself, as an experienced captain, chose the post where the bullets could best hit him.

When aim had been taken at him, at the moment of the fire, he said:

"Men, spare the face; aim at my heart!"

He fell, holding in his hands the portraits of his wife and of his children: those portraits used before to adorn the hilt of his sword[465]. It was but one affair the more which the gallant man had settled with life.

The different manners of death of Napoleon and Murat preserve the characters of their lives.

Murat, so magnificent, was buried without state at Pizzo, in one of those Christian churches in whose charitable bosom all ashes are mercifully received.

Madame Récamier, returning to France, passed through Rome at the moment when the Pope returned[466]. In another portion of these Memoirs, you accompanied Pius VII., set at liberty at Fontainebleau, to the gates of St Peter's[467]. Joachim, still alive, was about to disappear, and Pius VII. was reappearing. Behind them, Napoleon was struck; the conqueror's hand let the King fall and raised the Pontiff.

[Sidenote: Pope Pius VII.]

Pius VII. was received with shouts which shook the ruins of the city of ruins. The horses were taken from his carriage and the crowd drew him to the steps of the Church of the Apostles. The Holy Father saw nothing, heard nothing; rapt in mind, his thought was far from the earth; only his hand rose over the people from the tender habit of blessing. He entered the basilica to the sound of trumpets, to the singing of the _Te Deum_, to the acclamations of the Swiss of the religion of William Tell. The thuribles wafted perfumes to him which he did not inhale; he would not be carried on the _sedia gestatoria_ under the shadow of the canopy and the palms; he walked like a shipwrecked man fulfilling his vow to Our Lady of Succour, and charged by Christ with a mission which was to renew the face of the earth. He was clad in a white robe; his hair, which had remained black in spite of misfortune and years, formed a contrast with the anchorite's pallor. On arriving at the Tomb of the Apostles, he prostrated himself: he remained, without movement and as though dead, plunged in the depths of the counsels of Providence. The emotion was profound; Protestants who witnessed the scene wept scalding tears.

What a subject for meditation! An infirm, decrepit priest, strengthless, defenseless, taken from the Quirinal, carried captive to the heart of Gaul; a martyr, who awaited naught save his tomb, delivered from the hands of Napoleon, who pressed the globe, resuming the empire of an indestructible world, when the walls of a prison beyond the seas were being prepared for that formidable gaoler of the nations and the kings!

Pius VII. outlived the Emperor; he saw the master-pieces, the faithful friends which had accompanied him in his exile, brought back to the Vatican. On his return from persecution, the septuagenarian Pontiff, prostrate beneath the cupola of St. Peter's, displayed at the same time all the weakness of man and the grandeur of God.

On descending the Savoy Alps, Madame Récamier, at Pont-de-Beauvoisin, found the White Flag and the white cockade. The Corpus Christi processions, passing through the villages, seemed to have come back with the Most Christian King. In Lyons, the traveller arrived in the midst of a Restoration festival. The enthusiasm was unfeigned. At the head of the rejoicings stood Alexis de Noailles[468] and Colonel Clary, Joseph Bonaparte's brother-in-law. All that is told to-day of the coldness and gloom with which the Legitimacy was received at the First Restoration is a shameless falsehood. Joy was general in the different sections of opinion, even among the Conventionals, even among the Imperialists, excepting the soldiers: their noble pride suffered from those reverses. Nowadays, when the weight of military government is no longer felt, when vanities are aroused, it is necessary to deny the facts, because they do not accord with the theories of the moment. It suits the purpose of a system that the nation should have received the Bourbons with abhorrence and that the Restoration should have been a time of oppression and misery. This leads to melancholy reflections on human nature. If the Bourbons had the inclination and the strength to oppress, they might have looked forward to a long retention of the throne. Bonaparte's violence and injustice, dangerous to his power though they appeared, in reality served him: men are appalled by iniquities, but manufacture a great idea out of them; they are disposed to regard as a superior being one who places himself above the laws.

Madame de Staël, who arrived in Paris before Madame Récamier, had written to her several times; only the following note reached her:

"PARIS, 20 _May_ 1814.

"I am ashamed to be in Paris without you, dear angel of my life: tell me your plans. Would you like me to go before you to Coppet, where I am going to stay for four months? After so many sufferings, my sweetest prospect is yourself, and my heart is for ever devoted to you. One word as to your departure and arrival. I await that note to know what I shall do. I am writing to you to Rome, Naples, etc."

[Sidenote: Madame de Genlis.]

Madame de Genlis, who had never had any relations with Madame Récamier, was eager to become better acquainted with her. I find a passage expressing a wish which, had it been realized, would have spared the reader my story:

"11 _October._

"Here, madame, is the book which I had the honour to promise you. I have marked the things which I should like you to read....

"Come, madame, to tell me your story 'in these words,' as they do in the novels. Then I will afterwards ask you to write it in the form of recollections, which will be full of interest, because, in your earliest youth, you were cast, with a bewitching face and a mind full of shrewdness and penetration, into the midst of those whirlpools of errors and follies; because you have seen everything; and because, having preserved, during those stormy times, your religious sentiment, a pure soul, a stainless life, an impressionable and loyal heart, possessing neither envy nor hateful passions, you will depict everything in the truest colours. You are one of the phenomena of these days, and certainly the most amiable.

"You shall show me your 'Recollections;' my old experience will offer some advice, and you will write a useful and delightful work. Do not come and answer, 'I am not capable,' etc., etc. I will permit you no commonplaces; they are unworthy of your intelligence. You can cast back your eyes over the past without remorse: this is, at all times, the fairest of our privileges; in the days in which we live, it is an inestimable one. Avail yourself of it for the instruction of the young person[469] whom you are bringing up; it will be the greatest boon you can show her.

"Adieu, madame, permit me to tell you that I love you and that I embrace you with all my heart."

Now that Madame Récamier has returned to Paris[470], I will go back for some time to my first guides. The Queen of Naples, uneasy about the resolutions of the Congress of Vienna, wrote to Madame Récamier to find her a man who would be capable of handling her interests in Vienna. Madame Récamier applied to Benjamin Constant and asked him to draw up a memorandum. This circumstance had the most unfortunate influence upon the author of the memorandum; a stormy sentiment was the result of an interview. Under the empire of this sentiment, Benjamin Constant, already a violent Anti-Bonapartist, as is manifest in the _Esprit de conquête_[471], allowed opinions to overflow the course of which was soon changed by events. Thence arose a reputation for political fickleness baleful to statesmen.

Madame Récamier, while admiring Bonaparte, had remained true to her hatred against the oppressor of our liberties and the enemy of Madame de Staël. As for what concerned herself, she did not give it a thought and she made light of her exile. The letters which Benjamin Constant wrote to her at this time will serve as a study, if not of the human heart, at least of the human head: there we see all that could be made of a passion by an ironical and romantic, serious and poetical intelligence. Rousseau is not more genuine, but he mingles with his imaginary loves a sincere melancholy and a real reverie.

Meanwhile, Bonaparte had landed at Cannes; the perturbation due to his approach was beginning to make itself felt. Benjamin Constant wrote Madame Récamier this note:

"Forgive me if I avail myself of circumstances to trouble you; but the opportunity is too favourable. My fate will be decided in four or five days surely; for, though you used to like not to think so, in order to have to show me less interest, I am certainly, with Marmont, Chateaubriand and Lainé, one of the four most compromised men in France. It is, therefore, certain that, if we do not triumph, I shall in a week be either an outlaw or a fugitive, or in a cell or shot. Grant me then, during the two or three days which will precede the battle, as much of your time and as many of your hours as you can. If I die, you will be glad to have done me this kindness and you would be sorry to have afflicted me. My feeling for you is my life; one sign of indifference hurts me more than, four days hence, my sentence of death could do. And, when I feel that danger is a means of obtaining a sign of interest from you, I derive from it nothing but joy.

"Were you pleased with my article, and have you heard what people say of it?"

Benjamin Constant was right, he was as much compromised as I: attached to Bernadotte, he had served against Napoleon; he had published his work _De l'esprit de conquête_, in which he handled the "tyrant" more roughly than I handled him in my pamphlet _De Bonaparte et des Bourbons._ He crowned his perils by talking in the newspapers.

On the 19th of March, at the moment when Bonaparte was at the gates of the Capital, he had the firmness to affix his signature to an article in the _Journal des Débats_ ending with this phrase:

"I shall not, like a wretched turn-coat, go creeping from one power to the other, covering infamy with sophisms and stammering out profane words to redeem a shameful life."

Benjamin Constant wrote to her who inspired him with these noble sentiments:

"I am glad that my article has appeared; at least none can now doubt my sincerity. Here is a note which some one wrote to me after reading it: if I were to receive a similar one from somebody else, I should be gay upon the scaffold."

Madame Récamier always reproached herself for having unintentionally exercised so great an influence over an honourable destiny. Nothing, in fact, is more distressing than to inspire those fickle characters with those energetic resolutions which they are incapable of keeping. On the 20th of March, Benjamin Constant belied his article of the 19th. After driving a little distance away from town, he returned to Paris and allowed himself to be caught by Bonaparte's seductions. Appointed a State councillor[472], he obliterated his generous pages by working at the draft of the Additional Act.

From that time forward, he bore a secret wound at his heart; he no longer with assurance broached the thought of posterity; his spoilt and saddened life contributed in no small degree to his death. God preserve us from triumphing over the miseries from which the loftiest natures are not exempt! Heaven does not give us talents without attaching infirmities to them: expiations offered to foolishness and envy. The weaknesses of a superior man are the black victims which antiquity sacrificed to the infernal gods, and still they never allow themselves to be disarmed.

[Sidenote: Madame de Krüdener.]

Madame Récamier spent the Hundred Days in France, where Queen Hortense invited her to stay; the Queen of Naples, on the other hand, offered her an asylum in Italy. The Hundred Days passed. Madame de Krüdener accompanied the Allies, who arrived once more in Paris. She had fallen from novel-writing into mysticism; she wielded a great empire over the mind of the Tsar of Russia.

Madame de Krüdener lodged in a house in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The garden of this house extended as far as the Champs-Élysées. Alexander used to arrive _incognito_ by a gate of the garden, and politico-religious conversations would end with fervent prayers. Madame de Krüdener invited me to one of these celestial incantations: I, the man of every illusion, have a hatred of unreason, a loathing for the nebulous and a scorn for hocus-pocus; we are none of us perfect. The scene bored me; the more I tried to pray, the more I felt the dryness of my soul. I could find nothing to say to God, and the devil incited me to laugh. I had liked Madame de Krüdener better when, surrounded with flowers and still inhabiting this paltry earth, she was writing _Valérie._ Only, I used to consider that my old friend M. Michaud, so oddly mixed up in this idyll, had not enough of the shepherd about him, notwithstanding his name. Madame de Krüdener, become a seraph, strove to surround herself with angels; the proof is contained in this charming note from Benjamin Constant to Madame Récamier:

"_Thursday._

"I am a little embarrassed in fulfilling a commission which Madame de Krüdener has just given me. She entreats you to come looking as little beautiful as you can. She says that you dazzle everybody and that, for that reason, all minds are troubled and all attention becomes impossible. You cannot lay aside your charmingness; but do not enhance it. I could add many things about your beauty on this occasion, but I have not the courage. One can be ingenious on the charm which pleases, but not on that which kills. I shall see you presently; you have told me five o'clock, but you will not come in till six, and I shall not be able to say a word to you. I shall try, however, to be amiable for this once again."

Did not the Duke of Wellington also lay claim to the honour of attracting a glance from Juliet? One of his notes, which I transcribe, is curious only because of the signature:

"PARIS, 13 _January._

"I confess, madame, that I do not much regret that business will prevent me from calling on you after dinner, because, every time I see you, I leave you more impressed with your charms and less disposed to give my attention to _politics!!!_

"I will call on you to-morrow on my return from the Abbé Sicard's, in case you should be in, and in spite of the effect which those dangerous visits produce on me.

"Your most faithful servant,

"WELLINGTON."

On his return from Waterloo, entering Madame Récamier's drawing-room, the Duke of Wellington exclaimed:

"I have beaten him soundly!"

In a French heart, his success would have made him lose the victory, had he ever been able to lay claim to it.

[Sidenote: End of Madame de Staël.]

It was at a sad time for the glory of France that I met Madame Récamier again; it was at the time of the death of Madame de Staël. Returning to Paris after the Hundred Days, the author of Delphine had fallen ill again; I had met her at her house and at Madame la Duchesse de Duras'. Gradually, her condition growing worse, she was obliged to keep her bed. One morning, I went to her in the Rue Royale; the shutters of her windows were two-thirds closed; the bed, pushed towards the wall at the back of the room, left only a space on the left; the curtains, drawn back on metal rods, formed two columns at the head of the bed. Madame de Staël, half sitting up, was propped up by pillows. I approached and, when my eyes had grown a little accustomed to the darkness, I distinguished the patient. A burning fever fired her cheeks. Her bright glance met me in the dimness, and she said to me:

"Good morning, my dear Francis[473]. I suffer, but that does not prevent me from loving you."

She held out her hand, which I pressed and kissed. As I raised my head, I saw on the opposite side of the bed, against the wall, something which rose up white and thin: it was M. de Rocca, with an emaciated countenance, hollow cheeks, bloodshot eyes and a sallow complexion; he was dying. I had never seen him, and I never saw him again. He did not open his mouth; he bowed as he passed before me; the sound of his footsteps was inaudible: he went away like a shadow. Stopping for a moment at the door, "the vaporous idol twitching its fingers" turned back towards the bed to wave adieu to Madame de Staël. Those two ghosts looking at one another in silence, one erect and pale, the other seated and coloured with a blood ready to flow down again and to congeal at the heart, made one shudder.

A few days afterwards, Madame de Staël changed her lodging. She invited me to dine with her, in the Rue Neuve-des-Mathurins: I went; she was not in the drawing-room and was unable even to come in to dinner; but she did not know that the fatal hour was so nigh. We sat down to table. I found myself sitting by Madame Récamier. It was twelve years since I had met her, and then I had seen her for but a moment. I did not look at her, she did not look at me: we did not exchange a word. When, towards the end of dinner, she timidly addressed a few words to me on Madame de Staël's illness, I turned my head a little and raised my eyes. I should fear to profane to-day through the mouth of my years a sentiment which preserves all its youth in my memory and whose charm increases as life withdraws. I separate my old days to discover behind those days celestial apparitions, to hear from the bottom of the abyss the harmonies of a happier region.

Madame de Staël died[474]. The last note which she wrote to Madame de Duras was traced in big crazy letters, like a child's. It contained an affectionate word for "Francis." The talent which expires impresses one more painfully than the individual who dies: it is a general desolation that strikes society; every one at the same moment suffers the same loss.

With Madame de Staël disappeared a considerable portion of the time in which I had lived: many of those breaches which the fall of a superior intelligence forms in a century never close up again. Her death made on me a particular impression, with which was mingled a sort of mysterious astonishment: it was at that illustrious woman's that I had first met Madame Récamier and, after long days of separation, Madame de Staël brought together again two travelling persons who had become almost strangers to one another: she left them, at a funeral banquet, her memory and the example of her immortal attachment.

I went to see Madame Récamier in the Rue Basse-du-Rempart and, afterwards, in the Rue d'Anjou. When one has rejoined his destiny, he believes himself never to have left it: life, according to the opinion of Pythagoras, is only a reminiscence. Who does not, in the course of his days, recollect some little circumstances indifferent to all, except to him who recalls them? Belonging to the house in the Rue d'Anjou was a garden; in that garden, a bower of lime-trees, between whose leaves I saw a moonbeam when I waited for Madame Récamier: does it not seem to me as though that beam were mine and as though, if I went to look for it in the same place, I should find it? I scarce remember the sun which I have seen shine on many fore-heads.

[Sidenote: The Abbaye-aux-Bois.]

It was at that time that I was obliged to sell the Vallée-aux-Loups, which Madame Récamier had hired, in half shares with M. de Montmorency. More and more tried by fortune, Madame Récamier soon retired to the Abbaye-aux-Bois[475]. The Duchesse d'Abrantès speaks as follows of that abode:

"The Abbaye-aux-Bois, with all its dependencies, its beautiful gardens, its extensive cloisters, in which played young girls of all ages, with careless looks and frolicsome words, was known only as a saintly abode to which a family could safely entrust its hope; even then, it was known only to the mothers who had an interest beyond its high walls. But, once Sister Marie had closed the little gate surmounted by an attic, the boundary of the saintly domain, one crossed the great court-yard which separates the convent from the street, not only as neutral, but as foreign ground.

"To-day this is no longer so: the name of the Abbaye-aux-Bois has become popular; its renown is general and familiar to all classes. The woman who goes there for the first time and says to her footmen, 'To the Abbaye-aux-Bois' is sure not to be asked by them in which direction they have to drive....

"Whence did it, in so short a time, derive so positive a renown, so wide-spread an illustriousness? Do you see two little windows, right up at the top, in the lofts, there, above the large windows of the great stair-case? That is one of the small rooms of the house. Well, nevertheless, the fame of the Abbaye-aux-Bois took birth within its confines, came down from there, and became popular. And how could it but become popular, when all classes of society knew that, in that little room, dwelt a being who led a life disinherited of all joy and who, nevertheless, found words of consolation for every sorrow, magic words to alleviate every pain, succour for every misfortune?

"When, from the recesses of his prison, Coudert[476] caught a glimpse of the scaffold, whose pity was it that he invoked? 'Go to Madame Récamier,' he said to his brother[477] 'tell her that I am innocent before God... she will understand that evidence...' and Coudert was saved. Madame Récamier joined in her generous action a man gifted with both talent and kindness: M. Ballanche seconded her endeavours, and the scaffold devoured one victim the less.

"It might almost be described as a marvel offered to the study of the human mind, that little cell in which a woman of more than European reputation came to seek repose and a decent asylum. The world is generally inclined to forget those who no longer invite it to their banquets; it did not forget her who, formerly, in the midst of her joys, lent an even more willing ear to a complaint than to the accents of pleasure. Not only was the little room on the third floor of the Abbaye-aux-Bois the constant object of the errands of Madame Récamier's friends, but, as though a fairy's magic wand had relieved the steepness of the ascent, the same strangers who used to ask as a favour to be admitted to the elegant mansion on the Chaussée d'Antin continued to beg the same boon. For them it was a sight really as remarkable as any rarity in Paris to see, within a space of ten feet by twenty, all opinions united under one banner, marching in peace and almost hand in hand. The Vicomte de Chateaubriand told Benjamin Constant of the unknown marvels of America. Mathieu de Montmorency, with the urbanity personal to himself, the chivalrous politeness of all that bears his name, was as respectfully attentive to Madame Bernadotte[478], who was about to reign in Sweden, as he would have been to the sister[479] of Adelaide of Savoy[480], daughter of Humbert the White-handed[481], that widow of Louis the Fat[482] who married one of his ancestors[483]. And the man of the feudal times had not a single bitter word for the man of our days of liberty.

[Sidenote: Society at the Abbaye.]

"Seated side by side on the same divan, the duchess of the Faubourg Saint-Germain became polite to the duchess of the Empire; nothing seemed to shock in that unique room. When I saw Madame Récamier again in that room, I had just returned to Paris, after a long absence. I had a service to ask of her, and went to her with confidence. I well knew, through common friends, to how great a measure of strength her courage had risen, but I myself lacked it when I saw her there, under the loft, as peaceful and calm as in the gilded drawing-rooms of the Rue du Mont-Blanc.

"'What!' said I to myself. 'Nothing but sufferings!'

"And my moist eye fixed itself upon her with an expression which she must have understood. Alas, my memories passed back over the years and recaptured the past! Ever beaten by the storm, that woman, whom fame had placed at the very top of the wreath of flowers of the age, had, for the last ten years, seen her life surrounded by sorrows, the shock of which was striking repeated blows at her heart and killing her!...

"When, guided by old memories and a constant attraction, I selected the Abbaye-aux-Bois as my refuge, the little room on the third storey was no longer inhabited by her whom I should have gone to seek there; Madame Récamier at that time occupied a more spacious apartment. It was there that I saw her again. Death had thinned the ranks of the combatants around her, and, of all those political champions, M. de Chateaubriand was almost the only one among her friends who had survived. But for him too the hour struck of hope deceived and royal ingratitude. He was wise; he bade farewell to those false pretenses of happiness, and relinquished the uncertain power of the tribune to grasp one more practical.

"You have already seen that, in this drawing-room at the Abbaye-aux-Bois, there was question of other interests besides literary interests, and that those who suffer may turn towards it a look full of hope, Constantly occupied as I have, for some months, been with all that relates to the family of the Emperor, I have found a few documents which do not seem to be devoid of interest at this moment.

"The Queen of Spain[484] found herself under an absolute necessity to return to France. She wrote to Madame Récamier to beg her to interest herself in the request which she was making to be allowed to come to Paris. M. de Chateaubriand was at that time in office, and the Queen of Spain, knowing the loyalty of his character, had every confidence in the success of her appeal. Nevertheless, the thing was difficult, because there was a law which affected all that unhappy family, even in its most virtuous members. But M. de Chateaubriand had in him that feeling of a noble pity for misfortune, which later made him write those touching words:

Sur le compte des grands je ne suis pas suspect: Leurs malheurs seulement attirent mon respect. Je hais ce Pharaon, que l'éclat environne; Mais s'il tombe, à l'instant j'honore sa couronne; Il devient, à mes yeux, roi par l'adversité; Des pleurs je reconnais l'auguste autorité: Courtisan du malheur, etc., etc.[485]

"M. de Chateaubriand lent an ear to the interests of a person in distress; he examined his duty, which did not lay upon him the fear of dreading a weak woman, and, two days after the request was made, he wrote to Madame Récamier that Madame Joseph Bonaparte might return to France, asking where she was, in order that he might send her, through M. Durand de Moreuil, then our Minister to Brussels[486], permission to come to France under the name of the Comtesse de Villeneuve. He wrote at the same time to M. de Fagel[487].

"I have related this fact with so much the more pleasure as it honours both her who asked and the minister who obliged her: the one through her noble confidence, the other through his noble humanity[488]."

Madame d'Abrantès praises my conduct far too highly: it was not worth even the trouble of remark; but, as she does not tell all there is to tell about the Abbaye-aux-Bois, I will supply what she has forgotten or omitted.

[Sidenote: Captain Roger.]

Captain Roger[489], another Coudert, had been condemned to death. Madame Récamier had joined me in her pious work of saving him. Benjamin Constant had also interceded on behalf of this companion of Caron's, and had given the condemned man's brother the following letter for Madame Récamier:

"I could not forgive myself, madame, for always importuning you, but it is not my fault if there are incessant condemnations to death. This letter will be delivered to you by the brother of the unhappy Roger, sentenced with Caron[490]. The story is very hateful and very well-known. The name alone will acquaint M. de Chateaubriand with the matter. He is fortunate enough to be at the same time the first talent in the Ministry and the only minister under whom no blood has been spilt. I say no more; I leave the rest to your heart. It is very sad to have to write to you almost exclusively on distressful matters; but you forgive me, I know, and I am sure that you will add one more unfortunate to the long list of those whom you have saved.

"A thousand fond respects.

"B. CONSTANT.

"PARIS, 1 _March_ 1823."

When Captain Roger was set at liberty, he hastened to express his gratitude to his benefactress. One evening, after dinner, I was at Madame Récamier's as usual; suddenly appeared this officer. He said to us, in a southern accent:

"But for your intercession, my head would have rolled on the scaffold."

We were stupefied, for we had forgotten our merits; he shouted, red as a turkey-cock:

"You don't remember?... You don't remember?..." In vain we made a thousand excuses for our lack of memory; he went off, striking the spurs of his boots together again and again, as furious at our forgetting our good action as though he had had to reproach us with his death.

About this time, Talma asked Madame Récamier to allow him to meet me at her rooms in order to consult me on some verses in Ducis' _Othello_, which he was not allowed to speak as they stood. Leaving my dispatches, I hastened to keep the appointment; I spent the evening with the modern Roscius recasting the unlucky lines. He proposed an alteration to me, I proposed another to him; we vied with each other in rhyming; we withdrew to the window-recess or to a corner to turn and re-turn a hemistich. We had much difficulty in agreeing as to the sense and the rhythm. It would have been rather curious to see me, the minister of Louis XVIII., and Talma, the king of the stage, forgetting what we might be, emulating each other in enthusiasm, and sending the censorship and all the grandeurs of the world to the deuce. But, if Richelieu had his dramas performed while letting Gustavus Adolphus[491] loose on Europe, could not I, a humble secretary of State, busy myself with the tragedies of others while seeking the independence of France in Madrid?

[Sidenote: Sweet hours at the Abbaye.]

Madame la Duchesse d'Abrantès, whose coffin I have saluted in the church at Chaillot, has described only the _inhabited_ abode of Madame Récamier; I will tell of the _solitary_ refuge. A dark corridor separated two small rooms. I maintained that this vestibule was lit up with a gentle light. The bed-room was furnished with a library, a harp, a piano, a portrait of Madame de Staël and a view of Coppet by moonlight; pots of flowers adorned the window-sills. When, quite breathless with clambering up three flights of stairs, I entered the cell at the fall of evening, I was enraptured. The outlook from the windows was over the garden of the Abbaye, in the green clumps of which the nuns moved to and fro and school-girls ran hither and thither. The top of an acacia-tree rose to the level of the eye. Sharp-pointed steeples pierced the sky, and on the horizon appeared the hills of Sèvres. The expiring sun gilded the picture and entered through the open windows. Madame Récamier sat at her piano; the Angelus tolled: the sound of the bell which seemed "to weep the dying day, _pianger il giorno che si muore_[492]," mingled with the last accents of the Invocation of the Night in Steibelt's[493] _Romeo and Juliet._ A few birds came to nestle in the raised outer blinds; I joined the silence and solitude from afar, above the noise and tumult of a great city.

God, by giving me those hours of peace, indemnified me for my hours of trouble; I foresaw the coming rest which my faith believes in and my hope invokes. Agitated as I was elsewhere with political occupations, or disgusted with the ingratitude of Courts, peacefulness of heart awaited me in the recesses of that retreat, like the coolness of the woods when one leaves a scorching plain. I recovered my calm beside a woman who spread serenity around her; and yet that serenity was not in any way too even, for it passed through deep affections. Alas, the men whom I used to meet at Madame Récamier's, Mathieu de Montmorency, Camille Jordan, Benjamin Constant, the Duc de Laval, have gone to join Hingant, Joubert, Fontanes, others who were absent from another absent company. Amid those successive friendships have risen young friends, the vernal offshoots of an old forest in which the felling is everlasting. I beg them, I beg M. Ampère, who will read this when I am gone, I ask them all to keep me in their memory: I make over to them the thread of the life the end of which Lachesis is spinning out on my distaff. My inseparable road-fellow, M. Ballanche, has found himself alone at the commencement and at the end of my career; he has witnessed my friendships broken by time as I have witnessed his carried away by the Rhone: rivers always undermine their banks.

The misfortune of my friends has often weighed heavily on me, and I have never shrunk from the sacred burden: the moment of reward has arrived; a serious attachment deigns to help me to support that which the multitude of the bad days adds to their weight. As I draw near my end, it seems to me that all that has been dear to me has been dear to me in Madame Récamier, and that she was the hidden source of my affections. My memories of diverse ages, those of my dreams as well as those of my realities, have become moulded, blended, confounded into a compound of charms and sweet sufferings of which she has become the visible embodiment She regulates my sentiments, in the same way as Heaven has set happiness, order and peace into my duties.

I have followed the fair wanderer along the path which she has trodden so lightly; soon I shall go before her to a new country. As she passes in the midst of these Memoirs, in the windings of the basilica which I hasten to complete, she may come upon the chapel which here I dedicate to her; it will perhaps please her to rest in it: I have placed her image there.

[Footnote 336: This book was written in Paris in 1839.--T.]

[Footnote 337: MADAME DE STAËL, _Corinne, ou l'Italie_ (Paris, 1807).--T.]

[Footnote 338: Florio's MONTAIGNE, Booke I., chap. III.: _Our affections are transported beyond our selves._--T.]

[Footnote 339: Madame Récamier, before her marriage, was Jeanne Françoise Julie Adélaïde Bernard. Of all her baptismal names, only Julie remained, transformed into Juliette. Her father, Jean Bernard, was a notary at Lyons; in 1784, he was appointed a receiver of finance in Paris.--B.]

[Footnote 340: And not thirteen, as the earlier editions have it.--B.]

[Footnote 341: Jacques Rose Récamier (1751-1830), the Paris banker. The marriage took place on the 24th of April 1793.--T.]

[Footnote 342: Benjamin Constant, _Adolphe: anecdote trouvée dans les papiers d'un inconnu_ (Paris, 1816).--T.]

[Footnote 343: At the corner of the Boulevard de la Madeleine and the Rue Louis-le-Grand: the last remnant of the Hôtel de Richelieu, which was almost wholly destroyed during the Revolution. The Pavillon de Hanovre served as a public ball-room.--T.]

[Footnote 344: ANDRÉ CHÉNIER, _La Jeune captive_ (Paris, 1795):

"I do not wish to die so soon."--T.

]

[Footnote 345: This letter is dated, "From my retreat at Corbeil, Saturday, 28 September 1797." La Harpe was proscribed after the 18 Fructidor, and found a shelter at Corbeil, where Madame Récamier paid him one visit.--B.]

[Footnote 346: This letter has no further date, but must have been written a few days after the 18 Brumaire.--B.]

[Footnote 347: LUCIEN BONAPARTE, _La Tribu indienne, ou Édouard et Stellina_ (Paris, 1799).]

[Footnote 348: Like the Duc de Laval, another admirer of Madame Récamier, Benjamin Constant disliked dates. His work on Madame Récamier does not contain one. At the end of 1798, Madame de Staël was charged by her father to sell the house which he owned in the Rue du Mont-Blanc, now No. 7, Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin. M. Récamier had long had business-relations with M. Necker, whose banker he was, as well as his daughter's; he bought the house. The deed of sale is dated 25 Vendémiaire Year VII. (16 October 1798).--B.]

[Footnote 349: Later the Duc de Laval-Montmorency, whom Chateaubriand was to replace in Rome.--B.]

[Footnote 350: Madame de Staël's novel of _Delphine_, which appeared in the autumn of 1802.--B.]

[Footnote 351: "By the voice of the old thou didst praise beauty's charms."--T.]

[Footnote 352: Peace was concluded at Amiens between Great Britain and Ireland on the one side, and France, Spain, and the Batavian Republic on the 27th of March 1802, and lasted till the 18th of May 1803, when Great Britain resumed hostilities.--T.]

[Footnote 353: Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire (1757-1806), _née_ Spencer, wife of the fifth Duke of Devonshire, and famous for her wit, beauty and social and political influence.--T.]

[Footnote 354: Elizabeth Viscountess Melbourne (1753-1818), _née_ Milbanke, married in 1769 to Peniston Lamb, first Viscount Melbourne. The rise of her family was due to her brilliant qualities.--T.]

[Footnote 355: Emily Mary Marchioness of Salisbury (1751-1835), daughter of Wills Hill, first Marquess of Downshire, and married to James Cecil, seventh Earl, later first Marquess of Salisbury, in 1773. Lady Salisbury perished in the fire that burnt down the west wing of Hatfield House in November 1835.--T.]

[Footnote 356: Antoine Philippe Duc de Montpensier (1775-1807) died in England of a malady of the chest.--T.]

[Footnote 357: Louis Comte de Beaujolais (1779-1808) died in Malta.--T.]

[Footnote 358: George IV. was appointed Regent of the United Kingdom in 1811, and came to the throne on the 29th of January 1820; Louis-Philippe usurped the throne of France on the 9th of August 1830.--T.]

[Footnote 359: Alexander Douglas-Hamilton, Marquess of Douglas, later (1819) tenth Duke of Hamilton and seventh of Brandon (_d._ 1852), had been Ambassador to St. Petersburg and was, at this time (1802), M.P. for Lanarkshire.--T.]

[Footnote 360: Charles X. came to Holyrood in 1830. The Dukes of Hamilton are Hereditary Keepers of Holyrood Palace.--T.]

[Footnote 361: Charlotte Duchess of Somerset, _née_ Douglas-Hamilton, married, in 1800, to the eleventh Duke of Somerset.--T.]

[Footnote 362: Francesco Bartolozzi (1727-1813), the famous Italian engraver, lived in London from 1764 to 1802, when he removed to Lisbon to take charge of the National Academy in that capital.--T.]

[Footnote 363: William I. was proclaimed first King of the Netherlands on the 16th of March 1815. He abdicated on the 7th of October 1840, one year after the above lines were written and three years before his death.--T.]

[Footnote 364: Bernadotte became King of Sweden, as Charles XIV., in 1818.--T.]

[Footnote 365: September 1803.--B.]

[Footnote 366: Andoche Junot, Maréchal Duc d'Abrantès (1771-1813).--T.]

[Footnote 367: MADAME DE STAËL, _Dix années d'exil_,