François de Chateaubriand
Mémoires d’outre-tombe
Book XVII
Translated by A. S. Kline © 2006 All Rights Reserved.
This work may be freely reproduced, stored, and transmitted, electronically or otherwise, for any non-commercial purpose.
Contents
Book XVII: Chapter 2: Madame de Coislin
Book XVII: Chapter 3: A journey to Vichy, through Auvergne, to Mont-Blanc
Book XVII: Chapter 4: Return to Lyons
Book XVII: Chapter 5: Trip to the Grande-Chartreuse
Book XVII: Chapter 6: The death of Madame de Caud (Lucile)
From this point on, removed from active life, but nevertheless saved from Bonaparte’s
anger by Madame Bacciochi’s protection,
I left my temporary lodgings in the Rue de Beaune, and went to live in the Rue
de Miromesnil. The little house I rented has
since been occupied by Monsieur de Lally-Tollendal and Madame D’Hénin, his best beloved, as they
said in Diane de Poitiers’ day. My
small garden ended at a builder’s yard, and next to my window was a tall poplar
which Monsieur de Lally-Tollendal, in order to breathe less humid air, cut down
himself with his broad hand, which he considered emaciated and transparent: one
illusion followed another. The paved road then terminated at my door; further
on, the road or street, climbed through a vague patch of land called La
Butte-Aux-Lapins. La Butte-Aux-Lapins, with a scatter of isolated houses,
adjoined the Tivoli
I had nothing to
do; at the very most I talked to the rabbits in the park, or chatted to a trio
of rooks about the Duc d’Enghien, on the bank of an artificial stream hidden
beneath a carpet of green moss. Divorced from my Alpine legation and my Roman
friendships, as I had been separated suddenly from my
Yet my
resignation had added to my fame: a little courage always goes down well in
Monsieur de Tocqueville, my brother’s brother-in-law and
tutor to my two orphaned nephews, lived in Madame de Senozan’s country house: such legacies due to
the scaffold were everywhere. There, I saw my nephews growing up alongside
their three de Tocqueville cousins, of whom Alexis made one, the author of De
La Démocratie en Amérique. He was more fortunate in Verneuil than I had
been in Combourg. Was the last of fame I shall
have seen unknown to his infancy? Alexis de Tocqueville has travelled a
civilised
Verneuil has changed owners; it has become the possession of Madame de Saint-Fargeau, celebrated because of her father and the Revolution which adopted her as its daughter.
Near Mantes, at Mesnil, lived Madame de Rosanbo: my nephew, Louis de Chateaubriand, was married there later to Mademoiselle d’Orglandes, the niece of Madame de Rosanbo. The latter no longer parades her beauty round the lake and beneath the beech trees of that country house; she is gone. When I travelled from Verneuil to Mesnil, I passed Mézy en route: Madame de Mézy was romance withdrawn into virtue and maternal grief. If only her daughter, who fell from a window and broke her neck, had been able to fly over the château, like the young quail we used to chase, and take refuge on Île-Belle, that happy island in the Seine: Coturnix per stipulas pascens (a quail feeding amongst the grasses)
On the other
bank of the
Little by little my mind, tired of idleness, in my Rue de Miromesnil, found distant phantoms forming. Le Génie du Christianisme inspired me with the thought of demonstrating the truth of that work, by mingling together Christian and mythological characters. A shade, whom, much later, I named Cymodocée, sketched itself in my mind: not a feature was missing. One day, having divined the presence of Cymodocée I shut myself up with her, as always happens with the daughters of my imagination; but before they may leave that state of reverie, and arrive at the banks of the Lethe through the Gate of Ivory, they often change their form. If I have created them through love, I have unmade them through love, and the unique and beloved object I later reveal to the light is the product of a thousand infidelities.
I only stayed in the Rue de Miromesnil for a year, since the house was sold. I came to an arrangement with Madame la Marquise de Coislin, who rented me an attic room in her hôtel, on the Place Louis XV.
Madame de Coislin was a very old lady. At
nearly eighty, her proud and dominating gaze expressed wit and irony. Madame de
Coislin was not well read and gloried in it; she had passed through the age of Voltaire without knowing it; if she had any idea
of it at all, it was as a period of bourgeois chatter. It was not that she ever
spoke about her noble birth; she was too superior to stoop to anything so
ridiculous; she knew very well how to view the little people without
being derogatory; but after all, she was the offspring of the premier Marquis
in
Did Madame de Coislin have relations with Louis XV? She never confessed it to me: yet she admitted that she had been greatly loved, though she pretended to have treated the royal lover with the greatest severity. ‘I have seen him at my feet,’ she told me, ‘he had charming eyes and the language of a seducer. One day he proposed to give me a porcelain washstand like the one which Madame de Pompadour possessed. – “Ah! Sire,’ I cried, ‘that will do for hiding beneath!”’
By an odd chance, I met with this washstand again in
Madame de Coislin lived in a room of her hotel opening beneath the colonnade which matches the colonnade of the Garde-Meuble. Two seascapes by Vernet, which Louis the Well-Beloved had given the noble lady, were hung in front of an old tapestry of greenish satin. Madame de Coislin remained, resting, until two in the afternoon, sitting up, supported by pillows, in a vast bed with curtains of a similar green silk; a sort of nightcap badly pinned to her head allowed her grey hair to escape. Diamond ear-rings, mounted in the old style, fell to the shoulders of her bed-jacket, which was sprinkled with snuff in the manner of fashionable people during the Fronde. Around her, on the covers, lay a shoal of envelopes, separated from their letters, on which envelopes Madame de Coislin wrote her thoughts, at all angles: she never bought paper: her post furnished her with it. From time to time, a little bitch called Lili stuck its nose out from beneath the sheets, barked for five minutes or so and retreated grumbling into its mistress’s ‘kennel’. Thus time had dealt with Louis XV’s young love.
Madame de Châteauroux and her sisters were cousins of Madame de Coislin: the latter would not have been of the mood, as Madame de Mailly was, as a Christian repentant, to reply to a man who insulted her using a coarse expression in the Saint-Roch church: ‘My friend, since you know me, pray to God for me.’
Madame de Coislin, avaricious, like many spirited people, crammed her money into cupboards. She lived gnawed at by a swarm of coins which stuck to her skin: her people relieved her of them.
When I found her plunged inextricably in calculations, she reminded me of the miser Hermocrates, who when dictating his will had himself declared as his own heir. Yet she gave dinners randomly; though she moaned about the coffee which, according to her, no one liked, and which was only there to eke out the meal.
Madame de Chateaubriand took
a trip to
Madame de Coislin, embraced spirituality when she wished. Credulous and incredulous, her lack of faith led her to mock beliefs of which she was superstitiously afraid. She had met Madame de Krüdner; the secretive Frenchwoman was only spiritually enlightened as to the benefit of possessions; she did not please the fervent Russian, who agreed with her not at all. Madame de Krüdner said to Madame de Coislin, with passion: ‘Madame, who is your confessor within?’ – ‘Madame,’ replied Madame de Coislin, ‘I know nothing of any confessor within; I know only that my confessor is within his confessional.’ After that, the two ladies no longer had anything to do with each other.
Madame de Coislin was proud of having introduced a novelty to court, a fashion for loose chignons, despite the very pious Queen Marie Leczinska, who was opposed to that dangerous innovation. She maintained that in the past a person who was comme il faut would be advised never to pay their doctor. Exclaiming about the abundance of female lingerie: ‘It smacks of the upstart;’ she said, ‘we others, ladies of the court, only had two chemises; we replaced them when they were worn out; we were clothed in silk robes, and lacked the air of working class girls young ladies possess today.’
Madame Suard, who lived on the Rue Royale, had a cockerel whose crowing, across the inner courtyard, bothered Madame de Coislin. She wrote to Madame Suard: ‘Madame, wring your cockerel’s neck.’ Madame Suard returned the message with a note: ‘Madame, I have the honour to reply that I will not wring my cockerel’s neck.’ The correspondence rested there. Madame de Coislin said to Madame de Chateaubriand: ‘Ah! Goodness me, what times we live in! She’s only the daughter of Panckoucke, the wife of a Member of the Academy, you know.’
Monsieur Hennin, a former clerk in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who was as boring as a book of etiquette, scribbled long novels. One day he was reading a descriptive passage to Madame de Coislin: a lover forsaken and in tears, was fishing, in a state of melancholy, for salmon. Madame de Copislin, who was impatient and did not like salmon, interrupted the author and said to him with that air of seriousness that rendered her so comical: ‘Monsieur Hennin, could you not have him catch another kind of fish for that lady?’
The stories Madame de Coislin told cannot be re-captured, because there was nothing in the content; everything was in the mimicry, the tone, and the manner of the speaker: she never laughed. There was a conversation between Monsieur and Madame Jacqueminot whose perfection outdid everything. When, during the conversation between the two, Madame Jacqueminot replied: ‘But Monsieur Jacqueminot!’ the name was pronounced in such a way that one was seized by wild laughter. Obliged to let it die down, Madame de Coislin waited gravely, while taking snuff.
Reading in a newspaper of the death of several kings, she removed her glasses, and said, while blowing her nose: ‘There is an epidemic among these crowned creatures.’
At the moment when she was ready for death, someone at her bedside maintained that one only succumbed because one allowed oneself to; that if one was truly attentive and never lost sight of the enemy, one would not die: ‘I believe it,’ she said, ‘but I am afraid I am becoming distracted.’ She expired.
I went down to her room the following morning; I found Monsieur and Madame d’Avaray, her sister and brother-in-law, sitting by the hearth, a small table between them, counting coins from a purse they had taken from a hole in the panelling. The poor dead woman was there on the bed, the curtains half-drawn: she could not hear the sound of the gold which ought to have woken her, counted by fraternal hands.
Among the pensées which the departed had written, on the margins of letters and their envelopes, some were of great beauty. Madame de Coislin had revealed to me what remained of Louis XV’s court, under Bonaparte, when the days of Louis XVI were done, as Madame d’Houdetot had revealed what was still left to us, in the nineteenth century, of her society of philosophers.
In the summer of
1805, I rejoined Madame de Chateaubriand
at Vichy, where Madame de Coislin had conducted her, as I have said. I
discovered no sign of Jussac, Termes and Flammarens, whom Madame de Sévigné found preceding and following
her, in 1677; for a hundred or twenty years and more they had been
sleeping. I left my sister, Madame de Caud, behind in
In my collected works are two small Voyages which I then made through
When I was a child, in
Alas! Madame de Beaumont had been
resting on the banks of the Tiber for nearly two years, when I trod her native
soil, in 1805; I was only a few miles from Mont Dore,
where she came seeking that lease of life she extended a little in reaching
Rome. Last summer, in 1838, I travelled through that very same
We left Clermont, and, returning to Lyons, passed through Thiers and Roanne. This route, then little frequented, follows the banks of the Lignon, here and there. The author of L’Astrée who is not a great spirit, nevertheless invented places and people who are alive; so much fiction when it is appropriate to the age in which it appears has creative power! Moreover there is ingenious fantasy in that resurrection of nymphs and naiads mingling with shepherds, ladies and knights: those varied worlds go well together, and one readily accepts mythological fables joined with the inventions of the novel: Rousseau has mentioned how he was deceived by d’Urfé.
At
Madame de Staël
visited Madame de Chateaubriand the following day in
‘There is only one circumstance in which it might be true that mountains inspire forgetfulness of earthly troubles: that is when one retires far from the world to dedicate oneself to religion. An anchorite who devotes himself to the service of humanity, a saint who wishes to meditate on God’s grandeur in silence, can find joy and peace among wildernesses of stone; but then it is not the tranquillity of those places that occupies the souls of those solitaries, on the contrary, their souls spread serenity in a region of storms……………………………………………………………………........
There are
mountains nevertheless which I would still visit with extreme delight: those of
On our return to
The noble gentleman, a painter by command of the Revolution, led that generation of artists who present themselves as sketches, grotesques, caricatures. Some wear fearful moustaches, as if they were off to conquer the world; their brushes are halberds, their scrapers are sabres; others have enormous beards, their hair hanging down or puffed up; they smoke cigars disguised as volcanoes. These cousins of the rainbow, as old Régnier called them, have their heads full of floods, seas, rivers, forests, waterfalls, tempests or massacres, torments and scaffolds. In their rooms are human skulls, fencing foils, mandolins, Spanish helmets and Turkish robes. Boastful, enterprising, rude, generous (as to touching up the portraits of tyrants they paint), they aim to form a species apart somewhere between monkey and satyr; they are determined to have it understood that the secrets of the studio have their risks, and that there is no safety for models. But how they make amends for these follies by their exalted existence, their suffering and feeling nature, a complete abnegation of self, an uncalculated devotion to the miseries of others, a manner of feeling delicate, superior, idealistic, a fierce poverty welcomed and nobly sustained: finally, on occasions by immortal talent, sons of work, passion, genius and solitude!
Leaving Geneva at night to return to
So the native genius that troubled me in my cradle, sometimes retraces its steps after having abandoned me; so my former sufferings are renewed; nothing is healed in me; if my wounds close instantaneously, they suddenly re-open like those of the crucifixes of the Middle Ages, which bleed on the anniversary of the Passion. I have no other resource, to ease me during these crises, than to allow free rein to the fever in my thoughts, just as one pierces a vein when blood rushes to the heart or mounts to the head. But what do I speak of? O religion, where then is your power, your curb, your balm! Is it as though I had not written any of those works of the innumerable years since the hour when I yielded the day to René? I had a thousand reasons to believe myself dead, and I live! It is a great sorrow. These afflictions of the lonely poet, condemned to suffer the spring despite Saturn, are unknown to those who are never far from communal existence; for them, the years are always young: ‘Now the young kids,’ writes Oppian, ‘watch over the author of their being; when the latter falls prey to the hunter’s net, they offer him sweet flowery grass in their mouths, which they have gathered from afar, and carry fresh water, drawn from the nearby stream, to his lips.’
On returning to Lyons, I found letters from
Monsieur Joubert: they told me of
the impossibility of his being at Villeneuve
before the month of September. I replied: ‘Your departure from Paris is too
far-off, and bothers me; you know that my wife would never wish to arrive at
Villeneuve before you: also she has a mind of her own, and since she is with
me, I find myself minding two minds that are very difficult to manage. We will
stay at
This Monsieur Saget was the patron of canons; he lived on the hill of Sainte-Foye, in a region of fine vineyards. One ascended to his house more or less by way of the place where Rousseau spent the night by the banks of the Saône.
‘I have often spent a delightful night,’ he writes, ‘near the town on a path that borders the Saône. Gardens raised in terraces lined the path on the opposite side: it was so warm in those days: the evenings were charming, dew dampened the withered grass; no breeze, the tranquil night; the air was fresh without being cold; the setting sun had left red clouds behind in the sky, whose reflections turned the water a rose colour; the trees on the terraces were filled with nightingales who replied to one another. I walked along in a sort of ecstasy, giving over my heart and senses to the pleasure of it all, and only sighing a little in regret at enjoying it alone. Absorbed in my sweet reverie, I extended my walks far into the night, without realising that I was tired. At last I did realise it: I lay down voluptuously on the ledge of a sort of niche or false doorway, let into the wall of a terrace: the roof of my bed was formed by the tops of the trees, a nightingale was perched exactly above me; I fell asleep to its singing: my rest was sweet; my awakening more so. It was a fine day: my gaze, on opening my eyes, fell on water, greenery, a delightful countryside.’
Rousseau’s charming itinerary in hand, one arrived at Monsieur Saget’s
residence. This lean and ancient fellow, married long ago, wore a green cap, a
grey woollen coat, nankeen trousers, blue stockings and beaver shoes. He had
lived for many years in
On certain days, at Sainte-Foye, they laid on a particular meal of calf’s-head marinaded for five days, cooked in Madeira wine and stuffed with exquisite ingredients; very pretty young peasant girls served at table; they poured excellent vintage wine, cellared in demi-johns with a capacity of three bottles. We collapsed, I and the chapter in cassocks, beneath the weight of Saget’s dinner: the hill was black with them.
Our dapifer (master of the feast) quickly came to the end of his provisions: among the ruins of his last moments, he was taken in by two or three of his former mistresses who had plundered him throughout his life, ‘a species of woman,’ said Saint Cyprian, ‘who live as if they may be loved, quae sic vivis ut possis adamari.’
We dragged
ourselves away from Capuan luxuries to go
and see La Chartreuse, still
accompanied by Monsieur Ballanche.
We hired a carriage whose decrepit wheels made a lamentable noise. Arriving at Voreppe, we stayed in an inn at the top
of the village. Next day at daybreak, we mounted horses and departed, preceded
by a guide. At the
After dining in a vast kitchen, we set off again and met Monsieur Chaptal, carried in a palanquin like a rajah, he was a former apothecary, then senator, afterwards owner of Chanteloupe and inventor of sugar-beet processing, eager heir of the sweet ‘Indian reeds’ of Sicily, perfected by the sun of Tahiti. Descending through the woods, I thought about the former coenobites; through the centuries, they carried fir saplings and a little earth in a fold of their robes, which became trees among the rocks. Happy, O you who journey silently through the world, and never turn your heads as you go by!
We had no sooner reached the entrance to the valley when a storm broke; a deluge fell, and raging torrents hurtled roaring from every ravine. Madame de Chateaubriand, rendered intrepid by the strength of her fear, galloped through water, stones and lightning flashes. She had thrown away her umbrella in order to hear the thunder better; the guide shouted: ‘Commend your souls to God, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit!’ We arrived at Voreppe to the sound of the alarm bell; the scattered remains of the storm arrived before us. Far off among the fields you could see fire in a village, and the moon showed the upper part of its disc above the clouds, like the bald and pallid head of Saint Bruno, founder of the silent Order. Monsieur Ballanche, disgustingly wet with rain, said, with his unalterable placidity: ‘I am like a fish underwater.’ I have just revisited Voreppe this year, 1838; there was no thunderstorm; but two witnesses of it remain, Madame de Chateaubriand and Monsieur Ballanche. I make the observation, because I have so often in these Memoirs noted those who are missing.
Returning to
The previous
year a grave sorrow had surprised me at Villeneuve. In order to tell you
of it, I must go back many months to a point prior to my Swiss journey. I was
still living in the house in the Rue Miromesnil, when Madame de Caud came to
‘17th of January.
I rely on you and Madame de Beaumont for my happiness, with that thought I evade my ennui and my sorrows: my whole occupation is to love you. I have spent this night in lengthy reflections on your character and your mode of being. How close you and I always are, I believe it takes time to know me, so many the varied thoughts in my head, so greatly does my timidity and a sort of external weakness contrast with my interior strength! That is more than enough about me. My illustrious brother, receive my most tender thanks for all the kindnesses and marks of friendship you never cease to show me. This is the last letter from me which you will receive this morning. Even if I have told you a few of my thoughts, they are no less complete still within me.’
Undated.
‘Do you think I am truly safe, my friend, from any impertinence of Monsieur Chênedollé’s? I am determined not to invite him to continue his visits; I am resigned to Tuesday’s being the last. I no longer wish to trouble his courtesy. I close the book of my destiny forever, and seal it with the seal of reason; I will no longer consult its pages, now, regarding either the trifles or the important concerns of life. I completely renounce my foolish thoughts; I will neither occupy myself nor grieve myself with those of others; I will deliver myself headlong to all the events of my journey through this world. What matter about my attachment and how I am! God can no longer afflict me except regarding yourself. I thank Him for the fine, dear and precious gift of your person that He has granted me, and for having preserved my life without stain; these are all my treasures. I might take as an emblem of my life the moon in a cloud with this device: Often obscured, never tarnished. Adieu, my friend. Perhaps you will be astonished (by the change) in my language since yesterday morning. Since seeing you, my heart has raised itself towards God once more, and I have placed it wholly at the foot of the cross, its only true situation.’
‘Thursday.
Good day, my friend. What is the flavour of your ideas this morning? For myself, I recall that the only person who could reassure me when I feared for Madame de Farcy’s life was the lady who said to me: “But it is in the nature of the possible that you will die before her.” Could any reply be more just? There is nothing, my friend, like the idea of death to rid us of the future. I hasten to rid you of myself this morning, since I feel myself to be in too good spirits for saying beautiful things. Good day, my poor brother. Joy to you.’
Undated.
‘When Madame de Farcy was alive, always being close to her, I did not see myself as needing to share my thoughts with anyone. I possessed that good without ever doubting it. But since we have lost that friend and circumstances have separated me from you, I have known the torment of being unable to relieve and revive its spirit in conversation with someone; I feel that my ideas are bad for me when I cannot rid myself of them; that is surely due to my poor constitution. However I am happy enough, since yesterday, with my courage. I pay no attention to my sorrow, and a sort of internal weakness that I experience. I am forsaken. Continue to be kind to me, always: it reveals your compassion these days. Good day, my friend. I will see you soon, I hope.’
Undated.
‘Rest easy, my friend; my health is restored in the blink of an eye. I often ask myself why I have such need for support. I am like a mad woman who builds a fortress in the midst of a desert. Adieu, my poor brother.’
Undated.
‘As I am suffering from a severe headache this evening, I am just going to write down quite simply, at random, some of Fénelon’s thoughts for you in order to discharge my duty to you:
– “One is truly narrow when one withdraws within oneself. On the other hand, one is truly expansive when one quits that prison in order to enter into God’s immensity.”
– “We will soon find again what we have lost. We approach it every day at great pace. A little while and there will be nothing to weep over. It is we who die: what we love lives and dies not.”
– “You are granted deceptive powers, such as an ardent fever grants during an illness. For days, you reveal a convulsive movement by means of which you demonstrate courage and gaiety, with a wealth of suffering.”
This is all my head and my sorry pen allow me to write this evening. If you wish, I will begin again tomorrow and perhaps copy more for you. Good evening, my friend. I will never cease to tell you how my heart bows before that of Fénelon, whose tenderness seems so profound to me, his virtue so elevated. Good day, my friend.’
‘I send you on waking a thousand tender thoughts and grant you a hundred blessings. I feel well this morning, and am anxious as to whether you will be able to write to me, and whether those thoughts of Fénelon will seem well-chosen to you. I fear lest my mind might be too disturbed.’
Undated.
‘Would you imagine that I have occupied myself foolishly since yesterday correcting your work? The Blossacs, in greatest secrecy, have entrusted me with a novel of yours. Since I do not think you have turned your ideas to good advantage in this novel, I am amusing myself by trying to render them in all their power. Could one show greater audacity? Pardon me, great man, and recollect that I am your sister, and it is allowable for me to misuse your riches a little.’
‘Saint-Michel.
I shall no
longer speak to you: Do not come to me any more – because only having a few
days left in
‘Saint-Michel.
My friend, the sound of your voice has never given me so much pleasure as when I heard it yesterday on my stair. My thoughts, then, sought to mount upon my courage. I was seized by a feeling of comfort at feeling you so near me; you appeared and all my inner self returned to a state of order. Sometimes I experience a great repugnance at heart when drinking of my chalice. How can that heart, which occupies so small a space, contain so much existence and so much sorrow? I am very dissatisfied with myself, very dissatisfied. My tasks and my thoughts drag me along; I hardly occupy myself with God any more, and yet I content myself with saying to Him a hundred times a day: – Lord, hasten to grant me peace, for my spirit has plunged into weariness.’
Undated.
‘My brother, do
not grow weary of my letters, or my company; consider that you will soon be
free forever of my importunities. My life is shedding its last glow, a lamp
that is expiring in the darkness of a long night, and that sees the dawn
breaking in which it will die. I beg you, my brother, cast one glance back
towards those first moments of our existence; remember that we have often been
dandled on the same lap, and hugged together to the same breast; that you have
already added your tears to mine, that from the earliest days of your life you
have protected and defended my fragile existence, that our games united us and
I shared your first studies. I will not speak to you of our adolescence, of the
innocence of our thoughts and joys, of our mutual need to see each other
unceasingly. If I retrace the past, I freely confess, my brother, it is to make
myself live more deeply in your heart. When you left
This letter so poignant and so wholly admirable is the last I received; it alarmed me by the deeper sadness with which it is imprinted. I hurried to see her; my sister was walking in the garden with Madame de Navarre; she came in again when she was told that I had gone up to her room. She made a visible effort to compose her ideas and at intervals she gave a slight convulsive movement of her lips. I begged her to be reasonable, not to write such unjust and heart-rending things to me, and to cease thinking that I could ever grow weary of her. She seemed to grow a little calmer at the words which I repeated to comfort and console her. She told me that she thought the convent was bad for her, that she would feel better in solitary lodgings, near the Jardin des Plantes, where she could see the doctors and go for walks. I urged her to follow her own wishes, adding that I would let her have old Saint-Germain, to help Virginie her maid. This proposition seemed to give her great pleasure, as a reminder of Madame de Beaumont, and she assured me that she would attend to finding herself new lodgings. She asked me what I intended to do that summer: I told her that I would be going to Vichy to re-join my wife, then to Monsieur Joubert at Villeneuve, before returning to Paris. I suggested she might come with us. She replied that she wished to spend the summer alone, and that she was even going to send Virginie back to Fougères. I left her; she was calmer.
Madame de
Chateaubriand left for
That evening, I saw the worthy Saint-Germain; I gave him his instructions and some money so that he could secretly reduce the cost of anything she might need. I committed him to keeping me informed of everything, and not to fail in calling me back if he had business with me. Three months elapsed. Arriving at Villeneuve, I found two quite reassuring notes concerning Madame de Caud’s health; but Saint-Germain forgot to tell me of my sister’s new lodging arrangements. I had begun to write a long letter to her, when Madame de Chateaubriand suddenly fell dangerously ill; I was at her bedside when I was brought a fresh letter from Saint-Germain; I opened it: a horrifying line told me of Lucile’s sudden death.
I have cared for
many graves in my life, but it was my fate and my sister’s destiny to have her
ashes committed to the will of Heaven. I was not in Paris at the moment of her
death; I had no relatives there; forced to remain at Villeneuve by my wife’s
perilous condition, I could not attend to those sacred remains; and
instructions from afar arrived too late to prevent a common burial. Lucile knew
no one and had not a single friend; she was known only to Madame de Beaumont’s
old servant, as if he had been charged with linking their two fates. He alone
followed the forsaken coffin, and he had died himself before Madame de
Chateaubriand’s sufferings allowed me to conduct her back to
My sister was buried among the poor: in which cemetery was she laid to rest? By what motionless wave of the ocean of dead was she engulfed? In what house did she die after leaving the convent? If by making enquiries, if in examining the municipal archives, and parish registers, I meet with my sister’s name, what will that avail me? Would I find the same cemetery keeper? Will I discover the man who dug a grave that was left nameless and unrecorded? Would the rough hands that last touched such pure clay retain the memory? What nomenclature among the shades would show me the obliterated grave? Might he not be in error? Since Heaven has willed it so, let Lucile be lost forever! I find in this absence of knowledge of the place a distinction between it and the burial of my other friends. My predecessor, in this world and the next, is interceding for me with the Redeemer; she is praying to Him from among the remains of paupers with whom her own are mingled: so, her remains lost, Lucile’s mother and mine reposes, among the preferred of Jesus Christ. God will have recognised my sister; and she, who thought little of this world, was bound to leave no trace behind. She has left me, that saintly genius. I have not spent a day without weeping for her. Lucile loved to hide; I have made, for her, a solitary place in my heart: she will leave it only when I have ceased to live.
These are the true, the only events of my real life! At the moment when I lost my sister, what did the thousands of soldiers falling on the field of battle mean to me, the crumbling of thrones, or the altering face of the world?
Lucile’s death struck at the roots of my soul: my childhood at the heart of my family, the first vestiges of my existence, it was they that were vanishing. Our lives resemble those fragile buildings, shored up in the air by those flying-buttresses that do not crumble all at once, but collapse in succession; they continue to support some gallery when they have already failed the sanctuary or the cradle of the edifice. Madame de Chateaubriand, still wounded by Lucile’s imperious whims, saw only deliverance for the Christian woman, finding peace with her Lord. Let us be gentle, if we would be regretted: great genius and superior qualities are mourned only by the angels. But I was unable to share Madame de Chateaubriand’s consolation.
End of Book XVII