Chapitre XI

Chateaubriand and Delphine de Custine-Her refusal to lend him money-Their quarrel and reconciliation-Flying visits to Delphine de Custine at Fervacques-Extracts from Chateaubriand's letters-The subsidence of love in friendship and esteem-Chateaubriand projects a journey to the Holy Land. IN order to consider Chateaubriand's relations with Madame de Custine, it becomes necessary to travel back a little.

"Promise me that you will come to Rome," we have seen him writing to her; and he really seems to have expected that she would join him there, travelling under Chênedolle's escort. We find him, at any rate, inviting Chênedollé, whom he proposed to employ as a secretary, and requesting him to bring with him an unnamed " person who is going to spend six weeks or a couple of months with me." But his other friends were, at the same time, trying to arrange to send Madame de Chateaubriand to him, and Pauline de Beaumont was also writing, on her own account, to say that she meant to come. Hence the appeal, already quoted, to Fontanes, "I rely upon your friendship to get me out of the mess."

The " mess," however, it must be added, was partly of a pecuniary character. Pauline de Beaumont alone had joined Chateaubriand, and he had charged himself with the expenses of her illness. The cost was heavy,

and he was poor; so he asked Delphine de Custine to lend him five thousand francs, and she refused. That was the situation when he returned to France after Pauline de Beaumont's death; and one might have expected it to lead to immediate estrangement; but it did not. We find this sorrowful confession in the Mémorres—

" My grief, I fancy, flattered itself, in those distant days, that the tie which had just been broken was the last that I should ever form. And yet how short a time it was before I replaced, though I did not forget, the object of my affections! Thus it is the lot of man to pass from one weakness to another ! »

No names are mentioned, but the meaning of the passage does not admit of doubt. Chateaubriand, as we know, though he does not say so, had not waited for Pauline de Beaumont to die before replacing her. Her illness had brought him back to her, but her death set him free for the second time. It was not only about money that he had corresponded with Madame de Custine during his stay in Italy; and now his return to her was simultaneous with his return to Madame de Chateaubriand. That confession also is contained in the Mémoires, in a passage which is in form a eulogy of Madame de Chateaubriand's merits.

" Held back by an irrefragable tie I purchased, at first at the price of a little bitterness, the pleasant satisfactions which I enjoy to-day. Of the griefs of my existence only those which were irremediable remain. I owe, therefore, a tender debt of undying

I4I

gratitude to my wife, whose attachment to me has been equally touching and sincere. She has made my life more serious, more noble, more honourable, by invariably inspiring me with respect, if not with the strength to be as faithful to her as I should have been »

Precisely-he could hardly have put it better. Joubert, regarding his life at this period from outside, wrote: " Our friend is the chief of a tribe which seems to me quite tolerably happy"; but that was the time when Madame de Chateaubriand was appealing, as we have seen, to M. Clausel de Coussergues to take pity on her loneliness and call when M. de Chateaubriand was out; and it was also the time when Chateaubriand complained-to Madame de Custinethat he was like a bird kept prisoner in a cage. He added that, in July, he would visit her at Fervacques, and that it would be " like a fairy story"; and she, on her part, without waiting to receive his visit, came to Paris, and took up her abode exactly opposite to his house-a circumstance to which Madame de Chateaubriand was very possibly referring when she expressed her desire to inform M. Clausel de Coussergues of the many annoyances that were " torturing" her.

A number of letters passed, though only those written by Chateaubriand himself have been preserved. It was his chivalrous practice to destroy love letters on the assumption that ladies did not like to be compromised; but he misjudged them. They were not afraid, but felt, as one supposes, that to be compromised by so great a man was to be flattered and distinguished; so they kept his letters, and bequeathed them to heirs, who sold them to dealers in autographs, from whom biographers in the fulness of time acquired them. Madame de Custine did so like the rest. There are about fifty of Chateaubriand's letters to her in the collections of MM. Agénor Bardoux and Chédieu de Robéthon; and the story, to which there is barely an allusion in the Mémoires, can easily be put together from them.

We find Chateaubriand, assuming the character of " a father of the Church, very unworthy no doubt, but still of perfect good faith," and in that capacity remonstrating with Madame de Custine for allowing her son to receive his first communion with insufficient preparation. We find him complaining again that "life is very sad," and that he is laid up with a fever and obliged to take quinine. We find him confiding to Madame de Custine that he has conceived the idea of a new book-Les Martyrs-and that the throes of composition make him unsociable and ill. We find him promising to stay with her, yet doubting whether he may not be prevented because "you know that I am not free." And presently we find him quarrelling with her.

She has been talking; she has told some one about Chateaubriand's request for a loan of five thousand francs. The talk has at last reached Chateaubriand's ears, and he remonstrates with some acrimony, and grows still more acrimonious when trivial excuses and explanations which explain nothing are offered to him. The refusal, he says, was bad enough in itself-" nothing was easier for you, in your position, to procure the small sum which I requested, and a score of my poorest friends would have obliged me by return of post if I

had not given you the preference"; but the breach of confidence was an outrage. How cruel, too, to have been jealous of Madame de Beaumont! How cruel and how senseless! She should have been thought of, not as a rival, but as a woman who suffered, and needed help and pity. As for the malicious insinuations that Chateaubriand had borrowed money from her ... et cetera. It was a good deal more than a storm in a tea-cup; and Delphine de Custine must have had very winning ways indeed to be able to calm it, and to persuade her lover that the breach of confidence was only an accidental indiscretion, grossly misrepresented.

She succeeded, however, and the quarrel was once more the renewal of love, with the faithful Chênedollé as confidant and go-between. That accommodating man was Madame de Custine's neighbour in Normandy; and visits to her could easily be represented as visits to him. So he was introduced, and made use of, and was trusted, and justified the trust, receiving and respecting Madame de Custine's confidences as well as Chateaubriand's, both at the time of the liaison and afterwards, when Chateaubriand was "behaving badly." No one but he knew that, at the time when Chateaubriand was keeping up appearances so successfully that Joubert found his domestic life a " subject of contemplation" and a " model," he was also paying furtive flying visits to Fervacques; and neither Joubert nor Madame de Chateaubriand seems ever to have extracted any information from him on that branch of the subject.

As for the history of those flying visits-we can trace it in the correspondence as a history of caprices

and changing moods and lovers' quarrels, with coolness on one side at all events for its inevitable culmination. Sometimes Chateaubriand's language is as passionate and devoted as any mistress could desire. He addresses Madame de Custine as "dearest" and subscribes himself "yours, yours until the end of time." He writes, on the very day on which he quits her, to say that life without her "has already begun to be tedious"; and he expresses his dread that a letter addressed to him at Villeneuve may arrive during his absence and be opened by his wife. But there are other letters of which the tone is quite different-the cold and irritated tone of a man who considers that too much has been expected of him, and that women really are most unreasonable creatures, and that Delphine de Custine is the most unreasonable of them all.

Probably she was unreasonable, or at least exacting, after the style of a spoilt child. Her impetuous establishment of herself in lodgings opposite to Chateaubriand's house, under Madame de Chateaubriand's nose, was the act of a dare-devil and a madcap which warrants us in saying, as it would have warranted him in thinking, that she threw herself at his head; and, having little regard for appearances herself, she seems to have been hurt to find that he was not equally contemptuous of them. So we find him presently taking the line of a vain man who is very sure of himself, and remonstrating almost with acerbity-

"You persecute me too much. What can I do more than I have done? I have twice flown in the face of common-sense in coming to see you, and I have stayed with you as long as I could and longer than 1 ought. 1 assure you your most unjust complaints are making me very angry indeed. I really don't know what to do to please you. Do try and see how very unreasonable you are."

A quarrelsome letter that; and it would appear that the lovers not only quarrelled on paper, but also quarrelled when they met. On one occasion trouble arose because a letter in an unmistakable feminine handwriting was delivered for Chateaubriand at Fervacques, and his explanation that it was from "a Breton sister who wants tickets for the coronation" was received with scepticism, as very likely it deserved to be. Of another quarrel-perhaps about nothing in particular-there is a memorandum in Chênedolle's papers.

" One day," he writes, "they went for a drive, and Chateaubriand was cross with her. On their return she saw a gun which we had carried when shooting in the morning. She seized hold of it with a movement of delight and passion, and was within an ace of shooting herself through the heart."

We know nothing of the rights of that story, however, and very likely it has none. It has its significance, however, as a mark of a stage in the decline of Chateaubriand's devotion. A further stage indicated by the contents of the one letter from Madame de Custine to Chateaubriand which we possess—

"I have received your letter, and I leave you to

imagine how it affected me. It was worthy of Fervacques and its public, but I took care not to read it aloud. I have the right to be surprised, I think, that your numerous specifications include no word about the grotto and the little boudoir with its two magnificent myrtles. You ought not to have forgotten all that so quickly. I, on my part, have forgotten nothing-not even that you do not care about long letters.

"Your friend is still here, but he is going tomorrow. am more sorry than I can tell you, for it means that shall no longer see anything that you have loved. There were passages in your letter which hurt me very much¹ « 1

1 Sainte-Beuve and M. Bardoux print the letter as addressed to Chênedollé, but that must be a mistake. It must have been given to him as an autograph, or have found its way among his papers by accident. L 2 147 ↩

Here again we know nothing of the actual circumstances, but the letter need not, for that reason, be treated as an enigma. In the grotto and the boudoir, one conjectures, favours had been granted and intimacy had been engrossing; and Chateaubriand, in thanking his hostess for her hospitality, had seemed ungrateful and forgetful. Madame de Custine was discovering that, as the Duchesse de Duras, whom we shall meet presently, put it: "M. de Chateaubriand does not spoil his friends. I fear, on the contrary, that he is himself somewhat spoiled by their devotion. His replies to their letters are always irrelevant, and I am not sure that he reads them." She had herselt done more than any one else to spoil Chateaubriand, as, indeed, she recognized in after years; and a pertinent anecdote about the happenings in her boudoir is reported by Sainte-Beuve. Even after disillusion had overtaken her, she still, it seemed, showed the shrine with pride in the spirit in which people in country houses show a room in which a king once slept. And so—

" This," she was wont to say, " is the boudoir in which I used to receive him."

" Really. Then it was here that he went on his knees to you »

"Ah, but perhaps it was I who used to go on my knees to him."

That is likely enough; for she was also discovering that he was not "exclusive in his affections." She had discovered it before to her profit, and now she discovered it to her detriment. Her suspicion of the " Breton sister" who wanted tickets for the coronation may or may not have been well founded. It was not, at any rate, the only suspicion which she harboured. " Another infidelity of mine, you see!" writes Chateaubriand in the style of a man who anticipates such a charge and answers it by making light of it; but when he wrote that, the end of the intimacy was already very near at hand.

The journey to Switzerland had interrupted it; and now a longer journey, to Jerusalem, and Carthage, and Spain, in quest of Oriental " images " for Les Martyrs was in contemplation. Chênedollé had been told of it, but had kept the secret, just as he had previously kept from Madame de Beaumont the secret of the flying

visit to Madame de Chateaubriand in Brittany; and when Madame de Custine at last found out, she did not even know that he had known. It is in a letter to Chênedollé that we read how she heard that a vague dream of travel had become a settled plan, and realized that the end of her happiness had come-

"The man of genius has been here for a fortnight, and he leaves me in two days' time. It is no ordinary departure, and it is no ordinary journey that he is undertaking. This chimera of an expedition to Greece is realized at last. He starts to fulfil his vows-and to put an end to my hopes-accomplishing a task which he has long desired to essay. He assures me he will be back in November, but I don't believe him. You know how sad last year was for me, and you can imagine how sad the coming year will be. He declares that he loves me better than ever; but the proof is not very convincing-he is going away for a long journey in two days from now. . ..

" Good-bye. You can understand what an agony of mind I am in. I can write no more. . . .

" Everything has been delightful for a fortnightbut all is over »

In a sense, indeed, Madame de Custine was wrong. There was to be no open breach. Chateaubriand was to remain her friend, and to write her many more letters, and to use his influence, albeit unsuccessfully, in support of her desire to see her son¹ made a peer of France. But it was quite true that she was no longer, and never again, to hold an exclusive place, or even the first place, in his heart; and this very pilgrimage to the Orient was a part of a project of infidelity.

1 Astolphe de Custine. ↩

For Chateaubriand admits in the Mémoires that his famous Itinéraire tells only a portion of the truth, and that he did not by any means "visit the tomb of Christ in the spirit of a repentant sinner." On the contrary, he " counted the moments," and was "absorbed by a single thought," and " prayed to the winds to waft the ship more quickly," aspiring to " win glory in order to win love."

And the woman whose love he thus sought to win was not Delphine de Custine, but Natalie de Noailles-Mouchy, who had promised to meet him, at the end of his journey, in the Court of the Lions at the Alhambra.

Chpter XV

Chateaubriand as a Catholic Childe Harold-Natalie de Noailles-Mouchy-Her early life and adventures-Her appointment to meet Chateaubriand in the Court of the Lions at the Alhambra -Chateaubriand's late arrival and Natalie's infidelity-The Duchesse de Duras-Later relations with Natalie de Noailles-Mouchy-Later relations with Delphine de Custine.

MADAME DE CHATEAUBRIAND travelled with her husband as far as Venice. It had been arranged that " worthy Ballanche"¹ of Lyons should meet her there and take her home. But "worthy Ballanche" was late for the appointment; and Madame de Chateaubriand, as she states in her Memoirs, "made a scene with him," and would not even grant him a day's grace in which to see the sights of Venice, but required him to start at once, at five o'clock in the morning. The incident seems to confirm Madame de Boigne's estimate of her disposition. Evidently she was " snappish," and one guesses that there was a fresh outburst of snappishness when a certain "dear countess"-not named, but possibly Madame de Custine-came to her in tears, saying that she feared M. de Chateaubriand must be dead, as she had not heard from him for a fortnight. Madame de Chateaubriand herself, the Memoirs continue, received no letter from him for eleven months.

1 Ballanche was the son of a Lyons printer. he gave up printing in order to become a man of letters and to live in Paris near Madame Récamier. It was from his writings that Chateaubriand took the title of Le Génie du Christianisme. His contemporaries never refer to him otherwise than as "le bon Ballanche." I5I ↩

He was proceeding meanwhile to the East-to Athens and the Morea, to Constantinople and Asia Minor, and Palestine and Egypt and Numidia-in quest of images « and glory. » Those who wish to trace his footsteps must do so in the pages of the Itinéraire, which is a delightful book to read. Its topography is, in places, a little loose, and the alleged " observations" are often borrowed from the illustrious traveller's predecessors in the field. Dr. Avramiotti exposed many of its inaccuracies in a malicious pamphlet,¹ and Titus Tobler,² the erudite German, speaks of the journey as " un voyage fait avec des Voyages." But that hardly matters. One does not read the Itinéraire for information, but for sentiment, and " atmosphere," and, above all, for gorgeous imagery and harmonious phrases.

Chateaubriand set forth as, in Sainte-Beuve's words, " the first Childe Harold of the century"-only, of course, as a religious, and especially a Catholic Childe Harold. He belonged, as he put it himself, to the "class of the superstitious and the weak," and he pictured himself as "very likely the last Frenchman to leave his country and travel in the Holy Land with the thoughts and feelings of one of the pilgrims of old." If that was a pose, at least he posed for himself as well as for the world; and, as for the imagery and the phrases, he found them in abundance, and enriched French literature therewith-

1 Alcuni Cenni critici, etc. ↩

2 Bibliographica geographica Palastina. ↩

"The desert still seems dumb with terror, as if it had not dared break silence since the day when it heard the voice of the Eternal."

In so far as the journey was a pilgrimage, that sentence may be said to strike the note. Chateaubriand was proud of it, and drew the attention of his friends to it in his letters, declaring it to be the finest sentence that he had ever written. Only, of course, as we have already seen, the journey was only in part a pilgrimage. Its true and ultimate goal was not the City of Jerusalem, but the Palace of the Alhambra. Chateaubriand confessed as much, as has been said, and we may as well have the full text of the confession before us—

" But have I told the whole truth in the Itinéraire about this journey which I began in the port of Othello and Desdemona? Was I really visiting the tomb of Christ in the spirit of a repentant sinner? The fact is that a single thought absorbed me, and that I was counting the hours with impatience. Standing at my vessel's prow, with my gaze fixed upon the evening star, I prayed that the winds might waft the barque faster, and that I might win glory in order that I might win love. I hoped to find glory at Sparta, at Zion, at Memphis, at Carthage, and to bring it to the Alhambra. How my heart fluttered as I approached the shores of Spain! I had passed through my trials, but would my memory have been cherished? By what misfortunes has not this mystery been attended! The light of the sun still shines on them. If ever I snatch a stolen moment of happiness, it is troubled by the recollection of those days of seduction, enchantment, and delirium."

The meaning of the passage-that Chateaubriand was to be met in Spain by the beautiful Natalie de Noailles-Mouchy-has been already indicated; but the Mémoires throw no light on the enigma, and the details have to be disengaged from many sources.

One source, of course, is Le dernier Abencérage ; but that work, equally of course, is not a confession, but a romance. The story is invented, though the local colour is depicted faithfully. That reservation must be made before any critic says that Natalie is Blanca or that Chateaubriand is Aben-Hamet. Only the sentences describing Chateaubriand's impatience as the coasts of Spain drew in sight are transferred almost verbatim from the Mémoires to the novel; and there is apparently a touch of reminiscence in the passage which relates how the Abencérage wrote Blanca's name on the marble in the Hall of the Two Sisters-" in Arabic characters, in order to give future travellers yet another mystery to solve." Sainte-Beuve tells us of tourists who discovered Natalie's name there, though not in Arabic characters, but in Chateaubriand's own handwriting. There are later stories of Catholic tourists erasing the inscriptions, to suppress a scandal.

A further glimpse at the story-for a long time the only one available for biographers-may be found in the Memoirs of Baron Hyde de Neuville¹, afterwards Chateaubriand's intimate friend, and ultimately one of his literary executors. The Baron was in Spain at the time, and made Natalie's acquaintance while she was awaiting Chateaubriand's arrival. He tells us that Natalie, in love with Spain, and Spanish ways and customs, called herself Dolores, and delighted to execute the Spanish dances attributed to Blanca in the romance. He adds that he met Chateaubriand on her behalf when he disembarked at Cadiz, and was much impressed by the enthusiasm of his manner, reputed to be ordinarily cold, and disdainful, and stiff: " He was fresh from the Holy Land, and his enthusiasm had to find utterance, so that I was accorded the first-fruits of the Itinéraire." And then follows vague praise of Chateaubriand's genius, and of Natalie's virtue and charms. It is little, but Madame de Boigne tells us more, veiling her narrative under mysterious initials which can so easily be penetrated that they may be quite properly ignored.

1 A royalist who tried to persuade Napoleon to recall the Bourbons. After the Restoration he held appointments in the diplomatic service, and was Minister of Marine under Martignac. ↩

Natalie was a Mademoiselle de Laborde; her husband, whom she married before the Revolution, was the Vicomte de Noailles. He emigrated, and went to England; she remained in Paris, and, ‚ in the later days of the Terror, was arrested and imprisoned. Thermidor delivered her, as it delivered so many personages who have figured in this story. She then went to London to join her husband, and found him aspiring to rival the Prince of Wales in the affections of Mrs. Fitzherbert. As was natural in the circumstances, he was not particularly pleased to see his wife. He proposed, therefore, making economy his pretext, that they should live together in a cottage in the north of England; and, having settled her there, he found that business required him to leave her and go to London. A male friend in whom she confided remonstrated with M. de Noailles, warning him that unswerving fidelity was not to be expected under such conditions.

M. de Noailles replied that he neither expected unswerving fidelity nor desired it, and that, if his friend saw his way to seduce Madame de Noailles during his absence from home, he would be obliged to him. His friend took him at his word, and Madame de Noailles yielded to temptation; but when the storm broke, as the conspirators had arranged that it should, the seducer made a full confession of the plot and of his share in it. Madame de Noailles burst into tears, quarrelled with him, and fled to Yarmouth. He followed her to Yarmouth, was forgiven, and returned to France with her; but the liaison did not last. The beautiful Natalie was caught in the vortex of the Directoire orgies, and changed partners many times. "I am very unhappy," she is reported to have said, "for, as soon as I fall in love with one man, another appears who pleases me better;" and this misfortune still pursued her, if Madame de Boigne is to be trusted, even after she had met Chateaubriand.

It is Madame de Boigne who tells us that their rendez-vous was at the Fountain of the Lions-just the romantic kind of appointment, in fact, that Chateaubriand would delight to make, and that Natalie would delight to keep; but a cruel irony crowned the consummation of the plan. Chateaubriand was late-as much as two months late-for his engagement; and Natalie was impatient; and a French officer met her

while her impatience was at its height, and paid his court to her, with the result that, as Madame de Boigne informs us: "When M. de Chateaubriand arrived, full of excuses for his delay, and of panegyrics upon the punctuality of his beloved, he found a woman in deepest mourning, bewailing with extreme despair the death of a rival who had been successful in his absence »

The ardour of Chateaubriand's affection, Madame de Boigne assures us, began from that time to cool; but though one would have expected it to do so, there is no convincing evidence that it did. He travelled for three months with Natalie in Spain, " combining" -it is still Madame de Boigne who speaks-"the functions of consoler and adorer"; and the intimacy was ostentatiously continued for some time after their return to France. Natalie, whose levities had provoked criticism even in that tolerant age, was socially rehabilitated by Chateaubriand's protection. He gave her a position more dignified than that of any of his previous mistresses by announcing that strangers could only make his acquaintance through her introduction; and the end of the liaison only came gradually after the lapse of a good many years.

Of the immediate causes of the breach, when it did occur, nothing is discoverable. Presumably nothing happened except that Chateaubriand, as usual, got tired of loving, and became, as was his way, neglectful; and the presumption is strong that he neglected her for a lady whose acquaintance he made through her introduction-the Duchesse de Duras.

Chateaubriand's relations with the Duchesse de Duras will have to be traced at greater length in a

later chapter; but the facts which bear upon his relations with Natalie may be noted here. She was Natalie's friend, and also Chateaubriand's confidante. She loved him, though she would not be his mistress; and he loved her, though he could not overcome her valiant resolution. The tone of the correspondence proves that to demonstration. They address each other in their letters as " brother" and " siste% ' and we shall presently see the Duchesse de Duras helping Chateaubriand to set his finances in order and to launch himself on a political career. Meanwhile, knowing her own heart, she was afraid that Natalie might be jealous, and required Chateaubriand to reassure her on that point. We find him doing so, quite in the early days of their friendship-

" What madness is this, dear sister! Madame de Mouchy knows very well that I love her, and that nothing can detach me from her. . . . Sure as she is of me, Madame de Mouchy forbids me neither to see you, nor to write to you, nor even to go to Ussé, whether in her company or alone. Did she do so, no doubt I should obey her, as I have told you a hundred times. So that is all right. You respect me for telling you this, and you will rely on me the more now that I have done so. ... Believe me, I never break my word in any of the serious matters of life. If you would be my sister, I should be glad to be your brother. The elevation of your sentiments and the warmth of your affections prove to me that I should be a very happy brother, and that we should get on together admirably. It was Madame de Mouchy who inspired The Abencérage; and I am glad that you like

it so much. There is no sentiment in it that is not worthy of you.

Your brother

It is the letter, most obviously, of a man who is changing his allegiance in the act of denying that he does so ; and Madame de Duras' delicate apprehension that Natalie might be jealous can hardly have been unfounded. Natalie, undoubtedly, was jealous, and had grounds for jealousy; and her jealousy preyed upon her mind; so that her story had a tragic end of which we may read, partly in Madame de Boigne's pages, and partly in a letter written by the Duchesse de Duras to Madame Swetchine.

Her manner, we are told, presently became strange. She withdrew, for a long time, from society, as if to sulk and grieve. Then, at the Restoration, she plunged again into its gaieties, and was seen, says Madame de Boigne, "dancing at a great ball in rose-coloured finery"; and at last, during the Hundred Days, her increasing eccentricities obliged her friends to place her under restraint. "Her wounded pride," writes Madame de Duras, "had long been poisoning her life." She did not, apparently, understand that she had herself done anything to poison it; for Natalie had never reproached her, and she was very fond of Natalie, and she had only been Chateaubriand's " sister." So she speaks of Natalie's "heart,; ill at ease with itself, yet too proud to insist upon its rights," and she goes on—

" In fact, my dear friend, all these causes have produced their inevitable effect. Her head has become bewildered, her imagination has received a shock, and she has lost her reason. I cannot tell you how it has grieved me. Yet my poor friend was glad to see me. There is no violence in her madness, but it is heartrending. Terror has overtaken her. She believes that she is in danger of assassination, that all her food is poisoned, that we are all doomed to perish, sooner or later, as the victims of a conspiracy, but that the plot is specially aimed at her, and that all her servants are conspirators in disguise. In fact, she suffers from a thousand hallucinations. Every night, when she goes to bed, she fancies she will die before the morningand yet she says that she is happy."

And there follows a picture of Natalie in tears, demanding "what she has done that she should be treated thus," and the prediction that " M. de Chateaubriand will be much distressed."

No doubt he was, in spite of Madame de Boigne's assertion that he heard the news "without a sigh." No doubt, too, he saw himself once again as " the fatal man" whose love blighted and brought calamity, though whether he held himself in any way to blame for what had happened is another question. A case might be made out ... but it would not be fair to press it. Natalie's own conduct had been somewhat light; one imagines her, with all her charm and beauty, a wild, irresponsible, inconsequential creature who would hardly have kept her sanity in any case. Chateaubriand had stopped to love her in passing, and had then passed on, as many men will and some men must-as he had done before and was to do again. Love, it would appear, was necessary; but the

women who loved him were not-until he met Madame Récamier-and even then-But his heart, at any rate, did not go back from Natalie to Delphine, as it had gone back from Delphine to Pauline; and as Delphine, like Pauline and Natalie, has no longer any essential part in the story, this is the place in which to say the little that needs to be said about her later years.

Allusion has already been made to Chateaubriand's unsuccessful attempt to secure her son's nomination as a peer of France. Some critics have attributed his failure to a lack of zeal, but they do him an injustice; there was a far more shocking reason. Astolphe was a graceless youth whose vices were unnatural, and who was found out in them. He was not only found out, but punished-waylaid and beaten by the avengers of corrupted boyhood-stripped naked and left lying, in that ignominious condition, in a suburban field. Clearly there could be no question of a peerage for him after that. A family council was called to consider what should be done, and Chateaubriand assisted at it. Astolphe, he advised, must either fight duels right and left, or else leave France for ever; but the advice was not taken. Astolphe fought no duels, and only left France for a little while, with the result that his career was cut short and he never recovered from his disgrace.

His mother's heart was broken, and her health failed. She withdrew from society, and lived in seclusion at Fervacques. From time to time she besought Chateaubriand to visit her. He wrote her charming letters-if he could be happy anywhere, he said, he could be happy at Fervacques-but there was

M ıбı always some reason why he could not come. First his duties as Foreign Minister, and then his activities as a journalist leading the constitutional Opposition were the excuses which he alleged; and there may sometimes have been something in them, though they failed to satisfy Delphine. At last, in 1826, a wearied, withered woman, she went to Bex to die.

Chateaubriand, fallen from power, was staying at Lausanne at the time. Possibly, as M. Bardoux suggests, it was in order to be near him that she chose a health resort in the Canton of Vaud-drawn by the same motive that had drawn Pauline de Beaumont to Rome. But, if so, she came in vain; for those were the days of Madame Récamier's ascendency. She saw Chateaubriand once, and he pitied her, noting how pale and hollow were the cheeks of her who had once been the Queen of Roses; but the pity did not turn to love. She died, not in his arms, but alone in the Hôtel de l'Union; and his tears, when he heard the hearse rattle over the stones of Lausanne at midnight, were less for her than for his own long-dead, far-distant youth.