Chapitre XXVII

Another pamphlet-" Madame, your son is my king"-Chateaubriand prosecuted-His acquittal-The Duchesse de Berry bears a child in prison-Her announcement of her secret marriage-She sends Chateaubriand to break the news to Charles X at Prague -His journey, adventures, and reception-His visit to the Duchesse d'Angoulême at Carlsbad-The Duchesse de Berry, released from prison, summons him to Italy-He meets her at Ferrara-She sends him on a second errand to Charles X, which proves fruitless.

THE Duchesse de Berry had been betrayed by a Jew named Deutz, whose pieces of silver a contemptuous minister had handed to him with a pair of tongs. Tracked to a house in Nantes, she had hidden herself in a secret chamber behind the fire-place. The lighting of the fire had smoked her out; and she had been arrested and imprisoned in the fortress of Blaye, to await her trial.

Chateaubriand, though he had discountenanced her insurrection and refused to be a member of the " secret government" which she had proposed to constitute in France, now asked permission to act as counsel for the defence. He could not do that, as no trial ever took place; and he failed even to obtain leave to visit her in her place of detention. Thus baffled, he challenged opinion as usual with a pamphlet : his Mémoire sur la captivité de Mme. la Duchesse de Berry.

It was an explosion of ringing defiance of the ruling powers. One sentence in particular could be read as a treasonable manifesto: Madame, your son is my King. The editors of the royalist newspapers quoted the phrase with enthusiasm. Their journals were seized and they were prosecuted. Chateaubriand insisted upon being prosecuted too, declined the services of the great orator Berryer as his advocate, but spoke in his own defence in the hall from which Fouquier-Tinville had sent Danton to the scaffold. He was acquitted, as were also the other defendants, amid scenes of wild enthusiasm. Ardent young royalists were with difficulty dissuaded from taking the horses from his carriage and dragging him home in triumph. Madame, your son is my King, pronounced a lawful saying by a jury, was taken by the Legitimists as their motto, engraved upon women's necklaces and rings, and printed on the front page of newspapers.

And then a strange thing happened: the Duchesse de Berry bore a child in prison.

Her enemies were astonished and amused; her friends were astonished and grieved; her family were astonished and shocked. She felt-she could not help feeling-that she owed an explanation, if not to Louis-Philippe or the governor of the jail, at least to her father-in-law, Charles X; and she decided that Chateaubriand was the one man whom she could trust to speak for her.

Though he was not allowed to visit her at Blaye, she managed to get a letter conveyed to him. She would rather have seen him, she wrote; she had " so much to tell." Above all, she had wanted to talk about her baby. She had intended it to be a secret baby, whose existence should be known only to the most intimate of her confidantes; but it had been born in such painfully public circumstances that it was only by telling the whole truth that she could silence the voice of slander. The fact was that, while in Italy, she had secretly married Count Lucchesi-Palli-of a good old family, and a descendant of one of the twelve companions of Tancred-and this was the result. Would Chateaubriand go to Charles X, who had lately left Holyrood for Prague, and break the news to him, and beg him to allow his daughter-in-law, in spite of her mésalliance, to retain her rank as a French princess?

He set out at once in a carriage which had once belonged to Talleyrand-a vehicle, he says, "but imperfectly adapted by its origin and habits to the task of running after fallen kings." As far as Basle, and even further, he travelled almost in triumph. In the old Swiss frontier town, a school-boy handed him an address "to the Virgil of the nineteenth century," consisting of the quotation: Macte animo, generose puer;¹ and he proceeded-" very proud of my high renown"-through Schaffhausen, Ulm, Blenheim, and Ratisbon, to Waldmünchen, on the Austrian frontier, where he was held up at the Customs House because his passport had no Austrian visa.

1 From Statius, though Chateaubriand erroneously attributes it to Virgil. ↩

Carrying confidential documents, and fearing to be detained or searched, he had not dared to arouse suspicion by asking for one. He had only, he imagined, to mention his name in order to be allowed to pass ; and indeed nothing more was necessary in Switzerland, Wurtemberg, or Bavaria. The guardian of the Austrian frontier, however, professed never to have heard of him. " I felt as humiliated," he confesses, "as Cicero when he returned from his government in Asia and was asked by his friends whether he had come from Baiae or from his Tusculan villa ; « but there was nothing for it but to write to the Governor of Bohemia and wait for his answer in this remote village on the outskirts of Bavarian civilization. He waited, therefore, noting his thoughts daily in his journal.

A funeral passed beneath his window, and he reflected that the dead man had probably died without hearing of him. A pretty girl passed, and he reflected that, if he had been younger, he might have fleeted the time carelessly in gallant adventure-a thing which he could no longer do at the age of sixtyfour, because he had been so little parsimonious of his vigour in the past. He discovered that the local brewer was not only aware of his celebrity, but had bought his books, and kept them on the same shelf as the mugs. There was comfort in that, and also in the recollection that he had once received an expression of admiration from a lady in Peru. On the whole, however, he was bored, and his relief was great when the Governor apologized for the constable and accorded him permission to proceed.

He proceeded, and was received in audience by the royal exile-white-haired, and bowed down beneath the burden of his seventy-six years, his misfortunes, and the tyrannical influence of the Jesuits. He was entertained at dinner, and thanked, and offered money, though the King had so little of it that he was grateful for the hospitality which allowed him to live rent free. He refused the money, though he had so little of it that the Duchesse de Berry had had to lend him 6,00o francs before he could go upon her errand. There was some pleasant talk about his extravagant dissipation of his resources. " What the devil do you spend it all on?" the King asked genially; and Chateaubriand-that " basket with a hole in the bottom of it » as the King had called him when he wanted fifty louis to buy an ass that Madame de Chateaubriand might drink ass's milk-could only answer that he was unbusiness-like and did not know. But when the talk turned on the Duchesse de Berry and her baby, the King was not amenable.

The adventure in La Vendée had displeased him ; " a mad folly, ," was his description of it. It was not easy to persuade him that her case was like that of Henri IV, who had also stirred up civil strife, "and had not always been strong enough to win." That baby, which had arrived so unexpectedly, to the entertainment of the ribald, made a difference; and therefore, after much argument-

"Very well, Mr. Ambassador. Let the Duchesse de Berry go to Palermo. Let her live there openly, demonstrating to the whole world that M. Lucchesi is her husband. Then we will tell the children that their mother has married again, and she shall be allowed to come here and embrace them.'

That was all that Charles X could be induced to say. Having made his partial concession, he changed the subject and talked of other things-of the education of his grandchildren, the state of France, the conduct of the Duc d'Orléans, and the question whether he would not himself have done better to fight for his throne instead of abdicating. Chateaubriand reminded him that Bonaparte had abdicated; " and thus,' he concludes, "I sheltered the weakness of my king behind the glory of Napoleon."

His mission to Prague terminated, Chateaubriand went on to Carlsbad to wait on the Duchesse d'Angoulême, who was taking the waters there. She was perfectly polite, and as kind as she knew how to be, but not in the least cordial. Her heart had been chilled in prison and in exile; she could still weepbut only for her own memories and troubles. She was very sorry to hear what had happened to the Duchesse de Berry-very sorry indeed in a cold, conventional way, and as a matter of politeness and routine. She sent her a few lines, ostensibly of sympathy and most correctly phrased, in answer to her letter; but as for exerting her influence with the King-well, the King was the King, and must decide things for himself.

So Chateaubriand left her, and once more took the road for Paris, writing his diary as he went, and filling it with the vague meditative fancies of the man who leans back among the cushions, abandons himself to day-dreams, and lives in memories. He crosses a river-how many rivers has he not crossed in his time! He passes Bayreuth-and the slender forest pines remind him of the pillars of the mosques of Cairo, and the cathedral of Cordova. He passes Bamberg-and it was there, was it not, that Berthier, Prince of Neuchatel, threw himself out of the window? He enters a wayside church to pray-and why, oh why, is he not a monk at Rome? A swallow flies in at his window while he is at dinner-and is it now, perhaps, of the family of the swallows that built their nest under Charlotte's window at Bungay? He reaches Meaux-and Meaux recalls Bossuet and his warning that " man reaches the grave, dragging after him the long chain of his disappointed hopes." And so on, and so forth, through many pages of melodious eloquence, until he is back in Paris and receives the news that the Duchesse de Berry has been released from Blaye, and would be grateful to him if he would meet her at Venice and once more help her with his advice.

Her man of business supplied the money, and he set out on a fresh pilgrimage, early in September, crossing the Alps for the tenth time, and still keeping his diary, and still filling it with his thoughts of what had, and might have, been.

He stopped at Bex-and perhaps the horses which drew him were the same which had drawn the hearse of Delphine de Custine. He rested at Sion-and that was where he might have lived as Minister Plenipotentiary if he had not resented the murder of the Duc d'Enghien. He crossed the Simplon-and when last he crossed it, he had been on his way to take charge of the French Embassy at Rome, whereas now ... He paused at Verona-and Verona had seen the real beginnings of his political career, and what a difference it would have made to the world if that career had not been interrupted by a miserable jealousy! And so to Venice.

Madame had not arrived, and he had to wait for her, dreamily seeing the sights by day, and dreamily dropping his thoughts into his diary by night. He visited palaces and prisons, and reviewed the careers of prisoners and poets-of Silvio Pellico, and Rousseau, and Byron-and he loitered in cemeteries and recalled the memories of dead and forgotten courtesans. Twenty-six years had passed since the day when he embarked at Venice for Jerusalem, leaving Madame de Chateaubriand in charge of " the worthy Ballanche" while he sought glory to lay at the feet of Natalie de Noailles-Mouchy. A quarter of a century! And what hard things he would say of that quarter of a century, if it were not for the happy accident of his meeting with-Madame Récamier! And so forth until the message came that Madame would like him to wait on her at Ferrara.

He got there before her; and Ferrara recalled the wanderings and sufferings of Tasso. He had himself been compared to Tasso in Fontanes' charming poem, " Le Tasse, errant de ville en ville." What could he do better then than enter Tasso's story in the pages of his diary while he waited? He wrote it there, and was thinking of the Man of Genius-one cannot be quite sure whether the reference is to Tasso or himself-as "a Christ, persecuted, scourged, crowned with thorns, and crucified," when at last Madame drove up to the inn, girlish, excited, ebullient, and exclaiming: "My son is your king; so help me to get through the crowd."

He helped her, and then learnt that he was to be dispatched on a further errand. First, Madame de Berry feared to go to Prague alone, and insisted that Chateaubriand should go with her. Then she was informed by the police that she could not be allowed to go at all, and begged Chateaubriand to go instead of her. Henri V, according to French law, would attain his majority at the age of fourteen, and the coming 29th of September would be his fourteenth birthday. It was proposed that he should, on that date, publish a solemn protest against Louis-Philippe's usurpation. As he was a child, in fact, though legally a man, it would be necessary to obtain Charles X's approval of the step. Chateaubriand must see to that.

So he was off again, with little hope that any good would come of his journey, but summoning his Breton obstinacy to his aid and persevering. "I obey your orders, Madame," he said, "but I shall be able to accomplish nothing." " No, no, you are all-powerful," said the Duchesse de Berry, pushing him out of the door; but the event showed that Chateaubriand was right.

The King was polite, considerate, and kind Though he was ill in bed, he had Chateaubriand brought up to him. He cast his eyes over the proposed manifesto, and " seemed to approve of it"; but that was all. Nothing was done; and Chateaubriand quite understood that nothing would be done, for he could see that other influences were at work. Just as the men about the King were, for him, only Jesuits in disguise, so he, for them, was only a Republican in disguise; and they, jealous of his intrusion, and sure of having the last word with a monarch who was little more than a shadow, were bound to get their way.

They got it; and the royalists of France waited in vain for the expected manifesto; and Chateaubriand drove back to Paris, and to private life. He had a few more books to publish; but his main occupation in the years that followed was to receive homage, and prepare his Mémoires and so build himself a monument of enduring fame.