A FRENCH TRIBUTE TO ENGLISH INTEGRITY.
The Viscount de Chateaubriand gratefully memorializes his respect for the virtue of a distressed family in London by the following touching narrative prefixed to his Indian tale, entitled “The Natchez:”—
When I quitted England in 1800 to return to France, under a fictitious name, I durst not encumber myself with too much baggage. I left, therefore, most of my manuscripts in London. Among these manuscripts was that of The Natchez, no other part of which I brought to Paris but René, Atala, and some passages descriptive of America.
Fourteen years elapsed before the communication with Great Britain was renewed. At the first moment of the Restoration I scarcely thought of my papers; and if I had, how was I to find them again? They had been left locked up in a trunk with an Englishwoman, in whose house I had lodged in London. I had forgotten the name of this woman; the name of the street and the number of the house had likewise escaped my memory.
In consequence of some vague and even contradictory information which I transmitted to London, Messrs. de Thuisy took the trouble to make inquiries, which they prosecuted with a zeal and perseverance rarely equalled. With infinite pains they at length discovered the house where I resided at the west end of the town; but my landlady had been dead several years, and no one knew what had become of her children. Pursuing, however, the clue which they had obtained, Messrs. de Thuisy, after many fruitless excursions, at last found out her family in a village several miles from London.
Had they kept all this time the trunk of an emigrant, a trunk full of old papers, which could scarcely be deciphered? Might they not have consigned to the flames such a useless heap of French manuscripts? On the other hand, if my name, bursting from its obscurity, had attracted, in the London journals, the notice of the children of my former landlady, might they not have been disposed to make what profit they could of those papers, which would then acquire a certain value?
Nothing of the kind had happened. The manuscripts had been preserved, the trunk had not even been opened. A religious fidelity had been shown by an unfortunate family towards a child of misfortune. I had committed with simplicity the result of the labours of part of my life to the honesty of a foreign trustee, and my treasure was restored to me with the same simplicity. I know not that I ever met with any thing in my life which touched me more than the honesty and integrity of this poor English family.