The mandate enclosed was a dismissal. Ten minutes later, M. de Villèle, in his turn, had received M. de Chateaubriand's reply. The letter of the Minister for Foreign Affairs was just as laconic as the letter received from the Minister of Finance:—
"M. LE COMTE,—I have left the Foreign Office; the department is at your disposal."
There were exactly fifteen words in each letter: it was the fault of the words themselves, and not of M. de Chateaubriand, that the answer[1] contained four letters more.
This dismissal was a very bitter pill for the author of le Génie du Christianisme, and it was in connection with this event that he gave utterance to the words which we believe we have already quoted:—
"I hadn't even stolen a watch from the king's mantelpiece!" he had said on leaving the Foreign Office.
The order had been drawn up by M. de Renneville,—to whom we shall refer in due course,—the secretary described by Méry and de Barthélemy as being sewed to M. de Villèle's coat-tails.
"M. de Renneville," says Chateaubriand in his Mémoires, "is still so good as to appear embarrassed in my presence! And, good God, who is this M. de Renneville, that I should ever think of him? I meet him often enough, ... does he happen to know that I am aware that the order striking my name off the list of ministers was in his handwriting?"
There were actually men, under the Empire, who were cowardly enough to cut off their first fingers to prevent their being made soldiers. It is a pity some men are not brave enough to cut off the whole hand before they write certain things.
But at the time when M. de Chateaubriand was being ejected from the ministry, Providence was signing an order, in terms I almost as brusque, for Louis XVIII. to quit this life. The king was ill at the time of the Feast of St. Louis, so ill that he was I advised not to entertain on account of the fatigue it would I entail on him; but, with his usual sententiousness, the king answered, "A King of France may die, but he ought never to be ill."