A short while ago M. Charles Bailie published a fat book upon this personage, who was somewhat slender, somewhat droll, and even, I will venture to say, a little ridiculous. But as this biography gave its author an opportunity to study men and manners of the period of the Restoration, and as this study swarms with new and well-told anecdotes, we gladly ignore the insignificance of the hero. Here is a summary of the life of this cardinal-duke: Auguste de Chabot, born February 29, 1788, followed his father, the Prince of Leon, into exile, and returned to Paris with him in 1800. He was educated in a somewhat haphazard fashion by a refractory Oratorist and later by a former college regent. In 1807, when his grandfather, the Duc de Rohan, died, his father became Duc de Rohan and he himself Prince de Leon. When his father died in 1816 he became Duke de Rohan.
In 1808 he married Mlle. de Séreit, who was seventeen years old. Chateaubriand sometimes said to him: "Come, Chabot, so that I may corrupt you"; but his morals remained irreproachable. He traveled in Italy; he saw Madame Recamier and did not fall in love with her. Queen Caroline distinguished him. "She treated him," said Lamartine, "with a marked favor which promised a royal friendship, if the future cardinal had seen in the most beautiful of women anything else than the delight of the eye." He had pretty features, gave infinite care to his toilet, wrote romantic poems and dabbled in water colors.
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In 1809 he became a chamberlain of the Emperor. In 1815 his wife was burned to death, the laces of her gown having taken fire. In 1819 he entered the seminary of Saint Sulpice and was ordained a priest in 1822. Madame de Broglie thus described him, in the following year: "He had a thin pale face, and, at the same time, a coquettish care for his person which seemed to join honest instincts with former worldly memories; in his face there was a mingling of fanaticism and foolishness."
He went to La Roche-Guyon to preach and on this occasion he chose five hundred volumes from the magnificent library collected by the Marquise d'Enville, piled them up in the castle courtyard and burned them: they were rare volumes adorned with precious bindings. Later he went to Rome, where he expected to be made a cardinal. He returned without the purple; but he had converted Madame de Récamier's chambermaid.
In 1828 he was elevated to the archbishopric of Auch and later to that of Besançon. He dissatisfied the seminarists by untimely reforms; he did not take it amiss that ecclesiastics should wear polished laced boots. He shocked the liberals by his bigotry and the clergy by his luxury. He restored his cathedral; but he spoiled the apse, broke out the crossbars of the windows to replace them by frightful stained glass, demolished the altar, which was a beautiful work of art of the eighteenth century, and cast out a beautiful stone pulpit of the fifteenth century from which Saint Francis de Sala had preached.
He was made cardinal in the month of July, 1830. The fall of the Bourbons forced him to flee to Belgium, whence he passed into Switzerland. After the death of Pius VIII, he took part in the conclave which elected Gregory XVI and officiated at the marriage of the Duchess de Berry to Count Lucchesi-Pali. He returned to his diocese in 1832, where he was received by a riot. He nevertheless remained there and died in 1833 of typhoid fever.
The Patriote, a newspaper of Besançon, which had opposed him, published the day after his death a courteous article: "We do not doubt that he owed what influence he had to his virtue. He prayed devoutly and the accent of his voice, intoning the chants of the Church, breathed true religion. No one can say what he would have effected among us, if his career had been longer and if he had become reconciled to our Revolution."