Its dining-room and a chapel, arranged by them, gave on this court. The chapel has been thrown into, and made one with, the dining-room, but this is the only alteration since their time. His bedroom, and that of his wife—with her huge bird-cages behind—and the salon between the two rooms, looked out on their garden, and beyond it on the vast grounds of the Missions Étrangères. The enchanting seclusion was dear to him in these last years, during which his only work was the completion and touching-up of his "Mémoires d'Outre Tombe." Select extracts from the manuscript were sometimes read by him to the group that assembled in the drawing-room at the abbaye, between four and six o'clock of every afternoon. The hostess sat on one side of the fireplace, her form grown so fragile that it seemed transparent for the gentle spirit shining out, like a radiant light within a rich vase. Châteaubriand "pontificated" in his arm-chair opposite, toying with the household cat, the while he tried to listen to the lesser men; "a giant bored by, and smiling pitifully down on, a dwarf world," is Amiel's phrase. When Châteaubriand spoke or read, it was with sonorous tones, and with attitude and gesture of a certain stateliness. He was always an artist in all details. His costume was simple and elegant. Short of stature, he made himself shorter by his way of sinking his head—"an Olympian head," says Lamartine—between his shoulders. Under his thick-clustering locks rose a noble forehead, power shone from his eyes, pride curled his lips—too often—and his expression gave assurance of a glacial reserve.
The day came when he found himself too feeble for the short walk between his house and the abbaye. Then his friend came to him. She and Madame de Châteaubriand had been sufficiently friendly, but that good lady gave her days to her prayer-books, and to reading her husband's books; which she never understood, albeit she had the finest mind of any woman he had known, he always asserted. She died in the winter of 1846-47, and her body was carried to the Infirmary, the care of which had been the occupation and the happiness of her later years. Jacques Récamier, when in mortal illness in 1830, had been brought to his wife's rooms in the abbaye, at her request and by special favor of the Mother Superior, and there he had died.
And now, Châteaubriand offered marriage to Madame Récamier, and she refused what she might have accepted, could it have come a few years earlier. "But, at our age," she asked, "who can question our intimacy, or prevent me taking care of you?" She was prevented only by the cataract that slowly blinded her, and she sat by his bedside, helpless, while Madame Mohl—who had remained Mary Clarke until the summer of 1847—wrote his necessary letters. That sympathizing woman, one of the few congenial to him, had only to come down from the apartment she had taken on the third floor of this house, overlooking the gardens; the apartment which she and her learned husband, Julius Mohl, made the social successor of the Récamier salon, through many years. Châteaubriand's death took place on July 4, 1848. He had lived to see the Orleans throne, which he hated, overthrown as he had foretold by the republic, which he did not love. His faithful lady stood by his deathbed, with Béranger, equally faithful to old friends, old customs, and old clothes, clad as we see him in his statue of Square du Temple.
Châteaubriand's funeral service, attended by all that was best in France, was solemnized in the Church of the Missions Étrangères, next door, and his body was laid in a rock of the harbor of Saint-Malo. Madame Récamier went back to her now desolate rooms. On May 10, 1849, she drove over to the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, on a visit to her niece, whose husband, M. Lenormant, was its librarian and had his apartment there. That night she died in that building, in a sudden seizure of cholera.
THE PARIS OF HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Court of the Pension Vauquer.
THE PARIS OF HONORÉ DE BALZAC[1]