It may have been, for she always dwelt on her royal ancestry, in the house now No. 5, which had been the home of Maurice de Saxe. That son of Augustus the Strong of Poland and of the Countess of Königsmark was the father of a natural daughter, who became the grandmother and guardian of Mlle. Lucile-Aurore. Madame Dudevant gave his name to her son, and this young Maurice, and his sister Solange, were now brought to their mother's new home. She devoted hours to their amusement and instruction, and hours to her pen-work; writing far into the night when daylight did not suffice. She improvised a study in the ground floor on the court, cool when the westering sun flooded her windows above, and quiet when too many visitors disturbed her. For she had sprung into fame with her "Indiana"—its author styled George Sand—and after only two months' interval with her "Valentine." Naturally inert, she had to push herself on to work, and then her "serene volubility" knew no pause. She had now to be reckoned with in the guild of letters, and its members met in the "poets' garret," as she termed her little salon.
Balzac came—he who discouraged her in the beginning, on Quai Saint-Michel—and Hugo and Dumas and Sainte-Beuve and young de Musset. With this last-named she went from here to Italy, having persuaded his mother that his infatuation would reform the wayward youth. All the world knows, from the books on both sides, the story of the short-lived liaison. She returned to this home in August, 1834, hungry for her children. Then we lose sight of her for many years, in her visits to her beloved provincial scenes, and her journeys to other lands, and her temporary residences on the right bank of the Seine. In the winter of 1846 and 1847 she had a pied-à-terre in her son's studio, in the secluded square of Cours d'Orléans, its entrance now at 80 Rue Taitbout. There she was visited by Charles Dickens, who describes her as "looking like what you'd suppose the queen's monthly nurse would be; chubby, matronly, swarthy, black-eyed; a singularly ordinary woman in appearance and manner." Others describe her, at this period, when she had just passed her fortieth year, as having a wearied, listless bearing, her only notable feature being her dull, mild, tranquil eyes. In February, 1852, she was found by Mr. and Mrs. Browning in the small apartment attached to her son's studio, at No. 3 Rue Racine. It is at the top of the house, and can be rented to-day. A curious picture of her and her surroundings is given by the Brownings. She was a constant attendant at this time at the Odéon—on whose stage her plays were produced—and at the restaurant in the place in front of the theatre. There she used to sit among her male friends, smoking "those horrid big cigars" which so revolted Rachel that she would never meet the smoker.
George Sand's last Paris home was in Rue Gay-Lussac, and she was one of the earliest tenants in that street, opened in 1868. She had three or four small rooms in the entresol of No. 5, the lease of which, after her death in 1876, was sold by her son to a Roumanian lady, along with some of his mother's furniture. This lady is delighted to chatter about her illustrious predecessor in this apartment, and allows the favored visitor to sit on the broad couch, covered in dingy and worn leather, whereon George Sand was fond of reclining in her last tranquil days, at rest after stormy and laborious years.
There is a hospitable little inn in the Faubourg Saint-Germain endeared to many of us by memories, joyous or mournful. The Hotel de France et de Lorraine, in narrow Rue de Beaune, just south of the quay, was one of the earliest hotels in Paris, and was an approved resort of the Royalists, before emigration and after Restoration. They seem still to haunt its court and halls, where there lingers that atmosphere of decayed Bourbonism, which James Russell Lowell humorously hits off in a letter written when he was a guest here. The pervading presence is that of Châteaubriand, and our amiable hosts have a pride in keeping his apartment—on the first floor, in plain wood panelling of time-worn gray—much as it was when he wrote, in its salon, his letter of resignation of his post in the Diplomatic Service, to the First Consul, to be Emperor within two months. Châteaubriand was in Paris on leave of absence at the time of the shooting of the Duc d'Enghien, in the ditch of Vincennes on the night of March 20, 1804, and he refused to serve any longer the man whom he regarded as an assassin. Just seventeen years earlier these two men had arrived in Paris, both sub-lieutenants, of nearly the same age, equally obscure and ambitious, equally without heart. Napoleon Bonaparte, coming from Corsica, took a room in the Hôtel de Cherbourg, as we have seen; François-Auguste, Vicomte de Châteaubriand, coming from his natal town of Saint-Malo, found lodging in the Hôtel de l'Europe in Rue du Mail. This street, between Porte Saint-Denis, by which the coaches entered, and Place des Victoires, where they put up, was full of hôtels-garnis for travellers. Installed there, Châteaubriand hunted up the great Malesherbes, a friendly counsellor who put him in the way of meeting men of note; among others Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, at the top of them all, just then, with his "Paul et Virginie." These two, the one just fifty, the other not yet twenty, then in 1787, strolled together in the Jardin du Roi, forgetting their old world and its worries, in their talks of the new world and its glories.
During the next two or three years, Châteaubriand came frequently to Paris, an intent and disgusted onlooker at its doings. He stood, with his sisters, at their windows in Rue de Richelieu, open on that September day, when the mob surged by holding aloft on pikes the heads of Foulon and Berthier. His Royalist stomach revolted, and he joined his regiment at Rouen, to retire soon from the service, and to sail in 1791 for the new United States, with dreams of distinction as the discoverer of the Northwest Passage. He dined with George Washington, to whom he carried a letter from a French officer, who had served in the colonial army. The President waved aside Châteaubriand's florid compliments, and advised him to give up his futile quest. The young Breton wandered far into the new country, and while resting in a clearing on the Scioto, where now is Chillicothe, Ohio, he read in an old newspaper of the royal flight to Varennes, and of the enforced return.
At once he started for France, to offer his sword to his King, arriving in January, 1792, and in the summer of that year he joined the growing train of émigrés to England. For eight years he toiled and starved in London, and returned to Paris in 1800. His passport bore the name of "Lassague," and he posted, in company, as far as Porte de l'Étoile. Thence he went on foot down the Champs Élysées, finding none of the silence and desolation his fancy had pictured, but, on either hand, lights and music. On the spot where the guillotine had stood he stopped, provided with the proper emotions. He crossed Pont Royal, then the westernmost bridge, and betook himself to lodgings in Rue de Lille, in an entresol of one of the dignified mansions, that seem still to stand aloof from their bourgeois neighbors. From here, he stole out to his meals, hiding his face behind his journal, in which he had been reading impassioned praise of the new book, "Atala," and listened to the other guests speculating as to the unknown genius who had written it. The picture is to be cherished, for it is the only known portrait of Châteaubriand, modest and shrinking. He had brought the manuscript of "Atala" to Paris in his pocket, and had sought long before securing a publisher. The book found a public eager for novelty. It came in a period of sterility in letters, when all the virility of France had been spent in her colossal wars, and the new century was alert to greet the serene light of science and literature. That came from all points of the horizon, but the resplendent figures of these years were Madame de Staël and Châteaubriand.
These two had nothing in common, but they were not inimical, and Châteaubriand was one of the minor lions at Madame de Staël's receptions. For this was a little earlier than 1803, when a more beneficial air than that of Paris was ordered for her by the First Consul, whom she bored. This "cyclone of sentiment" must have bored Mr. Pitt, also, when she visited England during the Terror; for he seemed to think that the lady did protest too much about the absence of an equivalent in English for the French word "sentiment," and he replied: "Mais, Madame, nous l'avons; c'est 'My eye and Betty Martin.'" And when she got to Germany she bored Goethe, not only with her sloppy sentimentality, but with her shapely arms, too lavishly displayed. There could be no sympathy between the woman, who, in Sainte-Beuve's words, "could not help being even more French than her compatriots," and the stuff of whose dreams was a union of the theories of the dead and of the newly born centuries; and Châteaubriand, the hard-headed opponent of every revolutionary idea, who pompously labelled himself "a Bourbon by honor, a Royalist by reason, and still by taste and nature a Republican"!
A year after his "Atala," in 1802, his "Génie du Christianisme" had placed him, in the estimation of his country and of himself, on a literary throne level with the military throne of Bonaparte. The rhetorical fireworks of this book, corruscating around the Catholic Church, lighted up the night of scepticism, when worship had been abolished and God had been outlawed. Yet, as he poetized beyond recognition the North American savages in his "Atala," so now he prettified the sanctuary and "gilded the Host." The First Consul, welcoming any aid in his scheme to use the Church for his own ends, sent the author to the legation at Rome. We have seen his return. After this, he moves about Paris, lodging, for a while, he says, "in a garret" offered him by Madame la Marquise de Coislin, a stanch friend and stanch Royalist. "Hotel de Coislin" may still be read above the doorway of the stately mansion that faces Place de la Concorde, at the western corner of Rue Royale, and aggressive Bourbonism speaks from its stone pillars and pediment. His garret there was no squalid lodging. On his return from the Holy Land in 1807, Châteaubriand planted the Jerusalem pines and cedars of Lebanon he had brought back, in the garden of "Vallée-aux-Loups," a little place he then purchased near Aulnay, on the south of the city. Here, while the Empire lasted, he passed years of quiet content, with his wife, his plants, and his books, but writing no more romance after 1809. In 1817, having a town residence, and finding himself too poor to keep this country place, he sold it, and new buildings cover the site of his cottage and garden.
Recalled to active life by the Restoration, Châteaubriand posed as one who was more Royalist than the King, with a mental reservation of his platonic fancy for a republic. He was a pretentious statesman, none too sincere. His pamphlet, "De Buonaparte et des Bourbons," had been worth an army to the cause, said Louis XVIII., who placed him in the Chamber of Peers, and in 1822, after a short stay at the Berlin Embassy, in the Ambassador's residence in London. Lording it there, in all "the boast of heraldry, the pomp of power," he recalled his former years of obscurity and privation in London streets, and began his "Mémoires d'Outre Tombe." In writing about himself he was at his ease, feeling that he had a subject worthy of his best powers, and these memoirs have little of the inflated and fantastic mannerisms of his romances about other people. As to the rest, they are a colossal monument to his conceit and selfishness. Dismissed suddenly and indecently by Louis XVIII., from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Châteaubriand was made Ambassador to Rome on the accession of Charles X., in 1828. He refused to recognize the younger branch of the Bourbons in 1830, and when the crown was given to Orleans, he strode out of the Chamber of Peers, and stripped himself of his peer's robe, with great theatric effect. Appearing no more in public life, he was active in pamphlets and in the press as an opponent of the new royalty, which would lead to a republic, he predicted.
"Châteaubrillant, Vicomte de, Rue de l'Université 25," is his address in the Bottin of 1817; a record of interest in its antiquated spelling of his name, and because this is the house, on the corner of Rue du Bac, which we shall visit later with Alexandre Dumas. This three years' lease expiring in 1820, he removed to the fine old mansion, where he gave reception to young Victor Hugo, to be described later, at No. 27 Rue Saint-Dominique. Its site is covered by the modern building numbered 197 in Boulevard Saint-Germain, whose southern side, just here, replaces the same side of Rue Saint-Dominique, as has been already told. He kept other town addresses, to which we need not follow him, during his absences on diplomatic duty. From 1827 to 1838 we find him and Madame de Châteaubriand in their retired home, in the southern outskirts of the city. Their 84 Rue d'Enfer is now 92 Rue Denfert-Rochereau, the old street name thus punningly extended, in homage to the heroic defender of Belfort.