[4] In the few passages of the Recollections of the Congress of Vienna, where the author refers to his childhood and his family, he deliberately throws a veil over both subjects. Without the Unpublished Notes, the pages of which bearing upon the present publication were kindly communicated to us by the present head of the family, M. le Marquis de Chambonas, we should have failed to pierce the darkness in which certain parts of our writer’s life are wrapped.
[5] I can only follow the original. This is not the name of the godmother mentioned in the certificate of baptism; but Mme. Barryals had probably contracted a second marriage.—Transl.
[6] I am preparing for publication the Mémoires du Général le Marquis d’ Hautpoul, who, as a child, spent the whole of the Terror in the neighbourhood of Versailles with his relatives, including his father, a former colonel. It should be said, though, that a member of the Convention had made them adopt the disguise of gardeners.
[7] From that moment, M. de La Garde’s information about the Marquis de Chambonas becomes very scant. In his Unpublished Notes there are a couple of grateful references to his ‘father,’ but that is all. We are left in ignorance about the disparities of character which appear to have parted them for ever. All that is known about M. de Chambonas is due to the documents (dossier) relating to him, preserved in the Archives of the Ministry of War. He seems to have settled definitely in England. Wrecked in health, and even paralysed, it is from there that he petitions in 1816. Finally, he obtained a modest pension with the superior grade of lieutenant-general. He died in Paris, not in 1807, as is stated by one biographer, but in February 1830.
[8] The Album contains, moreover, a short biography of the queen, some of her letters to M. de La Garde, and a facsimile of his handwriting; the whole on vellum-made paper, with gilt ornamental borders. The book is very rare. M. le Marquis de Chambonas has a copy of it belonging to his uncle. I have the good fortune to possess another.
[9] It is well known that the first words of Napoleon on setting foot on French soil in 1815, were: ‘The Congress is dissolved.’
[10] Not to be confounded with Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, the author of Paul et Virginie. The Abbé de Saint-Pierre’s literary fame mainly rests on a book entitled Projet de Paix Perpétuelle. M. Bloch, the Russian Utopist of to-day, has invented nothing.—Transl.
[11] Baron Wilhelm von Humboldt, eminent diplomatist and statesman, celebrated philologist, born at Potsdam in 1767, died in 1835. He took part in the Conferences of Prague, Châtillon, Paris, and Vienna. He left valued works on the primitive dwellers in Spain, on the Chinese language (letters written in French to M. A. de Rémusat), and a collection of studies on æsthetics, etc. 6 Volumes. Berlin 1841–48.
[12] She was the sister of George III., and became involved in a love-affair with Struensee, her husband’s prime minister. Struensee was beheaded, and she was sentenced to divorce and exile.
[13] The sentence may be interpreted in two ways. The absolutely modern version would be ‘the most honest man’; the Molièresque sense, ‘the most accomplished man of the world.’—Transl.