How did the erewhile minister of Louis XVI. succeed in passing unmolested through the Terror? It seems almost incredible. This was one of the exceptions the particulars of which have been traced by memoirs that have recently come to light.[6]
During the Directory, in fact, M. de Chambonas floated absolutely to the top, and at one time there was talk of sending him to Spain as ambassador. The plan fell through, and after the coup d’état on the 18th Fructidor (4th September 1797), M. de Chambonas, considering himself no longer safe, hurriedly left Paris to avoid arrest.
Behold our wanderers at Hamburg, and afterwards in Sweden and Denmark. Auguste de La Garde in his somewhat florid style will tell us many amusing anecdotes; on the other hand, the bombardment of Copenhagen by the English fleet in 1801 affected him sadly.
A few months later, the lad of eighteen is sent to France by M. de Chambonas in order to obtain the removal of the sender’s name from the list of émigrés—he had been considered as such while he was in hiding at Sens—and to claim the estates the nation had confiscated. Auguste de La Garde is hospitably received by Mme. Récamier, who, while bestirring herself in behalf of the ‘father,’ takes the son in hand with regard to his education. Through her influence, La Harpe assists him with his counsels, and the best professors direct his further studies. As for the property the restitution of which is claimed by his ‘father,’ by that time established in England, all idea of it had to be abandoned; and young La Garde himself, his mind precociously ripened by his exile, was compelled to look to his own independent future.[7]
His personal charm, his natural gifts, and, in short, the useful connections he rapidly made for himself, soon procured him employment and a start in life. At the outset, he obtained through the goodwill of Prince Eugène missions to Italy, to Marmont in Dalmatia, to the Court of King Joseph at Naples, and finally to Rome, where he was cordially received by Lucien Bonaparte and his family. The pages, whether in his Recollections of the Congress of Vienna or in his Unpublished Notes, referring to his primary benefactors, go far to exonerate him from the charge of ingratitude, for he lavishes upon those benefactors all the ornaments of his rhetoric; at any rate, nearly all, for the greater part of the acknowledgment of his indebtedness goes mainly to Field-Marshal Prince de Ligne, who was his protector, his beneficent and ... very useful relative, a member of the Chambonas family, having, as we already stated, married a Princesse de Ligne.
La Garde first met with the Prince de Ligne in the Eternal City. He soon became a familiar visitor to the octogenarian prince, who, like the generous Mæcenas that he was, gave him a pressing invitation to come and settle near him in Vienna. The young fellow was too sensible to make light of an offer insuring material welfare and a regular existence after years of uncertainty. He, therefore, settled in Vienna near to his benefactor, yielding for the matter of that to the spell exercised over every one by that very superior specimen of manhood, and requiting his kindness with an affectionate veneration increasing as time went on. The whole of the first part of the Recollections attests a boundless gratitude; and if on the one hand that work constitutes the brightest ornament of our author’s literary crown, it constitutes on the other the most complete panegyric of the prince who had become ‘his idol.’
From Vienna, the Comte de La Garde passed into Russia, where he met with a cordial welcome from the elegant society of St. Petersburg. In 1810 he published there a volume of poems, which obtained a most signal success. Subsequently invited to Poland by the Comte Félix Potocki, and treated with the most generous hospitality, he was enabled to devote himself to numerous literary works; and as a mark of gratitude to his hosts, he translated into French Trembecki’s poem dedicated to the cherished wife of Comte Félix, the celebrated Sophie Potocka.
The Recollections of the Congress of Vienna contains frequent references to the ‘superb Sophie,’ who was born in the Fanariote quarter in Constantinople, and whose singular career was solely owing to her beauty. She married in the first place the Comte de Witt (of the family of the Dutch Great State-Councillor, whose descendants had entered the service of Russia). The Comte de Witt enticed her away from a secretary of the French Embassy in Constantinople; Comte Félix Potocki, in his turn, eloped with her while she was Comtesse de Witt, and married her, thanks to an amicable arrangement nullifying the first marriage. Comtesse Sophie, celebrated throughout Europe—her loveliness had even compelled admiration from the Court circle at Versailles—lived on a regal footing on her estate of Tulczim, and dispensed her hospitality to the French émigrés in a manner calculated to dazzle many of them. The Mémoires of General Comte de Rochechouart and the present Recollections are specially interesting on the subject. The success of the poem, ‘Sophiowka,’ was such as to gain for its adapter the honorary membership respectively of the Academies of Warsaw, Cracow, Munich, London, and Naples.
The Comte de La Garde was to receive another flattering testimonial in Poland, many years later, on the occasion of the appearance of his poem on the ‘Funérailles de Kosciusko’ (Treuttel & Wurtz: Paris, 1830). Its several editions by no means exhausted its success; the senate of the republic of Cracow conferred upon him the Polish citizenship, while the kings of Bavaria, Prussia, and Saxony complimented him by autograph letters.
La Garde was the author of a great number of songs; and the most renowned composers of the period competed for the honour of setting them to music. Many of these romances were dedicated to Queen Hortense, whose acquaintance he made at Augsburg in 1819. This led to his collaboration in ‘Loi d’Exil,’ and ‘Partant pour la Syrie’—the latter of which became the national hymn during the Second Empire. In 1853, there appeared L’Album artistique de la Reine Hortense, a much prized collection of the then unpublished songs of the Comte de La Garde, with their music by the queen, and charming reproductions of tiny paintings, which were also her work.[8]