He was too proud to wear his mask to the end, and he threw it off completely "beyond the grave."
He himself names as his "chief faults" ennui, disgust with everything, and constant doubt. These faults had their good sides. Profound indifference to all this world has to bestow preserved him from the temptations of base ambition; doubt preserved him from placing implicit confidence in the doctrines which a spirit of aristocratic defiance more than anything else led him to champion; his pride sustained him, and though it did not preserve him from hypocrisy, it kept him from ever committing a mean action. But, until the ingratitude of the authority which he had reinstated roused him to rebellion, there was a hopeless discord between his nature and the part he played.
[1] Paul Heyse expresses this thought in an excellent epigram:
Bist du schon gut, weil du gläubig bist?
Der Teufel ist sicher kein Atheist.
[2]
O honte, ô crime! on rosse les Puissances,
On jet à bas dix mille intelligences
Qui figuraient dans les processions;
De leurs gradins les Trônes on renverse,
On foule aux pieds les Dominations
Et des Vertus le troupeau se disperse.
... l'on jet à leur nez,
Devinez quoi? les têtes chérubines
Aux frais mentons, aux lèvres purpurines.
Parny, La Guerre des Dieux, canto 10.
[3]
Propres sans plus à garnir les gradins,
À cet emploi se borne leur génie,
C'est ce qu'au bal nous autres sots humains
Nous appelons: faire tapisserie.
[4]
Cf. Parny:
Étaient-ils trois, ou bien n'étaient-ils qu'un?
Trois en un seul; vous comprenez, j'espère?
Figurez-vous un vénérable père,
Au front serein, à l'air un peu commun,
Ni beau, ni laid, assez vert pour son âge
Et bien assis sur le dos d'un nuage ...
De son bras droit à son bras gauche vole
Certain pigeon coiffé d'un auréole ...
Sur ses genoux un bel agneau repose,
Qui, bien lavé, bien frais, bien délicat,
Portant au cou ruban couleur de rose,
De l'auréole emprunt aussi l'éclat.
Ainsi parut le triple personnage....
[5] Ad familiares, lib. iv. Epist. 5.
[6] "In this condition he was more enamoured, more vivacious; he told me that I gave him the most rapturous pleasure, called me a seductress, &c., and in that secluded place did what he pleased" (Madame de Saman, Les Enchantements de Prudence. Avec préface de George Sand, 1873, pp. 166, &).
[7] Chateaubriand, Les Martyrs, more particularly books iii. and viii.; Mémoires d'outre-tombe; Sainte-Beuve, Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire sous l'Empire; Nettement, _Histoire de la littérature française sous la Restauration_, i., ii.