Chateaubriand's obsequies were performed in the church of the Missions étrangères, where a large concourse assembled, notwithstanding the city and the state were still in the agony of a social crisis. But his ashes were transferred to his own Brittany, where a solitary rock in the bay had long before been granted him by the municipality of St. Malo, as a place of burial. More than 50,000 persons were present at this strange and solemn interment. They seemed to represent France mourning his loss. The sea was covered with boats; the roofs of the houses, and the shores beneath, were crowded with spectators; banners floated from rock and tower; while mournful canticles and booming cannon broke the stillness of the air. The coffin was laid in a recess of the steep cliff, and surmounted by a granite cross. Ampère was deputed by the French Academy to pronounce his eulogy on the occasion; and he concluded his report to that body in these [{101}] words: "It would seem that the genius of the incomparable painter had been stamped on this last magnificent spectacle; and that to him alone among men it had been given to add, even after death, a splendid page to the immortal poem of his life."
On Easter day in the following year Madame Récamier was persuaded to remove from the Abbaye-aux-Bois to the National Library, where her niece and nephew resided. The cholera had broken out in the neighborhood of the Abbaye; and though she did not fear death, she had a peculiar horror of that dreadful pestilence. But her flight was vain; the scourge pursued her, and fell with sadden violence on her enfeebled frame. The day before, Ampère and Madame Salvage had dined with her, and on the morning of her seizure her niece's daughter Juliette had been reading to her the memoirs of Madame de Motteville. During twelve hours she suffered extreme torture, but spoke with her confessor, and received the sacrament of extreme unction. Continual vomiting prevented the administration of the eucharist. Ampère, Paul David, the Abbé de Cazalès, her relations and servants, knelt around her bed to join in the prayers for the dying. Sobs and tears choked their voices, and "Adieu, adieu, we shall meet again; we shall see each other again," were the only words her agony allowed her to utter.
Madame Récamier breathed her last on the 11th of May, 1849. The terrible epidemic, which generally leaves hideous traces behind, spared her lifeless frame, and left it like a beautiful piece of sculptured marble. Achille Devéria took a drawing of her as she lay in her cold sleep, and his faithful sketch expresses at the same time suffering and repose.
Such was the end of her who, without the prestige of authorship, was regarded by her contemporaries as one of the most remarkable women of her time. We will not indulge in any exaggerated statement of her piety. Great numbers, no doubt, have attained to more interior perfection. Her ambition to please was undoubtedly a weakness. Religion did not make her what she was; yet she would never have been what she was without it. It was the ballast which steadied her when carrying crowded sail. It was the polar star that directed her course amid conflicting currents and adverse storms. It raised her standard of morality above that of many of her associates. It taught her how to be devout without dissimulation, a patroness of letters without pedantry, a patriot and a royalist without national disdain or political animosity. It made her charitable to the poor, kind to the aged and sorrowful, gracious and unassuming with all, at the very time that the proudest of emperors invited her presence at his court, and his brother Lucien made her the idol of his verse. Its golden thread guided her aright through the intricate mazes of social life—through a matrimonial position equally strange and unreal—an engagement to a royal prince who was the foe of France—through friendships with Bernadotte and Murat on their thrones, with the queens of Holland and of Naples when fallen, and with the third Napoleon when plotting to regain the sceptre of the first. It so lifted her above intrigue and cabals that she could give her right hand to the disaffected General Moreau and her left to the devoted Junot—could be made the confidante of all parties without betraying the secrets of any. It inclined her to be chary of giving advice, but to make it, when asked for, tell always on the side of virtue. It enabled her to exhort the sceptical with effect, and dispose the philosophic to accept the faith. [Footnote 19]
[Footnote 19: See her letters to Ampère in the Correspondant, 1864.]
Her autobiography has unfortunately been destroyed by her own direction, because blindness would not allow her to revise it and cancel its [{102}] defects. But many fragments of it have been preserved, and a thousand personal recollections, collected from those who knew her, have been wrought by her niece and other biographers into a lasting monument.
From The Fortnightly Review
CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS.
BY SIR JOHN BOWRING.
I was gathering together some examples of the strange opinions held by the Chinese as to "outer nations," when I fell upon a curious official document, presented to the emperor by a great mandarin, who occupies a very prominent place in the modern history of China, Keshen, once viceroy of the two Kwang. His name brought immediately to my recollection, by a very natural association, that of my old acquaintance, Father Huc, whose contributions to our knowledge of China, Tartary, and Tibet are among the most original authentic, and instructive that we possess.
It is a matter much to be regretted that only a small part of Father Huc's personal adventures has ever been communicated to the public. I first met with him on one of the Chusan islands, dressed as a Chinaman, and living in every particular as the natives live—his food was rice—his drink was only tea. He was recognized as the director and instructor of no less than five Catholic communities. I had heard of the existence of professors of the Tien-choo (heavenly master) religion, and, going some way into the interior, found the Lazzarist doctor instructing the people. He had an extraordinary mastery of the colloquial Chinese; spoke and wrote Manchoo, and was not unacquainted with the Mongolian tongue. I enjoyed his company as a fellow traveller, having given him a passage in a vessel which was at my disposal, and I fell in with him in five different and distant parts of China. I have no doubt of the general veracity of his narrative, of his sincere love of truth—perhaps not wholly separated from a certain credulity and fondness for the marvellous, with which, I have observed, oriental travellers are not unfrequently imbued. It would be interesting to learn how Father Huc got to Peking, lived for many years in the city and its neighborhood, no one knowing or supposing him to be a foreigner—what were the arrangements by which, departing on his mission to Manchuria, he managed to escape from the scrutinizing eye of the police, at a period, too, when the determination to repel the intrusion of "barbarian strangers" was at its height. Of his interviews with Keshen, after the discovery of the objects of his journey, and the determination of the mandarin envoy to drive him out of the country, he gives many interesting particulars in his "Souvenirs," but he does not mention that Keshen, who had been stripped at Peking of some millions sterling, the gatherings of profits and peculations in the high offices he had filled, and who managed to amass a considerable sum of money in Tibet, confided his sayings in that country to the keeping of the Lazzarist missionary; and at the very time when the decree was issued for his banishment, Keshen obtained from him a promise that he would, when he passed into the [{103}] territory of China, deliver over "the silver" to the parties whom Keshen designated. Huc was a delightful companion; he had no asperity; on the contrary, he was full of jokes and merriment. Courageous, too, when in the presence of danger, his ready wit furnished him with every appliance necessary to his safety and protection. His familiarity with Chinese character was remarkable; he knew when and where and how to domineer and command, where it was safe to assume authority. In China, one of the common instruments of government is to send from the court secret spies, whose persons are unknown, and the object of whose mission is to report confidentially to the emperor on the shortcomings or misdoings of the great mandarins. It was often Huc's fortune to be thought one of these mysterious but redoubtable visitants, and he turned the suspicion to excellent account. The fact of his speaking Manchoo, and being well acquainted with Tartar forms and usages, very naturally strengthened the conclusion that it was most desirable to obtain his patronage and favorable opinion in the confidential communications to be made to the Tartar dynasty. No doubt many a functionary has trembled, self-condemned, in the presence of the missionary, and has courted his indulgent judgment by those attentions which are supposed to conciliate. Bribes, large and attractive, representing the estimated value of the service to be rendered, are constantly offered and frequently received by the traveller who is believed to have the ear of the supreme authority. I have heard that from twenty to thirty thousand pounds sterling are sometimes collected in a district circuit, the collection being made at the risk of either the bribed or the briber, or of both, each being necessarily at the mercy of the other in case of betrayal. But, at the same time, Father Huc possessed all the arts of prostration and deference when the circumstances of the case required them. There was, however, less of assumption in his lowliness than in his loftiness; his was never "a pride that aped humility." The acting was when he played the part of a ruler. He was altogether a natural man—unobtrusive, but fluent in the presence of those interested—and who could fail to be interested in his strange adventures? He never recovered the free use of his limbs after he returned to Europe; and died in France, leaving much undone—the doing of which would have been most useful to his race.