The author was a younger brother of the perhaps better known Count Joseph de Maistre, French Ambassador at the Russian Court in the early part of this century, and one of the ablest defenders of the Papacy. He was the author of the famous Du Pape and the philosopher of the Soirees de St. Petersbourg. Count Joseph was likewise an intimate friend of Madame Swetchine’s, whose interesting life has been published by “The Catholic Publication Society,” and was instrumental in the conversion of that remarkable woman to the Catholic Church.
The De Maistres belonged to the haute noblesse de Savoy. Count Xavier, as well as his brothers, became an exile during the first French Revolution. He went to Russia, where he married. After an absence of twenty-five years he returned to his own country.
Lamartine addressed him one of his Harmonies Poëtiques after his return, saluting him thus:
“Voyageur fatigué qui reviens sur nos plages
Demander à tes champs leurs antiques ombrages,
A ton cœur ses premiers amours!”
He also calls Count Xavier the Sterne of Savoy, but without his affectation, and declares him equal to Rousseau, but without his declamatory style. “He is a familiar genie, a fireside talker, a cricket chirping on the rural hearth.”
The writings of Xavier de Maistre were among the favorite volumes that composed Eugénie de Guérin’s library, and we can imagine a certain sympathy in their intellectual natures. The Lépreux in particular appealed to her sympathetic nature, and the thought of meeting its author filled her with delight. When this meeting took place at Paris, Count Xavier had just lost his children, and was so depressed in consequence that it was not equal to her expectations.
But Lamartine speaks of seeing him a few years after, and describes him as “an old man of fourscore years, gracious in manner, and with no signs of decay of body or feebleness of mind. Airiness of sentiment, a mild sensibility, a half-serious, half-indulgent smile at human affairs, a tolerance—the result of his intelligence—of all human opinions: such was the man.
“His sonorous voice had a far-off sound like an echo of the past, and was well adapted to the reminiscenses of his previous life, which he loved to tell.
“His Leper of the City of Aosta is, in the literature of the heart, equal to Paul and Virginia; the Journey around my Room is only a pleasantry. The Leper is a tear, but a tear that flows for ever!”
Lamartine, in his Confidences, gives a pleasing picture of the De Maistre family, and likens a summer passed among its illustrious members in Savoy to the conversations of Boccaccio at his country-seat near Florence. They used to assemble beneath a clump of pines at the foot of Mont du Chat, overlooking the Arcadian valley of Chambery, so redolent of St. Francis de Sales, another genius not less poetical, and with no less delicacy of sentiment, but loftier than Xavier de Maistre; and sometimes they came together on a terrace over-arched by vine-hung elms before the Château de Servolex, the residence of Madame de Vigny, De Maistre’s sister.