One day as Lamartine was walking in the street his dog made the acquaintance of another dog belonging to a physician of the place. The owner was M. de Ronot, who had been a fellow-student at College. Warm friendship now sprang up between them. Lamartine pays him this tribute: "I was often absent from the land of my birth, especially after death had blighted all the roots of my family; but I knew that there was one who watched for my return, who followed with his eye my adverse fortunes, who fought against the envies, hatreds and calumnies that grovelled on the soil of our homestead—alas, about our gravestones, and who received with delight everything in my life that was good fortune, and with grief everything that was sad."
He died many years afterward with the name of Lamartine on his lips. It was at the period when Lamartine was in deepest adversity, and abandoned by the many who in brighter times had ardently professed their friendship.
When the time came in spring for the family to go back to Milly, the whole family welcomed this modest abode as an asylum. The mother resumed the instructing of her daughters, and her visits to the sick and poor. Lamartine often went with her. He always found living in a city to be intolerable, but he brought his melancholy with him. He renewed his intimacy with the Abbé Dumont at the garden of the parsonage, and gradually recovered health and spirits.
Translations of Byron's poems appeared that season in French journals. Lamartine was prompted to endeavors of similar character. That autumn he wrote several of his Meditations, and read portions of them to his father. The old Chevalier, who knew nothing of the new school of poetry, was deeply affected, but feared to utter praise, lest it should be from parental partiality.
The second winter at the new house in Mâcon was passed like the first. Lamartine had no liking for the social entertainments. When Lent came, he left home and spent the spring and summer with his other uncle, the Abbé Lamartine, at D'Urcy in Upper Burgundy.
This uncle had been compelled, by the accident of having been a second son, to take priest's orders. Thus interdicted from having a family of his own he bestowed his affection richly upon his younger brother and children. He considered them as his own, and Lamartine was recognized as his heir. They spent the summer and autumn in their younger years, at his patriarchal mansion, and he took an actual part in their education. It was here that Lamartine acquired his passion for life in the country.
The abbé had spent his noviciate at Paris, and mingled in society in the time of Louis XV. He was a man of the world rather than of the Church. Relinquishing the priestly functions at the Revolution, he now lived by himself on his share of the paternal estate, a Homeric life, hermit-like, as a philosopher and cultivator of the soil.
His housekeeper, herself formerly a nun, persuaded him to purchase dogs and a horse for his nephew. Lamartine had always been beloved by all the domestics, and his uncle, who was the most affectionate of men, treated him as a personal friend rather than as a kinsman.
One afternoon in the latter part of July, he was riding back from a jaunt in the neighboring forest when a letter-carrier delivered him a note from two Roman ladies at an inn at Pont-de-Pany. His uncle, in whom humor was a prominent quality, demanded at once to know the mystery.
"There must be no mystery with me," said he. "The heroes of a romance always need a confidant, and I have known both parts in my time."