After my arrival in France, I had written to my family to inform them of my return. Madame la Comtesse de Marigny, my eldest sister, was the first to come to me, went to the wrong street, and met five Messieurs Lassagne, of whom the last climbed up through a cobbler's trap-door to answer to his name. Madame de Chateaubriand came in her turn: she was charming, and full of the qualities calculated to give me the happiness which I found with her after we came together again. Madame la Comtess de Caud, Lucile, came next. M. Joubert and Madame de Beaumont became smitten with a passionate fondness and a tender pity for her. Then commenced between them a correspondence which ended only with the death of the two women who had bent over towards one another like two flowers of the same species on the point of fading away. Madame Lucile having stopped at Versailles on the 30th of September 1802, I received this note from her:
"I write to beg you to thank Madame de Beaumont on my behalf for the invitation she has sent me to go to Savigny. I hope to have that pleasure in about a fortnight, unless there be any objection on Madame de Beaumont's side."
Madame de Caud came to Savigny as she had promised.
I have told you how, in my youth, my sister, a canoness of the Chapter of the Argentière, and destined for that of Remiremont, cherished an attachment for M. de Malfilâtre, a counsellor to the Parliament of Brittany, which, remaining locked within her breast, had increased her natural melancholy. During the Revolution she married M. le Comte de Caud, and lost him after fifteen months of marriage. The death of Madame la Comtesse de Farcy, a sister whom she fondly loved, added to Madame de Caud's sadness. She next attached herself to Madame de Chateaubriand, my wife, and gained an empire over the latter which became painful, for Lucile was violent, masterful, unreasonable, and Madame de Chateaubriand, subject to her caprices, hid from her in order to render her the services which a richer shows to a susceptible and less happy friend.
Lucile's genius and character had almost reached the pitch of madness of Jean Jacques Rousseau; she thought herself exposed to secret enemies: she gave Madame de Beaumont, M. Joubert, myself, false addresses at which to write to her; she examined the seals, seeking to discover whether they had not been broken; she wandered from one home to the other, unable to remain either with my sisters or my wife; she had taken an antipathy to them, and Madame de Chateaubriand, after showing her a devotion surpassing all that one could imagine, had ended by breaking down under the burden of so cruel an affection.
Another fatality had struck Lucile: M. de Chênedollé, then living near Vire, had gone to see her at Fougères; soon there was talk of a marriage, which fell through. Everything failed my sister at once, and, thrown back upon herself, she no longer had the strength to bear up. This plaintive spectre rested for a moment on a stone, in the smiling solitude of Savigny: there were so many hearts there which would have joyfully received her! They would so gladly have restored her to a sweet reality of existence! But Lucile's heart could beat only in an atmosphere made expressly for her and never breathed by others. She swiftly devoured the days of the world apart in which Heaven had placed her. Why had God created a being only to suffer? What mysterious relation can there be between a long-suffering nature and an eternal principle?
My sister had not changed in any way; she had only taken the fixed expression of her ills: her head had sunk a little, like a head on which the hours had weighed heavily. She reminded me of my parents: those first family memories, evoked from the grave, surrounded me like wraiths which had gathered round at night to warm themselves at the dying flame of a funeral pile. As I watched her, I seemed to see in Lucile my whole childhood, looking out at me from behind her somewhat wild eyes.
The vision of pain faded away: that woman, borne down by life, seemed to have come to fetch the other dejected woman whom she was to take with her.
*
Talma.