[558] Jean Baptiste Louis Georges Seroux d'Agincourt (1730-1814), a distinguished antiquarian and archæologist. He had been a farmer-general under Louis XV., and amassed a huge fortune, which he devoted to study and the cultivation of the arts. After visiting England, Holland, Germany, and Italy, he settled in Rome, in 1778, where he became intimate with the Cardinal de Bernis and Azara, the Spanish Ambassador and art-patron, and compiled his great work, the Histoire de l'Art par les Monuments, depuis le IVe siècle jusqu'au XVIe, in 6 volumes folio, with 336 plates.—T.
[559] Isaias xxii. 18.—T.
[560] Barbara Juliana Baroness Krüdener (1764-1824), née von Vietinghoff-Scheel, a famous Russian mystic, was married, when fourteen years of age, to Baron Krüdener, Russian Ambassador in Berlin. After leading a very dissipated life, and publishing her well-known novel, Valérie, ou Lettres de Gustave de Linar à Ernest de G. (1803), she suddenly, in 1807, withdrew from the world, gave way to exalted devotion, and pretended to have received from Heaven a mission for the regeneration of Christianity. She travelled through Germany, visiting the prisons, preaching in the open air, and converting men by the thousand. In 1814, she came into contact with the foreign sovereigns then in Paris, exercised a great ascendant over the Emperor Alexander, foretold to him the return of Napoleon from Elba and his ultimate fall, and inspired him with the idea of the Holy Alliance. She next resumed her travels through Switzerland and the various States of Germany, but her extraordinary influence began to be dreaded, and she was expelled wherever she went. In 1822, she took refuge in the Crimea, where she founded an institution for sinners and criminals, and died at Karasu-Bazar on Christmas Day 1824.—T.
[561] Joseph Michaud (1767-1839), author of the Printemps d'un proscrit and a History of the Crusades, and a member of the French Academy. In 1795, he was condemned to death for professing Royalist opinions in his paper, the Quotidienne, but succeeded in evading execution of the sentence, which was revoked in 1796. He was appointed Press Censor under the Restoration.—T.
[562] The Comte Guillaume de La Luzerne, who in 1787 married Madame de Beaumont's elder sister, Mademoiselle Victoire de Montmorin, was the nephew of the Comte de La Luzerne, the ambassador, and son of César Henri de La Luzerne, Minister of Marine under Louis XVI. Chateaubriand appears to have confused the two.—B.
[563] The Saint-Germains, husband (Germain Couhaillon) and wife, had been for thirty-eight years in the service of the Montmorin family. Chateaubriand afterwards took them into his own service, which they never left.—B.
[564] Auguste de Montmorin (d. 1793), a naval officer, had perished in a storm when returning from the Mauritius.—B.
[565] Annibale della Genga, Pope Leo XII. (1760-1829), succeeded Pope Pius VII. in 1823.—T.
[566] This tomb, which faces that of the Cardinal de Bernis at San Luigi dei Francesi, was erected by Chateaubriand himself at a cost of some nine thousand francs.—B.
[567] And not in 1827, as is given in all the earlier editions of the Memoirs. Chateaubriand spent the whole of the year 1827 in Paris. It was not until 1828, under the Mortignac Ministry, that he was appointed to the Embassy in Rome.—B.