M. de Tocqueville[651], my brother's brother-in-law, and guardian of my two orphaned nephews, occupied Madame de Senozan's[652] country-seat[653]. On every hand were scaffold legacies. There I saw my nephews grow up with their three Tocqueville cousins, among whom Alexis[654], the author of the Démocratie en Amérique, was prominent. He was more spoilt at Verneuil than I had been at Combourg. Is this the last renown that I shall have seen unknown in its swaddling clothes? Alexis de Tocqueville has travelled through the civilized America, of which I have travelled through the forests.
Verneuil has changed masters; it has become the property of Madame de Saint-Fargeau, famous through her father[655] and through the Revolution, which adopted her as its daughter.
Near Mantes, at the Ménil[656], was Madame de Rosanbo: my nephew, Louis de Chateaubriand, eventually married Mademoiselle d'Orglandes there, niece to Madame de Rosanbo; the latter no longer airs her beauty around the pond and under the beeches of the manor: it has passed. When I went from Verneuil to the Ménil, I came to Mézy[657] on the road: Madame de Mézy was romance wrapped up in virtue and maternal grief. If only her child, which fell from a window and broke its head, had been able, like the young quails which we shot, to fly over the château and take refuge in the Île-Belle, the smiling island of the Seine: Coturnix per stipulas pascens!
On the other side of the Seine, not far from the Marais, Madame de Vintimille had introduced me to Méréville[658]. Méréville was an oasis created by the smile of a muse, but of one of those muses whom the Gallic poets call "the learned fairies." Here the adventures of Blanca[659] and of Velléda were read before fashionable generations which, falling one from the other like flowers, to-day listen to the wailing of my years.
By degrees my brain, wearying of rest in my Rue de Miromesnil, saw phantoms form before it in the distance. The Génie du Christianisme inspired me with the idea of proving that work by mixing Christian and mythological characters together. A shade which long afterwards I called Cymodocée sketched itself vaguely in my head; not one of its features was fixed. Cymodocée once conceived, I shut myself up with her, as I always do with the daughters of my imagination; but, before they have issued from the dreamy state and arrived from the banks of Lethe through the ivory portals, they often change their shape. If I create them through love, I undo them through love, and the one cherished object which I, later, present to the light is the offspring of a thousand infidelities.
I remained only a year in the Rue de Miromesnil, because the house was sold. I arranged with Madame la Marquise de Coislin[660], who let me the top floor of her house on the Place Louis XV[661].
*
The Marquise de Coislin.
Madame de Coislin was a woman of the grandest air. She was nearly eighty years of age, and her proud and domineering eyes bore an expression of wit and irony. Madame de Coislin was in no way lettered, and took pride in the fact; she had passed through the Voltairean age without being aware of it; if she had conceived any idea of it whatever, it was that of a time of a voluble middle-class. Not that she ever spoke of her birth; she was too great to make herself ridiculous: she very well knew how to see "small people" without compromising her rank; but, after all, she was born of the Premier Marquis of France[662]. If she was descended from Drogon de Nesle, killed in Palestine in 1096; from Raoul de Nesle[663], the Constable, knighted by Louis IX.; from Jean II. de Nesle, Regent of France during the last crusade of St. Louis, Madame de Coislin vowed that this was a stupidity on the part of fate for which she ought not to be held responsible; she was naturally of the Court, as others, more happy, are of the streets, as one may be a thorough-bred mare or a cab-hack: she could not help this accident, and had no choice but to endure the ill with which Heaven had been pleased to afflict her.