She expired.
I went down to her room the next day; I found Monsieur[672] and Madame d'Avaray, her brother-in-law and sister, sitting before the fire-place, with a little table between them, counting the louis in a bag which they had taken from a hollow wainscoting. The poor dead woman was there in her bed, behind the half-closed curtains: she no longer heard the sound of the gold which ought to have awaked her, and which fraternal hands were counting.
Among the thoughts written down by the defunct on margins of printed paper and addresses of letters were some which were extremely beautiful. Madame de Coislin showed me what remained of the Court of Louis XV. under Bonaparte and after Louis XVI., even as Madame de Houdetot had enabled me to see what still lingered, in the nineteenth century, of philosophic society.
*
In the summer of the year 1805, I went to join Madame de Chateaubriand at Vichy, where Madame de Coislin had taken her, as I have said. I did not find Jussac, Termes, Flamarens there, whom Madame de Sévigné had "before and behind her" in 1677: they had been sleeping since one hundred and twenty and so many years. I left my sister, Madame de Caud, in Paris, where she had fixed her residence since the autumn of 1804. After a short stay at Vichy, Madame de Chateaubriand proposed that we should travel, in order to be away for some time from the political troubles.
Two little Journeys[673] which I then took in Auvergne and to Mont Blanc have been collected in my works. After an absence of thirty-four years, I have lately received at Clermont, from men unacquainted with my person, the reception usually shown to an old friend. He who has long occupied himself with the principles which the human race enjoys in common has friends, brothers and sisters in every family; for, if man is thankless, humanity is grateful. To those who have connected themselves with you through a kindly reputation, and who have never seen you, you are always the same; you have always the age which they ascribed to you; their attachment, which is not disturbed by your presence, always beholds you young and beautiful, like the sentiments which they love in your writings.
When I was a child, in my Brittany, and heard speak of Auvergne, I imagined it a very distant, very distant country, where one saw strange things, where one could not go without great danger, and travelling under the protection of the Blessed Virgin. I never meet without a sort of melting curiosity those little Auvergnats who go to seek their fortunes in this great world with a small deal chest. They have little besides hope in their box, as they climb down their rocks: lucky are they if they bring it back with them!
Alas, Madame de Beaumont had not lain two years on the bank of the Tiber when I trod her natal soil in 1805; I was at but a few leagues from that Mont Dore where she had come in search of the life which she lengthened a little in order to reach Rome. Last summer, in 1838, I once more travelled through this same Auvergne. Between those two dates, 1805 and 1838, I can place the transformations which society has undergone around me.
We left Clermont and, on our way to Lyons, passed through Thiers and Roanne. This road, then little frequented, followed at intervals the banks of the Lignon. The author of the Astrée[674], who is not a great genius, nevertheless invented places and persons that live: such is the creative power of fiction, when it is appropriate to the age in which it appears. There is, moreover, something ingeniously fantastic in that resurrection of the nymphs and naiads who mingle with shepherds, ladies and knights: those different worlds go well together, and one is agreeably pleased with the fables of mythology united to the lies of fiction; Rousseau has related how he was taken in by d'Urfé.
Geneva.