That evening I saw the worthy Saint-Germain; I gave him orders and some money, so that he might secretly reduce the prices of anything she might require. I enjoined him to keep me informed of everything and not to fail to call me back in case he should want to see me. Three months passed. When I reached Villeneuve, I found two fairly tranquillizing letters about Madame de Caud's health: but Saint-Germain forgot to speak to me of my sister's new lodging. I had begun to write her a long letter, when suddenly Madame de Chateaubriand fell dangerously ill: I was at her bedside when I was brought a new letter from Saint-Germain; I opened it: a withering line told me of the sudden death of Lucile.
I have cared for many tombs in my life: it fell to my lot and to my sister's destiny that her ashes should be flung to the skies. I was not in Paris when she died; I had no relations there; kept at Villeneuve by my wife's critical condition, I was unable to go to the sacred remains; orders sent from a distance arrived too late to prevent a common burial. Lucile knew no one and had not a friend; she was known only to Madame de Beaumont's old servant: it was as though he had been charged to link two destinies. He alone followed the forsaken coffin, and he himself was dead before Madame de Chateaubriand's sufferings allowed me to bring her back to Paris.
My sister was buried among the poor: in what grave-yard was she laid? In what motionless wave of an ocean of dead was she swallowed up? In what house did she die, after leaving the community of the Dames de Saint-Michel? If, by making researches, if, by examining the archives of the municipalities, the registers of the parishes, I should come across my sister's name, what would that avail me[688]? Should I find the same keeper of the cemetery? Should I find the man who dug a grave that remained nameless and unlabelled? Would the rough hands that were the last to touch so pure a clay have remembered it? What nomenclator of the shades could point out to me the obliterated tomb? Might he not make a mistake as to the dust? Since Heaven has willed it so, let Lucile be for ever lost! I find in this absence of locality a distinction from the burials of my other friends. My predecessor in this world and in the next is praying to the Redeemer for me; she is praying to Him from the midst of the pauper remains among which her own lie confounded: even so does Lucile's mother and mine rest lost among the preferred of Jesus Christ. God will certainly have been able to recognise my sister; and she, who was so little attached to earth, ought to leave no trace there. She has left me, that sainted genius. Not a day has passed but I have wept for her. Lucile loved to hide herself; I have made her a solitude in my heart: she shall leave it only when I shall have ceased to live[689].
Those are the true, the only events of my real life! What mattered to me, at the moment when I was losing my sister, the thousands of soldiers falling on the battlefields, the destruction of thrones, the changes in the face of the world?
Lucile's death struck at the sources of my soul: it was my childhood in the midst of my family, the first vestiges of my existence, that were disappearing. Our life resembles those frail buildings, shored up in the sky by flying buttresses: they do not crumble at once, but become loose piecemeal; they still support some gallery or other, while already they have become separated from the chancel or vault of the edifice. Madame de Chateaubriand, still bruised by Lucile's imperious whims, saw only a deliverance for the Christian who had gone to rest in the Lord. Let us be gentle if we would be regretted; the loftiness of genius and the higher qualities are mourned only by the angels. But I cannot enter into the consolation of Madame de Chateaubriand.
*
My journey to the East.
When, returning to Paris by the Burgundy road, I caught sight of the cupola of the Val-de-Grâce and the dome of Sainte-Geneviève, which overlooks the Jardin des Plantes, my heart was broken: one more companion of my life left on the wayside! We went back to the Hôtel de Coislin, and although M. de Fontanes, M. Joubert, M. de Clausel, M. Molé came to spend the evenings with me, I was distraught by so many memories and thoughts that I was utterly exhausted. Remaining alone behind the objects that had quitted me, like a foreign mariner whose engagement has expired, and who has neither home nor country, I struck the shore with my foot; I longed to swim in a new ocean to refresh myself and cross it. Nursed on Mount Pindus, a crusader to Hierosolyma, I was impatient to go to mingle my loneliness with the ruins of Athens, my tears with those of the Magdalen.
I went to see my family[690] in Brittany, returned to Paris, and left for Trieste on the 13th of July 1806; Madame de Chateaubriand accompanied me as far as Venice, where M. Ballanche came to join her.