Here I will copy for you two pages from the Life of the Duc de Berry; it is as though I told you my own:
"After twenty-two years of fighting, the brazen barrier with which France was girt about was forced: the hour of the Restoration drew nigh; our Princes left their retreats. Each of them made for a different point of the frontier, like travellers who, at the risk of their lives, seek to penetrate into a country of which marvels are related. Monsieur set out for Switzerland; Monseigneur le Duc d'Angoulême for Spain, and his brother for Jersey. In that island, in which some of the judges of Charles I. died unknown to their fellow-men, Monseigneur le Duc de Berry found French Royalists grown old in exile and forgotten for their virtues, as in former days the English regicides for their crime. He met old priests, henceforth consecrated to solitude; he realized with them the fiction of the poet who makes a Bourbon land on the island of Jersey after a storm. One of these confessors and martyrs might say to the heir of Henry IV., as the hermit of Jersey said to that great king:
Loin de la cour alors, dans cette grotte obscure
De ma religion je viens pleurer l'injure[141].
"Monseigneur le Duc de Berry spent some months in Jersey; the sea, the winds, politics bound him there. Everything opposed his impatience; he found himself on the point of renouncing his enterprise and taking ship for Bordeaux. A letter from him to Madame la Maréchale Moreau gives us a vivid idea of his occupations on his rock:
"'8 February 1814.
"'Here I am like Tantalus, in sight of that unhappy France which finds so much difficulty in breaking its chains. You whose soul is so beautiful, so French, can judge of my feelings; how much it would cost me to move away from that shore which I should need but two hours to reach! When the sun lights it, I climb the tallest rocks and, with my spy-glass in my hand, I follow the whole coast: I can see the rocks of Coutances. My imagination rises, I see myself leaping on shore, surrounded by Frenchmen, wearing the white cockade in their hats; I hear the cry of 'Long live the King!' that cry which no Frenchman has ever heard with composure; the loveliest woman of the province girds me with a white sash, for love and glory always go together. We march on Cherbourg; some rascally fort, with a garrison of foreigners, tries to defend itself: we carry it by assault, and a vessel puts out to fetch the King, with the White Ensign which recalls the days of France's glory and happiness! Ah, madame, when removed by but a few hours from so likely a dream, can one think of betaking himself elsewhere!'"
*
It is three years since I wrote these pages in Paris; I had gone before M. le Duc de Berry in Jersey, the city of the exiled, by twenty-two years; I was to leave my name behind me, since Armand de Chateaubriand was married, and his son Frédéric born there[142].
Gaiety had not abandoned the family of my uncle de Bedée; my aunt continued to nurse a big dog, descended from the one whose virtues I have related: as it bit everybody and had the mange, my cousins had it secretly hanged, notwithstanding its nobility. Madame de Bedée persuaded herself that some English officers, charmed with Azor's beauty, had stolen it, and that it was living, laden with honours and dinners, in the richest castle of the Three Kingdoms. Alas, our present hilarity was compounded only out of our past gaiety! By recalling the scenes at Monchoix we found means of laughter in Jersey. The case is rare enough, for in the human heart pleasures do not keep up the same relations one to the other that sorrows do: new joys do not restore their springtime to former joys, but recent sorrows cause old sorrows to blossom over again.
For the rest, the Emigrants at that time excited general sympathy; our cause appeared to be the cause of European order: an honoured unhappiness, such as ours, is something.
M. de Bouillon[143] was the protector of the French refugees in Jersey: he dissuaded me from my plan of crossing over to Brittany, unfit as I was to endure a life of caves and forests; he advised me to go to England, and there seek the opportunity of entering the regular service. My uncle, who was very ill provided with money, began to feel straitened with his large family; he had found himself obliged to send his son to London to feed himself on starvation and hope. Fearing lest I should be a burden to M. de Bedée, I decided to relieve him of my presence.