I have discovered a letter from the Chevalier de Panat on the readings from a work at that time so unknown. The letter is charming: the dirty chevalier's positive and scoffing spirit did not seem susceptible of thus rubbing itself with poetry. I have no hesitation in giving this letter, a document of my history, although it is stained from end to end with my praises, as though the sly author had taken pleasure in emptying his ink-pot over his epistle:
"Monday.
"Heavens, what an interesting reading I owed to your extreme kindness this morning! Our religion had numbered among its defenders great geniuses, illustrious Fathers of the Church: those athletes had wielded with vigour all the arms of reasoning; incredulity was vanquished; but that was not enough: it was still necessary to show all the charms of that admirable religion; it was necessary to show how suited it is to the human heart and what magnificent pictures it offers to the imagination. It is no longer a theologian in the school, it is the great painter and the man sensitive to impressions who open up a new horizon for themselves. Your work was wanted, and you were called upon to write it. Nature has eminently endowed you with the great qualities which this work requires: you belong to another age....
"Ah, if the truths of sentiment rank first in the order of nature, none will have proved better than yourself those of our religion; you will have confounded the unbelievers at the gate of the Temple and introduced delicate minds and sensible hearts into the sanctuaries. You bring back to me those ancient philosophers who gave their lessons with their heads crowned with flowers, their hands filled with sweet perfumes. This is a very feeble image of your suave, pure and classic mind.
"I congratulate myself daily on the happy circumstance which made me acquainted with you; I can never forget that it was Fontanes who did me that kindness; I shall love him for it the more, and my heart will never separate two names whom the same glory is bound to unite, if Providence re-opens to us the doors of our native land.
"Chev. de Panat."
The Abbé Delille also heard some fragments of the Génie du Christianisme read. He seemed surprised, and did me the honour, soon after, to put into verse the prose which had pleased him. He naturalized my wild American flowers in his various French gardens, and put my somewhat hot wine to cool in the frigid water from his clear spring.
The unfinished edition of the Génie du Christianisme, commenced in London, was a little different, in the order of the contents, from the edition published in France. The consular censure, which soon became imperial, showed itself very touchy on the subject of kings: their persons, their honour and their virtue were dear to it beforehand. Already Fouché's police saw the white pigeon, the symbol of Bonaparte's candour and revolutionary innocence, descend from Heaven with the sacred phial. The true believers who had taken part in the Republican processions of Lyons compelled me to cut out a chapter entitled the Rois athées, and to distribute paragraphs from it here and there in the body of the work.
*
Before continuing these literary investigations I must interrupt them for a moment to take leave of my uncle de Bedée; alas, that means taking leave of the first joy of my life: freno non remorante dies[250]! See the old sepulchres in the old crypts: themselves overcome by age, decrepit and without memory, having lost their epitaphs, they have forgotten the very names of those whose ashes they contain.
I had written to my uncle on the subject of my mother's death: he replied with a long letter containing some touching words of regret; but three-quarters of his double folio sheet were devoted to my genealogy. He begged me above all, when I should return to France, to look up the title-deeds of the "Bedée quartering," entrusted to my brother. And so, to this venerable Emigrant, exile, ruin, the destruction of his kin, the sacrifice of Louis XVI. alike failed to make the fact of the Revolution clear to him; nothing had happened, nothing come to pass; he had gone no farther than the States of Brittany and the Assembly of the Nobles. This fixity of ideas in man is very striking in the midst and as it were in presence of the alteration of his body, the flight of his years, the loss of his relations and friends.
Death of my uncle de Bedée.
On his return from the Emigration, my uncle de Bedée went to live at Dinan, where he died, six leagues from Monchoix, without having seen it again. My cousin Caroline[251], the oldest of my three cousins, still lives. She has remained an old maid in spite of the formal requests for her hand made in her former youth. She writes me letters, badly spelt, in which she addresses me in the second person singular, calls me "chevalier," and talks to me of our good time: in illo tempore. She was endowed with a pair of fine dark eyes and a comely figure; she danced like the Camargo[252], and she seems to recollect that I bore a fierce passion for her in secret. I reply in the same tone, laying aside, in imitation of her, my years, my honours and my reputation:
"Yes, dear Caroline, your chevalier," etc.