The charming Clara[266] was at Ghent with her mother. We two made up bad couplets to the air of the Tyrolienne. I have held many pretty little girls on my knees who are young grandmothers to-day. When you have left a woman, married in your presence at sixteen years of age, if you return sixteen years later, you find her of the same age still:
"Ah, madame, you have not put on a day!"
No doubt: but it is the daughter to whom you are saying so, the daughter whom you will also lead up to the altar. But you, a sad witness to both hymens, you treasure up the sixteen years which you received at each union: a wedding-present which will hasten your own marriage with a white-haired lady, rather thin.
Marshal Victor.
Marshal Victor had come to join us, at Ghent, with an admirable simplicity: he asked for nothing, never teased the King with his assiduity; one scarcely saw him; I do not know whether he ever had the honour and the favour of being invited on a single occasion to His Majesty's dinner-party. I have met Marshal Victor since; I have been his colleague in office, and I have always perceived the same excellent nature. In Paris, in 1823, M. le Dauphin was very harsh to that honest soldier: it was very good of this Duc de Bellune to repay such easy ingratitude with such modest devotion[267]! Candour carries me away and touches me, even when, on certain occasions, it attains the final expression of its ingenuousness. For instance, the marshal told me of his wife's[268] death in the language of a soldier, and he made me weep: he pronounced coarse words so quickly, and changed them so chastely, that one might even have written them.
M. de Vaublanc[269] and M. Capelle[270] joined us. The former used to say that he had some of everything in his portfolio. Do you want some Montesquieu? Here you are. Some Bossuet? Here it is! In proportion as the game seemed about to take a different turn, more travellers arrived. The Abbé Louis and M. le Comte Beugnot alighted at the inn where I was lodging. Madame de Chateaubriand was suffering from terrible fits of choking, and I was sitting up with her. The two new-comers installed themselves in a room separated from my wife's only by a thin partition; it was impossible not to hear, unless by stopping one's ears: between eleven and twelve at night the new arrivals raised their voices. The Abbé Louis, who spoke like a wolf and in jerks, was saying to M. Beugnot:
"You, a minister? You'll never be one again! You have committed one stupidity after the other!"
I could not clearly hear M. le Comte Beugnot's answer, but he spoke of thirty-three millions left behind in the Royal Treasury. The abbé, apparently in anger, pushed a chair, which fell down. Through the uproar I caught these words:
"The Duc d'Angoulême? He'll have to buy his national property at the gates of Paris. I shall sell what remains of the State forests. I shall cut down everything. The elms on the highroads, the Bois de Boulogne, the Champs-Élysées: what's the use of all that, eh?"
Brutality formed M. Louis' principal merit; his talent lay in a stupid love of material interests. If the Minister of Finance drew the forests after him, he had doubtless a different secret from that of Orpheus, who "made the woods go after him with his fail; fiddling." In the slang of the time, M. Louis was known as a "special" man; his speciality of finance had led him to accumulate the tax-payers' money in the Treasury in order to let it be taken by Bonaparte. Napoleon had had no use for this special man, who was in no sense an unique man, and who was at the most good enough for the Directory.