Captain Roger[489], another Coudert, had been condemned to death. Madame Récamier had joined me in her pious work of saving him. Benjamin Constant had also interceded on behalf of this companion of Caron's, and had given the condemned man's brother the following letter for Madame Récamier:
"I could not forgive myself, madame, for always importuning you, but it is not my fault if there are incessant condemnations to death. This letter will be delivered to you by the brother of the unhappy Roger, sentenced with Caron[490]. The story is very hateful and very well-known. The name alone will acquaint M. de Chateaubriand with the matter. He is fortunate enough to be at the same time the first talent in the Ministry and the only minister under whom no blood has been spilt. I say no more; I leave the rest to your heart. It is very sad to have to write to you almost exclusively on distressful matters; but you forgive me, I know, and I am sure that you will add one more unfortunate to the long list of those whom you have saved.
"A thousand fond respects.
"B. Constant.
"Paris, 1 March 1823."
When Captain Roger was set at liberty, he hastened to express his gratitude to his benefactress. One evening, after dinner, I was at Madame Récamier's as usual; suddenly appeared this officer. He said to us, in a southern accent:
"But for your intercession, my head would have rolled on the scaffold."
We were stupefied, for we had forgotten our merits; he shouted, red as a turkey-cock:
"You don't remember?... You don't remember?..." In vain we made a thousand excuses for our lack of memory; he went off, striking the spurs of his boots together again and again, as furious at our forgetting our good action as though he had had to reproach us with his death.
About this time, Talma asked Madame Récamier to allow him to meet me at her rooms in order to consult me on some verses in Ducis' Othello, which he was not allowed to speak as they stood. Leaving my dispatches, I hastened to keep the appointment; I spent the evening with the modern Roscius recasting the unlucky lines. He proposed an alteration to me, I proposed another to him; we vied with each other in rhyming; we withdrew to the window-recess or to a corner to turn and re-turn a hemistich. We had much difficulty in agreeing as to the sense and the rhythm. It would have been rather curious to see me, the minister of Louis XVIII., and Talma, the king of the stage, forgetting what we might be, emulating each other in enthusiasm, and sending the censorship and all the grandeurs of the world to the deuce. But, if Richelieu had his dramas performed while letting Gustavus Adolphus[491] loose on Europe, could not I, a humble secretary of State, busy myself with the tragedies of others while seeking the independence of France in Madrid?
Sweet hours at the Abbaye.
Madame la Duchesse d'Abrantès, whose coffin I have saluted in the church at Chaillot, has described only the inhabited abode of Madame Récamier; I will tell of the solitary refuge. A dark corridor separated two small rooms. I maintained that this vestibule was lit up with a gentle light. The bed-room was furnished with a library, a harp, a piano, a portrait of Madame de Staël and a view of Coppet by moonlight; pots of flowers adorned the window-sills. When, quite breathless with clambering up three flights of stairs, I entered the cell at the fall of evening, I was enraptured. The outlook from the windows was over the garden of the Abbaye, in the green clumps of which the nuns moved to and fro and school-girls ran hither and thither. The top of an acacia-tree rose to the level of the eye. Sharp-pointed steeples pierced the sky, and on the horizon appeared the hills of Sèvres. The expiring sun gilded the picture and entered through the open windows. Madame Récamier sat at her piano; the Angelus tolled: the sound of the bell which seemed "to weep the dying day, pianger il giorno che si muore[492]," mingled with the last accents of the Invocation of the Night in Steibelt's[493] Romeo and Juliet. A few birds came to nestle in the raised outer blinds; I joined the silence and solitude from afar, above the noise and tumult of a great city.
God, by giving me those hours of peace, indemnified me for my hours of trouble; I foresaw the coming rest which my faith believes in and my hope invokes. Agitated as I was elsewhere with political occupations, or disgusted with the ingratitude of Courts, peacefulness of heart awaited me in the recesses of that retreat, like the coolness of the woods when one leaves a scorching plain. I recovered my calm beside a woman who spread serenity around her; and yet that serenity was not in any way too even, for it passed through deep affections. Alas, the men whom I used to meet at Madame Récamier's, Mathieu de Montmorency, Camille Jordan, Benjamin Constant, the Duc de Laval, have gone to join Hingant, Joubert, Fontanes, others who were absent from another absent company. Amid those successive friendships have risen young friends, the vernal offshoots of an old forest in which the felling is everlasting. I beg them, I beg M. Ampère, who will read this when I am gone, I ask them all to keep me in their memory: I make over to them the thread of the life the end of which Lachesis is spinning out on my distaff. My inseparable road-fellow, M. Ballanche, has found himself alone at the commencement and at the end of my career; he has witnessed my friendships broken by time as I have witnessed his carried away by the Rhone: rivers always undermine their banks.