"15 October 1815.
. . . . . . . . . .
"It will be the same, monsieur le duc, with the measures of the 5th and of the 20th of September: both meet with nothing but approval in Europe. But what is astonishing is to see that very pure and very worthy Royalists continue to be smitten with M. de Chateaubriand, notwithstanding the publication of a book which lays down the principle that the King of France, by virtue of the Charter, is no longer more than a moral entity, essentially null, and without a will of his own. If any other than he had put forward a similar maxim, the same men, not without apparent reason, would have qualified him as a Jacobin."
*
There you have me finely put in my place. For the rest, it is a good lesson; that brings down our pride, by teaching us what will become of us when we are gone.
From the dispatches of M. de Bonnay and those of some other ambassadors belonging to the Old Order, it appears to me that the dispatches treated less of diplomatic affairs than of anecdotes relating to persons in society and at Court; they reduced themselves to a journal, encomiastic like Dangeau's[123], or satirical like Tallemant's[124]. And Louis XVIII. and Charles X. much preferred the amusing letters of my colleagues to my serious correspondence. I could have laughed and jested like my predecessors, but the time was past in which scandalous adventures and petty intrigues were connected with public business. What good would have resulted for my country from a portrait of M. de Hardenberg[125], a handsome old man, white as a swan, deaf as a post, going to Rome without permission, amusing himself with too many things, believing in all sorts of dreams, given over in the last resort to magnetism in the hands of Dr. Koreff[126], whom I used to meet on horseback, trotting in sequestered neighbourhoods between the devil, medicine and the Muses?
This contempt for a frivolous correspondence makes me say to M. Pasquier in my letter of the 13th of February 1821, No. 13:
"I have not spoken to you, monsieur le baron, according to custom, of the receptions, the balls, the spectacles, etc.; I have not drawn little portraits nor composed useless satires for you; I have tried to lift diplomacy out of mere gossip. The reign of the commonplace will return when the time of the extraordinary has passed: meanwhile, one should describe only that which is destined to live and attack only that which threatens."
*
Berlin in Winter.
Berlin has left me a lasting memory, because the nature of the recreations which I found there carried me back to the days of my childhood and my youth; only, very real princesses filled the part of my Sylphide. Old rooks, my eternal friends, used to come to perch on the lime-trees before my window; I threw food to them: when they had caught too large a piece of bread, they threw it up again with inconceivable dexterity to catch a smaller one, in such a way that they were able to take another a little larger, and so on up to the chief piece, which, held at the point of their beak, kept it open, without permitting any of the increasing layers of bread to fall. His meal over, the bird would sing after his fashion: cantus cornicum ut secla vetusta. I wandered in the desert spaces of frozen Berlin, but I did not hear beautiful voices of young girls issue from its walls, as from the old walls of Rome. Instead of white-bearded Capuchins dragging their sandals among flowers, I met soldiers making snow-balls.
One day, on turning the corner of the wall of circumvallation, Hyacinthe[127] and I found ourselves face to face with so cutting an east wind that we were obliged to run across country to regain town, half-dead. We passed through enclosed grounds, and all the watch-dogs flew at our legs, pursuing us. That day, the thermometer went down to 22 degrees below freezing-point. One or two sentries at Potsdam were frozen to death.