I gave a dinner on St. Louis' Day[219], in honour of Louis XVIII., and I went to visit Hartwell in remembrance of the King's exile; I was fulfilling a duty rather than enjoying a pleasure. Royal misfortunes are so common nowadays that one feels but little interest in spots that have not been inhabited by genius or virtue. All that I saw in the sad little park at Hartwell was the daughter of Louis XVI.
Plenipotentiary at Verona.
At last, I suddenly received from M. de Villèle an unexpected note which gave the lie to my previsions and put an end to my uncertainties:
"27 August 1822.
"My dear Chateaubriand,
"It has just been decided that, so soon as the proprieties relating to the King's return to London permit you, you will be authorized to come to Paris, thence to proceed to Vienna or Verona, as one of the three plenipotentiaries charged to represent France at the Congress. The two others will be Messieurs de Caraman[220] and de La Ferronnays; which does not prevent M. le Vicomte de Montmorency from leaving the day after to-morrow for Vienna, in order to assist at the conferences which may take place in that city before the Congress. He is to return to Paris when the sovereigns leave for Verona.
"This for yourself alone. I am glad that this matter has taken the turn which you desire. Cordially and entirely yours."
Upon this note, I prepared to leave.
The thunder-bolt which incessantly falls at my feet followed me everywhere. With Lord Londonderry died old England, which had struggled on till then in the midst of growing innovations. Supervened Mr. Canning: self-love carried him so far as to talk the language of the propagandist from his place in Parliament After him appeared the Duke of Wellington, a Conservative who came to pull down: when the sentence of societies is pronounced, the hand which was to build knows only how to demolish. Lord Grey[221], O'Connell[222], all those labourers at ruins were working successively at the overthrow of the old institutions. Parliamentary reform, Irish emancipation, all things excellent in themselves, became, thanks to the insalubrity of the time, causes of destruction. Fear increased the evils: if men had not been so greatly terrified at the threats, they would have been able to resist with a certain success.
What need had England to consent to our last troubles? Shut up in her island and in her national enmities, she was sheltered. What need had the Cabinet of St. James to dread the separation of Ireland? Ireland is only England's long-boat: cut the painter, and the long-boat, separated from the big ship, will go to wreck amid the waves. Lord Liverpool himself had sad forebodings. I dined with him one day: after dinner, we talked at a window overlooking the Thames; down the river we saw a portion of the City, of which the fog and smoke enlarged the bulk. I praised to my host the solidity of the English Monarchy, kept in balance by the even swing of liberty and power. The venerable peer, raising and stretching out his arm, pointed to the City and said:
"What sense of solidity can there be with these enormous towns? A serious insurrection in London, and all is lost."
It seems to me as though I were finishing a journey in England like that which I made, in earlier days, on the ruins of Athens, of Jerusalem, of Memphis and Carthage. Summoning to my presence the centuries of Albion, passing from renown to renown, seeing them swallowed up by turns, I feel a sort of painful giddiness. What has become of those brilliant and riotous days in which lived Shakespeare and Milton, Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, Cromwell and William[223], Pitt and Burke? All that is finished; superiorities and mediocrities, hatreds and loves, bliss and wretchedness, oppressors and oppressed, executioners and victims, kings and people, all sleep in the same silence and the same dust. But what nullities we are, if it is thus with the most living part of the human kind, with the genius which lingers like a shadow of olden time in the present generation, but which no longer lives in itself and which does not know that it ever existed!
Changes in England.