The Vicomte de Chateaubriand to the Comte de Serre[236]
"Paris, 23 June 1824.
"My dismissal, monsieur le comte, will have proved to you my inability to serve you; it but remains for me to express the wish to see you where your talents call you. I am retiring, happy to have contributed towards restoring to France her military and political independence, and to have introduced septenniality into her electoral system; it is not what I wanted it to be; the change of age was a necessary consequence of it; but at last the principle is laid down; time will do the rest, if, however, it do not undo it. I venture to flatter myself, monsieur le comte, that you have had no cause to complain of our relations; and I shall always congratulate myself on having met in business a man of your merit.
"Receive, with my adieus, etc.,
"Chateaubriand."
The Vicomte de Chateaubriand to the Comte de La Ferronays[237]
"Paris, 24 June 1824.
"Should you by chance still be in St. Petersburg, monsieur le comte, I will not end our correspondence without telling you of all the esteem and all the friendship with which you have inspired me: keep well; be happier than I, and believe that you will find me again in any circumstance of life. I am writing a line to the Emperor.
"Chateaubriand."
The reply to this farewell reached me in the early days of August. M. de La Ferronnays had accepted the functions of ambassador under my ministry; later, I, in my turn, became ambassador under the ministry of M. de La Ferronnays: neither of us thought himself to be rising or descending. Fellow-countrymen and friends, we mutually did each other justice. M. de La Ferronnays endured the harshest trials without complaining; he remained loyal to his sufferings and to his noble poverty. After my fall, he acted on my behalf at St. Petersburg, as I would have acted on his. An honest man is always sure of being understood by an honest man. I am happy to produce this touching evidence of the courage, the loyalty and the elevation of soul of M. de La Ferronnays. At the moment when I received this note, it was a very superior compensation to me for the capricious and hackneyed favours of fortune. It is only here, for the first time, that I think it right to violate the secrecy which friendship recommended to me.
Letter from La Ferronays.
The Comte de La Ferronays to the Vicomte de Chateaubriand
"St. Petersburg, 24 July 1824.
"The Russian mail of the day before yesterday brought me your little letter of the 16th; it will be for me one of the most precious of all those which I have had the happiness to receive from you; I am keeping it as a title in which I glory, and I have the firm hope and the intimate conviction that soon I shall be able to present it to you in less melancholy circumstances. I shall imitate, monsieur le vicomte, the example which you set me, and I shall permit myself no reflection upon an event which has, in so abrupt and unexpected a manner, broken off the relations which the service established between you and myself; the very nature of those relations, the confidence with which you honoured me, lastly, considerations of a much graver kind, because they are not exclusively personal, will explain to you sufficiently the motives and all the extent of my regrets. What has just occurred still remains entirely inexplicable to me; I am absolutely ignorant of the reasons, but I see the effects; they were so easy, so natural to foresee, that I am astonished that people were so little afraid to set them at naught. I am too well acquainted, however, with the nobility of the sentiments which animate you and with the purity of your patriotism, not to be very sure that you will approve of the conduct which I have thought right to follow in this circumstance; it was required of me by my duty, by my love for my country and even by the interest of your glory; and you are too good a Frenchman to accept, in the position in which you find yourself, the protection and the support of foreigners. You have won for ever the confidence and esteem of Europe; but it is France whom you serve, and you belong to her alone. She may be unjust; but neither you nor your real friends will ever suffer your cause to be made less pure or less fine by entrusting its defense to foreign voices. I have, therefore, silenced every kind of private feeling or consideration in the presence of the general interest; I have forestalled measures, the first effect of which would have been to arouse dangerous divisions among us and to violate the dignity of the Throne. This is the last service which I have rendered here before my departure; you alone, monsieur le vicomte, shall know of it; the confidence was due to you, and I know the nobility of your character too well not to feel very sure that you will keep my secret and that you will consider my conduct, in this circumstance, consonant with the sentiments which you have the right to exact from those whom you honour with your friendship and your esteem.
"Adieu, monsieur le vicomte: if the relations which I have had the good fortune to have with you have been able to give you a correct idea of my character, you must know that it is not changes of position that can alter my sentiments, nor will you ever doubt the attachment and devotion of one who, in the actual circumstances, considers himself the most fortunate of men to be placed by public opinion among the number of your friends.
"La Ferronays."
"Messieurs de Fontenay[238] and de Pontcarré[239] are keenly alive to the value of the remembrance in which you are good enough to bear them: witnesses, like myself, of the increase of consideration which France had gained since your entrance into the ministry, it is quite simple that they should share my sentiments and my regrets."
I began the contest of my new opposition immediately after my fall; but it was interrupted by the death of Louis XVIII.[240] and was not actively resumed until after the coronation of Charles X.[241] In the month of July, I joined Madame de Chateaubriand at Neuchâtel; she had gone there to wait for me, and had hired a cottage beside the lake. The chain of the Alps unfolded itself north and south to a great distance before us; we had our backs to the Jura, whose flanks, black with pine-trees, rose perpendicularly over our heads. The lake was deserted; a wooden gallery served me as an exercise-ground. I thought of Milord Maréchal.[242] When I climbed to the top of the Jura, I saw the Lake of Bienne, to whose breezes and waters Jean Jacques Rousseau owes one of his happiest inspirations. Madame de Chateaubriand went to visit Fribourg and a country-house which they had described to us as charming, and which she found icy-cold, although it was called the Petite Provence. A lean black cat, half wild, which caught little fish by dipping its paw into a large pail filled with water from the lake, was my only distraction. A quiet old woman, who was always knitting, prepared our banquet in an huguenote.[243] had not lost the habit of the collation of the country-mouse.
Neuchâtel had had its good days; it had belonged to the Duchesse de Longueville[244]; Jean Jacques Rousseau had walked in an Armenian dress on its mountains, and Madame de Charrière[245], so daintily observed by M. de Sainte-Beuve[246], had described its society in the Lettres Neuchâteloises; but Juliane, Mademoiselle de La Prise, Henri Meyer[247] were no longer there; I saw only poor Fauche-Borel[248], of the old Emigration; he threw himself soon after from his window. The kept gardens of M. de Pourtalès[249] charmed me no more than did an English rockery raised by man's hands in a neighbouring vineyard facing the Jura. Berthier, last Prince of Neuchâtel, in the name of Bonaparte, was forgotten, in spite of his little Simplon of the Val-de-Travers, and although he smashed his skull in the same way as Fauche-Borel.